Suicide by miki_šiki
AND ACROSS MY THROAT THE INTIMATE, ANONYMOUS KNIFE
Jorge Luis Borges held a few pseudonyms, H. Bustos Dornecq and Suarez Lynch among the more famous. But it is almost a certainty he had more. More lost works, prose and essays and translations, lost forever to an unknown pseudonym, reclaimed by the vast underworld of anonymous offerings to culture and language, to the linens and machines which connect earthly human life; an artist’s resolve to be swallowed by the anonymous sea with the aim of becoming one with humanity.
Even in life, under his birth name and after exploding in popularity, following in the spirit of a true folk artist, he let the public have him. This new found fame and surge of works where, inspired by his ethereal prowess, new writers dove into lateral depths and holy insignificance with a reimagining of their own versions of his famed labyrinths and tigers and mirrors, mimicking and imitating his works. That’s the advantage of imitators. They cure one of one’s literary ills, he said.
Then followed ... And good riddance. He meant to his words, this abstract confluence of the written word and the absurdist god he awakened in us all, to the very pseudonym given to him by birth; a chosen riddance to himself.
2.7.24
Nacionalizam je, pre svega, paranoja. Kolektivna i pojedinačna paranoja.
Nationalism is, after all, paranoia. Collective and individual paranoia.
- Danilo Kiš*
*The famed Serbian writer, Danilo Kiš, whose father was killed in Auschwitz, said of nationalism in 1974; twenty years after World War One and twenty years before the Yugoslavian Civil War. He died of lung cancer before he could bear witness to the horrors of civil war. He was the same age as his father.
The Unwomanly Face of War*
Wars, the books will tell you, have been fought by, won by and written by men; just ask the victorious ones! Men writing about men. When the Soviet women, around one million of them, spoke of the war they fought in, they never spoke of their own experiences but of the(ir) men's. They fell into the canon.
In the introductory chapter to Svetlana Alexievich's wonderful book she remembers, The village of my postwar childhood was a village of women. Village women. I don't remember any men's voices. So why then did they, or do we, only recognise the Manly Faces of war? Many women were hesitant to speak to her, either in fear of how they would be seen (by society, by their men), or fear of speaking their trauma into an unrequited existence. Putting internal turmoil to paper not an option. Battle Trauma for the Man is a thing of explosives, bloodshed, fallen heroes, martyrs, equipment and manoeuvres, bestsellers and lectures. Battle Trauma for the Woman is a thing of...?
The compulsion to hide one's own experiences for fear of systemic preference is an oppression. The Unwomanly Face of War liberates, albeit tenaciously, fearfully, women's voices who served in the Soviet army during World War II; every story as regular and harrowing, as sensitive and beautiful as the next, yet its own, an oral history, if you could imagine, ancient and precious, finally recorded. We too lived in the village of women, with the village women, and never knew it.
The method of anonymity was a luxury afforded to scholarly men. Choices can make or break and, as we have seen, Sanctify Man. Women, by their very oppressed muteness, were oftentimes regulated to a secondary anonymity; one of unimportance within the colonised modes of Patriarchal Practice. Choice therefore seemed a thing of an unnatural law.
*The Nobel Prize winning book by Svetlana Alexievich should be read alongside the seminal and widely taught Gulag Archipelago by Alekandr Solzhenitsyn. The latter a detailed, harrowing account of the bird's eye experience, the former a suppressed and ignored chorus of bird songs.
After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?
The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –
This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
Emily Dickinson*
*More known as a Gardener in life than a Poet, Emily Dickinson requested that her younger sister, Lavinia, burn her correspondences after death. She did not however give instructions for the 40 notebooks locked inside a chest, containing near 1,800 poems and hundreds of letters, which Lavinia fastidiously sought to get published. Emily Dickinson had published some ten works before her death, pouring out her mouth and soul and bones and heart into hundreds of anonymous pages destined for quiet death. As it was all around her, this Death, with the Garden, Emily perhaps refused to distinguish the life of picked flowers and leaves laid to rest inside a notebook from the mosaic of mastery her pen transcribed.
Sevdalinke
Often referred to as Women's Songs. Of love, unfulfilled and unrequited; a longing desperate urge to love in a time of national and ethnic suppression, a centuries-long violence and turmoil for a people denied. A love between two individuals, this sensitive, stubborn strength was considered of Women.
