Reflections on the Shadow Workshop Sarajevo 28-30 March 2025
Group photo
Shadow workshop in Sarajevo. A reflection.
Evgen Kajin
The river I
The river Bosna makes up the Bosna River Valley, the country’s industrial center and home to close to a million people, as well as the location of several major cities. It has no foreign variations of its name, and is known as the Bosna in all three of the country’s official languages. One of the river’s tributary is Miljacka, a river that flows through the centre of Sarajevo. It flows north until it feeds into the river Sava. (Šabić, 2014) (https://bosnia-travel.ba/rijeka-bosna-river/)
Threads
The workshop, held from 28th to 3th of March 2025, started long before it begun. There was an idea of it at some other shadow group (in Armenia or even before that), spreading by words of mouth and e-mails among those who were interested in it. An e-mail dated 9th July 2024: “In Armenia we were discussing the countries where there no one would need visas. Bosnia, Serbia… Any ideas of the next venue?” and “I’d love us to get a country and dates sorted. Open to anywhere.” On 1st of August, there were already a list of 30 people for the Shadow workshop in Sarajevo and dilemmas of attendance for many, which led to a creation of particular google group on 6th of August: “I have now created a new google group…”, while some messages from people offering explanations of some history. I remember reading the internet group posts with various opinions, wishes, contributions and uneasiness on how to set the dates of the workshop and what those days on calendar mean to different people referring to their culture and religious backgrounds. A place in Sarajevo was then the topic of discussions, with information on 30th September 2024: “Dear shadowers, Still looking and waiting for answers for bigger venues. And final confirmation from Jewish community is still to be done…”
The Jewish Centre was accepted, and that was followed by certain requirements of personal data and payment.
On 7th October 2024 one of the e-mails was added: “I have been reading all the emails sent over the last few weeks, it feels like hundreds, and see that we are suffering from the group struggling with growing and as all organisations that grow discover, chaos is likely to ensue. As fewer people know each other and so misunderstandings grow and wishes to bureaucratise and institutionalise start to appear.
The Shadow was a very simple concept, and I think many of us would like to keep it that way. The idea was to make it easy for people to join, easy for people to host and not expensive. So, the timings and design evolved with all that in mind. I also think that it is always more difficult for us who live in Western Europe to join when the workshops are held in Eastern Europe. That is a structural reflection of the political situation we live in. It will cost us more in both time and money.”
On 9th October, a proposition was made “that we have a google sheet form in which people can individually confirm their attendance…”
It was a second Shadow workshop for me and I was amazed how the organisational issues were slowly developing through threads each time I opened the mailbox. Participants provided and shared what they were able to, could, and wished; and that was covering a sets of related things from ideas, data, bits of history perspectives, opinons on culture, gender roles and equality, personal experiences, e-mail and personal data management, organisational efforts and travel plans with accommodation. One of those lines (16th October 2024) reads: “But, we are quite a well organised gang, some get lost on the lists (which one, which one now???), others pick up, and we move on…”
I remember how I joined to the group site, writing (10th October 2024): “Dear all,
Messages in e-mails flow as a river in the google group stream, collecting in a lake of various themes from organisational to social to gender to personal vibes and issues. I try to follow, to be here, be mindful and now I am jumping in trying to swim. I wish to be in Sarajevo.” and later, struggling with data and payment transfer (29th January 2025): “I am wondering why there are hurdles regarding this wandering. I am looking forward to measure their knots or at least witness some of their undercurrents during our March meandering.”
Roadtrip
The date of travel arrived and with it, our private travel gang of five went afoot by car from Slovenia, while one member begun her route even sooner and farther.
First part of the travel was highway in the early morning. We tried to settle quietly as we could in the limited space of cage on wheels, with some pre-dawn conversations that helped us connect, get closer and at the same time, allowed time to pass by. After about 3 hours of more or less east to south east course, we arrived at the border with BIH, where we turned south. Just crossing the border, some of us took internet phone cards for the state of BIH and someone requested a sails check for it. I remember one of the sellers froze and after few seconds of ominous silence, he answered: “My dear, you can get a check only for the gas here.”
About an hour later, due south, the road joined to the Bosna river. We crossed it over many bridges several times. As there was heavy rain on many of preceding days, the river level had risen. To us, that water mass seemed swollen, muddy, thick and menacing as its bright brown flow roamed not far below the road; it brushed closed to farms and churches in the valley as we drove by. The river made many broad turns and within some of them we noticed small villages where some houses had gardens, and on some of them there were crosses, some wooden, some shiny white, cleaned by the pouring rain of past days.
