A glance at the recent press brought me to Rumena Bužarovska, Macedonian writer and cultural maverick. Her latest book is No voy a ninguna parte (Impedimenta, 2025). In the interview, Bužarovska rails against patriarchy, dissects emotions with ironic fire, and, in passing, takes a jab at artificial intelligence.
Oh, what would social criticism be without such well-meaning generalizations wrapped in post-Yugoslav intellectualism? You read it and you don’t know whether you’re looking at a feminist indictment, a critique of emotional capitalism, or the ethical catalog of a farm-to-table restaurant in Skopje.
She says that AI is “polite but fake,” like shop assistants in Ohio… Well, well, excuse me for not addressing her informally while offering her real sugar or a pink packet for her cultural apocalypse. Comparing the language of machines to the performative warmth of Americans is a brilliant exercise if you want to do airport anthropology with pretensions of being a manifesto.
But Bužarovska doesn’t stop there. In her statements and stories—which are like sentimental reality shows written with the pen of an entomologist—love is both structure and trap, just as emotional repression becomes a civilizational disease. Women face not only husbands with closet sensibilities, but also systems that monitor their desire as if it were a controlled substance. “Patriarchy fears female pleasure,” she says. And she says it with such confidence that one begins to wonder if pleasure needs a visa to travel in North Macedonia.
Sometimes, however, her discourse gets the better of her. When patriarchy, capitalism, AI, and the semantics of affection appear in the same paragraph, one no longer knows whether one is reading an author or an influencer who has just discovered Marxism on TikTok and mixed it with a jet-lagged reading of Simone de Beauvoir.
Oh, and then there’s Rumena’s obsessive fear of formal language… In her world, Sophocles would have been canceled for using subordinate clauses. Anything that sounds elaborate smacks of imposture, it seems. The paradox is that, while denouncing the structures that constrain the human soul, her narrative also imposes another form of rigidity: that of self-satisfied denunciation. That said, Bužarovska must be credited with the gift of making people uncomfortable with style.
I’m Not Going Anywhere is a delightfully ironic title for a book that, although it doesn’t stray far from its obsessions, knows how to kick the dogmas of everyday life with grace. So yes, long live freedom of expression, which allows Rumena to declare that machines are empty, men fear clitorises, and cordiality is a scam. And it also allows us to suspect, just for a moment (of course!), that perhaps our writer has a master’s degree in the art of projection. Because if we’re going to talk about empty formulas, predictable algorithms, and structures that repress emotion… well, well, certain literary narratives with a diploma in rebellion hanging on the wall do that too.
