Champagne Flows While Syria Burns
by Janine di Giovanni, Newsweek, July 9, 2012
Four years ago, Damascus was chosen as the Arab world’s Cultural Capital by UNESCO, and some people seem determined to hold on to that sobriquet, despite the many dead. Indeed, at the Damascus Opera House, the orchestra’s musicians believe it is their noble duty to keep playing. “People say that we should not make music while people are dying; I say it is imperative to give people hope,” says one violinist. “Even to have the house one quarter full in these times is a great achievement. People have to drive at night through dangerous checkpoints to get here, and most people just want to stay home and be safe.” A female musician agrees. “I don’t want to give the impression that we are like the Titanic—the orchestra plays on while the ship sinks,” she says. Her fate in Damascus has more in common with the Russian musicians who kept playing during the German siege of Leningrad, she says. “Music and art, in times like these, fuel the soul.”
Angie Goes to War
by Janine di Giovanni, Newsweek, December 5, 2011
Her film depicts the isolation of war. Early on in the fighting, I remember going for a walk, avoiding the Serb snipers near the Jewish cemetery on the hill, to a neighborhood on the opposite side of the river where I lived. It was a time of intense bombing, sniping, starving, and freezing. I had witnessed old people who had been abandoned in their frontline nursing home and died in their beds. I saw kids who got rocketed for building snowmen. At the beginning of the war, America did not want to get involved; it saw the conflict as a European problem. In America it was portrayed as an intensely complicated fight between ancient enemies (Christians versus Muslims, Croats versus Serbs) and taking place in Europe’s backyard. As the fighting spread between Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia, the U.N. got involved, but it was not until NATO airstrikes in 1994–95 that the opposing parties were forced to the negotiating table, where the U.S. played a major role in bringing about peace. And yet early on, people hung American flags out their windows. “Are they coming to save us?” they asked me, tugging at my sleeves. “When are the Americans coming?” It was heartbreaking. Jolie’s film shows what it is like to be one of those people—a poet, a bank teller, a teacher, a mother—and to be transformed by the cruelty and betrayal of war. It is about what humans do to other humans to survive.
