Rape Warfare: The Hidden Genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia

Theme 1: Identity

Theme i IDENTITY About Myself I begin with my own identity, the aspects of this place called my self that made it ripe terrain for M.'s translations. Rape and other violence based on gender and sex are not unknown to me. For almost ten years, I have been working with groups of rape survi­ vors and battered women and have come to an understanding of the psychological processes involved in recovering from such vio­ lence. This experience with some of misogyny's worst manifesta­ tions has prepared me somewhat for my relations with individual survivors and certainly made me more willing to believe the early Bosnian­Herzegovinian and Croatian testimonies than I might otherwise have been. My engagement with feminism means that I try always to take into consideration the effects of gender and to work to undo and to prevent any and all injustices based on those effects. This does not mean that I hate men or adulate women as such. I see all people as liable to injustice based on gender effects, just as I see some people benefiting from them more than do others. The ben­ i 2 T H E M E i eficiaries are not always men. Nor are men, even when they are the apparent beneficiaries, in a patriarchal system, for example, necessarily to be envied for their "benefits." Gender effects often require of people classed in gender­dominant roles behavior that is harmful to them and that may prevent them from much inti­ macy and pleasure they otherwise might enjoy. I have been able to pursue this work, therefore, on my good days, without always blaming the rapists as men. I blame them as individuals, as crimi­ nals, as vicious perpetrators of horrible crimes. And I also see them at the mercy of a sexist and nationalist ideology that forms them that way. The solution, therefore, is to cure the disease and, in the meanwhile, to stop the crimes and justly punish the criminals. The third aspect of my subject position that comes to the fore in this work is my own perplexed unease with national identity as such. As the child of immigrants from Sweden to the United States, I felt very foreign, though I didn't know to call it that, as I negotiated the labyrinths of acculturation during my early years in school. My family lived in an insular Swedish community cen­ tered around the Swedish Covenant Church in Oakland, Califor­ nia. The big holidays were Swedish, and at times so were the preachers. The strangeness I felt at school led me to believe, there­ fore, that I was Swedish, not "American," and that I would finally feel at home only by going to Sweden. I did that at the age of twenty, and thus experienced one of the gravest disillusionments of my life. Of course I wasn't Swedish; I didn't even speak the language very well. Nor did I act or think, apparently, as did the Swedes I got to know. Whatever we had as common culture was, on my part, years out of date. In Sweden, I D E N T I T Y 3 my Swedishness was quaint, a daily kitsch reminder of the an­ guished gulf immigration makes. This identity situation got muddier when I began seriously to study Italian literature and culture. My acquired languages, in­ stead of Swedish, were Italian, which I now speak fluently, French, Spanish, and, given the vicissitudes of my personal life, even a little Greek. I spent some formative years in Italy and have lived there for extended periods since then. In Italy, I am clearly a for­ eigner but less clearly, given my physiognomy, personal presenta­ tion, and accent, an "American." My son is a Jew, though I am not. Normalized patterns of identity are jumbled in me, although I am often encoded as WASP and benefit from all the attributes of being "white" in a "white"­dominant racist society. None of this has cleared up with time. Instead, the constitu­ tions of national identity that have left me feeling somewhat mid­ Atlantic and identifying mostly with Italians, Swedes, and Jews in general and children of any immigrants in particular have be­ come a focal point of my intellectual work and my professional activities. The person I am could not easily accept an explanation of the war in the Balkans based on blanket characterizations...