Multiculturalism in Sarajevo and beyond?

Maja Bajevic, Double – Bubble, 2001

Maja Bajevic and Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich
ZAK | BRANICKA, Berlin

I've been asked over at the Marmot's Hole blog why I grew skeptical of multiculturalism. I intend to stay away from this topic over there since I don't want to waste my time being called names by some commentators who prefer shouting to listening and arguing to thinking, and I'm not ready yet to go deeply into the issue here, but I did come across an interesting quote yesterday from the 1961 Nobel Prize winner for literature, the Bosnian Serb writer Ivo Andric, taken from his short story "A Letter from 1920," and it seems apt:

Whosoever spends sleepless moments in a bed in Sarajevo might hear the voices of the Sarajevo night. Hard and firmly strikes the bell at two o'clock in the morning in the Catholic Church. More than one minute passed (exactly seventy-five seconds -- I counted) and only then . . . did I hear the slightly weaker, shrill sound of the Orthodox Church clock, also striking two o'clock in the morning. A moment later the sa-hat-kula spoke in a hoarse, subdued voice from the Bej Mosque, striking the eleventh hour -- the ghostly Turkish hour, the strange timekeeping of distant foreign countries. The Jews have no clock, only the heavens know what time it is -- whether according to Sephardic custom, or according to Ashkenazi. When all around is still and quiet, the difference separating men equalized by sleep is in the calculation of this hollow phase of the night. When they awake, they will be happy and sad, feast and fast by four different feuding calendars, and all their requests and prayers will be sent to heaven in one of four liturgical languages. The difference is sometimes visible and open, sometimes hidden and treacherous, but it always resembles hatred -- this difference is often hatred itself.

This passage (another translation found here) accompanies the remarks of curator Agata Rogos on the exhibition "From the Sunniest Day to the Darkest Night," which shows the artworks of Maja Bajevic, Adrian Paci, Alban Hajdinaj, Igor Grubic, and Hubert Czerepok. Concerning such night thoughts of Andric, Rogos observes:

With these words the Bosnian writer and Nobel Prize winner Ivo Andric described Sarajevo -- a town where four religions meet -- in his short story entitled A Letter from 1920. Such places never know peace, as the confrontation between various visions of the world more often serve to emphasize differences, and not similarities. Meanwhile, political correctness notwithstanding, the idea of multiculturalism, so deeply rooted in European philosophy, will always remain [merely?] a pious desire. This exhibition focuses on the ties between power, violence, and religion, and draws upon difference as a source of conflict . . .

Neither Andric nor Rogos appears to put much faith in the power of multiculturalism to quell hatred over differences, though they acknowledge the exceptionally deep culturally determined hatreds of the Balkans. Perhaps the Bosnian conflict itself initiated my skepticism as well, though I still advocated multiculturalism in those years of the early 1990s. Only with time -- toward the latter 1990s -- did I come to perceive the paradoxes of multiculturalism.

The problem with multiculturalism in its radical form is that it offers no metacultural foundation upon which to stand and critique cultural flaws, and one is left with extreme cultural relativism, except that everyone's supposed to be tolerant of other cultures, including such intolerable cultural practices as the genital mutilation of young girls, I suppose, and how does one deal with a culture of intolerance . . . tolerate it?

A moderate multiculturalism based on human rights offers a metacultural foundation for grounding a critique of cultural flaws, in every culture, but to what degree is moderate multiculturalism genuinely multicultural? It seems, rather, to assume a universal culture with national or ethnic variants. Moreover, what Rogos refers to as "the idea of multiculturalism, so deeply rooted in European philosophy," was likely predicated upon the values of Western Civilization and is in practice a moderate multiculturalism that works relatively well in Europe, which largely shares common foundational values, though there are obvious tensions even in the European multicultural reality.

That's all I have to say for now, but perhaps today's post here on Gypsy Scholar will provide some of those at the Marmot's Hole a partial answer to the question as to why I grew skeptical of multiculturalism.