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English

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With so many flare-ups of nationalism and isolationism in recent years, there is a sense that Europe needs to be fixed, or, at the very least, profoundly reconfigured; whether it is to address the grievances of those feeling disenfranchised from it, or to improve social cohesion, or even continue to exist as a democratic transnational entity. Bringing together 28 acclaimed women writers, artists, scientists and entrepreneurs from across Europe, this powerful and timely anthology looks at an ever-changing Europe from a variety of different perspectives and offers hope and insight into how we might begin to rebuild. Introduced by Laura Bates, founder of the Everyday Sexism Project. In collaboration with Hay Festival and Wom@rts.

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Short story

Europe

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Publié par	Comma Press
Date de parution	12 mars 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781912697465
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0324€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Comma Press.
commapress.co.uk

Copyright © remains with the contributors, 2020
This collection © Comma Press & Hay Festival of Literature and the Arts Limited, 2020
All rights reserved.
The moral right of the Contributors has been asserted.

The moral rights of the contributors to be identified as the authors of this Work have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The stories in this anthology are entirely works of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in them are entirely the work of the authors’ imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, organisations or localities, is entirely coincidental. Any characters that appear, or claim to be based on real ones are intended to be entirely fictional. The opinions of the authors and the editors are not those of the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 1-912697-29-7
ISBN-13: 978-1-91269-729-8

The European Commission's support for the production of this publication does not constitute an endorsement of the contents, which reflect the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges assistance from Arts Council England.
Contents
Introduction
Laura Bates

