When we arrived [at Blagaj] we had to describe our skills, and my mother and sister told the soldiers they could cook, so they were stationed in the kitchen. I said I could type, so I typed some documents on an old typewriter. Then I started to teach the kids. We didn’t have any schools, but we tried to arrange some teaching, and I taught English. I had 130 pupils. We didn’t receive any pay. It was voluntary. We only got some candles as payment, so we could sit at night and prepare the lessons, write down some exercises. My friend and I got a candle each, we shared it, so we had a spare one. Then there was a woman who had a baby, and she had some instant milk, but she breastfed her child, so we traded our candles for some instant milk.
There are many stories from that time, a lot of sad and a lot of beautiful stories. There was a woman who had one of her hands so badly injured that she couldn’t use it, and she had to take care of her two children, she had to chop firewood and take care of everything with one hand. On one occasion my friend was wounded, and there was a man who had a wheelbarrow, we wanted to borrow it to drive her to a place where she could get some treatment, but he didn’t want to lend it to us, he had to take care of his family. We lived like animals.
What else? In my class there was a very nice girl. She was so lovely and kind towards the other kids, she was so full of life. But one day she locked herself into a room and didn’t want to speak to anybody, she withdrew into herself, into her own traumas. It was sad to see. There was an eleven-year-old boy without parents, he managed himself. Planted potatoes and harvested them.
Once we had a lot of glue, I don’t know from where, probably Germany, then we made a lot of collages, on paper. We picked a lot of flowers and used them to make a tree, a hand or other beautiful things with this glue. We also made a two-metre-long letter to a school class in Bremen with drawings where we wrote who we were. There were a lot of beautiful things then.
When we buried our dead, we didn’t have coffins, as there was no wood. The last one we buried in wood, was one we laid on a door, but after that it was decided that we should only use fabric, sheets and such, because we barely had enough firewood.
My father returned from prison camp in 1994, but he hasn’t ever been the same since. He turned silent, introverted and sad. […]
In 1994 I started on the faculty in Mostar. It was a long way to walk, eight kilometres each way. I was a teacher at that time, but I didn’t have time and had to stop. I remember the day the radio reported: ‘Today there are no dead.’ It was unbelievable. They had been reporting who had died every day. That day it was as if the whole world opened itself to me. There was a German journalist who interviewed me and asked how I could be so happy when the whole town was destroyed and everything was in ruins, but I said he should try to imagine finally being able to walk the streets without being afraid of getting shot. He wanted to give me some money. He felt pity for me, but I said: ‘Keep your money and write the truth about what has happened here instead.’
Sometimes I think it is all like an experiment. Like if you take two frogs and you put one of them into boiling water and put the other into cold water, which you then bring to a boil slowly. I felt like the last one.
Lamira’s story, as well as the other examples I have presented, on a general level reveal that nothing is sacred: social relations and matters formerly taken for granted reveal their illusory character; meaning becomes problematic; agency vanishes; and institutions, practices and values change character. All in all this leads to a general need for reformulating moral behaviour, and re-identifying social belonging (e.g. ethnic identity).
The destruction of communication
Lamira’s story is somewhat extraordinary, not in content, but in form. It has a chronological order and is coherent. Most Muslim women in Stolac would probably recognise the feelings and situations she depicts, but few would be able to express them so clearly. This brings me to the methodological problem of how to represent the violent memories and experiences of my informants, how to “write about the ‘unmaking’ and ‘creating’ of the world in a ‘made’ world of academic prose?” (Nordstrom 1995: 138). Theory and academic writing style have a structure and order which is removed from lived experience (Hastrup 1988), an order which is imposed on the world, “the academic will to order” as van de Port names it (1998: 25), an order which is especially intolerant of the chaotic experiences related to war, violence and the unmaking of the world. It is therefore unlikely that experience of war and violence can ever be documented in any real sense. Representations of human suffering will always have gaps in terms of experience, perception and the nature of pain itself (Perera 2001: 157-60).
Furthermore, the problem confronts not only anthropologists: it is also central for the victims of war and violence themselves. In essence, the problem is this: how can one communicate experiences when existing categories do not suffice, and when the categories themselves have been distorted by the unprecedented events of war and violence. In addition, victims of violence and terror are also often caught in a dilemma between wanting to forget and wanting to remember at one and the same time. For example, Warren (1993) has described how people in Guatemala did not want to talk about la violencia (a period of intense state violence) because they feared reprisals. At the same time, however, that period came up in all routine conversations, in part because it functioned as a temporal marker in people’s conceptual world. My informants showed the same ambivalence: on the one hand they wanted to speak out, and to put their violent experiences into word to tell the world about them (thereby experiencing the imperfection of words); on the other hand, and at the same time, they wanted to forget, to be able to get on with life and achieve peace of mind.
Problems with forgetting
The evocative power of words was one reason why my informants wanted to forget. Telling someone about horrible events can make them come alive (see also Jackson 2002: 57; Perera 2001: 159). If people did choose to talk about experiences like internment in a prison camp, the horrible time in Blagaj, or the expulsion, they would often only say a little and then stop. They did not want to talk about it because it was like reliving the experience. We see this clearly in the following excerpt from my notebook about a man called Emir, who had been interned in a prison camp with three thousand prisoners and only thirtythree plates and spoons:
Emir: So nearly 100 of us had to share each spoon and plate. When the Red Cross arrived, we washed the spoons for the first time. We had very little time to eat, 15 seconds.
TK: Was it hot food?
Emir: Yes it was soup. We slept on the floor on the concrete. 500 in one hangar. There were no blankets, and if you had to pee, you just had to do it where you were.
He suddenly stops talking, I can feel that he is moving towards the limit of where he still can talk and keep things at a distance. I say that it is impossible to understand how people can do such things to others. He answers that if you could, you would be like them.
According to Anvere, people’s and especially men’s attempts at forgetting are rather general, as she straightforwardly ascertained about her husband.
Nihad he has not told me about the prison camp, he can’t manage. No men tell about their experiences from there, well yes a little when they drink loza [grape brandy].
Like speech, television is a strongly evocative medium. Once the film Welcome to Sarajevo, which depicts the horrendous time during the siege of Sarajevo, was shown on television. Seeing the film with my hosts was a tough emotional experience. We all sat watching: nobody said a word except my landlady, who kept sighing. Her husband, who normally likes to eat the hot popcorn his wife makes, did not touch it. After the film nobody spoke, and we all went to bed. The day after several people asked if I had seen the film. Safet said that when he saw it everything came back to him. He told me how he had relived a lot of episodes from the war, and had not fallen asleep until 4 am. Nusret’s father, on the other hand, said that he only saw the first ten minutes. He had