The most massive protests over the failure to adopt the Law on the Unique Master Citizen Number (JMBG) were held June 11, 2013, when thousands of citizens came onto the streets. As the most radical act carried out after the war, these protests were a blockage of the B&H institutions. The protests were characterized by the peaceful gathering of citizens […]
I went to a conference in Bosnia in July and talked with friends in Sarajevo about the social and political situation in the country. During the war, some eighteen years ago, people in Bosnia suffered war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Nationalist politicians leading the neighboring countries of Croatia and Serbia were directly responsible for these war crimes, crimes […]
When the Vilić brothers married off their sister, They sacrificed three hundred sheep, Built three new mausoleums, Circumcised three hundred young boys, That their sister might cross the mountain alive and well. When their sister had crossed over the mountain alive and well, She crossed over the mountain, and went into the field, A freezing rain mixed with sleet struck […]
When the famous 1985 New York Times Book Review polemic between Milan Kundera and Joseph Brodsky (the latter, a poet; the former, a novelist—but I like them both more as essayists) came again into my hands after several years, I let myself be seduced by the text out of habit, enchanted by the beauty of the authors’ sentences—until I eventually […]
The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia has acquitted on appeal Momcilo Perisic, former Chief of Staff of the Army of Yugoslavia (VJ), who had previously been sentenced to 27 years in prison for war-crimes in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina. He was one of only six officials from Serbia-Montenegro ever indicted by the ICTY for war-crimes in Bosnia. He was […]
Clothesline: Bosnia-Herzegovina features interviews with women in Mostar who contributed to the Global Clothesline Project. The Clothesline Project, started as a grass-roots movement in Cape Cod, U.S.A. in the early 1990s, invites women to construct T-shirts that express the violence they have suffered and the healing they are experiencing. Clothesline: Bosnia-Herzegovina continues this work and features interviews conducted with women […]
When he’s, usually after midnight, returning home, the cold concrete of the staircase is waiting for him, and he, such as he is, cannot control the tidal wave of ontology: what is when what is he’s what is returning what is home what is what …? In front of the entrance, he starts shaking empirically and sees himself as Ulysses […]
In the Liberation obituaries I find that F. has died. She was the prettiest girl at the Sarajevo Philosophy Faculty, Class of 1974. My roommate in the student dorm Drank day and night because of her, but she once told me “I like you better.” There was no love between us. I caressed her once on a shaded bench on […]
“Hello?” Saša answered. “Hello, it’s Adin, hello . . .” From the phone booth, I raised my voice over the clattering of a passing streetcar. “Adin, man! You’re alive? Alive, damm, you’re alive! Where are you calling from?” “From Zagreb.” “Yeah, I can hear you’re in Zagreb. How did you get out? Man, I thought you were dead. You went […]
Autumn Has Come, My Quince, Early Autumn Autumn has come, my quince,* early autumn, From autumn to autumn, The whole village is already married off, My quince, run to me, To your dear friend… Every night, my quince, every day, I count the hours, I think of you! My quince, I am dying for you! Be mine, my treasure! Don’t […]
The borders of great civilizations, as we know from the ‘new historians,’ are drawn by the zones of the major agricultural cultures – of the olive and the grapevine… Bosnian everyday culture is characterized by…. the plum. Ivan Lovrenović When Simo is at work, I always watch Sarajevo TV. Well, it’s not called Sarajevo TV any longer, rather some sort […]
In a study of families and marriage practices carried out before World War II in what was called the Kingdom of Yugoslavia at that time, Vera Stein Erlich described a distinctive feature of marriage in Bosnia. She said that “In patriarchal regions [referring to Montenegro, Macedonia, and Serbia] the bride was chosen almost exclusively and autonomously by the parents of […]
The evening after the funeral, a pigeon descended for the first time on the window, carried by the noiseless fan of spread wings. At first sight it was ordinary, a grey pigeon with unsymmetrically painted stains of white and blue feathers. He didn’t coo, but with a lazy step he balanced his weight like a tired acrobat on his last […]
K&T Meats is my favorite butcher shop on Broadway, in Astoria. It resembles me of those in Vitez, Maglai, and other small Bosnian towns, except this one’s jointly owned by six or seven immigrants—Greeks and Romanians—who, apart from English, speak a meat-market hash of all the Balkan languages, even Hungarian, since their customers’ meat recipes, products, and foods come from […]
The poetry collection Hyperborea, by our longstanding contributor Milorad Pejić, was awarded a newly established prize “Slovo Makovo – Mak Dizdar” for the best poetic work published last year in the Bosnian, Montenegrin, Croatian, and Serbian language. The Prize was established at the initiative of Dr. Alija Behmen, Mayor of the City of Sarajevo, and was a result of the […]
AWARD In the courtyard of the National Library, workers are loading a truck filled to the brim with obsolete books, sentenced to death by combustion in the city’s heating plant in order to free shelf space for new popular items. The truck moves and a few lighter copies drop onto the sidewalk. A thin one with a maroon paperback cover […]
frankenstorm’s trick-or-treating forcing a delicate village maiden into split-second decisions – what kind of shoes are appropriate for the 10 block blackout venture to the nearest smart phone charging outpost oh my gosh my atm card doesn’t work either it’s like it’s… what was the name of that movie?
The end of the world is happening every day, every evening and morning The four riders of the apocalypse are thundering over our heads. Do you hear them? Gliding from Bosnia to Rwanda, Afghanistan, they gallop to Iraq and Libya The first horseman, on a white horse, the conqueror, seduces people, drives them mad The second rider is on a […]
After Tin Ujević’s Fisharmonika No notebooks map my soul. Accordion Strains and fingering capture the terrain. In country lanes membranous bats drop Like cataracts. All dream? Does dreaming stop? Earth sprouts a wig. That moon’s a myth From yellowed picture-postcards I’m besotted with. We went by road, the long route, just to find— Too late—it looped to all we’d left […]
All who stroll by the popular seaside promenade known as Šetnica, located not far from Trpnj on the peninsula Peljesac in Croatia, have the opportunity to be reminded of all the misfortunes and tragedy of the previous war. Namely, on one of the stone boulders by the promenade almost every year from 1976 to 1990 is written next to the […]