Jean, Slavenka, and the Tea Party for Sanity
[In the following essay, Cobban discusses the effects of war on women portrayed in works by Drakulic and Jean Said Makdisi.]
An accident of history, really, that brought this nice young man, untested in foreign affairs, to the presidency of the republic at a time when the United States is in a position of unequaled supremacy in world politics. Decisions that he makes—on Bosnia, Somalia, Cambodia, wherever—can rip apart the fabric of whole nations.
What does Bill Clinton know of war?
Forests of print have addressed this question, and enough electronic wizardry to boost a message to the edge of the universe. But that discourse was always dominated by men—fighting men in uniforms, political men reading opinion polls, think tank men fine-tuning the game of grown-up bullyboys called “deterrence.” But put all of these specialists together in a room, and the picture you get of this thing called “war” is still incomplete. Locked outside, but more deserving of entry than ever before, are people with a different view of war: those who are not its producers but, perforce, its consumers (and who thereby are consumed by it). Themselves products of two great developments of this century of ours—the inclusion of massed civilian populations in the target sets of warriors, and the spread of mass education—some of these civilian war consumers can today describe war in a way that is more complete than any previous description. Especially the women among them.
Move over, Les Aspin. Move over, all you Clausewitz wannabes with your Rube Goldberg “models” of this or that form of warfare. Move over, warrior-poets of glory or of anguish. Make room for experts like these: Jean Said Makdisi, a college teacher and mother who chronicled sixteen years of war in Lebanon in her book Beirut Fragments (1990); and Slavenka Drakulic, a journalist and mother who chronicled the first year of the present Balkan wars in The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War (1993).
These women might both have put into their titles a word, fragments, that implies a tentativeness of experience or discourse. But each book builds an overwhelming, thoughtful, and undeniably true picture of what war does to societies at the end of our century.
Never mind the generals. Compared with these women, what does Bill Clinton know of war?
Should we arrange a tea party perhaps? Invite Jean, Slavenka, and Bill. Do you think he's ever been to their countries? Maybe he visited “Yugoslavia” in 1969, on the trip when, most famously, he went to Moscow. I was in Yugoslavia in 1970: I got off the train in Slavenka's home-town, Zagreb, and hitchhiked down to the coast. Then in 1974, I went to work as a correspondent in Lebanon. I “covered” and lived the war there from 1975 through 1981; had my first two children there; knew, like Jean Makdisi, the special terrors of raising children inside a war zone. I knew, as Slavenka would, the particular difficulty that a mother can have in dealing, as a journalist, with topics impossible to speak of.
This is how Slavenka described an interview she was supposed to conduct with a survivor from the Croatian city of Vukovar, which had recently fallen to the Serbs. Ivan was nineteen. He had fought along-side the city's defenders, but had then been forced to withdraw from it with his mother and five younger siblings. His father was lost—either dead or captured. Slavenka talked to Ivan in Zagreb:
I knew he was waiting for me to ask him questions, but I was at a loss for words. I didn't know what to ask him, caught by surprise. His face was so unbearably young that it undid me in a way. This is a story that cannot be written, I thought, not the story of this child who has lost his friends, his house, his father, even the war itself. … He could be my son, I thought, and could not stop thinking of it. … The more talkative and open he became, the more I withdrew. I felt guilty.
Yes, these two women would be good to invite to my tea party. We'll have Bill sitting there—I hope our trees don't set off his allergies. I think we should invite Hillary, too; maybe she can do some cultural interpretation for us.
Why a tea party? Well, you might think of the Boston Tea Party, not a true tea party at all, of course, but it did mark a transition to a hopeful new order. You might think of the Mad Hatter's Tea Party, a total up-ending of existing logics and systems of argument. Or you might think of this tea party, encountered by Jean when, in the midst of Israel's punishing 1982 bombardment of Beirut, she went with her husband to visit some friends:
For an instant I thought I was hallucinating, but soon I was laughing in delight. There on the lawn she had set up a table on which was spread afternoon tea. There was a teapot with a crocheted tea cosy, the kind you buy at church bazaars; there were porcelain teacups, silver sugar tongs and teaspoons, embroidered linen napkins, and a little silver dish with biscuits. Both she and her sister, whose house had become uninhabitable because of the bombings, were wearing long, fashionable cotton kaftans. They were neatly groomed and freshly lipsticked. …
“I can't believe this,” I said. “I feel as if I'm dreaming. How do you do it?”
