Slavenka was… irrepressible.
I had been studying her for a few years earlier than we met. Her writing belonged amongst my first encounters with japanese Europe. At the moment, as a scholar of East European historical past within the Nineteen Nineties, I used to be so typically advised, ‘you, a younger American, privileged and superficial and missing in historical past and profound experiences, you’ll by no means perceive’. And I used to be grateful to Slavenka Drakulić, who moderately than saying ‘you’ll by no means perceive’, as an alternative set about explaining – by way of telling tales, selecting the illuminating anecdote, casting the political in human phrases.
She was not making the polemical level ‘we’re identical to you, don’t exoticize us!’, however moderately: ‘I do know this a part of the world may be very totally different from yours, however there are actual individuals there dwelling actual lives and I can inform you about these lives in a method that can make you perceive – if not every little thing, then fairly a bit.’ She associated to her readers with generosity.
Now, once I discuss with my graduate college students about writing, Slavenka’s perspective is my mannequin. I inform them: be beneficiant in direction of your readers. Attain out your hand. You’re not writing to make your self sound superior, you’re writing to assist different another person perceive a time and a spot the place they themselves weren’t.
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The primary time I noticed Slavenka in particular person I by no means would have dared to introduce myself. It was 1994 in Prague; she was giving a lecture at Central European College, the place I used to be taking a summer season course in artistic writing with the Czech novelist Arnošt Lustig. The moderator (a person) launched her by saying that she had lately married the Swedish author Richard Swartz. When she took the microphone, Slavenka identified that one would hardly introduce a person this manner. ‘And by the way in which,’ she added, ‘that is my third marriage.’
I form of beloved that.
It was one other fifteen years of studying Slavenka earlier than I spoke to her. Once I did it was in Vilnius in 2009, at a Eurozine convention. I used to be now not a twenty-two-year-old scholar however a thirty-seven-year-old professor, and even so I used to be a bit star-struck. I wished to ask her about S: A Novel in regards to the Balkans, which I had assigned in a course. The novel’s heroine, a younger Bosnian schoolteacher imprisoned in a Serbian camp, turns into pregnant because of repeated rape by Serbian troopers. S. survives the warfare, is evacuated from Bosnia as a refugee, and provides beginning in a hospital in Stockholm. She has no intention of protecting, and even seeing, the child, however then, unexpectedly to herself, decides that she desires to be that baby’s mom.
Slavenka advised me that S. was impressed by the rape victims she had spoken to throughout and after the Yugoslav wars. She listened to their tales – tales of displacement and terror, of motherhood and loss. She advised me in regards to the girls who defined to her that ultimately, regardless of every little thing, the youngsters they carried and bore felt like their very own.
This made sense to her. ‘In any case,’ Slavenka advised me in Vilnius, ‘I gave beginning to my daughter after which I divorced her father. And I forgot about him utterly. However my daughter is my daughter!’
That was our first dialog, appropriately unforgettable – and as if a continuation of ‘And by the way in which, that is my third marriage.’
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Later, once we all turned pals, I discovered her fairly splendidly matched with this third husband. If I’m not mistaken, it was Martin Pollack, the Austrian author whose voice is so terribly missed, who launched them. All three shared an intense dedication to the duty of the author to inform the reality, even when readers most well-liked to not be advised.
S. is just not a straightforward novel to learn. As soon as I confirmed Slavenka a Fb publish from my former graduate scholar Colleen, by then a historical past professor herself, who had learn S. along with her college students.
I knew that I used to be taking a threat by assigning Slavenka Drakulić’s novel S. on warfare and ethnic cleaning within the former Yugoslavia to my Historical past of Fashionable Europe class. I nervous that the scholars can be uncomfortable speaking about girls’s our bodies, rape, torture, infanticide, and suicide. Or worse, I feared they’d be detached to the struggling of Muslim refugees or the hazards of nationalism. I didn’t anticipate the almost unanimous gratitude that the category expressed towards Drakulić for telling this story and towards me for making them learn it. S. reached them, and, by way of S., I reached them.
