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3 MINUTES AND 53 SECONDS – LIST OF SONGS




Here is a list of songs mentioned in Bert Stein’s book 3 Minutes and 53 Seconds.



Playlist: 1980s / 1990s / (1980s во 1990s) / 2000s or separately:

1980s

Michael Jackson – Thriller (1984)

USA for Africa – We are the World (1985)

Live Aid (1985)

Survivor – Eye of the Tiger, from the movie “Rocky IV” (1985)

Europe – The Final Countdown (1986)

Metallica – Orion (1986)

U2 – Where The Streets Have No Name (1987)

Simple Minds – Don’t You Forget About Me (1985)

Guns N’ Roses – Welcome To The Jungle (1987)

Iron Maiden – Seventh Son of a Seventh Son (1988)

Salt-N-Pepa – Push It (1987)

Bobby Mcferrin – Don’t Worry, Be Happy (1988)

Riva – Rock me (1989)

Tajci – Hajde Da Ludujemo (1990)

Faith No More – Epic (1989)

1990s

Toto Cutugno – Insieme: 1992 (1990)

Larry Wright – from the movie “Green Card” (1990)

Vanilla Ice – Ice Ice Baby (1990)

AC/DC – Thunderstruck (1990)

R.E.M. – Losing My Religion (1991)

Spermbirds – My God Rides a Skateboard (1986)

Spermbirds – Americans are cool (1986

Bad Religion – Big Bang (1989)

Snuff – I Think We’re Alone Now (1990))

Мизар – Велигден (1991)

Red Hot Chili Peppers – Give It Away (1991)

Rage Against The Machine – Killing In The Name (1991)

Bad Religion – Recipe for Hate (1993)

Whitney Houston – I Will Always Love You (1992)

Primus – My Name Is Mud (1993)

Disciplina Kičme – Buka u modi (1991)

Ace of Base – All That She Wants (1993)

Snow – Informer (1993)

Sepultura – Territory (1993)

U2 – Numb (1993)

Cypress Hill – Insane In The Brain (1993)

Onyx – Bacdafucup (1993)

Body Count – Body Count (1992)

Tool – Sober (1993

Björk – Human Behavior (1993)

Last Expedition – Keljav Dabar (1994)

Beck – Loser (1994)

Nirvana – Blew (1989)

Nirvana – Love Buzz (1989)

The Prodigy – Out Of Space (1992)

The Prodigy – Their Law (1994)

Massive Attack – Protection (1994)

Portishead – Mysterons (1994)

Tricky – Hell Is Round the Corner (1995)

Beastie Boys – Fight For Your Right To Party (1986)

Beastie Boys – Sabotage (1994)

Sepultura – Roots Bloody Roots (1996)

Sepultura – Ratamahatta (1996)

Robert Miles – Children (1996)

Goldie – Timeless: Inner City Life, Pressure & Jah (1995)

Dead Can Dance – Nierika (1996)

The Chemical Brothers – Block Rockin’ Beats (1997)

Korn – A.D.I.D.A.S. (1996)

Alessio Bertallot – B Side on Radio Deejay (1997)

Apollo 440 – Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Dub on Radio Deejay (1997)

Daft Punk – Around The World (1997)

Orbital – The Box (1997)

Rabih Abou-Khalil – Arabian Waltz (1996)

Hungarian Gypsy’s violin (1998)

Korn – Freak on a Leash (1998)

Faith No More – We Care a Lot (1985)

Marilyn Manson – The Dope Show (1998)

Jamiroquai – Deeper Underground (1998)

Lauryn Hill – Everything Is Everything (1998)

Alex Reece – Candles (1996)

E-Z Rollers – Walk this Land (1999)

Red Hot Chili Peppers Californication (1999)

Red Hot Chili Peppers – Road Trippin’ (1999)

2000s

Moloko – The Time Is Now (2000)

Gorillaz – Clint Eastwood (2001)

System Of A Down – Chop Suey! (2001)

Alicia Keys – Fallin’ (2001)

Radiohead – Pyramid Song (2001)

Depeche Mode – Dream On (2001)

Daft Punk – Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger (2001)

Björk – Pagan Poetry (2001)

Darkwood Dub – Život počinje u 30oj (2002)

Johnny Cash – Hurt (2002)

Red Hot Chili Peppers – By The Way (2002)

The Streets – It’s Too Late (2002)

Kismet ‎– Dreaming (2002)

Tricky – Evolution Revolution Love (2001)

The White Stripes – The Hardest Button To Button (2003)

The White Stripes – Seven Nation Army (2003)

OutKast – Hey Ya! (2003)

Metallica – St. Anger (2003)

Foo Fighters – Times Like These (2003)

Franz Ferdinand – Take Me Out (2003)

The Black Eyed Peas – Let’s Get It Started (2003)

Foltin – Donkey Hot (2004)

Gwen Stefani – What You Waiting For? (2004)

U2 – Vertigo (2004)

Red Hot Chili Peppers – Road Trippin’ (1999)





WIM HOF OR D-R KNEIPP – IT DOESN’T MATTER. JUST BREATHE IN, AND LET YOURSELF GO
– INTO THE COLD!




Wim Hof Method is taking over the world! You have probably heard the famous
quote “Breathe in, letting go!” or “The cold is my teacher” by Wim Hof,  but who
is Sebastian Kneipp and in what way are those two connected? Let me tell you
from my personal experience.

Wim Hof – right on!

Wim Hof is a Dutch weirdo and practitioner of extreme endurance records in the
cold. I became familiar with him after his visit to Joe Rogan Experience, a
podcast that I started following as early as 2010. I was mesmerised by Wim Hof’s
persona, his eccentricity, but even more by the simplicity and effectiveness of
his method. Of course, I tried the breathing part and it felt great, but I
didn’t try the cold showers, and forgot the most important part – commitment.

I dabbled in the method from time to time, before going to swimming in the cold
pool and when I felt down, but it wasn’t until several years ago when I got sick
that I realised its potential. One night I was shivering and my fever was rising
like crazy. My brain filled with images and sounds from the past and it felt
like when I was child and hallucinating from the violent fevers. Then something
told me to sit up and start breathing. I was breathing not only with my lungs
but also with my mind in determination to win over this thing that was winning
over my body. I breathed deep and deeper until I almost passed away. I
remembered that as a kid I was trying to hold my breath for a long period of
time, but only succeeded to go to 1 minute and 15 seconds at most. In the last
session of many I looked to the clock and saw 3 minutes 30 seconds. I didn’t
have time to wonder at my new record, but at the feeling of happiness, my fever
was completely gone and I didn’t even feel sick anymore. I became a Wim Hof
believer, because “doing is believing”, like he says.

Several moons passed as I dabbled in the Wim Hof method, but didn’t try the cold
showers, I thought that breathing was enough, and I wasn’t disciplined. It was
the isolation and the global fear of the invisible enemy that brought me back to
the method. This time I did it right, breathing, cold showers, meditation and
exercises. My results kept rising, and I felt great, no depression in isolation,
motivating others and fulfilling my time to the fullest. Of course, there’s
still much to learn and to achieve for me personally, but I am truly grateful to
Wim Hof and his findings.

Where does the method come from and how I came familiar with it

Then I begin thinking about the roots of the method. I remembered the sight of
the kids, even kindergartens, in Russia outside in their bathing suits, rubbing
snow on their bare skin, to improve immunity. The Russians and other nations
that live in cold environments are also known for their baths in the frozen
lakes.

The positive effect of the cold and cold water is known to early civilisations.
Ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman civilizations practised it, in Ancient Greece
it was called the Water Cure and Romans bathed in frigidariums. Cold shower
therapy is also used in ancient indian Ayurvedic medicine and classic yoga
practices that recommend cold morning showers.In the modern world and in the US
athletes heal their inflammation from excess exercise by extreme cold using cold
baths and cryotherapy. In the past in Europe the popularity of so-called
Hydrotherapy was spread by Sebastian Kneipp and his book My Water Cure (1886)
that was reprinted more than fifty times and in many languages.

Being from south of Europe (although that’s a whole nother story where my
country  fits in the european context), I remember it was 1997 and I was away at
the time, a student at the University of Bologna in the small Italian city of
Cesena and I have missed some of the important happenings in my country of
Macedonia and its neighbouring countries. Such were the serbian protests against
Milosevic and the end of an nationalistic era. Youth of my country was inspired
by the serbian example, but only from the point of massive protests or throwing
eggs at the government buildings. The serbian protest were anti-nationalistic,
and our were large student and high school nationalistic protests of macedonians
against faculty lectures in albanian language. Then many people lost their life
savings in banks as a result of pyramid schemes that cost some of them even
their lives. And lastly several people were killed and many injured because they
lifted a flag of Albania in Macedonia. It was a boiling point and many people
expected that after the war in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia, we were the
next and the last war-appointed place in the long string of ex-yugoslavian wars.

In those circumstances my sister was graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in
Skopje with her installation/exhibition entitled Walking on Cold Water According
to Dr. Kneipp, installed within the Institute of Physical Rehabilitation in
Skopje. But why Dr. Kneipp and why there?

It was several years ago that I spent my whole summer in the Institute of
Physical Rehabilitation healing my arm that was broken, operated upon, merged
with a metal plate and fourteen screws, and in the process they screwed up the
nerve that was controlling movements of the fingers. Besides that, my elbow was
an immovable joint from being too long in the casket. So, being fourteen years
old, the medical personnel thought I would heal in no time – except for me it
was eternity, whole summer spent in hospitals, instead with my friends or
preparing for the highschool exam, I spent my time learning how to write with
the other arm.

In the meantime I visited the Rehabilitation centre where first they attached
electric current to my arm and stimulated the nerve and the muscles. It was
painful and uncomfortable. I clenched my teeth and looked the other way. In the
small room there was the hospital bed I was on, electrical appliances for
torturing patients, a table and two chairs. On one chair there was the nurse,
and on the other a mother with a baby. The two women talked, and the baby was
crying. It was obviously paralized, born that way, as I got to know from the
mother, and it wasn’t getting better. But, she had hope and was doing anything
she could. The nurse took the electrodes from my arm and I left the room without
a word, ashamed of myself and with a great sense of guilt that I had been
feeling sorry for myself.

The next room looked like a kindergarten, and indeed there were many figurines
and 3D geometric shapes, that you were supposed to play with, in an orderly and
preprogrammed way just to stimulate your nerves. There was a girl there that I
liked. She was around my age, she looked me back, but both of us immediately
looked the other way. She was doing the same exercises, and I looked at her
hand. Her fingers were small and underdeveloped, like fingers of a baby on a
child’s hand. She noticed my look and her gaze changed immediately.

