Pain area

Ministarstvo boli

Coming from a country that no longer exists, teaching a language that is fragmented, I stick out my tongue like a fairy tale dragon, and it forks: Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Slovenian, Macedonian…
Can a language so painful, a language that has never learned to describe a reality as complex as one's inner experience of reality, tell stories?
It all started this way. Or that way. They did this, went there, and ended up in the Netherlands. The exiles' narratives are dateless. So much happened in the brief "post-war" period that their mental clocks broke under the weight. Everything broke. Place and time became divided into "before" and "after," life into "here" and "there." Suddenly, they were without witnesses, parents, family, friends, or even the everyday people they had come to reconstruct their lives from. Without these reliable intermediaries, they were thrown back into themselves.
In a media-driven world, nothing is real. Memory passes through many intermediaries, appearing as Juliette Binoche or a red, white, and blue woven bag, translating my personal pain into my own language. Only this one thing is real.
Pain is silent and useless, but the only real witness.

2023-05-01

北京日报出版社

Ideal Country

320

9787547744482