Hasan remembered how in Constantinople he had spoken about the dignity of his countrymen, and laughed. Fortunately for himself, he did not hold anything against anyone or complain. He took everything that happened to him like a cruel joke. Others are even worse, he would say, and it seemed to me that he was defending his earlier enthusiasm more than […]
She sings still boisterously for a long time And we do not really know who she is or what she is And when we eat these well-baked tasty cakes That she herself prepares and serves We will be transformed into lions, wolves, boars Wild animals without their wildness We will retain all that otherwise adorns us Human propriety instantaneous Courage […]
(This text is a slightly modified version of an article written toward the end of the war in Bosnia and first published in the Boston daily The Christian Science Monitor, July 19, 1995) Radovan Karadžić is a Montenegrin who claims he is a Serb, a psychiatrist who tries to be a poet, and a war criminal who insists that he […]
Something has changed between me and people since I became a parent to one of them. – Paul Claudel I’m running home with my little daughter – again, shells have surprised us on the street. Shells have, for centuries, been falling every day, and every time they surprise us. I’m hurrying her on with angry words: transferring my rage from […]
Like everything else our language is particular to us Outsiders cannot learn it it’s gibberish to them Yesterday I heard a woman say “This war has destroyed my life” Why do we always say “this war”? To acknowledge the wars that came before? To remember future wars? To say this war is to acknowledge that one the last one and […]
Darling, your face is turning white becoming featureless an untracked field of snow Your eyes which once burned like blue sky are flattening out memory fails us both I curse my failing memory try to catch it it disappears around a bend another another The exact timbre of your voice the gesture that moved me so the way your laughter […]
In Sarajevo I was happy there cafés theater nightlife twenty minutes to the mountains three hours to the sea a good job a cosmopolitan life but when the war started I felt unsafe so I came to Belgrade to live among my own I thought a better life no shelling here there is water electricity that works neighbors are not […]
This summer I took a class on the city of Sarajevo in light of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Built into this course was the opportunity to go to Sarajevo for a week. I knew immediately that I had to take this class. I am ashamed to admit that I knew very little about the war. I was six […]