The One and Future Riot Review by Joe Sacco – Masterclass in Visual Reporting | Press books

Coe Sacco is one of the very few graphic novelists who has broken into the mainstream. His breakthrough work is Palestine, a collected volume of single-issue picture books he created in the 1990s, documenting the violence in Gaza. His style is to work like a journalist in a war zone and interview people on the street, telling their stories with pictures. Lessons about global politics emerge from extreme local conflicts and depictions of everyday life.

Palestine catapulted Sacco to fame, drawing comparisons to Maus, Art Spiegelman’s two-volume epic about Polish Jews during the Holocaust in which Nazis are depicted as cats, and Jews as mice. These works are sold prominently in bookstores, not in musty basements filled with shelves of polyethylene-wrapped superhero comics. Along with two others, Moss and Palestine pointed out that graphic novels, as they became known, could be serious works of fiction, nonfiction, and journalism. Palestine itself is as depressingly relevant today as it was in the 1990s. In December 2023, it was reprinted for the first time in a decade, after being sold out in the wake of the October 7 attacks.

The historical background of Sacco’s work is colonialism. Just as Palestine charts the long-term ramifications of the Balfour Declaration, this new book explores the legacy of the disastrous and inherently violent act of partition of India in 1947. It is a history told through the lens of a seemingly limited-scale conflict in a very rural region of Uttar Pradesh, northern India, more than six decades after the British imposed a chaotic partition of the country along ill-conceived religious lines. Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of British India, who lacked any humility or foresight, declared: “I will give you full assurances. I will see to it that there will be no bloodshed or riots.”

Sacco focuses on the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots, but spends time documenting the history of the region and the tensions it prefigured. The exact reason for this is disputed: a Hindu Jat woman was subjected to “Eve harassment” – a grim euphemism for public sexual harassment – ​​by a Muslim man, who was then killed by her brothers, who later killed themselves. Or was it a traffic accident that developed into a sectarian strife and escalated into a murder at the hands of rampaging gangs?

Although the cause remains a mystery, the result is well documented: clashes between the two sects, dozens killed, hundreds injured, and tens of thousands displaced. At every turn, politicians and religious leaders fail to maintain peace and control.

This thus becomes the story of the turbulent relationship between democracy and sectarian politics, and the brutality that constantly lurks in the shadows. He charts how rumors and misinformation fuel chaos – a video posted on Facebook purporting to show the execution of a local Jat boy was pivotal in igniting frenzied violence, even though he turned out to be many years old and from Afghanistan.

The riots continued for a few days, and the army was eventually called in to quell the violence. Sacco recounts the aftermath of what happened in the camps into which the dispossessed – both Jats and Muslims, but mostly Muslims – were forced, and attempts at reparations, which were inept and perhaps corrupt.

The “future riot” in the title conjures the idea that violence is a permanent feature of democratic processes in India. Prime Minister Modi’s rise was at least partly prompted by riots in Gujarat in 2002, after a train carrying Hindu pilgrims was set on fire and blamed on Muslims. Anti-Muslim bias in the wake of the Muzaffarnagar riots has benefited Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. A decade later, the atmosphere in Uttar Pradesh, and the country in general, remains volatile. In the concluding pages, Sacco turns to a question of global importance: Does a democracy that provokes violence risk being overtaken?

There is intelligence and realism in the paintings and art. It is dynamic and clear, and the people look less like caricatures than they do in Palestine. Vox Pop music permeates the narrative, a reminder of the subjective experience of people on the street, in the thick of the action. But there’s a strange phenomenon that I’ve never seen before in 40 years of reading comics. The skin color of all heroes is dark, and shading is not done by cross-hatching, but by parallel horizontal lines. Once I noticed it, it became distracting, like the TV overlapping each character’s face, and I couldn’t shake it. This may seem like a pathetically trivial point, but comics are a visual medium, and you have to stick with the art. I told myself: Get over it, because the story is important and compelling, but it is not important.

Above all, Joe Sacco is a journalist, and that’s journalism. The formula, of which he is almost the sole proponent, has a subjectivity absent from traditional methods. The heroes’ memories may be contradictory at times, but Sako includes them nonetheless. A graphic novel – a very unsatisfactory description – can contain all the complexities of turbulent politics. In an age when long-form journalism is under pressure and political analysis is reduced to crumbs, Sacco’s work is a lifeline.