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What Book Would You Never Burn (For Fuel)?

  • Dennis Ferhatović (author)
Chapter of: Rumba under Fire: The Arts of Survival from West Point to Delhi(pp. 3–13)

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Metadata
TitleWhat Book Would You Never Burn (For Fuel)?
ContributorDennis Ferhatović (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0134.1.04
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/rumba-under-fire/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
CopyrightFerhatović, Dennis
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2016-02-29
Long abstractI was in Sarajevo for the first time in the summer of 2003. I visited it again in 2007, and then again, in 2012. Sarajevo is a fabled place with real wounds. You may have a number of associations with the place: the fateful shot that started World War I; the 1984 Winter Olympics; the flowering of music and film in the eighties; the horrible 1425-day-long siege; the annual film festival attended by Brangelina; the serious prob-lem with packs of stray dogs; ćevapi and pita and a variety of Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian sweets that you can buy at the Sweet Corner. As you walk the streets, admiring the fashions of youthful and middle-aged passers-by or dreaming of a freshly baked roll of pumpkin börek, your gaze may float downward where you can see a hole in the ground left by a grenade. These declivities are filled up now, sometimes with red paint, which means that someone was hit and killed on that spot. When they are marked with red paint, people call them “Sarajevo Roses.” A horrible beauty permeates these words, as does a hope for renewal, for resurrection. Sarajevo is an example par excellence of elegant resilience or resilient elegance. It always reminds you of vulnerability and instabil-ity, of life’s preciousness and aesthetic possession. “You know Sarajevo has something strange” a sticker on an electric post that you run into proclaims in English. Foreign backpackers you run into in hostels, beer halls, and parks tend to agree: they have seen Vienna and Budapest, Belgrade and Zagreb, but Sarajevo has this energy, man. Where else could you still see—in a row—a half-destroyed building with cracked walls and open wiring; an almost intact building gray from years and socialist realism; and a restored building for which a jolly Scandinavian nation had given hard cash and chosen soft col-ors such as pink and turquoise. Wherever I look, I see prolif-erating reminders of ruin and promises of renascence. Wher-ever I look, along the main street, in the area demarcated as the flea market, or near small bridges over the miniature Mil-jacka, I see used-book vendors.
Page rangepp. 3–13
Print length11 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Dennis Ferhatović

(author)