[careful. the love and anguish of murdering easily applies to the opening sentence. if i tortured syntax like that very often, i'd be facing charges in the hague.]
ENG 201-013
6 December 2010
Cultural critic Theodor Adorno famously—or perhaps, infamously—is quoted from an essay in 1949 as saying that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric,” a statement he defended several times (in 1955 and 1962) before backing away from such a stance a few years before he died (he stated in one of these essays that not only poetry was barbaric but that, indeed, “all culture after Auschwitz, including its urgent critique, is rubbish”) (“Negative Dialektik,” Adorno). He elucidated upon what he meant in a 1962 essay by responding to a treatise by Jean-Paul Sarte: “The question asked by a character in Sartre’s play Morts Sans Supulture, ‘Is there any meaning in life when men exist who beat people until the bones break in their bodies?’, is also the question whether any art now has a right to exist...” (“Commitment”). This line of thinking infuses virtually every form of art, poetry, literature, and music that has come about since World War II, and has been retroactively applied to examine events predating the mid-20th Century. It would be a futile and quickly dismantled argument to claim that there is no link between events of great barbarity and the art which follows it, but to debate the points of to what purpose is an artist using such events is a question as old as “barbaric” art itself and, in a more modern context of a culture saturated by media, the question is added of when it becomes acceptable to do so.
Whether it is Sylvia Plath using Holocaust imagery to reflect her own personal tragedies or the ancient Hebrew people singing victory songs about the vanquished enemies they themselves annihilated (that is, committed genocidal ethnic cleansing upon), the grotesque paintings of mass murder and neighborly atrocity as depicted by Vasily Vereshchagin and Pieter Bruegel, the fact that art and literature has been created from such massacres is not the point of debate. The question, as posed by Adorno’s stance becomes, is it barbaric to do so?
To answer this, an examination of five topics related to the Bosnian Genocide in the 1990s will be discussed: a keynote address concerning the importance of the artist living in a barbarous culture, a contemporaneous film currently being made about the genocide, an American author and activist who smuggled herself into Sarajevo during its siege years, some anecdotal evidence gained from first-hand accounts from two indigenous artists in the Balkans (a poet and a film-maker), and a privately-printed memorial poem concerning the Srebrenica Massacre in 1995.
In a keynote address at the Streamlines Conference in November, 2010, Dr. Jonathan Barz commented that he had “read that the Iranian government was gravely concerned about the number of their college students who were majoring in the humanities” (Barz) and quoted the article as saying “[Khamenei] called the humanities a field of study that ‘promotes skepticism and doubt in religious principles and beliefs,’ and that it was worrying that almost two-thirds of university students in Iran were seeking degrees in the humanities” (qtd. in “Crackdown”). Barz went on to clearly state his opinion on this matter by saying “Is it just me, or is there something wonderfully affirming about hearing that our field of study cannot be tolerated because it is inimical to repression and thought control?” This “field of study” being, of course, that of literature; including the barbaric poetry written after Auschwitz. The two major points Dr. Barz implored his audience to consider about the study and reading of literature—especially controversial literature—was that “literature invites us to develop the habit of moral reflection” and that “literature reshapes our character by encouraging empathy.” these are crucial points to consider when assessing the place “barbaric poetry” has even in, as Adorno stated, a culture of rubbish. While the debate about culture is better left to another thesis, the importance literature plays in casting light and reflection upon genocide is paramount. But, even in challenging Adorno’s stance on the subject, there is a wide ground to consider before staking an empirical response to declare what is, or is not, beyond the pale of acceptance.
