Nadija Mujagic is the author of The Teenage War Survival Series, as well as the recent novel Till a Better World. Hayat spoke with Mujagic about her inspirations, writing process, and more.
When did you decide to tell your story in the form of a memoir? What, to you, is the power that words have?
My first memoir, Ten Thousand Shells and Counting, is about surviving the Bosnian War, resulting from the break-up of the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. When the war started, I was fourteen years old. My family and I lived in Sarajevo, the capital city that was besieged during the entire war. The book explores the dire circumstances under which we lived: witnessing family members, friends and neighbors dying of shells and bullets in front of our eyes; living without electricity, running water, heat, food; surviving with a sense of despair and hopelessness.
I had the urge to tell my story shortly after the war ended. Writing about the shocking effect the war had left on me presented the coping mechanism. I arrived in the USA two years after the war, and I felt that the world should know what the Bosnian people went through, hoping none of the atrocities would repeat again.
I feel the war aftermath is not well understood. People don’t just survive a war, pick up their pieces, move on and live their lives happily ever after. The war scars are deep. The healing is a long process. My motivation was to show that the war is senseless and it only causes damage to humankind. As a result, I was compelled to write a sequel memoir. Immigrated is a book about my personal experiences of moving to another country shortly after the war, coping with the new circumstances, and healing from the ghosts of the war.
Despite all the evidence that a genocide against Bosniaks did take place, several scholars still deny it and propagate lies. In order to counter them, personal accounts, such as war memoirs, are important and significant records that help shape one’s culture history.
What about novel writing? Where did the inspiration and motivation for Till a Better World come from and how did it develop?
It’s a funny story. I was listening to Boston local news one day, and I heard that a pregnant woman delivered her baby in a public bathroom somewhere in a Boston neighborhood, and then threw the baby in the trash. The baby was thankfully found and was in safe arms shortly after. This news bit sparked an idea about my women’s fiction novel, as I drew it parallel with stories about unwanted babies born during the Bosnian War. It is heartbreaking to write this: but, it needs to be said that rape was one of the chosen weapons of the war, whereby more fifty thousand Bosnian women were victims of it. Most of these “crimes” still remain unpunished. I do not know if any other novels talk about similar events from during the Bosnian War, but my motivation was to educate and inform. While the novel offers gut-wrenching accounts of the war, it does provide a glimmer of hope in the end.
Does the catharsis or reward outweigh the difficulty of writing about such traumatic topics and memories? What has helped you push through those difficulties?
Absolutely. While many tears were shed during and after the writing process, the outcome was as I had hoped for: I better understood what had transpired during the war, and while the scars still exist, they are now enveloped with kindness and peace.
What’s your writing process like?
Unlike many other authors, I do like to outline chapters before they become live on the page. I do a bit of research here and there, but most of my characters and ideas come from my head. After a first draft is finished, I like to give it a few weeks then come back to it with fresh eyes. Then the editing process begins. Once I edit my first draft, it goes to my trusted alpha and beta readers, then the new draft gets submitted to an editor and then the final draft gets proofread by another editor.
Any current projects?
Yes. I am currently writing a psychological thriller I tentatively named “The Exchange.” It is about a young girl whose aspirations to become an actress take her to LA, and where all her troubles begin. I hope to have it published in early 2023.
Purchase Till a Better World by Nadija Mujagic here.
Check out her website here.
