The Feast in Footnotes in Gaza vs. Atavistic Endeavors

Joe Sacco's (2009) Footnotes In Gaza 

• Link to images on (Pages 137): "The Feast"                  SCN_0005.pdf (4,132K)
• Transcription of Captions/ Dialogue: "We've suspended our research for a few days. No one wants to sit down for an interview about '56 during Eid El-Adha, the feast which commemorates Abraham's readiness to sacrifice his son Ishmael to Allah, Over the last week goats and rams have been coaxed and pulled down the streets of Khan Younis in a lonely sad trickle. But this is the eve of the feast and now the bulls are arriving. A BULL IS COMING!! x2... (Sacco 137)... The entire process from butchering the bull to allotting the meat has taken four hours. But there's more. Each household must now further divide its portion: a third is for the family; a third is passed out to close relatives and friends; and a third goes  to the poor" (Sacco 145)

 Prefacing Excerpt from Edward Said's "Discrepant Experiences" in Culture & Imperialism (1993): 

"Self-definition is one of the activities practiced by all cultures: it has a rhetoric, a set of occasions and authorities (national feasts, for example, times of crisis, founding fathers, basic texts, and so on), and a familiarity all its own. Yet in a world tied together as never before by the exigencies of electronic communication, trade, travel, environmental and regional conflicts that can expand with tremendous speed, the assertion of identity is by no means a mere ceremonial matter. What strikes me as especially dangerous is that it can mobilize passions atavistically..." (Said 37)

                 In the closing of the Khan Younis portion (pages 1-150) of Joe Sacco's (2009) Footnotes In Gaza  a great feast during the Eid El-Adha, or the "Festival of the Sacrifice," is juxtaposed alongside a contrapuntal page (136) loaded with the the dogmatic preaching of President Bush announcing to the world that "the game is over" against the prophetic shouting exclamations  that "THE AMERICANS TAKE TURNS STEPPING ON OUR HEADS AND THE HEADS OF IRAQIS! AFTER IRAQ THEY'LL ATTACK SYRIA UNTIL ALL OF US WILL GET A BEATING!!" It certainly seems appropriate for Sacco to appropriate such contradictory voices at this point in the closure of the Khan Younis vignette and the hypnotic collusion of Bush's politically televised versus the Eid El-Adha's spiritually teleological ceremonies seem to push into suspension any authentic opportunity for mutual intelligibility or legibility until after the (figurative, literal) bull is lacerated and distributed evenly in thirds (3rd force). This feast I think fulfills multiple heuristic functions, the foremost of which I believe to explore, celebrate, and transplant the vitality within the cultural avatars and events against grain of atavistic regression. Contextually and historically, in Ainslie Meares's 1960 work A System of Medical Hypnosis, the term atavistic regression is used to denote the tendency to revert to ancestral type:

“The atavistic hypothesis requires… a regression from normal adult mental function at an intellectual, logical level, to an archaic level of mental function in which the process of suggestion determines the acceptance of ideas. This regression is considered to be the basic mechanism in the production of hypnosis."

                    Furthermore, Sacco's thorough documentation in the Appendix I I believe directly embraces the different shades of metamorphosizing atavism dialogically nested within the spectacles from "On November 23, 1957, the Israeli Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee met with IDF chief of staff Moshe Dayan to discuss the war and its conduct": Is there any kind of treatment being given to the prisoners [and newly homeless refugees, women, children] beyond handing out their food rations. Is there any kind of spiritual treatment, because one of these days these people will go back to their countries. Is there any kind of treatment that will show them what kind of country this is, what kind of army, what this community is they've fallen into?" (Sacco 395).

                   The noxious notions and accosting motions gesturing towards justification of domestic destruction with the en medias res unreliable-evidencing that "we only bulldoze a house when that house is used either for intelligence gathering, or shooting [at] our forces, or as a cover for people who are planting explosive devices, or used by the tunnel smugglers" is an additive atavistic endeavor that fails to acknowledge that festivals, feasts, and everyday surface realizations of the vitality of people continue to operate within and without the will of the militancy and rather revolve around the continuous events of cultural reproduction and reciprocity (Sacco 406). 

• Link to images on (Pages 254-5): "The Will of God"    SCN_0004.pdf (3,956K)

"Like the man's father told us, events are continuous. Last night the Israelis attacked Bureji camp several kilometers away and killed eight; the night before they attacked Khan Younis and killed two... In the morning Abed, Khaled, and I go see the damage to Khan Younis. An eight story building, the largest in the Toufieh neighborhood, was imploded by the IDF. The Israelis say it was used as an observation post for militants firing into a nearby IDF position" (Sacco 254).

"Abed laughs off this explanation. I once brought some journalists here to see if we could film the settlement from the roof- and the owner adamantly refused, Abed says, fearing the IDF would spot the camera and cause him trouble. So why, he asks, would the owner allow militants on his roof?" (Sacco  255)