Still, we landed on our feet.Īll that was before our own country asked us to forget everything and leave, us naïfs, whose lives were fouled up by the wars in ex-Yugoslavia. First it just voiced a request, but if we didn’t obey it was quick to kick us out into the world. They flit from one place to another, leaving no trace, responsible for themselves alone.Īnd, as usually happens when the Grasshoppers gather in poetry cafés, we recalled that all of us had graduated from tough universities back before Bologna, read entire libraries, split into stoics and epicureans, and made plans to bring Al Pacino to the hall of the defunct Radoje Dakić factory in Podgorica, turned into a theater, so Al could play Willy Loman, the traveling salesman-but all that was before our own country asked us to forget everything and leave, us naïfs, whose lives were fouled up by the wars in ex-Yugoslavia. The Grasshoppers are permanently part-time-employed, subtenant migrants. That Friday lunchtime, five or six of us Grasshoppers were drinking strong, “colonial” teas and eating dunked limoncello biscuits at the Poetry Café in London’s Covent Garden. Black parodies the old genre and suggests how wholesome it can be for women to cease leading lives whose central purpose is to “be there” for men.įor migrant women with a secret-the women of our age.

In this opening to Montenegrin writer Olja Knežević’s novel Gospođa Black, a group of migrant friends drink tea together in London.

Milena by Olja Knezevic