Trofej in Gloria!

29/08/2024 — De Kroatische versie van Trofee, vertaald door Svetlana Grubic Samarzija en uitgegeven bij Hena, is nog maar net verschenen, en ik mocht het al uitleggen in het topmagazine Gloria. Grote dank ook aan Marijn Achten en Sébastien Van Malleghem voor de beelden, die het helemaal blitz maakten. En ja, er komt een boekvoorstelling in Zagreb! #TROFEJ

Wie graag wil weten wat ik vertelde en Kroatisch spreekt/leest, kan het interview hier nalezen.
Voor alle anderen, hieronder de Engelse versie.

You are a journalist, an author, a librettist, and a screenwriter – ever had a writing burno – out?

On the contrary. I always have more ideas than writing time… there’s actually a stack of stories waiting on my desk to be written (although some ideas still have to find the right form – I’m not sure yet if they will become novels, plays or operas. I always need a theme, a plot and a form before I start, and it can take years before I find all 3 elements for one particular story.) I think writing in all these different genres is (for me) actually the secret to not getting a burn-out: I have the feeling that all these kinds of writing influence each other in positive ways, triggering new ideas and new ways of story-telling. Concepts, skills and techniques from other artforms enrich my writing as I go along. If I have the feeling that I ‘have to’ write, it usually means that my approach is wrong, as even commissioned pieces can be exciting and challenging if you find freedom within the box.

However, there’s certainly days that I would love to do something else, preferably something with my hands or something outside, in order not to spend so much time in my head. Usually I then just escape for a while, and go hiking or motorbiking to refill my batteries — physical movement, preferably slightly repetitive, always resets my mind and brings back the creative flow.

Writing can also be lonely, and therefore I’m glad I have the luxury to combine all these different kinds of writing: journalism leads to unexpected insights, encounters and conversations, and writing for opera and music theatre (and being present as a dramaturg during all the rehearsals) is a very interdisciplinary form of (co-)creation (with all benefits and difficulties that go with that), where you create something together with the composer, director and musicians. I greatly value these contacts, which again enrichen my writing. And luckily, I also perform very often – I love being on stage, both as a writer and as the host of the Dead Ladies Show, a café chantant about remarkable women that I curate. This direct contact with the audience is a good way to see how my work is received and gives me tons of energy — and often new ideas.

What´s the secret of „creative process” for all of the mentioned business identites?

A willingness to think about things with an open mind.
Curiosity. Awareness. Paying attention to small details which most people overlook.
Most things I write start with a sentence, a thought, an idea, an image…

Sometimes it’s a theme, sometimes a scene, sometimes a character.

It can take years before these loose atoms click together into a narrative.
Once that has happened, I start to look for a form
(or sometimes it begins with a form which has to find its story)

because if everything is possible, I get nervous — infinite options are overwhelming.
So I try to box things in by setting limitations for myself: a theme, a plot and a form.

I like to use fixed forms – like musical structures, canonized stories or strict concepts.
Then, you have to find freedom within the box, challenging the borders you set for yourself.

That’s the fun part.

And while doing that, you have to forget about outside expectations.
Don’t try to imagine how things will be read, what people will think, if your book will work.
That’s the hard part.

And then, when all this is clear, I just just have to sit down and write.

That is, for me, the easy part.

Was it hard or easy to get into mind o write this story that is so white, male, masculine, and with a deep sense of colonialism?

I have a soft spot for unpleasant characters – I find it fascinating to try to understand what drives people who are completely different than me and with whom I’d likely get into a fight if we met in person. Understanding them is the key to empathy and dialogue, and therefore to change. I think this is one of the main strengths of fiction: that it enables us to try to understand ‘the other’ in a safe context (and allows us to think ideas to the extreme, exposing their consequences). We live in a time where we are surrounded by very harsh opinions, all thinking we are right in our own bubble, and the other is wrong. If we stay in our corner, dialogue becomes impossible and if there is no communication, there can also not be change. Therefore, I always try (like I also try in real life when I talk to people as a journalist) to find common ground, something we do share, instead of focussing on the differences. This can be a starting point for talking to each other instead of shouting, and for letting go of our fixed opinions (as many things are not so black and white as we think).
With Hunter White, this common ground was his true love for nature, his longing for something real and touchable in our digital world, for testing his own borders and limitations, and to a certain extent also his loyalty to his ethical principles (although they are different from mine). I used these anchor points to get close to him and try to understand him from within without judging him, because I believe that if I do that as a writer, the reader will follow in my footsteps. And that’s what I wanted in this story: to trick the reader into following and gradually accepting Hunter’s logic, without judging him, up to the point where they suddenly realise, with a shock: have I thought along with this man up to this point?! Thus exposing their own unconscious colonial reflexes and prejudices, which are still present in all of us.

