“I don’t go to the cinema to hear these clichés about life—something you say to someone so that they can move on.”

Yorgos Lanthimos is a Greek director whose award-winning film, Dogtooth, is set to open in New York tonight. Born in Athens, Lanthimos has directed a series of videos for Greek dance-theater companies, TV commercials, music videos, short films, experimental plays and two feature length films. Dogtooth, his most recent film, has garnered a slew of prizes including two from the Cannes Film Festival (Un Certain Regard Prize and the Prix de la Jeunesse) and five prizes from the Greek Film Academy (including ones for Best Film, Best Director and Best Script).

Dogtooth is haunting, funny, and beautiful. Set in a secluded home somewhere in Greece, the film’s plot revolves around a tightly-knit family kept permanently isolated by a protective and paranoid father. In this perverse miniature universe, language and norms have fractured, rearranged, and sometimes disappeared altogether. The children—who, although in their 20s or maybe even 30s can only be described as such—live in a world where airplanes tend to tumble out of the sky and into the bushes; where the stray kitten in the yard is a terrifying existential threat; where the word “pussy” is translated as “a big light.”

But under a playful, and occasionally funny, shell lurks a very dark existence. When the children discover smuggled VHS tapes of Jaws and Rocky and their artificial reality starts to unravel, the father goes to any lengths to preserve the world he’s hermetically sealed. What follows are stunning and vivid flashes of violence, incest, and abuse. Dogtooth’s success stems from its striking ability to navigate that uncomfortable ecotone between tragedy and comedy, leaving viewers marooned between laughter and horror.

I saw Dogtooth at the 2009 Reykjavik International Film Festival in a packed house on the outskirts of town. The Q&A that followed with Lanthimos was good, but left me wanting more. I found the director outside the emergency exit and asked for an interview.

Two day later I met Lanthimos at Café Paris, a busy bar in the heart of downtown Reykjavik. He’d arrived early and ordered a strange dish of what looked like shrimp riding a wave of mayonnaise over a bed of lettuce. Lanthimos saw me looking at his plate and offered me a bite. I politely declined.

The Rumpus: The translation of the film’s title—Dogtooth—gave me a totally different impression of what the film was about. I thought it might have been an action film. But it’s actually referring to the canine tooth. Why’d you go with Dogtooth?

Yorgos Lanthimos: Canine sounded too intellectual in English to me—too scientific. Since there’s a lot of word play in the film, with dogtooth being a word that almost doesn’t exist, I found it worked better. There are a few things called dogtooth—I think there’s a tuna, and a design. It fit the film; it means this, but not exactly.

Rumpus: What made you want to do a movie about this family?

Lanthimos: I think the idea came from watching friends that had recently gotten married or had children. I’ve never had children or been married and I was fooling around with them, asking, ‘Are you sure? Is this going to work? Is this a good idea? Can’t you see all these families falling apart?’

And they were getting very defensive and scared just by me making these jokes. If they got so irritated by the idea of this thing falling apart, what would someone do, in an extreme situation, to keep their family together?

Rumpus: And the family unit can be a useful placeholder for a lot of different systems. There was one member of the audience who was convinced the movie was a metaphor for welfare states and modern Europe…

Lanthimos: The whole idea started with the family and we realized later that it could be seen as whatever else. It could work as an allegory, which is a word I don’t really like; I never think that way. It started off with, ‘What’s the future of the family going to be?’ How can you narrow people’s minds by educating them—telling them, ‘this is the right thing, this is the wrong thing’? When we wrote the script and started working on the film it was obvious that, OK, this works in any system, society, relationship, country. It’s a microcosm.

Rumpus: The fundamental dystopian nature of the film’s premise—a total co-opting of language and norms—gives it a tinge of science fiction.  Did you consider making it into a full-blown sci-fi film?

Lanthimos: It was an idea in the beginning. Because you’re thinking about the future of families…should [the story] be placed in the future?

But I abandoned that idea because I was more interested in the actual happenings of the family. I thought that the science fiction aspect would be an addition that would attract too much attention to creating a different world. Whereas I think this could work in any era. It’s not science fiction—it’s more fundamental.

Rumpus: The film is very aesthetically pleasing, but there are instances of extreme violence—it’s surprising.

Lanthimos: I think it’s only shocking because it comes suddenly in the context of the film being funny and bright and beautiful in many ways. When it happens, it happens unexpectedly—that’s why people consider it ‘extremely violent.’

Rumpus: And the violence is graphic too…

Lanthimos: And it’s realistic. It’s plain and brutal. It’s out in the open—you see everything.

Rumpus: You knew you wanted that aspect from the very beginning?

Lanthimos: Yeah, I knew I wanted that—I knew I wanted to create this contradiction. Not to make a film that was dark and violent throughout. I wanted the contrast of parents trying to create a very beautiful environment where the kids were beautiful, where everything’s beautiful. And next to all of that, these things that they’re doing are horrible and tragic—they’re destroying and deforming their kids in many ways. This thin line of going from tragedy to humor to ridiculousness is something we really wanted to keep.

