As if I am not there: A NOVEL ABOUT THE BALKANS

Slavenka Drakulic*(Abacus, 1999. r.r.p. $25.25)

Those of us lucky enough to have been born and grown up in Australia can not fully appreciate what it is that survivors of genocide/ethnic cleansing, political violence, torture and rape have gone through. Certainly, we have images, statistics and daily news reports of humanity’s inhumanity. However, we can not presume to know what an individual has suffered. When the philosopher Martin Buber was challenged on the number of Jews who perished in the Nazi Holocaust he replied that it did not matter if it were 6 million or not, it mattered still if it happened to only one person. Our emotional response and insight is greater from an account of personal outrages than from the cold tabulation of human rights violations. It is through personal accounts rather than statistics that we can know their pain. It is to fiction or biography we must turn for some insight into the emotional life of individuals caught up in these atrocities. Drakulic’s novel is one such.

The narrative follows a year (1992/93) in the life of S. a primary school teacher in a Bosnian village. The book opens with S. (daughter of a Serbian mother and Muslim father) just having given birth to a boy conceived from one of many pack rapes/beatings she underwent in a concentration camp (it is estimated that up to 60,000 women have been raped in the Balkans conflicts). We are then taken back to the day Serbian forces enter her village, separated the males and females and transported them to adjacent death camps. For the first few weeks S. undergoes privation in the form of minimal shelter and food. When she is transferred to “the women’s room” she is subjected, almost nightly, to gang rapes and bashings. After 3 months in the camp she catches the eye of “The Captain” who while feeding her and treating her decently, still takes sexual advantage of her (at this stage S. sees the sex as an acceptable “pay off” for being treated civilly). After 7 months in the camp the women who are still alive are exchanged for Serbian captives. They are dumped over the border in Croatia, and soon find themselves in a refugee camp outside Zagreb. Within a month S. is accepted as a refugee by Sweden and is flown to Copenhagen where she gives birth to the son conceived in the camp.

This is an important and carefully constructed novel - Drakulic is at pains not to make this an anti-Serbian tract. The use of initials only to identify characters means that we are not constantly reminded that this person is Bosnian, Serbian, Muslim, Orthodox, or Catholic. Similarly, apart from chapter headings needed to identify where the action is happening the words Bosnia(n) or Serbia(n) rarely occur in the novel. One is constantly reminded while reading this novel of the universality of abuses the characters undergo. Indeed, this universality is apparent from the novel’s epigraphs - quotes from the writings of Primo Levi (survivor of Auschwitz, and along with Tadeusz Borowski the best chronicler of the Nazi Holocaust), Eva Grlic (survivor of imprisonment and torture in Tito’s Yugoslavia), and Varlam Shalamov (survivor of Kolyma, a Russian concentration camp).

Frequently, while reading this book I was struck by the fact you could change the location from Bosnia to Germany, Poland, or Siberia, from the 1990s to 1930s, 1940s, or 1950s. The story would be basically the same - rape, torture and other forms of brutalisation, with local variations.

Drakulic employs a plain almost distanced style (at least it seems so in this English translation), which paradoxically makes the narrative more powerful, the emotional impact that much greater. Again, Levi and Borowski both use an unadorned style which is all the more affecting for being so.

People who work with traumatised refugees will recognise the emotions, rationalisations, the coping mechanisms S. employs in simply surviving, both in the camp and after. Dissociation, somatization, irrational feelings that one somehow deserves this, not wanting to ask about the “disappeared” in case one is told, the feeling of falling in the crack between the past and the present, the recurrent nightmares, and not having the words to describe your ordeal.

After being released from the camp S.’s ordeal is not yet over. There is the waiting and waiting, there is the finding of a new home. Like many survivors, S. is faced with 2 common responses from people who have not been subjected to such abuses. Firstly, people just don’t want to know - the novel’s title comes from Levi’s book If this is a man where he tells of his Auschwitz experience and people, including his family, behave “as if I am not there”. Secondly, many people behave as if it were the fault of the survivor, as if they brought it on themselves.

The novel ends on a positive note with S. reconciled with the baby she did not want (she discovered her pregnancy too late for an abortion). She will probably keep it (the novel opens with the birth and S.’s determination not to touch the child but have it immediately adopted).

If you are looking for an explanation of how or why one group of humans try to turn another group of humans into non-humans this novel will not supply it. If, however, you want an account of the emotional life of a torture survivor I recommend this novel. Read it and marvel, while horrified, at the resilience of the human spirit.

*Slavenka Drakulic was born in Croatia in 1949. She is a journalist who has written 3 previous novels and 3 books of non-fiction (including Cafe Europa). She writes in both Croatian and English. As if I am not there was Croatian translated from Croatian into English by Marko Ivic.

A number of articles in English by Drakulic are available on the Internet.

Reviewed by David Finlay