Dubravka Ugresic (The Museum of Unconditional Surrender), who died in 2023, was a towering figure in literature. A Muzzle for Witches--which has been translated from the Croatian into impeccable English by Ugresic's longtime translator, Ellen Elias-Bursać, for this posthumous publication--makes a fitting capstone to her English-language oeuvre.
Ugresic left her native Yugoslavia during its civil war and subsequent disintegration, a time in which she was branded a "witch" for not embracing nationalist Croatian sentiments. This is largely the context in which this collection of interviews, conducted by Merima Omeragić, should be understood.
This set of interviews portrays in painful detail the sexism to which women writers and women in general find themselves subjected in the former Yugoslavia. "Time and effort are needed if the system of patriarchal values is to be extirpated, as it has flourished over the last thirty years, while rooting itself ever deeper, in the fertile manure of nationalism," Ugresic asserts. She also decries how the government destroys and suppresses books in acts of "cultural libricide" done in the name of nationalism that other countries can unfortunately draw parallels to.
The subjects covered in the slight volume are as thought-provoking as they are wide-ranging. They include the ongoing depiction of women as victims in art, the variety of nonliterary positioning activities that authors engage in to increase their visibility, and Ugresic's sense of the utter futility of those endeavors. "They will be pushed aside by a flood of new creative people.... They are all seeking, in a frenzy, the best possible way to leave a trace of their existence." --Elizabeth DeNoma, executive editor, DeNoma Literary Services, Seattle, Wash.