Taking cover

Where can people go for sanctuary when the bombs go off, as they did
in Srebrenica 10 years ago? Into the timelessness of good writing,
GORAN SIMIC says

By GORAN SIMIC

Saturday, July 16, 2005 Page D15

I know where my nausea comes from every time I get into a situation
that resembles a war. The stomach pain is like an inherited disease:
Your family pretends not to see it until somebody else notices. Once,
by accident, I was cornered by a crowd at the Orange Parade in Belfast,
surrounded and scared by angry drummers and pipers, and I found myself
running toward the nearest bar as if running to a basement. I spent the
New Year celebration in Bari, Italy, with piles of pillows over my head
because of the firecrackers exploding on the streets. In a Paris park,
I was ashamed to find myself jumping over the bench after some kid’s
balloon suddenly deflated, sounding like a whistle of a grenade. And
then there was the time I finished an AC/DC rock concert in Toronto
outside the hall because artificial cannons started shooting from
the stage.

There is no country where one’s Pavlovian reflexes fade, once they’ve
been acquired. I asked myself more than once, am I a coward? I doubt
it. A coward would immediately leave a city under siege. Not me:
I stayed four years in war-torn Sarajevo. I lived with those other
400,000 humiliated citizens who were forced to burn the books from
their own shelves to warm up the stoves when the city’s gas and
electricity supply was cut off. My only excuse is the fact that
minus-20 Celsius in a room is almost equal to the minus 20 books
missing from my shelves. (My biggest comfort for burning my dearest
friends, books, was the fact that I helped organize the rescue of
300,000 books from the burning National Library when Serbian grenades
set the building on fire.)

Like so many of my fellow poets who’ve experienced violence and
bombings, I didn’t choose to get into trouble — but I chose to stay,
to be a witness. I was haunted by the idea that what isn’t written
will be forgotten.

Compared with stories, essays or newspaper reports, it seems to me
that poetry is the best writing form to express such experience.
There is no more resistant literary form than poetry; it lets writers
absorb the horror and yet produce sorrow and condemnation wrapped in
a form of beauty. That’s probably why Soren Kierkegaard once said that
poets are humans with unique lips — their inner suffering sounds like
beautiful songs. Still, I don’t like the romanticization of poetry, at
least out of respect for the graveyard of those poets who took the risk
to criticize those in power. Since there is no adequate way to measure
human pain and suffering, out of curiosity I decided to weigh three
of the books I consider to be guides to the dark side of our times.

Against Forgetting (Norton, 1993), which weighs 989 grams, is an
anthology of the 20th-century poetry as a witness, edited by Carolyn
Forche. It’s a guidebook through the last century’s conflicts, in
which poetry has been used as a testimony. I just love a selection
that begins with Siamanto (born Atom Yarjanian), who refused to let the
Turks’ massacre of Armenians be forgotten, and goes on to the Austrian
writer Georg Trakl’s poems about the Great War; Marina Tsvetayeva,
who committed suicide in 1941 as a response to Stalin’s repression;
Holocaust witness Paul Celan — and ends with the poems of Duoduo
and his struggle for democracy in China.

Even if this book were not a shortcut through the dark side of the
last century, I would still love it because it follows the observation
of Bertolt Brecht: “In the dark times, will there also be singing?/
Yes, there will be singing./ About the dark times.”

Scanning the Century (Viking, 1999), edited by Peter Forbes, is also
an anthology of 20th-century poetry, weighing 946 grams. It captures
the relevant dilemmas, from decolonization, civil-rights struggles
(including Lewis Allen’s lyrics to the Billie Holiday song about
lynching, Strange Fruit) to the way we live right now. But the best
part is the selection of poetry dealing with war. From the Great
War to the war in Bosnia, poets tirelessly take up the challenge to
fight against forgetting. Pity there’s no poetry from Rwanda, but no
collection is perfect.

Crimes of War (Norton, 1999), edited by Roy Gutman and David Rieff,
is a collection of essays by journalists and scholars — a kind of
dark guide to those politicians who think force of arms is the way
to a better world. During the Sarajevo siege, I met Rieff through his
mother, Susan Sontag, on one of the city’s worst days of bombardment.
Instead of going to see a film about Bosnia, we spent the day in a
basement, talking. Why watch a film about a crime if we’re living it?
This book reminds me of Rieff: sharp, honest and grounded in reality.
Oddly, Crimes of War weighs just 652 grams. I expected more.

So now I contemplate three books that I consider to be crucial to
my understanding of cities and people suffering through times of
violence. Together they weight just 2,587 grams. Is this all? I ask.
Where is the weight of human suffering?

Unfortunately, there is no measure for that.

Goran Simic, a poet and short-story writer, is the author of From
Sarajevo, With Sorrow. He and his family arrived in Canada in 1996,
after surviving four years of siege.