From a Distance: A Guest Post by Nino Haratischwili

Award-winning novelist and playwright Nino Haratischwili is back with a poignant novel of love and loss centered on a group of four women. Read on for an exclusive essay from Nino on writing The Lack of Light.

“The Lack of Light” is a very personal book for me, although it is not directly autobiographical. I always need distance and transformation in order to be able to write. But I had been living in Germany for a long time and realized that it was very difficult for me to talk to my German friends about my youth, it seemed surreal even to me, so distant and so dark. When my friends talked about the 90s, they meant MTV and discos and for me it was Kalashnikovs and civil wars. I really wanted to “dive in” this time from a distance and understand how it was all possible, what made people act the way they did. I was lucky, unlike the protagonists, to have been younger at the time and so I didn’t realize much of what was going on. It seemed somehow normal. I was a child and didn’t know any different, but later, after I got older and moved to Germany, I realized what an incredible time we had all survived.

That’s why it was important for me to go back and examine the time from distance. The mechanisms, the collapse of society, the anarchy that resulted and, above all, the young people who fell victim to this period. As it was a time of toxic masculinity, a very male-dominated time, I really wanted to describe it from the female perspective, because for me women were the real heroines of that time, who couldn’t afford the luxury of just collapsing and had to improvise and survive.

They had to get the children through and escape all the violence. To this day, so many Georgian women are abroad in caring professions, feeding their families from afar, a great tragedy that is not talked about enough.

But the generation of my characters has been particularly hard hit, I think. They were on the cusp of adulthood, full of dreams, and suddenly everything collapsed. Yet they were so young and were confronted with such brutality, they had to pretend to be adults, but they were not. So many of that generation didn’t make it: they fell victim to Russian tanks, civil wars or heroin. I really wanted to remember this generation.

The writing process was very peculiar, on the one hand I hardly had to do any research because I remembered so much myself: the darkness, the Mexican telenovelas on TV, if there was electricity, petroleum lamps, the tanks in the streets, the “US AID” milk powder cans, umpteen strange things and conditions, but at the same time remembering felt so strange, as if it were all a distant dream, because when I’m in Tbilisi today, it’s unimaginable that it all took place 35-30 years ago.