The twenty-three poems and three ballads in pH Neutral for the Life and Death are a dissection of the banality of everyday life and a quest for the meaning of existence. Dimkovska undertakes it of by means of a different perception of reality, revealing to us a world identical to the one our eyes are daily presented with, but this time perceived through the perspective of the nomadic subject. This is not a form of escape from reality through imposing a new type of escapism, rather, it is a confrontation with one’s own torment and with the torment of the world in which we exist, with a particular courage to give a poetic shape to the current issues of our times, and, at the same time, examine the relation between me and the Other and me and the World. In these poems and ballads, when they explore exile, as in “A Ballad for the Exiles of Aunt Elze”, this relation brings about an awareness of the contrapuntal reality, an awareness which, according to the theses of Edward Said expounded in his Reflections on Exile, belongs to everybody who is in a state of exile, regardless whether it is imposed or voluntary.
In pH Neutral for the Life and Death, as well as in Dimkovska’s previous collections, body and corporeality are openly explored, even their manifestations which some poets suppress in their verses. In “Nail Clippers” the speaker and her family transcend the spaces they share by means of the object used for trimming unnecessary keratin growth, and the nail clipper is transformed into a dot – a connector of those living in various countries, in a singular motif of a dialogue and a quarrel. In pH Neutral for the Life and Death the uterus goes sour, while the spine “bounc[es] back / like a coil-spring.”7F In “A Birthday Poem” the body is where the speaker recognises their kinship to God, “In God’s stomach too dull pain pounds as in mine / When the sound bearer renounces the voice of her womb”. This liberated body, this discourse liberated in the body, unites geographic regions, “I am more than a woman / With New York under my left ovary, with Bucharest under my right lens” (“A Birthday Poem”). In Dimkovska’s poems and ballads there is no room for abjection and escape from body and corporeality. “The happy man charges from without, and discharges at home / (pockets, stomach, mind, sperm)”, she says in “Key”, and in “A Ballad on the Caesarean Section of Life” she writes, “Along Lexington Avenue / the diarrhoea she smuggled from Djerba / flowed down the shoes of unmarried Misters’ World.” The categories abject and abjection and their connection to impurity were first referred to by Mary Douglas in her work Purity and Danger. In it she undertakes to expose the prejudice of nineteenth century science – that in the basis of the so called primitive religions lies people’s fear stemming from the belief that if they “cross some forbidden line or develop some impure condition,” they will suffer a great misfortune. (Даглас: 9)8F She connects the traditional practice of ritual defilement of the body in certain tribes to their attitude towards purity and impurity, which, according to Douglas, does not differ significantly from the so called civilised life. Douglas perceives the stigmatization of impurity as a feature of every social system – it is not merely a care for hygiene, but a respect for conventions. Dimkovska’s poetry goes beyond the “primitive” and the “civilized”, cancelling the boundaries they set between purity and impurity; she goes beyond conventions as well, both social and poetical. Cancelling abjection is a sign of victory over death – Dimkovska speaks of this world and the other world with a similar irony, while she characterises death only as a “neutralisation of life, / (…) / a bait for the worm that will eat dead me for only a week or two”9F („рН Neutral for the Spine “).
pH Neutral for the Life and Death, the fifth poetry collection of Lidija Dimkovska, confirms the author’s reputation as the undoubtedly most poignant creative voice of the generation of Macedonian writers born in the seventies. With these twenty-three poems and three ballads she remains faithful to her ars poetica, established in her previous publications, while she simultaneously embarks upon a further exploration of the world laid bare to the poetic voice, confronting the Other, everything that surrounds it, and the relationships arising from such encounters. The recent Hubert Burda European poetry award, once again demonstrates the significance of Lidija Dimkovska’s work in the contemporary global poetic currents.
Bibliography
Daglas, Meri. Čisto i opasno. Biblioteka XX vek: Beograd, 2001.
Димковска, Лидија. Изгризани нокти. Култура: Скопје, 1998.
Димковска, Лидија. pH неутрална за животот и смртта. Блесок: Скопје, 2009.
Ками, Албер. Митот за Сизиф. Култура: Скопје, 1997.
Кристева, Јулија. Црно Сунце. Светови: Нови Сад, 1994.
Сиоран, Емил. Оглед за распаѓањето. Култура: Скопје, 1996.
Translated by: Natalija Jovanović
#b
7. Translated by Ljubica Arsovska and Margaret Reid. (transl. note)
8. Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An analysis of concept of pollution and taboo. Routledge: London, New York, 2002. (1) (transl. note)
9. Translated by Ljubica Arsovska and Margaret Reid. (transl. note)