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"POST-MODERN TRANSFIGUARTION OF THE DRAMATIC LANDSCAPE
Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro

COLLOQUE INTERNATIONAL
"LE THÉÂTRE D'AUJOURD'HUI EN BOSNIE-HERZÉGOVINE, CROATIE, SERBIE ET AU MONTÉNÉGRO"

14 -15 novembre 2003, Institut d'Etudes slaves. 9 rue Michelet 75006 Paris

If we try to reexamine the twentieth century European history then we may discover that the last century of the millennium could be remembered mostly for two things: for the most devastating wars fought on European territory, and as a result of these wars, for the continuous redrawing of the nation's borders on the European map. From the very beginning to the very end of the last century European nations, especially those Slavic nations that occupy most of the Balkan peninsula, in the name of "blood and soil" fought, and some of them still fight, each other for new lands and territories. In that battle for dominance over the others, mostly over the neighbors, many nations fall apart, the old "empires" were replaced with new ones, some walls were torn down while new ones and new boundaries appeared on the fragile ever-changing European map. What was once history was erased and became part of the individual memory or as Dzevad Karahasan would put it, “the life was removed from the “real” into the “ideal”.” In that merciless process of transformations the Balkan nations became not only a metaphor for their darkness and self destruction, but became a metaphor for the European dark spots and quasars as well, for European inability to keep itself together.

What were the processes (historical, political, social, economic, cultural, artistic) that brought about the violent disintegration, fragmentation, and collapse of what was once Yugoslavia, common home to many Slavic and non-slavic nations? What was the drama that we witness in that “land of Demons”.

While the Balkan nations lived with their illusion called “brotherhood and unity” and while the Eastern European countries strived for their freedom from the dominance of the Stalinist ideology the western democracies were experiencing another cultural process. During the last two decades of the last century the West, especially America and its undefined culture, was experiencing a very specific process. That was the rapid expansion and dominance of Postmodernism - the most influential and (as any other "ism" in its own time) the most aggressive artistic "non-ideological" ideology and/or aesthetic in the social, intellectual, cultural, and artistic life of the past two decades. Significantly enough, then, and still today, there was no clear idea what Postmodernism really was, and interestingly enough, there is still no definition of Postmodernism. Everything is in the air – floating. Poor truth when everything can be truth.

The main ideologist of Postmodernism, Ihab Hassan, in the Spring 1982 issue of Performing Arts Journal in his article The Question of Postmodernism meditated that no clear consensus existed among scholars about the meaning of Postmodernism, and therefore there could be no consistent theoretical explication of it. But nevertheless, he stressed that Postmodernism "denotes temporal linearity and connotes belatedness, even decadence," that "it is anti-formal, anarchic, or de-creative," and questioned: "Is postmodernism only a literary tendency or is it also a cultural phenomenon, perhaps even a mutation in western Humanism?" In order to throw more light on Postmodernism, to distinguish it from Modernism which by definition is a priori included in Postmodernism, Hassan focused on certain characteristics of Post Modernism, presenting a table where he contrasted Modernism with Postmodernism, Hierarchy with Anarchy, Mastery/Logos with Exhaustion/Silence, Creation/Totalization with Decreation/Deconstruction, Synthesis with Antithesis, Centering with Dispersal, Root/Depth with Rhizome/Surface, Paranoia with Schizophrenia, Determinacy with Indeterminacy etc. Furthermore, in his attempt to articulate the cultural concept of postmodernism Hassan wrote:

“...Postmodernism depends on the violent trans-humanisation of the earth, wherein terror and totalitarianism, fractions and wholes, poverty and power summon each other. The end may be cataclysm and/or the beginning of genuine planetization....As an artistic and philosophical, erotic, and social phenomenon Postmodernism veers toward open, playful, optative, disjunctive, displaced or indeterminated forms, a discourse of fragments, an ideology of fracture, a will of unmaking, an invocation of silences. “

Reviewing these notes from a distance in the light of the events in what was once Yugoslavia, it seems today that Hassan, in articulating fundamental elements of Postmodernism simultaneously anticipated a specific sociopolitical, cultural, and artistic process which was already secretly underway on the multiethnic stage in former Yugoslavia. That process, which expressed itself in forms and with characteristics similar to those of Postmodernism, was taking place not only in intellectual and cultural circles, but on many other levels of society. Unfortunately, that process was experienced many times before that in tragic forms and as a tragic consequence of the nationalist blindness and madness in that corner of the world. Its name was well known: “Balkanization."

Let me briefly clarify this similarity.

