Indira Sultanic with Guppy Jo on the Universal Language 

By Charles McGuigan 12.2020

Photos by Rebecca D’Angelo

Indira Sultanic was born in a small town called Konjic, a sort of hyphen, midway between the cities of Sarajevo and Mostar. When she was just eight years old a war broke out in her homeland that would last for three years, a devastating civil war with a signature of ethnic cleansing, and even after the truce, recovery was slow in coming.

“They call us the ‘and’ or the dash because we are right in between the two cities everybody has heard of in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Indira tells me. “It’s a relatively small town, kind of nestled between mountains in a valley on a river. It’s pretty small.”

We’re on my front porch, socially distanced by twelve feet. Indira is sitting next to her husband, Andy Ullman, at a glass-topped table. By her side is a guitar, and Andy, who is also known as Guppy Jo, holds a goblet drum between his thighs. They had just finished playing one of Indira’s latest compositions, a song called “Untethered” that rings with a melancholic defiance, a will to sever the tethers to our past. Her words and rhythms, and the emotional depth of her vocals make me think of Sara Bareilles and Jason Mraz and a handful of other contemporary songwriters who manage to seamlessly blend folk with pop, where neither form outweighs the other.

Indira is remembering now what it was like growing up in country at war with itself, a war that would ultimately claim the lives of about 100,000 people, and see the rape of almost 50,000 women. It was the most massive European conflict since the Second World War.

“I was a kid,” Indira says. “I saw it all through a child’s eyes. When you are a kid you know that you should be afraid because your parents are afraid, but my parents were really good at making sure we had everything we needed.” Almost daily they could hear artillery fire, its crackle and roar like a distant thunder. “It was scary,” she says. “But I was a very curious child and a bit of a daredevil, so we would wander off and play with our friends during a ceasefire and do all the things that you would normally do.”

Not long ago, shortly after COVID-19 began changing the way we live, Indira walked into a grocery store and noticed the rows of empty shelves.  Walking past those naked shelves as the squeaky wheels of her shopping cart and the clack of her own shoes mads a faint noise, Indira’s ears pricked up at the low register of a hollow echo that took her back to her own childhood.

“It was kind of re-traumatizing at first because people were hoarding supplies, and hoarding food,” she says. “It felt like wartime. It just kind of reminded me of that. I was a kid during that war. Now I’m in my thirties and processing what happened to me during the war.  During the war in Bosnia, when there was no food, you couldn’t really get more of any supplies that you needed unless humanitarian aid came in and distributed that.”

Part of her was slightly amused by the fervent stockpiling of a particular item. “I think I know how to make due with some things because I have lived through that war,” says Indira. “If we were out of toilet paper, we still had running water, we still had soap. There are other ways to do things. Because we’re so accustomed to all of the modern day luxuries, I think people forget that you can still make due even if you don’t have these things.”

Indira remembers her education during the war. “Everything was kind of accelerated,” she says, “We would finish a grade in three months, and we would go to these little barracks, a makeshift school that they had to put together, and that’s where we had our classes, and everything was shortened. I don’t even know how we managed to get any education, but the teachers were amazing and everybody was continuing with life and trying to keep thing as normal as they could.”

These days, she shares her own experiences of privation with her students at VCU where she is an assistant professor of Spanish translation and interpreting studies in the School of World Studies. “I told them I lived through a war, and the point was to survive,” Indira says. She moves closer to the microphone, centering it before her moving lips, as if she is about to divulge a secret, and she lowers her voice. “I told them that they’re experiencing something that’s affecting them, something they can’t control.”

Indira pauses, considers what she has just said, and again moves closer to the mic. “I lived through a war,” she says. “This is what I tell my students. The idea is to stay safe and live through all of this. We don’t really know what’s going to happen. We never do.  I think the difference is that with the war, you could hear the shelling every day. There was this enemy and you knew something was going on. You knew that there was danger and you could hear it as opposed to COVID. You can’t see it, you can’t really hear it, you just hear about it on the news, and it’s invisible. It’s this sort of invisible killer, dangerous in a different way.”

There are other dangers Indira senses that remind her of her native land and what drove it to war, and what persists there even now. “In terms of the nationalistic rhetoric and some of the same propaganda that led to the war, it’s still present and there’s a lot of fascist and nationalistic kinds of behaviors and rhetoric,” she says. “When it comes to any of the forces that drive conflict, I think it’s very much here, and it takes a public figure to openly state these things and then give permission to everyone else to act on these beliefs and thoughts. ‘I hate my neighbor secretly, but I’m gonna now act on it because this person that I bow down to told me I could.’ There are acts that are isolated and hateful.”

When the tides of war receded, life in Bosnia began returning to normal. “At that time we had moved back to the city and it was as normal as it could be post-war,” says Indira. “We were going to school and hanging out with friends and recovering. Life was as normal as it could be.  We started resuming a lot of the normal activities. There was a lot of after school programming that was happening that we didn’t have during the war, so it was really nice to participate.”

One of her favorite activities before and after the war was music. Her parents, Bajro and Naila, and two siblings, Omar and Adisa, all sang. “I’ve always sung,” Indira tells me. “I’ve always enjoyed it and everybody in my family sings. My mom’s side of the family is especially musical and we used to sing   traditional Bosnian songs.”

