A promotion event for the poetry collection “Ovo je mogla da bude naša dnevna soba” (This Could Have Been Our Living Room) by Boban Stojanović was held at the Heartefact House on the last day of Pride Week, on Friday, September 8th, just before Belgrade Pride. With this special event, Heartefact not only promotes the excellent poetry of Boban Stojanović, a long-time human rights activist and founder of the Belgrade Pride organization, but also expresses gratitude for his years of courage and perseverance in fighting for freedom for all of us.
After experiencing years of physical attacks and death threats, which went unaddressed, Boban was forced to leave Serbia and settle in Canada in 2016. For the first time in his life, he felt peace. A life without the fear of uncertainty of any kind allowed him to focus on writing, leading to his first poetry collection, “Ovo je mogla da bude naša dnevna soba”.
When asked what inspires his poems and how they come into being, Boban responded: “At one point, when I felt tired of what grandmothers call ‘the weariness of life,’ I noticed that there are certain burdens I carry with me every day. Those burdens are memories, not memories of the entire traumatic event, but just one frozen image related to the event. And it doesn’t matter what happened afterward; what matters is that image. I found it somewhere in my thoughts, understood its weight, and wrote a poem about it. That’s how my poems come into being.”
The subjects of his poems are members of his family, friends, schoolchildren, people he has met, the aggressors who assaulted him, wise and brave women he knows. Some of these women were speakers at this event: Slađana Novaković, an editor from the publishing house Rende, actress Aleksandra Janković, and journalist Aida Jokanović. This year’s Pride godmother, Ida Prester, also joined the event via video link.
After the opening remarks by Heartefact’s director Andrej Nosov, Aleksandra Janković and Aida Jokanović read several of Boban’s poems. Boban’s willingness to bare his deepest fears and traumas from his life and share them with readers did not leave the speakers or the audience without tears. Even though Boban attended the book promotion via video link, the audience in the Heartefact House’s living room experienced all the emotions and the weight of the experiences that Boban wanted to convey to us through his poetry.
*The program during Pride Week was supported by the Swedish Institute through the Creative Partnership program.