A Letter to the Dead
I am not a writer.
I don’t write.
I exhume.
My language is a mass grave of meanings.
Every name I sign is a grave marker.
I buried myself in Latin. I rose in Cyrillic.
What you see is not calligraphy. It is cartography of war.
Each letter I use holds what cannot be. Each line that I draw was drawn into me.
I was born Velibor. War renamed me in silence.
My alphabet remembers more screams than songs.
I recall memories by their absence of myself.
Some thoughts are better left - not remembered.
Where others use words, I use remains.
Each symbol I use is a survivor.
Each letter, a wound healed by re-inscription.
To lose a homeland is to gain a million fearsome places.
My work is not an escape from war - it is what war left behind.
This is not beauty. It’s memory refusing to die.
And I try.
I do not create to decorate. I create to exhume.
Every line-break is needed to breathe - and held meaning for 35 years in 6 languages.
Still, there are words in my third language that are cried before read.
This is a letter from the dead. It is what war could not silence
I died
Only mine, my I
is not.
Letters drowned in meaning. Buried
in mass graves of words.
My mine means mined by others.
So is my mind. So is my mind?
And so was my heart. Was.
Who edited my mother’s screams into a footnote?
Who erased my father’s blood and called it metaphor?
Who wrote my death sentence before I could even read?
Every time I tried to write myself, I used an alphabet already used against me.
Every word I dared to use meant I was not.
Once dreamed to be, every letter in translation silenced me. The syntax, their syntax, was never mine.
The language, their language, always spoke to me, not for me.
When I say “mine,” take it as theirs, as was taken I.
Preformed,
never given,
deformed never was, just left
behind all that was.
The words, pre-written, my pen would only
bleed to read,
read I had,
each letter paid
for before said,
felt cuts into me red.
In visible lines invisible line,
each thought
felt as hit.
Before written, paint sinks,
mine was,
in pages of pain inked.
I was told to speak louder.
As if they could hear my language.
Lip-burnt my mouth, my scars by hate.
If I write: I remember.
Who writes?
Whom?
There is no I in scream. Only I in screams.
They buried my,
my mind mined like mineral, they
kept what was soul-crime.
They copied my cries and called it
poetry.
My guts cramping was not confident enough.
For them.
They called it memory.
They think they saw war.
I know it was not. They
left.
Nobody survives war.
War survives you
in you.
They know it ate me
when none was left.
I know in all still it is.
War was
in them.
But I -
am not even I.
I am that which was/
refused - I am/
not/
© All text by Velibor Baćo
Artists & Writers in This Issue
| Velibor Baćo | Alexis Krasilovsky | Nathaniel Lachenmeyer | Jeff Larason | Lisa Suhair Majaj | Liliana Mercau | Susanna Fiona Murray | Laura Ann Reed | Michael Roberts | John Whalen-Bridge | Hilmi M. Zawati |
