Dáša Vokatá

“But mainly, I want to add one basic thing, that we weren’t political in any way, on the contrary, I was and still am completely apolitical. All we wanted was to sing our songs, make our culture, paint our pictures; we wanted to do everything our own way because we weren’t keen on the so-called first culture, as Loony [Czech: Magor, the nickname of Ivan Martin Jirous - trans.] called it, and we were the second culture. The first culture, the one that was on television, wasn’t for us, so we looked for deeper meanings, and we then mediated those in our works, and we wanted to do that just for ourselves in houses mostly in the border regions, because the houses were cheap there, and we gathered there and held our concerts, our exhibitions, but even that was too much for the regime, and so it chased us out of our houses. Because although we did everything secretly and by word of mouth, we’d gather in tens and hundreds, which was forbidden; they were afraid of us, although we didn’t interfere with their matters at all, we lived our own lives...”

“Yeah, with Kryl, that was amazing as well... I met him at Abbot Opasek’s, at the monastery [in Rohr], where he organised a youth day every year for Pentecost; the Benedictines have a school there, and the school had a holiday, so he invited the young people from those Czech families, and he organised workshops, lectures, songs for them, and so on. Until then the only one to perform there was Kryl, that was roundabout 1981. When I arrived, that was our first meeting in person; he’s about ten years older than me, I was still a child when he emigrated in 1969, but I knew his songs, and we sang them at school. He said: ‘Look, Dáša, you’re a fresh emigrant here, do the people know me [back home] at all, do they still sing my songs? It’s so long since I was there.’ And I said, well of course they do, you’re still strong there, and he didn’t want to believe me, he shook his head. So I took a guitar and I started to sing him his song ‘Love’. And he broke into tears, he cried, and from that time we were friends for life and death right until his death, close friends.”