If there is anything more astonishing than the persistence of memory, it is the willingness to forget. Given the very real deconstruction of this country, the inhabitants of its successor states and republics are left to piece together something of what they once called their lives. Writers are remembered for what they did and didn't say during the war. This was also true for former Yugoslavs, like Danilo Kis, willing to confront the Second World War. The complexity of this experience is subtly traced in the fiercely intelligent work of novelist Dubravka Ugresic.
Repressive homelands are far more traumatic. . . .
Today, from the perspective of my nomadic-exile, I can only be grateful tomy former cultural milieu. I invested my ownmoney in the purchase of my broom. I fly alone. In a dictatorship of collective remembrance and amnesia, this solitude also remains a lifeline to sanity, an act of pure resistance. Bosnian poet Ferida Durakovic embodies a radical form of this.