“Breadgivers” by Anzia Yezierska

This post has been written by Irma Crnkic, a Bosnian student of English literature.

After reading Breadgivers by Anzia Yezierska nothing seems impossible anymore, or at least, not as difficult as it was at first.

Sara Smolinsky is the brave protagonist in this partly autobiographical story. Through Sara, the author, another survivor from the New York suburbs, voices all injustices and obstacles women had to face. The New York is dreary and drab. She realizes at a very young age that life is not peachy. What should have been a breezy childhood abruptly turns into bare survival: “Nothing was before me but the hunger in our house, and no bread for the next meal if I didn’t sell the herring.” Her will and strong vision carry her through tough times into a colorful future.

As she grows up, Sara faces cruelty and inferiority in both family and society. She is from an orthodox Jewish family, one of five daughters of a submissive mother and a clerical, disillusioned father who scorns her unique potentials and frequently tells her that all she is destined to be is a mother, an obedient spouse and daughter. She detests constantly being fed the idea that a woman is petty without a man, which her derives from the Torah: ”Only if they cooked for the men, and washed for the men, and didn’t nag or curse the men out of their homes; only if they let the men study the Torah in peace, then, maybe, they could push themselves into Heaven with the men, to wait on them there.” Sara tries to educate herself, even though it means going against everything her father believes in.

The vivid images of life’s cruelty painted by a young girl are heartbreaking. Poverty, dirt and stench of New York slums become real like comfort, purity and pleasant scents of our own homes. We share Sara’s distrust and disappointment in her father as he takes the best of the meal without even considering offering some to his daughters: “We sat down to the table. With watering mouths and glistening eyes we watched Mother skimming off every bit of fat from the top soup into Father’s big plate, leaving for us only the thin, watery part.”

Sara proves to have a will strong enough to claim a big chunk of her own life: “Wild with all that was choked in me since I was born, my eyes burned into my father’s eyes. ‘My will is as strong as yours. I’m going to live my own life. Nobody can stop me.’”

Using everyday, yet powerful language, the author presents a rigid world through the eyes of a young girl. She is stubborn which keeps her from withering like her sisters. Sara goes on bravely and fights for her future, refusing to be put down or devaluated. The vigor of this book lies in the permeating hopefulness of the world despite everything. That’s what makes it special and absolutely worth reading.

Sara’s struggle is a metaphor for those who want to rise above their fears and seize the day. She gives up so much for the passion to learn, to achieve more and to follow her dreams when everyone has turned his or her back on her. She perseveres. Sara plots her own path rather than follow the road less travelled – an admirable quality, an essence that makes this story so great.

This book is not about right or wrong, nor black or white, because life itself is not that clear-cut. People are never completely happy, nor miserable. The experience of pain enables one to achieve and appreciate happiness.

“The Moon in Its Flight” by Gilbert Sorrentino

Note: This essay is written by a new guest blogger, Therese Säde, Stockholm, Sweden.

An Unconventionally Conventional Love Story

In the introduction to the short story collection My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead, Jeffrey Eugenides argues that love stories give love a bad name. In support, he recounts the story of the Latin poet Catullus and the poems he wrote for Lesbia. Eugenides is particularly interested in Lesbia’s sparrow. The love of the sparrow prevents Lesbia from giving all of her love to Catullus, who therefore wishes that the bird would fly away. However, when the sparrow dies, the poet realizes that even though nothing is keeping Lesbia from giving all her love to him now, she is in mourning and does not love him the way he desires. The sparrow is dead, yet it still constitutes an obstacle. Eugenides argues that in each of the love stories in the collection, either there is a sparrow or the sparrow is dead. In Gilbert Sorrentino’s “The Moon in Its Flight” the sparrow is the love story itself. The characters of Arnie and Rebecca are trapped within the structure of the literary conventions of the love story, and their love is thus beyond rescue.

