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      • On Poetry & Poets by Abhay K.
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      • Identity Issues in the Poetry of Nissim Ezekiel by Dr.Arvind Nawale & Prashant Mothe*
      • Nissim Ezekiel’s Latter-Day Psalms: His Religious and Philosophical Speculations By Dr. Pallavi Srivastava
      • The Moping Owl : the Epitome of Melancholy by Zinia Mitra
      • Gary Soto’s Vision of Chicano Experiences: The Elements of San Joaquin and Human Nature by Paula Hayes
      • Sri Aurobindo: A Poet By Aju Mukhopadhyay
      • Wordsworthian Romanticism in the Poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra: Nature and the Reflective Capabilities of a Poetic Self by Paula Hayes
      • Reflective Journey of T.S. Eliot: From Philosophy to Poetry by Syed Ahmad Raza Abidi
      • North East Indian Poetry: ‘Peace’ in Violence by Ananya .S. Guha
    • 2014-2015 >
      • From The Hidden World of Poetry: Unravelling Celtic mythology in Contemporary Irish Poetry Adam Wyeth
      • Alchemy’s Drama: Conflict, Resolution and Poiesis in the Poetic Work of Art by Michelle Bitting
      • Amir Khushrau: The Musical Soul of India by Dr. Shamenaz
      • PUT YOUR HANDS ON ME: POETRY'S EROTIC ART by Elena Karina Byrne
      • Celtic and Urban Landscapes in Irish Poetry by Linda Ibbotson
      • Trickster at the African Crossroads and the Bridge to the Blues in America by Michelle Bitting
    • 2015-2016 >
      • Orogeny/Erogeny: The “nonsense” of language and the poetics of Ed Dorn T Thilleman
      • Erika Burkart: Fragments, Shards, and Visions by Marc Vincenz
      • English Women Poets and Indian politics
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      • Children’s Poetry in India- A Case Study of Adil Jussawalla and Ananya Guha by Shruti Sareen
      • Thirteen Thoughts on Poetry in the Digital Age by Mandy kAHN
    • 2017-2018 >
      • From Self-Portrait with Dogwood: A Route of Evanescence by Christopher Merrill
      • Impure Poetry by Tony Barnstone
      • On the Poets: Contributors in Context by Donald Gardner
      • Punching above its Weight: Dutch Poetry in English, a Selection, 2013-2017 by Jane Draycott
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​Do We Belong Where We Return Or Where We Die by Nikola Madzirov

I am not afraid of distances -
their closeness scares me.
 
