Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging(15)
Without exception, men who were leaders during one period were almost completely inactive during the other; no one, it seemed, was suited to both roles. These two kinds of leaders more or less correspond to the male and female roles that emerge spontaneously in open society during catastrophes such as earthquakes or the Blitz. They reflect an ancient duality that is masked by the ease and safety of modern life but that becomes immediately apparent when disasters strike. If women aren’t present to provide the empathic leadership that every group needs, certain men will do it. If men aren’t present to take immediate action in an emergency, women will step in. (Almost all the female Carnegie Hero award recipients acted in situations where there were no men present.) To some degree the sexes are interchangeable—meaning they can easily be substituted for one another—but gender roles aren’t. Both are necessary for the healthy functioning of society, and those roles will always be filled regardless of whether both sexes are available to do it.
The coming-together that societies often experience during catastrophes is usually temporary, but sometimes the effect can last years or even decades. British historians have linked the hardships of the Blitz—and the social unity that followed—to a landslide vote that brought the Labour Party into power in 1945 and eventually gave the United Kingdom national health care and a strong welfare state. The Blitz hit after years of poverty in England, and both experiences served to bind the society together in ways that rejected the primacy of business interests over the welfare of the people. That era didn’t end until the wartime generation started to fade out and Margaret Thatcher was elected prime minister in 1979. “In every upheaval we rediscover humanity and regain freedoms,” one sociologist wrote about England’s reaction to the war. “We relearn some old truths about the connection between happiness, unselfishness, and the simplification of living.”
What catastrophes seem to do—sometimes in the span of a few minutes—is turn back the clock on ten thousand years of social evolution. Self-interest gets subsumed into group interest because there is no survival outside group survival, and that creates a social bond that many people sorely miss.
Twenty years after the end of the siege of Sarajevo, I returned to find people talking a little sheepishly about how much they longed for those days. More precisely, they longed for who they’d been back then. Even my taxi driver on the ride from the airport told me that during the war, he’d been in a special unit that slipped through the enemy lines to help other besieged enclaves. “And now look at me,” he said, dismissing the dashboard with a wave of his hand.
For a former soldier to miss the clarity and importance of his wartime duty is one thing, but for civilians to is quite another. “Whatever I say about war, I still hate it,” one survivor, Nid?ara Ahmeta?evi?, made sure to tell me after I’d interviewed her about the nostalgia of her generation. “I do miss something from the war. But I also believe that the world we are living in—and the peace that we have—is very f*cked up if somebody is missing war. And many people do.”
Ahmeta?evi? is now a prominent Bosnian journalist who has dedicated her life to understanding the war crimes that blossomed all around her when she was young. She was seventeen when the war broke out, and within weeks had been hit by shrapnel from an artillery round that crashed into her parents’ apartment. She was rushed to the hospital and underwent reconstructive surgery to her severely damaged leg without anesthesia. (“They hold you down and you scream,” she said when I asked about the pain. “That helps.”) The hospital was overflowing with wounded—they were laid out in the toilets, in the hallways, in the entranceways—and the staff didn’t even have the time to change blood-soaked sheets after people died. They just loaded the next person onto the bed and continued working. The first night, an old woman died next to Ahmeta?evi? and somehow rolled onto her in her final agonies. Ahmeta?evi? woke in the morning to find the woman on top of her, the first of many bodies she would see during the war.
After two weeks Ahmeta?evi? was finally sent back to her parents’ apartment on crutches and resumed what passed as normal life during wartime. Her neighborhood had organized five apartment buildings—perhaps sixty families—into a huge cooperative that shared food and ovens and shelter. Vegetable gardens were planted around the buildings and everyone ate from the food they produced. Water was gathered individually from roof gutters or from hand pumps in town, but virtually everything else was shared. On her eighteenth birthday, Ahmeta?evi? remembers being given a single egg by one of her neighbors. She couldn’t figure out how to share it with her friends, so she decided to use the egg to make pancakes so that everyone could have some.
The basement of one of the buildings was deep enough to serve as a bomb shelter, and teenagers from the neighborhood led a kind of communal life down there that was almost entirely separate from the adults above ground. The boys would go off to fight on the front line for ten days at a stretch and then return to join the girls, who lived down there full-time. Everyone slept on mattresses on the floor together and ate their meals together and fell in and out of love together and played music and talked about literature and joked about the war. “The boys were like our brothers,” Ahmeta?evi? said. “It’s not like we girls were waiting for them and crying… no, we had a party. To be honest, it was a kind of liberation. The love that we shared was enormous. They’d come from the front lines and most of them were musicians and they would have small concerts for us. We didn’t believe in heroes. We were punk rockers. Our biggest hero was David Bowie.”