Consider that in the late summer of 2010—15 years after the political end of the Bosnian War—one of the biggest names in Hollywood film-making began production on a project she wrote, and is producing and directing. According to several local news services in Bosnia and Serbia, the film Angelina Jolie (who is also a “Good Will Ambassador” for the UN) is making concerns “a Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) woman who falls in love with her Serb rapist and commander of a wartime prison camp in which she is held” (“Suspends Permission”). This is, of course, an extremely controversial subject in the area from all sides involved. There is concern that Jolie’s film will profit on the romanticized misery of the victims of the war without shedding light upon the actual trauma and daily struggle many still face. The government agencies involved with issuing work permits for the film initially denied, then later granted permission to film the movie in Bosnia (“Suspends Permission” and “Reissues Permit”). However, due to protests against the film, production in the country was cut short “partly due to bad weather, but also because of politics,” as a spokesman for the production company stated; Jolie herself was never present on the set in Bosnia (“Cuts Filming”).
Based on the information gleaned in news reports as the actual script for the movie has not been made public—this could be seen as a case in which barbaric art is taking advantage of the victims of a tragedy and reflects in a very direct way upon both of Adorno’s points. One, that making art from another’s misery is distasteful, and, two, that such actions promote a culture which caters to the worst elements in it. These points are in direct opposition to the status both Dr. Barz and the Ayatollah Khamenei place upon literature and the arts: that of encouraging moral reflection while simultaneously promoting skepticism of any proffered narrative. How then to bridge the gap between opposed ideologies through art? Should we accept that making art from cultural trauma is ethically wrong?
When the Bosnian War was going on—when the city of Sarajevo was under military siege and international embargo—the American author, critic, and political activist Susan Sontag saw it as an opportunity to comment on the larger issues at hand. Unlike the overwhelming majority of people, politicians, and, more to the argument at hand, artists, did not even acknowledge the events that were transpiring in Europe as they blithely went on with their routines steeped in the safety and comfort of the objectively peaceful United States. What Sontag did in smuggling herself into a city being bombed was to do the only thing an artist is capable of doing. She made art. Produced in a theatre lit only by candles, enacted with local Sarajevan actors, Sontag directed a version of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot. The line in the play “Mr. Godot told me to tell you that he won't come this evening, but surely tomorrow,” takes on a cut-to-the-bone air of black humor that may not be understood outside of regions decimated by death. “Like the outcasts [of the play], Sarajevo has waited for relief from afar, the Western military intervention that many here believe is the only thing that can stop the Serbian nationalist forces besieging the city from destroying what is left here,” a New York Times articles quotes, and to Sontag, the statement is a call to arms for artists in the rest of the world (their weaponry of artists being, of course, brushes, cameras, guitars, and the mightiest weapon: the pen) because she, “who is virtually alone among the well-known writers and artists and performers of Europe and the United States in coming to Sarajevo during the siege” called the Siege of Sarajevo:
Here then, Sontag is stating that atrocity needs to be fought not with bullets and bombs, but with art. An opinion shared by two Balkan artists who were on opposite sides of the war in the ’90s.
Serbian poet Matija Bećković was a long-standing nationalist and member of the conservative Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He was a vocal advocate for Serbian control of the former Yugoslavian states and, during the NATO bombing campaigns of Belgrade in 1999, he was one of the authors of a protest phrase that followed the Serbian downing of a US stealth bomber: “We’re Sorry We Shot Down Your Plane, We Didn’t Know It Was Invisible.” An act some would say was a feeble response to overwhelming military and technological force, but a response befitting an artist, even one whose opinions may not be shared by outsiders to the conflict. This, coming from a man who in later years would make the compassionate statement that, “Bridges are the most important creation in human history. The bridge does not ask who crosses it.” By way of metaphoric exclusion, Bećković was stating that when walls and fences are constructed, bridges are needed more than ever. Poetry becomes a method of building such bridges.
Across the battle lines, in Bosnia, Sarajevan film director Danis Tanović relates a tale from the war in which he was filming a battle for Western media and took refuge in a small house during mortar fire. A painter was set up in the cottage and was working on a canvas, painting by the light a homemade candles. His canvas depicted a pastoral scene of Sarajevo’s old town square in winter. When asked by Tanović how he could be painting during the bombing, the painter replied, “What else would you have me do?” To him, the only response to warfare was to continue producing his art. After telling of this experience, Tanović offered an insight to the issue of art from atrocity, “If there can be no poetry after the Holocaust, there can be no art of any kind after Sarajevo.” Coming from a director who won an Academy Award for a film about the Bosnian War, this is, pardon the pun, a loaded statement.
