Café Europa – Project Asia

The fact that Café Europa was born during the war is telling. Poetry and war should walk separate paths. Yet it is from their intersection that the word-in-action, or poesis, arises. The Greek root of this word is close to the Sanskrit term for compassion – karuna. And in both cases, a command is addressed to the person who wields word/conscience: do something, speak, put the word into action! This is what war fears, whose deadly weapons can reach the lives of people, but never a poem. War burns books and kills poets, as is happening today in Ukraine, Burma or Gaza. And at the same time it gives birth to poetry, makes it mature and immortal. The last word never belongs to war, always to poetry. 

Victoria Amelina, a Ukrainian poet killed by the Russians, wrote that “the reality of war / devours punctuation / plot coherence / coherence / devours / as if a bullet had hit the language /”. And although someone might find a contradiction here, this is when a poet is born. Previously, she successfully debuted as a novelist. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a form of writing other than poetry becomes impossible for her. It is from under the poet’s pen in the war that the words come out: “shards of language / resemble poetry / but it’s not her / and it’s not her either / she’s in Kharkiv / as a volunteer”. The poem which begins to be written in non-poetic form, is giving birth to a new language of expression.

The bullet of war hitting the language can cause various consequences for poetry. Sometimes it is silence, or even a complete inability to write. It happens, as in the case of Czesław Miłosz, that the consequence of this “hit” is the birth of a new poetic language, resulting in masterpieces permanently inscribed in the history of world literature, such as the poems written in 1943: The World, Campo dei Fiori, and the series Voices of Poor People, from which come the famous poems A Song on the End of the World and A Poor Christian Looks at the Ghetto. There are also times when the opposite happens – the war engages poetry in a patriotic spirit, demands loyalism and apologia for sacrifice, and the artistry of the poem falls as a price. It doesn’t have to be this way, as proves by contemporary Ukrainian poetry, which will be featured more than once in Café Europa. On the other hand, this was undoubtedly the case with Polish engaged poetry, published underground during martial law in the 1980s. Much of the anti-war poetry of the beatniks, created for a “just cause” and imbued with a spirit of pacifism and social subversion, has also failed to stand the test of time. It seems to me that this also applies to poetry facing the wars in the former Yugoslavia. It is only the next generation that is proving capable of creating works with a deep, universal dimension. They bear witness perhaps not so much to the war itself, but to its consequences in the form of trauma, both individual and collective, and the fears and prejudices imprinted on social and political life. Among the most interesting representatives of this generation is Croatian poet, author of dramas and essays, editor and activist Monika Herceg.

Monika Herceg was born a year before the outbreak of war in the former Yugoslavia. And because her family lived in the Croatian-Serbian border region of Bania, where ethnic cleansing took place, she experienced homelessness, exile and the fate of refugees very early on. The traumas and reminiscences of these dramas often guide her poetic pen. The poem Europe Never Speaks of the Violence Suffered opens with the words: “After the razor wire, a poem / is easily resurrected / in someone’s sleepless night.” Importantly, however, war does not manifest itself here in military paraphernalia. The girl does not stand in front of uniformed soldiers; her fear is aroused by “illiterate men.” The war and its remnants to this day are the solidification of patriarchal culture, violence, including within the family, xenophobia, alcoholism and post-traumatic stress syndrome. Poetry attempting to resist this is freeing itself from “Balkan specificity.” The universal dimension of the poems, in the case of Monica Herceg aligned with the emancipating voice of women, acquires special strength. Exile to the “wasteland of a foreign tongue” overlaps with the diagnosis of Europe, where “the poem should end with the wound,” and with the image of the dead body of a refugee boy, drifting on the surface of the water of the Mediterranean, an image that has kept people in every latitude awake. 

