V E B A H O O D

BiH, 2010 © Velibor Božović

Tuzla, Zvornik, Bratunac, Srebrenica, Dobrun, Visegrad, Gorazde, Cajnice, Medjurjecje, Ustikolina, Josanica & Presjeka in three days. After returning to Sarajevo I had to be reminded it is 2010 rather than 1995.

We were looking for the old cemeteries but everywhere we looked, every conversation we had with eastern Bosnia locals, every thought we had afterwards, reminded us of the new ones.

Sarajevo, 2009 © Velibor Božović

Later this week I am going back to Sarajevo. Every time I go a feeling of a great anticipation overwhelms me. I am leaving home to go home only to come back home.

Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2005 © Velibor Božović

It is snowing outside and it looks just like a perfect poetry day. Here is a poem by Seamus Heaney from his 1966 book Death of a Naturalist:

The Early Purges

I was six when I first saw kittens drown.

Dan Taggart pitched them, ‘the scraggy wee shits’,

Into a bucket; a frail metal sound,

Soft paws scraping like mad. But their tiny din

Was soon soused. They were slung on the snout

Of the pump and the water pumped in.

‘Sure, isn’t it better for them now?’ Dan said.

Like wet gloves they bobbed and shone till he sluiced

Them out on the dunghill, glossy and dead.

Suddenly frightened, for days I sadly hung

Round the yard, watching the three sogged remains

Turn mealy and crisp as old summer dung

Until I forgot them. But the fear came back

When Dan trapped big rats, snared rabbits, shot crows

Or, with a sickening tug, pulled old hens’ necks.

Still, living displaces false sentiments

And now, when shrill pups are prodded to drown,

I just shrug, ‘Bloody pups’. It makes sense:

‘Prevention of cruelty’ talk cuts ice in town

Where they consider death unnatural,

But on well-run farms pests have to be kept down.

Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2009 © Velibor Božović

My latest work (see the preview here), still in progress, shows (or it will attempt to show) the present state of Bosnian medieval cemeteries. It is a collaboration with Toronto’s York University professor Amila Buturovic, also a native of Bosnia.

As she explains in the introduction to her first book on related subject, Stone Speaker which discusses the work of late Bosnian poet Mak Dizdar in relation to these cemeteries, they were ‘naturalised by landscape’ and remain the only witness, the silent one, to the lost world to which many contemporary Bosnians have uncertain relationship.

A few centuries of dense history passed, filled with imperial conquests, world wars, local wars and nationalistic awakening of different ethnic groups; consequently, the links between medieval dead and today’s Bosnian historical imagination were severed.

Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2009 © Velibor Božović

Sarajevo, BiH 2003 © Velibor Božović

It is a poetry day, while fighting the flu.

…

” In villages from which their childhoods came

Seeking Necessity, they had to been taught

Necessity by nature is the same,

No matter how or by whom it be sought.

The city, assumed no such belief,

But welcomed each as if he came alone,

The nature of Necessity like grief

Exactly corresponding to his own.

…”

from the poem The City by W. H. Auden

Sarajevo, BiH 2009 © Velibor Božović

Leaving a hometown for a long period of time, some 11 years in my case, makes one observe it in a more curious manner whenever the possibility occurs. My irregular visits to Sarajevo bring out some suspended curiosity and attention to things, big or small, that I don’t remember I have had before.

This is Valter, as it stands for decades on the same spot, by which I had carelessly passed countless times in my pre-immigrant life. Few weeks ago, while in Sarajevo, I came to face this statue for the first time in my life, as far as I remember.

Postovanje, I said.

His broken nose, which looks like to be damaged by a grenade’s shrapnel, and some flowers left by someone else before me, were the only things from this encounter that I can remember now. Memory, it seems, requires hard work.

Sarajevo, BiH 2009 © Velibor Božović

I’m back from Sarajevo. This time, my visit was a working one; not quite as the previous visits where I would spend most of my time in caffes. Still, as usual, I managed to make multipule visits to Nostalgija. Ista meta, isto odstojanje.

Sarajevo fljusak, Summer 2008 © Velibor Božović

In a week from now I’ll be on my way, back to Sarajevo.

The Lazarus Project (Projekat Lazarus) exhibition will be on (details to come), and a few weeks of photographing Bosnian medieval cemeteries.

Forgoten cemetery, Bosnia, Summer 2008 © Velibor Božović