The library in Sarajevo has been restored this year, although the thousands of books that burned in 1992 have not and will not be.
This isn’t my story to tell so I won’t tell it, although I think about it every day and have since I lived there: the story of the library, those who risked their lives hiding manuscripts, those who saw the burned paper blowing down the length of the narrow city as it hugs the Miljacka river tightly on either side. Among other things — among other losses — the library was home to the largest collection of Islamic manuscripts in Europe. The architecture of Vijećnica entangled Ottoman and Habsburg styles as close as sisters.
Maybe this is what those who fired and threw grenades from the hillsides couldn’t stand, or couldn’t comprehend — Sarajevo’s ever-flowering multiplicity, one petal Baščaršija’s wooden Turkish shop fronts, another petal long-faced yellow Viennese theatre buildings, one petal the lurid, Lego-brick papagajka building — in a mockery of Communist architectural styles, named after and coloured like a parrot — the whole flower of all of this opening at once forever.
Sarajevo has different flowers now, the famous Sarajevo Roses of red-painted bomb craters yawning open on the city’s streets. The saddest and most frightening people are those who can’t hold the beauty of different things at once, quietly appreciative of each. Like men who think in terms of good girls and bad girls, virgins and whores, these people are frightening and they rip through the fragile layers of everything. Don’t trust these people with anything.
The burning of the ancient library of Alexandria has become a humanist touchstone, warning of the deadening negativity of any kind of fundamentalism. During the Mubarak era, in the late twentieth century, Alexandria’s library was reconstructed, its new face launching itself perpetually out towards the sea.
Hard to look a library in the face when journalists are kept in cages for farcical trials and book-markets overturned.
One of my favourite things about the new sprawling Alexandria library is that when I visited it had an ‘internet library’. A room of computers hummed so insistently it echoed down into the wings that kept the Islamic manuscripts, preserving, as industriously as bees, all the things we don’t yet find important.
It was a tricky move to pull off, to resurrect the world’s most famous library while Mubarak’s era flanked itself on one hand with press censorship and on the other with national illiteracy rates sustained in large part by his choices. Maybe it was hubris.
Since the Egyptian revolution in 2011, Alexandria is sometimes symbol and sometimes natural organism, a new coral reef emerging fully formed out of the Mediterranean. Hard to look a library in the face when journalists are kept in cages for farcical trials and book-markets overturned.
Technically the Alexandria book-market overturning happened under the last post-2011 regime — the one that disastrously held power and was swiftly disastrously overturned last year — but anyway things are overturning. It’s exhausting, really, to keep up with all the things being overturned in turn.
There’s little comfort but perhaps an important lesson in the fact that, when books are burned, in a biblioclasm or libricide, the story of the book-burning imprints itself deeply. That story, itself, at least, is rarely lost. Look how long the story of Alexandria’s library lasted, resilient in photo-negative. It’s like when you’re in mourning and you feel more intensely close to the lost person than you ever have, for never until the loss had they so completely occupied your thoughts.
Every part of the story is a story with a story, a clever little matrioshka of forgotten female history.
One of the best and most unloseable stories about a lost or burning book is the story of Anna Banti and her novel on Artemisia Gentileschi. Every part of the story is a story with a story, a clever little matrioshka of forgotten female history. And in its layers it folds our sadnesses and univerals: death and law and war and rape and fame and language and beauty and loss. I tell this story to my friends when we’re in the library and they don’t believe that what we do is worth it.
The story starts with a story that is lost. Anna Banti, a Florentine writer and art historian, had almost finished her novel on the life of the Renaissance artist Artemisia Gentileschi when the fascists invaded Florence and the manuscript burned along with much of the city. Banti, among the refugees who fled to the hills, cried in the Boboli Gardens.
Not metaphorically — I mean, this is a true story — the real war burned Anna’s book. But metaphorically the novel rose again. Anna Banti rewrote the novel, stitching the story of what had happened to the earlier manuscript into the rewritten fiction of Artemisia’s life.
It’s painful to be post-modern out of necessity, maybe —but Banti’s book, reborn in this process as she was reeling in shock at being invaded, spins the thread of this loss into an intricate dialogue between herself, her lost manuscript, and the figure of Artemisia Gentileschi as imagined by Anna the writer. She talks to her for company on the hillside above the burning city. All is not lost.
Artemisia Gentileschi, the Renaissance artist at the centre of Banti’s reborn novel — an innovative artist since hailed as the female Caravaggio — began again in colour over and over. Maybe this is what drew Banti to her, even before the fascists and fire added another significance, or a deeper mirroring to Gentileschi’s own life. Gentileschi repeated, throughout her career in Rome, Florence and Naples, the figure of the Biblical heroine Susannah, who was harassed, or sexually assaulted, by the male elders of her community.