The protagonist and the object of his love are not in possession of their own story, they are at the mercy of the “America that [owns] them” (184) and the time in which their love story takes place. The significance of the time and place is emphasized in several passages. For instance, Arnie and Rebecca are “kissing with that trapped yet wholly frenzy peculiar to American youth of that era” (180) (emphasis added). The word “trapped” (180) further suggests that they are indeed held captive by the setting of the story. That it all takes place “in 1948” (177) is mentioned in the very first sentence of the short story. The second time the year 1948 is mentioned, it supports the notion of the character’s love being beyond rescue, or impossible. The narrator declares that “in 1948, the whole world [seems] beautiful to young people of a certain milieu, or let me say, possible” (177-178). However, “this idea” (178) of a possible world only “[persists] until 1950, at which time it [dies], along with many of the young people who [hold] it” (178). The quotation has the Korean War in view, but more importantly that the seemingly possible world is in fact impossible. The third time it is mentioned that the story takes place “in America, in 1948” (181) it is explicitly stated that “not even fake art or the wearisome tricks of movies can help them” (181), thus leaving Arnie and Rebecca on their own, in the hands of the conventional love story. On Christmas Eve, “they [walk] aimlessly around in the gray bitter cold … watching the people who own Manhattan” (183). Later that evening, Arnie sees “a drunk … carrying their lives along in a paper bag” (184). This observation suggests that Arnie and Rebecca do not own their own lives, and this is contrasted by them watching “the people who own Manhattan” (183), people in control of their lives and stories. Furthermore, the night they meet for the first time is described as a “late June night so soft one can, in retrospect, forgive America for everything” (177). Already four sentences into the story, the word “forgive” (177) provides the leader with a clue about the blame for the thwarted love.

Many love stories are based on unequal births or feuding families, and heritage is in fact another thing that makes the love between Arnie and Rebecca impossible. She is a “Jewish girl from the exotic Bronx” (178) and to Arnie this “vast borough [seems] a Cythera”. According to Greek mythology, Cythera is the birthplace of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Arnie thinks of Bronx as a Cythera, since it can “house such fantastic creatures” as Rebecca (178). He wants “to be Jewish” (178) himself, but he is “a Roman Catholic, awash in sin and redemption” (178). Arnie is very concerned about this from the beginning. “He [hates her] school” (179) and “all her fellow students” (179) and asks himself why he does not “at least live in the Bronx” (179). He continues longing “to be Jewish, dark and mysterious and devoid of sin” (179). They meet in the summer, their families have houses in the same lake resort community in New Jersey, and some time after they both have left for New York again, another girl gives a reunion party in her parents’ apartment. At this party, Arnie sees Rebecca talking to a couple who are soon to be married and he reflects on how “they [are] Jewish, incredibly and wondrously Jewish” (182) while he himself “[skulks] in his loud Brooklyn clothes” (182). At this party, Rebecca tells Arnie that “she still [loves] him, she [will] always love him” (182) but that she finds it “hard not to go out with a lot of other boys” (182) because she has to “keep her parents happy” (182). Rebecca’s parents are “concerned about him” (182) since they do not “really know him” (182) and he is not Jewish. After they have parted that night, Arnie is desperate:

It’s not my fault I’m not Marvin or Shelley. I don’t even know where CCNY is! Who is Conrad Aiken? What is Bronx Science? Who is Berlioz? What is a Stravinsky? How do you play Mah-Jongg? What is schmooz, schlepp, Purim, Moo Goo Gai Pann? Help me. (183)

When he gets off the train in Brooklyn and sees his friends, “he [despises] them as he [despises] himself and the neighbourhood” (183) and he fights “against the thought of [Rebecca] so that he [will] not have to place her subtle finesse in these streets of vulgar hells, benedictions, and incense” (183). Since they come from different backgrounds, and given the setting of the story, the love between Arnie and Rebecca are doomed from the very beginning.

