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After the bestseller “Children of Evil”, which was read by about 130 thousand people in a year and a half, and the collection of short stories “In the Name of the People”, Miodrag Majić’s new novel “Pelican Island”, Posted by “Volcano”, it focuses on a young Roma couple. The love affair ends shortly after the young man is accused of having sex with a minor, while the judge, who acquits him, remains ashamed in a media lynching, as a pedophile and thug for the rights of gypsies to a fair trial. The High Court brings a new verdict and puts the young man in prison, which brings him only suffering and violence, just like his beloved Aisha. Following Aisha’s suicide, the tabloid journalist, who claimed responsibility for several lives destroyed by her articles, faces the wrath of the judge, but also her own demons …
Miodrag Majić is a judge of the Belgrade Court of Appeal, has a doctorate in criminal law specializing in the field of international criminal law and participated in the drafting of laws in these areas. He has won several awards.
The two vocations, legal and journalistic, which must be based on truth, facts and responsibility according to words, are invested in your novel in their opposites. How and why has this happened?
The real question may be: how and why did this happen to us. How come no one here trusts judges and journalists? How do we come to the conclusion that, if they are honorable, the representatives of the two most honorable professions are forced to bow their heads when they meet citizens? And what can a society that doubts expect from those responsible for establishing the truth and communicating it? In that sense, the novel only immerses itself in the local reality. Through the story of the tragedy of two young people, it also testifies to the tragedy of two professions: the truth that warns us that it is impossible to cover up evil for a long time and not prevent evil and at the same time hope that it will disappear on its own. alone. And we judges and you journalists have been accomplices of evil for too long. The question is why then we are constantly in awe, pretending that there are other comrades who are not among us, who allowed all this to happen.
It is said that a dead mouth does not speak, but a young gypsy woman, an innocent dead victim, speaks at the beginning of the book. Why did you give him the floor and ever want something so surreal to happen in judicial practice?
In the first place, I belong to those who are not so convinced of the clear division into “local” and “local” world and that their possible intertwining is necessarily surreal. Even today we know too little about becoming, the secret of life and death, the migration of the soul and energy to be so promising. And the future is the basis of all categorical judgments, including that of the supremacy of matter over spirit. But, even if this is not the case, I am convinced that we must strive so that the dead are heard from time to time. Don’t we always do the same when we wonder what the late mother would say if we presented her with some of our intentions? Or when, as judges, do we appreciate the severity of the suffering inflicted on the victim by the murderer? In the novel, Aisha is actually the only real judge. Dead, he judges those of us who believe that we are still alive. We are on the bench of the novel, whose inevitability we deny.
The two main characters undergo major transformations. Do you believe in the power of true repentance and reality, as well as the fact that even the enemy can bring calm?
I believe that reconciliation with the enemy always brings calm. The nature of reconciliation is to understand someone who is different, even the one who irritates us the most, whom we cannot bear the most. They say that what is most difficult for us to accept in others is exactly what we recognize ourselves in. That is why repentance is the only way for a person to grow and thus overcome the limits imposed by the ego. Especially today, when to a greater or lesser extent we all turn to ourselves and to our worldly existential needs. The inhumanity of the society in which we live in this strange time makes us, even when we are convinced of the righteousness, commit inhuman acts. We speak ill of people, we turn our heads from the suffering that surrounds us, we jump to the dead in shopping malls in search of better pieces of meat … That is why every day must start with repentance.
Your heroes are characterized by a strong subconscious, they dream a lot and have symbolic visions. Is there any consolation that criminals are at least tormented by conscience, even if they do not answer to the law?
I know from experience that most people have a guilty conscience. Even those whom we consider the furthest from God and whom we call criminals. Only the anesthesia mechanisms of consciousness are different. Usually these are rationalizations: I had to do it because he is my old enemy, someone who would have killed me had it not been him, someone who destroyed my family, someone who is a criminal … Man’s natural aspiration is to preserve that balance itself, and it is most seriously disturbed when evil is done. In an attempt to preserve the purity of the soul, Buddhists go so far as to be careful not to accidentally step on an insect. But modern civilization teaches us that everything is allowed for Mammon to be solved. So there are compensations. However, one should not live under the illusion that all of this is happening only in the world of what we call villains. The same mechanisms are initiated by those who consider themselves correct, people on this side of the law, and among them there are many who pass and apply laws. The aforementioned colleagues are silent and accept to betray their profession and their morals, justifying their own actions when having children, as if others who do not have them did not have them! It still means that your conscience is tormented. And conscience is the worst tyrant. When tormented for a long time, it usually ends badly for the person. That is why most are trying to fool that judge on themselves.
On the one hand, this story points to the absurdity of fate, but on the other hand, it speaks of the cruel logic of life that the one who falls must still be pushed. Do these things intersect somewhere?
They intersect in modern man, the screw of that terrifying Orwellian construction, in the individual who agrees to be the lever of the system whatever he may be, the executor who, under his auspices and protection, more easily sends his kind to purgatory. . This is how Auschwitz was born, this is how we get gulags, naked islands, purges… So even today, at the wink of the emperor, we cut our heads in the media arena. Bad times give rise to bad things in people, animal nature and the need to fight for survival not as a man but as a beast came to the surface. That is why it is everyone’s job to fight for a more humane and just age.
Your judge is guided by human reason when trying a member of a minority community. Are these members of society often “coins to undermine”?
Unfortunately, they do it regularly. Among other things, the novel tries to force the reader to reconsider. Ask and imagine what we do less often. We decide on the basis of tweets, we judge on the basis of title, we are guided by impressions and sympathies … And depending on the position in the hierarchy of the food chain, our movements can affect the destiny of millions! That is why it is necessary to stop and think if what I do believing that it is a useful work is actually a path to hell for the one for whom the “medicine” is intended. I am glad that many of my readers have recognized this message and that it is one of the most common letters I receive in terms of content: thanks for switching!
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