Art can exist following large-scale atrocities. Some would contest that is must. Susan Sontag is one such voice. So is Bosnian poet Melika Salihbeg Bosnawi, who wrote a memorial poem about the Srebrenica Genocide of July 1995 on its fifth anniversary. In it she details the major players involved with orchestrating the massacre and makes word-play of their peaceful names. The military leader General Ratko Mladić’s name means “youth” and the poem tells of how the victims “only wished … that no mother give birth to a youth to call, gun in hand … to hunt human beings!” The name of political leader, Radovan Karadižić, means “rejoice.” Bosnawi’s poem tells of how the victims in Srebrenica “desired … that no Montenegrin she-wolf rejoice to suckle a son...” The poem concludes with some of the most vicious imagery in modern poetry:
Bosnawi’s poem drives home the point of barbaric poetry. When asked about such writing, an elderly survivor of Srebrenica who lost her husband and sons to the ethnic cleansing program of Mladić and Karadižić, replied, “Of course [this] poetry is barbaric! It has to be! How else will someone understand what [genocide] is like?”
Even if—or perhaps, especially if—culture is relegated to the midden heaps of barbarity, visceral poetry, art, and literature must never turn away from the most vile acts humans perpetuate. As a recent scholarly work cited, arts and literature “become tools to present contrasting viewpoints in a form where ideologies may be considered without condoning nor condemning them. This is done not to exonerate the participants but to complicate our judgment of such situations.” To cause a moral reflection in the self. And, if the bridge does not ask who crosses it, then poetry—that is, literature, music, art—does not ask who reads it. but to be read, such things must first be written.
Adorno, Theodor. Prisms. tr. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1983. Print.
Anonymous Srebrenica Woman. Personal interview. 3 July 2010.
Barrett, Kírk. “The Atrocity Exhibit: A Travelogue...” Streamlines: An Undergraduate Conference Celebrating Language, Literature, and Writing. Dubuque, IA. 12 Nov. 2010. Presentation.
Barz, Jonathan. “Literary Studies: The Radical Art of Learning How to Be.” Streamlines: An Undergraduate Conference Celebrating Language, Literature, and Writing. Dubuque, IA. 12 Nov. 2010. Keynote Address.
Bećković, Matija. Personal interview. 3 June 2010.
Bosnawi, Melika Salihbeg. Srebrenica Je Zvijezda Padalica [Srebrenica Is A Falling Star]. 2nd ed. Sarajevo: Melika Salihbeg Bosnawi, 2000. Print.
“Bosnia Suspends Permission for Jolie Film.” Balkans Insight. 14 Oct. 2010. Web. 5 Nov. 2010.
Harding, James Martin. Adorno and “A Writing of the Ruins”: Essays on Modern Aesthetics and Anglo-American Literature and Culture. Albany: State University of New York, 1997. Print.
“Iran Launches New Crackdown On Universities.” Radio Free Europe. 26 Aug. 2010. Web. 5 December 2010.
Sulzberger, C. L. A Long Row of Candles; Memoirs and Diaries, 1934-1954. New York: Macmillan, 1969. Print.
Tanović, Danis. Personal interview. 25 June 2010.
~•~
ENG 201-013
6 December 2010
To Love and Murder Easily
The Balkans...is...a gay peninsula filled with sprightly people who ate peppered foods, drank strong liquors, wore flamboyant clothes, loved and murdered easily and had a splendid talent for starting wars. Less imaginative westerners looked down on them with secret envy, sniffing at their royalty, scoffing at their pretensions, and fearing their savage terrorists. Karl Marx called them “ethnic trash.”——C. L. Sulzberger, A Long Row of Candles, 1969.
I, as a footloose youngster in my twenties, adored them.
