A multi-layered poetic documentary: A note accompanying "Death in Gaza" by Miraš Martinović

(On the margins of the book of poems “Death in Gaza” by Miraš Martinović)

Write about poetry Miraš Martinović is always a demanding undertaking. Writing about his latest book of poems, “Death in Gaza” (2025), requires a special kind of readiness, because it is a poetic achievement that grips the reader in emotional vises with its opening verses, and with each subsequent poem tests his steadfastness and moral compass.

This is not just a book of poems about the genocide in Palestine. After reading the first few of Martinović's poetic frames for images of Palestinian pain and horror, this collection becomes a document of our time of extremes and a harrowing saga about us and our weaknesses.

We live in a time when everything is negotiable, including human life and human dignity. Our lives are dominated by high-ranking sociopaths with presidential halos and pathological liars with leadership titles, who have an insatiable appetite for money, power, control and blood. Such individuals live transactional lives and can calculate absolutely everything, but can defend absolutely nothing. That is why they are without courage and without honor. They publicly parade what they define as empathy while daily trampling on every standard and nullifying every ingredient that gives empathy its full and true meaning. It seems that our time educates and forms smart cowards, and for this reason tyrants and technocrats can rule today. In such a civilization, it is possible to watch a live TV broadcast of the genocide in Gaza and Palestine without consequences for the perpetrator.

Our small environment is a copy of this transactional model of life and the arrogant conformism that fills it. There are rare moments when the silence of the domestic calculating swamp, which quickly changes the TV channel when the increasingly rare news about the genocide in Palestine appears, is stirred by a powerful roar of admonition and moral warning.

The book of poems “Death in Gaza” by Montenegrin poet and prose writer Miraš Martinović is one such multi-layered and multi-meaning poetic thunderclap. Painstakingly written and composed over almost three years, this collection of poems is a testament to a rare and valuable attempt to restore empathy to its full meaning and purpose. In some one hundred and twenty poems, the author framed images of the suffering to which Gaza and all of Palestine were subjected, and then named these terrible illustrations of our collective defeat: genocide.

The author confirms with this book that truth, honesty, morality and ethics have one and the same main and necessary ingredient: personal courage. Miraš Martinović reminds us with this book that only such an “armor” can give substance and strength to other virtues and protect them. He warns us that without the courage to call evil by its right name and to oppose it, our ethics and morality become and remain transparent trinkets adorned by intelligent cowards and calculating people.

Martinović's latest collection of poems is, above all, a book about hope in humanity, but also about the willingness to believe in divine protective affection. Therefore, the author begins his poetic documentary with a verse call "Lord" (p. 13-14), and ends it with the divine realization that he must stay in Gaza even at the cost of his own disappearance. Between the call at the beginning of the book and the decision to stay at its end, in this Palestinian "field of the unbroken" a "Game with Death" (p. 133) is played out daily in the hope that life will outplay its dark rival. This is where "Voices in the Ruins" (p. 16) are heard, next to which "Bajram" (p. 92) passes and "Columns from Rafa" (p. 102) march past while "A Boy Builds a House" (p. 117). These songs are, first and foremost, voices of hope and affirmation of the vitality of life that is indestructible and that will outlast all the killing iron and bridge the abyss in which the armed hatred of the aggressor roars.

The poem "Father" (p. 89), which for the author of these lines represents the poetic, ethical and moral center of this book, is a short, timeless story about parental pain, dedication, absolute perseverance and the genuine desire to someday find the stolen piece of one's father's heart.

OTAC

Ahmed Mohamed Falyn has difficulty walking.

Ahmed Mohamed Falyn doesn't give up

He tries desperately, he doesn't give up.

He is looking for the grave of his three-month-old daughter.

These four verses encapsulate all the horror and hope of the times we live in and connect the regions of pain and crime across the globe. Moreover, each poem in this book is Martinović's verse-based tomb to the madness of war and hatred, the violence that displaces entire nations, and the human unwillingness to stop that violence.

Ours is a time in which, at some dawn and through the ruins of some geographical latitude, some desperate parent constantly searches for the grave of their child killed by a bullet, a grenade, or the cold blade of hatred.

The faces of parents torn by pain are always the same, so father Ahmed Mohamed Falyn from the poem-testimony of the same name by Miraš Martinović becomes the archetypal face of the non-overcoming pain, which is one of the historical constants of our existence. Only the centuries, geography and languages ​​in which this non-overcoming pain is expressed are different. Today it is Gaza, and there was Srebrenica, and before that Rwanda, and before them there were Lublin and Ravensbrück, then the Armenians in the Ottoman state and so on into the past indefinitely.

Poetry as a literary genre is an absolute expression of the personal, so “Death in Gaza” can be read as the author’s “most personal” effort to date, also because it deals with a current topic – the ongoing genocide in Palestine. On the other hand, an analysis of Miraš Martinović’s literary work shows that the treasuries in which this poet found his motives were a kind of depository of the collective effort to understand one’s own existence and the suffering that accompanies it, but also an archive of testimonies of the continuous human effort to overcome difficulties. We can therefore speak of a recognizable temporal continuity of the thematic arc in Miraš Martinović’s works. This arc connects suffering and hope in the brighter dawns of Troy and Doklea, Alexandria and Jerusalem, Srebrenica and Ramallah, Gaza and many other places of power around the world and throughout the centuries.

“Death in Gaza” is, therefore, an integral and immeasurably personal part of the author’s entire oeuvre, which also includes previously published books such as “A Day That Didn’t Pass” from 2016. This new book represents a strong marking of the previously marked space from Martinović’s collection of poems “The Circle of Enchanted Time” (2017). “Death in Gaza” is also a continuation of the song about human destiny from the poetry collection “Bogumilske” (2020), but with an emphasis on the prayer for the innocence of Gaza and Palestine.

“Death in Gaza” is a refreshing change on the Montenegrin and regional poetic horizon, also because it reminds us of the murderous clarity and terrible beauty of reality, framed by direct poetic language. The poet quickly grabbed the images that overwhelmed him to the point of pain. Martinović offers readers a contemporary inventory of horror, but also a testament to human perseverance that leaves us breathless. That is why there is no need for aesthetic leveling, forced poetic eloquence and “excess words”, with which our poetry is often fraught. Miraš Martinović writes in clear and direct language, because the images he offers us are documents of life in Palestine under the hot rain of deadly lead. Such a life does not need metaphors to capture our attention.

As we know, the mastery of a poet is best demonstrated precisely at the point where he recognizes the beauty and effectiveness of simplicity. The perfect combination of expression and its effect is achieved when the poet's soul is seized by the reality of life, and he, like a literal rosary, draws it down into verses, and with it he draws the entire poetic horizon towards the reader. "Death in Gaza" is such a poetic string. It is at the same time the human voice of admonition of the man Miraš Martinović and a testimony to his poetic bravura and maturity.