Rock for Refugees

I was once a girl refugee. Eventually, things turned out fine for me because I had support from my family, friends, teachers, and mentors. As I was transitioning to adulthood, I had cousins who were also refugees and who were 10 and 11 years younger than me, and I helped them out too. Of course, in that shitty last decade of the 20th century in former Yugoslavia, we were all too busy with daily survival to realize we were mentoring and were being mentored.

It's only in retrospect that I realize that's what Mike Watt was doing by corresponding with my brother and me from 1991 on. He mentored us from afar, just by reading and responding to our letters. He's the one who always says "start your own band," which I took both metaphorically and literally.

My college professors were just doing their job, you could say, but Dusan Kvapil in particular made sure I had all the opportunities possible to thrive as a student. I never got to thank him. Even before I knew him, I was watching Czech movies with his subtitles, which lead me to read Bohumil Hrabal, which lead me to enroll in Czech Studies at the Philological Faculty of the University of Belgrade.

Belgrade's Women's Studies Center was an oasis for a lot of us, refugees or not. Dubravka Djuric, Jasmina Tesanovic, and Jasmina Lukic gave me books to read and resources beyond what they signed up for in the first place when they agreed to teach a few classes in a converted apartment in the Dorcol neighborhood. I ended up at the Central European University in Budapest, which determined the shape of things for me as an adult in many ways.

This is all to say: there's a benefit coming up, sponsored by Packingtown Review, and featuring my band Rent Party. Rock for Refugees will raise funds for GirlForward, "a community of support dedicated to creating and enhancing opportunities for girls who have been displaced by conflict and persecution." Help spread the word, and come out if you can.

My New Yorker Life, April 24, 2017

A connection at first touch.
Learn more.

What if technology could help
on the stink highway.

Name & name
a mushroom.

Stay well.
What is your succulent?

Rarely the one you expect.
Trespass when it comes uninvited:

Brand. Brand.com
Artists of the south,

the great glass elevator: the world.
This tableau is positioned to contrast

the man behind the mind.
A sturdy stance and a blurred head,

the more ways to wear,
live your life

heavy metal.
Towering sets, ornate costumes,

thanks for finding us.
To evoke a single arc

for an original mix
as spare and unconsoled as anything

overgrown with facial hair,
she makes narratives out of gestures,

half-buried in a mound of sand.
Every spit take and sight gag,

what would that sound like?
Blows the stuffing out of seashells,

the temples of the southern state.
Who purchases a book will receive a rose,

the heart of a puntarelle.
Start planning

alarm at what they say, shock
like a woke hieroglyph.

Trigger the question
in my childhood bedroom,

smell even better in the future.
I wish my life was that free

with the culture, the attire,
the most precious vehicle

people want to see.

My New Yorker Life, March 27

This is the second installment of a project I started on March 13.

Where to go, what to do. A couple embarks on a marital experiment. They must explain. Let the lipstick fly! Reconciliation, however well meant, turns out to be an elusive ideal. This pre-Depression world is dominated by the wealthy. This show is about stage magic itself.

This is the final performance. This bilingual group slugs through brawny no-wave shows with little concern for personal safety or noise-induced hearing loss. All those women flinging themselves around in great swaths of fabric. It’s a method that can be dissatisfying, when the strangeness and desires turn out to be humdrum. A downcast female figure in profile, walking in low heels—she appears both illuminated by acid-yellow light and bathed in lurid red. Oh, yes, I go there all the time. Master an art that improves every realm of your life. I like things done in an orderly manner. If only everyone could have access to this! The bread would be tasty.

This whole thing of making bronze statues to last five thousand years—if everyone did that, there’d be no space left. Snowmobiling is popular, and people leave their car doors unlocked while they’re at the grocery store. It requires constant vigilance. This is not a drill. He owes it. It’s a magnificent place, with eighteen-foot-high ceilings and a working fireplace. Both crave attention.

It’s outrage of the hour. We’re not sure if we’re middle class. We put all our focus on the wrong problem. Like a giant vac with nine nozzles. The warning is clear. Both apply for a job in management. Can I give you a piece of advice?

We’re these two bug-eyed kids who’ve been told to stick to the conductor like glue. You don’t see the poverty, but it’s there. A kamikaze candidate abandons the usual talking points. In my view. I’m happy going through my life without saying anything to anybody. A cat has value. The whole family is very determined. Intensely secretive and filled with people with Ph.D.s, it has been sensationally profitable. Their brains are almost too strong. They’re just sheep. She reads every story, and calls when there are grammatical errors or typos. Things that she thinks put lead on the target.

Broken Records: The Playlist, or, The Three Brunettes

On or around March 21, 2016, punctum books released my hybrid memoir/discography Broken Records, in which I recall what it was like to be a teenager, and then a 20-something, and then a 30-something during and after the break up of Yugoslavia, and all the wars, secessions, and nation-building, from about 1991 to about 2008. As ridiculously huge and heavy as all that sounds, the memoir is less than 190 pages long.

To mark the anniversary, here's my YouTube playlist with all the 49 songs from the book. It's possibly the most random playlist ever, but it will all make sense to my readers.

The opening song of the playlist, by the one and only Sabrina, isn't mentioned in the book directly, but it's an example of Euro disco pop which I do reference as the garish musical wallpaper of my childhood.

The very last song, "Because the Night" by Patti Smith, is the song I sang in Belgrade as NATO missiles were about to strike their first targets on March 24, 1999, when I was 25. Again, my readers find all this completely reasonable.

My New Yorker Life, March 13, 2017

On the day I turned 43, I retyped 43 sentences from the first 43 pages of the March 13 issue of The New Yorker. I didn't want any sentences with names, titles, or place names, and so I'd just read until I found a sentence on each page that fit my criteria. This both a lot like and very different from My Life by Lyn Hejinian, and anything by Conceptual Writers.

How refugees escape to safety. She is working on a novel. As if we need data to prove that human reason has its limits! Create something personal for your home with one of these needlepoint kits. He has already rethought the cavernous 808 drums of his city’s sound. It blends the romance between the son of an oyster farmer and the daughter of an aristocrat with a criminal investigation into the disappearance of several tourists. The comic action – set against the backdrop of war and chaos sparked by governmental folly – involves traumas and comas, grief and anguish. Best show on television. Dance music, with its easy beat and ever-expanding appeal, has influenced all kinds of musicians, banging sounds and styles into rigid form while working through new tones in real time. They changed the face of a nation. Who said there’s no more music on television? We’re bringing you art + ideas that inspire and provoke. It is time to rattle the cage. And the cast was charged with obscenity. We’re in the late eighties, with appropriate music cues.

Just when you thought you’d seen it all. Best of the year! Its curiously symmetrical composition has a flattening effect. Opera and dance have a long history as bedfellows, though since the late nineteenth century they have been more or less estranged. The tall man puts on the chignon and the little voice again. According to the legend, the impish goblins like to materialize in dark, humid corners, mostly after dusk, and sometimes when the air moistens with rain. My no. 1 color combination – as featured in my collections dating back to the 1960s and now revisited here in spring 2017. See: museums, monuments and memorials. Catch the blossoms. The month-long celebration of international cultures offers two embassy open houses. We’re familiar with the contours of the story.

A man of few intimates, he often cites acquaintances. We’ve been told that a few of the ticket holders are planning to cause trouble. But I’m a human first.

