experiences which gave them coherence, set them in a moral framework. A central strategy is what I will call ‘amputation.’ By ‘amputation’ I mean that when mental categories do not suffice and/or are invalidated, new categories are invented. While they cannot fully express war-related experiences, they function as a kind of symbolic shorthand.
Amputation: we ate grass
Often people said that they had to eat grass when living as refugees in Blagaj during the war. In 1993 and 1994 hardly any relief reached the area: the Muslim-controlled area around Blagaj was like a tongue of land, with only one unsafe entrance. People were hungry or even starving. But how does one communicate the feeling and experience of starvation? It does not suffice to say ‘we were starving’ or ‘starving to death’, or ‘we were extremely hungry’, though I have heard all these expressions. Then people summed up the experience in the sentence ‘we ate grass’. The expression ‘eating grass’ functioned as a symbol covering some of the feelings people had in relation to extreme starvation and fear. This symbolic expression could stand alone, without needing to be commented or elaborated on. Let me give two examples: One evening Nihad was jokingly talking about how they had made moonshine during the war, and we were all laughing at his story. Suddenly his wife said: “we had to eat grass.” Then the laughter stopped, and we were all silent for a couple of minutes. Then we started talking about something else.
Amer told a story he had probably heard from his wife:
The women went to the field to pick some grass, and they ate it. While they did this, the snipers were shooting at them. This was while we [the men] were in prison camp. Near the house where my mother lived, an old woman was out in the field, two times the snipers shot at her, they missed two times, but she did not hear, she was nearly dead. And then they shot her the third time. The women in the house were shouting at her to hide herself, but she did not hear, and then the third time they hit her. And all she did was to pick some grass from the field.
Amputation: losing weight
Another way of condensing and expressing the feeling of starvation and misery was to say how many kilos one had lost. “I lost thirty-five kilos in the first three months!” “Aziz lost thirty kilos in prison camp!” Again there is no reason to disbelieve this. The point, however, is the sentiment such a statement is able to carry. The accurate enumeration of the number of kilos lost is not a mere factual calculation, but rather a symbolic visualisation of hunger.
Amputation: film analogies
When they told me about the shelling, people sometimes made an analogy to film, saying for instance that when the Serbs starting shelling Stolac in 1992 it was like a movie, or it was like the things one had only seen in movies. Again, here, the analogy compensates for the inadequacy of the existing vocabulary. The merging of fiction and reality is a way to express such dramatic occurrences: the sound of a bomb hitting the ground, the sensation of immense tremors in the earth, the sight of people running.
Amputation: rather die than go through it again
People sometimes condensed their overwhelming, unwieldy and intangible feelings from the war by saying that they would rather die than go through it again. This might be considered as no more than a saying. However, the way people said it convinced me that at the moment of speaking they meant it seriously.
Amputation: this war was the worst
Another condensation: comparing this war to previous wars and then saying this war was the worst:
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
