JEAN, SLAVENKA, AND THE TEA-PARTY FOR
SANITY
by Helena
Cobban©
(This review article was first published in
Antioch Review, Spring 1994 (Vol.52, no.2). This version of it is the
exact, unedited one that Helena submitted to AR. Please
contact Helena
for reproduction rights.)
An accident of history, really, that brought this nice young man, untested
in foreign affairs, to the Presidency of the republic at a time when the
United States is in a position of unequalled supremacy in world politics.
Decisions that he makes -- on Bosnia, Somalia, Cambodia, wherever -- can
rip apart the fabric of whole nations.
What does Bill Clinton know of war?
Forests of print have addressed this question, and enough
electronic wizardry to boost a message to the edge of the universe. But that
discourse was always dominated by men -- fighting men in uniforms, political
men reading opinion polls, think tank men finetuning the game of grown-up
bully-boys called 'deterrence'. But put all of these specialists together
in a room, and the picture you get of this thing called "war" is still incomplete.
Locked outside, but more deserving of entry than ever before, are people
with a different view of war: those who are not its producers but, perforce,
its consumers (and who thereby are consumed by it). Themselves products of
two great developments of this century of ours -- the inclusion of massed
civilian populations in the target sets of warriors, and the spread of mass
education -- some of these civilian war-consumers can today describe war
in a way that is more complete than any previous description. Especially
the women among them.
Move over, Les Aspin. Move over, all you Clausewitz wannabes
with your Rube Goldberg 'models' of this or that form of warfare. Move over,
the warrior-poets of glory or of anguish. Make room for experts like these:
Jean Said Makdisi, a college teacher and mother who chronicled 16 years of
war in Lebanon in her 1990 book Beirut Fragments
[1]
; and Slavenka Drakulic, a journalist and mother who chronicled the first
year of the present Balkan wars in her book The Balkan Express; Fragments
from the Other Side of War (1993).
[2]
These women might both have put into their titles a word,
"fragments", that implies a tentativeness of experience or discourse. But
each book builds an overwhelming, thoughtful, and undeniably true picture
of what war does to societies at the end of our century.
Never mind the generals. Compared with these women, what
does Bill Clinton know of war?
* * *
Should we arrange a tea-party perhaps? Invite over Jean,
Slavenka, and Bill. Do you think he's ever been to their countries? Maybe
he visited 'Yugoslavia' in 1969, on the trip when, most famously, he went
to Moscow. I was in 'Yugoslavia' in 1970: I got off the train in Slavenka's
home-town, Zagreb, and hitch-hiked down to the coast. Then in 1974, I went
to work as a correspondent in Lebanon. I 'covered' and lived the war there
from 1975 through 1981; had my first two children there; knew, like Jean
Makdisi, the special terrors of raising children inside a war-zone. I knew,
as Slavenka would come to, the particular difficulty that a mother can have
in dealing, as a journalist, with topics impossible to speak of.
This is how Slavenka described an interview she was supposed
to conduct with a survivor from the Croatian city of Vukovar, which had recently
fallen to the Serbs. Ivan was 19. He had fought alongside the city's defenders,
but then been forced to withdraw from it with his mother and five younger
siblings. His father was lost -- either dead or captured. Slavenka talked
to Ivan in Zagreb:
I knew he was waiting for me to ask him questions, but
I was at a loss for words. I didn't know what to ask him, caught by surprise.
His face was so unbearably young that it undid me in a way. This is a story
that cannot be written, I thought, not the story of this child who has lost
his friends, his house, his father, even the war itself... He could be my
son, I thought, and could not stop thinking of it...The more talkative and
open he became, the more I withdrew. I felt guilty.(SD, pp.88-89)
Yes, these two women would be good to invite to my tea-party.
We'll have Bill sitting there -- I hope our trees don't set off his allergies.
I think we should invite Hillary, too, maybe she can do some cultural interpretation
for us with him.
Why a tea-party? Well, you might think of the Boston Tea-Party,
not a true tea-party at all, of course, but it did mark a transition to a
hopeful new order. You might think of the Mad-Hatter's Tea-Party, a total
upending of existing logics and systems of argument. Or you might think of
this tea-party, encountered by Jean when, in the midst of Israel's punishing
1982 bombardment of Beirut, she went with her husband to visit some friends:
For an instant I thought I was hallucinating, but soon
I was laughing in delight. There on the lawn she had set up a table on which
was spread afternoon tea. There was a teapot with a crocheted tea cosy, the
kind you buy at church bazaars; there were porcelain teacups, silver sugar
tongs and teaspoons, embroidered linen napkins, and a little silver dish
with biscuits. Both she and her sister, whose house had become uninhabitable
because of the bombings, were wearing long, fashionable cotton kaftans. They
were neatly groomed and freshly lipsticked...
