Sontag in Sarajevo

When Professor Zdravko Grebo, a legal scholar of the University of Sarajevo, died
this year, it seemed to many Sarajevans the end of an era: a specifically Bosnian
kind of intellectual, the last of his generation, of dissident, socialist anti-
fundamentalist thinkers who embodied the best of Yugoslav dynamism and
spoke to the hope – as Sarajevo has often stood as hope – that Europe can carve
out a space between totalitarianism and the brutalities of late capitalism alike.

Professor Grebo was known throughout the city for his work as a legal scholar
and as an activist, including for his friendship with Susan Sontag, the late
American writer who came to the city during the brutal siege in the 1990s, in
which the Bosnian capital was bombarded by Serb forces as part of the genocidal
Serb campaign during the wars of the former Yugoslavia.

Sontag’s visit to the city was part of her own trajectory as a singular twentieth-
century voice engaging with and uncomfortably parsing the clotted knot of
tragedy of the post-Holocaust world. It also caught the city at a unique moment
in its cultural experience, where art became a mechanism of defiance against the
deadly and dehumanising actions of Serbian ultranationalists. Prior to the war,
Sarajevo – lazily often positioned as half-Vienna half-Istanbul – had been a hub of
late-Yugoslav high culture, from ballet to avant garde theatre. Sontag’s visit to
the city drew upon these threads of high cultural practices and became a
mediation between the voices of Sarajevan citizens and the west, who watched
the city burn from the comfort of their televisions. Theatre and cinema has a
central role in Sarajevo, from the smoky Kino Bosna where teenagers kiss and
musicians form groups then dissipate, to the more ‘mainstream’ emergence of
the Sarajevo Film Festival as part of Bosnia’s post-war cultural recovery.

Sontag first came to the city in 1993 to meet with members of the Bosnian
chapter of the International PEN movement, the freedom of expression and
writer’s rights association she had been affiliated with since her campaign for
Salman Rushdie during his fatwa, and an organisation whose Bosnian members
included many of the brightest and most thoughtful authors and playwrights of
the former Yugoslavia.

Citizens of Sarajevo recall how Sontag was entranced by the city: its layer-upon-
layer of architecture, music and stories from Ottoman Bascarcija to the wedding-
cake Habsburg-yellow theatres to the Yugoslav communal housing, and haunted
by the stories of the siege. In her New York Review of Books piece in 1993, she
describes how impressions of this first visit were strong upon her return to
America that she knew next time she came to visit the city “I couldn’t again just
be a witness.”

Connecting with Haris Pasovic, the revered Bosnian theatre director who had left
the city when the war broke out in 1992 but returned in 1993, Sontag devised
the plan to stage Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett’s modernist mediation on
purgatory, meaning and human relationships. A year and a half into the siege of
Sarajevo, where civilians were killed almost daily from the attacks from the
surrounding hills and all inhabitants in the city feared for the lives, the play
seemed to speak to the horrors of limbo and dislocation, and communication-
breakdowns that arise in the choppy warped realities of war: the name ‘Godot’,
from godillot (military boots) evoked, for Beckett, the flotsam of war, the boots
left behind, the messages waiting to be received. The Washington Post dubbed
the production “Waiting for Clinton” – Bosnians waiting for the humanitarian
intervention or acts of solidarity from the west that, like Godot, seemed
promised but ever elusive.

During the rehearsals, there was a discussion on how to best get the word out to
citizens of the city about the production: printing the time and date of the
performance in a newspaper was perilous: if the newspaper blew to the hills
where Serb forces were positioned to attack Sarajevo, news that a gathering was
taking place in the city would quite likely make it a target. So instead invitations
were passed, like gossip, through the city streets.

The performance received a standing ovation for the Bosnian actors, and the
mayor of the city declared Sontag an honorary citizen of the city. Today, the
square in front of the Bosnian National Theatre in downtown Sarajevo is named
Trg Susan Sontag, in memory of her work to keep culture – and humanity – alive
in the city, flickering like the eternal flame in Sarajevo’s Ferhadija, fragile but
enduring.

Sontag’s vision of Sarajevo as cosmopolitan, anti-fundamentalist haven, outlined

in her 1993 New York Review of Books meditation on her time in the besieged
city, is not without critique: Sontag places much emphasis on the ‘Europeanness’
of Bosnians, perhaps in an appeal to humanise them to Americans, like many
western intellectuals in the 1990s engaging with Bosnian culture who made
much of how in Yugoslavia, Bosnians bought their shoes in Italy and went to the
opera in Vienna.

This approach by western intellectuals engaging with the former Yugoslavia in

the 1990s is understandable – not only to differentiate the social realities of
Tito’s Yugoslavia from lazy western conceptions of “Soviet” life as the only
paradigm of Communism (Yugoslavs, unlike many of their Soviet counterparts,
could indeed go on holiday in Italy and go to the opera) – but to emphasise
continuities and overlaps with western European culture in a predominantly
‘Muslim’ city to western audiences, in order to underscore: they are like us, so we
should care if they die. Whilst an understandable tactic, particularly in the world
Sontag moved in of the International PEN movement, supporters of Vaclav Havel,
Milan Kundera and Salman Rushdie as symbols of ‘literary liberal humanism’
against authoritarianisms and fundamentalisms alike, it raises the reply – so
what if Bosnians had all been devout Muslims with no interest in Italian shoes or
Viennese opera, would their lives matter less?

‘Waiting for Godot’ in Sarajevo in 1993 was both flame and plea – a flame to keep
the fire of culture alive, to feel human, and a cry to the west, ‘Waiting for Clinton’,
waiting to be heard and recognised as human. Sontag’s advocation for
humanitarian intervention in Bosnia, like that of Bernard Henri-Levy and other
western intellectuals who rallied for western intervention in Bosnia, may have
dovetailed and metamorphosised into rhetoric that Sontag herself would later
condemn. 9/11 happened only six years after the end of the Bosnian war, and the
“humanitarian intervention” rhetoric of the 1990s was harnessed by British
Prime Minister Tony Blair as a fig-leaf for western military adventureism in Iraq,
and all the dehumanization and mass loss of civilian lives that the western attack
on Iraq entailed. Nonetheless, as Trg Susan Sontag stands in downtown Sarajevo,
a reminder of the defiance of cultural life and humanism as an antidote to
fundamentalism, and how Bosnians kept the flame of humanity alive even as
others sought to destroy them.