We spoke with Velibor Čolić on the occasion of his arrival at Bookstan for the presentation of the diary "About people, food and gods". A French writer with a Balkan background spoke to us about the Asian passage of time, Vietnamese food, French literature, travel culture and the collapse of late capitalism .
Interviewed by: Matej Vrebac
The last time you presented the translation of your Book of Departures to the Sarajevo audience at Bookstan 2021, and this renowned international literature festival is the immediate reason for your return. Sarajevo is, among other things, also your city, that's where you started your literature studies, published your first texts... Are you looking forward to Sarajevo? Why is it still your city?
Of course I'm looking forward to it. Although both the city and I have changed, it must be so, everything was there. I think it works with cities as it does with old loves. Sometimes we recognize each other, sometimes we don't. Maybe now, after all those years, that hard-to-define realization is coming to me, it's probably a consolation: what was once is always there. If my memory is ashes, and it is, then I will try, like those grandmother witch doctors in the Balkans, to learn to read from it. That's how I see my writing and all my books: divination in ashes. A long, multi-decade letter, to my native bosom.
You present About people, food and gods, a diary in the eponymous edition of excellent titles edited by Semezdin Mehmedinović. Did Sam have to persuade you for a long time or did the collaboration happen spontaneously? How was the process since you wrote the diary in Vietnam, Brussels and Novi Mesto?
The idea appeared spontaneously. I used to post my short stories with photos on Facebook. Gradually, all of this began to take on a hybrid form: diary, travelogue, observations, anecdotes in that distant magical land. Asia, that spectacular continent for us. I sent Sam a few of those records. Go on, he replied, something will come of it. In fact, it was (and will be) material for a novel in French, for Gallimard. Three Journeys to the East. In January 2025, I'm going to Thailand for a month, with the same idea and the same "speed" (local buses, trains, vans, ships...) and the same time frame, and for 2026 I've requested residency in Cambodia. From those three diaries, I will try to compile the novel Three Journeys to the East.
Your diary is also a travelogue of twenty-five days in which you traveled Vietnam from north to south in April 2023. You write at the very end: Those who do not write, you live and travel only once. And those who write, you go through your journey more than once. What does it look like to relive that other, literary path, as opposed to the geographical one, especially from the current time distance?
Travel is a friend, a wise Chinese once said, and the enemy is a wall. It's clear to me. We buy a house, a car, clothes, and we invest money in travel. That writing reflex is probably a professional deformity. But it doesn't matter. It is such a human, yet futile, need to capture the moment, the "glow in the grass", something of exhilaration, the brilliance of a different air and light that long journeys can bring us. The great masters tried it: Marcel Proust, Jack Kerouac, the famous Swiss-French vagabond, sailor and poet Blaise Cendras. When poets look at the sky, they always see someone's eyes. It's all in the view, of course. Let us learn, if we are not completely lost, to look at "miniatures" with age, the unclear border between the big and the small world, the water surface of the lake from which fairy horses are born and die, and the incomprehensibility of the cosmos around us. It's all about the look and the emotion. Modern literature sometimes wants to be neutral, "cold", and that, I think modestly, is a shame. The text is the electrocardiogram of our soul. Ever since.
Literature always returns to us as much as we "spent" on it.
You notice the difference in the concept of time in Asia, which is cyclical, undefined in the eternal present versus the Western rectilinear accuracy. Isn't this perhaps the biggest difference that conditions all other differences in cultural patterns and traditions? How did your trip to Vietnam open your eyes to portray and describe it so skillfully?
I'm just at the beginning, I'm still on the surface of that "Asian" interpretation and understanding of time. In the book, I tried to explain it like this: I am delighted with the realization, the unexpected "discovery" that the past does not actually exist. That time is just an inexhaustible series of small present moments. Maybe it's from the "jetlag", I don't know, but I become perfectly relaxed and lucid. Here in the red and golden silence of Asia, I realize that we don't need to define time. It is set a priori, it exists by itself. But it could be said that time is what causes each present moment, as soon as it occurs, to be replaced by another present moment. Time is what guarantees the presence of the present at every moment.
You write about the different types of food you've had the chance to taste, from pickled bananas, runny honey, various nems to banh xeo, insects and the ubiquitous barbecue. You yourself write that the root of the soul is in the stomach, so it seems to me that the biggest culture shock for you in Vietnam was precisely the one related to the food, although you liked it very much?
Of course, food is culture. It's not just stuffing carbohydrates, fats, vitamins and other miracles into our living machine. It is always a sum, a mixture of everything that has happened and is happening to each of us. From our fights over which ajvar and baklava to Italian culinary bestsellers, pizza, spaghetti and the like. Asia is refined. Complex. I discovered that these dishes are not only of one taste, only salty or spicy. Rather, they are almost always whole bouquets, sometimes of strange flavors for us. It seems to me that the Christian concept of the separation of heaven and hell is wrong. Heaven and hell happen simultaneously. And so is Vietnamese food. Wonderful tortillas, incredibly delicious soups and just a few steps away, in a colorful market in Hanoi, a proud cook is dishing out roasted dogs. Caramelized, like they do with ducks. I saw another specialty in Hoi An. Huge, whole, grilled frogs sold to take away, strung on a stick, like a lily hip.