"I can't believe this," I said. "I feel as if I'm dreaming.
How do you do it?"
"My dear, I would go mad if I didn't... What do you want
me to do? Die? When I must, I will. Meanwhile, every afternoon I have my
tea."(JSM, pp.179-80)
So, a tea-party for sanity, amidst the craziness and killings
of the new world disorder! Held here, in Washington DC, capital city of the
planet, and quite a killing-ground in its own right. What could make more
sense?
* * *
As the guests arrived, I would make sure each was well
seated. Then I would preside over the ritual of pouring the tea, using the
silver teapot bequeathed me by my Aunt Katie; and I would find out who drinks
their tea with lemon, with milk, or with sugar. Perhaps at this point, already,
Jean and Slavenka would start right on in, sharing with each other and the
rest of us their considerable insights into one of our era's most troubling
processes: the dividing up of people into confining ethnic or religious boxes.
In Lebanon, the enforced dividing was attempted along
both sectarian and 'national' lines.
The Maronite Christian militias fought hard to create and enlarge enclaves
free of both Palestinian and (Lebanese) Muslim presence. "Cleansing" (
tantheef) was their word for this process from the beginning of the fighting
in 1975. (In Arabic, as in English, "cleansing" has a close but usually unmentioned
relationship with the more purely military term "mopping-up"). In vast parts
of the beautiful land of Lebanon, the Maronite campaign tore through a long-established
coexistence, setting neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend, in
a process of seemingly inexorable violence. The same process has now torn
apart previously diverse communities in the former Yugoslavia -- there, breaking
communities up along lines of imputed ethnicity. Saddest of all, to anyone
who has experienced Beirut, is the attempted destruction in Sarajevo of the
idea of peaceable coexistence between the residents of a single, gloriously
diverse modern city.
In Lebanon and in Yugoslavia, the deadly process of group
homogenization hastens and has been hastened by war.
Here is how this process feels to Jean, a Protestant Christian
and a Palestinian, married to a (Christian?) Lebanese, who in the 1970s and
1980s were raising their three sons in Muslim-dominated West Beirut:
I have felt repeatedly that religion has worked rather
like the stamp with which cattle are branded. I have seen it so many times
in the movies. The cowboy chases the steer relentlessly. He throws a noose
over the animal's head...
And so we are all, like it or not, branded with the hot
iron of our religious ancestry...
And how does the brand work? How does one fall into the
clutches of that cowboy holding the hot iron? How does one feel as it sizzles
into the flesh? I have felt it... (JSM, pp.137-8)
Here, a marvelous discovery, is the very same metaphor
in the hands of Slavenka, a Croat formerly married to a Serb, by whom she
has one daughter, now in her twenties: "War is like a brand on the brows
of Serbs who curse Croat mothers, but it is also a brand on the faces of
Croats leaving a country where all they had is gone."(SD, p.36)
In January 1992, the day before the European Community
gave formal recognition to Croatia, Slavenka wrote an essay called "Overcome
by Nationhood". By then, her new country had been racked for some months
already by fighting between Croats and ethnic Serbs backed by neighboring
Serbia. Slavenka wrote: "Along with millions of other Croats, I was pinned
to the wall of nationhood -- not only by outside pressure from Serbia and
the Federal Army but by national homogenization within Croatia itself. That
is what the war is doing to us, reducing us to one dimension: the Nation."(p.51)
But neither of these women allows herself to indulge in abstract moralizing.
Slavenka explained with engaging honesty how she, too, felt drawn into this
identification with the national idea by the horrors of the war:
Right now, in the new state of Croatia, no one is allowed
not to be a Croat. And even if this is not what one would really call freedom,
perhaps it would be morally unjust to tear off the shirt of the suffering
nation -- with tens of thousands of people being shot, slaughtered and burned
just because of their nationality. It wouldn't be right because of Vukovar,
the town that was erased from the face of the earth. Because of the attacks
on Dubrovnik.(SD, p.52)
While Slavenka felt herself becoming sucked into the system
of ethnic categorization, for Jean no such option has ever, in the Lebanese
context, been available. The complicated warp and woof of her personal reference
groups has precluded it. Jean also actively resists the idea of closed sectarian
identities in strong and wrenchingly effective language:
Although I am, by this definition at least, a Christian, I think of Islam
as part -- a large part -- of my heritage and revere it as such... I am the
child in equal measure of Christianity and Islam, but, to my great discomfort,
the marriage made between them in my historical background is threatened.
