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ОглавлениеChapter 2
Death and Creativity in Wartime
Culture is after that permanence and durability which life, by itself, so sorely misses.
—Zygmunt Bauman, 1992
The fundamental difference between peacetime and wartime is that in war death and destruction are massive and unremitting. War acquires an all-encompassing quality that makes peace inconceivable. During our lives, we go through periods of confusion in which our understanding of the world does not help us to organize our experiences in a meaningful way. In peacetime we describe this unstable state as a life crisis. We wonder whether life has meaning when its predestination is death. Culture is central to the ways people create meaning in the face of death. In Western culture many have found death meaningful because it marks the limit of our existence and in that way makes it possible to grasp.1 A life without limits is formless, an endless continuum or even a vacuum. Death enables us to define ourselves, and our mortality is an essential dimension of our identity. We deal with life crises and with death though our capacity to create new meanings in our profoundly altered situation.
When our civilian expectations of life are shattered by war, we search for ways to organize our shocking encounters with violence. However, even the most convincing explanations of “whose fault it is” and “which side is mine” are seldom long-lived in a war zone, as none of the warring sides provide protection and justice. When social institutions dissolve and meanings disappear, we use the full array of our cultural resources and inventiveness in order to make sense of our wartime existence.
Wartime conditions do not facilitate creativity, as Carolyn Nordstrom has pointed out (1997:15). Our capacity for making meaning often proves useless when we are confronted with the sudden terror of violent death and destruction. Mass murder is incomprehensible. While in peacetime we gradually reassess our situation in order to come to terms with death and loss, in wartime we must balance between acknowledging and ignoring the life-threatening circumstances in which we exist. Being too aware of the very real dangers we face inhibits our capacities not only to make sense of our situation and respond to it creatively but even to cope with it from one moment to the next. When meanings evaporate as soon as we have imagined them, when whatever map of the new world we construct is shattered as soon as we construct it, we find ourselves in a “limit situation.”
The experience of chaos that was characteristic of Sarajevans’ struggle to recreate normality during the siege, as well as their constant oscillation between knowing and not-knowing, was a typical limit situation, resembling the Holocaust and other instances of massive political violence. In limit situations the scale of destruction makes life conditions unrecognizable and incomprehensible: people feel powerless in the face of hostile forces; their survival or death is random; and the conditions of life are no longer morally recognizable as humane. Chaos and paranoia are the order of the day. In this situation, paranoia is not irrational but is founded on the experience that nothing can be trusted. In this “gray zone” (another term coined by Primo Levi [1989]), nothing is fixed and known; any action and view is potentially acceptable. Norms and normativity itself are eradicated. The debates that arose after the Holocaust about whether God still existed and whether poetry still was possible express this void of meaning.
This type of destruction surpasses anything that can easily be documented or communicated. While material destruction and mass killing can be caught on film or summarized in statistics, the destruction of cultural meanings is hard to express, as the very creation of meaning becomes difficult. The visible destruction caused by war has much deeper effects on us than meet the eye. It reminds us daily of our mortality, and by destroying our cultural artifacts it reminds us that there is no way in which we can achieve permanence. At the same time, the omnipresence of destruction that makes death a constant companion of people living in a war zone drives them to respond with startling creativity. They need not only to re-create culture through reshaping knowledge and forms of expression but also to deal with profound existential issues when death becomes possible, not in an unknown future some decades away, but any moment—as people are killed randomly, here and now, just a minute or a meter away from where one is standing.
The process of coming to terms with such fundamental existential changes centers on taking control over your life in spite of mounting evidence of your powerlessness.
Figure 3. Vilsonovo šetaliste (Wilson’s Promenade) in central Sarajevo, seen from Grbavica. March 1996. Photo by author.
During the first days of war people lived in a state of shock. Frightened, they hid in cellars without understanding what was going on. The awareness that the war would not be over in a few days came only gradually. An extraordinary situation had to be normalized under completely new circumstances. The first forays from shelters were short, in order to provide food, but over time became longer and freer. We started to stroll around the town searching for food or fuel. People went on with their lives and started increasingly to see themselves as the only reliable source of energy. Life began renewing itself, the culture livened up, and the hunt for survival started to take on meaning, but this was a completely different meaning from what the world is familiar with. One started to live a peculiar and dreadful life, which in its preposterousness seemed consummate. One lived with death as much as one lived with arts. No cultural activities stopped, but neither did the dying.
We lived a Spartan life and were more hungry than full. Almost all our strength went to the struggle for physical survival. Immeasurable time and energy were needed to provide water, food, wood. Under such circumstances the needs of an exhausted body lessen, and the soul seeks its peace wandering through the past. In a completely new way thought got nourishment and imagination wings…. As if a new inner need emerges, in a situation in which life is threatened and has lost its value, to establish an island of quiet understanding during a concert, theater performance, exhibition, or in the intercourse with thoughts and feelings of the characters in a book….
