The Post today is by guest-blogger, Laima Vince, author of the play The Interpreter (Vertejas) that will be performed in Vilnius, during the Baltic Pride Week on July 27th and 28th.
Laima Vince is a writer, poet, and literary translator. Twenty years after the independence movement began, Laima Vince returned to Vilnius as a Fulbright lecturer to document life in Lithuania's fledgling democracy. Over the past four years Laima has traveled around Lithuania's provinces and cities collecting oral histories. She has spoken with postwar partisan fighters; liaison women; Holocaust survivors; exiles to Siberia; German women exiled to Tajikistan; village verbal charmers and healers; young women who have been victims of human trafficking and the social workers who work towards their recovery in underground shelters; Chechen war refugees; gypsies; and gays and lesbians who are fighting for recognition and legal rights in Lithuanian society.
When people see or read The Interpreter many assume I am gay or bisexual. Why else would a
woman write a play with two gay men in relationship as the main characters? And
then, I’ve been attacked by gay friends who are outraged that I—a heterosexual
woman and the mother of three children, and living a conventional lifestyle—could
presume to know what it feels like to be in a homosexual relationship or to
suffer prejudice or experience a hate crime because of my sexual orientation. My
reply is that there are two human qualities that enable us to imagine ourselves
in the lives of others: empathy and the power of the imagination.
