“Retouching is our favourite artistic device. Each of us is a curator in his own museum…Uncover A, cover up B. Remove all spots. Keep your mouth shut. Think of your tongue as a weapon. Think one thing and say another. Use orotund expressions to obfuscate your intentions. Hide what you believe. Believe what you hide.”
― Dubravka Ugrešić, The Ministry of Pain
An extraordinary writer and thinker, Ugrešić died in 2023 at the age of 73. It’s her birthday today.
She lived in a state of permanent exile, and one of her constant themes in all of her work was exile (her most famous book is probably The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, a “novel” about a writer living in exile, about the plight of the exile – never really feeling “at home” anywhere). But she had a lot of themes she went back to again and again: retouching ^^, pop culture, language, misogyny, “ethnicity” (quotes necessary, especially in her particular context, Yugoslavia/the Balkans), identity. Her opinions were often “against the grain”, a polite way of mentioning the price she paid. She was run out of Croatia, fleeing in fear for her life. She did not feel safe, even, in returning. She was turned into a scapegoat, a target placed on her back. She caused rage in refusing to “go along with” the ideological groupthink evident in the nationalistic campaigns post-Yugoslavia-breakup, and during the war fervor of the early ’90s, when the former Yugoslavia rose up to declare war on each other. Vitriol doesn’t even begin to describe the response she got.
Museum of Unconditional Surrender is great, although she’s probably most famous for Baba Yaga Laid an Egg. In the last couple of years, I have been reading her essay collections, which are essential reading. Some titles: Culture of Lies, Europe in Sepia, Thank You for Not Reading, The Age of Skin, The Ministry of Pain, Karaoke Culture. Her subject matter is diverse: from Balkan politics to reality TV, from advertisements to ethnic cleansing. She also wrote a book about the literary world and its prejudices and blind spots.
Her biography is confusing but only because the world changed so much. She was born in then-Yugoslavia. It remained her identity, even after it was dismantled formally (in 2003, I think?) But Yugoslavia really broke up following the fall of the USSR, and the rise of Milosevic, and all of the competing nationalistic movements of brand-new countries who had been suppressed for nearly an entire century. An orgy of self-mythologizing went on, resurrecting old symbols and myths, expanding them into “destiny”. It sounds manic and terrifying the way she writes about it, particularly because she didn’t buy into it. There is a feminist critique here, too, since these movements looked backwards, to a glorious era in the past – the 1300s, or the 1600s, or whenever the various countries were kingdoms dominating their neighbors. And this, in her view, was macho bullshit on steroids because women are never included in such narratives. We see this playing out with the rise of white Christian nationalism, not just in the States but everywhere. Looking backward does not just mean being “great again” – it means suppressing the progress made in intervening years, and progress always means more rights for others. In the late 90s, how you “identified” in the former Yugoslavia was of paramount importance. Differences were erased: sameness was prized. When all the wars broke out, practically simultaneously, Ugrešić took a public anti-war stance.
Her punishment was swift and severe. She pointed out that much of this was an illusion: she was Yugoslavian, not “Croatian” – she had no relationship to “Croatia” as an identity, she had no nostalgia for a country that didn’t exist when she was born. She couldn’t just swap identities because she was told to. Ugrešić became Enemy #1, and – of COURSE – because she was a woman the punishment was drenched in misogyny powered by rape culture. We still battle with this. The death threats were constant. She was shunned from the Balkan literary world. No one would publish her anymore. Doors slammed shut. She was called a witch. She fled for her life.
In an interview shortly before her death, she said:
“The majority of my fellow writers consider ethnic labelling as something unquestionable and ‘natural.’ For me it’s a form of cultural violence. I was not allowed to choose the nation with which I was associated as a writer, or whether I wanted to belong to anyone at all. I was forced to belong. When I expressed skepticism towards the very idea of belonging, I was attacked by my cultural community and expelled from it.”
