(Self)Translation and Censorship
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(SELF)TRANSLATION AND CENSORSHIP: A STUDY BASED ON DIARIES OF JASMINA TEŠANOVIĆ BOJANA KOVAČEVIĆ DOCTORAL THESIS VOLUME II DIRECTOR: DR HELENA MARIA MILHEIRO TANQUEIRO FACULTY OF TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETING PHD PROGRAMME IN TRANSLATION AND INTERCULTURAL STUDIES SEPTEMBER 2015 2 APPENDIX IV NORMALITY: A MORAL OPERA BY A POLITICAL IDIOT AND MATRIMONY COURTESY OF JASMINA TEŠANOVIĆ ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPTS WRITTEN IN 1998-2000 3 4 Normality: A Moral Opera by a Political Idiot Text by Jasmina Tesanovic Photos by Stephanie Damoff March 17th, 1998 I tremble, my feet tremble while I am asleep. I feel like the heroine victim in the “White Hotel”: why do my legs tremble as if an energy is passing through them in circles? Will I need my legs to run away, and fail to run away? I fear death and killing. I fear being unable to imagine any future, not even a lunch which I could enjoy. I watch my child with a sense of guilt: I, with this destiny of trembling legs, was in no position to have children. To make them victims. Being here in Serbia, being here in the eighties, nineties. I should have been sensible enough to realize that I shouldn’t have children. No future, no peace. When I was pregnant, in the eighties, we didn’t have electricity for days. It was winter, and Tito had just died. Tito had always been telling us we had a lot of electricity, we were a rich country, we were the best in the world, between East and West. I believed him, I liked his face, I remember him ever since I was born. I thought he was my grandfather. Once I was supposed to give him flowers as a little girl but then they made me give flowers to President Nasser of Egypt, because I was taller, and Tito was smaller, and Nasser was taller and the other girl was smaller. Since then I always thought being small is a question of privilege and beauty I grew up abroad, my mother is a pediatrician who stopped working to follow my father’s career, an engineer who become a businessman. At first she was depressed but then she got used to it, she had me, but when I started going to an English boarding school she got asthma. And she got used to it too: her solitude and her asthma. We lived in Egypt and we lived in Italy: I went to a British school, spoke Serbian at home and the world around me spoke first Arab and then Italian. It was more than a schizophrenia, every day I switched from and into three languages, three cultures...and as my mother I got used to it. Only many years later I managed to turn this painful Babylon in my head into a privilege. As my father claimed I should. My legs tremble as if I were an old woman. When I was a kid, my legs used to tremble, but 5 then, I knew nothing about life, wars. I was just a sad kid in pain. March 20th, 1998 It has been a terrible month, especially the past few weeks. The killing has started again, this time in Kosovo. Again we are witnesses who cannot see. We know it is going on, but we are blind. I have no idea if I should do something. It is not even the killing that makes me die every day little by little, it is this indifference to killing that makes me feel as if nothing matters in my life. It is not important if we write or don’t write. It is not important if even we do see, if we move, if we try to make things better, or if we just kill, destroy and go on with our selfish animal being. My whole life is in crisis: I see no point to it. I belong to a country, to a language, to a culture which doesn’t give a damn for anybody else and for whom nobody gives a damn. And I am completely paralyzed because I am not used to fighting, I am not used to killing. I don’t believe anybody anymore, not even myself. I have stayed here and I have made a mistake: victim or not I have become part of those who did nothing for themselves or for the others they love. I hear my parents and their nonsense. They are old, maybe senile, but they have destroyed my freedom, my strength and taken away the power of my youth. It is my parents I am fighting. Once again the enemy is in me, part of me. And I have a feeling that I will not survive. I am trembling on the edge of insanity, and nothing and nobody is there to help me. March 22nd, 1998 Isn’t it funny, today I could feel OK if only I hadn’t experienced a week ago the horror I did. And it was because of the California fitness vitamins I’ve been taking. I wonder, is it possible that a whole nation is using vitamins for years which make me crazy after only two days? I wanted to jump out of my skin, I felt drugged with useless, mindless energy, I went out and walked into the snow and rain without a coat. Only after that energy went out of me I felt like myself again, even though weak and sick, as I felt before taking the vitamins. Is it Europe versus America, or is it me, alone against world powers, against the world as it is? Now I take tea, chamomile and a little bit of good food per day. No diets, no ambitions related to diets, looks, health. The only way to stay sane is to stay in your human, natural shape, related to you and your age. And that is not easy with America demanding and imposing inhuman standards. Useless, my life still seems rather useless, except for a few details: some people sometimes read a book of mine and feel good. Then I 6 feel useful, or perhaps just not useless. Otherwise, I wonder, if every life is as superfluous and useless as mine, what makes the world go round, why are children born. And then I realize that in my script, life was always elsewhere, as were talent, success, money. In my script, I was prohibited to live and succeed: my parents and my country didn’t want it. They forbade us to be individuals, successful, different. They were afraid all the time and we were supposed to inherit that fear. We really and truly did. At least I did. I am waiting for bombs, I am waiting for punishment, and my strength is in my resistance, my survival. I spent last evening with three beautiful young women; so kind, so happy, who knows why, maybe because no hopes are yet shattered. They cannot be shattered at their age. No war or injustice can shatter hopes of those who haven’t lived yet. Just like my child who is only thirteen. And they looked up to me: they would like to be me in twenty years. They cannot see my fears, my anxiety, my shattered inner self. They think I am wise, beautiful and sincere. And so I was. Like a medium I become what I am with, be it good, be it bad, be it something I want, or not. I was fine last night. We laughed about sanctions, about the war, about our destiny as people who have to flee. Because we know that we are bound to leave and try a new life or just become one of the rest, in order to survive. And my husband said: every country has its terrible political and social atmospheres, its terrible people, and people run away from the people they are born into. And that is true, except that here today, there is no place to run, except to others who are as oppressive, as low as these you are running away from. I know that despair from my first exile and I fear that choice. I was in Vienna, in 92, waiting for Belgrade to be bombed also by the country I was hosted. I had only one choice, to be a Serb, whatever that meant in Austria, a country whose language I couldn’t understand. In Italy it was even worse: I could understand too well that I had to be a bad Serb responsible for the war atrocities and guilty for not stopping them. And that would make me become a nationalist as most people who live in exile are. 7 March 24th, 1998 Hey, what is normality if not this philosophical approach to normality. I cannot wash dishes without being philosophical about it: is it the last time I am washing dishes? Will I have to wash dishes in exile the rest of my life to survive? And is it a worthy choice, at my age, with my royal background? And is this how life becomes interesting, because of its ups and downs, because of its ruins and not because of its continuity and peace? When I had my baby, I couldn’t buy diapers, I couldn’t by baby food, even maternity hospitals didn't have cotton and medicines. We had to get them on our own from abroad. This was before the war. The war came, the sanctions, and we had operations without narcotics, without medicines. We didn’t need an outer war to understand our invisible everyday war with standards of normality we had once.