Eight of March, also known as Women’s Day, is celebrated throughout Europe. It is a holiday with no prerequisites, except that of it being a holiday for women only. Although its roots are political, by the time I was in elementary school it transformed into the day on which we made love cards for our moms, and sisters. For many girls, myself included, Eight of March is irrevocably associated with receiving a first bouquet of flowers, and coming of age in recognition of our own femininity.
After moving to the US, I’ve been celebrating Eight of March as a gratitude day. Today, let’s be grateful for the opportunities we have, for careers of our choosing, for rights to our bodies, and ability to freely walk down the street. I heard somewhere to measure the true opportunities of women living in any country means to look at lives of women in the minority groups. The rule applies as much as for women in our countries, as it does to those living in less fortunate corners of the world. So let’s be grateful, and let’s help where we can.
And now, I leave you with a piece by Semezdin Mehmedinović, (excerpted from Sarajevo Blues) about Sarajevo’s siege, and a fleeting, but irreplaceable meaning of a scarf.
INNOCENT CIVILIANS
In front of the Theater-I almost bumped into her-a young woman pops out, spreading a cloud of perfume around her. Her tight skirt cuts her steps short. But this fantastic spectacle-like a spread in a fashion magazine-is only completed by a freshly bathed dalmatian trotting over the crushed cement and broken windows. He runs and weaves happily in her path over the shards of glass: she’s beautiful, and the dog is beautiful. Don’t they care about the war? They do, because shells are falling here: here, right where they are. Of course she’s an innocent civilian, but not all civilians are innocent. There are those who, like retired couples, go out hand in hand for an evening walk in the middle of a war they inspired, the course of its future in their hands. Of course, this business about civilians can get very complicated. You might run int a soldier pointing at the tip of his sneaker and the coagulated blood there that once belonged to a professor who thought that five thousand Muslim kids ought to be killed. Which means if civilians are innocent, soldiers are sinful and guilty. But soldiers, in a normal distribution of power, are just young people whose interests should be protected by some kind of youth movement. Of course nationalistic-macho power cubed (power x power x power) holds generational interest beneath contempt since it conceives of thing in millennial and mythological dimensions. As for feminism, that is, for women who-at least in light of this formula-are simply there to be demeaned, there’s little use in war. In other words: just by looking at nationalistic attitudes regarding generational and gender interests you could see that war was inevitable. But you couldn’t have foreseen that in such a short span of time, a young woman in front of the Theater could arouse the almost forgotten memory of a world in which something whole, beautiful and fragrant exists. Something like a silk scarf.
Tags: Coffee Break, Sarajevo