"A Sermon for Memorial Day"

READING

Dubravka Ugresic is a native of the former Yugoslavia. She left her homeland in 1993 for political reasons and now lives in Amsterdam. Her 2005 novel, “The Ministry of Pain,” exposes the wounds and despair of life following war. In this passage, two young emigres decide to attend a war crimes trial against the father of one of their friends. The author writes what she observed in the following passage:

“The questioning centered on a carp hatchery. Uros’s father and had been the head of a carp hatchery in a small town in Bosnia. He was being asked about repairs that had been made on the leaky roof of the main building, about the sheet metal that had been used to cover the roof and how much it cost and who was supposed to pay for it, and then about some truck or other and the driver and so on and so forth. The endless, tedious stringing together of details that made no sense whatever to us was intended to show whether Uros’s father and two accomplices had had enough free time to slip off to a nearby shack where the town’s Muslims were being held, force them to play humiliating sexual games — their favorite allegedly being “father and son” — and then beat them to death with their fetid-carp hands and toss their corpses into the ponds.

“All the defendants in the production sounded like amateur actors: all they were doing was reading out prepared statements from the computer screens in front of them. By speaking Robot rather than Human, they turned evil into a mechanical plot line, as mechanical as any other. None of the accused felt the slightest guilt. Of all the people who had destroyed the country — leaders, politicians, generals, soldiers, crooks, murderers, mafiosi, liars, politicians, generals, villians, and volunteers — not one was willing to come out and state, I am guilty. I had not heard the word “guilty” from them before, I did not hear it while sitting in the courtroom with Igor, nor do I ever expect to hear it. They were all just doing their duty. Do you feel guilty when you hammer a nail into a wall? No. Do you feel guilty when you beat a hundred people to death? No. Of course not.

“I wondered how things stood with the hundreds of thousands of nameless people without whose fervid support there could have been no war. Did they feel guilty? And what about that herd of a foreign politicians, diplomats, envoys, and military personnel who had stampeded through the country? Not only had they been liberally paid; they had earned the epithet of savior, to say nothing of promotions in the UN or whatever institutional hierarchy they chanced to represent. (And Croatia and Bosnia weren’t exactly hardship posts: the hotels were quite serviceable, the food decent, the Adriatic close at hand.) Did they feel guilty? They too were only doing their duty. Just like the sniper on the hill who gunned down the woman in the streets of Sarajevo. Just like the foreign photographer who took the woman’s picture (though it never occurred to him to call an ambulance) and won a prize for the best war photo of the year. Even the poor woman writhing on the pavement, the blood gushing out of her, even she, little as she was aware of it, was doing her duty by her authentic representation of war. Who is guilty of the death of Selim’s father? Who of the death of our Uros? Who is guilty of riveting Igor and me to our seats, hungering for absolution?”

SERMON

Every year we get another chance to ponder the meaning of Memorial Day and how it has evolved to suit our national purpose and mood. Remember the group of grieving women who went to a cemetery in Columbus, Mississippi. In a radical act of reconciliation, they put flowers on all the soldiers’ graves. Whether the dead were Union or Confederate, they were gone forever; the flowers acknowledged that someone loved them and now mourned. That is what Memorial Day was then.

The Civil War taught us necessary lessons about the evil of slavery and the imperative to overcome its lingering effects. People made real sacrifices for principles we still struggle to perfect today – a transcendent cause if there ever was one. But the women in the cemetery were not thinking about why there was a war. They were simply trying to heal.

That first Memorial Day observance evokes certain truths about the American ideal, about striving for equality and justice, about falling short and correcting ourselves, about moving on together. This truth is still real for us. It lays bare our national grief, so that we can comfort one another.

It doesn’t try to transform the loss of life into some higher good. It doesn’t try to tell us why these things we people do – war, hate, turning on each other – are somehow all right. It simply acknowledges loss and the need to reconcile ourselves with it and with each other.

Yet today’s Memorial Day rhetoric spins the original meaning into something like this: “Because our men and women died in a war, they died for a reason. To question the reason is to malign the very principles by which we live. They sacrificed themselves for our American values. Do not ask, did they die in vain?” Because what would the world look like if they did?

