If Goran Vojnović were a Serbian-Slovenian-Prekmurian feminist, I joked the first time I read this novel, it still wouldn’t have helped him. Because Ćrtice by Tina Perić, our former co-guide on the Ljubljana Feminist Tour, is such an astonishingly good book that it hurts. It is not “the next Southern Scum Go Home!”; it is not a correction, response, or upgrade. It is something else. Something quieter, yet far more precise. That doesn’t mean, however, that it isn’t exactly Southern Scum Go Home! that one should read Ćrtice alongside to understand what growing up as a member of a national minority from the former Yugoslavia in post-independence Slovenia was like.
Ćrtice (yes, with a soft “ć,” which is, of course, crucial, since this is the letter through which the “othering” of “southerners” by ethnic Slovenian majority happens, as argued, for example, by Kuzmanić here) is by far the most important literary text about the erasure I have ever read. Not because it opens the topic from a female, feminist perspective for the first time—but because it deals with the fact of erasure simultaneously without sugarcoating and beyond automatic victimization. The novel does not ask for sympathy and does not wag a moralizing finger. It simply shows how erasure happens to a young, growing girl: as a strange, stretched-out day, initially almost insignificant, but gradually more defining, until you realize that something, someone, the whole family, no longer exists in the way it should.
What hits me most is the perspective. Ćrtice is not a novel “about the erased” in the classic sense, but a novel about growing up in the atmosphere of erasure, in a world where you are never entirely sure whether you truly belong or are only conditionally present. The child’s view of the protagonist is not nostalgic but brutal in its honesty. Politics does not appear as a grand idea but as a subtle disruption in everyday situations: at school, at home, in the yard, in the language you speak, which simultaneously betrays you.
And then there’s the writing. Contemporary, distinctly “female,” and distinctly “Slovenian.” It is intricate, witty, and multi-layered, like all the best writings of women and multicultural voices today are. In this context, identities are, of course, part of the problem, not the solution. But as reconcilable as this post-identity writing may be, it is simultaneously antagonistic in its “Slovenian-Prekmurian-Serbian” stance. As a way of thinking in three languages, it constantly interrupts itself. Precisely because it does understand itself—in all three languages. This is a writing that cannot settle into a single identity position. It has no single voice, truth, or point of utterance. If it is feminist, it is feminist in the most productive sense possible. If it is Slovenian, likewise—rejecting hierarchies, allowing contradictions, aware that history is always written through bodies, relationships, and small everyday decisions.
Incidentally, humour in Ćrtice is not an addition. It is a strategy. A survival method. Therapy—even for those, if not primarily for those readers who are members of the “majority nation.” Here, laughter is not the opposite of trauma but its ally. And I am not necessarily talking only about the trauma of those who were victims of erasure but also the trauma of the entire society in which erasure could happen. The protagonist’s wit emerges throughout the reading as a bridge between these two worlds. As one of the ways to establish post-traumatic coexistence, despite the imbalance of power. Perhaps this is what makes the novel so powerful: the refusal of the idea that “serious” stories must be told seriously, even when written by those affected, i.e., those with minimal power to influence any future change in their favour.
It is no coincidence that Ćrtice won the award for best Slovenian literary debut in 2024 and was shortlisted among five finalists for Kresnik, the most prestigious national award for outstanding novels. The book does not function as a debut in the sense of “promising beginning” but as a fully articulated literary voice. A voice that could become one of the key voices in post-independence Slovenian literature—precisely because it refuses to be monumental, instead insisting on the details.
If you are going to read only one novel about Slovenian independence, let it be Tina Perić’s Ćrtice. It will tell you what the independence of the newly formed state meant for those women who had no choice but to begin fighting for their rights and laughing at the absurdity of the powerful insisting on rigid identities. If you plan to read two novels, however, add Vojnović’s famous debut. To get also the male, if not even patriarchal, perspective. If Southern Scum Go Home! shouted, Ćrtice engages in a gentle, measured conversation over coffee. And in that coffee chat, there is a generous serving of much-needed female humour, but also a heaping measure of bitter truths calling for more conciliatory, one might even dare say feminist, Slovenians.
Text by Gregor Bulc
Cover photo courtesy of Goga publishing house.