Cartoonist draws on her experience in the Middle East
Book tries to put a human face to war-torn countries and their victims with an illustrated treatment
In 2010, Seattle cartoonist Sarah Glidden packed up her sketchbook, camera and voice recorder and travelled to the Middle East for two months.
She was joining journalist friends who were working for the non-profit online publication Seattle Globalist. Glidden would observe as they gathered stories about the lingering effects of the Iraq war, especially on those displaced as a result of the American invasion.
Making the Kickstarter-funded trip even more complex, the group planned to document the story of former U.S. Marine Dan O’Brien, a childhood friend of one of the journalists, Sarah Stuteville, as he returned to the country for the first time since serving.
Glidden’s observations of those two months are captured in her new book, Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq which could be easily be described as a personal memoir or travelogue, but falls more into the growing category of comics journalism or illustrated reportage.
She kept her recorder on for the entire trip, choosing to listen rather than constantly sketch, while relying on photographs and drawings to capture body language and physical details. Glidden documented not just the reporters’ behind-the-scenes process, but quiet times when they would just be sitting around, having a few beers and talking about America’s place in the world.
Even though Glidden cringes now at her overly earnest and naive responses during those discussions, she didn’t edit them out of her personal story. “I wanted the dialogue to be real dialogue,” she says.
One situation Glidden captured through her muted but striking watercolour illustrations is the tension between Stuteville and O’Brien, as the journalist unsuccessfully pushed to get her ex-military friend, who refused to open up about certain details, to go on record to denounce the war.
“It was difficult for me to write about a friend and make her into a character and portray her in a way that isn’t always flattering,” Glidden says. “It was funny, when I was writing the book, I was going through what she was going through when we were on the trip. She wants him to be a compelling story, but she also cares about him.”
During their travels, the group meets refugees from a variety of backgrounds and Glidden turns over many pages to their heartbreaking, painful stories.
For the first time, the American journalists also directly encountered the hostility felt by those whose lives were destroyed by the war, many of whom demanded answers for their government’s actions.
“I think we often hear stories about how sad it was what happened to them, or anger when it comes to terrorism, but you don’t get to hear ordinary people say how angry they are, and frustrated,” Glidden says.
Though her trip took place six years before the current Syrian civil war, while Damascus was still a safe city, Glidden believes that Rolling Blackouts’ illustrated treatment provides a much-needed human connection to the country’s newest refugee population.
“A lot of times it’s easy for us to ‘other-ize’ people’s stories when they’re from far away or from a background that is harder for us to identify with,” Glidden says.
“Maybe part of that is an emotional defence. If you really accepted people who are going through such traumatic experiences as people like you, it would be so hard to take all the terrible news that you see.”
“But it’s really important for us to break through that barrier. And I think that comics and narrative journalism can help show a reader that this is a person like you and that under the circumstances, you’d react the same way.” Sue Carter is the editor of Quill & Quire.