"You don’t need to experience something to remember it"

- How old were you in the war?

- Oh, ok! Then you don’t remember much of it!

A person who assumes what my memories might be is not worth engaging with, I thought. My memories are my own, and what I do or do not remember belongs to me alone. I have no reason to convince anyone. As a matter of fact, I have no desire to share much with people who make statements about my life and experience.

But then, with time, you learn - words have power over us. If you repeat something enough, you start believing it. If someone else repeats something enough and you believe them, then you let them define your reality. My silence before “you don’t remember” type of statements, I learned, allowed others to claim my truth. And war has a funny way to linger on in one’s life forever. It hides at the bottom of a wine glass for some, at the tone of a familiar song, at the sound of the phone ringing, a plane flying too low over your house. The silence and the lingering of fragments of memories denied can cause a violent clash in your chest. And once that happens, the only way out is to find your own truth. It gets ugly. And you have to get your hands dirty.

Such is the story of Ana, the heroine of Sara Novic’s book Girl at War.

Before the war Ana Juric was a normal 10-year-old in Zagreb, Croatia. The beginning of the conflict in Croatia brings divisions, departures, separations, and uncertainty. Ana spends her days wondering around with her friend Luka, playing soccer, and listening in on grownups' conversations, trying to assign stories and meaning to the images of destruction she soon starts seeing on TV.

Due to her younger sisters’ deteriorating health condition, the family decides to drive to Sarajevo (where, according to the story there was no fighting yet) to the MediMission clinic. Her sister gets evacuated to America for medical treatment. On the way back, the Serb forces stop Ana and her parents, lead them to the woods, and kill her family.

This leads to a series of events which force Ana to become a child soldier, and eventually return to Zagreb to reunite with her family friends. Escape to America becomes her only hope for survival, so her godfather arranges for her reunion with her sister in Pennsylvania.

Several times Novic shifts between 1991 and 2001, by which point Ana has joined her sister in Pennsylvania and attends N.Y.U. She makes a decision to hide her past from everyone, but by the time she’s supposed to graduate, Ana’s persona starts to crack. She realizes she needs to go back to Croatia, and revisit and reclaim denied parts of herself. The novel ends with this visit, and Ana contemplating the meaning and construction of memory.

This novel will capture your attention immediately, as the opening section of the book is the best, and the passage quoted on the back jacket is the most dramatic part of the book. But Novic’s prose is pretty flat, and the switching between Ana’s wartime experiences and her crumbling life in New York ten years later do not always work. The main character lacks depth, especially in the second part of the book where she struggles to stitch her two realities together.

The war-torn version of Zagreb in which this novel is set never existed. Zagreb was far away from the frontlines and was not subjected to food rationing and air raids. There was no aerial bombardment. The missing nuances of events such as evacuation of her sister, or her return to Zagreb after her involvement in direct combat expose cracks in the narrative. While anyone who knows anything about the Balkans might poke holes in the story right away, the reader must be able to believe, and I am not convinced that’s the case with this book. Perhaps my own personal experience is getting in the way? It is possible that my inner Ana resents the unbelievability of the one Novic brings to life.

In any case, this is an interesting story and an intriguing contemplation of connections between memory, history, and the world that knows war intimately with the one that has only seen it on TV. While I cannot say that I absolutely loved this book, I have to admit that it made me reflect on my own process of stitching together my two realities - Bosnian and American.

And it reminded - words have power.

But so does the silence.