an interview with Goran Simic (excerpt)

Goran Simic: When I wrote it, sometime in 1994, I lived in terrible circumstances. It’s a period which remains in my nightmares. Sarajevo was under siege. Imagine a city in a valley surrounded by mountains, and five hundred thousand citizens who wake up one morning to discover only hills. Cannons and snipers spread death, fear, and sorrow over the next three and half years.

As soon as the city was cut off from water, power, telephone lines and food supplies—from the world of books—I was transported into a world of cruelty and survival. I, who had read so many books about war, believed that it happened only in literature, films and my father’s stories from World War II, found myself in a situation where, almost overnight, reality overpowered imagination. I had to admit that I learned nothing from those books in the sense of survival. Once you see streets full of blood, scattered human brains, hungry, roaming children looking for food, you feel ashamed to write about butterflies and birds. You feel the weight of your pencil heavy as that reality.

In that non-poetic time, poetry came back to me as a vast landscape of meaning, which I couldn’t even imagine in my pre-war writing. At the same time, I was a document writer of that period through the lenses of witness, and political annalist. I was an engaged poet as much as a human being, and captured moments of horror in lines of poetry. In that black theatre every single detail became a strong metaphor about the absurdity of war and I became an actor no different from other living citizens. Poetry became my mighty army that I could send into the world as a testimony of that dark time. Reading newspaper accounts from war-torn countries, one can easily notice how people became just numbers. Poetry that captures pain and suffering was the only decent and honest witness to war because in the pain of just one person lives thousands of lives. I learned more about human suffering during the second world war from a few of Paul Celan’s poems than I did from all war encyclopedias.

SC: In your opinion, what does it mean to be a compassionate writer?

GS: In my writing I was always focused on the human condition under pressure—political or social—about working-class people or people stuck in the frame of an intolerant society that hates individuality. I talked about unhappy people who raise the question about the meaning of being just a screw in a big machine for ground meat. I was talking about everyday people who paid such a high price for their own freedom and then sold that freedom for a couple of coins for the sake of their own security. The people I was writing about twenty years ago are no different from people living today in imagined security—using Prozac as an excuse for not trying to change anything. This world is full of sad and unhappy people. I chose to focus on them because I see them on the street every day and because I believe that if someone finds my dusty book on a library shelf a hundred years from now and reads it, he or she will have a much clearer picture of the time I lived than if they read a thousand books about countries, borders, flags, politics. If you want to learn something about the coffee harvest in Columbia and its political situation, don’t consult corporate figures, but ask workers on the plantation how they live.

SC: When you write about the painful or difficult experiences of your past and your countrymen, do you intentionally set out to do so with a compassionate eye?

GS: Yes, I am a compassionate writer. I believe that this planet is such a small place that I can almost touch the hand of a man in Iraq and feel what he feels living in his occupied homeland. I believe if I ignore what’s happening to my neighbour—have a fence between us for my own protection—I will never meet him because he will consider that fence as his protection from me. Somehow, I have a feeling that we are heading toward a time when love, compassion, and honesty can be found only in Harlequin novels or tourist guides to countries we never heard of. I probably inherited this kind of belief because I was raised in a tolerant city where people with different nationalities and religious backgrounds mixed naturally. My mother was tougher on me if I did not congratulate my Muslim friend on his religious celebration than if I came home from school with a bad mark. It seems Utopia is my only religion. But I have no problem with that.

SC: In the past, you have referred to yourself as a writer in exile. Do you still feel this way? Would you like to permanently return to Bosnia, if you could?

GS: By the nature of our work, we writers are already people in exile, because of the solitude in which we craft our lines knowing that we will likely never earn the respect that we deserve. Yes, there is a certain, barely visible, respect for poetry on special occasions like funerals, births, or when some politician decides to use poetic lines to sound smart. But we are a special kind of people and there are some of us who would rather sell all their property just to possess two good lines.

Travelling and having read all over the world, I have the impression that we are a kind of mafia, but with secret powers. Any place I go I have no problem finding a compatriot of that unofficial Poetry land and having a conversation about new books. They usually don’t have a problem about whether am I a Bosnian-Canadian poet or a Canadian-Bosnian poet, which is an obvious problem with geography and for those who are in charge of protecting national identities. They just call me by my name written on my books, which is most fair because in my writing I never want to represent anybody but myself.

Ten years ago, my writing was coloured by the human and political situations and war in the former Yugoslavia, a country that doesn’t exist anymore, in a language that doesn’t exist. Today I live in Canada, choosing this country that I love so much as my home, and I write about the touchy issue of exile, about people struggling with identity having one foot on half-welcomed soil and one on memories of the past. Their drama is also my personal drama. I know that my strange English accent will make me different from Canadian-born people for the rest of my life. Honestly, I never wanted to learn English to give the false notion that I was born here. If one wants to know me better, he should consider my past as a crucial part of my identity. Last month I was embarrassed and blushing in front of a hundred people in Sarajevo when I started my book launch reading—in English. It has happened a few times at readings in Canada that I unconsciously started answering questions in Serbo-Croatian. I was blushing then, too. But definitely, my way of thinking wasn’t changed at all on the eight-hour flight from Europe to Canada. I am still the same and feel happy when people try to correctly pronounce my name.

SC: Do you find that things that inspire you to write now are different from those that inspired you before the Bosnian war?

GS: I didn’t change much in terms of my focus on everyday people like me. The doubts in the way they live, the dissatisfaction with one’s own life that seems to have been defined by somebody else, lonely people who buy lottery tickets and wait for the Friday draw, which is something like the biggest event of the week. Canada is a great source for that.

SC: What is your typical process for writing poetry?

GS: As a young poet I was obsessed with experimenting with traditional rhyming form and surreal content. It was a kind of voluntary masochism putting together two almost opposite things: severe and exact form in which you can’t stretch, and surrealism, which craves freedom and the denial of linguistic borders. My first two poetry collections over 35 years ago were written in that style. But I was in love with the idea to see how much I could breathe under water. It helped me a lot to learn how to control my imagination and combine it with a classical education. And I learned how to express ideas clearly and opposite of l’art pour l’art. I still believe that if writer doesn’t have a clear idea what to say, it’s better to spend time watching hockey on TV.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the process of writing as the process of doing a mosaic—the ecstasies of thinking and open air of possibilities—much more than seeing the final product, but you have to have an idea of what you want to say before you sit and write. I prefer to have a plot and to wrestle with my half-defined characters. That knot in my stomach, that sweet pain is necessary to give my lines of poetry some drama.
I am the kind of writer who carries poems in my head for years. I don’t throw much into the garbage basket.

SC: Before the war, how did the literary scene in the former Yugoslavia compare to what you now know as the literary scene in Canada?

GS: From the moment I came to Canada my first impression was that there is no serious approach to poetry. You can’t count the serious critics here on both hands but there are thousands of reviewers. John Metcalf mentions in his book of essays that if you want to punish a journalist, just assign him to write book reviews. Poetry hasn’t been taken seriously because it’s not profitable, and I am afraid that we are heading into a period in which a successful writer will be measured not by the quality of his graveyards, and concentration camp sites, talking with people who lost their entire families, and walking in the forensic centre where I touched the bones of victims not yet ready to be buried, I saw horror you can touch and found myself on shaky terrain. I had the feeling that the last ten years physically existed only on calendars but nothing has been changed deep in me. I was on the verge of cancelling the trip and telling the TV crew to go to hell. I learned that I am not one who can write heartless and cold newspapers reports from an emotional distance. Sometimes I have the same feeling while reading poetry on the stage. I share with my audience 100% of me because I am not an actor but a poet.