Untitled 1

It is difficult.  It is difficult for a survivor.  It is difficult for a survivor to continue living.  Disconnected thoughts, disconnected memories always leading you to a breaking point.  But don’t be fooled—the breaking points, they are numerous.  Especially if you choose to live.  Which I do. 

Bosnia.  “Ethnic cleansing.”  The policy of ethnic cleansing.  Definitions of political expression are superimposed on the acts of evil.  Language cannot express the extent of murder.  It will always fail, and perhaps even betray us.

Time moves.  Your collective past becomes a footnote in history.  True—to a certain extent, it must become that because it is not only you or your people who have suffered.  At the same time you cannot remain silent.  And at the same time, you find yourself repeating the same words expressing your feelings about the war and mass murder.  Because, again, the language is limiting.

The less you say, the worse you feel.  The more you say, the more freakish you become in the eyes of the normal people.  “Why are you bothering me with this?  I was happy in my intellection.”  The gaze of broken past that you give to “them” as a way of seeking to be heard, returns into you almost immediately in such a way that you become the unwanted, you are the one who should carry the fault at bringing such a subject into the midst of metaphorical cocktail party.  Nobody wants to hear about war.  Rightly so.  You are all alone, a misfit, a freak, and yet a wounded child—an orphan who lost her own country.

What makes the whole goddamn thing worse is the very fact that it did not only happen to you, personally.  The attack and the denial of your humanity was collective.  Your future freakishness is perpetually depersonalized.  And so what are you?  A ghost?  Half-human?  Again comes that disconnection from the embodied past and present. 

People want to hear the message of hope in the midst of suffering.  Sometimes, that is an utter impossibility.  Or how about this: one day it’s there, another day it’s not.  There is no such thing as a solid and final hope, or a solid and final forgiveness.  Forgiveness may never come. 

Sometimes you yell out: I am angry at you, God.  What I notice that even when I proclaim my anger for God is that I am still trying to talk to him.  Either way, you don’t really know who to blame.  Should you even blame anyone?  Will that do you any good?  I am thinking not. 

The little annoyances.  They add up.  The little annoyances of small concerns, simplified philosophies, simplified politics.  “I believe that basically, deep down people are good.”  “We are all essentially the same.”  Simple, simple, simple paganism.  I am not interested in this bourgeois spirituality.  It is difficult to be charitable in these situations.  I have gotten used remaining silent because I don’t want shake anyone’s perfect world and bring the stain of evil into their reality.  But I don’t think that’s working anymore.