Goran Simic , A golden feast among cannibals
WRITTEN BY: Stanislava Paunović
Out of the need to speak anew about (and in ) dark times , the latest selection from Simić's poetry provides us with insight into the developmental arc of a poetic opus that seeks to reexamine and reinvent the personal and collective trauma of war, loss, post-war peace, oblivion, emigration, return, and dealing with a new everyday life.
Golden Feast Among the Cannibals presents a new selection of poetry by Goran Simić, an award-winning Bosnian poet, prose writer, playwright, and librettist. Simić lived and worked in Canada from 1996 to 2010, after which he returned to Sarajevo, from which he had previously emigrated after the end of the occupation. His poetry books include, among others: Tačka do kruga ili put ; Vertigo ; Sarajevska tuga ; Knjiga lutanja ; Immigrant Blues ; From Sarajevo with Sorrow ; Sunrise in the Eyes of the Snowman ; Treći zubi , and others.
Although in the afterword to the new collection we can read that Simić belongs to that stream of poetry that does not believe in anything written with a capital letter, such as: Homeland or Ideal or Flag , the poet himself announces the Golden Feast among the Cannibals in the introductory word precisely as a celebration of the 50th anniversary of his marriage to Poetry. Grouping the verses into a kind of thematic blocks, partly according to the boundaries of the original collections, the author of the new selection of poems has generally organized them from newer to older. He applied the same principle in the selection My Happy Days in the Asylum (2010), where he also wanted curious readers to get to know the young author only towards the end of the book. However, we immediately see that this is not a strictly chronological approach with the poem "War Mice" ( From Sarajevo with Sorrow ), which opens the collection.
In the poem "War Mice", the question of forgetting is raised as one of the essential problems of Simić's oeuvre - as a threat or trigger for the complete meaninglessness of experienced traumas and lost lives. The immigrant experience appears in conjunction with the problem of (non)memory, as a permanent feeling of not belonging, a life defined by borders, someone else's past and language ("Emigrant", "My accent", "About Ursula and the language", "On a bicycle"). Along with collective experience, the danger of forgetting is also felt in connection with personal and family history ("Names", "The grave of an unknown hero", "Decorating a Christmas tree").
On the other hand, witnessing the horrors of war – as an implicit attempt to make sense of them – represents one of the preoccupations of Simić's verses (“Wall of Horror”, “What I Saw”, “In a Time of Hunger”, “Lament over the City Hall”). Also, the second dominant thematic unit encompasses the absurdity of life in post-war “peace”, as an intimate confrontation with what has been seen, experienced and (not) done, at the moment when the immediate danger disappears (“Spring is Coming to My City”, “What a Fool I Have Been”, “Ordenje”). In this sense, Simić's love poems are also shaped through the prism of trauma, with a shared concern for fresh scars (“If We Stay in Bed Today”, “I'm Not the One”, “Love Story”).
Although throughout his entire opus he reaches for poetry as a way of making sense of existence, Simić questions the effectiveness of his own efforts with equal intensity ("The Apprentice", "The Third English Poem", "My Dear Jorge", a mini-cycle about the Black Hacknput, "At the Beginning, After All"). As a response to the witnessed suffering of war, in the poem "The Scene, After the War", the language of silence prevails over the attempt to evoke happier times. Silence, in this context, is experienced as a sign of deeper understanding and respect for the horror of what has been experienced, as the need not to minimize the experience with empty words. We face the same problem in the poem "Faces of Sadness", where the poet expresses his doubt that there is a vocabulary sufficient to describe the face of sadness that the subject feels all around him. In a similar vein, Simić problematizes the capitalist practice of media/newspapers delivering war/migrant stories in the form of consumerist content – like grief that can be “put on the scale and packed into those same colorful boxes that remained unopened under last year's Christmas tree” (“I got tired of myself as a victim”).
Providing readers with an authorial selection of poems from his decades-long opus, Simić, on the one hand, describes his intimate relationship with poetry as: his own biography , memoirs in verse , books identical to the phases of my life , and the like. On the other hand, throughout the poet's entire opus, he personally intertwines with the need to take responsibility for the time he lives in through writing, out of the belief or hope that through poetry the world can still change for the better. In his more recent poems, such an approach also includes speaking about geographically distant spaces, such as Syria and Palestine, as well as other current forms of incomprehensible (self)destruction ("Suicide Bomber").
Out of the need to speak anew about (and in ) dark times , the latest selection from Simić's poetry provides us with insight into the developmental arc of a poetic opus that seeks to reexamine and reinvent the personal and collective trauma of war, loss, post-war peace, oblivion, emigration, return, and dealing with a new everyday life.