Middle East and East Africa. His books include The Timbuktu School for Nomads, The Prester Quest (winner of the Dolman Prize) and Drinking Arak Off an Ayatollah's Beard (shortlisted for the Dolman Prize). He has written for the Guardian, Observer, and the Globe and Mail.Jubber applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Epic Continent: Adventures in the Great Stories that Made Europe, and reported the following:
Page 99 finds me in the Balkans, in one of the most disturbing parts of my journey. Exploring the legacy of epic poems across Europe often brought me into exciting or even humorous experiences. However, my encounter in Sarajevo was more discomfiting. For there, I met Eset Muračević, a Bosnian poet who was imprisoned in a concentration camp in 1992. He recounted some of the horrors he witnessed and explained how he survived it: by writing poems. ‘It was necessary,’ he explained, ‘to keep me calm.’ Without his poems, he believes, he wouldn’t have made it through the war.Visit Nicholas Jubber's website.
This page reflects a key point of the book: poetry can be powerful, for good and ill. It can stir people to terrible deeds (as did the Balkan epic known as the Kosovo Cycle, which was stirred and exploited by warmongers like Radovan Karadžić, the Bosnian Serb president), but it can also save their lives. This point is reflected in different ways throughout the book, from the impact of the Homeric epics on the formation of Greek nationhood to the enduring popularity of Icelandic poetry recitals. Page 99 is, I believe, a strong example, albeit a particularly dark one.
Before starting this journey, I knew the Balkans less than the other regions, and the Balkan epic was less familiar to me. So travelling across the Balkans was one of the most intense and eye-opening sections of the journey. Discovering that epic stories – which I loved very much – had been used as political weapons was disheartening but also illuminating. However, I had hoped to come across a more positive example of the impact poetry can have, so meeting Eset was really meaningful. His raw honesty captivated me, and I was fascinated to talk to him about his experiences, from which he had emerged with a heroic stoicism.
Throughout my journey, I sought out storytellers – poets, playwrights, singers, puppeteers and actors – and through them, I learned how Europe’s storytelling traditions continue to help us to look at the continent today. Eset’s poetry is very individual, rinsed in the pain of his wartime experiences, but it fuses with history and the interconnectedness of European culture. This is reflected in the title of one of his anthologies, The Last Circle, which references Dante’s Divine Comedy. As I learned from many other storytellers, when we refract our experiences through our literary past, it can help us to come to terms with the many problems we face today.
--Marshal Zeringue
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