Waiting, Part One of a Sarajevo Novel
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Waiting, Part One of a Sarajevo Novel The Figure of the Siege and the Refugee in a Selection of Twentieth-Century Siege-Exile Literature Priscilla Morris PhD in Creative and Critical Writing University of East Anglia School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing January, 2014 ‘This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution.’ ABSTRACT The Painter of Bridges is a hybrid siege-exile novel about a landscape painter, Zora Buka, who loses her life’s work in a fire during the siege of Sarajevo. Part One, presented in the creative paper, is set in Sarajevo and depicts Zora’s experience of the first ten months of the siege. Part Two is set in England: Zora recollects her escape from Sarajevo, and waits for her asylum claim to be accepted. The novel is therefore concerned with portraying the exceptional states of life under siege and of being a refugee. The critical paper shares these concerns and follows the movement of the novel from siege to exile. Beginning with a discussion of the siege in post-war literature, the critical section then looks at the double figure of the siege in Camus’s The Plague, before turning to themes of siege and exile in Susan Sontag’s 1993 Sarajevo production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. It finally examines Slavenka Drakulić’s representation of the refugee in her Bosnian war novel, As If I Am Not There. The critical paper thus offers close readings of two war novels and a wartime theatrical production. These texts are seen as ‘works of exception’ which illuminate the liminal spaces that Giorgio Agamben terms ‘zones of indistinction’. The readings of The Plague and Waiting for Godot draw on Agamben's theory of modern life to analyse their depictions of the refugee and the state of exception. Postcolonial questions about the representation of others, meanwhile, are addressed in the second reading of The Plague, where, going against much postcolonial criticism, it is argued a hidden allegory of anticolonial uprising is at work, and again in As If I Am Not There, where the uprooted, violated protagonist is found to have an ethically and artistically flawed doubled consciousness. !2 CONTENTS Creative Paper: Waiting, Part One of a Sarajevo Novel Chapters One to Twelve 7 Afterword: The Siege of Sarajevo; Background to the Novel 148 Critical Paper: The Figure of the Siege and the Refugee in a Selection of Twentieth-Century Siege-Exile Literature 1 Introduction 157 The Siege and the Refugee; The Siege in Post-War Literature: i) Characteristics of Siege Novels, ii) Differences from Other Forms of War Writing; Giorgio Agamben, The Plague and Waiting for Godot; Representing the Other 2 Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception, Homo Sacer and the Camp 179 Theory of Modernity; Bare Life; State of Exception; Homo Sacer; The Camp 3 The Double Figure of the Siege in The Plague 194 i) The Plague as Totalitarian Allegory: State of Exception; The Camp in The Plague ii) Hidden Allegory of Anticolonial Uprising: Re-reading Postcolonial Criticism 4 Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo 222 Sontag’s Production; Sontag’s Adaptation; Waiting for Godot as Space of Exception 5 The Strange Doubled Consciousness of As If I Am Not There 241 Strange Doubled Consciousness; Representing the Women’s Collective Experience through S.; Strange Doubleness of Ending; Migrant Text 6 Conclusion 265 Critical Afterword: The Influence of the Primary Texts on the Novel 268 Appendix 1: The Beljkašić’s Asylum Application (Abridged) 271 Appendix 2: The Painter of Bridges Sources 274 References 275 !3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank my supervisors Trezza Azzopardi, Dr Ross Wilson and Dr Clare Connors, my examiners Dr Stephen Benson and Professor Aminatta Forna, and all of those in Sarajevo and England who have shared their experience of the war with me, in particular, Dobri, Gordana, Dragana, Simon, Drago, Želka, Ana, Buba, Zoran, Almasa and Željo. Thanks also to Anna Metcalfe and Gavin McCrea, and, of course, my mother, my father, Sanja and Ana. !4 BOSNIAN/SERBIAN/CROATIAN PRONUNCIATION c ts as in cats ć tch as in itch č ch, a little softer, as in chair đ; dž j as in journey j y as in Yugoslavia š sh as in shadow ž as in treasure, television !5 CREATIVE PAPER Waiting Part One of The Painter of Bridges, a Sarajevo Novel !6 One A trickle