Clothes for Death

This morning I went to Donja Vrba, to give photographs to Marija, Liza and Ana, three women I photographed last year. They all live in a small village near Slavonski Brod in Croatia. First I visited Marija, who lives in a large, old house. When I met her last year she was in good health, very chatty, with strong features and clear eyes. Today, she was laying in bed, looking quite weak and pale, with her daughter looking after her. Her daughter said that it was good we visited today as this Wednesday she due to have an operation. Marija was so happy I came by and she really liked the photographs. It is such an amazing feeling when the people one photographs really like the photo. It makes me feel as though the whole project is worth it, and that connection that is created during this act of sharing is very powerful. All that uncertainty seems worth bearing…
I really like Marija, she is a strong woman, who I believe will pull through…Is she more ready for the day then some of us who have not prepared our clothes and the whole attire for the final moment, I wouldn’t know…

I also met Liza, whom I photographed in the amazing room with beautifully embroidered clothing (see image in the first blog). She was well and liked the picture very much, saying that she will frame it immediately. Ana, whom I visited last was there with her family and responded generously too. All three of them asked how much money they owed me for the photographs, which was very sweet…I felt the owing is more from me to them…

Their kindness was healing…

Tomorrow I am on the road again. This time I am joined by Marcus, my husband, and we will be making our way to Mala Pilica, near Bijeljina, east Bosnia. There a friend of mine, Zeljka, has done good work in finding women who are wiling to have their clothes for death photographed…

I am writing this from Zagreb, from a friend of mines computer. We met each other today after more then fifteen years. I cant believe it…such a long time…
He left, like myself at the beginning of the war, in 1992. His whole family left then, exchanging a house with a family in Croatia who then came to live in Bosnia…We chatted for hours, so much to say, and to get to know each other again…He hasnt been back to Banja Luka, where he grew up, for fifteen years. So, in a way, I was-am a connection to the past and possibly to the future…We agreed he must visit…Home that he imagines has become a picture in his mind, perhaps fiction, perhaps not, but it seems so important to make the physical and emotional connection again…

This afternoon I spent some time in the Home for Jewish Elderly, together with Dona Danon, an Anthropologist (who has kindly offered to help with this part of my research as she is writing an MA Theses on Sefardic Jewish women). She found out that there is a woman who is sewing the clothes for burial especially for the residents of the home, but we were not sure if the women themselves prepared anything. The seamstress was there when we arrived and had prepared the clothing, laid out with a dark sheet underneath, looking quite sombre and rather institutional. The clothing for burial consisted of the white dress which looked like a sleeping gown, the white scarve and the white socks. I was curious to find out from her that men were buried in the same clothing as the women, in the white gowns. She believed that there wasnt much deviation in terms of preparing a different type of clothing.

After this Dona spoke with a few women with whom she has established a relationship through her research and none of them had prepared such clothing (partly because the Home took care). I was greatful that she asked, as it is such a sensitive thing to ask, and through the past few weeks of speaking to the women myself I appreciated more the delicate nature of the project. On Tuesday, I met a woman who had prepared everything, but didnt want to be photographed. When I asked her why not, she said its just something inside…

We spent the rest of the afternoon chatting to a vivacious woman, in her 80s who told us many interesting facts about her life. She told us that the most tolerance she experienced was during the 1st Yugoslavia (which was the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovens), she said all the religions were respected and given space…She also spoke about Mesa Selimovic, one of my favourite writers, which has shaped so much of my adolescent thinking and writing aspirations…He used to visit her home, and spend long times chatting to her father…She tought this was because his relationship to his father was very distant. I have to admit it was so exotic listening such personal tales about a writer I admire so much.

I am struck by the way women keep their pieces of clothing, wrapped in a sheet, or in travel bags, plastic bags, suitcases… One of the women, Jovana, who is 97 years old, pulled out a dusty old suitcase from underneath the bed and inside of it was a floral dress, long woollen socks (which she probably knitted), petticoat and many family photographs. It was as though she was preparing for a journey and needed to be ready at any moment…

The Orthodox priest told me that in his view, the custom of preparing clothes for death (or funeral as some also say) comes from the tradition of preparing one’s best suit or a dress for the Sunday mass and preparing for the meeting with God. A person needed to be ready and in its ‘Sunday’s best’ when meeting God…
This stayed with me and I think he has definitely touched on some of the religious background to this still mysterious custom.

I met a woman whose husband researched wedding and funeral customs in Nevesinje, in the 1950’s. She published his book posthumously and gave me one copy of the book as a gift, Obrad Micov Samardzic, “The Orthodox Weddings and Funeral Customs in Nevesinje” . Even though he focused mostly on the wedding rituals there is an interesting chapter relating to the preparation for the funeral. In it he writes that it is important to wear ‘a beautiful and new suit’ as after the funeral ‘the women will talk about the way he was buried’. Even though his text is written from a very patriarchal perspective it does give a clue as to why presentation even when dead is very important. This seems to be particularly at play in small places and communities, and in those traditions where body is seen by others.