The first time Gentileschi was drawn to the Biblical figure of Susannah, as a young precocious artist in apprenticeship under her father, she hadn’t been raped yet. Just as in the Bible Susannah is both harassed and accused of adultery, this was also the accusation levelled at Gentileschi when she made an allegation of rape against her father’s friend, Agostino Tassi.
Gentileschi has repeated the scene so often in her mind, as if in traumatic flashback, that the tiniest of movements are clear in her brush-strokes
In her later works, Susannah’s a recurring figure, painted in anguish, painted in resistance, repainted over and over so that her depictions of Susannah begin to echo one another — in the later paintings, the tense, patriarchal dynamic between the younger and older males harassing Susannah becomes increasingly electric. That way that men police each other, men tense up around each other, or goad each other on. Gentileschi has repeated the scene so often in her mind, as if in traumatic flashback, that the tiniest of movements are clear in her brush-strokes — the brief eye contact between the two men assaulting Susannah, who turns her head to look at them, or turns her head away.
Gentileschi was a genius irrespective of her biography, just as Caravaggio’s art is Caravaggio’s genius with or without his personal story. Gentileschi’s developing experiments in colour come through particularly in her repeated treatment of Judith holding the decapitated head of Holofernes.
The first time I heard Rihanna’s single ‘Man Down’ in 2011 I thought of Gentileschi’s Judiths, the overlapping faces bubbling up Goya-ishly and nightmarishly, sharp in light and dark, in an aftermath, of revenge and loss, and of obliteration.
Some feminist art theorists have argued against the foregrounding of Gentileschi’s personal story, the astonishing sequence of events Banti took for her novel the first time round, before the invading soldiers in Florence forced her to reconsider. When Banti rewrote her novel she does not tell the straight history of a Renaissance-set twentieth-century novel: the twentieth century breaks and enters into the story Banti is trying to tell.
Other art theorists have pointed out how this tendency to refer to Artemisia Gentileschi by her first name —diminutive and feminine in its vowels — works to undermine the seriousness of her art as it stands alone, reducing her solely to her story — to her experience of rape.
Like Lee Miller’s surrealist photographs and war photography many centuries later, the fractures and repetitions in Gentileschi’s work question how we should best tell the stories of ourselves, how to hold at once the brain-shattering befores-and-afters, the identity fault-lines that get born in you in a moment of dissociation.
When you cut a tree open you don’t just see how old it is but also the years of plenty and the years of drought. In the art of Artemisia, and Lee Miller, and Anna Banti, the traumatic ruptures of befores and afters are present, but also soothed and smoothed over by the artist, retelling and replaying: as a fugue but also to regain control.
Anna Banti’s novel, the one written after the flames ate her first attempt, layers over and blossoms through Artemisia — once through her art, and once again through her life. They mirror themselves and they mirror each other: Anna with her lost and rewritten novels, Artemisia with her recurring repainted Susannahs, through which she re-enacts by proxy the defining official story and scandal of her life. All is not lost: Banti speaks to Artemisia in her mind in the Boboli Gardens as Florence is on fire.
The twentieth century writer speaks to the Renaissance artist. A viciously unjust rape trial in one century and a fascist invasion in another, and still here are Artemisia’s paintings, Anna’s novel. All is not lost.
The story of what has been lost is always more resilient, because it knows this might be the only chance to get the message out, far away from the burning centre of things and to some place where people have the luxury to be things like historians or journalists.
Susan Sontag wrote about both Anna Banti and Artemisia Gentileschi in an essay not long before her death. Sontag’s essay on Banti’s novel and how it speaks to Artemisia completes the triptych of female genius — painter, writer, theorist; three great solid-gold brains. Like a line of women secretly passing notes and whispers, from Susannah to Susan, from the Bible to Berkeley.
Female genius has been hard to sustain, because the opposite of genius is accomplishment: obedient, unoriginal, little craft. This has been a clever trick of culture through the centuries, making us all like those female characters in Jane Austen novels pissing around learning the pianoforte or whatever, un-stitching and re-stitching bonnets because I don’t know, what is there to do when you’re trapped and bored and not quite ever getting started.
I worry about this when I sign up to dance workshops and unlikely beginner’s language classes and all this shit I do to pass the time now that I need to write and the revolution’s over and my friends hate each other and Egypt’s heartbreaking and everything is broken.
I worry about female accomplishment, unthreatening and performative, which has no qualitative difference to a well-chosen bracelet or modifying your tone of voice — one of million little signifiers aimed primarily at men. They’re talents, maybe, but they’re never genius.
I watch other women perform it to great effect and think, sometimes, ‘well, okay, to pass the time, but is that really the best you can make of yourself?’
