Life, Novels

DRAGAN HAMOVIĆ, A POET WHO PUSHES BACK DARKNESS, FIERY AND GENTLY
The Age of Processing People into Mass
The turmoil we are living is fully controlled. There are two crucial targets of the global attack: self-conscious personality and cultural memory. A human and a society without heritage are deprived of their stronghold, they move at others’ discretion, like chess pieces. In a time of cynics and trick-masters, we have a vengeance of the untalented and pretentious. Identity engineering and occupation of consciousness. Persistent attacks on supporting pillars of internal survival. However, the organic resistance of the ”huge minority” is gradually growing, although it has the status of a guerilla in their own country

By: Branislav Matić
Photo: Guest’s Archive

Since he discovered the mother book and soft kernel, he became an expert in repairing memories. In his ancestors’ Herzegovina, he has his Hamovina, which he never forgets. In his hometown of Kraljevo, tucked in among dear seekers for direction and measure, he almost became an actor and radio reporter. Since he had studied the science of literature in Belgrade, he has been helping poets understand their poetry. He saw off one Lazar and greeted another. He loves Serbia, both visible and invisible. To those who mock it, he peacefully gives a chance to do their job.
Dragan Hamović (Kraljevo, 1970) in National Review.

Interplay of homelands. Do we ever think about how many people are built into our individual human structure? Not only those written in the unreadable DNA code, but also a myriad of people whose traces we carried on us during our lifetime. What kind of mixture is active inside of us and through us. We all have the task to survive as one Whole. A targeted and settled Whole. My father’s name and surname come from Herzegovina, on the brink of the unreached sea, from Dol on the edge of Popovo Polje. Father Lazar took us there every summer, to his aged mother and stonemason brother, to his father’s home, under the pretense that we’re going to Dubrovnik. We did reach the sea, at least for one day, and then hurried back to Herzegovina. Lazar was fed up with salty water and Ragusa in his youth. He was student of the Dubrovnik Gymnasium, just like my oldest uncle Mladen, student of the generation in the postwar years.
My grandfather Svetozar passed the road from an ordinary worker to foreman in ”Dubrovnik Steamboat Navigation”, which was a seed of his becoming a gentleman. He built a new house in the village in the thirties, very humble, and saved money. When the war came, everything except the house was destroyed. I don’t remember him, he survived Endehazi (Independent State of Croatia) in Dubrovnik, but didn’t live long after that. My great-grandfather Siniša cultivated his moustache. I know it from a picture. I’m not sure if he wore them as a young rebel in the bloody Vučji Do. In his old age, he lived to be woken up in the middle of the night to flee from the Ustashas, who began throwing Serbs from nearby villages into a pit in Ržani Do. Most of them were from Veličani, where Stana, my father’s mother, Velička, came from.
From my father’s homeland I remember the abundance of whitish stone and, opposite to the roughness of the landscape, gentle faces of cousins, glowing because of Lazar’s arrival from Serbia. Grandma Stana, very weak, blessed us with a sad smile. The essence of the social life of Hamovina, our summer Agora, flowing with laughter, was on a high terrace of my grandfather’s house. I wrote about it in my lyrical prose ”Home Upbringing”, used as an introduction to my book Soft Kernel.
Upon the wish of his father, my father enrolled in medical school in Belgrade, but soon ran away from dissecting rooms to study bloody history, with Otrogorski and Vasa Čubrilović. He didn’t care to wait for the promised position in the Military Historical Institute – he wanted to teach, so he reached Kraljevo, my mother’s old school. Not far from it was a new white house by the river, where Ljubinka Marković, young doctor-microbiologist, ceremonially brought him in, to spend the rest of his life there. My mother, the only daughter of Dragomir and Radmila, is still keeping my parents’ house and yard in Ribnica nice, keeping herself up at the same time, and, whenever I can, I return to it as to my port of origin.
The female line relates me to the area of Kraljevo, while all male characters are from somewhere: my father from Herzegovina, mother’s father from Podrinje, and my mother’s grandfather from Studenica. Thus I gained an expanded feeling of homeland. My children, however, thanks to their mother’s homeland, can add the Kumanovo area to their ancestors’ topography, near Staro Nagoričane and heroic Zebrnjak, plucked from Serbia in 1945, without consideration of the Serbian population around Milutin’s wonderful, now desolated endowment.

