Raki

ANNOTATION

Two culturally distinct settings-Aboriginal Australia and worn-torn Serbia-are entwined in B. Wongar's quasi-autobiographical, haunting new novel, Raki, that shows how these distant worlds are tragically similar in the systematic persecution of their indigenous, uneducated populations. The political message in these pages is clear and damning, but Wongar's real skill lies in his intense lyricism that finds strange connections among dreams and visions, family history and military strategy. Wongar, a Serbian refugee who traveled to Australia in 1960 to live in the bush country and raise an Aboriginal family, forges disturbing parallels between the fates of Aboriginal children taken away from their tribes by Australian authorities and those of mountain villagers in Serbia during World War II.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

'Raki' is the Australian Aboriginal generic word for rope, the unifying metaphor of Wongar's novel, representing the conquered or bound state of oppressed people. From the confines of an outback Australian prison cell to war-torn Serbia, Raki invokes a powerful story of enchantment and struggle - the struggle to uphold traditions and nurture memory and joyous fortitude in the face of human devastation. Drawing on tragic similarites between the forced separation of Aboriginal children from their tribal families and the decimation of his Serbian native land, B. Wongar has written an epic surprisingly optimistic novel. And the unifying symbol is raki - the rope which fuses the historical facts, linking the Serbian and Aboriginal cultures to time immemorial. But raki is also the yoke of servitude, the rope which snaps with the shock of genocide, but which ultimately binds people together with love.

FROM THE CRITICS

Kirkus Reviews

Over the past three decades Wongar's stories and novels (Gabo Djara, 1987, etc.) have been shaped by and focused on crimes against humanity. With myth-derived images, often surreal or grotesque, and melodic tributes to ancient tribal knowledge, he's cried out against the decimation and attempted de-culturization of Australia's Aboriginals.

Here, the author, born Streten Bozic in Serbia (he includes a brief autobiographical introduction), parallels the plight of two peoples linked in agony: Serb peasants and the Aboriginals. "Instead of `history' we have the word `ancestry,' " writes the nameless prisoner who will escape at the close—as a dingo (a wild dog that, to the tribal people, is a reborn human soul). In Wongar's version of Serbia, trees, boulders, animals and birds, and unseen beings, as in Australia, hold the stories of a place and a people. The stories his Serbian characters tell one another concern the continuity of horror, stretching from the Ottoman invasion of the Middle Ages down to the arrival of the Nazis and their Croat allies. In Australia, the invaders are whites who would mine uranium, test nuclear bombs, and round up and contain the Aboriginals. Men are hunted down and shot; children are roped together and taken away while their horrified mothers watch. The scenes shift from deserts, prisons, and poor villages to chilling commentaries by overseers mulling the utilization of captive people—should they be laborers, should they be done away with, or should they be preserved as curios? Horrors and atrocities mount, while the Aboriginals' native-woven rope (raki) becomes a symbol of captivity, a noose strangling both peoples. Wongar even extends his criticism to the media, which he excoriates for "maligning" Serbs. (Certainly their tragic past cuts deep.)

A harsh, hoarse, repetitive collage of voices, images of terror, and desperate struggles for life: a nagging plaint, perhaps, but occasionally as haunting as a dingo's howl.