Fairly early in the story, the narrator makes the following statement: “of course this [is] a summer romance, but bear with me and see what banal literary irony it all turns out – or does not turn out at all” (178). This foreshadows what the love between Arnie and Rebecca is destined to be, and what it is destined not to be. In another passage, the narrator argues that “any fool can see that with the slightest twist one way or another all of this is fit material for a sophisticated comic’s routine” (179) and that “these picayune disasters” (179) could be recorded “as jokes” (179). Although admitting that it is merely a summer romance, the narrator still tells the reader things by which it is understood that the story relates a consuming, passionate and painful love. One day, Arnie buys Rebecca a ring, an “innocent symbol that [tortures] his blood” (179). The reader learns that “of course [Arnie is] insane” (179). The frustrated teenagers “flay themselves, burning” (179). The description of their love contradicts the idea that it is simply a summer fling. Even though it all easily could be turned into a joke, “all that moonlight [is] real” (179, emphasis added). Their love is not to be neglected or diminished. Apparantely, it is more than a summer romance after all. It is just as cruel as any love can be. The narrator explains himself by saying that “the maimings of love are endlessly funny, as are the tiny figures of talking animals being blown to pieces in cartoons” (179). Perhaps there also lies some critique of the conventional love story and its popularity in this observation. This presumption is somewhat confirmed by the narrator sarcastically requesting the reader to “turn that into a joke” (180, emphasis added) after a passage in which Arnie, three years later, “[ravishes] the whores of Mexican border towns in a kind of drunken hilarity” (179). Towards the end of the story, the narrator shares some thoughts about this matter with the reader again: “of course, life is a conspiracy of defeat, a sophisticated joke, endless” (184) and therefore finally establishes that the love between Arnie and Rebecca is “a joke after all” (184), the cruel joke that is life and love.

The characters do not own their own story and are left without control, but not even the narrator, who also plays the part of the author, can change anything. The author cannot control the story, and Arnie and Rebecca are thus prevented by the literary conventions of romance. The author’s inability to change things is especially displayed through the numerous times he asks the reader or other people to help the characters. For instance, the last week before they have to return to New York, Arnie and Rebecca are kissing each other in the rain, and the author reaches out for somebody to help them:

Isn’t there anyone, any magazine writer or avant-garde filmmaker, any lover of life or dedicated optimist out there who will move them toward a cottage, already closed for the season, in whose split log exterior they will find an unlocked door? … All you modern lovers, freed by Mick Jagger and the orgasm, give them, for Christ’s sake, for an hour, the use of your really terrific little apartment. (181)

The notion that there is not any other way for Arnie and Rebecca than the destined one is also emphasized by the author several times throughout the story. He poses questions like “where [are] they to go?” (179) and “what [are] they to do?” (179) without expecting any answers. In addition, he highlights the fact that he is not in charge of every turn the story takes, for example by expressing how “it would be a great pleasure for [him] to allow [Arnie] to meet [Rebecca]” (179-180) in one of the Mexican brothels “in a yellow chiffon cocktail dress and spike heels, lost in prostitution” (179-180). However, he is not in control of the story and thus unable to make it happen. In other words, the love story writes itself, regardless of the narrator and the characters.

The last part of the story is a “postscript” (185) that “offers something different, something finely artificial and discrete” (185). The author explains that he now “[comes] to the literary part of this story, and [that] the reader may prefer to let it go and watch [Rebecca’s] profile” (185) as she walks away, “since she has gone out of the reality of narrative, however splintered” (185). He also grants the reader that “it will be unbelievable” (185, emphasis added). If the story has been in the hands of itself this far, the postcript is the author’s final attempt to take control of the story and give Arnie and Rebecca a happy ending. It is evident that the author is pulling the strings, trying to make the puppets act according to his intentions. He puts “the young man in 1958” (185). Arnie has served in the army and married “some girl” (185) after his discharge. The author asks the reader: ”let me give them a sunken living room to give this the appearence of realism” (185). He reveals his literary tricks to the reader. For instance, Arnie’s mother dies in 1958 and leaves the lake house to her son and the author admits that “this is a ruse to get [Arnie] up there one soft spring day in May” (185). When Arnie and Rebecca finally meet again after ten years, the author claims that “it’s too impossible to invent conversation for them” (185). As Arnie and Rebecca drive to her parents’ house “for a cup of coffee – for old times’ sake” (185-186), the author adds: “how else would they get themselves together and alone?” (186). He gives some advice to the reader concerning the credibility of this:

You will do well if you think of the ambience of the whole scene as akin to the one in detective novels where the private investigator goes to the murdered man’s summer house. This is always in off-season because it is magical then, one sees oneself as being somehow existing outside time, the yearround residents are drawings in flat space. (186)

