(Kemal Music: "The day after", New book, Podgorica, 2022)
Kemal Music with each new book he managed to expand and innovate the literary matrix, and project the object of his interest as a multi-layered given, to melt, fuse the boundaries of the real and the unknown, the rational and the bizarre, the necessary and the ephemeral, which is especially visible in the latest collection "The Day After" . In addition, if we were not guided by the strict formal-compositional construction of the material, the book can be interpreted as a novel with every right. Especially since the unity of the plot, which is especially visible in the previous novel "Unprovable truths of Lamek Ćisum", takes place in several gathering points of the native milieu and, at the same time, strong autopoetic passages. And one more, very important stylistic component, as the basic connecting link of his previous books, gives the stamp to the latest one as well - and that is the fantastic-fictional, ironic-grotesque drift of the story that further intensifies the whole theme, certainly providing it with a deeper literary persuasiveness.
This is one side of the author's poetic discourse, which is more or less visible in all his prose titles: to carry out as thorough a deconstruction as possible not only of the family, native, but also of the general social milieu; peek into his mythological drifts and historiographical clauses, most often drawn arbitrarily; get into the current demagogic public, into twisted religious-ethno-identity paradigms; into authoritarian psychology, consumer saturation... All the aforementioned thematic palimpsests form the backbone of the "Day after" collections, with the fact that they are now more precisely differentiated and, as such, made the entire literary construct much stronger and more convincing. What makes the collection extremely homogeneous in the problematic sense is hidden in one very important, and perhaps, from an aesthetic point of view, the most important potential, (which Sead Husic in the foreword of the book he names it as a "stylistic solution"), is the philosophy of silence. This phenomenon, in fact, represents the basic platform of the constant dramatic charge that forms the core of Kemal Musić's poetic narrative.
And in order to clarify the semantics of silence, if not to the end, at least to some extent, it is necessary to first decipher the problematic framework in which the author moves. And it consists of: life, on an individual, family or general social background, to which the author attributes a kind of metaphysical aura, that is, secrets; death, as mysterious as life itself; language and writing, ie. the writer as an interpreter of the world that most often appears as ineffable matter, thus producing another, subsequent enigma - silence! In essence, all of these are, in the literary sense, already known challenges. However, their value parameters in Kemal Musić's stories are primarily determined by the connotative relationship in which they are placed. And he is such that, in terms of intensity and sublimation of the dramatic charge, he represents a truly fresh, independent literary process.
The symbolism of the phenomenon of silence, so crucial in the analytical unfolding of the author's story, exists on two levels - the writer, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the outside world, from the closest family point, to friends, neighbors, workplace... The writer, as a subject, who in he holds all that indescribable drama in his hands, both his own and that of the Other, he leads the story with great certainty, plunging into fateful entanglements, psychological nightmares, existential uncertainties, into the usual-identity color, into the very magma of the daily rut from which, at times, he cannot escape neither the greatest spiritual leader nor the anonymous passer-by bound by many limitations.
In such mnological-dialogical "expertise", the writer marks with great precision the moment in which he closes his own story with silence, as a response to all that preceded him through that story. We recognize this kind of silence as a strong symbolic sign of the collapse of both the individual and the collective matrix of life, as a point that has absorbed all possible previous experiences to the point where it is no longer possible to influence their outcome, or any change that would status quo moved in a different, desired direction. Silence as a boundary between lived and dreamed, between suffering and its release, as a boundary between this and the other world, as a watershed between fear and freedom, courage and powerlessness...
Although, at first glance, silence appears as a consequence of given circumstances (mentioned above), phenomenologically, it takes on a different paradigmatic framework: it becomes our conscious choice, a way of defense, a guardian of our autonomy, our intimacy as the most vulnerable part of human destiny. Seen through the writer's analytical kaleidoscope in all its multiplicity, life, as if the author is telling us, has reached its final point of "boiling". The perspective of such a situation is highly questionable. Its transposition into a different context is only feasible through the writer's poetic-imaginary intervention. Only in this way is it possible to understand the silence of the mother (in the story of the same name) in which, after the early loss of her father in the whirlwind of the Second World War, and later arriving in a family with a different ideological orientation, she sought her own peace and stoic strength to withstand the dark cracks of the void that scarred her soul and her attachment to patriarchal principles. And all the other silences - father, brother, sister, which started with an open story and ended with restrained hope, were shown with no less dramatic charge, in the culmination point, through a light, lyrical linguistic weave, all the depth of their life's tragedy was summed up. He remains silent even in the face of death, as do the locals from the neighborhood, after the news that the old, strong Ćamil has gone to the "other" world. Here, death, in the conceptual sense, transcends all appearances, demarcating with implacable precision the phenomenon of Being and Nothingness, so the questioning of individuals, who otherwise believe in the continuation of the afterlife, who will be stronger - the earth or Camil, will still be followed by the recognition that the primacy will be maintained by the earth. That's what the author himself wondered when, as a child, he felt the proximity of death for the first time "I wished that our cousin would prevail. But it won't. Earth is the strongest. There is no one stronger than the earth. Especially not ours, full of human sweat. She lets us trample on her, turn her over all our lives. Let us torture her, and she torture us. And when we die, she buries us. And there is no further."
Kemal Music sees life as a puzzle, the unraveling of which lasts from our first memories to our last earthly moment; Hence, man is in a constant gap of measuring his own strengths in relation to everything that life, as it is, imposes on him from the outside. And it is precisely at this boundary, where the fragility of the human soul and the uniform concept of society are mostly pushed against each other, and very rarely intertwined, that the feeling of tragedy, alienation, ostracism is born, to which Musić's literary characters are mostly exposed, not only in this, but also in the previous prose. When they find themselves at such an existential dividing line, then, on the other hand, the boundaries of fiction and faction become more and more unstable, taking on fantastic outlines over time, and their vision of reality - an unreal-grotesque dimension.
The phenomenon of silence that the author carries out through a fictional poetic narrative, as he does in the story "Silence", in which the phantasmagorical scenes of the silent "conversation" between the Man from this world and the Writer from the other world, reveal the old age magic of the literary word and through the symbolic-allegorical the narrative shows that our everyday existence is only one in a series of worlds in which we live. And that the literary scene, in addition to the organization of its value laws, knows how, like life itself, to be a stage of (self) praise, presumption, conceit, mythomania and logical emptiness, Kemal Music vividly depicted with ironic nonchalance in the stories "The Writer" and "Book". Sead Husić's assessment that "Kemal Musić deconstructs a certain native space with this book" can with full reason be supplemented with the impression that he also deconstructs the literary scene in Montenegro with these same pages. Kemal Musić (according to the opinion of the signatories of these lines) with his latest book of stories "The Day After", through thematic selection and, above all, the literary process, defined his literary path with an apparently qualitative leap. Hence, and with reason, the expectation that this prose will find its way into the hands of literary critics and readers.
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