I do not wish to choose between them. Yet the choice is being made for me
by elements over which I have no control... The situation I find myself in
is like that of watching the rape of my own past, two legs of one body being
forced apart to the eternal shame of victim and violator.(JSM, pp.137-8)
* * *
Is there something special about women, and our lives,
that gives us a special, recognizable set of attitudes toward and insights
into war? For years, I thought not.
I was a successful war correspondent, after all, got my stories on the front
pages of major newspapers when I was only 23. I reveled in proving myself
as good as (better than!) my colleagues who were men. I hated signs of what
I considered squeamishness in myself. I felt embarrassed in 1976 when, being
taken by Falangist militia guides around Tel al-Zaatar, a Palestinian refugee
camp that the Falangists had just the day before captured, I found I could
take in every detail of the tour, the bodies squished this way and that by
the trucks of Falangist looters, the body of a pregnant mother with her belly
split terrifyingly, casually, open, and so on, until -- when our Falangist
guides invited us into a basement where they promised "lots more bodies"
-- I found
I
could
not
go
on.
So there I sat. In a little dusty courtyard in the middle
of that stinking, dried-out wasteland. In the strangely reassuring company
of three crumpled bodies of tiny supplicating old people. And I pondered
the words with which Falangist military boss Bashir Gemayyel had prefaced
our tour: "I am proud of what you are going to see there."
Like that. No attempt to invoke the thin pretense with
which I have heard other commanders respond to rumors of atrocity: The heat
of the battle... A few excesses... Dealt with promptly by commanders on the
spot... Bla bla, perhaps, but at least, a recognition that these things should
not be crowed about, should be prevented or kept hidden, are acts deserving
of shame.
Heat of battle / animals in heat / killing and pornography.
But here I was. The tour carefully arranged. The declaration
pridefully asserted. And I knew that words could never, in their standard
journalistic arrangement, adequately 'cover' this 'story'.
(Within six years, U.S. diplomats were trumpeting pudgy
Bashir as their great white hope for the healing of Lebanon. In 1982, with
U.S. and Israeli backing, he was elected President of Lebanon. Before he
could be inaugurated, he was assassinated. His followers, well-trained, immediately
carried out another, equally horrific series of atrocities in the camps at
Sabra and Shatila. No-one can claim this was unexpected. Our press coverage
from 1976 did at least accurately
convey the facts, if not the full moral import, of the event.)
In 1980, at the start of another war, my husband at the
time was covering the Iranian front, and I was covering the Iraqi front.
Our two preschoolers were with the nanny in Beirut. Came a telex: "There
is fighting in your neighborhood, and one of the militias has put a sniper
on the roof of your building." Did I stay on in Iraq, where the 'story' was
excellent? No, I didn't. Could I cover the 'story' in Beirut, where the politics
were intriguing? No, I couldn't. All I could think of as I raced back across
the desert to Beirut was an image of my beautiful children, held up bleeding,
dead, as I had seen so many other children taken from bombed-out buildings.
Nowadays, I consider such an 'attitude' toward the horror
of war is authentic, and relevant. It is an important part of the human experience.
It was not a part that fit into the standard conventions of journalism of
that day -- or of our present day. It is an attitude that, probably, given
our roles as nurturers, women have more frequently than men. Men sometimes
have it, too, I know. But none of us gets much listened to: the hegemony
that (male) power-based thinking exercises over the political echelon seeps
into nearly every corner of the public discourse, forcing women who want
to participate to do so on those terms. For some years now, I have been a
member of both the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and an
American-based networking group called Women in International Security. Most
of the talented, ambitious women in these groups shy away from any discussion
of whether women have a special attitude toward war. Their role-models are
Jeane Kirkpatrick or Margaret Thatcher: women who have spectacularly made
it in a male-ordered world.
But I think it would be good to engage our tea-party guests
in a serious discussion of whether women have a special, and perhaps especially
constructive, attitude toward violence and war. It's an important discussion.
One that has particular relevance in this era of wars against civilians;
and at this point when the United States may become sucked into violence
in the Balkans, as is already happening in Somalia. Let these two wonderfully
wise women from Lebanon and Croatia help us further the discussion.
