Future, what future? The idea gives me goose-flesh: Although loudly broadcast abroad, at home her voice is muffled. The Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic talks to Isabel Hilton

'IMAGINE,' wrote Slavenka Drakulic in a recent issue of New York Review of Books, 'that you live in Munich on a street named after Willie Brandt. One day you wake up and your street has become Adolf Hilter Street. Or imagine that you are a student at the Free University in Berlin and the city council has just decided to rename your street after Joseph Goebbels. These are not outlandish notions for those of us who live in the new independent Croatia.'

Drakulic is a Croat whose writings on the situation in the 'new independent Croatia' and the war in former Yugoslavia are published extensively abroad, but who has no voice in her own country. Abroad, she is celebrated and listened to. At home, she is vilified. She can come and go, can visit the world's capitals and debate with the international culture set; then return to Zagreb, to the nationalist passions of the Dark Ages. It is a life of abrupt cultural shocks.

Her life is full of fine balancing acts: between her circumstances at home and abroad, between her efforts to pursue her real ambition - to write fiction - and the urgent need as a journalist to make sense of what is happening around her. She has spent the past two months on a worldwide publicity tour promoting her second novel, Marble Skin, written in 1989 and now appearing in translation in Europe and North America. 'This,' she insists, picking up the book, 'is the one that is really important to me.'

Why that one? Why not Balkan Express, the high-impact book of essays about the war in former Yugolsavia? Or How we Survived Communism and even Laughed, the equally celebrated account of real life under the former regime? 'Because,' says Drakulic, 'I feel myself a fiction writer who is temporarily writing non-fiction. My main urge is to write fiction, but somehow life overwhelms you. You can't resist.'

The life that has overwhelmed her since 1989 - the collapse of Communism, the creation of Croatia as an independent state and the bloody disintegration of Yugoslavia - has been channelled into numerous essays and articles that are witty, eloquent and observed with a devastating directness. Her fiction is represented by two novels, Holograms of Fear and Marble Skin. Both are intensely physical, claustrophobic, painful explorations of profound taboos: the first probes the fear of death, the second, the sexuality of the mother.

The gulf between her fictional and non-fictional work extends even into the manner of writing: her non-fiction is written at her desk, her fiction in bed in longhand. Her non-fiction pours out from the need to nail and define the moment, to make sense of the chaos, to record the outrage. Her fiction comes, as she puts it, from the silence. There has not been enough silence recently. The turmoil in former Yugoslavia has meant that her third novel - about love - is overdue. Thus far, the war has distracted her from her fiction but not invaded it. She has no urge, she says, to write fiction about the war.

'I wonder if there is an element of defence mechanism here,' she says. 'Because if you let too much of the war in, it could destroy you as a person. I've seen it. Writers in my country are either not writing or they are writing a kind of patriotic ideological nonsense - kitsch about the victimised country.'

Perhaps, she says, she will find herself writing fiction about the war later. 'But when it started I wanted to articulate what was going on around me immediately and the best way of doing that was the essay. To put it on paper is the only way to understand, to formulate reality. Somehow I feel better if I put it down. Otherwise I would go crazy.'

'Everyday life in Zagreb is OK,' she shrugs. 'It's a very gloomy atmosphere - you don't see any solution and you see people in despair. But Zagreb has not been touched by war, physically, at least. My problem comes when I go abroad and journalists ask: 'What do you think about the future?' Whenever I hear the word 'future' I get goose-flesh. If you live in Britain there is a past, a present and a future. The future is a legitimate thing to discuss. It exists as a concept. When you are there, time looks different. Past and present are somehow intermingled. We live in a mythological consciousness and the perception of time is not the same. The future does not exist.'

'It's not only because of the war, there is no future while the war is on; but it is also due to Communism, because of their idea that under Communism we were promised a better future but we all knew that what it meant was improved Communism - so we didn't want it. The future was abolished in Communist countries because nobody thought anything could be changed.'

And if the future was privately abolished, the past was publicly reinvented. Now, under Croatia's first post-Communist elected government, it is being rewritten again. A mythology of the past forces a false identity on the present as Croatia's nationalist leaders trawl through its bloody history for 'heroes' of the cause of independence. The heroism of Tito's partisans, celebrated by the Communist regime, has been erased. The exploits of what Drakulic calls 'the quisling Independent State of Croatia' between 1941 and 1945 are now in vogue and its victims, the tens of thousands of anti-Fascist Croats and victims of terror, forgotten.

