The Riot That Foretold an Unstable Future

The cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco has made a career of rescuing history from the cleavages of memory. One set of scenes in his 2009 book, Footnotes in Gaza, exemplifies this, revealing how testimony about painful events can diverge among witnesses, even within a family. Sacco speaks with an elderly woman named Omm Nafez, illustrating her story: She says that her husband and two of his brothers were shot by Israeli soldiers while walking out of the family home; a third brother, Khamis, jumped over a courtyard wall and survived. When Sacco finds Khamis, however, his account doesn’t entirely match Nafez’s. He recalls that his brothers were lined up in the courtyard and shot, killed not in a surprise scuffle but by premeditated execution. Khamis remembers visiting one of these brothers on his deathbed, but Nafez and another source say that Khamis was not there. So Sacco depicts both variations, while drawing out their disjunctions through commentary and supplementary reporting. The reader experiences these memories, and then questions them, and then at last sees the author’s process as he labors to tell the most honest-possible version of the truth.

Key word: see. Sacco reported Footnotes in Gaza from Khan Younis and Rafah, two cities at the south end of the Gaza Strip, over multiple trips in the aughts, and ultimately told a larger story—which stretches over decades of displacement and violence—in comic-strip panels. In this format, he is a character too, his round glasses and rabbit teeth peeking out amid the clustered limbs and busy tableaus. He’s used this approach to investigate catastrophes around the world, reporting from Chechnya, India, Iraq, Canada’s Northwest Territories, and the International Criminal Court. His work combines on-the-ground reportage with historical reconstruction, often stitched together from a patchwork of oral recollections.

In all of his coverage, Sacco places you inside the moment, dynamically re-creating not only how it looks but also how it feels. Despite his intense and difficult subject matter, his style reflects the unruly world of the underground comics in which he came of age. In his early, memoiristic Yahoo series, he employed an outlandish vernacular, influenced by R. Crumb and Art Spiegelman. And today Sacco’s drawings are still loose, dynamic, even a bit cartoonish—but he always senses when caricature should end and the facts should take over.

His newest book makes such fact-finding a key theme, demonstrating the instability of a political system grounded in untruth—and investigating how populist leaders can wield that for their own ends. The Once and Future Riot concerns a series of escalating clashes in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. In late August and early September of 2013, violence between Hindu Jats and Muslim villagers culminated in a full-scale assault against a third group: the landless Muslim laborers who lived and worked in Jat villages. It is now widely agreed that 62 people were killed, two-thirds of them Muslim, and 50,000 people, again mostly Muslim, were driven from their villages. But when Sacco arrived, more than a year later, details about who was responsible for the violence and who was harmed proved strikingly hard to pin down. He encountered something more potent than facts: “the fiction, the myth,” as he puts it, a set of competing (and politically convenient) narratives that are already taking the place of the historical event.

Traveling around Uttar Pradesh with the help of a local journalist, Piyush Kumar, he finds, and illustrates, plenty of physical evidence: torched houses, refugee camps, scarred and displaced victims. Based on witnesses’ recollections, he draws massive crowd scenes in which hundreds or even thousands of people converge and clash. To keep the reader from losing their way, he tiles these full-page panels with smaller inserts, revealing visually who is providing what testimony. But these stories quickly begin to contradict one another—and Sacco’s presentation of his interviewees’ faces and names takes on a second layer of meaning, showing how a journalistic reconstruction is pieced together from disparate sources, sometimes overlapping and sometimes conflicting, which illustrates handily that the story he is constructing is not the only one on offer.

Official accounts—from village chiefs, social leaders, and a district magistrate—differ based on who’s speaking and where. In Muslim villages, Sacco’s interviewees tell him that only women and children threw stones; among the Jats, the party line is that no Muslim laborers were killed, and everyone left peacefully on their own. Each of these stories works to suppress contrary evidence; all are deployed in service of what Sacco calls the “One True Story:” each village’s authority-sanctioned, broadly accepted narrative of their own communal innocence and their enemy’s communal guilt. There are those, like the Muslim refugees, who speak for themselves. But they are already outcasts, with no power, and no influence over any version, big or small.