An actor and theater manager in Sarajevo [said]: “It seemed as if we by performing in the moist cellar moved the walls and the entrance to that dark room. We scared away the fear from children’s faces; they forgot what was happening out there.” (F. Trtak 1996:28–30, my translation)
Figure 4. A residential area on the front line between Serb-held Grbavica and the government-controlled part of Sarajevo. March 1996. Photo by author.
The same impulse that moved Sarajevans under siege to create art animated their daily struggles against death-dealing circumstances.
Comprehending this sort of destruction requires a description of the war “from within,” as Michael Taussig (1992) has put it, rather than from the comparatively safe world outside. Photographs do not speak for themselves. Stig Dagerman, the Swedish writer and the first reporter to be sent to postwar Germany, wrote in a letter to a colleague and friend, dated November 8, 1946, about the state of mind and soul that comes from observing mass destruction:
In Hamburg one can get off the train at Landwehr and walk for an hour in any direction without seeing anything but inner walls and floors hanging like flags in their holds and frozen radiators clinging tightly as blowflies to their walls. It is nearly in the middle of the town and one does not see a human being for approximately an hour. I walked for three quarters of an hour toward the east, then I walked back. When I came home to the hotel I switched on the lamp over the mirror, thinking: If I do not look different there is something wrong, sir. Perhaps I should have gone west first.
Yes, in the beginning the mirrors were the worst, but afterward it takes no talent to understand that one can cope with seeing everything without going blind. It is not even gruesome to be here any more. It only makes one tired and one sleeps well at nights. (Dagerman 1996:115, my translation)
Everyone staying for some time in a war zone has similar experiences. The overwhelming destruction numbs one’s sensitivity, the sight of death becomes an everyday fact, and exhaustion takes over after the initial rush of adrenaline in one’s body. Most of the people I met in Sarajevo had experienced this shift. One woman said: “Before the war I thought how war is so awful, and if I was in the war I could not sleep for days, or something. But you are so tired from the grenades that you … [laughingly] you just fall down and sleep. That’s … that was surprising, really.” I was amazed at how quickly I got used to the devastation, first of the Croatian frontiers and later of Sarajevo. While I was there, I never took a step back and looked at the town through the lens of peacetime standards. I suppose that, like many a Sarajevan, my senses of mortality were sufficiently engaged with avoiding sniper fire and occasional shelling. My creative forces were concentrated on the task of documenting life during the war. I lost this state of mind and emotion only a few times, when I experienced what other people in Sarajevo experienced throughout the war: the awareness of having no power whatsoever over your own life, the feeling of meaninglessness that resulted, and the omnipresent emptiness. Although we are aware of our mortality, we seem to have a limit as to how much of this knowledge we can take in at a time. This human quality was expressed many times by Sarajevans as a somewhat shameful amazement over their “getting used to it.” They often wondered whether they would look and act normal to people outside Sarajevo, because they were aware that in the outside world the material destruction and deaths caused strong emotional, social, and political reactions. They themselves no longer felt this way, as a young woman described:
Figure 5. Although all of Sarajevo was subject to shelling and sniper fire, some parts of town were directly exposed to shooting from the mountains. Signs were posted in these places saying, “watch out, sniper” (pazi snajper) or “dangerous zone” (opasna zona). Sarajevo, spring 1996. Photo by author.
In the very beginning, every person killed was reported in all of the mass media. As time passed—it may sound a bit cruel, but it really is so—we started getting used to all those victims, and people began to turn into mere numbers. It was reported only: so and so many killed, so and so many hurt…. And then we came to a stage when they would for example report: ten hurt, and you would say: well, it isn’t so many. Two or three killed—oh, then it is not so many today. You know. But that is terrible.
This numbness registered the war’s excessive violence.
A play with this theme was put on in Sarajevo; it was based on the life and work of Mula Mustafa Bašeskija, a Sarajevan chronicler who lived in the eighteenth century (Lukić 1991). His “Chronicle” included a time of plague in Sarajevo. At the beginning of the plague people who died were named and their lives were briefly described: who they were, what they did, and their characters. Toward the end of the play, the narrator only reported that by that time thousands of people had died. The play ended with a long list of names of the recently deceased. The connection through two hundred years of the experience of the plague with the experience of the siege was simultaneously terrifying and tranquilizing. From the perspective of shared human experience, personal mortality lost its significance. Art was the form through which this awareness could be expressed. When the authorities renamed a part of Titova Road for Mula Mustafa Bašeskije, the notion of sharing the war experience beyond the limits of their own time and their own mortality effectively became incorporated into the body of the town.
