Macedonia is a travel log in the tradition of Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde and Palestine. In this case, however, it isn’t a personal memoir. When he was promoting American Splendour, Harvey Pekar was introduced to Heather Roberson, a student of Peace and Conflict Studies from University of California, Berkeley. She was on her way to Macedonia, a part of the former Yugoslavia and a place where war was thought inevitable. But the inevitable war never happened. She wanted to find out why. Pekar was interested enough to ask her if she could keep notes of her planned trip, so that he could do a small piece, much like those done by Sacco.
What he got was enough to write a book. As a student of Peace and Conflict Studies, Roberson believed that the inevitability of war was more often a self-fulfilling prophecy, than an objective reality. The difficulty many have with this idea is illustrated beautifully in the opening pages of the book. Robeson is eating on campus and a gentleman asked her if he can sit at her table. There aren’t any other seats. They make idle conversation and discover that he’s a Political Science professor and she’s a Peace and Conflict student. He makes it clear that he considers this something of a basket weaving course. Wars are a fact of life and giving students credit for “Gandhian propaganda classes on meditation” isn’t going to change that. Now I did my undergrad studies in Political Science and didn’t dismiss his objections as cynical or narrow minded. But I didn’t dismiss her defence either. As an example she uses Macedonia, a nation that was expected to be engulfed in the conflict that raged in Kosovo in the 90s. But it didn’t. Why it didn’t becomes the question behind her research trip to the area.
She travels to Macedonia by way of Berlin and Istanbul and falls prey to many of the nuisances faced by single women travelling through Central Europe and the Near East. She spends a month meeting with activists, lawyers, professors, and others and tries to determine how the country succeeded in averting war. An important early meeting is with the legal ombudsmen. Robeson doesn’t believe conflict can be avoided, or that’s it is necessarily a bad thing, rather she believes it can be resolved through non-violent means, like the legal system.
In reading this book it becomes apparent that war may have been avoided, but peace is a long way off. There is no love or trust between the Macedonians and the country’s largest minority, the Albanians. So far, I have to admit, I got the feeling that she was overly sympathetic to the Albanians. No where is the European model of nation-state – a political nation built around an ethnic nation – addressed. Or course, this isn’t a completed work, so that may change. (I am reviewing a preview copy of the first eighty per cent of the book. I haven’t a problem with that. Most comic reviews are of monthlies – chapter by chapter reviews of a larger story.) Of course the Macedonians are being unrealistic. Their situation isn’t going to allow them a prosperous or happy future on their terms. And Robeson notes this. Things wouldn’t be as miserable there as there are, if everyone co-operated in making a bigger pie instead of fighting over the little pieces they have now.
Pekar does a good job of turning her research notes into a script and of telling another person’s story as a believable first hand account. Some parts, however, are so information heavy that they must have presented a real challenge to his illustrator, Ed Piskor. The two have worked together before and this time, I understand, Piskor was given a freer hand in adapting the script visually. There is only one part of the book where I think the task of challenge threatened to overwhelm the visual narrative. In reading one early sequence, where Robinson explains her initial research to her boyfriend, you get the idea that things are happening only in order to give a reason to create a visual sense of moving forward. It runs a dozen pages so it is undoubtedly scripted this way. And to be honest I don’t think anyone else could have gotten around the problem any other way. What’s happening in Macedonia is a complex problem most readers won’t be familiar with. They had to tell us this or they couldn’t show us the rest. But it does draw attention to itself. Having laid that foundation, however, the rest of the story moves forward very well. Even though much of the action involves interviews and talking heads, Piskor’s Macedonia is a credible, living place.
There are a lot of biographical graphic novels, and a lot of travelogues, too. What makes this one interesting is the question at the center. A country that should have collapsed into war didn’t. A country full of animosities still isn’t headed towards war. Why not? There’s an axiom that says you can learn a lot more from failure than from success. Macedonia’s failure to slide into war may prove to be a lesson we can all learn from. Pekar and Piskor have done a great job of translating Heather Robeson’s search to understand what happened, but congratulations to her for both asking the question and working to answer it. I can’t wait to read the rest. |
