Safe Area Gorazde
Fantagraphics Books
In 1996, Joe Sacco received the American Book Award for "Palestine"--a series of journalistic comic-form accounts detailing life in the Israeli occupied territories. During 1995 and 1996, Sacco spent four months in Bosnia beginning work on "Safe Area Gorazde," the follow-up to his acclaimed debut.
In "Safe Area Gorazde," Sacco's aim is to humanize the Bosnian war through an examination of the experience of Gorazde--a far- flung eastern enclave of Bosnian Muslims that was designated a "safe area" by the United Nations. Following waves of Serbian-sponsored ethnic cleansing, Gorazde narrowly avoided the total destruction that was the fate of the other UN-designated safe areas.
"Safe Area Gorazde" represents the fruition of Sacco's alternative form of journalism. Through comics, he investigates the effects of the Bosnian War on the largely ignored enclave of Gorazde. Sacco's use of comics proves to be effective in a manner in which the purely written word of traditional accounts fails. The pen- and-ink sketches of "Safe Area Gorazde" provide the reader with an image of the war that is seemingly more accurate--and certainly more humane--than the more established accounts of photojournalism. While Sacco has complete control over every detail in every frame of "Safe Area Gorazde," his representation of the Bosnian war never feels heavy-handed. In fact, this lack of objectivity inexplicably lends credence to his account; the reader trusts that the book's images somehow more truthfully represent the events detailed than a series of photographs ever could.
Through his postwar exploration of Gorazde, Sacco becomes intimately involved, as does the reader, in the lives of the town's residents and their experiences in the Bosnian war. In doing so, Sacco offers the reader a glimpse of a region that suffered horrendously without the aid and attention of the outside world that was opened to the similarly besieged media darling, Sarajevo.
"Safe Area Gorazde" is powerful beyond the respect generally afforded to the medium of comics. Sacco poignantly paints an image of a war-torn region and its inhabitants through the combination of words and images that the two approaches alone have rarely achieved. "Safe Area Gorazde" should therefore be treasured both as an important study of the Bosnian war and as a triumph of the validity of comics as a medium for serious discourse.
--Brian Gettler