Visualising resilience Joe Sacco's safe area Goražde

Abstract

This article argues that Joe Sacco in Safe Area Goražde, first published in 2000, constantly draws our attention to the resilience of the Goražde people who recover from their horrific experiences of the 1994-95 massacres, as a way of pointing to the continuing trauma of the same people. First, Sacco depicts both individual and social resilience. He then presents the inhabitants of the town as living in perpetual risk, for resilience demands the mobilisation of disaster or its threat as a constant presence. Third, resilience is linked to the collapse of cultural protection where the survivors are transformed into previvors of a future disaster. Sacco suggests that resilience, then, is not a good thing after all because it opens up already embedded vulnerability to greater exposure and an uncertain, but not secure, future.