Kraljevo in the personal myth. My hometown of Kraljevo, as I have seen it in the times of early intimate forming, wasn’t difficult to fall in love with. The irrefutable feeling of protection, from my Ribnica backyard below the Ibar confluence, spread further to the area of the city, which was given a freshly painted, urban face in the seventies. An excerpt of old Kraljevo was preserved on the left side of the main street: ”Zadužbina” kafana, a row of single-storey craftsmen workshops and other stores, the massive building of the ”Pariz” restaurant on the circular square designed already in Miloš’s time, and finally the Church of Holy Trinity (duke’s endowment) and the park around the quarters of Vasa Popović, duke of the Požega nahi.
In the early eighties, a monument to warriors from liberation wars, pushed aside to the edge of the city cemetery for two decades, was returned to the circular square. The top of the lance of the folded war flag, which the bronze soldier with a šajkača is hugging, again became the central point of the city circle. Mrs. Žiča prayed in silence, outside of the main traffic routes, because the sanctity was represented by bones of executed fellow citizens, united under the grassy plane behind the railway station. The stories my grandma always told about fears and troubles during the occupation wove an invisible net around me.
A new era of growth began at the beginning of high school, when I found myself in a small box of the renewed ”Kraljevo October” Theater, together with other young seekers for their direction and their measure. I was shy and introvert – as my bright sister would say – like a savage. As if I was on my way to execution. I’m no different nowadays, but then it was too obvious. I often pretended to be funny, and it sometimes hit the target.
Then, at the same time, I discovered journalism in high school. The local radio and weekly, from the highest floors of the so-called Home of Social Organizations, were my realistic roof of silent longings. I wore a bulky ”Uher” and microphone, playing reporter, with a certain effect. I wasn’t only shy, but a bit dumb as well; I got stuck while searching for the real word – just like today. I was longing for journalism printed on paper, not thrown into the air, but Ibar News was a serious newspaper after all. In the school year on the edge of maturity, before the army, my life was marked by the figure of Professor Ružica Lazarević. She had a grumpy mask, as well as various whims and childish outbursts. She used to forgive us, with an accomplice’s smile, what no one would, and was too strict in unexpected moments. She spread a series of names before us, which were only waiting for literature students. She wasn’t a local, persistently addressed us formally, and lived alone. When the flames of democracy and wars for Tito’s heritage broke out, I lost all my enthusiasm for journalism. Poetry kept me going.
In the background of the initial public tests, I wrote verses, reduced, free and starry. I wasn’t convinced they have some specific strength, although I knew I wasn’t lying. Thus I met my friend by vocation, Milivoje Pajović, whose poems, strange and beyond the mind, increased my distrust in mine. He also painted dreamy paintings, relying on himself from early days and capable of many things. We designed and created two auteur plays from our still unprinted poems. We performed them ourselves. On the piano and cello, we were supported by real future actors, Dugalić and Kubura. Pajović then joined the army and went a long way. We all went a pretty long way.
I never thought I’d ever leave Kraljevo. After my literature studies, I rushed to return home, because the doors of paradise of the city library opened up for me. Today, young people, even the best ones, most often find doors closed. Nevertheless, the moment came seven years later, when two visible hands (and one invisible) invited me to set off from there. So I did, humbly, still keeping my eyes on my place of birth. What I couldn’t turn into a personal myth there, I managed to at a decent, irrevocable distance.

The hyperbola called Belgrade. I like to watch Belgrade from a high periphery, above the Tošin Bunar train station, from where, a century ago, Austro-Hungarians fired cannons at Serbia. I see through the imagined limes, the borderline fate of the scattered crazy settlement. In the metropolis’ stream and rush, the belvedere crushes into fragments, a whirlwind of pictures. The lookout point on the edge of Bežanijska Kosa – during the day or in the evening light of electric galaxies – becomes my ”thinking hill” and my bow for unlimited internal journeys.
Belgrade is tawdry with its effective, wasteful and empty signs of a megalopolis, but still carries remains of the local intimacy of a recent polis. Belgrade is constant movement, flowing and disappearing. Belgrade is a collage of incompatible microworlds, which will never meet, or, even if they do run into one another – they won’t even take a look at each other. Belgrade is the true reflection of our incompleteness, for which we could acquire some stronger justifications. Belgrade is an expression of longing for stepping out into the worlds we do belong to, but never will.
For me, Belgrade is a polygon where I’m forced to overcome my inertias and limitations and continuously reminds me of them. A world traveler and runaway to Belgrade once said that the beloved city of his youth ”swelled up beyond all bounds and turned its back on Serbia.” However, it generously offers itself to all those who continuously show that they don’t deserve such an attitude. Belgrade is a huge exaggeration. That is why poets love it, from Crnjanski and Popa to tender pop-authors. And everyone adds his part to the hyperbola called Belgrade.

