Underground Barbie; or how a child endured the war in Yugoslavia

Sloboština Barbie (Underground Barbie, 2008) tells the story of surviving the horrors of the 1990's wars in Yugoslavia from the perspective of a child.

While adults aboveground are electing leaders dedicated to a “pure” racial state, redefining the very concept of citizenship, determining who is a “real” Croatian, and displacing whole communities as “foreign,” children underground—in a Barbie world of their own creation—hold presidential elections, host a refugee ball with “disgusting” dolls lesser than “genuine” Barbie, puzzle over the arrival of Black “Tropical Barbie,” discover a mass grave of Ken’s headless mistresses, and attempt to survive in a world that seems dedicated to the destruction of their imaginative and existential capacities.

Underground Barbie is a story about isolation, marginalization, race, capitalism, girlhood, womanhood, political systems, and the power of the human mind. It's reach extends far beyond the boundaries of Croatia, Yugoslavia, and Southeast Europe. Indeed, considering the regimes of racial injustice, gendered and sexualized violence, militarism, crypto-fascism and ersatz liberalism under which we currently exist, it is a parable for our own times. It took seven years for the author to find an English-language home for this book, seventeen years from its original publication in Croatian.

Maša Kolanović is a prize-winning author best known for her genre-bending works of fiction and poetry. Her books include the poetry collection Pijavice za usamljene (Leeches for the Lonely, 2001), the novel Sloboština Barbie (Underground Barbie, 2008), the prose poem Jamerika (2013), and the short story collection Poštovani kukci i druge jezive price (Dear Pests and Other Creepy Stories, 2019)which received the 2020 EU Prize for Literature, the Pula Book Fair Audience Award, and the Vladimir Nazor Prize for Literature. She is an associate professor in the Department of Croatian Studies at the University of Zagreb.

Translator Ena Selimović is a Yugoslav-born writer and co-founder of Turkoslavia, a translation collective and journal. Her work has appeared in the Periodical of the Modern Language Association, Words Without Borders, Los Angeles Review of Books, and World Literature Today and has received support from the American Literary Translators Association, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Washington University in St. Louis.

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