Peter Maas says it used to be that a young American, seeking adventure or enlightenment, would join the Peace Corps and, after two years in a distant locale, return home with an abundance of exotic memories and intestinal parasites
20th Century Horrors, Exhumed
The Stone Fields: An Epitah for the Living. By Courtney Angela Brkic
[Excerpt]
It used to be that a young American, seeking adventure or enlightenment, would join the Peace Corps and, after two years in a distant locale, return home with an abundance of exotic memories and intestinal parasites. Sometimes a life's passion would be born -- a devotion to a continent or a cause that would lead to decades of overseas wandering. Other times, the hunger for challenge would be sated, giving way to a life in Sarasota rather than the Serengeti. Either way, an existential turning point is reached. Everything is tested when you are transplanted into an alien land -- your physical and emotional strength, your preconceptions and prejudices and notions of human nature.
In these days of globalization, if a foreign epiphany is desired, there are as many options to choose from as cable channels: become an aid worker in Africa, work for the American embassy (or military) in Baghdad, write for a local newspaper in Phnom Penh, consult on privatization in Eastern Europe or teach English in Beijing, to name a few. The world has become a Wal-Mart of self-discovery, vast and accessible.
In the 1990s, the Balkans lured Courtney Angela Brkic beyond the shores of America. The daughter of a Croat who fled his native land so that he and his offspring could have a secure life elsewhere, Brkic had joined her father on occasional visits to Yugoslavia, which Croatia was a part of during her childhood. But in 1995, in her early 20s, she went to Croatia to work with refugees and later worked in postwar Bosnia, briefly, in a gruesome project -- exhuming corpses of murdered Muslims. She was an archeologist by training, and with her knowledge of the local language, she was of use to a forensic team from Physicians for Human Rights.
Brkic is a talented writer too -- the author of "Stillness," a collection of short stories that was published in 2003 and won the Whiting Writers' Award. When the time came to write a nonfiction account of her Balkan sojourn, she was at a literary turning point of sorts. Would she focus on her angst in the aftermath of war, or would she write of her family's stoic ordeal during the 20th century? The surprising thing about "The Stone Fields: An Epitaph for the Living" is that it is both of these things.
