A Muzzle for Witches by Dubravka Ugrešić, translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać, Open Letter, 2024
For thirty years, Dubravka Ugrešić lived in self-imposed exile as a cultural dissident and an enduring critic, challenging the prevailing orthodoxies that fueled anti-intellectualism, oppression, inequality, and nationalism. Her prolific writing—including both fiction and essays—took on topics ranging from the rise of virtual fandoms and the wars of Yugoslav dissolution, to cultural nostalgia and the state of the publishing industry.
A Muzzle for Witches, released this year by her longtime American publisher Open Letter, was Ugrešić’s final book before her death in March 2023. Translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać (the preeminent translator into English of Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian authors, including David Albahari, Ivana Bodrožić, Slavenka Drakulić, Daša Drndić, and Robert Perišić), the book is a highly polished transcript of an interview between Ugrešić and literary critic Merima Omeragić.
The book is divided into seven sections, throughout which Ugrešić expounds upon many of the key themes and ideas she addressed in her life’s work. Loosely guided by Omeragić’s brief questions, she focuses on three subjects that are her greatest concerns: the resurgence of Croatian nationalism after the breakup of Yugoslavia; the marginalization of women’s voices, particularly in literature; and the dubious future of contemporary literature itself. Cumulatively, these three areas—in no small part responsible for her extended exile—suggest a grim outlook for the future.
Ugrešić was a foremost critic of the state of culture in Croatia, which she viewed as inextricably intertwined with the growing nationalism amidst the dissolution of Yugoslavia and Croatia’s war of independence. That war caused “the butchering of the Yugoslav cultural scene into tribal communities—Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, Macedonian, Montenegrin, and Albanian.” One immediate consequence was the division of the Serbo-Croatian language itself into four separate languages, “an incredible instance of political and cultural violence.” (She signed the 2017 Declaration on the Common Language, affirming the unity of the language.)
In her telling, nationalism is always “intellectual suicide,” which invariably leads to “an appalling provincialization of culture and everyday cultural praxis.” Any such culture is intrinsically compromised because it is “founded on the principle of ethnic exclusivity,” which is inimical to the inclusivity implied in the term culture itself. As a result, Croatia’s nationalist cultural politics, stemming out of the 1990s, called for the erasure of all things Yugoslav, as well as “the burning of books and systematic cleansing of Croatian libraries of non-Croatian books”—what Ugrešić terms “cultural libricide.”
Those same voices also demanded the purification and re-canonization of Croatian literature, including a reappraisal of the authors who should be allowed to represent Croatia. Refusing to be labeled a Croatian writer under these absolutist delineations, Ugrešić was thus “erased” from the literary canon. Moreover, her steadfast criticism of Croatian nationalism led to attacks against her and other feminist critics as “witches” and “traitors” by the Croatian media, which sought to silence “all those they deemed witches, dissenters, enemies of the people.”
This sustained campaign of demonization led her to flee Croatia in 1993: “All I could choose was to leave this cultural territory which was no longer mine anyway. I feel it morally insulting to belong to a literature where talent is measured by one’s blood type.” She then lived for many years in the Netherlands, where she “brazenly insist[ed] on being treated as a transnational or post-national writer.” But until the very end, she was mystified by the “unceasing thirty-year animosity from the official Croatian cultural community.”
The experience led her to develop what she calls her “deformed” perspective (borrowed from a male Croatian writer who criticized her “strangely deformed optics”). Such a perspective is, of course, only deformed in comparison to the patriarchal standards of male authors and “the literary bureaucrats who decide who will and who will not enter the national canon.” Female voices are subordinated across all media, Ugrešić notes, but nowhere more so than literature, where female writers are barely included in Croatian classrooms: “Male Croatian literature continues to occupy its pedestal, though it isn’t described as male, but simply as literature.”
She also cites how her writing was belittled by male colleagues throughout her career, particularly following the publication of her novel Steffie Cvek in the Jaws of Life. Her male colleagues viewed her move from literary scholarship to fiction as not “worthwhile,” and one prominent male writer said that she would be better suited to “literary knitting and crocheting” than politics. Ugrešić recognizes such “fear and contempt” from her male colleagues for what it is: misogyny.
