Lithuanian Women’s Writing

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On Mobility and Migration (Part II)

In her scholarly essay about Lithuanian authors of the diaspora for Reflections on Belonging, a cycle of articles in Vilnius Review, Professor Eglė Kačkutė of Vilnius Univrersity examines the work of three contemporary Lithuanian women writing about mobility and migration: Dalia Staponkutė, Paulina Pukytė, and Agnė Žagrakalytė. Staponkutė is an academic, editor, and translator living in Nicosia (Cyprus); Pukytė is a visual artist and curator as well as a translator living in London (UK); and Žagrakalytė lives in Brussels (Belgium).

Both Staponkutė and Pukytė started publishing non-fictional essays in the Lithuanian press sharing their experiences abroad with the Lithuanian readership. They both went on to develop their creative literary projects in interesting ways. Staponkutė published the impressive book The Third Country: My Little Odyssey – marketed as a novel, but which actually is a memoir. Pukytė’s most valuable and mature work to date is her experimental book of short fiction, A Loser and a Do-gooder. It is a powerful reflection on the dark side of migration. Žagrakalytė‘s first extremely well received collection of poetry, I am Getting Married, was published before her departure to Brussels and all of her subsequent work – two poetry collections and two novels –  was written in Brussels. Her second collection of poetry The Whole Truth about Alisa Meler and her second experimental novel Klara engage closely with the themes of migration of a young woman and a mother of young children building her life in an unfamiliar environment. Žagrakalytė’s work on mobility stands out in that it offers an unambiguously positive view of migration.

Staponkutė left ethnically and culturally uniform Lithuania when it was still part of the Soviet Union to study philosophy in a culturally, linguistically and ethnically diverse St. Petersburg (then Leningrad), which was her first and decisive encounter with a cosmopolitan environment. She relocated to Cyprus in 1989 to marry a Greek Cypriot with whom she started a family. The Third Country: My Little Odyssey maps out her identity journey consisting of negotiations between her Lithuanian origins and emerging Cypriot self, her attachment to the Lithuanian language that is a core part of her identity to be transmitted to her daughters at any cost, her lasting relationships with her family in Lithuania, and her widely international intellectual and personal journeying as a scholar, a writer, and a woman. Kačkutė suggests that Staponkutė’s creative output belongs in the realm of transcultural literature as defined by Dagnino: ”Twenty-first-century authors who do not belong in one place or one culture […] and who write between cultures”. Staponkutė’s essay The Silence of the Mothers explores the image of a migrant mother, who chooses to teach her children her native Lithuanian and to learn Greek, in order to establish a sustainable bond with them. Her main concern becomes to create a distinct cultural space within each of these cultures for herself – her own Lithuanian space in Cyprus and her own Cypriot space in Lithuania.

Pukytė’s position as a transcultural author is established through the experimental mode of writing. A Loser and a Do-gooder portrays often illegal Lithuanian immigrants in the UK through a series of short dialogues, poems, or blurbs. Her marginal position as both an experimental and a transnational author allows Pukytė to depict the migrant experience outside of a binary system of “us” and “them” that automatically implies a power relationship between the narrator and the object of representation. Her writing constitutes a genre manipulation that summons the most powerful literary myth of migration and return to give it a culturally specific contemporary twist.

Žagrakalytė’s playful novel Klara offers a very different view of emigration from Lithuania. It tells the story of a young woman, Klara, who comes from a socially deprived background in rural Lithuania and briefly follows her mother to Finland where she lives with her new husband but quickly sets off on her own journey of initiation throughout Europe. Klara is also an aspiring author and artist, dreaming of producing the next best-selling bande dessinée (comics usually  in French and created for readership in France and Belgium, where there is a long tradition in comics, a genre separate from English-language comics). Her success as a migrant, who escapes hunger, poverty, and violence in Lithuania to construct a happy and fulfilling life for herself through her own determination and some help from an old neighbour, can be read as a parallel of the author’s own success as a transnational author and individual.

Lithuanian transnational women’s writing on mobility offers a rich and fascinating perspective on the most important social, economic and cultural development in the country. It also opens up Lithuanian literature to unexpected literary experimentation as well as unprecedented identity formations. This Lithuanian literary phenomenon is a powerful testimony of the creative impetus enabled by the freedom of movement within the EU and beyond.

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Lithuanian Women Authors