Another hour we drove by. After the city of Maglaj, the villages changed slightly. Churches with bell towers were rare and than vanished; instead of them, there were minarets, some small, some wide and high, while in some gardens there were white pillars, and it seemed as if they were made from the same stone and were as shiny, white and wet as tombstones we saw earlier.
In the car, we talked about death, listened to music of ex Yugoslavia (of rock like Bijelo dugme, Đorđe Balašević, Prljavo kazalište… and of sevdah) and planned to find good food in Sarajevo (čevapčiči, pite and baklave).
When we finally arrived, we had to accommodate five of us at three different places, getting keys and leaving luggage; afterwards, we went to eat. We found a restaurant called “Preporod”, which translates to “Revival”, where upon entering, the waiter said to us: “You came to the right spot. Right here and now, the fundamentally important thing is one and only: Relax.” And we agreed to everything he proposed to eat. Only after we ate it all did we stroll to the Jewish Centre, got our documents checked and stepped in the Shadow workshop group. We were tired, fed, glad to finally come in, felt welcomed by empty chairs and as I was about to sit down with all the long day behind me, I found out that I was sinking in a feeling of guilt.
Holding of the parents shadow
Shadow workshop part I
Mike Tait somewhere wrote about Shadow Workshop (2017): “Could we become more able to look at our own shadows rather than locating them elsewhere? Might we become more willing to take on our own authority rather than locating it elsewhere? How might we experiment with ways of learning and thinking together?”
So there was me, guilty-feeling cosy fed Slovenian man in war torn capital city of devasted region that managed to survive, where fears of new escalation were hanging in the air as real and heavy as grey clouds over us. What can I do with that? How can I make something of it for me, and then maybe, possibly, also for the group as well? How to work it through, or digest it, make it useful and reachable for the process that I chose to be a part of?
Suddenly it didn’t feel like a learning experience or even psychotherapy group experiment. It felt real. Like in flesh real, even though I had not lived the traumatic years of war and siege. Slowly, I remembered some devastating news and stories of that time, and how untrue it seemed back then.
Some (biased?) data
Here is a selected information that I needed for at least an attempt of some narrative of that period.
There once was a state called Yugoslavia. Its collapse and subsequent decay of social structures and values did not unravel in a vacuum. There are many aspects in the previous past of regional and international history that are impossible to present correctly. Maybe just to mention that Yugoslavia after 1985, in the international geostrategic sense, lost its function as a buffer that it had during the cold war. The (now ex) country slowly started to break apart after the death of its president Tito (in May 1980); however, the international attitude was “to support the continuation of a ‘unified’ Yugoslavian state” (White and Karčić, 2024, page 6) and it persevered to do so despite signals of the impending doom, as for example in the warning by the CIA in 1990 (Director of Central Intelligence, 2006): “Yugoslavia will cease to function as a federal state within a year, and will probably dissolve within two. Economic reform will not stave off the breakup. […] a full-scale interrepublic war is unlikely, but serious intercommunal conflict will accompany the breakup and will continue afterward. The violence will be intractable and bitter. There is little the United States and its European allies can do to preserve Yugoslav unity.”
It was on June 25, 1991 that Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence and Macedonia soon followed in October of the same year. The entity that remained of Yugoslavia led three wars against “… Slovenia (June 27 – July 7, 1991), Croatia (May 1991 – Dec. 1995), and Bosnia & Hercegovina (April 1992 – Dec. 1995). The West, in pursuit of stability, either openly or tacitly supported and rewarded… aggression.” (White and Karčić, 2024, page 8)
In the book Surviving the Peace, Lippman asked people of the region how they lived through the war and post-war social turmoil. Someone described their view of the war (Lippman, 2019, page 281): “It was all so unbelievable that at first, it seemed funny,…” because the social experience before the war was that “…we lived in a multiethnic society. That hate didn’t exist before; it was artificially installed.”
The same opinion can be found in the essay Genocide in Bosnia-Hercegovina: A Short History (White and Karčić, 2024, page 1): “Accepting a construct such as ‘Balkanization’ reduces our understanding of what was and is possible… the history of Bosnia shows that animosities and/or ethnic differences become violent only after outside agitation or interference.”
Lippman (2019, page 281) gave voice to a witness: “The emphasis on ethnicity and exclusion was so strong that ethnic hatred became normalised, and we lost the ability to have any communication among the different ethnicities.” In such an environment, Lippman continues to cite the witness, “hate became part of our everyday life… National and religious identities” were “openly used as weapons in the political arsenal.” The consequences of the nationalist program could soon be seen: “…we exist as ethnicities, not as people. This has only been possible through mass hysteria.”