If nobody comes here, it’s not the land of the free. A dozen or so people show up each day, looking for advice, protection, and a place to sleep. My life here is so hard and dangerous. The accommodations are clean, if rudimentary: creaky wooden floors, clanking radiators, leaky bathrooms, and steel-framed beds. Behold, as I guide our conversation to my narrow area of expertise. The real story, in real time. Does this feel calm? I am going for the unknown. I don’t have enough money in my wallet. More people are making hasty decisions. Is this normal? I always have my own rules, and I can bend them if I want. Like heaven.

Packingtown Review: Volume 8

I helped found this Chicago mag back in 2008. It has taught me how to edit serious literary works. It's been introducing me to writers from around the world, and it's teaching me how to code. Volume 8 is up.

August Notes

(photo: Dnevni Avaz)

1. At my core, I'm a stranger to passion. I've seen it in others: a passion for soccer or partying, for example. I've messed around with passion myself. Passion is another word for despair.

2. Commitment is what I know more intimately. I recognized it even as a child whenever I saw pensioners playing bocce or chess in the street. On that patch of dirt in the otherwise leafy park, heavy balls hardly moving, the players were calm and focused. On that folding table covered with a plastic tablecloth with a garish floral pattern, the only pattern the chess players saw was the checkered board and black and beige figures. That has always made sense to me.



3. Even though I only began teaching part-time at the age of 28, and full-time at 38, it's the line of work I knew I'd fall into one way or another. As I write this, I'm 42.

4. For the first 14 years as a teacher, every August, I'd write my syllabi and get excited about the semester to come. I knew my syllabi were fiction, a fantasy of a meticulously charted and (about to be) perfectly executed plan to help a group of strangers, teenagers who had just become adults, take control of language. I'd feel like teaching is my passion. This August, that feeling is finally gone.

5. For most of us, being a teacher involves thinking about teaching non-stop. That thinking is usually not in the forefront: it's more like a quiet but incessant background hum, like the sound of traffic behind closed windows and doors. I used to resent that.

6. For most of us, being a teacher involves knowing what your balance of money and time will be only one semester at a time. If there's enough money, that means you've strung together three or more part-time teaching jobs and will be able to pay for your health insurance, but will have no time to read anything other than student papers nor write anything other than feedback for those papers. (This is a problem when reading compelling books and writing the best work you can is the source of your mental balance.) If there's enough time, it means instant ramen and no health insurance. (The two can be a lethal combination.) I used to fear both scenarios.

7. This August, I feel no excitement, resentment, or fear. In their place, there's detachment.

8. What's the difference between resignation and detachment? In resignation, I'm frustrated and desperate. My ego is wrapped up with my day job, and it's never even remotely satisfied. At the same time, I plunge into a hobby—in my case it's neither a spectator sport nor partying, but that doesn't matter—with passion bordering on desperation.

9. But in detachment, I'm able to do my day job competently, and commit to my work of reading and writing and music with a sense of calm and focus. There might be a hum going on in the background: folders of papers, appointments and trainings, several work inboxes full of emails, ideas for future classroom activities, thoughts about the state of higher ed. So be it. Every day, I plug in my guitar with no other reason but to play it. I put lines on a page with no other reason but to convey images and ideas in a way that surprises me. I open a book for no reason but to experience images and ideas I am not able to convey myself.

The Stars on Fire, the World in Flames

In my brain, there is a video file. If I hit play, I see two married couples--my parents one of the couples--and a single dude in a car. (I wasn't there; my brain simply filed away a story I heard as a child.) My dad is driving, the single dude is in the passenger seat. In the back seat: my mom, her friend, and her friend's husband, also a close friend. They're crossing a bridge after an evening out. It's a broad, gorgeous concrete bridge over the Danube, somewhere in the Pannonian part of Yugoslavia. As they're driving across the empty bridge in the middle of the night circa summertime 1978, the radio is playing an old-timey, waltzy song. My dad pulls over, opens the door to the small Fiat-ish car (but made in Yugoslavia and thus called simply Fitcho), and the song spills and trickles all over the concrete bridge like syrup in a 3/4 time signature. On cue they all exit the car, and my mom's friend and my dad begin waltzing all around the car.

The brain file is a reworking of a story nobody remembers. But I remember my dad telling that story and commenting how the single dude--a foreign friend, it turns out--who was hanging out with them was a bit shocked that two friends of the opposite sex who were not married to each other would hold each other and dance. The foreign friend had came to Yugoslavia from another country to study. He had to learn the language from scratch in order to become an engineer. He made friends, such as my parents and their friends. But he never drank and never danced with a girl. My dad and his friend danced to show him that it wasn't a big deal. I remember that story and I remember feeling embarrassed for my parents and their assumptions about this foreign friend, who I hadn't even suspected, for a long time, was a foreign friend, since I had little concept of countries. But, having learned he was a guest in "our" country, my gut told me it just wasn't proper host-like behavior for my parents and their friends to make assumptions and try to educate their friend who had just obtained his medical or engineering degree.

This friend was, I understand that now, from one of the Arabic countries that had joined the Non-Alignment Movement, along with Yugoslavia, India, Indonesia, Ghana, and Egypt, back in the 60s. Instead of studying in his own country or in the West, he ended up in Yugoslavia. Perhaps he later married a Yugoslav and stayed in the country. Or perhaps he settled back in his homeland. Or found a third country. Perhaps he had to flee and become a refugee in 1991 or 1992 or 1995 or 1999. Or 2016. 

Perhaps he remembers that evening on the bridge, that waltz, the feeling of lightheadedness, the laughter, the certainty of a bright future in the summer night. Perhaps he remembers looking up at the sky, at all the same constellations he'd see back in Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Syria. (I still don't know where he was from. I was too young to grasp geography back in the 70s.) Perhaps he remembers his provincial, well-meaning friends dancing on the bridge, and perhaps he remembers his punk rock friends in Belgrade jumping around to this crazy record called "Non-Alignment Pact" by Pere Ubu that was new at the time. They sang:

I wanna make a deal with you girl
And get it signed by the heads of state
I wanna make a deal with you girl
Be recognized round the world
It's my nonalignment pact
Nonalignment pact
Sign it!

At night I can see the stars on fire
I can see the world in flames

A Poetic Trialog

After the anthology Wreckage of Reason II: Back to the Drawing Board came out in 2014, my fellow contributor Andrea Scrima, a Berlin-based US author and fine artist, asked Margarita Meklina, then-San-Francisco-based (now Ireland-based) Russian-American author, and me, a Chicago-based Yugo-American author, to engage in a conversation about what it means to write and experiment between languages, cultures, and geographies. We e-mailed back and forth for a while, and then edited the conversation into "Parataxis and Ponzi Schemes," recently published in The Brooklyn Rail. Here's a quote; click on it to read the whole thing:

Meklina: This is what the world is becoming now: all the artists I love are cross-cultural. They cross boundaries; they test limits. As for me, I’m part Jewish and part Russian, so for many of my relatives on my father’s side, Russian was a second language during the 19th and early 20th century, when they lived in a shtetl. Their first language was Yiddish! When I was young, I made mistakes in Russian, either due to my genes or the fact that I preferred to read rather than watch TV. I didn’t accent the words correctly; I still make these mistakes. And so my somewhat dubious position was determined by my biography: Russian people did not appreciate me being Jewish, and Jewish people didn’t consider me a Halachic Jew. This sense of being torn between my mother’s and father’s blood made me feel cautious and even hurt by both sides, and so coming to the US, where no one knew the difference between Russian, Ukrainian, or Jewish Russian, was a way to break free from all this and become who I wanted to be: a cosmopolitan.

Žabić: Margarita, you make me smile; I can imagine us being pen pals when we were little, fancying ourselves cosmopolitan intellectuals.

