Biber 05, a multilingual collection of short stories, was promoted on 24 May in Travnik at “Ex Ponto” the Birth House of Ivo Andrić. The promotion was organised by the Centre for Nonviolent Action Sarajevo/Belgrade, the Regional Museum of Travnik and the Bosnian Cultural Circle.
It brought together in conversation some of the authors of the stories entered in the contest and published in the Biber 05 Collection: Slađana Nina Perković (Banja Luka), Senad Jusić Čupo (Bugojno), Ante Storić (Šibenik), as well as Davorka Turk (Biber Team, Centre for Nonviolent Action Sarajevo-Belgrade), and jury member Lejla Kalamujić (Sarajevo).
The moderator was Enes Škrgo who welcomed everyone on behalf of the Bosnian Cultural Circle and said that Ivo Andrić spoke five and was translated into more than 50 languages, as well as that this multilingual contest and short story collection were needed to foster connections between different languages.
We conceived of Biber at one of the peace education programmes of the Centre for Nonviolent Action. The name is not an acronym, it is a word with the same meaning in all the languages of the authors who submit their stories for the contest. Our mission is reconciliation and that is one of the reasons we reached out to writers, to put our heads together and try to imagine the shape of this reconciliation. What all these stories share is a deep sense of empathy so that we can truly identify with the characters.
Lejla Kalamujić, who along with Kalina Maleska and Olja Savičević Ivančević formed the jury, spoke about the Biber Contest and the task of the jury.
As part of our selection process, the three of us read the stories out loud to each other. What makes this jury stand out is that we had quite a high level of agreement, so the task was not difficult and I can safely say we enjoyed it.
Enes Škrgo praised all the stories in the collection, saying that you could open it up randomly and be absorbed into the story you happened upon.
In the story Nešto mračno što mama nosi u sebi [Something Dark Mother Carries Within], I wasn’t writing about the war, but about what we leave to our children who were mostly born and live in other countries and speak other languages – said Slađana Nina Perković.
Ante Storić whose stories were published in two Biber Collections talked about how both of them deal with war crimes against civilians.
Both stories are about the Šibenik area. When the first story was published, they told me it was science fiction, that it was impossible, but then in the second story I included two crimes that happened in Šibenik itself. I wonder what they’ll say now.
All three authors have stories published in two Biber Collections, and Senad Jusić Čupo talked about this most recent edition.
In this story, I tried to portray the role of women in the Balkans, especially during the war. This here is a patriarchal society and we talk about heroic men that should serve as role models so that at the very next opportunity we should also die for the country. The role of mothers is marginalised, but I tried to depict the pain I saw in two generations: where a woman turns into a plant of sorrow over her child. No war has ever made a mother smile.
The short story collection we promoted resulted from the Biber 05 Contest for short stories about reconciliation in the context of the legacy of the wars and violence in the countries of former Yugoslavia, as well as stories contributing to better understanding among people, reducing hatred and dismantling prejudice, anti-war stories, stories about dealing with the past, deconstructing images of the enemy, stories 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 and all the Biber short story collections are multilingual and open to authors writing in Albanian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, Croatian, Serbian and Macedonian.
The electronic editions of all the Biber collections can be downloaded for free from the website https://biber.nenasilje.org/biber-price/ .
Before Travnik, the Biber 05 Collection was promoted earlier this year in Zagreb, Petrinja and Bitolj, and the Biber Team has announced that the sixth short story contest will be opened later this year.