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Tatiana Țîbuleac, born in 1978 in Chișinău, Moldova, is a journalist and writer living in Paris. Her books have won prizes in Romania and Spain. In 2019, she won the 2019 European Union Literary Prize for Grădina de sticlă (The Glass Garden). Voxeurop published her contribution to the series Archipelago USSR.
Your novel, Vara în care mama a avut ochii verzi (“The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes”), is a very European story about a family of Polish migrants who have settled in France. Why didn’t you write a story about your compatriots?
Perhaps because I wrote this book in Paris, shortly after I myself had moved there. I was also a migrant and everything seemed very cosmopolitan to me. In your first years abroad, you want to be a person who comes from everywhere, more than from one place in particular. The novel grew out of my estrangement, geographical and otherwise, from Moldova and Chișinău, the place where I was born and became a writer. These are themes I return to often, including in my second novel, The Glass Garden. Summer is a book I feel very close to, even after The Glass Garden, the novel I am most often identified with. I feel very close to that universe because it is a story that could have happened anywhere, to anyone. I don’t know if it is a European story, it is a story without a place. I wanted to create characters who were neither poor nor completely unhappy nor with obvious problems, to whom all their misfortunes happen one after the other and not all at once.
According to the latest census (2024), the population in Moldova has fallen below 2.5 million, almost one million fewer people than twenty years ago. Why do Moldovans emigrate?
Moldovans have been emigrating for at least 30 years. It is very important to talk about the differences between the first waves of migrants and the subsequent ones. They emigrate largely because of poverty, but not the poverty of the 1990s, when salaries were not paid and in the villages women left to be able to provide their children with food, clothes and school supplies.
People have always sought a better life, it is their right. Those who migrate today do so “with their papers in order”, because they can afford to study abroad, because they know they will find work and adequate healthcare. This is another kind of migration, similar to that of other poorer European countries, like Spain, Italy and Greece.