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Time Kneels Between Mountains

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Amra Pajalic

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“As I drank, I saw Srebrenica spread out before me from halfway up the hill, coated with a thick winter fog. Snow dusted the hills surrounding us, hugging the town in its icy embrace. Conifer trees dotted the hills, their branches looking muted from the snow covering them. Snow covered all the roofs in the valley, giving everything a white and still appearance. We felt frozen in time, abandoned and forsaken, which was a true reflection of our internal state. “The government should create a new tourism campaign. Srebrenica, the place where time kneels between mountains.” Ramo waved his hands out to the terrain before us. After we got our breath back from laughing, I passed the bottle to him. My cheeks flushed as he placed his lips over the spout where my lips had been. He finished drinking and handed me the bottle. Our fingers touched, sparks flying.”

LoveWarLove Story
Book:Time Kneels Between Mountains
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“Now the combined sounds blend in. The sound of piss trickling into the bucket, or shit dropping down to splatter onto the smelly leftovers from previous visitors. The sound of grenades and bullets wreaking destruction outside. Sometimes it sounds like a rocket-propelled grenade is right over us, that we should expect the roof to cave in on us and crush us to death. But that is another thing we have gotten used to. We don’t flinch anymore when a grenade whistles overhead.” Siege”

WarRomanceRomeo And JulietSarajevo
Book:The Cuckoo's Song
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“Mama clutched the wall, her face white with terror. 'Stupid girl!' She shook me by my shoulders. 'You can’t run out like that! Snipers will get you.' Like a long thin finger, my hometown of Srebrenica stretched in the valley between steep hills, clustered along the main road leading in and out of town. The green canopy of the birch tree forest looked like green fairy floss dotted with the burgundy terracotta tile roofs of white rendered houses. The nearby hills were a perfect vantage point for snipers. In the time it took them to shoot once, miss, and correct their target, an innocent bystander would have time to take just one step.” Fragments”

WarSiegeBosnian WarSrebrenica
Book:The Cuckoo's Song
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“The body clings to life at any cost. It even eats itself. When there’s no food, it turns cannibal and devours its fat, then its muscle then its bones. I’ve seen soldiers, mad with hunger and cold, chop off their own arms and cook them. How long could you go on chopping? Both arms. Both legs. Ears. Slices from the trunk. You could chop yourself down to the very end and leave the heart to beat in its ransacked palace. No. Take the heart first. Then you don’t feel the cold so much. The pain so much. With the heart gone, there’s no reason to stay your hand. Your eyes can look on death and not tremble. It’s the heart that betrays us, makes us weep, makes us bury our friends when we should be marching ahead. It’s the heart that sickens us at night and makes us hate who we are. It’s the heart that sings old songs and brings memories of warm days and makes us waver at another mile, another smoldering village. To survive the zero winter and that war we made a pyre of our hearts and put them aside forever. There’s no pawnshop for the heart. You can’t take it in and leave it awhile in a clean cloth and redeem it in better times. You can’t make sense of your passion for life in the face of death, you can only give up your passion. Only then can you begin to survive. And if you refuse? If you felt for every man you murdered, every life you broke in two, every slow and painful harvest you destroyed, every child whose future you stole, madness would throw her noose around your neck and lead you into the dark woods where the rivers are polluted, and the birds are silent. When I say I lived with heartless men, I use the word correctly.”

WarTraumaThe Passion
Author:janette winterson
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“When next this [Gaza war] happens (and it will happen, again and again, because a people remain under occupation and because the relative compelling powers of both revenge and consequence warp beyond recognition once one has been made to bury their child), this same framing can always be used. The barbarians instigate and the civilized are forced to respond. The starting point of history can always be shifted, such that one side is always instigating, the other always justified in response.”

WarHistoryOccupationJustificationPalestineGazaColonizationGaza War
Book:One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
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