How many times will it happen? Countless. Two little girls play together and end up arguing. The mother intervenes: she separates them, draws a line on the ground and forces each one to play on this side of her own border. After a while, each begins to ask questions of the other and, several laughs later, both scream so that they can be reunited. A man looks at them from the window and wonders: "Couldn't it be that we draw the borders only to be able to desire the other?".
When we say the power of literature. With this curtain, which transfigures all the conflicts of humanity into a childish quarrel, opens "Good conduct" (Crocetti Editore), the latest book by Elvira Mujčič, Italian-Bosnian author, these days in Sardinia, guest of the festival Éntula, organized by the Lìberos association and the InCoros project.
His story is inspired by an event from 2012, but a similar fact also happened recently.
It is news of a few days ago that the Serbs of northern Kosovo gathered in front of the town halls of some cities to protest against the election of new mayors of Albanian ethnicity and to ask for the withdrawal of the Kosovo police units. However, the conflict between the two ethnic groups has been going on for about thirty years.
In the novel he is embodied by two characters who compete for the seat of mayor of a small town.
The story is set in a village where there are 1362 Albanians and 1177 Serbs. To be elected is a Serb who wants to get along with the Albanians, but in Belgrade
not good, and they send a new mayor whose aim is to continue to fan the flames in the ethnic rivalry. His arrival not only brings political turmoil, but turns the lives of the protagonists upside down.
Do you think mediation is possible?
The Balkans are a sort of liminal passage where international politics meet, for which Serbs and Albanians are not the only interlocutors: Serbia is close to Russia, Kosovo is a NATO protectorate. A solution can only take the form of an international solution.
In the book he points out a way…
Literature has the power to read reality in new ways, and in the novel there is a female character, Ludmila, who embodies a possible way forward to reach a solution.
Which?
Ludmila is a character inspired by a woman I met when I arrived in Italy, fleeing the war in the former Yugoslavia, about twenty years ago. She's considered the crazy one in the country, she speaks in rhyme, and she does it to get out of this dichotomy of hate and looking for an enemy.
Its strength is language.
Yes, because you use different words from those of your fellow villagers and, since words define reality, what you say suggests that to get out of the crystallized dynamics of the conflict, which immobilizes the parties in a destructive status quo, new and different words are needed. those used so far.
The novel begins by talking about borders. Why, in a world where it is easy to move around, are borders strenuously defended?
Because globalization, which has facilitated travel, has done so to multiply consumption, and not to facilitate meeting between people.
She boasts two affiliations: Italian and Bosnian. How do you put them into dialogue?
At first I thought I had to choose one or the other, as if inside me there were two granite identities that couldn't dialogue. It was a lifelong work of mediation to finally realize that one can stay in the complexity, in the hybridizations that migration brings with it.