It was only when the immediate danger to their own lives had diminished that Sarajevans were able to see the destruction and let it affect their feelings. In 1996, after the Dayton Peace Accords, a new graffito appeared saying “kad se saberem—oduzmem se” (when I pull myself together—I fall apart). A young woman’s account of the effects of the first relatively long ceasefire in 1994 is characteristic: “For me it was much more difficult when the situation got better…. I felt terrible! The shooting ceased, but the town was very ugly looking. I mean, until then I didn’t pay very much attention. All is so destroyed … Only the skeletons of the stores, so much garbage in the town. A lot of concrete, cement, glass, everything.” In 1996, the situation was even more appalling, since along with the material destruction the destruction of the social, cultural, and moral fabric of the city became visible. The Dayton Peace Accords, cheered in 1995 because they stopped the shooting, were now understood for what they really were: an official and international formalization of the division of the country and people into three political and territorial entities, based on the different ethnoreligious backgrounds of people in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Until that moment, many Sarajevans had hoped that those divisions would end with the war. This story of Sarajevo shows that this division was destructive in a way that residents found impossible to comprehend; it felt like more than Sarajevans could take—so they “fell apart.”
To Know, Yet Not to Know
Entering Sarajevo for the first time, I was aware of the dangers awaiting me as I moved about in the town. I was fairly cautious and took every opportunity to learn the places where sniper fire and shelling were most likely. The most dangerous places in the center, I learned, were the crossroads around the Holiday Inn, as well as Hrasno and “Sniper Alley,” parts of town bordering Grbavica, which was under Serbian control. This undertaking was of limited usefulness, since the danger was omnipresent and hovering over us. Looking toward the surrounding mountains, everyone could clearly see where the military positions were. It was almost a rule that wherever there were no trees, the territory was under the government’s control; the trees had been cut by Sarajevans during the previous winters. In the forests you could see a blue UN flag here and there, which meant that on one side was the ABiH and on the other the Serbian Bosnian forces. The town was practically surrounded by Serbian positions. You could assume that almost every spot in the town from which you could see the mountains was a place where a sniper could see you.
As far as the shelling was concerned, the most dangerous places were around the Presidency Building in the center of the town, the public water pipes where long queues formed during the water shortages, and any other place where people gathered, such as marketplaces and bread lines. During the periods I spent in the town, there was not much shelling. Only once, in September 1994, as the ceasefire was coming to an end, did I experience random shooting and shelling of the town during the daytime. In March 1995, too, the city center was shelled at night. As people were used to much worse periods, I never spent long hours in a cellar. During lighter or intermittent shelling people hurried home, listened to the explosions in order to judge whether it was incoming or outgoing fire, estimated how far away the explosions were, and decided whether it would be necessary to leave the apartment for the cellar.
I became aware of the constant calculus of danger one evening during my first stay in Sarajevo, sitting on Kovači and chatting with a young Sarajevan woman I had met some days earlier, with whom I developed a friendship during the war years. We were waiting for Staffan, my Swedish colleague, to finish taking photographs of the newly extended cemetery. It was a pleasant September evening, sunny and quiet, and so was our mood. Suddenly she said agitatedly: “Now what is he doing? Does he think that he’s on holiday on Hawaii?!” I was surprised, and suddenly became aware of the mountains and forests surrounding us. We could have hardly been more exposed. I felt nervous, but there was really nothing to do. I asked her whether I should fetch my colleague, but we saw him coming so we just got up and continued our walk.
This episode taught me that even when people did not show it, they were always subliminally aware of their exposure, and some half-conscious meter in them constantly measured the necessity of an errand against the odds of being shot at. Sitting on Kovači was a necessary exposure, since we were there to see the town and document local life. But the meter in my new friend at one point indicated to her that we had been there for too long.
How did she know when it started to be too dangerous? The answer is: she did not. And this was one of the basic arts you had to learn in Sarajevo during the war. You had to be aware of the dangers and at the same time ignore them because there was not much that could be done about them. During my second stay in Sarajevo I heard a joke that captured the incomprehensibility and irrationality of Sarajevans’ situation, in which Sarajevans found some sort of shared logic that guided their lives: An American team of psychologists came to study Sarajevans. They went around the town asking people, “What is 3 times 3?” The first person answered “Tuesday.” The second person answered “365.” The third person said “9.” “Well, how did you come to that answer?” the psychologists asked the third person. “Well, it is simple,” the research subject responded: “Tuesday minus 365 is 9!”
As an example of stupid behavior, I was told about an ignorant foreign humanitarian worker who tied her shoes in the middle of the Holiday Inn crossroads. While the privileged foreigner was condemned for being unaware of the dangers, the ignorance of Sarajevans at the beginning of the war was described rather as childlike. A young woman explained:
For instance, when there was shooting, I could peep through the window. My dad told me: “Hide yourself, you see that there is shooting!” And I hid behind the blinds, and I was supposedly safe there because I didn’t see the street any more. Or in the bus, or in the tram…. If at Marindvor you could hear a sniper, people might raise up their hand, so as not to see the side from where it was shooting…. Someone could put up newspapers, women their bags, they covered the children…. Or, if there was shelling you could hear it whizzing. You knew that it would fall somewhere near or that it had already fallen, and then everyone ran and pulled their heads between their shoulders. As if you pull your head in a bit, and you’ve escaped the shell.
Figure 6. Gathering in front of the Catholic cathedral in central Sarajevo. Sarajevans used to linger there after mass even though they were directly exposed to shooting from the surrounding mountains. Sarajevo, October 1995. Photo by author.
