Shakespeare left us an oft-quoted adage about the relationship between things and names. In his tragedy Romeo and Juliet, his character Juliet complains that her family does not accept her lover Romeo and sums up the situation in his name: “What’s in a name? What 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 wrote it down. And I don’t disagree. But there are times when our survival as individuals and as communities seems to depend on names. As in the time of genocide.
The erasure of names inevitably accompanies genocide, as happened in my native Bosnia in the 1990s. When a force burns libraries and razes religious buildings, when it tries to erase the very history of a people, it does not only seek to get rid of their physical bodies. It wants to create the forgetting of origins.
For me, the most important symbol of this erasure is the fountain that my great-grandfather Fejzo Tuzlić had built in an unremarkable place, halfway between his hometown of Kotor Varoš and my hometown of Banja Luka. Both cities are located in what is now called the Serbian Republic, an entity that covers almost half of the country and which the Bosnian Serb nationalists received as a reward for their genocidal project in the 1990s.
You will not find this spring in books or on Google Maps, neither under its old name “Fejzina Česma” nor under its new name, Zmajevac (the place of the dragon). Its changing name symbolizes everything we endured during the war, to which we cling so stubbornly.
Why did Fejzo, a Muslim from a small, idyllic town with an old Ottoman fortress overlooking incredible waterfalls, decide to build a water fountain? Traditionally, among Muslims, there is a belief that one way to continue accumulating good deeds even after death is to leave a public asset, a “khayr,” something that will benefit everyone. This is what we call a “waqf.”
A typical public good is the “khayr fountain”, often built on the side of a main road so that travelers and their animals could quench their thirst. When I was a child, we always stopped at Fejzina Česma when we went to visit relatives. It was not because we were thirsty, it was my mother’s ritual.
I don’t know if Fejzo dug the spring or if he simply found it and arranged it to make it a convenient stop for travelers at a time when people didn’t just drive by but needed to rest and water their horses or cattle. All peoples. All ethnicities. All religions.
After decades of use, when Fejzina Česma needed to be repaired, it was Fejzo’s son Asim who took care of it. After the war, Asim’s son, my uncle, found out that someone had changed its name to “Zmajevac” and he put up a new plaque with his father’s name: Asim Tuzlić.
In my opinion, this name is not the right one, because it is not well established in the local jargon. Fejzina Česma was. However, someone was embarrassed by the Muslim name and carved “Zmajevac” into the stone in Cyrillic letters. “Zmajevac” is the name of the nearby ruins from the late Middle Ages, but it has nothing to do with the fountain in people’s memory.
According to the Muslim faith, the name of the place is of no importance. In this sense, Juliet is theologically right. A spring under another name will quench thirst. Water does not belong to anyone. Fejzina Česma tried to make it accessible and therefore every drop drunk by a man or an animal, as long as it exists, will be a coin in Fejzo’s chest with which he hopes to buy a place in paradise.
We refugees, who visit our homeland only every summer, use the old names out of instinct, or maybe even out of “inat” (meanness). All the new names are foreign to us and I imagine that on some level they must seem foreign to many Serbs who use them, because these names are nationalistic, toxic, and do not come from this land, these rivers, these dense forests.
The new Serbian-sounding names, as well as the adjective “Serb”, which is stuck on every corner, must seem strange to most people, because there is no country on earth with original names that can carry so many nationalist labels.
Why would any bridge in the small town of Čelinac be called the Serbian Bridge and fly a Serbian flag? Why would something be named after fascists and war criminals from the not-so-distant past? Why would my street be named after a town in Serbia and not after Ševala Hadžić, a Bosnian woman who fought the Nazis in World War II? My house has both the old and new street signs, and the new one is already faded while the white writing on the original blue plaque shines brightly.
Bosnia is of course not alone in its desire to erase names. There is hardly a place on earth where some erasure has not taken place at some point in history: new names have been inscribed on the palimpsest of the territory.
Let us consider the historical changes in the names of the Holy Land, this place that so dominates our global consciousness at the present time. We cannot avoid following the parallel war over names such as “Palestine” and local places in the territories of Israel, which is taking place in real and virtual spaces, even on the international stage. If we delve deeper into its origins, we can learn that the State of Israel established in 1949 a committee whose task was not simply to recover the old Hebrew names if they existed, but also to invent new ones.
Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, made it clear that “we are obliged to remove Arab names for reasons of state. Just as we do not recognize the political ownership of the Arabs in the land, we also do not recognize their spiritual ownership and their names.”
Sometimes I feel sorry for the bureaucrats who have to come up with new names for everything. It’s a lot. So much. These are projects that we can get involved in and that we should pass on to new generations.
Did they feel proud and creative in this hyper-erasure? If only they had today’s AI tools and could make a machine do it. They had to work hard, write on paper, stamp documents, file them and store them carefully in their new dungeons. Human work. There is no genocide without it. Only machines won’t do it.
So no, some roses wouldn’t smell as sweet. Romeo wouldn’t be as kind to Juliet if his legacy was erased and he was assimilated into her family. The meaning and power of their love depends on their names. Their love is built on family feud.
Unlike Romeo, a hopeless romantic who thinks he can call himself “love” and get away with it, we know it’s better this way. I’m sorry Juliet, but we can’t “take your word for it.” History has been written on our bodies, and it could disappear with them. For us who fight for “never again,” who ignore the new road signs and find our bearings through fragile memories, our spirit and our love hang on the thread of a few old names.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.