* * *
Partly, it is these women's ability to operate within
both the public and the private worlds, and to see and muse upon the connections
between them, that gives their writing its particular 'attitude' and effectiveness.
Jean attended school in very Church of England schools in Cairo, in the 'fifties.
So she is probably familiar with the English tea-time custom of eating the
piece of plain buttered bread before moving on to the jams, the jellies,
the cakes, fruit breads, or scones. At our tea-party, the conversation would
probably keep threatening to run away with us; the chirping of Minton cups
being replaced on their saucers would die away, the tea remain half-drunk,
morsels of cake left uneaten on the plates -- while Jean and Slavenka trade
their impressions of the dualisms of war.
Slavenka writes with exasperation of the impossibility,
when dining with admirers at the Harvard Club in Cambridge, of conveying
to them the complexities of the Balkan situation. She then imagines the following
scene, which draws its power from the cool precision of its domestic detail:
I can easily imagine the face of a Bush, a Kohl or a Major, at first eagerly
paying attention to the report given by an expert consultant who comes from
this part of the world over the plate of clear bouillon and then perhaps
some light plain-cooked white fish, only to shake his head wearily at the
end of the dinner, lifting a silver spoon of slightly quivering creme caramel,
admitting that he cannot understand, not fully, that madness, the Balkan
nightmare.(SD, p.8)
Jean writes of her war that,
It seemed simple at first, and limited, but gradually grew in complexity
to encompass every aspect of life and thought, even as it grew geographically
and in intensity. Expanding ripples of conflicts in a lake of violence caused
parallel ripples in my own existence, and sent me, reeling, fragmented portions
of consciousness.
Gradually, I ... found myself overcome by the effort to
manage both the inner and outer battles. Almost every aspect of the war I
had fought out in my own heart. Whenever I heard the argument of one side
expounded, I could immediately anticipate the other; and one without the
other would seem simplistic, false. I could therefore accept and reject simultaneously
all the arguments of the war, while at the same time categorically rejecting
the war itself.(JSM, p.134)
The connections between the public and private worlds
are not the only connections that these women are able to help us see. Another
kind of connection, particularly relevant for the era we have entered, is
that between different cultures. Both, of course, are represented here in
languages that are not their native tongues: How privileged we English-speakers
are, to have these writers communicate with us (and so beautifully!) in our
own language. But the most important cultural divide they bridge, as in Slavenka's
introductory essay on the Harvard Club, is that between cultures torn by
war and those that do not know how blessed they are with peace.
In December 1991, Slavenka once again left Zagreb, this
time for Paris:
I walked down brightly lit streets ... and I could hardly feel my own weight.
It seemed to me I was almost floating, not touching the pavement, not touching
reality; as if between me and Paris there stretched an invisible wire fence
through which I could see everything but touch and taste nothing -- the wire
that could not be removed from my field of vision and that kept me imprisoned
in the world from which I had just arrived... In a Europe ablaze with bright
lights getting ready for Christmas I was separated from Paris by a thin line
of blood: that and the fact that I could see it, while Paris stubbornly refused
to.(SD, pp.42-3)
While Slavenka rails especially against a Europe that
has turned its back on the Balkans, Jean reserves her special anger for the
arms dealers of the world:
I ponder, for the ten thousandth time since this damnable
war began, on the happiness of the manufacturers and salesmen of arms and
ammunition. Every roar, whistle, and crash translates itself in my mind to
the sound of a cash register, the tinkle of champagne glasses, and the hum
of conversation at a very expensive restaurant somewhere. The glisten of
shrapnel, the smoke billowing ut of someone's ruined home, the rumble of
the big guns, are all echoed in my imagination as the glitter of jewelry,
the smoke of cigars lazily puffed out of appreciative lips, and the rolling
of drums for a hip-swinging, carefree dance...(JSM, pp.45-6)
* * *
In addition to their ability to make sense of, and connections
between, two or more different worlds, what marks these two writers as particularly
female is the way they experience war as mothers. (Perhaps, too, their writing
gains extra poignancy from their special concern as mothers of 'mixed-parentage'
children.)
Some of Jean's most anguished writing deals with the conflict
she experienced when the Israeli army cast a deadly noose of siege around
West Beirut. Should she defy the attackers by staying in her own home, as
every fiber of her cried out to do? Or should she give in to the urgings
of her husband Samir, echoed within the parental part of herself, and take
her sons out of the besieged portion of the city to safety?