Cultural critic Theodor Adorno famously—or perhaps, infamously—is quoted from an essay in 1949 as saying that “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric,” a statement he defended several times (in 1955 and 1962) before backing away from such a stance a few years before he died (he stated in one of these essays that not only poetry was barbaric but that, indeed, “all culture after Auschwitz, including its urgent critique, is rubbish”) (“Negative Dialektik,” Adorno). He elucidated upon what he meant in a 1962 essay by responding to a treatise by Jean-Paul Sarte: “The question asked by a character in Sartre’s play Morts Sans Supulture, ‘Is there any meaning in life when men exist who beat people until the bones break in their bodies?’, is also the question whether any art now has a right to exist...” (“Commitment”). This line of thinking infuses virtually every form of art, poetry, literature, and music that has come about since World War II, and has been retroactively applied to examine events predating the mid-20th Century. It would be a futile and quickly dismantled argument to claim that there is no link between events of great barbarity and the art which follows it, but to debate the points of to what purpose is an artist using such events is a question as old as “barbaric” art itself and, in a more modern context of a culture saturated by media, the question is added of when it becomes acceptable to do so.
Whether it is Sylvia Plath using Holocaust imagery to reflect her own personal tragedies or the ancient Hebrew people singing victory songs about the vanquished enemies they themselves annihilated (that is, committed genocidal ethnic cleansing upon), the grotesque paintings of mass murder and neighborly atrocity as depicted by Vasily Vereshchagin and Pieter Bruegel, the fact that art and literature has been created from such massacres is not the point of debate. The question, as posed by Adorno’s stance becomes, is it barbaric to do so?
To answer this, an examination of five topics related to the Bosnian Genocide in the 1990s will be discussed: a keynote address concerning the importance of the artist living in a barbarous culture, a contemporaneous film currently being made about the genocide, an American author and activist who smuggled herself into Sarajevo during its siege years, some anecdotal evidence gained from first-hand accounts from two indigenous artists in the Balkans (a poet and a film-maker), and a privately-printed memorial poem concerning the Srebrenica Massacre in 1995.
In a keynote address at the Streamlines Conference in November, 2010, Dr. Jonathan Barz commented that he had “read that the Iranian government was gravely concerned about the number of their college students who were majoring in the humanities” (Barz) and quoted the article as saying “[Khamenei] called the humanities a field of study that ‘promotes skepticism and doubt in religious principles and beliefs,’ and that it was worrying that almost two-thirds of university students in Iran were seeking degrees in the humanities” (qtd. in “Crackdown”). Barz went on to clearly state his opinion on this matter by saying “Is it just me, or is there something wonderfully affirming about hearing that our field of study cannot be tolerated because it is inimical to repression and thought control?” This “field of study” being, of course, that of literature; including the barbaric poetry written after Auschwitz. The two major points Dr. Barz implored his audience to consider about the study and reading of literature—especially controversial literature—was that “literature invites us to develop the habit of moral reflection” and that “literature reshapes our character by encouraging empathy.” these are crucial points to consider when assessing the place “barbaric poetry” has even in, as Adorno stated, a culture of rubbish. While the debate about culture is better left to another thesis, the importance literature plays in casting light and reflection upon genocide is paramount. But, even in challenging Adorno’s stance on the subject, there is a wide ground to consider before staking an empirical response to declare what is, or is not, beyond the pale of acceptance.
Consider that in the late summer of 2010—15 years after the political end of the Bosnian War—one of the biggest names in Hollywood film-making began production on a project she wrote, and is producing and directing. According to several local news services in Bosnia and Serbia, the film Angelina Jolie (who is also a “Good Will Ambassador” for the UN) is making concerns “a Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) woman who falls in love with her Serb rapist and commander of a wartime prison camp in which she is held” (“Suspends Permission”). This is, of course, an extremely controversial subject in the area from all sides involved. There is concern that Jolie’s film will profit on the romanticized misery of the victims of the war without shedding light upon the actual trauma and daily struggle many still face. The government agencies involved with issuing work permits for the film initially denied, then later granted permission to film the movie in Bosnia (“Suspends Permission” and “Reissues Permit”). However, due to protests against the film, production in the country was cut short “partly due to bad weather, but also because of politics,” as a spokesman for the production company stated; Jolie herself was never present on the set in Bosnia (“Cuts Filming”).