When it comes to immersion in American culture, I, like you, find I’m less alienated and more liberated by the fact that even some of my closest friends don’t really know very much about where I come from. They’ll ask me, I’ll tell them, but they’ll forget by the time they see me again. And since the US maintains such hegemony, no American I know finds it objectionable that I moved here and that I write in English.

Three Questions to Three Women Writers, or Russians on Russian... in English (by Margarita Meklina)

My interviewees are three Russian women writers. Each of them – even if they agree to this statement or not – is known for excellent and highly original experimental prose or poetry.

Maria Rybakova, an Assistant Professor of Classics & Humanities at San Diego State University, was born in 1973 in Moscow but now lives in Southern California and writes and publishes her prose in Russian.

Olga Livshin, Head of the Russian Program at Boston University, was born in 1978 in Odessa but now lives in Massachusetts and writes poems in Russian and English.

Natalia Rubanova, who has been working as an editor for several major publishing houses in Moscow, was born in 1974 in Ryazan' and writes in Russian.

I asked these three Russian writers three questions and this is what they answered.

Margarita Meklina:

What is an “experiment” for a writer who writes in her own language but who lives surrounded by a foreign language in a foreign land…?

Maria Rybakova:

I would never attempt an experiment for the experiment's sake. I always seek a form that would be suitable for the content of the novel (i.e., for what I want to say). For example, when writing about love, I think the form of (unanswered) letters seems very fitting, since an attempt at communication is always central in the feelings of love. The life of a translator of an epic poem begs to be written in verse form. And so on. It is very important for me that the reader understands me, that the style does not overshadow the sense in any way. Unclear writing is bad writing, I think.

As for writing in a language different from the one spoken around me, I am a bit lost for an answer because I first became an author while living abroad, and it has never been otherwise for me. I am sure it plays a role, without a doubt. There is a sense of writing equalling remembering (the language, the people). I write in a language that I left when I was twenty. And in some way, when I write, I am reminded of how I was before I was twenty, sad and isolated and attention-seeking. Yet my everyday (non-writing) persona is pretty well-adjusted. That's just one split; there are probably many more. But each of us is many people at once, you don't have to leave the country you were born in to realize that.

Margarita Meklina:

Olga, I'm going to ask you the same question: what is an “experiment” for a writer who writes in a foreign language (English) but who hasn't forgotten her native one (Russian)?

Olga Livshin:

The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that to experiment is to “discover something unknown,” but also, paradoxically, to “test a hypothesis or illustrate some known truth.” In my twenties, I was fascinated by the first meaning of the two. I thought mixing Russian and English within the boundaries of a poem was going to lead to a new and explosive language. It was like the Impressionists putting paint brushstrokes of contrasting colors next to each other on a canvas, which led them to a new esthetic. And then there was the notion that I came to this country as a teenager, without really wanting to be here, and although my English was serviceable, I felt a little out of place with my perceptions of things most of the time. It was constant work to try to repress or conceal these perceptions in order to fit in, and sometimes I just wanted out. That was another reason why I wanted to import some semblance of Russian into English into the text. To turn the tables on the mostly American, native-speaker reader: what is it like not to understand, to be the other?

Then I realized I was missing the musicality of poetry: Russian uses a different alphabet, so most readers wouldn’t have the vaguest idea of what certain parts of the poem sounded like. It also started to feel a little mean and condescending – imposing unreadable graphemes on the reader. I do like the second OED definition, the one that refers to illustrating a truth, or a hypothesis about what the truth might be. And the deepest truth of one’s emotions and thoughts is often a composite. I think of the psyche along the lines of Bakhtinian heteroglossia, a patchwork of voices we carry within us. Many of mine were or are Russian in origin, but I think it’s fine to translate them into English. (Or vice versa—I also write poetry in Russian). What matters are the vicarious presences of the people who left their mark.

A task that I think is especially urgent for bicultural writers is to uncover the lived truths of power imbalances, misplaced expectations and stereotypes, in our home countries as well as our new homes. The broad expectations of what people think you are as a new American alone are often so tragi-comical. Isn’t it wonderful how there are twenty kinds of soap in our grocery stores? Aren’t you grateful that we gave you a job? Why are you still speaking your native language? These human experiences might be silent or marginal, but they’re quite real. One author who writes about these kinds of issues with poignancy and naturalness is the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The discrepancy she shows is that people are so very similar despite national boundaries, yet immigrants are often treated as less than equal, even less than human.

Margarita Meklina:

Natalia, here’s a question for you: what is an “experiment” for you, for a writer who writes in her own language and lives in a country where you were born?

Natalia Rubanova:



I never got immersed into “experimental” prose on purpose, even though some literary critics consider it experimental because of their [backwards] mentality and love for a so-called “tradition” based on a bleak, boring realism. Luckily, my texts do not fit there: they are a specificity of my brain, a physiology of soul, if one can say so. To write as one feels. I never think what “label” these “text workers” would attach to my texts.

Margarita Meklina:

Olga, could you please list the pluses and minuses of anthologies which put together writers based on their gender or sexual orientation or community (e.g., “Appalachian prose” or “Poems from Russian provinces”)?

Olga Livshin:

Wait, there is an anthology of gay provincial Russian women who immigrated to Appalachia? Seriously, I think it’s the power of the authors to sweep us away into their worlds that makes a difference between a not-so-great anthology and a terrific one. If we are taken into the universes of today’s downtrodden, or those who the world believes to be fine but they are not – that is great. Still, even in the case of writers who have a strong group identity, it’s the imaginative stories they tell, not the label or slogan, that give credence to the group. The label is familiar and uninteresting. It’s the stories that break out. They give the group a kind of rough, gleaming texture, something the reader might hold on to and care about.

Margarita Meklina:

Natalia, and what's your opinion about such anthologies?

Natalia Rubanova:

Frankly speaking, I see no pluses – any “highly specialized” anthology narrows down the audience and inadvertently labels its authors in a certain way.

Margarita Meklina:

Maria, do you agree with Natalia's statement? What do you think?

Maria Rybakova:

If it gives new writers some sort of exposure, then perhaps it is a good opportunity for beginning authors to be published. Although I am not sure who reads that sort of anthologies. I am afraid they may be just gathering dust on bookshop shelves. A more reasonable tendency is to organize anthologies focusing on a literary movement: say, an anthology of Beatnik poetry or something. Or a collection of ghost stories, or true-crime writing.

Margarita Meklina:

And now my third question to the three of you. Let's assume what you write can be characterized as “women's experimental prose.” What do you lack to succeed (e.g., time, inspiration, conversations with someone who shares your desires and writing style, money, bookstores to give readings at, positive examples, etc.)?

Olga Livshin:

I think it’s so interesting that writing can populate all of those places of lack you listed. When I was pregnant, I dragged my feet to work, an anti-nausea lollipop sticking out of my mouth while teaching (Russian 101 / Morning Sickness 1,000). I thought the writing life was done for an indefinite period of time. Then Scott Turner Schofield, a wonderful performer who directed my first play, suggested that I could do a poetry performance about pregnancy, and I did, at the Spenard Jazz Festival in Alaska where I was living. I was carrying a son – which I thought meant, among other things, that for a short time in my life I was simultaneously both sexes. So I danced with a onesie that had a man’s tie painted on it, and I serenaded my yet-unborn son as I danced. This was so light-hearted and jubilant… I was high on love.