I got out of that room feeling even more depressed. Then they sent me to the
“paraffin room” and I wondered what was all that about. In the waiting room
there were no more babies and kids, but old and wrinkly people that looked at me
like I didn’t belong there. I was called and entered a room with a big aluminum
pot. A nurse was mixing the contents of the pot with a long wooden paddle. What
the hell was that all about, I wondered. Was she going to boil me and eat me
like the children in the Hansel and Gretel story? No wonder there weren’t other
children outside that room! Well, soon enough she pulled a big, soaking wet and
boiling hot towel and wrapped it around my hand. It hurt like hell! I wanted to
scream and swear at the nurse, but then the image of the paralized child
appeared before my eyes. I decided to keep my mouth shut and wait for my arm to
boil or whatnot. Then they unwrapped the cooked meat and put my elbow under an
infrared light and that was it.

The last room looked like a physical education hall. “Do they expect me to jump
some hoops or whatever?” I thought to myself. A nurse came and sat me in a
chair, put a whole lot of powder on my hand and started massaging my arm. Well,
that wasn’t so bad. “What did you do to your arm?” she asked me. I was thinking
of my options. The truth was unbelievable, but I was too lazy to invent
something more believable like “I fell down the stairs.” I supposed that I’ll be
spending a long time there so she’ll probably know the truth anyway.

“We were armwrestling and my arm broke,” I said. “Who was the other guy,” she
asked in wonder. “A friend from school” I answered. “Well, listen” she stopped
massaging my hand and looked me straight in the eyes. “As soon as you resolve
this arm thing, you go back to that friend of yours and you break his leg!” I
laughed, but she seemed quite serious.

The lessons learned

I spent the whole summer in that place, and visited many other rooms. My sister
sometimes came with me and wandered the long hallways. That’s how she got to
know the place and discovered the rooms for the hydrotherapy according to the
18th-century Bavarian priest, Dr Kneipp. Later on, she discovered an 1926
croation translation of a medicinal book of alternative medicine called The
Female Doctor in the House by Dr. Med. Jenny Springer. In the book there was a
whole section on the practices of Dr Kneipp and the use of cold and hot water
and its benefits. She included those pages in her exhibition that was held in
the rehabilitation center and attracted a lot of people by the series of female
nightgowns that were floating like ghosts in large, water-filled concrete
basins; the white nightgowns were imprinted, in the area of the chest/heart,
with drawings of Dr.Kneipp’s healing methods. 

One day I was walking home and like it was nothing, my hand straightened itself
all the way like it was something normal. After that the healing was easier and
quicker. I got into highschool and didn’t break my friend’s leg. The nurse was
apparently joking, but also told me another peculiar thing. “Make yourself an
arm of plywood, tie your hand on it and sleep that way.” It apparently helped me
since I didn’t wake up with a clenched fist and cramped up hand. The other nurse
with the electrodes torture machine told me that I had to practice, not to leave
the movement of the hand to the machine. Every time it lifts my hand I have to
move it also. Even if my hand doesn’t move, I was supposed to move it in my
mind. And so I did. In the beginning, the movement was only in my mind and then
like a miracle it materialised itself into reality and my hand moved. Oh, what
happiness the small thing in life could bring to us!

Several years later, in 1997 when I finished highschool and my sister had her
exhibition I didn’t think much about the rehabilitation center or Dr. Kneipp.
But as I started practicing the Wim Hof Method I realised it drew much
inspiration from the practices of the Bavarian priest and older cultures that
practised the deep breathing pranayamas, the yoga asanas and especially the cold
bath.

It indeed has a lot of benefits, especially when you combine the cold water and
the hot sauna, the cold opens the peripheral capillaries and brings the heat to
the organs, and the hot opens them up and circulates the heat and the blood back
to the surface. It may seem like an old practice that bases its findings on the
antique and middle age humoral theory, but it’s benefits are more than visible
in everyday life. When the cold hits the skin it’s like electricity that
energizes your body. You’ll feel vital, energetic, happy and full of life!

Cold showers benefit not only your circulation and your emotional state, but
also it strengthens your immune system and, contrary to the common beliefs, they
keep you warm in the winter. It takes a lot of willpower to make yourself plunge
into the cold shower, and just by doing that your self-belief and inner strength
rises. The antidepressant effects on the mood, the autonomic nervous system and
the endocrine system in combination with the deep breathing are already well and
scientifically proven. You can check the facts and the scientific studies
online.

Wim Hof, Dr. Kneipp, whatever it takes, but try to be balanced

Wim Hof gets quite a lot of attention, especially today, but we shouldn’t forget
the age old practices, and personalities like dr. Kneipp. Life and health is not
an isolated thing, although we are forced to live in isolation today. Dr. Kneipp
proposed hydrotherapy as a means of bettering one’s health, but also in
combination with other methods like using botanical medicines, exercise,
nutrition and balance. All of these things could be practised at home, and are
useful tools in these times. Maybe the most difficult is the last aspect of
balance. Indeed, whenever I personally felt doubt or wasn’t trying enough for
whatever reason, my Wim Hof Method results were declining. We shouldn’t forget
the age old saying that in a healthy mind lies a healthy body and that the mind
is the first thing we should take care of before plunging ourselves into the
cold. Or maybe the cold could reset the mind and help the body? Well, like Wim
Hof says “doing is believing”, so don’t believe, just do it!

 

25.04.2020





“ISOLATION” IS NOT JUST A SONG BY JOY DIVISION




On the “modern” experience of feeling isolated and imprisoned through the eyes
of a citizen of an isolated country

Surrendered to self preservation,
From others who care for themselves.
From the song “Isolation” by Joy Division (1980)

 

I’ve been living in an isolated country for three decades now and the feeling of
helplessness that surrounds today’s world is very familiar to me and my
compatriots, indeed. Since the last decade of the 20th century, the world has
enjoyed the emergence of grunge and drum and bass, alt rock, broken beats and
dubstep, among other musical genres. Ex-Yugoslavia survived some different beats
and breakups, several wars, political and economical instability, embargos and
blockades from outside, changes of names and identities, transition of
governments, massive unemployment and “brain drains” and a fair share of
personal turmoil. My country of today’s North Macedonia lived all of it and
more, and we as its citizens felt as prisoners, small, insignificant, fearful,
deprived, isolated and powerless to change our state of being. Seems familiar?

School as a prison

I fled the city of Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) in 1990 when the rain was
still made of water instead of led and settled in the peaceful southern city of
Skopje in Macedonia. Both cities were still a part of one state of Yugoslavia,
and just a year later we were separate states on a course to nowhere. The former
parts of Yugoslavia declared independence, and all hell broke loose. Former
brothers turned against each other, families were separated, drinking rakija and
traditional dances with holding each-other’s hands were exchanged for flying
bullets and screams of agony.

In April 1992 my hometown of Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) was under attack,
and there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I didn’t know if my friends were
alive or dead, later I found out that some of them left the country and had
their fair share of the horrors of the fugitive life across Europe. The others
remained, some of them fallen victims of the war, others its prisoners. They
survived as they could, used books and furniture to heat their homes, or risked
their lives when they got out to get food or water from the donations, there was
shortage of oil, flour, gas, toilet paper… you name it. Seems familiar? 

I was thinking often about them, but I couldn’t do anything to help them. When
the warmongering beast awakens, there’s nothing anybody could do, really. In the
meantime I had my own share of personal battles. I was in eighth grade in
primary school and my best friend was attacked for being of a different
nationality than the others. “What a load of bollocks!” any civilised person
from the West would probably say, being right. But the mind of a person from the
Balkans does not work that way. Here, a name or a surname, could cost you a life
in those times, or maybe some broken teeth. While me and my best friend fled
from the angry mob that wanted a piece of our dental insurance, we thought for
ourselves: “We can flee today, but tomorrow we have to go to school again.”
That’s the feeling of being trapped in your own skin, or environment, depending
on the way you look at it, I suppose.

The prison is within our mind, but it can also be in our body

Well, let’s say that, in one way or another, my friend and I survived. Of
course, it’s just another sad bullying story, we were the victims, all the
others our tormentors, we cried, they cheered, we licked our wounds and life
went on… Soon the school was coming to the sweet end in the form of the
seemingly endless summer, and my friend and I were celebrating with our 50th
arm-pushing contest. Maybe we were inspired by the 80s movie Over the Top of one
of our childhood heroes Stallone, or maybe we were just boys, always competing,
always measuring our strengths.

Let’s just say that I didn’t notice that in the meantime, counting from 1 to 50,
my friend grew to be quite a large and strong young man, while I remained
more-less the same. Just before realizing that, my arm snapped in half and I
found myself in a hospital, confined to the surgical table, while the medical
assistant was holding my nerve radialis, and the surgeon was bolting the two
pieces of my humerus bone with a metal plate and fourteen screws. Yes, I woke up
in the middle of the operation and was given another dose of anaesthesia, enough
to kill a horse, or just to be sure that I wouldn’t wake up again, during the
operation, of course.

The next thing I know is that my face was plastered from one to the other side
of the table, but I couldn’t feel anything. I heard the voice of the medical
nurse yelling “Wake up”, but the darkness, and numbness of my body was
overwhelming and stronger than the reality, it almost felt more real and
familiar. I was in a prison of my own body and it felt like forever. The voices
were coming from the distant place of nothingness and timelessness, the same
place where we all came from. And then the light, colours, feelings, smell of
iodine and pain.

The prison of my body left, but soon after removing the seemingly another
physical confinement, the cast, I realized that I couldn’t move my hand. The
nerve was damaged during the operation, and my hand became the immovable object,
heavier than a ton of bricks. Indeed, lifting a finger felt like that for a long
time, the whole summer to be exact. While the others celebrated the end of a
school year and the end of primary school education with the traditional tearing
and throwing the books in the air I was confined to the rehabilitation medical
centers with the elderly people who looked at me as someone to share their life
stories and wisdoms to. I had no choice but to listen to them, it was my bad
luck that I was raised to show respect to the elders.

Isn’t it that we only appreciate normal things in life when we don’t have them
anymore? Well, when you lose your control over your dominant arm, and study to
write with the opposite arm just to pass the highschool entrance exam, you look
at things from a different perspective. Just as today – a simple walk in nature,
a hug with a close friend, or a relaxed moment in a supermarket shopping for the
family’s needs, seems like a distant and a long forgotten dream. When the things
we take for granted are taken away from us, we begin to appreciate them and
remember how it was like when we had them. The sad thing is that when we get
them back we forget to be appreciative and go back to the old ways of wanting
more, just as I forgot how happy I was to lift a finger and to be able to hold a
pen. That’s our nature.

Homeland as a prison

A prison could be built of flesh or of beliefs, but your own country can be a
big and impenetrable prison, also. And in the year of 1992 my country was closed
from all sides, imprisoned in its own beliefs that she has a right to the name
of the country of Alexander the Great. It was a pity that the world didn’t share
our own beliefs.

As a token of our good will to be a part of the EU, the world and the
progressive thinking we opposed the Yugoslav (Serbian) tendencies towards war.
So we closed our borders towards our northern neighbour and the main export
channel for our products. That devastated our economy since we have already been
blocked on the south, towards Greece. Why? Let me tell you a little something
about history – it’s a bitch, alright. Greece thought that we didn’t have any
right to use the name Macedonia, although ancient Macedonia was also part of our
territory, but ok. We were the b-side of the argument, small, weak and poor. The
winners write the history, and we were destined to be losers.

