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The author, blogger, musician and artist Jessica Jurassica deals forcefully with violence and trauma in her new book "Gaslicht". She always appears in public wearing a balaclava and under this pseudonym.
Keystone
With "Gaslicht", Appenzell-born Jessica Jurassica presents a narrative of experiences of violence and their causes and consequences. Her third book impresses with its urgency and linguistic precision.
"I wasn't crazy. The world was." This realization solidifies in the narrator of Jessica Jurassica's second novel "Gaslight". She jumps back and forth in time and space, constantly circling around patriarchal violence and how society deals with it.
The narrator's experiences of violence are trivialized by those around her as a "quarrel", she speaks of the "situation", of "disappointed love". Elsewhere, we read about how the narrator is "accused of lies, slander or incompetence".
She experiences a "rollercoaster of humiliation". The fact that an affected person is destabilized because they are denied such experiences is called "gaslighting". Incidentally, the term was the American dictionary Merriam-Webster's word of the year in 2022 and has long since been included in the Duden dictionary.
In order to better understand all these processes, the narrator reads literature on trauma, examines her own family background and debunks Freud's idea of female "hysteria". For long stretches, the text reads like a lengthy essay that clearly and decisively contextualizes violence and trauma.
Instead of a conventional plot, journeys give the book a framework. Financed with the prize money from a competition, the narrator is constantly on the move between the hills of her native eastern Switzerland, New York, Bilbao and other places.
The narrator is "obsessed" with "building a new frame of reference" in order to overwrite patriarchal narratives. The works of Virginie Despentes, the American author bell hooks and Judith Hermann provide her with such a framework. Jurassica has also found her own language and voice for the narration of violent structures. This is why the name Jessica Jurassica should be included in this list. The author, blogger, musician and artist currently lives in Basel and always appears in public wearing a balaclava and under this pseudonym.
*This text by Ramon Juchli, Keystone-SDA, was produced with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation.
27.08.2025, 06:45
