real-socialist photograph
- real-socialist photograph
my first photographwas one of mum and dadon the moonmum looking at dad lovingly, dad eyeing me warily(always fretting about whether something or other would succeed)in the background a giant new year treeshielding them from asteroid shardsflying in a moonish dimension
dad was wearing a plaid shirt the kind I guessevery yugoslav man must've hadback then. it could be seen in the DIY pagesfor men in the burda magazine
mum was wearing an infrared tracksuit made out of materialwhich absorbed the strains of endless giving. mum … cut from the clothof housework and emotional labour, in slippers which weren't à pompons
dad paranoid, mum head over heels
dad afraid that all beauty would perishmum unafraid, unstoppable, laying tracks to it
I was seven and I still hadn'tdeveloped the ritual of imagining sinking in an earthquake.it's a rather useful ritualwhereby one imagines a sudden earthquake sovividly one can feel the room movesee the shelves, books, walls fall, ceilings crash,the shell of the tower block cave in. the ritual develops subconsciously. [End Page 3] either you've got it or you don't.it's a useful ritual, an earthquake can't catch you by surprise
at seven I still hadn't discovered that talent, but nowI know the excitement I felt in the brieftime-space of a clickwas tantamount to an amorous socialist earthquakein which I sank, elated,into a moon crater [End Page 4]
MAJA SOLAR was born in 1980 in Zagreb. She holds a doctoral degree in philosophy. She has published three books of poetry: Makulalalalatura (2008), Of Course It's Not Natural (2015), and Without Spices (2017). She is the author of more than thirty articles on social theory. Since 2015, she has been working as a translator for the Serbian edition of Le Monde Diplomatique.
MIRZA PURIĆ is a literary translator, most recently of Faruk Šehić's Under Pressure (2019) and, with Ellen Elias Bursać, cotranslator of Miljenko Jergović's Inshallah, Madonna, Inshallah (forthcoming). His work has appeared in Agni, Asymptote, EuropeNow, H. O. W., and elsewhere. He is in-house translator of the Sarajevo Writers' Workshop and a contributing editor at EuropeNow, and he has served as an editor-at-large at Asymptote.