of grey light leaks from where a corner of bin bag is flapping loose over the glassless window. It spills down the living room wall, throwing shadows which deepen the cracks into canyons for a moment, and then all is black again. Her flat is blinking. The slapping of the plastic against the window frame is like the wind in the trees or the waves on the shore. The draught that slips in, rolling down off the mountains, is glacial. Zora looks down at her hands which are curled into claws. She is sitting on a stool near the stove. A book is on her lap. The fire is nearly out – ashy embers, that is all. She shivers and remembers. Picks up the book with numb hands and opens the red paperboard cover, preparing herself to tear out the pages. Again, she stops. The pages are printed with the stories they have read to each other, voices from other times and other places blowing like warm winds into cold, dark nights like these. It is their last book. The one he gave to her. With stiff fingers, she tears into it. She feels sick, cannibalistic. She is holding a wad of ripped tales in her hands and feels as if she has torn a clump of hair and scalp from a sleeping child. Her flat is black and silent. She puts the sheaf of stories into the stove and prods it with a poker. A red ribbon unfurls along the edges of the pages, small coughs of smoke spluttering into the room. A circle of heat grows around the stove and, shivering, Zora pulls her stool closer. Her suitcase is next to the door. She is waiting for someone to knock. Then, she will leave. She would normally be lying close to him at this time, the still time before dawn, when there is no gunfire, no explosions, just their stomachs ticking, side !7 CREATIVE: One by side, in emptiness. They have moved closer and closer together on the mattress they share on the floor, close enough to feel a small pocket of warmth grow between them, but never too close. Maybe there was the once, the twice – she cannot think. But now he has gone. And the other, too. Swallowed by the void. Quite empty her apartment now, dark and cold as the grave. Earlier, she packed in a frenzy. Blindly grabbing at things, pushing them into her battered, black suitcase. What did she pack? She hardly knows. Remembers objects in her fingers but is not sure if they went into the case or if they were part of a nightmare, a hallucination brought on by the shock and the cold and the lack of food. A clutch of gold watches winding round her fingers like serpents. Matchboxes in cheerful colours. Clothes, unwashed and crumpled – his clothes too, though why she has packed those, she does not know. Scrolls of stiff, painted paper and card. She had found some loose tobacco deep in the pockets of her mother’s fur – the one she had worn at the start, last spring, before superstitious fear had stopped her from putting it on. To ward off moths, she supposed. Zora had laughed till she cried then. How the men would have liked to have found that tobacco! Had she packed candles too? But what a fool! She will hardly need candles anymore when she leaves. There will be light and warmth over there, in England. Flames dance on the pages in the stove. In just a day or two, she will be able to speak to her husband and her daughter again on the phone. She cannot believe it. Nine months of nothing: of the retreat of the outside world so that it seems that nothing exists beyond the circle of mountains but blackness – and now she is leaving. Just like that. And all this – him, the sleeping close, the boy, and everything they have been through – is it all just to stop? She adds more of the book to the stove. To the right on the wall, notches in crayon keep a tally of the days. Beneath are a child’s drawings of trees, a lake, !8 CREATIVE: One mountains and the sky, meadows of pink, yellow and purple flowers in the foreground. On the opposite wall, deeply fissured from where the shell hit the flat next door, Zora and the girl have painted an apple tree, whose branches twist and curve with the cracks. That was back in the summer, when the apartment, shattered windows already blackened with bin bags, roasted in the heat like a blistering aubergine. Before the fire, too. The fire which severed time in half for Zora, and which is still all that she thinks of when her mind slips back. Now, in January, the thermometer has oscillated between minus fifteen and minus twenty Celsius for the past month. The city, unheated, is slowly freezing to death.