Šeila Pohara writes a vanished country into her debut novel

Šeila Pohara's first novel, «Les Serments trahis», is narrated by Šeki, a girl born in Sarajevo in 1982, two years after the death of Tito, according to Le Temps. The book traces the collapse of the Bosnia Šeki knew as the Yugoslav wars broke out in 1991.

Pohara, who wrote the novel in Geneva, told Le Temps that she herself lived through the return of violence to Sarajevo during that period, an experience that shadows the narrator's own.

The interview dwells on the texture of a childhood steeped in inherited superstition before it is overtaken by war. Šeki recalls her maternal grandmother, who believed in malevolent spirits and, Le Temps reports, "mettait du sel dans la baignoire le soir pour chasser ces choses invisibles qui sortaient des siphons" — put salt in the bathtub each night to drive away the invisible things that came out of the drains. Among the figures of that folklore was Babaroga, "la vieille à cornes, laide et échevelée, qui venait voler les enfants pas sages," the horned old woman who stole children who misbehaved.

The novel's point is that what actually emerged from the night starting in 1991 bore no resemblance to those childhood demons, and was far worse, Pohara tells Le Temps. No publisher, release date or further plot details are given in the source material.