Context
Letter from Sarajevo
John Taylor
If you struggle with the moral questions
raised by the disastrous political commitments of certain otherwise
stimulating or even essential writers, then ponder this anecdote. It
goes back to the years 1992-95, when Sarajevo was besieged by Serbian
paramilitaries and the Serbian-controlled Yugoslavian Army, and when
civilians—dashing through the streets for water or food—were being
killed daily by snipers hiding in the surrounding high hills. The
Russian novelist Edward Limonov (who is the author of the best-selling It’s Me, Eddie,
among other books, and who had become pro-Serbian with respect to the
Balkan War and ultranationalist with respect to his homeland) arrived
at an army outpost on the Trebevic mountain flanking the town, then was
filmed as he shot machine-gun rounds down at scurrying Sarajevo
inhabitants. This may be old news to you: the event was
featured in Pawel Pawlikowski’s 1992 BBC documentary “Serbian Epics,”
and the footage was later used as prosecution evidence at the trial, in
The Hague, of the Serbian ethnic cleanser Radovan Karadzic, whom
Limonov had befriended. Mea culpa: like most European and
American writers—Juan Goytisolo and Susan Sontag are conspicuous
exceptions—to whom the Balkan War, however close geographically, was at
best a very distant concern, I was unaware of much of this until I
arrived in Sarajevo for a prolonged stay last spring. A decade
has passed since the Dayton Agreement (of 21 November 1995) brought a
still-fragile end to the Balkan War, yet memories of this gruesome
anecdote involving Limonov have not faded. It was spontaneously
recounted to me on three different occasions by Sarajevans, none of
them writers, who were trying to convey what the treacherous siege was
like. The specter of a novelist aiming at men and women lugging
jerricans epitomizes, for such survivors, the widespread calculated
cruelty and murder that marked the war and changed probably forever a
town famous for its centuries-long, more or less peaceful, cohabitation
of Muslims, Roman Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and Jews. Indeed,
the square (Trg Oslobodenja) where I drafted parts of this letter while
sitting on a bench near the bust of the too little-known novelist Mesa
Selimovic (the author of the deep-probing, Sarajevo-set, psychological
novels Death and the Dervish [1966] and The Fortress [1970]), is flanked by the large Serbian Orthodox Church; if you pass
by the many outdoor chess players and cross the square, then turn
right, the Catholic cathedral stands just a little off Ferhadija, the
pedestrian shopping street; continue on your way down Ferhadija, and
you soon arrive at the great Gazi-Husrev-Begova mosque; and a few yards
more, to the left up a narrow passageway, is the old synagogue, now a
museum devoted to the history of the local Jewish population, most of
whom were exterminated by the Nazis during the Second World War. Within
a few minutes’ walking distance from there is the bridge near which the
Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated by the Serbian nationalist Gavrilo
Princip on 28 June 1914—the event that sparked the First World War.
Under that bridge flows the muddy, reddish Miljacka river, an incessant
symbol of earth mixed with copious blood. One of my
interlocutors, named Igor, insisted on driving me up a winding road to
the spot from which Limonov had fired his rounds. It is an overlook not
far from the former bobsled run of the 1984 Winter Olympics, and the
slope descending from there down to the town is still specked with
thousands of antipersonnel mines. Signs warn hikers to stop. “No
walking anymore in these lovely mountains, let alone skiing and
sledding,” Igor pointed out, adding that his own adolescence had been
nipped in the bud and that he himself had taken up arms to defend his
hometown. The offspring of a mixed Croatian-Serbian marriage, he was
not alone among non-Muslims in deciding to remain and side with his
fellow Sarajevans, the majority of whom are of Muslim origin. “It was
only during the war,” he related, “that we learned to listen to first
names ethnically—sometimes with disastrous consequences. Up to then, I
never paid any attention. We are all Slavs and speak the same language.” Now,
after the war, Igor sometimes finds himself painfully
stigmatized—depending on whom he is talking to—for being neither
“purely” Serbian nor Croatian nor Muslim. In one of the moving short
stories of Sarajevo Marlboro (1994), Miljenko Jergovic (1966-), recalling the war, similarly notes that And this sight continued to bring back all the horror and hubris
of the Limonov incident. It was, moreover, all the more tangible for me
in that I had run into and chatted with the Russian novelist a few
times during the 1980s, when we were both living in Paris. We had
writer-friends in common. His act has kept me thinking about writers’
oft-troubled relationship to reality, and by this I do not mean reality
as it is aimed at merely through the sights of crafted language. A
cynical French novelist once speculated that “perhaps in the final
reckoning . . . the goal of this coup d’état, with all its
consequences, was simply to offer attractive scenes enticing talented
men of letters to write about them.” Gustave Flaubert knew
well how human conflict and suffering can allure writers (independently
of any sympathy for the victims), sometimes politically deluding them
in the process. His remark is quoted by the dissident Serbian novelist
Vidosav Stevanovic (1942-) in his memoir Voleurs de leur propre liberté,
which became available in French in 2003. Living in political exile in
Paris since 1992, Stevanovic takes the Frenchman’s comment literally in
