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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

The Color of Watermelon

29 May, 1999 - 00:00

By Igor POMERANTSEV
Early at six machine guns

  started,

Tanks surrounded us,

All men were taken away

And shot before their

 mothers' eyes

I wrote down this simple verse listening to a girl at a refugee camp
near Tirana. Honestly, I had expected to find children subdued and scared.
They were not. At first I thought that they looked happy, but then I realized
that they were excited, hyperactive as psychologists put it.

Rugova's red-black scarf

Is our banner of rebellion

I was glad to hear that it is best to sing about Rugova the Peacemaker
than men with machine guns. But every other children's drawing showed the
acronym for the Kosovo Liberation Army... There were other drawings. Sevgije,
7, drew gray tanks and a green Serbian militiaman. Antigona, 10, drew spots
of blood on the grass, a dead Kosovar and his hat some distance from the
body. Children and I sat in a tent and they continued reciting poems.

I will turn into a bullet

And jump to meet you,

I'll attack you like a dragon

And will fire two grenades...

I spoke to the camp psychologist, a Kosovar medical student. What did
he think of the children's condition? He said they slept fitfully and became
nervous at hearing a helicopter approach. They often kept to themselves.
"We are doing our best to make them forget their horrible experiences,"
he said. At Kukes, I noticed that psychoanalysts asked children to relate
their stories, even write compositions, for in this way children can assume
an onlooker's attitude toward their problems, turning into narrators rather
than victims. I told this to the Kosovo student. The young man was surprised.
He thought he deserved every praise for being so humane. I thought he was
just a big kid after all. Looking at children's drawings and listening
to their recitals, I remembered Disanka Maximovic's poems. I used to translate
them when a young man. Particularly the cycle "At a Children's Drawing
Exhibit":

What is it? A watermelon?

A watermelon.

How does it taste?

It tastes sweet.

Paint its meat redder

To make it taste still better.

There was a lot of red in every drawing made by the Kosovo children,
but it was not the color of watermelon.

Special to The Day from Tirana

 

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