Miracle, spotlight, and trepidation: women finalists on NIN award 2023
When I contacted Danica Vukićević, Marijana Čanak, and Mirjana Drljević, women writers shortlisted for the NIN award 2023, I suspected that I would be talking to three very different women with strong words.
However, I could not even imagine how much their written answers would confirm those differences – from answers that are strictly formatted, to those that do not care about font and size, and those that are marked with an asterisk and almost ‘play’ on paper. I won’t tell you which answers are whose, I’ll leave it up to you to guess.
I will only reveal that through the answers I got a hint of what the process of writing the novels of these authors might have looked like. They deservedly found their way and won the hearts of both the audience and the critics – “Unutrašnje more” by Danica Vukićević, which was also chosen as the best novel according to the NIN jury, “Klara, Klarisa” by Marijana Čanak and “Niko nije zaboravljen i ničega se ne sećamo” by Mirjana Drljević.
In addition to the three of them, this year’s shortlist also includes the works of Goran Petrović (“Papir sa vodenim znakom”), Uglješa Šajtinac (“Koljka i Sašenjka”) and Milan Tripković (“Klub istinskih stvaralaca”), but today we bring you an interview with three women writers who talked with us about this success, but also about the end of the world, internal struggles and books they claimed to have read.
I
“Unutrašnje more”, “Klara, Klarisa” and “Niko nije zaboravljen i ničega se ne sećamo” are all debut novels that were chosen as finalists for the NIN award. For Mirjana, this is as well her first published book. Did you expect this success, and could it influence any future feats, or will they depend solely on your inner need to keep writing?
DANICA
Maybe we should start apologizing, maybe we should write as a motto: we apologize for entering someone else’s territory and for conquering it on pigeon feet… Each of us will say in her own name what and how we expected, but that is a feat and is a miracle. Time will stop now, and we will move on. There’s no end.
MARIJANA
I did not expect success, but I believed that the time might come for my readers’ circle to expand. The first novel certainly does not mean the first encounter with the text in the making – the background hides decades of writing in different prose forms, reading experience, and training the literary senses to notice and archive the potential core of the story. In this sense, literature has long been my way of understanding and interacting with the world, whatever happens, or doesn’t happen to this novel, it can’t affect my inner urge to write. I experienced all the events surrounding the selection for the NIN award as a big spotlight that temporarily directs the public’s attention to literature, then narrows down to individual titles, highlights them, and summon the reading public. It affects the life of a specific book, and I am glad that “Klara, Klarisa” had such an experience, I wish her independence and longevity, and my need to write remains unconditional.
MIRJANA
I didn’t expect anything. I don’t think of writing as a territory of success and failure, victories and defeats, nor as an asceticism, but above all as a space of freedom, as well as an obligation. I am free to write how I want and about whatever I want on the one hand, but on the other, I simply need to do it. The reception of readers and criticism is something you should be prepared and immune to, whatever it may be. I’m sorry that I don’t find satisfaction in media appearances and praise on social networks. In this sense, I worry whether I will be able to dive into writing again and forget about everything else, or whether I will have the feeling that the eyes of some future readers are fixed on me. I don’t know how everything that happens with this novel will affect my creative process in the future. It scares me a little.
II
In one of her interviews, Danica said: “It is a commonplace that attention and focus do not agree with the acute lifestyle naively called fast. Earlier, in ancient times, people wrote and read by sunlight or by candlelight; passions, oratorios, grandiose works were created, from our perspective, in impossible conditions. Who took them to heart, who read those creations? How can we find what someone has created for us? In the advertisement, in the algorithm… In the literalness of what is attached/offered or through intuition and self-awareness… Does anyone prevent us from looking for our own/real experience instead of a provisional one”.
I’m interested in how you perceive literature and the literary audience today. How do you imagine the audience reading you, if not by candlelight, and for whom were these novels written?
DANICA
The fact that our novels have come this far is in itself symbolic and powerful. We are arriving… Maybe people are tired of great novels, maybe they are tired of trying to convince them that exceptional is something that is below average (with me as an audience, that happened a long time ago). These books will find their readers, they already have, and that cannot be affected by placing an excavator. A friend reminded me today of a performer whom I adore and whose artistic destiny is one of the most beautiful and wonderful (and difficult) – it is Sixto Diaz Rodriguez.