Rumpus: Why?

Lanthimos: It goes more in depth than shoving violence in someone’s face. If you can experience horrible things while you’re laughing, you go through feelings that you wouldn’t otherwise. It makes you freer to watch the movie with your own personality—it doesn’t force you the whole time.

The one thing I’m most proud of is people laughing within a situation but also being shocked. It stimulates your brain more than just violence or just laughter, because your mind is on edge all of the time.

Rumpus: Is there a desired effect?

Lanthimos: I don’t have a specific desired effect—that’s too limited. I’d like the audience to go through different things with their own experiences, education, whatever.

Some people find the film very funny; some don’t, because they get into the theme of the movie so deeply that they can’t really see how funny these things are. I really like that. I like the film to be open—for people to interact with it. I’m not satisfied with one type of feeling from the audience. I’m satisfied if people are experiencing it in different ways.

Rumpus: There’s this terrible moment in the film when a character’s standing in the bathroom, pulling her own tooth out. Her mouth and hands are covered in blood. Then she looks up into the mirror and smiles in the most genuine way. For the audience, that was a very funny moment—did you know it was funny when you were shooting it?

Lanthimos: No, I didn’t know it was going to be funny. For us, making the movie, it was all funny. It’s all rubber tape—it’s just a game. But there are many moments that I didn’t expect the audience to laugh at. I think this happened because of the awkwardness and the back and forth. You’ve been laughing and then something horrible happens and you think, ‘Should I be laughing at this?’ As a defensive mechanism you keep on laughing but I don’t think it’s actually funny at that point. I noticed at the screening in Cannes that some of the audience was laughing at things that were not funny at all. It was an awkward feeling. You could see the audience being very engaged by the story, by the specific scene, everything.

Rumpus: There are scenes of incest in the film. How did you tackle the dissonance between the actors—who obviously have a socialized reaction toward incest—and their characters, who have none at all? Was there a process of deconstruction—of getting the actors to shed their hang-ups?

Lanthimos: We didn’t rationalize what we were doing. It wasn’t psychological—it was physical. Bring your body into a situation but leave everything else out. Don’t think about it—‘What does it mean? Is it right or wrong? What would be the rational way to react?’—forget that and just feel the other person’s hand, or the wall, or the ball. That’s how they tried to forget everything they knew as actors, or as people. Just by trying to be empty every day and to react to everything that was happening just in that moment. Not having a story in their mind.

It always works better this way. When actors have too much in their heads it’s too obvious—they perform in an obvious way and it’s very annoying. You see them thinking, ‘Now I should be upset.’ So I prefer to create a situation where it seems like they are upset by the things they’re doing, the way they’re sitting. I could have told them, ‘Now you’ll be cleaning your teeth with your tongue every five seconds.’ And I find when they do that, even if no one knows that they’re doing that, you think that there’s something wrong with them—that they’re upset.

The camera reveals all the thinking and trying to act; it’s not like theater at all. So I prefer to find very physical ways of making them do things or giving the impression that they’re doing things instead of trying to rationalize.

Rumpus: So you do all the thinking for your actors?

Lanthimos: Yes, I try to.

Rumpus: So what are their their roles?

Lanthimos: Their role is to be really open and to have the gift.

Rumpus: The gift?

Lanthimos: To me, in cinema, it’s not always about who’s the best actor. It’s about who’s good to be in this thing—who’s good to be in this situation. You know by seeing them and working with them a little bit. And sometimes non-actors are the best thing. The young sister in the film is not an actress—she’s a singer.

Rumpus: Are you ever nervous working with non-actors?

Lanthimos: It’s the most comfortable, the easiest way, because they don’t have all of these things that they’ve built up over the years, ways of acting. They’re much cleaner. And they have the gift.

Rumpus: Are you considering putting together a movie of all non-actors?

Lanthimos: Yes, I am, but the problem is that in Greece you don’t find that many people that are naïve about cinema, or TV, or acting. It’s really hard to find people who are ‘innocent.’ Because of the whole situation with television, exposure, fame and celebrity, even non-actors, when they’re invited to be in a film, think they should act. They imitate what they see on TV and of course they’re bad actors and it doesn’t work at all—it’s even worse. You really need to find people who are innocent about these things.

Rumpus: How do you find non-actors?

Lanthimos: It’s people that I know, mostly—friends. They know what I’m talking about. They shouldn’t do anything—just let me guide them. When it works, it’s like a miracle.

Rumpus: There was a woman at the Q&A who said she loved the film but couldn’t stand the ambiguous ending. Any thoughts?

Lanthimos: It’s fine—it’s the part I felt most comfortable with in this film. I had many problems with this film and the script. But when I thought of this ending, I was really satisfied. Because it’s not that ambiguous; it’s all there. And it’s not that much to ask. Why should I tell you exactly what’s going on? Why should I end it in a very specific way and give you a very specific film?

Rumpus: Is it frustrating to hear comments like that?

