You cannot heal yourself

In 2007, the Novi Sad writer Milenko Bodirogić founded the publishing house Orfelin, which publishes works of fantastic literature and books with a special graphic approach (which is why they are separate aesthetic artifacts). He published four books "for children and the sensitive" (Exiled beings, Rebels, Disappeared i About plants, animals and landscapes) illustrated by Novi Sad artists (Ivica Stevanović, Miloš Vujanović, Dragan Bibin, Vanja Todorić...). For Exiled beings In 2011, he received the "Politikino zabavnik" award ("The best work intended for young people") and the Belgrade Book Fair award ("Children's book of the year"). Bodirogić's first novel In forests and mountains (2019) was rated as one of the most independent novels of contemporary literature in this language. His second novel Sandblasting sand (2024) ranks him, wrote Miljenko Jergović, among the most important writers of his generation.

"WEATHER" We start a conversation while around us, but also in us (I believe), twist. In Novi Sad, probably the largest number of citizens in the history of this city took to the streets. In the cities of this country, for months, the largest mass movements in Europe take place. I don't see how else we could start a conversation about literature, here and now, but rather by looking at what is, from killing people under the canopy of the Railway Station, happening in this country.

MILENKO BODIROGIC: Bertolt Brecht, who had an immense influence on me, has one poem, almost programmatic - To those born after us, that's what it's called. In it, he wonders, I quote from memory: "What kind of time is it when talking about trees is a crime, because it implies keeping silent about so many crimes." So, if we want to talk about trees, or about books, we must first talk about crimes, and what happened in Novi Sad, at the railway station, is precisely murder, a crime. Brecht wrote that poem, if I'm not mistaken, in 1938 in exile, Nazism was already raging, and its first verse reads: "Truly, I live in dark times!" Such is this time, and our first impulse, like Brecht's then, must be to shed light on it, to say that we are aware of evil deeds and that they cannot hide in the dark. The amazing student protests do exactly that, they say: we see, we bear witness, you can't do it with impunity and that's why we stand up.

Is there a connection between what's happening now and here with your new novel Sandblasting sand?

U Sandblasting sand I was particularly interested in the "national guard", I'm talking about the very beginnings of the first Yugoslavia, swindlers, informers, people from the state corrupted by concessions for coal exploitation or salt trade, officially outside the police and military structures, and whose task was extreme violence, murders, beatings, rapes, robberies, sowing fear and breaking solidarity. In the National Guard, I saw the seeds of what would emerge in the 1990s Tigers, Yellow wasps, White eagles, what weren't all those paramilitary formations called... In the form of the National Guard I also saw those drug butchers who appeared here four or five years ago, instead of selling salt the state gave them concessions for narcotics, in that form I now also see those people under hoods who were initially sent to the students and who are still kept ready, on a short leash.

I, of course, do not know how the rebellion will end, no one knows that in major social changes, not even their actors, but the student energy enchanted me, they are not the obscurantists, the Lithians, which, to be honest, I was afraid of, because they have been poisoned for too long, a brilliant intellect and brilliant wit float above them, and above all, an awareness of society, that exiled concept, of community.

It's been five years since your last novel In forests and mountains, and now we got Sandblasting sand, novel less than 200 pages. Do you write difficultly?? Do you write in some kind of rhythm??

I don't have any rhythm in writing and publishing. I just walk, walk, that's very important, I observe, look and remember, and those memories include my life and other people's lives, the way I once heard them, narrated, in passages, fragments, what the interlocutors wanted to tell me and what I sensed behind what they said, as well as everything that I read, that formed me, like Brecht's Ballads of the Jewish Charity Maria Zanders, like the opening verses The Iliads, like one sentence spoken by Camil Effendi in Andrićeva To the cursed courtyard when Friar Petar assures him that he will get well, which roughly reads: "I can't, good man, get well, because I'm not sick, I'm just like this, and you can't get well by yourself." After the novel In forests and mountains I thought I wouldn't write anything more, now, after Sandblasting sand, I think the same. As a boy, I was amazed by Vuk's division of folk poetry into male and female, which meant epic and lyrical, but I was really touched by those songs that did not fall into any of those categories and which Vuk called "on the border", that is, ballads like Hasanaginice or The Deaths of Omer and Merima. Later, when I read Brecht's ballads and through them François Villon's ballads, I wanted to be "on the border", to not belong to any of the worlds. I'm talking about the experience of my early years, and now I think that my novels are actually ballads, and so I worry about their every sentence, its sound and rhythm. They can't be in long form, it's too hard for both me and the readers, it's clear to me from the experience of writing, since I reject, I would say, two-thirds of what is written. I know the rest almost by heart, like Bradbury's characters Fahrenheit 451, as befits ballads.

You believe, you say, yes after Sand you will not write anymore (You thought that too afterwards. The forest, pa, luckily, some held a thought). Why do you think that??

When I write about the revolutionary uprising in 1941 or the Husin Rebellion in 1920, the partisans and rebel miners would have to become active subjects again from the object of historical, political and ideological observation, today they are mostly disliked. That is my intention. And it is a kind of counter-memory, opposed to the prescribed and dominant, hegemonic memory, it is the memory of the denounced, oppressed and defeated, and the true creators of history. With each new book I feel that I am not succeeding in this, that I myself am defeated. In truth, I am still comforted by the fact that I am in good company, the only one I want to be in.

