I’ve never written about myself, which is, as I have now discovered, unusually difficult, like trying to cover yourself with a blanket that is too small. If I were to give myself airs and be so conceited as to decide to write an autobiography, I say to myself, where would I start? How would I divide up the chapters? Not by years, that’s been done. By big, crucial events? That would make sense, but then again, as attractive as the call of history may be, somewhere deep inside I want to be bypassed by that history, I want to make it over the Deep Blue River without any fateful shunts that would expel me from the rails. That is why I find a safe haven among people and books.
The Big Yard
The war had definitely stopped, but the state was nowhere to be seen yet, so it could have been 1996. In an orange van – once the state had established itself, the first thing it did was to abolish that orange van, calling it illegal transport – with my father dressed in fatigues, I went to the City Library in Zenica to take out my first book; I think it must have been The Big Yard by S. Raičković, but don’t take my word for it. I was in the first or second grade, an unusually good pupil, especially for someone who, because of the war, started school at age eight, without knowing how to write or tell apart colours and animals. (Let him wait another year, we have a wave of refugees now, then we’ll see, they said when I went there with my mum in 1994, during the war, to try to become a first-grader).
We doubted the war had finally stopped when we started going to school regularly, encountering wholly unusual things (I remember to this day the first time I saw white bread), but with a boy’s logic I somehow figured there would definitely be no more war when we got a telephone. Still, the piled-up weight of the war, as I would see much later, had not shifted off our backs: I went to a school that was almost exclusively Bosniak, the old school building was never renovated, but it got a brand new, much more appropriate name; my father went from being a soldier to being a professional soldier: instead of going to war for no money, he now received money without having to go to war. The Zenica Ironworks were severely maimed in the economic fighting that went on behind the front lines, otherwise known as privatisation, and this is what made my whole generation, as opposed to that of our fathers, go out and seek other forms of employment, far from the extinguished high furnaces.
The History of Pornography
Coming to Sarajevo at 15 to attend the madrassa (religious secondary school) marked me in more ways than one. For the first time I felt dislocated, an identity whose value I would come to appreciate only later and continue to carefully cultivate. Our disappointment with the madrassa authorities and the macho-religious discipline of the dormitory grew into a defiance that manifested itself in the images of cheguavara, listening to rock music and reading. My dilemma over whether to study history or literature and finally opting for history was not just a choice of profession, but also a salve for those of us coming to realise, a the threshold of our lives, that a secondary school certificate was not a ticket to history, but only to the quagmire that was Bosnia and Herzegovina. That generational feeling of lack of options took me back countless times to G. Tribuson’s novel The History of Pornography.
At university, I turned my secondary school enthusiasm for journalism into a profession. I worked as a freelancer for various media outlets, actively stepping into the social arena. Through volunteering and working with young people, I discovered faith within me as a sediment, not the faith that was a result of what I learnt at the madrassa or of what I inherited from my family, but something I experienced as primordial. That process displaced me once again and made me think about my identity and the society I was living in, and by reinterpreting the foundations from which I had grown, it inspired me to change myself and the world around me.
Murderous Identities
In the summer of 2012, I went to CNA’s Basic Training in Macedonia without much in the way of expectations, prepared to take notes and enter into the kind of interminable discussions to which historians are particularly partial. I returned without having written down a single note, beset with questions, wondering, shaken to the core. I had faced my prejudices (for example, those about atheists and LGBT people), I thought about what it meant for me in my society that I was a man, that I was white, that I was a Bosniak in the Bosniak-majority part of the country? Would I be prepared to go to war? To fight for what? To kill someone? I returned deep in thought about myself, with a lit spark of empathy for others that I had started to understand even though we were different. A safe space for me to express and then change myself, without being judged or labelled is what I wanted to bring back from Mavrovo and turn into a social norm, and preserving others from myself seemed like the first step in that direction. Murderous Identities by Amin Maalouf were the first stop on my quest for answers after the training.
Not long after the training I started working for a newly launched weekly magazine, and then for a web portal. It was a real challenge to work in a profession that was changing so dramatically rapidly and where the changes were not always for the better. Leaving a deep impression on me were meetings, conversations and interviews with people I greatly admire, and here I remember inspirational conversations with Latinka Perović, Michael Lapsley, the Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus… Journalism gave me, or at least so I imagine, an opportunity to act, to try to influence processes and change the society in which I lived. Finally, journalism tipped the scales towards what D. Stojanović calls the history of the present, and which could most succinctly be defined as a compound of history and activism. The commercialisation of everything, including the media, requires keeping up with the momentary desires of the consumer and meant that I was increasingly being swamped by what I considered trivial, so I sought a way out.
It is impossible to remain neutral on a moving train
This was when I received an invitation from CNA. In the time between my first meeting with CNA in 2012 and that invitation, we had already become friends, cooperated actively and hung out, and joining the CNA team was something I admit I had thought about long before I received the invitation. At one moment it seemed too early, at another too late, or that this wasn’t for me, or that I wasn’t made for that. After being invited to join the team, the dilemmas, qualms and fears multiplied. How and why do you organise peacebuilding trainings 20 years after the war? How do you take socially marginalised and often (ab)used veterans to visit sites of suffering? How do you measure the impact you make and chase away the thought that it’s all futile? The dilemmas and questions remain.
In Bosnian-Herzegovinian (post)war society, and it’s much the same in most other countries in the region, many of life’s choices mean taking a position. To stay here, raise a child here, hope to live to an old age, are certainly, at some level, a clear socio-political position. The life and work of Howard Zinn, a historian who refused to be neutral on a moving train, gives me encouragement not to succumb to conformiscuity.
And my motivation? It’s varied. I remembered one thing and I talked about it recently at my first training where I was the trainer. I remembered how back in 1993, the families that had lost members in the war received special food packages and how a bunch of us kids, all of five years old at the time, asked our fathers why they didn’t go get killed too. I don’t remember what our parents said to us at the time, and I don’t know what I would tell my daughter Sara today.