When Arnie and Rebecca enter the house, the author points out that “they now have the retreat [he] begged for them a decade ago” (186) and “if one has faith all things will come” (186). When they undress, the author asks for “a mist of tears in [Rebecca’s] eyes, of acrid joy and shame, of despair” (186). The postscript is clearly separated from the rest of the story, it appears “artificial” (185) and as an obvious creation by the author. The contrast between this “literary part” of the story” (185), as the author puts it himself, and the other part is sharp. The other part of the story is perceived as authentic and real. The reader believes it. This far, the story of the postscript has been in the hands of the author, but his attempt to rescue the love between Arnie and Rebecca is still twarted by the conventions of the love story. When the couple have driven back to New York, Arnie feels “his heart rattling around in his chest in large jagged pieces” (186). His heart is “rotten for everybody” (186-187), and so is their love: “it [is] rotten but they [will] see each other, they [are] somehow owed it” (187). Although their love is doomed, the literary conventions of romance owe them an attempt to a happy ending. However, being trapped by the love story, they are not in control of it. As the author observes: “these destructive and bittersweet accidents do not happen every day” (187). Although Arnie puts Rebecca’s phone number in his address book, “he [will not] call her” (187). “Perhaps she [will] call him, and if she [does] they [will] see” (187). “But he [will] not call her” (187). Arnie leaves it up to fate which might seem strange to the reader, but he does not have an actual choice since their fate is controlled by the love story. The author’s attempt to rescue the love betwen Arnie and Rebecca fails, as it was destined to do. The author recognizes this and tells the reader that he or she is “perfectly justified in scoffing at the outrageous transparency of it” (187), but “art cannot rescue anybody from anything” (187).

Arnie and Rebecca are held captive by literary conventions. They do not own their own story. Not even the author can change their fate. Their love is destined to be impossible, as a cause of the setting of the story, their different backgrounds and the love story as a concept. When they meet ten years later, they are both married with families. The love story ruined their chances from the beginning. It constitutes an indefinite obstacle. The love story is in control. However, it could be said that love always makes people lose control. Even if you are in control of your actions, this can never fully be the case with your feelings or thoughts. In addition, on some level or another, you are always at the mercy of the object of your love. Thus, when you are in love, you are not in control. Perhaps this is the reason why people read love stories. They offer some sense of being in control over something that cannot be controlled. A book can be put down; a film can be turned off. Yet, if you are not able to control every thought, a love story, the love story, stays with you.

Works cited
Sorrentino, Gilbert. “The Moon in Its Flight”. My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead. Ed. Jeffrey Eugenides. London: Harper Perennial, 2009. 177-187

“Tender Graces” by Kathryn Magendie

Tender Graces is about memory and what Tony Morrison called thick love, which is both present and past, both filling Virginia Kate Carey’s today and dissipating like ashes of yesterdays. The protagonist, Virginia Kate returns to her old house in the Smokey Mountains to find it empty and yet pregnant with the past.

Although the setting of Tender Graces is local, its appeal blows the borders of the South to such an extent that even a double foreigner like me (to the place and the local lingo) feels at home in the prose.

I could repeat all the praise that Magendie’s other reviewers have painted, but I feel it deserves much more than a cursive review that does not recreate any of the rich textures and aspects of the novel. I believe this subtle and intelligent, and yet somehow modest novel deserves a thorough literary analysis, which I will try to write in the near future. For now, I’d like to lift up a few aspects which distinguish this book from many literary pieces on the market. The first aspects would be with respect to the market. The novel is so deeply rooted in its subject, its characters, the places, that it is quite purged from marketing devices so omnipresent in much literature. This leads me to the most important feature of the novel: intimacy.

Magendie excels in creating intimacy to such an extent that there is some kind of intimacy even between characters that lack intimacy. Here, I am thinking of a wider, more profound intimacy that permeates every line of the novel, something only masters such as Michael Ondaatje can accomplish. I am not speaking merely about intimacy between characters, between human beings. Intimacy seems to be the ground of everything in this novel, that which holds together a world of humans, animals, things, nature forces, spirits, machines, ashes and the mountain winds. Everything seems to touch something else. There is even a kind of (maybe perverse) intimacy in the scenes of violence and abuse.

There is intimacy between this text and the reader so that the reader feels as if she or he is being made in the act of reading, growing from the same soil as Virginia Kate. This, I believe, has to do with Magendie’s language. It is not fixed, black on white, words but not love, as one of the characters says. To the contrary, it is alive, growing, rooted as VK is rooted in her past and yet growing on. It has a fleshy texture, it climbs like the boy Micah, it curls like hair, it smells like wood, it swirls like ashes being flushed down a toilet, and it burns like a picture of a monster. To use another phrase from the novel, like a woman, even if the text loses a few pounds here and there, they find their way back to the body of the text.

