My elementary school cafeteria was a big, sickly white cinderblock box lit with fluorescents, but it had a redeeming feature: a high, high ceiling ringed with small square windows. Just underneath the windows hung all of the world’s flags with their countries’ names stamped on placards beneath them.
At some point during every lunch, for six years, I’d sound out the names of the placards; slowly in kindergarten, quick by fifth grade. Some of them were easy – France, Brazil, USA – and some were harder. I remember that I was obsessed with the very longest country name: Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Bosnia. Herzegovina. It was utterly foreign as a name, but there was sweetness in the strangeness. What a treat to roll it around my mouth and let it spin out in one luxurious tumble: Bozzzz-nee-uh n’ Hurt-ze-go-veeeee-nah. (I added syllables, of course, and took them out at my leisure, for sure mangling the real pronunciation.) I remember wondering why this country got to take up so much extra real estate when other countries – like the US, for instance – were content with a couple of capital letters.
Now I’m fascinated by the decision of a public elementary school in Georgia to put up the flag of a fledgling country created by international mandate and propped up by international support. It could have been a statement of US support for “liberty” and it could have been a symbol of progress, of peace, of the end of bullets fired and men massacred and women raped in Bosnia. But I’m fascinated by how recent the events in Bosnia were for elementary school Anna. I was just six months old when Mladić’s forces ethnically cleansed Srebrenica and massacred its Muslim men and boys. I wasn’t even a year old when the Dayton Peace Accords were signed in Paris in December 1995, officially severing Bosnia from the remaining former Yugoslav republics, and then shattering it into three ethnically-divided pieces. When I was five – sitting in my elementary school cafeteria – Bosnia was still building peace between its new borders. But there was its flag, hanging in a north Georgia cafeteria, cast proudly in blue and white and spangled stars.
I forgot about that until a few weeks ago, when Dostana’s aunt, Sonja, asked me about my natal chart.
She’d looked at the few photos I sent to Taja and Dostana in my homestay letter. One of them was a shot my momma took of me climbing a palm tree in San Juan. Sonja told me that it was such a Capricorn (my sun sign) thing to do, to want to climb to the highest point possible. And that it was a Sagittarius (my ascendant) urge to wander far from home.
“I think you were drawn here,” she said, looking at me closely from her seat on the purple living room couch.
“Here?” I asked, pointing to the floor.
“Here,” she said, gesturing expansively.
I was homesick and a little drunk on homemade cherry rakija and exhausted at the thought of a midnight deadline for a political science paper I had that night. I believe in the divine movements of the universe and I believe in much of astrology’s teachings but I thought she was actually batshit crazy. Or just projecting some kind of national pride on me, some kind of insistence that of all places, I should be drawn to Belgrade. To Serbia. To the former Yugoslavia. To the Balkans. To a tiny region that’s seen more bloodshed and filled more textbooks than it ever wanted.
So yes, I thought she was crazy. And yet here I am on a bus in Bosnia, feeling both at home and deliciously, gloriously far away.
I’ve spent the last week reveling in Sarajevo’s nooks and crannies, in its ornate imported Middle Eastern rugs, in its silty-sweet Turkish (“Bosnian”, they say here, or “domestic”, or “our”) coffee. Letting my eyes feast on shining copper džezvas, on carved silver spoons, on round cobblestones pulled from the River Drina, on countless mosques’ slender minarets, striking against the blue blue sky. I touch Sarajevo’s rough stone walls and fall in love over and over.
This bus ride has taken us from Sarajevo to Potočari to the hills around Tuzla. We’ll arrive back in Belgrade tonight. And looking out the window makes my eyes well up.
Why all the tears here? my brain asks. Why does Bosnia, of all places, bring you to tears?
Because I am richer to be here. Because Bosnia makes me feel closer to the beating heart of things. Like I touched the tip of my tongue to a battery and ZING! My eyes flew open. Because I can see, really see the drying brown cornstalks, the hills, the colors, the sweeping cornflower blue sky. The small white and dove gray A-frame houses with sloping red tile roofs. The laundry strung across balconies dripping with potted flowers and vines. The rich earth. The strands of grass glistening and lush like they haven't realized it's late October, like they're pretending it's early June.
And because I cannot stop thinking of the men and boys who fled through these hills when Serb forces captured Srebrenica during the Bosnian War. The tears come because when Mladić cleared the town and bussed the women and small children to Tuzla – many of them victims of rape by his own soldiers – his soldiers separated the men of military age, fourteen and up. They captured those that tried to flee through the hills. They herded the men together and shot them like animals, shot them systematically, in shifts. Anonymously. In the thousands. The tears come when I think that Mladić brought in bulldozers to bury the bodies in mass graves. That these soft, soaring, green-gold hills are blood soaked.
Would I have loved Bosnia at five years old if I’d known its history? If I’d known even just this one small slice? It’s not a fair question to ask. Five year olds can’t understand murder and rape, shouldn’t understand it. They understand blue and white flags, stars, and a pretty name.
Is it unfair now, at twenty years old, to love Bosnia like I can't bring myself to love Serbia?
I don’t blame the people where I live in Belgrade for their bloody history. I blame the war criminals and their followers. I blame nationalism and cruelty. And I’ve tried, in my two months in Belgrade, to witness it with an open heart. I’ve walked it streets, eaten its food, spoken to its people, felt its history in my bones. And still Serbia has been a cold place. Belgrade has been a sad city.
But Bosnia has opened its arms to me. The people in Banja Luka and Sarajevo have been kind. The sunlight is thick and golden; even Milica says that the air smells like magic.
There is nothing left to do but to give thanks. So I thank Bosnia and its peoples for letting me bear witness to its past, to its present. I thank Bosnia for sunshine and coppersmiths and thick, sweet coffee. For letting a foreigner poke around its nooks and crannies, wander into its mosques with a badly-tied headscarf, mangle its language while trying to order food. For teaching me lessons about international interventionism, and how interventionism can fail, leaving destruction in its wake. For teaching me, more importantly, why those atrocities cannot be allowed to be repeated. For hurting my heart in all the ways that matter. For opening my eyes.
