Rifet Bahtijaragic, a Canadian and Bosnian writer, has for some time been broadening the cultural activities of Bosnians far away from Europe, in Canada. After the publication of his two novels, Blood in the Eyes and Bosnian Boomerang, came a collection of poetry, Eyes in the Cold Sky. Now he has given us Footprints: Poetry and threads of a poetical impression. In form and content it is a unique, innovative book. It comprises poetry and poetic/philosophical prose, interweaving the personal and the regional, the general and the global, the national and the supra-national, the emotional and the philosophical, the earthly and the cosmic into a gripping portrayal of the human need to understand the essential questions of endurance and the survival of civilization...
Rifet Bahtijaragic's Footprints leaves a deep impression on the human heart and mind. There is prose in the form of fictive interviews with a broad spectrum of leaders in our turbulent times - Marshal Tito, Michael Moore, the Dalai Lama, and Stephen Hawking. There is poetry born out of the recent Bosnian War - lyrical, bitter, impassioned, searching, and ultimately hopeful. This book makes explicit ideas and opinions we should all heed.
Rifet creates simple, graspable explanations for the secrets of the universe as well as for those of the human heart. His cosmic poetry and prose offer the hope that somewhere, beyond the world we have created, there are worlds we can communicate with and thus, maybe, be saved from ourselves.
About the Author: Rifet Bahtijaragic originated in the Balkan Peninsula. Here cultures of East and West mixed, and here also the sectarian politics of power and predominance bred confrontation and ignited destructive wars at least twice during one human's life. Running from that destructive Balkan syndrome, Bahtijaragic has spent the course of his life searching for paths throughout narrow nationalistic and intolerant religious societies close to home and far away, seeking to grow into an earthling with the sensibility of cosmic belonging. In the last war of bloodthirsty nationalisms in Bosnia, he could very easily have been murdered because of his pacifist orientation.
He was born on 7 January 1946 in the small mountain town of Bosanski Petrovac, close to the Croatian border. He finished his university studies fourteen years before the Sarajevo Winter Olympic Games, and during those years worked in two separate fields: as a specialist in economic development for state banks and companies, to make his daily bread; and as a writer of journalism, poetry, stories, essays and novels, to earn sustenance for his soul.
In the time of peace and happiness during Tito's Yugoslavia, Bahtijaragic did not succumb to the challenging temptations of the international metropolis. (He served as governor of Centrom Privredne banke Sarajevo, the Bosnian state bank service for Francophone countries, headquartered in Paris.) During the last Balkan Wars, at the end of the second millennium, he emigrated with his family from Bosnia to Germany, and then in 1994 to Vancouver, in Canada. He is a member of The Writers' Union of Canada and The British Columbia Federation of Writers.
Rifet never served in any army in his life.
