Post-War Identification. Torsten Kolind
TK: You have survived two wars?
Džanana: Yes one in childhood and one in old age…But that war [World War II] was nothing compared to this war. Božija milost! [Meaning something like God’s joy that God gives in abundance, which is the way Džanana compares World War II to the present war].
People would also make comparisons to Hitler, saying that he had not been as destructive as the Croats had been during this war. And not only old people who had actually experienced World War II made such comparisons. Even for younger people, evoking Hitler, the symbol of modern evil, and stating that this war was worse than what he did, was a powerful expression of the strength of their feelings.
Amputation: hero-tales
The last example relates to how remembering experiences can function as a way of recovering agency. I call the agency-generating stories told in Stolac hero-tales. The point is that when telling these rather tragic stories, the speaker introduces a little twist, so that he becomes an acting subject and not just an object acted upon by others. Hero-tales can be stories about escapes, hiding food in prison camp, dressing up like a woman and thereby tricking the Croat soldiers when they came to fetch the Muslim men, and so on.
A transcription of an interview can never convey the atmosphere in which it was conducted. This is a great disadvantage in this excerpt from an interview with Muhamed, as the atmosphere was full of humour and liveliness, and Muhamed’s story was accompanied by vibrant gestures.
Muhamed: Did you arrive from Denmark by plane?
TK: Yes.
Muhamed: From Mostar to Sarajevo, Mostar to Sarajevo over the mountains on foot! Yes on foot…And we had noting to eat, no water, there was nothing.
Muhamed’s wife: It was war.
Muhamed: Over the mountains. I had boots. My wife had only shoes. And there were a lot of stones, and they hurt your feet.
TK: How many days?
Muhamed: Four days and four nights. Halfway through Bosnia on foot, and we returned to Konjic on foot. And we returned to the house in the evening, washed a little … [and then he uses body language to show how they then made love]. We were not tired [laughing}, but after making love, we were tired [laughing]. […]
TK: When was that?
Muhamed: In 1994.
Wife: Tell him about when we were married.
Muhamed: The wedding was at ten o’clock in the morning … No wedding outfit … [only] uniform…we washed ourselves…My wife had smartened herself up you know, and all the time shelling, snipers; take cover. I said to my wife…it is normal at a wedding that you shoot in the air. I said ‘Here is a gun so we can shoot, for real.’ [Laughs]. But the shells were falling so we could not shoot [What he means was that they did not need to shoot, because all the shells were a salute in themselves]. Then we were in the basement, only the four of us. Me, my wife and the best men (kum i kuma). Nobody else. 10 o’clock in the morning. We signed the papers and then we were ready to go to another house and…you know [laughs.] And we had no wedding ring. My wife made pita [traditional dish] out of tinned food, then we had half a litre of sliva [plum brandy], and at 4 o’clock in the afternoon I had to go…to the front…yes…that’s how it was…love.
The unmaking of the world is not ‘only’ about how the everyday world is destroyed and values and social relations damaged. It is also about how communication of the violent experiences is itself problematic. People want to forget but cannot do so because the memories keep surfacing. And people want to remember and talk about it all, but cannot do so because they are not able to understand what happened, and when they try words and categories do not suffice, so new but still insufficient ones have to be invented: the amputated telling from the world’s unmaking.
The all-pervasive feeling of loss
The final element in my informants’ experiences of the world’s unmaking relates to a seemingly trivial, but nevertheless central point: the unmaking of my informants’ world is not restricted to either a discrete period in time (the war) or to a bounded set of core experiences. Rather, it must be seen against the background of a total and all-pervasive feeling of loss:
Loss of future or belief in a future (dreams, plans, wishes).
Loss of nation state (Yugoslavia, and the identity: Yugoslav).
Loss of a functional society (school, doctors, pension, law and order, industry, education).
Loss of a safe society (ethnic violence, Croat intimidation and discrimination of Muslims).
Loss of material goods and material status (house, clothes, not being able to buy birthday presents for one’s children, money).
Loss of status and dignity (an old ethnology professor from Mostar now walks about the streets in ragged clothes trying to earn some money by guiding the few tourists).
Loss of family members (refugees in other countries, killed).
Loss of the sense of psychological security (war-related traumas).
Loss of a native soil (for everybody Stolac is a new town, virtually nothing is as it was, personal contacts are gone, and the town has become ugly).
Loss of the past.
Even though this list covers many aspects of people’s sense of loss, it still cannot capture the pervasiveness of people’s feelings of bereavement. Stolac is a sad and depressing town, with a gloomy atmosphere. And though people are friendly, hospitable and refreshingly humorous (albeit blackly), the place drains their energy. I felt this myself. Sometimes I felt that Stolac was nothing but a sump of sadness and despair, despite the optimism, creativity and courage that sometimes also existed almost schizophrenically.
One example of the persistent attack on the everyday world is the way people seldom distinguished clearly between peace and war. People for instance said ‘after Dayton’ instead of peace, or they said ‘the present situation.’ They seldom remember the date of the Dayton agreement, but they remember the exact date they were released from prison camp and the day they returned to their home in Stolac. Sometimes people say they wish for peace to come (implying that the present situation is not peace), or they simply say outright that the war is not over. This is from an interview with Suljeman:
Suljeman: It is impossible to live here. When was it the peace came, 1995?
TK: Yes, in 1995.
Suljeman: Then six years have passed and there is no progress. Things have not become better, no industry, nothing.
One day while I was talking to Nusret’s father outside a small shop, a man about my age stopped by. He lived in a village one kilometre away, where the power supply had not yet been fixed. I asked him if they were going to get electricity soon, as a US-funded project was fixing the electricity lines around town. He said:
Yes, but they say that about everything: ‘Just wait a little, just wait.’ For my part the war has now been going on for eight years, and they are just wasted years. I’ve not accomplished anything, it has only been waiting time, and I’m still waiting, but for what? They say things will be better, but a lot of my years have been wasted. To you this is maybe interesting, but to us it is tragic. I have no job, nothing to do, and we’ve been living without electricity since we returned.
It is difficult to describe the sad atmosphere I often found in Stolac, An atmosphere that contributed to people’s general feeling of loss. Nevertheless, I will here quote a few excerpts from my notebook to give an impression of how the town appeared to me.
I
I am just returning from Nota [a small café]. I don’t know what it is, but something has happened to the way I see things today. From being exciting and interesting