“She killed her father, made sausages with him, and ate him”
Celebrated Polish author Joanna Bator always has her literary antennae switched on, subconsciously scouring her surrounds for intriguing tidbits that could potentially form the basis of one of her award-winning sagas.
For her acclaimed book Bitter, Bitter (Goshka, Goshka), that magic moment came in a cemetery in Lower Silesia in Poland one dark and cold afternoon.
“I was with a friend of mine who is a historian, and it was really a gloomy day. It was gray and raining and we were in this old cemetery, overgrown with vegetation. And Matteo, my dear friend, was talking and talking and suddenly I heard this story… It was 1829, the beginning of Anna’s story, and the tale is really gory. Anna did an unimaginable thing. She killed her father. Then she made some very tasty sausages out of his body. And then she ate him; she partially ate his body. It’s terrible, isn’t it?” Joanna Bator said, speaking ahead of her appearance at the 6th EU-China International Literary Festival.
“And the story was already formed right in my head. And this was how my character, my first character from my Bitter, Bitter novel, was born. Her name is Berta, Berta Koch. And she’s a beautiful German girl who lives with her father. And then, and then – well, to tell you more would be a spoiler, so I’m not going to say what happened to Berta and her father, Hans Koch. But that was how my story was born.”
These catalysts – moments of realisation – are critical in her work as a writer.
“I think this is the most important moment in the creative process. I think, it’s my hypothesis, that my academic background gave me the ability to follow the line of a very complicated story. In some way, it is already in my head. I can see a very special structure when I write. In this case, in the case of Bitter, Bitter, the creative process was a little different. It was divided into four files, each one named with the name of a main character: Berta, Barbora, Violetta and Kalina. And I was kind of surfing between these files.
Sometimes in the period of one hour I was surfing a lot of times between these characters. And I think, for the writer, it’s a very good thing, very enlightening and enriching to experiment, to give yourself the right to experiment.”
As she starts to build multi-generational narratives, Bator sees herself in some ways as part-writer, part-architect.
“Writing Bitter, Bitter, for me the most difficult question was how do you do that, write such a huge narrative, without having notes? But big, long novels with a complicated narrative structure, this is something I enjoy. I can see a very special structure when I write. I’m very interested in architecture and I was good at mathematics, in the technical field. So maybe it helps, this special thinking that is switched on when I start writing.”
Allowing her to explore and develop the lives of four women in the novel was a somewhat liberating experience for Bator.
“This story, being completely fictional, is my own emancipatory story. Told in four female voices. I had to do a lot of work to free myself from the limitations of my habitus. Of the way I was. The way of life my parents thought was the best for a girl. And I had a lot of different emotions at different stages of my life. And these emotions are personified by the characters of Bitter, Bitter. Starting from Berta, the beautiful Berta, who killed her father. It’s anger. It’s pure rage. It’s a good beginning, I would say. I am not encouraging of course anyone to kill their fathers, in a literal sense, but it is a good beginning. However, it’s not enough to free yourself, to be a person, a woman, the woman you want to be. So, this is why we leave Berta in the same place she was born because she couldn’t move forward. This is how I see my past. As a woman, as an academic, as a writer, as a feminist in Poland. I’m all of them – I’m Berta, Barbora, Violetta and Kalina.”
Bator’s writing style features a form of magic realism that she said has its origins in two key influences.
“The first influence is One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez). I read it as a very young girl, I was sixteen at that time. I never came back to this book, but I remember this moment, which I define now as the moment when I started to understand literary imagination. That as a writer, one can create words that are as real as the hard actual reality,” she said.
“And the second influence, maybe a more important one and for sure more intellectually elaborated, is the influence of Japanese literature and Japanese culture. I think in Japanese literature, for example in Haruki Murakami’s novels, the line between reality and the other world, a different world, is not as hard, as clear as it is in the so-called Western literature. It’s one click, one moment, one phone call, and suddenly we are in this different world. This is the quality I think I can feel in the literary sense, and I incorporated it as my own. It’s something that appears in my narrative. Without, of course, rational thinking – like saying, ‘oh, now we need a little bit of magical realism’.”
Reflecting on her successful career, travelling and spending time living in Japan were hugely formative experiences for her, Bator said.
“Without my first scholarship in Japan I wouldn’t be a writer, that’s for sure. It was after my Phd, my field was psychoanalysis, the philosophical aspects of psychoanalysis and gender studies. So I did my Phd, I left for New York, and it was at this time that I started to realize that the academic life was not really my thing. It was just a job. It was a hard time, actually. And then this wonderful opportunity came up; to go to Japan for two years; it was a JSPS scholarship, a doctoral scholarship. And so, I went. And after this free stay in Japan, I am still deeply in love with Japanese culture and the Japanese way of life. So everything in my life has something Japanese in it.”
With regard to aspiring authors who seek advice from her, Bator says she always suggests that first and foremost a writer starting out should identify a story they are bursting to tell the world. And secondly, work hard to carve out a bit of time and space for themselves – time to reflect and work on the craft.
“What you need at the beginning is a story, a story you really want to tell. It is so very important. So look around. And then, if it is possible, find a room of your own – fight for it if you need to. Sometimes you need to leave everything behind. Like your friends, for example. Everything you’ve learned from your parents,” she said.
“Sometimes to really tell your story in the way the story should be told you need separation. You need the distance. To be far away from everything you know, and also to look at yourself from a different perspective. This is what Japan gave me. To see my reflection. And look at myself in a completely different way.”