Snapshots of an anti-war feminist

Thursday, 28 September 2006 21:45

Snapshots of an anti-war feminist activist lesbian on holiday in her ex-homeland, ex-Yugoslavia, that was at war until ten years ago

How do feminist activists deal with activist guilt?   -  the feeling we get because the others are still suffering and we can’t help them.

How do anti-war activists go on vacation? - if there is war going in your region, if there is war going in your friends’ region?

How do lesbians go on vacation and recollect their sense of lesbian soul after the wartime that has buried the “L” word and erased the very notion of lesbian passion?

And we don’t want to repeat the old patriarchal role of the woman who is ceaselessly feeling guilt and worrying about others (usually children first) and never can be relaxed and feel pleasure of her own.

 
An image from the war in Bosnia
Year 1995 - the fourth year of war. Anti-war activists have organised the International Citizens Forum conference in Tuzla, a town in Bosnia and Herzegovina that had less shooting than the others.  There are ten buses and many jeeps traveling through war zones to reach this destination.  The second day of the conference, which was an historic one, obviously under all the given circumstances, there is a disco night in the hotel where all the participants are staying.   Two hours later, around midnight, the music stops for an instant, there is alternative Bosnian theater made by three young people who are playing the roles of three young people on the street and, one by one, each one get shot with the loud sound of snipers from the speakers.  One is dead, another one, the third one...  they lie down in the center of what was just a disco podium, and remain like that during the next minute.  The actors get up and leave, the music continues.


The next day there was an ongoing discussion about what happened that night.  Many foreign people from countries without war thought this was an unnecessary distraction given that it already was the present life of people in Bosnia.   The young feminist activists from Bosnia said it was very good, that this was exactly what they needed:  to get in contact with those who suffer.  To get a dose of pain and then continue to dance and have fun without guilt!

.............................
 
Belgrade.  Serbia.  Before I leave on vacation with my dear anti-war friend from Belgium - yes, we know each other from the last 11 years of Women in Black - another Woman in Black, from the just-finished-war-region calls on the phone.  The situation in Israel is still tense and she sounds tired and sad.  Images of Beirut come to my mind.  There is pain and misery in many regions, and I am still going on vacation.  Different emotions are running through me.  I take the t-shirt that my dear friend from Israel gave to me, and leave on the road.


Sarajevo.  Bosnia and Herzegovina. Our friend, another Woman in Black from Sarajevo, introduces us to a male friend.  He is 47 and has a little beard on his face.  I ask him about this beard  ...an instant later we are walking alone and he says, he is hiding his scar behind this beard.  Then he says,  “.....yes I was in the war in the beginning, and I have been shot three times, once by Serbs, the second time in Mostar by Croats, and the third time by ‘mine.’”

 
Sarajevo.   Our friend takes us on a little trip outside the town in the green hills around Sarajevo.  Apart from us thinking where exactly the Serbian snipers stood killing citizen, the scenery is wonderful.  An old hiking society is here with wooden tables out in the yard under the plum trees.  We are five and we want to sit there.  One middle-aged woman tells us what the best spot is, she is going to pick some plants.  I ask her what plants.  She tells me a name for a flower that gives peace of soul.  And then she says:  You see I sit in this way, with my back turned to Trebevic  (a mountain across from us) because my younger son was killed there, he was 19, it was in 1993.   I can’t ever face that side of town.  I have to sit with my back turned.  She is showing us the photo from her old wallet.


Mostar.  Bosnia and Herzegovina.  My friend and I are in a small, typical post-war shop that sells a little bit of everything.  It is just outside of the old town, with the rebuilt old bridge killed in the war, with big stones on one side and on the other side painted:  “Never to forget, 1993”  - the year when the bridge was bombed.  A young woman is working in the shop and she is somehow scratching her back when we enter.  We get what we want and she is still scratching her back, with one and then both arms crossed in front to reach the far places of her back.  How are you?  She says:  “Awakening of gellers.”  I ask her to explain more - in Bosnia I never know when people are joking or are philosophical or matter-of-fact.   She then says that the gellers (parts of sniper’s bullets) entered her back, and that it was in such an inconvenient place near her spine that it could not be operated on.  It is in the change of weather that the gellers in her back are aching.


Split – Supetar boat.  We are in Croatia, on the most beautiful Adriatic sea. The boat takes us to the island Brac.  There I meet, all of a sudden, four young lesbians.  Three are from Serbia, and one from Croatia.  This is what they told me:  one lesbian from Croatia is trying to build a little house on the small piece of land she got as a gift.  In a seminar we held last year, some lesbians from Serbia met lesbians from Croatia, and they are in love with the island.  So the lesbians from Serbia come to help build the foundation of the future house.  They all, many of them, sleep in tents and in sleeping bags and work.  All summer long.
 
This is just an ordinary story for any non-war state.  It was an ordinary story in the time of my youth.  But it is an extraordinary story for this moment in the history of the region.  These lesbians dare to cross the border and work together.  It is ten years after the war, but still whenever I leave for Croatia, some of my relatives ask me if I am afraid, and how can I trust Croats.  I watched waves of the blue sea from the ship and was proud, we move the peace ahead.

When the war started in Lebanon, first of all I thought about lesbians from Beirut and Haifa.  How the fact of our being lesbians in wartime has to disappear. It hurts people in war to even mention this “L” word.  So we, the lesbians, are the first ones to bury alive our lesbian souls, to close them down to the deepest inquietudes.  The image of the four lesbians from the sunshine ship this summer is in my lightened heart.  We can create workshops for lesbians and make them flow into each other’s trust.

Lepa Mladjenović

< Prev		Next >