Traitor

As an anthropologist, I should be observing the world on the basic premise that there is a cultural difference between here and there; between us and them. By saying this, I am seriously simplifying complex anthropological theories. They argue that it is more important to see HOW culture is constructed rather than compare different cultural expressions. Yet, I doubt there would be any incentive to do ethnographic research if we believed that people are everywhere the same.

My fieldwork in Croatia is progressing comfortably well. I talk to lots of interesting people while getting smoked out in cafes and bars. I stick to coffee as my favourite drink, knowing full well the downsides of too much caffeine. Early morning beer or a shot of herbal brandy, which seem to be favourite choices of my male informants are beyond my level of fitness. I couldn’t handle those even for the sake of my PhD degree. Of course I can see how publishing, my ethnographic topic, is different in the Balkans from the one in the UK. The circle of people is much smaller and business is always done in the most informal of places. I am mostly astonished by the fact that no one is ever to be found in their offices. Instead, there is a street filled with cafes where you can find all the right people you need to get something done. And when translated into the context of a busy book fair, this means that nobody is ever at their stand, but doing business in a nearby bar or restaurant. I would say, Croatia is arguably more informal than the UK. But if I think again, this is questionable too. Why so?

When I stop asking WHAT and start asking WHY, it clearly transpires that glasses of wine that usually accompany London literary events or business lunches that people schedule in only to keep in touch and pick each other’s brains bring both groups of publishers to the same goal – doing business in an informal way. I hate to say this, but I fear I am becoming a traitor of my own academic discipline. The only thing that I have noticed so far is that people use different tactics to achieve the same results. Does that realization undercut an a priori position of social sciences that everything depends on the specific socio-cultural context? Am I becoming some kind of absolutist who believes that there is a part of human beings which is universal and unchangeable?

I can’t deny the evidence that prove my position, even though the academia might find it childish and obsolete. For example, a friend of mine told me that the streets of Zagreb have become extremely aggressive and dangerous. Teenagers with pent up rage scream and intimidate people on trams and the only way you can deal with them is if you firmly look in their eyes, as if saying – don’t you dare mess with me. You need a killer look, my friend teaches me. He is a Croatia’s war veteran and I don’t question his word. But I still choose the English way – look away on public transport. See? Both cultures use eye contact to achieve the same result. Here, we pierce with our eyes, there we avoid each others eyes, only to be left alone. Our basic human need is met – we have defended ourselves.

Both friends in London and friends in Zagreb talk about their relationship problems. I listen to them with patience because I sincerely want to understand the human nature. And guess what – I see no difference. Everything has always revolved around our desire to share love and closeness with another human being. How we do it might differ but why we bond, share, argue and fall out boils down to reasons that reveal our universal human nature. When the ethnographic work is finished for the day, and I sit silently making sense of everything I have observed, I have one overwhelming sensation – I have totally forgotten where I am. Am I in London or in Zagreb? Or is it just the same?

In Case of Emergency, Leave Everything Behind

Just before the plane takes off, I am one of those people who always pay attention to the instructions on what to do if something goes wrong. We are few – because most passengers are already busy with leafing through in-flight magazines, sending last minute text messages or just chatting to their friends who are travelling with them. Plane journeys evoke a strange emotional reaction in me. Often I even cry a little while the plane is speeding up seconds before it climbs on top of the hot air current. I am not afraid of the ‘something can go wrong’ scenario. Ultimately, I am not afraid to die. What I dread is the disconnection between my body and my soul – and this is what normally happens to me. My body crosses several thousands miles in a few hours and when I reach my final destination, I feel as if I had left my soul behind. And no matter how clearly I know that the soul has no concept of time and space, I always feel lost and incomplete when I land at the destined airport.

As a true romantic, I believe that in the old days things were simpler. People travelled on horses or ships and allowed their emotional landscape to slowly adjust to the changes of the outside world. There was time to leave things behind, to stop thinking about everything and everyone we couldn’t take with us and they slowly and naturally merged with the new reality. Modern times create sudden and shocking crevices between then and now. We are forced to let go of our world within seconds, in those minutes when the flight attendant is showing us our nearest emergency exit.