Slavenka wrote again to me that the appreciation of those nameless college students meant extra to her than the reward of any literary critic. She cared about reaching individuals, and he or she cared about these girls who had advised her their tales.
Slavenka was unafraid to write down about intercourse, and about violence, and unafraid to declare herself a feminist in contexts the place that label was pejorative. She wrote forthrightly about how japanese European girls had been conditioned to face abuse. She characterised a dominant perspective of toleration: ‘It was mindless to report a person for his recurring behaviour.’
She was additionally unafraid to position duty on girls for an absence of solidarity. ‘The concept that girls ought to help different girls to realize widespread targets doesn’t exist in Jap Europe and by no means did,’ she wrote in Café Europa Revisited. This struck me, painfully, within the Nineteen Nineties: the dearth of solidarity amongst girls, the competitors over males – as if a legacy from the wartime technology when there had been a shortage, and the absence even of a language to speak about sexual harassment. For a few years I used to be a single lady wandering alone, the thing of that harassment missing an satisfactory language.
Later, once I was in my thirties, I turned somebody’s spouse. In 2018, an interview I gave to a Slovak newspaper in regards to the historic significance of the murders of the Slovak investigative journalist Ján Kuciak and his fiancée, Martina Kušnírová, was printed underneath the headline, ‘Manželka Timothyho Snydera pre týždeň: “Už len novinári nás môžu zachráni”’ – ‘Timothy Snyder’s Spouse for The Weekly: “Solely the journalists can save us now”.’ (The allusion was to Martin Heidegger’s [in]well-known Der Spiegel interview: ‘Nur ein Gott kann uns noch retten.’)
‘This headline is so ridiculous,’ Slavenka stated when she noticed it, ‘that it makes you surprise what we achieved within the final 25 years in japanese Europe.’
Slavenka herself lived girls’s solidarity. She learn drafts of my work and despatched me feedback. She pushed me to maintain writing after the beginning of my kids, when having the ability to compose a single poignant sentence at occasions appeared not possible.
For Slavenka, to compose a sentence was to take an ethical stance. I bear in mind a dinner with pals at their Vienna residence; we have been speaking about writing. And Slavenka stated that what novelists understood and students typically failed to understand was that human empathy got here into being solely on the stage of the person particular person. Hundreds of lives – or deaths – have been an abstraction; solely a single one was actual. Evoking that single life in a method that made empathy doable was an implicitly ethical query for her – for all of us across the desk, for that matter.
Slavenka was without delay Yugoslav, Croatian, European and cosmopolitan; she and Richard moved between Stockholm, Zagreb, Vienna and the Croatian peninsula of Istria on the Adriatic Sea. She was a prolific author with capacious pursuits who wrote each fiction and non-fiction, in a frankly astonishing number of genres from journalism and essays to novels and brief tales. In 1987, nonetheless throughout communism, she interviewed Abbie Hoffman, the American civil rights and anti-war activist. Abbie was the hero of my youth. Slavenka’s interview appeared in a Croatian newspaper two years earlier than his suicide – when most People had forgotten him. In her fiction she conjured up characters as disparate because the Polish poet consumed by her love for a Brazilian anthropologist and Bohumil the mouse, who was advised by the girl promoting souvenirs on the Prague museum of communism that individuals don’t come go to as a result of they don’t wish to confront the truth that they went together with it.
She was humorous, sarcastic, sharp, heat, open, self-critical, and demanding – above all of herself. She wrote about what she knew; she was on the planet; and he or she posed inquiries to which there have been no snug solutions. Why is it significant that there’s a espresso store referred to as ‘Café Europa’ within the centre of the Albanian capital of Tirana? What do the wild canines roaming the streets of Bucharest have to inform us? What’s revealed by ‘European meals apartheid’– the truth that the components in Nutella differ between Vienna and Bratislava? Why did Slobodan Milošević’s spouse, Mira Marković, whose trend model was in any other case fairly ‘comradely’, put on a ribbon or bow or plastic flower in her hair, like a small baby? How did Radko Mladić, the ‘Butcher of Bosnia’, really feel after his twenty-three-year-old daughter dedicated suicide together with his pistol? Can a butcher expertise the identical emotions as his victims?