My husband insisted. Like so many Lebanese, he had learned the lesson of Palestine,
and so he would stay; but for the safety of our children, I must take them
and go. I argued; I pleaded; I fought; but he prevailed. Would I, he had
shouted, would I take the responsibility if our children were burned like
those we had seen on television the night before? The sight of those little
burned bodies had made him vomit. I had not had the courage even to look
at them.
I could not find a counterargument. 'You take them; I'll
stay,' I had tried feebly. I had no right to condemn the children. I felt
shame, humiliation, rage, as I packed in the dark... My anger was a wheel
with a hundred spokes... (JSM, pp.164-5)
Jean took her sons out of the siege, and waited with them
in a friend's house in the hills nearby. The agony of being outside the tortured
city was intolerable; and when her husband later found a way to come out
and join her for a few days' visit, he learned firsthand how hard her situation
was. The three boys -- the youngest was eleven -- were eager to return. So,
like many others who had previously fled, the whole family walked back into
their besieged hometown.
Jean's descriptions of the psychology of a city under
siege and constant bombardment from land, sea, and air should be required
reading for all politicians whose military are urging this 'solution' to
any problem.
All of my previous hesitancy evaporated: Here was no doubt at all. This was
one battle in which I felt I could unquestioningly take sides. All the criticisms
that I had of the PLO's conduct in Lebanon -- and there were many -- receded,
for it fought directly and gallantly, against the overwhelming force of the
Israelis. Such courage as I possessed, such imagination, such idealism, such
historical sense were all mobilized, focused on the necessity of resistance,
which became to me the most meaningful political act of my life.(JSM, p.172)
But the siege, and the daily, deadly bombardments carried
on for weeks and weeks. They brought Jean to an even more terrifying view
of her parental responsibilities:
Eventually, exhaustion filtered insidiously through the
stoicism. I remember the haggard look on every face, the circles under the
eyes, the weight everyone lost. We were the living among the dead and the
dying, never knowing when we would be called to join their ranks, and so
we took on the look of the dead... The death machines worked; hardly anything
else did. I remember raw, wordless fear, actual terror, gnawing at the bravest
people, weakening them. And watching the children: my young son taking my
hand and placing it over his pounding heart to show me; his thirteen-year-old
brother sitting very still, very quietly, but very close to me, whispering
on August 4, 'Mummy, we're going to die today; for sure, we're going to die.'(JSM,
p.180)
A few days later, she once again put her parenting self
first, and, shortly before the mid-August ceasefire finally took effect,
she took the boys out of the city.
By the time Slavenka started writing the essays in this
collection, in April 1991, her daughter Rujana was, by contrast to Jean's
boys, just about grown up. In summer 1991, Rujana left Zagreb to go visit
Slavenka's ex-husband in Canada, and she only reappeared in Zagreb the following
spring. Slavenka thanks God that she has no sons. "To have a son in wartime
is the worst curse that can befall a mother," she wrote to her daughter in
April 1992. (This was before most of us learned what some Serbian fighters
were doing to Bosnian daughters in their "cleansing" campaign.)
Because she is a mother and a gifted writer, Slavenka
has a sympathetic imagination that enables her to imagine that any of the
young men waging this war might have been her son. Here is more of her reaction
to 19-year-old Ivan, the survivor from Vukovar:
He could be my son, he is four years younger than my daughter,
I thought, again disturbed by his youth, and looked down at my hands, at
the floor...
While I watch him light his cigarette with a resolute
gesture, slightly frowning as if trying to look older, I again feel horror
pierce me like a cold blade: really, what if this were my own son? What would
I tell him -- not today at this table when the war is almost behind us, but
in the early summer of 1991 in Vukovar? What would I have done, if one day
he came to me and simply said, 'Mama,I'm going'? Of course, I wouldn't ask
where he was going, that would have been clear by then, it could mean only
one thing, going to fight in the war. I wouldn't even be surprised, perhaps
I would have expected it... But I would nevertheless tell him not to go,
because this is not his war... Forget it, I'd say, no idea is worth fighting
for. But it's not an idea that this is all about, he'd say, I don't give
a damn about ideas, about the state, about independence or democracy. They're
killing my friends, they're killing them like dogs in the street and then
dogs eat them because we can't get to them to bury them... (SD, pp.91-2)
The dialogue that follows is a quietly explosive master-text
of moral philosophy. But if we were discussing this issue of "what is war"
-- for mothers, for anybody -- at our tea-party, I would hope that the guests
had already read, as well, the next essay in Slavenka's collection, "What
Ivan said". Ivan, asked to help load a pile of corpses onto a truck: "I couldn't
do it, I just stood by. As soon as I got there, I began to vomit. People,
dead people, rotting, decaying, flies coming out of their mouths..." (p.98)
Ivan, watching his friends beat a local Serb to death. Ivan, killing a man
for the first time, close up. Ivan, deciding with his friend not to kill
two advancing Serbian soldiers because they were conscripts, not volunteers:
"One of them almost shot my brother, then my brother returned fire and shot
him. The other one threw himself on the ground... When he gave himself up,
we saw he was really just a kid... We felt sorry for him, he was born in
1972, like me."(p.104)
This is powerful stuff, as journalism as well as in the
context of the greater human 'story'. I believe that Slavenka's ability,
as a mother and as a writer, to reach out to Ivan in the full dimension of
his humanity was an essential ingredient in her success in getting this story.
