Handover of fire

There is probably no greater burden than hindsight, perhaps only subsequent history is heavier. That's why Milenko Bodirogić, in the contemporary malice of the offered choice between almost stage nostalgia and solitary melancholic dialectic, chooses the latter, and then makes a series of bold artistic decisions. That sequence begins with the rescue of an unnamed boy, already painfully damaged by the anxiety of the Vojvodina plains and his father's predatory adultery, to the geopoetic Tuzla "framed by mountains". There he arrives at the home of his aunt and her husband, mining engineer Mija Divković, "a striking man with the gait of a Lipizzaner". Tuzla, which was once saved by five brigades from Vojvodina, returned the favor and thus justified its good reputation, which the author of the novel authentically describes with the undisguised intention of using these descriptions to win the possibility of the dignity of memory, even if only for a pelzer. This is precisely why the beginning of his Tuzla does not belong to the city that he found in peacetime in his young years, but it is Tuzla that is told through the novel by the beloved characters Mensur and Hajrija, lovers of the Husin Rebellion, and its illiterate, courageous, lifelong heroes who have nothing for their children, heroes to whom the mining vocation, along with the awareness of underground death by mountain shock or methane, also gave an awareness of the above-ground struggle.

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In the twenties of the last century, the miners, from Husin as well as those from Labin, as well as those from Matevana in West Virginia, as well as a little later the miners from the Belgian Borinage, no longer wanted to count only on much-needed luck, but on collective bargaining and, what is even more important, on collective solidarity. On the way from relying on luck to building solidarity, they defended civilization even though it could not even recognize them at that moment. Without losing sight of how important political workers, communists like Mitar Trifunović Uce were in those trade union and strike campaigns, our narrator, who seems to have been wounded multiple times, gives this narrative all the remaining strength, even if she ends it with the bursting of the aorta, the loss of the fish's breath in the exposed pool of the fish market in Bijeljina, the enlargement of Ibra's liver, Alma's phobia of blood, Mensur's loss of mind in May, traces of lime in Hairinia's hair or by the self-sustaining fear of waking up in the grave.

The terrible variety of punishments endured by all those who dared to reach out for solidarity, even if they were greatly weakened by past strength and knocked out teeth, stored in the miner's pocket, did not need evil as evidence of beatings, even if they were crushed by the known state power and the civility of its judges and officials, and by the terrible sadistic rampage of its executioners against the members of their families. The miners then took the place of the former outlaws in the collective tradition, but without the possibility of adventure and escape. Two years after the strike, their struggle was carried over to the pages of New Europe, where Krleža, Moša Pijade and others are asking for a pardon for Jura Kerošević, the leader of the rebellion sentenced to death, with whose words Bodirogić begins his descent into the pit of the 20th century. In its rocks, he finds traces of Man and an extremely daring thought - Man existed, therefore he can become Man again.

Evidence of that Man, of the beauty of kindness and the courage that beauty requires, Bodirogić imprints in places of memory such as hospital rooms, an inn in the immediate vicinity of the mining shaft in Trbovlje, poor basements where three generations of the poor are printed, in resilient mining verses, in the curls of gentle canaries, in the rippled expanse of Pjeskara, which must be loved as it is stepped on - with bare feet. In this feat, Orphelin's color experience helps him. Bodirogić, like Ismet Mujezinović, is an exceptional colorist whose colors, out of contempt for any boundaries, prevail over form, thus bringing the scents of Herzegovina's "greenish-golden žilavka", the natural arrogance of the Padišah turkey, or the joy of tangerines and oranges released from an overturned truck into the Jala river. And every detail on the way is crucial, because this writer is a self-effacing servant of the indigenous wilderness of language, to whom decisions about the places of his shooting should be left, since they are also portals that force the reader to confront precisely when they add to the burden of what he has read. That's why the author establishes rare but resistant places of respite that allow the experienced to be spoken and exchanged with kindred spirits. Libraries and cemeteries play such a role in this book.

In the personal libraries of Hajrije and Bogdan, in different periods, defeat is contemplated as much as victory, because these are places that can withstand the contradiction of Mujezinović's canvas. Self-portrait with a monument about freedom that no longer knows how to sing about Husina miners or the Sixth Eastern Bosnian Brigade. That's why cemeteries, as places of eternal respite, look for a perspective that extends far or at least beyond the moment in which this novel was created. The cemetery in Trnovac, where the wicked rest, will play a special role. It is in Trnovac that Bodirogić makes the most beautiful alliances of love with the past inhabitants of Tuzla, counting that "the ungodly are left with the comfort of plants and trees". All of them together ended up in the shade of a yellow quince or tuna, as the folk song says, which dared to grow near heaven, but whose branches leaned against hell. The eternal shade of this tree frees its residents from high eschatological expectations. In the described cemeteries, but also in Bogdan's ritual renunciation of Tolstoy, Bodirogić's theodicy is heard, a small contribution to the critical interpretation of the reduction of any tradition, even the tradition of faith, to the transfer of its ashes. Bodirogić swears by the tradition, as someone said, like handing over the fire, namely the one that warmed the miners' bones, as well as the one that managed to keep the anti-fascist movement alive in the forests and eagle's nests as well as in the unfree cities.

Of all the periods whose archival and imaginative material Bodirogić weaves, the moment in which he does so is the hardest. It is not just a predictable departure from youth, nor is it a commemorative laying of a wreath, but a kind of last resistance offered with all one's strength, but without the need for faith in victory. It is hard to say whether it is a generational issue. This book is a feat from which you cannot come out with less scars than you entered it. On the contrary, scars are counted, because they are the clearest indicator of resistance.

That is why the invisibility of scars often confuses rather than delights, especially when we remember the gentle and noble character of Mensur Alispahić, on whom all the force of newly discovered affiliations and revised historical accounts fell, which had their most ferocious climaxes in the bones of burning soldiers in Brčanska Malta in 1992, and then dismembered Tuzlaks on Youth Day in 1995 near the Gate, when 71 people were killed, mostly young and 150 people were wounded. Although tortured and exposed to scorn, Mensur until the last moment humanizes every place where, by accident, he witnessed the scenes of the destruction of man, his dismemberment into "mankind". In the song It's just a miner's grave. in the chord of the string bluegrass the grief of Hazel Dickens, the worker's daughter and sister of West Virginia, recalls a miner killed for union activity, whose grave is barely discernible in passing. A song Konjuh mountain preserves the memory of the fallen proletarian, Husina miner Peja Marković. And Mensur, as if the poem itself, takes upon itself the eternal memory of the places of wailing, the gnashing of teeth of young men and women, the breaking of the last thought and the shattered landscape of Tuzla. That's why Mensur's are all alien beings, the living are dead, the dead are forever alive.