The people there are gentle, the food is good, and the gods are smiling., is the best example of a sentence that reflects your experience of that magnificent country. Against that country where everyone is smiling and rejuvenated overnight, you contrast with a parodied image of yourself and other "old tourists from Europe", no matter how old they are. What makes Vietnamese men and women look younger than Westerners, apart from laughter and looks?
Complete the quote would be : The people there are gentle, the food is good, and the gods are smiling. It is a little different in our area. The food is strong, the people hate each other, and the gods are pissed off. That was and remains my biggest secret. Why does man hate us so much? There are many definitions of homo balcanicus. I would humbly add a few more. The Balkan guy smokes two packs of cigarettes a day, but he doesn't have a microwave because it's unhealthy and radiates. By inheritance, he became a medical, football, sexual and political expert by birth. He cures everything with garlic and brandy, gets annoyed when he watches the Chelsea-Arsenal London derby, and knows all about drafts, cold concrete and wet hair. And since they introduced democracy to him, the Balkan man talks about anything and everything, swears and spits on dog carts on forums, threatens the internet's endless truths, but in the end always ends up rounding up ours in the elections. Because he intimately knows, according to the law of joined vessels, that the other Balkan man is also constantly rounding his own.
A Balkan is not a man, he is a male.
Na loves school, but would die for the language.
He wears a branded tracksuit even though he is a dustman who has never kicked a ball in his life. They used to agree with him, but now he drunkenly insists that he is better and more valuable than others. No comment.
From the hustle and bustle of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh to the rice terraces of Ha Ging and the jungles of the north, you've traveled by all means of transport. What would you like to travel again and which place would you like to visit again?
Surely that "sleeping bus", a phenomenal bus with reclining cabins that drove us to the south of that country. And the cabin is spacious enough to comfortably accommodate my hundred and a few kilos and one hundred and 96 centimeters. Gentle, slow movement, for hours, and in front of you parades that other, unknown world, distant Asia.
And for the latter, perhaps the Mekong Delta, it was too hot at that moment, over 40 degrees.
Although it seems that it is a young country with a special history, the influence of the Americans is felt both in film and in all other spheres. Liberal capitalism is slowly and surely enveloping Vietnam as well, if we compare it with the countries created by the breakup of Yugoslavia, what stage has it reached?
I would not dare to compare the two territories.
In our country, all of this, unfortunately, has turned into plunder, nation, religion and mafia clans. In Vietnam, and this is visible, in "real" life, on the street, the state is slowly leaving its traditional allies Russia and China and turning to America and Japan. We can only imagine all the turmoil, youth, speed and intelligence with which this capable people discover capitalism. With everything that we do not have here. On the other hand, we also discover this so-called Asian, let's call it reconciliation with fate. In Mai Chao, a beautiful, forgotten valley of rice fields on the border with Laos, I secretly observed people working in these mystical phosphorescent fields. This reconciliation is as old as that country. Confucius' teachings state that this vertical of authority is always respected. Authority is of divine nature and therefore, by respecting authority, we also respect the gods. There is no room for rebellion there. Of course, I am simplifying, but this calm, Vietnamese, difficult is precisely the product of that.
This year at Bookstan, several prominent authors from France are presenting translations of their books. On the other hand, francophone literature is much larger than France itself, and only a small part of it reaches us to be translated. What new voices do you notice, what kind of translation selection would you like to see on the shelves of our bookstores?
Speaking of translations, I must mention. A few years ago I started, and now I will finally, finally continue, translating contemporary Bosnian poetry into French. I called it Jukebox Memories, one song from each of the selected poets like those singles in jukeboxes. Without any anthological ambitions. The conditions are that I like it and that the author accepts to be a part of it. I also have a publisher, certainly the best French for poetry, Bruno Docey Editions, I just had to wait for free time to get back to that jukebox. For now, I have translated Ahmed Burić, Darko Cvijetić, Faruk Šehić, Mila Stojić, Tanja Stupar Trifunović... I will use my stay in Sarajevo to complete our jukebox. We'll see what it looks like in the end.
Can we know what you are currently writing, are you up to something? If this question is too invasive, then rather tell us what you are reading these days to recommend to us?
A big and long tour is for this new novel of mine, Guerre et Pluie , which was published by Gallimard this winter. It doesn't leave a grain of time for writing or anything else. Those tours are an inseparable part of all this around the book. I'm talking about forty dates in four months. Decent paid, you have to be always in a good mood and healthy, always 100% "pour amuser la bourgeoisie", as I define it. It should be understood that way. It's not an advertisement, it's a sale of this and that. You simply go to festivals, radios, televisions and talk about your book. There are worse ways to earn a living. They only need to call you, but that's another story. Otherwise, at Bookstan, I will present the French writer Hervé Le Tellier, and his bestseller L'Anomalie , which was also translated into our language. An excellent, witty, virtuoso novel. Enough.
Do you always carry your trusty Moleskine notebook for notes and drawings?
Only for long and distant trips.
Final question: do you ever meet the face of the Monkey King on the streets, which reminds you of Vietnam, or can we only encounter monkeys on the streets of Europe?
Here in Brussels there is a whole zoo. My generation is again witnessing the end of something. This liberal capitalism. I sometimes say in the hall: we exchanged the end of communism for the twilight of capitalism. That's why you should while you can still travel.
As far and as long as possible. If you haven't studied, travel. We have no other choice. Until it is really proven that there is life after death.