Ciężar skóry

The Burden of Skin is a collection of ten short stories, seven of which are set in Albania, three in Poland, and all ten in the present day.

What these two separate societies have in common, according to Rejmer, is that they are peopled by individuals who have to rely on their own strengths, and thus are dependent on the strength or power of others. They are not protected by institutions, and must also contend with a tradition that normalises violence against women and children. In such a world strength, meaning power, is the key to almost everything

– forcing obedience, vengeance and corrupted justice.

The domination of violence means that a human being is in the first and last place skin: strength is measured by one’s capacity to affect someone else’s body, and weakness by one’s incapacity to defend one’s own skin. And so in Rejmer’s fiction the weak fantasise about getting beyond the confines of their own bodies. But these dreams are not political or legal in nature. Faced with the physical intensity of oppression, her main characters don’t think up a better world – it’s as if not just the political but also the social imagination had died within them. Their revolt against violence drives them to fantasise about a change of incarnation – they want to become animals, to dissolve in water or disappear in the sunlight. They dream of escaping beyond themselves into something non-human, because they don’t believe something human could ever change.

Set within simple situations, these unsettling tales are characterised by economical distribution of the facts, rising tension and action that aims towards the irrevocable.