“From 1992 until 1995 … Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) went through a devastating war in which ethnicity and religion were used to justify mass killings.” (Sonneveld and Sušić, 2023)
For the sake of counting the dead during the war, the Sarajevo-based Research and Documentation Center, IDC, conducted research from 2004-2006, and the study has been dubbed the “Bosnian Book of the Dead”. It claims “there were 97,207 casualties… The study does not include deaths due to accidents during the war, or due to reckless handling of weapons, starvation, or lack of medication”(Heil, 2007).
In the time frame from April 1992 to February 1996, the city of Sarajevo “was besieged by Bosnian-Serb forces” from “the surrounding mountains” (Sonneveld and Sušić, 2023). One street was named ‘Sniper alley’, “the informal name given to the main boulevard in Sarajevo which was lined with sniper post and became a notoriously dangerous place to pass through” (Irwin, 2010).
“People living in the suburbs of Sarajevo… often had to bury their dead in front of apartment buildings, at night. After the war, most bodies were exhumed and reburied in cemeteries, but not all. This explains why it is not unusual to see tombstones alongside houses today. In other cases, Muslims were buried in the graveyards next to the many small mosques in Sarajevo” (Sonneveld and Sušić, 2023).
Twenty years after the war, in 2012, city “remembered victims of siege as ethnic divisions persist. At dawn on April 6, Sarajevo woke to an unusual scene… There were 11,541 chairs in total, each representing one citizen of Sarajevo who was killed, died of hunger or disappeared during the siege” (Sadović, 2012).
At the end of the war, the “distribution of the specific ethnicities…” was a “major argument when internal borders were established (and thus the peace treaty indirectly legitimised ethnic cleansing), and the creation of homogeneous ethnic spaces at the subnational level was one of the objectives in Dayton.” Those spaces became semi-homogeneous territorial units, in which “their representatives possess power, and in order to maintain their control, they have an interest in keeping ethnic tensions and suspicion alive”(Reményi et al, 2016).
The country that I am from, Slovenia, in the meantime, managed to continue its integration into the European Union.
Shadow workshop part II
Running up that hill
Sitting in a large group of around 50 with those people in that building, in that place and with that history, triggered various reactions in me. I mentioned the feeling of guilt. It had to do with the here-and-now of coming late, but there was also the fact that we from Slovenia were lucky in respect to people in this region. The feeling was so intense that the following day, I had to find a way to voice it in the group.
Did the fact that I knew many people in the group, of which majority were from Slovenia, make it any easier for me? Was there less effort for me because I knew the language of the city and was also fluent in English? Or did that only add to my pressing internal perception of being a traitor?
To whom could I project such an uncomfortable content that sets off the urge to expel it? In a group with a leader, the latter could be the one. Or the leader could point to a scapegoat in the group, so that I could follow the lead and would not be the one to blame for my emotional excrements unloaded on that member. The leader could also present an enemy external to the group as a valuable target for my damaging sentiments, and I would engage in full throttle attack on such an entity.
Shadow workshop is meant to produce groups without a leader.
Wait – did I just write that?
Was it indeed what the Shadow Workshop was meant to offer? Or is it just me writing this… is the goal of the Shadow workshop to set off reflection to one’s own reaction to the flexibility of how it should be?
And what is the “leader” doing in my writing just here and now? Oh, here I go, searching in what I thought is the source: “The questions continue along similar veins as we look to the future… Is the emphasis on 15 minute contributions and subsequent diverse ways of reflecting a continuing, enlivening experiment?… Or, are we trying to cram too much in?” (Tait, 2017) No, there is another: “…2014, an idea arose to organise a co-operative group analytic workshop with the purpose of exploring the different meanings of the concept of the shadow. The spirit of the event was to make it co-operative…” (Loncar, 2015, p. 48). “Each and every participant shaped it in a variety of ways, from helping to facilitate discussions, to helping with washing up. That gave a unique feeling of shared space and ownership, where we got to see how opposites, professional/personal, dream/reality, active/passive, host/guest are inseparably interwoven…” (Loncar, 2015, p. 49)
Here is more: “In the Large Group, the aim is not to find direct relations between members as in the Small Group… but to discover through dialogue how the superordinate systems operating in everyday life and work are replayed in the group as well as uncovering each person’s positional value relative to those systems” (von Sommaruga Howard, 2024, p. 65).
