Sarajevo : How with This rage Shall Beauty Hold a Plea?

One of the many purposes of story-telling is to attempt to arrest life for a moment, to hold it in place, freeze it, and portray it as it will be seen in the mirrors of future years, when strangers might look among the words, and find a beauty or a tenderness or even a violence or a sorrow, so that life is once again given motion – life given life -- in that unfathomable thing, the human heart. This is of course an enormous purpose, just as the human heart is an enormous mystery, and it only occurs every now and then that life is given life, and the world defies its own logic: call this, for a moment, Sarajevo.

 

I recently went to the Bosnian Herzogovinian capital for the first time. I had long looked forward to it, since I had often encountered the city in the work of some of my favourite artists, including Danilo Kis, Aleksandar Hemon and the filmmaker Emir Kusterica. I had enountered it, also, as we all have, in the history of war. The city was a prospect of sadness and recovery to me.

 

One afternoon I sat in the Andre Malraux Cultural Center in the heart of the city. I was chatting with the centre’s director, Francis Bueb, a man who had moved from France during the siege in ’94, and has remained there since. There was a photograph in the deep part of Bueb’s office. It was, without doubt, one of the most terrible and beautiful photographs I have seen in all my years of seeing.

 

A girl lies on the streets of Sarajevo, wounded, blood on her white dress. Her hair is dark and tangled. She stares at the camera, an incalcuable sadness -- incalcuable. Behind her, shot by a sniper, lies her dead father. In front of her, a small dog, obviously beloved, lies also dead, shot close to the heart. The girl is alive, wounded, but alive. She is being kept so by the sniper in order that he can kill others who come to rescue her. In the deep distance of the photograph – on a street that is no sniper’s alley – a man stands and watches. The photo is horrific in its intensity and most people who see it, including myself, must turn it over because we can’t bear the weight of it. So that is what I did. I turned it over as if I could forget.

 

And yet it is supremely beautiful, this photograph. It is beautiful because it is unforgettable. It is beautiful because the young girl still has the passion to plead, Why? It is beautiful because she has known deeper beauties. It is beautiful because she looks into the deep eye of the camera and she asks us -- the sniper, the politician, the lover, the drunk, the poet, the cameraman, the waiter, the fruit vendor, the journalist, Francis Bueb himself – she asks us to forgive ourselves somehow, to look at this moment and rearrange it in the deepest chambers of our being.

 

She makes us witness. And without witness there is nothing. Without witness there is not even trespass. She becomes, at her deepest core, an artist of our time.

 

The photograph is kept in a black frame in the back room of the Centre, where Sarajevo slides past outside, into the 21 st century, past the marketplace and up Mula Mustafe Baseskije, above the mosques and steeples, out into the hills and into the countries of elsewhere. Still, no matter how far we go, the photo sits in our hands as if to remind us that we are the ones watching, and that even when we turn it over we cannot forget.

 

I am aware of how tiresome it must become – having come from Ireland, and now living in New York – to hear these stories of war, as if all Sarajveo stories must be war stories. But if we can’t tell them, we can’t stop them. If we can’t stop them, we’re doomed not to know what happens afterwards. The small beauty of the afterward in this particular case is that the woman was rescued, and the photographer, Luc Delahaye, managed later to help get her to a hospital, and later still to evacuate her through the military air bridge to Paris, where she now lives. And Sarajevo, poised as it is, still, near the edge of doom, is a place one can walk today, and dare to hope that the photograph is not repeated.

 

I had four days in the city. It is not much. I heard the adham called out by the muzzein. The church bells. The wind through the grass in the old Jewish graveyard. The late nights of singing. I turned corners into other corners. I laughed and drank and ate cevapi and idled in the cafes and walked the riverbank and enjoyed the incredible hospitality of the people. I have to say that it was a beautiful time and one I will not forget.

 

But let me throw a small spanner in the works of memory. While I was there (speaking with many others at the Andre Malraux Cultural Centre), there was a gay festival taking place in another part of the city. Protests were organised by right-wing fascists and Islamic fundamentalists alike. Festival goers were intimidated. They were threatened. They were followed home. They were beaten up. A young Danish man was stabbed. The gay festival had to be closed down and the organisers were run out of town. Imagine that. Just imagine. In Sarajevo. Yet again. The extremists won. They were allowed to win. The police stood by and let it happen. The media was largely silent. It sent a chill down along the Miljacka River.

 

And allow me to toss another spanner, a small and important one – the extremists didn’t win entirely, no, not entirely. That same night, Francis Bueb stood up at his own festival across town, and told us the story of what had happened. He beseeched us not to be silent. He took all that sadness and he made a rage and a beauty of it. He had the bravery to begin witness, as he has had now for fifteen years. That is what Francis Bueb and the Andre Malraux Centre do – they try to give whatever small answer they can to the old Shakesperian question: How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea? He stood up there – as all artists must -- and said that he would not allow them to win. Perhaps the deepest spanner of all was that the Andre Malraux Centre was deep in a financial crisis and it was even suggested that it might have to close down: in the days afterwards it got a reprieve, because other brave people came along and recognised that the stories must continue. The stories must always continue. But imagine what Sarajevo would be without the Centre, or the photograph, or the story itself. The prospect of not being able to witness is almost unbearable. What direction does the road without witness take?

 

Sarajevo, Sarajevo, an artist of our time.

 

So, let me make a photograph of it for you once more: There is a dog on the ground. The dog is shot. It is in a woman’s arms. A man lies dead behind her. Another man watches. We are all watching. We must step into the photograph and drag that girl out. We must.

 

Colum McCann

October 15, 2008