Taboo-Busting Literature has ‘Liberating Potential’, Says Serbian Author

"Literature has a multi-faceted impact on societies like ours," believes Serbian writer Sasa Ilic, whose most recent novel deals with the enduring traumas of the 1990s wars in a country where political leaders continue to deny the truth about what happened.

"Literature dealing with burning issues that are mostly taboo, such as Yugoslavia, the war, war trauma, war crimes, the abolition of freedom, the creation of a post-war profiteering class that originated in the 1990s and now affects the entire public sphere… of course such literature has liberating potential," Ilic explained in an email interview with BIRN.

Ilic's novel 'Pas i Kontrabas' ('The Dog and the Double Bass') won the prestigious NIN magazine prize for literature in January last year. Even before he was given the award, the announcement that a writer known for his opposition to the nationalist narratives that continue to dominate Serbian society had been nominated sparked controversy.

The main character in the novel is Filip Isakovic, a jazz double-bass player and former Yugoslav People's Army serviceman, who in the years after the wars is sent to a psychiatric hospital in Serbia.

The story focuses on the inmates of the institution - other 1990s war veterans and a former doctor who was prominent during the era of Slobodan Milosevic's regime, but also contemporary migrants.

"There are two things that interested me - how the war trauma of the 1990s is dealt with in politics today, and how institutions that are supposed to deal with this problem have been captured [by the ruling party, some of whose officials served in the 1990s regime]," Ilic said.

Ilic was born in 1972, and when the war in Croatia broke out in 1991, he was a conscript in the Yugoslav...

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