Then, when I had him, the labor was complicated and I was sick for a long time afterwards. But somehow poetry started puttering sometime around when Nathan was four months old. I guess I was getting used to the idea my child and I might start enjoying a close, adoring relationship without the medical shadows hanging over, at least some of the time. In tough times you have a certain amount of darkness and quiet. I sat in our puffy, broken, fake-suede-upholstered rocking chair at 2 AM and wrote lines in my head about Nathan while rocking him to sleep. I don’t think I was thinking anyone would read these poems. They came because of this hiding, and grief, and uninterrupted love. Obstacles can be interesting places to visit.

Margarita Meklina:

Maria, what's your view on the obstacles?

Maria Rybakova:

If there is anything that prevents me from writing more, then it's laziness. Although, of course, if I could quit my day job, I would quit it immediately. But part of me thinks that hating one's day job may be a good thing for writing, actually. I think it's a good thing to hate everything except writing. Not because writing is so good, but because the world and people are so god-awful. Anger is a very inspiring emotion, I find.

As for women's writing, I never felt a part of that, because I never felt as a woman. I have a woman's anatomy and I have sex with men, but I never felt as a woman (or a as man for that matter). I always felt neither female nor male, but just some sort of a vague “person.” It suited me just fine. I never spent much time with other people, and so I never felt any need to define myself.

Margarita Meklina:

Natalia, and what about you, “women's experimental prose” and obstacles?

Natalia Rubanova:

This is a funny question. “Women’s experimental prose.” Why “women’s”? There is just prose, and there is just literature… Uzh skolko raz tverdili miru (the world was told this so many times)… Is it normal to divide prose for F and M? Isn't this similar to signs on bathrooms? My prose is not an experiment for me… and what do I lack? A publisher who is a soul mate and who is ready to invest not only in my prose collections, but also into at least some minimal PR: nowadays, to announce and sell a new book without PR and promotion is quite unrealistic.

Margarita Meklina:

And that's why we are working here, on this Tumbler, on our own PR, promoting ourselves and the women writers' anthology Wreckage of Reason II where I'm one of the authors. About myself: I was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the US right in time to celebrate my 22nd birthday, but – as my short story “Jump” from WORII clearly shows – I'm still torn between English and Russian, between the United States where I’ve spent the past twenty years and between my country of birth.

NYC Launch of Wreckage of Reason II and Katabasis Rewritten

(pic above: "a book selfie" by Lillian Ann Slugocki)

Wreckage of Reason II: Back to the Drawing Board was launched in the anthology's hometown of New York City. Check out Lillian Ann Slugocki's post about the launch and then read her interview with Elizabeth Bachner. Here's a little bit of it:

Elizabeth Bachner on her story "How to Shake Hands with a Murderer": This piece is a katabasis, a hero's trip into the underworld (and maybe back?). The protagonist is a girl separated, heartbreakingly, from her love, her best friend--she's lost him to various literal and metaphoric deaths--he's become a rock star, or a junkie, he's far away and they can't find each other, he's died and been buried, they've both transformed in ways they can't understand, he was a boy and now he's trapped in her memory, or lost in the dark adult world. Any katabasis is also a story about the process of writing, about where you have to go, and what you have to do to yourself, to get the unspeakable into words.

Read all about it, thanks to Karen Lillis and her series Writer on Writer!

Rhyme Circle: Ja imam sarene oci / novac nece doci / medjutim ovisnik o moci / na kraju nece dobro proci

Although Koja has been a part of my consciousness seemingly my whole childhood, the first time I remember being fully engrossed in his music was when he appeared with his band Dicsiplina Kicme on TV and did "Novac nece doci." I think Koja burned some dinar bills then, but I couldn't find a video of that. Here is a non-video of a kick-ass live performance:



His latest is a rhyme throwback to that song. Twenty-nine years later, the current lineup of Disciplin A Kitschme releases "Ovisnik o moci."



In my silly translation:

"Novac nece doci" (1985):
My eyes are kaleidoscope
Will I get cash? Nope!

"Ovisnik o moci" (2014):
However if power is your dope
Will you fare well? Nope!

REPOST: Writer on Writer: E.C. Bachner Interviews Lillian Ann Slugocki

Note: I am simply reposting Karen the Small Press Librarian's blog entry from April 20, 2014. All hail Karen Lillis! Be sure to check out her blog and the other interviews from the Writer on Writer Series.

This installment in the Writer on Writer interview series has a twist: Instead of asking the participants to read a whole book, I asked two writers involved in the same anthology to read each other's anthology piece. The anthology in question is one I'm proud to be included in as well. Wreckage of Reason Two (Spuyten Duyvil, 2014) is the sequel to Wreckage of Reason (Spuyten Duyvil, 2008), and both anthologies feature contemporary women writers experimenting with prose. This week's Writer on Writer features E.C. Bachner and Lillian Ann Slugocki, two New Yorkers whose bold narrative voices pop off the page. Today E.C. (Elizabeth) Bachner interviews Lillian Ann Slugocki about Lillian's story, "Streetcar Deconstructed."

Stay tuned, as always, for the second part of the interview, when Lillian will ask Elizabeth about Elizabeth's story, "How to Shake Hands with a Murderer."

*****

Elizabeth Bachner: I'm obsessed with the idea of whether there are differences between a character and a person, an author and a self, and I love the brilliant and playful way your feminist deconstruction of A Streetcar Named Desire approaches these questions. What are your ways of thinking about autobiography versus fiction, "real" versus imaginary or invented? How do you use yourself in your work? How does your work change and shape your life?

Lillian Ann Slugocki: My life is like this scrapbook of stories, and people, and cities--and I look at it, dispassionately, as the raw material for my work. But having said that, there are many layers over and under the autobiography. I layer myth--my current obsessions are Leda, Orpheus, Eurydice and Leander--as well as narrative structure--e.g. a conflict and its resolution, as well as intertexuality. I use echoes of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Angela Carter, plus all the lit crit I studied at New York University: Judith Butler, Thelma Shinn, Gayle Green, Mircea Eliade, Luce Irigaray, Julie Kristeva, and Audre Lord. The result is that the I, first person, in my work is me, but not me--an amplified version. Stronger, wiser, certainly more flawed, and certainly more interesting.

People who read my work are usually very quick to assume that it’s straight up autobiography, like when they read The Blue Hours, my novella about the sexual disintegration of a marriage. But real life can be very boring. I’m convinced that even memoirists are not unlike novelists--they use plot arcs, they deconstruct, compress, they add and subtract in similar ways--because it’s all in service of telling a story. And real life doesn’t contain those structural elements. There is an art to choosing where to begin a story, and where to end it, amongst all the hundreds of possibilities. The writer makes those choices, whether the genre is fiction or non-fiction. And I tend to write stories about the things that are of concern to me at any given moment. It could be identity, it could be sexuality or the female body, it could be history--and in writing them, I think I better understand the context of my own life.

Elizabeth: In your deconstruction of Streetcar..., there are so many different ways that you approach and confront Tennessee Williams as a writer, his characters, the fact of playwriting, the fact of theater, the canon. There's parody, lots of wit and fun and adventure, and definitely deconstruction--but primarily I'm left with a feeling of love for both works, yours and his. Could you say a little about your experience of this process?

Lillian: Oh God, I do love that play. I’ve seen so many versions of it-- theatrical and cinematic. Ivo van Hove directed it at New York Theater Workshop, and it was a stunning deconstruction. Life-changing. No sets, no scenery, no props, no costume changes--just a large claw-footed bathtub, stage left. Filled with water. And Blanche, played by Elizabeth Marvel, is naked in that bathtub, submerging and rising up, over and over, splashing water all over the stage and the audience--I got drenched! The spine of that production was the bathtub and the naked woman.