Even so, she is skeptical about the potential for women to change this, as “most women seem to be incapable of recognizing misogyny.” Instead, it falls to the Croatian media to determine the “acceptability” of women: “The result is that the only good Croatian woman is a dead Croatian woman, or one who is modest, submissive, quiet, and anonymous, hence, the proverbial waitress.” She attributes much of the blame to Abrahamic religions, “the most durable, brutal, and forceful harmer of women and women’s self-confidence.”
Ethnoreligious nationalism and misogyny are thus deeply intertwined, and all so-called “national” literatures are inherently patriarchal. Misogyny permeates contemporary culture, as “the existing conglomeration of cultural products would seem to suggest that the woman is still the victim.” Yet throughout, she steers clear of prescriptive solutions: “Time and effort are needed if the system of patriarchal values is to be extirpated, as it has flourished over the last thirty years, while rooting itself ever deeper, in the fertile manure of nationalism.”
In addition to the scourges of nationalism and misogyny, Ugrešić is skeptical about the future of literature itself. Populism, “the dominant political constellation,” has threatened funding and support for the arts, and she cautions about the danger of “social barbarization” as well as the increasing ideological dominance of “traditional discourse,” represented in Croatia by “folk chants, silent circle dances, droning guslas and so forth.” Moreover, she notes that an ongoing shift to media focused on young people suggests “the drastic infantilization of global culture.”
She also cites the increasing primacy of the market over literary criticism and scholarship in appraising literature: “Profit is increasingly important, the profit of the facilitators—cultural workers, publishers, distributors, managers and so forth.” As a result, authors have become “multitasking enthusiasts,” focused on promoting their own brands and turning literature itself into a commodity: “To be marketable is a relatively new category for valuing literature.” However, as elsewhere in the book, this claim goes unsubstantiated (serial novelists of the nineteenth century may beg to differ).
Indeed, some of Ugrešić’s pronouncements are unduly facile. She laments the overpredicted demise of the critic: “It would seem that the traditional role for the arbitrator of good taste has been abandoned, and now anyone can step into this role. . . perhaps because critical thinking no long matters.” Others tend toward the hyperbolic. At one point, she declares the current moment “the most narcissistic in the history of civilization.” Later, she asserts that “[f]or most of today’s readers, literature is merely a form of socializing—something like Facebook.” This doesn’t quite ring true. But would it be so terrible even if it were?
Given the interview format of A Muzzle for Witches, it may come as no surprise that many of its theories are more artfully articulated in the author’s other writings (The Age of Skin, Karaoke Culture, Europe in Sepia, or Fox, to name a few). As such, she is left to draw on hackneyed examples to prove her points, such as using the much-overtheorized case of violinist Joshua Bell’s subway station concert to demonstrate the undue influence of market mechanisms in culture. Still, Ugrešić acknowledges that she has a particular reader in mind: “I address a competent reader, a reader who would be more likely to have something to teach me than me to teach them.” This may be a tall order, but it is a bracingly welcome idealism.
More broadly, she warns that literature “might cease to exist, certainly as we know it.” In response, she suggests a thorough-going reappraisal of the “notion of canon,” allowing for a revaluation of binaries such as “culture and subculture, high and low, elite and commercial, authentic and imitational.” As one alternative, she emphasizes the liberating potential of transnational, post-national, or international literature, which allows authors to move “freely from tradition to tradition, from narrative to narrative, without the obligation of belonging to any one of them or even adhering to them completely.”
In the final section of A Muzzle for Witches, poignantly titled “The melancholy of vanishing,” the writer outlines her statement of faith about the power of literature: “Literature is not a toy in the hands of male or female writing egos. . . Literature is communication between me and those of my readers who cannot be bought, no matter who and where they are.” Over her career, Ugrešić was an unfailingly perceptive critic and observer of politics, culture, and so much else. Until the very end, her writing worked to unsettle, challenge, and dismantle—a process she called “a perestroika of literary values.” But much like the more famous perestroika, her vision was far from completed during her lifetime. One can only hope for a happier outcome.
Eamon McGrath is a writer based in Brooklyn. He writes about literature from Southeastern Europe @balkanbooks.
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