His two books from the Occupied Territories, Palestine and the newly released, devastating Footnotes in Gaza, are brilliant--rare, astute and compassionate looks at the tragic and absurd reality of daily life under Israeli occupation. So I feel almost sheepish admitting that Safe Area Gorazde, Sacco's comic about the Balkan War, has become my favorite of his full-length works.
Sacco took four trips to Gorazde, a majority Muslim town in eastern Bosnia, in the waning days of the Balkan War. Gorazde was an enclave: a UN-designated "safe area," although the epic irony of that phrase was not lost on anyone who visited there. Surrounded by hostile Serb forces for the better part of four years, Gorazde teetered more than once on the brink of the ethnic cleansing and genocide that eventually swamped all the other "safe areas" around it, including Srebrenica, where an estimated 8,000 people were slaughtered in the largest mass killing in Europe since WWII. And yet, miraculously, Gorazde survived--although the reasons had far more to do with luck than with any actual effort on the part of the so-called peacekeeping forces.
I'm not exactly sure what I find so compelling about Safe Area Gorazde. Perhaps it is Gorazde itself: the scrappy little industrial town on the Drina River whose name few western journalists could pronounce (go-RAJH-duh). Besieged, shell-scarred and starving, its population swollen with desperate refugees from areas already overrun by the Serb army (a constant reminder of the fate than many believed awaited Gorazde itself) and yet still, somehow, grimly and humbly clinging to life. This is certainly what drew Joe Sacco there and what kept him coming back. In fact, he dedicates his book to the town, "where I spent some of my happiest moments." After reading the book, one understands that this is not sarcasm.
Safe Area Gorazde also has the benefit of coming as close as any of Sacco's books do to having a single protagonist, although he emerges quietly. If there's a hero in Safe Area Gorazde, it's Edin, Sacco's tireless guide and translator. Grad student, conscripted math teacher and occasional soldier, Edin is as unassuming, war-weary and battered as his home town, and, it turns out, just as much a survivor.
We don't realize quite how much of the story we've been seeing through Edin's eyes until nearly the end of the book, when, suddenly, we find ourselves following him almost uninterrupted through twenty-six harrowing pages of the 1994 Serb offensive that nearly overran Gorazde. Turns out Edin participated (while nursing a head wound, no less) in the grim guerrilla defense of the city organized by a handful of soldiers and local residents. The front line, as it were, ran practically through his front yard. He sometimes fought alongside family members and neighbors; other times with strangers, refugees retreating from towns that had already fallen.
While we've known all along that Edin is a soldier, that he's been going back and forth to the front for most of the war, we're not quite prepared for the image of this seemingly mild-mannered school teacher crouching in bombed-out houses with his father and brother under withering tank and artillery fire, sniping at invading soldiers with a Kalashnikov while blood seeps through the bandages on his forehead. This guy--an engineering grad student who lives with his parents and complains about his students' poor test scores--doesn't seem like a likely resistance fighter. He could be anybody. He could be one of us. And yet Edin is revealed to be a reasonably competent strategist of urban guerrilla warfare and becomes sort of a leader, in his characteristically modest way, trying to keep the line organized and talking people out of retreating when he can. It is, after all, his home he's fighting for.
The pages describing the '94 offensive, circumscribed by a claustrophobic black border from beginning to end, are some of the most vivid and striking in the book. Sacco employs every trick of framing and perspective in his arsenal, often drawing Edin and his comrades from an over-the-shoulder angle, as if we're crouching there right along with them, in that gutted house, against that wall, flat on the ground behind that pile of bricks that seems ludicrously insufficient cover from an advancing tank.
(I couldn't help thinking, as I read these pages, if that tank had been an IDF tank and that guy with the Kalashnikov had been a Hamas fighter and that town had been Gaza and not Gorazde, how the perception might have changed. Would he have become a cowardly terrorist deliberately hiding himself among civilians, instead of just a guy defending his neighborhood against vastly better armed invaders?)
Edin's is a true story, of course; all he did was live through it. Sacco's genius is to present it to us with no preparation (even though the entire comic is told in flashback), letting it unfold matter-of-factly and without warning, as it did for the participants. We understand the terror on the faces of the men hiding in rubble, because we've heard the same horror stories of mass murder, mutilation and rape that they have, and because we've come to know Gorazde a bit, and we don't want to see it destroyed.
While the villains of Safe Area Gorazde are clearly the Serb nationalists--and not without reason--there are some other forces for whom Sacco reserves a hefty dose of bile. One is the "international community," particularly NATO and the US, who callously muttered about "neutrality" when besieged people needed food and civilians needed protection from genocide, then intervened only when there was something to be gained in the post-Cold War pissing contest.
During the '94 offensive, Edin remembers NATO planes constantly flying over Gorazde, taking surveillance pictures as he and his neighbors fought for their lives on the ground. How hard would it have been for the biggest, most advanced military in the world to take out the murderous artillery batteries in the hills above Gorazde? Certainly not very hard--half the world had seen the United States' precision-guided bomb porn broadcast on CNN during the Gulf War. But somehow, in those rare cases when bombing something could actually save lives (see: Auschwitz railroad tracks) the world's biggest military has a tendency to be mysteriously unavailable.
The other targets of Sacco's contempt are the "hack pack," the swarm of mainstream media journalists who breeze into Gorazde in the morning with the UN aid convoys to snap up a few sound bites and thirty-second clips, then pile back on the convoy trucks to be back in Sarajevo in time for dinner, and deadline. Sacco sees the type of oversimplified, context-free, ahistorical journalism that's become the norm in the rapid-fire twenty-four-hour news cycle, in which conflicts are neatly packaged to be consumed like the latest fashion trend, as exactly what he's rebelling against. He counters it with two weapons: a keen respect for history (he goes back to WWII to untangle the roots of this conflict) and a genuine sense of compassion for the people and places that become the subjects of his books. With these tools, he seeks to answer the most important question in the journalist's litany, the one most frequently ignored by sound-bite journalism: Why?
Joe Sacco has a great gift for revealing the sparks of kindness, humor, courage and solidarity that dwell in dark places, for finding the humanity amongst inhumanity that makes war-torn places simultaneously the best and worst places on Earth. Perhaps the best praise I can give his book is that after reading it, I kind of wanted to visit Gorazde. And when I found this photograph of the town from 2006, patched up and with all its lights back on, I recognized it instantly, and I smiled.
I really need to re-read this. It was the first Joe Sacco book I read, and I don't think I properly understood The Awesomeness Of Joe Sacco yet.
ReplyDeleteGreat review!