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REVIEW FOR NORTHWORDS NOW DAISY MACKENZIE SHADOW BEHIND THE SUN

Remzije Sherifi

This is an important book. It describes the experience of one individual and her family set against the forces of history.

The author is a refugee from Kosova, now living and working among refugees and asylum seekers in Glasgow. Her narrative includes accounts told to her, as a child by her grandmother, of atrocities committed in earlier generations. She describes how she ‘could not believe such horror. Real and not real . . . a terrible fiction on the other side of a veil . . . surely not in our place or time.’

What these words describe is a continuing experience for many of us now. We find it hard to visualise the atrocities we hear of happening in places remote from us. But where is Kosova? –in Yugoslavia? Yes, that veil exists for us too.

But Remzije Sherifi tells her story with skill. She was a professional radio journalist in Kosova. She knows how to construct the narrative; how to incorporate key elements of the centuries-long back history of the Muslim Kosovans; how to focus on the refugee-in-Glasgow present.

She takes the assassination, in 1914, of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by a Serb nationalist, as a point from which the rest of her narrative extends in its various directions. It includes an account of the break-up of the Balkan states following Tito’s death and the breakdown, by the 1990s of communism. This is useful: it makes clear past inter-ethnic conflict; and shows the context in which the recent Serbian assault on Kosova became possible.

The narrative style is plain, with an almost domestic straightforwardness. (Owing something, perhaps, to the self-effacing assistance of Robert Davidson?) This makes the accounts of witnessed atrocity and experienced deprivation entirely credible.

But the urgent focal point of this story is the experience of the resulting refugees trying to rebuild their shattered lives. They are trying to do it in this country now, trying to recreate something like a community in which a future can be built. She urges us to understand, to try to make a difference.