Kolo Sestra (Serbo-Croatian for sisters circle) Slavic thaumaturgy, the circle of sisters is a process of manifesting healing that is referred to as miracle-making.
Storied Instructions
At first, the Kolo Sumejja women felt guilty about having a “real vacation.” Many women in the aftermath of the Bosnian war were shut in as if in prisons without bars because of poverty and the way of life in the aftermath of a war that had painful memories on every street and in every home. Even a simple bus fare to a town less than five kilometers away was a choice between eating and paying a bill. Since the current model of western clinical trauma treatment does not work or apply for most, the indigenous South Slavic practices were best suited to allow the women in these situations to heal.
Out of their prisons for only a half-hour, even as quickly as going over the mountains that are visible from their Alpine village, the traumatized and often seriously depressed women started to tell bar jokes and break out into song. I could not sleep or read. Yet I could not avoid noting this Slavic thaumaturgy, a process of manifesting healing that is referred to as miracle-making now.
No matter how many sessions and years of therapy I conducted, I could not possibly have created the intensive therapy that took place in the tattered yellow bus chugging through the Bosnian mountain passes toward the Adriatic Sea. This was even more stunning in light of the release of videos revealing the brutal takeover of Srebrenica, a small town outside of Tulsa, Bosnia (now reclaimed as Serbia). In 1995, within five days, Bosnian Serb soldiers removed Muslim men and systematically murdered them. (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/…/bosnia-agonizes-over…/ )
At first, on the bus to Neum, the Kolo Sumejja women discussed their reactions to the broadcast of the Srebrenica videos on Bosnian television. The universal and archetypal force struck these women. The fact that a mother, a Serb Mother, would find the damning videos and turn them over to the public alerted the Kolo Sumejja women that this mother is their sister, no longer divided from them by ethnic or religious origins. The videos allowed mothers and relatives to identify their male relatives and see their last moments. And for that, the Kolo Sumejja women proclaimed gratefulness and heartfelt thanks various times.
What erupted was this reaching for female solidarity, a kolo uteri legacy that immediately perpetrated healing rather than hatred. It was Vahdeta Sivor Krnjic’s words that triggered an alert within me. She stated that the force of motherhood and being a mother with the decades’ long bleeding cycles evolving into the wisdom of menopause is known for creating life and therefore heals not just the family but entire communities.
All this occurred in the first hours on the bus to the coast, which we rented and drove through the night to avoid the insufferable heat of the day. I packed my eye mask and earplugs and begged for a pillow from Sana Koric’s immaculate home with its pristine white linens. But for all my tools to sleep, the Kolo Sumejja women sang and danced the kolo on what little aisle was left unattended by luggage.
I am sure they conspired to joke with the sleeping American-Serb, but it was so much more than that.
The explosion from their hearts and verve for life after so much war and death propelled the ruckus of laughter and haunting songs chanted between the jokes and sometimes punctuated by farting. The latter would have me plugging my nose and yelling at the offender, which only made them roar with laughter and tears. I would swear in Bosnian and they would chortle hysterically until they held their stomachs.
At one point, I turned around in my seat at the front of the bus, a seat placed as far as I could get from the culprits who thwarted any sleep. It was not what I saw, it was what I felt. Female solidarity settled in among our shoulder-to-shoulder existence in the crowded yellow bus, with a male bus driver who would be sworn to confidentiality but allowed to laugh. I wonder whether this was how the Elysian Mysteries were kept secret from the men.
I think so since I heard Fata, the eldest in our Kolo Sumejja, tell him that she and the women would do insufferable things to him if he did not keep quiet. The bus driver sweated when she told him that. I laughed when I saw that since he was a former soldier and actually able to defend himself. The local male bus driver came to me on the fourth trip to share that he loved these elder respected women of his community, but he had come to worship them. He realized how beloved each female was to him. I noted that he called his mother in addition to his wife on the trips because of his new reverence for these women.
As the tattered yellow bus chugged over the mountain passes and road that hugged the Neretva River, through Mostar with its beautiful green waters, I would often turn in my torn vinyl seat to see how the Kolo Sumejja women healed their war traumas with song and especially the kolo dancing in the aisle, blocking the bus driver’s view. Could it be as simple as the women, experiential professors of trauma, indicate? Removing oneself from the traumatic environment commences the healing by layering new memories over the painful memories; this is the wisdom I observed from the Kolo Sumejja women.
Often, we would bring someone who had not been to the coast and was severely traumatized, along with a translator in her young adult years. The women would share their menstrual wisdom, especially if one of the young women was bleeding or having body issues mid-cycle. One of the young translators was shielded from translating the swear words or dirty jokes just because she might be pregnant or, even more, important to the Kolo Sumejja women, in the space of deciding whether to conceive a child. It’s one of the aspects of the apprenticeship from menstrual cycles that forms inherent intelligence into menopause: the uteri legacies and the kolo are the environments that influence our very DNA. That they knew this without cracking open a scientific book on genetics is not surprising to me.
Of course, what transpired to the newly married young woman was that the Kolo Sumejja women, without a single instruction among themselves, made sure that abundance saturated the environment. This was no small matter on an awfully loud bus with roaring laughter filling the inside.
Rasema, big-boned and tall, placed a fistful of the communion meal she made for the trip in front of the young translator with her wide Slavic hands. The translator reminded us that she was not pregnant yet and didn’t need to eat for two. Rasema leaned over the seat and told the translator that during the war, food was absent. What would she do to manifest a healing memory instead of the snipers firing on the market and the starvation that occurred during the sieges in Novi Travnik?
Rising up in the aisle, Rasema said that it would be done by celebrating food in its glory now. I knew brilliance when I witnessed it. Rasema was offering communion with food and mentorship for the new bride so that the future generation would not have etched in the mother’s DNA the memory of sieges and starvation.
Perhaps, it was the awe on my face in witnessing the communion in front of me that Rasema would tap me on my heart with her large hand. Rasema said that is how we heal from the newly released videos of the Srebrenica massacre. Rasema then pointed to the back of the bus with the instigators of laughter, jokes, and kolo dancing in the tiny aisle, and silently punctuated her point.
I did not get any sleep whatsoever, arriving in Neum on Adriatic Coast with circles underneath my eyes.
The Impact:
Despite having heard and witnessed their war stories, still etched upon their minds and bodies a decade and more after the war, I was amazed by the Kolo Sumejja women’s super consciousness in feminine metaphysics. Their uteri legacies, found in the round dances and women’s songs, engaged with the archaeologies of female memory practices and evolutionary practices. Female solidarity was so strong that it etched what archeologist Marija Gimbutas named the Lithic Civilization of the Goddess and Old Europe. It was a peaceful culture with no war or pornography as a way of life. With the loss of female solidarity globally, and the disparaging view of female memory practices we have experienced for the last 5,000 years, we are experiencing the most violent epoch ever known on the face of the planet. I know this to be true in witnessing so much internationally with my Kolo Trauma work and as a Psycho-social Gender Victims Expert for the International Criminal Court.
Female trauma issues are being taught by the Kolo Sumejja women, and only brave students willing to bear witness come to their classroom. Practicing the kolo with the Bosnian Muslim women is dipping into this memic immortality and extended social interaction in the war-torn community. Wisdom in these Bosnian women rose up from the very earth beneath their feet and fingers that worked the rich, often blood-stained soil. The shocking videos showing the last moments of the Srebrenica males being shot, a refreshed storehouse of blood and mayhem, only served to provide healing and compassion both to and from the Kolo Sumejja women.