This train of thoughts does not offer answers… But it helps me to think what is happening.
I am diverging from the painful content.
In the large group in Sarajevo, it seems to me, if I write for myself, I was like a carrier for some issues that bind together, even if just for mere moments, my own emotional processes with those of the larger context, be it culture, society, (regional) political atmosphere of that moment and of the past, or humanity. We were bearing and transmitting broader issues of the context we came from.
In different moments, I was a bystander, enabler of a crime, hiding what was shameful; at other times, it was me who was the victim and felt exposed, vulnerable to the core. In a certain point, I shouted orders and demanded to be executed; but was also caring husband and father at another time.
One group was dealing with the (un)usefulness of boasting and bonding of the Balkan men and what can women do in the meantime. Participants from one country could speak about their fears and hopes when some participants from the other country were not there. One of the groups on the last day was completely lost in time, disoriented from the beginning to its end.
I remember a drawing session after the social dreaming. In a particular moment, associations went to slaughtering animals on farms. I grew up on a small farm and the discussion stirred in me pictures and living memories of ways how men in my family worked that out. But what I did just then, on the panel paper, was to draw a protector and companion animals to a lonely chicken.
A few days after the Shadow workshop, at home, I drew my impression of a morning experience, when I was running up that hill and found the land full of graves. But I drew also an impression of a holding.
The river II
Upon ending the workshop, later that day, we were driving back home. The rain was slowing down and the river Bosna seemed to settle a little; its waters that threatened the villages few days ago were letting go. Maybe, I thought, maybe some day, Bosna will again be able to embrace its people.
References and further reading:
Director of Central Intelligence. (approved for release in May 2006). Yugoslavia Transformed 18 October 1990. National Intelligence Estimate. Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room. https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/1990-10-01.pdf (page iii)
Europe Direct Information Center. Member States of the European Union. https://www.strasbourg-europe.eu/eu-member-states-of-the-european-union/
Heil, R. (2007, June 26). Bosnia’s Book of the Dead. Institute for war & Peace Reporting. https://iwpr.net/global-voices/bosnias-book-dead
Irwin, R. (2010, September 17). Military Observer Describes “Random” Sarajevo Shelling. Institute for war & Peace Reporting. https://iwpr.net/global-voices/military-observer-describes-random-sarajevo-shelling
Loncar, A. (2015). Report on ‘Coming out of the shadow’ in Aarhus. Denmark, 6 – 8 February. Group Analysis 48(2): 48-49
Malcolm, N. (1996). Bosnia: A Short History. New York: New York University Press (page 193) In: White T, Karčić H. (2024, winter). Genocide in Bosnia-Hercegovina: A Short History. Educational Handouts.https://www.keene.edu/academics/cchgs/resources/educational-handouts/genocide-in-bosnia-hercegovina-a-very-short-history/download/ (page 1)
Reményi, P., Végh, A., Pap, N. (2016). The influence of ethnic policies on regional development and transport issues in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Belgeo 2016(1). http://journals.openedition.org/belgeo/18991 (Paragraf 12)
Sadović, M. (2012, April 11). Sarajevo Still Bears Its Scars. Institute for war & Peace Reporting. https://iwpr.net/global-voices/sarajevo-still-bears-its-scars
Šabić, I. (2014). Onomastička analiza bosansko-hercegovačkih srednjovjekovnih administrativnih tekstova i stećaka. (Onomastic analysis of medieval administrative texts and tombstone inscriptions from Bosnia and Herzegovina). Dissertation. Osijek: Sveučilište Josipa Jurja Strossmayera u Osijeku, Filozofski fakultet
Tait, M. (2017). Reflections on the evolution of the shadow workshops. Shadow Workshop: E-mail correspondence.
