[Content warnings: violence, rape, antisemitism, Islamophobia]

In Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World, Mark Twain wrote, “Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn’t.”

For Arnesa Buljušmić-Kustura, a survivor and scholar of the Bosnian genocide, writing about the aftermath of a well-documented war was—and is—no easy task. She describes Letters from Diaspora: Stories of War and Its Aftermath on its back jacket as “a fictionalized portrayal of immigrants living in Diaspora based on the real stories Bosnian people have shared with her throughout her years of living in the United States.” 

This sentence provides the audience with all they need to know—while the stories are fictionalized, they are not falsified.

Falsification is a modification designed to intentionally misinform readers. Fictionalization is reimagination, specifically to provide others with a fresh perspective.

In fictionalizing, an author may change a name, rephrase a sentence, or alter the structure of a testimony—but the essence of the story is preserved. In Letters from Diaspora, Buljušmić-Kustura has done just that—compile and combine survivors’ stories she’d heard with her ear and transform them into stories with heart.

“Fifty years after the world said ‘Never Again’ to the horrors of the Holocaust, genocide took place on European soil,” says the organization Remembering Srebrenica. Despite years of multicultural and multiethnic coexistence, rising racism and Islamophobia led to neighbors killing neighbors. Serbs and Croats pitted themselves against Bosniaks, who were primarily Muslim. 8,000 believers were senselessly murdered, and their remains are still being dug up to this day.  

“While it has been [30] years since the war and genocide, the Bosnian population remains unhealed and too traumatized to speak publicly of the horrors they lived through,” the author’s note prefaced (Buljušmić-Kustura, 12). This statement echoes again in multiple letters. Rabija, whose first letter serves as an introduction to the silence surrounding the Bosnian genocide as a whole said, “We are afraid and yet we speak very little about the fear that we feel. I often wonder if my Bosnian friends do not speak about our past for fear it will repeat itself again.” (Buljušmić-Kustura, 21-22)

It’s understandable why a survivor may not want to be noticed so publicly and to live their lives recounting horrific incidents to audience after audience. Some may also not want to relive those terrible memories over and over again. Others feel significant pressure to put their identifying information out into the world, where it lives forever on ink and paper. To combat this, assigning a pseudonym to a survivor’s story can be liberating. The anonymity grants dignity; a rawness that might not otherwise be shared with others. Should a reader come across a survivor in real life, the reader would have no idea—and the survivor may prefer that, to continue navigating through their lives free of interrogation, no matter how innocent. Protection is as much of a priority for the dissemination of survivors’ accounts as is publication. By weaving some stories with others and assigning new names to each one, Buljušmić-Kustura directed this masterfully. Indeed, with some of the details given, it takes an expert to handle with care. 

“I saw them burn.” This is just one harrowing part of Jasmina’s letter. “I saw his body on the footsteps of the home I believed would hold our children one day. Is [thirty] years enough time to get over that? How can I get over that?” (Buljušmić-Kustura, 26)

Fictionalization is also helpful in cases of protecting a survivor’s physical safety. Genocide deniers and members of hate groups routinely threaten the safety of survivors, directly and indirectly. Neo-Nazis, for example, once fought to march to assert their First Amendment rights to freedom of expression and protest in Skokie, IL. Skokie, in 1977, was home to hundreds of Holocaust survivors, and those citizens were rightfully opposed to a thirty-minute show by those Neo-Nazis to wear swastikas (Goldberger). The ACLU accepted the case, and after a lengthy legal battle, the neo-Nazis were told to demonstrate in Chicago instead. A few years later, the wider community responded to that demonstration by building the Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie.

It’s a similar situation of safety for Bosnian-Americans, especially those who choose to return to their cities of origin. Hana shared in her letter, “[W]hen I returned to my hometown, two of the men that forcibly took my body were in the line next to me. They were free. They were happy even. […] Is that the kind of injustice I must live with? To know that the men that held me captive for a year, that abused me every day for a year, are able to go on and have happy lives?” (Buljušmić-Kustura, 42)

“I saw them burn.” [PC: Tim Mossholder (unsplash)]

“I interned at The Hague. I saw the faces of those responsible for the deaths of my loved ones and one by one they gave them sentences that were too lenient, in my opinion. In some cases, they did not even give any sentences. I saw the faces of genocide and yet I could do very little to give them the punishment they deserved.” (Buljušmić-Kustura, 50)

The last reason, flexibility, may seem to center around the writer, but it can still revolve around the survivor. Writers are charged with telling a story. To do so requires not-so-simple decisions of craft. Detailed responses from interviews may have to be cut out due to word counts and page limits. When speaking to multiple survivors, some of the accounts are repeated, for no fault of their own—but unfortunately, audiences often complain of too much similarity between them. There’s a pressure to only highlight the unique parts of every survivor’s story; otherwise, they might not be read.

Buljušmić-Kustura did this masterfully in diversifying each letter, even the ones about loss. Safet mourned how Islamophobia and racism severed the ties between him and his Christian Serb friend (Buljušmić-Kustura, 30-34).

It’s the details like this that give the audience empathy and each account memorability. Sabahudin perhaps said in his interview that his mother, father, brothers, and neighbors were brutally slain. But a certain pain evokes within us when the author poetically ends one part of his testimony with “All of their blood creating one large puddle.” (Buljušmić-Kustura, 58) 

Our stomachs coil. Our eyes water. It’s as if Letters was sent to our personal mailbox, and we’re communicating with a long-lost friend. A human being, like us.

There are tender moments, too. We feel as though Ivana is chatting with us, sharing how she was a Christian at the start of the war and became a Muslim after it ended, despite the vile propaganda around her. (Buljušmić-Kustura, 60-66) Alma predicted that after another exhausting American party, she would return to her own home and think of how weddings were done in Bosnia. “I won’t dance, but I’ll close my eyes and I’ll send my mind back in time to the days I used to dance all night, until my feet bled.” (Buljušmić-Kustura, 72)

So let us uphold a real survivor’s dignity, safety, and story through fictionalizing. In doing so, we put the “art” in articulating—to share a story well-told and well-remembered.

Related:

– History of the Bosnia War [Part 1] – Thirty Years After Srebrenica

– Rising To The Moment: What Muslim American Activists Of Today Can Learn From Successful Community Movements During The Bosnian Genocide