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 – and myself having positive energy – things have changed. People 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
