The acclaimed poet has published her debut novel 'The Forest Begins Here,' a harrowing story of growing up in poverty and violence, and in an interview with Novi list she speaks about writing, trauma, and the position of women.
After establishing herself as one of the most award-winning young Croatian poets, Monika Herceg has published her first novel. "The Forest Begins Here" is an emotional and dark prose mosaic that follows a girl's coming-of-age in rural Croatia in the 1980s through 130 short episodes across 245 pages.
In an interview with Novi list, the author, born in Sisak in 1990, reveals that prose has never been foreign to her, even though the public primarily knows her for her highly successful poetry collections. "Prose has always been here. For me, literature is a living tissue; I sleep with books, I literally have to push them out of bed (laughs), I wake up with books, I'm always writing things down," Herceg said.
The novel is narrated through the eyes of a child, and the author emphasizes that she deliberately reduced the language to poverty, childhood, and oral tradition. A major load-bearing beam of the narrative is the grandmother's storytelling, and Herceg stresses that it was necessary to remain within the language of "grandmother's possible cognition." Her grandmother, just like the character in the novel, was illiterate.
"I would say that all writing is, to some extent, digging into oneself," the writer pointed out, whose poems have been translated into about ten languages, with selections of her poetry published in Austria and Lithuania as part of the European poetry platform Versopolis. Regarding the transition from poetry to prose, she says that the story itself finds the bridge, and she cites Max Porter and his book "Grief Is the Thing with Feathers," as well as regional authors Milena Marković ("Deca") and Darko Cvijetić as influences.
The novel is set in the late 1980s in the continental part of Croatia. A girl lives with her father, mother, grandmother, and grandfather in a dilapidated house with a single lightbulb. Her father is the only one employed, the pay is meager, and they barely make ends meet. However, the biggest problem is not just poverty, but the patriarchal violence inflicted by the grandfather, a violent alcoholic who beats everyone.
At the start of the Croatian War of Independence, the father leaves to join the Croatian army, and the rest of the family flees a village surrounded by a Serbian population. They return after exile, and the father comes back from the war severely wounded but able to work. The girl's world of imagination, where she talks to the house, the barn, and the trees, transforms into a doe that carries the forest within her, becoming her escape from harsh reality. In the darkest moments, while her mother bathes her, she whispers to herself: "Now she will dive into the deep, and never return!"
The story is told through episodes ranging from one to at most four pages, each carrying a strong emotion. These vignettes form a dark mosaic that, while painful, is artistically invaluable. In just two or three episodes, such as "Snowman" and "Green Beans," we witness rare glimmers of happiness in an otherwise bleak everyday life.
"The Forest Begins Here most of all shows how, from the shards of everyday life, a voice is born strong enough to tell what others could not even utter."
Herceg has received numerous awards for her poetic work. She won the Goran Award for Young Poets in 2017 for the manuscript "Initial Coordinates," and upon publication in 2018, the book was awarded the Kvirin Award, the Fran Galović Award, the Slavić Award, and the international Mostovi Struge Award. In 2019, she published "Closed Season," for which she received the Na vrh jezika Award, and she also won the Lapis Histriae Award and first prize in the Biber competition. She is a member of the editorial board of the magazine Poezija of the Croatian Writers' Society.
Speaking about personal losses, Herceg recalled her father. "My father, who was a veteran and disabled due to the Homeland War, and suffered from severe PTSD, died when I was fifteen, leaving our mother, who didn't work, alone with the children on top of a hill," she recounted. She speaks about that pain from the perspective of time: "Sometimes we mourn death long after it happens, because before that we didn't have the emotional capacity for such feelings."
Today, she raises two children, and jokingly adds that the third child is "little her," who equally needs the love and tenderness she didn't receive. Her novel "The Forest Begins Here" is described by the publisher as an intimate and merciless chronicle of poverty, violence, and exile, a story of women who endure and memories that continue to grow from the ashes.
