Dina Franin
Republike Austrije 21
10000 Zagreb (CROATIA)
(+385 1) 3772 233
dinafranin@yahoo.com
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![[Dina Franin - Maglajlić]](images/dina256r.gif)
Poetess / Pjesnikinja
(Multimedia center NONA, Zagreb 1995, pages 144-147)
DINA FRANIN
They Only Confuse Me (Oni me samo zbunjuju)
Dina Franin is one of those rare women writers who take the fate of writing, the mode of presentation of women, into their own hands, daring to speak of subjects, otherwise kept silent about (or avoided) in literature, in a different way. Her utterance does not want to be attractive or appealing; rather, it is sharp and strident like a long-suppressed inner voice that has finally broken loose. It is adamant, warning and true. It dares to exist and demands its place, a place which is not a privilege but a right to speech.
AN UTTERANCE IS A TESTIMONY TO MEANING. MEANING PROVES THE UTTERANCE and is not indifferent to it:
"I want to write down my feelings
the natural way, the stream of my thoughts,
unadultered pure human cry."
Dina Franin does not accept herself as a sign in the social system of signifying, nor the world as the sum of signs and symbols; in a patriarchal system that has "lived out all its Utopias" and where the woman exists only as a mute signifier of male desire, she speaks out in her own voice. She speaks of herself, of the world that keeps guard over the meanings in which it has imprisoned, enslaved, exiled the woman and taken her away from herself, denying her the possibility to believe in herself speaking of herself. The bodily presence and vocals absence is typical for the representation of the woman as sign in male representation. When instead of poetic imagery, text is used, the discourse of documentary images, not words, but speech and utterance as the place of subjective and ideological activity, a space for women's audible voice is opened, and the reader is placed in a position from which it is possible to perceive something akin to the initiation of a child into language, indubitably a symbolic system of patriarchal order.
Dina Franin's poetry steps outside the system, it is conscious speech that refuses negotiations and blackmail, while stripping false meaning bare to reach beneath the level of the symbol, undermining it and revealing it as a mask underneath which life is benumbed and meaningless. Just opposite from what it indicates.
Seeking the modes of utterance that were a priori denied to it, this poetry accepts only its own points of view.
PRIMAL SCREAM
Mummy! Daddy!
Mummy! Daddy!
Why do you pester me with lyrical forms,
grammar, tropes and figures,
why is good poetry symbolic
when symbolism is an imitation of life
and the defence of neurotics.
I want to write down my feelings
the natural way, the stream of thoughts,
unadulterated pure human cry.
Mummy! Daddy!
I write the way I feel.
GAMBLER
I walk the rope
stealing a little from life.
I'm affraid of the tomb you buried me in.
No one laughs here.
You don't sleep at night, you work.
Jelously I listen to the men painting our house.
They ask me where I'll go during summer.
Nowhere.
Where have I been?
Nowhere.
I walk the rope
stealing a little from life.