Normality Effect

The wounds are still raw and there is  enormous corruption everywhere but there is a sustained peace, even normality – or rather what we have come to call “a Normality Effect”: this is something we experienced as well in Tel Aviv, and even in our short visit to Ramallah. In all these places there is an elaborate veneer of normality, despite the awareness of all the tensions and threats that could turn normal life into hellish war overnight. In Mostar, there are physical reminders of brutality everywhere, so the juxtaposition of a normal life with the memories of the war attain a particular surreal level. One building, for example, is completely pockmarked and half destroyed by shells, yet two of its floors have been renovated and are inhabited, while the middle floor remains a wreck, its Serbian owners having fled the city, and who will probably return someday, when the property values have risen again, and then sell the place.

We encountered the immediacy and intensity of all the feelings that are alive in the region as soon as we arrived in Mostar and met up with  Amir  Galijasevic, the guide  recommended to us by the Sarajevo Center for Contemporary Art.

Amir’s life story in itself would merit a whole chapter in this blog – how he was sent away from Sarajevo as a teenager to Germany during the war, how he became a refugee and then a student in Switzerland, and finally how he decided to come back to Bosnia and make a life for himself in his homeland.  Today he is a kind of jack-of-all-trades, working as a guide for foreign visitors, doing translations, and following his passion of producing Dub music and promoting live concerts. We hit it off right away and we knew that we would be in good hands in our stay here.

We took a brief walking tour of the city, with its charming Ottoman old town and the famous bridge that was brutally destroyed by Croatian forces during the war, and we learned that in fact Mostar is a divided town, with an invisible demarcation line between the Croatian Catholic side and the Bosnian Muslim side, and that very little is done in order to create more interaction between the two sides, who prefer to live side by side but ignoring each other as much as possible. Because of this division, the town has been without a Mayor for the past 8 months!

Amir took us to visit a cultural youth center, run by a group of enlightened creative people, including his friend Marija Kolobaric – a Croat who actually chooses to live in the Muslim side of town. This center is the only place where Croat and Bosniak youth can meet, and it is actually  the only place where movies can be seen in the city, since the only proper movie theater was destroyed in the war and has not been rebuilt yet.

Speaking with Marija we understood the particular quandary of artists and intellectuals in BiH, who are committed to the rebirth of their countries cultural institutions and heritage after the total collapse brought about by the war. They are doing this with very little support of the government or of foreign organizations, since culture is deemed irrelevant in the face of all the other problems that the country has to deal with. Both Marija and Amir complained of how the country is mired in apathy and cynicism, and part of that attitude can be blamed on a lack of cultural pride or the sense that it is possible to build a better society from the ashes of the war.

Later on we were taken to a posh terrace lounge, where a crowd of hipsters where enthusiastically rocking to a live band from Belgrade –S.A.R.S. who has  a song topping the charts in the region.. It was explained to us that this band was an example of a kind of Anarcho-Pop that was becoming quite popular, and at least in that sense it showed that there is room and a receptive audience for alternative culture.