Lanthimos: No, not really. I’m sure that they’re thinking different things and that they just want an answer. You see that they care, that they really care. Maybe they already know [the ending] and maybe that’s what’s frustrating to them. It’s not a happy ending but you don’t quite tell it to their face. It’s engaging, and isn’t that the best thing?

I don’t like when a film says everything. I saw a film yesterday and I was really upset. At the end of every scene someone would say what the gist of the scene had been. Like, “Things are getting difficult, but you should carry on.” CUT. Then why have that scene? Why make a film? Then he’d say, “You’re just thirty years old, you have time to change all of your mistakes.” CUT. I hate that. I don’t go to the cinema to hear these clichés about life—something you say to someone so that they can move on.

I enjoy the experience of watching a film and not being told things. That’s what cinema is—it should be about showing an image and having the people watching it put everything into it. You have an image of a chair—a still shot. Some see it as an ugly chair, or a beautiful chair. Maybe someone has left, or someone is coming. I think that’s how cinema should work.

Rumpus: Some people are discouraged by that.

Lanthimos: But it’s not a lot to ask for your mind to work, at least with some films. There are entertaining film that do it for you, and you’re having a good time and it’s fine. And I do watch these types of film. When they’re good, I really enjoy them.

Like, I enjoyed the Bourne Ultimatum. I think it’s a masterpiece! It’s a masterpiece of this type of cinema. It’s perfect: pure action, no bullshit dialogue. It’s action to the highest degree of beauty and perfection. I think he [Paul Greengrass], is a very good director.

But I want more from my audience. It’s what I have to offer—to experience things without laying out everything I have to say. It’s about posing questions and not giving answers. We can’t all have the same answers for everything.

***

Dogtooth is opening at Brooklyn Heights Cinema and Cinema Village tonight, June 25th in New York City. David Byrne will be on hand for the 8 pm Cinema Village screening to introduce the film. Look for a wider release later this summer and fall.

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[To learn about The Rumpus International Rivers Interview project click here.]

Three of Tsepeneag’s books have recently been translated into English and published by Dalkey Archive Press: Vain Art of the Fugue, Pigeon Post, and The Necessary Marriage. What struck me first when sitting down to read Tsepeneag’s books was the lack of narrative—or, rather, its insignificance. Whatever narrative exists serves as paper-thin camouflage; sheep’s clothing for what lurks beneath.

And what lurks beneath are structures—complicated, spiraling, head-over-toes, hand-sculpted structures.  In Vain Art of the Fugue, my favorite of the three, Tsepeneag adopts the fugue—a style of composition highlighted by multiple voices or instruments harping on one central musical ‘phrase’—as a model. The result is multiple iterations of a hopelessly simple story: one man trying to ride the bus to the station. As characters, symbols and events crop up, fly by, collide and disappear, the task takes on surreal, impossible proportions. If at times difficult, Tsepeneag’s imaginatively rich texts are also intensely rewarding.

The following interview was conducted in the summer of 2009 and translated from French with the help of Aude Jeanson.

The Rumpus: Could you describe the circumstances of your exile?

Dumitru Tsepeneag: After multiple trips to Paris and being accused of participating in ‘heinous’ activities in regard to the state, I found my Romanian nationality revoked by ‘presidential decree’ in 1975. Because I hadn’t asked for political asylum like everyone else, I had to live and travel with the infamous Nansen Passport from then on. This wasn’t easy…I finally obtained my French citizenship in 1983.

Rumpus: Did you start writing in French immediately?

Tsepeneag: My first book published in France was translated and titled Exercices d’Attente in 1972. It was a collection of short works written and published in Romania. In 1973 I was ready to publish the novel Arpièges, which I had started writing in Romanian and of which I had published some fragments under the title Vain Art of the Fugue. Some years later, I finished Necessary Marriage.

Vain Art of the Fugue was the only one of my novels to be met with relative public recognition: it was nominated for the Prix Médicis by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Milan Kundera pocketed the prize instead and the public never clamored to buy it.

My editor, who was tired of paying for translations, asked me: “Why don’t you write in French?” He was right.  It was a difficult period for me, and not only in material terms: I had severed relations with the Romanian exiles who had become politically conservative and even extremely right wing; I was giving chess lessons to earn a living. Luckily we spoke quite a bit of French at home so it wasn’t too difficult for me to write in my adopted language.

I got a grant in Berlin thanks to an American friend, the poet Christopher Middleton. It was there I started to write Le Mot Sablier. The text is particular, a type of linguistic hourglass : the first pages are written in Romanian, with French slipping in little by little, ending a battle of words in which French is victorious: the last pages of the book are written entirely in French.

As my editor had no desire to frighten readers with the Romanian pages, he had them translated and published the whole thing in French in 1984. It was only years later, in Romania, that I was able to publish the book as I wrote it.

Rumpus: When did you decide to return to writing in Romanian?

Tsepeneag: I published two more books in French: Roman de Gare (1985) and later, Pigeon Post (1989). That same year the wall came down, and seized by the frenzy of radical political change, I decided to renounce French and return to Romanian. It’s true that in Romanian I feel more relaxed, as if I’m wearing slippers…but I came to this decision primarily for other reasons: I had only published three collections of texts in Romania. Even before my exile I was prohibited from publishing, I was ignored and forgotten. In going back to Romanian I had the opportunity to take my revenge.