            Home is a psychological edifice: the fear of not belonging; the faith in the return that will defer death; safety’s hearth. Even the most sterile hotel room welcomes you with a burning log on the TV screen to reassure you that you belong here for all the ugly pictures on the wall and the aggressive air freshener. Today, sheltering at home is called isolation rather than belonging. By contrast, the mythical looking-back that kills loved one or turns them into stone, the looking-back toward a home one is about to leave, makes that home even more alive in the time of remembrance. For a long time now, I have been living the home as a dynamic reality, as if a tree with roots in the air. In Paris, my home was the Les Récollets complex, once a monastery for the Recollects Order, later converted into a military hospital - a space that over time preserved the tension between the monks’ silence and the screams of the wounded. In the seductive Berlin, I lived near Gottfried Benn's medical office, where the metal spikes on the window ledges made the pigeons fly on, nomads who had already forgotten what they had left behind and where they would land. Nomads don’t believe in monuments, although my refugee ancestors kept the key to every lost home in the medicine cabinet, a symbol for a life that will continue (go on), as if believing that one day they will return to the point of departure. More and more often, home is a space that abandons us, for we have become so accustomed to the spatial displacements of our body that we no longer  feel travel as an abandonment but only as a change of locale, although sometimes I have the feeling that each abandoned home follows me as if a hungry animal. Only in poetry can I be at home, only in doubt can I be safe. Literature began with poetry: "the song of a nomad predates the scribblings of a settler," writes Brodsky. Before I set out for a trip, I quickly open the suitcase and my shadow is already there, waiting for the books and the clothes. When I return, I open it slowly, the way one opens the sealed coffin of a war victim. As if extending the escape, deferring the belonging and rebirth, this time without witnesses.
            Belonging is often the enemy of rootedness. Simone Weil says: "to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul."  A human being also belongs to the in-between spaces, to the houses that remain unfinished. I live in Strumica, a town near the borders of Greece and Bulgaria, and have always felt the safest in that hundred-meter strip between the two borders, a space without monuments or conditions for historical memory. Those spaces, aptly named no-man’s-land, want to tell you that you are Nobody if you feel them as your own. Ideological systems always tend to create a Nobody out of a body and a mind but "the person who creates a Nobody by denying Somebody’s existence will himself become a Nobody," writes Octavio Paz in The Labyrinth of Solitude. So it is with cities. We feel that a city begins to belong to us when we find a corner, a small square or an unnamed bridge for each of our inner states, and one begins to refer to it by a fragment of their life routine or personal history. I believe that belonging is a natural, but also a self-deceptive response to the return to a city, if rarely to living in it.Do we belong to where we return, or only to where we die? Czesław Miłosz begins his poem "The City of My Youth" with the lyrics: "It would be more decorous not to live. To live is not decorous, / says he who after many years / returned to the city of his youth. There was no one left / of those who once walked these streets. / And now they had nothing, ex-cept his eyes.” The cities where you feel like you belong to yourself are harbors of your imperceptibility, where, alienated from the realities you have inherited, you begin to build the world’s truths. The title of my first book, published twenty years ago, was Locked in the City, bearing mostly on the mental state of confinement, shaped as well by the political logic of restrictions through visa and conceptual walls. The affiliation with Balkan, be it voluntary or forced, is at once a blessing and a curse, a birth in the geographical space of guilt: your mother spread her legs to give birth to you on the dock. But the confinement is everything except a belonging, even if the planetary seclusion forces us at the moment to belong to the world.
 
Post-edited from the German and the Macedonian by Nataša Ďurovičová
​
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​Nikola Madzirov (poet, essayist, translator) was born in 1973 in Strumica, R.Macedonia, in the family of war refugees from the Balkan Wars. His poems are translated into more than thirty languages. For the book Relocated Stone was given the East European Hubert Burda poetry award and the most prestigious Macedonian poetry award Miladinov Brothers award at Struga Poetry Evenings. Other recognitions include Studentski Zbor award for best poetry debut and Xu Zhimo Silver Leaf award for European poetry at King’s College, Cambridge in UK. He was granted several international fellowships: International Writing Program (IWP) at University of Iowa; DAAD and LCB in Berlin; Marguerite Yourcenar in France… He lives in Strumica.

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​VerseVille (formerly The Enchanting Verses Literary Review) © 2008-2022    ISSN 0974-3057 Published from India. 