What about the West and the East? Well, our version of the West is Albania, a
country that was struggling itself, a former communist state. And they had it
rough, allright. Our former socialist state of Yugoslavia was a theme park
compared to Albania. We had all the personal freedoms, listened to western music
and watched American movies. I mentioned Stallone, but he was only one of many
of our childhood heroes like Schwarzenegger, Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Charles
Bronson, Chuck Norris, Jean-Claude Van Damme and others. Our east neighbour
Bulgaria was also a poor communist state, but their only interest in our country
was if it was a part of theirs. 

All of them, so-called eastern bloc countries, including Romania,
Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary were considered as poor countries by the
standard of Yugoslavia. If you exclude the political prisoners, the
nationalization and appropriation of the personal belongings of the wealthy
citizens, the average yugoslav bloke had free education and health care,
functioning social support for the less fortunate and great housing policies for
the workers. Yugoslavia was practically a free market socialist state and it’s
GDP growth from 1950s to 1980s was often greater than most capitalist market
economies of Western Europe and the US.

But since the 90s and the breakup of Yugoslavia, and the creation of the smaller
national states, it has been a whole nother story. My country of Macedonia was
particularly closed. Serbia and Croatia were at war, but they had friends,
Russia and the EU or US. We, on the other hand, had no friends and no relations
or a means to export or import goods from anywhere and in the middle of the
process of transition from socialist to democratic government. It was an
experience from hell. The once full markets were empty, no bread, milk, meat,
flour. Since oil and the gas came from Greece, it never came, or if you waited
for several days in the gas station, maybe you could fill a tank. It was a time
when criminals ruled our sovereign country and smuggled cigarettes, coffee,
sugar, oil, electronics, chemicals and even arms. All of those things were more
worth than gold. Macedonian tobacco, famous in the world for more than a
century, was given to the big players for literal pennies. They packaged it and
sold it back to us via contraband for ten times fold.

Politicians or crime bosses had their bellies full and jiggling in laughter like
a merry old Santa Claus. The ordinary people were desperate and hungry, their
savings blocked by the state and the banks, left without a job or a choice in
life, hungry, frightened and without perspective. In those circumstances my
mother was sitting in the kitchen and talking to her friend, a medical person,
about the processes of conserving food and water.

“If you open a bottle, the water is microbiologically clean for a week. Of
course, tap water is full of chemicals and is safe for maybe a month if stored
properly,” she was talking as if reciting a verse from a prepper’s book. My
mother wrote all down and made a list: water, flour, oil, canned food… and kept
a reserve of everything through the ‘90s.

Inflation was 450 percent, GDP was minus 7.5 percent, the unemployment rate was
30 percent and if you had the luck to be employed it was for a wage of $100. If
by any chance you had foreign capital, banks took it from you. People were
living like prisoners in their own country. Many people fled the prison, but not
everyone had the chance.

A prison of the war

In those times of economic instability the fear of the shadow of the war
approaching and covering our sunny southern state was always present. In 1991
ex-Yugoslavia separated and we gained independence, in 1992 the terrible war in
Bosnia started, in 1999 it moved nearer, to Kosovo, and finally in 2001 it came
to our country. It was a hell of a decade, and I was in the best years of my
life, thirteen to twenty-three. 

In the last year of the turbulent decade, or the first of the new millennium,
Block Rockin Beats came to our country, and people started killing each other.
Albanians wanted rights, Macedonians said, “maybe, but not with guns”, and as it
happens in the Balkans, guns talked instead of words. The war already started in
some other cities, but my city of Skopje was still safe. My mother was afraid
that the military would take me to the front. I was a student of psychology then
and didn’t believe that they needed anyone to talk to them about Freud, they
needed warriors. But still, I was under stress that in any moment someone would
knock on my door and take me away. When the bell rang we all jumped as shot from
behind. One night I was awakened by explosions and rumblings and my heart nearly
jumped out from my chest. As I was trying to locate myself in the darkness I
realized that it was just thundering.

Soon after that, the thunder and rattles came to our city. There were real
battles, not more than 10 miles from my house, helicopters, plains, mortar
explosions, Kalashnikovs, and the sounds of war previously heard only in movies,
were accompanying me in my study of Charcot, Helmholtz, Wundt, Piaget, Pavlov,
Skinner and other pioneers of psychology. It was a real test of motivation and
persistence of reason over emotion.

Being in your own country, in your own apartment, but still feeling like you are
a prisoner of some big prison is very strange. If you didn’t hear the shootings
for a brief morning when the sun bathed the trees and birds sang their spring
song you stood in your window in wonder how nature doesn’t seem to care about
our worries and just carries on. Maybe just for a moment, when the birds would
fly in a flock, frightened by the sound of an explosion, you’ll maybe rejoice
“We got you!”

Every spring, for ten years, we waited for that moment to come. We knew that
someday we would be awakened not only by the sun, but also by the sounds of the
war. And when it came, we were frightened like that flock of the birds on the
tree in front of my house. But we couldn’t fly away to some other tree, instead
we stayed in our city and in our homes and hoped that the war would end soon.
It’s when the feeling of prison and isolation was in it’s peak. You trust no one
and fear everyone. Even your best neighbor tomorrow could turn his back on you
and shoot you. It has happened before, you know. When the war in Bosnia started
the nearest neighbours that sometimes in their lives argued about something
stupid, now had a licence to kill, and they used it. Everybody is a potential
threat and if you want to live, you should be carefull. Trust no one, care for
yourself. Does it seem familiar?

An epilogue – world as a prison

Well, the war ended in the summer of 2001 and it seemed like better times were
coming. In the coming years there were several other instabilities and on-off
shootings, but overall we were going in the right direction. Albanians got their
deserved rights and we became a more democratic state.

In the following two decades we didn’t recover economically, and our neighbours
didn’t support us. Hell, we didn’t even have a name for our state, since
Macedonia wasn’t internationally recognised, or our people, language or
religion. In the mind of the world we were an invented construct, non-existent
entity and that sure had its toll on us. We struggled to be a part of the EU for
decades and didn’t succeed, there was always an excuse that we didn’t fit with
the big boys, although we did everything they asked from us. 

Many people fled this big prison of a country, most of them fine, smart people.
What was left of the was not the best. Some thugs, rough people that could
survive and thrive in difficult situations. Let’s just say that I’m not one of
those people and it’s quite difficult for me to be a fully developed human being
in the circumstances where the higher intellectual needs are thought of as not
important, even looked down on. The former schoolyard bullies that tormented my
friend and me became rich and powerful and the country was imprisoned by such
characters. Former proud communist party members that informed on their friends
became free market and venture capitalist that ruled the unprotected majority.

In the year 2020 the three decades of our imprisonment ended, I was ready to
accept that my adolescence and youth went in vain, but that my middle years
would hopefully be better. My country got a new name – North Macedonia and the
EU and the world was willing to recognize us as a part of it, even our most
vicious enemy, our southern neighbor, that rejoiced in our struggle in the
decades we were struggling. We were prepared for something big, for the greater
future we dreamed of for three decades, to be able to travel and work abroad
without waiting for visas, being humiliated from other states officials like we
are lesser of a human beings, being able to work and earn something more in
life. Many of our citizens felt it wasn’t right to change our name, but they
were fed up of pure survival and wanted to live a full, happy and fulfilled
life.

And just then, in the beginning of 2020, the world got isolated. It was as our
bad luck passed on to the whole world. Now we were all living in fear, distrust,
economic downfall and isolation, and there’s nowhere to run from the prison of
reality. Does it seem familiar? Sure it does, now the whole world is like one
big prison. But fear not, the human race is a tough customer, it survives, it
adapts, just like nature, it’s a part of it. It will prevail, and build
something better. It is a matter of time.

 

24.04.2020





NO WOMAN’S LAND – MY MOTHER’S HOMELAND




A short personal account of Yugoslavia and Macedonia from 1920 to 2020

 

It was 1984 and I was a seven-year-old boy with long messy “Beatles-like” hair,
as my doctor father used to tease, and a motherless “son-of-a-gypsy-woman” as my
grandfather, a no-nonsense WWII veteran, used to say. Of course my hair was
messy; I was being raised by two egomaniac father figures, neither of which told
me to comb my hair or dress properly оr all the other things that a mother would
normally say. My parents were separated by then, my mother, a descendant of
bourgeois “traitors” and my father, a son of a proud socialist partisan warrior.
I was living in the Marxist paradise and didn’t even know what my mom looked
like, she was like a ghost figure, guarding me from a distance of a thousand
miles, whispering in my ear not to worry, to leave my toxic home environment as
much as I could and go outside to play with my friends. The street was a place
of zen-like calm and eternal happiness. Indeed, it was a magical year – the 1984
Winter Olympics were being held in my city of Sarajevo, now just a collection of
old shelled and bullet-riddled Austro-Hungarian buildings.

As I search through my memories like the pieces of a puzzle, I think to myself,
“Damn, it could just as well have been Nineteen Eighty-Four!” People informed on
others to the party, even their friends or relatives, who then often lost their
jobs or, as my paternal grandfather, were taken to prison, although he was a
socialist. In the meantime, my socialist country fell apart. We endured a
hellish, pointless war. I lost all my childhood friends. But I gained a new
transition-to-a-capitalist homeland. And, yes, a mother too. But let’s be fair.
Living in Yugoslavia under socialism in 1984 wasn’t so bad. Later, some even
called it “Coca-Cola socialism”. It was true that we had all the benefits of
capitalism, even Coca Cola, although we preferred the domestic Cockta, which, to
be honest, didn’t taste as good as the sweet dark American drink it aimed to
replicate.

Throughout history, but also in any one particular moment of the Yugoslav past,
there were many realities. In one of those realities, my mom was born in 1950.
She was the granddaughter of an industrialist, who came from Czechoslovakia to
Skopje in the 1920s with dreams of building his little capitalist kingdom. And
he succeeded. Since then, Skopje has been part of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats
and Slovenes (1918-1929), the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (1929-1941), the Federal
People’s Republic of Yugoslavia (1945-1963), the Socialist Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia (1963-1991), the Republic of Macedonia (1992-2019) and the Republic
of North Macedonia (2019). It’s mind-boggling, I know. In 1938 my
great-grandfather, the Czech capitalist, built a factory called “Kumanovo” on
the outskirts of Skopje, that had an automated flour mill, by my mother’s
account the first of its kind in the Balkans. He also bought a lot of land,
built several houses, and gave each of his daughters a house as a gift. Little
did he and other wealthy people know that the war and, later on, socialism was
coming.

Korda Family

My maternal grandmother, Nada Korda, was a large and strong woman, but only by
her looks. In all of the pictures I have seen of her, she is gazing in the
distance because she was burdened by a weak heart. Unlike her sisters, she
didn’t want any material possessions. She had one wish only – to study art. Her
father couldn’t say no to her and paid her tuition and living costs. Since there
was no Faculty of Art in Skopje, she went to study in Belgrade, Serbia in 1938.
When she finished her studies in 1942, she came back to Skopje. And like
everyone else, she survived by tenacity and sheer will to live. In 1944 she
married a capitalist, a wealthy young man who rode motorbikes, greased his hair,
and smoked expensive cigarettes.



