A review by avthenas
The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War by Slavenka Drakulić
5.0
Wow. This was a such a powerful and immensely important book that touched me deeply. Slavenka Drakulić (who’s quickly becoming a safe bet for me) once again shared her personal experience with post-communism in short fragments, this time focused explicitly on the Yugoslavian conflict in the 1990s, gruesome accounts as well as daily life during wartime and reflections on the ”war only happens to other people“-mentality. It can (and should) also be read as a timeless document against prejudice and dangerous political speech and nationalism. If you‘re not sure if this might be your thing, check out the prologue and the very last chapter, ”High-heeled shoes“.
some of the passages I underlined:
”At last people in the West began to grasp what was going on. It was suddenly clear that Europe hadn’t learned its lesson, that history always repeats itself and that someone is always a Jew. Once the concept of otherness takes root, the unimaginable becomes possible. Not in some mythological country but to ordinary urban citizens.“
(I visited a concentration camp memorial site just last week for the second time, and considering the state of national and international politics as of right now, these words are so impactful.)
”I’ve read in the newspapers that you refugees are getting more money per month from the state than we retired people do’ (...) I felt an almost physical need to explain to him that I am not ‘we’ (...), I think I have never experienced such a terrible urge to distinguish myself from others, to show this man that I was an individual with a name and not an anonymous exile trying to steal his money.“
*
”The truth is that everytime the word refugee is pronounced, in my mind it recalls pictures of women covered with black scarves and poorly dressed, their faces wrinkled, their ankles swollen, dirt under their nails. One can see them wandering through the city in groups with that particular look of lost persons. Some of them beg in restaurants or at street corners or just sit in the main square. Who are these people, I asked myself, realizing at the same time what a strange question it was, a question poised between the cliché established for us by the media and the fact that they are no different from us, only less lucky.“
*
”What I am starting to do is to reduce a real, physical individual to an abstract ’they‘ – that is, to a common denominator of refugees (...). From there to second-class citizen - or rather, non-citizen - who owns nothing and has no rights. Now I think I understand what I couldn‘t understand before: how it happened that people who lived near German concentration camps didn‘t do anything, didn‘t help.“
*
”Why should they bother with the screams of thousands of people being bombed or simply dying of hunger, when those screams can hardly be heard?“
some of the passages I underlined:
”At last people in the West began to grasp what was going on. It was suddenly clear that Europe hadn’t learned its lesson, that history always repeats itself and that someone is always a Jew. Once the concept of otherness takes root, the unimaginable becomes possible. Not in some mythological country but to ordinary urban citizens.“
(I visited a concentration camp memorial site just last week for the second time, and considering the state of national and international politics as of right now, these words are so impactful.)
”I’ve read in the newspapers that you refugees are getting more money per month from the state than we retired people do’ (...) I felt an almost physical need to explain to him that I am not ‘we’ (...), I think I have never experienced such a terrible urge to distinguish myself from others, to show this man that I was an individual with a name and not an anonymous exile trying to steal his money.“
*
”The truth is that everytime the word refugee is pronounced, in my mind it recalls pictures of women covered with black scarves and poorly dressed, their faces wrinkled, their ankles swollen, dirt under their nails. One can see them wandering through the city in groups with that particular look of lost persons. Some of them beg in restaurants or at street corners or just sit in the main square. Who are these people, I asked myself, realizing at the same time what a strange question it was, a question poised between the cliché established for us by the media and the fact that they are no different from us, only less lucky.“
*
”What I am starting to do is to reduce a real, physical individual to an abstract ’they‘ – that is, to a common denominator of refugees (...). From there to second-class citizen - or rather, non-citizen - who owns nothing and has no rights. Now I think I understand what I couldn‘t understand before: how it happened that people who lived near German concentration camps didn‘t do anything, didn‘t help.“
*
”Why should they bother with the screams of thousands of people being bombed or simply dying of hunger, when those screams can hardly be heard?“