Speaking of Subalterns: Siege and Surreality in Sarajevo, 1993
Some things can't be true even if they really happened.
—attributed to Ken Kesey
To summarize the brutal absurdity in less than 100 words: The longest military siege in modern history occurred in a European capital city in the final decade of the twentieth century. For 47 months—between March 1992 and February '96—Sarajevo was the target of almost daily bombing campaigns and subjected to a brutal series of sniper assaults.
Although the greater conflict involved a dizzying number of belligerents—Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Bosniaks, Bosnian Serbs, Bosnian Croats, Kosovars (Albanians living in Kosovo), the list can be extended from there—the Siege of Sarajevo can be narrowed to basically three antagonists: 1) The Sarajevans, people who remained after the siege began, and identified themselves as being residents of Sarajevo before any ethnicity or nationality; 2) The Bosnian Serb military and milita who carried out the systematic campaign of artillery shelling and snipering in an attempt to "cleanse" the city of those who were not Bosnian Serb; and 3) the United Nations—known colloquially as "Smurfs" due to their powder blue helmets and always-clean white Armored Personel Carriers—it was the UN's embargo that prevented Sarajevo from defending itself, and the UN's inept cultural and political indifference that allowed, and at times, outright encouraged, the Bosnian Serb military to increase their siege of the city for almost four years.
The Bosnian Serbs were under the political leadership of Radovan Karadžić and the military command of Ratko Mladić. The Bosnian Serbs were, according to political convenience, either controlled, or not controlled, by the Serbian President neé dictator, Slobodan Milošević. In a larger perspective of the war and its causes, to declare absolutely that Serbia was to blame, is simplistic and exonerates atrocities committed by Croats, Montenegrins, Kosovars, and Bosnians themselves. But, without a doubt, when perspective is narrowed to Sarajevo, the beseged bombardment of the city is the direct handiwork of nationalistic ideologues, Karadžić and Mladić. The hundreds of snipers who preyed upon citizens are not without their blame and shame in the matter, but that's the topic of another story, another essay, another presentation.
For now, the perspective is narrowed to the absurdist construction of a theatre of cruelty in an atrocity exhibit afternoon matinee showing of:
Waiting for Godot: Siege and Surreality in Sarajevo
In December 1992, standing under UN guard on the tarmac of the runway at Sarajevo International Airport, UN Negotiator Lord David Owen told Sarajevans, "Don't, don't, don't live under this dream that the West is going to come in and solve this problem … don't dream dreams." A few months later, a 960 meter tunnel was completed that linked the UN-controlled airport with a house in the neighborhood of Butmir. It was through this tunnel that Sarajevans smuggled enough meals, medicine, and munitions to survive the 47-month siege in which little international aid was sent and even less survived the UN arms embargo and politically-protected black market.1 2ab It was through this tunnel that numerous people paid hundreds of German deutschemarks to escape the city's slaughter. It was also through this tunnel in July, 1993, that American author, theorist, and activist Susan Sontag smuggled herself into Sarajevo. Her purpose, ostensibly, was to direct a theatrical play: Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. Her purpose, alternatively, was both hailed for its bravery and criticized for its arrogance.
From a certain perspective, Sontag's visit and one critic's opinion of it, serves an analogous microcosm to the entirety of the Siege. Sontag herself voiced several possible reasons she was in Sarajevo—in addition to being there to direct a Bosnian version of Waiting for Godot, she wished to "express" her "solidarity with the people of Sarajevo" and to make a "small contribution to cultural life"3 there—however, Irish critic and journalist Kevin Myers took exception not only to the production of the play itself, but to Sontag's very presence in Sarajevo. "If ever a single person was living proof that intelligence is a meaningless quality without modest common sense," he recalled, "it was Susan Sontag."4
John F. Burns, writing in the New York Times, describes the artistic intent: "The choice of Waiting for Godot was almost inevitable. Like the outcasts, Sarajevo has waited for relief from afar," because, Sarajevans believed, Western intervention was "the only thing that can stop the Serbian nationalist forces . . . from destroying" the city.5 While bureaucracy played out between men in formal suits who chatted over drinks in presidential palaces, Sontag and her cast scrounged for props and lit their bomb-shelter basement theatre with candles. During rehearsals, Sontag tells of how the she and the cast "tried to avoid jokes about 'waiting for Clinton,'" but she admits, that was the metaphor looming over the absolute "Chekhovian ... pathos."6
Kevin Myers began his criticism with the production itself. Through "personal reckoning," Myers recalls that the "performance lasted as long as the siege itself. It was mesmerisingly precious and hideously self-indulgent," while Sontag's obvious choice to have "each of Beckett's characters played by a Bosnian Muslim, a Bosnian Serb, and a Bosnian Croat" was, in his mind, "inexcusable" and "pretentious twaddle." Re-gauging the aim of his animosity from production to person, he declares, with the tone of an abusive father, that it was his "abject failure" to "put the wretched woman over my knee and give her a sound spanking." He attacks Sontag as being "degrading and insufferable as her conduct towards the Sarajevans. And as far as I could judge," he railed, "she never listened to any of them, but only uttered lordly pronouncements as she held court in the Sarajevo Holiday Inn, while outside scores daily died." Such a fatalistic comment impels the question: would the scores of Sarajevans have died just the same with or without her pronouncements? Did her coming to Sarajevo cause further destruction? And, when casting such accusations, what was Kevin Myers doing to end the degrading and insufferable circumstances in which Sarajevans were living?
