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Europe in Sepia

Vedrana Veličković Dubravka Ugrešić is a novelist and essayist living in Amsterdam. Although originally ‘from the Balkans’ (she was born in Croatia), Ugrešić has often described herself as an ‘ethnically inauthentic’ and ‘a-national’ writer. When her country, then Yugoslavia, slid into civil war in the 1990s, Ugrešić wrote against the war and the rising tide of aggressive and destructive nationalisms in Croatia and Serbia. Alongside other anti-war and feminist voices, she became a target of an intensive media campaign and was branded ‘a traitor’ and ‘a witch’. Ugrešić’s position as an already established writer in Yugoslavia – her critically acclaimed, prize-winning postmodern novels In the Jaws of Life and Fording the Stream of Consciousness were published in the 1980s – changed drastically and she left Croatia in 1993. This is a well-known story that must, nevertheless, be continually retold, even after twenty years. Because, ironically, Ugrešić has become known as one of the most renowned Croatian writers ‘outside the Balkans’ (read in the ‘West’), despite her refusal to identify with the ‘new’ ethnic or national labels when Yugoslavia disintegrated; while ‘back home’, until very recently, she would be referred to as a writer who went into a self-imposed exile and excluded from the body of ‘new’ Croatian literature redefined after the war. But maybe this is another familiar story about ‘the burden of representation’ and ‘the writer in exile’ and, as such writers know very well, perhaps there is something to be gained as well after exile. Ugrešić is a ‘Balkan’ writer as much as she is a European writer, a post-Yugoslav writer and a ‘world writer’. She is, more precisely, a ‘translator’ of loss, a careful archivist of the changes that have occurred throughout ‘Eastern Europe’ after 1989, of fragments of the Yugoslav cultural past and our contemporary popular culture. Her recent novels include The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1999), The Ministry of Pain (2005) and Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (2009), and her recent books of essays are The Culture of Lies (1999), Thank You for Not Reading (2003), Nobody’s Home (2007) and Karaoke Culture (2011, winner of the Jean Améry Essay Prize). Ugrešić’s books have been translated into some twenty languages. In July 2013 she talked via email to Vedrana Veličković about her work.