Hell is others: Sarajevo and the tragedy of intimacy

"Only the dead have seen the end of war." Plato's observation is blisteringly true. War is humankind's perpetual default mode, the most intimate sign of its intrinsic cruelty.

- Ashraf Jamal

"History hurts," writes American philosopher Fredric Jameson.

As for our subjection to violence or our imagined immunity the presumption that war occurs elsewhere? The truth is, war is everywhere. Immunity is delusion. Suffering is the defining condition. Joy, or redemption, achieved only when one has travelled through a strait.

Sarajevo, a stage-play written by and starring Aimee Mica Komorowsky and directed by Kayli Elit Smith, raises these gnawing questions regarding violence, ethnic hatred, the brutalisation of women and the monstrousness of men.

Set during the Bosnian War, which started on 6 April 1992 and ended on 14 December 1995, it is an intimate examination of sexual discrimination and abuse, illicit love across an ethnic divide and a dissection of male power.

In addition to Komorowsky there are three men on stage: a South African war photographer and two Serbian soldiers of different rank. Komorowsky plays a Bosnian.

If the monstrousness of ethnic cleansing is a core theme,