AUSTRIA
Cracks in the Ice
Julya Rabinowich

BELGIUM
Staging Europe
Annelies Beck

BULGARIA /UK
Two Lakes
Kapka Kassabova

CROATIA
In Human Form
Asja Bakić

CYPRUS
Hummingbird
Nora Nadjarian

CZECH REPUBLIC
Europe Must be for t he 99 Per Cent
Apolena Rychlíková

DENMARK
My Dream for Europe
Janne Teller

ESTONIA
Europe Day or Bloody Thursday
Maarja Kangro

FINLAND
Things That Have Nothing to Do with Reason
Saara Turunen

FRANCE
Our Mediterranean Mother
Leïla Slimani

GERMANY
The Quest for Europe’s Global Strategic Role
Yvonne Hofstetter

GREECE
I Can Now Tell You My Story
Sofía Kouvelaki

HUNGARY
Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire
Zsófia Bán

IRELAND
All of One Mind
Lisa Dwan

ITALY
No Science, No Future
Silvia Bencivelli

LATVIA
The Bull’s Bride
Nora Ikstena

LITHUANIA
Change Is Not Just a Hashtag
Žydrūnė Vitaitė

LUXEMBOURG
Remote Control
Carine Krecké

MALTA
The Illusion of Europe
Caroline Muscat

NETHERLANDS
Another Rosy-fingered Dawn for Europe?
Gloria Wekker

POLAND
The Void
Bronka Nowicka

PORTUGAL
The Voice Inside my Head
Ana Pessoa

ROMANIA
Inside the Coffer
Ioana Nicolaie

SLOVAKIA
Ride
Tereza Nvotová

SLOVENIA
The Crisis of Trust
Renata Salecl

SPAIN
The Same Stone
Edurne Portela

SWEDEN
Everything I Have, I’ve Been Given
Karolina Ramqvist

UNITED KINGDOM
A Tale of Two Witches: Re-weaving a Social Europe
Hilary Cottam

About the Contributors
About the Translators
About the Project
Introduction

Women see things differently. Of course we do. Like anybody, we bring our own unique experiences to our perception of any problem. The rich and detailed tapestry of who we are is made up of every moment we have lived, felt, seen, experienced, suffered. It affects the way we see things. And we cannot look through anybody else’s eyes but our own.
Usually, we don’t think much about how differently people see things. We accept ‘home truths’, or conventional wisdom. We come to believe that the certainties presented by the loudest voices are irreproachable: that the narrative presented to us as ‘the state of Europe’ today is fact.
So it might come as a shock, between the covers of this book, to look at our world only through women’s eyes. To see a Europe so far removed from the over-simplistic, binary, staid portrayal of recent times. To come to it afresh in all its fractured, fragile, compromised, contoured parts. To recognise its flaws and its richness, its gifts and its costs, its challenges and its beauty. Like this, in the words of Asja Bakić, ‘It looks… fragile’.
It also looks like hope.
We cannot rebuild what we cannot clearly see. We cannot challenge invisible injustices, nor hope to heal wounds we are not brave enough to inspect. We cannot solve a problem without a name, nor address the needs of a shapeless group of people we vaguely label ‘left behind’ because we are too lazy ever to find out who they are.
To take stock of where we are, and to move forward, we need new ways of seeing the world around us. New ways to look at Europe and the world beyond, and a willingness to forge new ways of being in that world. As Hilary Cottam writes: ‘The answers perhaps lie in a different kind of thinking – or magic if you will.’
Through women’s eyes, we can begin to see things differently. It comes as a shock, because our default setting is to see things through men’s eyes without even realising we are doing so. The front pages that deliver us our daily bulletins, the think tanks that advise us, the politicians pontificating and talking heads tattling: they seem to provide us such wide-ranging perspectives. But we are hearing from the same people over and over again. Not just because their views are so frequently informed by the same socio-economic, geographical, ethnic and educational background. But because, in UK Parliamentary debates about Brexit, for example, 90 per cent of the talking is done by men. 1
As any Instagram aficionado will attest, when you have looked at something through a single filter for long enough, it can be a shock to switch to a fresh lens. What is presented to us as real might be hopelessly distorted by airbrushing, but when it is all we see, it quickly becomes accepted as the truth. Like the ‘carefully created but unreal image’ from Nora Ikstena’s story, in which the eyes of a young Europa are brutally opened to a new reality. For a continent named after the myth of a rape, to be forced to look anew at itself through women’s eyes is a refreshing and necessary concept.
‘What European society so desperately needs nowadays,’ writes Apolena Rychlíková, ‘is a chance to take a deep breath and start thinking beyond the present day, a chance to see itself in a different way, in a different constellation and social order.’
Looking at the world through different eyes is a challenge and it can feel like an affront. The pieces of writing contained in this book are not always easy to read. They are exacting, challenging and complex. As any good solution should be. They encourage us to look at Europe with a fresh perspective, to question our own assumptions and the limitations of what we have thought possible.
They dare us to move away from a hard and dry consideration of economic factors, of numbers and currency and market movements, and to think instead as people. To think afresh, in the language of Janne Teller’s ‘livability’ – of community – of the simple yearning for what Apolena Rychlíková describes as ‘a dignified and well-rounded life’.
We cannot achieve a future of peace and prosperity without confronting the sins of the past. These women encourage us to acknowledge our own failings and wrongdoing: to examine, for example, what Gloria Wekker describes as ‘the utter lack of shame manifesting in European political attitudes towards the non-European Other during the colonial era and now.’ Renata Salecl gives us the uncomfortable task of recognising ourselves as a version of the anti-vaxxer, reliant on the tendency of others to make less selfish choices in order that we might pursue our own ruthless individualism. These writers hold up a mirror that is not easy to look into.
Again and again in these pieces, the question of gaze emerges. Where do we choose to look? And when do we allow ourselves to avert our eyes? Will we choose to confront the urgency of climate disaster, or bury our heads in the sand until it is too late? Are we brave enough to look directly at the devastating chasm between our richest and poorest citizens and to admit the hard realities that have widened it? Can we continue to witness the deaths of innocent people at our borders with little more than curious detachment as they beg us to let them in? ‘How humiliating and how tragic’, as Leïla Slimani says.
None of this is easy. As Tereza Nvotová writes, it will require persistence . Or, as Edurne Portela explains, it might only be achieved if we are forced, literally, to stumble over painful reminders of past resistance in order to write a different kind of future for ourselves.
It will also require us to join forces. Nowhere before reading the pieces contained in Europa28 have I experienced quite this exhilarating mixture of politics with science, philosophy with economics, ethics with architecture. We have a modern tendency to approach a problem from a single angle. To drill down ever deeper into narrow solutions based in a single discipline. But just as the peoples and countries of Europe are not a homogenous bloc, and yet have come together to create something with its own identity, its own magic, so it might take a little of the power of each of these different ways of seeing the world to find our path. We will need both fact and fiction, if we are to admit to the reality of our situation, and yet still have the audacity to dream a new way of being.
If we are to realise the promise offered by female thinkers, we must also ask difficult questions. It is one thing to celebrate women’s ideas and advances, and another to do the necessary work to enable them to come to fruition. Are we prepared to make the required cultural and structural shifts to clear a path for the women like those whose words appear in this volume? Will we enable them to fulfil their potential contribution to our shared future?
For too long, we have demanded that women themselves do the work of dismantling their ow