Sarajevo Posts

Interview with Bulgarian writer Georgi Bardarov

06 12 , 2023 No Comments

(C) EU

This interview is facilitated by EUPL and funded by the European Union. 

I am posting snippets of my correspondence with Georgi as it would give readers an insight into how powerful his writing is.

Thank you for writing the books that you have written. It has not been an easy task reading your writing. I made many false starts. Extraordinarily, I would read the words on the page and none of it would make sense. Then I began reading around it and kept trying at different parts of the day to read your work, hoping I would begin to understand it. Finally, the breakthrough happened. I do not know what it was or was it that simply I had to zone in as a reader into the mind space that you were demanding as a writer. It has been so hard. More so, because you are writing about conflict. Despite your sentences being short and crisp. Descriptions being precise. It is incredibly hard to read the texts at first. It is obvious from the little that I have read of your work in translation that your contribution to contemporary European literature is extremely crucial. It is almost as if it is a sobering reminder that the horrors of conflict wrought upon societies are cyclical, history tends to repeat itself. And with that, the impact on mankind, local societies, triggering migrations, and the spin-off effect upon other communities and nations is a situation that is constantly in flux. Your writing does make the reader pause and reflect. Is any of this conflict worth this suffering and distress? Nevertheless, thank you for what you have written so far. I sincerely wish that there were more of your interviews and conversations available in English on the Internet. I barely found any information except for a quote or two.

Let’s hope we can rectify it. 

***

Thank you very much for your frank words about my book and for your interest. Your questions were very meaningful and it was a pleasure to answer them. I am sending them to you as an attachment. I understand that you had a hard time with my books and thank you for being patient and reading them, when I wrote them it was also very hard for me, I have painfully experienced every one of them. I have visited each of the places I write about and talked to people who have experienced or been affected by the conflicts. I heard stories so shocking that some of them I can’t even repeat to my closest person, these stories changed me forever and will stay with me like a wound that will never heal. Yes, there is little information about me in English, but keep in mind that it is almost impossible for a writer from a small country like Bulgaria to be noticed outside his country, that’s why Georgi Gospodinov’s success is spectacular and I am very happy for him.

Warm greetings from cold, winter Bulgaria!

Georgi

***

Georgi Bardarov is a Bulgarian scientist and writer. He is an Associate Professor of Ethno-Religious Conflicts and Demography, a Vice-Dean of the Geology & Geography Department in University of Sofia. He founded and co-hosts the most successful course for the art of public speaking and oratory skills in Bulgaria. A member of the board of the Bulgarian Petanque Federation. He is part of the creative team of the publishing and production company Musagena, which aims to find talented contemporary writers and artists. In 2015, Georgi Bardarov won the first intellectual reality TV show for writers called The Manuscript which awarded him with the publication of his debut novel – I am still counting the days. The book is based on a true story about the love between a Bosnian Muslim and Christian Serb amidst the siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian war.

Georgi Bardarov is the winner of the Pen Club award for his debut novel. The book has also been nominated for novel of the year in Bulgaria. In 2020, his second novel Absolvo Te was published. The novel, inspired by two true stories, explores the abyss between two nations with common origins but have been waging a daily fratricidal war for decades. Georgi Bаrdarov is the winner of the European Prize for Literature for 2021 and the biggest literary prize in Bulgaria – the National Vazova Award for 2022.

Q1 What is the focus area of your work as an academic of Ethno-Religious Conflicts and Demography? 

As a specialist in ethno-religious conflict, my main concern is to expose the folly of military conflict. I think there is no cause that is above human life, every war is hidden under the mask of some cause, national, religious, etc., but in fact every war is just a business, a very profitable business for some, while others die thinking they are doing it for the cause. The main thing I want to convey to my students is that all humans are essentially the same and every division, ethnic, religious, even racial, is made for the sole purpose of being manipulated and used. Regarding Demography, I want to break the clichés about the demographic situation in the world because demography follows its logical and natural course and there should be no fear of demographic processes.

Q2 It has been extremely hard, under today’s circumstances of the ongoing conflicts around the world, to read your latest novel Absolve Te (I absolve thee). As far as I have been able to gather, it is based on two true stories – one about World War II and the Holocaust, and the other about the Arab-Israeli conflict. The main characters are a Palestinian, a Jewish man and a Nazi officer. Each of them must forgive and look past each other’s sins. How do you find the mental bandwidth to write about war while there are so many ongoing conflicts around the world? Do you test samples of your work with a trusted circle of readers before publishing the manuscript?

