“NEW PINK” A PIECE OF SILENCE THAT SCREAMS

(Towards the book “Emotional sediment” by Ana Jovkovska, Skopje: TRI, 2022)

In the last few years, I have had the privilege of being the first reader of everything written by the scientific researcher, columnist, and writer Ana Jovkovska. It allows me to witness first-hand the tireless energy and perfectionist drive with which Jovkovska approaches writing, both academic and creative. No matter the genre she is writing, whether it is scientific culturological works, journalistic interviews, and columns or prose-essayistic medallions – and Ana is an author who mostly feels narrowed down by classically defined literary-critical genres – her approach is almost the same. She always has a clear vision of the message she wants to send, thorough preparation and reading of professional literature from several fields about the topic she wants to write about, a bursting creative charge, and deep respect for literally every word.

The complexity and thoughtfulness of the writing craft are counterbalanced by the simplicity of what is written, and when I say simplicity I mean it as the greatest compliment of the kind of like Blaze Koneski, as the ability to bring the writing to that seemingly spontaneous form of speaking, which brings the thought closer to the readers on such a wonderful and effective way. At the same time, with the same simplicity, Jovkovska hunts down the complicated and traumatic experiences of humanity, unpretentiously and quite honestly speaking in the first person singular, although as the fourth wave of feminism taught us – behind the personal always hides the political, behind the individual pain of the person are masked the collective molds of the society. As is characteristic of her and proven on many occasions so far, this author is aware that one should not be silent about both. So she says, “If I change the scenery, the feelings and situations will remain unchanged. It is about binary male-female relationships, standardized gender identities, about eternally misunderstood emotional relationships. About some things, we remain silent for too long… until the waves overflow the cup of emotional endurance.” (Jovkovska, 2022: 15)

Extracted from the everyday life and the inspirations that open equally the banality of an ordinary day spent between four walls, a husband, a child, and a dog, and on the other hand, eternal themes such as gender stereotypes, comfort zones, enlightening books, emotional cripples or existential crises, the thoughts, the short stories, the columns and essays from “Emotional sediment” by Anna Jovkovska have different forms and even more different motives and leitmotifs, but one strong connecting thread. The stories from Jovkovska’s kitchen are “slow cooked”, seriously thought out and dug through the layers of collective matrices, but at the same time deeply felt and filtered through the bars of personal experience and interspersed with the charm of her rare, and consequently, precious nature. Here she seems to deal with herself and the women’s revolutions she leads in her forties, the way maturity has taught her to quickly emerge from the vortex of grief, to have understanding, empathy, and love for others “till the end of the world”, because despite all the pains, experiences and dangers, the life is beautiful even if it’s nothing close as we imagined it should be. At the same time, her intimate stripping hides a certain Gandhian philosophy behind it, deeply believing that by personal example she can pave the way to a fairer, freer, and more spiritual world. So, from the lines of her last book, we will learn that silence is sometimes more difficult than the ugliest word, that being brave means getting out of the comfort zone and fighting to live your way, and that we should more often remember ourselves of the flowering of the mysterious kingdom of love and finally – that we should bring more life into the life.

“Lucky we are we who have friends to lick the wounds together. And while children long for other people’s toys, we recognize ourselves in other people’s problems. Like mirrors, reflecting each other, we clean ourselves of the emotional sediments,” says the author in this quote, after which the entire book is titled. The same metaphor inspires Professor Vladimir Martinovski to write that this extraordinarily layered book, written with great skill and a strong introspective view, has handwriting “as thick as coffee grounds, steeped in a playful language of metaphors, symbols, and associations, yet is simple, unpretentious and easy to read.” (Martinovski, 2022: cover).