“You can easily rebuild houses, but you can’t rebuild people, because there are always invisible scars that remain on people who have gone through horror,” says the poet Goran Simi? (Vlasenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1952). He has just published the anthology My happy days in the asylum (LaBreu, with translation by Simona Škrabec, also author of the epilogue), where he reviews a work that reflects his life, especially the harsh siege of Sarajevo, the city ??where he lived until in 1996 he emigrated to Toronto hosted by Canada, and to which he returned in 2010.
The war is the central key of his poetry based on his experiences and those of his ancestors (his parents were partisans in the Second World War), but he does not do it from the hatred or the exaltation of an univocal culture, but from pain and loss combined with everyday life, seasoned by metaphor. His was a strong and still uncomfortable position, because he is of Serbian origin and, having been able to choose a side – one of his brothers became a Serbian general, while another fought to defend Sarajevo – he chose to stay -se during the siege and work for “a united and multicultural Bosnia”.
The title refers to a sanatorium, “an insane asylum where there are two sides among the patients: those who will be executed when they leave and those who will form the execution squad, and they have an agreement to pretend they are crazy and not have to to go out. It was crazy to survive, after all. Outside there is war, it’s moral chaos, but inside you can agree”. He acknowledges that obviously, “when you get shot at, you insult the mother of the person who shot you, because we are like doves in a hunt. But the feeling is the sorrow and the need for the war to end, and that is why during the war we lived pretending that we had a normal life. We established PEN to bring people together and try to make life normal in abnormal circumstances. It is a necessity in order not to be humiliated”, he recalls of those “four years living in Sarajevo during the siege, looking for water all morning… and food for my two children, trying to protect them”.
Today, he cannot avoid showing solidarity with those who suffer, because “once you experience a war, you see that they are all the same, and I feel sick to my stomach just thinking about what is happening in Palestine or Ukraine, it is a great disruption. I can feel that fear and what it’s like to try to save your life and that of your family, to fight for food, for water, for hospitals”. He assumes that now, as then, wars come from interests that go beyond religion. “My mother could not bear another war, so she died at the beginning of the Bosnian one, she did not understand how the next door neighbor could fight someone like her just because she spoke differently, when we have lived together for so many years. As we say here, your neighbor is closer to you than your own skin.”
His work has wanted to be a “witness, a man who has seen what has happened, even before the war and everything, and I want to give poetry beauty in the midst of so much horror, even if it seems paradoxical and difficult. You have to have a certain distance, because you want to forget, and at the same time you don’t want to and you can’t”. We must remember the past, “we cannot pretend that nothing has happened, because many things have happened, there have been many crimes”.
Can it ever be left behind, a war? “You can pretend that the war is over, as I say in a poem that begins: “The war is over. At least it seems so. / That’s what this morning’s newspaper says.” There is a lot of pain, and a lot of truth, because new wars replace the old ones, and we don’t even have time to memorize the suffering of the old one, which means we haven’t learned much from history.”
Simi? likes to be translated into minoritized languages, and is especially happy to have been translated into Catalan, because he remembers during the siege of Sarajevo the solidarity of the city reached them, and he even came close to coming then, but instead he emigrated to Canada, advised by his friend Susan Sontag.
In Toronto he also started writing in English, because “even though he had previously published six books and several children’s plays, there if you don’t write in English it’s like you don’t exist”. He wrote in this language From Sarajevo with sorrow (From Sarajevo with pain) and his work was also published in Finland, Denmark or Norway (in Spanish in 2008 Penas del immigrante was published, a translation by Verónica Garza Flores, at Lyricalmyrical Press, restricted circulation in Toronto).
With his poetry, Simi? defends the legacy of his city, because “before the war, Sarajevo was the epicenter of culture, where there were great theaters, the main record companies and publishers, and the war took it away. They even burned the National Library, to burn all the memory of life together and to be able to start national cultures of each State. It was like my country was burning.” “My position is a united and multicultural Bosnia. I don’t want to be a national, but a citizen”.
This Wednesday in Barcelona he participates in the commemoration organized by PEN Català for the International Day of the Persecuted Writer at Cercle Artístic Sant Lluc, with Simona Škrabec and the president of PEN Català, Laura Huerga.