A MUZZLE FOR WITCHES

A celebrated writer and thinker answers smart questions about misogyny, nationalism, resistance, and the nature of art.

Respected for both her fiction and scholarly work, Ugrešić (1949-2023) became the first woman to win the NIN Award—Yugoslavia’s highest literary honor—in 1988. When Yugoslavia was riven by ethnic conflicts and fights for independence a few years later, the author became a pariah for her anti-war stance. The book’s title alludes to one of the epithets hurled at her during this time. Though she left her home, she never stopped writing about the place of her birth and the violence that tore it apart. This collection of interviews with Omeragić is her final published work. In “Women and the male perspective,” Ugrešić illustrates the pervasive power of misogyny by describing the life of her novel Steffie Cvek and the Jaws of Life, from inception to critical reception and transformation into a movie that turned her feminist fiction into cheap laughs at the expense of women. Elsewhere, the author recounts how the literary curiosity and experimentation of her youth had devolved into prose grounded in misogyny, bigotry, and dirty jokes by the 1980s. “The implanting of cultural memes” is an incisive exploration of how populism and digital media have blurred “the boundaries between culture and subculture, high and low, elite and commercial, authentic and imitational.” Even as Ugrešić offers astute critiques of international phenomena, her thoughts always come back to Yugoslavia. She celebrates the subversive power and linguistic richness of children’s books while lamenting the didactic turn Yugoslavia’s children’s literature took when divided by nationalism. As she surveys the contemporary cultural landscape in the former Yugoslavia, she finds them “seriously compromised. Because how can a culture founded on the principle of ethnic exclusivity call itself a culture?”

Sage closing remarks from a vital public intellectual.