I remember my own reaction to my first air-raid alarm in Zagreb in September 1991. I was alone in my great-aunt’s apartment on the fifth floor of a building near the center of the town. As I heard the sirens, I decided to go downstairs and see what the others would do. I took the staircase, having learned during earthquakes in my childhood not to take the elevator in such situations. I had also been told not to panic and rush, because many people had been trampled in the subways during the Blitz in London. I found people gathered on the ground floor. Some tried to convince children to go to the basement, but most of us went out to see what was going on. It was very quiet, unusual for a city with nearly a million inhabitants. We could only hear an occasional car speeding along the empty streets. We were looking at the skies in order to spot airplanes. The only problem was that the entrance of the building where we were standing faced north, and the military air base from which the planes were coming was to the south. But none of us seemed aware of that fact. We just stood there, watching in the wrong direction and exposing ourselves completely unnecessarily, with the feeling that we somehow were in control of the situation!
Afterward, when I thought about it, I remembered what a soldier told me in Nova Gradiška, a town on the front line toward Serb-controlled territories in Slavonia. “It is the first bomb that kills. Because that is the one people watch out for. If you don’t get hit by the first one, the others, no matter how many they are, won’t harm you because you’d be in a shelter by that time.” The young woman who described naively hiding bullets and shells from view continued: “But when the first shells exploded in front of our building, and when the shrapnel from the neighboring apartment went through our apartment, well, then we started to take shelter…. Either in our hall, or by going out to the staircase, so that we wouldn’t be near the doors or windows. And there were days when the shelling was going on all the time, and when all of us were in the cellar for the whole day.”
People behaved irrationally at the beginning because they could not recognize real danger. They could make stupid choices because they were still reasoning within their peacetime standards. As their experience of the war grew, some Sarajevans were seized by fear that could become paralyzing. They called those who were too scared and who sat in their cellars all the time podrumaši, cellar people. Being so frightened was judged as a weakness and staying in the cellar was regarded as absurd, because in war there was no way to protect oneself. I was told several versions of a common story that was meant to prove this point. Some person, a young man hiding from the armed service, or a panicky older woman, spent all of the first two years until the ceasefire in the spring and summer of 1994 in the cellar, firmly refusing to go out. The relatives provided him or her with the necessities. When it was finally quiet, the person dared to go out for the first time and got killed by a random sniper bullet or one of the few shells. The moral of the story: if you were meant to get killed you would, no matter what you did. Trying to protect yourself entirely was futile, it made your life even more restricted, and any semblance of normal life vanished.
During the war it became acceptable to be afraid, even for men who traditionally were not supposed to show their fear. In such extremely dangerous circumstances it was impossible not to be afraid, so social norms adapted to the situation. Sharing fear and having it acknowledged enabled people to cope with it when necessary. As a young soldier told me, everyone was afraid, and what was important was not to be overcome by panic. At the front lines, if you felt afraid it was okay, because you knew that the guy on the other side of the front line was afraid, too. If you happened to meet face to face with an enemy soldier, you could count on both of you being afraid, and you could either shoot him or hide. But if you panicked, if you lost control of yourself, then he would certainly shoot you.
Casualties and fatalities were a fact of life. People got shot at, got hit, and got killed. In the Sarajevo Survival Map I read: “The State Museum … was on the front line…. The building was hit by more than 420 shells…. In front of the museum stood a UN transporter that was supposed to protect the citizens riding in the trams. A lot of people were killed and injured on that spot” (Kapić 1996). The first time I went there to meet an acquaintance for an interview, she told me that a woman had been killed there earlier the same day. The first time I experienced direct shooting was also there. The shots came from Grbavica, in front of UN soldiers in their tanks who did nothing to protect me. At first I bent over, ran, and swore. But soon I started to feel numb, heavy and empty, instantly depressed. Seized by the paralyzing realization that I had no control over my life, I lost all will to do anything. When I thought about it afterward I understood that what was happening inside me was a half-conscious realization that my life—all I ever did, my qualities and qualifications, the righteous purpose of my being in Sarajevo—was no longer worth anything. I remember a soldier on the Croatian front line showing me a bullet. “You see this bullet?” he asked. “That’s how much your life is worth in war: 1 deutsche mark!” In Sarajevo, being confronted with my mortality in this direct way rendered all cultural phenomena, including money, meaningless. My life was not worth even a deutsche mark! After a day, when I managed to convince myself that my stay was worthwhile and worked out a way of exposing myself as little as possible, the depression disappeared. My world was reestablished through reaffirmation of my own values.
Most Sarajevans experienced this seemingly never-ending pendulum swing between strength and depression. Periods when they could dismiss the dangers of their situation were followed by periods when their sense of normality was fractured, and then they had to struggle to reaffirm their sense of purpose, even of self.