Image: Nada Korda (second on the left) with her relatives and one of her
paintings above, Skopje, 1944



Image: “Gypsy Woman,” a painting by Nada Korda (1941)

Yugoslavia under the socialist regime was a wealthy country. There was no famine
like in the USSR, and people were happy. Well, most of them, anyway. My paternal
grandfather was imprisoned for five years in “Goli Otok” (literally “Naked
Island” since there were only rocks and no vegetation). It was a hell on earth
for political prisoners and he sure wasn’t happy. He was, however, a socialist
and a WWII partisan veteran with thirteen bullet holes to prove it. But that’s
nothing compared to the “traitor capitalist bastards” of my maternal
grandparents. All the factories and houses they built were taken away from them
by the legal processes of colonization, nationalization, and expropriation. That
was the reality of socialism, not only for the city folk but for affluent
landholders with a lot of livestock. The official story was that the socialist
state took all of their possessions for the wellbeing of the people of
Yugoslavia. But the reality was that all the private belongings that the state
commandeered went into wealthy private hands of the communist leaders, which
made the people poor. Like one of my mom’s grandparents’ houses, that was given
to a general who, simply, passing down the street, saw the house and liked it!
The family was given one night to move out.

In those circumstances, all of my family from my grandma’s side left Yugoslavia
and went back to Czechoslovakia. All but my grandma. She stayed in Skopje with
her husband and they lived a happy life… Of course, there are no happy endings
in real life, but hey, there’s no fun and joy in life without difficulties! Her
dream of becoming a professional artist was crushed by the war, the socialist
nationalization of wealth, her illness, and her family leaving her. But she had
a husband and, more than anything, she wanted to be a mother. The doctors
advised her against having a child since it would be too great a strain on her
weak heart, but to no avail – it didn’t matter to her. So, in 1950, my mom was
born. There are not many pictures of my grandma from that period, but in those
that I mentioned before, she always seems distant and looking into the future,
as if she could sense that she wouldn’t be around for very long to see her child
grow up. When my mom was nine years old, my grandma died. She left behind a
husband without the love of his life, a house full of books that she read while
confined to her bed, and many unfinished paintings. 

Sima Family

And what about my grandfather? Well, he was crushed, of course, but this wasn’t
the first tragedy of his life. His father was a Vlach (Aromanian), a people
believed to have introduced urban culture to the Balkans. By the end of the
Ottoman Empire, my great-grandfather was mayor of Kochani in Macedonia, a city
famous for its rice production. In the 1920s he came to Skopje, already a
wealthy man. He bought a house in the famous Skopje neighbourhood of “Pajko
Maalo”, and opened a fabric store called “Simic”. His original surname was a
Vlach “Sima”, but in the times of the Yugoslav Kingdom it was changed to
“Simic”. Later, under fascist Bulgaria, it became “Simov,” in Macedonia
“Simoski,” and finally back to Sima. That’s one of the wonders of the Balkans,
changing your identity is quite a regular thing.



Image: Jika Sima, 1935

He and his wife had five children, two boys and three girls. The two boys went
to university and graduated in economics, one in Paris and one in Skopje. After
the death of their father, they ran the family business. The older one married a
Bosnian woman and they moved with their two young children to Bosnia at the
beginning of WWII. On the day of their arrival, the father and the little
daughter, called Biljana, were killed in a Fascist ambush and died on the bus.
The mother and the son survived and came back to Skopje. The grieving wealthy
family gave the house in “Pajko Maalo” to the wife of their brother, and my
grandfather called his first and only child – my mother – Biljana, in memory of
the young seven-year-old daughter of his older brother.



Image: The girl that was killed in WWII (1940) and my mom who was named after
her (1958)

As Socialism knocked on the doors of my family’s fortune, the “Simic” fabric
store and all the possessions they had were taken. My mom lived with her family
in rented flats and houses. But my grandfather, Jika Sima, didn’t give up. He
opened a sporting goods store in Skopje called “Sport,” and then a furniture
store called “Jugoexport”. He was part of the administration of the country’s
best soccer club, “Vardar”, and was active in promoting winter sports, founding
the “Mountaineering Union of Macedonia”. He was a tough capitalist nut to crack,
but when my grandma died in 1959, he was devastated. Like all single fathers, he
tried to fill the void of the maternal figure in the life of his daughter with
strict rules, and he ruled his kingdom with a firm hand. Well, as you can
imagine, that didn’t sit well with my mom. She was sent to live with her aunts
in a village and had a seemingly pleasant rural experience filled with natural
wonders before moving back to Skopje several years later. 

My mother in socialist Yugoslavia

She was 13 years old when the new Socialist Republic of Macedonia, as a part of
the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, lived through a catastrophe.
Skopje was destroyed by an earthquake. Most of the buildings were destroyed. All
the citizens of Skopje were given temporary living barracks. As the situation
settled, my grandfather donated his barracks back to the state. He bought a
house from his wife’s sister, where my mom still lives today. He was maybe the
one and only person I know who gave back his barracks, since all the other
citizens of Skopje built houses on top of their barracks, and later apartment
buildings. And that’s how the city of Skopje came to be after the earthquake. It
seems to me that my family has always valued hard work, sincerity, and effort. A
lot was taken from them, but they never took anything that didn’t belong to
them. My mom was raised by that principle, one I also believe in. Skopje was
rebuilt with international aid from the East and West, and this brought to life
some of the interesting brutalist architecture that Skopje was famous for in the
1960s and later on. In those times our socialist youth wasn’t any different from
the youth of the capitalist countries. We also listened to British and American
rock music and shook our hips to the sounds of The Beatles and The Rolling
Stones. 

The new decade was on the rise and my mom was 20 years old. Finally, let off the
hook by her strict father, she enjoyed her time with her friends in Makarska, a
city on the Yugoslav Adriatic Sea. It was then and there, at a party with the
sound of Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix in the background, that she met the man
that would become my father. She left Skopje, and her father relocated all her
belongings to Sarajevo. One year later she gave birth to her first love child,
my sister. Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, in the 1970s was a
different city from Skopje. It was a real mixture of Austro-Hungarian and
Ottoman influences, and a mixture of nationalities and religions as well. In
socialism, everyone was equal regardless of their beliefs. And they really were
– under Marshal “Tito” the people used to speak his name as if he was the one
and sole deity. “Brotherhood and unity” was the slogan of the Yugoslav nation
and all the people lived by it, especially in Bosnia. The Bosnian people had a
real sense of humour too, and in those circumstances, my sister was born and six
years later, I came along. It was the great old seventies, hard rock, sideburns,
modern homes, electrical appliances, orange, green, yellow and all.



Image: My mom in 1972, a young mother and a student of Law, a smoker till this
day

The 1980s arrived with a bang! Our Marshal on a white horse, Tito, died. That
event in Yugoslavia was perceived by everyone as an apocalypse. From the child
sitting at its desk at school, looking through teary eyes at the picture of Tito
on the classroom wall, to the ninety-year-old man in his house, listening to the
news on an old radio, pouring himself a rakija (a 50 proof drink made from
grapes) in a small glass, and then spilling some on the floor – for the soul of
the dead, possibly even crying “dear Tito!” Our saviour, who brought all the
different nations together into one Yugoslavia, built bridges with Asia, Africa,
Europe, and the USA. He met with all the important leaders of his time. He was a
celebrity, and he was visited by numerous celebrities. Yugoslavia was a real
player on the world map. At the time, his funeral was the largest state funeral
in history.

But that year, 1980, was also a personal catastrophe for my mom. My parents
divorced and she was alone in an adopted city. But all the friends and family
that were dear to her now abandoned her since they all had been my father’s
friends and family. She was left alone with two children, an uncertain future,
and an unstable job in a city that suddenly became strange and distant. And then
the legal struggles and hatred between the once young lovers began. She won in
court. The legal system was still functioning. The mother had a right to her
children, no matter if the father had many connections and was a big-shot
doctor. But he wouldn’t accept defeat.

My mom was living with me and my sister in a rented basement, again as in the
times of socialist confiscation. But now the tyrant wasn’t the state that the
people loved, but the man she once loved, and who wanted to take back his son.
She had to go to work and there was no one to keep her children safe. Many times
my father would just come around and take me from the street or from school. My
mom was a stranger in a strange land and the only way to get me back was with
the help of the police. That was my life back then, being kidnapped by my
father. Then the police would come banging on the door, my grandparents telling
me to hide, followed by a forceful entry, police pulling me out of my hideout,
and bringing me back to my mom. But why just me, why not my sister?

My paternal grandfather was a Montenegrin highlander, a soldier who came to
Bosnia to fight with the partisans and who took part in two of the most decisive
battles of WWII, those at Neretva and Sutjeska. What does that have to do with
anything? Well, in Montenegro, when a little boy hops on a bus, if an elderly
woman is sitting down, she must stand up for the boy to take her place. You
would imagine that the right thing to do is the opposite. But no, not in
Montenegro, because a boy is an heir to the family name, meaning a woman is
important solely as the potential bearer of a little boy. That’s why my sister
was left alone, while I was kidnapped over and over and over again. My mom
decided that it was enough. She was doing enough psychological damage to her
family. She packed her stuff and took us to the railway station. Then my father,
a well-informed person, as it seems, showed up again and took me by force. I
cannot imagine what went through my mom’s head in the moments before she got on
that train to Skopje with my sister and left me with my father. But I can only
imagine that, with her maternal instinct, she knew that if she stayed the
situation would only get worse. She was in a foreign city with no one to protect
her and her children. This way, her boy was with his father, who was capable of
doing anything just to have him. It must have meant that he loved him dearly and
wouldn’t let him suffer.

* * *

I was three years old and left with my father, grandfather, and grandmother. I
was told to call my grandmother  “Mom,” which I did, but deep down, I knew that
wasn’t right. The ghost of my real mom that I couldn’t picture anymore always
seemed to float around me. Sometimes it was a smell, a feeling of warmth, or a
sound and I knew it was her, sending me messages from wherever she was. But I
had no cognitive recollection of her even later, in 1984, when my grandfather
called her “a gypsy-woman”. Firstly, “gypsy” was a pejorative word in
Yugoslavia, meaning someone without a home, a wanderer, and a poor person. But
my mom wasn’t poor. She was from the southern part of Yugoslavia that had—and
still has—a large Roma population that is considered a part of the community.
So, by doing that, my grandfather insulted two nations with one strike, Roma and
Macedonian, but also my mom and me. He was a socialist warrior, and she was the
daughter of an industrialist. Should I add more?

