The aftermath of war: what happens after survival

One of the themes in my book is the aftermath of war. For a long time, I wanted the title of the book to be ‘The past is never in the past’ because it isn’t. No matter how capable we are in locking it away, banishing it from our lives, it is still there. It lingers, bubbles under the surface, ready to erupt at the most innocuous of times. In my book, Jacqui, a friend of the main characters, is a psychologist and she explains to her friend Damir that his cousin Selma has become an expert in locking away her pain and grief but that it won’t stay that way forever. So, when there are finally signs that she may be losing it, Jacqui is the only one who rejoices, who is happy it is not a complete disaster. The fact that she has started talking about the past is a good sign, and if she can’t recall everything, it is probably for the better. It could be overwhelming to remember everything at once.

Like my character Selma, I also locked up the past for many years. My husband and I decided we had moved continents for a reason. We wanted to leave the past in the past, be ‘new Australians’ in every sense of the word. We avoided the Bosnian community and only kept regular contact with our parents and brothers. Almost all of our friends were Aussie, and we adopted the Australian way of life with gusto. Even the food was multicultural (we both actively learnt new recipes), including the obligatory prawn on the barbie, and the girls played netball. Could we have been more Australian?

Our girls grew up aware of their background (there is no such thing as stopping my mother from sharing her opinions, stories and her version of history) but, unlike other first-generation kids of refugees/migrants, they did not experience the usual ‘In my country …’ which is only the start of a long monologue as to how wonderful everything is in the ‘old country’ and how everything is lacking over here in Australia.

At the time, I found such conversations irritating. I often thought, ‘if it’s that wonderful, why are you here, why don’t you go back to your country?’ Of course, now I know that this is a coping mechanism, allowing people some respite and validation that they were not always this incompetent or disrespected or alien to what was expected from them. But at the time, it was annoying, and I felt so good about myself: how I had managed to fit in and how I am bringing up two good Aussies.

But inevitably, just as it happened to my heroine Selma, I also came to a point of no return, when the past wouldn’t budge and asserted itself. It wasn’t abrupt and didn’t end up in an accident, like it did for Selma. It was stealthy. It was a few years before I turned fifty, when I found myself taking stock and reminiscing how my life had developed, what I regrated and what I took pleasure in. My life in Australia was largely one of taking opportunities that offered themselves to me, hard work and rewards for my hard work. I couldn’t have been prouder with how things had gone.

This is also the time when it was too hard to not think back when I was a child, a young woman, where I’d lived, what I would have done had there been no genocide, had I not been forced to leave my country. An unknown grief entered so many of my moments, particularly the ones when I was by myself in the car, listening to music. More and more often, I chose songs from ‘that life,’ when I was much younger. More and more often, I had to stop the car because I couldn’t see through the tears that ran down my face. It was too painful to think of that other me who never got a chance. I grieved not only for the country and loved ones I’d lost, but I also grieved the person I might have become in that other world that was taken away from me.

And then there was the guilt. I always felt that I needed to honour all the victims of the Bosnian genocide by living the best life that I could, to show the enemy that they couldn’t exterminate us, that we would sprout wherever we were dispersed. I had certainly lived up to that. I was a CEO by the age of 40. I was respected and my opinion was listened to.

Yet the more successful I became, the more conscious I was of those who had never been given the opportunities I had. Who knows what all those who perished would have done. There may have been a physicist, a poet, a mother who never got the chance to be one. I grieved intensely all those who never got to experience life in all its facets. Sometimes the burden seemed too much.

At about that time, a friend lost her mother. Her grief seemed disproportionate to the event as the mother was elderly, they were not particularly close, and the death was not unexpected. She started seeing a psychologist who told her that she needed to start writing, keep a diary of all the thoughts that crossed her mind. This friend is not artistically minded but the fact that she pursued those writing exercise like a lifeline made me think that I had unprocessed grief as well, and that a writing exercise might just be what I needed.

That gave me the idea to start processing my own grief and pain by writing. The first few years were very much stream-of-consciousness, but I noticed how much better I felt after each writing session. Somehow, the writing process helped me sort my confused feelings, primarily survivor guilt and a sense of not belonging to any of the worlds I knew. And, very slowly, a story started taking shape and eventually resulted in the book that is now called Where the Soil Remembers. The past remains within us, asking to be acknowledged, understood and incorporated into our current life and experience. The past, truly, is never in the past.