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PARTISAN REVIEW
And so I'm curious how you would suggest that one could effectively
project the image of a suffering affiuent person, a suffering familiar–
looking person.
Slavenka Drakulic:
The problem is that the overaccumulation of these
images of "otherness" creates the effect of their being ignored, because
you cannot identify with these people, their appearance, their problems. I
have written a book where you
can
find points of identification with the
Western world, so the people from the West could see that "this could
happen to us." Out of four and a half million people in Croatia, four
million didn't experience war directly. They haven't been bombed. Their
children haven't been killed. Somehow the whole region of the Balkans
has been cut off. And it was a clear message that it doesn't belong to
Europe. The reaction to my book showed that people can identify much
more easily when you show them that you are the same as they are, that
there is no difference. And in that way you can somehow claim some re–
sponsibility, because if there is no understanding there can't be any re–
sponsibility. I'm not saying that the majority of the people there are not
peasants. Of course the peasants are the ones who have been resettled and
moved, who are the refugees. I'm describing the effect of this kind of
journalism, though I'm not blaming journalists individually: we have to
remember that forty of them have been killed in this war.
Edith Kurzweil:
I'd just like to add one point. I think that your question
itself points to the problem of being presented with images. The presen–
ters, it seems, know a great deal more than what they show us; that adds
to the construction of otherness Slavenka talks about. For us, it's at yet
another remove.
Philip Gourevitch:
Remember that extraordinary image of the man
who played the cello every day in Sarejevo? It was certainly a European
image, I would say. And in terms of stirring a sense of responsibility in the
West, I wonder whether that image really was more effective than the
images of atrocity which at the same time make people "other" and also
stir a greater sense of outrage. I'm just wondering really, I'm not
challenging what you have pointed out.
Slavenka Drakulic:
Okay, but have we seen any results ofthat outrage?
What happened with all this outrage? Last year in August, images of
concentration camps were projected for the first time, and nothing hap–
pened after that. There was the big story about tens of thousands of raped
women, and nothing happened after that. So you have these worse and