View the official trailer.

Taqwacores by Michael Muhammad Knight

The Taqwacores is a novel about a strange community, to put it mildly. To even try and come up with a single word or a sentence that could capture even the gist of the crew of Muslim punk artists is mindwrecking.

The title, “Taqwacores”, combines taqwa, the Arabic word for “piety,” with “hardcore,” used to describe many genres of angry Western music (and also adult movies). So the protagonist Yusuf Ali experiences “taqwacores” as deep Muslim piety mixed with angry hardcore music (played in praise of God), and mixed with a dose of sex (both soft and hardcore). When I say mixed, I mean piety/music/sex often coincide. The story begins when Yusuf, who comes from an average Muslim family of Pakistani origin, lodges in with a group of Muslim youth in Buffalo.  There stops mundaneity. Every trace of the average, the regular, the orderly vanishes. There is not a moment Yusuf’s mind is not twisted and bent. What fascinates him the most is perhaps the burqa-wearing feminist guitar player who leads men in prayer and delivers sermons. A lot of stuff for some Muslims to be angry over. But Muhammad Knight, speaking through his characters, arguing back and forth through their own dialogues, seems to suggest, there are many things Muslims should be angry about such as Osama bin Laden and the likes of him, and their picture of Islam that they try to palm off on other people. The punk crew can rage against things such as the treatment of Muslims in the post 9-11 America as well as the moral-police in a Muslim country who let dozens of women burn inside a building because they would not let streetwalkers see women without traditional hejab (head-cover etc). 

Muhammad Knight was born an Irish Catholic in upstate New York and converted to Islam as a teenager. He studied at a mosque in Pakistan but became disillusioned with Islam after learning about the sectarian battles after the death of Muhammad. He said he wrote The Taqwacores to mend the rift between his being an observant Muslim and an angry American youth. He found validation in the life of Muhammad, who instructed people to ignore their leaders, destroy their petty deities and follow only God. In the novel, Muhammad Knight often makes references to various Sufi poets who were rebels of their times. One of the characters even claims boldly that the Islamic messenger Muhammad was the hard core punk artist of his time. The small community sing in praise of his anti-establishment actions, his smashing of false idols etc. The book paints the Muslim punk scene with such flavor I am not at all surprised some readers contacted the author and asked where and when were the forthcoming concerts. (Note: Mark Levine wrote a book about the current rock and punk scene in the Middle East, entitled Heavy Metal Islam: Rock, Resistance, and the Struggle for the Soul of Islam.)

One can say a lot about why and how disturbing and innovative, and yet how old-fashioned the book can appear in its focus on identity crises, a juvenile ending in which the narrator leaves the practice of Islam while “remaining a human being.” At the surface, the novel seems to be about diversity of Islamic practice in the US and a dramatization of some conceptual struggles within the faith, the novel is dully one-sided in its preference of juvenile (rather than real hardcore) rebellion and dismissal of all other types of Muslims.  

One thing that strikes me is the way a community is described. We conceive of community as a gathering of people who have a common ground, a common essence perhaps. Community is often based on myth, be it of religious or secular nature. The motley crew of The Taqwacores indeed have something in common, their love of God. Yet, they are both religious and absolutely against religion. There is nothing they more respect and disrespect as Islam. They absolutely love it, and yet any “ordinary” Muslim would say they disrespect every single aspect of Islam, except perhaps devotion to God himself. To them, to maintain a dose of disrespect to religion is the best way to avoid what Islam is against, the worship of anything but God. They try to demythologize the myth of Islamic community and at the same time uphold it. Their community is not a single thing connected to for instance body, fatherland, nation, leader, language. Any such community, to them, loses the essence of what J-L. Nancy called being-in-common, and the with-together. Even though they believe in God, their “in-common”, their being-in-common does not amount to a substance that absorbs everything. Rather what they share is a strong sense of finitude and a lack of substantial identity, ideal or empirical such. They are inifinitely aware of their finitude, of their lack of infinite identity in the face of the God they worship through they punk rituals (which are not even real rituals because they change from day to day). The interesting thing is that they are not really kids with shattered identities, simply alienated, and all that jazz. They are quite certain in their persuasions and do not hold back in their extreme need to express their positions, spiritual or political. They expose themselves totally, in the true sense of the word: they pose themselves as open to others in the deepest intimacy of their own being. This seems to me what makes their peculiar community, a community that is not society they react against. Community but not society.

In addition, I will add some words from an American convert, Dawud Khuluq, who has more insight into the “taqwacore” phenomenon:

There wasn’t really a genre of “Muslim punk/hardcore” before The Taqwacores came out, which is one of the problems with this particular phenomenon. That book has a lot of elements that are lauded within the story that I find reprehensible that I found reprehensible about the punk and hardcore scenes even before I converted to Islam. Which is why I was vegan straight edge and held an affinity for the Hardline Movement (which was a militant vegan deep ecology ideology). Many members of Hardline converted to Islam and it was through their writings and their music that I came to be interested in Islam.

So in a sense, you could trace the true origins of Muslim punk/hardcore not to the fictional story The Taqwacores that all these newjacks with little actual allegiance and regard for Islam, but to bands like Vegan Reich and Racetraitor. Vegan Reich, in fact, originated the Hardline Movement and was pretty much responsible for the vegan straight edge scene in the hardcore/punk world spawning many bands and vegan and straight edge people in their wake. Hardline was basically a movement with an ideology that adhered to what they called the “one ethic” that all life is sacred and has the inalienable right to its existence. The last Vegan Reich EP was titled “Jihad” and had Surah al-Zilzalah in Arabic and English on the back cover. Racetraitor had Muslim and Bahai members in the band, two of the guys were Iranian-Americans. They actually have some ayat of the Qur’an being recited in Arabic in the background of one of their songs… which is a very grindcore-ish metal sound. They were also vegan straight edge and some members were in the Hardline Movement. You could even trace things back to a side band of the Vegan Reich guys called Captive Nation Rising that was more of a reggae/punk band that includes references to Islam and other religions in its art, liner note essay, and lyrics. The Hardline Movement eventually morphed out of being an exclusively hardcore/punk phenomenon and became an Islamic organization with a definite Sufi/Irfani and Shi’i flavor.

That’s where I’m coming from, and to me the whole book and phenomenon is an insult to all of my friends who come from that background and actually precede by a number of years. I say this primarily because anyone that takes the tenants of the faith seriously and practices it according to what the Qur’an says regarding a number of issues (such as abstaining alcohol, extra-marital sex, and drugs, and actually keeping the prayers regularly) are depicted in a decidedly bad light in The Taqwacores. Proto-facist shaved bald Muslim punk bands that are supposed to be at once reminiscent of Wahhabis and Nazi skinheads; and the straight edge guys like Umar, who is a total a-hole until the last chapter of the book. The people who take Islam seriously and practice the religion earnestly are made the villians; while the characters that regularly break with the tenants of Islam are made out to be the heroes. I also find it ridiculous that they guy has his characters wear Israeli flag stars of David as some sort of vacuous rebellion akin to what some early punks in the 70s did with the swastika… which was a stupid attempt at rebellion, and one that would be met with violence in almost any punk/hardcore scene in this day and age because Nazis are not tolerated in those scenes. They’ve been driven out and have had to create their own Nazi scenes. A band like Screwdriver (a Nazi skinhead band) could never get on the same bill as Agnostic Front or Madball.

Note:  The Taqwacores is coming out as a film. Read more at Zabiha News. The picture below taken from this site.

 

“Sarajevo Rose / War Rhymes” by Melika Salihbeg Bosnawi

Background: On 1 March, Bosnians celebrated something of an Independence Day. I say something because it still does not feel like there is an independent Bosnia, rather a creature with a couple of heads knocking each other unconscious from time to time. I am speaking of course of the head called the Federation in which all constitutive peoples are legitimate citizens. The other head is so-called Serbian republic stretching from the North and deep down almost to Sarajevo. It is very much ethnically cleansed. I should know because I come from its largest city, Banja Luka. The other day, the American representatives came visiting Bosnia,but instead of respecting the international view that Bosnia is sovereign within its historical borders, the delegation found it necessary to meet over coffee and baklava with the leadership of the Bosnian Federation, and then separately with the illegitimate leadership of Republika Srpska, over I don’t know what, maybe brandy. Such a move gives further political power to those who have done everything to used every ounce of their creativity to kill and steal.

