Taina Tervonen, Grobničarke , translated from French by Nihad Hasanović
WRITTEN BY: Zejneba Hajdarevic
The hope for pure progressive rhythms after the catastrophe of war is like fighting for breath. Below, in the vast pit of the mass grave, both words and bones seek their order. Without it, only the absence of meaning remains. Taina Tervonen writes about this in her work Grobničarka .
It could be said that the most basic narrative move of literary templates that take (post)war atrocities as their central backbone is the hope for a just, virtuous conclusion. Many of them, undoubtedly, demand that all these tragic realities yield a final catharsis - a much-needed purification and liberation.
Among such efforts, there is a rumble and a multitude of convictions that literature cannot be the same as history, that it is impossible to present the experience of war realistically and convincingly. It is as if the word stands forever frozen in front of the unspeakable, unable to dissolve the residue of painful experiences.
Back then, after the experience of World War II, the soil of European consciousness was trapped in a collective amnesia, denying historical facts, collective memory, and the establishment of any critical lens as a guide to a “better tomorrow.” Years later, with the consequences of “yesterday’s” deaths of the 1990s still vivid, the danger of this kind – at least as far as the Balkan soil is concerned – does not subside.
For Taina Tervonen, the Franco-Finnish writer and her work The Undertaker , this is not the case. Because if there is a rift over the literary language that forces absurdities and if the words often stand distraught in the face of the consequences of war, it certainly does not mean that writers stop writing, artists stop creating. And silence, of course, in this case for Tervonen, is not a game that a sheet of paper can endure for long. The testimonial value of the book is revealed due to the author's deep faith in the document and confession as a guarantee of recovery and a way out of the eclipse of post-genocide disorientation.
Gravediggers is the product of several years of authorial reporting and participation with those whose delicate and morally important task was to exhume and identify victims found in mass graves in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Following Senem Škulj, a forensic anthropologist, and Darija Vujinović, a researcher, Tervonen confronts a series of genocidal consequences. While Senem unravels the bones, Darija digs into family stories and the memories of the living.
A mass grave is not an idea. A mass grave is a business – writes Taina Tervonen in the introductory pages. Of the 110,000 dead after the war, the remains of 10,000 had not yet been found by early 2010, when the story begins, and many graves have yet to be explored. Since 2013, when the Tomašica grave was discovered near a large mining complex southeast of Prijedor, Tervonen has been reconstructing the war and its aftermath as a journalist – to the extent that her unreliable first-person narrative agency allows. Adopting, however, an unprejudiced point of view forged by a multitude of perspectives, Tervonen avoids the double trap of distance and outburst to construct a statement of remarkable accuracy, in prose imbued with tenderness, which contrasts with the violent reality of the written material. Through portraits and landscapes that respond to each other – chapter after chapter, encounter after encounter – The Tombkeepers constitute their monumental dimension.
In this sense, Tervonen's testimony will take shape between sobs and sudden agony, the silence of words and letters - that rhythm of broken breath that does not flow from the past to the future, but in the reverse direction. Translating the symbols legible in half-decayed bodies and unburied skeletons will show that when one war ends, a new one begins : for justice and a dignified burial of the dead, but this time with a ritual and a name.