The word sevdah derives from the Ottoman-Turkish word sevda meaning love, an intense love-sickness. Originally performed without instruments, Sevdalinke are folk songs traditionally originating from Bosnia and Herzegovina. A melodic oral tradition, so viral and potent it survived long enough to meet instruments.
After the freeing of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and of Serbia, Croatia, North Macedonia and Montenegro from 500 years of foreign rule, instruments accompanied Men and Women singing and recording this long-ago love. The public awaiting their vinyl releases; the young wearing jeans, the old opening their windows, to listen to simple, youthful love which harboured hope in a time of suffering.
The first line of the Sevdalinka is often its title, as they were oral, titles weren't so much given as they were received. As with Emily Dickinson's poems. The title was an arbitrary first line publishers and music artists had to ascribe in order to meet today's modes of reception, but the entirety of the song, or poem, is in and of itself the life and the death. To suggest a title would be to label the annonymous swirling of decadent emotion, history and wonder. One must find oneself inside the song, one must imagine a Bosnian woman in Ottoman-Sarajevo longing for her lover, one must think of one's own lover today. Is Fata's longing for Mujo any different? Is your longing for Safa, who accepts Halil's flower over yours, any different?
Anonymity was born from necessity. A collective feeling, the immediate sevdah, distilled from spoken then sung words, lungs, tongue, teeth, lips and the playful expressions human hands produce, designed rotating ear-worms throughout a land and its occupied people, surviving war, displacement, aggression and time itself to carry love old and new. History has shown the page and its ink can be thrown into fire, lost forever. The anonymous villager's song is infinity.
Excerpt: Norman Finklestein's Conclusion from his book Gaza: An Inquest into its Martyrdom*
In A Century of Dishonor, written at the end of the 19th century, Helen Hunt Jackson chronicled the destruction of the Native American population by conscious, willful government policy. The book was largely ignored, then forgotten, and finally rediscovered by later generations ready to hear and bear the truth. Speaking to the fate of the Cherokee nation, which was expelled from one tribal homeland after another and finally stripped of its tribal holdings by the US government, Jackson wrote, “there is no record so black as the record of its perfidy to this nation.” The present volume was modeled after her searing requiem. The author holds out faint hope that it will find an audience among his contemporaries. Still, the truth should be preserved; it is the least that’s owed the victims. Perhaps one day in the remote future, when the tenor of the times is more receptive, someone will stumble across this book collecting dust on a library shelf, blow off the cobwebs, and be stung by outrage at the lot of a people, if not forsaken by God then betrayed by the cupidity and corruption, careerism and cynicism, cravenness and cowardice of mortal man. “There will come a time,” Jackson anticipated, “when, to the student of American history, it will seem well-nigh incredible” what was done to the Cherokee. Is it not certain that one day the black record of Gaza’s martyrdom will in retrospect also seem well-nigh incredible?
*Published in 2018, before the current genocidal onslaught and after the numerous hi-tech killing 'operations' the Israeli government inflicted on the civilians of Gaza, this book was written in formidable defiance of Finklestein's contemporaries and political spectrum. Painstakingly recording each and every atrocity done upon the Palestinians, with meticulous, undeniable scholarship, Norman Finklestein's book once, as he put it, 'collected dust' but in the current crisis has emerged to provide historical context, hard proof, of the anonymous innocent children and women and men who have been killed in cold blood by their oppressive, propped-up terroristic neighbours. The anonymity of the third kind is to look away from the Unspeakable.
It’s also fine to die in our beds
on a clean pillow
and among our friends.
It’s fine to die, once,
our hands crossed on our chests,
empty and pale,
with no scratches, no chains, no banners,
and no petitions.
It’s fine to have a clean death,
with no holes in our shirts,
and no evidence in our ribs.
It’s fine to die
with a white pillow, not the pavement, under our cheek,
with our hands resting in those of our loved ones,
surrounded by desperate doctors and nurses,
with nothing left but a graceful farewell,
paying no attention to history,
leaving this world as it is,
hoping that, someday, someone else
will change it.
Mourid Barghouti*
*Barghouti is currently held in solitary confinement in an Israeli prison. As a leader of the first and second Intifada, Barghouti, like Mayakovsky before him, is both a beautiful poet and fervent activist. The West dates this type of tradition back to the Ancient Romans and Greeks, Cicero and Cato the Younger, but the written word, the beauty of holy prose clashing with human will can be traced back to the Persians, Egyptians, Mayans before them. It is within the nature of humankind to oppose oppression all the while singing.
