Dubravka of Yugoslavia

Of course, Yugoslavia no longer exists. It has been cut up into three countries: Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Hercegivina, where a bitter war still raged for years. It was called “ethnic cleansing,” a euphemism for driving away non-Serbs from Serb-controlled territory.

 I remember Dubravka Ugresic, whom I met at the Cambridge Seminar on Contemporary British Writing one July years ago, when I read last week’s banner headlines about the war tearing up Marawi. Dubravka and I had spent many hours talking about the war.

One time she told me about nine school kids slain in an attack in Sarajevo attack.” She said that “the school became a war zone filled with the screams and broken bodies of children in the deadliest attack in Sarajevo [Bosnia’s capital]. Mortar rounds fell outside the school’s entrance, claiming so many victims, dead or wounded, that officials said they couldn’t keep count.” She added that there was a photo of an old woman grieving for a young female teacher.

 During a writer’s conference held in the United Kingdom, I immediately looked up Dubravka, whose books I had seen displayed prominently at a bookstore.

 I saw her on the second day. She was wearing a rubber shoes (the Americans call it “tennis shoes.”) She had just come from a visiting professorship in the U.S During the break in our many plenary sessions, she stood outside in the chill air, a cup of coffee in one hand, in the other a cigarette. She had long blonde hair which she sometimes tied with a string. Her eyes were intelligent, alert, and piercing.

 She studied in Zagreb and is now a freelance writer. The feminist Virago Press in London published two of her novels. Fording the Stream of Consciousness won three major prizes for the best Yugoslav novel, this in the country with no lack of major literary talents. Her second novel is called In the Jaws of Life. The Yugoslav edition comprised two separate books, which Virago compressed into one edition, to Dubravka’s dismay.

  One day the British novelist Barry Unsworth came. He had just won the Booker Prize for Sacred Hunger, which probes the slave trade during the height of the empire. Unsworth said: “Profits were immense. This slave trade mirrors the ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ and greed of recent British economic life. For three centuries this went on, until the price of sugar dropped, and the slave trade was no longer profitable. Slaves were bought and sold not only in Jamaica but also in Liverpool and London. There were auctions of slaves in both cities and bounty for runaway slaves, with descriptions of their branding marks. People in Liverpool even now don’t want to talk about it, that the city’s fortunes were founded on blood.”

And then from his novel, Unsworth read a pungent description of how a slave is branded by his owner. Some of the Western Europeans began to murmur in disbelief. But the Asians, the Africans, the Latin Americans and the delegation from Eastern Europe, like Dubravka just sat there, unmoved.

Dubravka told me later, over lunch, “When Barry Unsworth was talking, nothing seemed to sink into me. I remembered Bosnia, and all he was saying meant nothing. I haven’t written about what’s happening in Bosnia. I taught Russian Lit for one year at Wesleyan University in the U.S. While I was there, I wrote a collection of essays called American Pictionary. After my friends read my manuscript, they said,’ But Dubravka, this is about the war in Bosnia!”

For the past two years of the war, she neither laughed nor cried. But while in London, she watched Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, a play about how a group of woman stalled the war games of the men by withholding sexual favors from them until they stopped the war. While almost everybody else in the audience was hooting with laughter, their feet up in the air, Dubravka wept. “I couldn’t understand it,” she said, her eyes widening, “I must have looked like a fool before all those people.”

Criselda Cris Yabes, who published The Boys from the Barracks: The Philippine Military After EDSA, wrote a dispatch straight from Sarajevo. She literally dodged bullets, waved her press card again and again, and talked to the women and children – the worst casualties of war.

One officer said the boys Cris saw begging in front of the barracks used to be students. Bright students. The women still go to work, with their make-up on. They said, “We have to act as if everything were normal. We have to go to work, to have something to look forward to. Every morning.”

One Bosnian woman asked Cris to smuggle a love letter to her boyfriend, a military officer separated from her by a thousand miles of enemy territory. She asked Cris to smuggle the letter because they might not see each other again.

My friend Dubravka would later go to Berlin, on a one-year DAAD grant to write her next book. I’m sure it would not be about Bosnia.

Months after I met Dubravka, The Los Angeles Times published poetry and art from the children of Bosnia, from a UNICEF project called “No War Anymore.” One of them is an entitled poem by Edima Suleymanovich, who is 12 years old.

It goes: “In my dreams I go among the ruins/ of the old part of town/ looking for a bit of stale bread./ my mother and I inhale the fumes of gun powder/ and I imagine it to be the smell of pies, cake and kebab./ Then a shot rings out from a hill nearby./ We hurry, although it is nine o’ clock/ and we might be hurrying to ‘our’ grenade./ Then an explosion rings out in the street of dignity/ many people are wounded/ sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers./ I reach out and touch a trembling hand, an injured hand./ I touch death./ Terrifie, I realized this is not a dream/ It is just another day in Sarajevo.”

What happened to Sarajevo is now happening in Marawi City – the sheer violence and mindlessness of war. Nothing really changes.

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