In Which A Woman Needs A Place

Say You Believe Me

by SUMEJA TULIC

My lonesomeness in Belgrade is every weirdo’s dream.

Most nights I curl in my hotel bed and watch cable television reruns of Sex and the City and Twin Peaks. If I am in a room that ends with the number 3, I get a balcony that overlooks the park and the parliament. Instead of staging an honoring service for Ivo Andric who lived in the same premises during 1933, I take a cup of coffee and, at times, think of Special Agent Dale Cooper or someone else — random, fictional, inaccessible and according to some dogma forbidden or dangers — I would gladly share my room with. In the afternoon, couples, awkward threesomes, loners and who-not will stand in front of the cinema next door. They will pass the Humphrey Bogart life-sized statue on their way in, and I will completely forget them.

As it gets darker outside, the towers and the thin and tall endings of buildings meet up, there, in the rosy and purple mash up of fog and sunset. Beneath them, in unpredictable sequences, the city's many lights will blaze and shortly disappear.

As in any other telling about loneliness, this one implies heartbreak too. Mine in Belgrade was like my nana’s stroke — it took time to notice its occurrence and took a lifetime to sort out its consequences.

He was the embodiment of the imperfections in reaction to which I metamorphose into one crazy but hopefully lovable deer. I guess he is that chemical agent that summons the combination of sweet and fuck in me. You see, when I’m not sure of things, I dilute the matter additionally by using terminology from domains I know nothing about. This is why chemistry, biology and deer have hijacked this paragraph.

In winter, I wear a boyish coat and pair of sinkers and stroll around. By the way, pretending to be a feminized boy is my No. 1 safety rule in walking alone at night. Obviously, No. 2 is looking like a poor person (not to be confused with hobo chic!). If I were to tell anyone what I see each time I go out at night, it would sound like a bunch of unconnected fixations on shops run by the Orthodox church scattered here and there; girls working in fast food places; shades of oily green lights that cut through trees and parked cars; the touching symmetry of the bridges crossing Sava.

The nervous exchanges of looks and polite smiles with strangers at night are like the sudden skype calls of unknown creeps drawn to your profile picture. There is something utterly wild and stupid that makes me pick their call. I guess it is the same thing that compels characters in horror films to walk alone into the woods. That is why when I am passing by the Terazije tunnel I let go of my hand, waiting for someone to take it in his own.

As the night progresses, the cars go wilder. And then, it all comes crashing into one silent hour, when I can only hear the old elevator taking tipsy guests to their rooms. On the other side of the city, around the times thieves break in houses, the animals at the Belgrade Good Hope Garden zoo become louder.

To portray the surreal nineties in Belgrade I recount the events in the Belgrade Good Hope Garden. The zoo’s first chimpanzee, Sammy, used to escape often and when he did it in 1990, the manager of the zoo made a televised appeal for his recovery and organized a rooftop expedition to lure Sammy back. With trade sanctions imposed, the manager made several appeals for carrots and cabbage and asked the city to provide hot water for a newborn hippo.

Then there was the incident with the elephant called Twiggy that was lent for breeding purposes by a Dutch zoo. Apparently the Dutch, compelled by the genocide in Srebrenica, asked for Twiggy back. As Twiggy failed to breed, the director of the Belgrade zoo resisted her return. I am not sure what happened to Twiggy after this. Also, I am not sure where are Nijas and Azra, the two camels that Muammar el-Qaddafi brought to Belgrade during a conference of nonaligned nations.

Mornings come fast in hotel rooms, even faster when you have to leave for work. There is that part of the morning appreciated only by those who got off from school or work to finish an assigned errand or to attend an out of office meeting. With the expected amount of exaggeration that goes into every metaphor — it feels like a free trip to a place you cannot afford to travel to. The joy I get from it in Belgrade is double the one I have in my hometown.

As I am map-illiterate, I will get lost on my way to point B for sure. Straying away from the usual streets bring unexpected sceneries and often a chance to feel home when you are really miles away from it. Once in Stockholm I took an early walk before breakfast and on my way I stumbled upon really tiny school children walking with their parents to school. The way they waved and shouted sweet hellos to each other from a considerable distance stayed with me to this day.