Von Sommaruga Howard, T. (2024). Lighting fires: On creating large group dialogue in organizations and society [CLGD]. Group Analysis 57(1):63-91
White, T., Karčić, H. (2024, winter). Genocide in Bosnia-Hercegovina: A Short History. Educational Handouts. https://www.keene.edu/academics/cchgs/resources/educational-handouts/genocide-in-bosnia-hercegovina-a-very-short-history/download/ (page 1)
email: ezop.zavod@outlook.com
My reflections
Teresa von Sommaruga Howard
Getting to Sarajevo from London is not straightforward, as there are no direct flights, unless you have access to those airports north of London. Instead, I took the opportunity of a direct flight to Ljubljana, in Slovenia, so I could catch up with Lev Pozar on the way. To get to Sarajevo, I went by car two days later with four Slovenian colleagues. It was a long and hard journey that took 8 hours, through Slovenia across the border into Croatia and then into Bosnia Herzegovina. I’m glad I didn’t miss this opportunity. Driving through these three countries gave me a picture of what it’s like living on the border of the European Union. Evidence of the Balkan war was witnessed along the way – burnt out and partly destroyed buildings but crossing the border into Bosnia was a shock. Rubbish scattered along the roadside. Highways in the EU gave way to slow single track roads full of repaired potholes. On either side of the road were small villages nestled in the hills, each with their own mosque. And in the green hillside beside each village, small fields dotted with what seemed like hundreds of white gravestones. The road followed the flooded river much of the way. I felt deep sadness.
Sarajevo finally appeared. The journey was well worth it. A town surrounded by hills, in a bowl, and the rushing river ran right through the centre. Many beautifully decorated stucco-faced buildings from the Austro-Hungarian empire. Prince Ferdinand was assassinated there, and it is said, triggered the First World War. Countless minarets sit above the roof line – a signal of the multicultural character of this special place that we were told was attacked by the longest siege in history: 1500 days, just because it was a place where people of different persuasions and beliefs lived together in relative peace. But there had been no EU funds for tarting the buildings up as in Ljubljana.
Evidence that it was once also part of the Ottoman Empire is still very much in evidence; the food, what is sold in the little shops, beautiful rugs, Turkish tea sets and food like you might eat in Istanbul.
The workshop attracted people locally from Slovenia, Serbia and Bosnia but no one came from any of the other Balkan states. Several people also came from Germany, from the UK, Ireland and Denmark. For many it was not their first Shadow Workshop, so most of us knew what to expect. We usually meet in the whole group for the whole weekend. We were about fifty in all. The Jewish Community Centre a substantial building on the banks of the river, still with a small active synagogue community, provided us with our meeting place. We were told that it had taken on a special role during the war, providing food, support and even vitamins. They also very generously provided us with lunch and supper each day.
We began Saturday and Sunday with social dreaming and reflection. Not surprisingly, the dreams on the first morning were full of death and destruction, changing patterns by any means possible and bridges being blown up or broken down. On the second morning, many historical dreams and memories emerged, along with confusing images.
From the start on Friday afternoon, there was confusion about when sessions were to begin. Somehow, we were not able to agree on how long the breaks would be or when we would restart. It was frustrating and deeply upsetting for some. What was preventing us from agreeing on these usually accepted boundaries? Perhaps we needed a convenor to insist or was something else afoot? That was until the last session. It was then that a strange conversation began within a sleepy and tired atmosphere, about feeling invaded by important people in our lives; mothers, fathers, friends. Suddenly towards the end of this session and the workshop, we realised what we had been enacting throughout the weekend! The siege of Sarajevo: it must have been a terrifying experience to live through and it was not so long ago. We had discovered that from the inside out.
email: teresa@justdialogue.com
Hosting in the Shadow of a Siege:
Nick Jones
“Wisdom or oblivion — take your choice. From that warfare there is no release.” ― W. R. Bion
This was to be my first Shadow workshop. It began with a sprawling exchange of emails some months before we convened, in which only location and the dates for the workshop were agreed: we’d meet in the Jewish Centre in Sarajevo, from March 28th until the 30th. In the custom of the Shadow, the rest of the programme would be devised and agreed at the event itself.
I know very little about the history and current political climate of Sarajevo itself, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the Balkan states. Born in 1981, my memory of the Balkans consists of names without meaning: Sarajevo, Belgrade, Yugoslavia; Serbo-Croat, Milošević, Tito, musical in their meaninglessness. This combination of ignorance and hazy pre-teen memories meant that I travelled to Sarajevo with a sense of naivety and a vague nostalgia; even, somehow, a sense of romanticism attached to the word Sarajevo — perhaps it’s simply the softness of the word, almost absent of consonants, a word which flows like water, which makes it an utterance absented from history, a place and a people reduced to a melody.
Then in the airport, I read about the siege of Sarajevo — at three years, “the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare,” according to Wikipedia, over which period 500,000 bombs were dropped by Bosnian Serb forces. Citizens endured periods of up to six months without water, electricity or gas; and nearly 14,000 people were killed. Reading this I felt like some kind of scavenger for knowledge, trying to learn by wrote facts served up by the web — massacre turned to data, indigestible chunks of numbers.
