Poetry by Nikola- Enjoy
To be born in the Balkans usually means being born with a pacemaker
in the heart, the purpose of which is to constantly appease the arrhythmia
of the inherited East-West mental conflict. The depth of
this problem is not in the sides of the world – despite their historical and
civilization denotations, nor is it in the conflict – but it is rather in the act
of inheriting, because hereditary diseases are the hardest to cure just as
inherited property is the hardest to divide. Like everyone in this region,
I was growing up in a time when the blood in my veins was running according
to the laws of dialectical materialism, while my heart was beating
following the 7/8 rhythm echoing from the East. On the day of my coming
of age in 1991, as an act of initiation, I was granted a new state system and
an independent republic. From my father I had inherited the faith in doubt,
and from my communist education – the doubt in faith.
In my language, in the root of the word “education” (“obrazovanie”) the
word “cheek” (“obraz”) is hidden, something quite concrete and touchable
which served as an object to punish our disobedience – the usual slapping
in school. However, in the Balkans, the moral phrases “to have a clean
cheek” or “to preserve one’s own cheek” share a context much broader
than the educational one, and translated literally they mean “to keep one’s
dignity”, i.e. “to be oneself”, even when the educational system in communism
said: “Be ourselves!”. The word “education” contained within itself the
linguistic and the ideological conflict between personal freedom and freedom
of personality in a strictly defined future wrapped in shiny tinfoil. But
the packages with an indefinite expiry date are the most cancerous ones.
In my school, we used to wear single-coloured uniforms as if dressed in
garments made of cloth for manufacturing state flags. Those textile walls
upon our bodies were supposed to be a dark cloak to hide the conflicts
that arose from the social status or the natural body growth of each individual,
while in the classrooms – above the loudspeaker that announced
the importance of all state holidays framed behind the dusty glass, the dictator
was smiling sweetly at us; surely he was dressed in different clothes.
However, the inner conflict arisen from the family myths and the bemoaning
continued to live, as there were neither clothes nor colour to cover the
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inherited hopes and fears. The cloning of the soul was noiselessly being
accomplished not in the laboratories but in the closed classrooms.
At the bottom of my winter clothes cabinet still lies my school uniform
from twenty years ago. I believe this is one of the few ideological monuments
that cannot be broken nor permanently placed in a park or a factory
yard. The moths are to finish their job, just as the moistness in the
basements is eating away the collected works of the leaders of the former
ideological and educational matrix. Remembering becomes the main motive
for a conflict, and the conflict produces even stronger remembering,
and here each second sentence begins with “Do you remember...” People
remember their childhood, and they do not forget the war.
I would like not to remember those imposed ideological aspirations and
pains which, like lead weights, were dragging behind me every time I
changed my home place. My high school books have not just been eaten
away by time but also by all the changed spaces of uncertainty. Now these
books have only museum value but would not be useful even to a museum
caretaker. I believe that my child will not inherit from me the inner conflict
of the interspaces as the voice of the man stuck in a lift between two floors
is nothing more than a scream for help.
Nikola Madzirov
The poet, essayist and translator Nikola Madzirov was born in a family of Balkan Wars
refugees in 1973 in Strumica, Republic of Macedonia. His poetry has been translated
into thirty languages and published in collections and anthologies in the US, Latin
America, Europe and Asia. Nikola Madzirov is the Macedonian coordinator of the
world poetry network Lyrikline.
For his poetry book Relocated Stone (2007) he received the Hubert Burda poetry award
for authors born in Eastern Europe and the most prestigious Macedonian poetry prize,
Miladinov Brothers, at Struga Poetry Evenings. For the book Locked in the City (1999) he
was given the Studentski Zbor award for the best debut and for the collection of poems
Somewhere Nowhere (1999) the Aco Karamanov prize. Inspired by his poetry, two short
films were shot in Bulgaria and Croatia. The contemporary American jazz composer and
collaborator of Björk and Lou Reed, Oliver Lake, composed music based on Madzirov’s
poems which was performed at the Jazz-Poetry Concert in Pittsburgh in 2008.
Nikola Madzirov has participated in many international literary festivals and events in the
US, Latin America, Asia and Europe and has received several international awards and
fellowships such as a KulturKontakt fellowship in Vienna, Internationales Haus der Autoren
in Graz, Literatur Haus NÖ in Krems, Literarisches Tandem in Berlin, Villa Waldberta
in Munich and International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa in the US.
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