The Border of My Body

Abstract

With my husband Miško Šuvaković, I spent October 1998 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. It was a time when Serbia expected a NATO intervention, which happened in the spring the following year. I was intensively reading the selection of Slovenian poetry translated into Serbo-Croatian by the Slovenian-Bosnian poet, Josip Osti. As someone raised as a Yugoslavian by nationality, the wars in Yugoslavia were a personal drama. Inspired by Osti’s translations and the political situation, I wrote fourteen poems titled “Eseji o slobodi kretanja” (“Essays on the Freedom of Moving”). At the centre of most of these poems were the questions of borders in materiality and in our minds, and of the impossibility of moving through the new countries’ borders that appeared during and after the Yugoslavian wars. The emotional relationship to the war as well as the geopolitical and geocultural changes in this region are at the center of these poems. The two poems presented here were published in my collection of poetry, All-Over (Belgrade: Feminist 94, 2004).