Balkan Heresy of Love

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Balkan Heresy of Love

It seems that the Balkan – and particularly Macedonian – letters written by women has been and will be for a long time deduced to the separate courageous examples of those exceptional women poets like Danica Rucigaj, Liljana Dirjan or Katica Kulafkova. The appearance of an authentic Balkan Erica Yong is simply – impossible.
Balkan men and women authors appear to admit and “announce” they are capable of writing within the already “classical”, even “programmed” literary genres: the most frequent lyric poems (let us say – those of Aco Sopov), occasionally short prose forms, seldom whole novels (let us say – “A Novel of London” by Milos Crnjanski).
The plays are another story. In fact, we will mostly be concerned with them. Later.
The conclusion is, without exaggeration, bizarre:
Balkan men and women authors – as it appears – love and want the Other only as His Majesty the Reader (or Observer), the general one, who is usually referred to as audience. Their literary love towards their reading audience, whatever this mysterious notion means (mysterious especially in Macedonian conditions), seems to be more intense than the love towards “the love of their heart”, as the authors of those hypersentimental popular novels would put it.
Whatever the case, the average reader of Macedonian literature will easily detect that the so-called “love topics” are not a frequent theme of its respected authors: excepting the so-called lyrical (love) poems; prose and drama mainly get to the “simplest”, typical love situations. While love expression itself, even when emotionally exposed to a high degree, does not develop its language further than the monosemantic statements of the kind I-love-you.
As if it hesitates whether to go further!
As if it is ashamed!

* * *

Having been dealing with Macedonian drama for a long time, not only with what is now called contemporary drama, but with its integral corpus, I noticed, long time ago, that Macedonian actresses are truly right: they claim that the complete dramatic discourse is notably male, which is evident in the way the characters are being created. It is the – men – who are always interesting and challenging to interpret. The function of the women characters, unless they are “giant”, “heroic”, the type of a mother who would sacrifice anything for her child, on whose pathos the whole dramatic tension is built, is mainly to support the men. The roles of men are always numerous, more active, more aggressive, dramatically more developed, more interesting to deal with critically. In Macedonian drama in general the women have hardly got a role to act: when something important seems to be on the scene, it is almost always deprived of any passion. Apart from the passion to prolong human kind.
Macedonian dramatic male authors – even the rare female authors – seem not to be able to truly and passionately love!
Even from the beginning of Macedonian drama in the nineteenth century, a certain view that love is sacred and an attempt to present it that way is evident, inherited (undoubtedly) from the long European tradition, Christianely pure, black-and-white and quasi-knight like. Enclosed in the frames of this solid, in fact – rigid, context, love is understood as “a holy feeling”, whose purity– no doubt extraterrestrial and void of bodily passion – must not be questioned. This obviously is a matter of love as an exclusive “result” of strictly male imagination, as one of those typically male fantasies in which any alternative is excluded in advance.
This “pure love” turns the woman into “a simple being” (deprived of free will and, of course, passion!), into a passive being, almost – an object. Gaining (in advance, automatically) all the attributes that men, from Odysseus’ time on, have imposed on the women, she receives an obligation to be “beautiful”, “fragile”, “tame” and “helpless” – so that the man-knight could protect her every step of the way! And to adore her, when he has got the time – usually between two battles! Such a doll-woman – deprived not only of her body, but of any spiritual needs as well – has nothing to do (with her life), except fulfilling for her “knight-protector” her one and only obligation – to be and remain honest. Till the last breath.
In the world of the male fantasies this honest woman is given the sole task (not only in drama, but in life as well): to retain the home and family, giving birth to children! Doing so, functioning exclusively to fulfill these two essential tasks(for she could not have any other needs), the honest womaneventually approaches the ideal of womanhood and femininity: she will become identifiable with the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God! “We still live in a civilisation where the idea of femininity is wholly absorbed in motherhood, represented in the Virgin Mary” – Kristaeva said fifteen years ago (Julia Kristaeva, 1983; 67).
It is hardly likely that anything has changed in the meantime, especially on the Balkan, despite all the technical and other progress which quickly passes through the rest of the world.

2018-08-21T17:23:39+00:00 March 1st, 2002|Categories: Reviews, Literature, Blesok no. 25|0 Comments