Contemporary Voices From The Black Mountain

‘A Black lace
On the white wall –
The ocean’s scent
The light is still
Falling on us,
Announcing,
The presence of the day’
Her 2008 essay, ‘To Be a Writer in Montenegro’ signalled her relationship with her country and its national literature; she felt awestruck by inspiration before this tradition though not precious or naïve. She admits to the possibility of the inner sanctum provided by Montenegro – the ‘magical premises’ that she occupies – being a fanciful, romantic fiction: ‘Perhaps these images exist solely in my mind’. Nevertheless the humble beauty of her testimony convinces as she finally defines what it is to be a Montenegrin writer:
A writer who writes in a language not vast but unique, reaching each lonely heart, each rocky stone, each sea-gull, each fig, each grape, each morning, each eye, each thunder, each lightning, each autumn leaf, each sea, and each tear drop.
Some of Bakic’s works are available in English here: Amazon.
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Ognjen Spahic

Born in 1977 in Podgorica, Spahic is a civil engineering and philosophy graduate, lauded by many for his 2005 novel, Hansen’s Children (reprinted in English by Istros Books in 2011) as well as his tragic, surreal though undeniably bewitching short stories. He has received the Romanian Ovid Festival Prize in 2011, the 2005 Mesa Selimovic prize and the CEI Fellowship for Writers in Residence 2011. He bears a great number of influences; Danilo Kis, Ivo Andric, W.G. Sebald and Raymond Carver (whose death frames the disintegration of a couples relationship in Spahic’s ‘Raymond is No Longer with Us – Carver is Dead’) though his literary voice is unique. In Hansen’s Children he tackles the realities of mortality and atrocity through the allegorical microcosm of a leprosarium. The ‘children’ of the story belong to Gerhard Henrik Armauer Hansen, the Norwegian scientist who isolated the Mycobacterium Leprae in 1873. The last leper house these ‘children’ occupy is located in South Eastern Romania, a ‘vast desert of fear, ugliness and disfigurement’. Through its complete isolation and the utter abjection of its inhabitants, Spahic manages to express the horror of political oppression and the dislocation of a cultural legacy.

His short story, ‘Aftermath of the Clothes of Text’ charts the descent of an already torn family further rocked by matriarchal suicide. Ana, the central focus and cause for concern for our narrator, is portrayed as sadly unhinged, seemingly consigned to a grief-stricken confusion. At the close, her dialogue falls apart, as loud, overpowering music drowns out her snatches of inebriated speech. This unsteady speech concerns the inclusion of a story detailing her mother’s death appearing on a dress, which she feels inexplicably compelled to buy, seduced by the idea that the whole body can become ‘legible’ with ‘meaning strewn all over it’. It perfectly captures the unreality of modern confrontations with trauma, limited and confined as we are today by diluted media representations. As a whole though, Spahic presents a modern tragedy, with events which linger in their awful effects, and actions which are not histrionic but framed within a depiction faithful to verisimilitude.

Find out more on Spahic from Montenegrina – The Digital Library of Montenegrin Culture.

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Publish date : 2021-08-13 07:00:00

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