Welcome to Slovenian poetry - June 2005

January 18, 2006 Slovenian literary space has in many ways been strait-jacketed through canonisation, bounded by patriarchal underpinnings and a narrow, parochial mentality. It seems unusual that after we have finally gained democracy for ourselves, in the field of spiritual creativity, we are still having to fight restrictive measures and an atmosphere of nihilism. The latter has bred insidious forms of censorship, which rather than stemming from the regime of national politics have their source mainly in the dominant social elite, which is using literature as a battlefield for social prestige and power. Hiding behind highly conservative notions of literature, it exercises control over public space: national institutions which distribute funding, the media, publishing houses and some key literary journals.

One of the few bastions of opposition is the literary review Apokalipsa, and not surprisingly, many of the strongest female voices – Taja Kramberger, Barbara Korun, Lidija Dimkovska, Stanka Chrobak Repar, Vida Mokrin Pauer, Maja Vidmar, Barbara Pogačnik and others – have in one way or another affiliated with it, and have begun – quite consciously – opening out the space for ‘women’s writing’. This has nothing to do with academic feminism, which has been present in Slovenia for years now, but with a deeply-felt sense of being made ‘the other’, of being marginalised. For Barbara Korun, the poet of this quarter, this has been the topic which she feels very strongly about. It concerns “women as poets and their experience of their own poetic role”. This has also, she says “changed her, (…) awoken [her] into the openness of questions that [she] had detected in the past with discomfort, but did not have the courage to voice”.

In an essay on another strong woman poet, Tatjana Soldo, who died tragically, Korun makes it clear that “contemporary Slovenian society is murderously disposed towards this woman-ness, it is explicitly gyneco-phobic, because it essentially consists of an elitist cultural ‘brotherhood’ (i.e. national culture). This culture doesn’t understand, cannot see, and cannot stand the chasms of otherness and difference, thus a woman is conceived as a permanent threat on the bases of her unknown and unfathomable otherness, which is not hierarchical, not based on pre-dominance, but on the power of empathy.”

Barbara is clearly aware that the so-called ‘women’s writing’ has deeper consequences. It is not merely related to intimate female experience, but to much wider human and creative openness. Making way for women’s voice crumbles the narrow borders, imposed by literary elites and patriarchal tradition. We could say this is yet another instance of that ‘third speech’ which we have witnessed in the voice of the great nonconformists and poets of our history, Primož Trubar, France Prešeren, Josip Murn, Srečko Kosovel and Edvard Kocbek – the speech of freedom, which is free only when realised. Having come to the heart of the best poetry written in the Slovenian language, it goes without saying that today it is the women poets who are making a profound and stirring contribution.