by Asja Bakić
While the breakthrough generation of women writers—spearheaded by Slavenka Drakulić, Daša Drndić, Biljana book of Jovanović, Vedrana Rudan, and Dubravka Ugrešić—has pursued narratives that reflect their lives, often written in the first person and fueled by the outrage and atrocities of the 1990s, Bakic has chosen otherwise. “I have no wish to write about myself or write myself down in countless versions because I have social media and my blog for that kind of writing, and sometimes it is all a bit much,” she has said. “I find stepping back from my own life and thinking like someone else more interesting.”
There are few writers from this part of the world, female or male, in Bakic’s generation or before, who have cultivated an ear for speculative fiction, science fiction, fantasy, and the dystopian. Four in total, all men, come to mind: Bosnian Karim Zaimovic, Croatian Davor Slamnig, and Serbs Zoran Živković and Borislav Pekic. Bakic’s fusion of science fiction, feminism, eroticism, horror, and the macabre, is, indeed, unique within the literatures of the former Yugoslavia. In fact, Bakic has said that she, herself, was surprised to find how the stories took a speculative turn as this collection came together. Perhaps her university study of Bosnian literature and language in Tuzla offered Bakic models from which to depart, rather than models to follow.
She has also chosen not to write about the war. The Tuzla of her childhood was a dangerous and tragic place, the site of a May 1995 massacre of some seventy young people when she, too, was a teenager of thirteen, and hers was the town that sheltered the survivors, the traumatized women and children who fled the Srebrenica massacre in July of that same year. Of this she has said, “This is a part of my childhood from which I cannot escape: the shelling from Ozren and Majevica, the days without bread, power, and water, the wave of refugees from the Podrinje area. I don’t write about it, but those are things I will never forget, just as I will never forget Yugoslavia, the only country in which I ever felt secure.”
In his review of Mars, published on the website Booksa.hr in 2015, Dinko Kreho points out that the word “Mars” functions at three different levels for the reader of the Croatian edition: “Mars is, foremost, a mythical topos of science fiction and the popular imagination of the twentieth century, Earth’s neighbor that inflamed the imagination of generations; Mars is also a key astrological symbol, the alleged ‘male’ planet juxtaposed to ‘female’ Venus. There is yet another dimension which Mars connotes for speakers of Croatian, having to do with the foreign, the alien, with not fitting in. As if he came down from Mars is said of someone who is visibly an outsider within a social setting or situation.” Kreho makes the point that all three of these associations are present in Bakic’s stories: her engagement with science fiction; her examination of gender relations and positions; and the ways in which individuals fail to fit into their social roles or constellation.
Asja Bakić strikes an eerie, Poe-like note in her stories, projecting dystopia through the lens of female sexuality. This mixing and mingling of genres recalls “weird” fiction in how she embraces the ghost story and other tales of the macabre. Writing and death are immediately linked for us in the first story, “Day Trip to Durmitor,” and writing and death return again and again, singularly or in tandem through stories of grisly murders, corpses turning to lichen, writers facing their own clones. As an angel declares, “Literature is … the primary link between life and death.”
The ordinary, understated way in which these stories narrate their extraordinary twists is what makes them leap off the page. In her translation, Jennifer Zoble follows the sudden shifts and quirks of the prose with a close and steady hand.
Each of these stories is different—some narrated in the first person, others with greater distance—but all have in common their inquisitive, exploratory protagonists who are trying to puzzle out, along with us readers, exactly what is going on in these worlds that don’t, yet do, make sense.
—Ellen Elias-Bursac
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
AND THE TRANSLATOR
ASJA BAKIĆ is a Bosnian author of poetry and prose, as well as a translator. She was selected as one of Literary Europe Live’s New Voices from Europe 2017, and her writing has been translated into seven languages. She currently lives and works in Zagreb, Croatia.
JENNIFER ZOBLE is a writer, editor, educator, and literary translator. She coedits In Translation, the online journal of international literature at the Brooklyn Rail, and teaches in NYU’s Liberal Studies program.
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