Based on the information gleaned in news reports as the actual script for the movie has not been made public—this could be seen as a case in which barbaric art is taking advantage of the victims of a tragedy and reflects in a very direct way upon both of Adorno’s points. One, that making art from another’s misery is distasteful, and, two, that such actions promote a culture which caters to the worst elements in it. These points are in direct opposition to the status both Dr. Barz and the Ayatollah Khamenei place upon literature and the arts: that of encouraging moral reflection while simultaneously promoting skepticism of any proffered narrative. How then to bridge the gap between opposed ideologies through art? Should we accept that making art from cultural trauma is ethically wrong?
When the Bosnian War was going on—when the city of Sarajevo was under military siege and international embargo—the American author, critic, and political activist Susan Sontag saw it as an opportunity to comment on the larger issues at hand. Unlike the overwhelming majority of people, politicians, and, more to the argument at hand, artists, did not even acknowledge the events that were transpiring in Europe as they blithely went on with their routines steeped in the safety and comfort of the objectively peaceful United States. What Sontag did in smuggling herself into a city being bombed was to do the only thing an artist is capable of doing. She made art. Produced in a theatre lit only by candles, enacted with local Sarajevan actors, Sontag directed a version of Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot. The line in the play “Mr. Godot told me to tell you that he won't come this evening, but surely tomorrow,” takes on a cut-to-the-bone air of black humor that may not be understood outside of regions decimated by death. “Like the outcasts [of the play], Sarajevo has waited for relief from afar, the Western military intervention that many here believe is the only thing that can stop the Serbian nationalist forces besieging the city from destroying what is left here,” a New York Times articles quotes, and to Sontag, the statement is a call to arms for artists in the rest of the world (their weaponry of artists being, of course, brushes, cameras, guitars, and the mightiest weapon: the pen) because she, “who is virtually alone among the well-known writers and artists and performers of Europe and the United States in coming to Sarajevo during the siege” called the Siege of Sarajevo:
The Spanish Civil War of our time … In 1937, people like Ernest Hemingway and Andre Malraux and George Orwell and Simone Weil rushed to Spain, although it was incredibly dangerous... They went as an act of solidarity, and from that act grew some of the finest literature of their time. But I don't think the fact that Sarajevo is dangerous is really the reason. I think there is an underlying reason that is deeper and more disturbing ... I think there has been a failure of conscience on the part of writers and intellectuals in the Western world.
Here then, Sontag is stating that atrocity needs to be fought not with bullets and bombs, but with art. An opinion shared by two Balkan artists who were on opposite sides of the war in the ’90s.
Serbian poet Matija Bećković was a long-standing nationalist and member of the conservative Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He was a vocal advocate for Serbian control of the former Yugoslavian states and, during the NATO bombing campaigns of Belgrade in 1999, he was one of the authors of a protest phrase that followed the Serbian downing of a US stealth bomber: “We’re Sorry We Shot Down Your Plane, We Didn’t Know It Was Invisible.” An act some would say was a feeble response to overwhelming military and technological force, but a response befitting an artist, even one whose opinions may not be shared by outsiders to the conflict. This, coming from a man who in later years would make the compassionate statement that, “Bridges are the most important creation in human history. The bridge does not ask who crosses it.” By way of metaphoric exclusion, Bećković was stating that when walls and fences are constructed, bridges are needed more than ever. Poetry becomes a method of building such bridges.
