Sixteen-year-old Amra Sabic lives in the city of Bihac, in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which has recently declared its independence from Yugoslavia. It is 1992 and Amra is on the train from Belgrade, Serbia back home after writing a series of tests in mathematics and logic. Amra feels that her parents don't seem to understand what is happening in their country. They believe people are general good, that education will create a better world. After passing tests in her hometown, her parents have sent her to Belgrade, in the heart of Serbia to take the next and highest levels of tests.
Now on a train home to Bihac, Amra is terrified when Serbian nationalists, known as Cetniks enter the train. There is already war between the Serbs who want land and control and Croatians who want independence. Amra believes it is only a matter of time before Serbia attacks Bosnia. And Serbs hate Bosniaks, Bosnian Muslims. Their leader, Radovan Kavadzic has threatened to eradicate Bosnian Muslims if they leave Yugoslavia. The soldiers are sneering and shouting at anyone they think might be Muslim. Amra's only protection is that they think she is a young Serbian woman. That's because Muslims in Bosnia don't wear hijabs, speak Arabic or recite the Qu'ran. They are Muslims of ethnicity after years of communism and look like other Yugoslavians. So far Amra's city of Bihac has been peaceful with Muslims, Croats and Serbs living in harmony for generations. Thankfully, Amra arrives safely in Bihac and is met by Tata.On her birthday Amra awakens to discover that a young Muslim soldier is staying at her home. Mama and Tata take in these soldiers and send them to safety. Muhamed is from Srebrenica. He tells Amra he never wanted to be a soldier, instead hoping to work in the spa famous for its healing waters. He was sent to a tiny Croatian town to massacre the people but after letting an old woman escape he hid until it was over. Upon learning the next day they were to be sent to another Croation town, he deserted. He met up with Amra's Tetak Ale and Tetka Fatma who saved him and sent him to Amra's home. Muhamed tells Amra that the soldiers are saying the Muslims are next, once they get to Bosnia.
When Amra meets up again with Tata, he has Omer and Erza with him. As they walk home, the calico cat follows Amra. Although she doesn't want the cat, Tata suggests that maybe she too needs a family. Amra's mother welcomes Omer and Erza but refuses to have a "maci", the Bosnia word for cat, in the house. Nevertheless, Maci sticks around.
Amra's birthday party sees her friend Olivera who is Serbian and Nura and Ivona attend. After eating Zuhra's delicious cake, Olivera suddenly leaves, telling Amra she's not allowed to stay after dark, in case something happens. This puzzles Amra, and when the other girls are spooked by Maci at the window, they also leave.
The next day while waiting for Olivera, Amra learns that their capital city of Sarajevo is surrounded by Serb forces. Amra begins to wonder about Olivera, who is Serbian. That night when she attempts to call Olivera, she hangs up on her and then during a second attempt tells Amra never to call again. When Maci follows Amra and Dino on their way to school the next day, a young university student named Davor offers to watch the cat while Amra is in class. Amra immediately notices that half the class is absent- all the Serbian students. Teacher Zivko, a Serbian who is married to a Muslim, tells the class that the Muslims and Catholics who are left in the city will soon be under attack. The Serbian families were secretly told to evacuate, while the army waits outside the city. He tells them to go home.
As she's leaving school, Amra tells Davor that she needs to get her brother Dino. He agrees to help her, but when they get to the intersection, Amra realizes she's forgotten Maci. As they leave the intersection, a sniper begins shooting, wounding people. Amra and Davor get Dino and then they head towards their homes. At Amra and Dino's home, Tata and Mama are packing to go to Cousin Vesna's house to shelter in her basement.
For the first three days not much happens but then bombing begins on the fourth day. Tata believes the world will put a stop to the bombing. After the bombing, Amra and Dino escape outside to try to find Maci and discover their house is still intact. Dino escapes death from a bomb when he hears Maci in a nearby garage. The place he was standing was hit by a bomb, killing three of their friends. Maci saved Dino this time. When Amra tells Mama how Maci saved Dino, she agrees the cat can stay.
For two more weeks Amra and her family stay with Cousin Vesna. Tata goes out to check on the city and learns that the teacher in charge of records for Amra's grade has destroyed all the records of the Muslim students. He also tells Mama that her brother Ejub was killed in bombing. With this, Mama decides they will go back to their home.
They find their house intact, but without electricity. However, Amra struggles, taking to lying in bed most of the day. But Maci and her new kittens are a sign of hope for Amra, reminding her that the world is a beautiful place. As Amra and her family struggle to stay alive as war batters Bihac, Maci is the one constant that helps the entire family deal with hunger, loss and fear.
