Joe Sacco’s groundbreaking comics journalism blends reportage and graphic storytelling. He has authored several works, including Palestine, which was recently rushed back into print, and Safe Area Goražde, on the conflict in Bosnia, and an upcoming one on the 2013 communal violence in Muzaffarnagar. Abhay Regi, an editorial fellow at The Caravan, spoke with Sacco in early November about his approach to journalism and his work on India, Palestine and Bosnia, the lack of representation and widespread dehumanisation of marginalised communities in the media, and what it means to challenge the dominant narrative.
In 2012, The Caravan had published your comics-journalism piece, “Kushinagar,” about caste in Uttar Pradesh. Most of your previous coverage, or at least what tended to catch the limelight, was your coverage of conflict. How did you have to adapt to cover something like caste? How does a reporter make that jump?
Well, caste is a form of conflict, you could say. When there are structures of poverty that are built around social structures themselves, that involves oppression. I just wanted to go and see what was going on, how Dalits live, some of the obviously very hard cases, and try to do something else. Basically, as a journalist, as a creative person, you’re trying to find something else, or trying to look at many different ways you can look at the world, and one of them is through physical conflict, violence, but there are other forms of violence. So that’s what I was looking at there.
When you do go to a new space—Bosnia, Palestine or Uttar Pradesh—you are largely communicating through interlocutors, through local journalists, et cetera. When covering an issue like caste, how do you, as a journalist going into a new space, adjust for the biases in the reporting itself, simply because of the people you are going through? What does a journalist need to be mindful of when they are going into a new space, particularly speaking about an oppressed community, where the forms of oppression might not be apparent to us, since we may not have faced it ourselves?