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Letters from the Fire
New Zealand Herald, 2 October 1999
What do you do with your helpless rage and grief when, an exile, you watch as your city and country are destroyed by bombs - as the landscape of your memory is torn away like a boat wrenched by a storm from its moorings?
For author Alma Hromic, powerless in Auckland while her childhood home, the Serbian town of Novi Sad, was blown to bits by NATO bombers earlier this year, all she could do was write. As the inability to eat and sleep bit down she turned to the Internet, spending countless hours researching Internet sources on the conflict and thrashing out the issue in her newsgroup. It culminated in a novel jointly written in a series of emails by herself and her close cyber-friend R. "Deck" Deckert, a Florida journalist. Letters from the Fire (HarperCollins, $19.95 ), a cyber-romance novel set in the political context of the NATO bombings, will be released on Monday.
She admits to a some trepidation about how the novel will be received. With the Western media and therefore Western public opinion generally in favour of the NATO campaign against Milosevic and the Serbian cities and town they perceived supported him, it may be seen as inflammatory to publish a novel which is not only written by a Serbian woman, but which questions the morality and point of the war.
"It's inevitably political," Hromic says of her novel. "But it is not crafted as a political book. I'm not out to 'convert' anyone to anything -- it's a love story filtered through a particular context."
One of those also speaking out against the war through the Internet newsgroup (and there were several in the group of Americans, Canadians and English who strongly supported the bombing) was Deckert, whom Alma describes as "a pacifist's pacifist". He recognised the personal stress Alma was under and convinced her that, while it may be difficult, she should try and turn her perception of events into a narrative, thus perhaps writing her way towards personal peace.
"My intuitive reaction was, 'I can't possibly, it's too close'," Hromic says. But she reluctantly agreed to start, using him as a foil. The original plan was that they would each assume a hardline position - he as an American hawk, she as a Milosevic supporter - and work their way towards a mutual, central position.
"But it was obviously not going to happen because neither of us could do that. We couldn't take a politically correct version if we tried. So he graciously decided to be the mirror, and it became Sasha's story. She gets the drama, and his character Dave reacts to it."
And off they went, writing turn by turn in pretty much the same chronological sequence as appears finally in the novel. They began on April 24 and were finished by mid-May - an extraordinary effort which kept pace with events as they unfolded, culminating in the book's finale, the obliteration of TV Novi Sad on May 2. By mid-May the manuscript was edited and submitted to publisher HarperCollins.
"We simply reacted to whatever the other guy wrote, which was chaotic but brought that spark and spontaneity. It wasn't planned, but a couple of themes emerged: the futility of war, and bridges..."
Novi Sad, which recently celebrated its 250th birthday as a city, had three historic bridges spanning the the Danube. All were destroyed by NATO, despite the decrepit state of the oldest one. As Sasha feels in the story, so does Hromic herself feel that these bridges symbolise her very identity: "It is not the bridge, it is all that the bridge stands for... it allows me to know my place in space and time... As for me and my people... our past flows through us like my beloved Danube flows through my city," Sasha tells Dave in the novel.
In the book, it is the building of bridges - as symbolised in the developing relationship between Dave and Sasha - that is as central as the breaking of them through the bombing.
It is 26 years since Hromic left then-Yugoslavia as a 10-year-old in 1973 when her father got a job with the United Nations in Zambia. They moved from there to Swaziland, and then on to Cape Town in South Africa where she attended the University of Cape Town and got three degrees, starting with a BSc in microbiology and culminating with an MSc in 1987. She held a number of science-related jobs, but also always pursued her literary interests. She has been writing poetry since she was five years old - "I was born with ink in my veins," she says - and has published much fiction and non-fiction work in magazines and journals in South Africa, England and New Zealand, as well as book reviews and articles. (Her name will be familiar to New Zealand Herald readers, as she is a regular reviewer on this books page.)
She published a book of three fantasy short stories, "The Dolphin's Daughter and other stories", in the United Kingdom in 1995 (currently in its fifth impression), and a non-fiction memoir of her years in Africa called "Houses in Africa" which was published in New Zealand by David Ling Publishers in September 1995.
Margie Thompson