Travel Writing
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.”
I haven’t read any of John Berger’s travel writings but I’ve read his essays, specifically the ones about art (Toulouse Lautrec’s brush strokes and Vangogh’s brush strokes…very well written), and the essays are captivating.
About your earlier post, ‘Bihar by night’, it made very interesting reading. How many nondescript, little towns does one come across while travelling, and each one has so many little stories to tell!
Comment by fingers — January 24, 2006 @ 11:58 am