When I was in Beirut, I interviewed several young fighters from different
sides of the war. But I was still fairly young, myself. I was speaking to
them more from a sense of horror at what it was that they felt they had to
do, than from the sense that Slavenka conveys so strongly: of the terrible
sadness a mother might feel, on learning that they have done these things.
* * *
Another part of these women's testimony speaks to the
power of domestic and personal orderliness to restore a larger sense of orderliness
to a life turned inside out by crisis and war. I have felt this effect some
in my own life: there were years of internal and external chaos when my most
powerful personal mantra was "When in doubt, fold clothes". So perhaps, when
we need a change of mood at the tea-party, we can trade some stories along
this general theme.
We need not ask Jean to repeat the story of the tea-party
amidst chaos that was the exemplar for our own gathering. But as I ask my
children to fetch the guests' cups for a refill, we could ask her to recall
the day when, in the middle of the Israeli siege, she found her friend S
emerging "triumphantly" from the working salon of a resourceful hairdresser.
Or she might recall the numerous occasions she refers to in her book when,
following yet another hideous series of events, she goes to special pains
to keep in control of her own appearance. Like this time, in April 1989,
after she had spent several nights in the parking-garage-shelter with no
electricity:
I woke up at 7:30. It was quiet outside. I showered and
dressed, choosing my clothes carefully. I chose a dark blue skirt and a sweater
and a white blouse, polished my black shoes, and fixed my hair. In patching
up my appearance, in choosing particularly neat and orderly clothes, I felt
I was undoing the humiliation of my ratlike state last night.(JSM, p.219)
Slavenka's friend Drazena (put an accent over the z),
would probably appreciate that account. Drazena came to Slavenka's house
after fleeing from the siege in Sarajevo. Slavenka's daughter Rujana insisted
that, among the other things they were giving Drazena, it was a good idea
to give her a pair of black patent high-heeled shoes. At first, Slavenka
thought that a daft idea; Drazena would need "sensible" footwear to trek
around looking for an apartment and a job. But Rujana stood her ground, and
persuaded her mother that having the emotional lift of elegant shoes might
be precisely what Drazena needed.
Slavenka recounts this discussion with her usual, most
engaging candor. She then develops her theme by musing how easy it is to
start judging people by the categories into which they fall ('refugee') rather
than by who they are as persons:
What I am starting to do is to reduce a real, physical individual to an abstract
'they' -- that is, to a common denominator of refugees, owners of the yellow
certificate. From there to second-class citizen -- or rather, non-citizen
-- who owns nothing and has no rights, is only a thin blue line. I can also
see how easy it is to slip into this prejudice as into a familiar pair of
warm slippers, ready and waiting for me at home...
Now I think I understand what I couldn't understand before:
how it happened that people who lived near German concentration camps didn't
do anything, didn't help."(SD, pp.142-143)
High-heeled shoes, warm slippers: once again, domestic
images, and the contrasts between them, are skillfully invoked to convey
truths of existential human import.
Slavenka might tell us, too, about the Laura Ashley wallpaper
that she had bought at the beginning of July 1991, when the Yugoslav Federal
Army dropped the first bombs on Slovenia. "I had been wanting to redecorate
my bedroom for ages, but went to buy the paper only after I heard the news
about the attack... I was aware that I was doing it in spite of the war,
perhaps as a symbolic gesture of faith in a future when putting up new wallpaper
would make sense."(p.25) And Jean might counter by explaining, as she did
two or three times throughout her book, how important it was to her after
times of particular stress to work out her frustrations in house-cleaning.
House-cleaning, that is, as the persistent, quiet and hopeful response to
all the militiamen's attempts to sow the chaos and disruption of their form
of "cleansing".
