Muzzle for Witches - Tapa blanda

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Dubravka Ugresicis the author of six works of fiction, includingThe Museum of Unconditional Surrender, and six essay collections, including the NBCC award finalist,Karaoke Culture.In 2016, shewas awardedtheNeustadt International Prize for Literature for her body of work. She went into exile from Croatia after being labeled a witch for her anti-nationalistic stance during the Yugoslav war. She lived in the Netherlands until her passing in March 2023.

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[From "Women and the Male Perspective"]

The widespread discreditation of women in the public realm of the academy and the art world is appalling. Mira Furlan declared at some point that our film directors don’t know what to do with actresses except undress them . . .

In the autumn of 1991 in New York, I watched a video with my friend, Mira Furlan, a Croatian actress of film and theater, that was put together to present an overview of her filmography. The video was a collection of clips from the movies that had made her a Yugoslav movie star. The clips were agonizing to watch. Scene after scene of a meaty man’s fist kneading a woman’s bare breast, of lovemaking often ending in rape, a scene in which the actress tries to hang herself from a toilet chain and fails (ah, such a klutz!), scenes in which men showed no restraint when slapping her across the face. The video included a famous clip, remembered by many Yugoslav moviegoers, each for his or her own reasons, in which the husband bashes in the head of his wife, the actress, with a big rock, thereby illustrating the venerable folk custom of wife-bashing, the murder of an unfaithful woman (or someone elderly) by smashing them with a heavy rock, usually wrapped in felt. “Do not show this demo video of yours to anyone,” I said. “Why?” she asked. “Imagine for a moment that you’re someone here in the United States, watching these scenes . . .” I don’t remember if we both burst into tears. I do know we grasped the true meaning of the phrase “deformed perspective.”

Have you meanwhile changed your perspective?

I have retained my deformed perspective to this day. With satisfaction I have noticed that several young women share it, such as Lana Bastašic. In her story “Šuma” [Forest], published in the collection Mlijecni zubi [Baby Teeth], she slays the traditional literary figure, the patriarch, the father figure, the omnipresent male authority, with a swift, well-aimed bullet. And while Camus’s The Stranger begins with the famous sentence Maman died today, Bastašic begins her story with the sentence Strangling Dad was going to take time. The father in her story goes off every day to the forest to clear his head. The daughter discovers the real reason. He is sneaking away to masturbate.

And now to shift this perspective to the small realm of literature (and to ignore all others, especially politics) and examine the male literary canon. We can recall the ever-present male figures—the writers, literary historians, critics, editors, literature professors, prize jurors, literary cliques, representatives of the national literatures who even rose to become president of the republic or to serve in the diplomatic corps (there are too many examples throughout what used to be Yugoslavia to list them all)—the literary bureaucrats who decide who will and who will not enter the national canon; the ones whom they have dubbed the moral literary verticals and the ones who are not moral verticals; those who are our Homers and those who are not; the literary male exemplars who carry on dialogues and polemics with their esteemed literary buddies; who cultivate their literary sons while ignoring their daughters, especially a daughter who might one day venture into the forest and raise questions about the father’s dignity and authority. Yet nonetheless most women in culture continue to respect, protect, and serve these fathers of theirs, exactly as if they are waitresses, instead of women using their brains.

True, men often coerce us into behaving like waitresses without giving this a second thought. Doing so is more often than not a reflexive gesture. Ours and theirs. Some twenty years ago I was on a panel with one of the classic figures from these literatures. As there was no translator available, they asked me to translate into English. He treated me exactly that way, as if I were his translator instead of his equal. I remember he was even a little irritated because, in his opinion, I wasn’t keeping up with him. Or a fresher example, from a recent panel in New York where aside from me and another female colleague who is a professor at one of the universities in New York City, the other panelists were men, compatriots, “intellectuals.” When the panel ended, one of them asked me to take a picture of them, the panelists. The boys lined up and flung their arms around each other and I snapped the photograph for history, which did not, of course, include my female colleague or myself. None of our colleagues thought to ask us to join them. I only caught on later, and thinking about this dredged up my memory of the boys in the snapshot, Croatian writers of the male sex. On the photograph they have their arms around each other and are wearing t-shirts with the commercial slogan “Read Croatia!”—a paraphrase of “Buy Croatia!” Hence, “Croatia” is imaginable and desirable but only as a category of gender. Male.