2005 City of Women festival is dedicated to SUSAN SONTAG

SUSAN SONTAG (1933 – 2004)
NERMINA KURSPAHIĆ: IN MEMORIAM

"I have every right to be personal, because I loved
her as much as she loved me, with a friend’s love
that a lot of people nowadays haven’t got the clue
about, but she knew everything. I’m in terrible
pain and it hurts so much having to face the fact that
Susan is really gone. I lost my dear friend, David lost his
mother, and the whole world lost Susan Sontag. She’s
gone for good, together with the century that she signed;
the lady of the Great Spirit, mind and heart."
(Nermina Kurspahić)

“It’s so beautiful here, this village of yours reminds me
of the Swiss landscape. The next time I’ll come in June
again,” were Susan Sontag’s words while we were sitting
and talking in the garden of my home on the outskirts of
Sarajevo. “The weather is fine, and somehow everything
seems better than it actually is...” And then the message
from New York, saying “I can’t make it in June, I’ll
come in September, I promise...” This happened last
year. And then “Susan sends you all her love, and she’s
very sorry about your father... He was a good person;
she’ll always remember him for that... She’s in hospital
in New York now, and she doesn’t want any visits nor
flowers...”

“Even when illness is not interpreted as a punishment it
turns out to be one, retroactively, because it ends up in
the breakdown of the moral values and the customs,”
wrote Susan Sontag. The death may have been her
punishment, but the rest definitely not... Her moral
values never broke nor did her spirit ever waver, but her
body did. She was fighting against her illnesses for 40
years. Her fight for the better world was even longer and
harder. Unfortunately she lost both battles. She fought
her own personal war against every known rules and
medical prognosis. “Cancer is a disease which leads to
the resignation, the decline of bioenergy and ultimately
to the loss of any hope,” wrote Susan in her book
entitled Illness as a Metaphor. None of this was true
for her. In her own words she was a genuine ‘fanatic
of austerity, in the sense of taking everything seriously’,
she was an intellectual, thinker, fighter for human rights,
and her own life contrary to every medical prognosis.

She was a great writer and a critic. Susan was the
founder of the American post-modernism, an avant-garde
artist, the follower of her own consistency, and ‘the dark
lady of the American intellectual life, the aesthete who
designed its cultural horizon...’. Even those who didn’t
really like her (Who are they?) gave her credit for that.
She made great many right and
courageous decisions and judgements
– from Vietnam, Bosnia to
the contemporary America. She
said and wrote that it is the
balance between the aesthetics
(intellectual, discursive) and ethics
that determines her as a human
being. And the truth is that everything
she wrote, said, worked is
absolutely coherent with this
claim. Unlike some other philosophers,
thinkers or intellectuals,
Susan Sontag never operated
within a single exclusive system
of values, she did not utilise her
ideas to build up ideologies nor – by demonstrating her ethics as well
as the sense for justice and moral standards – did she ever moralise.

On the contrary, she carried all her ideas, her knowledge, and the
education around like a ‘travelling library’ and applied it to the
segments of reality. Carlos Fuentes compared her to the renaissance
humanist Erasmus who ‘travelled with 32 volumes of books whose
contents were worth knowing’. Fuentes says: “Susan Sontag carried
(the knowledge) in her brain! I don’t know of any other intellectual
who thinks so clearly and is capable of putting it all together, joining it,
connecting it somehow. Her case is the best proof of the utopian thesis
– which a lot of people fail to bring to life – that the knowledge has to
have and actually does have a practical purpose, and that it directly
corresponds to the contents of reality, time and space.”

For Susan Sontag the pursuit for knowledge was like hunger. The
hunger – like the usual human need for food – drove Susan to spend
her life from the early childhood in reading, studying, thinking. She
considered the childhood to be ‘the waste of time.’ Thus she started
at that very time, in her early youth, to fill it with contents worth
remembering. As a fourteen-year old college girl she had tea with
Thomas Mann in L.A. Discussing with Mann The Magic Mountain or
the Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal music was
something completely normal and expected
for Susan. The same as it would be later
absolutely normal to discuss with the
Vietcong guerrilla, Vietnam rural population,
and the inhabitants of Hanoi or Sarajevo taxi
drivers about the meaning or insignificance
of ordinary things. Susan could talk to anyone about anything. But she
could never have shallow conversations on frivolous subjects nor she
was good at or willing for small talk or little gaiety.
During the aggression and genocide in Bosnia in the 1990s of the past
century, Susan Sontag took the part of the victims in a way that a lot
of people resented her. She was one of those intellectuals who saw and
recognised in the catastrophe of Bosna and its people (‘Bošnjaki’) a
‘deja-vu’ European scenario from the times of the Spanish civil war.
As a matter of fact, this very war was for many intellectuals who got engaged in the preservation of Bosnia a paradigm in the
sense of the confirmation of ethics as well as intellectual
integrity. For Susan Sontag, the parallel between Bosnia
and Spanish civil war in 1930s was logical. Namely, the
Spanish civil war and the ‘taking sides’ (and combat) as
intellectuals on the anti-fascist side was an ideal that was
never reached; unrepeatable yes, but nevertheless much
desired. Susan Sontag wrote a lot about this subject, and
in her famous essay “There” and “Here” she says: “The
war in Bosnia is not the only horror that is shown as a
programme for the last four or five years. But there are
events – models of events –, which represent the sum of
the opposition forces of the century. One of such events
was the Spanish civil war. The same is the war in
Bosnia, with its symbolic meaning.”