Graphic testimony

Trauma on Loan (3MB pdf)
In July 2003, two Iraqi businessmen were seized in Baghdad by US troops. They tell graphic artist Joe Sacco about beatings, fake executions … and being thrown to lions.

This appears in the Guardian. Go to the site and scroll down on the ‘Books’ page. I offer Sacco as another example of what I was saying yesterday about Berger’s travel-writing. The attentiveness to people, to broken histories, and a voice that is sensitive to its own failings. (Sacco has produced his own acclaimed account of a visit to the Occupied Territories.) Note, for instance, in the Guardian excerpt, his alertness to the notion that the sympathetic journalist is also in a sense an interrogator. The discomfort is shared by the reader, at least by this reader, when Sacco writes:

“Because after a while, in certain situations, a journalist in a room begins to smell; even he notices.”