After that, she came to Sarajevo many times and asked to see me, but my father
wouldn’t let her. Instead, he filled my head with fears that she was evil and
was coming to get me and kidnap me. As the years progressed and I went to school
there was always someone with me, my own personal bodyguard. Later on, when I
was finally trusted to go to school on my own, I was always reminded of the
possibility that someone was lurking behind me. Of course, my mom never tried to
take me by force, but in my dreams an evil witch was chasing me, every night,
ending with my falling into a bottomless well.

My mom never gave up on me. My paternal grandmother, who I loved, a woman with
strict eyes and peach fuzz on her upper lip, ran the family as it became clear
to me later. As soon as she died, my dad finally let me receive packages from my
mom. Maybe he remembered what it was like to miss a mother and he felt sorry for
me. Those packages were filled with the most interesting things for my school
needs, some homemade cookies and sweets like those that I had never tasted
before, and a letter from her and my sister, the two female figures, who I could
only imagine what they looked like. I read the letter with awe and shame. Why
shame? I was living in a manly world where the expression of emotions wasn’t
allowed, and the letters were filled with emotions. They always ended with a
plea for me to write something back, which I never did. My dad never forced me.
Plus, I was a kid and just didn’t know what to write. If I could, I would, and I
should have, as I learned later on in life. But as a kid – no way! – I was too
afraid of emotions. They only meant one thing, that you were weak. And I didn’t
want to be weak. My dad was also afraid, but he didn’t hide his angry emotions
towards me. He expressed his anger in the form of ruthless beatings using his
hands, his belt, his slippers, his foot… a really versatile means of expression.
My granddad didn’t beat me but he had his own particular way of showing his
anger, throwing things at me, like a cigarette lighter, his pipe, or a heavy
glass ashtray. He was an avid smoker, what could I say. Anyway, beatings and
throwing things at me were part of everyday home life, and luckily for me, I
wasn’t at home for the most part of the day. Whenever I could, I escaped and
visited my friends, played outside, hung out in the street, just like my
mother’s ghost instructed me to do. I was a street rat, indeed.



Image: Me (“Tito’s pioneer”) with Vucko, the 1984 Sarajevo Winter Olympics
Mascot

It was then, like a bolt out of the blue, that my father decided to let my mom
visit me. You know that strange feeling you get from meeting someone for the
first time and knowing you remember them from somewhere? It was like that for
me. Just weirder, I suppose, since her image and voice, her smell and feel was
imprinted in a part of my brain that I couldn’t access consciously. She took me
to the cinema, bought me ice cream, obeyed any and all my wishes. Never had
anyone been so nice to me in my life. And as we stood in the hallway, before
entering my house when our time together was up, she looked at me as if she
never wanted to let me go. I felt awkward and insecure. What should I do? Should
I go back and hug her? There had already been too many hugs for me in one day.
Hell, no one had ever hugged me, ever! So I just said “bye” and went inside. I
was in my toxic world again, and it felt like a relief. A man shouldn’t have
emotions, right?

Break Rockin Beats of the 1990s

Several years passed and before I knew what was happening my father said to me:
“Pack your things, you’re going to Kansas!” Well okay, it was Skopje, but it
might as well have been Kansas or the Land of Oz since it was a whole new world
for me. I got a new home, a sister and a mom, but lost a grandfather, father,
and all my old friends. Was it a fair bargain? I don’t know. It was fair for my
mom, for sure. She had both of her kids again, after ten years of battle. It was
1990 and the world entered into a new decade of Nirvana and grunge, MC Hammer
and hip hop, break beats, and of course, a new catastrophe. This time my
homeland was the target. Yugoslavia split in the most horrible and absurd way,
by war. Sarajevo, my hometown, bore the brunt of it. It was under occupation for
five years, and many of its inhabitants perished, while others fled to different
parts of Europe or the world. Former professors, doctors, and lawyers were now
cleaners, dishwashers, and garbage men. Life works in mysterious ways, right. 

What did I do in this decade? Well, I was a teenager then. I studied a lot,
listened to a lot of old and new music, learned the Macedonian language,
exchanged my friends for my grandma’s large library of art and science books
from the whole century, and spent some quality time with my mom and sister. It
was indeed good when we weren’t afraid of the war that was banging on our doors.
The 1990s for us were a mixture of good drum beats and bad rifle shots. My mom
always kept a supply of non-perishable food, and energy sources like coal, oil,
and wood as well as other things in the basement, needed in the case of
emergency. She was always a single parent with a plan. Luckily, the war didn’t
directly affect us in the nineties. But our neighbours, Serbia and Croatia, had
a fair share of it. My homeland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, had it the worst.
100,000 people were killed, and more than two million displaced. But hey! –
that’s the price of a senseless, brutal war that ended in 1995. It was time to
change those Kalashnikov beats for the break beats of LTJ Bukem, Roni Size, Alex
Reece, Goldie, Prodigy, and our own Kiril Dzajkovski. And damn, I liked those
beats! 

It was the end of the century, 1999, even the end of the millennium. I was a
dishwasher in London, visiting my sister, and escaping another war in the
Balkans, the Kosovo war, that could easily spill to my country of Macedonia as
well. In the Asian restaurant where I worked, the main cook was a tall,
happy-go-lucky guy, fond of drum’n’bass, and we bonded over musical stuff. The
other cooks were an overweight black lady, a refugee from Africa, and a skinny
guy from Wales. One evening, as we dined on rice with chicken legs and
vegetables that the nice African cook prepared for us, the guy from Wales showed
me some moves from the traditional dances of my country that he’d seen on TV. I
was blown away! My mom came to London and stayed with me, but our visas were
coming to an end, like the war in Kosovo. We went back to Skopje and life
resumed in the old-fashioned transition-to-democracy kind of way. Living a
prepper’s life. In the meantime people were simply hoping not to lose their job
and become redundant workers in the workforce, like many. 

Some people argued that the new millennium started in 2001, but it didn’t matter
to us, since that year, yet another war began, and this time it was our lives on
the line. We fled our country to Belgrade. I tried to continue my studies there
but instead went to Montenegro to visit my father. Didn’t I mention what
happened to him? Well, he had also fled his country of Bosnia and Herzegovina in
1992, and went to his father’s homeland, Montenegro, and started a new family
there. So there I was, with his wife and three kids. Why the hell was I there?
Well, let’s just say that one day I was planning to become a father myself and
that I wanted to make my peace with him, just to be sure that I wouldn’t beat or
leave my kids and become like him. That was the reason and I stayed true to
myself. I made my peace with him and never saw him again. The Macedonian war
ended on my birthday, August 13, and I went back home. My mom was happy to see
me again, but there was some disappointment in her eyes. She never told me why,
but I knew she was disappointed in me because I went to see my dad. I could
explain that I did it for myself and for my future family, but I knew it
wouldn’t matter. Maybe she was right.



Image: My mom in 2020

The new Millenium and the new reality of the 2020s

Soon I became a writer, some might say quite a fruitful and inventive one that
inspired some young authors, in my own country at least. My mom watched me grow,
become an artist, finish my education, get a job, a family, a house, “a f***ing
big television, a washing machine, a car…” and all that Trainspotting jazz. It’s
another story of survival; a shift from socialist to capitalist values, numerous
casualties in the process, and my country, now renamed North Macedonia, trying
to fit in with the big boys. The only problem is that Macedonia is a she, and
like my mom, nothing comes easy to her. She has to struggle and to fight for
every right that should belong to her. She is proud, and a bit older now, and
her kids are grown up, wiser, and more independent. Her fate remains to be seen.
This year, 2020, my mom celebrated her 70th birthday. New challenges have
arisen, a life of fear and isolation, but this isn’t only our problem, a problem
facing my country or my people. It’s the way of the world and a new story that
awaits to be told by the unfolding of an uncertain future.

 

22.04.2020

 





NOT EVEN THE WINTERS ARE WHAT THEY USED TO BE




 

The snow in March 2020, two days after the onset of spring, was not good news.
What about crops, and how long will our closed, poor, and small country survive
on its own food supplies, how long will we last?

These questions tormented me as I remembered the visit my childhood friend Hare
in February of this year. We haven’t seen each other for exactly thirty years,
since that 1990 when I left Sarajevo, my skateboard in the trunk of the red Lada
Niva that my father had collided with years ago and then his neck was in plaster
for a while. Sitting in the back seat of that car, on my way to Skopje, I saw
the landscapes of my city that changed on the rear window like scenes from a
movie. The girl that I liked on the playground playing tennis, the curved street
and the big stairs we used to ride, the place where I fell and decided not to
cry for the first time, Harris’s house on the corner between Leze Perera and
Logavina Street, the former Cinema in the local “Local Community” where the
shouts of Bruce Lee, the blows of Rocky and the shootings of Schwartzie from the
movie Commandos still echoed.

The world of my childhood ends there and the world of adults begin. The screen
becomes black. The cries of the people, the cries of the children, the shelling
on the houses, the bullet holes on all the buildings, the mines hidden on the
mountains to this day is a horror movie that I did not watch, but it is well
known to my friends and their families who stayed there to guard their homes.

Some taxi driver now lives in my apartment, but did that apartment ever belong
to me? My grandfather got it as a prominent fighter in World War II, a “medical
phenomenon”, as Hare would say. Rambo and Commandos can’t even catch a glimpse
of his thirteen bullet wounds, several taken out, most of them left in his body,
so that I, in my childish wonder, could touch them and admire his stories from
the war. Let’s play a game? Name a significant battle from Bosnia and
Herzegovina from World War II – my grandfather was there!

Today, thirty years after I left that apartment and that city, Hare brought me a
book. “Logavina, a street under siege,” about the experiences of an American
journalist living in Sarajevo, the personal destinies of people who lived under
occupation. “Our friend Beljo is also mentioned,” Hare told me. Yes, the Beljo,
who constantly got into troubles and thus got the name (“belja” means trouble),
a storky, blue-eyed and a boy that always was smiling who survived the war, the
years of famine and occupation, burning books and all the furniture from home in
the cold Sarajevo winters and then died on the first day of liberation. But I
have told you that story, as well as all the other stories that have already
been told. I don’t know if I will be able to read the book, although Hare read
it, and my childhood friends, Grebo, the good, cheerful, and honest Grebo who
survived the siege of Sarajevo, read the book.

Hare is my oldest friend. I know him since my birth, even he admits that I have
given him the nickname that is still stuck with him. Today he is old, with a
white beard and a bald head, but he has the same smile and joker eyes with which
he made us laugh as children. Aren’t people’s eyes really the same all their
lives? Except in old age, when they are obscured, it is as if they are putting a
protective layer between themselves and the world because they have seen too
much, they have survived everything, and everything is already clear to them.

We talked about the old days and how it snowed so much in Sarajevo in the winter
that the snow surpassed our children’s heads. We left our homes and jumped
straight into the snow. But you are also familiar with that story.

I commented that there have never been such snows in Skopje and that most
winters are without it. “It’s the same in Sarajevo now,” he said, “global
warming.”

Looking at the snow outside in front of my building, as it stayed on the trees
and the empty playground without the usual children’s chatter, I think about why
right now, when there is no one to cheer for it, the snow has decided to come
back. In one of my stories I told that snow brings joy to children and anger to
the elderly, now everyone is in the second category.

