According to my calculation, it was 1997. The house where the German literary Nobel laureate Heinrich Bell died was, since 1991, a place where writers from all over the world could find solace - usually they were left without a homeland, without freedom or even without a and without another. They would receive a several-month stipend and the opportunity to spend that time on an idyllic country estate on the slopes of the Eifel, somewhere halfway between Aachen and Cologne.
Dara in Bel's house
I also stayed there in 1994. Dara Sekulić came to Bel's house in 1997. It must have been summer. I know we talked like old acquaintances, even though she was two years older than my mother. Still with striking features, upright gait, a woman who has aged gracefully.
Although I belonged to a completely different generation, I felt that we were from the same tribe. People who wrote and whose destinies crossed paths in pre-war Sarajevo had this sense of community, not to say a literary pack. I remember her performances at literary evenings, even before the war I sat with her in wider society - it was inevitable in the Club of Light or in the restaurant of the Society of Writers.
But that summer of 1997, Dara seemed to me like another accidental survivor of the crew of the destroyed spaceship, which had parachuted into Bell's house. And I, who experienced the same stunt a few years earlier, came to show her, a newly arrived shipwrecked woman, that there are more of us, that she is not alone.
My three-year-old son Andrej was with me. This turned out to be a major obstacle in communication. Not because of Andrej but because of Dara. When she saw him and when we drank coffee in the orchard in front of the veranda, Dara left us - with me were Stevan Tontić and Dara's son Vladimir who came to visit her - to clear up our endless literary conversations.
She decided to hang out with Andrej. It will stay that way for the next two hours. She even found a basin, filled it with water, and planted the boy in it. The sonorous children's laughter echoed along the Eifel coast. That day will remain in my memory. Parents remember well when their children were happy.
Sarajevo meetings
Later, I saw Dara when I would come to Sarajevo on literary work, where she returned in 2002. Mostly at literary performances. Once at the Sarajevo Poetry Days - it was probably in 2009 - she read a poem about Branko Čučak, one of the most important Serbian poets from Bosnia and Herzegovina, who was accompanied during his life by the voice of a tavern scandal-master. Although I occasionally hung out with Čulet in the long pre-war days in bars, Dara wrote the song for him.
The last time I saw her was in 2017 in Sarajevo during the Bookstan literary festival. She was in conversation with the writer Vladimir Pistala, whose late father Boro was part of her world. I only greeted her briefly, leaving the loom of their conversation to weave memories.
Now I regret that I never told her that those long ago years in Germany, she made a three-year-old boy, and thus his father, happy.
The poet sprang from the pain
What we know from the biography of Dara Sekulić cannot leave us indifferent. She was born in 1930 (some say 1931) in Kordunski Ljeskovac. The village on the border of Bosnia and Kordun was badly damaged in the Second World War. Hundreds of locals were victims of Ustasha terror, and then of typhus. Dara will lose his parents in 1942. Like millions of children, they will carry the pain of orphans from that war. But also some pictures that, like in her "Records about plants and us" will remain behind her to soften us: "I remember a huge old pear tree in front of our house. It was stronger than the earth from which it grew, than the house and all of us in the house - sometimes it towered over the sky above our heads. And her fruit was small, when she bore it there was more than a leaf. Then they would stuff full sepetas into stacks of hay or straw; from where we took them out in the winter when they were soft and ate them. The foster pear".
In 2013, she gave an interview for the Nezavisne novine from Banja Luka on the occasion of the filming of the film "Kordun, a land without people", in which she also testified about her childhood. Then she said: "Today the village of Kordunski Ljeskovac, where I was born and spent my early childhood, no longer exists. It used to have more than 300 households, now there are not even three. Everything is overgrown with weeds, grass, nobody anywhere... From place to place I found similar sorrows, a terrible past and present, a terrible tragedy".
Home child
After the death of her parents, Dara Sekulić grew up in children's homes and boarding schools. Education meant a nomadic life for her. From the village of Rujevac in Bania, to high schools in Italy, Split, Karlovac, Zagreb and Sisak. Her studies at the Higher School for Social Workers brought her to Sarajevo. From 1953 to 1992, Dara lived in Sarajevo, where she gained a literary reputation, as a young poet she met Branko Ćopić and Skender Kulenović, her distinctive voice became more and more distinct. Poetry books, translations into other languages, awards such as the Sixth of April Award of the City of Sarajevo, the ZAVNOBiH Award, the Dragon Award, awards of the Society of BiH Writers, and the "Skender Kulenović" award followed.
A refugee with grandchildren
At the beginning of the bloody nineties, she was destined for another refugee which brought her and her two grandchildren to Vlasotince, in the south of Serbia. Dara Sekulić left a record that as a child she found a lemon peel, not knowing what it was, and that her mother, explaining to her that the bright yellow peel is not edible, called the lemon "lemon". In Vlasotinac, she found a lemon tree in her host's yard: "Besides the lemon, I also met an unusual, unique lemon. He was raised by Stanislav Stanković's family in Vlasotinac... I also saw sage, almonds, large cherries and kiwi in other gardens in the orchards of Vlasotinac; ornamental trees and creepers of the south, bokor lavender. I don't know what this lemon's childhood and youth were like, I met it when its large fruits, who knows how many times, were ripening. They tempted me irresistibly to tear off one, but that would be unworthy of a serious woman".
Suffering and defiance
Stevan Tontić recognizes in her songs "the voice of a suffering, acrid lyricism" but also "a strong will to bear fate (personal and family fate)".
Nenad Grujičić noted in his Anthology of Serbian Poetry: "Like a sea shell, Dara Sekulić's poems hide secret melodic noises and pearly notes of the mother tongue, often reduced to a minimalist framework of sound."
What some critics see as innovation in language is actually traditional mining in linguistic tunnels. In one of the most beautiful songs, "Spirit of Snowy Hills", Dara Sekulić repeatedly uses forgotten words and those that she coined in the spirit of language. Few would say so cupboards recognized the spruce grove. Ježur is a shiver of chills, and it can also be something that has goosebumps, ripples. Probably, most of today's Serbian speakers have never even heard, let alone said, such words. We know what it means to facebook but for cabinet or wardrobes, za lazy we haven't heard. But the poet heard it and saved it for us.
Željko Grahovac wrote about Dara Sekulić in his panorama of the latest Bosnian poetry "Running out of space" that "...the poet never remains 'speechless', even in the face of the most terrible reality - on the contrary. The word is his last stronghold, when the language falters in all other aspects".
Understanding after death
Looking back on someone's life, especially when they've only been gone for a few days, sometimes have a very sad thread in them. This time I wouldn't want that color to dominate. Dara Sekulić hung out with younger poets, who, like Abdullah Sidran, are not young anymore. One of them told me that after hanging out in a bar, a long time ago, Dara danced barefoot in the rain. There is life and longing in that image, that's why I quote it here, so that the generations to come would not think that those before them were not ready to breathe life to the fullest.
In 2013, Dara Sekulić told Banja Luka's Nezavisne novine: "Society only understands when a poet leaves his life and leaves his work behind." He is unnoticed until he dies, when he dies and leaves a deed, then society has something to brag about."
Several decades ago, the literary critic Mithat Begić, whom Stevan Tontić quoted in his preface to "New Poetry of Bosnia and Herzegovina" from 1990, found a lapidary formula to describe this unique poetess and her poetry: Exalted pride.
That's how I will remember Dara Sekulić and her lyrics.
Bonus video:
