IF I WASN'T A MUSLIM?

Damir Nikšić's video creation If I wasn't Muslim is inspired by Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof, which was composed based on the story by Shalom Alecheim about hard life of Jews in a small Russian village Anatevka in the early 20th century. Jerry Brock composed music based on the story and thanks to this outstanding cooperation the musical became a great hit as early as in 1964, and was a basis for a film with the same title. The main character in the musical and the film which track tragic eviction of Jews from pre-revolution Russia was milkman Tevya, and the plot is presented through destinies of families who cope with temptations and changes of modern life, embodied in life decisions of his five daughters.

The main song of Nikšić's video is a remake of the well-known song “If I were a rich man” from the musical. The story includes, by no means accidental, allusion to the motif of Chagall's famous painting with the same title, Fiddler on the Roof, which underscores semantic and symbolic connotations in the musical, film and lastly in Nikšić's video.

Indeed, the fiddler in Chagall's painting hovers above the roofs of Chagall's native village in the province of Vitebsk, where the painter was born in 1887, in a very religious, large Jewish family. Chagall's sentimental attachment to his homeland, filled with memories of Russian folk fairy tales and folklore, of Jewish rituals and tradition, shaped a completely distinctive artistic expression in the early 20th century.  

Nikšić's video also begins with the setting of his homeland: with a wide-angle idyllic panorama of Brezovo Polje, a settlement in Posavina which was built as a refugee settlement for Muslims evicted from Serbia in the 1860s, and where Damir was born almost a century later. Brezovo Polje witnessed new persecutions and massacres, of the same ethnic group, for the same reasons, in the late 20th century. In the early 1990s, during the war in Bosnia, Nikšić's relatives were evicted from Brčko, and in these tragic pools of refugees Nikšić recognized repetition of the same destiny. In introductory sequences of the video Damir directly addresses God, like Chagall, and asks him, looking to the left and the right, afraid and uneasy, about the reasons why he left Muslims to live here, in Europe, in permanent uncertainty and danger:

Dear God,
Of all the continents of this beautiful planet, You had to put my Bosnia in Europe.

I don't mind living in Europe, please,
Don't get me wrong.
I don't have any problems with that,
After all, this is the land of my ancestors,
But, as You can see, my European neighbors do.

It seems that You intended this continent to be Christian. Then, what went wrong with Your vast, eternal plan, That you made us, Bosniaks, Muslims?
And left us here, forgotten. (…)

Nikšić clearly links his video with the story in the musical/film; however, scenes of burning villages, refugees who leave their homes and cross the river by ferry are replaced by Damir's questions about his own identity. These questions and their unobtrusive though quite clear references, strive to grow into universal questions. Nikšić uses well-known historical references and associations of intolerance of Christian Europe toward Jewish community, presenting the tragedy of Bosnian Muslims as part of the same problem: as a constant European need to define its identity by cleansing itself from non-European elements. Amin Maalouf points out that these are not a couple of isolated cases but that the world is rather covered with wounded communities, and that all slaughters which happened over recent years, as well as most bloody conflicts, are related to the complex and fairly old “case files” of identities (Maalouf, 2002).

In several introductory sequences we view Nikšić from a raised perspective (it is a character staring at and confused about otherwordly truths, incognizable to mere mortals), and by his appearance Damir reminds of the character of the well-meaning, chubby milkman Tevya, even of the swarthy, bearded Chagall's fiddler. The mild didactic and rhetoric tone of Damir's voice in the first part of the video seems to be a muffled irony of the most part of Hollywood production. Damir goes on to perform verses of his poem If I wasn't a Muslim, with the music of Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof, superbly aligning the relationship of tragic and comic with mild elements of self-irony. The fundamental issues of the identity of Muslims in Europe thus resound in a casual, laid-back rhythm of the Broadway “Ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum”, with a note of parody and a satirical undertone:

If I wasn’t Muslim.
Ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum. My neighbors wouldn’t set my home on fire,
And surround me with barbed wire.

I wouldn’t live in terror.
Ya ha deedle deedle, bubba bubba deedle deedle dum. Books wouldn’t teach you that I was an error.
In European history.

I would not have to prove that I am not stupid.
A backward and primitive villain.
An alien threat to your way of life to be hunted down.
I wouldn’t be so ashamed of the names of my relatives and mine. (…)

The smartly incorporated autobiographical elements, which in this video carry a tinge of releasing energy that gradually rises in a crescendo of musical-stage intensity up to the final, culminating motif of Damir Nikšić with his arms out: on the one hand, like Fred Astaire with the shoulders still in motion and on the other, like a figure of a crucified, aching martyr who displays opposite emotional states, brought to ultimate limits.

Damir Nikšić's video If I wasn't Muslim premiered in Sarajevo gallery “Novi hram” in 2005 and it aroused enormous interest by wide audience. Due to unequivocal performing qualities, Nikšić's video made the “Eastern Question” of Bosnian Muslims a topic of contemporary art. By properly dosing elements of the tragic and the parody, relying upon Hollywood banalization of “difficult topics” in a society imprisoned by the imperative of entertainment, the artist made the reference historical examples contemporary and part of Bosnian Muslims' biography. Unfortunately, this biography still reflects Europe through its dominating and very alive stereotypes of Bosnian Muslims.

References:

• Maalouf, Amin (2002), U ime identiteta, Zagreb: Prometej.