*
Sarajevo sits in a valley. Hills surround it on all sides; and as the taxi from the airport descended into the city I had a sense of sinking into a bowl, the car having only to navigate the pull of gravity to make it into the heart of Sarajevo. Once there I looked up at the hills surrounding us and could imagine them littered with snipers, the city’s residents fish in a barrel to the gunmen on the hillside.
I walked into the Old Town, which seemed populated mostly by jewellery shops and coffee stores and among them three museums: the Museum of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide; the Siege of Sarajevo museum; and Gallery 11/07/95, dedicated to the Srebrenica genocide. Above the shop fronts some buildings bore the scars of shells and bullets, pockmarks in the render and mortar — a city of recent horrors and contemporary pleasures, jostling for position. The gold at eye-level made it easy not to look up, as if its presence belied the violence with which the city still lived.
“History is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake,” wrote James Joyce. This seemed a city forging ways for its citizens to live, without having fully awakened from its nightmares. I thought of a patient I see: he is plagued by nightmares which, on waking, morph into hallucinations — somehow he drives to his early-morning sessions where he sits silently in the chair, afraid to speak in case his nightmares overwhelm him again. He lives on a psychic tightrope, afraid to sleep and afraid to wake up; and the sessions are the same: I speak, so as not to let the silence turn to sleep; but not too much, in case I awaken something terrible.
Later that day I went with a colleague, Maria Puschbeck, to the Museum of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide. I say “went” — we entered the building and looked at some of the information in the entrance: maps with lines demarcating territories and the locations of snipers on the hillsides; an inflatable dinghy which had been used in the war to carry a woman in labour across a lake; and record covers altered to honour Sarajevo (“Never Mind the Bollocks, it’s Sarajevo”): a conflation of true horror and pop iconography; a punk camaraderie. Then we arrived at the entrance proper to the museum, where video footage of wounded people played silently on two screens. The man at the desk had a haunted and haunting air. Both Maria and I stalled, and then felt strongly that we needed to leave. Something in the atmosphere felt too much, too raw, the horror too present; and the images undigested and undigestible, clods of violence. We returned to the street with its jewellery and coffee shops. I felt like a coward but also relieved. The museum seemed a fizzing bomb nestled in the centre of the city, trying to contain and commemorate the reverberations of the war. We had a coffee and talked about the hat shop opposite.
Once the workshop itself began there was confusion about its start time. Some participants arrived to be told, on entering the already-established circle, our conversation underway, that they were late. Arrivals seemed staggered by nation, groups from different Balkan countries entering in hourly intervals until, as some of the history of Sarajevo was elucidated, the group waited for the last cohort, “the Serbs,” to arrive.
In time, forty-five of us had assembled and as we gathered, one Bosnian member introduced himself as a “proud host” and a survivor of the siege. He spoke about some of his experiences and those of the city itself, and I wondered aloud whether I might be some kind of “trauma tourist,” here to listen voyeuristically, dipping just a toe into the still-rough Balkan waters; or snorkelling, peering in on another world from the safety of the surface, moving lazily above the depths.
Notions of the “trauma tourist,” the “host” and the siege remained in the group throughout the weekend — that is, images of the visitor and the resident; the temporary and the permanent; the watcher and the watched. Siege, on the other hand, is an image of dread-filled stasis: an eternal tortured present from which no-one can leave an no-one can enter; a moment and a people encircled by a lethal ring, within which resources will only deplete. It is an enforced paralysis, necropolitics playing out in plain sight. The member who had initially declared himself the host would go on to come and go periodically throughout the weekend; another member who had, by having arranged the venue, been identified as a host, seemed to have lost the will to host under the barrage of emails in the build-up. We were a hostless people, among us some who, not long ago, would have been mortal enemies.
Leaderless by design, the Shadow workshop brings questions of authority, autonomy and group cohesion to the fore. Part of the group’s task, it seemed to me, is to find a way of co-existing for its duration, be that safely, creatively and so on, with neither a pre-ordained structure, nor hierarchy, to contain the complexities of this task. The notion of the host seemed an alternative to a leader: while not strictly an authority, the host provides and holds the space, a welcoming, stabilising force.
Perhaps in these perceptions, I am only expressing my own desire for an authority, someone to hold the group at its centre: one who is steadfast in their service to the group, at home with the idiosyncrasies of their guests and the space they’re in; who seamlessly co-ordinates the flow of food, drinks and conversation, continuing unperturbed when wine is spilled on the carpet. In analytic parlance, that is — the mother-father who makes what would otherwise be disparate cohere; or, the container.