Due to butchers like Mladić, Slavenka’s pals turned refugees. Certainly one of them was Dražena, a Bosnian journalist who fled along with her small daughter after the bloodied physique of a middle-aged lady struck by a grenade landed proper beside them on a Sarajevo road. In Balkan Specific, Slavenka tells the story of when Dražena is at Slavenka’s residence in Zagreb, and Slavenka’s twenty-three-year-old daughter, Rujana, is packing garments for her. Rujana offers her a pair of black patent leather-based high-heeled footwear; Dražena places them on and appears as if she is headed to a celebration. Slavenka finds this ridiculous – Dražena is a refugee now, about to go away for locations and circumstances unknown, she wants sensible issues, denims and sneakers. Rujana berates her mom: ‘How may you be so insensitive? She wants exactly that fancy stuff, as you name it. As a result of even when she has misplaced every little thing, she must really feel like a standard particular person, much more so now.’
What issues on this story is just not solely that Rujana is true to present Dražena the high-heeled footwear. What issues can also be Slavenka’s self-examination. ‘What I’m beginning to do,’ Slavenka displays in that trade along with her daughter,
is cut back an actual, bodily particular person to an summary ‘they’ – that’s, to a typical denominator of refugees … From there to second-class citizen – or moderately, non-citizen – who owns nothing and has no rights, is simply a skinny blue line. I also can see how straightforward it’s to slide into this prejudice as into a well-known pair of heat slippers, prepared and ready for me at dwelling … The second I assumed Dražena ought not put on make-up or patent high-heeled footwear was the very second once I myself pushed her into the group ‘refugee’, as a result of it was simpler for me. However the truth that she didn’t match the cliché, that she disillusioned me by attempting to maintain her face collectively along with her make-up and her life along with a pair of footwear, made me conscious of my very own collaboration with this warfare.
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Slavenka had no illusions in regards to the human situation; she shared the remark of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor that, by and enormous, individuals would select safety over freedom. In the course of the winter of 2013–2014, watching the revolution in Ukraine from Vienna, Slavenka grasped what was so particular: it was the second of selecting freedom. Each of us turned fellow-travellers of the Maidan. In Could 2014, we flew collectively from Vienna to Kyiv. My kids have been almost-two and 4 on the time, and I used to be very nervous about being away from them. After we’d landed and handed by way of customs, Slavenka texted Rujana to inform her she’d arrived safely. Rujana was in her mid-forties by then. ‘You’re by no means too previous to verify in along with your baby’, she advised me.
We have been each very blissful to be in Kyiv. There was one thing ecstatic in regards to the Maidan; it was a masterwork of self-organization and solidarity, and a reminder of the miracle of revolution. Even so, there was a sense of huge rigidity, even dread, once we have been there. Putin’s ‘little inexperienced males’ had already invaded Crimea and Russian-sponsored separatist rebellions had begun within the Donbas – a battle that felt eerily just like the ‘quarrel in a faraway nation between individuals of whom we all know nothing’ that was – and might be once more – the start of a world warfare. But even in my catastrophism, I didn’t foresee 24 February 2022. This was a failure of creativeness.
Within the time since, the e-book by Slavenka I’ve returned to most frequently is one she wrote after witnessing the Yugoslav warfare crimes trials in The Hague. Like Hannah Arendt listening to Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, Slavenka was listening to the defendants communicate her native language. There may be an intimacy implicit in that scenario, one thing the overseas press can’t seize. The e-book she wrote after these trials, They Would By no means Damage a Fly, consists of inquisitive portraits of warfare criminals, each very totally different. Her prose intersperses first particular person with third particular person – typically verging on omniscient – narration; at moments she writes as if from her protagonists’ views. She attracts upon her personal life in Yugoslavia, inflected by three generations: her dad and mom’ technology, fashioned by the Second World Battle; her personal technology, fashioned by Tito; and her daughter’s technology, seemingly freed from each.