Rumpus: Vain Art of the Fugue, Pigeon Post and Necessary Marriage were initially published 20-odd years ago. Did you revisit the texts when you realized they’d be republished?

Tsepeneag: For me, literature is the daughter of music: a bit heavy and more level headed than its mother. Literature submits to the same principles of successive perception, which allows it to build progressively. The narrative image has more dimensions than the painted image—literature is more complex than painting. Initially, this complexity represents a disadvantage, because the reader has to concentrate much more than when they’re looking at a canvas. It gives the author, on the other hand, the opportunity to feel like a creator: they can offer their readers a world in which there’s room for everyone, as every reader has their own reading and vision.

It’s not the subject of narration that interests me, but the structure. That’s why I stay in touch with my old works, which I reread regularly. I don’t hesitate to take up previously used images or even whole scenes. While I was writing Hôtel Europa in the early 90s, the first of a trilogy, I was rereading Vain Art of the Fugue. I took a whole scene—an episode in a train—from my old text and changed very little.

Many images of animals, mammals or birds, resurface regularly in my narratives. They are not symbols, but chromatic benchmarks. For me, music has always been the perfect construction—an inaccessible ideal. In Necessary Marriage, I tried to repeat entire phrases without the reader noticing. My work doesn’t have the rigor of music, but I hope it alludes to it.

But music doesn’t sum up my approach to literature—even in Vain Art of the Fugue. To ‘fugue’ I had to invent ‘trap-words,’ or words that would force the narrator to turn around and start his path anew. The reader’s impression is one of a dream—the only thing that’s left upon waking is the memory of a melody at the end of a concert.

Rumpus: I’ve read that there was a moment in your life when you were isolated, when all you did was play chess. Did this influence your work?

Tsepeneag: In so-called communist Romania, chess was held in high esteem, even if our champions were weaker than the Soviets. This game, this “sport of the mind,” was at the time a better way to establish your reputation than literature.

I was a professional chess player in Romania, but only a small-time master. When I came to France, I continued playing chess for many years: I played tournaments in numerous countries with mixed results. I wrote and published a book – La Défense Alekhine and translated two others from Russian. I taught chess in schools; I earned more money through chess than through literature.

Chess hasn’t really influenced my literature. It’s true, there’s a character in Pigeon Post, an old chess player; but it’s more of a wink, a self-portrait and not much more.

At one point I had a very complicated plan to use the game of chess as a generating structure for writing. I prepared for a long time. I finally wrote two chapters and stopped. It was too complicated and too difficult to write. And who would’ve read it?

Rumpus: But you’ve compared an author to a chess player before. In chess, the winner is the player who can organize the best set-up. Does that kind of set-up exist in literature?

Tsepeneag: There is no one ‘best set-up’, there are many—you can get to mate in endless ways. And—don’t forget!—in chess, like in literature, “the other” (the reader, the adversary, the partner, etc.) has to be a collaborator, has to work with you to get to the final goal. We depend on them! But they also depend on us…

The literary game is the abyss of human society itself: interactive, playful and tragic. We can’t live alone. For me, Robinson [Crusoe] is either a false myth or else he represents the denial of human society. We can’t play by ourselves. In literature, it’s even more complicated, because one has to play with an indeterminate number of players simultaneously and every game is different. The other player can abandon your game at any time…to go play chess.

Rumpus: In the 60s you were part of the Oniric literary group. What attracted you to dreams?

Tsepeneag: At first I met the grand poet Léonid Dimov, a marginal like myself during the years of proletcultisme and social-realism. We met, talked, drank, read each other’s works, but never published. Nothing until 1964, when there was a sort of thaw of cultural life.

Since adolescence I’ve had a passion for Romantic Fantastique literature, which continued with Expressionism and culminated with the genius of Kafka. It’s that German thread of the metaphysic—they were looking for the beyond in dreams.

On the other hand, Surrealism has been a part of Romanian literature since forever. Even before Tzara, who was originally Romanian, we had Urmuz, who was a surrealist before the term even existed. During Breton’s era too, there was a very active Romanian Surrealist group (Ghérasim Luca, Gellu Naum, etc.) closely related to the French. They had to quit their activities as soon as the Soviet communists took over.

Rumpus: But why did you feel it necessary to abandon automatic writing?

Tsepeneag: Our Onirisme movement was a synthesis between the Romantic Fantastique and Surrealism. Dimov and I rejected automatic writing. We loved surrealist painters: Chirico, Magritte, Tanguy and especially Brauner (also a Romanian), who never respected the laws that Breton imposed in his manifests. Where is automatism in the work of Chirico or Tanguy? Even Dali had to renounce it in order to be able to organize the space of the canvas according to the combined laws of dreams and pictorial aesthetics.