“My dear, I would go mad if I didn't. … What do you want me to do? Die? When I must, I will. Meanwhile, every afternoon I have my tea.”
So, a tea party for sanity, amidst the craziness and killings of the new world disorder! Held here, in Washington D.C., capital city of the planet, and quite a killing ground in its own right. What could make more sense?
As the guests arrived, I would make sure each was well seated. Then I would preside over the ritual of pouring the tea, using the silver teapot bequeathed me by my Aunt Katie; and I would find out who drinks their tea with lemon, with milk, or with sugar. Perhaps at this point, already, Jean and Slavenka would start right on in, sharing with each other and the rest of us their considerable insights into one of our era's most troubling processes: the dividing up of people into confining ethnic or religious boxes.
In Lebanon, the enforced dividing was attempted along both sectarian and “national” lines. The Maronite Christian militias fought hard to create and enlarge enclaves free of both Palestinian and (Lebanese) Muslim presence. “Cleansing” (tantheef) was their word for this process from the beginning of the fighting in 1975. (In Arabic, as in English, “cleansing” has a close but usually unmentioned relationship with the more purely military term “mopping-up.”) In vast parts of the beautiful land of Lebanon, the Maronite campaign tore through a long-established coexistence, setting neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend, in a process of seemingly inexorable violence. The same process has now torn apart previously diverse communities in the former Yugoslavia—there, breaking communities up along lines of imputed ethnicity. Saddest of all, to anyone who has experienced Beirut, is the attempted destruction in Sarajevo of the idea of peaceable coexistence among the residents of a single, gloriously diverse modern city.
In Lebanon and in Yugoslavia, the deadly process of group homogenization hastens and has been hastened by war. Here is how this process feels to Jean, a Protestant Christian and a Palestinian, married to a (Christian?) Lebanese, who in the 1970s and 1980s were raising their three sons in Muslim-dominated West Beirut:
I have felt repeatedly that religion has worked rather like the stamp with which cattle are branded. I have seen it so many times in the movies. The cowboy chases the steer relentlessly. He throws a noose over the animal's head. …
And so we are all, like it or not, branded with the hot iron of our religious ancestry. …
And how does the brand work? How does one fall into the clutches of that cowboy holding the hot iron? How does one feel as it sizzles into the flesh? I have felt it. …
Here, a marvelous discovery, is the very same metaphor in the hands of Slavenka, a Croat formerly married to a Serb, by whom she has one daughter, now in her twenties: “War is like a brand on the brows of Serbs who curse Croat mothers, but it is also a brand on the faces of Croats leaving a country where all they had is gone.”
In January 1992, the day before the European Community gave formal recognition to Croatia, Slavenka wrote an essay called “Overcome by Nationhood.” By then, her new country had been racked for some months already by fighting between Croats and ethnic Serbs backed by neighboring Serbia. Slavenka wrote: “Along with millions of other Croats, I was pinned to the wall of nationhood—not only by outside pressure from Serbia and the Federal Army but by national homogenization within Croatia itself. That is what the war is doing to us, reducing us to one dimension: the Nation.” But neither of these women allows herself to indulge in abstract moralizing. Slavenka explained with engaging honesty how she, too, felt drawn into this identification with the national idea by the horrors of the war:
Right now, in the new state of Croatia, no one is allowed not to be a Croat. And even if this is not what one would really call freedom, perhaps it would be morally unjust to tear off the shirt of the suffering nation—with tens of thousands of people being shot, slaughtered and burned just because of their nationality. It wouldn't be right because of Vukovar, the town that was erased from the face of the earth. Because of the attacks on Dubrovnik.
