Jesse Monteagudo: This review was originally published in Gay Today (Vol. VII Issue 147). It is reprinted with permission from www.gaytoday.com online. Jesse Monteagudo is a freelance writer and gay book lover who lives in South Florida with his life partner.
Bazhé is a writer, a poet, and an artist. Born in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia - now the independent Republic of Macedonia - Bazhé now lives in the United States. He has published poems and short stories in both his past and present homelands and has exhibited his art in New York City. Damages is Bazhé's first full-length book.
It is the life story of a gay man, but it is more than just a “gay book”. It is a first-person account of the collapse of Yugoslavia, a made-up country that could not last and was destroyed from within. And it is the story of a son's love for the only mother he knew - the woman who adopted and raised him - even as he continued to search for his birth mother.
This is a lot of territory to cover, and Damages is a big book. It begins with the death of Bazhé's abusive father, an official in the old Communist government of Yugoslavia. Bazhé knows that he was adopted; and his return to Macedonia to take care of his sick mother (who has colon cancer) allows Bazhé to search for his birth mother. Finding his natural mother gives Bazhé an opportunity to tell her - and us - his life story.
What Bazhé proceeds to tell us is a fascinating and disturbing tale; the tale of a young gay boy who grows up in a society which at the time was very hostile towards homosexuality. Bazhé's life in the Yugoslav Army, in the College of National Security - from which he was expelled - and in Yugoslavia's homosexual underground would make a good film, as would Bazhé's brief residence in Turkey, where he lived as the cross-dressing “mistress” of a rich Turk.
Those who have taken care of a sick relative or a life partner can relate to Bazhé's heart-rendering experiences, taking care of a mother through a painful and humiliating illness from which there is no cure. In the end, Damages is Bazhé's memorial to the woman who raised him and loved him and who, in spite of it all, will always remain his one true mother. Though the author's stop-and-go use of flashbacks slows down the narrative somewhat, he never loses his focus, or the reader's interest. Bazhé's life story is uniquely his own, but at the same time it is a story that we can all relate to. That alone makes Damages a good book worth reading.
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