After reading and analyzing in detail the texts that arrived at the Competition for the Annual Award of the Society of Writers of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in very strong competition, the members of the Jury decided to award the prize in the fields of poetry, prose and essay writing to Damir Uzunović for the novel called Ja sam.
Explanation for awarding the award in the field of poetry, prose and essay writing to Damir Uzunović for the novel I Am
The very title of the novel, underlining the special discourse of literature in relation to science and historiography, gives the reader the opportunity to interpret it in different ways and as such holds a fragmented fable (about 400 pages), narrated in three parts, together, until the Epilogue when the reader is finally offered a solution to this interesting code in an extremely pleasing poetic way.
As mentioned, Uzunović tells his story through three parts, which could function as three separate units, but they would lack the aestheticization that the novel gets with the integration of these chapters. The first part is reserved for the period of early childhood (Korea), written with an inspired use of language and an exceptional sense of humor, the second part covers the period of youthful maturation, getting to know yourself and the world around you with its good and bad fortunes, while the third part tells about the death of his father and life in exile and his return to Sarajevo.
In this gallery of characters, brilliantly portrayed in just a few sentences, Uzunović's world is constructed from the cultural to the historical, from childhood to adulthood, in which historical events and direct experiences are sequenced: from Sarajevo in the 1960s to the earthquake in Montenegro in the 1970s, from Gazimestan to the war in Sarajevo in 1992, and onwards, sharp testimonies about love and friends, family and travel, about the city of Sarajevo and its streets and neighborhoods, about religion and the party, the sea and the mountains, about nations and nationalism, about writing and reading, etc.
One of the basic themes of the novel is the problem of identity, that is, in accordance with the limits and possibilities, Uzunović questions how much a person, within different contexts, can realize through life in relation to what he wanted and in relation to what was offered to him by the place and time of birth.
This is a kind of internal dialogization that occurs, compositionally speaking, between the three parts of the novel and the epilogue, or Uzunović's narrator who tries to tell the story in order to reconstruct the past of his self, experienced long ago at the age of five to twenty and beyond, in a Proustian way. It is also a kind of self-assessment, or rather a reproduction of the unreliability of one's own self-image in relation to the impression that his narrator leaves on others. No memory is authentic but a creative act, because the past within itself has no emotional value until it speaks from the position of the here and now. It is an architectural peculiarity in relation to memory in which neither the narrator nor the writer are active actors but observers of one's own self which necessarily becomes the other, whereby the subjectivity of the participants in the events is replaced by the objectivity of the observer.
"I've noticed it before, that the language itself chooses the words it wants, puts them in points that I'm not able to compose and directs them to those who least expect it from me. To this day, I would swear that it wasn't me saying them but someone else, someone instead of me. Later it turned out that there couldn't have been any other words." (Uzunović, p. 333) These sentences from Uzunović's book perhaps best illustrate the stylistic and genre affiliation of his novel. Uzunović writes in a clear, seductive and distinctive style that his way of storytelling "calms" all the terrible and painful topics that deconstruct the world around them with their topicality. Throughout the entire novel, only the narrator's voice is heard dominantly, so that the narrated world acquires a tonal unity in which the narrator's instance instills confidence in the one who "hears" it, so almost without exception everything that is said is approved. Thus, the direction from the apparent reality and experience towards language is reversed in this novel, in accordance with the concepts of modern literature: language here is not what is seen through (the life of the characters, their states and feelings), but becomes what is seen. In this way, by means of convincingly achieved free undirected speech, logically motivated determination of the character of the story, great psychological "detection" in just a few strokes, precisely placed film scenes where each of them outlines a compact whole marked by the very theme of the story, the distance between the reader and the characters of the novel is reduced to the smallest possible extent.
Genre-wise, the story is realized between the "ossified" genre of bildungsrorman, on the one hand, and a prose oratorio with a gallery of narrated characters, on the other, thus refusing to be confined to the classical novel form. Uzunović illustrates with his way of storytelling how important it is for novelistic prose to have a good poetic imagination, and to what extent it is possible to tell a whole from a series of fragments, sensations and poetic images. In his brilliant descriptions, inanimate things come to life over time, and then one can feel in the best sense what inspiration means in art (e.g. Uzunović, p. 42), and living people, due to clear and precise analogies, can become just things (e.g. Uzunović, p. 49).
This mastery of language and the seductiveness of storytelling, which Uzunović assumes for his reader, contributes to a distinctive genre – the novel of books, in which the bildungsroman is enriched with the cultural image of a travelogue, or rather the chronotope of its events: Sarajevo and its streets, the Adriatic coast, etc. Autobiographical yes or no?, here it is completely the wrong question (and only interesting at the level of gossip). As much as there is autobiographical here (and there certainly is), it is skillfully structured and as such, from the individual to the general (as good literature should do), it has become a representative pattern of life and a portrait of a middle-class Sarajevo family of the former Yugoslavia.
Uzunović's language, which avoids any type of taboo, without ever entering the zone of vulgarity, and his special storytelling skill, which, among other things, is armed with knowledge of what he is talking about, and shaped into a fascination for seeing things in a double discourse (the mutual interpenetration of the views of adults and the views of children, and the mutual interpenetration of apparent reality and imagination), make this novel very unusual, in the direction of the poetic principle of literature that Viktor Šklovski wrote about - make things unusual to see them. And finally, the genre games with travelogue and bildungsroman enabled Uzunović to realize in his novel a wide array of spiritual landscape of cultural-historical knowledge about Sarajevo, its inhabitants and their ways of life, because only a novel that brings some kind of knowledge guarantees that we can also talk about its morality.
Jury: Edin Pobrić, president, Nenad Tanović, member. Jagoda Ilicic, member
In Sarajevo, March 9, 2023.