Novica Tadić’s The Red Locust is a key representative poem from this Montenegran (Yugoslavian) poet’s seminal 1981 collection Ždrelo (Maw). This poem has a majority of the hallmarks found in the poet’s oeuvre. The poem, much like the collection from which it comes, transcends the dark, surrealistic leanings of his earlier poetry to mine a richer mythology and metaphoric base.

The poem belongs to a small cycle (Shelters) in which the poems are thematically unified by an illusion of safety provided by various types of shelter. However, the title of the sequence transcends its obvious irony to reveal the insecurity and danger the poet feels about his total environment and expresses as a pervading sense of isolation and exploited vulnerability.

In the strange and disturbing opening image (“My doorbell / filled today / with bloody cotton.”), the poem sets a tone of uneasiness, evoking dread over what is to follow. Not only is the image simply horrific, but the presented world is unable to function normally, for the cotton would prevent the door buzzer from working. It is a muffled, muted world in the face of horror. The strangeness within Tadić’s verse helps set the stage for his unfolding hellish dramas.

When the woman on the couch in the second stanza is described as being “sprawled, stunned, thunderstruck,” the reader fears the worst, even though her exact fate is unknown. By excising the site of horror, Tadić masterfully preys on the reader’s imagination to heighten tension. The speaker is an inexplicable presence appearing almost to revel in the woman’s misfortune. He even mocks her, it is suggested in the final stanza, by reading to her from “her favorite volume,” although she appears beyond being capable of listening.

There is a running motif throughout much of Tadić’s work of a tortured figure, often female, suffering at the hands of a sadistic (or indifferent) speaker. According to literary critic Bojana Stojanović-Pantović, the cruelty displayed by the speaker is a mask (another common motif in Tadić’s poetry), for the speaker is more often the victim of countless demons and nightmarish creatures. It is a way for the speaker to hide his suffering and project it onto someone else. The victim, when not the speaker, is a sacrificial figure, like the woman in The Red Locust.

The central figure, however, is the menacing and “enormous” red locust that “across the city roofs springs” and “will nip off all her hair / like the last grass on earth.” According to Tadić, this locust has broken off from the biblical swarm that once plagued Egypt and now assails Belgrade, the capital of former Yugoslavia. The grotesque insect represents, at its most fundamental level, the tyranny of religion. But the color of the locust infuses the poem with a political subtext. Although red is associated with blood and would seem to lock the poem into a gothic reading, red also has another meaning, no doubt intended by the poet—the color closely associated with communism, the ruling ideology of former Yugoslavia.

Invoking religious imagery was a way for Tadić to comment in relative safety about the communist government of Yugoslavia. Under the protection of metaphor, he could address the injustices in a country whose leader—Tito (Josip Broz)—possessed an almost absolute power. By developing a metaphoric strategy, Tadić found a way to convey sentiments when it was not always safe to do so.

The by-products of his style were, first, that he found an engaging way of writing political poetry and, second, that he created haunting works of art that linger in the reader’s mind long after the political shelf-life of the poem has expired, thus preventing his poems from becoming mere political artifacts of a time gone by.

Bibliography

Tadić, Novica. Night Mail: Selected Poems. Edited and translated by Charles Simic. Oberlin, Ohio: Oberlin College Press, 1992.

———. “The Red Locust.” Translated by Steven and Maja Teref. New American Writing 23 (2005): 243.

Stojanović-Pantović, Bojana. “Neimenovano to” (“The Unnamed It”). In Ždrelo. Translated (unpublished) by Maja Teref, 133–139. Banja Luka, Bosnia: Zadužbina Petar Kočić, 2002.

Categories: Literature, World Literature

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