This is a cause for me, well beyond books and novels. But after two novels about wars, I feel infinitely exhausted and don’t want to write about war anymore. I am often asked in Europe if I will write a book about the war now in Ukraine? I answer no, everything I had to say about wars I have said everything in my two books, nothing new to add, everything is painfully repetitive, the protagonists change, the territory of the conflict changes, but the violence is essentially the same and it doesn’t matter when or where the war is! Yes, there are some very close people I discuss my manuscripts with, and I have a wonderful editor, Hristo Karastoyanov.

Q3 How do you find your entry point in writing these narratives about the war? How do you fix a text in time so as to be able to write it?  

First there has to be a true story that has touched me emotionally and I want to tell it to people. Second I do a lot of serious research with books, archival documents, people’s stories and third I absolutely go to the places I write about, do fieldwork so I can feel the energy of the place and then convey it authentically in the novel!

Q4 In some senses, your expertise as an ethno-religious conflict comes to the fore while writing these books. How much of this is historical fiction and how much of it is based on reality and empirical evidence? What is the purpose of writing conflict-based fiction? Does it give you the space to ask questions as well?

All my books are based on true stories, there is of course a lot of fiction, it’s hard to judge which is more, maybe 50/50. And my goal is for people to start asking themselves questions and not accept the easy answers and stay vigilant against manipulation.

Q5 What triggered your interest in conflict studies? What have you discovered over the years about mankind, conflict, and survival? Or am I missing something critical altogether?

I have a favorite thought, “Only the wisest and the stupidest never change.” Unfortunately, humanity is not one of the first. All the mistakes we’ve made as a human race we repeat them again, and again, and again.

Q6 You are a part of the creative team at Musagena when your mss was submitted for consideration. There is an imprint in your name on the website. Why did you feel the need to self-publish (if you can call it that) your debut novel?  Is the topic too sensitive and controversial? 

Yes, I am part of Musagenа. Our idea to create this publishing house was to be able to promote my books outside Bulgaria, because the traditional Bulgarian publishers work almost exclusively for the small Bulgarian market. Otherwise the subjects of my books are popular, albeit sensitive, both in Bulgaria and elsewhere in Europe.

Q7 What has been the response to your books? Do readers understand or are they as bewildered as the children in your stories are about what they are shown? Are readers receptive to books that are ostensibly set in the past but in reality, are about geographies that are currently in the news?

At the same time, my books are very well received, but readers are also shocked when they read them, because our idea is that such atrocities cannot happen today, that they have been left in the past. That is why I present war in all its ugliness and cruelty, so that people can feel that there is nothing more terrible than war, I believe that a war cannot be presented lightly or even “heroized”.

Q8 Is the experience of writing in any way cathartic for you? How do your academic pursuits influence your fictional writing and vice versa? 

Yes, I experience my own personal catharsis when I write my novels and develop my characters, I experience it with them. I wrote Absolvo Te because there are things I can’t forgive myself for in my own life, and with the catharsis of my three main characters, I experienced my own personal one. My academic career helps me do a lot of serious research for my stories; I do it more as a scholar than as a writer.

Q9 Who are the writers you admire?

Of course, except Georgi Gospodinov, who is already world famous, I like very much Ivo Ivanov, who lives in the USA and writes very strong stories about the strength of the human spirit, Radko Penev, who is a naval officer, but his books are charged with a lot of humanism and beauty, the incredible poet Petya Dubarova and my editor Hristo Karastoyanov, who is also a wonderful writer.

Disclaimer: This paper was written under the European Union Policy & Outreach Partnerships Initiative with the view to promote European Union Prize for Literature awardees. The publication was funded by the European Union. Its contents are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union.

Christina Lamb, “Our Bodies Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women”

25 02 , 2021 No Comments

In 2005, I had worked as part of a global team on a seminal report published by UNRISD called Gender Equality: Striving for Justice in an Unequal World. The particular section that I had researched was “Gender, armed conflict and the search for peace”. It was an extraordinary eye-opener for it highlighted the horrendous levels of violence perpetrated upon women and girls, across the world. Somehow conflict situations become an arena where the wild lawlessness thrives and the stark reality of the violence women experience is gut-wrenching. The women are treated worse than animals. Just flesh  They are easily dispensed with once the women outlive their utility which in most cases is that of being sex slaves. The UNRISD report went a step further than merely discussing the violence but also documented the various methods of peace that were initiated by women or with the establishment of institutions such as Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and of course, the International Court of Justice.

