Sit down and pour yourself a glass, stein, or cup of whatever you like to drink from. Before you sip, chug, or quaff, raise the vessel to Dubravka Ugrešić and thank her for being among our time’s best independent, iconoclastic, and undersung authors.
Ugrešić is no longer with us, but she left many valuable guideposts to help us negotiate the darkness. Her novels include the defiant Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (2011), the tragic tales in 2007’s The Ministry of Pain and The Museum of Unconditional Surrender from 1977 (RIP Roland the walrus), and the justly celebrated Fording the Stream of Consciousness (1988). Ugrešić wrote many essays taking on the increasing nationalism, violent rhetoric, and intolerance in what used to be Yugoslavia; the new Croatian government and its literary establishment branded her as a traitor and a witch. Still, she continued to fight the good fight against fascism and sexism even after her self-exile to Amsterdam and working teaching gigs around the world. Dubravka Ugrešić was a real one, and she deserves all the praise we can sing to her.
If you have read any of her works, you will salivate over Muzzle for Witches. It is a collection of her conversations with literary critic Merima Omeragić, translated by Ellen Elias-Bursać. If you don’t know Dubravka Ugrešić’s works, this current volume will serve as a worthy introduction to “Ugresiciana”. These interviews give us a window into the heart and soul of one of our bravest writers. They are also funny, exasperating, lively, and horrifying, escaping all the possible traps of boredom and irrelevance that might be associated with Books of Interviews With Relatively Obscure Deceased Authors.
In the first interview, we learn the source of some of Ugrešić’s alienation. Although she was born in the Croatian region of Yugoslavia and had a Croatian father, her mother was Bulgarian. She recounts being teased about her background as a child: “The message from the mean girls, who never became my friends, was that I was not like them…. [T]his pushed me to identify permanently with others, with Gypsies, Blacks, Bulgarians, foreigners.” She continued to try to see Yugoslavia as a country where many different (and often opposed) ethnic groups could come together. She was quickly disabused of that notion when she wrote “Yugoslavian” as her nationality and ethnicity on a student form; others assumed she was trying to hide a Serbian background.
As Yugoslavia disintegrated into war, ethnic violence, and literal Balkanization, Ugrešić was now based in a new nation called Croatia. She was disgusted by the chauvinism and anger that drove this new engine and started to react against it. This rebellion was met with a counter-revolution from the country’s literary establishment, garnished with an unhealthy infusion of sexism: “Their message was, essentially, that I should ‘shut my mouth,’ ‘because speech is the business of men.’ Another colleague coined the phrase ‘kitchen literature,’ which implies that women can only produce trivial writing.”
In 1992, Dubravka Ugrešić and four other like-minded feminist writers were attacked in the Croatian media, lumped together as the “Witches from Rio” after allegedly lobbying against Croatia hosting a major literary conference. They were accused of treason, egocentricity, and (most damning of all) disobedience. This caused a media firestorm in which the “Witches” were doxed, threatened, and slammed in every form of media.
Here, Ugrešić laments that she did not speak out then: “I behaved…like the polite little girl who does not violate the laws of decorum. This is as if after you’ve been raped you make coffee for your rapist and promise not to tell a soul about the little incident.” She continues onward to make a larger point: “One incident after another – and step by step, inch by inch, we find ourselves where we are now.”
Where are we now? Well, Dubravka Ugrešić had some ideas about that, too. She makes compelling arguments showing the link between her experiences and the modern political landscape. “Populism as the dominant political constellation…has shown us all its pitfalls and threats. The same thing has happened with the recent US political constellation, known as Trumpism.” Ugrešić sees this populism as an outgrowth of male domination – outsiders and critics must be silenced the same way women have always been silenced. She mentions the concept of the “witch’s bridle, a muzzle for chatterboxes…fastened – often at the request of a woman’s husband or members of her family – over a woman’s face, over her mouth and tongue.” Her feminist and political arguments merge in bold statements such as “The lie is not just the hoodwinking of a majority of voters, but it also serves as their alibi. (They lied to us! This is not our fault – we trusted them.)”
That is not all to be found in Muzzle for Witches. There are impassioned arguments for the future of literature and some stray bullets for authors who leverage their work into TED Talks and other side hustles. There are grimly funny ideas, such as how much more efficient Stalin’s purges of intellectuals would have been with Facebook. There are also insights into Dubravka Ugrešić’s favorite authors, some of whom are known to us and others still obscure. Muzzle for Witches is a rich collection and a significant contribution to this author’s translated work.