Reflections on Pretty Birds by Scott Simon

Reflections on Pretty Birds by Scott Simon
Random House, 2005

a good review of the book can be found here:
http://www.mostlyfiction.com/world/simon.htm

"There is no greater sorrow on earth than the loss of one's native land." -- Euripides

I first read this book over the summer of 2007 (I actually finished it while I was in Bosnia), and I absolutely loved it. Not only is it a powerful, fascinating story with compelling characters, but it also provides an interesting and accurate snapshot of what life was like in besieged Sarajevo. Sarajevo is a city I love and feel very close to, and I could visualize many of the places and people with whom Irena interacted.

What I liked best about the book was how it shattered my preconceived notions. To begin, I was startled when I first heard that the book was about a sniper who was a Muslim female – I had assumed that the snipers involved in the siege of Sarajevo were male and Serb, paramilitary units or members of the JNA. I didn’t think about the possibility of snipers on the other side, and if I had, I would have assumed they were soldiers in the Bosnian army and probably male. Irena challenged my concept of gender roles. Given that Slavenka Drakulić consistently affirms that Bosnia is a very patriarchal society, I thought it especially interesting that, according to Scott Simon, it was not uncommon to use girls as snipers. Though Irena is much tougher and sharper than I am, I can relate to her as a young woman, and I can see aspects of my girlfriends in her.

It was fascinating to find myself empathizing with the sniper rather than with the victim. When the novel opened, I was horrified to read about the blasé, casual way Irena went about shooting people as if it were any ordinary part-time job. I recoiled from the way she systematically decided how to line up her target, and justified shooting at the lemon stand because the people there could afford the luxury of buying lemons.

As I read the novel, however, I grew to understand Irena, to sympathize and even empathize with her, to understand her actions and realize why she chose to fight back. As I came to care about Irena, I came to realize how important survival was for her, and how becoming a sniper was her way of surviving. It’s very difficult for me to imagine myself in the shoes of someone who deliberately picks a human target to kill, but I was almost able to do so through the character of Irena.

I was very intrigued by the Knight, the Bosnian Serb radio propagandist who reads the “news” every day and spouts threats and racial epithets against the Muslims. If besieged Sarajevans want to hear music or get any sort of updates, they have to listen to the Knight and are forced to hear him mock and threaten them. First, I wonder about the accuracy of Simon’s description of the Knight. I know propaganda was a major political weapon during the Bosnian war, but Pretty Birds is the first source in which I’ve found a description of propaganda being played systematically over the speaker systems in Sarajevo. I’ve heard that Simon’s novel is well researched, accurate, and largely based on personal experience, so I assume the Knight is in some way based on a real person.

It makes me question how people responded to the Knight’s talk. Irena ignores his blather for the most part, though she grumbles that she has to listen to so much nonsense before getting to the music. Were they all able to ignore the Knight as successfully as Irena was? When someone says something offensive about you, a natural instinct is to become angry with the speaker and fight back against the accusations. But what if you are hearing the talk every day and there is no way to fight it? Do you start to believe that the negative things said about you are true? What does this do to your sense of humanity and of self-worth?

Furthermore, how did Serbs living in Sarajevo respond to the negative propaganda about the Muslims? In such a cosmopolitan and ethnically mixed city, it was unlikely that there were Serbs who knew no Muslims and could be genuinely deluded because of ignorance. Did non-Muslims believe what the Knight said? I think it’s hard to know, because it’s very conceivable that even the best-intentioned people may fall for propaganda because they don’t realize what it is. Such considerations make me very careful of the news I read and see, for I realize that I tend not to question what my usual sources (CNN and the BBC) tell me. I hope that I would be reasonable enough to realize if the media is presenting me with something inaccurate or deliberately misleading, but for all I know, I’ve been exposed to propaganda before and not even recognized it.

Another aspect I found interesting was Mrs. Zarić’s reaction to her daughter’s rape by the soldiers who forced them out of their home in Grbavica. She is furious, and rightly so. She wishes to respond to violence with violence, and wants revenge for the wrongs committed against her and her family. Mrs. Zarić does not consider for even one moment forgiveness or reconciliation of any kind, and I fully understand her action. Throughout Pretty Birds, I found myself trying to put myself in the characters’ places and wondering what I would do in their situations. If I had a daughter who was raped, how would I respond? How could I feel anything but anger, anger that I would pass on to my children and use to perpetuate the cycle of violence?

Simon makes extensive use of animals as literal innocent victims of war: the animals in the Sarajevo zoo starve to death, the dogs at Dr. Pekar’s clinic are dying, Pretty Bird is starving and the Zarić family is forced to let her go. At the same time, the animals can be seen as a metaphor for all of war’s innocent victims. Just as with people, some animals die, some (such as Pretty Bird) survive but are forced to relocate, and none has committed any crime or in any way deserves to be persecuted. On a somewhat ironic level, this can be read as a literary convention used to make people sympathize with and feel emotionally connected to the citizens of Sarajevo. For some reason, humans sometimes sympathize more with animal than with human victims, perhaps because we believe that animals are incapable of acting rationally and thus incapable of evil and never deserving of punishment or hurt. People can watch a disaster movie where a city is leveled and thousands of people die, but the family dog has to survive or moviegoers will be very upset. Pretty Birds may, to some extent, be playing on the same idea.