In its etymology, the term “host” connotes “stranger,” “foreigner,” “enemy” and “army.” In this way “host” also moves towards “guest,” these complementary words returning to the same linguistic root. In its Catholic sense, the “host” originates from the Latin word “hostia,” which translates as “sacrificial victim” — the Eucharistic bread expressing both sacrifice and resurrection.
To “host,” then, is to hold a paradoxical position: one who opens their home, and therefore themselves, to the unknown of the other; and, the host is one who sacrifices themselves for the group. This multitude of meanings is condensed into a single soft syllable, whose echoes move from the notion of welcome towards enmity and conflict, sacrifice and hope: cornerstones of human psyche, human history.
As a therapist I have sometimes thought of myself as a host: I wait for strangers to arrive, about whom I often know nothing more than their name. I am held by my setting, the familiar trappings of the consulting room and my chair anchoring me in such a way that I can receive the stranger. I offer them a seat and I take mine; and from this simple gesture the guest begins to tell their story, and we begin to create something.
But what does it mean to host the enemy? In a city whose buildings are still strewn with bullet holes, the linguistic ancestry of “host” seems pertinent. Is to host the enemy kamikaze, suicidal, murderous; or the offer of a truce, peace, reparation? We speak of “breaking bread,” to eat together, to make peace, the fragmented body of Christ consumed as a unifying act, that which is dismembered bringing unity to others. Is the one who hosts offered up for this?
I once heard of a missive from the IRA, in which they conveyed that certain people they were looking for could either go to the IRA, or the IRA would go to them. I always wondered if those called had gone to the IRA, would there be a chance to talk, and would that therefore be the better option than having them come to you? Might, somehow, accepting the invitation create the possibility of peace, and its refusal guarantee only slaughter? Another tightrope, between violence and dialogue.
*
It is strange, though, to talk here of the host as the body of Christ, or to talk of the IRA. In the Sarajevo shadow, we were ensconced in a Jewish centre in eastern Europe, in a predominantly Muslim city, itself the capital of a country whose citizens are mostly Muslim: the western Christian matrix is not paramount here. I know I cannot shake off my own frame of reference — my associations are, typically, those rooted in a Western, Christian tradition — and become other than what I am.
Similarly, within the workshop itself, it seemed difficult to recognise that we were in a predominantly Muslim country. In some ways, in microcosm, the Jewish centre in a Muslim city mirrored Israel’s position in the Arab world. Perhaps this parallel accounted for some of the difficulty in reaching this facet of our experience. In another way, this could be said to mirror the constellation of the city under siege: one surrounded by hostile forces.
But of course, it is Gaza that is, and has been, under siege, at the same time as it is being decimated. There is something about saying this which feels like a punchline, or an incendiary bomb in any conversation. I can say it but it is hard to fathom the enormity of the facts, or the reality of the Gazan situation; and yet, I have to say it. To refer to what’s happening in Gaza is just as likely to elicit agreement as it is to elicit offence and outrage. I know also that some people will find a form of neutrality here, too — “It’s a war and people die in war,” someone I know said recently, phlegmatically: a statement which seemed to render any opposition a hysterical position. A neutrality born of neutering, an impotence forced on being. To me this seemed a defence against the horrors of the “war,” which are defended against because a genocidal potential exists in the shadow of all of us. Periodically this mushrooms, somewhere, a population politically eroded, before being obliterated by the more powerful. The potential to crush the other exists, psychically, in all of us; and Gaza, to me, seems an enactment of the shadow, in the Jungian sense, of what it is to be human; and this seemed to lurk in the shadow of the Shadow.
The poet and classicist Ann Carson, in her book Nox, written after learning of the death of her estranged brother and in which she tries to make sense of his death, writes:
“History can be at once concrete and indecipherable… Note that the word ‘mute’ us regarded by linguists as an onomatopoeic formation referring not to silence but to a certain fundamental opacity of human being, which likes to show the truth by being seen hiding… To put this another way, there is something which facts lack. ‘Overtakelessness’ is a word told me by a philosopher once: das Unumgängliche — that which cannot be got round. Cannot be avoided or seen the back of. About which one collects facts — it remains beyond them.”
500,000 bombs and 14,000 killed in Sarajevo; over 50,000 so far killed in Gaza and they’re not done yet. In the pandemic, my father-in-law asked me casually, “How many people died today?” as if asking if it might rain later. Such tallies are tachometers for the dead, numbers racing higher as we shift through the gears until we coast in the highest gear, as if the higher the tally the smoother, somehow, the journey becomes.
