\u201cForgetting Spreads from the Center\u201d
-First story of the March monthly chapter-<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Written by Dunja Karanovi\u0107
Voiceover by Marija Drndi\u0107<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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]<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/em>. The red, Czech-made number seven is just old enough that Biljana herself could have ridden in it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Memory demands space\u2014concrete, 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 Mladi\u0107 Boulevard on Yuri Gagarin Street, which receives a fresh coat of paint every few weeks. Paint, fortunately, is not concrete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s route. Marx and Engels Square was renamed a year after Biljana\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The newly announced state first robs you of the joy of walking the streets<\/em>, she wrote a year prior to that, in her anti-war correspondence with Maru\u0161a Krese, Radmila Lazi\u0107, and Rada Ivekovi\u0107. 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\u2014and 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The center expands through capillaries: a dozen stops after Vukov Spomenik (an indigenous resident), the Boulevard (sans Revolution) gains its tributaries\u2014bronchi, bronchioles, and finally, cul-de-sac alveoli, and these alveoli bear women’s names. Biljana\u2019s street is located in the Mali Mokri Lug settlement, near the streets of Rebecca West, Maga Magazinovi\u0107, Ru\u017ea Jovanovi\u0107, Simonida, Mara Taborska, Jovanka Bon\u010di\u0107, and Jelena Lozani\u0107. The fragile memory that survives at this terminus of the number seven is female, yet fragmentary and unselective\u2014here, side by side, live writers, journalists, artists, nurses and architects, Chetnik women and leftists, collaborationists and anti-war activists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Biljana Jovanovi\u0107 officially received her street in August 2005. In the same issue of the Official Gazette<\/em> where this decision was formalized, it was also announced that Neimar Park was changing its name to Jelena \u0160anti\u0107 Park, though hardly anyone calls it that today. Biljana Jovanovi\u0107 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\u2019s friends solemnly marked the opening of this street, ten years after her death, Slobodan Milo\u0161evi\u0107 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n [1] An excerpt from Biljana\u2019s anti-war correspondence with Radmila Lazi\u0107, Maru\u0161a Krese, and Rada Ivekovi\u0107, published under the title “The Wind Goes Toward the South and Turns About Unto the North” (B92, 1994).<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n