My informants’ intentions to forget were often sabotaged by the way the subject of the war would surface in many everyday conversations. Anything could function as a trigger of episodes from the war, as the following examples show. My father visited me for four days while I was doing fieldwork, and I remember how it struck me that on the first evening he was with me in my host family’s company, we only talked for about half an hour about the things one normally converses with foreign guests about, such as climate, buildings, family relations, food and so on. At this point the conversation changed topic and we concentrated on the war and the present problems. It was impossible to carry on a ‘normal’ (non-war-related) conversation. Once Osman offered me a cigarette, a Bosnian cigarette labelled Drina. He asked if I knew the River Drina, and I said yes, it is located at Visegrad, which then led him to talk about the war, starting with the atrocities committed by Serbs in that town. And at a child’s birthday party, my comments about the lovely food we were served led to a discussion about the lack of food during the war. Often people did not even need a cue. Experiences from the war often erupted spontaneously.
Problems with remembering: incomprehensibility
I will now turn to the other side of the dilemma in which my informants are caught: wanting to remember and put their terrible experiences into words. Remembering is blocked by the fact that people often cannot understand what has happened. It does not make sense to them. As I was told several times, “how should you be able to understand it, when we can’t?” Many people explained that their memories were all like a dream: one is just waiting to open one’s eyes and wake up. Some of the examples offered above already express this feeling of incomprehensibility. I shall here limit myself to two examples. During an interview, in which Fahrudin had been talking about problems related to rebuilding the ruined houses in Stolac, he suddenly said:
There is one thing I don’t understand. I was born here and I lived here until I was caught and put in prison camp, and then I returned and continued to live here, and I intend to die here. But I cannot understand what was going on in their heads. The people who expelled the Bosniaks from here. Those who committed this urbicide [I come back to this term], genocide. You should talk to them instead if you are interested in this social pathology.
When I asked Amela, a young schoolteacher, what she thought about the situation, she turned my question back on me:
What do you as an anthropologist think about this situation? We live together in an area, Serbs, Croats and Muslims. We were raised in the same system and in the same social environment. Why do they have this will to kill? How can they have the will to kill a human being?
Problems with remembering: epistemology
A more fundamental problem confronting people’s attempts to remember and communicate their experiences in a meaningful form relates to epistemology: how to communicate experiences when existing categories do not suffice. In addition, the difficulty of communicating traumatic events arises from the victim’s experience of feeling disconnected from the life s/he lived before and his/her experience of being out of time. For this reason, “refugee stories are not like the stories we ordinarily tell. They do not carry us forward to any consoling denouement. They do not require others to listen to them or respond. There is no prospect of closure. There are victims, but few free agents. They may bear witness to an event, describe a journey, or recount a tragedy, but they suspend all consideration of salvation or justice” (Jackson (2002: 92). Furthermore, traumatic events are often remembered as bare facts disconnected from the world, as “an unbearable sequence of sheer happenings” (Arendt in Jackson 2002: 92). These events are therefore without meaning. This characterisation of refugee stories has parallels to some of the stories I was told. When people told me about, or rather tried to tell me about, such topics as prison camp, expulsion, separation from family and Blagaj, they lacked the right words and categories, and their stories sometimes sounded disconnected from time and were occasionally held in a prosaic, record-keeping style.2 However, there are also differences. My informants were telling about events that had happened at least eight years earlier, and some of these stories had been given some kind of structure since then, they urged the listener to respond, and they included considerations of ‘salvation or justice.’ Even though (pace Jackson) people were unable to express the whole of their experience, and were frustrated because they lacked the right words, nevertheless they did develop ways of communicating (about) their 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
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