Dearest readers!
Coming back to UBC after the holidays, and especially to my ASTU class, I have started to grasp to what extent the beginning of this university journey has affected me. Although, the scope of this impact includes experiences beyond the academics, the scholarly material I have been presented with is the core of my internal transformation. It has come to my realization during the holidays that I have not only altered the way I perceive and construct knowledge about external factors, but also my perception of internal knowledge about myself. Throughout the previous term in our ASTU class, we have addressed several works focusing on the exploration of personal experiences and public depictions of historically told memories and stories. All of the literary works together with the scholarly essays have invited me to think about my memories in a different light. Yet, it was not until reading our first work for this term Safe Area Gorazde by Joe Sacco that I was able to put these newly acquired lenses to address national memory of trauma on a more individual level.
First, being ethnically half Bosnian Serb, although I usually refer to myself as half Croatian as most of my relatives now live there, my perspective as a reader of this work was radically different from the previous works that we had studied. During the year of my birth, the native nation of my mother ceased to exist. The horrors and genocide committed by my people after Tito’s death are the stories of my childhood. Just 20 years ago, a horrendous genocide was committed by individuals whom some my grandmother can name. Undeniably, I have been aware of this since as long as I can remember and unfortunately I am repeatedly reminded of the persisting hatred between the ethnic groups every time I visit Bosnia. Prior to reading Sacco’s work, I had used a strategy of trying to understand and explain the historical factors from a rather scientific point of view. This meant me spending a significant amount of time and energy watching and reading about Marshall Tito who ruled Yugoslavia before the war broke out.
There is no doubt that Marshall Tito was praised as a strong, successful and charismatic leader by many of his own people and on the international scale. Yet, Tito’s political and economic policies were in many cases not build on a stable foundation causing Yugoslavia to become ethnically divided. Aleksa Djilas, a former Yugoslavian journalist, in his article “Tito’s Last Secret: How Did He Keep the Yugoslavs Together?” describes the Bosnian Genocide as consequence of Tito’s failure to create national cohesion. Djilas states that to remain in control of the economy, Tito slowed down the natural development of a market economy, including the development of goods and workers being exchanged between the different regions (Foreign Affairs). Despite this attempt to limit the influence from the west by restricting the economy and reinforcing Leninist principles, Yugoslavia still became rather westernized, which according to Djilas diluted the communist party and made it unable to remain in control when Tito died (Foreign Affairs).
Another essential aspect to notice is also the icon Tito himself became for the Yugoslavian people. According to the documentary “Tito the Rebel Communist” by the History Channel, there is a strong correlation between Tito as an individual and the coherence of Yugoslavia. Rising to power essentially by leading a communist guerrilla group fighting against the Nazi-Germany during the Second World War (Pavlowitch, The History Channel), Tito became an icon and war hero representing the collaboration of all Yugoslav ethnicities. Indeed, the official concept of Yugoslav unity solely depended on Tito and his socialist ideology and socialist values were taught to students and young schoolchildren substituting culture and religion, thus creating both support for Tito’s actions and a sense of a common ground under him that then fell apart when he passed away. Knowing these historical facts about the conflict, I had managed to shield myself from the emotional footprint of the genocide and the subconscious ethnic guilt I somehow felt.
It was therefor rather surreal the way the emotional applications of Sacco’s graphic narrative hit me. It was on the 7th of January and I was on my way to some family friends to celebrate Serbian Christmas (Orthodox Christians) after I just started reading Sacco, when I realized how emotionally hard it was for me to read. It is strange, because Sacco of Sacco’s position as an author writing about histories of his interviewees, I found myself in a situation where I was a reader of an external observer and at the same time feeling a personal connection. Interestingly, because of Sacco’s external position he was able to describe a realistic portrayal of emotions that my relatives could not describe to me because it was too painful form them to do so. Thus, although sometimes difficult, it really opened up another aspect of the war that I had been able to access, which is what I believe really is a remarkable power of literature dealing with trauma.
Have a nice weekend !