Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992-95

AUTHOR: Sacco, Joe

ARTIST: Joe Sacco (illustrator)

PUBLISHER: Fantagraphics Books

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2000

Publication History

Graphic journalist Joe Sacco traveled to the small town of Goražde four times in late 1995 and early 1996 to conduct interviews and take photographs in the almost entirely Muslim enclave designated a United Nations (U.N.) Safe Area during the Bosnian War (1992-1995). Sacco’s access to the region was facilitated by North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) air strikes on Serb positions around Goražde in response to the Serbian takeover of Srebrenica. Before that, Goražde had been effectively cut off from outsiders; the Blue Road (so called because of the color of U.N. peacekeepers’ helmets) connecting it to the city of Sarajevo had become contested territory. During that time, Sacco transported goods, currency, and letters between Goražde and Sarajevo.

Sacco worked on his book for the following few years, publishing several stand-alone comics titles. Fantagraphics Books published the first edition of Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia, 1992-1995 in a deluxe hardcover format with a foreword by British writer Christopher Hitchens in June, 2000. Fantagraphics published the first softcover edition of this title in January, 2002. The London-based publisher Jonathan Cape released Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia, 1992-1995 for the British market in 2007. Various European publishers have produced Bosnian, Italian, Serbian, and Spanish translations of Sacco’s account. In May, 2011, Fantagraphics published a special edition presenting a selection of Sacco’s sketches, photographs, interview transcripts, and excerpts from his notebooks, along with the original work.

Plot

Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia, 1992-1995 follows a narrative trajectory similar to the one Sacco presented in his groundbreaking, award-winning 1994 book Palestine: A Nation Occupied. Frustrated with the journalistic opportunities available to him as a recognized member of a foreign press, Sacco attempts to integrate into the community to get unofficial, ground-level accounts of what has taken place.

Sacco’s account begins with him sitting in a bar with his friend Edin, waiting for news of the peace agreements that will eventually become the historic General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina (also known as the Dayton Accords). The news does not arrive. Sacco shifts from this episode to relate how and why he got to Goražde—and this historically ambiguous moment in the bar—in the first place.

Sacco entered Goražde in a somewhat official capacity, as a journalist covering the Bosnian War. Because access to the small town had been virtually impossible before the NATO bombing of Serb positions around the enclave, foreign journalists and film crews glut the area, seemingly anxious to provide proof of the NATO progress in the war. Sacco and his colleagues are fêted by local dignitaries and given access to the finest lodgings and food available. Sacco, however, feels increasingly frustrated by the dissonance between the official line about what has occurred in Goražde and the stories he hears from locals. After a dizzying five-day stint, during which he meets several like-minded colleagues and makes some key local contacts, especially Edin, Sacco resolves to return to Goražde to gather more information.

Befriending Edin is a pivotal moment for Sacco. This Bosnian soldier, schoolteacher, and translator becomes Sacco’s guide, helping him navigate through the decimated landscapes of Goražde as well as the historical and cultural complexities that underpin the memories and opinions of the people Sacco interviews and comes to know. Sacco nevertheless attempts to portray Edin and others he meets in a neutral light, and he supplements their accounts with his own research into the region’s history and geography.

The book closes with Sacco reuniting with many of his Bosnian friends and contacts in Sarajevo after the signing of the Dayton Accords in Paris, France, on December 14, 1995. He observes that many of those he came to know seem restless and frustrated by life after war. The hopes that sustained them through the horrors of the previous few years now seem inadequate or insufficient in some way. The book closes as it began, on an ambiguous note.

Characters

•Joe Sacco is the narrator and a caricatured version of the author. His most prominent feature is his glasses, which are colored white, revealing nothing behind their frames. As the author, Sacco attempts to portray himself as an objective observer.

•Edin speaks fluent English and is Sacco’s primary contact, translator, and friend in Goražde. He is an engineering student at the University of Sarajevo who returns to his hometown of Goražde at the beginning of the Bosnian War. There, he enlists in the Bosnian forces defending the almost exclusively Muslim enclave, translates for peacekeeping troops, and teaches math to secondary school students. He introduces Sacco to many eyewitnesses of Serbian atrocities. His own anecdotes provide a majority of the material Sacco covers in the book.

•Riki, a friend of Edin, befriends Sacco. He serves as a soldier in the Bosnian army. He exhibits a quixotic nature and spontaneously bursts into snatches of English-language pop tunes and Bosnian folk and patriotic songs. A University of Sarajevo student whose studies have been interrupted by the war, he dreams of someday leaving Bosnia to travel in the United States.

•Emira, a nineteen-year-old, works as a translator for journalists covering the Bosnian War in Goražde. She epitomizes the tragic experiences and sometimes ironic hopes of Goražde’s youth. She longs for escape and material luxuries, especially original Levi’s 501 jeans, while she struggles to come of age and eke out an existence in a war zone.

•Dr. Alija Begovic, the director of a hospital in Goražde, verifies the extent of atrocities that Sacco hears about; he also offers his own horrific accounts of what it is like to work in a medical facility during wartime, sharing anecdotes about performing amputations with kitchen knives and anesthetizing patients with brandy.

