Diwan special issue

| Diwan 9 - 10|

EDITORIAL

Dear & respected reader!

It seems that the publishing of a double issue has become a specialty of the magazine you are reading. Thus ”Diwan” No. 9-10 contains two thematic units between its covers:

(1) the round table from the Gradačac Literary Meetings dedicated to the literary legacy of Mustafa Novalić, a writer from Gradačac who was killed in the war for the independence of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The following people from that meeting sent us their papers: Muhamed Filipović, Nenad Radanović, Muhidin Džanko, Mirko Marjanović, Nihad Agić, Zilhad Ključanin, Vedad Spahić & your humble editor; followed by

(2) an anthology of contemporary Slovenian writers composed (and translated) by Zdravko Kecman, an author from Banjaluka, and followed by a study on the ”Neue Slowenische Kunst” by Miško Šuvaković, a theoretician from Belgrade; the anthology contains poetry and proze by Dane Zajc, Franci Zagoričnik, Veno Taufer, Niko Grafenauer, Tomaž Šalamun, Aleksandar Peršolja, Denis Poniž, Jaša Zlobec, Boris A. Novak, Brane Mozetič, Marko Pavček, Vida Mokrin-Pauer, Nataša Velikonja, Dušan Čater, Aleš Čar and Jurij Hudolin.

For their help in gathering information about Mustafa Novalić (the composition of a bibliography and the classification of unpublished manuscripts), we would like to express our particular gratitude to Meliha Ferhatbegović (maiden name Jašarević), the widow of the deceased M. Novalić and Hazim Novalić, Mustafa’s brother. We would also like to thank Vesna Injac-Malbaša from the National Library of Serbia and Ivan Gađanski, the former director of the University Library ”Svetozar Marković” from Belgrade as well as our associates from the National and University Library of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo and the National and University Library in Tuzla.

Still, we start this ”Diwan” with a text by Rusmir Mahmutčehajić ”With the Other” exhibited at the European Academy of Sciences and Arts in Vienna in 2002, where the conference entitled ”The Religious Foundations for Tolerance” was organised by the Alfred Herrhausen Society for International Dialogue. Mahmutčehajić, a leader of the International Forum Bosnia, in an inspired presentation between Now and Death, Eternity and God, philosophically examines the poli-cultural space of everyday living with the intention of getting the citizen (as a human being) regardless of his/her religious affiliation to recognise his own dignity and sense of existing within him/herself as much as with people of other religious affiliations from his/her surroundings. For, the public (and private) opinion of Bosnia-Herzegovina is still burdened with the consequences of a traumatic war and a Dayton-unnatural state system.

We have ”intertwined” this post-traumatic syndrome of the first thematic unit with the ”made up” poetry of the ”female hand” by Dubravka Đurić, Lidija Dimkovska, Radmila Lazić, Ferida Duraković, Tanja Stupar and Aleksandra Čvorović. And Josip Mlakić, Dragoslav Dedović, Zoran Bognar and Nedim Ćišić made sure that the ”male hand” did not fall behind in emotion & verse. Pursuing this method, we ”arranged” the usually attractive and (often) dramatic Slovenian poets from the second thematic unit into a sandwich (a ”Diwan” Big Mac) with the prose shot in the ”slow motion” manner, generated by the pens of Jasna Šamić, Željko Ivanković, Goran Samardžić, Jovica Aćin, Ferid Muhić i Petar Mihajlović.

The exclusive middle between the two thematic units is ”bridged” by the travelogues of Goran Sarić (BH & Montenegro) and Tatjana Lukić (Canberra) along with the intimate documentary prose of Selma Borić (about Skender Kulenović) and Dragan Marijanović (about Nura-Marija and Selma Borić, but also about Vlado Dijak). We also added the youthful M. Trifunović and M. S. Božić (in order to mark these ”promising lads” in our own aesthetic biocenosis). Seen from that angle, Sulejman Bosto’s review of the exhibition of the photo-mountaineer Muhamed Šišić from this year’s Gradačac Meetings ”sticks out” like Mount Everest. Professor Bosto deals with the issues of the pre-hori-zon and the geometry of the world which enables him to unite the rhythmic-visual language of literature and painting in a meta-syncretist manner (if the postmodernists will ”allow” me some linguistic acrobatics).

From there all roads lead to the review where the ”perfect readers” (as Mustafa Novalić says in a story of the same title) Bognar, Čvorović and Amir Brka wrote about the books of Dragan Jovanović Danilov, Mihajlo Nikolić and Ibrahim Mulaomerović. And here, again, ”above perfection” are (of course the ladies) Jasna Šamić who presents an essay about Leonardo’s exhibition at the Louvre, and, especially, Tanja Stupar whose essay about the ”Vagina Monologues” by Eve Ensler fascinates with its ”feminal” power of the awakened body. And text.

Our master of the arts from Los Angeles, Bojan Bahić (who works the Web under the pseudonym ’Boccaccio’) is again responsible for the cover and illustrations signed: Art Creation Service. What else can we say, but thank you. And we hope fame will not pass him by, either.

That, dear (perfect) reader, is the contents of this double issue of ”Diwan”, the magazine that you can recognise (but not determine) by the ”local” colour of intercultural exchange in Bosnia-Herzegovina: the tendency to make the Bosniak, Serb, Croat, Jewish, Roma, civil, feminist, optimist, traditional and adventure artefacts of culture equally acceptable to he consumers of spirit throughout Europe & the transitional Bosnia-Herzegovina. Because the editorial board of ”Diwan” brings into textual dialogue ”local” Slovenian writers with ”local” Serbian and Macedonian writers, ”local” American writers (in the next issue) with ”local” German and Swedish, Iranian and Dutch writers, etc. On the pages of ”Diwan” conflicting forms argue as well: the study with the poem, the travelogue with the novella, the bibliography with the documentary text. And orthography with the visual perspective. In the general ”emptying of signifiers”. And the terror of symbols.

Because, dear reader, we have given you a magazine that can be read on the bus or the tram (but also on the back of Rocinanta): a publication whose conceptual openness and structural melange provoke attention and disturb boredom & media saturation. So that the ominous hypertext does not (finally) put you to sleep.

”Diwan” will continue its ”panicked resistance” of definitions like a rare beast in the trap of ”postmodernism” & the imprisoned mind.

Tuzla, August 17, 2003

Your editor, Dinko Delić

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