Award-winning war reporter Christina Lamb in her book, Our Bodies Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women reports from various war zones around the world. She travels far and wide meeting women who have been victimised, abducted, raped, sold by one soldier to the next, etc. She met people like the Beekeeper of Aleppo, Abdullah Shrim, and Dr Miracle or Nobel Peace Prize winner, Dr Denis Mukwege, who have helped women. Or the incredible Bakira Hasecic, Association of Women Victims of War, who said her hobbies were smoking and “hunting war criminals” and she was not joking, having tracked down well over a hundred. Of these, twenty-nine were prosecuted in The Hague and eighty in Bosnia. Abdullah Shrim has rescued hundreds of women who were kidnapped by the ISIS and reunited them with their families. He has run extremely dangerous operations and created a vast network of safe houses and carriers who would help bring the women to safety. It has been at great economic  cost to the women’s families, who at times have had to fork out sums as large as US $70,000. Dr. Mukwege, meanwhile, has helped reconstruct and fix women victims of sexual violence.

…either suffered pelvic prolapsed or other damage giving birth, or were victims of serial violence so extreme that that genitals had been torn apart and they had suffered fistulas — holes in the sphincter muscle through to the bladder or rectum, which led to leaking of urine or faeces or both.

In twenty years of existence, the [Punzi] hospital had treated more than 55,000 victims of rape.

He is recognised as having treated more rape victims than anyone else on earth. As a trained gynaecologist, he had set up multiple maternal hospitals around Congo so as to tackle the growing menace of maternal mortality, where women uttered their last words before going into labour as they were never sure if they would live. Once the Rwandan genocide occurred, Dr Mukwege, he began to help women victims.

Each group seemed to have its own signature torture and the rates were so violent that often a fistula or hole has been torn in the bladders or rectums.

‘It’s not a sexual thing, it’s a way to destroy one another, to take from inside the victim the sense of being a human, and show you don’t exist, you are nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s a deliberate strategy: raping a woman in front of her husband to humiliate him so he leaves and shame falls on the victim and it’s impossible to live with the reality so the first reaction is to leave the area and then is totla destruction of the community. I’ve seen entire villages deserted.

‘It’s about making people feel powerless and destroying the social fabric. I’ve seen a case where the wife of a pastor was raped in front of the whole congregation so everyone fled. Because if God does not protect the wife of a pastor how would he protect them?

‘Rape as a weapon of war can displace a whole.demigraohic and have the same effect as a conventional weapon but at a much lower cost.

The accounts in this book are meticulously documented. Christina Lamb even manages to speak to some of the victims. One of them, Naima, who had been abducted by the ISIS recalled the name of every single abductor she was sold to. It even astonished Christina Lamb that Naima was able to recall in such detail. ‘The one thing that I could do was know all their names so what they did would not be forgotten,’ she explained. ‘Now I am out I am writing everyting in a book with everyone’s name.’ Lamb travels and meets people in Argentina ( the Lost Generation and the Mothers and Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo), Nigeria and the Boko Haram, Bangladesh and the birangonas or brave/war heroine, the ethnic cleansing of the Muslims in Bosnia, the Rohingya camps of those who fled Myanmar, the Rwandan genocide between the Hutu and the Tutsis, the women abducted and kept by the ISIS, the former sex slaves of Japan or the rape of the German women by the Red Army during the Second World War etc. The list is endless and exhausting.

The graphic descriptions in the book are vile but most likely tamer versions of what was really said, shared or documented since it is impossible to collate it as is for a lay readership. The anger and revulsion that Christina Lamb feels and conveys in her documentation regarding the sexual crimes perpetrated against women is transmitted to the reader very clearly. The mechanical manner in which the women are raped over and over again, leaving the women numb and injured is blood curdling. It is also imbued with a sense of helplessness trying to understand how can this wrong be ever corrected — Why are women pursued in this relentless manner, used and discarded? Or even seen as war trophies. What is truly befuddling is the ease with which men rape women or conduct mass rapes. It is not only the systematic violence that is perpetrated upon the women but the horrifying thought that this attitude probably exists in a daily basis. Men see women as dispensable, as a sex that they have limitless and unquestionable power over and the authority and prerogative to do what they like. War crimes only bring to the fore that which already exists already. It is not a gargantuan leap of imagination by men that requires such methodical violence perpetrated upon so many women in this brutal and agressive manner. What is even more chilling from the facts Lamb unearths is the despicable manner in which the rapists are rarely convicted, and if they ever are convicted it is usually for war crimes. Their convictions are carried out on the strength of the ethnic cleansing that they perpetrated. The absolute lack of respect or value accorded to a woman survivor’s testimony, if some of the victims agree to testify, is atrocious. Instead as Bakira points out that if you do not testify it’s as if it never happened. “Women should be allowed to say things the way she wants, tell the story how she wants.” Unfortunately what emerges is that even the institutions of justice and remedial action are so patriarchal in their nature and construct that they do not wish to acknowledge the ghastly trauma women suffer. Chillingly “in Bosnia it’s better to be a perpetrator than a victim. The perpetrators’s defence are paid by the state while we [the women] have to pay our own legal costs. And there’s still no compensation for victims.”

