Welcome readers!
By the time we read through a couple of pages of Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde, we forget that we are reading the narrative of an American journalist on the War in Bosnia. At some point we start believing that it is all fiction, that the characters in the graphic narrative are a figment of his imagination, that the war never actually happened. Nonetheless, these thoughts are erased once we encounter pieces of humanity within those characters, and they bring us back to reality in order to remind us that this actually happened. For the past week in my ASTU class, we discussed the section of “Silly Girls” of Safe Area Gorazde. We questioned why Sacco referred to the young girls he met as “silly”, when he never referred to the men in that sense. In the end, however, we got to the conclusion that he didn’t refer to them as “silly” because they were dumb and didn’t know any better but to focus on shallow things during times of war; he referred to them as “silly” because they were human.
What does it mean to be human? Does it mean that we think of buying American Levi’s with all the money we have in times of war? Does it mean worrying about getting a boyfriend while people are starving to death right outside the door? I guess that being human means that we allow ourselves to be “silly” in spite of the circumstances. Sacco’s graphic narrative portrays the people that lived in Gorazde in their innermost human way. Through his mirroring glasses, we are able to distinguish the despair in their eyes, the pain in their voices, the anger in their faces, and the exhaustion in their whole bodies. To tell the truth, Sacco does not leave room to the imagination; setting aside the crude scenes of the wounded people in the hospital, the puddles of blood in the street, and the deteriorating bodies in the houses; the close-ups to the faces of the people that Sacco interviews and becomes friends with are enough to show us the effects of the war on the Bosnian people. Furthermore, Sacco is merely the middle-man between us and the characters, because when we read the book it feels like we are right there talking to them and they are looking at us; we can see the frustration and the uncertainty in their faces, we do not need anything else. The faces tell us everything we need to know; we can read what they say in the dialogue boxes and we get the explicit information of what they’ve been through, but the expressions in their faces convey everything that their words conceal. I guess that this is why we cannot see Sacco’s eyes through his glasses, because his expression is not really important to the recounting of the events. He is an outsider, a funny-looking outsider whose glasses work as mirrors that reflect the truth in the events that went down in Gorazde. Ultimately we found out what happened in Gorazde because Sacco did his job as a journalist, but most importantly because he did his job as a human being; he did not just stand in the middle of the ruins in Gorazde for 15 minutes to give a report on the current situation of the place, he went to Gorazde and allowed himself to be immersed in the safe haven city and recounted the stories of the people that lost everything at the hands of the Serbs.