My favorite Belgrade intermediary connecting points so far are a flock of pigeons that flew, despite the cold rain, over the city's fortress, and my own reflection in the display of the municipal library covered with Danilo Kis posters. For a moment it seemed we were having a conversation. As I was entertaining this idea, I was already at the Slavija Square, between a bus and a tram, inches away from a speeding car. If your flight ever gets delayed, and you are forced to stay over, the airport minibus will take you to Hotel Slavija. Wake up earlier and immerse your self among sleepy Belgradians crossing the Slavija intersections with a cigarette or a warm pastry in their hand.

The cab drives to the airport are usually composed of 20-minute Yugo-nostalgic rants that cathartically culminate in conspiracy theories that perfectly explain the violent crumbling of the old country. I hate nostalgia, but what I hate more is being an asshole to a middle aged man opening himself to a random person. So I lose myself in these conversations, nod my head and agree loudly with complete nonsense.

Obviously, I’m not that cool someone you bring to meet your bandmates. The essentials of cool imply withstanding silence around new acquaintances and suppressing the urge to impress. I fail at both. I spent a great deal of elementary school being the substitute teacher to my classmates. The power I drained from my classmates’ submissiveness still powers my confidence, so I am OK with not meeting the band. Your band sucks anyways!

Last time I saw him, my deer routine failed me. All that shape shifting is tiring. Pretending to be prey for sake of huntsmen’s affection is deadly. 

Sumeja Tulic is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Sarajevo. You can find her website here and her flickr here.

Photographs by the author.

"Joy" - Julian (mp3)

"Lust Spell" - Julian (mp3)

In Which We Dislike Geographical Distances

Of Eros

by SUMEJA TULIC

I hate geographical distances and maybe that is why I am fond of photographs of celebrities catching flights on several different airports in one week. There is something in defying distance, something almost blasphemous or at least exciting in changing the scenery of her destiny every now and then.

At home we didn’t own a globe or a map of any kind. In my dad’s office there was one showing the former Yugoslavia’s topography. I never found it to be sufficient. My fingers would wonder outside of its borders sometimes to Italy, sometimes south, across the Mediterranean Sea, back to the place I was.

I often remember these finger travels when I’m at airports or at bus stations; also I still do these travels. I close my eyes and randomly place my finger somewhere. Before I do so, I make sure I’m far from the center, where Europe is, and that I’m not pointing very low or very high, so I’m at a safe distance from both poles. Now, very often, selfishly, I miss my self around some people who are far away, and then, I look up a stash of photographs in messy and unnamed folders.

One of those people is Raphael. We met at the opening of an exhibition of broken relationships. Among everyday items and quirky and sophisticated commemorative objects of past love stories, stood the only black man in the room. Over the curse of one very hectic week in August, I got to know this tall, Dutch student of English and literature. My initial drive was to tell him all the “interesting” things I learned from my high school librarian who occasionally taught postmodern literature. I’m pretty sure I followed my initial drive, because it is the only explanation for me defining love to him as "the creative energy of Eros." Of course, I was the one who asked that question in first place.

I didn’t stop speaking or being endlessly happy to have met him. At points it looked like an infatuation, and maybe it was. We didn’t explore that option, because among other things, he had infectious mononucleosis, commonly known as the kissing disease. Unlike the sleeping beauty, Raphael could not have been woken. On the contrary, he could have passed his sickness with one. If I was to be infected with fatigue and fever, I wish it would have been because of someone like Raphael.

I try not to think about it when he drives me on his bike in Amsterdam, when I’m leaning on his back, trying to be cool about it, and about the bare windows of homes of Amsterdammers implying unrestrained comfort; the river, the screaming tourists, the fact that it is so beautiful all together.

I don’t wish I had met Raphael when he was a teen for a simple reason, between playing basketball and playing a text based supernerdy multiplayer online game, he and his crowd were into coining nicknames. I bet I would have been nicknamed something similar to what they called the Christian girl: "Vaginus Innocentius." Also, Raphael was in love and could barely eat because of Tanya, a girl he remembers like “stunning natural beauty who I never dared to hit on.” With Tanya and later Charlotte on his mind, we could have never talked about anything or more enjoyably sat together in silence like we sometimes do.

If we forget Deny the dog, Selma is the only child. By all definitions and expectations, she should be a loner, self-centered and selfish. Yes, she is a loner, and she may seem at times self-centered, but she is never selfish. When I got to know Selma, I realized these trades are also chosen ways in which she deals with intrusions of the world, how she ignores the screaming brutalities of our war-torn country.

