As If I Am Not There

The arrest and indictment of former Serbian nationalist leader Radavon Karadžić reopens the painful and lingering scars left by the genocidal Bosnian War of the 1990s. The experience of women in war, especially a war with genocidal characteristics, is often lumped into the collective tragic effects war has on civilians, but it is a unique and critical aspect. The suffering of the mothers and daughters left with destroyed families, pushed into camps, or exploited for their sexuality (or all three), is generally overshadowed by the seemingly more dramatic shuffle of armies and state boundaries. Remarkably, women and their bodies are often politicized to serve as the terrain for conquest, ownership, and destruction.



In her 1993 novel, "S.: A Novel About the Balkans," Slavenka Drakulic offers a voice on behalf of women whose lives the Bosnian War irrecoverably changed. She tells the story of S., a young woman from the city living in the country as a teacher who is caught up in a raid by Serbian soldiers. S. is taken to a prison camp, and she soon learns the horror and dehumanization of war as she is kept in the "women's room." There, women's bodies are treated as land, acquisitions to be overtaken and roughly conquered, laid to waste. In this way the Serbs implemented violent rape and sexual humiliation as a war tactic, dehumanizing primarily Muslim and Croatian women and often impregnating them, as if to plant Serbian seed in enemy soil.

Through S.'s experience, Drakulic tells the story of thousands of women who endured the Bosnian War and found no semblance of their previous life when it ended. S. herself is an amalgam of survivors interviewed by Drakulic, her experience is representative of many true horrors lived out by these women. Drakulic writes of S.'s post-camp life, thrust back at her as she is left to grapple with it as a Sweedish refugee. She is pregant.

"Her body lies in the bed inanimate object, an empty bellow or shopping bag. Nothing has changed with her departure from the camp. Her body is still in their power, even more so now. Only now does S. understand that a woman's body never really belongs to the woman. It belongs to others - to the man, the children, the family. And in wartime to the soldiers."

It is a harsh story, harshly written and unsentimental. S.'s anonymity is essential, her story terrifying because she is so much like me, like many of us. She's just a young woman, educated enough and out on her own, exploring and growing at her own pace. With the intervention of war into her life all control is taken from her as she becomes a commodity like so many seized crops, factories, and livestock. Within the space of a year her life is changed forever by insane political forces over which she has no control. "S." portrays the horrifying results of nationalistic sentiment gone exponentially amok from an acute and distressingly accessible angle.

Related:

First Chapter, S
The Prisoner
A Reckoning for the Women Victims of the Bosnian War?
Women's Action - Bosnia-Herzegovina: Mass Rape, Forced Pregnancy, Genocide
Rape and Sexual Abuse of Women in International Law