Artistic Style

Sacco’s artistic style in Safe Area Goražde is consistent with his previous work in comics and journalism. Consisting of a distinctive mix of life drawing and caricature, Sacco works in black and white, and his ink illustrations exhibit a variety of techniques, especially his virtuosity with pen and brush. One of the most compelling characteristics of Sacco’s style is his almost cartoonish depiction of himself, which emphasizes his short stature, his wide, toothy mouth, and his round spectacles. This last point is particularly important in light of Sacco’s tendency to convey emotion in his renderings of people’s eyes. Sacco rarely, if ever, draws his own eyes, and his white, owl-like eyeglasses suggest both objectivity and blindness. With this deceptively simple visual detail, consistent throughout his body of work, Sacco underscores the idea that he is, at best, an imperfect but committed witness to events taking place in the world.

Sacco is a master with line, and he utilizes cross-hatching to tremendous effect as both a method of illustrating depth and texture and a means to convey mood. Much of the action in Safe Area Goražde takes place in dark interiors (living rooms, cafes, and clubs), where Sacco’s cross-hatching suggests an air of intimacy as well as a conspiratorial tone. His use of this technique is most dramatic in his rendering of Edin’s account of his journey to Grebak, a distant Bosnian supply outpost in the midst of Serb-controlled territory that can only be reached on foot. Sacco’s dark treatment of men and women marching pell-mell through forests at night, passing the forms of others too exhausted to complete the trip, suggests the nightmarish fear that compels desperate people to survive in hellish circumstances.

Sacco adheres to a conventional comics format in his illustrated journalism. Pages are divided into sequential panels set against a variety of frames or borders. Sacco alternates situating regular panels against a flat black background with superimposing panels on illustrations presented on white backgrounds. In general, Sacco uses regular panels on black pages for documentary passages in which he and his sources are explaining or providing anecdotes about historical events and causes that illuminate what is happening in the present. Narrative and dialogue appear in frames and bubbles contained in the sequential panels. By contrast, Sacco’s white pages exhibit less order and regularity. Text and dialogue appear in bubbles and boxes of various shapes and sizes that crowd into adjacent panels, overlap borders and frames, or otherwise compete with imagery. Sacco’s depiction of Riki’s singing, for example, crams musical notation and bold, capitalized, undulating letters into thickly outlined bubbles, all of which transmits the singer’s volume and gusto and provides an ironic and poignant counterpoint to the tragic events Sacco describes.

Themes

In his foreword to Safe Area Goražde, Hitchens observes that, though Sacco adheres to a fairly objective treatment of events, he does demonstrate a “contempt . . . for the temporizing, buck-passing, butt-covering ‘peacekeepers’ who strove to find that swamp of low moral and ‘middle’ ground into which the innocent end up being shoveled by the aggressive.” Sacco persistently interrogates this idea of the innocent throughout his work. Reluctant to settle for tidy and ultimately specious arguments that foist blame “on all sides,” Sacco attempts to show and practice an unflinching objectivity that honestly portrays the effects of atrocity on real people. His interest in this tragic dimension of human experience transcends the impulse to justify the actions of one group over another, though Sacco also makes it clear that he understands the temptation to blame.

Complicating his treatment of this theme is Sacco’s ambivalence about his own role as a comics artist and journalist. He invites readers to consider his own innocence as an observer, for example, but also seems to question his own purpose and role as a reporter. The question remains, however, whether Sacco and his readers would be better off if he did not attempt to document the tragedies that he covers. The very existence of his work emphasizes that traditional reporting and media fail to account for details crucial to a fuller understanding of events taking place in the world, especially on a human level that could, suggests Sacco, provide some common ground.

Impact

Widely considered an innovator in print journalism and comics, Sacco opened the door to utilizing comics to represent historical events in ways that were credible to a general readership. While Sacco was not the first artist to treat historical subjects in a comics format, his vision is a unique combination of the ironic, first-person point of view characteristic of independent comics published in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s and traditional print reporting. In many ways, his portrayal of the Portland, Oregon, music scene in early comics such as Yahoo (1988-1992), for example, highlights the distinctive elements of his comics journalism: The artist depicts himself as both insider and outsider, witnessing a historical moment in the life of a particular community. Sacco’s own role in this account is both deliberate and dubious, though his work on Palestine and Safe Area Goražde abandons some of the self-referential irony present in his earlier comics in favor of an urgency to tell and draw a significant story as accurately as possible. In this respect, Sacco’s enduring impact remains his integrity as an artist and journalist. His commitment to represent what he sees and hears, even if offered self-consciously, lends his work a credibility and honesty that undercuts the arbitrary distinctions between media that reward academic pretensions or corporate interests.

Further Reading

Modan, Rutu. Exit Wounds (2007).

Sacco, Joe. Palestine (1996).

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. War’s End: Profiles from Bosnia, 1995-1996 (2005).

Bibliography

Baker, Bill. Review of Safe Area Goražde: The Special Edition, by Joe Sacco. ForeWord October 17, 2010). http://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/safe-area-gorazde.

Bartley, Aryn. “The Hateful Self: Substitution and the Ethics of Representing War.” Modern Fiction Studies 54, no. 1 (2008): 50-71.

Rieff, David. “Bosnia Beyond Words.” The New York Times Book Review, December 24, 2000. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/12/24/books/bosnia-beyond-words.html?scp=1&sq=Bosnia+Beyond+Words&st=cse&pagewanted=all.

Walker, Tristram. “Graphic Wounds: The Comics Journalism of Joe Sacco.” Journeys 11, no. 1 (Summer, 2010): 69-88.

Wolk, Douglas. “Drawing Fire.” Print 62, no. 1 (February, 2008): 76-83.