Then Jean might recall the first time her apartment received
a direct hit from heavy artillery. The whole family had been waiting out
the attack in the underground garage of their building. After it subsided,
she went up to check the apartment:
Front door doesn't open. Wrong keys? After a little struggle,
lock gives way. I have an impression of total whiteness. Strange, I think
to myself, when did Samir have time to cover everything with white sheets?
Funny: I don't own enough white sheets to cover everything...
Realization dawns. Those are not white sheets, but dust.
The place is a shambles. Everything is white and broken. Real fear now. This
is death. Not something to be read about in the newspapers, but something
that has come into my house, that has violated my life, my territory, my
being... (JSM, pp.24-25)
But Jean resolved that she would stay in Beirut. That
was March 1976. She stayed through another eight months of intense internal
fighting that year; then through five years of continued sporadic fighting,
some of it very violent. (I left Beirut with my children in early 1981.)
She stayed through most of the Israeli siege of 1982; then, through the chaotic
years of internal warfare that followed that. In the last dated entry in
her book, in February 1990, she recorded that her apartment had received
another direct hit.(p.241)
I believe that Jean is still in Beirut. In spring 1990,
she wrote that: "Time has been wasted;
years have passed; loneliness and emptiness have encroached. I have had my
youth ushered into middle age by war. My children's -- all the children's
-- childhood was lived in its shadow. My youngest son was four when the war
began; now he is in university."(p.214)
* * *
Women's lives can be described as having their own rhythms,
with each initiation into a new stage being marked by its own rituals and
meaning. First menstruation, first romantic love, marriage, first intercourse,
first childbirth; the nursing and raising of children, and sending them off
into the world; developments in the world of friends, the maturing of a marriage,
the passing of older generations. The rhythm of these events (which may not
always happen in the same order) has in our time been overlaid with other
acts of transition: graduations from various stages of education; first full-time
job, then promotions or other changes in our careers; moves from one community
to another; perhaps a divorce. As for war, in the past it was often present
in women's lives, against the background of the traditional transitions.
But generally, in the past, women's experience of war was vicarious, mediated
through either their male family members or its general impact on their communities.
In this century, women and children in settled civilian
communities have become the direct targets of war, however far they might
be from a battle-front. From the first tentative forays into aerial bombardment
of cities in the first world war, to the development of a whole doctrine,
"counter-value targeting", that held massed civilian populations to be a
quite plausible target in the "massive retaliation" of nuclear deterrence.
What has happened, is happening, to women and families in Beirut, Croatia,
and Bosnia, is just a simple extension of this thinking.
So perhaps we can start to look at women's lives in new
ways, constructing the dimensions of our experience not just on the basis
of how many children we have, or the stage we've reached on the job ladder,
but also by examining our lives through the lens of war. In this context,
Jean has to emerge the veteran. Not just the 18 years of Beirut's war survived,
but the intensity of some of those experiences, and the thoughtful, articulate
way in which her writing tries to make sense of them, mark this woman as
one who can give wisdom to us all.
Those who are outside looking in see only the war. For
us, there are people, friends, life, activity, production, commitments, a
profound intensity of meaning...
Most important of all, there has been a sense of community
so powerful as to compensate for the difficulties of life. I have felt, over
the years, in spite of the depression, the fear, and the doubts, a sense
of privilege at having shared this impossible fragment of history with so
many good people. We have looked evil in the face; we have spoken to wicked
men; we have asked ourselves the questions that most people are spared; and
we have understood that the lines between goodness and evil are sometimes
broad and clear, sometimes thin and invisible. We have done these things
together.
We have understood our own and each other's limitations
in a way that has made us all more tolerant of humanity. There are, for instance,
no more illusions left in any of us about bravery and stoicism, about who
can stand how much and for how long. We have seen each other crack under
the pressure of events, each one in his own way, each one at his own time
and for his own reason; we have seen each other lose dignity, seen each other
shake in humiliating fear. We used to laugh at these weaknesses but no longer
do so. We have seen ourselves and each other under a microscope for years,
naked blobs of humanity n glass slides scrutinized through the merciless lens
of history, and nothing any of us does surprises the rest anymore. We understand
and accept our own and our friends' limitations.(JSM, pp.210-11)
Some of the profoundest insights that Jean draws from
her experience of war are related to her gathering renunciation of violence:
Familiarity, they say, breeds contempt. Familiarity with
violence breeds contempt -- for what? People? Life? Nature? Goodness? Beauty?
