Interview with Myself

After a thousand and some days I returned again to my homeland. A thousand and some days and a whirl of national and international events. I came back in chains to my shackled homeland… The steps I took, the actions I carried out and the verses I created were not imposed on me by anyone, but they were my life, my dream, my struggle, my joy…

I wrote as a poet, as a journalist and as a writer, trying to submit as little as possible to the demands and rules of creativity of the time, but I was harshly criticised, stripped of publishing rights, and some of my works were turned into waste paper without ever being released, thus denying me the joy of creation. For an artist this is equal to death. This was another kind of imprisonment and isolation: silence…

“He chose to turn into a stone in his homeland. Now he stands in the place from which, once, still a child, he gazed at the world beyond the horizon of the sea, dreaming of knowledge, dressed in the mantle of hope, because the world was so vast, seen from afar, that there must be room in it for the people who would live in it….”