I have just spent a week in Croatia. It is a small country with a beautiful coastline, magnificent ancient cities, and verdant national parks. But just over a decade ago, a civil war of another kind – the violent breakup of Yugoslavia – left this land and people shattered. You don’t have to stray from the tourist route to see abandoned houses ruined by shelling, roofs blown off, the residents evicted or dead.

The guidebooks tell you not to ask people about the war. I can understand that. We weren’t very well informed about their history. The differences that inflamed them – ethnic, religious, political, linguistic – eluded us. We were guests, not inquisitors.

One night, however, a young hotel owner, just back from a shopping trip to Manhattan – where the clothes were cheap, he said – an interesting fact about the value of the dollar – poured us drinks and lingered to chat. He told us about the war – how he saw it as a Croatian. And then we could tell how just beneath the surface of sophistication and prosperity roiled this young man’s anger and pride, which made us feel, uneasily, his hate and hardness. This is what war does to people.

It almost doesn’t matter why. We can’t understand the reasons or the principles they identify with their struggle. All we see are the wounds. From what I could tell, they have a long way to go before they heal.

But who am I to comment at all? Is not this Memorial Day – and this political season – the occasion for our own version of national posturing, inscrutable to others and sometimes even to ourselves? While I was in Croatia, no one asked me about our war. I was grateful.

I don’t know exactly how to ask this question without sounding like I don’t cherish American values, or understand our history. Selfless men and women have responded to injustice by putting their lives on the line – the Civil War and World War Two being perhaps the best examples we have. Quite possibly there were no alternatives then. But here is my question: what about now?

Isn’t one of the lessons we’ve learned from war that we should never have another one? Not even the one we are having at this moment? And if we can avoid war – as we surely could have this time – how do we justify the lives lost? We can’t.

In “The Ministry of Pain,” Dubravka Ugrešić writes about the experience of losing her home, first by getting out when the trouble started and drifting around Europe. And then again when her country no longer exists; when Yugoslavia is history and everything and everyone have changed. And again when she attends a war crimes trial.

“Who is guilty?” she asks. “I wondered how things stood with the hundreds of thousands of nameless people without whose fervid support there could have been no war.” And all the others, those who were employed by the war, or profited from it; those who exploited it to advance their careers; and even those, like herself and her friends, “hungering for absolution,” nowhere to be found.

War involves guilt. The reason why we don’t want to question it, don’t want to ask whether it was worth it, whether we can justify the loss of life, is because we can’t. We can never justify the death and displacement, the profound losses of home and community, not to mention the brutality, that inevitably attends war. This is what happens. This is why there is guilt.

The only way to avoid guilt is to insist, self-righteously, on principle, on justification, on values that lift us with their transcendence – because we cannot face what we see right in front of us. I was shocked by the casual comments of ethnic hatred I heard as a mere tourist in Croatia. As if it were obvious that some people were bad and others were good and we should all be able to tell which was which.

I wonder what we sound like to those who visit us from somewhere else. When they hear about our war, the people we have killed in the name of freedom and democracy. Our justification, barely masking our guilt. It’s a bleak note for a holiday weekend.

All my life I’ve believed that people are better than we are. I’ve believed in our goodness and in our capacity to prevail over our worst instincts. I’ve believed that we can evolve into a society that reconciles differences without violence. Because I held these beliefs, I’ve opposed the wars of my time. It has been my way of keeping my faith in humanity.

But now I find my views about humanity are shifting. It is not so easy to overcome our worst instincts. Hatred of others, the need for revenge, the self-righteous certainty that our way is better – these are entrenched human characteristics. They translate into tragic irrevocable acts of violence, such as war, torture, extraordinary rendition.

This is the world in which we live today. I have to see it as it is and to accept my share of the guilt for the destruction that we have wrought. But I refuse excuse it all by saying that we acted on principle. I will not associate the values I cherish, freedom and democracy, with our national failure of character. And I still oppose this war and all the wars of our post-nuclear age.

I would rather be with that group of women, heavy with the knowledge of what human hate can do, mourning for all that was lost. Be with them as they place their flowers on the graves. See as they did that in death all are equal, and we will never know how beautiful they might have been. Or who we might have been if we had never let it happen.

________

Dubravka Ugrešić. “The Ministry of Pain.” Translated by Michael Henry Heim. New York: Harper Perennial, 2007.