Editor’s Note — In the summer of 1994, ATJT founding member Naomi Newman went to the former Yugoslavia with the Doves, a group of ten women, eight from California and two from Malaysia. They called the tour “Honoring Loss: Celebrating Life.” The group was made up of four performers, two visual artists, one theater/video technician, and three social change workers. The Doves gave workshops and performances in refugee camps and to peace groups, and they brought art supplies and embroidery thread to people in the camps.
It’s a very hot, very humid morning. Eight of us are leaning on our mounds of luggage in the Novi Sad railroad station. The tour is over, Vienna, then home. Across the platform we watch a gang of boys, singing and swilling, on their way to war. Are they the same kids that marched through the cafe-lined promenade last night? Sounds like the same “We’re the strongest mightiest we’ll conquer anyone” song we heard then, as we were coming out of the weird Chinese a la Serbian restaurant. In the distance their voices sounded festive, but closer they became scary and fascistic. Our presenter and peace worker, 24 year old Sarah, beautiful as a movie star and courageous as a movie heroine, started crying. “They’re everywhere. They ruin everything.” As if we didn’t understand, she added, “That’s a terrible nationalist song.”
This morning the boys are even more drunk and their hooting louder. The people waiting in the station turn away from them. They look embarrassed. “These are not our boys,” their bodies seem to say as they imitate the postures of normal times.
The boys — they’re so young, they must be terrified — pass the bottle, jump on each other’s shoulders, do whatever they can to make themselves more visible. It takes little imagination to see them burning villages or raping women. One half hour ago we stood in front of the old Novi Sad synagogue reading the plaque commemorating April 26, 1944 as the date when all the Jews of the city were rounded up, herded into the synagogue and then sent to concentration camps. Fifty years collapse like a punctured balloon. I hear Nazis singing their master race madness.
Standing with us is Nevena, whom we met just this morning as our guide to the synagogue. With motherly hospitality, she’s taken us under her wing and is overseeing our departure. As one of us starts to take a picture of the boys, Nevena grabs her arm. “Don’t,” her eyes command. We can’t decipher what is forbidden, photographing the station or the boys going to war, but we obey.
The hot muggy air thickens. The screaming of the boys dominates the atmosphere. People’s bodies and mouths are moving, but lifelessly like ghosts. I think of Bunuel’s movie, “Exterminating Angel” where a spell keeps strangers at a party locked together in a room. How long have we been here? No trains have come or are coming. Maybe we can’t leave, like in the movie, until someone discovers the act that will release us.
Someone says, Let’s sing ‘Down By the Riverside’.” “Yes,” say an eager few. “No,” say others. Nevena’s forbidding look about the camera makes drawing attention to ourselves seem risky. This is the first time during the trip where danger, real or imagined, is hovering. Our fragile unity fragments. It’s not easy to agree, each one of us is a born leader and an amateur follower. It feels like a test at the end of the journey. Can we stand, like the Women in Black in Belgrade, visibly resisting the war. Seems not. We sit waiting in silence, unable to agree, dispirited. But not for long. One of us begins singing, willing to risk even the disapproval of her own group. “I’m gonna to lay down my burdens/down by the riverside, down by the riverside... .” The first sound is enough and most of us gratefully join in “down by the riverside. I’m gonna lay down my burdens... “ very softly, our postures nonchalant, as if we were just chatting. “down by the riverside/gonna study war no more.” Now we are all in, all singing, very quietly, but singing just the same. “I ain’t gonna study war no more/I ain’t gonna study war no more....” Now there’s harmony, a boom boom bass line, and we keep singing. “Gonna study war no more/I ain’t gonna study war no more/I ain’t gonna study war no more/gonna study war no more.”
Here we were, eight women from California, creating an island of peace in a Serbian railroad station. We never raised our voices. We were not in a sound battle with the boys. We were not trying to win. This was more akin to aikido, staying centered, focused, pulling the energy away from the aggression rather than trying to stop it. This was not about victory but about beauty— “the one thing that can still astonish,” as an artist in Belgrade said after one of our workshops. I was so moved, so astonished by what we were doing, that I had to keep swallowing my tears so that I could keep singing.
Over and over we sang the beautiful redemptive African-American song- until we were released, until life and animation returned to the station. The moment unfroze. The trains started coming. The train to Vienna arrived far down the track. We stopped singing, clicked into gear, got all the luggage on the train with our now graceful team work. It was a long long hot sweaty ride. But as we traveled we talked, two by two, clearing up whatever crumpled places remained between us. By the time we got to Vienna, we were so giddy with our closeness, we didn’t know, didn’t want to know, that we had arrived. We stayed, squeezed in the compartment, talking, until the conductors found us and politely kicked us off the train.