While Slavenka felt herself becoming sucked into the system of ethnic categorization, for Jean no such option has ever, in the Lebanese context, been available. The complicated warp and woof of her personal reference groups has precluded it. Jean also actively resists the idea of closed sectarian identities in strong and wrenchingly effective language:
Although I am, by this definition at least, a Christian, I think of Islam as part—a large part—of my heritage and revere it as such. … I am the child in equal measure of Christianity and Islam, but, to my great discomfort, the marriage made between them in my historical background is threatened. I do not wish to choose between them. Yet the choice is being made for me by elements over which I have no control. … The situation I find myself in is like that of watching the rape of my own past, two legs of one body being forced apart to the eternal shame of victim and violator.
Is there something special about women, and our lives, that gives us a special, recognizable set of attitudes towards and insights into war? For years, I thought not. I was a successful war correspondent, after all; I got my stories on the front pages of major newspapers when I was only twenty-three. I reveled in proving myself as good as (better than!) my colleagues who were men. I hated signs of what I considered squeamishness in myself. I felt embarrassed in 1976 when, being taken by Falangist militia guides around Tel al-Zaatar, a Palestinian refugee camp that the Falangists had just the day before captured, I found I could take in every detail of the tour, the bodies squished this way and that by the trucks of Falangist looters, the body of a pregnant mother with her belly split terrifyingly, casually, open, and so on, until—when our Falangist guides invited us into a basement where they promised “lots more bodies”—I found I could not go on.
So there I sat. In a little dusty courtyard in the middle of that stinking, dried-out wasteland. In the strangely reassuring company of three crumpled bodies of tiny supplicating old people. And I pondered the words with which Falangist military boss Bashir Gemayel had prefaced our tour: “I am proud of what you are going to see there.”
Like that. No attempt to invoke the thin pretense with which I have heard other commanders respond to rumors of atrocity: The heat of the battle … a few excesses … dealt with promptly by commanders on the spot. … Bla bla, perhaps, but at least, a recognition that these things should not be crowed about, should be prevented or kept hidden, are acts deserving of shame.
Heat of battle / animals in heat / killing and pornography.
But here I was. The tour carefully arranged. The declaration pridefully asserted. And I knew that words could never, in their standard journalistic arrangement, adequately “cover” this “story.”
(Within six years, U.S. diplomats were trumpeting pudgy Bashir as their great white hope for the healing of Lebanon. In 1982, with U.S. and Israeli backing, he was elected president of Lebanon. Before he could be inaugurated, he was assassinated. His followers, well trained, immediately carried out another, equally horrific series of atrocities in the camps at Sabra and Shatila. No one can claim this was unexpected. Our press coverage from 1976 did at least accurately convey the facts, if not the full moral import, of the event.)
In 1980, at the start of another war, my husband at the time was covering the Iranian front, and I was covering the Iraqi front. Our two preschoolers were with the nanny in Beirut. Came a telex: “There is fighting in your neighborhood, and one of the militias has put a sniper on the roof of your building.” Did I stay on in Iraq, where the “story” was excellent? No, I didn't. Could I cover the story in Beirut, where the politics were intriguing? No, I couldn't. All I could think of as I raced back across the desert to Beirut was an image of my beautiful children, held up bleeding, dead, as I had seen so many other children taken from bombed-out buildings.
Nowadays, I consider such an attitude towards the horror of war to be authentic, and relevant. It is an important part of the human experience. It was not a part that fit into the standard conventions of journalism of that day—or of our present day. It is an attitude that women have more frequently than men, given our roles as nurturers. Men sometimes have it, too, I know. But none of us is heard: the hegemony that (male) power-based thinking exercises over the political echelon seeps into nearly every corner of the public discourse, forcing women who want to participate to do so on those terms. For some years now, I have been a member of both the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and an American-based networking group called Women in International Security. Most of the talented, ambitious women in these groups shy away from any discussion of whether women have a special attitude towards war. Their role models are Jeane Kirkpatrick or Margaret Thatcher: women who have spectacularly made it in a male-ordered world.
But I think it would be good to engage our tea party guests in a serious discussion of whether women have a special, and perhaps especially constructive, attitude towards violence and war. It's an important discussion, one that has particular relevance in this era of wars against civilians—and at this point, when the United States may become sucked into violence in the Balkans, as is already happening in Somalia. Let these two wonderfully wise women from Lebanon and Croatia help us further the discussion.
