The literary program of the XXXVIII Grad Teatar festival continued with the guest appearance of theater expert, feminist theoretician and writer Nataša Nelević, who presented her first novel entitled "A Little Novel about Mud". The moderator of the evening at Poets' Square was professor, writer and columnist Božena Jelušić, who introduced the author in her opening presentation, whom she said was extremely prolific and diverse in all the fields she deals with.
"She is, above all, a playwright, an extremely lucid, well-thought-out critic in the field of drama. However, at the same time, she is an anthologist extremely dedicated to the affirmation of female authorial practices. Her historical book "Women in Montenegro from 1972 to 1914." is something that concretely in my life meant an incredible deconstruction of the usual myth about Montenegrins, who allegedly always respected, protected and loved their mothers, sisters and daughters, and it seems to me that this book was to a large extent healing for society." said Jelušić, after which she introduced the audience in detail to Nataša Nelević's biography.
Speaking about the huge differences in the perception of female and male authors, Nelević said that it seems to her that what women do is always less important, and that this is visible in different ways.
"I have had several conversations about this novel and they always insist on this autobiographical material. A woman can write a literary work, she can write a good one, but only if it is really based on her autobiography. It is simply assumed that she does not have the capacity to imagine some reality. In other countries of the former Yugoslavia, there are various movements to, in a way, enable women writers to become as important as male authors; these are, for example, 'Humiliated female readers'. I recently saw that there is a podcast called 'Why Men Don't Read Women', and men really don't read women. But I would say that women don't really read men either. When it comes to this novel, I have a good experience because a kind of small women's lobby was created around that novel, without my asking and without any private connections. Thanks to these female, critic-theoretic connections, this novel was presented in Leipzig, and maybe it will get a German translation. So now I'm thinking less about how I'm less important as a writer, and more about how this time it turned out that there really are good female relationships and female alliances. I believe it is because of that, and I hope, because this novel deserves it. I think that women's relationships, women's lobby or women's networks should really exist, but only on the condition that they have something to gather around and if what they gather around is really literary worthy", said Nelević.
Jelušić said that she was extremely proud of Nelević because in this novel she managed to transpose herself into the character of Miroslav Krleža.
"We all admire Tolstoy for how well he portrayed Anna Karenina or Flaubert for how he portrayed Emma Bovary, and now we finally have an author who managed to transpose herself into the character of Miroslav Krleža at a difficult moment in his life, when he was deciding whether to remain Tito's the court poet or he will tell the truth about what he saw at the work action," pointed out Jelušić, and Nelević revealed that she needed Krleža.
"Somehow, this novel had its own course of creation that was not clear from the beginning, I did not have a clear structure and I can say that it was created more from some small essays, small notes, notes and the like. At one point, I somehow realized that I needed Krleža, and then a part of the writing process began that was much more exciting and interesting for me, and perhaps for the first time I really felt like a writer. When I realized that I can really completely imagine a character, an experience that really has no points of contact with my own. At some stage of the writing, it was much more exciting and simpler for me to load that certain character that actually has nothing to do with my own experience. I knew enough about Krleža, but somewhere I didn't have the idea to really reconstruct Krleža's character to the end, it is a fictitious character. Only when I finished the novel did I realize that it was a novel about a text. This is actually a novel about the right and the need to say it. We have a heroine who is demented, who loses the ability to speak, and finally, speech is everything. Reality outside of language, of course, does not exist. Then we have a young daughter who helps her to tell and say some things that she no longer has the capacity for because her words are slowly disappearing. And in the end, we have me as the author and narrator who helps both, to simply tell something or say that apart from Krleža's truth, there is another. So I think this is a novel about the power of the text, which, of course, is not huge, but ultimately a novel about the power of testimony. I think that words are our main weapon," said Nelević.
When asked if she is nostalgic about Yugoslavia, Nelević stressed that she is realistic about that period.
"I myself did not grow up in a privileged family, but I was not persecuted either. I was certainly not one of those highly privileged, I had to fight alone for all things in life, and then we fought much more alone than now. So I don't think I'm nostalgic, I've just seen things up close. Of course, I had a lot of my own experiences and memories, but also of other people. I had a strong need to convey them somehow, and from all that you can see a certain image of Yugoslavia. That basic motif in the novel, that Kiseljak and that labor action are in themselves a kind of deconstruction of the Yugoslav nostalgic myth, the myth of collectivism. Labor action is, above all, a paradigm of collectivity and it is actually the basis of Yugoslav ideology. So I'm not nostalgic, but I love that period, it's my life, I grew up there, it's my house, home, and now I simply can't even go out and look at it from the side and say whether it's good or bad. I can see what's wrong, but I just love that part of my life and what it's accomplished. The novel also opens up very complex questions about the relationship between mother and daughter, which are not always easy to explain," Jelušić pointed out.
"The relationship between a mother and a daughter is one of the most complicated relationships. Although we often say that the relationship between a father and a son is the most difficult, that relationship, thanks to Freud, has been given certain frameworks through which we think about it. This leads us to the question of power, but with the relationship between mother and daughter, it is about something deeper. Although the motif of the relationship between father and son is one of the great pillars of European culture and in a way understandable, mostly thanks to Freud, but also to writers, the relationship between mother and daughter carries more complex nuances that are more difficult to understand," Jelušić said, and Nelević explained that, despite various feminist theories, we still remain in a gray area when it comes to the relationship between mother and daughter.
"It is a deeply controversial relationship, I read a bit of psychoanalysis and thought where is the place of a woman who cannot let her mother down because the mother is the first, only and greatest love of all of us and she cannot resist. It is certainly a complicated relationship When I was writing the novel, I wasn't fully aware, but when I was writing some scenes, I realized that my mother stood on the edge of something imaginary. She is actually the only character who is constantly moving towards something that is fiction. In the novel, the mother is an emancipated Montenegrin woman who had the strength to leave the work action, regardless of the scandal that it entailed, and to return home from the work action. She wholeheartedly helps her future husband to somehow survive the fact that he was in Gol island, and that theme is present in the novel".
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