In the 1950s, Dragana Jurišić's aunt Gordana Čavić moved from her native rural Yugoslavia to Paris, where she died in the 1980s. Gordana claimed to be a seamstress to wealthy Parisians, but Jurišić thinks her work may have been more clandestine, involving regular phone calls from unknown men. Her Own recounts Jurišić's journey to uncover her aunt’s story.
Death, birth and belonging are the main themes as the narrator Jurišić travels between Ireland, Croatia and France. In the seriocomic opening scene, Jurišić has a miscarriage in an overpriced Dublin restaurant while listening to Barry Manilow. Obliged temporarily to keep the dead twin foetuses inside her, she “feels like a living coffin”. Afterwards visiting her family home, Jurišić observes Gordana ”in a photograph dressed in a dusty pink nightdress with frilled sleeves ... In her lap is a bear’s head with jaws open wide, exposing four long sharp incisors.”
Am I any different to Breton, a writer who built a platform for himself by sacrificing a soul in limbo
— Dragana Jurišić
Darkly absurd vignettes abound. As a child visiting the village priest, she sees a crown of thorns on his bed, puts it on, and promptly sees red. “Oh, now I am pretty, but what’s this warm goo in my eye?” A documentary eye is used to mythological effect, and whether the story is memoir or autofiction is unclear. The point of view is that of an outsider, an artist, and the short episodic chapters duly combine prose and illustrations (photographs and paintings).
There is an echo of Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat in the protagonist’s obsessive research of an erased woman from history, but here the focus is on family secrets. On a residency in Paris, Jurišić reflects on the moral ambiguity of using her aunt for her art. Meditating on André Breton, who exploited and discarded the mentally ill Léona for his novel Nadja, she asks: “Am I any different to Breton, a writer who built a platform for himself by sacrificing a soul in limbo?”
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Her Own is a compelling story and Jurišić's prose is direct yet poetic. There is unwavering gritty realism in all the bodies and sights and smells. Unromantic truth — poverty, violence, trauma — is channelled into a sense of bemused wonder at what’s behind it all.