The circle of fright starts with the fear for one’s life and ends with the fear of death. And so it goes on in a continuous circle—with a rational beginning and a rational end, or with an irrational end and an irrational beginning—and so on to infinity. Altogether it develops into a fright of the fear itself, which threatens to become an all-encompassing feeling. And so a new fear emerges, which is not cowardice, but a fear that one might lose one’s fear and become a hero. And then the fear appears anew. (F. Trtak 1996:29, my translation)
People developed various techniques for dealing with snipers and shells, but there was really not much to do about it in practice. Strength lay in the belief that you could survive.
For instance, people did not look at the sniper positions all of the time. Indeed, some people never looked, on the theory that if you looked at them they would shoot you. Others cast a confident glance toward snipers when passing the dangerous places to show that they were not afraid. Some thought that it was wise to go firmly but not too fast, in order not to provoke the snipers by showing fear. Others thought that it was better to speed up a bit, or even run if necessary, in order to show the snipers that they were aware of them, which would satisfy the snipers and keep them from shooting. All these strategies were equally futile in terms of avoiding getting shot; they helped people deal with being in a situation that was beyond their control.
A young woman described her reactions to the constant threat of snipers while moving about in the town:
Every day I used to pass one part where a sniper was shooting all the time. I don’t know if it was because of pride or some sort of obstinacy and stubbornness, but I didn’t want to run…. It often happened that I looked toward the hills like I could see whether he was going to shoot or not. [laughter] As if, to see first, and then I could hurry a bit, then stop, and so on…. Only when I heard shots all the time would I stop, and then again that instinct would start working, so—run as fast as your legs can carry you!
To run or not to run became a question of pride and humiliation. Like many Sarajevans, at some point in the war my host felt humiliated because he was being forced by some “primitive maniac” (that is, a sniper) to run in his own town. So he stopped running. He went firmly, with his head held high, straight over the most dangerous crossroads, feeling good because in this way he restored his dignity and showed the “primitives” that they could not break him. And so he continued for some time, until one day, in the middle of a dangerous crossroad, he came to think of his daughter in exile. Suddenly he was struck by the thought of what pain it would cause her if he got killed—and he ran as fast as he could!
To realize that one’s life or death was out of one’s hands could cause depression, and people had to ignore this fact in order to get on with their lives as best as they could. To lose control over one’s life to some unknown person’s whim was an utterly humiliating experience. To reassert some sense of control, at least to choose whether they would live in fear or not, enabled people to regain some pride.
I remember how all of us in a Zagreb NGO in 1993 were amazed to meet a refugee who had come directly from Sarajevo to the headquarters. The man was wearing a perfectly white and ironed shirt with a perfectly new and proper tie: he was not exactly the picture of refugee we expected, since we were aware of the shortages and knew that he had come through the tunnel. A young woman in Sarajevo explained:
The war did not affect my way of dressing…. It could be 15 to 20 degrees below freezing outside and 8 below in the room, but I had to wash my hair each time before I went on duty, so that my hair was clean when I worked, so that I was fresh, so that my lab coat was always washed and ironed, so that I wouldn’t go around untidy. It was probably a way of fighting back. During the time of the worst shelling and lack of water and gas and electricity, when the conditions were really miserable, I noticed that people were clean and ironed, and tidy. It was so during the whole of the war.
People struggled, not so much to maintain some prewar standard of decency, as for emotional and moral survival in the face of overwhelming degradation. Sarajevans were unable to prevent the decline of living standards, but they could still choose to look like citizens of a European city. In that way, they tried to take decisions about how to live their lives into their own hands.
The darkness of long winter nights was one of the most difficult disruptions Sarajevans had to cope with. A young woman’s account from September 1994 describes how people were thrown back on themselves:
The worst thing is that it gets dark early. You see already now—it is dark at half past seven. Eight o’clock, and there is no electricity. Terrible. You don’t know what to do with yourself…. And there is shooting … you can’t go anywhere…. You can’t read, you can’t do anything. Like, you strain yourself to read by candle, you lose time, and then you go to sleep at seven, eight….
As soon as I started thinking of what was happening to me, what I could have done, what I didn’t, what I could and what I couldn’t, I would fall into a crisis. And that leads nowhere. And then it is better not to think about these things, but just go on, as long as it goes.
With nowhere to go and nothing to do, alone with their thoughts and sounds of explosions outside, Sarajevans were imprisoned by darkness. Fighting off this sense of isolation and utter powerlessness demanded great inner strength. Memories of prewar life were a double-edged sword: they helped people escape from the wartime destruction, yet thoughts of the life they once had were painful. An old Jewish curse captured the pain of loss: “May God let you have, and then not have.”
