Reviews

Slow and information-dense, but as always I love that Joe Sacco records without a clear thesis. I feel like this will be a tough book for people who haven't already tried to engage with questions/reflections about land rights, generational trauma, and system disenfranchisement. And I mean that statement broadly, because Sacco really gets into the nitty gritty or land rights and communal decision-making. What benefits communities, and what harms them? It would be easy to make broad statements, but Paying the Land provides nuanced insight into how complex that question really is.

I don't know if this is Sacco's style changing, or his narrative voice shifting as he gets older, but there are only a few instances of self-reflection in this work, as compared to pieces like "Footnotes in Gaza." While he never comes to a conclusion about that would be best for the future of communities in the bush--in part because it would be wildly presumptuous of him to do so--he has some pointed comments for his white readers at the end.

Definitely worth a read, both as a record of the communities he visited on his trip, and as food for thought for those of us whose actions and lifestyles are part of a larger interconnected system.

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