The influential Arab daily newspaper "Al Arab", which is published in London in Arabic, published a detailed critical review of the poetic work of the Montenegrin writer. Tanje Bakić, and whose author is Hamid Okabi, Yemeni artist and critic.
The focus of the presentation is on the author's poem "Another River" from her poetry collection "Intertext" (2022), which has also been translated into Arabic on this occasion.
As Okabi notes, Bakić offers a striking model of post-war Balkan poetry - "poetry that listens more than it speaks, that writes about human weakness and fear as a form of silent resistance, and turns the river into a liquid memory that cannot be mapped on any map"...
“It is writing that strives for aesthetic healing, transforming pain into a new human consciousness and a more compassionate existence... Her poetics are characterized by condensed language, powerful images, and poetic structures that are based on intellectual complexity and reflection on existence, memory, and transformation,” Okabi points out.
Okabi concludes his account with the observation that "getting to know voices like Tanja Bakić is not a critical luxury, but a necessity for understanding the way poetry operates on the European margins today," but also a confirmation that post-war poetry can become an act of aesthetic resistance and a means of building a new, broader, and more compassionate consciousness than that offered by maps and borders...
Hamid Okabi is a Yemeni artist who has been living in Paris since 2018, where he runs the Arab-European Forum for Film and Theatre, where he organizes critical, literary and artistic seminars. His multidisciplinary work covers the fields of film directing, dramaturgy, but also visual arts, literature and literary criticism. He has directed ten short films and published 17 novels in 15 books with various publishing houses in Germany, the Maghreb and Egypt. Over the past three years, he has published six poetry collections, a collection of short stories and drama texts, and some of his works have been translated into English, German, French and Italian. In addition, Okabi is the author of 11 books of film criticism and four books of literary criticism. He is the author of 11 solo exhibitions of visual arts and one solo exhibition of photography in France.
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