For the last two weeks our ASTU class has been reading two astonishing books – Safe Area Gorazde, a graphic narrative written by Joe Sacco and a novel Obasan by Joy Kogawa. In this overview I will mainly focus on blogs discussing Sacco’s book.
Joe Sacco’s book Safe Area Gorazde depicts the events taking place in Bosnia during the War of 1992-95. As Peijia notices in her blog Sacco uses a different way of portraying people compared to Satrapi: ‘this, in turn with its raw and realistic drawing style, made me (the reader) feel a lot more ‘stunned’ by the narrative.’ Focusing on the Sacco’s style it’s necessary to mention his use of black and white as well. In the same way Satrapi used this minimalistic technique to draw attention to the event and the story rather than to a picture itself, Sacco also makes his characters (who are real people) more realistic and ‘alive’.
However, the drawing technique is not the only way Sacco makes a reader more connected with a story. As Jacqueline says in her blog: ‘Sacco shows the reader how human, and also American, the people he meets are by showcasing their more materialistic sides.’ Indeed through his book the author lets us know about Gorazdians’ desires and feelings, which are not different from people’s desires all over the world. In his blog Diego writes: ‘it shows the reader that those living in Gorazde, despite having less-than ideal living conditions, are humans just like you and me. They want peace, they want to travel around the world, and some of them also want to buy a new pair of jeans.’ These human desires give a reader an opportunity to understand better the characters and as Carolina notices they ‘turn numbers into people’.
Another important topic discussed in our class was the way women were portrayed in the book. When it came to this issue our class split in two. Some people consider the name ‘silly girls’ rather offensive and sexist. Others can explain it as another way of showing the humanity of those women. As Carolina says: ‘Sacco chose to represent certain women as “silly”, because some humans are silly. Silliness is human.’
To sum up, the way Sacco choses to pull personal stories of people out of the numbers can in some ways be provocative. However, exactly this technique creates a tapestry of stories that portrays the history of Gorazde.
Hey Imaan!
I read your post “GENDER INEQUALITY” (http://blogs.ubc.ca/imaanpunjasblog/)
and the question my World Cultures class asked last year, and that I will now ask you is, can we apply cultural relativism to female genital mutilation? As discussed in Sociology cultural relativism holds no specific culture or cultural practice as better or more correct than another but instead focuses on culture within its own historical and social context. Eurocentricism, on the other hand measures all other cultures and cultural practices against the ‘better’ and more correct ones of the West. In class last year we watched a documentary, that I cannot recall the name of at the moment, which explained the thinking behind female genital mutilation, mothers explaining why they did this to their daughters, and how mutilated women felt about their mutilation. Many women explained that it was culturally valuable and that they believed it was right to have been done to them. Other women explained how being mutilated took their sexuality, freedom, autonomy, and humanity. How do you think violent cultural practices, that are considered important to those who preform them can be changed, how can we work to understand them within their cultural context, rather than as acts of pure cruelty.
Hello Isabelle!
I think I agree with your point of how we (as a Western audience) should really try to understand other cultural practices within the context they reside in, and not purely on our Western (previously Ethnocentric based but our values today could still hold a good amount of these beliefs) conceptions of how the world should function. I remember someone talking/documentary/news article (don’t exactly recall) about an issue similar to this, in which cultures from many other countries were deemed ‘violent, barbaric or uncivilized’ simply because they were not Western values. For example, the notion that all Chinese people eat dogs seems to be ‘popularly true’ in countries with (largely) Western values. This might be the fact that long ago, European culture has established the status of dogs to be of pet/family value, so when this framework in applied on all other cultures, it is wrong. But there is undeniable evidence that many cultures ate dogs, maybe not as part of their regular culture, but perhaps in times of war or famine. Likewise, the culture of eating dogs in China is not a very common practice either. This tradition is located within a specific region in China where the dogs consumed are bred for the purpose of consumption. So frankly, I think people need to look further into researching a specific cultural practice rather than just depending on the what they think is common practice (or common sense in a sense, because they were unconsciously brought up to value Western beliefs)! But again, I agree that there is a lot more that could be done to understand different cultural ideas, practices and beliefs!