It would be too easy to associate the emancipatory power of Monica Herceg’s poetic voice only with her membership in the younger generation. Age only highlights something much more important to this poetry that we don’t usually associate with youth, namely a worldview maturity that gives credence to rebellion and is as hungry for knowledge as it is for empathy. Where to look for the sources of this maturity? The daughter of a fighter for the national cause in a post-Yugoslav country, growing up in the countryside, she experienced war wandering, poverty and violence. Although she would have reasons to do so, there is no complaint or self-pity in her voice. She has gone out into the world, lives in Zagreb, is an important figure in the life of her country, both literary (also as a playwright, editor of an influential publishing house) and social (as an activist for women’s rights, refugees and the environment), and has already won international recognition. However, this is not where the truth is expressed, setting the tone for her poems. The emancipation path runs differently in them than it did before. Moving from the countryside to the city, from the provinces to the center, is no longer of such importance; nor is the thing in joining existing protest movements or avant-garde poetics, let alone adapting Western patterns on their own ground. Of course, these are not trivial matters for the poetess, and her attitude is as far as possible from closing herself off to the world and apologia of parochialism. It’s just that simply being enamored with cosmopolitan openness, travel, cultural exchange or the European Union passport is not enough for Monika Herceg. The challenge for her is not to join Europe, but to take responsibility for it. Especially since the world of open borders and peace promised to her generation in the name of “never again” turns out to be an illusion. “Europe, stretched to the point of proximity collapse / Europe, the poem should end with a wound / with a boy floating, / kept above the sea surface / by a war lighter than the salty water.” In this poem, a woman fleeing the rape of a god turned into a bull is resurrected in the insomnia of those seduced by the barbed wire at their countries’ borders, barring refugees from entering Europe. 

Monika Herceg is playing for the highest stakes. Her poems perfectly sense the moment of transition, in which many narratives about the world, behind which stood the power of propaganda, armies and wealth, are being eroded. We are witnessing a radical shift from stories about civilizing barbarians, about Russia or Israel, about the interdependence of technological development with the good life. “History is written by the victors,” we have heard from the classics. “Until then,” Monica Herceg seems to be saying. However, this is not a consolation on her part, rather an awareness of the responsibility and risks involved in creating an alternative story, possibly free of hypocrisy and transcending the fences of tribal cultural divisions . For this to be possible, narratives created not in ideological factories of regime power or fanatical religion, but in a world of democracy and prosperity, must also be reevaluated often being a protective shield for conformity and indifference, defenseless against the banality of evil. Therefore, parables of pacifism in the face of the reality of aggression or beauty separated from goodness and truth are undermined. Feminism is deconstructed, widening the field of struggle to include ecology, but even this becomes insufficient for the author of the poem Hunt, unless we understand women as a metonymy for all beings deprived of citizenship in the realm of the equal and worthy, who “secretly / collapsing / into a single being”. 

Now we have lovostaj, an important expression for the poet and the title for the second volume of her poems, dating back to an Old Slavic root: a protective period for animals, in which humans agree to put down their weapons, to restrain their hunting instincts out of concern for fidelity to their ancestral heritage, for the future of the community, and perhaps even in altruistic concern for others. Again, we can find metonymy here, extending the lovostaj to human rights, free speech, democracy, international law, the environmental charter and other declarations that make up the story of a possible world of dignified coexistence. Only that “This morning/frost has lain heavy / over the dead does / even though / it’s the closed season”. Thanks to the free media, we read every day about dying animal species and the plundering of the environment. Politicians talk about international law and respect for human rights, they feed us stories about the achievements of science and a world without dictatorship and censorship, and we watch on high-definition screens every day, children dying of starvation, bullets by artificial intelligence precisely aimed at civilian objects, and outright genocide. Here is our protective period in the third decade of the twenty-first century – a perverse ouster hiding an enslavement as sophisticated as the construction of a smartphone or the fountain of peace. Out of rebellion and disagreement with such a state of the world is born Monica Herceg’s scream of freedom, finding expression in poetry deeply aware of the challenges posed to her by the ever-new incarnations of the enslaved mind. “Monika Herceg’s poetry,” wrote Olga Tokarczuk, “is like a wound through which the world shines – painful, true, saturated with memory and anger, but also with hope for new stories.” May the voice of the poet from Zagreb be heard wherever Europe, fleeing the rape of the gods, is resurrected in the insomnia of the poem. 

The poems I invited to Café Europa by Monica Herceg are from the volume Closed Season, translated by Marina Veverec, which will be published by the American publishing house Sandorf Passage this fall.

CLOSED SEASON

EUROPE NEVER SPEAKS OF THE VIOLENCE SUFFERED

By Krzysztof Czyżewski