Balkanization, that process of “mixing the taste of honey and blood” as a methodology and politics of destruction and disintegration of the Balkan’s cultural entity, as stated earlier on many other occasion and in many essays written by this author, is a "genuine" invention introduced to our occidental culture in the period of Romanticism and national awakening and as a process of disjunctioning and fractionating of the Ottoman Empire at the end of nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Consequently, for a century and a half Balkanization has shown that it is a retrograde state of mind and a de-creative process which violently transforms society and brings destruction, deconstruction, death and disappearance of existing reality. As a result of this partition, fragmentation, and confrontation of the Ottoman Empire a new word was invented. Thus, according to the New Webster Dictionary of American Language, to Bal-kan-ize means:

1. to divide (a country, territory etc.) into small, quarrelsome, ineffectual states (units).

2. to divide ( groups, areas, etc.) into contending and usually ineffectual factions; a movement to balkanize a minority voters.

Furthermore, Balkanization means deconstruction, disintegration, fragmentation, confrontation, self-orientation, isolation, break up of a whole into smaller and often hostile units, and return to experienced forms from the past.

So, when we consider the meanings of the fundamental elements that characterize both Postmodernism and Balkanization, then very easy a conclusion can be drawn that Postmodernism and Balkanization express the same defeatist horizon of dehumanization and, as Hassan would put it, veer "back to the big bang, far to the quasars, or inside to the black holes." Or: to paraphrase Richard Schechner, who recognized the danger of Postmodernist ideology and the approaching catastrophe of fractioning at that time (1982), “Postmodernism is downfall, decadence, nihilism and the end of humanism.” With the recent actual reappearance of Balkanization, which brought terror, violence, cruel fracturing of the human community, death and accordingly final silence, we witnessed practical realization of
Postmodernism in our reality.

But it is fair to be said that for many, this process of disintegration and death was seen as a liberation. In the light of this process of changing lands and territories when, as already said, many nations fall apart, when the old "empires" were replaced with new ones, and the walls were torn down, the word freedom was the most used and abuse word.

For example back then, the transformation Eastern Europe symbolized in the fall of the Berlin wall for most of the Eastern European Countries who lived under strong Soviet dominance meant, as Adam Michnik will put it later, a leap "From dictatorship to democracy, from monopoly to pluralism, from the status of a satellite country to a sovereign country, from the Warsaw Pact to NATO, from economy of scarcity and planned economy to a market economy and economic growth, from censorship to freedom, from closed borders to open borders, from state ownership to privatization."

Today, almost fifteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall which symbolized division and oppression and more than ten years after the death of Yugoslavia, a truly multiethnic and multicultural country at the heart of the Balkans, I have a distinct image of these events in my mind. That is a piece of cement, a stone taken from the rubble of the Berlin Wall, well packed and sold for five American dollars, laying on a bookshelf in a friend's office in a Distinguished American University. The friend is a distinguished university professor of Humanities. I am sitting in that office, in the Fall of 1990, looking at that piece of "memorabilia", a symbol of a new freedom, and I did't know what that “freedom” is going to bring to the people who, I believed, lived together once in my corner of the world, called Yugoslavia.

Does the freedom sings in the same powerful way the slaves and oppressed sung about it?
Back then in 1990, sitting in that professor's office I did not see that just in a year from that moment the country where I was coming from will disintegrate and will be turned into rubles and pieces of burnt bones and smashed stones, that no one would like to pack, buy and sell as "memorabilia" of a "wasteland in which century old hatred is taking its toll." That is unfortunately how that part of the world is regularly seen through the inaccurate Western blurry glasses.

In that moment I also could not imagine that in contrast to the transformation of the countries of the Eastern Europe, Yugoslavia will be a subject of a typical postmodern fragmentation, violent transfiguration, and dehumanization. I could not imagine that many of its citizens will be displaced, turned into appatrides, refugees, into people who are losing their identity. “The more we are out the more distant that place is from us, and we from it” Milos Lazin, a friend in exile, once said.

Also, in that time of hope for better life that the new freedom brings, unfortunately I didn't see the new invisible walls that started to rise on European soil for the people of that brutally killed country. One on hand there were the walls that separated the people from Former Yugoslavia from each other, and on the other, there is still one more dangerous wall, one who separates these people from Europe. I did not see the destructive and brutal "beauty" of post-modernism.

At that time no one thought that the arts, and theatre and drama as well, with the arrival of freedom will undergo a substantial transformation as well. Since then, many plays were written in these new emerged self-centered countries, remarkable drama has happened on this archipelago of small “new democracies” who have surrounded themselves by new erected walls marked by nationalism and intolerance, walls that reinforced their narcissism of small differences.

