Limited by the pressure of this Otherness, i.e. double Otherness, because the woman is most often Other in herself, and double Other when she is a foreigner, both Kolbe and Dimovska face the solitude, the unavoidable state of otherness. “I, for the sake of truth, have been living lonely. For twenty years. Since I left Macedonia. There is nothing lonelier than a single, perfectionist writer in exile, with a virtual biography from Casablanca.” Says Kica Kolbe. Coming to the same conclusion, in a bit more introspective way, Lidija Dimkovska says: “And for who knows which time in out nomadic life, she felt the well known, almost familiar emptiness of the being, the emptiness of the Home as a core and atom of human life, the emptiness of one’s own I before the world that you can not change, but it changes you itself, it destroys you and it resurrects you.” This is actually the moment of the great realization, the moment to which the authors (i.e. their narrators) strived to since they departed to their journey. At the moment when they realize that the spirit of provincialism is actually universal, and not national, the enlightenment that was the initial goal of the travel happens. It is not finding a single, universal answer, but a single, universal question – if the world is as it is, both where you have left from and where you have gone, then who are you? Where do you belong? What is your home?
Asking those questions, Kica Kolbe and Lidija Dimkovska depart in different directions. Kica Kolbe approaches these questions in a romantic immigrant way and she says: “I want to escape all European West and go somewhere far away. Especially its grandiose past… I want a strong smell of Macedonian lime.” She searches for the answers of the questions about belonging back, in her fatherland, i.e. in what she has imagined as her fatherland. Because, “if every departure from the native land is a small death, then every return is a resurrection,” she says, aware of her need to return home, i.e. to the place where the travel began. However, at the same time she is also aware that such a place simply does not exit, i.e. that the fatherland is an individual construction of each person, a virtual chronotope, painted by our reconstructed memories, emotions and expectations, a Casablanca that belongs to us only. “In the course of the last ten years my native city has lost all the real marks for me. It has somehow become an object of my imagination.” Such a home, such a city is presented by her in his novel, a virtual, changes, hidden under the show, made beautiful by the music and the presence of the man who loves her. A fictional one, but also as real as the real one. In this real world, Kica Kolbe clearly, in a Heidegger-like way tells the answer to the question where she belongs: “you have given me my mother tongue and the land where I was born in a moment of creative anxiety and doubts on where I belong as a writer, in Macedonia or Germany, who really needs my words and images, where is my home… the writer who moves resides in the language, most of all in his mother tongue.”
On the other hand, Lidija Dimkovska refuses to make the place where she started from more beautiful, even if it is only virtually. Asking basically the same question: “Was that a home or a simulacrum of a home? Were all the years of stranstvuvanje and nomadism years of a simulacrum of a life?” she does not think that home is a concept that has to be related to a place (a real or a virtual one), a space that will be marked by a toponym. “Personally, I prefer and I try to follow my own thought: ‘It’s important to have a fire rather than a fireplace.’” She says, finding the fire and home in her beloved one, i.e. in a man rather than in the space. Love is the reason for the moving, love is the reason for returning. And there is no other more real reason for traveling, returning and creation.
Translated by the author