Lidija Dimkovska, Poet, Macedonia, with Sivakumar Ambalapuzha, Poet, Kerala, India. ‘Samakaleena Malayalam Weekly’- Malayalam Language, Kerala, India.
1. Koco Racin is considered the initiator of the post II World War period of modern Macedonian literature. He was identified for his socialist ideals. Do you believe in National Identity? Are you motivated by people like Koco Racin, Blaze Koneski and Kole Nedelkovski ?
You open a very complex question. The national identity is a personal and a collective statement of belonging, identification, recognition etc. The Macedonian people used to feel the Macedonian language as mother tongue also when were not recognized as Macedonian people or when Macedonia was not an independent country. Because of historical circumstances Macedonia was officially recognized as a state-republic in the frame of Yugoslavia in 1945 and in 1991 it declared independence from Yugoslavia. The recognition of the collective national identity depends more on the others outside your nation, country etc. than on yourself, it depends on politics. Macedonia used to call herself Republic of Macedonia until 2018 but Greece didn’t want to recognize it as that, and internationally Macedonia was Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia when Yugoslavia didn’t exist anymore. Since 2018 it is North Macedonia, and it seems that the country has a new identity, at least internationally and outside of the personal identities of each person. However the notion of North Macedonia is not yet an inner identification so if you ask individuals from where they are, they will answer they are from Macedonia. The notion North so far is a political one. But who knows if in the future will be still that, or it will integrate in the inner and mental being of the people, for ex. in the new generations who will grow up with it, so for them probably will be normal and natural to answer to your question: I am from North Macedonia. I think that until you have a stable, strong and constant national identity, you need to work on it, to believe in it, to support the stability of it. But you cannot construct it if it hasn’t already existed in your archetypical background, in the conscience of your ancestors, in your national basement. My grandparents were born at the beginning of the 20s century, so half of life they spent in borders of other states, but they always felt only Macedonians. Koco Racin, Blaze Koneski and other personalities from the Macedonian history and culture only supported with their own works the national identity that already existed in the personal identitities of everyone who felt he/she is a Macedonian, not in the old notion of Antic Macedonian, but of a Slavic one, stabled on the territory of Republic of Macedonia, now North Macedonia. In a way, Koco Racin, Blaze Koneski and the others officially, with their ideas, works, testimony, put the final brick in the building of the national identity. I am grateful to them for that. I am aware of the national identity I belong to: even if I don’t live in Macedonia, I write in Macedonian language, my mother tongue, therefore I belong to the Macedonian literature. But immediately I can tell you that I don’t plead for the idea of national without the cosmopolitan part in it: as we know, the national can very easy transform in nationalistic. When we speak about a literature we think about the literature written in the language of the majority, in the official language of the country. But what about the other writers who live in the country and write in other languages? Like Albanians in Macedonia? Or we, the immigrants in other parts of the world? What national identity we can have and belong to? Is the 21st century still suitable to speak about national literatures, national cultures, and pure national identities when all around us people move, emigrate, refuge, change homes, countries, languages etc.? I don’t think so. I think that our time must be a time of inclusion, a space with no borders. I think that we have to speak about international literature.
2. Your Country can be proud of the prestigious Struga Poetry Festival and Racin Meetings. What do you have to say about such poetry interactions?
The poetry festivals for me are mobile anthologies of literature contemporary with us: ad hoc meeting not only with poets as persons but also with poetry and poetics. I think that the festivals are a precious type of gatherings, of dialog, of open debate, of learning, of exchanging. It is fantastic to meet personal the poets you read and love, and those you don’t know yet, in a real space and a real time. I could give anything to have a chance to meet personal my beloved poet Marina Tsvetaeva but it is impossible, we lived in different times. I attend a lot of international literary festivals and I am very grateful for each one because all of them enrich my personality, my life and my literature.
I met your Country’s poet K.Satchidanandan on such an occasion. We were together at Vilencia Fest (I was also one of the organisers) and Medellin. I like the translations of his poems I have read in Slovenian.
3. Macedonia has a tumultuous history and your writings reflect much of its experiences. Do you rely on History?Does it have a role in writings in future?
Absolutely, and not only to the Macedonian history. May I partially answer your question with the following poem?
