The seamstress’s story

 Interview by Tino Schlench

Mrs Kucbelová, “The Bonnet”, is an unusual book in terms of its form and genre. There is no classic storyline, instead there are many short episodes in which you report on your travels to the central Slovakian village of Šumiac. Is it a work of reportage, documentary literature or an autofiction?

This project was very special to me, as I had little experience in prose writing. I usually write poetry. For a long time, I didn't know whether I would even write a book about my experiences and observations in the village. At first, I made notes without knowing what direction it might take. The literary form I use to combine the various characters, themes and motifs has developed step by step. “The Bonnet” is documentary literature.

We can openly say that I am the narrator of this text. To a certain extent, I am telling my own story. To do so, I have used both reportage and literary approaches. In conversations with ethnographers, I realised that my examination of certain traditions and rituals intuitively drew on ethnography. This combination of methods naturally raises questions about the genre of the book. Mostly, I was interested in the text working as a text and speaking to the reader.

Your book states that you deliberately did not make any notes or record your conversations with the seamstress Iľka and only made notes afterwards. Why did you work this way?

I didn't want to record anything. I worked that way to open up a wider associative space and to distinguish my approach from journalism. Of course, we can never rely entirely on our memories, but nothing in the book is invented. I worked a lot with silence.

I didn’t originally come to the village as an author, it was a place I only knew from a TV programme. Rather, I arrived as a woman who wanted to be taught something.

In this role, I focussed entirely on making the bonnet [the ‘čepiec’ is part of traditional women's clothing in Slovakia, editor’s note]. I didn't ask any questions about Iľka's life and the village. It all came naturally. The most important answers emerged from the silence while we were working on the bonnet together.

Was it difficult to convince the seamstress to take part in your book project?

That developed naturally once I discovered that there was already a publication telling her story, written by a psychologist. Iľka gave me this book, which retells the life stories of several people. She was so proud that her story was worthy of being told in a book. So I got the impression that my project would also be okay with her, and that was the case.

“I have found that what we understand as tradition is often not that old”

It becomes clear early on in the text that you are critical of traditions, so it is surprising that you travelled so much to learn a traditional craft. How do you explain this interest?

I am actually rather suspicious of folklore and traditions. Nevertheless, I am drawn to these topics as they have a significant influence on our society. We live in a time that is characterised worldwide by an increase in reactionary values and the rise of right-wing parties. I was interested in what customs and traditions really mean to the people who hold them dear.

I have found that what we understand as tradition is often not that old, and that what we perceive as completely natural has actually developed over time. Traditions cannot be preserved, they are very fragile and are constantly changing. It is an illusion to find security and stability - which many people are currently longing for - in the past.

Your book is set in the village of Šumiac in central Slovakia. What is it like there?

Šumiac is a beautiful village in the mountains, and it’s poorly connected to other villages. It lies at the foot of the Low Tatras, near the symbolically highly charged Kráľova hoľa (King's Mountain), which is central to many national myths. This mountain is mentioned in a folk song that almost everyone in Slovakia knows.

The village is a place where two populations coexist: a Slovak majority and a Roma minority, which makes up at least a third of the village community. “The Bonnet” explores the social fabric of the village. The different communities live side by side rather than together, with the Roma settlement directly adjoining the village, which is predominantly inhabited by non-Roma.

Everyday life in these two areas is not significantly different, but there is a neighbourhood right next to the Roma settlement where people live in the poorest of conditions. The flats there are tiny, poorly insulated and often have no heating.

Many people want nothing to do with this part of the village. They want to distance themselves from it in the same way that the Slovakian population wants to distance itself from the Roma.

“What I would like to highlight is the subtle and indirect form of racism that you encounter almost everywhere”

The Slovakian majority population avoids the Roma community. Antigypsyist resentment is part of everyday life, people don’t sit next to each other on the bus and avoid each other’s gaze. The divisions seem deeply entrenched.

Of course, I can’t capture the problem of racism and antigypsyism in all its complexity in my book, nor can I offer any solutions. But what I would like to highlight is the subtle and indirect form of racism that you encounter almost everywhere and that many people are not even aware of. It is precisely this type of racism – often packaged in inconspicuous jokes – that is probably the most widespread in Slovakia.

In the book, you mention a TV show that was filmed in Šumiac but that no single Romni, or Roma, was to be seen in the entire programme. Is this a typical case of people sidelining minorities?

The programme is a popular cooking show. The production team could easily have visited other parts of the village and enquired about traditional recipes there, but that didn’t happen. That’s simply not the way things are done.