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Witness for the persecution | page 1, 2, 3
Several independent international commissions established that the number of raped women is 20,000 to 60,000. The Bosnian Ministry of Interior is declaring 50,000. Now, this is just an approximation, it serves as orientation. But in reality, it is very difficult to establish the exact number, because during the war and after it is difficult to compile any kind of statistics. In order for any of these numbers to make sense, how many people were killed or how many children wounded, you need to have all of the relevant demographic parameters. And with refugees, that is nearly impossible. But it is fair to say that women's rooms were a mass practice. More than that, women's rooms were a systematic practice, an integral part of ethnic cleansing. It means that this method was used to scare a population off of the specific territory. There were many women's rooms. Also Today "Terminus" What has happened to the "rape babies"? Is S.'s experience of giving her baby up for adoption a typical one? Are some of those babies being raised by their mothers? What is the social status of those children? In your book, a character recalls being told by the soldiers raping her "that she would give birth to their Serbian child and that they would force all of these Muslim women to give birth to Serbian children. Where are those soldiers now? If children are born, they will be born to these women and they, not their unknown fathers, will decide their fate." Not much is known about the babies, though there were probably hundreds to thousands. They have been protected from the very beginning. I heard that most have been given up for adoption. There are only a few examples of women who kept those children. However, their status is presumably not different from other children's, since no one knows that they were conceived by rape. What is the agenda of the Center for War Crimes for these women, beyond documentation? There is none. What are the lives of the women like now? I'm reminded of what S. thinks as she's readying to leave the Zagreb refugee camp: "Wherever they wind up, all these people will reek of the past." Last year I attended the weekly meetings of a psychotherapist and about 50 such women. They are refugees in Berlin. They are trying hard to survive, to go on. It is an immense, everyday struggle. To me, an outsider, it looked as if they live two parallel lives: one on the surface, in the present, and the other, the invisible one, in the past. If they manage to live a little bit more in the present, it is already a success. Do you think, as Varlam Shalamov says in the quote you use to open the novel, that "a human being survives by his ability to forget"? What does that say about our chances, as members of the human race, of escaping more horrors like the Balkan wars? We all like to believe that we are good, that human beings are essentially good and that it is possible to escape horrors. But I am not so sure. I think we are both, good and bad, and it is only an illusion that we know ourselves and that we can predict how we are going to behave in an extreme situation like a war. We don't know, we can't guarantee for ourselves and I think this is the terrible lesson that war teaches you. On the other hand, if we can't forget horrors that happened to us, we cannot continue to live. I believe Shalamov. He knew what he was saying, he was a prisoner in Kolima, the worst Siberian camp ... When you made the decision to fictionalize this story, did you feel any concern about the possibility that fictionalizing these unspeakable crimes could further distance us from them and from the women who were victims? Or that creating one "everywoman" could render the real victims more faceless -- rob them of their stories, when our inclination as readers and news-watchers is to want as much distance as possible? No, I did not. On the contrary, I realized that the only way for readers to identify with such suffering was to fictionalize a character, although not a story. Simply, there was no one woman who could tell her story in such detail, psychological and emotional. Victimized women can't do that. It means that either their stories will stay in the domain of witnessing and thus remain inaccessible to the public or that the public will have to wait another 10, 20 or more years until one of the victims decides to write her memoir. But then she also has to be very talented. I am sure that will happen. In the meantime, I decided to write a novel.
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