After some gentle urging, Indira agrees to sing one of these songs. She performs it acapella with a background percussion supplied by Guppy Jo. It’s called a sevdalinka—a sort of sad love song. There’s a deep yearning in these songs frequently about hopeless or doomed love, peppered with regret and resignation.  As I listen, with eyes shut, I am transported elsewhere. This music is definitely eastern, which makes sense—Bosnia after all, was part of the Otttoman Empire until the first years of the 20th century.  When various towns and cities in Bosnia became centers of Islamic culture, the locals adopted eastern religious melodies known as ilahije and fitted them out with new lyrics. The melody of the song Indira is performing is haunting and mystical. When she finishes the piece, I ask her for a rough translation.

“A woman is calling to her lover,” says Indira.   “She’s saying, ‘Where are you going, and why aren’t you taking me with you?’” And then the woman says something really strange.

“She says, ‘Take me along with you and take me to the market and find the silversmith and sell me to him and take money for me,’” Indira explains. “That’s how I understand it.”

Like many Bosnians, Indira and her family are Muslim. “I wouldn’t say we’re practicing Muslims though,” she says. “We were born into it and there are certain customs and things that we observed, and holidays that we celebrated. I’m not a practicing Muslim, but it’s part of my heritage and there are certain aspects of it that I still observe to a degree because I have great respect for it and it’s part of my upbringing.  We celebrate some of the holidays even here by recognizing and acknowledging them and indulging in baklava, but because I don’t have family here we really don’t get to go visit and enjoy the holidays in a way that they’re celebrated in Bosnia.”

As a teenager in Bosnia, Indira had one dream. “In high school I was going to be a rock star and conquer the world,” she says. “I competed in a lot of local competitions. I was in choir in middle school and high school, and I have a lot of musical friends.” And her native town of Konjic was filled with folks who possessed great musical talent, some of whom were nationally renowned.

Back in 2001, Indira won a local singing contest. “It was kind of like The Voice of my hometown,” she says. “And with the prize money I received, I was able to get a passport for myself.”

That same year she met a professor who taught at Bluffton University in Ohio. His name was Jim Satterwhite and while visiting an English professor in Kojic, he dropped by the high school Indira attended.  From this man, Indira received a college application to Bluffton University. It was on her 18th birthday, and she had wanted to immigrate to America for many years.

“Mom even to this day jokes, that during the war I was telling them, ‘Let’s go to America, everybody’s going to America,’” she says. “We were hearing the news of people fleeing the country, and I was like, ‘Why are we here? I want to go to America.’ And I think even after the war I always loved English and I was always drawn to the language and I really liked American English.” 

When she received that application from Jim Satterwhite, she felt her fate was sealed. She called her sister, Adisa, who had recently emigrated from Bosnia to Sweden.

“I’m going to America,” she said.

“What do you mean you’re going to America?” Adisa asked.

“I got an application to Bluffton University.”

There was pause, and then Adisa said, “So, you got an application; you’re not going anywhere.”

That sisterly rain on Indira’s parade lifted quickly enough. Indira applied, was accepted, and what’s more received a full-tuition scholarship. “But I didn’t pursue music,” Indira says. “I studied English in college, and Spanish and ESL.”

Now Bluffton was not the sort of town Indira had envisioned. “It’s always interesting to think about the version of America that you are sold when you don’t live in America,” she says. “People think LA, New York, San Francisco, beaches and coastlines and palm trees.”

Bluffton was quintessentially Midwestern small town. With a population under five thousand, this village in northwestern Ohio was Main Street USA with one main drag flanked by a bank, a coffee shop, a restaurant, a drugstore and the flagship store of Ten Thousand Villages. But for Indira, it was not disappointing.

“It was a beautiful experience,” she says. “I think having that small community was great because it was nurturing and it was safe. People even left their houses unlocked. It’s that America where all the neighbors know each other, and everybody’s really friendly.”

And Bluffton University was not like other schools Indira had attended. “It’s a Mennonite school, and coming from a different background it was my first introduction to a faith-based institution that had a really strong mission,” she says. “I got to learn about Christian ethics and took classes in biblical literature. It was a great experience. You take a girl from a small town in Bosnia and put her in to a small town in America. You get to learn a lot of different things that perhaps you never would have otherwise.”

After earning her bachelors from Bluffton, she received a masters in Spanish translation from Kent State. She then moved to Cincinnati and took a job as a project manager in a translation department, a position she held for the next three years.

And then she decided to further her education. “I knew I wanted to eventually go back and get a PhD because as people say in academia, ‘We’re all masochists and just like to constantly have to prove ourselves and be told we’re not good enough.’ I went to Kent State for my PhD. I got in their program and was offered the assistantship in translation studies.”

That was in 2011, and a year later, Indira’s would change for good and all.

It was in July and Indira, who had taught herself to play the guitar, was writing a song. She was at strange place that had formerly been a bank. At that time it was a beer and wine shop, and a guitar shop, a rehearsal spot for musicians, and it even had a small live stage surrounded by fifty or sixty theater seats, where musicians like The Schwartz Brothers would come to perform. On open mic night, Indira would perform some of her latest songs.

