Habitus

by Habitus · 03/22/07

The photographer Simon Norfolk finds moments of beauty and wonder in the world’s most forlorn landscapes. From Afghanistan to Auschwitz, Norfolk documents the imprints of war—sometimes physical, sometimes physic—on its surroundings. His book Bosnia: Bleed is an impressionistic testimony to the mass slaughter that accompanied the war in the former Yugoslavia. In particular, he focuses on the sites of “secondary mass graves,” where the perpetrators tried to hide the evidence of their crimes. He writes, “They thought that, by intimidation and subterfuge, their dirty secrets could be preserved, held, trapped. Frozen.”

Norfolk spoke to Habitus from his home in Brighton, England.

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by Aleksander Hemon · 03/21/07

The taxi driver who drove me from the airport and, when I observed that the leaves were already beginning to fall, replied: “Why, yes, first watermelons, then lessons,” which, on close analysis, I understood as representing a magic formula to describe the gradual approach of autumn.

The moment when, from Jekovac, after the Ramazan cannon fires to indicate sunset, you see the lights on all the minarets of Sarajevo simultaneously ignite.

The clatter of the first morning tram, echoing through the empty streets of the city.

The coldness of the buildings from the Austro-Hungarian era and the staircases inside them, with their treads worn by the soles that have climbed them for more than a century.

Somun—soft, white bread—(scattered with seeds) from the baker’s in Kovači.

Children’s balls, rolling in the shallow eddies of the Miljacka river.

The beauty of Sarajevo women, who always bear in them the imprint of their own past and their own future; the history of past and future changes: their faces reveal both skinny little girls and mature women, both minxes and careworn matrons.

The sfumato of a cold Sarajevo morning, before the sun steals up behind the mountains, and mist drifts up the slopes.

Škembići—tripe—at Hadžibajrić’s.

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by Joshua Ellison · 03/01/07

In just a few hours, I had traveled the distance between Sarajevo—Europe’s Jerusalem, as it’s been called since Sephardic Jews first settled there after their expulsion from Spain—and its namesake in the heart of the Middle East.

I walked both cities’ streets in the same day—the two cities I know on the planet where churches, mosques, and synagogues seem equally at home; where almost every turn points you towards another history, another ethos, another dream. These are places where multiplicity and division seem to taunt each other, where purity and synthesis make opposing claims on the cities’ authentic nature.

The displaced Spaniards who made their home in Sarajevo saw reflections of the Jerusalem they knew only in their minds’ eye. Somehow the analogy stuck. It’s become a central part of the story that Sarajevans tell about themselves and their city. In my time there, I heard it repeated by Jews and Muslims and Christians, by both locals and foreigners.

It’s the kind of comparison I would normally resist: there should always be room in the world for a Jerusalem, but how many can we take? Still, as much as both cities have changed over the generations, you can see the commonalities. In fact, the congruence has probably only deepened over time, and in ways that no one ever expected or intended. As I spent time in Sarajevo, I found myself thinking more and more about Jerusalem.

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by George Szirtes · 11/01/06

My Jewish Budapest did not exist. If it did exist it failed to inform me, if, indeed, it informed anyone. It might have existed in whispers, in tones of voice, in the sharing of certain unspoken, or little spoken, or not-spoken before the children, anxieties, but then I was a child and I had never heard of it. Furthermore I was not a Jewish child and neither was my brother, because, as you could have checked for yourself by a cursory physical examination, we were not circumcised. That we did not speak Hebrew, had never knowingly entered a synagogue, and had participated in no Jewish festivals or ceremonies, was further proof of the same fact.

True enough, our father was Jewish, he never denied that. He looked Jewish, that is if looks themselves can be Jewish. He had deep soft dark eyes and a considerable nose; indeed he still has the nose, and will, I expect, hold on to it now for the rest of his life; or maybe one should say, it has held and will hold on to him, it being a relatively small organ among many larger organs on the greater body to which it clings. My father was Jewish by accident, it seemed to me: the accident of his nose. Whether that was a minor or a serious accident, I couldn’t tell. But then the entire, as-yet-untried, ground of our being (to borrow a phrase from Paul Tillich) was necessarily unclear.

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by Claude Cahn · 11/01/06

Roma are often subjected to a special kind of justice-the justice of the mob. On an early autumn night in 1995, one such mob descended on the Romani quarter in the remote village of Velyka Dobron in Transcarpathian Ukraine.

On the night of 10 September 1995, fires destroyed three houses in the Romani settlement in Velyka Dobron, a Hungarian village in the Transcarpathian region of Ukraine. As the houses were set ablaze, the 400 to 500 Romani men, women, and children who live in the settlement ran to the surrounding woods. The next evening, the crowds returned and destroyed another nine houses, looting and plundering as they went. According to eyewitnesses, local police as well as police from the regional capital were present on both nights, but they failed to stop the mayhem.

The Roma of Velyka Dobron stayed in the woods for two or three months, afraid to come out, living off berries and roots and the occasional meal brought to them by sympathetic villagers, who themselves risked ostracism for their charity. During that time, three young Romani men turned themselves in for the crime that had set the Hungarian villagers against their community: the killing of a Hungarian man, Alexander Dokus, in a brawl. From the news of his death to the news of the perpetrators’ conviction, the local papers reported the event as another Gypsy crime story. The retribution against the Romani community that occurred in between, if mentioned at all, was muted and downplayed. Our organization, the European Roma Rights Center, heard the story the following May from Aladar Adam, chairman of the organization Romani Yag in Uzhorod, the Transcarpathian regional capital. We decided to make a visit to Velyka Dobron and piece the story together.

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by Joshua Ellison · 11/01/06

Diaspora means feeling proximity across distance, but it’s usually a solitary path.

Because everyone experiences it differently, the biggest challenge of thinking and talking about Diaspora is to define it–to give solidity to an emptiness that can reach into every part of the planet and take on a million peculiar variations.

Exile and loss are core symptoms. Those sensations are real, often acute. For many, the experience begins with treacherous passage from old worlds to new ones. It can mean endless seeking and precarious survival. Sometimes, the tumult is life-long and relentless. Or a primal wound that reopens itself incessantly in the mind. These are the shapeless contours of absence and longing.

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