When the essayist, novelist and editor Yvon Rivard approached her with the suggestion of grouping together, developing them, her chronicles published in The duty between 2017 and 2019, Maya Ombasic admits to having experienced a certain amount of dizziness.
Three years later, the novelist, poet and documentarian, who had never published an essay, places this exercise between the “lifeline” and a “wonderful and painful” challenge, which she considers to have succeeded in meeting.
“I enjoyed it so much that I am now in an existential dilemma: will my next book be an essay or a novel? » asks Maya Ombasic in an interview, one day before flying to Sarajevo to shoot a documentary there.
She exhibits, in Falling upwardsa kind of philosophical essay, a personal point of view on the world nourished by a triple experience: his intimate knowledge of war, forced exile at the age of twelve, as well as pluralism and cosmopolitanism, “consequence of this first ruin” on which it was built.
Indeed, her personal journey led her – even forced her – very early on to think about violence. Born in 1979 in Mostar, a small town in Bosnia-Herzegovina cut in two by the Neretva, today a jewel of heritage, Maya Ombasic thinks that “those who can express themselves have the moral obligation to speak for those who cannot. can’t.” “I always had this rage inside me,” she says. When we are children, we look at a world that is collapsing and we are totally powerless, when we realize the power of words, we tell ourselves that we have to do something. »
Mostar was a true crossroads of cultures, with a rich and plural identity. Forced to flee with her entire family during the Balkan War which followed the dismantling of Yugoslavia, she then spent her adolescence in Switzerland before settling in Canada.
Maya Ombasic had no idea, she said in Mostarghia (VLB publisher, 2016), the beautiful story dedicated to his father, nostalgic and “inconsolable about Mostar”, of the “dizzying historical resentments” which were at work in his country of origin before its breakup in 1991.
The awakening of the European monster
With the current crisis in Ukraine, Maya Ombasic feels that the European “monster”, as she writes, has awakened. “I’m going to Sarajevo tomorrow and I have the impression that it’s one of the last times I’ll go there. Because it’s about to burst. There’s this sort of pre-war atmosphere where people know something is going to happen. A bit of a burlesque spirit à la Kusturica: it doesn’t matter, we’re going to have a party, there are weddings, that’s why we get together. But we are on the edge, as the saying goes. And they know it. » A monster who has awakened and who is coming to life today, to his great despair, almost everywhere on the planet.
And in his eyes, she writes in Falling upwards, “no culture or elevation of spirit can do anything against the destructive impulses of humanity”. A vision of the world that is not very optimistic, which results from a “painful lucidity” acquired following her experience as a political refugee.
Why so much violence and polarization? “I do not claim to have the truth,” says Maya Ombasic, “I ask myself the question and I tried to answer. But one of the keys to the answer, in my opinion, is this conception of the Good that human beings have and which they consciously or unconsciously tend to impose on others. I think it is [Tzvetan] Todorov who says at one point: any conception of the Good which does not include the other is perverse. »
To look upward
It should be urgent, she also thinks, to reflect on Nietzsche’s idea of the necessity of forgetting: “no transmutation will ever be possible until we have gone beyond the phase of the double duty of memory and forgetting.” How to get out of this impasse ?
“What always strikes me when we go to Lebanon, the Balkans or that part of Europe that I talk about in the book, Flanders, is this kind of obsession with constantly rehashing the same story. They defend a certain memory, a certain conception of the Good. »
She cites Ypres, in Belgian Flanders, as an example of a community padlocked in its memory, where every day, since the end of the First World War, the dead of the war of 1914-1918 have been commemorated. “There is the being that flows, it’s not just that, but they are fixed on that. And in the Balkans, it’s the same. It’s always the same story, theirs. As if that of others did not exist. » Everyone has their own conception of the world, everyone has their own memory, everyone has their own wound.
If we do not have the same vision of the Good, which is humanist, universal, inclusive, humanity is heading towards its doom.
“There is indeed a double duty of remembrance, we must say it, commemorate it, recognize it. A bit like the First Nations are doing right now. But after ? After this, can we move on? »
“I don’t believe in God at all, but I believe in Plato,” exclaims Maya Ombasic. He understood 3000 years ago! If we do not have the same vision of the Good, which is humanist, universal, inclusive, humanity is heading towards its doom. But how to get there? It’s a different kettle of fish. It’s education, culture, knowledge, deconstructing the fear of others, all that. »
Falling upwards also seems to be a plea for us to “adopt the cosmic point of view”. To reconnect with a form of transcendence. Convinced that we are all “metaphysical exiles”, she believes that the solution must go through the path of consciousness: men and women must find the path to their own interiority.
“If you look closely,” she points out, “everyone is in a quest for meaning. We are thirsty for something that is bigger than us and that gives meaning to our existence, whether individual or collective. »
This meaning of life exists, this is the bet that Maya Ombasic is making. It is intrinsic to our consciousness. “It’s still extraordinary when you think about it, it took 14 billion years for the complexity of matter to reach us: an observer who looks at the universe in which he finds himself. It’s extraordinary. That, for me, is already enough. »
A point of view, she says, that forever changed her view of exile.