Modern times are crueller. We have time only to think about us. In case of an unfortunate event, the oxygen mask drops from above you. You breathe first and only then help others. Modern times force us to think about that most precious, most valuable thing without which we cannot live. What is the thing that we carry inside us everywhere we go? What should we never leave behind?

Last time I buckled up on the plane to Croatia, I was experiencing a kind of spiritual emergency. I was leaving one life behind – a knot of sadness, regret, anger and guilt. I could sense how each emotion was holding tight to the English ground, as if connected to the air strip with heavy rings. I knew the plane was about to detach from my London home, but I still wasn’t ready to let go. The physical motion is rarely enough to untie and release the emotional ball and chain. We can travel the world and still run around in circles, going mad in the claustrophobic chamber of our tired heart. This time, I think I even overheard the flight attendant’s safety drill. I woke up when I heard her words, which I swear they normally don’t use on short European flights: in case of emergency, leave everything behind.

Everything didn’t mean my suitcase, my sandwich or my iPod. It meant my mistakes, regrets, things and people that drain me, even desires and ambitions which tell me that I am never good enough. So, I closed my eyes and I severed those ropes that a minute ago were strong enough to take the whole continent with me. I located the nearest emergency exit and I took off. I took only me.

East European Peasant in London

Being an East European in London, I have experienced much politically incorrect behaviour which targeted my geographical origin rather than the universal human one. I have stopped wasting energy on being hurt by racist comments in Daily Mail type articles which spread the fear that people from my region steal and eat the royal swans in this country. They say it is necessary to sign-post London canals with a picture of a swan and a raised hand denoting a stop – refrain from killing and eating – to an allegedly illiterate, non-English speaking East European.

I have even been chatted up by a polite Englishman who, after finding out I was from Croatia, innocently commented: aren’t all women from your part of the world prostitutes? I innocently replied, thought I doubt that he understood my sense of humour: yes, I started as one as well, but now I moved on to do a PhD here.

But when an educated Yorkshireman who used to be my partner called me an East European peasant, I decided it was time to spend energy on venting out my outrage. I wondered to myself: do we need to wait for an ‘equal opportunities’ questionnaires to introduce a category ‘East European’ for a certain number of British people to recognize their cultural abuse? When a so called innocent joke gets too close to the bone, it even stops being a mere personal insult. It becomes a reflection of a malaised society – the one which is not concerned about genuine, self-motivated, respect for cultural differences but only about ticking boxes once they have been created by outside authorities.

The conversation was always about style. Apparently, we, East Europeans have no style in clothing, he concluded. Our jeans are not trendy enough, because we don’t spend enough money on the right brand and, by the way, they are totally unflattering to our flat enormous bottoms. Our tops are drab and unimaginative because we don’t know how to match colours – we are colour cowards – and we don’t reveal enough flesh. He said, we suffer from the lack of self-confidence so we walk with hunched shoulders and refuse to show our cleavages. When we wear turtle-necks in the winter, we are actually falsely prudish, hiding away our repressed sexuality. We should also examine ulterior motives of our need to wear warm and comfortable pyjamas during cold and damp English nights, because what is normal is to sleep naked, allowing our imperfect bodies to be sexually accessed at any time. Our worst crime is not wearing high heels which could actually help our posture look more feminine and extravagant.

We are guilty for valuing common-sense comfort over ludicrous ever-changing trends. For that, we are accused of having values of old boring ladies. ‘What’s going to be next’, he asked me when I refused to buy shoes on the basis of pure aesthetics ‘light pink and blue, like an old granny’s autumn coat?’

To win this argument, I even borrowed words of a famous fashion designer, one of his heroes – 90% of what you call style is personal choice and the WAY you wear the clothes you love, only 10% is trend. Style s reflected in your self-confidence, I proudly said, trying to defend my right to be different, to be me. But reasoning is the last thing on the mind of someone who has no eyes and no interest to allow your uniqueness and difference. Insisting on his own version of truth, he concluded the discussion: you, East Europeans, you don’t have any self-confidence, you grew up under communism, where there were only two flavours of ice-cream. So much about dictatorship…

In Eastern Europe, we had three flavours of ice-cream: chocolate, vanilla and strawberry. We wear comfortable clothes and we keep warm at night. We were taught to show our bodies to our lovers and not in the street. We don’t eat swans. We can read and write. We can also talk back when we feel our line has been crossed. This is because we have self-confidence.