Selma and I were two cocky idiots who shared the same concerns. Our concerns were so frivolous, but we were two seventeen year olds who thought their observations are beyond their primer object of interest. We would often silently stand next to each other on the bus, observing people. Selma would notice the leftovers of hair gel on schoolboys’ ears; I would nod with a smile.

I will forever remember when I knew she was someone with whom I could share my secrets. We were at a school trip in a beach resort in Turkey. The loud pop music, the enormous sun and the sweet taste of food and drinks were making me dizzy most of the time. When I was with Selma, sharing our dizziness while walking hand in hand, the dizziness would slowly fade away. I guess, if each of us got an equally dizzy or sick companion, we would no longer feel any of it. Our platonic lesbian parade distracted the hormone-raging men of the beach resort. I’m not sure if we knew the full meaning of patriarchy then, but we surely felt like we were beating it in the stomach.

Selma lived outside of Sarajevo, in the suburbs of a smaller town. She would drive her bike around her idyllic neighborhood covered with apple and oak trees. She loved Alanis Morisette, Radiohead and Björk. Recently I have disclosed to Selma that I actually can’t stand Björk. Her squishy and at the same time screaming voice puts me at unease. “Unlike you, the eternal tranquilizing human pill,” I told her. Selma smiled back from a Skype window chat. She is in Japan now. Just recently she learned how to ignore the sounds of Tokyo and to appreciate when she senses that there are thousands of humans less out there.

The first thing that Selma and Helena have in common is their appreciation of Miranda July. Both of them lent or gave me something of her work. Selma lent me the DVD of Me and You and Everyone We Know, Helena lent me No One Belongs Here More Than You. She spotted the yellow cover of the books on a gas pump in middle of nowhere in Germany. It would have been exceptionally great if Helena found another book by July there, among love novels, porn and gossip publications.

Unlike most of us teenagers of the Scully and Mulder era, Helena never thought of dinosaurs or NLO. Like now, when alone, she read in her bed and wrote “really embarrassing poems” and made “faux-sad drawings.” Helena was born to be loved and listen to. I love her eyes and her expressions when she tells me a story or retells what happened to her since last we met. Helena’s charm is in the comfortable way she bridges the maturity of her soul and the unexpected desires of her young self. She never stops to be wise, understanding or compassionate. Not even when she breaks hearts.

I could easily picture her 16-year-old self deciding to become “more of a girl." She would put lots of make up, borrow sexy dresses, and drink purple and green drinks. I bet, even then, she would single out from all the smoke, glitter, sounds of the clubs she is been to a beautiful lyrical scene to share with the diary or her friends.

Last time I saw Helena, she cooked a dinner for my sister and me in her home in Amsterdam. We sat around the table, a bunch of soon to be adults, concerned about everything, caring actually for nothing. I wish I was there when Helena’s first childrens' play premiered. After the show a mesmerized eight-year old asked Helena if the story was somewhere in a book so he could read it again.

I met Luka on Valentine's Day in a cinema, at an Ingmar Bergman screening. Most people would in defining Luka use the sentence “unlike anyone I have met” for reasons most limited to his calm and yogi like posture, and the fact that he wears things previously worn by his late dad or other male figures from his life. Luka is like nobody I have met because he is never angry, anxious or upset because of the weather or out of boredom. His discontents are short and mostly results of quarrels with his lovely Nona over groceries bought in the supermarket instead of farmer's market, and over “the extensive” usage of chemicals in cleaning.

I love walking with Luka. Few months ago, on one of our strolls, we stopped by the Memorial for children killed during the siege of Sarajevo. Luka casually flipped the rolls engraved with the names of the killed children only to stop it suddenly and say, “So here you have been.” Apparently, he has reconnected with most of his kindergarten and elementary school friends on Facebook, with few exceptions, among which is the girl whose name he just found. She and few other classmates’ faces were untagged on random class photos that every now and then someone would post.

I stood next to him, watching his calmness transform into something even more beautiful - a silent non-imposing grief. That is Luka; my warm friend who loves the mornings and is never ashamed to recommend a film by saying “I cried while watching it.” Luka spends the little free time he has during the week traveling through Google street view. Although we live in the same city, his profound sense of life and joy makes him, sometimes, unreachable and far away. I come with my daily worries and discontents and Luka hugs me and I feel war never happened, everybody is fine and we are still young enough not to be responsible for anything.

