The Unmaking of the World

Abstract

When looking at images, our experience is often profoundly marked by memories of previous visual encounters that affect us in unexpected ways. Sometimes events from intervening years have transformative effect--shifting our perspective so that upon returning to an image, we feel something new. Confronted with one panel from comic journalist Joe Sacco's fourth issue of Palestine, drawn and published in 1993, many readers will be reminded of specific group of images that hold such capacity to transform our ways of seeing. (1) In spite of fact that captive is not wearing poncho, panel is nevertheless reminiscent of notorious photographs from Abu Ghraib. To claim that hooded prisoner has become emblematic figure of war on terror--to degree that it haunts images from both near and distant past--does not seem unreasonable. (2) Moderate Pressure: Part Two (1993) describes how Ghassan, Palestinian man, was captured, interrogated, and tortured by Israel's General Security Service (GSS) in winter of 1991-92. (3) Alongside Sacco's 2006 reportage comic, Trauma on Loan, it represents an acute exploration of political and perceptual implications of what Elaine Scarry, in The Body in Pain (1985), calls the inexpressibility of physical pain. (4) In Trauma on Loan, two Iraqis tortured by American forces struggle to deliver testimony to American news media. Sacco's illustration of set of challenges they meet in doing so lends this account perspective absent from those of other journalists. (5) Although these stories are set in two very specific political and historical contexts, both revolve around crisis of witnessing embedded in very structure of torture itself--in severe hardship involved in what Scarry calls the passage of pain into speech. (6) To paraphrase title of Susan Sontag's book, distinctly verbal-visual style of Sacco's approach enables way of picturing pain of others--an ethical act of imagination that involves triangular constellation of victim, artist, and reader. (7) One of most immediate and important effects of Moderate Pressure: Part Two is way in which Sacco exposes rationalizing gestures of euphemism by showing us how is anything but. The ironic reference is to 1987 Israeli government report that suggested a moderate amount of physical pressure cannot be avoided during interrogations conducted by GSS (8); secret second part of report provided operational guidelines for permissible physical pressure. (9) Describing his work on human rights report about methods of GSS, Stanley Cohen writes: We wanted to undermine function of political language. (10) In same article, he also makes reference to this quotation by George Orwe: Such is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of (11) Sacco's method deliberately insists on rendering precisely those mental pictures--opening gap between visual realities and phraseology used to describe them. Before Sacco met Ghassan, there was no record of his captivity, photographic or otherwise. This lack of testimonial proof represents only part of problem, for elimination of traceable evidence is built into very act of torture itself. When victim undergoes torture, hoods are not merely instruments of torture--reeking of urine and threatening asphyxiation--they also instill an immense sense of isolation, blinding and disorienting victim so as to protect identities of torturers. Providing accurate testimony thus becomes difficult, if not impossible. Imagining Ghassan's ordeal and giving it pictorial form offers way to render invisible visible. By entering and inviting reader into secluded torture room, Sacco addresses pain's fundamental inexpressibility under severest conditions while enabling it to enter realm of shared discourse. …