AN ESSAY ON
THROUGH THE WORKS OF DONALD ATKINSON
SZESLAW MILOSZ, KEVIN CAREY & FERIDA DURAKOVIC
WHILE SARAJEVO BURNS
WENDY YU: 00165108
QUEST FOR PEACE IN LITERATURE AND FILM: PACS 312
Ferida Duraković
(b. 1957)
The Writer Contemplates His Homeland While
A Famous Postmodernist Enters the City
For a long time everything has repeated itself most cruelly
and yet everything is happening for the first time:
the face of a young man whose life all night
has been draining out through your hands, from the hole
in his back. The face of the soldier
by the bus station, with the pleasant May sky
frozen permanently in his open eyes – you are making it up.
I declare – this is not the calm and distant face of History
and a little pool of blood; in its middle a hunk of bread
soaked in blood like that now fabled morning Bregov milk –
you’re making it up, I repeat, for the very first time:
the Sarajevan clay that falls on the big feet of the boy
in his Reebok trainers as they dangle
from a makeshift bier made from a cupboard door. No, you
are not to be trusted, you have entered the heart
of darkness that erupted and gushed forth into daylight.
You are an unreliable witness, and biased at that. That’s why
the Professor has arrived, entirely Parisien in mien, Mes enfants
he started, and his fingers repeat it for him: Mes
enfants, mes enfants, mes enfants, in the middle
of the Academy of Science the old greybeards could think
only of his shirt, glaringly and conspicuously white.
Mes enfants, this is the death of Europe. Then he changes
it all into a film, into frames, into mouthfuls like
histoire, Europe, like responsabilité and, of course
les Bosniacs. Look here, that’s the right way to look History
in the face, not like you: in the crude irresponsible fragments,
the sniper shot that penetrates deep into the skull,
the graves already covered over by irredeemable grass,
your hands placed across the image of
Edvard Munch, who himself, once upon a time,
also made everything up, with no hope.
Translated by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill and Antonela Glavinić
All contents © Macedonian P.E.N. http://www.pen.org.mk/balkan/bosnia/durakovic.html
Fifty years after the promise of never again, it happened again. What have we learnt from Auschwitz? What will we learn from Sarajevo? Through the works of Donald Atkinson, Szeslaw Milosz, Kevin Carey and Ferida Durakovic, this essay examines the ability of poetry to preserve the experience of the individual in times of conflict and to perhaps incite progressive action.
“Why bring into the world / one more beautiful, conscience-less animal?” Asks Donald Atkinson in “The poet, replying to ‘just criticism’, declines to write ‘a poem for Bosnia’”. The poet “opened his eyes” and saw the devastation of all that is lovely. He suspected that the lyricism of poetry cannot capture the experience that is war “and he wished to die without words”. “If by a thousand poems / we could make such small difference.” Certainly, the lack of information is no longer the issue. The siege of Sarajevo went on for 1200 days as the light of television screens flickered around the world. What kind of understanding did we achieve through reliable images from reliable sources and unbiased testimonies of unbiased witnesses? How can we ensure that poetry does not reduce reality to what appears on television?
Television is the present incarnation of mass media. For mass media, the truth is always too complicated. That is called ethnic conflict and there are the resulting pools of blood. News reports on war often fail to connect the viewer with the people inside the television screen, creating only a blurry sense of dread. It is human nature to reserve compassion for the familiar and the personal touch of poetry can serve as a common ground to evoke that sense of familiarity. “The essence of poetry is that we experience the words of a poem as if informed within us, or as if we ourselves had uttered them” (Mehmedinovic 1).
Atkinson’s greater fear is that poetry is unable to transform itself into action. “Where poetry stops nothing happening, / we should stop writing it.” The fact that he chooses to voice this concern via a poem reveals that he is not so much wary of his role as a poet as he is of his unreachable audience. He is bitter when he considers the need to “find humbler ways to make words work, perhaps.” Aided by the power of the familiar, why do poets still find themselves powerless and unheard?
As children who grew up visiting Holocaust museums, we find revisionism absurd. To claim that the Jews were not victimized is to reject reality. We are open-minded new generations for whom denial is not a problem. Yet, as we watched the unfolding of violent events in the former Yugoslavia, we speak of the great danger of ethnic hostilities in less developed states, “listening with indifference to the cries of those who perish because / they are just barbarians killing each other.”
In his poem “Sarajevo”, Czeslaw Milosz declares, “the rebellion of the young who called for a new earth was a sham”. Out of the ashes of World War II grew the idea of European integration. In his Nobel Lecture on December 8, 1980, he spoke of two Europe and hoped that they would come together through time. During the siege of Sarajevo, the cold response of one Europe to the other bitterly disappointed him. In fact, when he republished this poem in his book “Facing the River”, he added a prefatory sentence: "Perhaps this is not a poem but at least I say what I feel." Meanwhile, on its official web site, the European Union claims that it has delivered half a century of stability, peace and prosperity. It seems that not everyone is included in the circle of gold stars “and the lives of the well-fed are worth more than the lives of the starving”.
We are guilty of not only indifference in the face of genocide, but
also of attempting to deprive the victims of their victimhood. In “The Writer
Contemplates His Homeland While A Famous Postmodernist Enters The City”, Ferida
Duraković creates the character of the Professor. He arrives in Sarajevo
and teaches the Bosniaks “the right way to look History / in the face, not like
you: in the crude irresponsible fragments, / the sniper shot that penetrates
deep into the skull”. Postmodernism rejects the idea that
self-interpretation necessarily reaches deeper or represents truer. It is taken
to a derogative extreme here when the
Professor calls the victim “an unreliable witness, and biased at that”. The
poet is attacking the Professor’s attempt to silence the victim’s
self-interpretation, which in turn prevents dialogue and understanding.
Staring into the television screen, we shake our heads and wonder why some people cannot just get along, as if they are spoiling our vision of world peace and causing us to suffer from “compassion fatigue”. In “Again”, Kevin Carey speaks of “the there is no contradiction between mass murder and playing Schubert thesis”. Hitler was a man with an appreciation for classical music. He was the product of the world he lived in. His monstrosity was rooted in the callousness of humanity. Milosz too warns the detached observers against indulging in a false sense of security, “unaware that what will strike ripens in themselves”.
So what to do while Sarajevo burns?
If we are content watching Cable News Network, we will see nothing more than a
faraway civil war with confusing sides and no particular interests at stake. If
we let the forces that control the mass
media control us, we can hide in our living rooms behind what we do not know.
Sooner or later, we will be presented with some sort of a solution, shipping
refugees across oceans and dividing countries up along ethnic lines until there
is no common ground at all. But what if, one day, we find ourselves inside the
television screen? Would we want not just our screams but also our voices to be
heard? Would we want the people watching to think of us not just as statistics
or symbols but also as individual human beings? (1011 words with
quotes)
Mehmedinovic, S. Sarajevo Blues. 1998.