Its raining again.
I´m enjoying the sound of it whoosh outside my open window. Its muggy here. Hot. Even sprawled out on my bed, I´ve used up all the cool spots and am compelled to migrate to the window to look out and watch the sheets of water pound the gravely road outside Valentina´s house into muddy puddles. Of course, my sleeplessness may also have something to do with the quantity of rakia (the unofficial national drink that everyone brews in their basements...) I´ve been consuming lately, or perhaps the many thoughts churning in my mind...probably both.
Today was an incredibly intense experience: physically, intellectually, maybe even spiritually. We ventured to Srebrenica and Kravica - testaments to Bosnia´s brutal war that began nearly 20 years ago.
I rode shotgun this morning on our drive out of Bijeljina, with Valentina behind the wheel. It was a cloudy morning with watery sunshine that broke through intermittently and illuminated the bright green of surrounding farmland. I especially love such roadtrips for their ability to promote deeper conversations - they allow you to think outloud and discuss difficult subjects without the pressure of eye contact or the possibility of escape. Instead, your thoughts free to twist and wind around in your mind like the road before you.
We talked about many things...mostly of course the feasibility of developing a unified Bosnia in the face of continued nationalism of the Bosnian Serbs, Croats, and Bosniacks. We talked about genocide, and the disparities between the truth and ´propaganda´ that construct men such as Ratko Mladic - who ordered the execution of 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica - as ´heroes.´
The reminders of war and historic rivalries are everywhere in BiH...plazas with glorified monuments, and rows and rows of sun-bleached, rain-hardened headstones at the entrances of each town. Peace feels tenuous here. Fragile. It feels like war could happen again. That fear keeps people suspicious, and glancing every-so-often back to the local hills that filed to protect all three groups from unimaginable acts of violence.
Srebrenica is surrounded by such hills, beautiful and green and rolling down into the valley. The five of us mingled sombrely through the thousands of headstones. Faceless people, with stories I don't know...such a reality threatens to make this massacre only another paragraph in the history of humankind. But frankly, it was impossible for me to remain detached. I took time reading name after name of the men, many who had been my age when they were executed. It only took a little imagination drawn from studied historical events to visualize myself here, gazing at these same hills, and realizing that I would die so undignified. I imagined families being separated on the first day, and fathers and sons dying next to each other on the last.
We left Srebrenica with heavy hearts. The car was largely quiet, a rare occurrence for our loud and opinionated group. Right before we had gotten into the car, the old woman Valentina had chatted up for us told us the story of her family's suffering. The woman looked weathered. Her dark, leathery skin crinkled into a quick smile, an incredibly surprising phenomenon. When I wasn't watching her face, I couldn't take my eyes off of her hands: smooth almost, like polished wood worn down by frequent use. It made me suddenly unsure about her age. She became timeless.
The woman eventually grasped my hand and led me over to the museum, a part of the memorial area I had overlooked. Inside my eyes were met with horrible images: a doll with its mouth slit, left on a shallow grave as a warning to all, barbed wire handcuffs removed from exhumed bodies in mass graves, and rows upon rows of evidence boxes.
As we sat quietly, watching the churches and mosques of other villages pass by our car windows, I couldn't help but think back to something a student said to Valentina the night before: ˝Fine, go to Srebrenica,˝ he said. ˝But remember who you are.˝
Remember who you are.
In other words, do what you feel you must do, but do not betray the memory of Serbian heroism. Witness but do not necessarily accept Bosniack propaganda. They claimed to have suffered more under ¨Serbian aggression,¨ but wait! Look at what Serbs have suffered! We have suffered too! Bring them to Kravica as well, and they will better understand our story.
Thus, remember who you are is an incredibly loaded statement, especially coming from an incredibly clever seventeen-year-old Bosnian Serb.
It is impossible to designate events on an empirical scale of suffering. It makes mediating such comments increasingly difficult to redirect. I thought I would have more answers by now about how to help Bosnia move forward, but if anything I am becoming more paralysed by the incredible power cultural memory has on exacerbating and perpetuating existing divisions.
Tonight is our last night here in Bijeljina. Perhaps Orasje will reveal another side to the questions surrounding Bosnian identity...
