Not All Writers Can Afford Rooms of Their Own

Since I write about women and literature in Zagreb, I must retitle A Room of One’s Own as Someone Else’s Property. I don’t stroll through an Oxbridge quad for inspiration, rather I wrest it from the internet in someone else’s kitchen that hasn’t been renovated in the last 60 years. The Zagreb landscape is a world apart when it comes to essayistic vision. Let’s take, for example, Bundek Park. There you can drink in the fumes of someone’s birthday barbecue and admire the busts of Russian poets. Had Virginia Woolf been forced to walk Mayor Bandić’s gravelly paths in search of inspiration, her cult essay would’ve sounded quite different. Admittedly, some things would be the same: “A husband might die, or some disaster overtake the family”—the problem of women’s creativity is universal.

Routinely, the inspiration I’ve found in someone else’s property I’ve then developed further, in other property belonging to someone else—most often at the mall, which lacks both natural light and natural desires. I feel comfortable there, where money is talked about in a candid and practical manner; such an environment helps me distinguish the themes that money carries into literature from the themes that it ejects from literature.

At no point should one forget that literature is a commodity that we can, but don’t have to, sell: a literary work can rot like a heap of Opuzen tangerines that never found their customer. As a property deteriorates when no one invests in it, so do the books of authors who likewise deteriorate in dilapidated properties. Does literature, we must ask, have any autonomy in relation to the old pipes, the leaky roof, the malfunctioning toilet, and the broken radiator? Of course it doesn’t. You can’t create a utopia in a room that’s a coffin. Actually, you can, but then it’s just a question of which drugs to take.

There is no room of one’s own in someone else’s property. We must banish from our heads the idea that it’s possible to make a home where nothing is ours. Which means that the literature written to pay rent to other people for these “rooms of one’s own” isn’t ours, either. It doesn’t belong to us because we don’t have the freedom to buy or sell anything with it. A literary text, just like a journalistic one, isn’t free if it’s tied to survival: none of us is above putting food on the table, paying bills, or keeping a roof over our head. No one. What can ease literature’s burden is the freedom of not needing to pay for someone else’s property with one’s writing. Having fewer expenses reduces the strain on the text. When we need to earn less, the work is less compromised because we don’t have to make concessions; we don’t hold back; we won’t censor ourselves so that others can pay for what they want to hear.

I often dream of my own apartment, really a small shack or cottage on some mountain slope near a forest, with fast internet and walking paths that Milan Bandić hasn’t come anywhere near. I don’t need a lot to give more through my writing, just the freedom to put the armchair where I want, to look no longer upon someone else’s idea of a home while trying to write essays free from the tenant’s expenses. A room of one’s own is liberating because it allows us to adapt the space to our writing.

If I don’t want any musty closets or cabinets around me, or rickety, defective chairs that make my cervical spine hurt even worse—what option do I have when such property, someone else’s farce of a property, is the only thing I can afford in Zagreb? Money dictates our themes and the rooms in which we write—they influence the text. It’s a lie to say we write whatever we want, whenever we want. We write what we have to write to survive. In my case this survival increasingly demands that I write fantasy because the space where I write is overfull of anxious daily banalities that I can’t write about in equally banal fashion without going crazy.

I’m not talking, of course, about escapism. Literature isn’t a bucket of bitumen that we pour on a leaky roof. When one writes in a difficult place, literature should show where the drip is, where the cracks are that need to be fixed: it’s the pile of snow on a crumbling roof and the bitter pill we have to take in order to open our eyes and see that we’re paying too much rent to lie in someone else’s coffin. Literature that peddles lies about everything working out on its own is the paid advertisement by which the writer rents the coffin for even longer, maybe even for life. And not only for themselves, but for their readers as well.

–Translated by Jennifer Zoble