Cultural heroes of the community or Brotherhood of Saint James

Writes for Kosovo Online: Muharem Bazdulj, a writer and journalist

When America was at its cultural peak, it had the ability to turn essentially anti-American criticism conveyed through popular culture into its own weapon. The best American genre films of the last century consistently confirm this. There's also an element of this in popular music. When the members of the U2 group mixed their fascination with American landscapes with criticism of American foreign policy on the album "The Joshua Tree," the audience mostly received this initial impression. On that album, there is a song about "the hill where one tree grows" ("One Tree Hill"), in which it is said that someone whose last name Bono pronounces as "Jara" sang, and how his song was a weapon in the hands of love, and how we all hear how his blood still cries from the soaked ground.

Back then, there was no internet, I was a kid and didn't know who "Jara" was. It took years for me to realize that Bono meant Victor Jara, a Chilean poet, songwriter, and theater director who was brutally murdered after Pinochet's coup against Salvador Allende. They say that the executioners first broke and cut off his fingers at the stadium so he couldn't play the guitar.

Half a century has passed since Pinochet's coup and Jara's death. The coup took place on September 11, 1973 (and therefore, September 11, 2001, was not the first "September eleventh" significant for the US), and Jara’s death occurred five days later (twelve days before the poet's unfulfilled forty-first birthday). The whole event had, of course, global significance, but after the end of the Cold War, it was forgotten in much of the world. It was not forgotten in Latin America, but, in a beautiful way, it turned out that it was not forgotten in the Balkans, in Serbia, in the former Yugoslav region.

Namely, an album titled "Above Darkness (Songs for Victor Jara)" was released by the Cultural Center of Vojvodina "Milos Crnjanski" on that occasion. The album is a kind of anthology of the best alternative ex-Yugoslav musicians, all the lyrics are the work of the Herzegovinian poet Mehmed Begic, and the most deserving person for the entire project is the poet and singer-songwriter Milos Zubac, who, in the accompanying booklet to the album, among other things, wrote, "This year marks half a century since Jara's withdrawal from this reality. The wonderfully complex world of South America will then pay attention to the memory of the cultural hero of the community, the guiding star whenever one needs to confront new manifestations of evil. Equally complex and inexplicable is the world of the Balkans, which itself has literally been immersed in evil, and has its own martyrs among creators. However, not enough is known here about Victor Jara. But it would be good to be known because the evil that he did not bend to and which could only break his body but not his spirit is the same evil that visits us from generation to generation, and often takes us over. Just as the light of Jara's life and Jara's songs can awaken our own light and give birth to our song. This is the purpose of the sacrifice that the great singer of the people offered on the altar of civilization's madness, a sacrifice that, like the one that was crucial for humanity two millennia ago, redeems and renews a faltering world".

Readers of our portal know Milos Zubac as the author of the album "Kosovske". He also spoke about the somewhat absurd situation that more has been written about his songs based on traditional music from Kosovo and Metohija in Great Britain than in Serbia. However, there is nothing unusual about the fact that the author of the "Kosovske" album has created an album dedicated to Victor Jara. As Zubac himself eloquently puts it, the world of Latin America is "equally complex and inexplicable as the world of the Balkans." Moreover, it is far from trivial that almost simultaneously, Ivo Andric wrote about Njegos as a tragic hero of the thought of Kosovo and about Simon Bolívar as a liberator. Milos Zubac recognizes such connections.

Here, one should write something in the genre of "music criticism" and comment on each song from the album with at least a sentence or two, but that would require a different text. However, what constitutes the common thread of the entire album for me is the entirely natural "rhyming" of the Balkans and Latin America. The lyrics by Mesa Begic, a man who knows both of these worlds, have great merits in that. But it is also not by chance that one gets the feeling that every song, no matter how much it is about Jara, has its origin here, in our parts. Because if we share similar crimes and dictators, colonizers and oppressors, revolutionaries and liberators, then presumably we also share similar artists; two fraternal ends of the world.

This can also be summarized differently; one of the most beautiful frescoes in Gracanica depicts St. James, and the capital of Chile, Santiago, the city where Victor Jara was executed, was named after St. James. There is always a connection; you just have to know how to see them. Milos Zubac knows how to look.