Politics

Labor Rights are Human Rights

Written by Ana Turck

I woke up at dawn this past Saturday, my one day off from work and looked around my house. There was laundry to be done, dishes to be washed, writing to catch up on and a relaxation session to be squeezed in this hectic period lasting 16 hours. A night prior, my husband and I were watching the coverage of the week–long protests in Madison, Wisconsin and the emotional fight of its Public Workers to preserve their human right to bargain for conditions and terms of their labor.

I watched this story unfold and my anxiety steadily rose. My short stint as a high-school teacher made me keenly aware of the challenges and the value… Read more

Pursuit of Perfection

Written by Ana Turck

My pursuit of perfection became much easier once I started school. Not only did I have tangible proof of my worth in the form of grades, but I also was able to spend time with Tata, since he was in charge of my educational support. I anticipated our studying sessions with a mixture of fear and happiness. Fear, because I knew that I would be slapped at least once or twice if I underperformed, and happiness because, even in this twisted kind of way, I had his full attention, no matter how brief our studying sessions were. My first encounter with Tata’s impossibly high standards was akin to hazing.

Orphaned Father

Written by Ana Turck

A man of brilliant intellect and sparkling humor, tata went through life largely unrecognized and unrewarded for the depth of his observations and quickness of his wit. Abandoned and neglected at the age of four, after his mother’s tragic death of a botched abortion, tata and his brothers spent most of their childhood being shuffled from homes of relatives and orphanages in between my grandfather’s eight unsuccessful marriages. In his possession, he held only two pictures, a reminder of a family that he once had. First, a sepia tone photograph, ripped and torn at the edges, showing three dirty- faced boys with shaven heads, ripped clothes and no shoes on their feet.

International

Polako, nigdje ne gori

Written by Ana Turck

According to our family’s lore, I was born on a coldest day of the winter, 1976. On that second to the last day of January a snow and ice storm raged all over the Sarajevo valley, turning the quaint city of the valley into a battlefield. Howling winds carried even more snow from the surrounding mountains dumping it haphazardly all over the streets, draping it across tree branches, and burying houses and buildings. It was as if the nature’s dam broke, and all its power and energy were recklessly unleashed on the city, already drowning in heavy snow from earlier storms.

That storm, like all others past, was nothing that Sarajevans were not equipped to… Read more

Politics

Part Two: Forgetting-The protest turns deadly

Written by Ana Turck

It’s a strange thing how some faces become etched in memory, serving as a visual representation of events. For me, the face of protests in Sarajevo 1992 belongs to a man for whom the intensity of his emotions became more than he could bear. At 16 I hardly understood these emotions. In his face I saw pain, sadness, anger and devastation. While his yelling and tearing off clothes scared me, I also felt sorry for him.

Passing the military barracks JNA soldiers (Yugoslavian Army) were in windows and on the roof. I imagined how magnificent this moment was and how great it would be if they joined us in solidarity. I still believed that the… Read more

Politics

Remembrance

Written by Ana Turck

There are moments in my life when I regret not keeping a journal; the kind whose pages are filled with mundane details, only seldom interrupted by fragments of insightful thought. In my early teens I tried this exercise in self-awareness, but faltered after realizing that the journal turned into lists of meals, obsessive ramblings about unrequited love and frustrations over schoolwork. Realizing the ordinary nature of my teen angst, I stopped writing and turned to poetry instead.

During the war I refused to write; partially due to my inability to focus on anything more than survival, but also as a form of resistance to the conditions of my life. I refused to be just… Read more

Politics

Dispatch from Sarajevo

Written by Ana Turck

I recently returned from a week-long visit to Sarajevo. Flying into Sarajevo airport and watching the awe-inspiring mountain ranges and green hills, I could not shake off the memories of my escape over them during the war. As the plane circled the valley I recognized Mount Igman and the winding road that my mother, baby brother and I took in a rattling, old Yugo taxicab during a brief lifting of the 3 year siege in the spring of 1995.

Recalling my escape, I re-lived the same soul-emptying sadness that I felt as I glanced, for the last time, at the city I loved so much. These thoughts and the anticipation of reuniting with my family,… Read more

Culture

Echoes Of A Dark Past

Written by Ana Turck

For a long time now I have been living with feelings of alienation from the culture of my youth, as well as the pain that comes with the feelings of non-belonging. I was a product of a mixed marriage, a type of institution hailed as the perfect model of nation-building in Tito’s Socialist Yugoslavia. Growing up in the fifties, my parents believed in the message of “Brotherhood and Unity.” Not unlike many Sarajevans of their generation, they denounced the practices of segregation based on one’s religious background. While there has always been a rich tradition of co-existence in Bosnia, most people chose to preserve the homogenous nature of their family ties through marriage. The horrific… Read more

Who Will Protect You?

Written by Ana Turck

Ignored by most of the world, an ongoing refugee crisis in Kenya is at a breaking point. The plight of Somali refugees, who are seeking a safe place in Kenya against persecution and violence, is becoming increasingly grim. Human Rights Watch recently came out with an extensive report detailing the horrific neglect of immigrants already in Kenya, as well as the abuse and systemic violations of rights of those who are trying to enter the already closed borders of Kenya.

Ill equipped to adequately deal with staggering numbers of refugees, 300,000 alone just in the town of Dadaab, the Kenyan government made a controversial decision to close its borders, hoping to choke the influx of… Read more

International

I Am More Than My Body

Written by Ana Turck

Women’s experiences of war are almost exclusively examined through the prism of rape and sexual torture. With the mass scale and the organized nature of rape during the Bosnian war, these stories were important to tell. In many ways, they helped illuminate and examine violence against women in the most meaningful ways and nest the discourse about gender politics into the public sphere.

However, more often than not, the ways in which these stories were told helped drown and silence the voices of many women who endured horrific aggressions against their bodies and souls, as well as having witnessed the suffering of those around them. Their stories of pain and destruction were synthesized, examined and… Read more