In the core of experiencing Serbia. If I said, partially as a joke, that Belgrade seems to me like a huge exaggeration, I can rightfully say that I experience Serbia as a kind of my extended, higher individuality, unfathomable in space and time, opposite to my personal narrowness and weakness of any kind. And such Serbia is based on figures I first adopted while adopting life. They were not just transmitters of a common legend – uninvented and worthy of respect – but before all carriers of unconditional love and constant donators of sacrificial gifts to their offspring and their vocations.
If Serbia is a female word, its first impersonation is my mother’s mother, from Studenica by her father’s line – as she liked to underline. Thus the word Studenica didn’t come into my mind as the first royal lavra, but as a sign of a living force and decisiveness, fighting and openhandedness of my grandma. Grandma Radmila was the only constant in the house and the living connection with the entire living and passed away people we are directed to. She was liveliness itself, first for her family and then further on. Liveliness in working, liveliness in words. A mother melody, cast into quick sound and mind sparks. A shirt is nearer than a coat. ”A ray peeks through the twigs and greets the sunlight”, a trembling pillar of her voice would shed sunlight on the kitchen. Grandma is the Serbia that fights and suffers, doesn’t give in, in its own small, family history.
As a grown up, in the core of experiencing Serbia, I realized the above described picture. Serbia is the ardently wanted, only occasionally reachable, projection of an extended family, the one that greeted me at my entrance into this world and raised me. The home, where I’m among my people, both present and justifiably absent. That is why I intimately noted the moment when the lyrical picture of ”Genuine Serbia” clears up, a land of sparkling shadows guarding and caring about their close ones on this side of life: ”Immense is the resistance of our caring shadows, / They’re armed with reasonless, exceptional love. / With them we’re defended from everything in advance. / A gathering of victorious souls. Heavenly Serbian army.” In other words, my closest ones are to blame for such an irrealistic experience of Serbia. Yes, it’s a sin indeed. However, we are living in a time of derogation of everything that was glowing and glistening inside of our dark ranges, so many will mock this confession of mine. I’m giving them the opportunity. Let them do their job.

Culture in the epoch of the mass. The turmoil we live is fully controlled. We can single out two crucial targets of the global attack. One target is His Majesty The Self-Conscious Individual, on whose behalf – that is, on behalf of the department called Reason – the authority of legends are disputed since European Enlightenment. And now even that notorious Reason is disintegrating. The second target is the remaining cultural memory, verified by experience, collected from available sources for the purpose of orientation in life. A man and a society without heritage are deprived of a stronghold, they move at others’ discretion, like chess pieces.
There is too much abuse and, as Lotman wrote, ”metacultural wrangling” inside the ”concept” and ”practices” praised today. The role of rebellious destructors of the petrified culture from a hundred years ago is something completely different from the contemporary annulling of any meaning, a grain of salt of human creation, leveling the high and the low, the deep and the shallow. Both in science and in art. Freedom has allegedly been conquered, but only the conscientious know how to use it. The mightiest wave it and manipulate widely and refinedly. Those who create beyond the logics of the system publicly don’t exist, regardless of resources they are gifted with. In the time of cynics and soulless trick masters, we have a vengeance of the untalented, yet pretentious ones. Processing of the personality and cultural community into a mass for mashing. Impersonality against personality. We are losing the solid soil of our ancestors beneath our feet, every day a bit more. However, the organic resistance of the ”huge minority” is gradually growing, becoming more directed and more necessary. Nothing is resolved. Anyone who resists carries ”a part of the solution”.

