WHO IS NIKOLA MADZIROV?

 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 18 | 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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