What’s in a name? Resistance to genocide

Shakespeare left us the much-quoted adage about the relationship between things and names. In his tragedy Romeo and Juliet, his character Juliet complains that her family won’t accept her lover Romeo and boils it down to his name: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.”

In essence, Shakespeare gives us the theory of the arbitrariness of signs long before the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure put it into writing. And, I do not disagree. But there are times when our sheer survival as individuals and communities seems to hinge on names. Like in the time of genocide.

The erasure of names inevitably accompanies genocide, as it did in my homeland Bosnia in the 1990s. When a force burns libraries and razes religious buildings, when it attempts to erase the very history of a people, it does not want to just get rid of their physical bodies. It wants to create oblivion of origins.

For me, the greatest symbol of this erasure is the water fountain my great-grandfather Fejzo Tuzlić made in an unremarkable spot mid-way between his native town Kotor Varoš and my hometown Banja Luka. Both towns lie in what is now called Republika Srpska, an entity which covers practically half the country and which the Bosnian-Serb nationalists got as a reward for their genocidal project in the 1990s.

You won’t find this spring in books or Google Maps, neither under its old name “Fejzina Česma” nor its new name, Zmajevac (Dragon’s Place). Its changing name symbolises everything we went through in the war, which we so stubbornly hang on to.

Why did mother’s grandfather Fejzo, a Muslim man from an idyllic little town with an old Ottoman fortress overlooking incredible waterfalls, decide to build a water fountain in the first place? Traditionally, among Muslims, there is a belief that one of the ways to keep amassing good deeds even after your death is to leave a public good, a “khayr”, something that will benefit all people. It is what we call a “waqf”.

One typical public good is the “khayr fountain”, often built by a main road so travellers and their animals could quench their thirst. When I was a kid, we would always stop at Fejzina Česma on our way to visit relatives. It was not because we were thirsty. It was my mother’s ritual.

I do not know whether Fejzo dug the spring or just found it and fixed the place as a convenient stop for travellers in a time when people did not just swish by in their cars but needed to rest and water their horse or cattle. All people. All ethnicities. All religions.

After decades of use, when Fejzina Česma needed repair, it was Fejzo’s son Asim who fixed it. After the war, Asim’s son, my uncle, discovered someone had changed its name to “Zmajevac” and he put a new plaque with his father’s name instead: Asim Tuzlić.