From the Serbian aspect. Serbian cultural self-consciousness, nonsystematic and headstrong, has been under someone’s accusation since a long time ago. However, the serious accusations today, rewritten and translated, come from the inside, even from those with a strong ambition to lead, change it and make new foundations for it. The strike of harsh power is replaced by persistent strikes on supporting pillars of internal survival. For example, our public consciousness has never recorded the heaviness of the fact that, since the disintegration of the previous state illusion, Cyrillic alphabet and Serbian books were removed and turned into ashes in new neighboring states. And that, before the eyes of the peace troops, our books from the Priština library, just like churches and houses, were burned without disruption. Serbia is, in a conciliatory way, accepting forgeries and ruthless twisting, for the sake of an unequal, forced cooperation with others. Its friends are convincing her that all the horrible stigmas are deserved. The identity engineers of new nations are plucking, when needed, from our language and cultural property. A strategic cultural response is lacking, apart from persistent indications and resistance of individuals and institutions, which have the status of a guerilla in their own country. And a response is a necessity, in the name of survival, and not only because of justice, which, as our elders said, holds the country and cities.
Public commentators on duty do not even hide the lack of elementary national self-respect or surplus of their ideological resentment towards Serbian heritage. In the magma of such heads, any involvement in favor of the suppressed Cyrillic alphabet is followed by lowest political etiquettes. In cases of long-term anticultural activities and brutal testimonies pointed against all visible Serbian signs, our selfless yugo-spherical spirits do not react or just relativize them, seeking higher justifications and making strained or unsustainable parallelisms. Occupied consciousnesses are aspiring towards completing the occupation.
We are continuing to fix our cultural character according to what others want to reduce or lower us to, not according to what we really are. Along with the threatening announcements of open lustrations, new commissaries among us, powerfully supported, are already greatly cleaning up the present cultural terrain from nationalists, implied butchers. Just like Slobodan Jovanović and Dučić, Crnjanski and Rastko, Milan Kašanin and Grigorije Božović, a series of spiritually selected and unique people were classified as degenerates and villains in 1945 and on.
Our direction is still not determined by our strategic ideas, but by the pressure of circumstances, the reality of external actions towards us. We are denying ourselves the right to our own direction. Others are directing us and we are thankful because they’re still not beating us – they even praise us from time to time. We haven’t been such even at times we consider the most inglorious.

Gates of poetry and sentences-sparks. Nothing recommended me in advance for the literary vocation. Neither much reading nor writing excellent school assignments. I was more into reading and drawing comics – ever since I concluded that someone draws the comics based on someone else’s story.
Poets that didn’t belong to the school program – and those that did repel me without exception – attracted me with their strange names. I heard about them from my strange logics professor, lyrical satiric Dimitrije Jovanović, who rather introduced us to the alogics of poetry. From this unusual beardy Marxist, I heard about Vinaver, Drainac, Libero, as well as common names that immediately sounded unusual: Branko V. Radičević (where did the V. come from?) or Brana Petrović (how come a man named Brana?). All of a sudden, words, words, words started flowing. More a sorcery than understanding. Out of nowhere, on the shelves on the ground floor of ”Beograd” Department Store in Kraljevo, I noticed a copy of the bluish Albatross Anthology by Gojko Tešić, with Vinaver and other strange and estranged names and texts. On the shelves – yes, in the department store! – were also discrete poetry collections of Česlav Miloš and Borges: Hymn of a Pearl and Code. Even stranger words, without bright colors and loud cries. They invoked me, with their inarticulate language, which I understood just necessary enough for the beginning. New titles and names kept coming – new discovering and discoveries.
Crnjanski, for example, was a strange name whose vastness I traveled across. I summed the discoveries in the ”Ballad of Crnjanski”, awarded, due to absence of real competition, by Our Factory magazine. My first published poem with a so-called interview (made of my distraught sentences made decent by the reporter) appeared in the newspaper of the big Wagon Factory, which initiated the creation of workers and home environment. (One of the workers was my aunt Javorka, mechanical engineer and magister from Birmingham, with poems that floated half way between Desanka and Eliot.)
At my philology studies, I couldn’t read what I wanted to, realizing that history of literature is paved with pieces necessary only for my exams. In the eve of the wartime nineties, Belgrade bookstores, in ambushes behind every corner from Kalemegdan to Slavija, were packed with cheap editions. I brought bundles of books literally every day to my student room in Konjarnik. Many are still waiting for me today. And will never live to see me.
At the beginning, I narrowed and thickened in my poems, according to theoretical justifications of the modern era that one mustn’t write in a human way anymore. I didn’t have what to write about, I wasn’t sure how to write, but the matrix of fixed verse began challenging me. I started believing such a frame of mine, because it tamed the huge force and amorphousness of words. Most people around me wrote and thought differently.
Old Lazar departed crying in pain and the young one arrived crying, both in a short time range. After an immeasurably long silence, I let my voice free again. First The Mother Book, then Fiery and Gentle. Afterwards, a sentence-spark of my son Lazar one ice-cold night fired me up to self-combustion. He said, along the way, or at least I heard – Dragon Drinks Tea. Thesuppressed mythical source boiled out and I tasted the pure fascination of playing, as never before or after, writing poems from a naive, somewhat children’s manuscript Dragon in an Egg. Everything came by as long prepared, waited for.

