War and Music

Illustration by ChatGPT

“Nothing good will happen because of politics,” says one of the characters in Steven Glloway’s eminent novel, The Cellist of Sarajevo. “Nothing good will happen without politics,” another character counters.

Written against the backdrop of the Siege of Sarajevo during the Bosnian War in the 1990s, this novel is yet another poignant reminder about the utter futility and cruelty of war. Who are affected by a war? Not the rulers who issue commands from their respective palaces. The ordinary men and women who strive to go about their daily lives are the real victims of a war.

Kenan, an ordinary man in the novel, faces the agonising dilemma of crossing the city to get water for his family. Dragan, another ordinary man, doesn’t know who among his friends he can trust now. Arrow, an ordinary woman who takes up weapons in order to defend her country, finds herself pushed to her limits – of body and soul, fear and humanity.

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu were not shaken by the death of over a hundred innocent children in a school in Iran by a missile that their whims had shot. When little children, innocent and helpless, are killed en masse by a missile that crashes into the place where they should feel the safest, do we need any greater reminder that in war’s machinery it is the most vulnerable who bear the heaviest burden?

Those little girls in the elementary school in Minab were caught between agendas that they never shaped and conflicts that they never chose.

Long ago, in 1869, the unparalleled Russian writer Tolstoy wrote his magnum opus War and Peace to show the world that war is never about any glory, as Napolean was claiming, but about chaos, vanity, and moral collapse. Soldiers are mere instruments when leaders gamble with human lives for the sake of their own personal agendas.

What if Americans had elected a less insane man than Donald Trump?

What if Benjamin Netanyahu had a brain that could perceive more than barbarism in non-Jewish lands?

I’m not suggesting that Seyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei was any better than these two. No, not at all. He was just another scrunched up leader who didn’t ever understand what exactly his God’s job was.

Let’s hope that other “great” leaders like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un and Narendra Modi don’t bring their own irrepressible egos and messianic pretences into this war.

Have you ever wondered why we don’t get better leaders than these?

The answer is: we ourselves.

Towards the end of the novel mentioned above, one of the characters says:

If this city (Sarajevo) is to die, it won’t be because of the men on the hills (the Bosnian Serb forces), it will be because of the people in the valley (the citizens of Sarajevo who were the victims of the Siege). When they are content to live with death, to become what the men on the hills want them to be, then Sarajevo will die.

The Cellist keeps playing his cello throughout the novel - metaphorically. His music is a refusal to submit the multiethnic spirit of Sarajevo to straitjacketed nationalism and its barbarism. His music is a powerful cry of civilisation, the longing of that civilisation to rise above the savagery of the nationalists.

Savagery has an uncanny knack of survival. Nay, of thriving.

Before the war, Sarajevo was a place where people of diverse identities lived together in harmony. It was common for a Bosniak to be best friends with a Serb, or for a Croat to be married to a Muslim. The “leaders” who unleashed the war didn’t like such harmonies. Those leaders weren’t just fighting an army; they were trying to kill the very idea that different people could live together in peace.

The novel ends with the disappearance of the Cellist after 22 days. “He played (his cello) for twenty-two days, just as he said he would…. He always played exactly the same way. The only variation in his routine was on the last day.” The woman named Arrow (a symbolic name she gave herself) kept vigil for his security. When he decides to put an end to his music, Arrow goes to the spot where he played and leaves her “offering” – a flower. The music, the spirit of resistance and humanity, is not over; it has been passed from the artist to the citizens.

The citizens.

They should decide the course of history.

Not some mass murderers and egomaniacs and jingoistchauvinistbigots.

In the last but one page of the novel, we read: The men on the hill didn’t have to be murderers. The men in the city didn’t have to lower themselves to fight their attackers. She (Arrow) didn’t have to be filled with hatred. The music demanded that she remember this, that she know to a certainty that the world still held the capacity for goodness.”

Let goodness prevail. Only the citizens can ensure that. They may need politics to assist. “Nothing good will happen without politics.” !!