The Mikser Festival was held from 5 to 7 June, for the first time outside Belgrade and instead at what could be called the most popular city in Serbia in the past year: Novi Pazar. The title of this year’s festival was “New World”. As before, the festival programme brought together contemporary music, art, urban culture, crafts and socially engaged ideas, with multiple concerts, performances, talks and exhibitions by numerous artists, cultural workers and activists. An added value to the festival was the host city, which over the past year has become an important gathering place for students and citizens in Serbia. It was precisely the students from Novi Pazar who walked hundreds of kilometres through Serbia during the protests and became one of the most striking symbols of the student movement and what their struggle represents. The messages sent by the young people of Novi Pazar reverberated across the country and, for a moment, made it resemble the kind of country we would like it to be. That is why Novi Pazar is the right place for talks on connection, dialogue and a shared future in a “new world”.
We gladly accepted the invitation to take part in the festival, so on 7 June, as part of the “Mikser Talks” programme at the Novi Pazar Cultural Centre, we presented the Biber Short Story Contest and its publications. Taking part in the talk were Almin Kaplan from Stolac, a writer and member of the sixth Biber jury, Danijela Repman, a writer from Sombor, Aida Šečić Nezirević, a writer from Travnik, Qerim Ondozi, a translator from Pristina, and Ivana Franović from the Biber team. The talk was moderated by Nadija Rebronja.
Biber is a short story contest for engaged stories in Albanian, Macedonian, Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and Montenegrin. The theme of the contest is reconciliation in the context of the aftermath of the wars and violence in the countries of former Yugoslavia, but also eligible are 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 session where we presented the Biber stories was titled “Stories that cross borders”.
During the talk, Almin Kaplan said, “I genuinely believe that books make peace between people. But people get nervous when you want to make peace between them. The reason is that they feel shame. The very fact that you were in a conflict with someone evokes shame, so people get nervous when it comes to making peace.”
Danijela Repman, whose short story “Erzähle mir etwas über dich“ won third prize in the sixth Biber Contest, said, “Although I don’t come from an area where there was active war, only the consequences of the war were felt, we have baggage we drag from the past… At one point I realised that I could tie this together into an anti-war story that would reflect how I think and how I would like other people to think about these things. We had a lot of deserters, because we are a multinational community. Because we are mixed – Serbs, Croats, Hungarians, Germans, Jews… When you find yourself in a story where you don’t know which side you belong to, because you don’t have to belong to a side, then it’s difficult. It’s a clash between what is expected of you and what you organically feel you should do. Especially if you can’t side with anyone. The story is a collection of motifs from my life, the life of my family, my husband’s family, and this constant struggle between where they want to classify us and where we want to be.”
Aida Šečić Nezirević has had two stories published in the Biber collections: “Snijeg“ in Biber 03 and “Pogača“ in Biber 05. When asked about the topics opened up by the Biber Contest and her motivation for writing, she especially talked about what inspired her to send in her story. “This story Pogača is a completely true story that I heard a few years ago. I wanted to write it down, but I never did before the contest came out and then I just somehow knew it was the right story for the Biber Contest, because it’s about people of different religions helping each other during the war. When I first heard the story myself, it gave me hope that not all people are enemies to each other, they’re not all evil to each other, there are always those prepared to put their life on the line to help someone else.”
Qerim Ondozi has been with Biber since the very beginning in 2015, when he started translating into Albanian stories written in Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and Montenegrin. He said, “This contest is not just about writing stories that will be published, or about receiving prizes. It is about getting people to think about these topics, what we’ve been through, spreading stories about it and getting people to think. The stories are the result. They offer an alternative to official discourses, which may seem small, but the effect is much larger.” He added that even today authors from Kosovo want to be translated into BCSM and he sees this as an expression of their need to communicate with the region.
Ivana Franović looked back at how Biber was created: “CNA has been working on peacebuilding for almost 30 years. And then, 12 years ago, at a gathering of young people, we came up with creating Biber. We were thinking about how, in addition to all the other activities we were doing to bring people together and create spaces where people could meet, we wanted to include literature. We knew we wanted to include Albanian and Macedonian, because we realised so little was being translated between the closest of neighbours. And translation is necessary if we want to foster understanding between languages. We don’t all have to know Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian in order to build bridges. That is why we insist that all the languages are present in the collection. We don’t print one in Macedonian, one in Albanian, one in BCSM, but all the language versions of the stories are in a single volume.”
The sixth Biber Contest was open from December 2023 to May 2024. A total of 490 stories were submitted. The jury, comprising Almin Kaplan, Jasna Dimitrijević and Tanja Stupar Trifunović, selected 25 stories to be included in the multilingual collection and decided on the prizes.
The seventh Biber Contest is dedicated to the student movement and was open until ten days ago. We are now reading, translating and selecting the stories for the short list. The results of the contest will be published in mid-November and the new collection should come out before spring.
Electronic editions of all Biber Collections can be downloaded for free from this website.
During our stay in Novi Pazar, we followed the diverse programme of the Mikser Festival and were particularly impressed by the play “22 Minutes” of the Novi Pazar Regional Theatre that deals with the abduction of passengers at the train station in Štrpci in 1993. We hope there will be an opportunity for the play to be performed in Belgrade.