In the circle of our large group, itself encircled by Sarajevo, which in turn is psychically still encircled by the ongoing potential for conflict to break out again across the region, it was as if we existed within concentric circles of unspeakable pain, each a fractal inversion of the other, orbiting but never reaching the centre of our experience.
The whole time in Sarajevo, I felt that there was something I was struggling to look at. I wanted to, but couldn’t quite manage it — perhaps this is me as the Tourist, the one who glimpses things rather than absorbs and assimilates. Perhaps in this sense, I can only ever be a tourist — always on the verge of returning home, wherever I am. In my early twenties I went backpacking alone in Africa: I met one man who, as he pieced together the circumstances of my life, said, “So you had a job at home, and somewhere to live; and when you go back you will have neither?” After I’d said yes he paused and asked, “So why are you here?” I couldn’t find an answer. I felt the same in Sarajevo.
Perhaps, simply, in a weekend there was too much to assimilate: Sarajevo’s past which is not yet history, for a thing in living memory is not yet history; rather, it is something in the psychic bloodstream, still pumping through the mind, body, and populace.
Ann Carson, again:
“History and elegy are akin. The word “history” comes from an ancient Greek verb meaning “to ask.” One who asks about things — about their dimensions, weight, location, moods names, holiness, smell — is an historian. But the asking is not idle. It is when you are asking about something that you realise you yourself have survived it, and so you must carry it, or fashion it into a thing which carries itself… Now by far the strangest thing that humans do… is history. This asking. For it produces no clear or helpful account.”
So instead, unable to delineate history from the present moment, we hunkered down in our workshop, weathering a psychic storm by banding together, the Centre becoming something of a bunker. In planning the weekend we had elected to have a number of groups per day, with minimal breaks in between. There was no deviation from this; we had only large group after large group, all of us together for each session, for the duration of the day. In this way we sat in a kind of vigil, facing each other with our backs against the city — penguins huddled in the Arctic, surviving by physical proximity. We ate, too, in this same room, standing up, walking around with paper plates as if it were impossible to leave.
It was as if we had placed ourself under siege. Etymology, again, sheds some light on this. “Siege” comes from “a seat, chair, stool; ceremonial seat of a king,” from Latin sedere, “to sit.” We sat and we sat. Harking further back, siege reaches “a privy, a latrine, chamber pot… hence, excrement, fecal matter; the anus.” Excrement is processed food, the waste after something is digested. So “siege” encompasses the king and shit, the highest echelons and the lowest human function. King Trump, in a megalomanic lust for synthetic glory, toys with making a Riviera from the ruins of Gaza, some capitalist alchemy which would resurrect a homeland as the plaything of the rich. Gold is the shadow of shit.
*
In one break I did leave the centre, and bought a leather jacket: retail therapy; a protective shell; a second skin; digital gold exchanged for a deer hide – the skin of another animal, which I felt I had the right to make my own. The last day, Sunday 30th, was Eid. I have a friend who lives in Sarajevo, but in a peculiar coincidence he was in London that weekend. He texted me and said, “It must have been special to have been there for Eid. I bet the city was pumping.” I had no idea. I spent Eid in the airport having left neurotically early, fearful I might miss my flight, my leather jacket folded neatly beneath the rest of my clothes.
I don’t know whether I returned home wiser, but I didn’t feel oblivious. For a time, I was not unlike my patient — unsettled for days, snippets of the large groups replaying and with them anger and sadness, unsure if I was still dreaming the group or waking from it. Throughout the weekend, there had been much talk of graveyards which reportedly litter the roadside from Croatia down to Sarajevo; and of the muddy water which flowed through the centre of the city, pouring down from one of the hillsides into the bowl of the city. This river had appeared in dreams and from these dreams, bridges became a powerful symbol — a link, but also that which is among the first targets of a war, severing the veins of a city. It was as if the muddy river still ran through me, churning up my own psychic debris, as the aftermath of the workshop streamed towards an ocean, where it might yet assimilate into deeper waters, somewhere beyond where snorkelling is possible: too deep to peer into, whose depths appear as shadow, an impenetrable darkness which, knowing it is not empty, emits a vertiginous allure, knowable only by immersion.
Ann Carson, once more, whose voice has somehow become something of a guide in the wake of the Shadow:
“We want other people to have a centre, a history, an account that makes sense. We want to be able to say: This is what he did and Here’s why. It forms a lock against oblivion. Does it?”
