Bosnia: Guilt
by
Dissociation?
A Discussion with Slavenka Drakulic
William Phillips:
I'm William Phillips, Editor of
Partisan Review.
We're
glad to have with us tonight Slavenka Drakulic, one of the famous "five
witches," the group of Croatian women writers recently denounced in a
nationalist Croatian weekly for their dissident views. I want to introduce
Edith Kurzweil, Executive Editor of
Partisan Review,
who will moderate
the dicussion and the questions after the talk.
Edith Kurzweil:
Many of you met Slavenka last year at our conference
in Newark ["Intellectuals and Social Change in Central and Eastern
Europe,"
Partisan Review
Fall 1992] and afterwards here in New York. In
the meantime she has written yet another wonderful book, called
The
Balkan Express.
Slavenka Drakulic:
I'm very happy to be here with you. I arrived just
two days ago from Zagreb. As you know, there is a war only in some
parts of Croatia, such as Dalmatia to the south, so I'm not exactly corning
from the war zone, but I'm close enough; Zagreb is only about thirty
miles from the war zone. I have chosen to tell you a story tonight which
has to do with responsibility, one of the things we should talk more
about. This story, the last one in
Balkan Express,
is called "High-heeled
Shoes." It is a very personal and painful experience about how I myself
became an accomplice of the war. You know, it's not enough to see only
what's happening to other people; at some point I realized I had to look
into the mirror and see what had happened to me and see how much I
have been changed by what has been going on around me. I believe that
if we look away from the war, believing it is only the politicians and the
military power and the nations or the states who are responsible for it,
then we are delegating our citizens' human and personal responsibility. It
is this refusal to become engaged on an individual level that has allowed
the war to go on. I think that each of us has to look into the mirror.
This story is about a friend of mine, a journalist, who left Sarajevo a
year ago. When it was still possible to leave Sarajevo by normal means of
transportation, she came to Zagreb with only a suitcase and her six-year–
old daughter, And she brought clothes only for her daughter because she
had planned to leave her with friends and go back herself to Sarajevo in a
week. While in Zagreb, she saw on television footage showing that her
house had been burned down; she couldn't go back there, because there
Editor's Note: This discussion took place on May 27, 1993, in New York City.
