Lana Bastašić’s novel Catch the Rabbit (2018) enables us to talk about the ways in which a (self)manipulating narrative disables overcoming a trauma and facing oneself. The female narrator essentially refuses to truly face the traumas during her growing up in Bosnia during the war in the 90s, which disables her to overcome the rift between subjective and objective reality, resulting in a cognitive dissonance. This work shows that language is a tool for maintaining power, in the way that it serves the need to maintain an idealized image of oneself.
The collection of short Stories Baby Teeth (2020) thematizes the traumas of coming to age in a patriarchal culture of violence, which affirms strength and negative authorities, as well as the need to reject these in order for a child to become an authentic and healthy person. The stories are presented from the points of view of children who lack verbal power to fully structure their traumas, but the very need to bring them to consciousness and talk about them creates the possibility to get from an disintegrated Self to one’s fullness.

These works by Lana Bastašić raise the need to re-examine the language through which manipulative and rigid narratives are formed, but also show that language is the path to self-awareness – through the desire to shape one’s personal experience and to communicate with oneself and with the Other.

Milana Gajović (Cetinje, 1994) graduated from the Department of Serbian Language and South Slavic Literature. she completed Master’s Degree at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade with the thesis on the topic: Relation Between Personal and Collective Identity in Literary Works of S. Valjarević. She is currently studying for a doctorate degree at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade and she is receiving scholarship awarded by the Republic of Serbia’s Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development. She published several articles about literary works of foreign and Serbian writers.