'My identity is not in doubt,' says Drakulic. 'Of course I am a Croat, but so what? I am a feminist, but this is not the only thing I am. I was married twice to Serbs and I divorced not because they were Serbs but for other reasons. But it's painful to be reminded that you are Croat by such bloodshed. And to be reminded that you are a feminist by rape.'

'The problems of public identity exist because what we are witnessing is the rewriting of memory, allowing history to be rewritten by a new government. Will it be rewritten every time there is a new government? It scares me that as a nation we are not grown-up enough to come to terms with our own past, either Communism or Fascism. We are not able to discuss it, to say, yes, the government can do whatever it pleases, but still people should address these moral and political issues. It's dangerous for the individual and for the nation.'

In one of the pieces in Balkan Express, Drakulic describes her mother's fear for her husband's grave. The grave is adorned with the red star that was the customary tribute to a federal army officer. But now that the federal army was attacking Croatia, her mother feared the grave would be desecrated.

'I visited his grave recently,' says Drakulic, 'and I found that my mother had covered the red star with a little wreath of flowers. She had twisted the flowers round the star to hide it. I was very sad when I saw that. It's a tiny little graveyard and everybody knows that it is the only grave with a red star. Yet she wanted to protect it from being destroyed by covering it up with flowers. And I didn't even have the courage to talk to her about it.

'We are all covering up our past and we don't have the courage to protect our memory. We shut up . . . We cannot find the courage to say: 'This is my past and who are you to say that my 40 years of life in this country have been bad?' '

If there is no protest, she says, then history repeats itself. 'I recently read Martha Gellhorn's The Face of War,' she says. 'I found it deeply shocking that there was not a single thing I had written about that she had not already described: refugees, concentration camps, deaths, beseiged cities. What can a writer do but write? If a writer gives up writing and takes up arms, which has happened in some cases in Croatia, it's a defeat. It's a defeat not only of the writer but of culture, of civilisation. I do not have anything but words. I have to stick to them.'

Drakulic has protested - in an outpouring of articles in the New York Times, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, anywhere that will publish her disgust at such acts as the renaming of Croatian streets after people like Mile Budak, a writer who served as minister of education and culture in the quisling Ustashe regime of Ante Pavelic in the Forties. She has complained about the imposition of the nationalist mythology. But not in Croatia. 'I am without a voice in my country,' she says. 'I haven't written anything there for two years. None of these books has been published there, not even the reviews. And as for journalism, I have been laid off. The best journalists in the country are jobless.'

Her insistence on discussing the issues has had a further price. Last December, Drakulic and four other female writers were attacked in a popular magazine after the head of Croatian PEN, the writers' organisation, accused them of plotting to undermine an international PEN congress that was scheduled to be held in Dubrovnik in April. There was no truth to his charge - the five women had little connection with PEN and, though they knew each other, were not a group. But the attack snowballed. For six months the women have suffered a campaign of vilification: they were attacked as 'feminists,' as 'women of a certain age who had been unable to find husbands' or, as in Slavenka Drakulic's case, who had married Serbs. They were described as 'daughters of Communism who had lost their privileges' and accused of 'participating in the rape of Croatia' by allegedly refusing to write about the mass rape of Croatian women.

'By coincidence,' says Drakulic, 'the article appeared on the same day as my article on the rapes in the New York Times, which started off the interest of the US television networks.

'The only thing we have in common is that we are all women and all critical of the regime. The attacks in themselves don't matter. What really hurts is that, with the exception of one male journalist who said this was a lynching, nobody supported us. Nobody. Everybody used it to prove their loyalty to the government, by spitting on us.' After the mass society of Communism, she claims, Croatia has fallen into the mass society of nationalism, a democracy only in the formalities, pervaded by fear. And the intellectuals, she complained, have lost their courage.

'The Croatian government,' she continues, 'works on the Bolshevik principle that if you are not with us you are against us. The intellectuals are blindfolded. They have said they are not going to ask any hard questions because of the war. But this war could go on for a very long time and in the name of the future we should really face it now. If we don't start to discuss these questions now, there is no guarantee that we will ever have any democracy.'

(Photograph omitted)