This is the detail the director chose as his point of departure from Williams’ text. And I knew I was going to deconstruct it, too--but it took ten years. It wasn’t until I was reading all of the above-referenced lit crit, primarily in my own ongoing search to define and categorize and reinvent the female narrative, that I thought it was time to revision Blanche. And like van Hove chose the bathtub as the point of departure, I chose the white moth, which is a relatively small leitmotif in the play. But it gave me a point of entrance--it opened the door, if you will, to her revisioned character. In my version, Blanche has a Master’s Degree from NYU (like me), and has read all the same theory, and at that point, the piece practically wrote itself. And I am making fun of the canon, as well as academic culture, of which I am a proud member, but a culture nonetheless that deserves to be made fun of. The canon, as it stands, is ridiculously outdated.

Elizabeth: When you're working--and/or reading and thinking about your own work--how do you think about your readers, your audience? Do you often have readers in general, a particular type of reader, or a particular reader in mind as you work?

Lillian: Initially, I have a word or a phrase or an image in my head that won’t go away. Like the image of the white moth on a hot summer’s night. And at that point, I’m not at all concerned about my audience. I treat my first drafts as letters to myself. It’s not until I’m on the second re-write that I become concerned with issues like: what is the story I’m telling, what is the arc, where does it begin, and where does it end, what is the through-line, what are the sub-plots, is everything resolved by the end of the story. I think my readers are people like myself; intelligent, driven, transgressive, definitely subversive.

Elizabeth: I love the way that bodies and sexuality come into the work of yours that I've read. What inspires you to work with erotic themes?

Lillian: One way to answer that question is to say, I’m obsessed with the intersection between the sacred and the profane. Another way to answer that question, goes to back to my issue with today’s canon. I believe women have to create their own narratives, and female sexuality has been, with a few notable exceptions (Anais Nin, Colette), written through the male gaze. That just has to change, and it is changing--erotica written by women has exploded, some of it is badly written, some of it is really well written, Angela Carter comes to mind. But good or bad, it’s good to see it out there in the world. I think that means that eventually women can reclaim their own sexual identity. Right now, we don’t own it, we haven’t written that definition, or told that story yet. Even as the fourth wave of feminism rises up, female sexuality is still primarily a male trope. And that informs everything. It informs Anna Karenina, it informs Blanche DuBois, Eve, Lilith, Mary Magdalene, Cinderella. Images of women in even the most stable of texts are informed by this trope.

So that’s what it is with me and erotica--it’s another way of reframing or renaming the female narrative. It’s like saying, I've got control of this now, and the story is going to be very, very different from what you’re expecting. And I’d like to think it’s honest and authentic, even if it might be a bit hard to swallow (pun definitely intended). I think a person’s sexual identity is the still point of our turning world. It is foundational, and I’m not even talking about how a person self-identifies--straight, gay, lesbian, bi, whatever--sexuality is a driving and undeniable force in our lives. And it is definitely political. The female body is still a wild and uncharted territory, but again, this is changing. I think of performance artists like Julie Atlas Muz, Deb Margolin, writers like Erin Cressida Wilson, and yourself, Elizabeth--female artists, who, in my opinion, write beyond the ending, who write beyond the white picket fence, beyond happily-ever-after.

Elizabeth: Another of the Wreckage of Reason 2 contributors, Robin Martin, wrote that she was glad panelists discussing the anthology at AWP raised the question of what makes prose experimental. "I don’t think my work is clearly experimental," she wrote, "By that, I mean I feel my work is still very accessible. Perhaps I like the term innovative writing better. Innovative writing has a smaller audience in mind, no pre-determined formula, and exists outside of easily defined narrative conventions." I'm really interested in this question. Do you consider your work experimental? Innovative? Or do you like some other word?

Lillian: I like both words, I like experimental and innovative. Whether I’ve written for the page or the stage, my work definitely “exists outside of easily defined narrative convention.” I pitched a series once to the Director of Artistic Programming at NPR, and when he received the first episode, Earth Sinking Into Water, he said, “This shouldn’t work, but it does.” And even though I was working with an excellent dramaturge and director, Erica Gould, I didn’t understand why it worked, either, except that it did. It was non-linear, it was progressive, but still it packed a strong emotional punch at its conclusion. Now I understand that it worked because it was structured like a piece of music. And today when I’m considering a long form piece, the narrative borrows many elements from the hero’s journey, as in Joseph Campbell's call to adventure, or the refusal of the call, mentors and guides, demons and conflicts, crossing the first threshold, the supreme ordeal. Or the way back, but not the same anymore--transformed, perhaps bearing gifts. I can work with this--it makes organic sense to me.

I just finished writing a novella, How to Travel with Your Demons, and the process began with a formal question: Could I tell a story about a protagonist traveling from Point A to Point B, and leave one central question unanswered which would create narrative tension? And I could. I did. And once I established that framework, then I could create the music around it, establish motifs, smaller conflicts that all circle around the central narrative. When an editor friend of mine read it, he called it "experimental structure with accessible prose." And I thought, yes. That’s exactly what I was aiming for. And I like breaking rules, too. The story is written in shifting points of view--first person, second person, third person. Time is fluid, non-linear, circular. I know the rules, and so I can break the rules, and still tell a story. So in that sense my work is experimental, but I can’t tell a story within the traditional confines of established narrative structure. It doesn’t make sense to me as a writer, it feels foreign and strange. I love it as a reader, but that’s not the same. And I love what you wrote [in our forthcoming interview], Elizabeth, that your Wreckage of Reason Two piece, "How to Shake Hands with a Murderer," is “a katabasis, a hero's trip into the underworld (and maybe back?).” Using powerful ancient storytelling techniques in contemporary stories of transformation is something I love doing with my own work. This process is really exciting to me, and maybe the katabasis will be my next method in my own search for the female narrative.

*****

Don't miss the New York launch party for Wreckage of Reason Two, at KGB Bar on Tuesday, April 22 from 7-9pm.

UIC's Program for Writers Reading Series Celebrates Wreckage of Reason II (Striped Tops Encouraged)

(l-r: Snezana Zabic, Lyndee Yamshon, Brooke Wonders)

The walls in the back room at Jak's are painted apricot, contrasting the dark brown paneling. The very basic metal-pedestal tables are covered with long white tablecloths, and the floor's whitish tiles have seen better days. A cracked mirror ball hangs above it all, perhaps a survivor from one of the previous century's original discos. The decor at Jak's might be charmingly outdated, but the food and drinks are both carefully prepared and low-priced, and the management has always welcomed writers, letting them hold events for a nominal fee or no fee at all.

It's the first Monday of the cruelest month, and the University of Illinois at Chicago's Department of English is hosting a reading to celebrate the fact that three of its recent or soon-to-be graduates appear in the anthology Wreckage of Reason II: Back to the Drawing Board (WoR2): Brooke Wonders, Lyndee Yamshon, and Snezana Zabic (yours truly). To make the coincidence stranger, our professor Cris Mazza and our classmate Megan Milks appear in the first installment of Wreckage of Reason. In fact when I submitted, I assumed I would not get picked because I figured (on top of all the regular contingencies), what are the odds?

It's a bit past 6 PM, and our classmates, professors, and friends fill the room. Due to the tight schedule of the Program for Writers Reading Series, the reading takes place as planned, even though the anthology has not officially come out; this is actually my first time hearing Brooke's and Lyndee's WoR2 pieces. I do know from our past encounters that the three of us share a tendency to play with genres and resist easy classification as either fiction or nonfiction writers. Our evening's MC, poet Tyler Mills, has us go in the alphabetical order, our last names squished right there at the end of the alphabet, missing only an X.

