Traumascapes by Tumarkin Maria;

Author:Tumarkin, Maria; [production]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300107487
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2013-04-28T16:00:00+00:00

Ruins of a tobacco factory, Sarajevo, February 2004

With the Survival Guide achieving wide international acclaim, Suada was flown to the United States and Japan to speak about the project. In Japan, says Suada, they understood the importance of it. ‘They scanned my mind completely. They recognised that it was about the future, about the end of civilisation and how you could pass through it ... They recognised we were on an equal level. There was no gap between us.’ Survival was a universal experience, one thing that bound all people together. It did not separate Sarajevans from the rest of the world. On the contrary, it brought everyone together, so close that there were no gaps left.

‘We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experiences, we have collectively been the witnesses of a fundamental, unexpected event, fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone. It took place in the teeth of all forecasts; it happened in Europe.’ These are the words of Italian writer Primo Levi. He is talking about the genocide of six million Jews in twentieth-century Europe. He is talking about the concentration camps, which he has survived, only to take his life later. Just like Holocaust survivors in post-war Europe, the people of Sarajevo need to be listened to, not simply because they have witnessed a fundamental event, but because they have survived this event in a fundamentally new way. ‘Sarajevo represents hope for the world, but the world is no hope for Sarajevo’—FAMA published these words, written by Suada, a few years after the siege. While the world and the United Nations looked on, Sarajevans walked out of the gates of hell by creating, in the words of FAMA, ‘a self-contained model of how an urban city anywhere can survive a modern cataclysm’.

Yet, instead of listening, the world it seems has been both lamenting and lecturing Sarajevans on all manner of topics—how to organise reconstruction, conduct politics, live alongside its neighbours, you name it. ‘Now that the war is over, we feel like the second-class citizens in our own city, like blacks in apartheid Africa,’ I was told by two women I met in Sarajevo. Yet the attitude of patronage is not only misplaced, it is potentially catastrophic. ‘It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say.’ (Primo Levi again.) That it can happen again is at the heart of what Sarajevo has been trying to tell the rest of the world. This is why, inconceivable as it may sound, the city represents hope. Because, in the words of FAMA, ‘the knowledge and skills accumulated during the siege [have] the potential to inspire and prepare the world for the 21st century’.

Suada Kapić had spent twelve years on projects related to the siege that began in 1992 when it dawned on her one day that all of her projects were about one thing and one thing only—freedom from fear. In Ancient Greece, courage was the first virtue—not

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