No more heroes any more No more heroes any more...
Whatever happened to all the heroes? All the Shakespearoes? They watched their Rome burn
The Strangles
My childhood was full of stories about heroes, mostly dead ones. Like in all socialist countries of that time, the values system was simply created in that way. The shadows of death heroes were all around us. We learned about bloody stories of their sacrifices every day at school, we sang together about them, we walked through streets named by them, we learned verses about them by heart, and on special days we brought flowers to their monuments and graves. That was a case of overkill - endless repetition which devalued every value. Nevertheless, somewhere deep in our children’s hearts we felt a kind of respect for all those who had fallen for our freedom, happiness, brotherhood and unity and the bright future for all our nations. Now, a new story has emerged. After new wars and new “revolutions”, most of their names have already been forgotten. The streets in most Balkans cities have changed their names one more time.
In the late 1970s I studied comparative literature and philosophy at University of Sarajevo. We missed the revolution of ’68 as we were still children then. It wasn’t common knowledge, but there were big demonstrations in Sarajevo at that time. As a nine-year-old child I heard students walking down my street toward the city center, calling on the workers to join them. The workers never came. Instead, people said, people’s militia came and the streets dawned in the morning all red from students’ blood. Despite of all that, no news came out about the Sarajevo demonstrations. That subject was a kind of taboo and the silence lasted for some twenty years, as if nothing ever happened. But, in Belgrade, some prominent party members visited rebel students the same day. President Tito addressed the students on national TV, using all of his charisma and charm to resolve all problems, like a good father with his wicked children. No one was put in jail. The system later rewarded most of the student leaders with good positions in society, culture and politics.
Ten years later we had nothing else to do other than to invest all our creative energy in some kind of sublimed, aesthetically covered, rebellion – through rock and roll, poetry, theater, arts and humor. Not one of us wanted to be a hero; even the trend of the times was pretty anti-heroic.
By force of circumstance, we got onto a world-wide, open stage with all our efforts as a part of something which was known as the spiritual (or cultural) resistance of Sarajevo during the war and the siege of the city in early 1990s. At that time, being rebellious was not a question of some romantic need, but a simple need to survive the enormous destruction of all values, material and spiritual. In our youth we thought that we’d grow up as a spoilt generation. We believed in a slow evolution of society, that the system will simply die by a kind of natural death and that democratization will be a logical and dialectical consequence. But at once, we found ourselves in a middle of a historical cruelty, recognizing that for the entire time we were merely a small intellectual minority, too weak to resist nationalistic brutality and awaken atavism.
But let’s go back to my student times, when myths were still in books and history was still far away from us. I like to remember those times when ancient gods, old philosophers, Shakespearean characters, Latin poets, middle-age legends, romantics and modernists, formalists and surrealist, walked through our lives. The friendships from studies were also something very special. There was a kind of unity in spirituality, sharing the same thirst for cognition, the passion for the unknown. It made all of us feels like a part of some secret sect, in a kind of holly alliance which must last forever.
Aida Buturović was in a study group with me. We met at in classes and became very close friends. She would call me when she has problems with her boyfriend and we’d speak for hours. Aida was also a very good student, probably the best of us. She was good looking and very intelligent, she had great passion for foreign languages and spoke several perfectly. She would translate texts from English, Spanish and French. The last time I saw her was just a few months before the outbreak of the war, in front of the Sarajevo library where she worked. I remember the day when I heard about her death. Communication in Sarajevo during the war was very bad, and not many phones functioned. News, mostly of the worst kind, spread slowly through the city from mouth to mouth. One neighbor came up to me and told me that Aida had been killed a few days before on the crossing close to the Presidency building. I had some spirits: half a beer bottle filled with pure alcohol. Even though all days were really hard, I saved it for hardest one. I took the bottle, drank a bit while red, luminous bullets flew in front of my broken window. I looked at the fires in the night spread all around the city, strong alcohol carved through my soul, I felt wholly empty - “the Nothing self” as some philosophers like to say.
Later, I learned that Aida was killed with single mortar shrapnel directly into back of the head; she was on her way back home from the already burnt library. She had been trying, together with her colleagues and some volunteers, to save what could be saved from the ashes of our national book collection.
Siniša Glavašević came to our faculty from Vukovar. He was bit of a freaky guy, crazy about poetry. He even looked like an old fashioned poet. He dressed like one, he moved like one, he spoke like one and he thought like one. He knew hundreds of poems by heart and he was a very good interpreter, succeeding even to earn some pocket money by working as a professional reciter at a time when poetry was no longer in trend. I used to act in a student theater group and we did some things together. We shared the same passion for arts and the beauty of words, having good fun, sometimes spiced up with a taste for cheap wine and crazy music. After graduation, he went back to Vukovar and I did not hear anything about him for years. In 1994 I went to Vienna, and a mutual friend of ours told me the following: Vukovar was attacked by Serbian forces and flattened to the ground. Siniša worked for a local radio station, and his words, poetry and strength were the last sign of hope for thousands in the bombarded town. He stayed by his microphone until the last moment. When the Serbian army and paratroopers broke in he was taken away and killed immediately. His remains were later found in the Ovčara mass grave. He ended as Federico Garcia Lorca or like Ivan Goran Kovačić. In his last days, he faxed his writings, condensed and very powerful stories, to his friends in Zagreb. They were later published in Croatia, as his first and last book.
Aida died trying to save some books. Siniša wrote a new one by virtue of his death. Today, you could find the name of Aida Buturović connected with Sarajevo and the burnt library. Her name is known in most of the world’s universities, librarians around the world consider Aida as a heroine. She is a cultural heroine and a symbol for new generations of intellectuals.
Children in Croatia learn about Siniša in history classes, and read his stories in their school books. One school in Vukovar is even named after him. He was one of Vukovar’s heroes, a legend in journalism and literature.
And now, how does one consciously feel about his friends who had become heroes, symbols, a part of some bigger myth or legend?
On the one hand, you must be proud of the fact that you shared your life with right people. On the other hand, you know that your friends will never see this world again, and you would like to trade every symbol, myth or ideology for one simple moment of the past when we sang all together in a small club in our university along with The Stranglers’ LP:
Column is originally published in ExPonto Magazine, Amsterdam