Who am I writing this for?

Ever since I learned how to tell my first story, the wild child in me wanted to write. It wanted to play around with words, characters and thousands of different plot sequences that shape our lives as we make our daily choices. I wanted to make sense of how I experienced the world by putting together a meaningful story – an explanation of the chaos around us.

Life is a non-linear chaos. Everything and anything is possible. It is happening right now and it is beyond our understanding.

I take my little people and their little events and arrange them in a meaningful and comprehensible plot. The one which offers a resolution at the end, possibly a catharsis as well. By lining them up along one plausible explanation of their life story, I take away choices from them. Choices to experience the world around them in any way they want and regardless of how grave and difficult their circumstances might be. So far, my favourite character has been a woman who feels rejected by her partner and who is desperately trying to improve their flaky relationship. To be able to create a dynamic tension in the story, I need to position this female character as rejected and clingy. I also need to portray the man as a cold, evasive and emotionally unavailable bastard who is in the relationship just for the ride. I don’t even have to tell you what will happen to them. Because the moment I told you how the two of them experience themselves in their own eyes, I have denied them the choice to see their reality in any different way. They are locked in the narrative.

Yet, they could also be a couple who is deeply in love with each other but is taking some time to concentrate on other things apart from their relationship. OK, I know what you think – there is no drama in this.

Every narrative is restrictive. It offers explanation at the expense of multiplicity of outcomes and choices. Not every narrative is equally desirable and profitable though. Especially in this country, there are very strict poetic rules about what type of story and style of writing are acceptable and sellable. I am sitting at editorial meetings of several publishing houses and note down all the drawbacks of newly arrived manuscripts. One has too many metaphors, the other is too vague and leaves the reader uneasy. The story is either too simple or not gripping enough. Some might say that I am sitting on a golden egg here by having access to all these rules that can help me write a perfect manuscript. I have the insider’s view to what publishers want. I could write a winning manuscript!

I could.

Yet, I choose not to. And I make this decision after a huge anxiety attack that made me list all the expectations that publishers have of a manuscript that they would consider buying. As the list in my head frantically grew, my confidence scarily fell to pieces. I asked myself – who am I writing this for? Who is my intended audience? Who do I need to satisfy? Which mould do I need to fit? And then this desperate narrative of fitting in also cracked along the seem.

I remembered – those who write to fit an already existing form stand a good chance of getting published. Along the way though, they risk losing their creativity by trying to fit in and satisfy the poetic trend. They will mass produce – every year one book. They will be able to call themselves full-time writers and will make a mediocre living out of it. They will call themselves successful writers but they will not feel the success in their heart. They will wake up one day and have the anxiety attack.

I don’t know who I am writing this for – this very text. I don’t have my intended audience in mind. I know which narrative is in vogue with most publishers at this moment, but I had to give myself a panic attack to realize it’s best for me to forget about this insider’s knowledge. The more I know about expectations of my readership, the less I am in touch with my writer’s voice. With the wild child.

Those who have written without any regard to publishers or readers have brought us the most creative and innovative stories and characters. They have given us the juicy, authentic, heart of creation. They have moved boundaries and broken poetic moulds. And yet, very often, they have not been considered successful writers in their time.

For a long time, I have believed that a successful writer is the one who knows how to communicate their message to their audience. My definition always involved some kind of exchange and validation of the writer’s voice from outside of themselves. Now, I’ve changed my mind. The successful writer is the one who writes from and for themselves. Their voice is born out of silence and not out of publishers’ expectations and popular trends. They welcome panic attacks that bring them back to their wild child story-tellers.

We live as we dream, alone.

I came across this famous sentence of Conrad's in his Heart of Darkness when I was in my late teens. It gave me a profound and painful shock, so long-lasting that I am still juggling and struggling with it emotionally in my thirties. This time, the thought is giving me a whole new ground from which to look at my life and reclaim what I have so far experienced as troublesome destiny.