History
Dead people in live years,
live people in dead years.
Dead nations in live decades,
live nations in dead decades.
Dead humanities in live centuries,
live humanities in dead centuries.
Each time has unwanted histories,
each history – unwanted times.
Amidst the contents, summary and key words,
history is a paper on life and death.
After the conference it’s duly published in the proceedings,
which no one will ever read.
I have been always interested in the history, maybe because in my childhood my uncle was a student of history and I was always looking at his manuals and books. But also because in Balkans we bear in history, live in history and die in history – and the history is absolutely connected with the politics or is a result of the politics. Especially in my novels I deal with historical events and circumstances: in my novel A Spare Life with the history of socialist Yugoslavia, its break up, the wars on its territory in the 90s and the times of transition after that. In my last novel Non-Oui I explored the topic of the Second World War in ex Yugoslavia, especially in Split, Croatia, in my short story collection When I Left Karl Liebknecht there are many historical references, too, you can find them also in my poetry. But always when I relate to the history that can be proofed by documentation, archived, I put it in the context of a personal stories of my personages. For me is very important the historical context of the human life of individuals. I think that literature must not be a new history, but a story. As a story it can contain history, too.
4. Contemporary Macedonian Poetry seems dialogical, between tradition and modernity, between different artistic forms of expression and art of poetic images. Can you say something on your own poetry? –
My first two or three books have been in the tradition of the Macedonian poetry, with a lot of poetic images, metaphors, lyrics, abstractions, metaphysical questions etc. I probably used to continue the one of the lines of the Macedonian poetry with such kind of poetry. The other line was narrative, epic, poetry of everyday life, with allusions on real historical, social, cultural events, with signs of urban mythology, but I recognized my poetry in this lane later, when I left Macedonia. Actually, when I left Macedonia my poetry drastically changed and became narrative, metonymic, in the same time surrealistic and realistic. But I think that in my case I cannot speak about my poetry only in the line of the Macedonian poetry: I used to live for seven years in Romania and fell in love with the contemporary Romanian poetry, now I live in Slovenia and I also always read a lot of international poets. Anyway, I think that the biggest influence on my poetry and even more my prose was made by the life as it. Life that has not been so easy and in all these years of migration, of looking for personal identity, of living and travelling to places of other cultures, languages, poetics, of alienation, of not belonging.
5. What is your view on Ekphrasis (between words and images) and contemporary Macedonian Poetry? –
I think that in today’s Macedonian poetry the ekphrasis between the words and the image is much more direct and open than in the past, especially at the younger poets. I am not sure if it is a benefit or a loss for the poetry. The Macedonian poetry loves to make images with words and if you want to see the Macedonian poetry with visual eyes, it is always in strong colours. I prefer when the words create narrative images – a story, actually. I think that I am a storyteller in any literary genre: poetry or prose. In the poetry of the others poets I like when I can see in visual and in motion view the poem- story the poet is telling to me. Poems based only on words for the sake of the words and the images they create, without a nucleus of meaning, experience, situation, statement, feeling based on identification with the poem, are empty for me. We live in such a real, almost surreal world that when we write poetry actually we recreate the real world in another real world that is the literature. Some poets from Macedonia do that with great success and they are my favourite poets.
6. I think, Motherhood and maternal suffering in religious texts have a place in contemporary Macedonian poetry. Is it true? –
You are in a way right but I have to precise that about the Biblical motherhood many more men poets have been writing than female poets. Female poets had to grow up and to take care of real children in the time when the men poets could do abstraction of maternal suffering. In the Macedonian poetry is interesting that the women poets always have been more orientated about the problems of society, contemporarily, everyday life, the real motherhood etc. and the men poets have been (at least in poetry) more tender and pathetic about religious suffering. Normally, not all of them, but mostly of them have been considered as poetry messiahs, princes of metaphors etc. at least one line in the Macedonian poetry followed the modernist abstraction and lyrics not connected with the real life and its problems. But another line, that I like much more, with Blaze Koneski on the head, wrote about the life as it was and as it is, and his poem, for ex. about the women of his people is so dramatic and realistic picture of the real human condition of the women.
