The designated year of the appearance of Darkness, 1961, indicatively “overlapped” with two more anniversaries, extremely relevant for the then ideological (socialist/communist) imaginative spectrum, internationalist (and not national!) in their being: 20 years since the beginning of the anti-fascist uprising (1941-1961) and some 15 years from the constitution of the Macedonian state, ASNOM – Macedonia, that for people without space could not be only political constellations, but must also be an emanation of the long suppressed national nostalgia (or nostalgia for the national).
The author Čašule was a participant in that historic uprising from the very fist moment (since the famous October 11, 1941, even before it), but the national nostalgia – nostalgia for the national myths, for the national imaginative spectrum – essentially moderates not only his family origin (his grandfathers were Spiro Crne and Pere Tošev), but also his entire work. Beyond any doubt, in the name of that nostalgia, in the same euphoric jubilee year of 1961, the activist Čašule intensively participated in another truly cultural deed: with the architect Bogdan Bogdanovic, author of the memorial monument to the uprising in Prilep, he managed the construction of this cult location with a powerful symbolic charge, that he himself (finally) managed to name with the nostalgic/pathetic syntagm Mound of the Undefeated. (By the way, Čašule is considered to be a writer lastingly inclined towards “hard terminology”, imprinted in the titles of his books: Darkness, Whirl, Standing, Bitterness, Faint… are some of these titles). Nevertheless, the celebratory, euphoric, pompous, even grandiloquent socialist/communist zeitgeist greets this national pathos with approval. The sixties were good and liberal years, years of fat cows. Macedonia, like (in fact) the whole common state, was doing brilliantly, in all areas.
Precisely at such a moment of almost idyllic, liberal socialist stability, Čašule’s “negritude” storms in the Macedonian literature and theater. And, paradoxically, first through the fragment published in the Ilinden issue of Nova Makedonija! Drama that affirms an unusual and quite unexpected interaction between the artist and his time (Adorno), drama that makes pragmatic that ambitious and famous thesis of Sartre about art that it should be responsible for the awareness and conscience of the epoch (Sartre, 1981/3). Today this might seem like a provocation: at the time when Macedonia was doing better than well, one unpleasant drama persistently imposes/theatralizes the idea that such goodness stands on feet of clay and that, simply, the Macedonian metaphoric apple (of knowledge) is being hollowed by the fatalistic worm of doubt.
By the way, but not unimportantly: in the middle of these same liberal sixties, in the former Yugoslavia there flourished – in literature, and especially in motion pictures – the trend that aesthetics has called the “black wave”. The drama Darkness is undisputed proof of the thesis that a Macedonian author should also be considered as an authentic promoter, “partisan”, even herald of this enervated wave that the communist ideologists in the course of the seventies intensely blamed for “spreading hopelessness and destruction.”
It is interesting to note that communist romanticism, as named by Zika Pavlovic, a great film director, one of the most important “black wave” representatives in former Yugoslavia, never (except maybe a little, at the very beginning, between 1945 and 1949) managed to contaminate the works of Kole Čašule. On the contrary.7F An activist who intensively lived the historical moment and directly participated in the greatest social tasks – the formulation of the national programme, the affirmation/ “modernization” of the nation, the creation and fortification of the statе… – at the same time expressed himself as an author arduously burdened with an unclear/intuitive awareness of some inherited mistake, that had been built in as a “manufacturing defect” not only in the system, but also in the whole cause, in the nation itself. In one of his later books (published in 2000), Čašule determines his nation as a “sick tribe.”
In fact, all of Čašule’s books (classified according to individual titles, they amount to 53), continuously make variations – dramatise, include essays, raise problems… – on the fatalistic line of Lukov, the great manipulator of the great mechanism that moves not only the play entitled Darkness, but also all other Macedonian negritudes (one of the frequent syntagms of the author), but also “all the negritudes of this world” (Чашуле, 1980:254). This line is positioned at the very end of the fourth part of the play with the syntagmatic heading:
Macedonia is dead, dead a long time ago, first in our hearts and then where you are looking for it – in History. (Чашуле, 1980:346).
I know some cynics who consider that this line is more relevant today than when it was written.
Literature consulted:
Anderson, V.B. (1983), Imagined Comunities. London:Verso
Kovač, Mirko (2006), Povjerljivo. Zagreb:Meandar
Матевски, Матеја (1968), Долги години црнила. Скопје:Разгледи Х/1968/6, 733-738
Pavis, Patrice (2004), Pojmovnik teatra. Transl. Jelena Rajak. Zagreb:Antibarbarus
Павловски, Јован (ур.), 2002, Личности од Македонија. Скопје: МИ-АН
Петковска, Нада (1996), Драмското творештво на Коле Чашуле. Скопје:Детска радост
Sartre, Jean Paul (1961), Što je književnost?. In: Izabrana dela, tom 3, Beograd:Nolit
Стефановски, Горан (1985), Тетовирани души. In: Собрани Драми (2003),:Табернакул
Чашуле, Коле (1980), Црнила. In: Чашуле, Трилогија. Скопје:Мисла
Čašule, Kole (2000), Sick Tribe. Skopje: MI-AN
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7. The system of socialist values, as the one that was continuously propagated by the practical policy (in which, nota bene, the author himself participates quite actively, convinced he is helping its construction or, even, its salvation, of which a good – that is, bad – example is his appearance at the last Congress of Yugoslav Writers, 1986) that his literature permanently and mercilessly “undermines”, demystifies, perverts…