A Word Wowen Only of Consonants: Narrative Strategies in Hair Everywhere by Tea Tulić

Abstract

Narrated in the first person, mostly from a child’s perspective, Hair Everywhere (2011) by the contemporary Croatian author Tea Tulić (b. 1978) presents the story of how a mother’s dying of tumour affects those around her through a series of simultaneously poetic and prosaic sketches, as moving as they are witty. While other members of the family are not ignored, the focus is squarely on the matrilineal trio, including the narrator and her grandma. Mysterious enough when taken individually, and only more so in the context of the collection as a whole, certain motifs are insistently repeated and varied in these fragments, mirroring the mother’s deterioration and the narrator’s infantile rationalisation, and all but achieve the status of private symbolism. The paper will discuss these narrative strategies in an attempt to establish how the composition of the collection bears upon its interpretation.