***

Note about the Road Passed
Dragan Hamović (Kraljevo, 1970) graduated from the Serbian Language and Literature Group of the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade in 1995, defended a magister thesis in 2008 (”Poetry and Poetics of Jovan Hristić”) and doctoral thesis in 2010 (”Poetry of Stevan Raičković and Poetic Environment in the Second Half of the XX Century”). He worked as editor in chief of the ”Povelja” magazine and publishing of the National Library in Kraljevo (1997–2002), and as library director from 2001. He was editor in the Belgrade Institute for Textbook Publishing (2003–2011) and is presently senior research associate in the Institute of Literature and special advisor in the Ministry of Culture and Information of Serbia.
Books of poetry: ”Darknesses, Mocks” (1992), ”Appointee” (1994), ”The Mother Book” (2007), ”Album of Early Verses” (2007), ”Fiery and Gently” (2012), ”Dragon in an Egg” (2013), ”Shouldering” (2015), ”Soft Kernel” (2016), ”Fixing Memories” / ”Ремонт воспоминаний” (2017).
He won the ”Milan Bogdanović” award for literary criticism (2006), and the SANU Award from the Endowment of Branko Ćopić fund for his poetry collection ”The Mother Book” (2008). He has been living and working in Belgrade since 2003.

***

Cross in a Stone
My good uncle Stanko, master of stonemasonry, which Popovo Polje has always been famous for, small in stature and able to break hard hills, was a great man in my eyes. He additionally grew after his death, when I discovered that, together with his father-in-law Đorđe Vulić, he created the tombstone in the form of a cross for the miraculously announced grave of the mother of St. Basil of Ostrog in Mrkonjići. In the sixties, it was an almost illegal action of the Bishop and the oppressed faithful people.

***

Born at the Age of Fourteen
Nataša Kovačević, a great expert in literature, Freud, Jung and theater, gymnasium professor, an essayist with a wide swing and imaginative prose writer, but most of all a master of oral seduction by the mind, brought us together in the drama studio in Kraljevo. We began with the theater of absurd, grotesque Ionesco, who suited us well. ”I was fourteen when I was born” – are the first words I sent from the scene, under a Napoleon cap. The audience laughed, and I myself didn’t know what to think about it.

***

Comics
I practiced my hand, ink and pen, studied general and local history of comics, followed all selected comics editions. I devoured authors of the French-Belgian school, realistic and caricature types, became mature for Hugo Pratt and Corto Maltese. The Italian roto series were in the past, except for crazy characters of Magnus & Bunker in the irresistible translation from Zagreb. I read our comic writers, mostly Bane Kerc, sometimes more from patriotism. I envied the Croatians for having Maurović, Radilović and Nojgebauer brothers, a bit surprised for finding names such as Solovyev, Lobachev, Kuznetsov or Navoev in the Belgrade editions between the wars, with excellent transfer of Serbian folk fairytales and epics into comics.

***

The Dragon within Us
... Did the dragon (who is not a monster in Serbian legends, but impersonation of secret protective forces) lie sadly imprisoned on the bottom of my hard shell up to then? Then, through the first crack, he broke through the wall of his dungeon and sang in a clear voice: ”What force the egg haves, / What kind of miracle lies in eggs!” A child in us is a much stronger factor that we dare to admit, as a soft and indestructible core of existence and pledge of survival. That is how I understood it then and I level myself now according to it.