A cultural worker of Sarajevo evoked the words of Dante as well as the music and words of the Hebrew slaves in “Va, pensiero” from Verdi’s Nabucco, where the destruction of the beloved land and the tormenting memories of the better past, including dear ones now far away, end with a plea to the Lord to “inspire a harmony that we may have the strength to endure”:
The long winter night starts at 4 PM. It is cold in the room and there is only one flickering candle light. One cannot read and that which one writes is illegible the following day. The thoughts come to a standstill and continuously go back to the past, and one realizes that Dante was right when he wrote: “Nothing is so painful as to in misfortune remember the happy moments.” You get overwhelmed by despair and escape to bed from the ‘Choir of Hebrew Prisoners’ in Verdi’s Nabucco: “Go, thoughts, on golden wings….” You cannot sing, cannot hum, but you feel a need to sing out loudly, so that everyone hears and joins in the song. When the eyes fill with tears the catharsis has come to its end. You get used to the idea that the following day shall be the same and you prepare yourself for the sources of happiness that are going to be found in small changes. And the melody of the Hebrew prisoners’ choir resonates in you, for you. It does not take much to feel happiness the following day: a look from a neighbor and it is a triumph if the fetching of water goes a quarter of an hour faster than the day before. (F. Trtak 1996:29, my translation)
The most intimate thoughts, coming when imprisonment by darkness left people nothing but the freedom of mind and soul, could find expression in something larger than the vulnerable individual life: a connection across time and space, a sense of belonging to humankind, which is achieved through art.
Magical Thinking
People coped with life conditions beyond their ability to control or even comprehend through magical thinking and small private magic routines, another “childish” solution to an objectively unbearable situation. I was surprised to find myself engaging in magical rituals. The first time I was on my way to Sarajevo, my grandmother, who had never read horoscopes and certainly did not believe in them, said that my horoscope was good for the period I planned to remain there. Although we acknowledged our skepticism with a chuckle, we were both glad that the horoscope was propitious. Knowing there was nothing practical I could do to improve my security, I also looked for a protective amulet to take with me. I did not find one, but when I left Sarajevo I realized that the shoes I had worn were the same ones that I had worn during my visits to Croatian and Herzegovinian front lines in 1993. From then on, I wore my anti-sniper shoes every time I was in Sarajevo.
Many people in Sarajevo told me that in the middle of shooting and shelling they would resort to some prayer. As religious observance was not common in prewar Sarajevo, most did not know how to pray, and people of Muslim background often did not even know how to pronounce the words. But still, praying gave people a feeling of protection. A secularized woman from a Muslim background said:
Shells were falling, I was going out, I had to water the garden, because it was important for me that the cabbage plants grow, so that I could survive, and I went and I prayed to God…. In the Muslim way, I don’t know any other way…. I know only “bilsmilah ilahim rahim,” everyone can learn that, even a two-year-old child. And I prayed to God. Why? Only to chase away the fear, not because I believe, because of my own security…. I felt safer when I went out like that. There, I thought, some higher power will save me.
For a religious young woman from a Catholic family, the belief in a suprahuman power had a stronger and broader protective effect:
My family is religious, practicing believers…. It helped us through the war in a much more painless way than the others. I tell you, even if He was dead, there is something. There is God…. Look, people were losing hands, legs, heads. Whole families. I didn’t lose anything. You know, I have to knock on wood. [laughter] I didn’t lose anyone or anything…. We never went to bed hungry or thirsty, while people were dying of hunger. I never froze…. I was singing in the cathedral choir. Boy, ooooh it was madness, shooting from all directions! … You have probably seen where the organs are in the cathedral. There is a rosette through which they could spit from Trebević [the mountain facing the cathedral entrance], let alone fire a shell. And there were hundreds of young people in the choir. And no one got hurt. You know, I don’t need better proof.
As former unbelievers, as well as religiously observant people, prayed to God in situations of danger, religious practices facilitated the entrance of the nationalist political project—the division of the former Yugoslavia into separate ethnoreligious states—into the most private dimensions of life. Religion was often invoked as a vague reminiscence from childhood, such as a grandmother praying, or ascribed as an identity by being an offspring of one of the three major religious traditions. Sarajevans noticed the irony of dividing into three groups through praying in three different ways to God, because they perceived God as one and the same.
Some Sarajevans of Muslim background took their newly discovered belief in destiny as a proof that their Muslim roots really mattered, since belief in destiny was perceived as one of the characteristics of Islam. But many more understood it as a philosophical recognition that their lives were entirely out of their hands. It was a way of rationalizing away the dangers in order to do the daily errands. A middle-aged woman told me: “I was not afraid at all, you know…. You never know whether you must rush or go slowly, whether you go toward your mortar shell or you run away from it…. You just go and think about that it is some sort of destiny, or something like that.”
Others made logical arguments to themselves in order to dispel their awareness of danger. The probability of getting killed in Sarajevo was no larger than in any big city anywhere in the world: people were more likely to be injured in traffic accidents and violent crimes in New York City than to be injured by shells and snipers in Sarajevo, I was told. As in the story about cellar people (podrumaši), the moral was that dwelling on or even thinking about the dangers was useless. Or, as the young soldier told me, a way of keeping yourself together at the front was to realize that the soldiers on the other side were just as scared as you were.
I found that being with someone and talking about something else was a good way of forgetting that you were constantly within the sight and reach of shells and bullets. If you were walking alone, the best thing was to think about things you had done, people you had met, or what they had said.
