OSLOBOĐENO EVINO TIJELO U ROMANIMA BISERE ALIKADIĆ: LARVA I KRUG

Abstract

This work of Bisera Alikadić, the first author of the novel that tackles taboo topic of body and corporeity, scrutinizes dimension of body and corporeity. Novels Larva [The Larva] (1974) and Krug [The Circle] (1983) introduce intriguing and specific theme of liberation of woman’s body and censorship on sexuality into Muslim (now it is Bosniak) literature, as early as seventies of 20. century. Owing to this type of writing, B. Alikadić was met with a negative reception and was criticized in terms of mainstream national literature. Namely, her position of female author is defined by shifting between Islamic and masculine, as well as family and cultural authority on one hand; and the tendency to achieve woman’s right to literature-creative work and independent writing, on the other. Her novel Larva published in a specific cultural and historic moment (just a year after Erica Yong’s Fear of flying) was found to be erotic, vulgar, scandalous in a bare representation of sexuality and woman’s body, therefore damaging. In the context of internal social (patriarchal) limitations and bounds of national literature in which the work and the author occur, resistance of the community and the act of marginalization of the author is evident. Such attitude is based on public rage or more precisely, on rigid and a self-righteous stance of the Islamic Community (the case and the incident appeared in Preporod), negative and outward critic of the fathers of national literature (historians and critics). In latter field, the novel Larva was brought into disrepute by literary critics, agreeing mainly in (wrong) assessment that the literary work was viewed in a manner merely simplistic- through shameful exaggeration of sexuality and identifying the voice of main character Eva as autobiographical, labeling the work as vain and mediocre at best, erotic and romantic, and finally by means of satanizing the author, with accusation that she contributes to bad moral status of the society.