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At All Costs, Stifle My Natural,
Hideous Laughter

by SUMEJA TULIC

People from postwar countries are like children from broken homes or people with a birth mark or a fire stain, you are never just who you are, a human being that does this and that. You become a premeditated experience of people that read a good article on it, or saw a great movie about it.

They speak to you carefully, they ask you questions that you heard before. They look at you with disbelief and doubt when you say something out of order like "I do not go to that part of my country not because it is governed by Them. I don't go there because it is too long and exhausting for a trip that brings you to see nothing and nobody."

I hoped that with growing up and becoming more serious generally, I will be better in my “Bosnian war child living in a postwar Sarajevo” role, but I have to say I still stutter when vocalizing a decent narrative of what went wrong and how it is going nowadays.

I stutter not because I am overly imaginative and detailed in my description that my consistency and credibility are questioned. I stutter because I simultaneously think of the topics I should be speaking about to someone I just met like weather, and books we read so we can brag about having read them.

Instead, there I was telling them how my pregnant aunt, my uncle and little cousin were running from their apartment while a soldier was shooting at them.

I went cinematic, Hollywood style, and described how my mother would has been listening the radio each night of the four war years, always at the same hour, to hear what neighborhood, village and town has been shelled, occupied or burned to the ground.

One of these evenings she heard the speaker say the name of the neighborhood my aunt lived in. I continue with descriptions of letter we sent to our family in Bosnia, written in Red Cross letter blueprint.

I still remember the disappointment I felt when realizing that these one page letters have no space for my nine year old genius drawing and endless reporting on my school success.

my mother

It didn’t really matter anyways, hence the fact that my grandmother really did not have time to think of me and my successes. Apparently, the only ones who cared were politicians from the government who from time to time would urge the Bosnian children and youth in abroad to be best students they can. Strangely, today, in peaceful times, they have completely forgotten "the jewels of our nation."

In minutes that follow this exhaustive storytelling, I am embarrassed. The embarrassment comes with the fact that sharing traumas, individual or group, feels like believing cheap advertisements for elderly people: "you will sleep better"," "you will feel better", "they will love you," "they will understand you."

You buy into it and then, not only it doesn’t work for you, it also causes side effects. No, they cannot understand and they should not understand where you come from.

The numerous conventions, the many scholarly thoughts on the stupidity of waging wars that are accepted in the western hemisphere, guarantee among other things a personal context framed with things like generational choice in music, books and films; unique expressions of rebellion; clichéd and widely accepted reasoning on issues like premarital sex or voting in elections.

Most importantly, these contexts have history text books that conclude the story about war in 1945 and sociology books that pretty much disassociate you from everybody else, including your family.

I tried it all to blend with the young once from the West. Physically disguised in western popular clothing trends for youth; carrying The Catcher in the Rye in one hand and an analog camera in the other, declaring unknown indie bands from Brooklyn and California as my music choices. Nothing worked!

I am bruised and I will keep telling stories in which negotiations in Washington or Paris trigger a screaming argument between a couple with no children living in a neighborhood that separates two enemy armies.

My house is in that neighborhood. I will name my ten classmates in the six grades that did not have one parent in an attempt to explain why Reebok gave free sneakers to all of us. We all looked equally poor and underclothed. They thought we were orphans.

I will tell all that and then take my guests from Western Europe to a dinner in uphill Sarajevo. I will take them to a restaurant that is elegant, Italian-looking like.

How to get there? Go through the main park, climbing all the way up.

You may ask which park is the main park in Sarajevo. The main park is the one that looks like a random graveyard; where gravestones appear spontaneously from behind the bushes and between park benches. An awful place to have a picnic.

Sumeja Tulic is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Sarajevo. This is her first appearance in these pages. She tumbls here.

Photographs by the author.

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Comments

[Paul]

I really enjoyed this. Thanks.