“You can easily rebuild houses, but you cannot rebuild people, because there are always invisible scars left on people who have gone through horror,” says poet Goran Simi? (Vlasenica, Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1952). He has just published the anthology Els meus dies feliços al manicomi (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 who in 1996 emigrated to Toronto welcomed by Canada, and to which he returned in 2010.
War is the central key to his poetry based on his experiences and those of his ancestors (his parents were partisans in the Second World War), but he does so not from hatred or the exaltation of a univocal culture, but from pain. and loss combined with everyday life, seasoned by metaphor. His was a strong and even uncomfortable position, because he is of Serbian origin and, having been able to choose sides – one brother of his became a Serbian general, while another fought to defend Sarajevo – he chose to stay during the siege and work for “a united and multicultural Bosnia.”
The title refers to a sanatorium, “a madhouse 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 make it appear that they are crazy and not have to leave. It was crazy to survive, after all. Outside there is war, it is moral chaos, but inside you can make an agreement.” He recognizes that evidently, “when a projectile is fired at you, you insult the mother of the person who shoots you, because we are like pigeons on a hunt, but the feeling is sorrow and the need for the war to end, and that is why during the war we lived as if we were leading a normal life. We established the PEN to bring people together and try to live a normal life in abnormal circumstances. It is a necessity to not be humiliated,” he recalls of those “four years living in Sarajevo during the siege, searching for water all morning… and food for my two children, trying to protect them.”
Today he cannot help but sympathize with those who suffer, because “once you experience a war, you see that they are all the same, and I have a stomach ache just thinking about what is happening in Palestine or Ukraine, it is a great disruption. I can feel that fear and what it means 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 couldn’t stand another war, so she died at the beginning of the Bosnian war, she didn’t understand how her next-door neighbor could fight someone like her just because she spoke differently, when we had lived together for so many years. As we say, your neighbor is closer to you than your own skin.”
His work has wanted to be a “testimony, a man who has seen what has happened, even before the war, and I want to give poetry beauty amidst so much horror even though it may seem paradoxical and difficult. You have to have a certain distance, because you want to forget, and at the same time you neither want nor can.” We must remember the past, “we cannot pretend that nothing has happened, because many things have happened, there have been many crimes.”
Can a war ever be left behind? “You can make it look like the war is over, as I say in a poem that begins: ‘The war is over. At least it seems that way. / That’s what this morning’s newspaper says. There is a lot of pain, and a lot of truth, because new wars replace the previous ones, and we do not even have time to memorize the suffering of the previous one, which means that we have not learned much from history.
Simi? likes to be translated into minority languages, and he is especially happy to have been translated into Catalan, because he remembers that during the siege of Sarajevo they received solidarity from the city, and he was even on the verge of coming then, but instead After that, he emigrated to Canada on the advice of his friend Susan Sontag.
In Toronto he also began to write in English, because “although he had previously published six books and several children’s plays, there if you don’t write in English it is as if you did not exist.” He wrote in that language From Sarajevo with sorrow and his work was also published in Finland, Denmark and Norway (in Spanish in 2008 Penas del inmigrante was published, a translation by Verónica Garza Flores, in the Lyricalmyrical publishing house. Press, circulation restricted to 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 publishing houses, and the war took it away. They even destroyed the National Library, to burn all the memory of their 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 he is participating in Barcelona in the commemoration organized by PEN Català for the International Day of the Persecuted Writer at the Cercle Artístic Sant Lluc, together with Simona Škrabec and the president of PEN Català, Laura Huerga.
Catalan version, here
