Why the Dwarf Had to Be Shot
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Sasha Skenderija Why the Dwarf had to be Shot Translated from the Bosnian by Wayles Browne and others 1) Foreword by K. E. Bättig von Wittelsbach Afterword by Wayles Browne (Illustration on the cover by Sasha Skenderija) Table of Contents Foreword by K. E. Bättig von Wittelsbach /5 NOTHING'S LIKE IN THE MOVIES (1990-1993) I. EYE OF THE NEEDLE 1. Images from which he lives /13 2. If he falls asleep /14 3. Only possible things happen /15 4. We live in darkness /16 5. The war is on, the lines are broken /17 II. ON THE ONE-WAY STREET FAMILY, SPRINGTIME /18 FAMILY, SUMMERTIME /19 A PLACE FOR THE PHOTOGRAPH /20 ON THE ONE-WAY STREET, GIRL WITH A DOG /21 DEEP BLUE /22 FIRESIDE /23 TELEPHONE /24 FACE /25 BILLIE HOLIDAY /26 WINTERTIME SCENE /27 FAMILY PORTRAIT /28 WEATHER FORECAST, MARCH '92 /29 III. WHY THE DWARF HAD TO BE SHOT 4TH OF JULY 1991 /31 SUNDAY /32 THE OCCUPATION IN TEN SCENES /33 BLACKOUT /34 TREATISE ON TAILORS /35 VENTRILOQUISTS /36 SYMBIOSIS /37 WHY THE DWARF HAD TO BE SHOT /38 PARROT /39 SUBLIMATION /40 PICTURE POSTCARD /41 GUERNICA /42 MASTER CRAFTSMEN /43 IV. MIDNIGHT EXPRESS Landscape chained in the lenses of your sunglasses /44 PRAGUE FRACTALS (1993-1998) l /46 A sunny winter afternoon, a woman in a blue /47 Waking up Sunday morning /48 Almost nothing. But just because of that /49 There are the empty zones in the city /50 The smell of your perfume catches me on the street /51 In Prague you can see a tour group of the blind /52 A late Saturday afternoon in Prague, November 1993 /53 I saw a girl with a broken leg /54 On the table a spoon, a radio, The Key to Heaven /55 The sickness condenses in the head, the lungs /56 A girl in the subway. The irrevocable clap /57 Coming back from an all-day walk, the first day /58 Giraffes live in an airplane hangar, because where else /59 It's snowing. Two girls try to start an old Škoda /60 The woman on the bench is waiting for someone /61 A teenage girl and two boys at the next /62 Lonely, determined to change that /63 I took little Denis for a walk. Right behind /64 Derailed from life: how can I find my way /65 The city is shut down. Coated with ice, fog, smog /66 I assure her that I am on her side. She /67 This drunk Saturday night's running on too long; I feel /68 As you talk, your face sheds the fragile /69 The rain emptied out the outdoor restaurants /70 Was it worth it, I say to myself, as I watch /71 You (& I) /72 My three-day friend from Slovenia /73 When you leave, I go to the movies /75 Spring comes into the beer cellar, turns to gold in the mugs /76 A sign in the beer cellar that says PRICE CATEGORY III /77 The kind of unease that strikes you when you find in your pocket /78 To stay different, never to be like them /79 LOCI COMMUNES (1999-2003) Common Places /80 Fourth of July /82 Cape of Good Hope /84 Afterword by Wayles Browne /88 About the author and translators /93 Endnotes /95 Foreword by K. E. Bättig von Wittelsbach In one of his final writings, the late Palestinian-American critic Edward Said wrote: I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this to the idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance. These currents, like the themes of one’s life, flow along during the waking hours, and at their best, they require no reconciling, no harmonizing. They are “off” and may be out of place, but at least they are always in motion, in time, in place, in the form of all kinds of strange combinations moving about, not necessarily forward, sometimes against each other, contrapuntally yet without one central theme. A form of freedom, I’d like to think [...]. With so many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place.1 Like Theodor Adorno before him (―the whole is the untrue‖), Said saw the contrapuntal self, a self never quite at home, as a conditio sine qua non for any intellectual existence and vitality. Both thinkers were familiar with exile as a physical and a metaphorical condition - the state of geographical and intellectual dislocation, of remaining outside of the mainstream, of never being fully of any place, but ―being unsettled and unsettling others.