order to raise the question of how aesthetics relate to ethics. “Ethics
nonetheless still concerns [writers],” cautions Stevanovic, “who use
aesthetics as an excuse for hiding their head in the sand and refusing
to participate, to accept responsibility.” This is a classic
call for political concern and direct writerly commitment. A democrat
and a long-standing adversary of Balkan nationalisms, the novelist had
returned to his homeland during the crucial period, mid-December 1996
to mid-July 1997, in order to take part in the growing opposition
movement against Slobodan Milosevic. It seemed then that Serbia could
become more democratic. Stevanovic’s memoir recounts the failure of
this movement, and castigates the intellectuals who eventually
exchanged their ideals for political privileges. His chronologically
intricate novel, Abel et Lise, which was also translated into
French in 2003, similarly evokes the personal destruction caused by the
rise of nationalist sentiment, in this case as it tragically affects
the now separate lives of two former lovers, an Albanian man and a
Serbian woman. In Stevanovic, the political dichotomies are
clear-cut (however literarily engaging), but let me return to
Flaubert’s more psychological observation about the motivations of some
writers attracted to war and suffering. Several of Jergovic’s stories
in Sarajevo Marlboro scrutinize authorial or journalistic
inspiration per se, raising the additional question of how events are
consequently construed from various vantage points. The lesson
formulated both by him and by another compelling Bosnian writer,
Aleksandar Hemon (1964-)—much of whose formally sophisticated
collection The Question of Bruno (2000), written in English,
concerns the dilemma of a young Sarajevo writer who finds himself in
Chicago on a scholarship when the war breaks out in his hometown—is
that even well-meaning outside observers are inevitably trapped into
viewing events according to their ideas about how such events should be
viewed. Both Hemon and Jergovic are interested in the phenomenology of
violence, hatred, and survival, as well as in how such phenomena are
perceived, especially by writer-eyewitnesses,
writers-newly-arrived-on-the-scene, and writers-in-exile. More
generally, they overturn the too simplistic Western understanding of
the Balkan War as an irrational ethnic and nationalistic confrontation. The two short-story writers are not alone in espousing this viewpoint. As quoted by Ammiel Alcalay in his preface to Sarajevo Marlboro, the Slovenian theorist Slavoj Zizek, for example, posits that “The Gravedigger” likewise stages an encounter between the
writer-narrator and an American journalist. “I understand that he is
researching the subject for his article,” pointedly explains the writer
(who has become a gravedigger), “except he can’t write the piece
because he already knows what it’s going to say.” This, too, is a
caveat for any well-intentioned writer desiring to probe behind the
epiphenomenona of reality. Even more incisively, a story about one
Slobodan, who is an idiot, describes how one of the first CNN bulletins
from Sarajevo contained footage of the retarded man wandering aimlessly
through the city as dozens of shells exploded on all sides. “The camera
followed him for about seventy yards,” adds Jergovic, As for the human realities of the Balkan War, two remarkable
collections of short prose by the Bosnian Velibor Colic (1964-)
focus—like Hemon and Jergovic’s stories—on the kinds of telltale detail
that, if you prefer keeping your emotions intact, you had better avoid.
Written on the spot during the fighting and available in French, Les Bosniaques (1993) and Chronique des oubliés (1994) recall both the short-prose interludes of Hemingway’s In Our Time and Daniel Zimmermann’s terse eyewitness accounts of Algerian War scenes (Nouvelles de la zone interdite).
One also thinks of Marcel Cohen’s volumes of short prose reports on all
sorts of disturbing contemporary phenomena. Like Cohen, Colic’s concise
texts record extremely grim facts, without proffering the slightest
moral judgment. For this reason, the images are all the more harrowing: These questions alone were sufficiently pertinent to what I had
seen and learned in Sarajevo. Indeed, Basara ominously (and sometimes
jocularly) tells various stories and conjures up quite a lot of
disturbing trivia, all the while reflecting on the logic underlying
everyday life. It is impossible to sum up his at once capricious and
hyperlogical narration, which constantly moves from the routines and
common facts of the quotidian to something opaque and undefined and
threatening. As I was reworking my notes for this Letter, long after I
had returned home to France, two sentences from Chinese Letter kept haunting me. Let me quote both as tentative summaries of my
Sarajevan experiences. The first points to the problem of determining
the rational connections among what one sees, how one lives, and what
one writes. “On paper everything has its direction, its logic,” claims
Basara, “but in reality everything that happens except for this logic
is unclear.” The second quotation concerns a girl without an arm: “What
is this girl going to do, asks the author, “in [a] world in which even
two hands aren’t enough to cover your face with?”as time went by the Muslims and the Croats began to
listen to the firebrands among their leaders. They began to look
askance at each other and then to set fire to one another’s houses.
Each community went its own way—some escaping to Zenica, others from
Zenica to neighboring towns. They dug trenches for several weeks and
then the chaos began. Wherever you went there was blood and shooting. .
. . We battled over each field, over plots of land to which none had
given a second thought until then.