MARIJANA
From the beginning of civilization until today, the role of the writer remains unchanged, whether telling a story by the fire, carving characters on clay tiles, wax tablets, parchment, or paper, or producing a melody on a typewriter or keyboard… – the writer is the one who conveys the most exciting story and keeps the community awake. Literature has the power to awaken from a collective trance, from dogma, delusion, and illusion. Our entire existence rests on mythologies, everything that has ever happened to us and everything that can happen to us is recorded in mythological stories. We vary these stories, both in life and in literature. Recognizing your story and taking responsibility for it is the way to a deeper understanding of yourself and life, to transformation. During the writing process, I never have the reader in mind and that is the best I can do for the reader. I do not deal with assumptions and calculations about the potential reader but deal exclusively with the text, discovering its laws, and my own satisfaction within that process. It is the only way to offer the reader a valid story. After publication, the reader establishes a relationship with the book, with the characters within it, with the atmosphere, the sound, the mythical context… not with me.
MIRJANA
I write for myself, it’s finally my turn, I finally have the famous room of my own, behind the door of which remains everything that is not me. It is a great privilege to do something just because you feel like it. If you have a knack for something, if you have a bit of talent, you owe it to yourself to pursue it.
I don’t imagine the readers, they inhabit the territory where the text goes alone, without me. It is the life of the text, what comes after writing, after parting with the text.
I think that, although times change, attention spans shorten and media multiply, the power of language remains unchanged – we have no more powerful weapon than this. That’s why I read, that’s why I believe that literature will survive.
III
All three of you write and speak out, among other things, about the constraints of patriarchy, and in different ways, your work is aimed at improving the position of women in society. How much does that part of you influence your writing and in what way? We know that only seven women (Danica included) have received the NIN award to date, although it has been established back in 1954. What do you think that tells us? Is there any kind of ‘women’s writing’ that you lean on?
DANICA
It is inconceivable to me that any woman author, be she a poet or a novelist, does not have her own recognized or unrecognized ancestors. Coincidentally, the corpus of men’s writing is huge, and accessible to everyone, whether we like it or not, those works are in the “rooms of our own”. But in the secret room next to that, there are many treasures. We take from there, we feed from there. From there we convey the secrets of the craft, the messages that were waiting for us.
MARIJANA
Literature is one and indivisible. I am not interested in literature as a program or ideological-political engagement, but as art, as magic, sound, melody, as the power behind words. Only as such, literature can produce catharsis, cause transformation, and lead to reconsideration. There is a clear difference between literature and a political pamphlet: the effect of the pamphlet is aimed at reprogramming the mind, at assimilating external information, while literature based on mythology addresses the deeper layers within us, provoking inner wisdom. That is why it is impossible to plan or force the effect of a literary text in advance. Such attempts are harmful, because if someone’s mouth is full of political correctness, it is often only a semblance of tolerance, a learned speech pattern without essential understanding, without openness to appreciate other people’s truth. The only thing I am focused on is the credibility of the story itself, the passion for the story and discovering its best possible expression, and the music behind the text. In doing so, I primarily rely on mythological heritage, original fairy tales, legends, and stories about the origin of everything. A woman’s letter is a hoax, an apartheid that I do not agree with. The fact that there is a need to add underline and emphasize that a work was written by a woman, the need to artificially stratify literature into female, queer, or any so-called minority literature, only shows that as a society we do not value women, queer or any other ‘minority’ experience as human, as part of life.
MIRJANA
I think that in this question lies the answer to the question of why Danica received the award this year, for which I congratulate her most warmly. If the jury continues to reward finding new entrances to the novel, redefining the concept of the novel, and paving new paths in the language, more and more women will receive awards. Masculine prose is the standard, and the masculine position is the default position, just as the masculine gender in language should include both genders. Women are historical apostates, the women’s voice is looking for its own ways again because you don’t have that much tradition to lean on, and the position of women is rapidly changing, so women are forced to innovate and break new ground.
Some of the authors that are important to me are Rachel Cusk, Olga Tokarczuk, Toni Morrison, and Ursula K. Le Guin…
IV
Mirjana said in an interview: “Only when I wrote the epilogue did I understand that I had actually written a novel about the end of the world. Metaphorical end, and actually about more of them.”
What is or what are the ends of the world for you in terms of writing about them, and why?
