(Tatjana Đurišić "Holy Trinity", New book, Podgorica, 2023)
I have never been able to write about good books. This, I guess, is why a good book does not require a presenter, because it reveals itself. Such a book, all opportunities, do not need the illumination of an interpreter's alibi, because it is all in good language. Therefore, this daredevil of mine that you are reading is not so much a father Tatiana's book as much as it is about the way to me. That's why, I guess, books are read and re-read - in order to explain some Self, which questions the foundation of an always vague identity.
Day one
On the first day, I give up biographicalism in order to adopt it anew, or for some facts to turn into just my impression. Therefore, this text is not just a presentation of the book. If so, it would be easy - presenting text through text. It would be as easy as it is to talk about something that belongs to you in spirit and being. Such proof of the text would be a courteous and journalistically correct bow to the text and the author. So, a beautifully learned way and a beautifully worded text about something that is, in itself, a part of my identity as a reader. But I, on Day One, have the need to write about myself, like every reader who writes about himself by reading someone else's book.
She was my teacher. She was our teacher. At that time, it was really not a small thing to be a professor of Philosophy. To be a professor to us, who in those years were magnificently talking about nation, race and blood. When I became a high school teacher, I realized that being a teacher is really not a small thing. Those inclined to register the above lies would say: The voice of enlightenment that resounds as the desert echoes in which there is the one who is being followed! He who baptizes barbarians only with his tongue. During those years, Tanja was at the Faculty of Philosophy in Nikšić. She was, if you'll forgive me, a witch. She was a witch with a touch of punk. And with one sound, only hers, coming down the stairs. I don't know how it is now, but back then our language and literature classrooms were down there, somewhere on the first floor. Yes, all the lecturers were coming down, only Tanja could be heard from afar. She heard that she would be welcomed - that she would be determined. A student who sharpens his teeth, or learns the principle for and against. In those post-war years of mine, if NATO aggression is counted as war, and I as a pathetic gesture of a defeated volunteer, she as a teacher was a measure of something big. Today I dare to say that it was knowledge, and she was its bearer. One man, dressed as a peasant, told me: "You know, she could have been Montenegrin." Nikola Milošević, if she wanted to".
Day two
A book Holy trinity they consist of speeches, polemics and essays, collected in three parts The Father speaks, the Son polemics, the Holy Spirit of essays. Polemics and essays were published between 2008 and 2022, most often in the daily newspaper Vijesti, and speeches in the anthology Njegoševi dani. Therefore, the Holy Trinity is a sum, an angry sum, of the best that Tanja, in those years, wrote and spoke in order to speak out and explain the all-around-and-dangerous-kitsch-miracle that Montenegro was turning into. That's why it's not surprising that the referral under the title Chronicle of Homeland Terror. These texts are just that, a kind of chronicle of possible and impossible anomalies and the slippage of an idea that in one patriotic moment became isolated, animalized, animalized, took on the distortion of abomination - corruption and crime. If the Leader, to whom I also gave legitimacy in the elections, had protected the homeland with tried-and-tested mechanisms of state terror, we would have known what we were in for, but love of the homeland, with kitsch sentiment, and the accusation that anyone who raises their voice against lawlessness, instantly becomes a hater and traitor to the motherland, she could not end up anywhere else but in the oxymoron that is homeland terror.
The genres practiced by the author never remain in the self-sufficiency of a linguistic construct, primarily a literary one. They break in outside, looking for an interlocutor or a listener, or the third person who himself is grinding his teeth, believing only in language - in the clearly and loudly spoken word that pop is pop, and that bob is bob. The holy trinity is also the trinity of language: in speech (monologue), response (dialogue) and writing (essay). That is why the speech, polemic and essay tend to the space of the white world - the space in which their concrete activation is possible. So concrete that he pretends to illusions that he can change the world, for the better, of course.
First unit, The father is speaking, abounds in the destruction of canonical forms - political, historical, ideological and cultural. The tone is raised, but there is no clamor, that innkeeper's noise, characteristic of the Balkan sense of public speaking. In each of these texts, in the first place is the intellectual, famous and creative, the one who is responsible for the legacy, such as, for example, in connection with I don't care, and which does not allow its profanization, according to the ideology, powerful and terrible, such as the powerful and terrible context created on the ruins of the Yugoslav semiosphere. Or, a responsible intellectual-professor speaking in front of the students of the Faculty of Philosophy and Philology in Nikšić: As I said yesterday, and as I will say forever, rebellion is born first in words, so gather your verbal magic and fill your fingers with witchcraft, let your gestures dissatisfactions send a clear message that you will take the future into your own hands. Take the sword of the Spirit - the mighty Word, and be strong in your verbal Fire.
What the hell is verbal Fire? It seems to be a passion without which there is no creation, a passion in language. The passion to express and explain the anxiety of an aware individual before the dictatorship of a system created, not without irony, according to the rules of a developed democracy. Such are Tanya's speeches - creative and rebellious.
The second unit, Son of controversy, reveals to the duelist. The glove is accepted with dignity, and then answered. How? Answer in such a way that everything explodes. That's not an answer, that's fireworks! And all based on texts from Professor Đurišić's vast reading experience. That is why the texts of the second unit are reading for those with a sweet tooth, and why not those with a passion for reading. Those texts are not angry, they are aesthetic. The procedure goes like this: the subject of the polemic is taken as a welcome thing on which it will be shown how, thanks to the power of language, someone can shake out of their underwear. Where can you find a more beautiful prolegomena for a drama of the absurd in an academic way or a sad comedy in three characters.
The third unit Holy Spirit Essays make very successful analyzes of phenomena such as Njegoš, Lalić, Montenegrin identity and its semiosis. The essay is a grateful form because it accepts all discourses, not allowing any one to be dominant. This whole confirms the author's high place in the science of literature, providing her with the authority of that endemic rarity that is taken at her word.
Day three
Holy trinity It's not just a broken text that follows the rise and fall of a party, which turned itself into a state through vile political sorcery. That's how I can write, and I'm still in the spirit. The Trinity is, first of all, a Text that can live up to the model of non-conformity. A text that does not need a period to deserve a capital letter (or red, if we follow the logic of the "liberators"). This book is a discovery of the language in which rebellion is best read. If it makes sense to protest, and it does.
Bonus video:
