I was born in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Hercegovina, in 1984, when I came kicking and screaming into this world. It was the Winter Olympics in the mountains around the concrete housing blocks of my neighbourhood. According to my mother, I was a quiet, happy child, and my sister and I were often inseparable, playing in the grounds of our family’s summer house on the village land outside the city, where we would escape at summer.
To those who can remember, the former Yugoslavia was a happy time, a socialist state administered under General Tito, where neighbours from diverse ethnicities, Muslims, Serbs and Croatians got along and lived in a united community.
War ravaged the country apart. The war displaced me and the childhood trauma led to a sense of displacement in me, always trying to better my own experience and knowledge of the world somehow, and this alienation and feeling of not belonging anywhere, ultimately formed a great suffering that fed my art and way of seeing the world.
The war broke out in 1992. The war broke out on my birthday. As an eight year old boy, my day had been spent attending a birthday party of another youngster in the neighbourhood. And that night, it was my time to have a party. I had asked my father to celebrate with a cake, made of Leonardo, the character from the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles. But the cake never arrived. We wondered why. Later that evening, gunfire started ringing out over the mountains. Two days later, on the TV, war was officially declared. No one knew of the suffering that was to come.
All around was bloodshed, horror, death. Bombs exploding, the night ringing with bloody screams. Serbians on rooftops in the city with sniper rifles, shooting at innocent people walking by. Serbians dropping bombs on the Merkale marketplace, killing innocent children. Women beaten and raped, throats slit, bodies thrown into ditches in Srebrenica. The western world did little to interfere, the French being instrumental in denying help to the people that needed it most - helpless children such as myself and my sister. The streets of Sarajevo where I was born were permanently stained with blood.
For almost a year we lived in the basement. I did not go to school, let alone go outside. The noise of the bombs was deafening when it could be heard. I could do nothing in the basement, so I began to read. And I read and read, escaping into a fantasy world, the children of the Famous Five books by Enid Blyton and their adventures in the greenery of an idyllic England.
On occasions when we could venture out of the basement and into our flat, its building’s walls full of bullet holes, I have a memory of going outside to collect pieces of shrapnel. Together with the other neighbourhood kids, the one who had the biggest piece of shrapnel was the top dog. But even a tiny piece of jagged shrapnel like the one I had collected, could kill you by flying into your heart and ending you.
My mother was anxious, and all around me was fear and pain. The environment is instrumental in forming a child’s later life, but I do not go in for Freudian analysis of behavioural psychology. I could have been born anywhere in the world, and I set no store in proud nationality. I am a child of the world. However, the trauma of my childhood is something that I can never forget.
That winter we escaped in a convoy, leaving Sarajevo forever. My mother clutched my sister and me close to her, and we got on the convoy, passed through a landscape ravaged by death and checkpoints of brutal-faced soldiers, who somehow let us through. We escaped to Croatia, where we faced an anxious wait. My uncle, my mother’s brother did a heroic deed. He had emigrated to England after marrying an English woman. And from here, he arranged for us to flee to safety in England, where I have lived nearly all my life.
A little boy and girl should not have seen the things that we had seen.
I grew up in England in what many might see as an idyllic little village in the greenery of Devon. But I did not see it that way. I could not adjust or adapt, and never really have. Bullying and power of these insensitive and cruel British children was the only language of the playground that could be understood. I grew up all my life without my father, with no one to guide or support me in life. Even at nine years old, I knew I did not deserve this pain.
Now and then, I return to Bosnia, to the scene of my childhood. Calm and peace prevails now. Tourists come to visit the cobbled streets of the ancient town built in the Ottoman empire, its winding lanes leading to relaxed coffee shops, where young people sit smoking, drinking strong Turkish coffee, and laughing with their crowd of friends. You would never think of the blood that was spilled here. They do not speak about it, but they all remember.
I came back several years ago to my father, still living in the old flat where we hid before we became refugees from our own land. I find my father distant and unengaged, cerebral but inactive. Yet he is an honest man of high intelligence and possesses integrity. Speaking to him hurts and I do not like to engage in a life that for me no longer has any meaning. But for all the absence and love that I never received growing up, I still respect him as my father.
When we were six years old, my father took us to live in Russia, where he worked for a year with a company. My sister and I running around the corridors of the infant school, speaking in Russian, giggling, laughing. The children around free and innocent, the heartbeat in a childhood dream. This was a happy memory. Yet most of it remains forgotten.
In search of lost time, I remembered. And when I had finished expressing my memories, I understood that I was scared of nothing.
(Image (c) Patrick Chauvel, 1993)
(Writing (c) Sead Seferovic, 2019)
Read on for the next chapter via the home page, as the story continues, and the journey takes us to - London....