by Joe Sacco
ISBN: 1560974702
Sacco is a comics journalist and this book is his account of the war in Bosnia, as he came to understand it during the months he spent there. His understanding came through the eyes of others: the people he met and sometimes befriended in Goražde and Sarajevo, people who had always lived there, people who were refugees and had fled there, people who had returned home in a time of war.
One of the things about the comic format that I found useful in this story was the fact that Sacco drew himself into the stories — where he was in the panel served to remind the reader that he is a filter for the (usually translated for him by his friend Edin, a Muslim math teacher) stories of others. He is more honest about claiming his role, his bias, his reality than am I used to seeing from journalists. He doesn’t let the the reader forget that he has a magic blue card to get out of Goražde free because he is a journalist, while the people he spends time with have been cut off from the outside world and have no choice but to stay.
Part of Sacco’s appeal to the people he meets is his mobility, his newness: he can take parcels with him when he visits Sarajevo, he knows about movies they haven’t seen, stories they haven’t heard and hunger for. What we don’t see, really, is the appeal of Goražde for Sacco. Yes, we can see why he comes to care about the people he meets there, because they welcome him with open arms and tell him amazing and horrible stories about their lives. But we don’t see why he went there in the first place.
I don’t think this missing element (why is he there?) detracts from the main strength of his book, however. As I see it, what his book does best is answer the seemingly unanswerable questions you have after seeing a blurb in the newspaper or a sixty-second spot on television about civilians living through war: what is it like to live that way, under siege, even in a “safe” area? What does that mean?
As he learns and shares the stories of Edin’s family, his town, his friends, Sacco shows us what this means. He writes and draws about seemingly impossible things: mothers crawling to escape snipers while holding their small children; a family’s home becoming the front line; generating power for the VCR with homemade equipment placed in the river Drina so you can watch Chuck Norris movies on tape; neighbors burning each others houses down; being shot (more than once); the cold, the fear, and the hunger; the endlessly misplaced hope.
Sacco’s style is realistic, and he draws himself as the most cartoony-looking character. The stories he tells are more powerful for being visual. For me, I find one of the hard parts of following war stories to be that they are often unimaginable, figuratively and literally. Sacco provides the reader with a pictoral and textual narrative that is easier in some ways (because you can see what is being talked about) and harder in others (because you can see what is being talked about) to understand.
He does provide some background information, and some larger context of the war, but this is not an unbiased, historical account (if such a thing can be said to exist.) It does read like an emotionally true account, however. I didn’t buy this book because I borrowed it from someone at work, a man from Bosnia. He told me he couldn’t say much about it, because he was biased, only that it was all true, these things did happen.
Read this book if are curious about what “these things” are like for people who aren’t policy makers, aren’t professional soldiers, and aren’t able to get away when war erupts.