Sacco traces the origins of the riot back to the murder of a Muslim boy by two Jats, who were then killed by a crowd in the village of Kawal. But all of these interactions were quickly imbued with a set, predetermined meaning. For many of the Jats interviewed by Sacco, a Muslim boy could not simply court a Hindu girl; he must be trying to seduce and despoil her, an act the Jats call “Love Jihad.” After the Jats called a mass meeting, known as a panchayat, some local Muslims armed themselves, perhaps believing that the Jats were planning a massacre on the scale of the 2002 Gujarat riots, during which more than 1,000 people died.

A year later, the displaced Muslim laborers are still living in tents, trapped between their persecutors and government officials who, Sacco suggests, wish to compensate only a handful of the victims. But the story of this disaster won’t be swept quietly onto the ash heap of history, as the author has learned across the world: For those living in conflict zones, “events are continuous,” an interviewee in Footnotes says.

Sacco knows better than most that political chauvinists of all kinds can point to past moments of injury and humiliation to justify any current cruelty or authoritarian project—an especially powerful appeal when those historical injustices are real. His Gazan interlocutors were speaking in the midst of the Second Intifada, when past atrocities were referenced by militants and politicians alike to justify new violence against civilians. In his 2000 book about the breakup of Yugoslavia, Safe Area Goražde, the Bosnian Serbs massacring their neighbors in the 1990s defended their crimes by appealing to similar killings carried out against ethnic Serbs during the Nazi-era fascist regime. The Once and Future Riot sees it happening again: Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalists rode the Uttar Pradesh riots to electoral victory, invoking very real suffering to excuse bellicose ethnic supremacism and the persecution of Muslim minorities.

Safe Area is one of Sacco’s best works because he takes the time to characterize the residents of Goražde, making visible what both propaganda and the fog of war tend to obscure. The book is full of harrowing, enraging war stories, but the main subjects are the people of Goražde, the remaining Bosniaks whose survival presents a firm rebuttal to their besiegers. The Serb ethno-nationalists he quotes seemingly can conceive of living and belonging only in the abstract, atavistic language of ethnicity and blood. But Sacco’s subjects don’t need to ruthlessly assert their right to their home; they belong in Goražde because they are already there. They share a love of pop music, The Bodyguard, and Levi’s 501s; they care more about the mundane facts of their love lives, their education, and their families than ancient feuds or religious rivalries. By focusing on the persistence of private life during wartime, the book widens from an investigation into a kind of communal portrait, literally illustrating the way injustice contorts and is resisted by people, together and alone.

Riot is more narrowly focused than that sweeping work; Sacco is searching for a story, and he eventually finds it, sometimes at the cost of the subject’s human dimensions. We get many perspectives on what happened before and after the panchayat, but “rather than provide a region-wide sampler of the violence visited on the Muslim peasantry,” he focuses only on the village of Lisarh, where the reprisals were especially lethal. This allows him to map out a precise timeline of the entire riot, as well as to catalog the many denials and excuses offered by local officials and activists. But because of this focus, he spotlights the actions of particular Jats and blurs together the broader experience of the victims, until both perpetrators and casualties grow abstract. I left the book uncertain about some key facts: the scale of the riots, how many villages they affected, whether they looked different in rural versus urban areas. In past books, Sacco made a point of emphasizing this kind of epistemic uncertainty, but in Riot he occasionally glosses over it—perhaps because too much remains unknown.

This might be an unavoidable shortcoming, but it can undermine what is best in his method, as well as the higher ideas he’s using the book to pursue. Victims emerge and disappear, without much time given over to individuating them. He does not probe their life stories, as he did with Omm Nafez and Khamis back in Gaza; he must race off to the next source. Like figures in a massive spread, they lose their particularity, and they form again as a collective, a swirling mass where no face can stand out.

Then again, what the cartoonist loses in detail he gains in scope. The Once and Future Riot is a new sort of book for Sacco, more philosophical than humanistic, its eye trained on larger social and political structures. Here, he’s concerned less with the aftereffects of political violence and more with the future it might engender. Such mass assaults, he believes, might become a common feature of Indian democracy, where politics is dominated by Hindu nationalists intent on making a populous and diverse country into a two-tiered polity fighting abstracted enemies. And there are uncomfortable analogues across the world, conflicts driven by demagogues who don’t care about the fuzziness of the truth or the fallibility of memory—only about power, and about weaponizing any cleavage or crack they can find. “A democracy that arouses violence,” he suggests, “may one day be overwhelmed by it.” After a career spent reporting on ethnic chauvinism, criminal impunity, and history’s endlessly reopened wounds, he has stepped back to take in the long view. The outlook isn’t bright.