How did the research go?

I’m obsessive when it comes to research. As I, in all my novels, but certainly in Trophy, expect of my readers that they try take an interest in unpleasant characters doing extreme things, and don’t close the book midway, I have to make every part of the story as believable as possible. This means every detail has to be correct. If Hunter wakes up at 3am in the bush, I want to know which insects and birds are awake. And if a small animal sneaking through the grass sounds the same as a big one. Or if a hyena and a lion meet, I need to know who attacks whom and how – sometimes this knowledge also shapes a scene or drives the story forward in a new direction. Normally, I would go into the field for that, but as I wrote this book during covid, this wasn’t possible. Luckily I knew from my first novel, which partly plays in WWI, that you don’t ‘have to be there’ to write about something. And luckily people upload the craziest things, like 24 hours of savanna sounds, on youtube. In retrospect, I also don’t think going there would have made the book better. If I go somewhere, I take myself and my view on things with me. Sometimes you can build a more polyphonic and objective view on things by combining many external sources. Also, I’m not sure if I could have done to my characters what I have done to them now if I’d met them in real. Sometimes distance is a good thing.

You personally had no connection at all with hunting or trophies?

Not at all – I’m the kind of person who carries mosquitos out to the terrace instead of killing them. But that’s was so fascinating about writing: that it draws you into subjects and territories you know nothing about, uprooting all your prejudices and replacing them by a much more nuanced viewpoint with more greytones – precisely what you also want to happen to the reader. Therefore, I tried not to only get all the facts correct, but also to get into the mind of my character: his ideas, his ethics, his logic, his thoughts, his feelings. To explore his systemic colonial ideas, his longing for masculinity and his values, his weaknesses and his vulnerability. It would have been much easier to judge him directly, but so much less interesting. Because part of his feelings are engraved in all of us, they are what keep the system going – and it’s only by acknowledging and facing this that this can change.

Power is always toxic?

Good question – I think it depends on the definition of power. If power is thoughtful leadership, focussed on the well-being of the whole community, it can be a very helpful way to give direction to the world. But all power based upon superiority over other creatures tends to be or become toxic, as it is based on inequality. And if the well-being and prosperity of one group or individual is based on the exploitation of another group or person, that can only be toxic. Think of Ursula Le Guin’s short novel The Ones who Walk away from Omelas: everyone in the city is rich and happy, but this happiness is built on the suffering of one child being held captive in a cellar. Everyone in the city knows this. And still, many stay and accept that this one being is sacrificed for their luck. How to define and handle power is a choice. Not to be corrupted by it a rarity.

The whole book is an accusation of how ‘the West’ deals with the world – do we have a real chance to change?

Also a good question – within the box, I think the chances are very slim. Those who benefit from the system will always try to keep it in place. The way in which colonialism manifests itself today may be more subtle, but the West (and Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and the other new powers) still thrives on the exploitation of the rest of the world. The rich countries still control global politics, build their wealth on foreign resources, create climate problems with effects in African countries and then blame refugees for migrating and refuse them access to Europe… In short: we all still live in a world which is built on the oppression and exploitation of ‘the other’ – in all it’s variations: the African continent, cheap Asian (child) labour, silenced political opponents, underpaid workforce, people falling through the mazes of the social security net, homeless and immigrants, people without access to healthcare or education, women (economy would collapse if they would be paid for all their hours of unpaid tasks), ethnic minorities, the elderly, etc etc.

(Accepting) this is what keeps our world turning as it turns now. Really changing it would mean rethinking everything from the beginning and starting over from different goals and values. What is prosperity? What is security? What is humanity – how much of it do we include into our goals for welfare? And what are we willing to pay for this change? What do want to sacrifice in the short term in order to be happy (or even just still there) in the long term? Even though people are the only animal able to imagine their own finitude, we don’t seem to be very good at thinking further than our own immediate profit & (political) lifespan.

Is this „colonial hunting literature”? And what does it really mean?

Yes and no. I discovered ‘colonial hunting literature’ as a genre during my research, as I was looking for the ideal form for this story. There’s the literary variation (Hemingway and friends), but also the books written by professional hunters (like J.A. Hunter) who worked in Africa during colonial times and who wrote adventurous stories about it — using vocabulary which these days isn’t acceptable anymore, but with lots of interesting zoological and anthropological observations and a lot of respect for the local guides with whom they collaborated. All of these books also feature very masculine characters; the connection with ‘real masculinity’ that Hunter longs for so badly is also very present there. I borrowed this ‘colonial’ form and used it to write a novel which is for me in the first place a critique on colonialism — I like that kind of irony.