For African migrants trying to reach Europe, Malta is
directly in their path. Joe Sacco observes their treatment in his
homeland
Image sources: http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2010/winter/sacco-unwanted &
http://www.vqronline.org/articles/2010/spring/sacco-unwanted/
Comic recounts migrants’ Malta experiences
The experiences of African migrants in Malta have been prominently featured in the Guardian newspaper, in a 12-page comic produced by a Maltese-born, award-winning comic artist and journalist.
Today’s edition of the Guardian featured “The Unwanted” by Joe Sacco, a Maltese citizen who currently resides in Portland, Oregon.
Mr Sacco has talked to Maltese and Africans alike about the local situation, and The Unwanted focuses both on the dangerous journeys migrants undertake, and the fact that the Maltese are not always too happy to welcome them.
Familiar faces of Home Affairs Minister Carm Mifsud Bonnici, his spokesman Darrell Pace, Marsa’s mayor Francis Debonoand the far-rightist Norman Lowell, feature prominently in this graphic novel .
“It’s quite a long story about African migrants trying to get to Europe. They’re crossing the Sahara and then getting on these boats and trying to make it to Europe and a lot end up in Malta, where I’m from. So I wanted to see how the Maltese are dealing with it and what’s going on with the migrants there and what the migrants think of how the Maltese are reacting to them,” Mr Sacco told Publishers Weekly.
Mr Sacco was born in Malta in 1960, but his socialist parents, fearing the pervasive influence of the Catholic Church on Maltese society, migrated to Australia soon after, moving again, to the US, in 1972.
He lived in Malta for a brief time in the 1980s, publishing a Maltese-language romance comic named Imħabba Vera, a comic which included an instance where the female protagonist goes to Holland for an abortion.
“Malta is a Catholic country where not even divorce is allowed. It was unusual, but it’s not like anyone raised a stink about it, because they had no way of judging whether this was appropriate material for comics or not,” Mr Sacco said in an interview to New York newspaper The Village Voice.
He returned to the US, but it was his later travels which brought him acclaim. A comic book narrating his experiences during 4 months spent in Bosnia during the Bosnian War, Safe Area Goražde, was named “best comic of 2000” by Time Magazine and won the Will Eisner Comic Industry Award for Best Original Graphic Novel a year later.
Mr Sacco also travelled to Israel and Palestine several times, which led to the publication of 2 comic books: Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza, which was just released this month.
And now, one of his current projects took him back to his native land.
Source: http://www.di-ve.com/Default.aspx?ID=47&Action=1&NewsId=74744
