How - whatever ill-formed perceptions he might have harboured about the deep-seated animosities `over there’ - could he fail to be moved as a human being?
Or might he not be?
At least, more than fleetingly? How necessary is it for the average `non-political’ westerner to preserve the perceptual gap between themselves and the alien `other?’
Consider Samantha.
Twenty-four, eclectic interests, socially aware. She is a student of poststructuralism, a child of postmodernism. Focus on `the other’ is her specialty, you might say.
What, in the sprawling schema within which she operates, could speak to the Sarajevo massacre? How might that event be `deconstructed’?
As further evidence of the bankruptcy of the Enlightenment project? As chilling illustration of the limits – but also murderous effectiveness - of communitarianism? As indictment of postmodernity itself? Because the universalist liberal values it rejects seem less redundant now than vitally and urgently necessary.
What can Samantha reach for to address – much less assuage – the existential abyss to which footage of the Sarajevo market massacre surely gives rise? Many outside as well as within Europe were galvanised - after initially being paralysed - by those images. And by the footage of the deliberate incineration of a peasant family in the formerly peaceful town of Ahmici.
The BBC report which accompanied that footage was understated, which enhanced its devastating impact. The husband and father’s advice to his young family to hide in the cellar, while he would try to head off their assailants on the stairs. His brutal clubbing to death (he yet got it easy). And the remorseless burning alive of his wife and children below. The mother’s clenched, blackened fist afterwards (all we were shown, but enough, enough). And the correspondent’s simple report (what else could he say?) that they had died `in the greatest agony’.
And which would have been the greater agony for that hapless woman? (can physical and emotional torture be compared?) The pain of the flames as they consumed her defenceless body? Or the incalculable anguish of knowing she could not protect the children she loved from the same fate? Later, in a follow-up to that incident (the appalling inadequacy of language!) UN soldiers, themselves rightly condemned for sins of omission, flagged down a car in the village. Expressed their disgust and disquiet at what had occurred. And were met by an indifference so complete as to rival the horror which had been perpetrated (`What’s that to me? It’s nothing to do with me’).
The revulsion many all over the world experienced over this and similar acts cannot be denied. But the outrage dissipated (like so much else) in the torpor and inadequacy of responses to it. The fuel vital for concerted government action dissolved before it could cohere. Giving rise to the familiar refrain; `If elected governments fail to act, what can I, the lonely citizen, do?’
And so a patina of resignation begins to collect over the wound of outrage.
Leonard Cohen said it years ago in another context: There is only one moment of pain or doubt…but a mouth kisses and a hand soothes the moment away.
6. Lena
Remember. Remember.
Remember the good things, now that memory seems all that is left.
Like the things of which I remind Sasha in my letters to him (Sasha who I may never see again!) Like crisp winter mornings on the way to class. Those perennial coffees in the Cafe Milena. Family dinners when we were all there, and when there were no arguments (don’t let a sour note intrude. The memories must only be good).
What else, what else?
Everything to do with Sasha. But thoughts of him can’t comfort, because they’re suffused with the pain of his absence.
Sasha who I may never….
Stop it!
The point of this journal is not to succumb to the grief that gnaws inside me like a living thing. Although perhaps grief is now the only thing that lives when so much – including hopeseems dead.
What else, what else?
There must be so much more.
Recover the texture of the everyday. The innumerable little acts and rituals. Which, because so ordinary, might be a source of distraction now. But which exactly because they were taken for granted are hard to capture for that reason.
Does the past signify so little that it fades like a mirage in the face of adversity?
So I must, after all, focus on the present. The uncensored present. Which is not conveyed in letters to Sasha. But which is likewise difficult to do in the face of prior horrors of which it is impossible to speak to anyone.
Anna’s rape and death.
The first she described to me. The second I witnessed.
Anna was psychologically shattered by the assault by her neighbour. Which was worse, she said, than if at the hands of an unknown conscript. So much worse that I wondered, as I saw her killed by a bomb fragment in front of my eyes, whether she had actually been spared.
To think like that at such a moment!
Yet think it I did. We had accompanied each other many times on our desperate forays for food. Dodging snipers as we had avoided angry birds in mating season. It was a while before she told me what had happened to her.
Details which were like acid on her tongue. Which I am now compelled to register by writing down.
But why? Why must I do this when no one will read it? And when I already know? Am I using the memory of my friend and her anguish as distraction from my own, which is so much less in comparison? And not for the first time I resist the thought that actual death might be a release for many of us as it had surely been for her. Because perhaps it is the only reprieve from this nightmare.
Anna. My friend Anna. Whose violation and death are but one lonely statistic in this morass of destruction. How I am able to recount her experience, rather than why, is the more challenging question. Her pupils had dilated. And her skin had turned ashen as she told me of her rape. Of how, while searching for firewood at dusk only a few metres from her home, she had been seized by Vitaly and forced to submit to him.
It had been rapid and clinical (`like animals’, she said in a voice calm with despair). A man she knew not only as an adult, but with whom she had played when they were children. The fact of prior personal ties was the worst violation.
Not a word had been spoken. There was no eye contact. Her predominant reaction at the time had been incredulity. But she was sure, she said, that he felt no shame or remorse. That in the likely event their paths crossed in the future, his manner would be exactly the same as it had been before the assault. He would attempt the same bland remarks they had always exchanged. It was, she said as her voice faltered, as if the war had furnished the welcome pretext - and even legitimacy - for what dared not be acted upon before.
And isn’t it a fact that incidents of violence against women have increased as a result