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  • Home
  • About Us
    • Contact
    • Media Coverages
    • Copyright Notice
    • VerseVille Blog
  • Submissions
    • Poetry and Essays Guidelines
    • Book Review Guidelines
    • Research Series Guidelines
  • Masthead
  • Editions
    • 2011 Issues >
      • ISSUE-XIV November 2011
    • 2012 Issues >
      • ISSUE-XV March 2012
      • ISSUE-XVI July 2012
      • ISSUE-XVII November 2012
    • 2013 Issues >
      • ISSUE-XVIII April 2013
      • ISSUE XIX November 2013
    • 2014 Issues >
      • ISSUE XX May 2014
    • 2015 Issues >
      • ISSUE XXI February 2015
      • Contemporary Indian English Poetry ISSUE XXII November 2015
    • 2016 Issues >
      • ISSUE XXIII August 2016
      • Poetry From Ireland ISSUE XXIV December 2016
    • 2017 ISSUES >
      • ISSUE XXV August 2017
      • ISSUE XXVI December 2017
    • 2018 ISSUES >
      • ISSUE XXVII July 2018
      • ISSUE XXVIII November 2018
    • 2019 Issues >
      • ISSUE XXIX July 2019
    • 2020 ISSUES >
      • Issue XXX February 2020
      • ISSUE XXXI December 2020
    • 2021 ISSUES >
      • ISSUE XXXII August 2021
    • 2022 ISSUES >
      • ISSUE XXXIII June 2022
  • Collaborations
    • Macedonian Collaboration
    • Collaboration with Dutch Foundation for Literature
  • Interviews
  • Prose on Poetry and Poets
    • 2010-2013 >
      • Sylvia Plath by Dr. Nidhi Mehta >
        • Chapter-1(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-2(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-3(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-4(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-5(Sylvia Plath)
        • Chapter-6(Sylvia Plath)
      • Prose Poems of Tagore by Dr. Bina Biswas >
        • Chapter-1(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-2(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-3(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-4(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-5(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-6(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-7(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-8(Rabindranath Tagore)
        • Chapter-9(Rabindranath Tagore)
      • Kazi Nazrul Islam by Dr. Shamenaz Shaikh >
        • Chapter 1(Nazrul Islam)
        • Chapter 2(Nazrul Islam)
        • Chapter 3(Nazrul Islam)
      • Kabir's Poetry by Dr. Anshu Pandey >
        • Chapter 1(Kabir's Poetry)
        • Chapter 2(Kabir's Poetry)
        • Chapter 3(Kabir's Poetry)
      • My mind's not right by Dr. Vicky Gilpin >
        • Chapter- 1 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
        • Chapter-2 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
        • Chapter-3 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
        • Chapter-4 Dr. Vicky Gilpin
      • On Poetry & Poets by Abhay K.
      • Poetry of Kamla Das –A True Voice Of Bourgeoisie Women In India by Dr.Shikha Saxena
      • Identity Issues in the Poetry of Nissim Ezekiel by Dr.Arvind Nawale & Prashant Mothe*
      • Nissim Ezekiel’s Latter-Day Psalms: His Religious and Philosophical Speculations By Dr. Pallavi Srivastava
      • The Moping Owl : the Epitome of Melancholy by Zinia Mitra
      • Gary Soto’s Vision of Chicano Experiences: The Elements of San Joaquin and Human Nature by Paula Hayes
      • Sri Aurobindo: A Poet By Aju Mukhopadhyay
      • Wordsworthian Romanticism in the Poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra: Nature and the Reflective Capabilities of a Poetic Self by Paula Hayes
      • Reflective Journey of T.S. Eliot: From Philosophy to Poetry by Syed Ahmad Raza Abidi
      • North East Indian Poetry: ‘Peace’ in Violence by Ananya .S. Guha
    • 2014-2015 >
      • From The Hidden World of Poetry: Unravelling Celtic mythology in Contemporary Irish Poetry Adam Wyeth
      • Alchemy’s Drama: Conflict, Resolution and Poiesis in the Poetic Work of Art by Michelle Bitting
      • Amir Khushrau: The Musical Soul of India by Dr. Shamenaz
      • PUT YOUR HANDS ON ME: POETRY'S EROTIC ART by Elena Karina Byrne
      • Celtic and Urban Landscapes in Irish Poetry by Linda Ibbotson
      • Trickster at the African Crossroads and the Bridge to the Blues in America by Michelle Bitting
    • 2015-2016 >
      • Orogeny/Erogeny: The “nonsense” of language and the poetics of Ed Dorn T Thilleman
      • Erika Burkart: Fragments, Shards, and Visions by Marc Vincenz
      • English Women Poets and Indian politics
    • 2016-2017 >
      • Children’s Poetry in India- A Case Study of Adil Jussawalla and Ananya Guha by Shruti Sareen
      • Thirteen Thoughts on Poetry in the Digital Age by Mandy kAHN
    • 2017-2018 >
      • From Self-Portrait with Dogwood: A Route of Evanescence by Christopher Merrill
      • Impure Poetry by Tony Barnstone
      • On the Poets: Contributors in Context by Donald Gardner
      • Punching above its Weight: Dutch Poetry in English, a Selection, 2013-2017 by Jane Draycott
  • Print Editions