She was disgusted by the resurrection of the concept of “ethnic” purity.
She ended up in the Netherlands, where she lived for the rest of her life. She experienced a near-constant state of dislocation, geographical and emotional. She is a living embodiment of the problem of language. She was similar to Victor Klemperer in her devotion to paying close attention to what was being done to language: how politics and “identity politics” warped language to eradicate ambivalence and/or questioning. There were things you could no longer say. When people bristle at “identity politics”, they’re often being disingenuous – they can’t stand being reminded that … people unlike them exist in the world – they are powered by grievance and self-pity. Ugrešić’s situation shows a potential and worrying end-game when identity is prioritized. Her identity was fluid, complicated and contradictory. Her experience was common in the former Yugoslavia: Bosnian, Serbian, Albanian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Yugoslavian … if you were a MIX, and most people were, what were you supposed to do in the ensuing upheavals? Forced to choose sides, even though everyone had a shared history. In the phantasmagorical atmosphere of nationalism and identity, submission was REQUIRED. She couldn’t do it. She is an inspiration.
She wrote a lot about Western literature’s narrow-mindedness and its ideological requirements, how Eastern European literature is fetishized, seen as “other”, in comparison to other “local” literatures. There’s the problem of translation. If something is not translated into English, its impact will be purely local. Someone like Milan Kundera was widely translated. So was Vaclav Havel. Would these two have become world famous if they weren’t translated into every language on the planet? Important voices are side-lined because they aren’t translated. Ugrešić introduced me to so much great literature I never otherwise would have heard of. The Banquet of Blitva, by Miroslav Krleža! Masterpiece. If it was widely translated, it would be considered one of the world’s great political satires. Read it! It’s translated into English. No excuse!
From The Museum of Unconditional Surrender:
But, nevertheless, the same year when the names of the streets changed, when the language and the country and the flags and the symbols all changed; when the wrong side became right, and the right side was suddenly wrong; when some people were afraid of their own names, when others, apparently, for the first time weren’t afraid of theirs; when people were butchering each other, when some were butchering others, when armies with different insignia sprang up on all sides, when the strongest set out to obliterate everything from the face of their own country; when terrible heat waves laid the land bare; when a lie became the law, and the law a lie; when people pronounced nothing but monosyllabic words: blood, war, guts, fear; when the little Balkan countries shook Europe maintaining rightly that they were its legitimate children; when ants crawled out from somewhere to devour and tear the skin from the last descendant of the current tribes; when old myths fell apart and new ones were feverishly created; when the country she had accepted as hers fell apart, and she had long since lost and forgotten her first one; when she was seared by heat in her flat, as it radiated from the baking concrete and the concrete sky; when the panic-stricken light of the television flickered day and night; when she was racked by the icy fever of fear–my mother, despite everything, kept tenaciously to her dogged ritual visits to my father’s grave. I believe that it was then that she looked for the first time at the moist gravestone and suddenly noticed the five-pointed star (although it had always been there, at her request) and perhaps for the first time she had the thought, feeble and exhausted as she was, that it might be possible to paint out the five-pointed star carved into the stone, and then she thrust the thought aside in shame and kept the photograph of my father in his partisan uniform in the album–as her own. It was as though it was then, suddenly confronted with the little star above my father’s name, that she really accepted her own biography as well.
When she got home she sat down in her baking flat as in a train; she sat there with no defender or flag, with no homeland, virtually nameless, with no passport or identity card of her own. From time to time she would get up and look out of the window, expecting to see scenes of the war-destroyed country, for she had already observed such scenes. She sat like that in her flat as in a train, not traveling anywhere, because she had nowhere to go, holding on her lap her only possession, her albums, the humble dossier of her life.
There’s a reason her name was constantly on the short-list for the Nobel Prize.
She was a giant.
“I feel like I am smuggling neglected Central and East European literary values into World literature.” — Dubravka Ugrešić
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