DIWAN - CASOPIS ZA KULTURU

| DIWAN 3-4|

EDITORIAL

Dear & Esteemed Reader,

This double issue of DIWAN carries many novelties. We have changed a design & logotype of the former almanac and transformed it, as you can see, into a periodical. A journal in the field of culture. We have made personal changes to the Editorial Staff, introduced new columns and preserved some of the previous qualities we had been praised for. Yet, it is your exclusive right to value ups and downs of our periodical. We will try to survive the age of non-culture and quasi-culture in times when almost every local community has its own university.

We are here presenting a few thematic entireties dedicated to Alija Isaković, a house in the photograph on page 2 was named after, and to Mirko Marjanović, a contemporary B-H and Croatian author, who often aestheticizes his native soil. But, we here want to remind you that having realised his home-obsessions, Mirko M. has not presented Tramošnica and Gradačac through images of cheep patriotism. Croatian and Bosniac writers and critics Karamatić, Horozović, Musabegović, Šego, Agić & Šimović, participants of the round table held during Gradačac Literary Gatherings in May 2000, have written a contribution for discussion on Marjanović's work. Through such an engagement the Editorial Staff of DIWAN has been following a new course from historiography towards current literary phenomena, as, what is an arch-library for if it does not "please" "Modernism & Postmodernism" readers. That is why Kazaz and previously mentioned gentlemen, led by a lady Musabegović, wrote about Isaković and Marjanović to whom only Ivan Lovrenović should join here to complete SVJETLOST Editorial Board from its famous days.

The fiction circle is, then, represented by doyens, a retrospective - "early" Ibrahim Kajan and delicately sarcastic Kemal Mahmutefendić as well as a bit younger authors Brka, Šimović, Hajdarević & Delić. As members of the middle-age generation of B-H writers they are making their "place in the sun" between the established "grey-haired heads" and "young lions" who have already been hastening towards B-H literary peaks.

The closing pages are enriched by Bosniac tradition from the pen of Muhidin Džanko and by historical temptation of inter-religious and inter-cultural clashes having their roots in the scary Middle Ages at the bottom of Ivan Pederin's palimpsest. In addition, there is a cry of Zaim Muzaferija, a reliable witness of ages bygone.

We do not pretend to provoke somebody's (long ago) disappeared peace of mind. On the contrary, in times of force & blackmailing policies, which are still threatening the fragile B-H dialogue in renewing, we consider responsibility of intellectuals greater than ever. Greater than it is now. In times when need for cultural goods exchange is ultimately more important than newly acquired habit to tolerate cultural evils. We do therefore appeal for love, naively & irrevocably - definitively.

Well, now, our Dear & Esteemed, please imagine a heart above mountains as a flower made of ice and melt it with your laughter in the country of hydro-power plants, refugees and salt, where readers are fewer than writers…

Tuzla, 28.11.2000.
Dinko Delić