First, Brooke reads her completely fictional short story titled "Memoir," a fable starring a talking, living book and her owner Lucy. "The Book" not only self-records the owner's most embarrassing moments, but also passes itself down the matrilineal line generation after generation against the recipients' will.

Next, Lyndee regales us with "Frankly Fucked Up In E-Town," a humorous snapshot of an unemployed drama school graduate forced to move back into her old room in her overbearing parents' upper-middle-class home in Evanston, IL. The audience relates immediately, because we all know what it means to be infantilized by our parents as we and they age, regardless of the economic and geographic circumstance.

So, we've got a fable and a satire. What else is missing? A haibun, of course. My piece, "Failing Haibun" grabs the Medieval Japanese form and stretches it to fit an episodic narrative that travels from a humble tube radio in a kitchen in Yugoslavia in 1979, to a transatlantic plane stranded in Brest, France in 2001, with the 1990s Yugoslav Wars squeezed in between.

Afterward, Tyler delivers a few parting words, this being the last reading of the Series for 2013/2014. It's Brooke's birthday, so we sing, and then the crowd slowly migrates to Jak's main room and beyond.

As I write this, I wonder about the subtitle of the anthology and the effect it has: An Anthology of Contemporary Xxperimental Women Writers. Is there something inherent in our gender that makes our writing experimental? Of course not, and the term "xxperimental" is purely tongue-in-cheek, lest anyone think all this comes from some essentialist impulses. Rather this anthology is a political statement.

Just a final thought--in the past two decades, on both sides of the Atlantic, the only spaces that were open to me as a writer were the "innovative," "experimental," "non-commercial," "non-marketable" ones. And yet, my writing is quite accessible, as is Brooke's and Lyndee's and, I have no doubt, our fellow anthology contributors' work. Yes, we play with form and language, but all in the service of crafting compelling writing for a broad literary audience tired of formulaic prose. So what gives? Do the politics of patriarchy, racism, and capitalism collude or collide? And how do writers fight? Well, to be continued...

Meanwhile, keep up with all the contributors' adventures on the WoR2 superblog!

Wreckage of Reason II: Back to the Drawing Board

Wreckage of Reason II is the home blog for the eponymous anthology out now.

Since contributors to the anthology live around the US and even abroad, but some of us are active in virtual lit realms, the blog will bring lots of information about and from all the 29 writers featured in the book.

Soon, I will post there (and here) about the reading Brooke Wonders, Lyndee Yamshon and I did last night.

Howe Gelb in Chicago, 12/6 (Report pt. 1)

A snapshot by Dubravka Juraga:

I've seen Howe Gelb live twice now, and I've been listening to his music since the early '90s Giant Sand. The first time I saw him was about 5-6 years back, the second time was last night. Both shows were great, but the energy was different this time. The previous time, he was playing just his guitar, and I think he was backed by a slightly larger band. Last night he played guitar and piano equally and was backed by two guys. He wasn't talking much at all in-between songs 5-6 years ago, as I recall, and no jokes (again, my memory might be failing me). I don't expect musicians to tell stories or jokes in-between songs, not at all. I come to hear their music, everything else is bonus. But what last night made me realize is that it does wonders for the show when a great musician like Howe Gelb switches back and forth between his guitar and his piano, playing older songs and new ones, and then strings it all together with unforced, economic, precise and sometimes funny commentary. He was genuinely calm and at ease this time around, as if everything has fallen into place as completely as possible for him. Maybe it's also that threshold between the middle age and the old age that, in the best-case scenario, brings a kind of calmness. It makes me look forward to my mid-to-late-fifties. (Yeah, I realize that's a very naive and immature thing to say.)

There's much to be admired about the grain of Howe Gelb's voice. His singing is very minimalist, but if you listen carefully, he conveys a lot of different emotions and attitudes with very subtle changes within a song and an album. Add to that the changes that come with time, and you have a wealth of material to study. Or just enjoy. It's not all about dissection and theorizing.

Dinner guests will arrive soon, so I'll have to continue tomorrow.

Broken Records Promo Page

Soon folks will be able to download this book as a PDF (free) or order a print-on-demand physical copy (for a fistful of dollars). Cover by Gretchen Hasse.

31s St Beach & Harbor, Chicago

Po(jest)zija/Po(eat)ry

Our book is out, thanks to Jovan Gvero and SKC NS!

This story, published in Feminist Review, Issue 99 (2011) in an earlier version, is about the friendship and activism behind this book. (This version is from an unpublished book Broken Records.)




Neo AFŽ: Revolution without Premeditation

1) Manifesto

WE ARE TEARING DOWN the existing patriarchal consciousness.
WE ARE TEARING DOWN stereotypes and prejudices against those who suffer
discrimination.
WE ARE TEARING DOWN the borders that divide that which is inseparable.
WE ARE TEARING DOWN the artificial differences and values set up by force.
WE SEEK the right to the individualization of values.
WE SEEK a celebration of the diversity of people and their ways of life.
WE SEEK a space to create, express ourselves and work freely.
WE SEEK an exchange of critical views.
WE DEMAND equal opportunities to access knowledge and information for everyone.
WE DEMAND complete freedom for everyone as they create and search for knowledge.
WE DEMAND the immediate cessation of violence against national minorities and non-
heterosexual people who are fighting for their rights.
WE DEMAND the unconditional recognition of our activity in the context of the
tradition of progressive women’s movements.

Ivana Percl and I wrote the manifesto one summer day in 2001 on the island of Vis, sitting at a massive table in the front yard of the former Yugoslav People’s Army barracks, a complex of stone buildings once occupied by countless 19-year-old boys on their mandatory 12-month-long service. But in the early 2000s, the barracks stood mostly empty, except when in the summer they were rented out as an affordable seminar venue to not-for-profit organizations strapped for cash. The barracks had not been renovated at all, and remnants of the past were scattered all around the complex. We found a framed color photo portrait of Josip Broz Tito on the floor in the corner of a room, and then Ivana and I had a friend take a picture of us squatting and holding hands in front of it. We all slept on the cots with their thin and worn-out spring mattresses that had been used while the army was still there in the decades prior to 1991. The cots caved under our bodies like bumpy, wiry metal hammocks, but we were in our 20s, and too excited about our projects to care about comfort. It was there that Ivana and I decided to print our manifesto in a zine that we’d type up, cut and paste by ourselves, then xerox and hand out for free, mainly using the office supplies we could help ourselves to at work. We decided we wouldn’t ask for money for Neo AFŽ, and that we wouldn’t register as a NGO or a not-for-profit organization, that we simply wouldn’t register at all, that we would work clandestinely, with hardly any operating cost.

The manifesto finally appeared in the first Neo AFŽ zine in November of that same year, after we’d collected enough submissions to fill five double-sided sheets of paper folded in the middle, to create a small booklet. The copy that I have with me in Chicago, where I live now, is probably a third-generation photo copy of that first zine. The grainy cover photo features a friend of ours smirking as she burns a fascist poster on a Belgrade wall. On the next page, we address “fans of utopian ideas, and idealists,” we define Neo AFŽ as “a group of radical feminists practicing subversive theory and activism,” and we urge readers to make their own photocopies of the zine to distribute further. The facing page features the “We Are Tearing Down” manifesto setting the stage for the political and personal, critical and creative prose and verse, drawings and photographs that would fill all the subsequent issues of the zine.

