Zbornik Mednarodnega literarnega srečanja Vilenica 2004 - Ljudmila

A Twilight Encounter
Muharem Bazdulj
The Ambiguity of Boring History
Rousseau’s sentence, Fortunate are a people whose history is boring to
read is is usually interpreted as a desire for an absence of wars, unrest,
floods. However, it is also possible that boredom might be a manifestation
of a persistent and monotonous repetition of similar events even
though those events are not boring as such. What I want to say is that the
monotony of the endless repetition of unpleasant events does not have
that same lightness as the boredom that led to the exodus from Eden, and
which is, together with leisure, a faithful companion of happiness. But
since man calls destiny only what pounds him, even though fortuitive
circumstances are fruits of destiny, too, boredom is generally perceived
only as the monotony of pleasant events. People like to invoke Tolstoy’s
words that only misfortunes are unique while all happiness is identical,
that unhappy families and countries are each unhappy in their own way.
Heine would not have agreed with Tolstoy. According to him, every tragedy
is familiengluck. The Bosnian tragedy is a tragedy of being stretched:
on the east it is a wild frontier and rebellious bulwark, on the west a devil’s
island and the dark side of the moon.
The Weight of Smoke
However, the ambiguity of boredom is not the only historical ambiguity.
All of history is an ambiguity of a sort. Each nation has its own history.
The realization of Russell’s Let the people think is as unattainable as is his
old countryman’s state whose unreachable nature is hidden within its
very name: Utopia. A hero is always a perpetrator too. An English nobleman
and a famous navigator is, to the Spaniards, a pirate and a thief. It is
only certain that he brought tobacco to Europe and that he managed to
measure the weight of smoke first by weighing a cigarette and then subtracting
the weight of the butt along with the weight of the ashes once he
finished the cigarette. Tobacco was brought to Bosnia as an agricultural
commodity by Ali-pasha Rizvanbegovich, a Herzegovinian Sultan and a
Montenegrean butcher, the sworn enemy of Prince-bishop Petar Petrovich
Njegos II, the Montenegrin Solomon and a poet of slaughter.
Wilkinson
Belted, and carrying a sword, according to an honorable family tradition
(whose ironic counterpoint as well as whose seamy side is evident from
the razor industry logo) Gardner Wilkinson, while traveling through
Herzegovina and Montenegro, took upon himself the noble task of mediating
between Ali-Pasha and Njegos hoping to abolish that ugly and primitive
custom of decapitation wherein heads later serve as trophies.
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