We could say that Romanian Onirisme was born from painting and not from surrealist literature. The visual is primordial. Dimov said, ‘Dreams are not a source, but a canon, a legislative model.’ We don’t recount our dreams; we construct them with the materials of reality. We aren’t looking for God, psychic truth or authenticity, but for esthetic effect. That’s why I baptized our movement Structural, or Esthetic, Onirism. Dreams and music were our models.

Rumpus: What led you to edit the review Seine et Danube?

Tsepeneag: I worked on a number of reviews in Paris. The first, launched in 1975, was Les Cahiers de l’Est, which lasted five years. It was published by a small press which I’d convinced to fund the review thanks to Eugène Ionesco, who was a sort of the protective patron of the project. His daughter, Marie-France, was part of the editorial team. We published literature from all eastern countries except the Soviet Union. It was because of this review that my Romanian nationality was revoked.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, I published Les Nouveaux Cahiers de l’Est with my Parisian editor POL in 1992. Our mission was the same, except this time we published Russian literature as well. It only survived four issues: the public had lost interest. The East was no longer a threat to the western world, and when there’s nothing to fear we turn our backs, we look elsewhere. Eastern literature is still the poor relative that everyone wants to forget, the Cinderella who hasn’t (yet) found her prince.

Seine et Danube was launched in 2003 with the help of Romanian authorities who had finally realized the necessity of promoting literature and Romanian culture in general. Along with focusing on the literature of the countries the Danube traversed (with an emphasis on Romania), we printed work that interested us from the banks of the Seine: French and French-Romanian authors like Cioran and Fondane. We dedicated our last edition to surrealism and Esthetic Onirisme.

Rumpus: Could you describe the last time you saw the Danube?

Tsepeneag: I see the Danube each year in Budapest, Hungary, in Bulgaria, and obviously Romania, where the river has its delta. It’s always the same: every year it’s a little dirtier, a little more polluted.

***

Rumpus original art by Ilyse Magy.

The Rumpus International Rivers Interview #1, #2, and #3.

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How The Soldier Repairs the Gramophone (2008), Stanisic’s first book, is a self-portrait of a precociously creative young boy as he wades through the ugly swamp of ethnic violence and political destabilization of the Balkans during the 90s. Chapter titles like “When flowers are just flowers, how Mr. Hemingway and Comrade Marx feel about each other, who’s the real Tetris champion, and the indignity suffered by Bogoljub Balvan’s scarf” bleed into a narrative equally lyrical. The meticulous tenderness with which Stanisic threads his story left me emotionally exhausted.

[To learn more about The Rumpus International Rivers Interview project click here.]

Stanisic also writes nonfiction—the essay referenced in this interview is a pointed take on so-called ‘Immigrant Literature’ entitled “Three Myths of Immigrant Writing: A View from Germany” published in Words Without Borders.

The first time I asked Sasa Stanisic for an interview, he declined. The book, he wrote, had been haunting him since its original publication, imposing a ‘geopolitical agenda’ he’d never foreseen. As for the Danube, he wrote, “I haven’t written one single word about it, as a matter of fact I don’t even have the slightest idea how Danube smells or feels on the skin.” I fretted over this.

I re-read his book, swapped out some questions, and approached him again a few months later. The following interview was conducted in August, 2009.

The Rumpus: Were you surprised to find Daniel Handler standing on a beach, holding an accordion on the American cover of How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone?

Sasa Stanisic: My German publisher and I had no idea who that person with the accordion was until at some point my Dutch editor recognized Daniel and pointed him out to me. I guess for the U.S. readers the whole thing is more interesting since they might be able to connect the image with the actual living person. For me it was just a funny coincidence which at least led to a great experience—I immediately read all his work and enjoyed it a lot.

Rumpus: Could you elaborate on what you meant by HSRG’s “geopolitical agenda”?

Stanisic: A book is not only written—after it’s finished it starts writing you, the writer. You become its notebook, its sheet of paper on which it forces you to think and rethink your original ideas, your topics, your research, actually everything. Dealing with all the questions once the book is out and unchangeable, forces you to permanently give opinions about—in this case—sensible, challenging topics that you are basically only half the expert you would have to be if you wanted to explain yourself in a trustworthy, intelligent and helpful manner.

Writing about a war will always be political writing, no matter what amount of hermetical hide-and-seek or aesthetical operations are involved. Thus, the FAQ regarding my book were not about my use of commas or how the images went berserk, but about the political situation in Bosnia, about guilt and shame, about victims and perpetrators, about reasons, arguments and beliefs that led to the conflict in the first place, etc. All of this needed and still needs answering and ongoing discussions, but I mostly felt overwhelmed and unqualified to articulate anything worth more than personal experiences of the siege, of fear and refuge—all the things which I wrote about anyway.

Rumpus: So at some point the book had grown into something different than what you’d expected?

Stanisic: Something as radical as a war can only be understood (if at all) through the collaboration of journalists, academia, artists and, of course, people. By trying to give an artistic approach through my book I stepped unwillingly into other fields. Like a dentist being asked about a throat ache on a much more relevant scale, I was caught in trying to explain what was unexplainable for me. In the end, trying to explain why it was unexplainable finally led to a huge general insecurity in dealing with the subject at all. Instead of giving it a rest I continued pursuing more research, talking to more people on the subject as if I was to please this aftermath of the book by knowledge that was more historical and psychological than literary and aesthetical.

