We were destroyed in more than one way, scattered, completely lonely wherever we were, not ready for feelings because since the fall of Srebrenica, all feelings were somehow half-hearted, almost burdensome. Ever since, I cheat on the new men and women in my life. I cheat on them with the dead. And for some reason, only there—among memories, among shadows—do I feel better.
I am writing this and there are tears in my eyes and knots in my stomach and a lump in my throat. I feel sick. Reading a memoir is so very different than reading a historical collection of events. I wasn't emotionally or mentally prepared for what I had encountered in this memoir. I thought—so stupidly I thought—that I would get a historical recount of the Bosnian genocide, that I would understand what happened, what built up to it, how it ended. The pain, the test of oppression and war, of how it either dwindles the flame of your humanity or makes it burn more furiously, was not something I was expecting. The hunger, the famine, the love, the people, the loss, the brutality, the utter inhumanity of it all was unbearable, it was so unbearable.
There is this particular chapter where Emir's morality is tested, where he does something so selfless that I couldn't help but cry and cry, not because of the pure-heartedness of it, but rather because of the weight of this gruelling question: Would I have done the same thing if I were in his shoes? I don't like to ponder too much about this question.
I think of these people, my brothers and sisters, separated and torn from their families, wives and daughters and mothers leaving their aching and bloody hearts in the hands of their husbands and fathers and sons. Of the elastic band of kinship, of love, of family being stretched and stretched and stretched by distance and murder until it snapped. Bosniaks, thousands of them, lined up and shot. Bosniaks, thousands of them, starved to death, bombed to death, their remains having to be scraped off the ground and walls. Bosniaks, thousands of them, put into empty schools and warehouses, executed, burnt alive. Bosniaks, thousands of them, thrown into mass graves as if the earth and dirt could ever cover the inhumane crimes of the Serbs. Bosniak women, raped and tortured in a hotel-turned rape camp that is, to this day, open and marketed as a resort by the Serbians. Bodies and bones still being recovered, still being identified. Family members dying before they can bury their dead.
I don't know what to say. This was a very emotional read for me. Emir writes so beautifully, so painfully. I suppose my only critique would be to read the afterword before you start the memoir (not after) for it gives a lot of context that is vital to understand the events Emir talks about.
Throughout the course of this memoir, I could only hope that Allah سبحانه وتعالى burns the oppressors in the same vicious and heartless way they burned my brothers and sisters; that Allah stacks them on top of each other in Jahannam in the same way the oppressors stacked the thousands of bodies of my brothers and sisters in mass graves. And how perfect is my Lord's punishment; how perfect is His Justice.
They have their life, I have mine. If I cry, I would die of heartbreak, so I don’t. Instead, I fix my house, I eat something, I drink some coffee.