DRAGANA

KRSENKOVIC BRKOVIC

The Circle of Life and Death
(an interview with Dragana Krsenkovic Brkovic published in the Cultural Complement of the daily newspaper Pobjeda on February 19, 2005)

 

“What kind of world is that where nothing is made to suit a man” – these are words of the character from The Master’s Palace, written by Dragana Krsenkovic Brkovic. It seems that this question is a foundation of the text. The Master’s Palace speaks about violence. At the same time it speaks about tending of the main characters for solutions to resist death, tightness and boundaries of life given to them. Whether it talks about the ancient times, submerged into the nebula of forgetting, or about some more familiar past moment; whether it addresses the people passionately loyal to some greater goal – to its profession or to its loving being –the forms of violence and pressures which the people endure and to which they are exposed are broad. In the world, into which we come unwillingly, existing order of things and relations leads us into unique position. Every one of us, despite all obvious and clear differences that separate us, becomes in some way a victim of something at the end. For the cultural complement Culture and Society of the daily newspaper Pobjeda, Dragana Krsenkovic Brkovic speaks about The Master’s Palace and the diverse forms of violence, which flow one into another and receive contours familiar with our every-day reality and with our history.

Vlatko Simunovic: Into the tissue of, I dare to say, the anthological story Three visions of M.S. you have incorporated as a light motive the ancient Hetit’s adage: “Every story finds its own way to the one who shall tell it”. In what way you “have been reached” by story that you recounted in many varieties in the book known to us as The Master’s Palace?

Dragana K.B.: For me, the only way to understand the world is to listen to the secretly inner sense of the things, the appearances and the relations which surround us. Only in that plain you can find the place to perceive and understand basic flows which are not very often easily observable on the surface of the events. The stories of The Master’s Palace have come into being from that plain. These stories, following the internal, “invisible” flows, try to understand the pattern of our own, present moment. They also seek the answer to the question: Where we should look for the roots of the contemporary, extremely dramatically events? The adage you have mentioned opens the other sides of the book. It suggests, in the broadest sense, that stories and the very process of story-telling (whether in prose or dramatic form) is alive, authentic process, so powerful that it can resist cruelty of existing. Although it seems very fragile, more like dream and visions you can not catch, story-telling is perhaps the only tool and weapon human can use to confront time and silence which unavoidably blanket everything he/she does, thinks and feels.
I believe in the singular power of the story. As one of the most sensible ways of human’s creation and expression, it is an evidence of human strength to create “his”/”her” reality and relationships and a patterns of it. In the story, human defines his/her position to the world, defends from the world, and dissolves the world and limits of his /her position. When you reach the source of the story, you can touch the ancient living and presence; the vision of the past times and their mark in our consciousness; the rhythm of steps of endless number of nameless people and of our own moment which is flowing. Through the story we listen to secretly deep and unconsciousness foundations of the human’s mind, its boundary wishes and instinct longings… From these sources the story gets its own strength to “find its own way”, as the ancient proverb says that you’ve mentioned.

Vlatko Simunovic: Could we consider The Master’s Palace as an act of your condemnation to the Time of indifferent relativism?

Dragana K.B.: Certainly. For me, this field is the only place where it is possible to express disagreement with those processes that disintegrate, destroy or modify life, making it - generally – hardly bearable, making it so distant from shapes and contents we need so much.
When The Master’s Palace was published, I became aware of the fact why the main motives of this book were violence, the forms of its appearance and consequences of its devastation. It was, above all, my own answer to personal revelation of the cruelty of the gory events in this area ten years ago, to easiness with which everybody entered that story, as well as with incredible indifference of surrounding people to obvious, terrible pain of so many humans, on both sides. When you perceive that people talk with the same coldness about number of victims with one, two or more zeros you do not need better evidence that something is wrong with the world which you live in.

Vlatko Simunovic: Is the central theme of stories collected in The Master’s Palace, in some way, eternal evil and relation between human and evil?

Dragana K.B.: If the “eternal evil” is the syntagma that describes processes which happens in permanent structures of life and death, than it is possible to consider The Master’s Palace as the book that addresses human’s relation toward “invisible but powerful forces, ready and willingly to destroy and turn into nil everything in a human being, including himself/herself”.
At the same time, these stories are dealing with what might be called “primordial reality” – in other words, the structure of unconsciousness which reflects itself in dreams, through annihilation of time, through the ritual models of the collective behavior (for example the model of hero-victim, the model of the victim built in an edifice, the model of the brothers-enemies…).
Also, they are dealing with phenomena of positive energies’ arising and awakening of life on the other, opposite point (for example the model of the creators and the keepers). On the basis of that dichotomy – the force of destroying settled in collective unconsciousness, on one hand, and the force of creating and keeping life, on the other hand – dramaturgy of The Master’s Palace is done. Behind dark (and, often, to the ordinary eye invisible) actions of the social entities, the institutions of ruling or the inherited forms of social relations, lies the rhythm of the infinite circle of birth-development-falling-death-rebirth. This circle of life and death leads all of us into a unique position: every single one of us, at the end, becomes the victim of something.

 

Vlatko Simunovic

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