Our Bodies, Their Battlefield is not easy reading. There is a visceral reaction to reading the accounts. But as Lamb points out  that this is a very dark book but she hopes that the reader too will find the “strength and heroism of many of the women inspiring”. She continues, “I use the expression ‘survivors’ to emphasise the resilience of these women, as after all they have survived, rather than ‘victim’ which has a more helpless connotation and some see as a dirty word. Meeting all these women, the last word I would use about them is passive. However, while I do not want to make ‘victims’ their identity, at the same time they are victims of an appalling brutality and injustice, so I do think the word has some validity. In some languages, such as Spanish, the word ‘survivor’ means survivor of a natural disaster. Colombian and Argentinian women I met told me it made no sense to refer to them as survivors. So I have used both where appropriate. In the same way, Yazidis told me they did not object to being described as sex slaves, as long as that was not seen as their identity.” Gender divisions are an age-old phenomena. Seeing women as loot, especially at times of war is also many centuries old. But the fact that these ugly, ruthless, mindless, violent practices continue to exist despite there being so many conversations about gender equality and sensitivity is extremely painful. It is as if those who believe in the dignity of women and in gender equality are expending energy on a losing battle. When will it stop? Will it ever cease? And surely these are learned behaviours and attitudes towards women, so how and when are the younger generations of men being indoctrinated and encouraged to behave in this abominable fashion? It is true that many men still believe firmly in the idea of masculinity being that when you prove your supremacy as an individual upon women, but seriously, can this old-fashioned attitude not stop? War zones are a stark reminder that these attitudes are not going away in a hurry.  My only objection is to the cover design of this book depicting women wearing head scarves. Thereby signalling that the violent behaviours documented by Lamb exist more or less within one specific community, ie. the Muslims, who are equally conveniently seen as terrorists. This is wrong. The cover design should have been either an illustration depicting conflicts and different scenarios or had a montage of images from different regions and communities. This striking black and white image does a great deal of disservice not only to the community it represents but also to the book.

Nevertheless, please read this extremely powerful book.

25 Feb 2021

Aleksander Hemon, “The Book of My Lives”

Aleksander Hemon, “The Book of My Lives”

11 09 , 2014 No Comments


Aleksander HemonThe situation of immigration leads to a kind of self-othering as well. Displacement results in a tenuous relationship with the past, with the self that used to exist and operate in a different place, where the qualities that constituted us were in no need of negotiation. Immigration is an ontological crisis because you are forced to negotiate the conditions of your selfhood under perpetually changing existential circumstances. The displaced person strives for narrative stability– here is my story!–by way of systematic nostalgia. p.17
 
I first came across Aleksander Hemon when I read his moving (and painful) essay, “The Aquarium”, in the New Yorker. ( http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/06/13/the-aquarium, 13 June 2011) It was about the loss of his second daughter, an infant, from a brain tumour. Then I read a brilliant interview by John Freeman published in How to read a Novelist: Conversations with writers ( First published in the Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/feb/23/aleksandar-hemon, 23 February 2013 ). In it John Freeman observes that “Hemon has been widely praised for the unexpected images [ his] style creates, but it was not, he says, the hallmark of a writer trying to bridge here and there. It was deliberate, honed, and in some cases mapped out. ‘I wanted to write with intense sensory detail, to bring a heightened state.’ He is a sentence writer who counts beats as a poet does syllables.”

Aleksander Hemon was born in Sarajevo and has lived in Chicago since 1992. The Book of My Lives is his fourth book, but first nonfiction. It follows A Question for Bruno ( 2000), Nowhere Man ( 2002), The Lazarus Project ( 2008) and Love and Obstacles. The Book of My Lives consists of 16 essays that were originally published elsewhere, such as The New Yorker, Granta, and McSweeney’s. There were revised and edited for the memoir. The essays vary from time spent in Sarajevo, being with the family, eating his grandmother’s homecooked broth, to participating in a Nazi-themed birthday party for his younger sister and disappearing off to the family cabin on the mountain called Jahorina, twenty miles from Sarajevo, for weeks on end to read in solitude and peace. On one such visit, the American Cultural Centre called him to say he had been invited to America for a month. While he was there, the war broke out in Sarajevo and he could not return for many years. The second half of the book consists of essays documenting/coming to grips with the new life/experiences — of being an immigrant in America. 