We often pick up interesting thoughts that are floating around us. Some come from our parents, other from peers, books and various media. Thoughts anchor themselves deep in our psychological landscape without asking for permission. We make a perfect host for them, and no matter how interesting, deep, and philosophical they may sound, many of them cause us inexplicable anguish. Take the 19-year-old me: I embraced this Conrad’s thought with ovation only to be able to justify my adolescent suffering about not fitting in with my self-centred and pretentious social surroundings. The reality, of course, was that I didn’t fit in, just as much as anybody who has grown out of the herd mentality doesn’t fit in. So, instead of looking for fresh pastures, I dressed my social wounds with the intoxicating depth of Conrad’s mind, whilst staying with the same group of horses whose unsavoury name was ‘The Bambus Clan’ – bunch of high school girls who called themselves after a drink bambus, a deadly combination of coke and cheap red wine that sent us unconscious and sick every Saturday night.

I would have done anything to smoothly fit in with the constitution of the Bambus Clan – anything but not care if I did fit or not. So I tossed them the Conrad’s thought, knowing how much they valued suffering as one of the ‘coolest’ things a teenager can do. They praised me for being so meaningful, for giving them the expression of their otherwise inexpressible pain and alienation. They used Conrad’s idea as a means of social cohesion – they wallowed together in the realization that understanding between people is utterly impossible. We would go out together and drink more bambus to ease the pain and secure the bond. I wallowed in the same realization a bit more than them, which made me understand that I will never be able to fit in with another social group. I finally managed to scare myself to death by believing that alienation, separation and coldness are closing in on us and that this was all we could hope for in the life to come.

I wrote a book about love which I called Absence and I dedicated the first story to Joseph Conrad. I thought there is really nothing to talk about in terms of love but how much it sucks when love is not around. And though I plodded through 200 pages grieving and morning the human condition, the inability of two people to be joined as one, I already sensed that this heartache might be caused by our own deceiving minds. I wrote in the opening of the book: Absence has less to do with the lack of the Other and more to do with our own disposition. I understood then that I am not suffering because of reality itself – which is that people are separate, individual beings who come together to try and share their lives – but because I have been convinced that this was a tragic and dismal destiny of our kind.

Since then, there have been other, exaggerated, variations of experiencing separateness as an apocalyptic state of existence. After leaving Croatia, the ‘fear of being alone’ has mutated into the ‘fear of being alone in England’ – don’t ask me by which logic, but I was convinced that, if I went back to Croatia, I would never feel alone again. I tried reminding myself how I used to hate Zagreb for its unfriendliness and aloofness; how I would roam empty and neglected leafy paths on Sundays, grumbling about lazy Croats because nobody wanted to join me. They all preferred their family barbecues. Yet, from my London perspective, empty streets of Zagreb looked pleasingly lively.

I noticed something positive about these illogical mind twists that I played on myself. I noticed that a thought that is skimming my troubled mind is the very source of my heartache. First I think We live as we dream, alone. Then I say, oh, gosh, being alone is the most horrible thing that can befall the human kind, then I continue, people are all doomed because we will never be able to understand one another and we will live and die in our isolation, and it goes on and on until I notice that my whole body is tense, my teeth are clenched, the palms of my hands are sweaty and my stomach is slowly being corroded by its own juices.

Recently, I tried changing the course of my train of thoughts. I started with aloneness and I thought, it’s good to be alone because it gives me plenty of time to write. If I can’t understand myself, I will never be able to pour myself into words, and I can say goodbye to the hope of being understood by others. Hey, why do I need others to understand me? A-ha, here was the voice that changed the meaning of Conrad’s words for me so that I slowly lost the tension from my unnerved body. The more I tried to understand my own experience of the world, the less I needed others to validate and approve of how I felt. The communication and unity with the Other started to take place within me and as part of my daily experience of just living with myself. Conrad’s words are now even truer than before, even more beautiful than ever, yet their meaning has changed for me. Whatever seemed like an inherent lack within people has now become our biggest strength. Just think, being alone in your own experience of the world means that you are the master of your house. You get visitors, and if they are well-intentioned, you let them in to wine and dine together. But if they are mean, jealous, fowl-mouthed road bandits, you know how to keep your gate closed. You will never again come back home to find your house marauded by such specimens.

