The Enchanted Loop of the ’90s

Written by Đorđe Šćepović

Although the title might call to mind the prose of Danilo Kiš, this is something much more ordinary, much more trivial. This is about our everyday life: about yet another award and its recipients. Tradition and experience have taught us how to approach awards – both the national ones and the smaller, local, even village-level prizes. They’ve shaped our relationship with Montenegrin culture and Montenegrin authors. Ultimately, they’ve taught us about ourselves. About a provincial mindset that insists on seeing itself as inferior. About the complex of being a small nation. About our endless obsession with, and desperate pursuit of, the approval of the "greater ones" – to the point of frothing at the mouth.

It’s always been like this with us and with awards. A tradition of pandering. From the grand Njegoš Award to the smallest, most insignificant prize handed out by a local community council.

There’s been a lot of talk these days about awards. Specifically, about the country’s highest honor: The 13th July Award. About broken laws, about the laureate B. Vuković, and about the book for which Vuković was supposedly awarded. A book that does not exist. The poetry collection "Houses of the Homeless" can’t be found among published works. If you go looking, you’ll find The House of the Homeless by the Bosnian poet Benjamin Isović – but not Vuković’s book.

Though it’s not enough that three of this year’s awardees come from the field of culture (which is prohibited by law and by the award’s official guidelines), or that B. Vuković has been crowned with a prestigious award for a book that doesn’t exist. Good people insist this is nothing new, that it’s happened before, that books have been published without CIP (Cataloguing in Publication) data or with fake CIP entries, even though that data is required to catalog a book before publication.

Still, I can’t recall anyone ever receiving the country’s highest honor for a book with falsified CIP data – or for a book that simply doesn’t exist. But then again, if Rajka Glušica could be promoted to university professor based on books that also don’t exist, why shouldn’t B. Vuković get an award for a non-existent book? Surely, we’re not going to nitpick now?

Either way, it’s less painful to just congratulate Vuković than to waste time defending the indefensible. And I don’t want to disrupt the opposition’s righteous rhythm as they criticize the jury and the laureate, and rightly so, but I still have to ask: who was in power back in 2013 when the 13th July Award was given to Gojko Čelebić and Ilija Lakušić? Do their worldviews differ from those held by B. Vuković today? Just to jog the memory of those with short attention spans: the chair of the jury that granted the country’s top award to Vuković’s ideological twins back then was Dragan Vukčević, long-time head of CANU and a respected figure within the former regime.

But that was then. Should we be digging up the past?

Perhaps this is all just one elaborate performance by the poet Vuković. Maybe he’s simply telling us: “All the good poetry books have already been written – now I’m writing a book that doesn’t exist.”

In any case, everything these days seems to revolve around awards. Everything is charged with symbolism right now. The PEN Center and other organizations are calling for the "Ratković Award" to be revoked from convicted war criminal Radovan Karadžić. You know, since no one thought to take it from him over the past thirty years, maybe now’s the time?

But no, of course not. Once again, the world gets to witness our familiar, time-honored cowardice. When asked by journalists about the initiative to strip Radovan Karadžić of the Ratković Award, the director of the public institution Ratković’s Poetry Evenings said that’s not within his authority. It’s up to the municipality, which established the award back in 1973.

If that’s the case, how can this same director proudly celebrate the continuity of an award over which he supposedly has no authority?

But really, none of this is new. Nothing shocking. Nothing that could surprise us. “Our experience is provincial”, wrote Radomir Konstantinović. And the province is always afraid. It always lives in fear. Because, “if I do what I ought to do, maybe I’ll lose what I’ve spent my whole life longing for”. And in this unfortunate country, to be a director is the ultimate longing for many. In the end, it always comes down to that.

As I said, everything these days is drenched in symbolism. On the jury that awarded the Ratković Prize to Radovan Karadžić back in 1993 sat Želidrag Nikčević – a war propagandist and an admirer of war criminals. Želidrag Nikčević is also a member of the jury that awarded Bećir Vuković.

A coincidence? Or the enchanted loop of the ’90s?