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FOREWORD TO SHADOW BEHIND THE SUN

George Szirtes was born in Budapest in 1948 and came to Great Britain as a refugee in 1956. His first book, The Slant Door, was published in 1979 and won the Faber Memorial prize the following year. In 1982, he was invited to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and, since then, has published several books and won various other prizes including the T S Eliot Prize for Reel in 2005. His work has been translated into numerous languages.

Any attempt to sort out the political history of Kosova, as of the entire Balkan region, is bound to result in fierce controversy and is certainly not within my own competence. In current parlance, I have no intention of going there. I state this upfront since the author of a Foreword is, by implication, committed to the text that follows.

But there are commitments and commitments. Human beings are not distinct from history on either a personal or social level. They are born into circumstances they have not created; into races, religions, regions, nations, tribes, associations and families, and they carry their histories with them not only on their political backs but in their very genes. Or so it seems, all too painfully and all too frequently. Our commitments to the catalogue of groupings are partly voluntary, partly assumed by others. You are partly what you think you are, but just as often – maybe more often – you are treated on the basis of what others assume you to be. Pogroms, massacres, genocides, holocausts are the result. The fiercest battles are fuelled by the fiercest controversies. As the writer of this terrifying and gripping memoir, Remzije Sherifi, says: ‘Time and again I would read of such horrors as I knew were being repeated every day, and by the descendants of the same people’ (my italics). I will not go where those italics lead me nor is it my business to go there. I can neither affirm nor deny that perspective. I can do no more than listen and stand back.

But a commitment to individual human beings and to humanity at large is a different and larger matter. Human beings suffer as individuals. They suffer personally and they suffer an element of the sufferings of others through an ennobling empathy. It is, of course, the suffering of those to whom we can put a name or face that most affects us: family, friends, people familiar in public life. And I cannot quite help thinking that there is a vaguely definable reception range for empathy, a point beyond which empathy moves into what may become self-righteous sentimentality, an equation in which hatred of the perceived offender becomes equal to or greater than love for the perceived offended. The test will always be in action, usually direct action. The test will be in time, money and energy committed: in food, shelter, protection, and championing through a quiet calling-by-name.

But I am discussing these commitments from the safety of a chair and a desk, in a warm room, looking out at a bright winter sky that is unlikely to carry the echo of approaching gunfire or the fear of imminent murder and rape. It is very different for those who live, or have recently lived, under less secure skies, as the writer of Shadow Behind the Sun has done.

In 1991 I was one of two British writers invited to attend the literary festival at Struga, Macedonia, just as the troubles of ex-Yugoslavia were beginning. The American writers who should have attended were advised not to. We flew into Belgrade on the day that President Gorbachev was being set free from house arrest at his dacha. The next morning we flew to Ohrid in a small plane that leapfrogged the mountains and banked quite sharply over Lake Ohrid before returning to land at the rough and ready airport. The landscape around Struga and Ohrid is spectacular with some magnificent Orthodox churches and monasteries. Across Lake Ohrid lies Albania, then under the rule of Enver Hoxha, mysterious, backward, a fragment of the Stalinist past. Our English speaking guide said we should not take a boat far out over the lake as we would be in Albanian territory, and he also made it clear he was expecting trouble soon all over the country, even, he said, in Macedonia.

The terrors were to come shortly after, terrors on top of historical terrors I had only read about. Like other people in the west I watched the siege of Sarajevo and heard the reports of murders, burnings alive, massacres, tortures and concentration camps. Then came the NATO forces and the air-raids on Belgrade, and little by little the disintegration of the Milosevic regime with its schemes of Greater Serbia.

The idea of Greater Serbia spelled trouble in the region, much as the idea Greater Hungary would do, for there was, and remains, a movement for Greater Hungary too. The proponents of that movement point to gross historical injustices, as irredentist movements have always done, and for perfectly comprehensible reasons. In the case of Hungary it was the reduction of the country by two-thirds of its geographical area together with the loss of half its population by the Treaty of Trianon after 1919. Whole families were split up. Areas associated with legend and culture were suddenly abroad, in hostile territory. In 1995 in Budapest I attended an open-air political meeting as a journalist where people could buy postcard maps of the whole region. You pulled a tab at the side of the postcard and the area of pre-1919 Greater Hungary popped up.

Enormous passions and loyalties are prompted by such memories and, as Sherifi says more than once, and indeed exemplifies in her own writing, memories in the Balkans are particularly long and engaged. Who would believe such atavistic monstrosities could be visited neighbour on neighbour in the last years of the century in Europe? They were though. They might be again.

Sherifi’s book offers a close eye-witness account to something of what happened in Kosova in the mid-nineties. Beyond that it is a family story and community story, one that tells of serious illness as well as ethnic aggression and violence. It is a story of survival. But then again it is something more than that too. It is a tale of refugees and asylum seekers, every second chapter in the book being a report on life in refugee communities in Glasgow. It tells of organisation and support and in doing so it argues for humanitarian values: for welcome, for kindness, for efficiency and sensitivity. As the book goes on it records events in places like the Drop-In Centre and The Oasis Women’s Group, talks of the coming together of people of very different backgrounds as when a Christian Gospel group is brought in to entertain an audience ‘mostly made up of Turkish Kurds, Muslims’ that ends up in a conga danced round the Community Hall.

The commitment to those hurt, traumatised, exiled and derelict is both universal and personal, just as the account that follows this is. A face emerges out of the turbulent waters of history and speaks to us of where it has been. Dangerous waters leave few survivors. We must look after those that find themselves aboard our own apparently so-solid ship. There is no unsinkable ship; there are only boats and rafts in history. Looking after them is looking after ourselves. Is, indeed, being ourselves. We need people such as Remzije Sherifi to speak out of the waters and help us be ourselves.

Visit http://www.georgeszirtes.co.uk/