Rumpus: Was the article you wrote on immigrant literature for Words Without Borders in part a response to the reception of How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone?

Stanisic: The reason for writing that essay was less a personal agenda than an attempt to explain my unease with the general label of “immigrant literature” after I had read quite a number of reviews (in different countries) involving books written by ‘immigrants.’ It just seemed to me so utterly wrong to credit someone’s work just for the fact that this someone migrated from one place to another. We all move. We are all leavers and new beginners at some point, and yes, it is a huge leap from war to peace, from one language to another, from Boston, MA to Joplin, MO. Unfortunately, involuntary displacements are still taking place while we speak. But no matter how much sympathy we personally feel towards a person experiencing a step like this—which in different degrees will always include loss, sadness, and pain—being an immigrant is not a literary criterion. Having brown hair isn’t one either. Regarding fiction, our concern shouldn’t be the author’s origin (and of course I am forgetting the sales people right here), because that is actually merely a simplified, almost insulting judgment of the book by its cover—or rather by the name and origin of its author—an act of discrimination if we want to say it in a more provoking way, but at the least an act of ignorance and false empathy.

Rumpus: But aren’t these labels unavoidable?

Stanisic: I am realistic enough to see that there is no way around this label. It is not being made or forced by authors, it is being made because we are for sale and sales objects need exotic power, and because everything is pigeonholed anyway—putting things in order, no matter how random and insufficient, lets us sleep better at night.

Rumpus: As Europe becomes more unified and migration more common, will these labels eventually disappear?

Stanisic: Europe is not becoming more unified—well, yes, on paper—but not as long as the criteria for so many things (import regulations, border control, visa politics…etc.) are still made in an unjust, unreasonable way. Given that the label “immigrant literature” is already established, unavoidable for anyone with a migrant background and used in any given context, I strongly advocate an absurd amount of specification to go along with the label. For example, an author whose parents fled a war but he himself was born in the country where they fled to, and that is where he went to school and college before he wrote his first book of poetry in the language of this country—he should be labeled as: “Author whose parents fled a war but he himself was born in the country where they fled to, and that is where he went to school and college before he wrote his first book of poetry in the language of this country.”

Rumpus: You mentioned that you were traveling to research for a new project. Is that a method you used in How The Soldier Repaired the Gramophone?

Stanisic: Yes, I also did a great amount of writing while doing research. It gave me the opportunity to meet and talk to people other than family, but also to explore my own memory deeper by comparing it to the memories of others who were in my home town during, for example, the political transition from socialism to a nationalistic “democracy” or during the bombings. I just feel much more secure about whatever I write if I stand with one foot in reality—meaning if the stories I write about have a core of “this actually (could have) happened.”

Rumpus: You write that an immigrant author’s most interesting book is his second or third, after they’ve purged the need to tell the story of their transition. Have you done that?

Stanisic: It is a bit more challenging for the simple fact that now the stories I am writing are relying more on my imagination than on facts, more on research than on memory; so it is basically a slower writing process, more reading, more exploring. On the other hand, this approach is a little bit relieving too, since many times while writing [HSRG] I felt too close and equal to my character.

Rumpus: Is there danger in that?

Stanisic: It can stand in the way of narration in cases where we want the protagonist to actually go through some kind of catharsis while our own (non-fictional) experiences and stories lead to something banal or completely uninteresting. By changing the way I experienced things, even just involving different details than in reality, I often felt I was betraying the past and playing an unfair game with the reader where he (of course) would ask himself “Did this really happen?”

Rumpus: Having never seen it, could you recite anything you learned about the Danube?

Stanisic: Not really. It was the Big One. Sava, Drina, Bosna—little ones, but no less beautiful. Danube–the Big One. That’s all.

***

Rumpus original art by Ilyse Magy.

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[To learn more about The Rumpus International Rivers Interview project click here.]

As Yugoslavia disintegrated in the early 90s, nationalist fervor erupted. Dubravka Ugersic’s firm anti-nationalist stance exposed her to public harassment: she was labeled a “traitor” and “public enemy” by the press. Ugresic left Croatia in 1993 and currently resides in the Netherlands.

Reading Ugresic’s latest collection of essays, Nobody’s Home is bearing witness to a beautifully articulate curiosity: Ugresic questions nationalism, multiculturalism, Eastern European authors (‘Easties’), celebrities, immigration, capitalism and more. The essays—rigorous and opinionated—smuggle concepts that snag readers with their clarity and originality. In speaking of confronting her Eastern European identity, Ugresic writes:

Can someone explain to me how it could be that—having come to the West from the South of Europe, from the former Yugoslavia—I look more and more, with every new day, like—a woman from India?!

Columbus’ gaffe is proliferating. I went westward and turned up in the East. Moving from East Amsterdam to West Amsterdam didn’t help either: in doing so I found myself even further eastwards.