We were eager for some kind of street feminism that would need to be reinvented, especially in Croatia. Belgrade at least had the Women in Black, and we respected the stoic, silent vigil they had been conducting every Wednesday at noon on the square in front of the National Museum to demand peace and justice. We had also taken part in student protests in the late 1990s, massive performances that may or may not have helped the demise of Tuđman’s and Milošević’s fascist regimes. By 2000, those regimes had been replaced by liberal democratic political forces, and that was supposed to be the end of it: now it was supposed to be smooth transitional sailing into the European Union, which is of course heaven on earth. But Ivana and I were itching for something more radical in nature, even if smaller in scope: with our little photocopied zine, we at least wanted to express our desire not just to replace whoever was in power with whoever was in the opposition, but for a system free of patriarchy and heteronormativity first and foremost. Throughout it all, we also cultivated a sense of humor, as we saw how vastly disproportionate our ambitions were to our power. Ivana, whose expertise and educational background were in marketing, would write letters to the editors of national publications to protest against and dissect various misogynistic commercials, and she always signed those letters Neo AFŽ, not so much to hide her identity as to promote our group and what we stood for.

2) Dubrovnik

Before there was Neo AFŽ, there was the beginning of my friendship with Ivana. The setting is again the Adriatic: we met in the late spring of 2001, at a feminist course at the Inter-University Centre in Dubrovnik.

One evening probably mid-way through the week-long course, after a day of heavy theory, we students from various parts of the post-Yugoslav region gather on a beach to relax and drink, sitting on the sand between the Adriatic and the old city walls. To compensate for all the intellectual work we’ve been doing over the previous few days, we get silly and loud, and we play a type of charades where you are supposed to guess the celebrity name scrawled on an index card taped to your forehead, asking yes-or-no questions until you can guess the name. ‘Am I a woman? Am I a singer? Am I alive?’ As long as answers are ‘yes’, you can continue; if you get a ‘no’ you have to wait till all the other players have taken a turn and you can begin again on the next round. You have the sea murmuring nearby, you sip your wine enveloped in the warm late-spring night, and the slightest blunders you and the other players make become a cause for uproarious laughter.

The game of beach charades takes us back to childhood while time gallops ahead. I am the one who tapes the name of Jura Stublić, leader of the 1980s pop band Film, onto Ivana’s forehead, for no reason except perhaps that I subconsciously remember his old hit ‘Ivana’, about an older man who is having an affair with a girl whose age is an ‘unlucky number’ she is trying to conceal. Ivana finally guesses, ‘I’m a male singer, I’m alive, I used to be cute and now I’m an old has-been, I was fronting a band in the 80s, it wasn’t Haustor. Wait, was it Film? I’m Jura Stublić!’ And she recalls how back in the late 1980s, when she was indeed 13, she fantasized that Jura was actually singing to her. We all laugh until we cry, recalling that when we were kids we didn’t realize how creepy the song was.

3) Ambivalence and Alternatives

In February 2002, we participated in the City of Women manifestation in Ljubljana. Issue 4 of the Neo AFŽ zine that came out in the summer of the same year was the only publication in the country to devote an entire issue to the writings by the organizers and participants of the first Zagreb Gay Pride demonstration-parade.

One of the clearest memories I have of the summer of 2002 is of tasting the sting of the tear gas that almost broke apart the Zagreb Gay Pride celebration in the Zrinjevac park after our first successful parade, which happened the day before my flight to the US.

We walked around the city protected by a private security firm as well as police in riot gear. On the sidewalks of the streets along our route were people of all ages, mostly admonishing us, throwing pieces of melon at us, spitting at us. I protected myself from the spit with a copy of the official Zagreb Gay Pride poster that spelled three words in shades of pink:

ISKORAK
KONTRA
PREDRASUDA

One of the anti-Gay Pride spitters was a furious local Nazi skinhead shouting “sieg heil,” raising his arm repeatedly like a robot. Another was a middle-aged woman some recognized as an English missionary known as “Sister Ruth.” The woman was balancing a huge statue of the Virgin Mary on her shoulder. The woman was also raising her arm and shouting “sieg heil.”

Our walk was not the caravan of unbridled, carnivalesque, erotic, celebratory (and commercial) energy that Gay Pride parades are in the West. We were tense with trepidation at a possible attack by the homophobes all around us, right there, wondering what would happen if they tried to break through the security. One of them threw tear gas into our small crowd in the park, and we started running, trying to resist the urge to wipe our watering eyes and running noses. It turned out it was just a small amount of the chemical, easily blown away by the breeze, and we soon calmed down. The fucker must have enjoyed watching us scatter in panic, if for a short while.

After the program was over, most of us quickly dispersed to our homes. About thirty of those who stayed around in bars and cafes downtown were sought out and beaten up by the homophobes when the police were out of sight.

4) The Name

I don’t quite remember exactly how we came up with the name Neo AFŽ. But it definitely rang a bell for our audience members: AFŽ was of course Antifašistička Fronta Žena, or the Antifascist Front of Women, an organization that originated in World War Two (founded by the Yugoslav Communist Party during World War Two) and lasted into the early 1950s. Considering that the organization had been gone for fifty years, the acronym was still used remarkably widely, and I remember how people in Vukovar would often joke about contemporary women’s organizing, calling us the AFŽ, not without a touch of nostalgia. In Croatia and Serbia in 2001, as the nationalist parties from 1990s were replaced by the more European-oriented opposition parties—although the change seemed merely cosmetic—Yugonostalgia seemed to grow ever stronger, and for an obvious reason: it grew of frustration with the then current state of events, the joblessness, the corruption, and the hundreds of thousands of families torn apart and displaced as a result of the wars of 1990s. Vukovar in particular was and still is technically divided from top to bottom, and children from kindergarten age all the way though high school have attended segregated classes and schools ever since the war ended. When one is unable to imagine a better future, one re-imagines the past as near utopia.

But Neo AFŽ tried to turn these nostalgic tendencies into something productive, and instead of idealizing the past we tried learn as much as possible about it, and especially about the triumphs and defeats of women’s movements. When the Communist Party dissolved the AFŽ in the 1950s, some feminists of that generation continued working quietly within the confines of the regime. Socialist women (our grandmothers’ generation) kept their jobs and hard-earned rights, but were not relieved of their traditional domestic duties and thus the double-burden compromise with patriarchy was established as the norm. The next generation of feminists came of age in 1960s and 1970s (our mothers’ generation), completely at odds with the generation that raised them. Instead of building on past efforts, they began their own struggle seemingly from scratch, inspired by their French and Anglo-American peers in the 1970s, focusing on consciousness-raising and finally opening women’s centers in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Neo AFŽ was a part of the third, post-socialist generation of feminists, and we intentionally built alliances with both of the previous generations, wary of falling into the same old traps.

5) Factory Girls: An Interview

(Originally published in the zine NEO AFŽ, November 2001)

Stoja Žabić is my grandmother. She was born in 1924 in the village of Karajzovci (near Banja Luka), and she’s been living in Borovo since 1946. I decided to interview her and learn about AFŽ first hand.

Q: When did you join AFŽ?
A: I was a member of SKOJ and us girls founded AFŽ chapter in our village in 1943, I think.

Q: A couple of you SKOJ girls founded the AFŽ?
A: No. The Party founds AFŽ, and SKOJ girls participate, lead it. Our village was near Liberated Territory Gornji Podgradci, it was right below Bosanska Gradiška, which hadn’t been liberated yet. Gornji Podgradci had it all: the municipality office, headquarters, all of it. The Gornji Podgradci Party headquarters decreed the founding of AFŽ in our village.