Partly, it is these women's ability to operate within both the public and the private worlds, and to see and muse upon the connections between them, that gives their writing its particular attitude and effectiveness. Jean attended school in very Church of England schools in Cairo, in the fifties. So she is probably familiar with the English tea-time custom of eating the piece of plain buttered bread before moving on to the jams, the jellies, the cakes, fruit breads, or scones. At our tea party, the conversation would probably keep threatening to run away with us; the chirping of Minton cups being replaced on their saucers would die away, the tea remain half-drunk, morsels of cake left uneaten on the plates—while Jean and Slavenka trade their impressions of the dualisms of war.
Slavenka writes with exasperation of the impossibility, when dining with admirers at the Harvard Club in Cambridge, of conveying to them the complexities of the Balkan situation. She then imagines the following scene, which draws its power from the cool precision of its domestic detail:
I can easily imagine the face of a Bush, a Kohl or a Major, at first eagerly paying attention to the report given by an expert consultant who comes from this part of the world over the plate of clear bouillon and then perhaps some light plain-cooked white fish, only to shake his head wearily at the end of the dinner, lifting a silver spoon of slightly quivering creme caramel, admitting that he cannot understand, not fully, that madness, the Balkan nightmare.
Jean writes of her war that,
It seemed simple at first, and limited, but gradually grew in complexity to encompass every aspect of life and thought, even as it grew geographically and in intensity. Expanding ripples of conflicts in a lake of violence caused parallel ripples in my own existence, and sent me, reeling, fragmented portions of consciousness.
Gradually, I … found myself overcome by the effort to manage both the inner and outer battles. Almost every aspect of the war I had fought out in my own heart. Whenever I heard the argument of one side expounded, I could immediately anticipate the other; and one without the other would seem simplistic, false. I could therefore accept and reject simultaneously all the arguments of the war, while at the same time categorically rejecting the war itself.
The connections between the public and private worlds are not the only connections that these women are able to help us see. Another kind of connection, particularly relevant for the era we have entered, is that between different cultures. Both, of course, are represented here in languages that are not their native tongues: How privileged we English speakers are, to have these writers communicate with us (and so beautifully!) in our own language. But the most important cultural divide they bridge, as in Slavenka's introductory essay on the Harvard Club, is that between cultures torn by war and those that do not know how blessed they are with peace.
In December 1991, Slavenka once again left Zagreb, this time for Paris:
I walked down brightly lit streets … and I could hardly feel my own weight. It seemed to me I was almost floating, not touching the pavement, not touching reality; as if between me and Paris there stretched an invisible wire fence through which I could see everything but touch and taste nothing—the wire that could not be removed from my field of vision and that kept me imprisoned in the world from which I had just arrived. … In a Europe ablaze with bright lights getting ready for Christmas I was separated from Paris by a thin line of blood: that and the fact that I could see it, while Paris stubbornly refused to.
While Slavenka rails especially against a Europe that has turned its back on the Balkans, Jean reserves her special anger for the arms dealers of the world:
I ponder, for the ten thousandth time since this damnable war began, on the happiness of the manufacturers and salesmen of arms and ammunition. Every roar, whistle, and crash translates itself in my mind to the sound of a cash register, the tinkle of champagne glasses, and the hum of conversation at a very expensive restaurant somewhere. The glisten of shrapnel, the smoke billowing out of someone's ruined home, the rumble of the big guns, are all echoed in my imagination as the glitter of jewelry, the smoke of cigars lazily puffed out of appreciative lips, and the rolling of drums for a hip-swinging, carefree dance. …
In addition to their ability to make sense of, and connections between, two or more different worlds, what marks these two writers as particularly female is the way they experience war as mothers. (Perhaps, too, their writing gains extra poignancy from their special concern as mothers of “mixed-parentage” children.)
Some of Jean's most anguished writing deals with the conflict she experienced when the Israeli army cast a deadly noose of siege around West Beirut. Should she defy the attackers by staying in her own home, as every fiber of her cried out to do? Or should she give in to the urgings of her husband, Samir, echoed within the parental part of herself, and take her sons out of the besieged portion of the city to safety?