Baba Yaga Laid an Egg (2009), her latest work of nonfiction, was published as part of Canongates’ Myth Series. The book is a three-forked approach to Baba Yaga—the infamous witch of Eastern Europe. Ugresic addresses this myth and touches on a few others with a lighter touch than in her nonfiction—though the essayist’s head inevitably emerges.

The following interview was conducted in the fall of 2009.

The Rumpus: How did you get involved in the Myths project and what attracted you to Baba Yaga?

Dubravka Ugresic: I was invited to propose “my” myth and do the synopsis. I chose Baba Yaga without thinking twice, and when the editorial board of Canongate’s myth project accepted it, I found myself in trouble. But when I look at my choice retrospectively, it was not only a right choice; it was an absolutely precise choice. It had its long history, only I had forgotten about it. Even the title of book, for instance, was fixed some thirty years earlier than the book was actually written. In that respect, and in some other respects, Baba Yaga is not departure from my works, but the opposite. Writing Baba Yaga was a sort of reunion with my earlier writing style. If you read my early collection of short stories Lend Me Your Character, you will find a similar literary energy.

Rumpus: After reading Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, I was surprised to read that you yourself had been labeled a “witch”—that they’d decided to use this very specific term. Even if your decision to take on Baba Yaga was impulsive, did the project give you the opportunity to appropriate the insult?

Ugresic: We—I, and other four women, three of them journalists and one of them a university professor—have been labeled “witches,” “traitors,” “people’s enemies,” “conspirators against Croatia” etc. because each of us wrote critically about Croatian and Serbian nationalism. This media witch hunt started in 1992 and went on for some time. It also opened a “production” of “inside enemies” in Croatia. The witch-hunt practice and hysterical nationalism were the reasons I left Croatia.

A history of female intelligentsia shows that women thinkers were often perceived as “witches” and publicly discredited as witches. When Mohammad was mocked in a Danish newspaper several years ago, a million of people stood up to defend His right not to be mocked. Hundreds of thousands of girls have been raped, sold to brothels and enslaved; hundred of thousands women burned, raped, molested—and nobody, except some activist groups, have stood up to defend their rights. When the Pope died, millions of ordinary people cried for the old man and even rushed to Rome to cry there. When Anna Politkovskaya was murdered, a few stood up to the Russian authorities demanding the murderers be brought to justice. In the meantime, another woman journalist was murdered. A dust is slowly covering those cases. These are the standards of the world we live in, and we can’t do anything about it.

I am not interested to write about my case. Others should write about it, if anyone would ever be interested to write about it.

Rumpus: You’ve written before about the forced fracturing of languages during the break up of Yugoslavia. Did myths go through a similar process?

Ugresic: They did. When everything breaks apart, as it happened with the former Yugoslavia, then language, history, values, literature, ideology and mythology—as an  important part of “house furniture” —break apart too. Yugoslav socialist mythology, with its heroes, personalities, ideas and ideals, was vandalized, very often literally (destruction of monuments, libraries, and churches, for instance). Old myths were replaced by new national and nationalistic myths. Their function was pragmatic: such myths were supposed to reinforce the differences between the Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians; to give “reason” and “legality” to the war, to transform criminal acts into heroic ones. Mythologization served as a sort of huge laundry machine, to wash the dirt; a sort of collective psychotherapy. Instead of truth and real reason for the war, new ideologues offered people myths.

Rumpus: In Nobody’s Home you argue that “themes of exile, passports, and visas will gradually vanish from the Eastie’s (Eastern European author’s) repertoire.” As Europe unifies, is the “Eastie’s” identity in peril?

Ugresic: The new Eastie, at least the part I know best, is in trouble. The old system fell apart and our Eastie, in order to survive, had to transform himself and adapt to a new one. However, one can’t transform him or herself without consequences. That’s why the typical Eastie is a liar: he uses one language when he speaks to his local audience and another when he speaks to an international audience. He is doing this job of self-positioning in order to survive.

Rumpus: But does the Eastie generate this situation for his own profit or is he a victim of a system beyond his control?

Ugresic: He is not a victim, not at all. He is an active participant of a post-communist, “democratic” life. If you check media, newspapers, publishing houses, and universities in Eastern European countries, you will see that some former dissidents (those who survived) are now in power; that many writers got as much power as they could. Some of them are newspaper owners; some own publishing houses; some have their own TV-shows, radio-programs, regular newspaper columns, and so on and so forth. I would say that the Eastie generates this situation for his own profit.

Rumpus: What language do you write in?

Ugresic: I write in BCS. This funny abbreviation was coined by the translators who work at The Hague Tribunal, and stands for Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian. I didn’t change the language I write in—when I found myself in exile I was too old to change languages. I don’t have any romantic ideas about the mother tongue. I think that young writers can, in many respects, only profit from switching to another, bigger language.

Rumpus: In all your work, but especially in your essays, your writing is argumentative and opinionated. Do you picture the readers you’re writing for?