Q: What were the women in charge of, specifically?
A: During the war it was the woman’s duty to help the People’s Liberation Struggle, the wounded. Women and SKOJ members were in charge of securing food for the partisans. Securing food, and everything, knitting wool socks…. I didn’t knit a single pair, don’t worry. (Note: Grandma has always refused to do any kind of needlework ever since childhood.) Besides, SKOJ and AFŽ were in charge of convincing the folk to help the PLS.

Q: Was there any word about women’s societal position?
A: Oh yes, at length. Women didn’t even have the right to vote before then, can you believe it?!

Q: What did people think of women partisans?
A: The opinion of women with guns was positive, it was equal, they were equal.

Q: Tell us a remarkable story about some female comrades, for the zine, make it interesting, you know?
A: There was one girl from Dubica, and another one from Gradiška, they were in SKOJ. They joined the struggle as soon as 1941—their names were Bora Batos and Mira Šimik. They met in Borovo, by chance, in 1938, can you believe it?! One of them came here with her dad, one had already been living here…. They became best friends, of course, both originating from the same part of Bosnia. They worked together with Jovica Brandajz at the factory.

Q: He’s the one who turned them on to progressive ideas?
A: No doubt. Jovica Brandajz was killed in Dudik in 1941, and they went to the Kozara mountain and got organized there. They joined the local SKOJ chapter and recruited all the other progressive folk. Other women gladly joined, that was the only way for them to really aid the struggle. Ach, listen, Nana, everyone wanted something to improve after the war, women were no exception.

5) Tied to the Stove

Yugoslavia remained a rural country well into the 20th century, but my grandparents’ generation left their villages in droves after World War Two, when they were young, and took jobs in cities around the country. Borovo in particular, a city less than two decades years old, must have been a haven of youth figuring out how to live away from the village norms they knew, how to come up with a new system. The former peasant girls cut their hair and donned a new wardrobe, and tried to emulate the city-born chicks they met upon arrival. They joined AFŽ and the Party, began voting, some even running for office, leading workers’ meetings, rebuilding infrastructure with the guys. Once the babies came, their guys began watching the little ones and doing housework. But in 1953 the Party dismantled the AFŽ and the brief experiment in equality began deteriorating. Men simply went back to the old ways of going to work, from work to the dinner the wife would make, after dinner a nap, and after that TV or card games. Wives—the concept seamlessly transitioned to my parents’ generation—worked, cooked, cleaned, took care of the children, sometimes they nagged, and sometimes promoted patriarchy with glee, favoring sons and teaching daughters how to be docile and obedient.

Neo AFŽ exists largely in the past, but it’s not entirely stuck there. There is a bilingual book titled “Po(jest)zija/Po(eat)ry” Ivana and I worked on for years after I moved to the US: we wrote free-verse poems and poem-recipes that you can actually follow and prepare simple meals. The irony that half of our manuscript is comprised of recipes, that we return to the kitchen as if in a bad parody of a defeated radical feminist movement, as if in some awful misogynistic scenario in which bitches get tamed, does not escape us. And so the recipe-poems are in fact satirical and easy, while the non-recipe poems tend to be quite oblique, and we are saying: read and write complicated poetry, and in the meantime, prepare simple, quick meals to nourish yourself for the struggle, don’t waste precious time in the kitchen. We don’t want to live in the world where cooking is complicated and demanding, and poetry is reduced to one-dimensional aphorisms.

And even though the zine stopped coming out in 2003, we didn’t reduce our existence to just writing, reading, and getting by. We kept attending and organizing numerous street protests in Zagreb, Wilmington, NC, and Chicago, (animal rights, gay rights, unionizing, against the Iraq war, for immigrants rights), and we stayed active in local music scenes, as promoters and performers. Hardly a tame lifestyle.

revolution without premeditation

at. ''''''''''''''' to ape the adolescent sects apply a pat
that '''''''''''' of glitter on your lips, wear rhinestone jewelry, a hat,
apart. '''''''''' anything in order to open the art-
at last. '''''''' ificial respiration center by the salon next door, past
at last. '''''''' the stylized beehives, the mast-
er ''''''''''''''''''' pieces—style 2003. you may pass if the - - symbol
at rest. '''''''' is next to your driving lane. (maneuvering rest-
ricted.) '''''''' at night, patrols ___
''''''''''''''''''''''' __________turn the caesura into a solid line.

revolution without premeditation

a kilo/kilo & ½ of dry beans
three spoonfuls (tbsp) of barley (four is okay)
one carrot (home-grown or not)
a tablespoon of oil
two cloves of garlic
salt

soak a kilo of beans until morning. in the morning, put the pot of beans on the stove and let the beans simmer. add the carrot, sliced or not, a tablespoon of oil, minced (or whole) garlic, and let it all simmer until softened. add salt, a lot of it. in the meantime, bring a pot of barley to a boil, and then let it simmer. when the barley softens, combine it with the beans and let everything stew together. for how long? approximately, for a while. in the end, gently thicken the stew by pouring it, stirring constantly, over the flour browned in a larger pot. serve to a group of several people. note: never serve to just one person. lettuce garnished with all kinds of tasty additions goes well with this main course. instead of lettuce, you can serve peppers, not thermically treated (raw). make sure you serve bread.


the amount of serious love-sickness

she stayed. she cared mostly for the delta
[especially the branching kind]
not so much for the spring, river, or ocean.
delta. delta. we called her
/you are guessing/ simulation.
she liked her earth to be silty
water muddy
she could sing swamp scales, always
somewhere in-between
the tones desirable to us
coming from the sea level
or above the sea so we
left, she did not.

the amount of serious love-sickness

1 packet of instant mushroom soup
1.5 liters of water
2 eggs
vegeta (salty spices)

pour the content of the soup packet into the lukewarm water and stir it with a ladle to prevent the formation of lumps. if lumps occur, they must be broken apart. you do it by pushing the lumps to the walls of the pot and then pressing them. stir constantly. add a teaspoon of salty spices. when the soup begins to boil, throw in two beaten eggs, but not all at once. let the eggs drip into the soup, and stir constantly. reduce the heat and continue cooking for about ten minutes (because of the eggs and salmonella). eat while it’s hot. nothing on the side. it’s soup.

obedience is not a virtue. obedience is slavery. a gradual diminishment of creativity, with a dulling tendency. disobedience is often unjustly confused with naughtiness. it’s a tendentious and intentionally incorrect misconception. disobedience is a self-sustaining category.

women’s disobedience is the death of patriarchy.

Past the Ten-Year Mark

Last July I celebrated the ten-year anniversary of my arrival in the United States. I met friends at a comedy variety show, we played guitars, had a few drinks.

Eleven years ago, twenty years ago, thirty years ago, all the way back to my birth, I was in Europe. Mainly the Balkan part of Central Europe. Since moving to the States, I've visited Europe three times. One summer, one winter, another winter. I'll probably go there again in December. When I think about Europe, I don't think about those past or future visits--those are mere brief parenthetical statements in the long-winded sentence of my post-European life. Europe is now a place that exists in the past no one can access. I can access only the synecdoches of that Europe. I can look up old Olympia typewriters for sale from various online suppliers that respond to this demand for the past. If synecdoches worked outside of language, I could purchase one of those and possess my Europe distilled into an obsolete machine. Of course, more than a West German typewriter exported to America, I am a synecdoche of Europe. I never possessed any of it in the first place. That's in part how I was able to leave.