LitLetter 98 The Bright Lights of Sarajevo
Confronting the Truth - Tony Harrison
This gem of a poem was written by Tony Harrison (b. 1937), described by Simon Armitage, the current Poet Laureate, as Britain’s leading poet-playwright, although Harrison is known to prefer the label poet. Born and educated in Leeds, he studied Classics at Leeds Grammar School and Leeds University. He has created some powerful poem translations of ancient Greek plays, notably the Oresteia by Aeschylus. Tony’s most controversial poem is titled ‘V’, written in 1985 during the miners’ strike. It describes a visit he makes to the grave of his parents in a suburb of Leeds where he finds the grave vandalised. The title is open to interpretation – victory, versus, verse, etc – though I disagree with this list. My interpretation is more fundamental.
This poem here is typical of the style of Tony Harrison. He uncompromisingly confronts the truth, especially in an arena of political machinations. You may have forgotten the details of the siege. Briefly, they are as follows. When Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence from Yugoslavia after the 1992 Bosnian independence referendum, the Bosnian Serbs - whose strategic goal was to create a new Bosnian Serb state - encircled Sarajevo with a siege force of 13,000 stationed in the surrounding hills. From there they assaulted the city with artillery, tanks, and small arms. From April 5, 1992 to February 29, 1996, the Serbs blockaded the city. The Bosnian government defence forces inside the besieged city, approximately 70,000 troops, were poorly equipped and unable to break the siege. This siege is the longest in history of its type, three times longer than the siege of Stalingrad. The number of people killed and injured is included as a postscript to a soulful short film of an event in the recovery of the Sarajevans.
The Bright Lights of Sarajevo by Tony Harrison
After the hours that Sarajevans pass
Queuing with empty canisters of gas
to get the refills they wheel home in prams,
or queuing for the precious meagre grams
of bread they’re rationed to each day,
and often dodging snipers on the way,
or struggling up sometimes eleven flights
of stairs with water, then you’d think the nights
of Sarajevo would be totally devoid
of people walking streets Serb shells destroyed,
but tonight in Sarajevo that’s just not the case–
The young go walking at a strollers pace,
black shapes impossible to mark
as Muslim, Serb or Croat in such dark,
in unlit streets you can’t distinguish who
calls bread hjleb or hleb or calls it kruh,
All take the evening air with a strollers stride,
no torches guide them, but they don’t collide
except as one of the flirtatious ploys
when a girl’s dark shape is fancied by a boy’s.
Then the tender radar of the tone of voice
shows by its signals she approves his choice.
Then match or lighter to a cigarette
to check in her eyes if he’s made progress yet.
And I see a pair who’ve certainly progressed
beyond the tone of voice and match-lit flare test
and he’s about, I think, to take her hand
and lead her away from where they stand
on two shells scars, where, in 1992
Serb mortars massacred the breadshop queue
and blood-dunked crusts of shredded bread
lay on this pavement with the broken dead.
And at their feet in holes made by the mortar
that caused the massacre, now full of water
from the rain that’s poured down half the day,
though now even the smallest clouds have cleared away,
leaving the Sarajevo star-filled evening sky
ideally bright and clear for the bombers eye,
in those two rain-full shells-holes the boy sees
fragments of the splintered Pleiades,
sprinkled on those death-deep, death-dark wells
splashed on the pavement by Serb mortar shells.
The dark boy-shape leads dark-girl shape away
to share one coffee in a candlelit café
until the curfew, and he holds her hand
behind AID flour-sacks refilled with sand.
This poem is about resilience, the resilience of a besieged community of people who having lost thousands of friends and neighbours can triumph over the conditions of still present danger from Serb mortar shells in the most human manner possible – young men and women seeking each other’s company, even if for one night only. The black-out provides the cover such that ‘black shapes impossible to mark/as Muslim, Serb or Croat in such dark’, and all people are equally unseen, indistinguishable as we know they should rightly be.
And it is the youth who lead the way. How many times has that happened in the history of human conflict? That young people by their actions cause a dead-lock to be broken or by their courage a monster to be confronted? It is the youth who are first to say “Enough’, we cannot live like this, as here in Sarajevo’s evenings where they wish to form friendships with partners of their choosing.
The bright lights of the title resolve to not bomb flares nor the amber of phosphorous lamps but the light of the Pleiades, that beautiful constellation of stars in the night sky. Even this is still a threat as the clearness of the evening gives opportunity to the bombers.
Tony has a facility for capturing mid-conflict the issues and woes of the protagonists. He visits the scenes, writes immediately and details some aspect of the life there – as here with the dark boy-shapes and the dark girl shapes – that nails the truth of the matter. What the Serbs were doing was an act of unbridled hostility, a crime against humanity, and the poet’s protest is as imaginatively creative as one would expect.
The power of the imagery is bolstered by the meter and rhyme. A rhyme at the end of consecutive lines in a two-line couplet and a fine rhythm which I have tried to capture in my reading of this poem here (you will need Spotify to listen). I could not find a version read by Tony himself; the poem deserves the flat, broad vowels of a Yorkshire dialect, and I am closest to that!
The overall effect is one of resignation that such atrocities happen in the first place, yet then one of relief that the foundational aspects of the human character have re-asserted themselves – resilience of character in the face of hardship, and the strength of young people to remind all observers that life continues and will continue – under the eternal bright lights of the Pleiades.