Safe Area Gorazde, by Joe Sacco

My cover looked cooler, but this is the best image I could find.

Genre: Graphic Novel, Memoir

Rating: ★★★★

Pages: 229

Published: 2007

Publisher: Jonathan Cape

This rating has a trigger warning for blood/gore imagery, war mentions, and the like.

Hello again, peaches! I'd apologize for the radio silence, but I'm really not that sorry about it. Study abroad has been pretty neat so far, and this past month I spent my Spring Break on (as one guy in my group put it) a "tour of the Ottoman Empire." 6 countries (Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro, Bulgaria, Turkey) in 10 days. My takeaway? The Balkans are beautiful and awesome and I wanna go back like nothing else. (As my friend, E., "I could make a life here!")

Because I'm me, and I was surrounded by enabling poli-sci majors, I found time during my trip to go to a few bookstores and picked up some """relevant reading.""" (Book haul post to come later. If I remember.) One of the books I got in Bosnia was Safe Area Gorazde ("Gorazde" pronounced like "gor-AJ-da"). I picked it up after visiting the Gallery 11/07/95, which is a permanent gallery about the Srebrenica massacre (or genocide, depending on who you're talking to). 

Real talk: the Gallery is super depressing and kind of awful, but in a good way? It was very informative and powerful, and definitely impacted my stay in Sarajevo. It was kind of surreal walking around the Balkans and examining the scars that the war left on both buildings and people. 

Building in Belgrade, Serbia.

Inside the Gallery

 

  

The building next to my hostel in Sarajevo.

(But this review is about Joe Sacco's time in Bosnia, not mine.)

Safe Area Gorazde details the time that journalist Joe Sacco spent in Gorazde, Bosnia, from 1994-1995. The book's material is largely based off of his interviews with Bosnian Muslims in the Muslim "enclave" of Gorazde, but also includes historical information and Sacco's opinion on the war. Safe Area Gorazde is meant as a memoir, but delivers Sacco's own brand of self-reflection and political observations. 

I was kinda familiar with Sacco's art before reading Safe Area Gorazde, and had some prior knowledge about the Balkan War. Gorazde was mentioned briefly in the Srebrenica exhibit as a UN Safe Area, but wasn't really elaborated on. My interest was piqued, then, when I saw Sacco's book in Sarajevo (it was one of the titles consistently available in English throughout the city) and I decided to purchase it. I didn't recall seeing Sacco's work in many stores previously, so I thought it would be a worthwhile buy. 

I enjoyed reading Safe Area Gorazde for its writing and art, and was appreciative of how Sacco established the book as his personal narrative during a portion of the conflict, as opposed to a definitive telling of the entire war. Sacco wrote about the privilege he enjoyed during the war (such as being able to travel relatively freely whereas people from Gorazde were stuck in the city). National privilege is an uncomfortable thing to admit when traveling, and I sometimes think that some writers, despite operating outside of the host society as foreigners, tend to over-identify with their subjects to the point where they believe they face the same challenges and restrictions as them.

Page from Safe Area Gorazde detailing the 1994 offensive. Copyright Joe Sacco.

Panels from Safe Area Gorazde. Copyright Joe Sacco.

I would absolutely recommend Safe Area Gorazde to anyone interested in learning about the Balkans War, the intersection of nationality and ethnicity, modern nation-building, and how international government organizations operate. It's a powerful book, a compelling memoir that Sacco shares with other individuals about a dark period in European/world history. Although dark and depressing, the story that Sacco tells does not stand for willful ignorance.