I met Saša Mladenović at one of the literary meetings in Belgrade more than a decade ago. In the literary bazaar, it is enough to know a few characters, sooner or later you will get acquainted with the entire writer tribe through them. He told me stories from the end of the "southern railway", he came from a climate that I certainly liked. Later, once - when I was staying at my address in Leskovac - we went to Crna Trava in his car. It proved to be an excellent guide for everything that is interesting between Crna Trava and Vlasotinac.
We rarely see each other, we follow each other on social networks. I see he has published a new novel, and I remember he once told me about writing it. It's about the uprising of an aging and deserted village against dubious investors who fill the rivers with pipes, transporting cattle and thirsty people across the water.
Meeting in Leskovac
The other day, I was walking through the main park in Leskovac, past the "Safari" cafe and restaurant, and I heard someone calling me. I turn around and see Saša Mladenović at the entrance to the garden - between two lamps in the shape of elephant tusks. I know that he was a medical worker in the United Nations mission in Africa for several years, so this picture is so obviously symbolic that I laughed.
We talked briskly, drinking quick coffee. Saša has just arrived from Belgrade in order to polemically cross spears in some local media with a representative of the local elite who decided to make a pact with big-city investors, and they will stuff another river into the pipe.
In that short meeting, Saša gave me his new novel "Goat Uprising". 24 hours passed and I called Saša to tell him that I read the novel in one breath. One detail caught my attention. The cover of the novel states that Saša wrote it on the banks of the Bengui River in the Central African Republic. Saša is a pharmacist with a degree and spent two years in the United Nations mission in Africa: "The smell of the Sahara brought me back to my childhood spent in my mother's village in Macedonia, and the children's games on the Bangui river helped me to get out of myself the tastes of my rivers that are now buried because of 'economic progress'. Every time a child dived into the river, I saw myself, the boy, and felt that noise in my ears, that pressure in my nostrils, which was only like that then. And that is what drew me to jump among them and become Serbian, as the local fishermen called me, whom they will accept as their countryman". That's how Saša Mladenović wrote about Bistrica in Africa.
Goat uprising
The atmosphere in the novel is occasionally hilarious-carnivalistic, grotesque, there are also poetic passages, touching moments. Some parts even reminded me of one of my favorite childhood novels, "The Boys of Pavlova Street". On the other hand, there are Alanfordian, black-humored atmospheres, and even absurdist moments like in the films "Kvaka 22" or "Who is singing there".
A group of old country bachelors decide to unite and move from their abandoned villages to the village of Bistrica. They pool their combined forces, livestock and property, their masonry skills for which the people of the area are known, and the cooperative begins to flourish. They are joined by Major, a former cadet of the military academy, then a veteran of the wars of the nineties, who, retired, returned to his homeland. But the river that flows through the village is occupied by a dubious investor, a war profiteer from the nineties. He has every license to stuff the river into a pipe. He didn't count on the real war declared on him by the old guys and their goats. The major's monologue in front of the police commander foreshadows the rebellion: "They say that this river is being destroyed by pushing it in a pipe, very soon a desert will be created here, and a dead river in the lower reaches." No fish, no crabs, no us. We're gone, Commander! So what will our goats drink?"
However, the legal fight is not yielding results: "The river is dammed. The machines spewed concrete and filled excavated holes. The pipes were waiting to be installed. And Bistrica looked sad. It was no longer a mountainous river that knew that it carried everything before it and that carried a lot of drowned townspeople on its soul. Now she was squealing like an immature chicken waiting for all its blood to drain out".
River, hills, childhood
Lyrical moments in Saša Mladenović's prose are reserved for descriptions of nature: "And on the other side of the river, vast pastures rise just above the basin. When the sun sets behind her, in the middle of that green expanse, shadowed by the curves of the body of Buk's head, a line is outlined by which the darkness drives the light. And at dawn, that same trail recedes, when a streak of light begins to push the darkness. The steep pastures in its plain merge with the grassy expanse of the extended Ajdučki polje. In the morning, when the thin rays of the sun begin to twist, breaking against the mirrors of dew berries, new grasses and flowers are born. Above them, the highest peak of the mountain, the Hollow Tooth, looks like a stone-like jaw that would swallow the moon in the moonlit night. From its summit, the most distant places can be seen, far away in an embrace with the horizon".
In such descriptions, one cannot overlook the observer's attachment to the seen.
The language of the occupied homeland
All the dialogues in the novel take place in the southern dialect, a language that the author, who was born in Vlasotinac in 1974 and grew up in the village of Kruševica near Vlasina, took with him from his childhood. His father, a math teacher, wrote down the words, as if he knew that speech would slowly disappear. It is the speech of Black Grass bricklayers, peasants at the Vlasotina market, the language of Sasha's schoolmates, a dialectal melody full of poetry and humor. At the end of the novel, the author added a "Dictionary of Lesser Known Words and Expressions". That's where we find out that they are bones according to popular belief, mythical creatures, girls who intercept travelers in the forest after midnight. Bulcha is a fool. Godzha is a lot. Ripple is death. Kutre is home. When it is said "he will lie down with the chickens" it means - he will lie down with the chickens.
A dialogue chosen at random will best illustrate the liveliness and tenacity of dialectal expression. One of the main characters was nicknamed John Travolta in his youth - John Travolta, John Travolta - because of his penchant for acting and movies. He is talking to a comrade, the peasant Pero:
- What if I had that Kalashnikov from the Major, I would have crushed everything!! - said Jontra Perry, as he drove the cattle with him to the river.
- Well, didn't he tell you? - Pera asked him.
- So he told me, but I don't know if they found him there.
- You're yelling, they didn't find the rifle there, where did you say it?
- As far as I heard, they didn't.
- Who knows him? Come on, Gileta, make those goats get drunk so we can milk them, the cheese needs to be made.
Personal reasons
Saša Mladenović says that the characters in the novel are real: "I lived with those people. Grown up. Went to school. At fairs and village assemblies. Drank in bars. Some events happened in Rakita and Toplo Dol, so they gave me space to link them. There are also the personal destinies of some people from those two places that I wanted to protect in some indirect way".
And the relationship to the river, as a source of life? His advocacy for the preservation of rivers in Serbia is not theoretical, it has deeply personal roots: "He grew up on two rivers: Vlasina and Bistrica, which is its tributary. My childhood was not the sea, but fishing for trout in the rapids, 'exploring' deep eddies or going down the river on a truck or tractor tire. Rijeka is a part of me, and I experienced the crime that the state committed against Vlasina too personally, and I consider it a genocide against those people who remained or against us who might return because you never know what tomorrow will bring. You can only hope for something from the country".
Saša states that his favorite author is Knut Hamsun, and that "Fruits of the Earth" is more than a novel for him. He is fascinated by the way Isak, the main character, creates his world out of nothing. "And then, when they offer him fabulous money to sell it, he refuses, because it should remain for his children's children". Saša smiles somewhat bitterly when making such statements. "Creation out of nothing is the destiny of our people, but we are also not inclined to leave something to the future generation," he says and adds that an example of this is the "brutal killing of the Rupska river", which was just sacrificed for a small hydroelectric plant by the decision of the local authorities in Vlasotinac. Besco. The devastation of the human environment continues. But "Goat Uprising" offers a stoic prescription against despondency. Saša Mladenović says: "Actually, the heroes of the novel, from long-forgotten villages, mock the world they live next to because the new internet technology allows them to do so, and in essence they mock the despair that surrounds them."
Bonus video:
