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