‖2 For Said, exile was indeed a space of boundless privilege, granting to the exiled a potential for immensely rewarding intellectual productivity, the unique position of a decentered observer, free to experience the pleasures and rewards of the constantly shifting ―eccentric angles of vision,‖3 beyond the reach of those belonging to the mainstream. Its rewards await in the unexpected, the provisional and the risky, the never-being-at-home, where the exiled can discover freedom precisely through their displacement from the usual and the expected. The condition of being removed, then, the in-betweenness, becomes the privileged site of daring and self-invention, granting the decentered subject a singular capacity for perception, self-reflection and creation. Although he never met the Palestinian-American Edward Said, Bosnian poet Sasha Skenderija shares Said‘s experience of exile and loss of home due to the redrawing of ethnic and religious boundaries in the country of his birth. For both of these exiles, literature became true home, and a final place of freedom and discovery. Like Said, who was born in the British Mandate of Palestine, now part of Israel, Skenderija comes from a country that no longer exists – Yugoslavia. He began publishing in Yugoslav literary journals in the 1980s, and in 1993, at the age of twenty-four, after having completed his first university degree in comparative literature and library science, and lived through the first six months of the Bosnian war, he left Sarajevo for the Croatian capital Zagreb, and then Prague in the Czech Republic. There he enrolled in Charles University‘s doctoral program in information and library science, worked as a librarian at the State Technical Library, and continued to write poetry. Shortly before completing his doctorate, he was named assistant professor in the Institute for Information Studies and Library Science at Charles University, where he taught until his departure for the United States in 1999, and where he is still a visiting lecturer active in supervising graduate research. In Ithaca, a small upstate New York university town, Skenderija accepted a position at Cornell University‘s law library, pursuing his two lives as a poet and a librarian, in two languages – Bosnian and English. Cornell University, acting through its highly supportive Institute for European Studies, was the first university outside of Bosnia to offer a course in Bosnian literature, and that course attracted a great number of students, with academic interests as diverse as comparative literature, linguistics, law, and peace studies. After reading through a long- established canon of Bosnian prose (Ivo Andrić, Isak Samokovlija, Meša Selimović), our students turned their attention to the works of the new generation of Bosnian writers, all living in North America: Aleksandar Hemon, Semezdin Mehmedinović, Goran Simić and Sasha Skenderija, and were delighted to have the opportunity to discuss their readings - in person - with the adoptive Ithacan Skenderija. The poetry of Simić, Mehmedinović (―Semezdin‖ in ―Cape of Good Hope‖) and Skenderija have in common a number of themes: survival of the individual and the community through daily experiences of death and destruction in the besieged city; struggle to maintain human bonds and intimacies amidst the brutality, violence and loss of life; burdens and discoveries of survival, and the feeling of disconnectedness in a life lived in exile; displacement, memory and glimpses of a different, fractured and perhaps newly constituted self; echoes of a new identity in a new, unfamiliar place of being, and - perhaps even more importantly for a poet - in a new language (or in Sasha Skenderija‘s case, in new languages: Czech and English). In a 1993 letter from Prague, sent to Cornell University‘s Slavic linguistics professor Wayles Browne, and inquiring about the possibility of having translated into English his collection of poetry Ništa nije kao na filmu (―Nothing‘s like in the movies,‖ published in Bosnian in Prague, but composed mostly before and during the siege of Sarajevo and revised during his exile in Zagreb and Prague), Skenderija wrote: [this book] seeks to be a book about love as such and about the city as such. It is highly intimate, and thus I hope a little universal as well. It was written amid a complete collapse of values and meaning, when man was left without the slightest possibility of making sense of his own suffering and death. It is an attempt to give dignity to the existential paroxysm I was (we were) caught up in.4 Nothing’s like in the movies, now the first part of this collection of Skenderija‘s poetry, begins by opening a door to the world of familiar tensions between lovers, parents and children, promise and expectation, longing and fulfillment, memory and utter uncertainty. In a city poised at the edge of war, small spaces of pleasure are still possible: Twice in one day the plane flew across the front / line. [...] Unplanned, at the airport she’s there to meet me / [...] A flash of unexpected joy, a little evening / celebration: welcome home (“Deep Blue‖).