It was impossible to keep these illusions continuously intact. Everyone went though cycles of not caring, followed by periods of fear and feeling exposed. When I asked one of my friends how she felt after a shell exploded in her garden only a few seconds after she went into the house, she said she felt miserable. After such an experience she usually called a friend to talk, made something special to eat or drink, or did “something nice—to forget it.” Her technique was to reaffirm life in a way that brought back feelings of comfort and security.
Sarajevan Humor
Naming, or even caricaturing the myriad disruptions of normality was an effective way of resisting distressing conditions and of preserving prewar norms or creating new values amid the war. Joking was a significant form of resilience in Sarajevo. Not only could the most painful problems and traumas be expressed and shared through jokes, but their self-mocking perspective achieved a sense of control and distancing from everyday circumstances. These jokes were always directed at those with whom the speaker identified, the stereotyped “us,” rather than at the stereotyped “other,” as in many ethnic jokes or other instances of wartime humor.
In the former Yugoslavia Bosnians were known for poking fun at themselves, and this practice continued throughout the war. Jokes about two Bosnian characters, Mujo (Muhamed) and Suljo (Sulejman), sometimes accompanied by the female character Fata (Fatima), were plentiful and very popular. The characters were naive, yet shrewd. One of the first jokes that appeared during the war was about Mujo and Suljo fleeing Bosnia and seeking refuge in Slovenia, where Bosnians were mainly known as immigrant laborers and had a lower status than Slovenes. When Mujo and Suljo got to the river that marked the Slovenian border, they found it difficult to get across and made a little boat that could bear only one at a time. Mujo got in first, and when he landed on the Slovenian side Suljo called to him: “Come on Mujo, send the boat back so that I can also get over!” Mujo answered from the other side: “Get lost, you Bosnian. Who cares about you?!” The joke was based on Slovenian feelings of superiority, but the sting in it lay in Bosnians’ critique of the unscrupulousness of their fellow Bosnians.
This quality of being able to laugh at oneself characterized the youth culture of Sarajevo before and during the war. If you were to be accepted as one of the group (raja), you had to show this capacity. Not knowing this, I was put to the test by some young people with whom I spent a lot of time during my stays in Sarajevo. The situation was totally ludicrous, and I was perplexed about it for some time. One night, when I was walking home with two friends after a nice evening together, the moon was shining brightly above one of the totally destroyed houses in the town center. I was taken by the atmosphere and, as all of us were accustomed to ruins, I declared romantically: “What lovely moonlight.” The girl in my company, whom I had gotten to know fairly well by that time, looked puzzled for a moment, looked at the ruined house, and then started to laugh. “Lovely moonlight!” She could not stop laughing and repeating this stupid sentence. I was puzzled and tried to explain myself, but she and the fellow who was with us kept laughing, and eventually I started laughing too. Whenever I tried to change the subject, they started laughing and repeating what I had said. Eventually, when this continued for weeks, I got annoyed. Every time we met it was impossible to start talking because my friend would repeat my comment about the moonlight and start laughing, and whomever we met would be informed of the good joke. After I got back to Sweden, I told another Sarajevan friend about this incident, and she explained to me in a matter-of-fact, dry, un-Sarajevan way that this was the way young people showed that they liked each other and considered them to be their raja. But then she too started laughing, and as I stood there bewildered, she realized that I did not know that what I had said was a line from a joke about Mujo and Fata. When Fata complained that Mujo was only interested in sex, Mujo, trying to be a romantic lover, said, “Look, Fata, what lovely moonlight!” before he threw himself all over her as usual. As the joke was very popular in Sarajevo, if not the rest of Bosnia and Herzegovina, it never occurred to my Sarajevan friends that I could not know it. Suddenly my cultural incompetence was revealed, and my friend in Sweden could not resist concluding jokingly: “You see, we are different, and it is right that we no longer live in the same country,” meaning Croats and Bosnian Muslims. She enjoyed making this comment, as both she and her parents were emotional Yugonostalgists. Because I was unaware of the joke, I could not laugh at myself for saying this line, as I otherwise probably would have done. I am not sure whether I passed the test, but I might have been forgiven since I was born in a dry and cold place like Zagreb and lived in an even worse one, Sweden. In any case, we remained friends.
Jokes were a typical way of commenting upon situations of destruction and humiliation. For example, the joke that runs, “What/how2 does a smart Bosnian call a stupid one? From a phone abroad!” expressed one of the most acute dilemmas during the war: to leave or not to leave. By sharing the joke, people were letting one another know that they shared the same problem.
Many of the jokes were impossible to tell outside the town because of their macabre humor.3 People who did not have the same sort of experience, who judged situations by peacetime standards, had no way to appreciate such jokes. Instead, they tended to find them disturbing and morbid, as was the case with the joke that went: “What is the difference between Sarajevo and Auschwitz? There is no gas in Sarajevo.”
Figure 7. “Maybe Airlines,” check-in desk for UN flights from Sarajevo. Sarajevo, October 1995. Photo by author.
