VADE MECUM

Selection from “Foreword: Searching for Our Lesbian Nests in Yugoslavia and After,” by Lepa Mlađenović, in Intersectionality and LGBT Activist Politics: Multiple Others in Croatia and Serbia, ed. Bojan Bilić and Sanja Kajinić, 2016

In the early 1980s the feminist movement started to grow in Yugoslavia, and the first wave of young feminist lesbians began to recognise each other, organise, and work together in three capitals—Ljubljana, Zagreb, and Belgrade. At moments it felt like the new world was opening in our search to understand what our lesbian difference was. I’m not a girl/I’m a hatchet … I’m not a fool/I’m a survivor/ … Look at me as if you had never seen a woman before ([Judy] Grahn, 1971).

“Time heals wounds”

That’s just a lie.

It gets easier,

But when it’s getting bad again,

In which I am loved.

That is it.

That is the poem.

Short.

Because it never lasts