Ugresic: From the moment I left the country, I can’t picture my readers anymore. It’s a blind date, so to say. But the writer’s life is full of paradoxes, such as: The more distant the reader, the better the understanding! I have a better chance of being properly understood by a literary, educated American reader then by a similar reader in my former country. Why? Because nationalism is like a pesticide: its poison lasts longer then one season and it penetrates everywhere—into literature, culture, and consequently into its reception.

Rumpus: On the topic of nations and language: you’re an outspoken opponent of right-wing nationalism. But you also question the concept of ‘multiculturalism.’ Is there a connection between the two?

Ugresic: I’ve never heard about left-wing nationalism, but it is possible that in today’s ideological mess such a concept exists. In any case nationalism, be it right or left, is in my view is only a euphemism for fascism.  Multiculturalism sprung up from nationalism, as it’s opposite. There is nothing wrong with the concept, but it is too often misused and abused in practice. In practice the culture of “Other” is often taken as an excuse for our indifference and our inverted chauvinism. The “Other” is no better in this respect either: he often uses his “culture” as an excuse to perpetuate rigidness, unwillingness to change and accept different standards.

For instance, if three Turkish brothers, German citizens, kill their “over-emancipated” sister, they would in their defense point to their “culture,” their “ethnic habits,” their “family pride.” The police would not tolerate the murder, of course, but would read the crime as part of their (Turkish) “culture,” their “ethnic habits,” all in all with “understanding.”  Politically correct respect for the culture of the Other is often just a mask for a total indifference towards the Other.

Rumpus: Could you describe the last time you saw the Danube?

Ugresic: I see it every time I visit Budapest, and that is always the most impressive view. The most amusing occasion was in Vienna some time ago. It was summer and the banks of the Danube were full of little improvised open restaurants where people were dancing salsa. People living in Vienna, locals and emigrants, were crazy about salsa that summer. That added to the Danube—I mean to the Danube as a cultural text—a totally new, refreshing meaning.

***

Rumpus original art by Ilyse Magy.

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• A Question of Perspective

An Introduction to The Rumpus International Rivers Interview Series

The International Rivers Interview Series was born of two unrelated events. The first was a Roni Horn exhibit I saw some years back in New York featuring the work Still Water (The River Thames, For Example). Horn framed multiple close-up shots of the Thames passing through central London and approached the river with a number of questions. I remember Horn asking, ‘What is the color of water?’ and the elegant simplicity of that question struck me. One answer is that it has no color, that water is a body that either reflects its surroundings by throwing back a visual reply or absorbing organic matter. Water is, Horn later said, “a master chameleon. Or the ultimate mime.” Could rivers like the Thames, I wondered, reflect more than mud, trees and bridges, but history and culture too?

There’s reason to believe they already do. Consider the so-called birthplace of civilization, cradled by the sinewy arms of the Tigris and Euphrates; or China’s race towards modernization and the Yangtze, a river recently transformed into the largest power plant in the world by the Three Gorges Dam. These rivers have outgrown their ecological or commercial roles; they help us narrate a global history. In the U.S., rivers were the veins and arteries of a growing nation long before railroads were ever dreamed of. In time, they became potent cultural symbols— the Mississippi of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for example—and these symbols, I believe, continue to be very real. When Borges paid a visit to Twain’s Missouri home in 1986, the nearly-blind and greatly aged author dipped his hand into the Mississippi. Raising it out of the water, Borges said “Now I understand the essence of America.”

Rivers also have the unique characteristic of straddling and rupturing borders. The Mekong travels through six countries; the Nile and Danube pass through ten each. Spaces of conflict, cohabitation and occasionally cooperation, rivers continue to be primal resources, intertwining the communities that border them for better or worse. This is as true for the Jordan River which divides Israel and Syria, as it is for the length of the Rio Grande that separates Texas from Mexico.

My second reason for putting this project together is a statistic I’ve never been able to shake: of the some 15,000 literary titles released in the US yearly, only about 300, or 2% are translated. Aside from depriving American readers and international authors, these figures reinforce a skewed sense of the world. How many of us can name three contemporary authors from China, a country of 1.3 billion? If given context, I thought, maybe these books might not seem so alien—and authors, I decided, were the best source for context.

"The Danube Valley Near Regensburg" by Albrecht Altdorfer (1510)

The goal of the River Interview project is two-fold: to introduce and promote a group of authors; and to let these authors provide a cultural context for reading and understanding their work. I chose the Danube as the first river in the series after reading one of the most astounding books I’ve ever come across: Claudio Magris’ Danube: a sentimental journey from the source to the Black Sea (1981). The Danube is a good launching pad and rich in literary history—Goethe often strolled along its banks for inspiration; Kafka could see its waters from the window of the sanatorium in which he spent his last days.

The four authors included in this series—Sasa Stanisic, György Dragomán, Dumitru Tsepeneag and Dubravka Ugresic—were chosen after correspondences with friends, publishers, professors and literary organizations. They are writers whose work I admire intensely. Each of their stories is unique; each of their voices is clear and articulate; each of their books offers a single answer to the question: What color is the Danube?

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