In their daily lives, people did all they could to take verbal revenge on those whom they saw as the cause of a particular disruption. The twenty-year-old biscuit that was sent as humanitarian aid from the United States was called a “Vietnam cookie,” implying that the United States was getting rid of leftovers from the Vietnam War. The out-of-date powdered eggs were called “Truman’s eggs,” as they had been in the aftermath of the Second World War; in local language, the same word means both “eggs” and “testicles.”
In jokes snipers were made into fools, as in the joke where Mujo killed Suljo with his sniper rifle. The astonished people asked, “Mujo! Why on earth did you kill your brother [in the Muslim faith], Suljo?”“Well, you never know these days,” answered Mujo. “I saw Suljo and when I looked through the sniperscope I saw a big cross on his forehead. So I fired.” The cross was in the rifle sight, but Mujo thought that it was on Suljo’s forehead, which would mean that Suljo had become Christian and gone over to the enemy. Another joke that ridicules snipers was about an old man rocking in his rocking chair by the river where the snipers were continuously shooting. A passerby asked him what he was doing. “Teasing the sniper,” answered the old man.
Even the UN soldiers stationed in Sarajevo adopted the same sense of humor: they called their air bridge to Sarajevo “Maybe Airlines,” insinuating that anything could happen and nothing could be counted on. The last time I was at the Sarajevo airport a little advertisement was hanging at the check-in desk (see fig. 7). It was possible to hang up the advertisement after the resignation of Yasushi Akashi, the UN’s highest civilian commander of the operation in the former Yugoslavia, who had prohibited the joke about the UN air bridge in 1993. In 1994 a UN officer complained to me that it was a bad sign if the highest authority for the whole operation did not have a sense of humor. To me, it seems that Akashi did not have the Sarajevan sense of humor, which implies that he did not have the same life-references that the civilian population and UN soldiers did. From this perspective, it is not surprising that the UN operation did not do much for the people of Sarajevo. Akashi acted in the “soldier” mode of relating to the war, rather than perceiving war as those with firsthand experience did. Sarajevans and UN soldiers serving in Sarajevo had more critical distance on the war, and their war-specific sense of humor often articulated the “deserter” mode of understanding.
Artistic Life
The determination to resist the omnipresence of war, the impulse to deny or forget it, the desire to feel some continuity with prewar life, the drive to express and share experiences, and the need to feel connected with others beyond the limits of the besieged town, the aspiration toward a sense of pan-human belonging—all resulted in an amazingly active artistic life in Sarajevo.
Under the circumstances in which the new was not death but continuing to live, when one was forced to accept the despair as a normal human condition, arts became the fount of the life-force. It gave back life to people, gave birth anew to optimism and strength, and gave meaning in a time when it looked as if life had lost all meaning. In surroundings where all was dead and threatened by death, this old human—and in these circumstances new—companion gave permanency and existence to a threatened and degraded life and showed the indestructibility and the beauty of the spiritual life. (F. Trtak 1996:31, my translation)
A coordinator of arts and entertainment in Sarajevo throughout his professional life, Fahrija Trtak gathered materials about the many cultural events taking place during the war and generously donated them to me.
Individual musicians, artists, writers, and other cultural workers performing alone or together, … anonymous individuals who organized soirées in their residence quarters, cellars, apartments, and backyards, … various types of amateur companies…. Many a foreign artist and cultural worker participated in the cultural life of Sarajevo. All of them came to help. They were there with completed programs, they directed plays, prepared and organized exhibitions, played music, filmed, started collaborations, planned aid and guest performances, and also taught. Over eighty performances by Sarajevan theatres were staged in fifty-nine European cities; painters and sculptors from Sarajevo exhibited in thirty-four countries; musicians performed in all important European centers. Films made in Sarajevo were shown in fifty-two international festivals [during the period from April 1992 until April 1995]…. The cultural activities had the scale and content resembling those of peacetime…. The cultural life of besieged Sarajevo refutes the Latin proverb Inter armas musae silent, “While weapons talk Muses become silent.” In Sarajevo Muses did not become silent. (Trtak 1996:30, my translation)
In the situation of extreme existential danger, people needed the creative force that the arts provide. By performing internationally to the extent that they did, Sarajevan artists were able to call world attention to the plight of Sarajevo. At the same time it also gave them an opportunity to come out of the siege and reconnect to the normal world, which everybody longed for. Some probably used this opportunity to seek asylum and stay abroad.
In the town, Sarajevans performed and attended performances against all odds, and every performance was a victory of civilian life over the war. Lest the city’s surprisingly vibrant cultural life convey the misimpression that Sarajevans engaged daily in the production and consumption of art, however, we must note that the significance of these artistic events lay mostly in the fact that they were happening at all and that it was possible once in a while to attend them. A secularized Muslim woman explained: “We used to go to the concerts, to the theater…. I could not go very often because most of them were at twelve or at one o’clock, when I was at school…. It was because of the electricity. They could not give a performance in the evening without electricity, so they performed during the daylight.”