How did authors and theatre practitioners in that unhappy corner of the world respond to these new challenges? How did the playwrights address this new freedom? What was the role of theatre in that disintegrative process? What did theatre artists (playwrights, directors, actors, scholars, etc.) do to prevent or to enforce that destruction? What does theatre landscape look like after that collapse? What does the dramatic expression in the new emerged democracies mean toady? How does it speak to its own new audiences?

Today we know that Balkanization as an old/new process on the territory of what was once Yugoslavia began on the one hand as a recycling of the national mythology (Hassan would say that history is palimpsest), and on the other as a disassemblage (a will of unmaking in Hassan's terms), of the communist federal system which was hidden behind the republics' outcry for independence. This return to national values, to the ethnic roots, this "the ideology of fracture," which will later bring a violent discourse between the fragments, began as many remember today in literature in the first half of the eighties with few novels and plays and continued for more than a decade into the first years of the existence of the new Balkan countries.

Some of the theatre practitioners and playwrights followed their ethnic impulses and their blood, fought for their soil, choose "to belong" to theirs – refused the others, and consequently got stock in their nationalistic trenches. Nothing new in Europe. They became adversaries and advocates of their small countries affirming once again the "beauty" of the "soil and the blood", blending their communist's and nationalist's sentiments into new breed: war profiteers.

On the other hand there was a new, younger generation of playwrights who grew up and appeared mostly in the newly emerged small feuds on the ruins of former Yugoslavia. This generation of playwrights, addresses the issue of disintegration and defeat more directly and in terms that are closer to their contaminated ground, with less optimism, less utopian images and more post-modern nihilism.

Their response to the European tradition of ethnic intolerance and confrontations in the name of “blood and soil” are disturbing. They create their own, closed, worlds of figures and characters on the outskirts of the war theatre but within the tradition of wars for dominance over the others - mostly over the neighbours. Those worlds are filled with brutality and vulgarity, desperation and cynicism, and no sense of love, hope, or any other form of compassion dominate the landscape. What really exists is brutal sex, violence, drugs, and death. Significantly enough everything is within their own ethnic tradition, mythology and national heritage, while the other cultures are seen exclusively as enemies, destroyers, and conquerors. It is a bitter and shocking picture of a desperate and devastated environment with no exit for its forthcoming new generation that even does not like to know about the others.

In the plays of these new playwrights dominate, as pointed out, brutality, violence, despair, vulgarity, and bad taste. Instead of sharpening their criticism and dissatisfaction with the current violent transfiguration of the land, which brought the crime, prostitution, lawfulness and overall corruption of the society, they unfortunately remind trapped by that same cancerous environment. In spite of their personal critical stands and personal opposition to the current despotic and corrupt regimes they in fact without being able to reach needed critical and aesthetic distance in their plays, become part of that brutal and contaminated world that serves that new god that Ivan Klima names – entertainment, profit, and fast success. That is how “the aesthetics of blood and sperm“ was born.

Almir Ibrishimovic’ Balkan’s Devil Shame and How to make a performance, Shovagovic’s Brick and Birdies, Biljana Srbljanovic’s Belgrade´s Trilogy and Family Stories are paradigmatic representatives of these new generation of playwrights who write self-oriented self-confined plays that correspond with their own reality losing their step with the world at large. In their plays and productions that appeared on the grounds of former Yugoslavia, now fragmented, fractured, disunited and devastated landscape, they portrayed a world which is thematically local, parochial, self-contained, and aesthetically based on the twentieth Century realistic tradition.

On the other hand many of those theatre artists and playwrights from the older generation, who fought for decades for broadening the landscape of democracy and individual freedoms, were urged under the new very repressive nationalistic regimes and circumstances to leave their countries and to continue their work in exile. Some of them like Dzevad Karahasan, Kaca Celan, Slobodan Snajder in real exile, while others like Filip David in internal exile [can we say self imposed exile] within his own new emerged “democracy”. Many of these authors continued to raise their voices in an outcry against the disintegration, against the fragmentation against the walls between them and their friends from the other parts of their, once common country. In their plays like Boat of Fools, [Filip David], Snake Skin , Innes and Denise [Slobodan Snajder], Eastern Diwan, Povuceni Andjeo, [Dzevad Karahasan] they tried to critically see the poignant reality, to expresses their deep discontent with the violent transfiguration of our humanity and to suggest their audiences to look beyond our differences, to look for a New World based on different principles of social structures and social justice. To look for a multi-cultural and tolerant world. They were envisioning an environment that crosses the borders and tries to remove newly raised walls. They were different and therefore had to go in exile. In their plays under the ashes one can discover a spark with bitter optimism and utopian sentiment, the world that is still one unified whole, but one that has been removed from the real into the ideal and one that exists only in their mythology.

