Post-War Identification. Torsten Kolind
are strange. The town is strange, a dump. Down at Nota, for instance, five to six people sit. There is a only little light. Two individuals are talking. Some drink coffee and half-sentimental Bosnian music fills the room. The room is no more than twenty-five square metres. The cables in the bar are hanging down. An old 16-inch TV stands on the bar, it is dirty. One of the ‘waiters’ sits in a corner kissing his girlfriend. Jamezdin is sitting in the dark, alone, like he has totally given up.
TK: What did you do today?
Jamezdin: Nothing!
He has no coffee, nista [nothing]. Osman sits on one of the four plastic chairs, which, placed around a plastic table, make up the regular table for those who play cards in the evening. The room is like a bunker someone has tried to fix up a little. On the way out we talk a little about football, and about good and bad Danish football clubs. They know them better than I do. The worn football programme in the bar, showing dates for matches and the odds, is the only thing livening the place up. One of the young men turns on the TV, but there is nothing, only static.
II
Stolac is a hole. There is nothing in the town. The tired unshaven man sitting in the post-office, staring and saying sutra [tomorrow] when I ask if I have mail. Cafés with room for one hundred but with only ten guests. I met the guy without teeth on my way back, we talked a little…about nothing.
III
It is as though everything, in one way or another, has been ravaged by the war. Houses are shattered and collapsed and just standing as empty gaping ruins: bushes and grass grow in many of them. Goats are grazing there. Other houses, inhabited, are filled with holes after shell splinters, they lack windows, and plastic or planks cover the window openings. Houses about to be built – but the money has run out – are left half-finished, but inhabited anyway. Laundry is hanging outside, and a satellite dish hangs on the rough wall. Outside in the garden there is an old lady, dressed in black. Her child or grandchild gets into the old ramshackle and rusted Opel Cadet in the driveway, starts it and drives away, the noise from the leaky exhaust pipe filling the air. I pass a small bridge, the metal railing is torn by shell splinters, and it is rather rusty. Below is an old factory, all the windows are broken, the drainpipes are gone, so the walls on the north side are mossy as the rainwater just runs down the building’s sides. The roads are filled with potholes, but people still drive extremely fast. I meet a young girl, about twenty-five, in a pink pullover, I say hello and smile, she smiles back showing all her missing teeth. The Muslim graveyard [Harem] is overgrown by twining plants, the Croats haven’t touched it, but time has. Nobody has tended it for the last five to seven years. All this decay is in glaring contrast to the few new and very stunning three-storey houses and a totally new Alfa-Romeo or Mercedes driving by.
IV
At the café I noticed many have bitten-down nails. Coffee, cigarettes and bitten-down nails.
And finally, two quotations that communicate the feeling that the unmaking is still on-going. One day Anvere said to me:
Nicolas [my second name], you can’t understand what the war has done to us. At first sight everything may look normal, but it’s not. Nothing is normal. The war has changed everything.
Another day she talked about the time in Blagaj. This is how I recalled the conversation afterwards.
Anvere: In Blagaj I lost thirty kilos in the first three months. Imagine! Fear and there was no food. All the time I had to think about how to get food. Alen [son] did not come out of the basement where we lived for half a year, he would not, he was scared. I had to go out to get food. But there was nothing to buy. There were no shops. Sometimes you could buy a little from those who had something, some of their homemade stuff, a little meat or some honey. But it was expensive. If not, I had to pick grass, we had nothing else. We cooked it and ate it. And we were scared all the time…And the things Nihad experienced in the prison camp, he has not told me. He can’t bring himself to tell me, and I can’t stand to hear it.
Nihad: It was terrible; you can’t understand how it was. One day or one week you could maybe endure, but when it continued week after week, month after month…I saw people dying in front of me, we were scared, it was…
He stops. Nihad is not a man who talks a lot, but at this moment I simply do not think he can manage to say more, and I do not ask. His face is ash-grey, and his whole body is somewhat fallen apart. When he stops talking he lowers his glance, and it stays there. His wife then said:
Anvere: And the fear we had hasn’t left us. When I gave birth to Amer in 1997, I think I passed on that fear to him; he was like…wild and restless [she cries].
TK: Yes, but he is a good boy now, he has a good life now.
Anvere: Yes, but I passed on that fear to him, and now what does he have to grow up for? There is no future, no work, nothing.
This last section has showed how – owing to the unhealed traumas of my informants and the present depressing situation – the unmaking of the world is still going on. I have termed it the existence of an omnipresent feeling of loss. Let me stress again that my depiction of Stolac and people’s mood is just one side of the coin. The other side is hope, successfully forgetting the past, optimism, laughter, humour, determination and energy. But when the coin is flipped, this side often lands face down.
The aim of this chapter has been to give an account of central themes in my informants’ experiences related to the unmaking of their world. The very foundations of existence (property, security, food and family relations) have been affected. The stories and values governing normal social life were also damaged, which led people to question not only ontology, but also moral principles and social relations, especially ethnic relations. Furthermore, the unmaking of the world means a loss of epistemological frameworks, making both the remembering and communication – as well as forgetting and repression – of traumatic events equally problematic. Lastly, I have tried to capture my informants’ general and all-pervasive feeling of loss.
The chapter is a necessary introduction to the rest of the book, in which I concentrate on my informants’ remaking of their world. I intend to analyse the contours of the mental landscape (what I see as their counterdiscourse) they have created in order to explain and give meaning to the devastating experiences of recent years. It has been necessary to show how profoundly people’s world has been unmade in order to make it possible to contextualise how fundamental the question of identity is in this process of remaking for the Muslims of present-day Stolac. It is my argument that the unmaking of people’s world forces them to first question and then recreate a number of the central categories of human experience: social relations, moral values, the everyday world, and group identity (especially ethnic). I will be treating many of my informants’ questions and uncertainties concerning these fundamental issues under two primary headings, touched upon in each part of the rest of the book. Firstly: Who are they, the ones who did this to us? And secondly: Who are we, since this was done to us? The question of the identity of the Other will be the theme of Part II, and the question of my informants’ own post-war identity will be the theme of Part III. However, before looking at some of the answers people have come up with in detail, I will outline the central aspects of the analytical framework for my discussion of the remaking of the world.
1 Whereas in Scarry’s theorising the experience of violence is a matter of the relationship between the individual and his/her body, in anthropological theorising the experience of violence is primarily a matter of the relationship between the individual and his/her society, for society constitutes the foundation of the life-worlds of individuals. Therefore, the unmaking of the world relates to more than the inability to express individual experiences. This term also encompasses the experience of what one might call ‘social pain’, the breakdown of social relations and categories (see for instance Ross 2001).
2 Factuality could be used as a way for the speaker to distance himself from the spoken. The only time I heard Emir’s father talk about his