Myers actually goes a step further, summoning violence upon Sontag (and, grandly humanist, himself as well), wishing for both their deaths because of the ideological differences he perceives. "My real mistake," he confesses boastfully, "was not radioing her co-ordinates to the Serb artillery, reporting that they marked the location of Bosnian heavy armour. My own life would have been a cheap price to pay."7
In this contentious bombarded city, there is a café called To Be Or Not To Be that remained open throughout the Siege. The owner of the café, Enis Selimović, crossed out the words Or Not, because, he said, in the midst of a military siege where others wish you dead, not being is not an option. The owner of To Be
The play's producer, Haris Pasović, voices that art and culture defies "barbarism and fascism,"9 and suggests that art could, or perhaps must, come from such injustice and annihilation. Sontag's own declaration about the Siege sounds more like a manifesto than an artist's statement. Sontag asserts that
Sarajevo is the Spanish Civil War of our time, but the difference in response is amazing. In 1937, people like Ernest Hemingway and Andre Malraux and George Orwell and Simone Weil rushed to Spain, although it was incredibly dangerous. Simone Weil got terrible burns and George Orwell got shot, but they didn't see the danger as a reason not to go. They went as an act of solidarity, and from that act grew some of the finest literature of their time.10
In a vitriol-filled obituary published in the UK newspaper, The Telegraph, Kevin Myers contends that "[s]uch bilge [as Sontag's writing and activism] can only exist in Eng-Litish, the impenetrable campus-dialect in which English literature is analysed, discussed and then buried. Susie's gone now," Myers snides, "but no doubt some other tongue will soon be babbling comparable Eng-Litish gibberish in her stead." His parting shot at Sontag came post-mortum, so, like hundreds of thousands of Sarajevans (and Bosnians, Serbians, and Croats), she could not respond to her accuser.
However, most Sarajevans understood as much about this written battle over Sontag's wartime visit to their city as the rest of the world understands about the Siege of Sarajevo. Myers criticism and accusations of Sontag are those of a Westerner who speaks with the comforts and bravery of being out of range while firing off volleys of violent words from afar. To Sarajevans, Kevin Myers is merely a name in newsprint, distant and unknown. But ask a Sarajevan who Susan Sontag was, and most everyone of them can reply that she was an American writer who came to Sarajevo during the Siege; the city's Siege Museum displays numerous photographs and handbills of her theatrical productions. Regardless of her reason and intent, she is remembered in Sarajevo not because of what she wrote, but because of what she did.
But the alternative, as Kevin Myers would have it, is that Sontag's anguished cry that Sarajevo "the Spanish Civil War of our time" should have never been uttered, never been written, and certainly never acted upon. Kevin Myers then, would have her to exercise her American right to remain silent because, like the opening line in Waiting for Godot, he suggests, there is "[n]othing to be done."11
Critical theorist Gayatri Spivak controversially posits that the subaltern—that is, any oppressed and marginalized people—cannot speak (being the oppressed, and thus subject to having no self-agency, their voices go unheard even when they do speak).12 Philosopher Linda Alcoff warns about the epistemological traps and hazards of speaking for, or even about, others.13 Given this, is there, as suggested in Godot, nothing to be done?
Sontag might have been the arrogant intellectual Myers accused her of being. Yet for her, doing nothing was not an option. She smuggled herself into a bombarded, embargoed city, not to speak for, nor even about, others. But to be with those others. And that shared company performed an absurd play by candlelight as the siege of a European capital city entered its 18th month. Despite Myers self-aggrandized emoting, the Sarajevan performance of Samuel Beckett's tragicomedy lasted only two hours, the conclusion, however, of the non-theatrical absurdist tragicomedy of the Siege itself, would require waiting 29 more.
Following the Siege, more than 15 years after the wars in the former Yugoslavia ended, Susan Sontag's name was dedicated to a public square in the heart of Sarajevo.
The square is in front of the National Theatre.
·—ж—·
1. Andreas, Peter. Blue Helmets and Black Markets: The Business of Survival in the Siege of Sarajevo. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2008.
2. a) Death of Yugoslavia. Series Prod. Norma Percy. BBC. 1995.
b) "Death of Yugoslavia Archive, 1985-1996." Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives. King's College London.
3. Sontag, Susan. "Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo." Performing Arts Journal 16.2 (May, 1994).
4. Myers, Kevin. "I wish I had kicked Sunsan Sontag." The Telegraph. 2 Jan. 2005.
5. Burns, John F. "To Sarajevo, Writer Brings Good Will and 'Godot'." New York Times 19 Aug. 1993.
6. Sontag. ibid.
7. Myers. ibid.
8. United Nations. "UN World Court acquits Serbia of genocide in Bosnia; finds it guilty of inaction." UN News Centre. 26 Feb. 2007.
9. Burns. ibid.
10. Sontag. ibid.
11. Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. 1954. New York: Grove Press, 1982.
12. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. "Can the Subaltern Speak?" In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbana-Champaign: Illinois UP, 1988.
13. Alcoff, Linda. "The Problem of Speaking for Others." Cultural Critique 20 (Winter, 1991-1992).