On that July afternoon, Indira met members of a band that called itself The Devil and Me. The drummer was immediately attracted to Indira. His name was Andy Ullman.

“And we just started talking and I asked if she’d ever played with a drummer before and she said, ‘No,’” Andy tells me. “She had her guitar with her, so we went up to the rehearsal space and played a few songs that I actually recorded on my phone. I was smitten with her right off the bat. You know how it is.”

At the time, Andy worked with a guy who hailed from Serbia, and when he discovered that Indira was from Bosnia, he tried to wow her with his knowledge of Bosnian vulgarity. She didn’t seem to be impressed. She would roll her eyes when he suggested another dirty word.

What caught Indira’s eye though was Andy’s manner of dress.

“It was just band practice,” says Andy. “So I was wearing Adidas running shorts that were way too short for me and a white T-shirt. And I’ve got a salty face after a two-hour practice. Things aren’t crisp and clean.”

Now Indira is laughing and her smile is broad and gentle. “He was wearing what was jokingly called the Bosnian uniform,” she says. “The stuff that’s stereotypically young eastern European or Russian men wore at the time. A dirty wife beater, running shorts, and his hair is in a ponytail and super long. He’s sitting there a Bosnian uniform.”

There was something else that caught her attention about Andy. He knew more about music than any one she had ever know. He was a walking encyclopedia of it.

Indira reaches her hand across the table and place it on her husband’s hand. “You started talking about the greatest rock bands of all time from all around the world,” she says to him. “And that was before you even knew I was Bosnian.  So you started talking about Bijelo Dugme (White Button) as one of the greatest bands of all time. It was fascinating that you knew that.”

The following Tuesday, Indira and Andy played again, this time with Gary Jungeberg, a member of the Devil and Me, which would soon disband when the lead singer and bass player moved to Cleveland. “Gary is very creative and he’s a brilliant guitar player,” says Andy. “Gary and I would eventually call ourselves Guppy Jo, which was the nickname of a woman who used to work in the bank that later became our practice space.”

Within a month after meeting, Indira and Andy began dating. Andy tells me that he has on old iPhone 4s recording of the music he made together with Indira right after they first met. “That recording was made two hours after we met each other,” says Andy. “And I’ll post a little snippet from it on Facebook when the anniversary date of that day comes around.”

Indira and Guppy Jo began playing as a trio at coffee shops in Ohio. They would practice two times a week, and their sound had become tight. “With every practice I would bring a more developed idea and then Gary would start building around that and so the songs came together,” Indira says. The couple were married in 2015 and then moved to California where Indira had accepted a position as assistant professor at Fresno State University.

Before they left, at Gary’s urging, they spent six weeks recording what would become their first album which has eleven tracks. “I did all the vocal tracking,” Indira says. “And Gary did all the engineering. All the credit for producing and editing and mixing and mastering goes to Gary.”

Before leaving for the west coast they staged a final concert on July 4, playing to a packed house.

Their time in Fresno was brief. Less than a year after moving there, Indira was offered a job at VCU here in Richmond. 

Since moving here two years ago, Indira and Guppy Jo have been developing a pretty loyal following, and Indira continues to write songs.  “We probably have enough material to release another album,” says Indira. “We started working with a producer from Northern Virginia named Austin Bellow who’s amazing, and for now we’re just doing singles. It’s been really great collaborating with someone like Austin.”

Where her songwriting is concerned, Indira is a perfectionist. “I’m very critical of my work,” she says. “And I won’t show it to anyone unless I think it’s good.”

The song must be authentic so that she can put her emotion behind it when she performs. And the words matter, on every conceivable level. “I spend most time on the lyrics and revising the lyrics and thinking about how the words fit into the melody,” Indira says. “Because I play guitar and accompany myself and write my own songs I don’t play the melody, I sing the melody. So if I’m playing a chord progression, I start to build the melody around it, or the lyrics.”

Inspiration comes from almost anywhere. Take her most recent song, Little Situation, soon to be released.  “We had just learned a couple we know were going to be getting a divorce, and I thought, ‘We got ourselves a little situation,’” Indira explains. “And that’s exactly how the chorus goes. The whole song was built around that.”

But Indira got stuck. “I couldn’t finish the second verse,” she says. It plagued her day and night. She wrestled with it, but nothing would come. Then she read Glennon Doyle’s book, “Untamed”, and something clicked. “Reading that book inspired me to finish the second verse of the song,” says Indira.

A well-composed song, whether or not you understand the language it is written in, should be able to evoke the appropriate emotion. “You can hear the emotion and you can tell if the song is sad, even with just the composition and the chords,” Indira says. “The minor chords can tell one story. There are just so many different things that come into play, which is why it’s considered the universal language. It makes you happy, or it makes you sad, or it kind of moves you in a way even though you may not understand the lyrics.”

Indira Sultanic looks at her husband Guppy Jo. “Andy and I are a couple and we are married and we live together.  We have this rhythm. We play together as a unit.”