Hare was here and left. I didn’t tell him anything I wanted to tell him, and I
waited thirty years to do so. I had a flashback again at the meeting with my
father, in Herceg Novi, Montenegro, in 2001, while there was a war at home in
Macedonia. I wanted to meet him and to get him out of the system, to tell him
that I would not be a father like him, that I would not leave and forget my
children. And I really didn’t do that. But in the act of caring too much for my
children, I made them unprepared for life. I understand that now. The rest of us
who have been mistreated or left alone have learned to fight and to succeed. Did
my father inadvertently do me a favour? That thought bothers me and disturbs me.
The feeling that all you have done out of goodwill turned out bad. But, as I
often say, “Whatever you do as a parent, you will make a mistake.” I hope I have
also done something good!?

I left Hare in front of his hotel in the centre of my city, Skopje. “Thank you
for letting me talk,” he told me, and I replied “Eg … wh … zr …” and that was
it. The last thing I said at our first meeting in thirty years. Thousands of
thoughts in Macedonian and Serbo-Croatian competed in my head, and none of them
made sense. “You live here now,” my mother’s words from thirty years ago when I
moved to Skopje were repeated. Indeed, my thoughts are not speaking in my mother
tongue, for a long time.

Could I have done something different, say, tell something I didn’t say in my
books? Would there be a difference? What would have changed? Whether the writer
lives to write or writes to live is an eternal dilemma that I still cannot
unravel.

It’s time to get back to reality. I’ve been here for a long time, I’m not what I
used to be, that kid is left somewhere there, on the corner between Lese Perera
and Logavina, laughing inside Hare’s home and watching TV with him, playing with
the turtle in his yard, running out and gathering friends, and then all together
running to our playground with a ball in hand and so on all day! Let him stay
there.

We are here and we are watching the snow that brings us worries instead of joy.
Childhood is over.

 

23.03.2020





ALL THE WARS BEGIN IN SPRING




Vlado is the bravest man I know. No, Vlado is the smartest man I know. “Never
let emotions overwhelm your logic,” he said in a Spock, from a planet Vulcan,
manner.

It was March 2020 and the whole world was in a panic. Except for Vlado. Let me
tell you a few words about him.

In 1996, I fell in love with a girl who was taking an Italian language course
with me, and instead of telling her, I wrote her letters that I never gave her.
What today’s Americans would call a classic “bitch move.”

That 1996 we were finishing high school, I was attending “Josip Broz – Tito”
highschool, named after the former Marshal on a white horse, the pride of every
Yugoslav, from a seven-year-old child who put Tito stickers all over the
furniture in his home, to a seventy-seven-year-old man who kept a picture of
Tito on his TV. Vlado was in his fourth year at the “Marija Sklodovska-Kiri”
High School of Chemistry. One of these two characters will be remembered in
history, you decide who.

Vlado was sitting on his couch in the small kitchen on the fifth floor of a
socialist building in Skopje’s “Karposh” neighbourhood and listening to my
stories about my unfulfilled love, that I have told him I don’t even know myself
how many times. He did not comment on anything and occasionally responded with
his standard “a-ha”. My place – the chair next to the small dining table, and
above it a shelf with a radio cassette player and next to it cassettes of rock
and hard rock bands from the seventies to the nineties of the last century.

The end of the last century was the time of cassette players, TVs with
cathode-ray tubes, turntables, records, tape cassettes, video recorders and VHS
cassettes, walkmen and CD players and other technology that is unnecessary
today, but it seemed fantastic to us as futuristic as the  Marty
Mcfly’s hoverboard from the movie “Back to the Future”. Times have changed, but
some things have not. Vlado’s eternal “a-ha” and his views on life and people.

The kitchen was no more than two meters wide to three meters long, but it was
Vlado’s world. There I tried to unite my world with his and poured out my soul,
while Vlado silently witnessed that cosmic act.

To the left of the kitchen – a magical space called “pantry” in which on a shelf
were arranged all the necessary groceries for the family and of course the jars
with domestic products characteristic of our environment – ajvar, pickles,
lutenica… The barrel with the sauerkraut, of course, was stored in Vlado’s
basement and his task was from time to time, especially when his mother decided
to make sarma, to go there, to open it, to take one sauerkraut, to mix the
“swamp” water as Vlado called it and to close the barrel properly. Vlado also
had other household chores, such as vacuuming at home. All my friends and I had
the same responsibility. In the Balkans and in that way the gender equality was
maintained. The boys cleaned with a vacuum cleaner. Personally, I had other
homework assignments, to scrape the bathtub, because “it’s a man’s job and
requires strength”, and like all friends, I participated in family washing
carpets (except Vlado who washed them himself and for a fee that seemed a cruel
move from his parents, but eventually led to Vlado’s financial independence and
success in later life), then painting the house and constantly moving furniture
for different seasons.

Sometimes I washed the dishes not because I had to, but because I wanted to
since the time I lived with my father and grandfather and I was often left alone
at home. Then my greatest pleasure was to bring the chair to the sink, soak the
sponge in water and detergent, and start rubbing. The foam that was collecting
on my hands like sugar wool and disappeared with a jet of water seemed magical
to me. Again alone and without choice, I sometimes fried eggs for myself, but
then I realized that it was not enough to mix it, leave it in the pan and go to
watch the cartoons. If you don’t want them to be “raw on the top, burned on the
bottom”, you need to turn the egg while frying it, I learned early, maybe at the
age of nine without the help of Jamie Oliver!

The smell of flour and home-made products went into my nostrils after Vlado
opened the door of the pantry and took the bread out. He took out the board, cut
a slice of bread and ate it like that – without anything. Such a simple and so
practical act. No wasting time on opening jars and smearing unnecessary salty or
sweat layers, just cut-out and eat!

As a continuation of “our” world was the terrace, no larger than a half-meter
and maybe two meters wide, where in addition to the various wooden objects that
Vlado’s father constantly cut and shaped with the knives he made and sharpened
himself, there were standard building jardinieres with flowers, a small coffee
table and two chairs. There we continued our conversation in which I forgot my
fear of heights fueled by excursions through the narrow mountain roads across
Bosnia and Montenegro where buses defy the laws of gravity.

In those extensions of our minds, we passed a part of our youths, my later
unfulfilled loves and the only great love of Vlado that happened and disappeared
without him sharing a word with me. That’s why Vlado is the bravest man I know.

In March 2020, the world was in a panic over what I called a “war with an
invisible enemy.” Hidden at home and isolated from each other, as was the case
in my hometown of Sarajevo, in a real war in the early 1990s, we lived in
uncertainty. Vlado lived in the most affected country in Europe, Italy, and
stoically endured everything that happened, with a rational approach and a cool
head.

Then I remembered one of our conversations from the “time of the kitchen” in
which we talked about his grandfather who came during the Second World War with
the fascists in Macedonia, as a doctor, and fell in love with Vlado’s future
grandmother, with whom he gave birth to several children. However, he never
recovered from the war and, tormented by his own demons, returned to his home
country, leaving his wife and children alone.

“I would go crazy in a war,” Vlado commented, identifying with his grandfather,
and I saw it as a sign of weakness in him, someone I considered the most
mentally stable person I knew. That conversation remained somewhere in the
annals of the four walls between the kitchen table and the chair next to it, the
couch and the cassette player, the bread-cutting board and the smell of flour.
The life went on in a frantic paste that swallowed memories and experiences by
the fear of the war and the uncertainty of our little country that always
struggled to survive.

Returning to that conversation, after many years, in that terrible March 2020
(and all wars begin in the spring), I reminded Vlado of the conversation about
his grandfather who did not remarry after the war, experienced deep old age and
left all his property and money. of the church. However, he left to the
descendants of Macedonia citizenship with which everyone left for his home
country.

“You said you would go crazy in a war,” I said, “but what we’ve been going
through this “kind of war”, and it seems to me that you would have endured the
real thing quite well.”

“No, war is taking lives, and today it is about saving lives. Now it is most
necessary to have a rational approach to things, “Vlado explained to me and
continued:

“I am relatively calm because I have studied things in detail so that I can make
an informed decision. I don’t want to be hypochondriac and live in fear all my
life. Of course, one should be careful and responsible for one’s health. For
immunity, take vitamins, keto diet, intermittent fasting, exercise, information
from scientific sources, protection with masks and most importantly – not
visiting the elderly people, we must protect them. My general preoccupation is
not to infect others and that is why I am isolated, “Vlado concluded.

That is why Vlado is brave, but not like some “I will not be affected by this”
people that live in our environment, and not only that – he is virtuous, because
his preoccupation is with others, and then himself. That is why Vlado’s
“madness” in the war would be not because of fear for himself, but because of
the obligation to hurt others, I understood that in these times of war. It is a
lesson that in difficult times we should all learn and repeat. I think that then
the world would be a better place to live.

 

21.03.2020





ABOUT THE PRODIGY AND MUSIC FROM OUR YOUTH, TRAVELING THROUGH TIME AND OTHER
DIMENSIONS!




In December 1995, we were in the middle of the fourth year of highschool, and
Skopje was filled with alternative youth, god almighty – it really seemed to be
part of a parallel universe, because an incredible event from the other
dimension – T-Festival happened!

Even before they were globally known, however, in the midst of popularity, The
Prodigy came to our little forgotten city in the Balkans, which even the war
avoided! But, of course, its shadow lurched over us, as we trembled daily under
political insecurity, or under the pressure of an economic embargo from Greece,
unemployment and technological surpluses were accumulating, we were shut down
from all sides, a real powder keg in which one word, wrong gaze or act could
have been a real “Firestarter”.

But then Firestarter did not exist yet, and “our” albums were for me “too much
rave” album “Experience” and the favorite breakbeat “Music for the Jilted
Generation”. I was headbanging my head on the song “Poison” because, as a
metalhead, it was the only way I knew how to dance. Prodigy was somehow perfect
for me, and “Voodoo People” was magical music for our “thrown-away” generation.

The Prodigy’s performance began and before I realized I found myself in the
mosh-pit that turned me around and took me as a breathtaking river towards the
whirlpool in which I sank. I got kicked in the mouth by Dr. Martens in all
colors, and someone played a harmonica with his fist across my ribs, and finally
someone threw me with a karate kick out of the whirlwind like a rag. As I
regained consciousness, I realized that this was something different, I wasn’t
at an ordinary mosh pit in Music Garden, this was a beast no one could control –
and it was ready to swallow us!

We graduated from high school and the world was in front of us. We were young
and filled with hope for a better future. I was getting ready to go to Italy for
studies. Damn Informatics for the next millennium in la bella Italia.  “You will
find a job for sure, optics is the future,” my mother’s friend convinced me.
What could go wrong? Well that’s another story.