Now at home we have dad’s University Atlas from 1977. Geopolitically, the world has changed since the year of publication. Russia is no longer in a great Soviet Union, there is only one Germany, and Djibouti is an independent country. Last time I opened the University Atlas, my finger pointed somewhere in Pakistan. Wonderful.

Sumeja Tulic is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Sarajevo. You can find her website here. She last wrote in these pages about somebody else. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"That Was Only Wasting Time" - Kissed Her Little Sister (mp3

"I Ain't Got a Friend" - Kissed Her Little Sister (mp3)

In Which All Of This Has Nothing To Do With Sex

Self-Credited

by SUMEJA TULIC

The way it goes for not that pretty girls with freckles and wavy hair is to adopt a survivor mode that enables anticipations associated with pretty girls. And that is exactly what I did. I chose rich and to some extent delusional interpretations of my reality and coupled that with curiosity and outspokenness.

Of course, if you are raised in a confused patriarchal family – where your mother is your father and your father is a mother with short outbreaks of bad temper – this will get you into lots of trouble. For instance, the first time I was punished for my curiosity was when I asked why Jews and Muslims wear small hats and should one give it up? Had I not had my own interpretation of the slap that surprised both me and my father, I could have gone through life blaming him for my subsequent lack of courage, sense of adventure and maybe even lack of academic ambition, but I took pride in the fact that I felt fear and anger in my father’s eyes more than the warmth that seared my cheek. I just knew I had to.

Luckily, amongst the decomposed layers of things, ignorance and fear that made my 1990s, fragments of narratives slipped in. I never got the whole story or the accurate chain of events. All I knew was fueled by the excitement that rushed in while realizing that I had nowhere to go with my questions. My mother was a sad beautiful woman trapped in a desert, my father was tired and worried and most he could do was to explain verses from the Quran in a puppeteer sort of a way. Our school textbooks were the well-implemented thoughts of a poorly educated submissive male.

My knowledge on sex came from few completely different formats and sources. My school friends and graffiti could give speculative information on the subject in form of nervously written "Fuck." However, in one of the houses my family lived in, the former attendant left a stash of Van Damme movies and what I later in life figured out was a porn collection. I never got to the porn, but the action films that my parents kept contained a few riddling scenes. Some disturbed me, others – such as the one in which a man literally bakes an egg on women’s chest – made me confused.

Later, while visiting a friend, I stumbled on One Thousand and One Nights. Strangely, my parents didn’t mind me sitting by myself on a green couch in their friend’s house; reading soft erotic tales dipped in a sea of adventures every time we visited. Up to this day I don’t really know how did I learn what sex technically meant. Actually, when I think of knowing about it, it is sort of a memory. A defused and blurred collection of cinematic fragments starring random people I knew, places and walls in dusty towns I lived in.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that intertextuality doesn’t only come to the well read amongst us. Of course, well read people can line up few legitimate footnotes beneath their claim. Others can't. I hope I don’t come off as a completely ignorant and smug, bragging about one's self-credited genius, because, in all honesty, I'm not trying to. If anything, this is inspired by acute depression and envy that I regularly feel when reading and listening to some of you, dear peers from other places.

The drama of it all is that I can divert myself from my own fault by rightfully blaming few dictators and warlords along with my teachers and parents. All those were members of a gang that crippled the education and wider academic upbringing of entire generations. And it was so easy: they took books off shelves and put nothing instead. Literally nothing.

During the lunch breaks at school, I would sneak out and cross the highway. I would run very fast to a newspaper stand. The vendor was used to being confronted by angry fathers demanding a refund, so I lied, telling him my parents gave me money to buy a kids' magazine. Once I was back at school, beneath my blue school uniform, the colorful pages of the magazine would be glued by sweat to my body. I knew I did my part. The rest was up to somebody else.

Coming back to not that pretty girls with freckles and wavy hair: when you grow up to be a not that pretty woman with very cute freckles and God knows what kind of hair, you realize that your survival mode fails you badly when you are talking to that attractive guy who seems very smart. But this is something completely different and I am not comfortable talking about it just yet.

Sumeja Tulic is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer and photographer living in Sarajevo. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about her childhood in Libya.

Photographs by the author. You can find more of her photography here.

"Paddling Out" - Miike Snow (mp3)

"Devil's Work" - Miike Snow (mp3)

"Black Tin Box" - Miike Snow & Lykke Li (mp3)