Across the battle lines, in Bosnia, Sarajevan film director Danis Tanović relates a tale from the war in which he was filming a battle for Western media and took refuge in a small house during mortar fire. A painter was set up in the cottage and was working on a canvas, painting by the light a homemade candles. His canvas depicted a pastoral scene of Sarajevo’s old town square in winter. When asked by Tanović how he could be painting during the bombing, the painter replied, “What else would you have me do?” To him, the only response to warfare was to continue producing his art. After telling of this experience, Tanović offered an insight to the issue of art from atrocity, “If there can be no poetry after the Holocaust, there can be no art of any kind after Sarajevo.” Coming from a director who won an Academy Award for a film about the Bosnian War, this is, pardon the pun, a loaded statement.
Art can exist following large-scale atrocities. Some would contest that is must. Susan Sontag is one such voice. So is Bosnian poet Melika Salihbeg Bosnawi, who wrote a memorial poem about the Srebrenica Genocide of July 1995 on its fifth anniversary. In it she details the major players involved with orchestrating the massacre and makes word-play of their peaceful names. The military leader General Ratko Mladić’s name means “youth” and the poem tells of how the victims “only wished … that no mother give birth to a youth to call, gun in hand … to hunt human beings!” The name of political leader, Radovan Karadižić, means “rejoice.” Bosnawi’s poem tells of how the victims in Srebrenica “desired … that no Montenegrin she-wolf rejoice to suckle a son...” The poem concludes with some of the most vicious imagery in modern poetry:
I have yet to call for help … / Hieronymus Bosch and Brueghel. / I have yet to ask them / to paint: / the regions turned to Hell, / the torment of the innocent, / iconostasis of horror, / and, then, to thread up a caravan of satanic faces, / the horde of the damned, lost souls, / on their blood-soaked / course / in the twentieth century / to Gehenna, / as they pass through / Bosnia.
Bosnawi’s poem drives home the point of barbaric poetry. When asked about such writing, an elderly survivor of Srebrenica who lost her husband and sons to the ethnic cleansing program of Mladić and Karadižić, replied, “Of course [this] poetry is barbaric! It has to be! How else will someone understand what [genocide] is like?”
Even if—or perhaps, especially if—culture is relegated to the midden heaps of barbarity, visceral poetry, art, and literature must never turn away from the most vile acts humans perpetuate. As a recent scholarly work cited, arts and literature “become tools to present contrasting viewpoints in a form where ideologies may be considered without condoning nor condemning them. This is done not to exonerate the participants but to complicate our judgment of such situations.” To cause a moral reflection in the self. And, if the bridge does not ask who crosses it, then poetry—that is, literature, music, art—does not ask who reads it. but to be read, such things must first be written.
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor. Prisms. tr. Samuel and Shierry Weber. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1983. Print.
Anonymous Srebrenica Woman. Personal interview. 3 July 2010.
Barrett, Kírk. “The Atrocity Exhibit: A Travelogue...” Streamlines: An Undergraduate Conference Celebrating Language, Literature, and Writing. Dubuque, IA. 12 Nov. 2010. Presentation.
Barz, Jonathan. “Literary Studies: The Radical Art of Learning How to Be.” Streamlines: An Undergraduate Conference Celebrating Language, Literature, and Writing. Dubuque, IA. 12 Nov. 2010. Keynote Address.
Bećković, Matija. Personal interview. 3 June 2010.
Bosnawi, Melika Salihbeg. Srebrenica Je Zvijezda Padalica [Srebrenica Is A Falling Star]. 2nd ed. Sarajevo: Melika Salihbeg Bosnawi, 2000. Print.
“Bosnia Suspends Permission for Jolie Film.” Balkans Insight. 14 Oct. 2010. Web. 5 Nov. 2010.
Harding, James Martin. Adorno and “A Writing of the Ruins”: Essays on Modern Aesthetics and Anglo-American Literature and Culture. Albany: State University of New York, 1997. Print.
“Iran Launches New Crackdown On Universities.” Radio Free Europe. 26 Aug. 2010. Web. 5 December 2010.
Sulzberger, C. L. A Long Row of Candles; Memoirs and Diaries, 1934-1954. New York: Macmillan, 1969. Print.
Tanović, Danis. Personal interview. 25 June 2010.
~•~