We agreed with a friend of mine, Sandra, to celebrate our birthdays together and
at the same time to say farewell to our friends. Everyone had to go their own
way. She was born one day before me, on the 12th, me on August the 13th. Two
years ago she appeared in our school as a powerhouse, she has lived in Africa,
was educated who knows where in the world, she spoke better French than our
professor, the methusaller Boshko who instead of teaching us “J’e sui” through
tears in his eyes told us about the adventures of “pour Cosette” by Victor
Hugo’s “Les Miserables”. Every class, from beginning to an end, to his end, God
rest his soul.

We did the party at my home. The wall in the living room was a masterpiece made
of my sister, with uneven gypsum and light from underneath which gave the look
of a cave, and in the kitchen, crates of beer were emptied faster than I could
refill them.

“It looks like in a caffe,” said Bojana, the indescribable love of my best
friend from the highschool, and a friend from the bench, Vla. But the living
room was empty at the expense of my room, where I had put all the unnecessary
things from other premises, and right there against my will, my friends got
together away from the music and the party. Boyana told Vla about her boyfriend,
a dangerous biker and faculty student with whom an insecure high school student
could not compete. Both of us were disappointed, I from the party, and he from
the girl he was longing for. In fact, I had a similar diagnosis. Only my was in
the Music Garden with her boyfriend and I had to see her right away!

We flew out in the warm August night and before we knew we passed in front of
the youngsters piled on the benches in the city park where Skopsko, Kavadarka
and Smederevka were drunk in plastic cups. We greeted with metalheads, punk and
alternative kids and we were ridiculing the snobs who were directed to the
discos in the park and found ourselves in front of the Music Garden.

“ID card,” pronounced the mouth under the doorman’s bald head, and I, with my on
that day full, nineteen years, was insulted and publicly protested how he could
not believe me about my age. “You may be forty years old, but the law is a law,”
he said with a mockery, and I pulled my ID card in my back pocket and stepped
into the garden of music.

From the speakers roared Ratamahata from Sepultura, popular at the time and a
furious mosh pit took place before us. Several nights earlier I performed my
trans-dance, I headbangered as if I wanted to get my head off my shoulders, and
I jumped everywhere, while others looked at me with astonishment, and some of
them with rage. Then I went out and headed for the quay and vomited into the
river Vardar. But tonight in me there was no alcohol or joy, she wasn’t there,
nor did I have a desire for a mosh pit.

We went back to the party, Bojana was gone, and we both were depressed. Ariton,
a friend from school was putting on the records, now a famous DJ, the sound was
familiar, but an unknown version of the song. The refrain went: “I’m going to
send him to the outside space, find another race”. Music completely overwhelmed
me; sadness was no longer there, only the present and the rhythm, like the
pulsing of the heart that requires knocking, the breath that breathes, now and
right away!

“What is this,” I asked Ariton as he searched through the vinyls to play next.

“Prodigy,” he answered me, “singles.”



Soon I went to Italy, the tape with the singles that I downloaded from Toni’s
vinyl became my favorite music along with other pleading bands from those
1996-97, and later through the years and decades, Prodigy made the undisputed
blend of electronic and punk- rock music, with a garage sound that merges my
greatest musical love into an unrivaled whole, like no one until then … and
forever!

Like any musical orthophone, after the era of mobile phones began, to date, I
only had two ringtones, “Out of space” and “Voodoo people”. Therefore, today I
am not writing with sorrow, but with gratitude for the sounds that from our
little blue dot in space travel with the speed of light to the famous galaxies
and unknown civilizations and carry the sound of our youth, our history, love,
fears, falls and victories . Perhaps Liam is the brain, but Flint is the heart!
It remains to be seen whether the brain can survive without the body?

“I’ll take your brain to another dimension …”





1993 INSANE IN THE BRAIN – CYPRESS HILL




“Let’s go to Bagdad Café,” said Kečer.

“I don’t feel like going,” I replied.

“C’mon, we’ll head over to Džadžo later,” he added. That sounded OK to me. We
took off.

I didn’t like Bagdad Café, until it turned into the New Age Teahouse, which
became my favorite hangout later on. But Džadžo and 21 at the Trades Center were
perfect venues for me—grungy, authentic, and alternative, minus the tea and
intellectualism, and minus the philosophers and mystics, everything that was
abhorrent to my heavy metal and punk rock mind at the time. But a person changes
over time and may even mature, as long as he’s not chewed up and spat out by the
daily grind and turned into something that no longer resembles himself, but
rather everyone else—in one huge pot of ajvar.

Former Yugoslavia was mired in upheaval, in contrast to the Czech Republic and
Slovakia, which had managed to peacefully separate. The world didn’t care one
bit about the war in Yugoslavia, because to them we weren’t part of Europe, but
rather an outpost. We were “Balkanites,” a bit of dirt on their shoes that
should be wiped from their consciousness. But why would they care when there
were at least a dozen other civil wars going on in the world, which they also
weren’t concerned about. Guatemala, Angola, Afghanistan, Sudan, Sri Lanka,
Libya, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Algiers, Tajikistan, Burundi . . . to name a few.

Recipe for Hate by Bad Religion sounded like the perfect name for an album for
that time, but I didn’t like it. It felt to me as though hardcore punk was dead.
But it was resurrected in a different way by the songs of the post-punk bands
such as Fugazi or by the grunge sound of Mudhoney, who I listened to until it
almost drove my family and my neighbors crazy.

“I Will Always Love You” by Whitney Houston was wailing from the TV and I turned
it off in disgust. I liked a different kind of howling—loud punk screaming and
the rattling sound of the cassettes, which was sometimes even louder than the
music itself. Nirvana’s follow-up album to Nevermind wasn’t like that and their
performance on MTV Unplugged disappointed me. It seemed as though grunge rock
was in crisis. Nevertheless, alternative music did not stop after Nirvana’s
popularity declined. Primus’s My Name is Mud introduced a new sound and a new
awareness in my life. So did Disciplina Kičme and other unusual bands, which I
discovered on my weekly pilgrimage—walking all the way from Debar Maalo to the
new railway station, where the cassette shop, Pop Top, was located.

Despite the objections of my music buddy, Vlad, music could be both heavy and
fun at the same time, which I liked as a concept. “Buka u modi” was blaring from
my stereo. I was in 10th grade and it seemed as if the opportunities before me
were unlimited.

Trotoar, the local magazine dedicated to the alternative scene, appeared at the
right moment, just as Ace of Base’s All That She Wants or Snow’s Informer were
assaulting our ears daily. We could finally learn more about our idols at a time
when we didn’t have the internet and things weren’t just a mouse click away. We
had to order books from overseas and go to the university library to copy out
texts by hand or photocopy them, but we didn’t mind because we were hungry to
know more.

Heavy metal was evolving. After the death of Metallica, there weren’t many bands
left that would blow us away—with the exception of Sepultura, who continued
singing about socially relevant topics on their album Territory, something that
was quite uncommon for metal bands. Meanwhile, in former Yugoslavia fierce
territorial battles were being fought. In the old days people used to ask, “Who
are you? Where are you from?” with an interest and desire to get along with you.
Now the standard reply was just, “I’m a nonentity.”

The guitar on U2’s “Numb” roared, catching the world unprepared. Music became a
thumping heartbeat, a machine propeller, a car engine . . . I listened to it and
thought about “my” Einstürzende Neubauten, who’d been making music like that for
years . . . It seemed that pop-rock music was evolving and catching up with rap,
which was always experimenting. Insane in the Brain by the timeless Cypress Hill
and Bacdafucup by the short-lived Onyx breathed new life into the scene, while
Body Count blended metal with rap in a completely new way that I liked.
Headbanging to rap was a challenging concept. My heavy metal friends teased me
for doing it, but hey, that’s a completely different story.

This is a story in which tennis star, Monica Seles, was attacked with a knife,
after which her career would never be the same, while her attacker received a
minimal sentence. But that was just another one of the many injustices of 1993
that the world turned a blind eye to. Another reason for people to keep their
heads down and withdraw into themselves.

“Sober” by Tool was playing on MTV. I wondered to myself, “Are we all just
puppets trapped in the containers we put ourselves in?” It seemed as if the
whole country was stuck in a world of its own. Spurned by others, we fought hard
to survive, but the fight wore us down. And as if that wasn’t enough, the period
of economic transition then just finished us off. People right and left were
losing jobs. And songs such as “Human Behavior” by Björk and the album Into the
Labyrinth by Dead Can Dance seemed like soundtracks that perfectly matched this
kind of atmosphere. We had entered the labyrinth of transition from which there
has been no escape.

 

Excerpt from the book “3 Minutes and 53 Seconds” (Goten, 2015)
Translated by Paul Filev
Copyright © Branko Prlja, 2015

 

 





1992 KILLING IN THE NAME – RATM




Another world of sound was slowly but surely entering my life. While hardcore
punk forever remained on the sidelines, garage rock broke out of the underground
and directly entered the minds of millions of young people around the world,
changing the music scene forever. Taking a cue from Nirvana, we wore plaid
shirts and short T-shirts over long-sleeved ones, while Pearl Jam, with their
more melodic sound, epitomized the American reality of the 90s.

“Do you know that you look like the lead singer from the Red Hot Chili Peppers?”
my classmates teased me. I was crazy about their album Blood Sugar Sex Magik.
Alternative funk rock with shades of rap was a revelation to me.

The eclectic 90s had begun. “Give It Away” was rocking from my cassette player.
I copied down the lyrics, even though I didn’t really understand them and nor
did I read too deeply into the words that preached altruism and selflessness. To
me they signified rebellion and a “don’t-give-a-damn” attitude. The times were
mean and nasty. The war and the siege of my birthplace began.

May 9, 1992. Victory Day, commemorating the end of World War II and the defeat
of fascism. We had to write about the same topic for an assignment in primary
school and I couldn’t restrain myself. Risking a good grade, I wrote about
fascism and my sense of loss, about the death of Yugoslavia built on the
skeletons of those who’d fought against fascism, which in former Yugoslavia had
become even more pronounced than it had been in 1942. I wrote about my friends
and the fear of never seeing them again. I got an A for my assignment, even
though I digressed from the topic a bit, but what else could I do when the times
were going awry?

Timur was attacked. He’d been getting harassed for some time by the nouveau
riche kids—real turncoat nationalist bastards—who burned the teachers’ grade
books and scrawled graffiti over the school and yet who somehow excelled as
students. Classes had ended for the day, and just outside the schoolyard—a mob
had gathered. They followed Timur, teasing him. He bore it stoically, but then
they began shoving and hitting him. He tried to defend himself but he couldn’t
stay on his feet. He fell to the ground and the others jumped him. At that
moment, I forgot that they were all two heads taller than me and twice as heavy
as my 80-odd pounds—including the denim jacket covered with heavy metal patches
I was wearing—and I threw myself into the fray, swinging wildly at everyone
around me.

Timur got up and, not realizing that I was next to him, began to run off. A few
of the others gave chase but he was a lot faster and they never caught up to
him. Someone shouted “You effin’ Serb!” which couldn’t have been farther from
the truth. Some of them came back and turned on me. “This guy was sticking up
for him!” they shouted, and in that moment time stood still. Moving toward me
was a force of nature in the shape of a crowd thirsting for blood.

