Disavowing the writer

By Aleksandra Djordjevic
*AI - generated translation, published with the author's permission 

What is a writer? Is it anyone who has something to say to the world? Someone who possesses the means to shape a thought and express it uncommonly? Or perhaps the one whose works have been published and awarded?

Beyond all formal and external criteria, the inner ones seem more important to me — deeply subjective and individual. If I am a writer today, can I cease to be one tomorrow? There are as many truths about writers as there are truths about people. And as human beings, today we truly are, yet in the very next moment, we are not. That brief pause between physical imprint and immaterial presence (or absence) is so indefinite that it is almost impossible to grasp the essence of life, let alone the essence of a writer.

At times, it seems to me that writers feel a greater need to define — and perhaps justify — their existence than readers do. Everyone has their own path from language to story, from word to message and when listening to the acclaimed ones, you are almost compelled to fit yourself into one of the existing, articulated, and signature-stamped dialogues or monologues about writing. In one such conversation with Dubravka Ugrešić, her thought stayed deeply etched in me: that it is not only the famous and wealthy who are allowed to advertise their backsides on social media, just as it is not only the eloquent and formally educated who are allowed to write. Yet as a human being, I refuse myself the right to deny anyone their own truth. Because the moment I speak of others from the position of a judge, I deprive myself of the freedom to be what I am.

Be that as it may, writers often speak negatively about other writers. Always with a reason. Often invoking the very truth Ugrešić warned about. Yet whenever someone denies another person the right to develop, or speaks in that subtly dismissive way — he is not a writer, he merely writes — it warns me that beneath these opportunities to prove ourselves amid an ocean of absurdities lie ingratitude and deep frustration. A successful person is capable of rejoicing in another’s success. An unsuccessful person is forever haunted by the desire to be acknowledged by others. To me, there is no human being who is purely successful or unsuccessful by definition, but rather a human being composed of successes and failures — and, even more importantly, of their interpretations of both.

I invite you to accept individual truths, though I do not mean by this the destruction of existing nomenclature or the invention of labels for every possible nuance of a writer’s essence. Because from there, the path becomes easy. Once someone is called a writer, they may be bad, mediocre, good, or rarely, brilliant; in other words, qualitatively defined. But what draws me more is the characterization of their works, while allowing writers themselves to remain human beings. No defenses or heroic interventions are necessary for literature to survive, no distancing from pulp or popular fiction. It is only necessary to exist in harmony with one’s thoughts, at peace with one’s possibilities and impossibilities, in connection with the world. And to withdraw when the body and mind require it.

In withdrawal, I see possibility; in silence, I hear a calling; in stillness, I feel a wave. Unlike the writers I admire (believe me, they are not world-famous names, but names resonant within my silence — people I know directly or indirectly) who can effortlessly recite the titles of books that shaped them and speak about them at length, I can do that only with words themselves. My matrix is built from lexemes that shimmer around me like within a closed slide, whether they have ever been used before or not, and from those gray, still undiscovered ones that delight me even more. Every new word is, to me, like a newly hatched bird — fragile and bewildered. It takes time, use, and stumbling before it learns to fly, but once it does, it flies without much thought. It circles me together with all the other newly discovered words like butterflies in a whirlpool, and I gently receive them and let them go.

In the end, it does not matter what we will be called. Because in our essence, we are everything that we do.

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