Beyond Both Sleep and Waking Life
The siege on Sarajevo in 1992 began with the destruction of the Oriental Institute and its museum collection. "Wiping out the past is the beginning of barbarism, history is extinguished, memory is erased," says author Dzevad Karahasan.
Since he fled Bosnia in 1993, when his exile began, he has put his memories down in books that take stock of a city in ruins. He tells of the beauty of life in Sarajevo and the mosaic-like iridescence of Bosnia, which ceased to exist when the war began. He writes, as he puts it, "into the shadow of an ideal, into memory."
A stranger in the night
His latest book, "Reports from a Dark World," (original Bosnian title: "Izvjestaji iz tamnog vilajeta") is a collection of five prose texts that hover somewhere between invention and reality. The narrator heads off on a journey and wanders through a "dark world," a netherworld of lonely, up-rooted people who are haunted by their various states of limbo, "as far away from sleep as from waking life."
Dzevad Karahasan describes the stories, experiences and thoughts of these lost souls. The result is a loosely connected series of reports from life "in times of need and in a strange world." What connects the stories is their horizon: Bosnia and its center of gravity, the capital city of Sarajevo.
Karahasan tells of people who have experienced how the city in which they have spent the majority of their lives has been ravaged, and how they begin to doubt whether the former life they remember was ever real. Their loose grip on reality slips away. Emilio, a Bosnian in exile in Piacenza, tells of his experiences in a long monolog.
He begins to lay roots in his new home. He leads a life as a "stranger in the night," a life that is comfortable, quiet and dead. And it never stops raining; the endless rain is unbearable. As hard as he tries to remember concrete situations, moments or conversations, his memory remains "abstract, general, unreal."
Lament for a world that disappeared
His niece tries in vain to distract him with a well-meaning invitation to a Rolling Stones concert – an attempt to remind him of his youth and forgotten possibilities: "Sarajevo is dead, Uncle, not you." The world falls apart, memories fade from day to day, and in his thoughts he walks through all the courtyards that have been destroyed during the reconstruction of old Sarajevo.
"Somewhere inside of me the sound of the fountain has been preserved…the steps on the wooden stairs are still there… the laughter of a girl echoes…" With almost manic precision, Karahasan's figures reconstruct their lives, defending every last memory in order to reaffirm that the world in which they lived really once existed.
The narrator's journey is also a journey through the past. Private memories touch on historical memory and the history of Bosnia: "Events from the glorious past of my people, of whom I know nothing and about whom I wish to recall nothing because it is confusing, intangible, threatening, dark."
In the former Theresienstadt concentration camp, the narrator finds traces of Gavrilo Princip, the Sarajevo assassin who killed the Habsburg heir and his wife in 1914, thus setting off the First World War. In Istanbul he encounters the story of one of the blood-thirsty viziers of Bosnia, Dzelaluddin Ali Pasha, who recorded in a calligraphy for all of eternity his tender love for his elephant after its death in autumn of 1821: "You, too, my brother, are a stranger here, just as I am."
Over the bridge
These stories resemble puzzle pieces that together make up the imaginary space of Bosnia and a conjured world. The reader is confronted primarily with questions – about the representability of this world when "behind everything written there is another side equally important and in full contradiction to what has been written. How can this be recorded?"
A Bosnian student poses this question to his professor and hands him in lieu of a term paper on "the inner life of Sarajevo" two letters describing life in this place.
Tucked in these letters is Dzevad Karahasan's homage to the great Bosnian storyteller Ivo Andric; a few passages from Andric's "Letters from the Year 1920" have found their way into this text. For Andric, who described the Orient as "the greatest wonder and the greatest horror," the motif of a bridge (the title of his first Epic novel) serves as a metaphor for his entire oeuvre.
Karahasan hopes that "the most reliable path to hidden truths is through literature – to truths that we seek or are trying to hide" and he follows in the footsteps of Andric by reconstructing Bosnia's past entirely through personal memories. And at the same time he forgoes all claims to the truth, of which he says: "we don't know it and can't know it, we can only hope that we understand something of it or at least a hint of it."
Yvonne Gebauer
© Süddeutsche Zeitung/Qantara.de 2007
Translated from the German by Christina M. White
This article was previously published by the German daily, Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Qantara.de
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