I say creativity because I’m thinking of the art of war, art of deception, art of politics, which Melika Salihbeg Bosnawi so brilliantly, and subtly dramatizes in her book Sarajevo Rose/War Rhymes. This is a perennial book, prose-poetry of high aesthetic and intellectual quality.

Particularly striking is the poem about Lady Hate and her Happening. Lady hate, to Melika is an artist, a trend-setter, someone who does not look back in shame or to learn something from history, but always looks forward using her creative powers to invent new ways to humiliate with brilliance, maim with a sting, shed blood with passion, introduce some extra twisted twists into the story of everyday lives of city/village people.

Art, imagination, creativity – which are normally considered positive human faculties, that is what makes us human in the first place – are in Bosnawi’s dirge weapons of mass destruction, much like in Kubric’s 2001 Space Odyssey, where creativity is first employed in the production of a weapon. There are loads of creativity in these works of art, complex aesthetics used to criticize and draw our attention to the art of war, which in the end amounts to one and the same, quite uncreative thing, murder. I’m thinking of the Twin Towers and the way we were stunned because it was innovative, we’d never seen that before, very modern, very trendy, and yet essentially the same as murder of Srebrenica population, Ruwanda, Gaza, you name it. I wonder how much creativity went into the production of smart bombs. I’m thinking of kids painting drawings on bombs, sending artistic messages to those who will never see them, never get a chance of using their creative imagination to interpret that art.

Bosnawi does not stop there. She explores creative imagination and the aesthetics of everyday living, of mundane choices in contrast to the creativity or rather clichés of war. take a look at these lines:

I was among the rare ones who never sped,

or shuddered,

or never went underground

when sirens were warning…

[...]

It was simply my aesthetic choice,

rather to be slaughtered under daylight,

while making a human pace,

or under the light of the moon, while sleeping in,

as clean as possible,

bed linen

(240)

Bosnawi chooses to interpret her war-days decisions in terms of aesthetics, arty creativity. How you die seems just as important as how you live. Are you shot while waiting in a line for bread and water, or in a school yard, or in a dump, in a gas chamber, or by a bullet in a presidential motorcade? Mostly there is no choice. Death is a surprise. But to Bosnawi, in her anti-war artistic imagination, the art of dying, the choice of one’s aesthetic appearance, the aesthetics of existence in the face of death is as important as it is ironic.

Bosnawi’s books can be ordered directly from the author. This is her web site.

In addition, this is what the critic Zoran Mutic wrote:

TESTIMONIES TO THE GENOCIDE

The War Rhymes were neither. They stand alone, unique and separate, and that is perhaps their foremost quality. As with most writers, life can rarely be detached from their work. And with The War Rhymes it has been proved again: Melika Salihbeg Bosnawi has made a remarkable contribution to poetry as such and, consequently, her work defies classification into genres. In an astonishing amalgam of erudition, technique and talent, with mastery of images and occasional inventive plays on words, this fragile witness from the slaughterhouse has produced a volume of about 8.500 lines that tell the saga about a city, about its both heroic and tragic, forlorn populace, but above all about a woman: a lonely “zoon politikon”, whose faith helps her not only survive but also discover tender characters in the “House Of Urchins”, the children abandoned within total abandonment, as well as miserable political games of professional patriots. “Sarajevo Kids War-Chorus” is a horrifying reading experience, lived over and over again every time we read it – and in fact it is a simple rendering of everyday reality, therefore even more horrid. Names, statistic data, facts and figures given in an off-hand manner only reinforce the horror, while the paradox of twisted delicate imagery, so normal for ordinary lyrical poetry, makes us shudder with awe.

A poet once commented on the futility of arguments about the form and contents in poetry. “They are the same”, he claimed. “By changing the subject-matter we necessarily change the form.” And this is not to poet’s disadvantage. The contents in which regular events (be they episodes from personal recollections or information from the city mortuary) get entwined with historical data, characters and quotations from the Holy Book, could only be rendered in the present form. And with this we come to the question of the language.