This blog is a bit non-chronological as I try to catch up on the last week’s journey and events…

The train journey and the impossibility of taking photographs:
The train glided slowly through Bosnia – Doboj, Kakanj, Zenica, reaching Sarajevo and on to Herzegovina reaching Mostar. The remains of the war were sticking out like scars. Ruined buildings, with bullet holes still dotting the walls, banks of rivers covered with plastic bags… New mosques, new churches, full cemeteries…It was painful to see the level of poverty and division that is present everywhere I looked. Train station names have been erased depending on the entity, cyrilic ones have been erased in Federation, and latinic ones if in Republika Srpska so one was in no doubt in whose territory one is at any time…When I talked about my pain of seeing such poverty and division to my partner he asked me if I took some photographs. I replied that I couldn’t be a tourist in my own country (but I am some sort of a visitor) and that I couldn’t bring myself to take photographs. It is as though I felt anaesthetised and from that numbness couldn’t create…
I was able in the evening to jot down only a few disjointed words, in my own language this time (I predominantly write in English).
Ne mogu fotografisati oronule zgrade, ostatke rata, balkone sa odjecom, smece rasuto…Ta ideja mene kao turiste boli, nema dovoljno distance, zemlja suvise bliska…
I can not photograph ruined buildings, war remains, balconies with clothes, rubbish strewn…The idea of me as a tourist hurts, there is not enough distance, the land is too close…

I am beginning to understand what Theodor Adorno meant when he commented that "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”.

After eight hour train journey from Banja Luka to Mostar via Sarajevo, pulled by a train engine on which it said ‘Republika Srpska Rails’ and upon arriving to Mostar the engine has become ‘Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina Rails’ I arrived to a depressing looking train station in Mostar and was picked up by an Orthodox priest and his priest trainee (also a Theology student). {Bosnia and Herzegovina is divided into two parts Republika Srpska and the Federation – sounding like something from the star wars. Even my train ticket had a different pricing for different ‘entities’ as they call them.}
When we spoke on the phone prior to meeting at the station the priest described himself as wearing the priest robes (at which point I didn’t bother giving him my description) as it definitely wasn’t difficult to recognise him in long black cloak, and a black cap. It took us an hour on a windy road up a mountain to reach Nevesinje, a small town where he lived with his family (Orthodox priests can merry), running an Orthodox church. I was so intrigued about their lives, having grown up in the socialist Yugoslavia, and not having much contact with religion. (I remember as a child staying with my mother’s family in Croatia and thinking that God only existed there as they were the only people I knew who went to church and who had the scary looking pictures of angels and other dramatic looking characters.) So we chatted rather informally in the car, me quizzing them about priesthood, them describing me their ‘career’ paths, of studying Theology, which lasts four years, then one can do Masters etc etc and e.g for four years one of the subjects is a History of Religion and even though they primarily train to be priests in the Orthodox tradition, they for example learn about Islam for an academic year and so on. They dropped me off to a private accommodation where I was to stay with a family, who run a sort of B&B, or village tourism.
The priest told me of a two women who agreed to be photographed, and accompanied by a driver, a priest assistant and dodgy old golf (now that’s what I call doing the fieldwork in style) we set off the following day to our first visit. Ljubica lived in Nevesinje, and we were welcomed by her and her daughter. I negotiated where we should take photographs, and managed to convince her to take them in her bedroom, as there were five people in the by now very smokey living room (it never ceases to amaze me how much people smoke here – a friend in Banja Luka told me it is the curse of the third world countries).

I always leave to the women to arrange how they want to present the clothes; it is their personal choice how they spread it out and nearly everyone immediately has their own notion of how they like it to be arranged for photographing.

I am forever plagued by the questions of ethics as this practice of entering personal places and ‘taking’ a photograph is on some level exploitative and I am constantly asking myself if I have explained correctly what the photograph is for, and even though I do ask for signatures on a model release form, a sense of having taken something away stays with me.

After the first visit we drove another half an hour to the village nearby, accompanied by a daughter of the second woman who agreed to be photographed. There, we were offered a coffee, which I must not drink anymore as it is so strong and black that couple of those a day and my heart begins to jump a beat. The family lived in a basic village condition, growing their own food and I thought it was interesting that in the UK I pay so much money for the organic food and farming in the organic way has become a bit of a middle class thing – thinking here of that programme, was it on the BBC about a young couple running their organic farm, he reminded me a bit on Jamie Oliver, and the whole series had this sexy farming message written all over it.

I will write more again, as I try to catch up on the last week…but right now I am going to catch up on much needed sleep!