Not a fairy tale but… Second chapter, fourth story: Resistance is an act of love

31 Mar Not a fairy tale but… Second chapter, fourth story: Resistance is an act of love

“Resistance Is an Act of Love”
-Fourth story of the March monthly chapter-

Written by Dunja Karanović
Voiceover by Marija Drndić

Is the scattered (like dust) pain (physis) that walks the streets, hovers over the river, hides in the widest treetops and there where it actually cannot be seen, is it male or female?[1]

Biljana Jovanović was born in 1953 in Belgrade. Her mother Olga Ćetković, a journalist for Borba, tragically passed away on April 26, 1955, when Biljana was two years old. Her father, Batrić Jovanović, was a politician, a participant in the National Liberation Struggle, and a member of the Party, which Olga had become disillusioned with shortly before her never fully explained death.

“Every twenty-sixth of April since I was sixteen, I am in Belgrade and at the cemetery. I have a secret relationship with the twenty-sixth of April, with Avala, where thirty-seven years ago my mother hanged herself, with the time of day, at dawn, with that death, place, and date—not with Olga, I don’t remember her,” Biljana wrote in 1992, from Ljubljana.

The loss that struck Biljana, her older sister Ana, and her younger brother Pavle early on would reflect on her writing, but also on her attitude towards the socio-political system in which she grew up. Biljana’s friend Jelena Trpković knew her since childhood:

“We went to the same elementary school, ‘Petar Popović Aga’, today ‘Mihailo Petrović Alas’. I sat in class with her sister, we were a year older. Even then she was ahead of her generation. She always missed the figure of a mother. She was attached to her grandmother and aunt, but her mother’s picture always hung on her wall,” Jelena recalls.

After studying philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade, Biljana Jovanović published her first books: the play Ulrike Meinhof in 1976, the poetry collection The Guardian (Čuvar) in 1977, and the novels Avala is Falling (Pada Avala, 1978) and Dogs and Others (Psi i ostali, 1980). Avala was published at the same time that Biljana’s colleagues from the Faculty of Philosophy organized the first feminist conference in the region at the Student Cultural Center, called “Comrade Woman” (Drug-ca žena), raising important questions about the position of female comrades in a society that considered itself egalitarian. Biljana’s literary subjects live out these same questions defiantly, openly, and unconventionally. “When she published her first novel,” writes Svetlana Slapšak, “she provoked more fear than praise, and the official critics didn’t know what to do with this piece of glowing coal.”

In the early eighties, Biljana founded the first non-governmental organization, the Committee for the Protection of Man and the Environment, and was a member of the first Committee for the Protection of Artistic Freedoms, fighting for the rights of artists and activists convicted of ‘thought crimes’ or ‘verbal offenses’. She advocated for the release of the Kosovo politician and writer Adem Demaci, who spent twenty-eight years in prison because of his activism. In 1983, she traveled to Dubrovnik for the trial of poet Milan Milišić.

“When my husband was convicted of a thought crime, Biljana came to Dubrovnik representing the Committee for the Defense of Artistic Freedoms, and that is where our true friendship began. Afterwards, we constantly saw each other on the Belgrade-Dubrovnik route and became very close. We spent hours together every day and then we would talk on the phone until midnight. Biljana loved free people, free in spirit, broad-minded. She was an adventurer in life and in literature,” explains Jelena Trpković.

During the eighties and early nineties, three more of Biljana’s plays were published: Fly to the Mountain Like a Bird (Leti u goru kao ptica, 1982), Central Prison (Centralni zatvor, 1990), and Room on the Bosphorus (Soba na Bosforu), as well as the novel Soul, My Only One (Duša, jedinica moja). The beginning of the nineties, however, represented a moment when almost all of her energy and defiance were directed toward anti-war activism. She was the spiritus movens of the Civil Resistance Movement, one of the founders of the Association for the Yugoslav Democratic Initiative (UJDI), a member of the Belgrade Circle, the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, and the initiator of the Flying Classroom Workshop (LUR), an artistic initiative aimed at connecting the countries of the disappearing Yugoslav space. At a time when new borders were being drawn, Biljana flew across them, creating maps of friendship, tenderness, and solidarity from Ljubljana, Maribor, Pristina, Zagreb, and Dubrovnik, to Sarajevo and Belgrade.

“The awareness that Yugoslavia had been destroyed had not yet prevailed; the trace, the bloody thread, that it was possible, despite everything, still possible to save, retain, not give up, prevent—that thought and feeling, that thread, was an immense driving energy for constituting resistance, and even for acting out of grief. It was not an illusion, but strength. Which Biljana Jovanović carried. Moving, traveling, acting in resistance in the epicenter, Belgrade, and thereby embracing and greeting everyone, everywhere ‘outside’. It wasn’t called ‘sending a message’ back then; it wasn’t a ‘message’, it was truth and love, not a message, but a state and a stance. Resistance is an act of love,” wrote Borka Pavićević on the anniversary of Biljana Jovanović’s death.

She died in Ljubljana on March 11, 1996, from a brain tumor, the same disease that had afflicted her father, and from which her younger brother later died. Besides a small street in Mali Mokri Lug, Biljana Jovanović’s name is also borne by a literary award presented by the Serbian Literary Society since 2006. However, at this moment, in this society, in these cities full of ambiguous energy, the memory of Biljana Jovanović is most cherished by walking.

[1] from the poem “Voices in the distance” (Glasovi u daljini), written on August 5, 1995. The Guardian (Čuvar) (Kontrast, 2025).