7. You were born in Skopje, Macedonia. You have also graduated in Romanian Literature. You had also shifted to many places as per circumstances and now in Slovenia). ‘Skriena Kamera’ (Hidden Camera) deals with your own experience of displacement through frequent moves. How do these experiences influence or appear in your poetry? –
In different ways: changing it, giving it new topics, new expressions, opening to it many new windows. When I moved from Macedonia firstly to Romania and after that to Slovenia, I noticed that nothing I could take for granted, the central issue of my life and my literature became the question of identity. "Hidden Camera" was born as an auto fiction novel in which the relation "I and the World" or "I vs. Others" found appropriate articulation in the story of Lila, Joseph and Edlira as contemporary nomads / artists at a residence in Vienna, but also in the diary of Lila for all the homes and alienations in her life. I fell on my own skin the testamentary message of Kocho Racin: “ The whole world is my house". But sometimes I feel I don’t have any.
8. Some of your poems are analysis of modern East European Society, which combines surreal and bizarre. What is the motivation to write like that? –
It is absolutely the reality, so much surreal and bizarre that we don’t need to invent it, and not only in East European Society. We live globally in a surreal and bizarre world, itself poetry, but far from the romantic meaning of the noun of poetry. And it is interesting that as bigger and more bizarre is the surrealism in the world, the poetry is better, deeper, more existential, more profound. When I used to live in Romania I was writing poems like a crazy poet, almost all the time. Actually it was not a time to write everything that inspired me because the inspiration was at any step. The Romanian society was in a heavy transition post-Ceausescu, with big political, cultural, social changes, not always successful, not the ones that people dreamt about, sometimes abused by the policeman, often strange, but never boring. Up and down, all the time, fantastic for literature When I moved from Romania to Slovenia I coped with a quite normal, ordinared society, the country was flouring after the transition post-Yugoslav and I didn’t really find subject for my poetry: I alimentated my poetry with memories from Macedonia and Romania. But soon the Slovenian society also shown its black side and ironically became interesting for poetry matter. Today I can find poetry and narrative subjects everywhere I am, outside in the world or inside in me.
9. Many of your writings refer to cultural and gender identity. Do you think that this exists? How concerned are you about it? –
Everyone must be concerned, not about the cultural and gender identity but about its recognition. In 21 century we still fight for rights of women, of rights of LGBT, of rights of any group of minority – for me it is absolutely unbelievable. So long history of civilization, of culture, of human wisdom, knowledge, experience etc., - and we still debate if the woman has right or not to abortion, if two men or two women can sleep together etc. I am very disappointed that we always back to the same problems and to the same mental, cultural and political obstacles, more often put by ideological reasons, by conservative dangerous minds.
10. Your poetry is identified for its combinations of metaphors from apparently unrelated areas, like combining religious (mythological) symbols with modern technology. What is the secret of these playful undercuts to the reader’s expectations? –
The characteristics you mentioned are present mostly in my previous poetry collections, but in the last one, In Black and White, and in the new poems I think that I am more and more realistic and narrative. I don’t think there is any secret, I just write as I feel, think, consider etc. I don’t have any concept of writing poetry. In novels of course I have a story that I want to tell, but in poetry I usually write momentary fragmentary verses and when I feel the right moment comes for a complete poem, I finish the poem giving it a form and final frame of content. The poetry is a always a mirror of the inner being, but the inner feelings are often consequences of the outside events. Anyway, I try to avoid writing verses and entire poems when I am very sad or I feel weak and helpless – in these moments I prefer to write diary. Writing poetry is a courageous act, is a force, and is an exploration of energy. When I write, even if about the most tragic things, I am completely happy person. Writing for me is breathing, a life, a happiness.
11. I have read that you and Kulavkova broke the tradition of poetry written by women. Your writings reflect humour, thematic texturing, dark sarcasm, unexpected shifts from harmonious to consciously elaborated disharmonies. Thus your poems have the effect of frantic and illusory prosaic quality. You skilfully combine and recombine seemingly absurd topics. Do you enjoy such a way of writing? Why? –
I think that also the first Macedonian female poet – Danica Rucigaj, who died in the Skopje earthquake in1963, and after that Radmila Trifunovska, Liljana Dirjan, Gordana Mhajlova Bosnakoska and some other women poets in Macedonia introduced something new to the Macedonian poetry. The today generation of female poets and the youngest one give the poetry new dimensions and open it to new worlds. Actually I consider that at the moment the poetry written by women in Macedonia is the best and the strongest poetry we actually have. The women poets are more courageous, more radical, free to write about reality, the life itself, the social, economical, psychological, political problems than many men poets who prefer to continue with abstract and metaphorical poems. Fortunately there is a also a group of men poets I can identify with their poetry as Jovica Ivanovski, Risto Lazarov, Tihomir Jancovski, Nikolina Andova Shopova, Istok Ulcar, Elizabeta Bakovska, Gjoko Zdraveski and some others who write great poetry about not so poetical things around them.
