The Balkan Express: Fragments from the Other Side of War [Paperback]

THE BALKAN EXPRESS: FRAGMENTS FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF WAR by Slavenka Drakulic, is a book of short essays that are memoirs and written illustrations of what it is like to find the country in which you live divided by war. Under Drakulic's hand, this stops being a political abstraction of battling ideas (pan-Slavism vs. independent nation states), but a physical and psychological hardship of the intimate and emotionally scarring, deadly violence and nihilistic realities of war in one's own neighborhood.

While this book -- published in the nid 1990s, with essays dating from July 1991 to January 1994, through the complete Croatian war of secession and the beginning and continuation of the war in Bosnia that killed 200,000 and displaced millions -- is somewhat dated for us now that we know of the end of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the division of Bosnia-Herzegovina (and the eventual war in Kosovo), the timelessness of the ideas she expresses about war seems as if it would always be salient, especially now as the United States has soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Drakulic, who also wrote Cafe Europa and S: A Novel about the Balkans, details the outcomes of war, sometimes unexpected, sometimes not. While she mentions violent and ghastly images of war (a young couple of lovers, a Serb and a Bosnian, who have obtained permission to leave Sarajevo for Belgrade are shot in the no-man's land outside the city on their officially permitted leave-taking, the bodies left in the grass for days), she dwells more on the psychological understanding of war in one's own country, one's own city, one's own neighborhood. ("My friend in Paris who moved there when she was 10 years old, at the end of the Algerian war, told me that her teacher had asked her why, even after years of living in France, she walked down a street zig-zag. This is how you walk to avoid a bullet, she explained to her teacher. And this is what the generation of children who survived a war in Croatia will do, walk zig-zag and run to hide in cellars at the sound of aeroplane.")

Drakulic notices that war became real to her in small, personal moments of realization, such as when she sent her college-age daughter from Zagreb to live in Canada with her Serbian father, and saw that her daughter was taking clothes for all year round and her worn, stuffed, childhood stuffed-animal companion, in case she couldn't come back. She sees how she herself judges a refugee friend negatively for wearing fancy shoes and makeup, realizing that she has an underlying belief that a refugee should have no joy. She notes how the war follows refugees wherever they go; the war follows her to Slovenia, a famous Croatian actress to New York and her friends to Paris in their thinking and values. She writes about the shock she feels when she meets a young man, a soldier from Vukovar, in Zagreb after the city fell to the Serbs, who was so young, she can't get past what he's been through for his age.

A recurring theme of the book is how the war has taken a pluralistic nation of apolitical people (in her generation, born in the 1950s), who didn't notice or care about who was Serbian, Bosnian, Croatian, or their religions, Orthodox, Muslim and Catholic, respectively, and obliterated them as individuals in favor of categorizing them as Croatians, Bosnians and Serbs above all else, and refusing them the right of being their own persons and "othering," as the literary critics say, those in different demographic categories, drafting them to kill those Others, or support the slaughter of those Others because their lives now depend on it.

This book is highly effective in helping one see what it would be like to have war break out within 100 miles of you, and come nearer every day. Though Drakulic writes that the war in the Balkans can be held, emotionally, at a distance by Europeans ("the 'other' is the lawless 'Balkans' they pretend not to understand") and by Americans ("For the USA it's more or less a 'European problem'), she destroys any complacency the reader might feel as far away in time and space from the Balkans with her highly intimate and moving glimpses into the psychological horrors of war in a world more like ours than it is different.

This book was published in 1993. This makes it hard to read, since several times Drakulic talks about the war being "almost over". When one knows that the worst in the former Yugoslavia was yet to come this makes this depressing book even more depressing. But, it's worth reading to get an inside account of how the war in Yugoslavia seemed to a smart, cosmopolitan reporter. It's not a history of the conflict nor an analytic account of it. You'll not fully understand the war or why it happend by reading this book. But, you'll understand the people to a greater degree. Drakulic is a very sympathetic writer who portrays her subjects (including herself) in a very humane way at a time when it was all to easy to forget the humanity of others. It's worth reading for that alone.

This book frightened me but also made me aware of the dangers of saying that we live in a safe world. Nothing could be further from the truth! I am an avid reader of the war in the Balkans and have found only one other book that so graphically depicts the atrocities and harsh realities of modern-day war. Beautifully written and easy for the layman to understand.