Not a fairy tale but… Second chapter, first story: Forgetting Spreads from the Center

12 Mar Not a fairy tale but… Second chapter, first story: Forgetting Spreads from the Center

“Forgetting Spreads from the Center”
-First story of the March monthly chapter-

Written by Dunja Karanović
Voiceover by Marija Drndić

I run up and down through the city: catching sights, shoving them into my head; God knows if all this will become a memory, and what color will spill over that memory![1]

Forgetting spreads from the center toward the periphery. The number seven tram runs through the center, connecting two peripheries, or, in the language of housing inequality, two wider city centers. The red, Czech-made number seven is just old enough that Biljana herself could have ridden in it.

Memory demands space—concrete, bronze, or marble, permanent addresses and residences. The New Belgrade terminus of the number seven lies in a space where memory is cast in concrete. Here, the streets and the stops that intersect them still know the Non-Aligned, old alliances, and institutions with obsolete names that no longer have a country. Revisionism and erasure arrive here guerilla-style, like the unofficial Ratko Mladić Boulevard on Yuri Gagarin Street, which receives a fresh coat of paint every few weeks. Paint, fortunately, is not concrete.

As the journey progresses from the wider to the inner center, the transformation of memory takes on an institutional character. The AVNOJ Boulevard, where Biljana lived, bears a different name today. One bridge connecting New and Old Belgrade has been raised, another has vanished, and with it, a part of the red number seven’s route. Marx and Engels Square was renamed a year after Biljana’s death, as was the Boulevard of the Revolution. Marshall Tito Street, where 100,000 people stood beside Biljana on May 31, 1992, also carries a different name.

The newly announced state first robs you of the joy of walking the streets, she wrote a year prior to that, in her anti-war correspondence with Maruša Krese, Radmila Lazić, and Rada Iveković. Yet, in the newly formed state, along streets with new names, upon newly laid pavements and perpetually new cobblestones, people still walk, and gather, and fall silent—and they do so in even greater numbers. The center is a space where oblivion is dictated, but also a space where the muscle memory of a society can be restored.

The center expands through capillaries: a dozen stops after Vukov Spomenik (an indigenous resident), the Boulevard (sans Revolution) gains its tributaries—bronchi, bronchioles, and finally, cul-de-sac alveoli, and these alveoli bear women’s names. Biljana’s street is located in the Mali Mokri Lug settlement, near the streets of Rebecca West, Maga Magazinović, Ruža Jovanović, Simonida, Mara Taborska, Jovanka Bončić, and Jelena Lozanić. The fragile memory that survives at this terminus of the number seven is female, yet fragmentary and unselective—here, side by side, live writers, journalists, artists, nurses and architects, Chetnik women and leftists, collaborationists and anti-war activists.

Biljana Jovanović officially received her street in August 2005. In the same issue of the Official Gazette where this decision was formalized, it was also announced that Neimar Park was changing its name to Jelena Šantić Park, though hardly anyone calls it that today. Biljana Jovanović Street has only twenty or so numbers, but that is twenty addresses, twenty dots on the map of a city that sustain memory. On the day Biljana’s friends solemnly marked the opening of this street, ten years after her death, Slobodan Milošević died in The Hague. His cul-de-sac, fortunately, does not yet exist in Belgrade, and cannot be visited by tram. Forgetting spreads from the center, but it turns around at the periphery.

[1] An excerpt from Biljana’s anti-war correspondence with Radmila Lazić, Maruša Krese, and Rada Iveković, published under the title “The Wind Goes Toward the South and Turns About Unto the North” (B92, 1994).