The Brooklyn Rail

A Muzzle for Witches treats the interview format as a kind of trampoline. An interlocutor poses brief, mild questions, and the responses erupt into furious spins, double and triple-loop, oopsie-daisy. The high bouncer, however, is the late Dubravka Ugresic, among the most brilliant voices of the twenty-first–century refugee experience. She’s in complete control, since all the give and take has to do, in some way, with the defining tragedy of her life and work: the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. When that madness erupted, Ugresic was an esteemed novelist and scholar, but by 1993, she’d been branded a “witch” and forced to flee her native Croatia. Given this background, her unlikely-looking Muzzle coheres as just the opposite. The woman won’t be silenced, neither about the brutality she suffered nor the triumph she achieved. She both brings off a howl of warning and shows the way to safety.

More’s the miracle, Ugresic managed this on her deathbed. While there was always a specter haunting her Europe⎯ in a word, totalitarianism⎯ by the time she sat down for this interview, the ghost she faced was her own. After forging a new career in “transnational, post-national literature,” settling in the Netherlands and winning fellowships at Harvard and elsewhere, bone cancer had laid her low. As a Dutch citizen, she could choose euthanasia, and she’d achieved a fresh perspective, indeed unique, on her old hard-right specter. She could see its shadows stretching far beyond her old neighborhood.

In the blood-soaked ground around Sarajevo and Vukovar, Ugresic claims, “a fresh generation of … Fascists” found their “spawning ground.” When the subject turns to the vile kingpin Radovan Karadžić (now at last doing time as a war criminal) she points out how, across the West, other would-be despots have adopted his model. The implications for the MAGA-maddened US are inescapable. I felt the chill especially when the Q&A turned to “libricide,” the suppression⎯and destruction⎯of books:

School libraries must not keep books by writers who are of non-Croatian ethnicity … The librarian at Nikola Hribar school in Zagreb’s suburbs … destroyed 400 books. The Culture Center in Slatina burned 2000 books…. By [2000] almost three million books had been destroyed.

The historical material generally takes this approach, forgoing battles or politics in order to concentrate on culture. In Muzzle, as in all Ugresic’s work, inspiration is grafted to erudition. Moreover, her command of the literature, the drama and music and more, is deepened by an alertness to their shifts in standing. Having seen so much artwork condemned by the State, ripped from the shelves, she says, “I feel compelled in my books to remind readers of authors who have been … forgotten or left behind.” By extension, “culture implies inclusivity,” and her own later work embodies how “life beyond national borders” provides “a kind of mental detox.” As for any notion of art “founded on the principle of ethnic exclusivity,” its hollowness is brought out by a vicious irony concerning the murderer Karadžić. As the text notes more than once, the book-burner considered himself “a writer.”

And Ugresic’s denunciations are hardly limited to Croatia. All over the upper Balkans, she witnessed a rich multicultural milieu deformed in the name of some sacred homeland, and she’s more than smart enough to see the same pattern worldwide: “Patriotism is, in practice, most often a criminal enterprise.” Then too, everywhere, thug rule goes hand in hand with the oppression of women. The book’s very title comes out of a painful instance of misogyny: “Men’s hatred for women has always zeroed in on … denying a woman’s right to speech … The scold’s bridle or witch’s bridle, a muzzle for chatterboxes, was fastened … over a woman’s face, over her tongue and mouth.”

Now, as a reading experience, all this risks wearing you out. But Muzzle offers more than unrelieved misery, bounding about like a gymnast, flashing acid wit and pyrotechnic insights. As I say, it goes light on the backing and filling, working outside of chronology. Nonetheless, there’s a pervading sense of getting somewhere, enhanced by the text’s arrangement in seven sections, each with its own core concepts and none unrelentingly grim. The sorry history, after all, is entirely familiar to the interlocutor, Merima Omeragić. Herself an esteemed writer and scholar, she holds the sort of Zagreb position her subject might’ve⎯if she’d been born a bit later. Omeragić knows the work so thoroughly that in the end, looking over the whole bibliography, she asks the central question⎯whether a “happy literary outcome” is “even possible.” Ugresic’s answer alludes to her own looming death, subtly, yet also to her totem, the fox, always a wily survivor. Central to such balance, now gloom and now sparkle, is of course her frequent translator Ellen Elias-Bursać. When the author claims “I experience the English versions of my essays as the most mine,” it’s a tip of the cap to Elias-Bursać.