What I mean is that too often our whole lives depend on how other people treat us and how life circumstances arrange themselves around us. Knowing that you alone are the master of how you experience these outside forces is a source of strength and not, what I used to think, a pitiable and tragic human fault. These days I need little or no understanding from others. Understanding myself and how I sail through life is such a grand task that it leaves me no time to fret about whether anyone will think what I do is any good. Once I’ve felt that strong favourable wind in my sails, there is no looking back to see if anyone is waving their white handkerchief.

Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

I just got back from Berlin last night. My impressions are almost opposite to what everyone I know told me about this ‘vibrant’ city. Most of all, it was not in the least true that people spoke English there and that foreigners had no problem communicating with the locals. Before we set off, my beau asked me if I spoke any German. I said, no, of course, I don’t.

Everywhere we went, all the information we enquired about, we got German spoken back to us. Then we would look at each other, and after a moment’s silence, I would produce a clumsy translation of what the person had said. At the end of the first day, J said to me – but you said you didn’t speak any German! And I don’t – that’s what I believe. I studied German for 4 years and I lived for a year in Austria. I measure my knowledge of German against the time spent learning it – the outcome is disastrous considering how much effort I’ve put into it. German makes me feel inadequate and linguistically thick, so I would rather forget I had ever had any contact with it.

But J doesn’t understand my worries. Being English and wanting to fight the dominance of his mother tongue, he wants to speak the language of the locals. So I give him some basic phrases – bezahlen bitte, cappuccino ohne chocolaten pulver, ich ferstehe nicht… Like a dictionary, I provide him with phrases and translations, and he uses his mouth to utter those sentences. Together, wir sprechen Deutsch. He believes that a certain number of words and sentences makes you speak the language. He is never afraid to speak, even if he knows only a single word! I believe I don’t speak German because I am inhibited by my own guilt for not speaking it as fluently as I should have. Yet, together, we get by, determined to enjoy our stay in Berlin.

When on our last day we finally buy currywurst – the German most popular fast food – J, now feeling quite comfortable with speaking German to waiters, explains that we want one with catch-up and one with mayo. He says it in Spanish to the German Turk. Uno con catch-up y otro con mayo. But the guy understands him and that’s all it matters really. We get our food, the Turk gets the money, J is pleased for not having talked in English and I finally relax about my notoriously rigid linguistic rules. At the end of the day, you speak the language if you think you speak it and not if you get an A at school. Language is a living thing – The French say frittes for pommes-frittes and the Germans say pommes for the same thing. We all know what it means and what chips taste like, don’t we?

Five Year Sentence

I often wonder why the line between freedom and confinement is so thin. Just recently, as the spring seeped into the sad and overcast London metropolis, I felt a strange uplifting feeling. It started in the morning as I was doing the habitual tooth-brushing, face washing and hair-style arranging. I looked at myself in the mirror and I suddenly felt in the right place at the right time.

Similar sensation would crop up from time to time before, but never lasted for long. Having got used to my London bathroom and the house in general – distinct furniture, English spoken from the TV set always turned up too loud and strange plants that grow only in this part of the world – I never minded the interiors of this new land. Well, not quite true – I still do mind the separate hot and cold taps, but I have devised the technique by which I catch water from each tap and create a pleasingly warm liquid in the palm of my hands with which I wash the sleepiness off my face.

Yet, in the past five years, since I moved to England, each morning I have dreaded the moment when I look outside the window and realize that I am lost in a foreign land. The unfamiliarity of sounds – either loud screams of police or ambulance sirens or a chirp of birds different from those in my own country – smells and colours that do not connect to any brain cell, memory or feeling but just denote strangeness and confusion. I could never make peace between the serenity of my house and the lulling feeling of safeness it gave me and the harsh, utterly scary cityscape that lay outside the walls of my private confinement.

