ANDREW LIMBONG, HOST:
In 2013, two young men - they were cousins - killed a man. This was in a rural part of Uttar Pradesh, a state in northern India. The cousins were Hindu. The other man was Muslim. What followed was a series of alternating violence in the region between Hindus and Muslims. Joe Sacco's new book, "The Once And Future Riot," is about that violence, but it's less about the ins and outs of what happened and more about the stories people tell themselves about what happened.
JOE SACCO: Because ultimately, I think everything is about story. It's how you categorize your enemy. You want to diminish any role you might have had in the violence, and you want to foist something else on the antagonist. And I think that's the way stories are constructed, and that's how you can build a political movement.
LIMBONG: Sacco is arguably one of the biggest names in comics journalism. He's reported on a lot of violent conflicts throughout the years. He won an Eisner Award in 2009 for his book "Footnotes In Gaza." I had a conversation with him about his new book, and he told me why, in this instance, he was so interested in examining the myth that was overshadowing the truth.
SACCO: Well, because I've done a lot of books about violence, and I'm - I've become sort of interested in human nature and what makes people tick and how they justify what they do. That was the idea, is to have a look at their stories, and then the journalism part of it was to see if those stories matched up with the facts.
LIMBONG: Yeah. It's interesting because there are multiple scenes in this book where someone is telling you something, and then you depict yourself sort of walking away from the interview going like, ah, that wasn't true, right? So talk us through how you separated fact from fiction.
SACCO: Well, some things just seemed ludicrous on their face. For example, I talked to Muslim villagers, a village chief. And Hindus - Jat Hindus had gone through the villages in - on a convoy, and they were attacked, and some of them were even killed. And I was told that it was children who threw the stones - children, sometimes women. Those things seemed quite ludicrous to me.
There were other instances in a Jat Hindu village where I was told that no one was harmed, but I knew that 13 people were missing and presumed dead. And what I was told was that the Muslims had left at night, for example, and no one had noticed over three days that they had left the village to sort of escape this forthcoming violence. It - you know, your journalistic Spidey senses just come out, and you begin to sort of think, this just doesn't pass the truth test at all.
And then of course, as a journalist, it's incumbent on you to see if you can find out what the facts were, and that's what this book is. I mean, to me, this is a book of, in some ways, pure journalism, where you have she-said he-said, and then you actually try to ascertain what the facts are rather than just letting people say what they think or what they say happened.
LIMBONG: You often report on events from the past. I read it as a way to think about the present, right? You did the brunt of the reporting for this book back in 2014. So why publish the book in 2025?
SACCO: You know, I started working on this book right after I did the research in 2014. And truth be told, I was kind of sickened by it. I wrote the script, and I drew about 14 or 15 pages, and I just had to stop. I've spent so much time writing about violence and drawing it. It was just getting to me.
So I started another book. I did a book about Canada and Indigenous people, which I thought would get me away from writing and thinking about violence. But that turned out to be a book about violence, too. I mean, it turned out to be a book about residential schools and what happened there, the violence against the children there. That made me realize I - maybe I can't get away from violence.
So I - after I finished the book on Canada, I returned to the India book partly because I thought, you know, I've troubled people for their stories. I've spent a lot of time making them go over these traumatic events, and I have to honor that somehow.
LIMBONG: Was there a bigger story - right? - here? Like, there's these relatively small-scale riots. But do you think it told a bigger story not just about India, but about global conflict right now?
SACCO: I think it's a story about democracy, in a lot of ways. I mean, India has drifted into autocracy, and I believe the United States is drifting in the same direction. And a lot of that has to do with finding the enemy. I mean, there's that famous phrase, that politics needs an enemy. And in India's case, it happens to be the Muslim population. And in the United States, Muslims have been the enemy, too, but it's also - at this point, it's immigrants, and it's been Black people. It's, like, the other - for example, painting immigrants as rapists and murderers.
You know, you can drum up fear, and fear is, I think, one of the, you know, primary reasons why people flock to certain politicians that stoke fear and tell them they'll have security. So it is a bigger story. It really has to do with democracies and how they're eroded and how unfortunately they can drift toward autocracy.
LIMBONG: You've had a long career in comics journalism, and a lot of it involves sort of drawing yourself into your books. Why do you think it's important to include that in your stories? - you know, there with, like, a notepad. You got your glasses, asking the questions - like, that sort of thing.
SACCO: I came out of an autobiographical tradition, so drawing myself in my stories was something I just naturally did, and I didn't think very much about the consequences of drawing myself in a journalism story, which I know is kind of odd from sort of the American journalism point of view where you remove yourself from the story, but I think it's worthwhile putting yourself in the story 'cause often there are interactions with people on the ground that bring out a lot about culture, about hospitality and all those sorts of things.
The other thing is, it sort of lets the reader know that this is from one person's point of view, that I'm actually a human being conducting this journalism. I'm not a, you know, all-powerful, all-knowing journalism god hovering above everything. You know, I make my mistakes. I can be manipulated. I mean, all those things I - can be shown. In other words, I like to emphasize sometimes some of the seams of journalism and how it's gathered.
LIMBONG: You've reported on a lot of conflicts around the world, and obviously, a major conflict on people's minds right now is the one in Gaza. You've been reporting on the Palestinian people for decades now - right? - long before October 7 and the escalating war that followed. And I'm just curious, where do you think the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is heading?
SACCO: Well, I'm not sure if it's heading to a good place. I think ultimately, Israel would prefer to completely subjugate the Palestinians or cleanse them completely from the territories, and I think they went for it until this last week. You know, the Palestinians need to have self-determination. And without that, on some level, the conflict is going to keep going on.
LIMBONG: That's journalist Joe Sacco. His new book is "The Once And Future Riot." Joe, thank you so much.
SACCO: Thank you very much. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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