I’m scared of my indulgent London life now, of dance classes and beginner’s languages and what to wear to a meeting and gossip and manicures and all this uselessness in the aftermath: it’s like twenty-first century pianoforte-playing. It’s making a sign that says ‘I’ll be a good accessory’. I wanted a solid-gold brain, I wanted a diamond mind that would cut through anything. I don’t know what happened to this want.
I wanted lots of things when the Egyptian revolution started, and I was twenty-five and on the cusp of things. I’m nearly thirty now and I can’t separate my growing-up from these last years of newspaper headlines and arguing friends and abandoned political placards. I’m scared I have grown up into being less hungry for everything.
It’s for this that I use formal logic when I can, and try not to use the metaphor of fertility. Every female writer’s made a file in their head of subject-matter, metaphors, and tones that stop us being taken seriously. Less menstruation, more equations was a motto I came up with for writing when I was in my early 20s. This code — which is itself somewhat un-feminist, as though things relating to women are necessarily less serious — broke down this year while I’ve been writing about Egypt.
Loss layers upon loss across the centuries, like coastal erosion pulling down cliffs, firstly slowly and then all at once.
There’s no way to explain the swollen rottenness of writing about the revolution that’s dead now, the pushing and pushing and labouring for something that we know is gone, except to use the metaphor of stillbirth. I don’t want to use the metaphor because it’s lazy and it’s dangerous at once, but physically at night I feel it more strongly than I’ve felt anything this last numb year: how I have to carry this dead thing and strain, alone and pleasurelessly, in the negative energy of loss.
Loss spreads as though it itself — inconsolable and aching — consumes its surroundings in hunger. It’s like a sinkhole that first peeks out at a little opening and ends up calmly engulfing a town. You see it in half of the story of Artemisia Gentileschi and Anna Banti. Loss layers upon loss across the centuries, like coastal erosion pulling down cliffs, firstly slowly and then all at once.
I needed the spring that spring because I’d just come back from Sarajevo and I was scared I’d never love anything again. I’m scared, again, that I won’t ever love anything the same way again, but I’m nearly thirty now so it’s no longer cute and the revolution did die, and we watched that happen like adults not like children.
The hardest thing about transitional justice — of how to address the past, and all its hoarded horrors bursting out of the cabinet drawers of the present, through inherited furniture riddled with woodworm and historic property-claims and paperweights holding down everything everyone is still due — is how unprocessed trauma sits on unprocessed trauma like stacks of papers in a ransacked library.
Like many young-ish women, my male colleagues and acquaintances sometimes speak to me like I’m a secretary, but even if they didn’t at night my mind would be perpetually filing. I picture these sedentary layers of history like the brain-shock equivalent of the Rashiduns, Umayyads, Abbasids, each rising and crumbling in turn.
You try think of something like the Spanish Civil War’s unprocessed horrors, rumours passed down in villages and unmarked patches of countryside, the aching chasms of untold truths in between official stories, and through it hold too all the layers that have since silted on top of it: all the unprocessed horror, 1940s, 1950s, 1960s…at some point your brain stops. So many layers, it would fill a library, or all the different petals of it could tumble and cascade from flowers forever. Like yawning Sarajevo roses that remember each of the century’s gun shots.
Once before Egypt I was around a lot of people who’d all been through something that had been a headline, in a town that became a symbol except for the people for whom it was still home. All our friendships were strained and all my love was brittle, we were like a crate of empty wine bottles on the back of a truck going up a mountain — rattling and rattling, clanking hazardously against each other, someone or other always about to shatter. There was so much loss that it was like tiptoeing across quicksand, and no-one can do that with their heart open for long.
At the times when you can’t hold the enormity all at once of everything that has been lost it often looks like happiness. It’s just an inability to hold, in our little un-golden minds, the whole hillside of loss all at once. I’m not saying I forgive you with this, only that I know only the thin shoreline of you is anger and the ocean behind is loss. I know the town you’re from is surrounded by hills of gravestones, so many that the hills are white with loss. The first time you look up when you’re in the valley you could think that they were clouds.
And no-one can carry a whole ocean or hillside full of loss inside them without converting some of it into feelings that are less hard to hold. And loss is the hardest thing of all to hold — there’s no lovely adrenaline or soothing panic to lose yourself in when you finally stop and face it.
Sometimes when you are really in the thick of life, writing well and loving people around you with the concentration and intelligence that really loving people requires, the loss is not cavernous and corroding.
At times like that you are full enough to feel sustained by the thought that — for instance — although the libraries were burned, the stories of the libraries carried on, so these are stories making something out of loss.
At least the stories about the burned libraries remained is a thought you can sustain, only rarely, at those times when your life itself is burning properly. You can never sustain it for very long.
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