Poets, among all artists, are the ones most likely to turn back again and again towards the innate failures of their craft. Whether if it is a stifled voice suffering the consequences of societal atrophy, a consummate frustration at the form’s lack of innovation, or the perceived obsolescence of the written word in addressing the pertinent concerns of life—writers of verse are constantly looking for ways to subvert and resolve such plaguing doubts. Amongst them, Radmila Petrović is a young Serbian poet composing under the brightening promise of the New Sincerity movement, helping to lift the veil of stasis. In this following essay, our Editor-at-Large for Serbia, Jovanka Kalaba discusses the weary weight that burdens the works of Serbian literature, layered with a century’s worth of national trauma, and how Petrović has rejuvenated the scene with equal parts lightness and gentleness.
There is something about Serbian cultural productions—of film especially, but literature as well—that audiences do not find particularly appealing. “Too dark” is what one will normally hear people say; with a particular brand of gloom, our narratives often dwell on national tragedies—namely the major conflicts of the twentieth century, most pertinently the Yugoslav Wars—but also political failures, systemic dead-ends, and the emotional and societal burdens that come along with them: guilt, denial, emotional numbness, ideological polarization, class polarities, etc. Literary and art works are often received in a way that can be summed up in a statement uttered by one of my friends: “Does reading a good book or watching a good movie around here always have to result in feeling as if someone had clubbed me with a baseball bat?” This “tough love” approach taken by most artists as a way to confront their audiences with the truth usually results in an overtly cerebral recognition of their works on the progressive, liberal side of the spectrum, and utmost consternation and suspicion of auto-chauvinism and self-hate on the conservative and nationalist part of the spectrum—nothing else.
Times have been rough for those determined to be sincere about the philosophical and cultural preoccupations of (post)modern living; truth is largely perceived as an outdated concept, a perhaps inevitable conclusion considering how worn-out the language has become—used up by television, advertising, and other forms of mechanical reproduction. In his Calligraphy Lesson: The Collected Stories, Mikhail Shishkin says that words—“guards that keep out emotion and meaning, sentries at the boundary between people”—have lost their divine meaning. The only thing remaining is to “learn to grope your way toward understanding each other, or else be able to escape over the verbal barbed wire.” He insists, however, that “there is no road to understanding except through words.” But how can one speak the truth if the language is not working?
Among those who write—escaping over the verbal barbed wire, in other words—being able to articulate oneself in the language of sincerity is a path only few know how to tread. Even fewer are the ones who tread it lightly. Radmila Petrović is a young Serbian poet who has only recently stepped into the limelight with her collection of poems Moja mama zna šta se dešava u gradovima (My Mom Knows the Kind of Things that Happen in Cities) published by the PPM Enklava publishing house in Belgrade, Serbia in 2020, with some poems soon to appear in English translation. Radmila Petrović’s poetry is arguably the finest Serbian example of what Post-Soviet thinkers Dimitry Prigov and Mikhail Epstein called “new sincerity”—the lyrical language that transcends the ironic and self-referential framework of contemporary postmodern literature and poetics. As in the title of her poem “Samo želim nekoga da rasklopimo traktor mog oca u tišini” (“I Just Want Someone to Disassemble My Father’s Tractor With in Silence”), Radmila Petrović is unafraid of dismantling existing cultural and literary canons, integrating the roughness of her rural experiences into the delicateness of her expression with tremendous ease, heralding a new wave of post-Yugoslav poetry.
This ease does not apply when one tries to comment on what Radmila Petrović has done with her poetry—as I am now attempting to do. She talks very boldly and directly—most importantly, very non-regressively—about things that few are able to discuss in Serbia today without some kind of agenda or clear position on the existing ideological spectrum. And with this boldness comes the calmness with which she deconstructs the patriarchal notions of tradition, human relations, propriety, gender, approaching them without hate, denial, a chip on her shoulder, or sense of victimhood in her poems.
Her poetic voice appears to originate from a single person in all of her poems: a “long-legged” country girl in the capital, fresh out of college, confused about her sexual orientation and “trapped under burdens of the land that so far has come down through the male line” (from the poem “Jezik bilja / The Language of Plants”). The poet was born in a small village in the mountainous region of Western Serbia, the region of highlanders, stretching long towards the south and west, comprising the whole of Montenegro, a portion of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia, all the way to Slovenia—hence the “long-legged” voice. It is high, rocky, and harsh, life is narrow and hard, and people of the region are often tall, athletic, quick-witted, and sharp, but also conservative and unbending, deeply entrenched in patriarchal ways. Petrović does not glorify them, nor does she dissect them from the superior, meta position of a person who perceives things with greater insight. Although hurting to do so, she loves them, with a rare mix of precision, humility, hopelessness, and forgiveness. She seems to ask herself, and her parents especially, how is it that her love had to involve hopelessness and forgiveness, when things could have been just love.