In a single chapter she writes about Zoran Vuković, a Bosnian Serb tried for mass rape of Bosnian Muslim girls within the city of Foča. Slavenka listens as he testifies that after raping a fifteen-year-old woman, he advised her that he selected to not be as brutal along with her as he may need been, having considered that his personal daughter was the identical age. This was in essence his defence: I may, in any case, have been nonetheless extra merciless.
Slavenka, whose writing performed such a big position in conveying the savagery of Serbian warfare crimes, was the thing of a hate marketing campaign by Croatian nationalists. They referred to as her a witch – for being a feminist, an anti-nationalist, a humanist who aspired to common classes of understanding. On this method, too, her place and sensibility have been paying homage to Hannah Arendt. She noticed the supply of evil not in a genetic predisposition of Serbs, however in vulnerabilities mendacity on the coronary heart of the human situation. She believed that ‘the dehumanization of perpetrators solely contributes to a misunderstanding of the core downside: all of us carry inside ourselves the potential of each good and evil. In important conditions, there could be no assurance which aspect we’ll take.’ She provides, in her inimitable tone, that that is ‘a really disagreeable function of human beings’.
Why – Slavenka requested – do we have to flip the perpetrators into monsters? To guarantee ourselves that the predisposition to commit these crimes someway exists outdoors of human nature. She refused the self-protection supplied by that reasoning. ‘Peculiar individuals couldn’t do what these monsters did. We’re extraordinary individuals, subsequently we can’t commit such crimes,’ she wrote. ‘However when you get nearer to the true individuals who dedicated these crimes, you see that the syllogism doesn’t actually work.’
She wished her readers to see how individuals may slip into mass atrocity step-by-step. She rejected palliative consolation in favour of duty: ‘it’s important that we perceive that it’s we extraordinary individuals and never some madmen who made it doable. We have been those who in the future stopped greeting these neighbours of a unique nationality – an act that the following day made doable the opening of focus camps. We did it to one another.’
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Within the months after Trump’s first inauguration, she deliberate a visit to the American East Coast to go to – in a traditional Slavenka mixture – her kidney surgeon, her second ex-husband, and Gloria Steinem. By then I had been instructing at Yale for a decade; I took the practice from New Haven, Connecticut to Manhattan; we met at a French café within the West Village. I used to be in a state of despair about my nation’s descent into fascism. My husband and I had job affords in Geneva. I used to be torn: I felt like our college students at Yale wanted us to assist them course of what was taking place. However I additionally had a powerful impulse that we should always take our young children and flee. The lesson, in any case, of 1933 was that it was higher to go away sooner moderately than later.
Slavenka tried to calm me down: ‘It took Milošević a while to persuade us that we wished to kill each other. We didn’t know at first, we thought we received alongside. It’s important to put together individuals for killing, it doesn’t occur in a single day. So you may chill out, you could have time to get your children out. At this time we should always order a glass of wine, get pleasure from a pleasant lunch…’
This was Slavenka: freed from any illusions about our mutilated world – but all the time able to go on preventing and writing and loving and laughing.
Our final trade was in early June. I had simply returned to Toronto from a literary competition in Kyiv, the place I’d taken a photograph with our Ukrainian good friend Oksana and her younger daughter to ship to Slavenka. She wrote again proper saying she was so blissful to get up and see the three of us, including ‘and, after all, I wanted I used to be there’.
We wished she have been there as properly.
I arrived in Vienna lower than three weeks later, a couple of days after Slavenka’s dying. I opened the closet in our residence and noticed a costume she had handed right down to me a number of years in the past, a glimmering silvery lilac, by an Italian designer. It’s the form of costume meant to be worn with black patent leather-based high-heels to a celebration.
