Dubravka of Yugoslavia

Of course, Yugoslavia no longer exists. It has been cut up into three countries: Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Hercegovina. It’s called “ethnic cleansing,” a euphemism for driving away non-Serbs from Serb-controlled territory.

But I still remember Dubravka Ugresic, whom I met at the Cambridge Seminar on Contemporary British Writing in 1993. when I read last week’s banner headline: “Nine school kids slain in Sarajevo attack.”During the Cambridge Conference, I immediately looked up Dubravka. She was supposed to stay at Hawthornden Castle as an International Writer’s Fellow after my term (13 April – 11 May). But she wrote the administrator asking for a deferment before or after the Cambridge Conference.

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 US during the break in Cambridge, 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 had published two of her novels. Fording the Stream of Consciousness won three major prizes for the best Yugoslav novel in 1988, 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 the former Eastern Europe, like Dubravka – just sat there, unmoved.

It’s so verily like watching Salaan Bombay in 1989 in Scotland, three weeks after leaving Manila. As Director Mira Nir dissected the ills of her native Bombay in one scene after another (headless chickens, street children on drugs, the violence and prostitution), some people in the audience began to weep. When our friend from France asks us how we felt about the film, Tina, the Filipina, and I said, tartly, “We felt nostalgic.”

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 US. 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 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 among other well-received books, wrote a dispatch straight from Sarajevo. She literally dodged bullets, waved her press card again and again, and talked to the women and children – who are always the worst casualties of war, and the on in need of development aid, in times of both war and peace.

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 miles of enemy territory. She asked Cris to smuggle the letter because they might not see each other again.

My friend Dubravka is now in Berlin, on a one-year DAAD grant to write her next book. I’m sure it will not be about Bosnia.

Six months later, I was staying in my sister’s house in Los Angeles when I read the Los Angeles Times. It 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 gunpowder/ 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./ Terrified, I realized this is not a dream/ It is just another day in Sarajevo.”