I Remember: Writings by Bosnian Women Refugees Book

Out of the ravages of a nationalist war - and the subsequent patched-together peace accord - comes a hauntingly simple book. It is an exercise in sanity, an affirmation of life and community composed of the drawings and writings of women in Belgrade refugee camps. The "I Remember" project ("Sjecam Se" in Serbo-Croatian) was conceived by two women refugees who were working with Women in Black in Belgrade and was made possible by financial and moral support from women in Italy and Spain. Its purpose was to encourage and give hope to other women refugees - to challenge them to draw on their humanity as a resource against the despair caused by a war they never wanted. The memories these women chose to draw and write down range from mundane to extraordinary, lyrical to bitter. But running through the thirty-two memoirs is a common theme of bewilderment, not only about personal predicament, but about the lack of an understandable reason behind it. One of the worst tragedies of one of the most destructive wars of the late 20th century is that it came from the will of a few power-grabbing leaders - men who found that in unstable times they could play on nationalist sentiment, whipped up by lies in the media, to make people accept war over diversity and accommodation. I Remember, in which ordinary women reconstruct in words and pictures communities now torn apart by such rhetoric, offers a powerful testament to the brutality of nationalist drives toward sameness and "purity." And, amidst outsiders' attempts to explain the war in terms of the "history of old hatreds," I Remember will stand as a poignant record of courage and the desire to live in peaceful and culturally complex community - written by those women who lost the most.