Laertes – förlag

The Insulted Plays make up a tetralogy that begins in a state of strife in the Russia of 2017, goes on to inhabit the vortex of a transformational Belarus, and ends at an Archimedean point to the planet Earth itself.

Like an “all against all,” Insulted. Russia tracks the sharp divisions in society — a dissevering that is fated for clashes.

Beginning on election night, 2020, Insulted. Belarus dramatizes the birthing of a body politic and the vicious, abortive intervention in response to it.

The Voices of the New Belarus resound as the groundswell of the nation: a polyvocal, verbatim chorus that attests to the blood-stained aftermath of widespread protests. Their voices form a pillar of every kind of strength.

Like a microcosm suspended in the cosmos, the space capsule of Insulted. Planet houses an international crew that is riven by historical tensions and pitched by a sudden war on Earth.

Although animated by acts that strike like a slap in the face of our humanity, The Insulted Plays direct us on — to decency, hope, fellow-feeling.

At a remove from Sarajevo, on a writer’s residency inFrance, a playwright finds himself in the thrall of echoes from the past — in alabyrinth of siege-time references.

This is not an ordinary memoir, but an exploration oftraumatic experience as revealed by remnants of association. It is also a mappingof otherness from the standpoint of the stranger, of near affinities that endin divergence, color as a point of contrast, of animosity like a bolt from theblue.

The work of a master playwright from the Balkans, GoranStefanovski, is anthologized here. A charged family drama, Wild Flesh, opensthe collection, plotting the ideological rifts and baleful foreign intrusions thatgripped Yugoslavia in the advent of World War ll.  The False Bottom follows as a work ofpure subversion. In three movements set in disparate years, 1911, 1983, and1999, a single character unsettles the powers that be, quakes the very ground —the fake premises — of the dominant order and frees the forces of life. TattooedSouls is set in America, played out in an emigree community. Though embroiledin a new world, they bear the telling imprints of the old. Casabalkan (afterCasablanca) is a gambling boat afloat in neutral waters wherein everyparty to the war can interact freely, a microcosm in which every element can intermingle.In the short Ex-Yu, a daughter is in pursuit of her father’s finalmoments. Grilling two witnesses, she attempts an orphic journey to the scene ofa suicide en route to battle. These plays speak bluntly to the human condition.Though set in the recent past, they track with the pressing concerns of ourtime and balance on the same precarity.

These texts in the wake of invasion, written by the members of the Theater of Playwrights, Kyiv, in spring, summer, and fall of 2022, have a documentary thrust. Reporting from diverse places in Ukraine, from Kyiv, Lviv, Mykolaiv, from occupied Kherson, from the front itself, and locations farther afield in countries of refuge; employing diverse modes of expression: poetry, screenplay, dialogue, diary, diatribe, comedy, short story, recollection, each is a singular response to a seismic and agonizing shift. Each is an act of defiance as well, an assertion of the full human weight, of the integrity of a people.

Collected here are four full-length plays and one piercing scene by the eminent poetic language, social justice dramatist, Karen Malpede:The particular twists in bloodlines, in psychosexual scars, in cataclysmic social forces are what US exposes; the very particular violence and reconciliations that recur endlessly between two disparate human beings who confront one another as lover and beloved. Better People are to be concocted in this genetic research play that interrogates the true import of better. From the depths of a dystopia, in the wake of the climate apocalypse, four rebels enact a daring plan to give birth to something new — to beings Other Than We. In a great leap of fellow feeling, the separate griefs of three diverse characters converge — together with that of a blue roan horse: Blue Valiant.From the fastness of observation, in Dinner During Yemen, two foreign experts dine to the tune of bloodcurdling screams.Each of these works represents a heroic attempt to liberate the world.

These dystopian dramas envision and interrogate scenes of extremity on the planet and within the social order. They depict a world that is inundated; a world deprived of water; a world that feeds on scraps, that runs on vestiges; a world that is devoid of any natural habitat; and foresee the furthermost assault of authoritarianism. Scattered among the scenarios are acts of radical selfishness. One text invents a stratagem that depends on radical love.

In the final months of Xhevdet Bajraj’s life, he producednearly 300 poems, writing exclusively in his native Albanian, not employing thelanguage of Mexico — the country of his exile — as he had sometimes done. This bookis the first of a trilogy dedicated to these poems.  

He had given the manuscript a title: Angelus Novus, aftera monoprint by Paul Klee. Walter Benjamin interprets it like this: “A Kleepainting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about tomove away from something he is fixedly contemplating . . . His face is turnedtoward the past . . . where he sees one single catastrophe which keeps pilingwreckage upon wreckage . . . The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, andmake whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it hasgot caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer closethem.”

Bajraj contemplated Kosovo fixedly and added to his gaze thesuffering he witnessed in his place of refuge. Unrest is the essence of hiswork, unrest and dislocation, but his poetry does make whole, and as if toawaken the dead.

This series bears a name borrowed from an earlier poem: COFFIN/ When I die/ I hope they will look/ for the blackbox of my life/ among my poems.