Prayer? God himself? For me, familiarity with violence has bred contempt
for violence, and only for that, for I have seen what it has accomplished
and it is nothing to be proud of...
In the name of causes come the scream of children, the
wails of mothers, the smoke of a burned land. In the name of humanity comes
the merciless inhumanity of air raids, tanks, machine guns, and throats slit
from ear to ear gushing blood.
And in the midst of this orgy of violence, this dance
of death, this saturnalia of killing, what is there to do but refuse it?
Put it down, this refusal, if you will, to sentimental bourgeois finickiness,
and dismiss it with contempt. I have no answer, except to say that I have
seen what I have seen.(JSM, p.149)
Slavenka shares Jean's passion for non-violence. In July
1991, she wrote a moving essay about the World War 2 pistol that her father
had kept hidden away in a closet at home and showed to his two children only
once, hiding from them, along with the pistol, memories of the terror of
war that continued to prey on his mind. Then, moving to her present situation,
the writer adds:
While I shop for dog food in a store selling hunting equipment,
where they also sell guns, an old man comes in offering to sell a lady's
pistol for 1000 DM. He puts it down on the counter, small and shiny like
a silver toy. All of a sudden, I felt a strong urge to possess it, to buy
it, to have it -- me, too. Why not, I think, I am alone, defenceless and
desperately frightened. My desire lasts only a second, but I realize that
in that moment the jaws of war have finally closed around my fragile life...
Like my father's, my life is now breaking in two.(SD, p.16)
And even Jean, while pronouncing a non-violent manifesto,
does so with huge empathy for those who are not able to. In the passage about
her attitude toward those who defended Beirut in 1982, she expressed clear
support for people using forceful means to defend their hometown. And she
even seriously questioned whether, under each and every circumstance like
those she has seen, she would abstain from acts of personal cruelty:
What do all these acts of unimaginable cruelty mean? ... I want to know whether
I can escape the apparently inescapable conclusion that it is in the nature
of the beast, that any of us could do it, that I could do it. Could
I, if pushed far enough, yet do it?
I have not seen my baby's body mangled in the dust or
my fiancee's raped body lying bloody in the street, legs wide apart and eyes
blank. I have not seen my father dishonored in death or my mother's nakedness
exposed to the world. I have not seen my beautiful, strong, young husband
reduced to unidentifiable bits of flesh... And since I haven't, I no longer
dare say that I would not do such cruel things as have been done.
Besides, is there a difference between killing people
by pressing a button as you soar through the sky and killing people while
you see terror on their faces?(JSM, pp.202-3)
Slavenka might reply to this question that yes, from the
point of view of the killer, there is a difference: In her interview with
Ivan, he spells out how much harder it is to kill someone when you can see
his face. But both women would probably agree, that from the point of view
of the victim and her or his survivors, there probably isn't any difference
at all.
* * *
The atmosphere at our tea-party has become quite serious.
We are talking, after all, about questions at the core of human existence
and purpose. Jean might bring some of her points home, for the Americans
present, by expanding her reflection on what she describes as the "generalized
rage" of the young men with guns. Perhaps, she writes, they wield them, "to
vent a bottomless anger with a world that has done them no good and, when
they shoot, aim at their own dissatisfaction as much as at any more precise
target."(pp.133-4)
In her introductory essay, this thoughtful, experienced
survivor of the war-zone warns that:
Outsiders look at Beirut from a wary distance, as though it had nothing to
do with them; as though, through a protective glass partition, they were
watching with immunity a patient thrash about in mortal agony, suffering
a ghastly virus contracted in forbidden and faraway places. They speak of
Beirut as if it were an aberration of the human experience: It is not. Beirut
was a city like any other and its people were a people like any other. What
happened here could, I think, happen anywhere.(JSM, p.20)
So, these women -- whose depth of experience of war and
breadth of sympathetic imagination have allowed them to conclude that there
are circumstances under which anyone, even you or I, dear reader, might submit
to the brand of a confining, imposed identity, and that there are circumstances
under which anyone, even you or I, might commit atrocities -- are also telling
us that there are circumstances under which any societies, even yours and
mine, might fall apart.
That's a serious thought to ponder. Not just in Croatia,
Mogadishu, or Tadjikstan. But here in Washington DC, too.
Come to think of it, never mind Bill Clinton. We could
just have Hillary at the tea-party. And have a far-reaching discussion between
women about society, evil, social breakdown -- and the wars, and threats
of wars, in all of our cities.
--ends