BRIŽ / BRUGES
FROM THE WRITER’S PERSPECTIVE: DUŠAN MIKLJA Travelling as life itself, cities as destiny All the cities in which we’ve lived predetermine our life’s journey. But this boils down to a cause-and-effect relationship, because cities make people just as much as people make cities. By tracing the contours of cities, I sketched the map of my inner life
destiny, and, perhaps most of all, as a personal confession. In various cities, I investigate who has done me harm, but I also seek an antidote, taking into consideration good and nice things that I’ve experienced. ON CITIES I actually wonder how much the cities we’ve been to, spent time residing in, or had a perma- nent address in, are alive inside us. How can we describe a scene to someone if that scene isn’t al- ready “caught” inside us; how can we lead them through the streets of a city; show them the people there; describe their customs and habits? That’s because we live in cit- ies just as much as they live in us. That choice is sometimes random, sometimes voluntary, occasional- ly imposed by social conditions or forced by circumstance. It isn’t al- ways equally agreeable, but from my point of view, as a man who’s en- gaged in writing, I’m equally grate- ful for those that have brought me joy and those that have exposed me
I HAD THE GOOD FORTUNE OF BEING IN AFRICA during the time that it was freeing itself of the shackles of colonialism, in Italy dur- ing the period of the Red Brigades and terrorism, in New York during the build-up to the disintegration of Yugoslavia, and in Brussels, the seat of the headquarters of both the EU and NATO, during the time of Yu- goslav collapse. In my novel Cities as Destiny, there’s almost nothing that’s made up – neither the person- alities nor the events. That’s because we live in cities, but cities also live
in us. That can be considered liter- ally in this novel, because it was a personal choice to live in the cities where I’ve lived, while it was also something imposed on me by un- desired circumstances. ON THE NOVEL In genre terms, this novel can be experienced in numerous ways – as prose, as a testimony to the seismic social upheavals of recent decades, as a description of cities, though not in the sense of a trav- elogue, but rather in the sense of
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