Sarajevo Under Siege. Ivana Macek
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disruptions of normality was an effective way of resisting distressing conditions and of preserving prewar norms or creating new values amid the war. Joking was a significant form of resilience in Sarajevo. Not only could the most painful problems and traumas be expressed and shared through jokes, but their self-mocking perspective achieved a sense of control and distancing from everyday circumstances. These jokes were always directed at those with whom the speaker identified, the stereotyped “us,” rather than at the stereotyped “other,” as in many ethnic jokes or other instances of wartime humor.
In the former Yugoslavia Bosnians were known for poking fun at themselves, and this practice continued throughout the war. Jokes about two Bosnian characters, Mujo (Muhamed) and Suljo (Sulejman), sometimes accompanied by the female character Fata (Fatima), were plentiful and very popular. The characters were naive, yet shrewd. One of the first jokes that appeared during the war was about Mujo and Suljo fleeing Bosnia and seeking refuge in Slovenia, where Bosnians were mainly known as immigrant laborers and had a lower status than Slovenes. When Mujo and Suljo got to the river that marked the Slovenian border, they found it difficult to get across and made a little boat that could bear only one at a time. Mujo got in first, and when he landed on the Slovenian side Suljo called to him: “Come on Mujo, send the boat back so that I can also get over!” Mujo answered from the other side: “Get lost, you Bosnian. Who cares about you?!” The joke was based on Slovenian feelings of superiority, but the sting in it lay in Bosnians’ critique of the unscrupulousness of their fellow Bosnians.
This quality of being able to laugh at oneself characterized the youth culture of Sarajevo before and during the war. If you were to be accepted as one of the group (raja), you had to show this capacity. Not knowing this, I was put to the test by some young people with whom I spent a lot of time during my stays in Sarajevo. The situation was totally ludicrous, and I was perplexed about it for some time. One night, when I was walking home with two friends after a nice evening together, the moon was shining brightly above one of the totally destroyed houses in the town center. I was taken by the atmosphere and, as all of us were accustomed to ruins, I declared romantically: “What lovely moonlight.” The girl in my company, whom I had gotten to know fairly well by that time, looked puzzled for a moment, looked at the ruined house, and then started to laugh. “Lovely moonlight!” She could not stop laughing and repeating this stupid sentence. I was puzzled and tried to explain myself, but she and the fellow who was with us kept laughing, and eventually I started laughing too. Whenever I tried to change the subject, they started laughing and repeating what I had said. Eventually, when this continued for weeks, I got annoyed. Every time we met it was impossible to start talking because my friend would repeat my comment about the moonlight and start laughing, and whomever we met would be informed of the good joke. After I got back to Sweden, I told another Sarajevan friend about this incident, and she explained to me in a matter-of-fact, dry, un-Sarajevan way that this was the way young people showed that they liked each other and considered them to be their raja. But then she too started laughing, and as I stood there bewildered, she realized that I did not know that what I had said was a line from a joke about Mujo and Fata. When Fata complained that Mujo was only interested in sex, Mujo, trying to be a romantic lover, said, “Look, Fata, what lovely moonlight!” before he threw himself all over her as usual. As the joke was very popular in Sarajevo, if not the rest of Bosnia and Herzegovina, it never occurred to my Sarajevan friends that I could not know it. Suddenly my cultural incompetence was revealed, and my friend in Sweden could not resist concluding jokingly: “You see, we are different, and it is right that we no longer live in the same country,” meaning Croats and Bosnian Muslims. She enjoyed making this comment, as both she and her parents were emotional Yugonostalgists. Because I was unaware of the joke, I could not laugh at myself for saying this line, as I otherwise probably would have done. I am not sure whether I passed the test, but I might have been forgiven since I was born in a dry and cold place like Zagreb and lived in an even worse one, Sweden. In any case, we remained friends.
Jokes were a typical way of commenting upon situations of destruction and humiliation. For example, the joke that runs, “What/how2 does a smart Bosnian call a stupid one? From a phone abroad!” expressed one of the most acute dilemmas during the war: to leave or not to leave. By sharing the joke, people were letting one another know that they shared the same problem.
Many of the jokes were impossible to tell outside the town because of their macabre humor.3 People who did not have the same sort of experience, who judged situations by peacetime standards, had no way to appreciate such jokes. Instead, they tended to find them disturbing and morbid, as was the case with the joke that went: “What is the difference between Sarajevo and Auschwitz? There is no gas in Sarajevo.”
Figure 7. “Maybe Airlines,” check-in desk for UN flights from Sarajevo. Sarajevo, October 1995. Photo by author.
In their daily lives, people did all they could to take verbal revenge on those whom they saw as the cause of a particular disruption. The twenty-year-old biscuit that was sent as humanitarian aid from the United States was called a “Vietnam cookie,” implying that the United States was getting rid of leftovers from the Vietnam War. The out-of-date powdered eggs were called “Truman’s eggs,” as they had been in the aftermath of the Second World War; in local language, the same word means both “eggs” and “testicles.”
In jokes snipers were made into fools, as in the joke where Mujo killed Suljo with his sniper rifle. The astonished people asked, “Mujo! Why on earth did you kill your brother [in the Muslim faith], Suljo?”“Well, you never know these days,” answered Mujo. “I saw Suljo and when I looked through the sniperscope I saw a big cross on his forehead. So I fired.” The cross was in the rifle sight, but Mujo thought that it was on Suljo’s forehead, which would mean that Suljo had become Christian and gone over to the enemy. Another joke that ridicules snipers was about an old man rocking in his rocking chair by the river where the snipers were continuously shooting. A passerby asked him what he was doing. “Teasing the sniper,” answered the old man.
Even the UN soldiers stationed in Sarajevo adopted the same sense of humor: they called their air bridge to Sarajevo “Maybe Airlines,” insinuating that anything could happen and nothing could be counted on. The last time I was at the Sarajevo airport a little advertisement was hanging at the check-in desk (see fig. 7). It was possible to hang up the advertisement after the resignation of Yasushi Akashi, the UN’s highest civilian commander of the operation in the former Yugoslavia, who had prohibited the joke about the UN air bridge in 1993. In 1994 a UN officer complained to me that it was a bad sign if the highest authority for the whole operation did not have a sense of humor. To me, it seems that Akashi did not have the Sarajevan sense of humor, which implies that he did not have the same life-references that the civilian population and UN soldiers did. From this perspective, it is not surprising that the UN operation did not do much for the people of Sarajevo. Akashi acted in the “soldier” mode of relating to the war, rather than perceiving war as those with firsthand experience did. Sarajevans and UN soldiers serving in Sarajevo had more critical distance on the war, and their war-specific sense of humor often articulated the “deserter” mode of understanding.
Artistic Life
The determination to resist the omnipresence of war, the impulse to deny or forget it, the desire to feel some continuity with prewar life, the drive to express and share experiences, and the need to feel connected with others beyond the limits of the besieged town, the aspiration toward a sense of pan-human belonging—all resulted in an amazingly active artistic life in Sarajevo.
Under the circumstances in which the new was not death but continuing to live, when one was forced to accept the despair as a normal human condition, arts became the fount of the life-force. It gave back life to people, gave birth anew to optimism and strength, and gave meaning in a time when it looked as if life had lost all meaning. In surroundings where all was dead and threatened by death, this old human—and in these circumstances new—companion gave permanency and existence to a threatened and degraded life and showed the indestructibility and the beauty of the spiritual life. (F. Trtak 1996:31,