First Person Safe Area Gorazde

I thought it was very interesting the question Adam posed to us for this blog post: Why does Sacco insert himself into the story of others? Why does he make himself into a co-subject?

Lately, I have been reading about (and watching) the American autobiographical documentary film—that is, a first-person narrative that takes the filmmaker’s family as its subject as it explores issues of family secrets and dynamics. In it, the filmmaker’s character is always built in relation to another family member. And something which I read recently stated that the autobiographical film was the new literary memoir. Could SAFE AREA GORAZDE be considered a journalistic memoir? When and why did literary memoirs start to take hold in a history of literature?

I was excited by this statement because of all that I don’t know but also because of the possibility that there might be larger, transdisciplinary developments of Thought that influence creative work across the gamut of all the creative fields. I’m almost certain there’s something called post-modernism that might be related to this move towards an embrace of complete subjectivity as a way towards Real Truth, given that in our times, we have generally given up on any pretense of Objectivity as being a plausible enterprise in documenting or relaying some kind of Real Truth.

When I think of what Sacco did, inserting himself amidst the people, and by his own self-referential reference to those journalists who went around throwing bon bons at the kids on the street, the role of the participant-observer that comes to us from the discipline of Anthropology comes to mind. They have made it part of what they do to admit the fact that their observation affects what is being observed. On the other hand, documentary film has had an on-and-off relationship with this “coming clean,” or insertion of the character of filmmaker into the film. During the most fervent period of documentary filmmaking in the 1960’s and 70’s, American documentary filmmakers were making “direct cinema” or telling stories from a fly-on-the-wall, observatory mode, while ethnographers-cum-documentary filmmakers in France were practicing a “cinema verite,” which was all about using the film camera and the filmmakers’ presence as a catalyst for what then occurred in front of the camera. I sense that the reason Joe Sacco inserts himself into his story has something to do on a macro level with this idea that authors or auteurs are generally moving towards a personal, first-person approach in order to get closer to Truth, a rule of Subjectivity over Objectivity, and that this is a phenomenon that has theoretical foundings and can be seen across disciplines and creative media. So I’m very curious about this.

Now on a specific level, I think that Sacco’s decision to speak about such a heavy topic as the war in Eastern Bosnia in the first person is a good storytelling device. It humanizes the tragedy and personalizes it for readers who share the same position of “outsider” as Sacco himself. The chapter that really did it for me was AMERICA MAN (pp. 190-192) when Sacco admits, “I wanted to put a hundred thousand miles between me and Bosnia…between me and these horrible, disgusting people and their fucking wars and pathetic prospects…” In a first-person voice, Sacco shows himself as a human. Just like Spiegelman, Sacco is not perfect and he is honest about it, which is a really effective way to deal with topics of inhumanity. History textbooks have always been hard for me because it’s always a listing of names, geographical locations, and dates. In SAFE AREA GORAZDE, it’s about Sacco’s relationship to these people that tell us something about the people, and not their testimonies alone. As a work of journalism, I understand why Sacco decided to structure his novel moving between first-person voice of the people and their daily life and testimonies of eye-witnesses and an official narrator in the black pages. Using his personal experience as his main structure, he is then free to "flashback" to give us historical information--the first-person serves to draw us into the story almost so that we might be able to digest the black-bordered, informational chapter and gives it a real texture and complexity--it's humanity.