My husband insisted. Like so many Lebanese, he had learned the lesson of Palestine, and so he would stay; but for the safety of our children, I must take them and go. I argued; I pleaded; I fought; but he prevailed. Would I, he had shouted, would I take the responsibility if our children were burned like those we had seen on television the night before? The sight of those little burned bodies had made him vomit. I had not had the courage even to look at them.
I could not find a counterargument. “You take them; I'll stay,” I had tried feebly. I had no right to condemn the children. I felt shame, humiliation, rage, as I packed in the dark. … My anger was a wheel with a hundred spokes. …
Jean took her sons out of the siege, and waited with them in a friend's house in the hills nearby. The agony of being outside the tortured city was intolerable; and when her husband later found a way to come out and join her for a few days' visit, he learned firsthand how hard her situation was. The three boys—the youngest was eleven—were eager to return. So, like many others who had previously fled, the whole family walked back into their besieged hometown.
Jean's descriptions of the psychology of a city under siege and constant bombardment from land, sea, and air should be required reading for all politicians whose military are urging this “solution” to any problem:
All of my previous hesitancy evaporated: Here was no doubt at all. This was one battle in which I felt I could unquestioningly take sides. All the criticisms that I had of the PLO's conduct in Lebanon—and there were many—receded, for it fought directly and gallantly, against the overwhelming force of the Israelis. Such courage as I possessed, such imagination, such idealism, such historical sense were all mobilized, focused on the necessity of resistance, which became to me the most meaningful political act of my life.
But the siege, and the daily, deadly bombardments carried on for weeks and weeks. They brought Jean to an even more terrifying view of her parental responsibilities:
Eventually, exhaustion filtered insidiously through the stoicism. I remember the haggard look on every face, the circles under the eyes, the weight everyone lost. We were the living among the dead and the dying, never knowing when we would be called to join their ranks, and so we took on the look of the dead. … The death machines worked; hardly anything else did. I remember raw, wordless fear, actual terror, gnawing at the bravest people, weakening them. And watching the children: my young son taking my hand and placing it over his pounding heart to show me; his thirteen-year-old brother sitting very still, very quietly, but very close to me, whispering on August 4, “Mummy, we're going to die today; for sure, we're going to die.”
A few days later, she once again put her parenting self first, and, shortly before the mid-August ceasefire finally took effect, she took the boys out of the city.
By the time Slavenka started writing the essays in this collection, in April 1991, her daughter, Rujana, was, by contrast to Jean's boys, just about grown up. In summer 1991, Rujana left Zagreb to go visit Slavenka's ex-husband in Canada, and she only reappeared in Zagreb the following spring. Slavenka thanks God that she has no sons. “To have a son in wartime is the worst curse that can befall a mother,” she wrote to her daughter in April 1992. (This was before most of us learned what some Serbian fighters were doing to Bosnian daughters in their “cleansing” campaign.)
Because she is a mother and a gifted writer, Slavenka has a sympathetic imagination that enables her to imagine that any of the young men waging this war might have been her son. Here is more of her reaction to nineteen-year-old Ivan, the survivor from Vukovar:
He could be my son, he is four years younger than my daughter, I thought, again disturbed by his youth, and looked down at my hands, at the floor. …
While I watch him light his cigarette with a resolute gesture, slightly frowning as if trying to look older, I again feel horror pierce me like a cold blade: really, what if this were my own son? What would I tell him—not today at this table when the war is almost behind us, but in the early summer of 1991 in Vukovar? What would I have done, if one day he came to me and simply said, “Mama, I'm going”? Of course, I wouldn't ask where he was going, that would have been clear by then, it could mean only one thing, going to fight in the war. I wouldn't even be surprised, perhaps I would have expected it. … But I would nevertheless tell him not to go, because this is not his war. … Forget it, I'd say, no idea is worth fighting for. But it's not an idea that this is all about, he'd say, I don't give a damn about ideas, about the state, about independence or democracy. They're killing my friends, they're killing them like dogs in the street and then dogs eat them because we can't get to them to bury them. …
The dialogue that follows is a quietly explosive master text of moral philosophy. But if we were discussing this issue of “what is war”—for mothers, for anybody—at our tea party, I would hope that the guests had already read, as well, the next essay in Slavenka's collection, “What Ivan Said.” Ivan, asked to help load a pile of corpses onto a truck: “I couldn't do it, I just stood by. As soon as I got there, I began to vomit. People, dead people, rotting, decaying, flies coming out of their mouths. …” Ivan, watching his friends beat a local Serb to death. Ivan, killing a man for the first time, close up. Ivan, deciding with his friend not to kill two advancing Serbian soldiers because they were conscripts, not volunteers:
One of them almost shot my brother, then my brother returned fire and shot him. The other one threw himself on the ground. … When he gave himself up, we saw he was really just a kid. … We felt sorry for him, he was born in 1972, like me.
