What is art? I will not even try to answer that question, since I acknowledge without any embarrassment that I would be out of my depth.

 

However, I do want to discuss its presence in Dokufest, not in the fictive genre of the festival which is the short film, but in the few documentaries which have blurred the thin line between the definition of purely art pieces and that of  a documentary, whose fan base has always held on to its journalistic approach.

One of the films shown in Dokufest, which plays coyly with the definition of a documentary as a journalistic tool, and reality as a subject of contemporary art, is Phil Collins’ “Zasto ne govorim srpski (na srpskom)”. Collins, whose funny luck’s to share a name with “The” Phil Collins (the singer), premiered his art piece/film originally intended for an art exhibition in the US, here in Prizren last night.

The film/art piece is a collection of bits and pieces from interviews Collins made with Albanians on the topic of why they do not speak Serbian anymore, by interviewing them in the Serbian language itself. With a variety of protagonists, Collins has put a together a story about colonialism and cultural hegemony, which puts question marks on a lot of things: the perceived inferiority of the Kosovar Albanian during Yugoslavia and Serbia’s occupation, the division line between nationalism and practicality in daily life and at the same time opens up the wound of war: the oppression and its brutal consequences shaped in human loss. The key figure of the film was a Serbian woman living in Gjakova, married to an Albanian, whose son went missing during the war only to be found later in one of the many massive graves in Serbia.

Three of the people appearing in the film were actually present during the screening, and although Collins himself was not, a semi sort-of debate followed. The interviewees were well-known public personas; Bujar Bukoshi former-PM, Greta Kaqinari, an educator and Halil Matoshi, editor. There were a few questions from the audience, but the whole discussion deviated into the “American culture hegemony” problem, instead of talking about things we apparently have gained in the war, such as the hatred towards a language we fondly and often have used just as English is used nowadays.

For people who were eventually convinced to express their “indifference” towards the use of Serbian in front of the camera, Matoshi and Bukoshi seemed fairly burdened with hatred towards the “language of the enemy”, and didn’t hesitate to show it publicly. Matoshi’s determination in speaking his bad Serbian flamboyantly and then claim that if he didn’t know it he would never learn it (nowadays), was to an extent comical.

He then continued by using an example of how Kosovar Albanians say “to sleep like a log” by using the idiom “to sleep like a lamb”, while Serbs use “to sleep like a man whose throat’s been cut” maybe in order to show us, linguistically prove to us that “the Serbian logic” is burdened with killings. Although I’m exaggerating a bit, I feel no sympathy for him nor Bukoshi, because when asked whether even after they’ve seen the film edited, do they still stand by it, they both poignantly confirmed this.

Bukoshi’s answers were even funnier, he gave an impression of a person who is put in a very uncomfortable position, but I guess he has had experience and is no rookie to such occasions. A former prime minister, and opposition politician, Bukoshi criticized “the bloody Serbian bastards” for not apologizing for the crimes the Serbian state did.

In the other side the long time educator Kaqinari, compared to Bukoshi’s and Matoshi’s statements, seemed very romantic when giving us the education morale speeches such as “more languages you know, the richer you are”.

These contradictory-with-themselves characters actually help the cause of the film, which is in a contradiction itself: why I don’t speak Serbian while apparently speaking it.  Collins amazingly achieved the artsy trick: how do you get people to remember and talk Serbian although knowing this causes them grave emotional distress. In the end the answer why Kosovars, or Albanians or whoever was in Collins’ mind, do not speak Serbian was only given us by the Serbian woman herself. Her tragedy, which in a sense is a collective one, is a consequence of the Serbian hegemony’s final distortion and that distortion is the reason why Serbian language is not quickly forgotten, but rather quickly repressed.