Pain Department
by I
About This Novel
Coming from a country that no longer exists, being taught a language that was fragmented, I stuck out my tongue like a dragon in a fairy tale, and it bifurcated: Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Slovenian, Macedonian... Can a language so painful, a language that has never learned to describe reality as complex as one's inner experience of reality, be able to tell a story? It was always like this in the beginning. Or that. They did that, went there, and then came to Holland. The exile narrative is undated. Too many things happened in the short "post-war" period, and their psychological clocks broke under the pressure. Everything is broken. Place and time are divided into "before" and "after", life is divided into "here" and "there". They are suddenly without witnesses, parents, family, friends, or even the usual people with whom they can reconstruct their lives. Without these reliable intermediaries, they are thrown back into themselves. In a mediatized world, nothing is real. Memories pass through many intermediaries, taking the form of a Juliette Binoche or a red, white and blue woven bag, translating my personal pain into my language. Only this one thing is true. Pain is silent, useless, but the only true witness.
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