Earlier in the school year, our ASTU class read the graphic memoir Safe Are Gorazde by Joe Sacco. The book follows Sacco, an American journalist, reporting on testimonies (mostly individual) from the war in Eastern Bosnia in the early 1990’s. Although the author does provide some factual evidence at times, the majority of the book is spent telling individual stories from Bosnian muslims of their personal experiences from the genocide that took place. As much as the individual testimonies do create a mosaic of narratives from this violent period, the similarity found in many of the narratives causes me to question if the book is really working to create a variety of viewpoints, or more-so a single-view, master narrative of trauma. And if the book is really only creating one master narrative, how restrictive is this to the reader’s understanding of what took place in Gorazde?

This idea came to me after our class read an article by American literature scholar Ilka Saal, discussing the role of narrative perspectives in trauma literature. Although the article focused on a different piece of literature, I believe some of the concepts can easily be applied to Safe Area Gorazde. Discussing post-trauma narratives, Saal suggests, “translating of the wound into narrative poses important aesthetic and ethical questions… with regard to what kind of narrative perspectives, structures, and tropes we ultimately deploy to render the ineffable fathomable”. In other words, Saal is arguing that when putting human trauma into literary format, it is important to be considerate when choosing which perspectives are remembered and which are forgotten. “Formal decisions are crucial in determining our historical, cultural, and political understanding of the event” (Saal). With this condition in mind, it is hard to look at Sacco’s book merely as a narrative mosaic of various testimonies; Safe Area Gorazde can clearly be seen as a well organized collaboration of various testimonies of the same perspective. As before reading Saal’s article, I felt that the book gave me a well-rounded understanding of what took place in Gorazde, I am now questioning some of the assumptions I made earlier about trauma journalism. I now see that to get a fuller understanding of what took place in Gorazde, it is essential to expand your readings past one piece of literature — however varying that piece of literature may seem — as literary accounts of trauma are almost always entered around just one perspective.

Sources:

Saal, Ilka. “Regarding the Pain of Self and Other: Trauma Transfer and Framing in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.” Modern Fiction Studies 57.3 (2011): 451-476 Web. Project Muse. 25 February 2015.

Sacco, Joe. Safe Area Goražde. Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics, 2000. Print.

Recently in my Arts Studies class, we read the collection Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak as part of our study of memory pertaining to 9/11 and the war on terror. The book contains a collection of poems, written in various styles, by detainees at the notorious Guantanamo Bay prison. The poems cover a range of tropes, mostly dealing though with a sense of frustrated longing. Another important aspect of the book though is the careful notice to give biographical context to each individual poet. One of these biographies reads, “Sheikh Abdurraheem Muslim Dost is a Pakistani poet and essayist…. Dost was a respected religious scholar, poet, and journalist… before his arrest in 2001” (Falkoff 33). These short biographies serve to contextualize the poem the reader is about to encounter, and possibly affect the way that the reader understands the message.

In our CAP geography class one concept we recently talked about was the idea of commodity fetishism, an aspect of consumer culture where the consumer only looks at a commodity or good (i.e. an iPhone, soccer ball, etc.) as an individual object (Barnes, 2015). Off of this idea, Marx has then argued a need to defetish – to grasp the real life of – a commodity. To “defetish” commodities, geographers often create commodity/supply chain analyses that trace the trajectory of a product, “from its conception and design, through production, retailing, and final consumption” (Barnes 2015). Below is an example of a commodity chain analysis for shark fins in East Asia.

Although this sonly one example of a commodity chain analysis, practically any physical good can be directed in this way. Can the process of defetishing commodities only apply to physical objects though? Looking at Poems from Guantanamo I would argue not, with the poets’ biographies as the main example. Without the biographies, the collection of poems would simply appear to come from an ambiguous, generalized prisoner. However, with the biographical context of each poet, the reader is reminded of the significance of each individual prisoner in Guantanamo Bay, in a sense “defetishing” them, and seeing how their lives outside of prison have affected the world. This act of human defetishing reminds us that each person is their own individual, and could be seen to contradict the narcissistic “us and them” dichotomy that has become so prevalent in the post-9/11 era.

Sources:

Barnes, Trevor. “Commodity Fetishism.” University of British Columbia. University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC. 30 January 2015. Lecture.

Falkoff, Marc. Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak. Iowa City: U of Iowa, 2007. Print.