From Trebevic mountain, Igor and I had “an excellent view
of the hills around Sarajevo, which are dotted with white Turkish
tombstones,” as Jergovic also states with bitter irony. Resembling so
many small Arlington cemeteries (each similarly impressive in its stark
row-by-row accounting of slaughter), well over a dozen Muslim
graveyards sprouted up on every hillside during the war. Some ancient
graveyards adjoining modest neighborhood mosques likewise became
overcrowded with white, turban-crowned, pillar-like stones.
in former Yugoslavia, we are lost not because of our
primitive dreams and myths preventing us from speaking the enlightened
language of Europe, but because we pay in flesh the price of being the
stuff the Other’s dreams are made of . . . Far from being the Other of
Europe, former Yugoslavia was rather Europe itself in its Otherness,
the screen onto which Europe projected its own repressed reverse . . .
Against today’s journalistic commonplace about the Balkans as the
madhouse of thriving nationalisms where rational rules of behavior are
suspended, one must point out again and again that the moves of every
political agent in former Yugoslavia, reprehensible as they may be, are
totally rational within the goals they want to attain—the only
exception, the only truly irrational factor in it, is the gaze of the
West, babbling about archaic ethnic passions.
I’m sure that Flaubert would have understood Zizek’s point
about passionate or violent behavior actually concealing a devastating,
rigorous, Machiavellian logic—applied by outside, sometimes initially
opaque and undesignated sources—that one must pinpoint and define if
one is to make some sense of the reality transpiring before one’s eyes.
Such is the gist of Jergovic’s story “The Letter,” in which the
narrator finds a missive that has been sent to a man in Sarajevo who,
before receiving it, was killed by a sniper while he was standing in
his doorway smoking a cigarette. It turns out that the letter has been
written by an African who had originally come from a nonaligned country
and had settled in Sarajevo during the years (between 1948 and 1980)
when Yugoslavia, ruled by Marshal Tito, was itself a nonaligned
communist nation. In his letter to his Bosnian friend, the African
explains why he has fled the city and details how hard it is for the
foreigners, where he is now living in exile, to understand the war.
Significantly and tragically, the letter cannot be answered; it is in
the writer’s hands, in all possible senses of the expression.
no doubt because the journalists were expecting to
capture the moment when the Serb onslaught destroyed an innocent life
in Sarajevo. Slobodan very casually sauntered over to the cameraman and
gave him a warm smile. . . . He didn’t stop. He just went on his way as
the shells continued to fall. That night the reporter, with some
disappointment, informed viewers that there were insanely brave people
living in Sarajevo.
While I was exploring the streets and back streets, I thus
often thought of the different ways in which writers have responded to,
or spurned, objective reality. I thought of how reality has been
variously defined by writers and philosophers alike. In Sarajevo, it is
certainly hard not to be overwhelmed by the brute (and brutal)
factuality of nearly everything in sight. War scars are omnipresent:
bomb-devastated edifices that have not yet been razed and replaced;
weeds and even trees that have sprouted up through shattered concrete;
the half-destroyed helicopter, tank, and sundry artillery vehicles that
are rusting behind the Historical Museum and next to the National
Museum with its stunning Bogomil gravestones and excellent wild animal,
bird, and insect collections; countless shell-dented walls and
bullet-pelted balconies (sometimes with blooming flowers in a pot or
two); numerous smoke-blackened, windowless apartments in buildings also
containing attractively curtained flats that have been repaired. In the
small shops of the Bascarsi Muslim quarter in the old town, not far
from the phosphorus-bombed National Library (everything was lost), you
can buy artillery shells of all shapes and sizes that have been
transformed into vases, pen holders, and ashtrays. Dire contrasts such
as these pop up at every corner.
The guards of the Doboj concentration camp dragged Jozo the prisoner by the balls to the toilet of the former Federal Army barracks, now transformed into
a prison. When he was finally able to prop himself back up, he saw the
Serbian emblem (the four C’s) drawn on a mirror with human shit. The
guards forced him to lick it off.
No direct transition can link this despicable scene and Chinese Letter,
a novel by the Serbian writer Svetislav Basara (1953-), yet the book
provided an unexpected coda to my Sarajevo sojourn. Published in
Serbian in 1984 and in English in 2005 (Dalkey Archive Press), the
novel is unrelated to the Balkan War. But from the very first sentence,
with its evocation of jarred identities (“My name is Fritz. Yesterday I
had a different name”) and with the author’s tense first allusions to a
100-page statement that he has been ordered to write by two unnamed,
threatening men, a grim political tragedy seems to loom on the horizon.
Chinese Letter is informed by the communist ethos of Eastern
Europe and, more specifically, by the increasing tensions, following
the death of Tito in 1980, among politically manipulated ethnic
populations in a Yugoslavia already falling apart. Yet this historical
and political background does not sufficiently describe the unsettling
ambience of the book. There are echoes of Kafka and Beckett, but also
of Stephen King and Agatha Christie. Major philosophical concerns are
raised when “something happens,” and the question too of what the
writer should do with whatever he thinks an “event” or “incident”
means.
