And Their Souls Wander With The City Crows.

Sarajevo Blues by Semezdin Mehmedinović

Finished reading 'Sarajevo Blues' by Semezdin Mehmedinović a couple weeks back. I rather enjoyed it and I get the impression that I'll be giving it a few more reads over the years. I'm not exactly sure when I became fascinated with the Balkans, though I've been taken by folk music from the region for a number of years now. Recently, I'd been trying to learn more about the history of the Balkans and while I've read 'Balkan Ghosts' by Robert D. Kaplan, 'Sarajevo Blues' is now the most current book I've digested and the first by a native of the region. Unlike 'Balkan Ghosts', 'Sarajevo Blues' is a mixture of poetry, prose & short essays as opposed to a historical travelogue which I think helps my understanding of the region beyond perceptions culled from foreign reportage. Foreign reportage, seeming to be 90% of what is available when I check the sadly limited selection for the region in bookstores (but that's a separate tangent and a sore point). All that said, 'Sarajevo Blues' was fascinating and provoking & after the jump I've posted two of the pieces that I've reread numerous times.

CORPSE

We slowed down at the bridge
to watch some dogs tear a
corpse apart by the river
and then we went on

nothing in me has changed

I heard the crunch of snow under tires
like teeth biting into an apple
and felt the wild desire to laugh
at you
because you call this place hell
and you flee from here convinced
that death outside Sarajevo does not exist



FREEDOM

First of all I want to say the following: for over a year already, as long as the war has been going on, I've been writing about my experiences in Sarajevo. I don't even dare think about anything beyond this city--everything that isn't part of my own personal experience, is simply guesswork. Those with no faith in themselves keep on speculating, while the world maintaining this siege has nothing but contempt for them.
     Writing only about things that I actually saw with my very own eyes, I was subjected neither to censorship nor self-censorship. It simply didn't exist. Such freedom, for someone engaged in this kind of work, is entirely adequate. On the other hand, I didn't see the effect of writing, in any form, during the war. But that would be a futile task, given the extraordinary need for people to read.
     At the market I saw a counter with a newspaper on it accompanied by a sign saying: one reading, two cigarettes! With more than some curiousity, I stood off to the side, just to see if anyone would take up the offer. Before I knew it, a young guy with a beer bottle in his pocket came up to the counter and "bought a reading."
     In Sarajevo, all published sources of information are referred to as "the press." But no one, for instance, calls books "the press." And reading the press has become a vice here, like cigarettes or alcohol. People still read, and listen to the news on transistors, following reports about peace.
     It's very difficult to live with the perpetual expectation of better days to come, as you witness each month getting harder than the last. What do we do? We wait for Bosnia to get better. For fifteen months radio, TV and the newspapers promise peace. But the desired direction in which the course of the war is to be carried out isn't even known. For those whose job this is have yet to define either any strategic or political objectives. Days and months pass hopelessly waiting for peace or freedom, even though the meaning of these words have been completely obscured.
     During the war I've experienced moments that had the taste of freedom, without this being a paradox. I was "happy" then "because I was conscious of myself without being afraid" (Benjamin). Freedom during war doesn't mean freedom of the individual, with its metaphysical dimension: it can even be experienced in a camp. In war, its meaning is bound to the collective, making peace and freedom the same.
     The collective is a mob that suffers in silence, and waits. That's how it is in Sarajevo. That's how it was when the trollies ran: when the power was cut, people simply got out without asking for their money back; others got in, neatly destroyed their tickets and patiently waited for hours until the power came back on and the trolley started moving again.
     In mythological time, the man engaged, someone who "thinks their own reality," recognizes "charisma" by his very deeds. Such a person believes that his influence on the course of events is decisive: he names streets and nations, making sure his words reach the ears of those who can turn his ideas into action. On his missionary journey, he can already count, right from the start, on the glory of the person who first said this or that. He wants to get paid for his ideas. These dreams are not grotesque: the fact that they have already been associated with a belief in the existence of people who can bring such ideas to realization means that individuals as such actually don't exist.
     Walter Benjamin writes of a conversation with Brecht in which he articulated a critique of fascism. He was left with the impression of a man who "emanates the power of a grown-up in order to confront the power of fascisim," a power that emerges from the depth of history, a place no shallower than where the forces of fascism originate. that was an illusion. But we live in times when even such an illusion is no longer possible, since the world remains bereft of great individuals. This is certainly the case in politics, no one who can offer the world a vision of salvation, nor are there people who could carry out the realization of such an illusion.
     War is mythological time. The world is polarized and opposites have become that much more apparent. And everything is clean, like in a child's world. A child says: it's cold as heaven, probably since he's heard people say it's hot as hell so many times. In my search for moral consolation, as infantile as I knew that was, I thought up the following distinction: to be in Sarajevo means being in the world of truth. Out of town, where fascism rages, people dwell in a world of lies. Infantile indeed.
     These days, I pass through streets famous for massacres: in a passageway I see a display case with an advertisement for photographs. In one pictures, four skydivers create the figure of a dancer in the air. They smile, overwhelmed by a feeling of freedom, conscious of the fact that they're flying. But there is nothing angelic in this spectacle: their smiles are almost hysterical, maybe because of the packs on their backs that skydivers still have to reconcile themselves with. More proof that every form of freedom is inevitably connected to risk. And even though their faces are clearly different, their individual fate is wiped out by the signature beneath the photo: Produkt von Kodak. What remains, then, is an ad for the photo itself, for the incomparable quality of its color. And this informs an age in which advertising has definitively replaced criticism.
     A constant discomfort derives from this--writing these sentences, or any other for that matter--I am writing an ad for the war.
     With that, every utterance about freedom finishes.