The funny thing is that the need for collective self-legtimization fits snugly into the neoliberal fantasy of multiculturalism, which is nothing if not a dream of a lot of others living together, everybody happy to tolerate and learn. Differences are thus essentially required for the sense of belonging: as long as we know who we are and who we are not, we are as good as they are. In the multicultural world there are a lot of them, which out not to be a problem as long as they stay within their cultural confines, loyal to their roots. There is no hierarchy of cultures, except as measured by the level of tolerance, which, incidentally, keeps Western democracies high above everyone else. ….p.16
 

I read this book while travelling through Kashmir. In fact it took me a day to read, completely engrossed in it. It was a little surreal reading the essays while on holiday in Kashmir, especially those describing the conflict in Sarajevo, since the presence of the security forces, the freewheeling conversations with the locals about recovering from many years of conflict, or the tedious security checks at the airport are constant reminders of how fragile any society affected by conflict is. It is a memoir I would recommend strongly. A must.

Here are some links related to Aleksander Hemon that are worth exploring: Gary Shteyngart in conversation with Hemon http://chicagohumanities.org/events/2014/winter/little-failure-gary-shteyngart-aleksandar-hemon

Aleksander Hemon interviews Teju Cole, Bomb http://bombmagazine.org/article/10023/teju-cole

An interview in the Salon http://www.salon.com/2013/03/23/aleksandar_hemon_i_cannot_stand_that_whole_game_of_confession_i_have_nothing_to_confess_and_i_do_not_ask_for_redemption/

Q&A in the NYT http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/20/waiting-for-catastrophes-aleksandar-hemon-talks-about-the-book-of-my-lives/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

Review in The Economist http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21575736-essays-exile-writing-survive

Aleksander Hemon The Book of My Lives Picador, Oxford, 2013. Pb. pp. 250 Rs 450 
11 Sept 2014 

Sean McMeekin “July 1914: Countdown to War”

Sean McMeekin “July 1914: Countdown to War”

03 06 , 2014 No Comments

July 1914

When we studied about WWI as children, our school textbooks would dismiss in one sentence the assassination in Sarajevo of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary as being responsible for the war. In comparison Sean McMeekin’s July 1914: Countdown to War is a big fat book of nearly 470+ pages documenting the assassination, the aftermath in the month of July 1914, and the complicated politics. His account is packed with detail. It does not matter if one is unfamiliar with the nitty-gritties of the Habsburg Empire, the rising power of Russia etc. He makes the claim that the Great War  was “The War of the Ottoman Succession”. It will require a historian, especially of this period to do a scholarly critique of the book, yet it does make an important contribution to the avalanche of books being published in 2014–the centenary of World War I. 

July 1914: Countdown to War is packed with information without getting tedious, is strong on storytelling, making it very accessible to a lay reader too. It is worth reading. I found a print book useful to scribble notes in the margins but a book like this would do well to have a digital interactive edition.

Here are some links related to July 1914: Countdown to War and WWI literature. ( Now for similar articles from different parts of the world.)

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/feb/06/greatest-catastrophe-world-has-seen/ A review article by R. J. W. Evans on NYRB on a bunch of WWI books, including two by Sean McMeekin. ( 6 Feb 2014 issue)

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/05/27/the_house_of_habsburg_revisited_empire_nostalgia_austria_hungary_central_europe An excellent article on Foreign Policy by Simon Winder, “The House of Habsburg Revisited”. ( 27 May 2014.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOwaYNiJ6G8 In a discussion of his book, July 1914: Countdown to War,  historian Sean McMeekin reveals how a small cabal of European statesmen used the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand to initiate a long-awaited showdown among the Continent’s powers, ultimately leading to the start of World War I. In this talk he also says that many of the contemporary conflict flashpoints/battlefields are the same as those during WWI. (29 January 2014, The Kansas City Public Library. )

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/new-titles/adult-announcements/article/62227-the-war-that-fractured-history-100-years-on-wwi-books.html#path/pw/by-topic/new-titles/adult-announcements/article/62227-the-war-that-fractured-history-100-years-on-wwi-books.html A round up on Publishers Weekly of books on WWI, but does not mention any of Sean McMeekin. ( 9 May 2014)

Sean McMeekin July 1914: Countdown to War Icon Books, London, 2013. Pb. pp. 470. Rs. 599

3 June 2014 

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