New Voices from Serbia: Shot by Both Sides

“After some forty years of communist rule and almost fifteen years of the nationalist and populist regime of Slobodan Milosevic, new Serbian culture can hardly be anything other than "the voice of the defeated". It is the voice of those who felt most directly the devastation of the nineteen-nineties: wars and the unimaginably swift and fundamental impoverishment of all levels of society apart from the newly arrived mafiocracy.

The country's isolation at that time was far more systematic than during the "soft", post-Tito communism of the nineteen-eighties. In those days the urban youth of Yugoslavia still considered itself an integral part of the western world, participating as far as it could in its subcultural scene, but also in the "classical" art-scene of Europe and North America.

At first sight, the worst is over: wars, the populist dictatorship, hyperinflation, and total poverty. But, that only means that what is coming is "transition", as an East European purgatory, rudimentary capitalism of the semi-mafia type, corporatism in everything, including arts.

Luckily, it seems that new Serbian literature and art is sufficiently vital to withstand this assault as well, just as it did the previous ones.They are after all, let us not forget, people who grew up with the song "Shot By Both Sides"!”

Teofil Pancic, Journalist and Publicist / Translated by Celia Hawkesworth

The Voice of a Generation
20th November 2003 / SALON DES ARTS, London

Vladimir Arsenijevic, Milena Markovic, Hajdana Baletic and Aleksandar Zograf, visited London in november 2003 for an evening of presentations and talks at the Salon des Arts. They presented their views and experiences of the conflict in former Yugoslavia and how it has influenced their lives, visions, and writings.

The evening was hosted by the novelist and literary editor of The Idler , Tony White and Ada Gadomski, and started with individual artist's presentation.

The strip-cartoonist Aleksandar Zograf recorded the bizarre and tragic happenings of life in Yugoslavia in the Nineties, with his unique intelligent and witty mixture of twisted fiction and hypnogogic vision.

Milena Markovic, whose plays tell sometimes in naturalistic, sometimes expressionistic way about the consequences of the collapse of a value system, won the biggest laughs of the evening with an energetic, tragi-comic and true story about her mother (see picture).

The actress Branka Katic (star of Emir Kusturica's classic 1998 movie Black Cat, White Cat ) read extracts from Vladimir Arsenijevic's forthcoming novel Ishmail, which documents the arrival of punk in Belgrade and the disappearance of a 1960s avant-garde.

The actress Vesna Spasojevic read excerpts from the best selling novel by Hajdana Baletic Take me to another place, which deals with young people's struggles for an urban lifestyle in wartime Belgrade, and themes of emigration.

The presentations were followed by a discussion between the authors and the public about the experiences of surviving years of war, the challenges facing writers and artists in the post-Milosevic Serbia and the options for a way forward: international exchange, self-publishing and independent publishing houses for experimental and non-nationalistic fiction (as Arsenijevic is doing with Rende).

This event was part of RELIGION, ART AND WAR EXIBITION - A series of events related to this subject, explored through use of different media, from spoken word to film, drama and an open debate in In Aid of UNICEF and in Partnership with Imperial College London. www.salondesarts.org