The Palindrome Scandal and the Yugoslav War

Abstract

The starting point for this chapter is a palindromic poem, entitled ‘1991. Rim i Mir ili Ono’ (1991. Rome and peace or that) by the Croatian poet, Dubravka Oraić (born 1943), first written in 1981 and published in full in 1993, and the reaction to it of another Croatian writer, Dubravka Ugrešić (born 1949), who used to share an office with Oraić in the Institute for the Study of Literature at the University of Zagreb. The two writers, looking at the same poem, read it in completely different ways. Not only is the poem itself a series of palindromes, but it turns out that the reading of it is as well: it can be read in one way, but equally plausibly from the opposite direction. At the heart of this phenomenon is language and this chapter is essentially an exploration of an aspect of language use.