Balkan warrior

During the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Dubravka Ugresic was denounced, she says, as “a whore, a witch and a traitor”. A reluctant citizen of newly independent Croatia, she took a stand against nationalism “and all its perversities”, and like many people became a target. As the Balkan wars escalated, she found herself the victim of a “collective paranoia: people rushed to be willing executioners. Nobody forced them to kill, spit on and humiliate others – but they did. It became acceptable. It was like being marked with a yellow star.”In her astringent writing of the early 1990s, collected in The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays (1995), Ugresic wrote of nationalism as the “ideology of the stupid”. Though she was just as scathing about Serbian chauvinism, she excoriated a self-justificatory victim mentality in the “freshly baked European state of Croatia”, whose ultra-nationalist president, Franjo Tudjman, had come to power in 1990, declaring Croatia paradise on earth. With a nod to Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Ugresic wrote: “What is being annihilated with guns, grenades, murders, rape, the displacement of peoples, ‘ethnic cleansing’, the new ideology supported by the media, is memory.”

The title essay was written shortly before Ugresic was driven out of Croatia in 1993: the book appeared first in Dutch translation. She wandered in Germany, the Netherlands and the US before settling in 1999 in Amsterdam, where she lives alone. A novelist, critic, screenwriter and children’s author, she loathes being identified as a Croatian writer, the representative of a “country from which I ran away into exile.”

For Marina Warner, Ugresic is a “wise jester and aphorist with a madcap wit”. Lisa Appignanesi relishes her “acerbic sense of life, and Eeyore grumpiness”. Ugresic, who likens AA Milne’s Eeyore to the sceptical, melancholic figure of the central European intellectual, practises sardonic jesting with a serious intent. Her work ranges from Thank You For Not Reading (2001), a dissection of today’s literary marketplace, to dark fiction exploring trauma, flight and the violence done to selfhood by political upheaval.

Her most recent novel, The Ministry of Pain (2004), now out in translation, is named after an S&M club in The Hague – also, of course, the setting of the war crimes tribunal for former Yugoslavia. In the book a lecturer in Serbo-Croat at Amsterdam university tries to keep alive “Yugonostalgia” in her students – who are all fellow emigrés – as her own world disintegrates. The depiction of a sado-masochistic relationship underlines what Ugresic sees as the “self-hatred, self-hurt part of post-traumatic conditions”: it is a novel about “the trauma of language and the language of trauma.” … more>>