The “Asmir” trilogy that begins with No Gun for Asmir, continues in Asmir in Vienna, and concludes Escape From Sarajevo, is one of Christobel Mattingley’s true stories. It is so true that Mattingley, herself, and her grown-up son play important roles in the story – a modern adventure of war-time refugees fleeing for safety!
No Gun for Asmir begins with the savage civil war that erupted after the fall of Communism in the bitterly contested and conflicted territories of the former post-Brosip Tito Yugloslavia.
Fighting breaks out around Sarajevo. To escape the dangers of artillery fire and snipers, a Muslim family a mother and her children escape from the Serbian assault. Meanwhile, in sequel volumes, the father and his mother – the maternal grandmother are forced to stay during the long brutal siege.
Mattingley writes in a way that simultaneously captures young Asmir’s point of view, shocked, terrified, puzzled by things that are too horrible to be really understandable even by adults. (War, and religious hatred, are fundamentally irrational!)
Yet at the same time Mattingley makes clear to older readers exactly what it is that Asmir cannot yet understand. Her words are so carefully chosen, though simple enough, the ordinary events so profound, though sometimes as brutal as our modern, often savage, world, that at many times adult readers will be close to tears.
Perhaps surprisingly, most of Mattingley’s many books provide stimulus for mathematical activities. Some are set in specific locations around Australia, while others are set in other places around the world: this calls for good map-work.
Many are set at specific times in history and need time-line research and historical contextualisation (dates and date-sequences are mathematical).
Her true-life stories of Asmir and his family, starting with No Gun For Asmir (Penguin, Ringwood, 1993), a Bosnian family with young children, displaced by the Serbian war against Sarajevo, require careful map-work and time-schedules to follow the routes to safety.
Families are important in almost all of Mattingley’s stories. Making a family tree is a helpful way of understanding significant relationships, as well as the generational distances of time. This can be expanded to include characters from the neighbourhood. Similarly, sometimes a sketch-map helps make sense of locations, and their spatial connectedness, for events in some of the stories.
Fortunately, Mattingley includes the maps that a reader needs to locate events, and follow Asmir and his family as they travel across central Europe.)
It is also important to identify, and compare, the allegiances and beliefs that are the root explanation of the Bosnian war: the Orthodox Christian Serbs fighting against the Muslim Bosnians.
This raises the historical and geographical and religo-cultural questions of even earlier times: how did Muslim peoples come to occupy territories that had formerly been Greek, and then Roman, and then Christian, and then Turkish Ottoman?
These true (!) and personal (!) “Asmir” stories are VERY highly recommended.
Moreover, the lessons they teach (although never in a heavy-handed, preachy, moralistic or didactic and teacherly way!) are, sadly, still highly relevant in our modern age of mass refugee movements in many war-torn regions of the world!
No Gun for Asmir has been widely recognised, and translated. For example:
1994, High Commendation, Children’s Literature Section, Australian Human Rights Awards.
1994 Children’s Book Council Notable Book.
1996 Shortlisted Yabba Awards.
1999 Shortlisted KOALA Awards.
Escape From Sarajevo has also been widely commended:
1997 Recommended List, Family Therapy Association of Australia.
1997 Children’s Book Council Notable Book.
1998 Shortlisted InauguralChristianSchools Book of the Year Award.
VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
John Gough – Deakin University (retired) – jagough49@gmail.com
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