As If I am Not There Book

Karolinska Hospital, Stockholm, 27 March 1993. A newborn, a boy, is stretched out in his cot; to S., his mother, he is "supposed to be her son". He is, in fact, a "nameless little being ... condemned to death from the start". It's a stark, and startling, scene to open Slavenka Drakulic's fourth work of fiction, As If I Am Not There: A novel about the Balkans. This scene, which flies in the face of maternal feeling, invites the question why: Why does this woman, feeling only animosity for her child, imagine pressing a pillow gently over his face to end both his suffering and hers? Of course, he is a child of war: The novel's title announces that; more specifically, a child of rape. S., as we learn through the book, is a survivor of the "women's room", part of the camp in Bosnia where she, like so many other women, are raped over and over again in an act of war which will dispossess them of mind and body. It's some years now since Susan Brownmiller's classic Against Our Will depicted rape as an act of civic and sexual war against women but her feminist thesis agitates throughout this novel. "Drakulic takes us down into the very heart of the Balkan darkness", writes Michael Ignatieff; she does so by forcing her readers to look at the "way a body can be enslaved which is known only to women." Rape is one reference here; (unwanted) pregnancy is the other. This book is on the cusp between the literature of survival that frames its story--the opening epigraphs from Primo Levi, Eva Grlic, Varlam Shalamov-- and the special terror of an act of war which violates a woman and the child to whom she is fated to give life. -- Vicky LebeauRead More