Your novel follows three narrative and time lines: the first line follows the hero's upbringing in Tuzla, Yugoslavia, war and post-war period; the second line is the story of Husina miners; finally, the third line is the present in which the narrator follows the tracks of his heroes all the way to Slovenia. What holds those three lines together?

Those three time and narrative lines are actually mutually conditioned. Suppression of the Husin rebellion, through the application of constitutive violence, violence that must destroy society and its impulses of solidarity and divide it into conflicting groups, that suppression of the rebellion is actually a matrix that, long prepared and branched out, will finally go completely wild, brought to a crescendo, and destroy Yugoslavia as well. In that bloody final, the nationalisms of the former Yugoslav peoples will feed each other. Divided and subjected to torture, as Mensur says in Sandblasting sand, police and military, religious, media, bureaucratic and administrative, we became strangers and erased, and for those for whom it was not enough to align, who still dreamed dreams of unity and brotherhood, a bloody feast was arranged for the National Guard.

After the rebellion, those who organized and carried out the massacre of the Hussain miners will not be punished, on the contrary, they will be promoted and decorated; Chief Dimitrije Grudić was decorated with the Order of Saint Sava, he will get even more lucrative jobs, as even today here, in the territory of our former country, criminals are celebrated and declared heroes.

Far from it., however, that the novel is exhausted in that motif, no matter how much he, otherwise, was important. The motif of friendship and the dissolution of friendship is equally important?

U Sandblasting sand The Husin revolt is the central axis, but it is also a novel about friendship, about the city, about crimes, about books, music and pictures, about words, as they are lunatik i bastard, about the fear of converts, and if you want a novel, as the narrator would say, Fr fucking love. If there were some metaphysical bookkeeper, who would add up and subtract all his inputs and outputs, the balance would be extremely uninventive - life.

I think that true friendships never completely disintegrate, something of the friend always remains in us, whether we want it or not, even after the breakup and that residue in ourselves, if we are honest, we will easily recognize it. It is the same with the fateful friendship of Mensur, Bogdan and the narrator. If you read carefully, Mensur's mother Emina talks about this when, after four decades, she finds something of Fakir (the narrator's nickname in the novel) in her dead son, she actually finds that hidden, lonely place of his comfort called the sand of the sandbox, and Bogdan, who initiates the split and is eloquent and imaginative in his insults, remains permanently marked by the friendship triangle.

There is also the amazing figure of Hajrija.. I don't remember ever being in literature, silverberry, came across at least one similar character...

The narrator says about her Hajrija was my God., the only one I have known... That's all I can say about Hajria.

There is a certain similarity. - let's call it structural - between your previous novel In forests and mountains i Sandblasting sand. What is the relationship between those two novels??

Storytelling in a novel In forests and mountains is almost linear, it flows from the introduction of the two actors, Rajić and the narrator, to Rajić's death, just as the excursions in 1941 follow the flare-up of the partisan uprising from Fruška Gora, through Bosnia and Croatia, to Slovenia. At the same time, it is "framed" by one framework story, the one about Rajić's legacy and his grave. A careful reader should not miss the parallel with Andrić The damn courtyard, in which there is also such a frame, where the items left behind by Friar Peter are listed, primarily his tools, and everything ends with a fresh mound in the whiteness of the snow.

U Sandblasting sand is, on the other hand, a broken structure, so much so that I sometimes feared that I was demanding too much from the readers, that they would perish in the space-time vortex. Fortunately, as I learn from the reactions that reach me, that did not happen. Both novels, however, are strongly marked by melancholy, a fruitful, I hope, vulnerability and feeling of not belonging, a kind of orphanhood because, as the gentle Ćamil Effendi would say, it cannot heal itself.

Miljenko Jergović recently wrote about the relationship between those two novels Sandblasting sand not a continuation of the previous one In forests and mountains, but as if within it, it is created by the fact that in the middle of walking on that vanished land, one area is suddenly focused, and in it one city.

Is there an ideological framework from which you write? It was addressed to your previous novel "objection from the right" yes it is, do not like, Yugoslav. Do you understand that objection?? I ask because the same thing would happen. "remark" could also refer Sandblasting sand.

Of course, I do not run away from such remarks, my novels are Yugoslav and red. Perhaps it is best to return to Brecht again now. He was accused of high treason in the German Reich, his books were burned, he emigrated and before Nazism retreated to Denmark, Sweden, Finland, from Russia he went to America and there, in 1947, he was brought before the infamous philistine Committee for Suppression of Anti-American Activities. The Federal Republic of Germany did not want to receive him, and the key word of Brecht's work, as noted by his friend Walter Benjamin, was friendliness, kindness. Did Brecht's persecutors, those in the Reich and those in America, know kindness? Walter Benjamin did, an asthmatic with a post-infarction heart, fled to the Pyrenees and killed himself in September 1940, fearing that the Spanish police would hand him over to the Gestapo. The question of engagement, even in literature, is - will we be with the persecutors, or with the persecuted, because the world, even today, again, seems to be ignorant of kindness.