If I was ever asked why I moved to England, I would say – it is because I wanted to be free. What a lie. I probably don’t know why I moved to England. Maybe because I didn’t know what freedom was. So, fine, I knew I would never be hurt, spied on, bullied or discriminated against in my new country but I still kept fearing the unfriendliness and coldness of London. I was free in my living room, but the prisoner of my inability to accept the city where I settled. I hated London so much, I hated the noise, dirt and rubbish on the streets, looks of people as they passed me, artificial smiles of shop assistants, I even hated everything in London that was similar to my culture. I remember, one morning I woke up and still half-asleep I heard the rustle of a chestnut tree that grows close to my window. I strained my nostrils to inhale as much air as possible. The sweet blossomy fragrant of chestnut that runs through Zagreb streets in spring. But when I woke up, I was still in London. So I hated London even more for deceiving me. For giving me a hint of home and then relentlessly taking it away from me.

Zagreb is the prettiest city. Delicate, small, walkable. Its streets are adorned with rows of trees – chestnut or lime trees – and the Austro-Hungarian building, always neatly restored, look like biscuits that grown on the witch’s house who captured Hansel and Gretel. Creamy coloured, with beautiful shapes and curves – you literally want to eat them. In fact, Zagreb is so pretty that you would never be scared walking anywhere in the night. Nobody ever shouts there, there are no sinister corners, there is light everywhere and there are people who wash streets after midnight so that the city can wake up in its glory. How would it be possible to feel threatened in this paradise? But stay a bit longer, and you feel that something is not quite right with this perfection. While the outdoors is pleasant and people like socializing in the open air cafes, there is something inexplicably dark simmering in people’s houses, in their minds. Cold-hearted, close-minded and most of all jealous of anyone who has nothing to complain about, Zagreb made me a prisoner with its way of thinking. It was always a perfectly polished but stone cold, jealous, step-mother to me. It never openly threw me out of its embrace, but just starved me of any human emotion, support of acceptance. If I stayed, I would have slowly died, without even realizing it.

The morning I felt I was in the right place at the right time, I suddenly felt free both from the insularity of Zagreb people and the fright of London streets. I remembered a friend from Belgrade who told me that, wherever you go, it takes five years to make a place a home. And he was right. I came here looking for freedom, but I spent five years living in quarantine before I ventured outside of my physical space. Fear is not freedom, hatred is not freedom. This morning I put my nose outside the window and smelt the warm air full of the rushed, hectic, urban molecules. This is London. I rang a new friend, a girl I only met a week ago, and arranged to meet her for lunch. I decided to give it go. To give everything a go.

Why does literature have to speak the truth?

Last week Turkey's most renowned writer Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize for literature. His name has been in the media quite often in the last year. Even those who have never read his books, will have heard his name – yes, he is the protagonist of the infamous case in which the state wanted to press charges against the written word. Pamuk wrote about the 1915 genocide against the Armenian minority in Turkey, claiming he was the only one who was never scared to bring up the taboo subject in his country. But having a troublesome relationship with certain events from its Ottoman past, the Turkish state was reluctant to call the killings of the Armenian people genocide. Thus Pamuk was accused of “insulting the Turkishness” of his home country.

Orhan Pamuk has often been criticized in Turkey for having views which are too westernized. Even though he is now based in Istanbul, he did spend some time at Colombia University in New York in 1980s. I wonder what makes a writer belong to a particular country. Is Orhan Pamuk a Turkish writer only because he writer in Turkish? And why don´t we regard him an American writer if this is where he got his ideas about freedom of expression from?

Literature has always been tied to a national identity more than other forms of art. Because it uses a national language as its medium, literature was rarely able to stay neutral and purely “artistic”. In crucial historic moments, there has always been a clash between those writers who support the state (even if only by keeping their pens idle) and those who speak out and bare the consequences of such a choice. Some writers fight for their right to write and then face political trials, some go into exile. But whatever the path a writer takes, the words they write are never apolitical.

The Pamuk case was not only about the literary representation of the Ottoman past. International attention paid to the outcome of Pamuk´s plight highlighted the political dimension of literature. Thus Turkey´s commitment to freedom of expression and respect of human rights were seriously questioned in the light of the country´s application to EU membership.

