For the New Agamemnons Who Will Come
The play, Balkan Bordello, was commissioned in 2015 by the National Theater of Montenegro in Podgorica. I agreed to write a Balkan version of The Oresteia by Aeschylus, a sort of, “Oresteia revisited!” It was easy to say yes, unaware of what awaited. But when I re-read Aeschylus’ play, I regretted my decision. I doubted I could do it, but now, there was no going back. Also, I found terrifying the degree to which his images of violence and murder resembled so closely what we went through in the Balkans during the 1990s and afterwards.
In Podgorica, the play was first performed as o.REST.es IN PEACE, a title with a double-meaning, which I changed when the play was produced a second time, in Prishtina at the National Theater of Kosovo in 2017. We had serious trouble there. A group of Kosovo Liberation Army veterans attacked the theater the day before opening night and demanded that the play be banned because, in their words, it was anti- national and insulted the “values of the liberation war.” There have always been more people around here who are poised to defend the “values of war,” and far fewer ready to defend the values of peace. In the end, the play did open in Pristina, but only with a heavy police presence. There was plenty of trouble but that is a conversation for another time. The veterans even wrote a review of the play after the premiere. Entertaining, right?
The most tragic aspect of war is, without a doubt, the blind faith of the people in the leaders who send them off to war. It is a form of unnatural, but conscious, submission. And a society loses its moral compass when a leader who rules by terror and calls for war is respected more than a prudent opposing one who calls for peace. Traditionally, in the Balkans, common criminals and bandits have been more popular than the wise or prudent. So, in the play, I wanted to portray this mentality and the madness that captured the Balkans in the 1990s. Also, I wanted to address the post-war period, a time that was just as “mad.” And although I refer to a “post war period,” actually I have the impression that for the Balkans, this is a permanent condition, that the Balkan peoples experience life as citizens of an endlessly “post-war” country. This means that crime, robbery, violence, and many other things, are tolerated as normal, because of the logic that, “Well, the war has only just ended.” It has been almost 30 years now, but the “post-war” shadows us like a ghost. And while brutality and evil were transformed into norms during the wars of the ‘90s in the Balkans, the post-war period created new norms — of fear and insecurity in daily life.
When this play was staged in Podgorica, one of the questions of the actors during rehearsals was: “Who is Agamemnon?” According to them, he could not have been a Montenegrin because the Montenegrins had not fought in the war and had never sought to conquer a foreign country (I mean, “They bombed Dubrovnik in Croatia, but that’s all,” the cynics would say). Similarly, in Pristina after the play, it was said that Agamemnon should be sought in Belgrade as Kosovo was the Troy that Serbia had invaded. After the show in Belgrade, I am certain that someone said something similar, that Agamemnon is perhaps an American NATO general who bombed Serbia. No doubt even in America, someone will suggest that Agamemnon is to be found in the Balkans or elsewhere, in some other war zone, rather than the USA!
It appears that no one wants to be associated with Agamemnon. They see him as foreign, as the “foreign other.” this reminds me of Borka Pavićević, the now deceased, and irreplaceable, Serbian playwright and human rights activist, who at the start of the ‘90s, just before the Yugoslav wars, wrote: “Of course, there are people in this country who want peace. Of course, even those who want victory, want neither war nor death. But no one will win, there will only be death.” ¹ . Borka’s prophecy was correct; war did destroy us, no one was the victor, and all of us, in one manner or another, have died. We have only died.
Balkan Bordello is a play for the Agamemnons of Prishtina, Belgrade, Podgorica, Tirana, New York, Tel Aviv . . . It is a play for the new Agamemnons who will come . . . “But no one will win, there will only be death.”
— Jeton Neziraj
Prishtina, 3 January 2022
¹ Borka Pavićević, 5 August 1991. The text was later published in the book, Društva / Zajednička čitaonica #5, Borka Pavićević, Boris Buden (Beogad: Krokodil, 2020), 20.
Translated by Alexandra Channer