Many of these intellectuals and influential public figures of that period, believed that divisions according to ethnic lines and destruction in the name of blood and soil were of the past. To many of them the future seemed brighter. Unfortunately, history proved them wrong. All those ghosts from the shameful past reappeared on the complex and ethnically-confrontational Yugoslavian stage in forms not seen before in Europe, which seemed incapable of stopping this dance macabre. They might have singled out the evil and pleaded for love again, but obviously aware that there is no more time for love in the time of death, they did not respond to the horror in a predictable way.

In that fragmented landscape Eastern Diwan, Snake skin and Boat of fools are not only brought together as scripts written by authors who have opposed the postmodern fragmentation, who ended up in exile, real or metaphorical, but also as plays that expressed from three different points of view the violent postmodern transfiguration of the Yugoslav landscape and its aftermath.

Karahasn’s Eastern Diwan was written at the very end of eighties and interestingly enough never produced in Bosnia although preformed at the Sarajevo MESS festival in the spring of 1990 just one year before the war started. Eastern Diwan explores the relationship between the individual and the state, the intellectual and the tyrant, the freedom and oppression and in imaginative and metaphoric ways announces and anticipates the disintegration and transfiguration of the Yugoslavian multicultural landscape at the time. The play is based on the central part of his novel with the same name and in structural terms it follows very simple narrative discourse. In fact the play has a form of a nightmarish flash back and takes place in Baghdad in 922. Gazvan, the Emir of the Caliph’s Guard or the chief of the police in today’s terms, and loyal to the Caliph and his policy of repression, has disturbing reminiscent in the twilight of the destruction of his world represented by his prison tower, at time of uncertainty and political turbulence. As reaction to a serious of shocking and mysterious violent events, inexplicable deaths, murders, suicides, and riots Gazvan in his investigation to find the rebel and the perpetrator of the crime discovers that all these events are linked in some elusive way to the poet Al – Haladj, a mystic and philosopher. The individual, the intellectual, the free man becomes a treat to the system, to the existing order. The state, the Caliphate, the entire world is brought to the verge of explosion and is in a state of danger. Gazvan has to preserve the order and to save it.

Gazvan that man of law and order, that man of iron fist, who has designed even his prison tower according to his world view and beliefs, where everything resembles the best of the worlds in his ideal option, “discovers” the conspiracy and infiltrating himself and his people in, tries to save his authoritarian vertically structured world. And in that rigorous attempt to save his prison tower, his closed world and closed vision, Gazvan in fact with his riggidness destroys his ideal world of order. The entire system – prison tower falls apart – its inhabitants in long refugee like lines leave that damn space and the death, that continues companion in human life inhabit the fractured and fragmented world. The last image of black birds, and black snow falling over the prison tower, and an ultimate final silence just in the most impressive way anticipate the forthcoming fragmentation of then still unified country and once again reinforce Ibn Hasan postmodern ideal – back to the black whole, to the quasars.

There where Eastern Diwan ends Snajder’s Snake Skin begins. It begins in the ruins, on an isolated fragment of human existence, and it begins in an environment which is left after the destruction and disintegration. Snake Skin that poignant and disturbing theatrical discourse on human metamorphosis created in 1994 and never performed in Croatia begins in fact under the piles of rubble in an abandoned hospital morgue, which was once an autopsy lab somewhere in war-torn Bosnia. Snajder uses this tragedy of destruction as a core of the topographical and chronological landscape, as a metaphor in his profound depiction on the violent transformation of humanity in Europe and brings together three victims of the Balkan madness, a variety of religious, historical, and mythical figures, there and a number of animals hollowing in the distance.

Snajder’s dramatic narrative brings a world in which fiction and reality blend in mind-boggling ways, past and present interact, cultures clash, politics and ideals fight over the future, violence and poetry confront each other, irony and bitterness overshadow naïveté and narrow-mindedness. In Snake Skin Snajder draws from the huge archive of his - or our - country's past and present to build his poetic discourse upon two complementary segments: a well-known Bosnian fairy-tale of Serbian roots, told in Croatian, which narrates a story about a woman who is afraid to give birth to a snake that can transform itself at night into a handsome young man and which can be kept young only if its skin is burned at its time of shedding and the other segment: the poignant and actual Bosnian reality in the time of writing his play, where warlords, criminals, and war profiteers decide the fate of the Bosnian people, and where violence, rape, and ethnic cleansing during the brutal war has placed the "gods" and the owners of life and death in opposition to each other in their old new war.

