Black Butterflies is a 2022 novel by Priscilla Morris that focuses on the emotional toll of the notorious war in Bosnia during the early 1990s. The epicenter of that war was the city of Sarajevo which had hosted the Winter Olympics just a few years before the war broke out and left the city a ravaged shell of its former self. The city itself almost becomes a character alongside the story's protagonist, Zora Kočović.
Zora teaches at the city's Academy of Fine Arts. As the story begins, she is living a happy, normal life with her husband and her elderly mother who visits during the often-harsh winters. The intrusion of the sectarian differences which erupt into civil war ignites a series of decisions and events which completely alter the circumstances of this existence and transform it into a daily struggle for mere survival.
The perspective that Zora's story offers the reader of this notorious point in recent European history is informed by the real-life historical accounts experienced by members of the author's own family. As a result, the novel paints a particularly visceral portrait of the daily miracles required to live through the horrors of violent battles targeting the place you call home. The historical event which serves as the primary focus of the novel is the siege of Sarajevo. That took place when Bosnian Serbs terrorized residents of the city—of all sectarian factions—and essentially destroyed everything that the city had been during those Winter Olympics. It is the consequence of that unending attack which gives the novel its enigmatic title.
The struggle of Zora to maintain a semblance of normality in the wake of being separated from her husband and mother following her decision not to accompany them on a trip to England to visit her daughter is just part of the point of this book. The other part is the power of books to tell such stories. During the siege, the National and University Library is assaulted by the onslaught of shelling from outside the city. As it begins to burn, millions of pages of books being to float, charred, above the city, taking on the appearance of black butterflies. This phenomenon continues for many days after the library suffered the attack. These "butterflies" land on the flesh of the residents of Sarajevo, leaving their mark as the flotsam and jetsam of war.
For Zora, however, the black butterflies created by the destruction of artistic creation becomes the stimulus for how she would survive living in a situation in which even the most basic necessities become a little private mini war. The novel is a story about how to survive what seems to be conditions that defy the ability to survive. For Zora, survival becomes the response to the destruction of art by being the thing that moves her to create art. Artistic creation becomes what saves Zora from horrors of war.
