Elizabeth Skene

This summer I read The Cellist of Sarajevo, a novel set in Sarajevo, while under siege during the Bosnian War. I picked up the book because I love the cello, not knowing I’d be writing a paper related to the topic, or that I’d be applying to intern with the tribunal that is prosecuting people for the terrible crimes I read about.

Although it is fictional, the painful accounts it gives are well grounded in facts & history. The siege lasted for three years &, by the end, the population was 64% of what it had been before the war. Many mosques, museums and libraries were destroyed.

This semester I’m writing a paper on the intentional destruction of institutions of cultural and social significance, focusing specifically on libraries and archives. There are many terms for this, all of them debated & contested: cultural genocide, libricide, cultural cleansing and social death being a few of them. No matter what you call it, it is serious & heartbreaking.

The most powerful illustration of this I’ve found is by Kamal Bakaršic about the destruction of the National Library in Sarajevo. This except is from his essay “The Libraries of Sarajevo & the Book that Saved Our Lives.” [emphasis added]

On August 27, 1992, in the early morning, the National Library was deliberately attacked and burned. Twenty-building, launched from four positions in the surrounding hills….

The attack lasted less than half an hour. The sun was obscured by the smoke of books, and all over the city sheets of burned paper, fragile pages of grey ashe, snow. Catching a page you could feel its heat, and for a moment read a fragment of text in a strange kind of black and grey negative, until, as the heat dissipated, the page melted to dust in your hand.

It seems the Nazis burned about twenty million books. But not in one place (in about 45 different places). August 27, 1992 in Sarajevo, then, may have been the biggest book burning in history. In one day, and one night: a million and a quarter books.

…I think the aim of this kind of aggression, against museums, against libraries, is to erase our remembrance of who we are. Why else would someone want to burn books? Simply to create the situation where the people of a society have no memory of their past.

Exploring & researching this is fascinating, but some day I hope to do more than just research it – I want to actively participate in the prevention of these situations & to facilitate in the reparations for and reconstruction of archives/libraries/museums/etc that have been targeted for destruction.

Sorry to sound like a mix of a paper & a resume. It’s just that this topic consumes my heart & I want to share my passion, especially since this is a topic that nearly no one talks about, but is incredibly important.

Library demolition is a sort of malign tribute to the power of libraries.

Line, Maurice B. 1994. “The New Tribalism: Its Implications for Libraries All Over the World.” LOGOS 5 (1):6-12.

It’s nearly 3am. I still have a slight fever & an increasingly sore throat. Apparently sleeping most of the day makes sleeping at night difficult. As does reading about a topic that sets your soul aflame. Especially after eating an espresso bean chocolate bar. However, sleep is important & tomorrow I have a group meeting that I need to attend, no matter how I’m feeling, & so:

goodnight.