Amra Sabic-El-Rayess is a professor at Columbia University, where she leads the International Interfaith Research Lab. She is the author of the YA memoir The Cat I Never Named: A True Story of Love, War, and Survival. Her new nonfiction book, Three Summers: A Memoir of Sisterhood, Summer Crushes, and Growing Up on the Eve of War, is a story of the three years leading up to the Bosnian Genocide.
On a sunny summer day in June 1992, a bomb ripped through the blue sky and killed four of my friends who were playing in the neighborhood. Their crime? Being Muslim. I was guilty of that same innocent crime and for the next four years of the Bosnian Genocide I starved, dodged missiles on the way to school, and learned that my name was on a list of girls to be sent to a rape camp.
While genocides through history may target different groups and be of different scales, they all have in common a defining trait: the intent to destroy a group, in part or in whole. During the Bosnian Genocide, I lived under a military siege and constant bombing for nearly 1,200 days, cut off from access to food, electricity, and the rest of the world. On a good day, a friend of a friend was killed. On a bad day, it was a close friend or a family member. As I write in my memoir The Cat I Never Named, an animal saw more humanity in me than my fellow humans did.
No genocide is ever the beginning of violence. Rather it is the denouement of a story told over years and even generations in an effort to embed cultural violence in the form of hateful and dehumanizing narratives, which are constructed to extinguish empathy in humans for the other—whoever that other may be in a given time or geography. Nor is this violence only reflected in immediately quantifiable horrific deaths and gruesome statistics. The narratives of hate themselves are the most enduring form of violence because they can be taught across generations. Stopping the killing is almost always temporary unless we find a way to stop dehumanizing one another.
I have never completely escaped that dehumanization of Muslims—it is still normalized in America along with its adjacent and powerfully embedded forms of anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism. I live with that othering, a bleeding wound that never heals. When I was a child growing up in the former Yugoslavia, I was surrounded by narratives against Bosnian Muslims that ranged from dismissal to hate. In my curriculum in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I always remained invisible. When I wasn’t invisible, I was despised. There was never a single word problem in math that featured a Muslim child’s name, or a story that portrayed a Muslim character as anything but a villain. I was assigned readings that glorified the executions of Muslims throughout history. I grew up hearing politicians such as Radovan Karadzic—currently serving a life sentence for genocide—warn that Bosniaks will “disappear from the face of the Earth.” I didn’t believe it, until he and others like him tried to make it happen.
Today, I am no longer a direct target, but a survivor. I am also a witness, from a physical but not emotional distance, of both Hamas’s attack that killed an estimated 1,200 Israelis, and Israel’s killing of more than 30,000 Palestinians, including more than 13,000 children. Again and again, we desert our common humanity and normalize unconscionable violence against the “other.” Segregating communities into “us and them” is the first step in Gregory Stanton’s Ten Stages of Genocide, grievously exacerbated when accompanied by dehumanization and the denial of one another’s suffering. This pathway to genocide is a facet in the history of human experience that I not only recognize but know first-hand.
And it always starts with stories we tell. Stories are mobilized to perpetuate hate or instill resilience to it. It is the stories we tell that define our role in history and humanity. It is the stories we tell that determine our present and the future we choose for the next generations.
With Three Summers, as with The Cat I Never Named, I chose to challenge the narratives of hate that I recognize in politics, education, media, and even at dinner conversations, both then and now. I wrote Three Summers to illustrate how an 11-year-old girl named Amra in 1980s Yugoslavia first begins to see that her life is about to take a dangerously different turn from that of her favorite cousin, Zana, because Amra is the other. Yet, Amra refuses to hate, and holds on to the love and laughter she shares with Zana and her othercousins who grow closer than sisters over three magical summers in Bihac, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Their love for one another allows them to reject the hate that their society is forcing on them... but is it permanent? Can bonds of humanity be stronger than narratives of hate?
We must create our own narratives if there is to be any hope—to give the world stories of unity and love and resilience that let people be seen and understood. My life taught me that there are no winners in societies overtaken by hate. To effectively diminish the human capacity for brutality we must un-other the dehumanized, those who are targeted across all societies and geographies. We can end such othering only by flooding our classrooms and media with empathetic storytelling. Every human being wants to be seen, heard, and respected. And none of us wants to become the victims, the perpetrators, or witnesses of hate-fueled violence, if only we are given the chance to escape that fate. If we truly wish for our children to live, love, laugh, and learn, we must offer them a detour from pathways of hate and let them embrace stories of empathy and humanity.
