This is my friend Maia Iotzova, a filmmaker, an artist and a fellow Bulgarian. She agreed to be the first participant in my project. When we met, she showed me and talked to me about the books in Bulgarian in her home library. She is especially fond of the children’s books she has, some of which she has bought from street vendors in Sofia. She was happy to have found them, fortuitously, as they were books she used to have as a child, but didn’t keep. The book that she was reading at the time we met is called, fittingly, My Brother’s Suitcase: Stories about the Road. It is a book of short stories about language and migration; stories that trace the boundaries of home. For Maia this is an important book because it helps her reflect on and understand better her own experience of (im)migration. The epigraph to one of the stories caught my attention: “I am homeless, because there are so many homelands that make their home in me” (by Czech-born writer, philosopher and journalist Vilém Flusser).
The emotion of finding it and remembering specifically [this book] from my childhood.
For me, what I’m doing with the books is going back, but in a way I’m also rebuilding that link, creating a whole world again—these worlds that were separate. I think it’s very important because you can’t go forward and you can’t fully be here unless you are connected to your past. […] That connection to the past that literature offers is so important because then you are reflecting on the human story, which is constantly repeating.
Maia talks about what having Bulgarian books in Canada means to her.
Titles from Maia’s Bulgarian bookshelf:
- Куфарът на брат ми, истории за пътя, редактор Невена Дишлиева-Кръстева (My Brother’s Suitcase: Stories about the Road, edited by Nevena Dishlieva-Krasteva)
- Невидимите кризи, Георги Господинов (The Invisible Crises by Georgi Gospodinov)
- Граница, Капка Касабова, превод от английски Невена Дишлиева-Кръстева и Капка Касабова (Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe by Kapka Kassabova)
- До моя съвременник, Георги Марков (To My Contemporaries by Georgi Markov)
- Въведение в българското съвременно изкуство (1982—2015), Весела Ножарова (Introduction to Bulgarian Contemporary Art, 1982– 2015 by Vessela Nozharova, translated by Ekaterina Petrova and Boris Deliradev)
- Слънчогледи за Мария, Керана Ангелова (Sunflowers for Maria by Kerana Angelova)
- Градска география, Зорница Христова и Десислава Димитрова, илюстрации от Сияна Захариева (Urban Geography by Zornitza Hristova and Desislava Dimitrova, illustrations by Siyana Zaharieva)
- Слънце в паничка, истински приказки, Надя Трендафилова (Sun in a Bowl by Nadia Trendafilova)