The multilingual regional Biber Short Story Contest and the latest Biber Short Story Collection were presented on Wednesday, 1 April, at the Municipal Assembly Hall in Tuzi and on Thursday, 2 April, at the Cultural Centre of the Old Royal Capital Cetinje.
The following people took part in the discussions: Jasna Dimitrijević, jury member from Belgrade; Qerim Ondozi, translator from Pristina; Mihailo Marković, author from Cetinje, and Ivana Franović, member of the Biber Team. Kristjan Gjokaj was the host and moderator for the event in Tuzi, while that role in Cetinje was played by Filip Kuzman. Lidija Brnović provided support to the organisation of the two events.
Jasna Dimitrijević, who was part of the jury for the sixth Biber Contest together with Tanja Stupar Trifunović and Almin Kaplan, related how awaiting new Biber stories was always exciting and she was eager to see what topics and perspectives would emerge, especially in stories written in Macedonian and Albanian.
“The most exciting and the stories I like best are those where the narrative voice goes through a transformation, starting from a delusion that is illuminated as the story progresses. I like being surprised by something I wasn’t expecting. As for the quality, I think I speak on behalf of the other jury members as well when I say that we are satisfied, and that the stories included in the collection are inseparably both engaged and artistic. My opinion is that a literary work cannot be engaged if it is not artistic and vice versa.”
Ivana Franović from the team that organises the Contest said that back in 2014, Biber emerged from a conversation about what more could be done in peacebuilding, and since there were literary authors involved in the conversation, they landed on the idea of organising a literary contest.
“The first contest in 2015 received 300 stories and that was without much in the way of a media strategy, which is a fairly large number, compared to other contests, and it was not expected. Now, we are already organising the seventh contest. We also needed to translate the stories, because there is absolutely a lack of exchange on that level. So, we wanted to overcome that language barrier, as well.”
Mihailo Marković, a Cetinje native whose story Konkurs was included in the Biber 06 Collection, talked about how the inspiration behind his story came from growing up in times marked by wars and social crises.
“As part of the generation that grew up with all that dissolution and destruction of the 1990s, I felt a strong urge to write about it. For me, this topic is both very personal and very fraught. Especially for us from Montenegro, this is a position from which we never speak, and society has pressured us and keeps pressuring us to stay silent, because we all pretended as a society that it never happened, that Montenegro never even participated in the war.”
Qerim Ondozi, who translates from Albanian, said that through working on these stories, he grew both as a literary translator and as a person.
“As for the challenges of translation, I would say I picked the easier path of translating from languages of the former Yugoslavia into a language of the former Yugoslavia, which means that most words I don’t have to translate because all our languages, whether we like it or not, have so many words in common that some refer to as Turkish loanwords, others as Balkan loanwords or Serbian loanwords. The very name of the contest, Biber, is a common word in all these languages. It is also an advantage for the translator to work with living authors, because you can then communicate with them if you need additional clarification. But I often wrote to the authors just to congratulate them on their stories.”
Qerim shared his personal experience, relating how working on Biber helped him process the loss of a loved one from the war period in a healthier way. “It took me a long time to get over that loss. Biber came at a time when I had made a turnaround and started dealing with my past, it was like a gift I was given to make the turnaround in dealing with personal pain. A noble thing about these stories is that pain is universal, the approach to pain is universal, and empathy resulting from that pain means crossing borders that we put up ourselves.”
In both Tuzi and Cetinje, there was a lot of talk about reconciliation in the future.
For Jasna, the future of reconciliation is with the younger generations unburdened by the narratives that shaped her generation. “It is up to us to provide all the possible resources and support, because these are curious young people who cannot be so easily deceived and they are prepared to push the boundaries that we were unable to move. I’m not worried.”
According to Qerim, “whenever we are talking with young people, we should highlight the beauty of diversity, that all our differences amount to something beautiful and not to animosity which is imposed and forced, we need to produce more counter-narratives.”
Mihailo pointed out that in the region, the way reconciliation is spoken about is inappropriate, sensationalist and wrong. It is often reduced to the level of platitudes and political sloganeering. “That is why these initiatives are important, because they initiate thinking about these topics through sophisticated style, through quality literature and they shift the paradigms when it comes to communication in the region in a way that is not profane or banal or dishonest.”
Ivana believes that “reconciliation in the future will happen when we as societies start responding to injustice no matter who the target is and no matter who the perpetrator is, when it becomes unacceptable as such. I believe this is easily reachable. One of the obstacles are our politicians, those who constantly present our neighbours as our enemies. For me, my enemy is anyone trying to make another person my enemy, and in the case of Belgrade and Serbia, this is clearly the governing regime structures.”
In addition to the Centre for Nonviolent Action Sarajevo/Belgrade, the other organisers were: the Municipality of Tuzi and the Cultural Centre of the Old Royal Capital Cetinje.
Authors writing in Albanian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, Croatian, Serbian or Macedonian are welcome to send in their short stories for the Biber Contest. The published stories deal with reconciliation in the context of the aftermath of the wars and violence in the countries of former Yugoslavia, including stories that can contribute to better understanding among people, reducing hatred and dismantling prejudice, anti-war stories, stories about dealing with the past, deconstructing images of the enemy, about empathy, brave stories that dare walk in the “enemy’s” shoes, stories that push boundaries and open up the way to build a more stable, safer and freer future for all. The contest is organised by the Biber Team of the Centre for Nonviolent Action Sarajevo|Belgrade.
The Biber 06 Collection was published in March last year. It includes 25 stories from the region selected from 490 that were entered in the contest.
The seventh Biber Contest will be open until 24 May. This time, in addition to traditional Biber topics, the contest is dedicated to the students in Serbia and will also accept stories about them and their struggle for justice, freedom and equality.
Electronic editions of all Biber Collections can be downloaded for free from this website.