When Chronicles Are Not Enough
In a span of just four days, between the 9th and 12th of July 1995, units of the Bosnian Serbian Army of Republika Srpska under Ratko Mladić killed more than 8.000 Muslim men and boys in the surroundings of the town of Srebrenica. A massacre the gravity of which remained obscure for too long, but that is now legally recognised as the first genocide in Europe since the end of World War II.
What lingers, thirty years later? Is it still worth to talk about Srebrenica?
Christian Elia, a journalist whose interest in reporting was born after and because of this massacre, thinks so. Talking to Ivica Đikić – Croatian author of Metodo Srebrenica – and Elvira Mujčić – Bosnian writer and translator (La stagione che non c'era) – he delves into the creative process of these two very different writers.
As "anniversaries risk getting sick with rhetoric”, he wants to look beyond stereotypes – strongly aware of the complexity of this particular anniversary, coinciding with another gruesome genocide.
He wants to understand what gives the courage to “look into the well”, to tackle a pain that appears deeper and deeper the more you observe it, and what kind of language can be used to talk about a tragedy of these proportions.
Mujčić is rather decisive: she doesn’t have that courage. She doesn’t think of herself as a witness or testimony, she just “walks around the well”, in a constant search for alternative, liminal ways to shed light on the atrocity. “In my stories, genocide echoes like an absence”.
Đikić, for his part, is driven by a burning desire for clarity. He wants numbers, methods, techniques – research is the only possible way into the hearts and minds of the perpetrators. It’s fiction – “a literary attempt to explain what’s inexplicable”. And yet, one that’s imbued with reality.
The writers share a sense of impotence: despite these thirty years, public opinion on the massacre remains unchanged. “We’ve learned nothing” says Đikić, “we’re incapable of learning from history”. In Italy, just as in Serbia and Bosnia, the discourse is stuck on mere repetition, often spoiled by active attempts to look the other way, to ignore the past and its aftermath. But, as Mujčić states clearly, chronicles aren't enough.
What's extremly problematic is the filter used to analyse this genocide – a racialising gaze that reduces both victims and perpetrators to poor peasants or primitive and ferocious beasts. Beyond necessary condemnations, simplification neglects a context which demands, to this day, our attention.
When asked about the ideal reader for this book, Đikić says he had two in mind. First, the victims, the relatives of the dead. He researched and wrote while obsessing over not hurting those who had suffered. On the other hand, he thought about future writers. Writing fiction is a way to testify, to lend a voice to the oppressed and rewrite the narrative around disasters.
Đikić is more than convinced art is the only means to change the narrative, to force those who are ignoring their responsibilities to acknowledge them.
Trying to find an answer to an impossible question – what to do, how to react to the violence we still see everywhere around us – the two authors agree on a very important point. We need literature – to moves past the horrors, walk through the darkness and come out alive and a little more human.