In her very personal poems, Radmila Petrović bravely looks into the eye of social traumas that shape every conservative, patriarchal society, even the national ones (in the poem “Srpkinja sam, al mi Kosovo nije u srcu, nego ti” / “I Am a Serb, But It’s Not Kosovo That’s in My Heart, You Are”). Doing so, she has achieved this odd, unexpected thing with her poetry—having avoided all the obvious traps of tacky sentimentalism, dull irony, ideological pretentiousness, forced optimism, or in-your-face pessimism, its sincerity is exceptionally tender. There is an ease in the ways her poetry speaks to the reader, but there is nothing easy about it. The rawness of her rural experiences blended with an almost psychoanalytical understanding of familial and social relations is rendered into poetry, which is possibly a most vital contribution to the Serbian contemporary poetic scene. Most of Serbia’s young poets do not touch on rural experiences in this way, and one cannot blame them: our parents and grandparents either taught us to get away as far as possible from our hometowns, or veered towards the other extreme, celebrating the imagined superiority of the village, which also made many leave without looking back. The poems such as “Govorili su mi da je Beograd grad u kome nikog ne smeš da pogledaš u oči / They Said That Belgrade Was a City Where You Can’t Look Anyone in the Eye” or “Pesmu ne bih nazvala po ulici Požeškoj / I Wouldn’t Name a Poem After Požeška Street” bring such inherited biases into light. In the latter, the poetic voice contemplates her living in a rented apartment in the capital although her family owns “the house that was built to be / the biggest in the village,” which is a phrase often used as a valid argument against pursuing your goals and dreams instead of enjoying the perks of inherited privilege. The poetic voice has chosen the first, and ironically says: “Goodbye, comfort, goodbye, / the benefits of legal property ownership.” Whichever the case, Serbia does not have the culture of rural appreciation; it is not glorification that I mean by appreciation: the truth is that one must consider deeply the place and the context of where they came from before moving on. There are very few families in Serbia—as in the whole of the Balkans—who can pride themselves on coming from a long line of city dwellers; the majority can trace their origins to a more or less remote rural area of the former Yugoslav space only two or three generations back.
This knowledge is made explicit in Radmila Petrović’s poems: although sometimes rigid, backward, and unforgiving, that self-contained rurality is where we all came from. To be a good writer, one must consider it. In (post)modern circumstances, this is especially difficult, having in mind the outright negation of sincerity throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century literature and art. In his famous essay “Consider the Lobster,” David Foster Wallace talks about the “degrees of passion, conviction and engagement with deep moral issues that we—here, today—cannot or do not permit ourselves.” The question is whether it is a matter of personal choice, or enforced by political and socio-cultural circumstances, but Wallace asserted that a return to the “old sincerity” was not possible, that what literature needed was a “new sincerity” that would incorporate an understanding of how the media industry informs our perceptions. In other words—contemporary writers require a fresh way of achieving passion, conviction, and engagement that involves a deep comprehension of postmodernist literature, but speaks to the heart.
Radmila Petrović was born in 1996, only a year after the war in former Yugoslavia ended. Amidst the fallout from the conflict, Serbian life persisted under the embargo imposed and maintained throughout the 1990s, suffering economic sanctions, travel restrictions, general poverty, and a constant vision of themselves as manifestly lacking the same opportunities as their peers in the rest of Europe and the West. Despite this, we have largely managed to retain—given the circumstances—a high level of cosmopolitanism, a sense of belonging within a world that we have been forcibly exempt from. The unavoidable downside of this particular state of confinement was, and has been, an excessive escapism into the Western media culture. If you cannot travel and experience the actual culture of a place, you learn about it through media representation—the perception of it being liberal, emancipated, and progressive. That is not always a bad thing, but it can morph into an idealized falsehood if one already holds an urge to move away from the regressive, patriarchal, and nationalist narratives of one’s own culture. One starts comparing personal circumstances to something that has not been experienced firsthand, something perceived as superior. When there is this constant yearning to keep up with the world, the very reasons destructive narratives persist in a culture is the fact that they remain unaddressed—when the most progressive part of the society treats them as either obsolete, or a lost cause.
For Radmila Petrović, they are neither. In her poetry, she will approach infanticide—writing about an old neighbour who, a week before her death, circles madly around the tree under which she buried her baby daughters before she finally had a son—with the same awareness and determination as when she contemplates how a country girl, used to eating sheep’s offal, can fit anywhere in today’s world. Addressing all these ideas daringly, her poetry could not be more liberal, emancipated, and progressive, though free of any formal ideological training of this kind. In an interview, she says that, being born and raised in deep province, she grew up almost entirely without watching TV or knowing anything about pop culture, only picking up on such things once arriving in Belgrade. She adds that this is probably how she is able to articulate herself in the way that she does.
For many seeking to express themselves in contemporary circumstances, any kind of synthesis appears as an unfathomable abstraction, so they settle for stating the obvious, that a truly integrated unity of things in a profoundly fragmented world is impossible. But, as Mikhail Shishkin says: “Word corpses watch over us. The only way to get past them is to revive them. We have to breathe new life into them, so that love can once again be called love.” Radmila Petrović’s poetry seems to say: do not leave ravages down the road you are treading, even if the truth you speak breaks your back. A gentle sincerity is possible.
Jovanka Kalaba is Editor-at-Large for Serbia at Asymptote, an English Language and Literature graduate with a PhD in Philology (Comparative Literature) from the University of Belgrade, as well as a literary translator from/into the Serbian language. She is the translator of Jovanka Živanović’s Fragile Travelers, published by Dalkey Archive Press. She can be reached via jovanka.kalaba@gmail.com and is on Instagram @kalabina_odmor_kuca
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