My Husband Review by Eva Dunsky

On My Husband by Rumena Bužarovska

Translated from Macedonian by Paul Filev

McLean, IL/Dublin: Dalkey Archive Press

2019

128 pages

$15.95

Review by: Eva Dunsky

In the United States as of late, we’ve given the word systemic new meaning: you’re likely to hear it everywhere, from social media to casual conversation to the nightly news. It’s trotted out to explain the rot at the center of our democracy; the racism and sexism in which our country has always been steeped. Infographics on Instagram and sobering threads on Twitter crop up daily with that word in pride of place. 

It’s less common, however, to hear a frank discussion of what these systems actually are: most people haven’t quite made the leap from calling things systemic to considering the actual systems in place. If all the nasty isms we claim we want to do away with—racism, sexism, chauvinism—are systemic, then wouldn’t the logical next step in this discussion be to point out the systems that preserve these mentalities and allow them to persist unchallenged?

For Bužarovska, who is already doing this work by foregrounding the corrosiveness of systemic patriarchy, that system is marriage. And the outlook is grim. The wives are not alright. Neither are the husbands. Nor, for that matter, are the children of these unhappy unions, who we’re led to believe will go on to enter unhappy unions of their own. In the eleven stories that make up My Husband, the institution of marriage is at the center of each petty cruelty, each profound disappointment, each quietly cutting comment and abrasive fight.

Bužarovska even takes a systematic approach to detailing its oppressiveness, as each story chronicles a woman at a different moment in her marriage. The wives occupy a spectrum, from harboring residual tenderness for their husbands to feeling indifferent about them to flying into fits of loathing at the sight of them. Regardless of individual feelings, they’re all demeaned on a daily basis in big and small ways, robbed of what makes them individuals by the constraining role of “wife.” And they take out these frustrations on the easy, most readily available targets: the men sprawled across their couches, asking when dinner will be ready.

Not that Bužarovska wants us feeling bad for the husbands. In some stories, the husbands are textbook villains, tyrants of the home who intentionally entrap their wives by making them (or at least making them feel) dependent on the comforts the husbands provide. In others, they’re the lazy and impotent objects of ridicule, belittled by wives they barely understand. Stories like “Empty Nest,” on the other hand, chronicle mostly happy marriages where the cruelty between spouses is accidental, such as when the narrator, who has poured herself into raising kids instead of investing in her passion for painting, overhears her husband tell their niece (who is living with them as she completes her art school degree) that her paintings are embarrassingly amateur. In a rapid turn that’s characteristic of Bužarovska’s fiction, the wife’s humiliation immediately gives way to anger, taken out not only on her insensitive husband but her hapless niece as well.

The men in these stories, to be sure, are also victimized by the drudgery of married life, and Bužarovska gives us insight into the crushing pressures and frustrations that often spark their violence. But these stories shine brightest when portraying the psyches of the women, and the psychological violence they inflict on each other. For instance, in “Soup,” the unnamed narrator is recovering from the sudden death of her husband, an adequate but lackluster partner on whom she cheated in favor of explosive sex with a man who sees her as interchangeable. She uses her mother, who is there trying to nurse her back to health, as a punching bag, which only compounds her guilt: “I bristle every time she touches me. I’m sick of feeling sorry about being cruel.” Only when her mother admits to her own cruelty—she recounts a time she left the narrator and her brother home alone as small children, when her daughter sustained horrific burns trying to heat up stew, all because she wanted to meet up with the man with whom she was having an affair—can the narrator allow the dam holding back her shame to break.

Which brings us to motherhood, marriages’ corollary (because in Bužarovska’s fiction, like marriage, there is no way out of the motherhood bind). The mothers in these stories are abusive at worst and ambivalent at best: they see domesticity for the trap that it is, and their children, as its natural offshoot, serve alongside their fathers as conduits for their mothers’ rage. Then—as in “Soup”—these children grow up to enter into the same pacts and make the same mistakes. And so the cycle continues.

Any attempt to break this cycle, we’re led to believe, will come with its own drawbacks: like any totalizing system, there is no way out. In “The Eighth of March,” for instance, we see what happens when women shirk their obligation to look pretty and faithfully reproduce. At a work party, Irena is questioned for not being married, not having children, and not wearing makeup, harangued in that allegedly teasing way that tends to culminate in a torrent of unsolicited advice. When she gets frustrated and goes home, we see the threat she poses by not playing her part, the derision and anger she elicits from her unhappily married coworkers completely out of proportion to the fact of her leaving a work party early.

In these eleven stories, Bužarovska points out a key, constraining fact with which every woman is intimately familiar: patriarchy breeds cruelty. There’s no shying away from this truth, or diminishing its import, and she captures its effects with remarkable precision. It feels strange to say these stories are brave, but I keep returning to that word, perhaps as a substitute for unflinching, which isn’t quite right. It’s more than the fact that these stories are unflinching, which they are: it’s that they’re asking transgressive questions about marriage and motherhood that, even in our current moment of gendered autofiction, are rarely laid out in such stark terms. It makes sense that Bužarovska was largely responsible for pioneering the Macedonian version of the #MeToo hashtag. Who else would be bold enough to take on the institution—the system—of marriage?

Clearly, she’s struck a chord: in Macedonia, where her fiction is a bestseller, Bužarovska is a household name. But these stories, which have been translated into many languages, are universal. “Patriarchy is the same everywhere,” says Bužarovska, “it’s just that it has its own local idiom and characteristics in each place. I simply tell the universal story of it through this local Macedonian prism.” This strikes me as accurate: while the choices available to women may be different in different countries, the overarching constraints are universal, and geographical differences have to do only with how these constraints manifest.

The first step, then, has to be naming and questioning these systems with full force and no hesitation. Maybe then we’ll be ready to start thinking about which ones serve us, which ones need to be reimagined, and which should be relegated to the past.

Eva Dunsky is a writer, teacher, and translator at Columbia University. Her work has appeared in Joyland, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and Cosmonauts Avenue, among others, and she’s at work on a novel. Read more of her writing at https://evaduns.ky/.