At the Edinburgh International Book Festival, Kapka Kassabova talks to Roxanna Kristalli about her latest book Anima.

Kapka Kassabova grew up in Bulgaria and has lived in Scotland now for 20 years. She has written a quartet of books about the Balkans, focusing on the areas where borders meet, between Bulgaria, Greece, Albania and Turkey, the changes to the landscape and the communities as the politics have changed (fall of communism, rise of private enterprise including ‘informal’ businesses, joining the EU). Anima is last in the quartet and takes place in the same area as her last one,Elixir, the Mesta river valley in the south of Bulgaria. Elixir focussed on people who gathered herbs and knew all about their medicinal and healing properties. In Anima, she describes her time living with pastoralists, who she called ‘the last true highlanders of Europe’, where humans are just one component in an environment that includes sheep, dogs, predators and most of all, the mountain.

The realm of the plant people is quiet, slow and secretive (much of the plant growth goes on underground). The energy of the animal realm however, is fast, it’s about movement. You, Kapka says, are in charge but you are not in control, you follow the flock. While the industrial mindset is about productivity and control, pastoralism is about learning to respond rather than impose. Industrial farming she says, looks for higher productivity while with pastoralism you live in resonance with your environment, you live from experience rather than from an ideology.

What particularly fascinates about Kapka’s books is her openness to new experiences, and her honesty in facing fears that inevitably come up in new and unpredictable environments. What is also remarkable is her capacity for enchantment. She clearly became close to the sheep, all with their individual personalities, and the dogs, who are the ones who herd the sheep and protect them from predators such as wolves and bears. But there is a sense of loss, of ending, as these people are the last pastoralists and foragers.

Kapka Kassabova (right) and Roxanna Kristalli at the Edinburgh International Book Festival

Animal people, she says, are fanatical, intense. There are always things to do when you are responsible for animals, it’s a monastic life. Pastoralists have a sense of loneliness, of not belonging, and they have addictions, they drink a lot, they are unstable, while the dogs were the ones which were stable and reliable.

She clearly has the gift of empathy, of being able to sit with others who feel pain, to ‘accompany pain’, as she puts it. Since it is not possible in life to protect ourselves from it, even though we might try, she has found that expression of emotion, and prayer, though not necessarily in the religious sense, helps with this. To be humble, that is one way to transmute pain into something that carries light.

Her next book will focus on where she lives now, in the Scottish Highlands. She sees, as many of us in different parts of Scotland do, the destruction of forests which upsets the whole ecology, affects wildlife and human communities too. This industrial mindset, she says, is not sustainable or appropriate to our ecological problems today. There is a need, not just for more trees, but for people to live well in places. We need to reconnect with the land because in some very essential way, we are the land.

The language of Kapka’s books is captivating, and they are imbued with her insightful perception into the psychology of humans, animals, plants and landscapes.

Morelle Smith

Ideology and Community

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