There is no doubt that the 2006 Nobel Prize went to a great writer. And forgive me, but these are my intimate musings - I wonder how healthy it is to judge literature through the prism of international politics all the time. There are writers and writers. Some may feel compelled to be politically outspoken and campaign for freedom of expression and in that course write fabulous texts. Others can produce work of equal quality and keep a very low profile. If this Prize is given for literature, my only question is if we are able to judge books purely on their literary merit. If not and if literature ends up being inextricably linked to politics and values of civil society, I fear we might risk losing this great form of artistic expression. Lastly, is truth really a prerequisite of a great piece of literature?

Everything she wrote was on the edge

Many things remind me of the place I come from. Of the home land. I carry the feeling of belonging to a place where I am not present any more like a ball and chain around my ankle. It’s almost a nuisance to have an origin. And it’s only after I have left the hearth that I know it once existed. If you stay in one place all your life, you can hardly know you have a motherland.

It is Monday morning and I am up late. I don’t work in the PEN office every day. Only Tuesdays and Thursdays. Still, I check my emails religiously whenever I can, which means non-stop. Most London homes have wireless connection these days and the outside world has become as accessible as the air we breathe. Obviously, only through the computer screen.

I see Amanda’s email in my PEN inbox. She is asking if we are planning to issue a statement on Anna Politkovskaya assassination. I shudder. When did that happen? I search the BBC website and I find it there, under 7th October; breaking news from Europe, an obituary, tribute paid to Russian journalist, comments of outrage, shock and grief. I feel my throat turning dry and my fingers stiff and cold on the mouse pad. They are not moving. I remember Anna’s photo in the ‘Writers in Translation’ folder in my office – pensive but determined gaze, her short grey hair beautifully framed with the purple of her top. She is one of ‘our writers’. Her book ‘Putin’s Russia’ is proudly displayed in the English PEN office. We now only have one copy left with a note sticking out – please do not remove from the office. Other copies have gone missing, which is what usually happens to a good book. Book theft, though, is never considered a crime. I still cannot believe Anna has been shot dead in the lift of the building where she lived.

‘Putin’s Russia’ – a warm but critical depiction of the country where human rights are routinely trampled upon – was the book that inaugurated ‘Writers in Translation’. Anna’s commitment to truth and free expression that she showed in her work as a journalist became the mission of our programme as well. The book was almost dropped from the Harvill and Secker publication list, but with the PEN grant, its print-run grew to almost 20,000 copies. ‘Putin’s Russia’ was available in bookshops around the UK. In duty free zones at airports, where only best-sellers are stocked. It was a recommended reading. She once said that her duty as a journalist was to write what she sees as reality. She wasn’t afraid of the risk that was part of her work. A work of a truth-teller. My professional duty was to do whatever possible to have her book published in English and made available to the world to read.

But Anna’s death cuts deeper than that. She reminds me that I am a writer. A Croatian writer. Constantly pushing the limits of what is publicly allowed, her writing was the expression of attachment to her own country. The strokes of her pen, like a sharp knife, peeled layers of obscurity that cover people’s daily actions and experiences. Anna took the risk of telling the truth and not fleeing. That’s why she makes me wonder why I left Croatia. Why couldn’t I have stayed and written there? Why even now I write in English?

Being a writer is not only an art form, and not only a profession. It is a state of mind which seeks to preserve boundlessness. A writers’ mind will question everything. It will turn the world upside down like a housewife doing a floor to ceiling clean-up. Even the most banal, taken-for-granted things will not escape the scrutiny of a writer’s feline curiosity. But today, I think less of the literary playfulness that governs the writing spirit. I feel that being a writer is about having an integrity. It is a risk that we willingly take each morning afresh. And a risk for which we are sometimes called to pay with our own life.

Why do so many writers leave their countries to be able to write?

Why are so many writers murdered in their own motherlands for speaking the truth?

This was going to be a lazy morning with a languid cup of coffee and a few lines to write. Instead, I am faced with the death of a colleague and challenged to examine my own integrity. What would I say my duty is if asked in an interview?