In Your Dreams is Šime Knežević’s second poetry collection – his first was the prize-winning chapbook The Hostage (2019). In this new collection, Knežević looks to fragmented dreamscapes and their arrested cyclical motions to explore the malaise of cultural memory. Again, I fear that I reduce the collection too much to just its diasporic affects, and feel that I must emphasise the vastness of this poetic project, that imbricates digital aesthetics, popular culture, and the physical rhythms of labour. Nonetheless, just as with Peres da Costa, I am drawn to how Knežević’s diasporic poetics speaks to the psychic lures of memory, and the unease of the entrapping rhythms that hang about like an earworm:
I summon a wav. file, and I sink a jaw-dropping way to hide in continuous desire. (‘Autofiction,’ 34-35)
Knežević’s motions of return are less to do with body and place than they are with the rhythms of displacement in quotidian experiences, and how these situate the body and mind. He draws together fragments of the past, revisiting the memory-scapes and post-memory-scapes of his Croatian heritage to produce a sense of stasis-in-motion.
Knežević and Peres da Costa are linked by their interest in writing for the stage. Knežević draws on the theatricality and performative dimensions of the stage for his portrayal of cultural inheritance in In Your Dreams. In place of the father’s house which figured, for Peres da Costa, as the site of memory and malaise, Knežević turns to the theatrical to explore the cyclical traps of memory. Culture as a witnessed, mimicked, and performed practice survives through such reproduction. In the poem ‘Cast’ (2-3), the speaker interprets the script for his own adulthood through the stage-lit performances of his parents’ conflicts.
Describe the play. Two adults, Probably a couple, arguing. What about? Why don’t you listen? Untranslatable. Stage lights, front row: felt as if taken and altered by it. (2)
These conflicts we witness in our childhood may set the stage for our own growth. In such a staging, a “scene I often revisit,” we may mistake these ugly feelings of diasporic conflict as the script for culture itself (2). Knežević continues:
Their story won’t develop, conflict unresolved. I compose myself in their costume, character, language and dilemma—in this scene I assemble my prototype: agitated, intangible, wronged, uneasy, ideals balkanised. (3)
Here is a conflict of the mind in what it means to continue and reproduce culture. An anxiety for cultural survival (a Balkan heritage) clashes with the resulting fragmentation when cultural reproduction operates through a failed mimesis (balkanised).
Beyond the theatre, Knežević’s collection also delights in the polysemous potential of water poetics to explore the cyclic trappings of memory, stuck in stasis whilst emulating movement. I love the serene scenes that the poem ‘Ždrilo, 1989’ (4-7) evokes. Situated by the water “in the cold grasp of Velebit air,” yet warm amid the love of family and the speaker’s sister’s borrowed “woollen coat,” Knežević evokes the warm fuzzy memories of childhood, which are often so at odds with the spatial formations of our present (4).
Dad rows across Divojačka Poljica. I utter tiny ghosts: my confidence to speak his native tongue as opaque and inert. At the end of my exhale the boat draws in closer to shore. (5)
The father here serves a similar psychic function to the fevered father in Peres da Costa’s poem. The paternal is a site of longing, for return and for heritage, for a link to the picturesque past and to the familial. Yet, the fantasy, trapped in cycles of memory, is also grounded, by an uncanny father who balances the boat “at spirit level” in the calm lapping waves of the Croatian coast (5).
Linguistic loss is another barrier to this site of memory. Unable to speak out to his father, the speaker lingers in this recollection of the boat’s motion, uneasily and passively anticipating a way out of the cycles of memory.
[…] I am a memory of a memory. Waiting for him to remember me. (4)
And yet, this is a history that does not belong to the speaker, he has no control over the direction of the memories: “My father maintains the course / between the past and future, his” (6). Though this beautifully calm poem depicts a leisurely boat trip around a shoreline, the romantic “clear […] shallow water” and the “school of fish applying their elliptical / brushstrokes” dissolve into lofty memory (6). How does the diasporic condition mediate, meditate, and ritualise the motions of our ancestors? Knežević’s serene landscape of fantasy is one which the speaker seems loathe to leave behind, but he has little choice except to disembark.
His nephew disembarks. When do we? From this memory. We have to. But we push the boat out one more time. (7)
Knežević adds to such water poetics in ‘Autofiction’ (34-35), where he explores the promise of self-determination in sailing the seas and finding one’s own way.
The author composes an homage to a self who sings and sails on the great game of once upon a time. I am a sailor. I sing to excess. I am as perverse as degenerate art. I typecast myself across digital space. (34)
This poetic wild west – of finding the self and joyful adventure – is exciting, with its archipelagic, diasporic poetics that delight in the cohesion of the incohesive.
I ‘feel’ no separation between aspects of my contents, a century of classes, visits and titles. I feel intact. (34)
Yet, at the same time, the undulating motion of the waves are unsettled and dysmorphic, uncertain of each move and motion.
I am as calm and confused as the sea. I signal with my hand. I think it’s a natural gesture. (35)
Knežević returns to tease out the ugly affects of confusion within the diasporic mode, but these are concurrent with the generative and exciting agency of self-determination.
The feel of a daydream is like the feel of a ripple in the ocean. I am a ship in distress at sea. (35)
As I read and re-read through Knežević’s and Peres da Costa’s collections, I feel as if I am re-reading my own cultural memories or, as Knežević might suggest, my parents’ memories. In a post-memory, mental landscape of places that may or may not be part of my own story (was I really there or was it an invention from the stories my parents told me?), I am left scavenging through fragments. I try to make sense of the diasporic condition as if trawling through family medical histories to understand my predisposition to particular conditions. The power of such parallel readings of diasporic sense-making (a triadic web across Goa, Croatia, and my own Hong Kong-Timor Leste post-memories) is perhaps this possibility to celebrate and commiserate in diasporic communion. After reading these collections, I feel as if I have just returned from group therapy, all of us celebrating healthier relationships with our ‘condition’ (see: finding joyful and nuanced meanings of diaspora). And I feel grateful for the opportunity to make sense of and admit such ugly feelings of shame and guilt.