12. The allegory between the conjoined heads of Zlata and Srebra and the breakup of the former Yugoslavia has been discussed much. Can you say a few words about that? –
I can say that I was not really aware of the parallel when I was writing the novel. I didn’t make any concept of that – to show the separation between the girls parallel with the separation of the republics in Yugoslavia. I just wanted to write a novel about the life of Srebra and Zlata, conjoined twins, in their time and their apace and it was since 1984 until 2012. In this long period of time many things happened: the socialism of Yugoslavia, the collapse of the Yugoslav system and the breakup of the country, the wars in 90’s, the building of new countries, the independence of Macedonia, the period of transition, the changes of socialism in capitalism, all of these in the context of Europe and the entire world. The metaphor of separation of the ex-Yugoslav republics through the life of Srebra and Zlata came discreetly, from the interior of the story and I was shocked when one of my first readers told me that the story is a metaphor of that. But recently a Romanian professor and writer wrote that we are conjoined with the history like Srebra and Zlata in the heads – it is also a great metaphor of my story. I think that in literature the big ideas must come form the inner spirit and the body of the story and not from the outside look.
13. During the existence of Yugoslavia, the official slogan was Fraternity and Unity. And now Yugoslavia is separated as 6 countries. Macedonia is still in a process of transition from hope to realization. Of course it relates to Politics, but what do you think of Macedonia post-independence in regards to the mixing of regional cultures? –
The Yugoslav slogan Fraternity and Unity was a very beautiful slogan, the slogan that can be applied to the entire world. I am not sure it was really respected in Yugoslavia – apparently yes, but for sure not all the time and in all the space of ex Yugoslavia. When Yugoslavia broke up, not even F and U remained from Fraternity and unity. Instead of that was blood, hate, arms. If you want to learn about a really awful separation, learn about Yugoslavia and not repeat the way of it. I think that the separation itself was not a problem, but the way it was realized was a big one whose consequences we still feel. Now there are six countries, more or less successful in their transition. Slovenia and Croatia are members of the EU, the other ones not yet. Macedonia among them is still in process of transition. Macedonia itself is a region of mixed cultures, besides Macedonian, there are Albanians who represent a major minority in Macedonia, than Turks, Roma, Vlachos, Bosnians, Serbians etc. For me the richness of the cultures in Macedonia is a great one, but in reality there are still problems of assimilation, integration, discrimination. The ethnic Macedonian people and the Albanian minority live like in a parallel life, they touch each the other only in very exceptional cases like conflicts or questions of common interest. A curiosity about the culture of the Other is still quite low. In field of literature, for ex., I, as a writer who writes in Macedonian, hardly know what my colleagues, who write in Albanian, write and publish. Firstly there are only few translations of their works in Macedonian. They are supposed to know Macedonian but I am not sure they read us, the writers who write in Macedonian. So we are in way foreign writers to each other. The mixing of cultures must be regarded as something beautiful, useful, modern. My impression is that each one in Macedonia stays with its culture not mixing with the others. And it is pity. But my big hope is the youngest generations who probably will change the cultural landscape and will really mix their cultures, knowledge, and experiences. Not only as a project, because also now in Macedonian there are projects of this kind, but on the base of the system. We need system’s changes in the favour of the multiculturalism, not only projects of it.
