The bench

I wish there were more in the book about benches (or chairs or floors); the physical places that allowed James Riding to sit – for hours, days, weeks across 5 years – bearing witness to the daily rhythms of Sarajevan life. While reading this book I kept wondering whether these sitting spaces were comfortable or clean or well positioned or visible in the urban landscape. I now believe my almost-obsession with these benches derives from an unsatisfied desire to read more about the positioning of the author in the story he tells. To me, it remains essential to engage critically with our centredness when we tell stories about others. Thus my comments will re-centre the bench as the critical space from where to praise the book’s innovative contributions but also to continue conversations left pending on authorship, time, and contemporary Bosnian politics.

On the importance of being seated

What I most appreciate in this book is the experimental ways it narrates what we experience as the persistence of the past in the present of Sarajevo and Bosnia-Herzegovina. We are invited to reflect on the traumatic legacies of the war not just because they exist and persist but for how they limit what we can see of Sarajevo and the present politics of former Yugoslavia.

I am excited about a book that explores Sarajevo from benches, cafes’ chairs and other seated positions. Firstly, I believe we should pay more attention to how research happens from sitting down, from inhabiting places of immobility from where we project expectations and anxieties onto what moves or stands still, making certain things more visible, noticeable, and attractive than others. Secondly, I think we need to be seated to account for the complexities of Sarajevo. To be seated means we can take a break from what we know, read, or saw, and to observe carefully how the contradictions emerging from the everyday bear witness to conflicting processes of remembering, forgetting, memorialising, and cancelling the violence of the war.

I find the innovative ways to account for daily rhythms and routines attractive. I liked the long lists that span across pages detailing actions, describing people and animals, reproducing words as they entered the author’s visual space. I appreciate the lack of filters, the rawness of these meaningless lists because they don’t attempt to edit and narrativizing life. On the contrary, they expose Sarajevo as ordinary. For a moment, we can forget about Sarajevo’s siege, deaths, and destruction because life continues, in Sarajevo, as normal.

Sitting with memories that belong to places we don’t belong to

In the book, the bench often becomes a shelter from the present; a space where the author sits while he disconnects from things that happen synchronously to him to access the past through the evidence left in video recordings, personal memories, historical reconstructions and court cases.

But I found the parts re-circulating the extreme violence, destruction, and traumas caused by the war very problematic. I kept wondering why we need these graphic illustrations in a book that aims to approach Bosnia as more than its bloody conflict. I worried about how these images might affect different readers. The author struggles to watch certain scenes too. He tells us that he is forcing himself to watch, that he needs not to move away from the screen; but why? Would watching the scenes of war make war more real? I don’t believe so, because war cannot become real unless it is lived, experienced, and suffered.

I appreciate the endless lists of unimportant events because they offer a powerful portrayal of Sarajevo as a city that managed to move on, to find new equilibria and rhythms. Sarajevo makes sense of the war by means of black humour – unsettling jokes of catastrophes that would read inappropriate if they came from elsewhere. I don’t dispute that the traumas of the war remain and shape the present in more or less visible ways, but I don’t understand the need to re-insert violence and destruction to better picture that trauma. Who would benefit from reactivating these memories – even though factual – in the present? Not the people in Sarajevo and not those for whom these memories remain too painful to be talked about. We read that the author borrowed from death to bear witness of the genocide, but what are the ethics of this when there are people for whom to bear witness is not an option but a trauma they cannot opt out from? Why do we need, as outsiders, to describe traumatic events to make better sense of them? How instead focusing on the silences we encounter in the present and action those silences to acknowledge that trauma co-habits and informs life in post-conflict cities?

The writing and rhythm of the book favour the entangling of past and present as a means to make sense of various, interconnected presents; the present of the author who observes, the present of his friends who return from the Bosnian diaspora and the present of extremely violent images of the war, which remain alive to define this city in global imaginaries. I appreciate and value these perspectives for their contributions in understanding different aspects of the Bosnian present. But while the author sits immobile and exhausts the present with words, for others the present remains exhausting because of the overbearing presence of the war. I don’t think our research can bear witness to what we did not live. Rather, the value of our work might be in understanding that we remain observers of facts we can only partially account for.

Bench politics

The author witnessed the protests that revitalised Bosnian grassroots politics in 2014 and memories of the protests enter the book as they became part of Sarajevo’s everyday life. In this final section I wish to add more specific comments about the politics of everyday life.

I was happy to read reports from the Plenums and to get a glimpse of what the protests must have felt for those who lived them. I wish we had left the bench to follow the unfolding of those events, to see how the everyday of Sarajevo transformed. I wanted to read more about how the city mobilised to embrace political action. The protests in this book are presented as an event of extraordinary reach, and so they were. But the protests and the plenums did not just happen because of favourable circumstances. They took place because of active, persistent and insistent everyday grassroots activism. I write as a researcher of these movements and, to me, research that engages with the everyday is fundamental because is able to expose how grand narratives about a place stride and collide with its day to day activities. In this sense, I believe there could have been more in the book about the perceived political impasse and stillness of Bosnia-Herzegovina as a country unable to recover from the war and the buzzing life of Sarajevo with its clubs, cultural circles, and well frequented cafes. It is in these contradictions that we can understand how the plenums could happen in a place where politics is generally despised. If this book set out to challenge representations of Bosnia that always centre the war as the defining moment, I wish there were less images from the war and more about survival strategies, counter-movements and vibrant activist circles. If this book wanted to make sense of contemporary Bosnia, it should have also discussed how activism negotiates the traumatic memories of the conflict to create a less divisive and more inviting future.

Lastly, I wish the author had invited people to sit with him on the benches of Sarajevo; the people he observes and takes notes of and (virtually) the other scholars whose work already challenge representations of Bosnia-Herzegovina in its complex relationships with war, conflict, violence and trauma. I wish this book were written more in dialogue with ethnographic research from the region that describes the everyday life of this country accounting for the multiple, creative, and interesting practices of coping, co-habiting, entertaining, and coexisting with traumas without re-traumatising the present.