Review of S. by Slavenka Drakulic

if you have not read the novel, spoiler alert!

if you would like to follow these reflections without having read the book, please see this review from Salon Magazine

Reflections on S. A Novel about the Balkans by Slavenka Drakulić

I’ve been trying to process some of the difficult or disturbing issues about the war in Bosnia for four years now. I’ve heard first-hand accounts of atrocities, put my fingers in bullet holes in Vojkoviči, Mostar, and Sarajevo, seen the war cemeteries in Srebrenica and Potočari, visited the site of the concentration camp at Tronoplje, and walked through part of the siege tunnel in Sarajevo. I have read about and seen some upsetting things, but I was starting to think that books about the war in Bosnia didn’t really affect me on a gut level anymore. I got through the first part of S. with no real problems – it was distressing to read about people being displaced, raped, and tortured, but I wasn’t connecting with the reading in a significant emotional way. I started to worry that perhaps I was becoming “hardened” to atrocities, that horrendous things didn’t seem so bad to me anymore because I had heard so much about them.

I was wrong. Two incidences in the novel – the description of how a father is forced to rape his son before both are shot, and the suicide note E. leaves about how she unsuccessfully tries to save her daughter from being raped and killed – really shook me. I literally had to stop reading because I felt physically ill. If merely reading a fictionalized account of such horrible acts affects me so deeply, I can’t even imagine what it must have been like to actually witness or live through them.

This book raised interesting issues about gender roles, especially because rape is a uniquely gender-based crime in that the perpetrators must be (with very few exceptions) men. Drakulić affirms that Bosnian society (especially in rural areas) is very patriarchal, and that women of any sort are treated as secondary or somehow sub-human. The goal of ethnic cleansing is to dehumanize the minority, to make the “other” inferior. Patriarchy can turn women into objects, and perpetrators of ethnic cleansing aim to turn minorities into objects. The Muslim, Croat, or mixed-ethnicity women who underwent ethnic cleansing in concentration camps, then, were sub-human on two levels because they had their humanity doubly removed.

S.’s relationship with the Captain also raised a major gender issue. The Captain and S. connect on some intellectual or emotional level, and their relationship signifies a grasp at some kind of normalcy for both of them. Yet the relationship is not one of mutual consent, in spite of having the semblance of one. S. does not have a choice – she has to sleep with the Captain, has to let him rape her. Though she realizes that her position as the Captain’s mistress is the best she can have in her situation because it makes her off-limits to the other men, she is not in a position she likes or would want.

Being in this position, however, allows S. to have a kind of power over the Captain, a power derived from her female sexuality. S. tries to gain some control over her own body by playing at seducing the Captain, by dressing up for him and going through the charade of seduction. If she is the seducer, she at least holds the semblance of power and control. It seems that one tool a woman always has at her disposal against heterosexual men is her sexuality. Her possessions may be taken from her and her body used without her permission, but she always holds the capacity to elicit sexual desire in men. It seems a woman’s sexuality can be both her biggest downfall and her greatest weapon; her sexuality makes men treat her as an object yet allows her to hold a kind of irremovable power over them.

S. is “troubled by the thought that all the while the ‘women’s room’ existed, so did this world, with its regularly flying planes and smiling flight attendants” (167). I share S.’s distress over how the rest of the world functions normally while her world falls to pieces. What distresses me most is the realization that I’m on the opposite side of things. Areas all over the world are falling to pieces right now, and I am doing nothing about it because I am content to exist in my world of flight attendants and regularly flying planes.