Pain area

Introduction

Coming from a country that no longer exists, teaching a language that is in pieces, I stick out my tongue like a fairy tale dragon and it forks: Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Slovenian, Macedonian…

Can a language so painful, a language that has never learned to describe a reality as complex as one’s inner experience of reality, tell stories?

It all started this way. Or that way. They did that, went there, and ended up in Holland. The exiles’ narratives are dateless. So much had happened in the short “post-war” period that their mental clocks had broken down under the strain. Everything had broken down. Places and times had been divided into “before” and “after,” life into “here” and “there.” They were suddenly without witnesses, parents, family, friends, or even the everyday people they had seen to reconstruct their lives. Without these reliable intermediaries, they were thrown back into themselves.

In the mediatized world, nothing is real. Memory passes through many intermediaries, in the form of Juliette Binoche or a red, white and blue woven bag, translating my personal pain into my language. Only this one thing is real.

Pain is silent and useless, but the only real witness.