This is powerful stuff, as journalism and also in the context of the greater human story. I believe that Slavenka's ability, as a mother and as a writer, to reach out to Ivan in the full dimension of his humanity was an essential ingredient in her success in getting this story. When I was in Beirut, I interviewed several young fighters from different sides of the war. But I was still fairly young, myself. I was speaking to them more from a sense of horror at what it was that they felt they had to do, than from the sense that Slavenka conveys so strongly: of the terrible sadness a mother might feel, on learning that they have done these things.
Another part of these women's testimony speaks to the power of domestic and personal orderliness to restore a larger sense of orderliness to a life turned inside out by crisis and war. I have felt some of this in my own life: there were years of internal and external chaos when my most powerful personal mantra was “When in doubt, fold clothes.” So perhaps, when we need a change of mood at the tea party, we can trade some stories along this general theme.
We need not ask Jean to repeat the story of the tea party amidst chaos that was the exemplar for our own gathering. But as I ask my children to fetch the guests' cups for a refill, we could ask her to recall the day when, in the middle of the Israeli siege, she found her friend S emerging “triumphantly” from the working salon of a resourceful hairdresser. Or she might recall the numerous occasions she refers to in her book when, following yet another hideous series of events, she takes special pains over her appearance. Like this time, in April 1989, after she had spent several nights in the parking-garage-shelter with no electricity:
I woke up at 7:30. It was quiet outside. I showered and dressed, choosing my clothes carefully. I chose a dark blue skirt and a sweater and a white blouse, polished my black shoes, and fixed my hair. In patching up my appearance, in choosing particularly neat and orderly clothes, I felt I was undoing the humiliation of my ratlike state last night.
Slavenka's friend Drazena would probably appreciate that account. Drazena came to Slavenka's house after fleeing from the siege in Sarajevo. Slavenka's daughter, Rujana, insisted that, among the other things they were giving Drazena, it was a good idea to give her a pair of black patent leather high-heeled shoes. At first, Slavenka thought that a daft idea; Drazena would need “sensible” footwear to trek around looking for an apartment and a job. But Rujana stood her ground, and persuaded her mother that having the emotional lift of elegant shoes might be precisely what Drazena needed.
Slavenka recounts this discussion with her usual, most engaging candor. She then develops her theme by musing how easy it is to start judging people by the categories into which they fall (“refugee”) rather than by who they are as persons:
What I am starting to do is to reduce a real, physical individual to an abstract “they”—that is, to a common denominator of refugees, owners of the yellow certificate. From there to second-class citizen—or rather, non-citizen—who owns nothing and has no rights, is only a thin blue line. I can also see how easy it is to slip into this prejudice as into a familiar pair of warm slippers, ready and waiting for me at home. …
Now I think I understand what I couldn't understand before: how it happened that people who lived near German concentration camps didn't do anything, didn't help.
High-heeled shoes, warm slippers: once again, domestic images, and the contrasts between them, are skillfully invoked to convey truths of existential human import.
Slavenka might tell us, too, about the Laura Ashley wallpaper that she had bought at the beginning of July 1991, when the Yugoslav Federal Army dropped the first bombs on Slovenia:
I had been wanting to redecorate my bedroom for ages, but went to buy the paper only after I heard the news about the attack. … I was aware that I was doing it in spite of the war, perhaps as a symbolic gesture of faith in a future when putting up new wallpaper would make sense.
And Jean might counter by explaining, as she did two or three times throughout her book, how important it was to her after times of particular stress to work out her frustrations in house-cleaning. House-cleaning, that is, as the persistent, quiet, and hopeful response to all the militiamen's attempts to sow the chaos and disruption of their form of “cleansing.”
