Sometimes, Our Women Sing to Keep From Screaming
TW: femicide, sexual assault, harassment
When I am serving coffee to a group of men, which I used to do more often in my younger days, I back out of the room, never turning around. I think I learned this lesson when I was four. I could be wrong about the exact age, but it was young enough that I remember almost always knowing this lesson but old enough that I can remember the incident that taught me it.
I do remember how old I was when I learned that other girls didn’t learn this lesson. I told this story as a joke to my friend in middle school and while I was laughing she grew more and more horrified. I realized that other girls didn’t have to push down their anger and turn it into laughter like I did (or at least, they didn’t have to do it quite as often).
Eventually, I stopped laughing.
I was almost 14 when Antonia Bilić died. Antonia was a young girl only three years older than I was that was murdered while hitchhiking. For a summer, the news could not stop talking about her. They published photos of her every night and excerpts from her diary.
One of those excerpts has stayed with me forever. She wrote about how excited she was for people to see her at her proslava mature (the Croatian equivalent of prom) in her gorgeous new dress. I thought about her years later when I bought my prom dress with the startling realization that I would soon be older than her.
My family said that it was all very sad and all but why was she hitchhiking in the first place. Something didn’t sit right with me then, but I was too young and had inhaled too much poison while breaking my daily bread with the people that ostensibly loved me the most in the world but could not fucking stop hurting me in order to articulate why.
Now all I have to do is think about that conversation and I’m guessing the thousands of other similar conversations that happened around the region that summer to black out with rage. Imagine, your country kills you by decimating the public transportation in your region, putting you in a position where you have to take your life in your hands every time you need to go somewhere. Imagine, your country kills you by teaching every man that they can put their hands on a woman with impunity. Imagine, your country kills you and as it stands over your bloodied body it asks you why you had the audacity to get murdered.
I used to think that Balkan cities were maybe safer than the Western ones I was familiar with, where I quicken my step and push my head down every time I see a man. Hell, I’ve even been catcalled on my isolated Vermont campus, while wearing an ankle-length puffer winter coat, beanie, and scarf. (when I told this anecdote to some people, they were quick to say it was the townies. As if I didn’t see that the car had out-of-state plates. As if rich boys don’t act with impunity. As if we didn’t have enough poison on our own campus without blaming the working class population of the town. As if I hadn’t spent most of my college career terrified of going to parties or walking home alone because of consistent inappropriate behavior from a boy from a wealthy family that had managed to curate a reputation as an on-campus feminist. But I digress. You must understand my digression. It is hard for me to separate the threads of every time a man has made me miserable, has made me feel smaller than myself, into a palatable essay with a beginning, middle, and end.)
Once I learned more about the cities I stopped believing this ridiculous myth that they are somehow safer than the West (I can now add several of our own quasi-metropolises to the list of places that have hurt me, go team). The first time I ever traveled solo I was a naive 18 year old in Sarajevo and one man kissed me when I tried to buy a necklace from him and another man followed me around a museum trying to convince me to come stay in his sketchy house “as a hotel guest” and then I locked myself in my hotel room and cried for half a day. In Banja Luka an old man just walked up to me and kissed me on the shoulder while I was waiting to pay for cevapi and the cashier kept talking on the phone and didn’t do shit while I cried and begged her to let me pay so I could get away from him. Again in Sarajevo a man followed me to the basement bathroom in a bar to try and get me to kiss him and sometimes I wonder what would have happened if he wasn’t so scrawny that I easily pushed him down the stairs while I was trying to get away.
I would have more stories if I had spent more time in our cities. Every time I visit I accumulate more.
Sometimes on the streets I feel the same sick claustrophobia I do in our villages. The village is where everybody knows you but you are not safe anyway. The village is where the houses are close together enough to hear you screaming, where everyone knows you well enough to know why you’re screaming, and nobody does shit to help you anyway because they’ve decided, under the watchful eyes of the mass market portrait of the Virgin Mary every house seems to have, that you brought this misery onto yourself.
People ask me sometimes why I keep going back. I ask myself sometimes why I keep going back. I guess there’s no place on this planet that would be perfectly safe for a woman but that does not mean that I do not want to scream sometimes.
I do not think I would want to raise daughters there.
I’m thinking about all this lately—well I am rarely not thinking about this, such is the nature of trauma, especially the traumatic events I’ve experienced but only tiptoed around in this piece. But I am thinking about this lately because I am beginning to notice how invested many men, whether ours or Westerners that love the region, are in portraying this place as safe. “My sister feels more safe on the streets of Mostar at 3am than in London in broad daylight,” one man says. “There just isn’t as much violence here,” another adds to their sage chorus.
Sometimes I understand that reasoning. They want to sanitize our reputation, sick of the Westerners drawing up their skirts at the borders, calling us a lawless violent place as if they are not the countries that have exported so much rape all over the globe. I guess some men are really just clueless. Some I think don’t realize how little we tend to tell our men about the realities of our lives. Few of you have proven that you’ll actually believe us, after all.
A lot of men, especially diaspora men, seem to be invested in this little illusion of the region as a place of pastoral patriarchal safety. But treating this region as if it’s frozen in some imaginary chivalrous past does nobody any favors (also, that pastoral fantasy never existed. Think about how dangerous life was for our grandmothers, inside of the house and out). They don’t actually care about our safety, they just want to continue sitting on the couch without realizing that their friends are killing us. Maybe I’m being too harsh, maybe some men are motivated by actual love for this region every time they try to dust off this tired illusion. But we can find things to like about the Balkans without negating facts that are present, namely that so many of us women are terrified.
And if you can’t? Then it might be time for you to be quiet.
I’m just sick of denial. I lived in it for so many years and I’ve become too old for it. I’ve grown since I was a child, I chafe at its boundaries. My feet are too big now, they stomp on all those words that usually boil down to “it was not so bad for you, so shut up.”
I’m sick of men hurting us, even killing us, making us mourn for our sisters, then turning around and claiming that none of that is happening. I’m sick of feeling like an alien in my own home. Most of all, I’m so fucking sick of all of this fear that I have to live with, no matter where I am and I am sick of men that think they get to decide how and when I feel my fear when they’re the ones causing it in the first place.