Guy Delisle – Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City (2011) Review

This is the fourth time that Guy Delisle moves to another country for an extended period of time. It’s Israel as you can guess from the title. And as he flies into the country and lands, I guess, at Tel Aviv, there is a real sense of “here we go again”. Again going through the motions of being confronted with new environments and an unfamiliar culture, again going through the crapshoot process of getting a place to live and settle for a while. The last time, Delisle stayed in Myanmar for a year (see Burma Chronicles) because his wife worked for Doctors Without Borders, and for the same organisation they now find themselves in a poorer neighbourhood on the Palestinian side of Jerusalem. 

The Burma trip was the first time that Delisle had a whole family with him, including a baby boy named Louis. This time, Louis is an energetic five year old, and Guy and his wife Nadege have a new baby girl, Alice. None of which makes it any easier to travel around. 

By far the longest of Delisle’s travelogues, it is also the one with the best storytelling. The chapters are longer and storytelling is more subtle. Instead of presenting only snippets of strange events or short observations without much context, as he did in Shenzhen, Delisle now writers multi-page scenes that often end with some poignant moment where he doesn’t even have to explain in words what is going on, but uses the power of illustration to linger on what he wants to convey. He isn’t so interested in really trying to understand the politics and history of it all, but he is an excellent observer and prefers to look at what people are doing through a more detached, sarcastic lens. The tone is not outrage, but detached, quiet sarcasm about human behavior. 

So, instead of howling in your face about politics, he prefers to draw a scene where he lets his children play in a playground where also Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Orthodox Jewish parents let their children play, and he notices how all the children mingle without problems, and that even the parents can find it in themselves to have friendly interactions there. Or, he joins a team of observers to observe border crossings as muslims try to travel to the great mosque in Jerusalem, and on the flip of a dime there’s panic and people start throwing rocks. Delisle’s focus in those moments is on how surreal it is that in the midst of this chaos there is a vendor trying to sell sesame breads. So, if you have a stake in this issue, go read the book, get angry and be sure to leave a vicious comment underneath. I don’t care.

After first reading Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and now this book, these two really show religions at their worst. Be careful or you might just start a theocracy or an apartheid regime. Everything that Delisle shows here is stuff that he finds weird, and in Israel it is about division and anger. The petty bickering over holy sites just brings out the worst in people. Delisle joins some Doctors Without Borders activities that includes psychotherapists as they visit the city Hebron where Israeli settlers try to live alongside the Palestinians there. The psychotherapists try to help with the constant tension this brings up and with traumatised Palestinian kids who become too afraid to walk to school anymore. I agree with Delisle that this is the real story to be told here: traumatised kids. The rest is just adults beings assholes. 

Israel the way Delisle depicts it may be a place full of tension and frustration, but also a place filled to the brim with history and with a great diversity of communities. A hectic, dynamic place that has potential for greatness and love, but in reality just falls back into conflict everywhere. Delisle doesn’t try to elevate one community or one religion over the other. He’s just constantly baffled because every other day there is another religious holiday or festival which means that suddenly he can’t drive the car or suddenly he can’t buy products with yeast or whatever. He’s always surprised and doesn’t try to really learn or understand, but he is a conduit this way for people like me who also don’t really know much about all these things. 

I liked this; I learned a lot. Delisle’s lens of course offers a biased view from that of a non-religious western dude, but he visits so many places and lets so many different people talk to him about the situation in the country, that he nevertheless shows a lot of places and a lot of issues from all sort of angles.