Then Jean might recall the first time her apartment received a direct hit from heavy artillery. The whole family had been waiting out the attack in the underground garage of their building. After it subsided, she went up to check the apartment:
Front door doesn't open. Wrong keys? After a little struggle, lock gives way. I have an impression of total whiteness. Strange, I think to myself, when did Samir have time to cover everything with white sheets? Funny: I don't own enough white sheets to cover everything. …
Realization dawns. Those are not white sheets, but dust. The place is a shambles. Everything is white and broken. Real fear now. This is death. Not something to be read about in the newspapers, but something that has come into my house, that has violated my life, my territory, my being. …
But Jean resolved that she would stay in Beirut. That was March 1976. She stayed through another eight months of intense internal fighting that year; then through five years of continued sporadic fighting, some of it very violent. (I left Beirut with my children in early 1981.) She stayed through most of the Israeli siege of 1982, then through the chaotic years of internal warfare that followed. In the last dated entry in her book, in February 1990, she recorded that her apartment had received another direct hit.
I believe that Jean is still in Beirut. In spring 1990, she wrote:
Time has been wasted; years have passed; loneliness and emptiness have encroached. I have had my youth ushered into middle age by war. My children's—all the children's—childhood was lived in its shadow. My youngest son was four when the war began; now he is in university.
Women's lives can be described as having their own rhythms, with each initiation into a new stage being marked by its own rituals and meaning. First menstruation, first romantic love, marriage, first intercourse, first childbirth; the nursing and raising of children, and sending them off into the world; developments in the world of friends, the maturing of a marriage, the passing of older generations. The rhythm of these events (which may not always happen in the same order) has in our time been overlaid with other acts of transition: graduations from various stages of education; first full-time job, then promotions or other changes in our careers; moves from one community to another; perhaps a divorce. As for war, in the past it was often present in women's lives, against the background of the traditional transitions. But generally, in the past, women's experience of war was vicarious, mediated through either their male family members or its general impact on their communities.
In this century, women and children in settled civilian communities have become the direct targets of war, however far they might be from a battlefront: from the first tentative forays into aerial bombardment of cities in the First World War, to the development of a whole doctrine, “counter-value targeting,” that held massed civilian populations to be a plausible target in the “massive retaliation” of nuclear deterrence. What has happened, is happening, to women and families in Beirut, Croatia, and Bosnia, is just a simple extension of this thinking.
So perhaps we can start to look at women's lives in new ways, constructing the dimensions of our experience not just on the basis of how many children we have, or the stage we've reached on the job ladder, but also by examining our lives through the lens of war. In this context, Jean has to emerge the veteran. Not just in surviving the eighteen years of Beirut's war, but in the intensity of some of those experiences, and the thoughtful, articulate way in which her writing tries to make sense of them, mark this woman as one who can give wisdom to us all.
Those who are outside looking in see only the war. For us, there are people, friends, life, activity, production, commitments, a profound intensity of meaning. …
Most important of all, there has been a sense of community so powerful as to compensate for the difficulties of life. I have felt, over the years, in spite of the depression, the fear, and the doubts, a sense of privilege at having shared this impossible fragment of history with so many good people. We have looked evil in the face; we have spoken to wicked men; we have asked ourselves the questions that most people are spared; and we have understood that the lines between goodness and evil are sometimes broad and clear, sometimes thin and invisible. We have done these things together.
We have understood our own and each other's limitations in a way that has made us all more tolerant of humanity. There are, for instance, no more illusions left in any of us about bravery and stoicism, about who can stand how much and for how long. We have seen each other crack under the pressure of events, each one in his own way, each one at his own time and for his own reason; we have seen each other lose dignity, seen each other shake in humiliating fear. We used to laugh at these weaknesses but no longer do so. We have seen ourselves and each other under a microscope for years, naked blobs of humanity on glass slides scrutinized through the merciless lens of history, and nothing any of us does surprises the rest anymore. We understand and accept our own and our friends' limitations.