14. Folk literature provided effective means to express desires, thoughts and feelings of Macedonian people. It was a part of Macedonian culture and nationality. Due to certain oppressors and de-nationalizers, the Macedonians could freely develop a national culture only after independence. Is it true? –
Officially absolutely it was like that, but can laws forbid the inner development of culture? The archetypes and the legends are older than the national states, the songs are older than political decisions, the artistic imagination always find its way – not to forget that the best churches painting of icons and iconostases were made in the time when Macedonia was under the Ottoman imperia. My grandmother knew a lot of Macedonian folk songs and stories, without being alphabet, they were in her soul, she inherited them from her family etc. The Macedonian people are a people with destiny, as well as its national culture, but there are many other people and countries like that. Anyway, I think that Macedonian culture today has a big treasure of outstanding works in any cultural field.
15. You have imagined, children could adopt mothers who were single, having no other children, and ready to care for the children. Do you still advocate it? –
Oh, it was the fruit of the imagination when I used to write my novel A Spare Life and as I know, it never happened that children had adopted a mother for them. When I was a little child, in my neibourghoud there were some single women and only one of them adopted a child, with physical and mental disabilities and curiously she was many years after killed by her adopted daughter. But the other women lived single, two of them, for.ex. as sisters, there was also one divorced, but not one of them adopted any children. Not far from there, there was a house for children without parents and I was sometimes thinking how beautiful could be these single women to adopt these single children, or better, the children from the house to choose mothers. It entered in a way in my novel. I am not sure if I personally advocated it, but I like the idea, why not? Maybe children know better what kind of mother they need, if they don’t have any? But your question absolutely opens the relation between the reality and fiction, and also the fiction and reality. Once one of my readers told me that a woman wanted to meet Zlata from A Spare Life, the twin who survived the surgical operation of separation from her twin sister Srebra, so to go together in a town to collect some donation for pure people. I was shocked that someone so much believed the story that considered Zlata living among us. Recently I found out that in Italy there was a successful separation of twins conjoined in the heads, like Srebra and Zlata. And I was so happy for them, as the dream of the personages from my novel became a reality for the girls from Africa. Interesting, isn’t it how can interfere the reality and the fiction that is actually a new reality.
16. You are now living in Slovenia. You have said that it is in your own room (inherited by Virginia Woolf) that you are feeling at home. Don’t you ever want to return to your land? –
I always return to my land, in one way or another. A part of me never left my land because I still write only in Macedonian and the first readers of my books are my Macedonian readers. My land is my childhood in the village of my grandparents, my memories, my youth, and my education, everything that made me an adult person. I am always longing to come back to every of my homes. I consider myself as a contemporary nomad, a nomad between three languages (Macedonian, Romanian and Slovenian) that are spoken only in the respective countries: Macedonia, Romania, and Slovenia. It is not a kind of poetical and favorable nomadism; it is a fateful nomadism, a destiny. I consider myself a cosmopolitan and I always belong to the places I ever visited. Everywhere I go and stay for a while, I live there.
17. Please give a list of your awards?
(for poetry):
- the Macedonian award for poetry debut (1993),
- the German poetry prize »Hubert Burda« (2009),
- the Romanian poetry prizes “Poesis”(2002) and “Tudor Arghezi” (2012),
- the European Prize for Poetry “Petru Krdu” ( among the previous winners have been Charles Simic, Tomas Transtromer, Paul Muldoon, Adam Zagajewski etc.) (2016)
- shortlisted for the German literary prize »Brucke Berlin« (2013)
- shortlisted for the American Best Translated Book Award (2013)
- shortlisted for the Polish award “European Poet of Freedom” (2016)
- the Slovenian award “The Cup of Immortality” (2020).
(for prose):
- the award of Writers’ Union of Macedonia for the best prose book of the year, twice, for my novels Hidden Camera and A Spare Life (2005 and 2013)
- the European Union Prize for Literature for my novel A Spare Life (2013)
- long listed for the Best Translated Book Award 2017 for my novel A Spare Life (published in English by Two Lines Press, SF, 2016).
- shortlisted for Writers’ Union award of Macedonia for the best prose book of 2017 for my novel Non-Oui
- shortlisted for the International literary award Balkanika 2017 for my novel Non-Oui
- Special mention for European Cultural Heritage 2018, for the cycle of five short stories from my book of short stories “When I Left Karl Liebknecht”
- shortlisted for the award of Writers’ Association of Macedonia for the best prose book of 2020 for “When I Left Karl Liebknecht”
No comments:
Post a Comment