Ferida Duraković

Many Sarajevans who survived the siege still remember the long nights they spent reading books by candlelight. They read to take their minds off the sound of shelling, at least for a short while. Many read some books more than once, because they were a comfort to them or because they had nothing else to buy. Books were sold and bought on the streets and in the markets. What did books mean to Sarajevans during the siege? What did you read then? Is there a book that “helped” you in some way during those difficult days and nights?

Ferida Duraković: These memories of the post-apocalyptic horror of the 1990s in besieged Sarajevo are incredible! After 30 years, I feel like I'm seeing someone else going through all of this and then I cry...

For the first few months, we walked around the city like zombies, waiting for "it" to end, so that we could continue our lives as before, to return to our individual everyday lives and ordinary human problems... Because all of us who stayed in the city believed that "it wouldn't last long", that the JNA (the Yugoslav People's Army, "proud, steely, compact" from school textbooks, the one that spread "freedom, brotherhood and peace", because it was "Tito's army!") knew where it was stepping, why and whom it was stepping on, so that by July we would all be on the Adriatic Sea, swimming. But the Poet, who senses what he himself does not know, but it writes itself for him (B. Miljković), says that "delusions sing most beautifully"...

Well, then we started to reset, to catch up... First the old people, especially those who experienced and survived World War II: my father started buying flour and salt with the little money we had in the house, my mother counted sugar, rice and macaroni packages in the pantry - because the old people knew: when the flood of war starts, it takes away people and bridges and houses, animals and life itself, along with the ideals of youth and the ridiculous communism of the former state. A mother, with four hearts in her chest for four children, that's a special story of courage and strength.

As the unimaginable horror heated up, we had to find meaning in the long, too-long nights under curfew, under grenades and snipers, in basements and on the front lines... And so we ALL started reading. Exchanging books: professors, teachers, tailors, workers, soldiers, neighbors, everyone! We all stood in line every day for water or bread and talked about books, as if that thread of civilization kept us hopeful and alive.

Those who had fled from the city called while the phones were working; they complained about how hard it was for them without us and how unhappy they were, even where they had arrived. Out of love for them, we were still silent about our suffering and frozen by thoughts of the future. That is why we sought confirmation of our fate in books, as some solid proof that - if we were gone - we would confirm our fate described in some novel or poem that resembled our life... For me, for example, books like „Death in Venice“ by Thomas Mann and everything else that suddenly resembled futile intellectualization and writing in leisure "fell" to the hundredth place forever, and books that spoke of our fears of death, hunger, disease, oblivion from the rest of the world and lack of dignity, rose up - then I "swallowed" „The Plague“ by Albert Camus on two occasions (for what is war but a plague?), which became the book of my life. And to understand the fate of my relatives and friends in exile, I read Miloš Crnjanski's „Novel of London“. I cried to the poetry of Gottfried Benn, and to the cries in the verses of the unfortunate Georg Trakl...

In addition to reading books, citizens kept diaries or recorded daily sketches of events, wrote poems or short stories. During the siege, authors wrote and even published novels and poetry collections. The diaries of journalist Zlatko Dizdarević and the girl Zlata Filipović were published in France. Literature lives. The written word lives. What did writing mean to the citizens of Sarajevo at that time, and what to the writers?

Ferida Duraković: Every written text, especially one published somewhere outside of Bosnia and Herzegovina, related to our life and suffering in the besieged city, and to the violently murdered Yugoslavia, and especially Bosnia and Herzegovina, gave us hope that SOMEONE, sometime and somewhere after us, would come across a trace of our misfortune, that they would read who we were, what we experienced, how we lived and died, or rather how we were murdered, those without weapons, civilian collateral damage of all wars. Because the written word truly lives. Especially if it is true, since it is repeated by thousands of civilian companions. Our words, written and sent to the world together with journalistic reports and photographs, were undeniable witnesses to crimes against civilians. The International Peace Center Sarajevo played an important and great role in this, through which thousands of foreigners of all kinds who were interested in Bosnia in one way or another passed. There, the writers had the opportunity to bring and leave to a foreign journalist or humanitarian their text related to the war, or a letter for their loved ones somewhere in a faraway world, and many of them would do their best to deliver those private and public letters to the right place, and send the texts to where our appeals would resonate. In 1993, a school notebook was also published - the diary of the girl Zlata Filipović, the thoughts of a child captured under shells in Sarajevo. I was given the task of translating those twenty pages into English from Friday to Monday, it was a bad translation, but so necessary - and it immediately went out into the world. The diary was later published in many languages and in many editions, much thicker than the original, but I no longer had anything to do with it.

How would you describe your own writing process during the siege? How did the conditions of life under siege and the daily risk and fear influence your writing? How did your experience of the siege influence your creativity in the period after the siege and does it still influence you today?

Ferida Duraković: Almost all of us spent the first year of the war trying to find our bearings and understand what was happening to us, why in Sarajevo and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and how not to pay with our own lives for someone else's choice to go to war - especially if the president of your new-old homeland resolutely declares: "Sleep peacefully, there will be no war", while in the Parliament a criminal (a poet, imagine!) threatens "a highway of hell and suffering that will lead Bosnia and Herzegovina to hell, and the Muslim people perhaps to extinction". We did not sleep peacefully. There was a war. Bosnia and Herzegovina stepped into hell by someone else's decision. The president lied. Thousands of civilians (women, children, the elderly, the helpless, the wounded, the hungry) died, tens of thousands were wounded, hundreds and hundreds of children were killed in the city alone. I cannot even think about Bosnia and Herzegovina, not even today.