Some of the profoundest insights that Jean draws from her experience of war are related to her gathering renunciation of violence:
Familiarity, they say, breeds contempt. Familiarity with violence breeds contempt—for what? People? Life? Nature? Goodness? Beauty? Prayer? God himself? For me, familiarity with violence has bred contempt for violence, and only for that, for I have seen what it has accomplished and it is nothing to be proud of. …
In the name of causes come the scream of children, the wails of mothers, the smoke of a burned land. In the name of humanity comes the merciless inhumanity of air raids, tanks, machine guns, and throats slit from ear to ear gushing blood.
And in the midst of this orgy of violence, this dance of death, this saturnalia of killing, what is there to do but refuse it? Put it down, this refusal, if you will, to sentimental bourgeois finickiness, and dismiss it with contempt. I have no answer, except to say that I have seen what I have seen.
Slavenka shares Jean's passion for nonviolence. In July 1991, she wrote a moving essay about the World War II pistol that her father had kept hidden away in a closet at home and showed to his two children only once, hiding from them, along with the pistol, memories of the terror of war that continued to prey on his mind. Then, moving to her present situation, the writer adds:
While I shop for dog food in a store selling hunting equipment, where they also sell guns, an old man comes in offering to sell a lady's pistol for 1000 DM. He puts it down on the counter, small and shiny like a silver toy. All of a sudden, I felt a strong urge to possess it, to buy it, to have it—me, too. Why not, I think, I am alone, defenseless and desperately frightened. My desire lasts only a second, but I realize that in that moment the jaws of war have finally closed around my fragile life. … Like my father's, my life is now breaking in two.
And even Jean, while pronouncing a nonviolent manifesto, does so with huge empathy for those who are not able to. In the passage about her attitude towards those who defended Beirut in 1982, she expressed clear support for people using forceful means to defend their home-town. And she even seriously questioned whether, under each and every circumstance like those she has seen, she would abstain from acts of personal cruelty:
What do all these acts of unimaginable cruelty mean? … I want to know whether I can escape the apparently inescapable conclusion that it is in the nature of the beast, that any of us could do it, that I could do it. Could I, if pushed far enough, yet do it?
I have not seen my baby's body mangled in the dust or my fiancee's raped body lying bloody in the street, legs wide apart and eyes blank. I have not seen my father dishonored in death or my mother's nakedness exposed to the world. I have not seen my beautiful, strong, young husband reduced to unidentifiable bits of flesh. … And since I haven't, I no longer dare say that I would not do such cruel things as have been done.
Besides, is there a difference between killing people by pressing a button as you soar through the sky and killing people while you see terror on their faces?
Slavenka might reply to this question that yes, from the point of view of the killer, there is a difference: in her interview with Ivan, he spells out how much harder it is to kill someone when you can see his face. But both women would probably agree that, from the point of view of the victims and their survivors, there probably isn't any difference at all.
The atmosphere at our tea party has become quite serious. We are talking, after all, about questions at the core of human existence and purpose. Jean might bring some of her points home, for the Americans present, by expanding her reflection on what she describes as the “generalized rage” of the young men with guns. Perhaps, she writes, they wield them, “to vent a bottomless anger with a world that has done them no good and, when they shoot, aim at their own dissatisfaction as much as at any more precise target.”
In her introductory essay, this thoughtful, experienced survivor of the war zone warns:
Outsiders look at Beirut from a wary distance, as though it had nothing to do with them; as though, through a protective glass partition, they were watching with immunity a patient thrash about in mortal agony, suffering a ghastly virus contracted in forbidden and faraway places. They speak of Beirut as if it were an aberration of the human experience: It is not. Beirut was a city like any other and its people were a people like any other. What happened here could, I think, happen anywhere.
So these women—whose depth of experience of war and breadth of sympathetic imagination have allowed them to conclude that there are circumstances under which anyone, even you or I, dear reader, might submit to the brand of a confining, imposed identity, and that there are circumstances under which anyone, even you or I, might commit atrocities—are also telling us that there are circumstances under which any societies, even yours and mine, might fall apart. That's a serious thought to ponder. Not just in Croatia, Mogadishu, or Tadjikstan. But here in Washington D.C., too.
Come to think of it, never mind Bill Clinton. We could just have Hillary at the tea party. And have a far-reaching discussion between women about society, evil, social breakdown—and the wars, and threats of wars, in all of our cities.
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