Discussion
The Cat I Never Named presents young readers with a gritty, personal account of the Bosnian War from the perspective of a sixteen-year-old girl. The war, which began in 1992 and ended in 1995, was the result of the breakup of the communist state of Yugoslavia after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989. At the end of World War II, Yugoslavia was a country comprised of six republics: Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia. The country was ruled by dictator Josef Tito until his death in 1980. Ethnic tensions began to increase between Serbs and other groups in the region especially after Slobodan Milosevic came to power in Serbia in 1987. In 1991, Slovenia and Croatia voted to secede from the country followed in 1992 by Bosnia and Herzegovina. The secession of Croatia, resulted in increased tensions between the Serbian population and the dominant Croats. With the declaration of independence by Croatia, the Serbian population went to war. This was the beginning of the conflict that eventually spilled over into Bosnia, a region inhabited by Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), Croatians and Serbs who lived together in peace for decades. Although the secession of Bosnia/Herzegovina was recognized internationally, Bosnian Serbs were not so accommodating.
Amra Sabic was a teenager when war broke out. Her memoir vividly describes how it felt to be hated simply for belonging to a specific ethnic group. She struggles to understand how a best friend could suddenly come to hate her. "No, Olivera doesn't hate me. She's my best friend. She knows nothing about this conflict, no more than I did only two days ago. Bihac isn't Sarajevo. We are peaceful, full of brotherly love. We accept differences. No one here would hurt another person just because their ancestors came from one place or another." However, Olivera does not hold this view at all. In school she tells Amra that her father says "...all Serbs are afraid of Muslims..." When Amra confronts her friend, she has no explanation for why she might be afraid of someone like Amra.
Amra also finds herself also dealing with her own desire to hate the Serbs. When their Serbian neighbours home is being robbed by a Bosniak classmate, Amra believes they deserve to be robbed and to have nothing. But her father tells her "...Jovanka and her husband, they are just people. The Serbs, they are just people. Most of them are like us, just trying to be happy and get along. A few of them have been corrupted by hate, or greed, or...I don't know what. But inside we are all the same. Just because some of the Serbs have forgotten that, you shouldn't. Ever. One day this will be over. We'll all go back to being just people again. Make sure you haven't forgotten your humanity by then."
The war makes Amra think about human nature and our capacity to help or hurt one another. In her city under siege, Amra rethinks her opinion of her neighbour Jovanka, wondering if the woman was actually trying to help her. "What if tired old Jovanka tried to commit one herooic act in her life? Face with horror she couldn't fight, what if saving me was her attempt to make things not right but better? What if every Serb tried to do one small thing to fight the hate that has taken over our world now? What if everyone on the planet did?"
Amra also struggles to understand the abandonment of her friend Olivera. When Nura tells her that Olivera knew what was happening but simply kept quiet, Amra feels differently. "I feel betrayed by my best friend. But I also try to understand what she must have gone through, to be torn between her own beliefs and her parents' beliefs. To be told to think that Bosnians are dirty subhumans, and then see proof to the contrary in her best friend. Or did she come to believe it too?"
As the war continues on, Amra eventually makes a crucial decision after visiting the home of Damir, a boy a year ahead of her in school. Hoping to borrow his old math textbooks, she learns from his father that he has been killed by a missile. She begins to understand that maybe she can help build a better world.
The Cat I Never Named is a story about maintaining our humanity in the worst of times. Amra and her family survived the war but it changed all of them forever. Amra has crafted a readable account, using the events and people she encountered during the war that effectively portray the horrors of war, the suffering of innocent civilians and the destruction of society and culture. It is also a story about a young girl determined to survive and make the world a better place by letting the world know the power of hatred to destroy everything good. In her author's note, Amra states that she "wrote this book to illustrate how deeply damaging hatred is. Hatred is the most powerful emotion, more powerful than love. Love compels us to do selfless things....But hate can make people commit horrific violence, such as Serbs raping my relative in a rape camp. Only hate is that powerful..."
Amra writes in her Acknowledgements, that she "...wanted to ensure my story transcended the moment and would remain a powerful lesson for generations to come. I wanted it to sensitize young adults to those who are other-ed and discriminated against. I wanted to bring the world together by changing youths' mind-sets." Amra also explained the cover of the book and what it tries to achieve. "The blown-up mosque was inspired by a one destroyed in the village of Ahmici during a massacre against Bosniaks, Bosnian Muslims, on April 16, 1993. The goal was to counter a prevalent narrative that nearly two billion Muslims are a monolithic group of people. Instead, the book's jacket present my authentic self, a liberal Muslim teen , yet a Muslim who was still so profoundly hated. The jacket illustration serves as a reminder that the hate is a product of its perpetrators rather than a reflection of its victims. To those who spent years trying to kill me, it never mattered who I was. What mattered was how they saw me. There is nothing that victims can do to ameliorate that hate except to educate by telling our stories in hope of evoking collective empathy among those open to hearing our stories. The jacket also demonstrates a dichotomy between the love Maci and I felt for each other and destruction around us that the hatred produced."
The author also includes a map at the front to orient young readers, A Note From The Author, Resources for Further Reading and Movies About the Bosnian War. The Cat I Never Named is an uplifting reminder that people have the choice to stand up against hate and instead to change the world for the better, one loving act at a time.
Book Details:
The Cat I Never Named by Amra Sabic-El-Rayless
New York: Bloomsbury Publishing 2020
368 pp.
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