DANICA
The end of the world is practiced constantly, and once it will succeed. And maybe the apocalypse is a misread metaphor, a bad translation, just like Adam’s rib.
MARIJANA
I’m not sure I can answer the question, because I don’t accept the idea of the apocalypse in any sense, the world will be fine whether we are part of it or not. I don’t know what the end of the world would be on the thematic level because whatever I write about, I believe that literature can offer a spectrum of meanings, different truths, and possibilities instead of some fatalistic images. After all, to neutralize the very idea of ‘doomsday’ and root us deeper into life. Let’s remember Scheherazade, she teaches us how telling a story can delay death.
MIRJANA
The constant transformation of the world demands that we follow it with our own transformations. From historical disasters to intimate endings, everything is united against the status quo. A man in a world that ends several times during his life is an exciting subject for me. Transformation, metamorphosis, moving from one state to another, moving through time with the human need to maintain the continuity of one’s own existence.
Language is the glue that holds those fragments together and glues the pieces of the broken world together as many times as necessary.
V
“Trapped in a labyrinth of relationships, will she manage to find a way to herself, or has she lived in vain?” – Marijana asks herself in an interview about Klara from “Klara, Klarisa” novel. The question is universal, but I would like you to answer from the perspective of a writer, a woman, someone who is part of the ‘generation X of the former Yugoslavia’, as Mirjana puts it.
DANICA
I’m a baby boomer, so I can’t answer from generation X. Let’s rejoice, let’s rejoice that we’re writing, that we’re alive!
MARIJANA
Klara is at the center of a common life trap, on the seesaw between who she is and what others demand her to be. Everyone can identify with some elements of her story, and recognize themselves at risk of alienation or at risk of depersonalization. I am aware of both of these risks. From the point of view of a writer, I was at risk of both hermetic language and the complete impenetrability of the story, from perfectionism to denying the need for play, at the risk of an excessive tendency to self-isolation to the possibility that nothing I write will be read. Seen from this point, these are all now plusquamperfect. I no longer question futility but feel free to write, explore my own style, to discover the wonders of language. Literature is my way of living. From a woman’s point of view, it seems to me that we are often faced with the requirement to ‘play the game’ in a manly way in various spheres of life, in order to prove that we can and are worthy, and this puts us at risk of forgetting the essential values of the feminine principle.
MIRJANA
It is the only path that is inevitable and the only place to which all roads lead. It seems to me that women find it more difficult. My generation does not have a female model of self-searching, traveling to one’s own nature, at least that is my experience. Mothers of my generation lived in the function of family relationships, although they themselves mostly had careers and worked. A larger and more important part of their lives took place at home, in the family circle. We are now in a blank space, we don’t want to live like our mothers, and we are going down a path that no one has shown us.
Writing is definitely a way to find yourself – finding your voice, defining your position in the world and reviving your sense of the world. And reading is the same.
Both while writing and while reading you are alone. Solitude is very important. When you start seeing it as a blessing, you’re on the right track.
VI
Through YuBiblioteka, your novels will also be available to people who have moved from our region to the USA and who follow the local literary scene. Is there anything you would like to tell them before or after they read your book?
DANICA
I tell them to open themselves to new paradigms, to new voices, and to embrace us!
MARIJANA
I would like to thank the founder of YuBiblioteka for building a virtual bridge between the Balkans and the USA. Klara admires bridges, she is crazy about bridges, she sees bridges where no one else can even imagine them because bridges are lifesaving. Each reading revives the characters and the story anew, inscribes new meanings into it, fills in the blanks, and prolongs the life of the book – thanks to the readers for that.
MIRJANA
Don’t come back.
VII
And one last question – is there a book that you lied to someone that you had read, even though you hadn’t? 😊
DANICA
I have several cardinal non-readings, and in order not to lie if that work/author is mentioned (we passed each other, I don’t regret it when the time comes, maybe we’ll meet), I just keep silent, waiting for the topic to change. But it’s so cute. Not knowing everything.
MARIJANA
Of course, Dositej Obradović’s “Saveti zdravog razuma” (eng. Counsels of Common Sense). I lied to myself and to my Serbian literature of the 18th-century professor. I lied convincingly.
MIRJANA
Yes, I lie that I have read the Bible, I have never read it in its entirety, always skipping, looking for something that interests me at that moment. Here, I publicly promise to read it, it makes no sense anymore.
S.P.