In that acrid setting, framed by the thirty-year war in which nature and culture intermingle, where human screams, gunfire, and the howls of wolves cohabit in past and present time, Snajder does not search for the sources of evil and pain. He has already named these beasts many times: they are totalitarian blindness, nationalism and bigotry, religious and ideological dogmatism of all sorts. Instead, he transforms his theatrical environment, the cold and stony morgue, the dark wood where all speak the same language, into a landscape of human despair which might be healed by a mother's love.

Sanjder turns to the Bosnian part of hell in his pursuit of a new hopeful environment and in that light Snake Skin may be seen as his creative attempt to trace new maps and to envision a humane landscape for the time to come. The initial aesthetic point in Snajder's attempt for his new ecology of theatre is rooted in the idea of human resistance to any form of militant extremism, in resistance to nationalism's distortion of tradition and history, and in the belief in the integrative power of multiculturalism. Aware of the failure of traditional social structures based on the patriarchal concept of society, he encourages possibilities for a new social structure based on the mother principle. Furthermore, his vision is reflected in the aesthetic idea of the theatre as a landscape, an environment, a new aesthetic entity as a metaphor for the more humane world-culture in the new millennium.

The question remains: Is the road to the future paved by gravestones? Is the exit from the Bosnian, Yugoslavian, European poisonous cycle of conflicts to be found on the other side of the Bosnian cemetery, with its rows of Catholic and Orthodox crosses and its Muslim turbans covered with snow--the final image of Snake Skin?

“O God, look at this land, look at these people!” pleads Filip David at the very beginning of his unpublished and maybe still to many unknown play the “Boat of fools” And that line “O God, look at this land” may as well be the last line of Snajder’s Snake Skin. Similarly to Snake Skin the snow covers the land, the winds bring scent of burnt grounds, the killing fields are there in the fog, the rivers flow and only boats of fools sail on them. Everything human is gone. The past is destroyed, the present is unbearable, the future does not exists. This play Brechtian in nature, prayer in its tone and fresco in its imagery brings a world in disarray, a world without direction and compass, a world that has lost its sense. On Filip David’s Boat , one discovers a new category of people, war profiteers, smugglers, losers, people from the lower depths, homeless, lost and people left alone in the dark and in evil times. That is a boat with all sorts of scam, with villains and victims, with kids without future, with hunger and death present and visible on their skins. That is a boat fools, lunatics, insane and afflicted, a rift that comes from a fog and darkness, left and forgotten by all in the night, a boat that goes nowhere. That is an image not of Serbia but of the Balkans isolated from Europe and left alone with its own demons. Where are the poets to rise their voices against this horror. Why were the poets silent? Brecht could ask. Filip David screams but no one listens to him. He cries out from the top the lungs that the boat can not reach the banks and that everything is lost in the fog or in the smoke maybe. The only thing that is left for that isolated island moving in a same spot is a desperate prayer, a plea for an end to this endless madness, a prayer for a life with a human face. Filip David’ plea at the end of his “Boat of the Fools” is a voice from the black hole, from the quasar, a fragmented remains from another world.

“Otkad je sveta i veka stalno neko nekoga proganja.
stalno neko nekome oduzima `ivot.
Stalno neko druge tla~i u ime istine,
stalno nekoga uni{tava u ime prava.
Stalno se di`e novi neprijatelj koji uznemiruje i rovari, oslu{kuje i preti,
jednom u uniformi generala, drugi put u uniformi narednika, tre}i put u civilu,
`etvrti put u lepom ruhu, peti put u prosja`kom gunju, a {esti put go.
Ve`ito neko nekom zabranjuje da jede, stanuje i spava, da tra`i sre}u i da `ivi.”
Svuda, svuda, svuda...kroz tamu duboke no}i, u maglovita
jutra, {iri se o~ajni~ki {apat naroda jednog izgubljenog sveta:
Gospode, baci pogled na ovu zemlju!"

It seems today that this postmodern transfigured Balkan landscape that sprung out of the rubbles of the Berlin Wall, and that raised its own new walls waits for its new drama. Not drama about rubbles that decorate professors' bookshelves, but a drama about a world lost and disappeared behind those new invisible walls, about a braided world without walls moved into the “ideal” and settled on the enormous archipelago of fragmented existences in exile. Literary and metaphorically. Is that drama going to be written ever.