I did not write during the first months of the war: our family house burned to the ground in the shelling, along with everything I had, although that was not much. We had to provide food and water, "invent" money for the overpriced salt, sugar, flour, survive hungry until we got the first grams of humanitarian aid... I worked as a fixer and translator, we lived in other people's apartments in Sarajevo, suffered and loved each other much more than before and after the war... In September 1992, I published my first text about the war - a kind of diary, "Every mother is a wunderkind". And my mother, like all mothers in the war, was a miracle child.

In the surveys and video interviews (Oral History) that we conducted with the citizens of Sarajevo during and immediately after the siege of the city, we very often came across statements from citizens that they found salvation in books. In our materials on education and childhood during the siege, the interviewees mention how children read a lot of books at that time, not only for school, but also in their free time. They developed their imagination, learned and grew into smart, literate and successful generations. How can we motivate children and young people to read today, in the age of modern media and social networks? Is enough being done today to create a new reading audience?

Ferida Duraković: I think we are worrying without reason that children do not read or will not read. The new generations, those children who were born during or after the war, are children of the new technological era. If they are deprived of a normal life by their own state, at least they are not deprived of progress in the world, on the contrary. These are already formed and sovereign individuals, they are more educated than their parents (as is only right) and they have their own ways of surprising us in every way. Books may change their appearance, children read them technically in a different way, but they read, and the content of great literature and ancient messages about good and evil will never disappear from them, nor will they disappear from the lives of children who carry the reading culture from home and school. After all, the world that our children and grandchildren inherit from us – may they forgive us for leaving such a world behind! – is not that good, so whatever those children do, let them fix it for themselves, not for us, logically – we, participants in the (geo)political fractures of the world or not, ruined that same world and unwillingly handed it over to predators and dementors before we became aware that wars are fought not for the betterment of all of us but for the power of the heartless. We know this, thirty years after “our” wars, and today before our eyes Palestinian children, women and the elderly are dying of hunger and wounds at the will of those same predators and dementors. It is terrible that we are leaving our children with nothing but the monster of capitalism, the lack of solidarity, neighbourly support and tenderness that we experienced so deeply during the war.

Today's children, I know for sure, read, in other formative ways, but we don't need to dictate to them what to read, how to educate themselves, they acquire knowledge either here or in the wider world... although nationalistic literary and cultural canons clip their wings so that they don't fly away from those who want to control their lives. Instead of giving them the wind at their backs so that our children, educated and eager for a well-ordered home, can return to us and forgive us for our inability to navigate the modern world that scares us.

The first non-governmental organization in Bosnia and Herzegovina registered in besieged Sarajevo was the P.E.N. Centre of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was founded in 1992. You talk about it in a video statement in our Spoken History (FAMA Collection). What did the founding of the centre mean at the time and how did you communicate with the international P.E.N. organization? Was it possible to establish contact and cooperation with authors outside Bosnia and Herzegovina? What was the cooperation with them like, if any?

Ferida Duraković: The P.E.N. Centre of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which we founded on October 31, 1992, was created on the initiative of Prof. Zdenko Lešić and Prof. Muhamed Filipović, with the great help of the poet Goran Simić.

After the news of the formation of the "self-proclaimed multiethnic P.E.N. Centre", which foreign journalists present in Sarajevo sent to the world, in September 1993 at the congress in Santiago de Compostela (Spain) our centre was accepted with acclamation and applause as a full member of the world association. We were not at that congress because we could not leave the besieged city, but our colleagues from the Slovenian P.E.N. Centre, represented by the brilliant writer Boris A. Novak, who founded the Committee for Assistance to Sarajevo, did it for us in a friendly and brotherly way. And in 1994, with the help of UNESCO, we travelled to Prague for the P.E.N International Congress, when we officially became a member of the world family of writers, poets, editors, novelists and other intellectuals.

The P.E.N Centre became a meeting point throughout the war. Numerous artists, actors, writers, committed intellectuals and advocates for peace (as well as adventurers and swindlers of various orientations and intentions) came to visit us. I cannot remember them all, but I will always remember Susan Sontag, Juan Goytisolo, Vanessa Redgrave, Maruša Krese, Annie Leibovitz, Nedim Gürsel, Predrag Matvejević, Christopher Merrill, Drago Jančar, Joan Baez, Bruce Dickinson, the Laibach group, Boris A. Novak, Zubin Mehta, David Wilde, Phil Alden Robinson, Bibi Anderson, Bernard-Henry Lévy… Not to mention hundreds of journalists, war correspondents and politicians of various profiles. Ironically, I remember the wife of French President Mitterrand, who took a nap during a meeting with members of the Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and when I asked her if she would take any wounded children with her when she left Sarajevo, she replied: "I have not received such a request," and then disappeared into the fog of general dishonour together with her pretentious husband, whom the people of Sarajevo greeted with hope on the streets, thinking that he was on their side.

However, in the memory of not only us artists, but also the citizens of Sarajevo, Susan Sontag remained, who directed (how fitting!) the play "Waiting for Godot" by Samuel Beckett in the Youth Theatre with local forces and in poor technical conditions, in order to turn the rest of the world to the wonderful city that in the heart of Europe is dying before the eyes of the Western world, waiting for... Godot. The premiere was held on August 17, 1993. The strange respect she had for all of us, and besides all the gifts she collected and brought to Sarajevo and at the cost of her arrest in Pale, one fact knocked everyone in wartime Sarajevo off their feet: on the second day of her stay in Sarajevo, she took off her bulletproof vest with the words: "I can't wear a bulletproof vest next to all of you who walk with me without a bulletproof vest. May what befalls you be mine."

What was your day like during the siege?

Ferida Duraković: Instead of a futile repeated story about how it was, which everyone talks about in their war records of various kinds, I offer readers a prose poem/poem prose, a kind of diary of the war events of 1992.