“Don’t lay a finger on him!” someone next to me said. They froze on the spot,
put their tails between their legs, and left. I turned around to face a
metalhead who looked dangerous and evil. He gave me a wink. To this day I don’t
know who he was—maybe my heavy metal guardian angel—but I’m grateful to him
because he saved me from a lynching. I’d always known it, but that day I
received indisputable confirmation—music connects us regardless of ethnic,
religious or regional differences.

Timur never forgave himself for leaving me alone, despite the fact that at the
time and amid all the confusion he didn’t realize it was me in there, trying to
defend him. Since then he’s been trying to make up for it and has always been
there when I needed him—to this very day. But then, I reckon it’s because I
helped him when everyone else abandoned him, and because we were different from
all the others—prejudged and misunderstood. Maybe that’s why we were inseparable
in good times and in bad. And the bad times were yet to come.

The next day Bobby and his brother came to school with me and hung around the
schoolyard in case they needed to defend us. Both of them were big and burly,
unshaven, long-haired guys. The Principal called us to her office.

“Who are those criminals hanging around the schoolyard?” she yelled at us. We
were taken aback.

“M-my sister’s boyfriend,” I stammered.

“Tell them to leave at once!” she thundered.

“But yesterday Timur was beaten up, and we—“

“I’m not interested. I don’t know anything about that. And you two will be
punished . . .”

Of course she knew. Of course she was interested. But not in justice. She was
interested in the parents of those kids who were beating us up, in their
support, their money, and their power. We were worthless insects who, squashed
or otherwise, made no difference to anyone. We were punished, while the bullies
got off scot-free. That was the beginning of a new era.

I was checking out the cassettes at Bagi Shop, the music store in the Mavrovka
mall, when all of a sudden a thunderous sound from the speakers shook me to the
core. I was electrified. I asked the owner what he was playing and before I knew
what was happening, Rage Against the Machine entered my life like a tornado,
lifting me up high and slamming me back down again. I felt as though I were
riding a wild horse that I couldn’t control. The times were making us all feel
that way.

It was the end of the school year and we were getting ready for the holidays.
The physics teacher hadn’t arrived yet. The bell rang. Timur and I were arm
wrestling. Even though I was leading 13-3, I still wanted to keep going. “If you
bend your body, you’ll use the deltoid muscle,” we’d talked about our
arm-wrestling techniques many times before, and we knew the Latin names of all
the large muscles, because we lifted weights every day after school. Timur
pumped up quickly and he didn’t plan on stopping. In the years to come, he
became a dangerous guy who defied the bullies, the bared pistols, and the
security gorillas outside the nightclubs. In the end, those who used to beat him
up would run a mile as soon as they saw him.

As we were arm wrestling, I twisted my arm around awkwardly, so when Timur
pressed his fist with all his might, my arm had nowhere to go and a bone
snapped—just like in the movies. I lost consciousness but then came to, and saw
my arm dangling. I grabbed hold of it and ran outside. And thus, the saga of my
humerus fracture began.

Waiting several hours with a broken arm at the City hospital, and then being
saddled with a poorly fitted plaster cast. Removal of the crappy cast with a
pair of old-fashioned pliers, because the hospital’s drill wasn’t working.
Broken bones that hadn’t healed properly. Vain attempt at separating them. An
operation and a metal rod inserted in my arm.

Then, a damaged nerve, slow recovery, and atrophied muscles after the removal of
the cast. The whole summer holidays spent at a rehabilitation center in Kozle.
Every day. Massaging muscles. Hot paraffin wax therapy for a stiff elbow. Nerve
stimulation, physical therapy exercises. Infrared heat lamp. All in vain. The
top neurosurgeons in Macedonia advised me to travel to Slovenia for an
operation.
“Listen, son, if you want to get better, you’ll have to work at it,” said a
middle-aged man who attended the physiotherapy sessions with me.

“But the nerve isn’t responding. It’s dead.”

“Take a look at my arm,” he said, and raised it. “Can you see that? It moves.”

“But—”

“Listen to what I’m telling you. I know all about it. My case is the same as
yours—radialis nerve injury,” he smiled. “Just keep exercising and don’t stop.
You can rely on either a machine hoist to lift your arm or on yourself to lift
it.”

“But I can’t lift it, not even half an inch!”

“Lift it with your brain! Lift it in your mind. And put a splint on your arm
before going to bed at night and sleep with it on.”

“Killing In The Name” by Rage Against the Machine was roaring through the
speakers. The walls were shaking. They’re being killed in the name of who?!
Suffering, death, misery, hunger, and disease . . . Are my friends OK? . . . Are
they alive? . . . And my dad? Do I really care about him? . . . Has he been able
to escape? I wondered to myself. But the only sound that came out from deep
within me was a wild and primordial cry: “Aaaaaa!” as I tried with all my
strength and mind power to lift my arm.

The sweat was running down my forehead, but I just kept repeating, “The power of
the mind! The power of the mind!” I needed all the pent up anger and
frustration, the noise and rage of all those fighting against the machine—grunge
rockers, gangsta rappers, and metalheads—so I could defeat the metal rod in my
arm; fourteen stainless steel screws that went through my bone and pinched the
nerves that had previously been removed from the muscle tissue and held in the
assistant’s rubber-gloved hands during surgery to bind the bones. And then
finally it happened—my arm moved—a fraction of an inch.

The distance between zero and a fraction of an inch is greater than the distance
between one inch and a yard. Then everything sped up. And preparations for the
entrance exam for high school went smoothly. But the intricate movements of the
fingers that allow one to hold a pen and write were still far from my abilities.
“Everything’s in the mind,” I remembered. I learned to write with my left hand
and that’s how I got into “Josip Broz Tito Senior High School.”

Had comrade Tito known what was happening to the land that he’d built, he’d be
grateful that he wasn’t alive. Or maybe not?

 

Excerpt from the book “3 Minutes and 53 Seconds” (Goten, 2015)
Translated by Paul Filev
Copyright © Branko Prlja, 2015

 

 





1991 LOSING MY RELIGION – R.E.M.




Teen spirit ruled our lives and I lived for the weekends when we’d have jam
sessions with our friends from junior high. Kečer introduced me to hardcore punk
and bands with weird names that were borderline funny, and with that necessary
dose of the rejection of society’s norms that perfectly matched my own
rebellious spirit.

A chewed-up cassette was spitting out a refrain from “My God Rides a Skateboard”
by German band Spermbirds. This was followed by the screaming vocals of
“Americans are Cool—Fuck You!” a song that protested against the spread of
American-style democracy all over the world. The Americans themselves didn’t
give a damn about any of it.

The Gulf War was taking place at the time. The adults watched the unfolding
events on TV as if they were part of an evening thriller, completely removed
from the lives of the Iraqi people—who, by the way, weren’t dying at the hands
of the dictator from whom the Americans wanted to liberate them, but from
American bombs. But in reality something quite different was taking place, both
globally and locally. Unrest began to stir in Yugoslavia. All of a sudden, the
present turned from being precarious to completely uncertain, and no one was
even contemplating the future.

“Why shouldn’t I wear this T-shirt?” I protested.

“Because it’s wrong,” said my mother.

“According to who?”

“Not to mention it’s dangerous.”

Our argument went on. In the end, I decided not to wear the Bad Religion T-shirt
with a crossed-out cross printed on it. I’d borrowed it from Kečer for Easter
“celebrations” at the main Cathedral. I decided against wearing it, not out of
fear, but so my mom would quit worrying. But what did I know about religion? To
me it was a sign of conformism and an inability for people to think for
themselves. Besides which, religion could in no way be reconciled with science,
the thing I really venerated.

“Big Bang” by Bad Religion was playing in the background. I was thinking about
the origin of the world, the universe, and our place within it. Everything
seemed perfectly fine to me, but at the same time completely meaningless.
Science, with its laws and principles, provided some comfort, bringing order to
the chaos we’d found ourselves in.

Religion found a place in my life, but only years later, when I realized that
atheism is just another form of fanaticism. At the same time, I wasn’t
interested in “isms”—neither religious nor political. Unlike me, our country was
overrun by chauvinism; one wrong word, one bad look or even just having the
wrong surname was enough to get you beaten up.

Snuff’s song “I Think We’re Alone Now”—a cover of Tiffany’s song from the
happier and slightly more serious 80s—was a track that was often played on
Maximumrocknroll, an alternative music program on Macedonian Radio 2. Standing
by in readiness, I pressed “record” on the cassette player. Soon our small
country would be alone too—but also sovereign and independent. And then our
struggles would be just ours.

I played a few chords on the guitar and Fatty seemed to like them. Kečer tapped
the cymbal suspended from the light fitting because, as in true DIY punk rock
style, there was no stand. Then he tapped the single snare drum and the familiar
hardcore “bupp-u-dupp-u-dupp” beat filled my bedroom. Fatty was recording us on
an old cassette player. He plucked his acoustic guitar as if it were a bass,
while we kept playing madly. We had no focus, no guiding message or vision, and
our songs were made up on the spot. And in the spirit of parody and social
consciousness that characterized the punk movement, we were called Social
Imbecility. Like true punks, we had no idea how to play, but we loved it—more
than anything else.

As a kid, I’d hated guitar lessons at the Sarajevo Music Academy. But later, as
a teenager, I was glad that I’d learned to play an instrument. Soon, though, all
I had left was my classical guitar. I had to return the electric guitar I’d
borrowed—just when Kečer bought himself a great big drum kit, and just when a
bass player joined our rehearsals. Those two kept on playing, and later formed
the band Superhicks. They’re probably the only band in Macedonia today that
dares to engage in any intelligent social criticism, while those who are the
actual object of their critique bop along to their songs.

The thing that Kečer didn’t like was my soft spot for heavy metal. But what
could I do when Metallica released their last good album that year, and the
sound was heavy—heavy and slow—too slow for hardcore punks. In the end, the only
thing that I have left from my punk period is a demo cassette tape of our songs
with a homemade cover and the “SK-HC” (Skopje Hardcore) graffiti tag on my
garage wall.
However, many years later, when I began to write seriously, that ideal of the
perfect hardcore punk song came back to life in my writing—something fast,
furious, short, as short as possible, that says everything and leaves nothing
unsaid. I’m still chasing that ideal.

We were in the front rows at a concert being held outside the former Central
Committee of the League of Communists of Macedonia, now the government building.
Bobby lifted me onto his shoulders and I was right there—a few meters away from
Goran Tanevski from the band Mizar. The sounds of “Svjat Dreams” floated over
the sea of people around me and we were united by his heavy, serious voice and
the heavy drums that echoed in our ears and that reverberated through our
bodies, proud of “Macedonia, our motherland.”

 

Excerpt from the book “3 Minutes and 53 Seconds” (Goten, 2015)
Translated by Paul Filev
Copyright © Branko Prlja, 2015

 

 



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 * No woman’s land – my mother’s homeland
 * Not even the winters are what they used to be



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