Witness for the persecution

Croatian novelist and journalist Slavenka Drakulic tells a story of breathtaking brutality. We interview her about her new novel and her experiences.

By Kate Moses

Mar 9, 2000 | For most Westerners, who have the luxury of rhetorical objectivity while pondering the benign creep of tiny tanks across a television screen, the word "war" has been sanitized, denuded of the visceral horror and fear it is meant to evoke. It's a word that's been used too often and in too distant a context. It's a concept that no longer holds its edge.

According to Croatian novelist and journalist Slavenka Drakulic, the word war "has recently become tamed and domesticated in our vocabulary like a domestic animal, almost a pet." So it goes without saying that one simply cannot grasp the possibility of war entering one's daily life on a mild Sunday afternoon, say, while drinking Cabernet and eating pasta for lunch with a friend.

But war entered Drakulic's life in just such an inconceivable way in the fall of 1991: She held her fork poised halfway between her plate and her mouth as low-flying MIGs suddenly roared over her apartment building in Zagreb.

The Western world's reaction to the outbreak of war in the Balkans in the 1990s betrayed this lack of understanding of war as much as it betrayed a yawning gap in sensitivity to the fearful citizens of the Balkan nations, most of whom, despite the oft-repeated myths of their "ancient legacy of hatred and bloodshed," were simply stunned by the presence of war in their own villages and neighborhoods.

One doesn't live one's daily life by the myths of ancient legacies; one lives by wondering, as does Drakulic's schoolteacher narrator in "S., A Novel About the Balkans," how one will manage to grade the progress of schoolchildren whose parents are fleeing the area. War, when it comes, comes as a shock, whether or not you've been born into a bloody legacy.

In her novel about the Balkan war, Drakulic makes S.'s initiation into the daily life of war as mind-bogglingly surreal as her own had been: S. is so taken aback by the sudden appearance of the young Serbian soldier who has just kicked in her apartment door that she invites him to sit down for coffee and then joins him, benumbed, at the table.

What follows for S. is a nightmare of monumental proportions -- after being rounded up with all of the other Bosnian Muslim villagers in the town, S. watches as soldiers lead the village's men away and listens, together with the other women and children, as gunshots ring out from a distance. The women are then taken to a warehouse where they are robbed, imprisoned, forced to sleep en masse on the bare concrete floor, to defecate as a group in an open field and to watch, again in silent helplessness, as their young girls are led away by guards. S., too, is soon led away to the "women's room," where the youngest and most attractive women are sequestered so that they can be repeatedly raped, beaten and tortured at the whim of Serbian soldiers.

The real nightmare, though, is that the character of S. is the only fictional element in Drakulic's novel. Everything that happens to S., all that she experiences and witnesses -- from her months in the women's room to the horrible realization that she's become pregnant, from observing another rape victim calmly smothering her newborn with a pillow to hearing that guards are forcing Muslim fathers to rape their own sons or be shot -- comes from interviews with women who were victims of acts of breathtaking cruelty and racial hatred.

"War is merely a general term," thinks S. from the Serbian prison camp, "a collective noun for so many individual stories." Drakulic's "S." is the true story of the women who learned the real, unspeakable meaning of war in the Balkans.

Drakulic has been observing and recording the everyday experience of life -- politicized, random, gruesome, hauntingly enigmatic -- in her part of the world with acuity and insight throughout her career as a respected writer and journalist. Her concern for the lives of women is long-standing: She is a founding member of the first network of Eastern European women's groups and has served on the advisory board for Ms. magazine.

In addition to the major European newspapers for which she writes regularly (Italy's La Stampa, Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Sweden's Dagens Nyheter), Drakulic is now a contributing writer to the Nation. She's the author of "The Balkan Express: Fragments From the Other Side of the War" and "Cafe Europa: Life After Communism." "S." is her third novel. Mothers Who Think spoke with her about "S." and the terrible legacy of the Balkan war on the same day that the New York Times reported on the dismal conditions for women and children now swamping the Chechen refugee camps.

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