Maya Jaggi
Picture Posts
In the two decades since Joe Sacco invented comics reportage as a genre, his work has fuelled a revolution in respect. Together with Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust memoir, Maus (1986), Sacco’s war-zone masterpieces, including Palestine (collected in one volume in 2001), Safe Area Goražde (2000) and Footnotes in Gaza (2009), prised open doors. His example can now be discerned in graphic novels around the world, such as Zahra’s Paradise (2011) by Amir and Khalil, set after disputed elections in Iran, and Magdy El Shafee’s Metro: A Story of Cairo (2008), on the corruption that spurred the Cairo Spring. Mubarak’s doomed regime was sufficiently alarmed to put the cartoonist on trial.
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Perception is a weird thing. Lawrence Durrell saw Hydra as a ‘great horned toad’ but Henry Miller thought it resembled a ‘huge loaf of petrified bread’. Niko Ghika painted it as a series of neat white and orange squares.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-call-of-the-wine-dark-sea
The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3