A few days ago, from something that pretends to represent Bosniaks in the diaspora, there was an aber that Danila Kiš should be banned from dating Njegoš, because in the novel Peščanik he writes against Muslims, calls for hatred, et cetera. Signed by: KSPD Sandžak from Slovenia, Bosniak-American National Association (BANA), Pravda from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Congress of Bosniaks of North America and the Canada Genocide Research Institute.
I harnessed myself to find out what Kish had written against Muslims, and of course I remembered nothing. As the diaspora does not explain its urges with a quote, the announcement of the Bosniak organizations did not help, except to make me laugh painfully. Of all the books, Peščanik should be "the source of conflict between the peoples living on the land of the former SFRY." A novel that not even many professors have read, now falls under the pillow of many cleaners, butchers and chats, who are anxious to slaughter their neighbors inspired by the impeccable rhythm of Kish's prose.
My memory wanders to the record of Meša Selimović, to whom a certain Sabiha from the fourth B sent a letter congratulating him on Dervish and his death, thinking that it was some kind of reward. Selimović published the girl's letter in "Memories" as proof of how secondary his profession was and how unknown the very concept of the novel was to a child from a poor family, a peasant, an illiterate, and to the gods and workers abroad who were not very interested in the book at the time.
When all that applies to Meša Selimović, who was certainly a "classic of the living room" along with Andrić, what can we say about Kiš, who was also frowned upon by his colleagues because he did not sing enough folk songs.
Pesčanik, when I start the story, is an extremely stylized and complexly woven novel, so Kiš himself once criticized the critics for being more concerned with the form, as if no one saw that the book was about the Holocaust.
The same thing happened with Grobnica for Boris Davidovič, it became an extreme scandal of the literary bazaar, a form of crime and alleged plagiarism, which, quite by accident and by the way, dealt with the phenomenon of the Gulag and the crimes of Soviet communism.
Rather, it's time to interrupt with one "anti-Muslim" passage from Peščanik, to finally deal with the controversial content that some Pečalbarians want to ban.
"Pigs are the least picky of all animals. No doubt, Muhammad knew this as well as the Jewish hygienist prophets. So, one day the young Muhammad was sitting and watching a pig eat some horribly dirty thing: it tore up a carcass or ate a rotten potato, resembling human excrement. Then, satiated with the roast pork with which he had recently filled his belly, Muhammad began to vomit, because he remembered that what he had eaten was mutton. He quickly puts his finger in his mouth, like a drunkard, and throws up in the sand by the sea. Then he hurried home and entered into the code what he was writing then, and which he would later call the Koran: do not eat pork, because you will vomit. It's the same thing with kosher: some prophet ate rotten meat…”
It is about the part of the book entitled "Notes of a Madman", just to mention, a fragmentary lexicon of lucid imagination that can be attributed to the manic character of the writer's father, the famous Eduard Sam, who, among other things, theorizes how Newton discovered the law of gravity while shitting under an apple.
It is inappropriate for me to consider this case further, to give lessons about what artistic prose is. Kish once used the biblical saying about pigs and pearls in a polemic, so he was attacked for being uncultured. The quote from the Holy Scriptures was proof of Kish's lack of culture, as the national phantoms are now accusing him of, no less than "anti-civilization". There is no reason to defend Kiš, at least not from the terror of the sad stupidity with which he is showered, I just wonder from what trunks of meaninglessness and darkness of ignorance all those "initiatives" come out of.
Instead of the question of bad blood, to give all this a nice twist in the direction I'm looking for, I'll remind you of the episode that talks about the "Muslim" in Kish, which appears as part of the poet's only identity - language.
As powerful as they are connoisseurs, translators are human beings of flesh and blood, prone to mistakes, some of which are charming. Kish talks about the English and Hebrew translations of the novel The Garden, Ashes in which the figure of the mother is given through a confused reading. In the novel, namely, it is written that the mother tells her son the verses of the folk ballad Omer i Merima, which the translator translated as the lyrics of "Homer i Merima". Aside from the fact that such a translation is not completely bad and wrong and that "with a share of effort and a miracle", the reference to the folk spirit of the mother, which could speak through Homer and even Merime, who was delighted with the oral genius of the South Slavs, somehow turned out to be correct - here I would quote how Kish gives a biographical explanation in an interview:
"Finding myself in Hungary, in a foreign environment, whose language she never sufficiently mastered, my mother recited poems and told me stories in the first place to fill her terrible loneliness. She did that, I believe, in order to preserve something of her tradition in me, so that, having become estranged from my mother tongue, I would not become estranged from her."
This is what happens when you are in the diaspora, Milica, the sister of the famous pedagogue Rist Dragićević, among the Hungarians, reached for her national language, and instilled an identity in the boy, who listens to Omer the boy, Merima the girl, dreams and has no idea that in the distant future each a fool to be able to accuse him of hating Muslims and inciting war.
Bonus video:
