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- Eleven stories featured in the collection tell of destinies in mental hospital in Sarajevo, depicting with seismographic precision Bosnian post-war society with all its anomalies and deviations; portrayed through individual destinies of the sensitive and the unstable ones. The book of Lejla Kalamujic voices the marginalized group of LGBT* persons, which is denied of its right to existence by the balkans society. Free expression of sexual affiliation and love should be included, yet as Anatomy of a Smile tells, persons of different sexual orientation necessarily end in madhouses or outcast from the society. (en)
- Nineteen stories featured in the collection depict the emotional journey of the heroine that includes her dazed memories of early deceased mother, her childhood with an alcoholic and absent father, witnessing her grandparents fading away and dying, the country that is falling apart, the world which is changing, all the way to the disclosure of her sexuality and sharing of her existential concerns. The motif that runs through all of these is the motif of the mother, like omnipresent spiritus movens, and leads us unobtrusively through the emotional life of the heroine, sharing pre-war, war and post-war Sarajevo, “folk”, ethnically mixed marriages, Sid as a place of refugeehood, hospitalization in psychiatric hospital - with Eros and Tanatos. The collection of Lejla Kalamujic is an authentic testimonial about the fate of a family, whose writing out is an act of courage and facing of the darkest and the hardest there is in a person. (en)
- It was in the film All About My Mother. The mother, Manuela, had her Esteban, who was killed by a car on his birthday. Esteban had wanted to write a novel about his mother, but Almodóvar made a film about the mother’s mourning for her son. I saw the film at the Meeting Point Cinema. That evening I went home right after. I hiked up the street in the old part of town, toward my motherless house. The figure of Esteban vibrated before my eyes. I saw him there, drenched in his jeans and windbreaker, clutching his soggy notebook. The street I was trudging up was called Širokac, and it was incredibly steep. At the top I paused to catch my breath, and turned to face the valley. The city below was sinking into darkness, and it occurred to me: What if my mother were still alive today, and it had been me who’d died that faraway night seventeen years before? (en)
- Voices of women in the tradition of our literature have been suppressed, least to say. Nowadays, we understand the reasons behind it. We are aware of what patriarchy as a system of values and a way of life has brought on. I am not saying that all values stemming from such literary traditions should be annulled. To claim such a thing would be ridiculous. However, I think we should be aware of the extent to which they've been inscribed with misogyny. Oftentimes when one wants to bypass that argument, concepts such as "universal values", "human" and "humankind" are used. It never worked in practice. "Universality" and "humanity" have always been the masks hiding potent power of an adult man . So yes, in that context, I believe the story is of female gender. Furthermore, as thematic text is related to mother-daughter relationship and I indeed feel like a daughter in literature . I am a daughter of those mothers whose own poetics had been denied affirmation by social and economic structure. (en)
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