BOREC
BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Posebna hvala lektorjem angleških besedil, Damiru Arsenijeviću, Tag McEntegart in Melissi Mendelson, ter Jeleni Petrović za tovariško velikodušnost in izjemno zavzetost. TANJA VELAGIĆ, KATJA KOBOLT
BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Hvala avtorjem in operativi ter zlasti Pešadiji, na katero bi bil ponosen tudi IX. korpus: Levu Centrihu, Jerneju Kosiju, Primožu Krašovcu in Lidiji Radojević.
UREDNIŠTVO REVIJE BOREC
BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST SPOL, LITERATURA IN KULTURNI SPOMIN V POJUGOSLOVANSKEM
PROSTORU GENDER, LITERATURE, AND CULTURAL MEMORY IN THE POST-YUGOSLAV SPACE
PRISPEVKI Z MEDNARODNEGA SIMPOZIJA A COLLECTION OF PAPERS FROM THE INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM
BOREC, LXI/2009, št. 662–665
UR./EDS. DAMIR ARSENIJEVIĆ, KATJA KOBOLT, JELENA PETROVIĆ, TANJA VELAGIĆ
BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST KAZALO
JELENA PETROVIĆ, KATJA KOBOLT 13 Uvod
MARUŠA KRESE 18 Pisateljice v Vzhodni Evropi Pisateljice v Zahodni Evropi
KATJA KOBOLT 27 Zagovor primerjalnih pristopov k pojugoslovanskim literaturam kot (transnacionalne) politične prakse ali česa se lahko filologije naučijo od feminizma
JELENA PETROVIĆ 45 Politika feminističnega pisanja/branja/prevajanja
DAMIR ARSENIJEVIĆ 63 Politika spomina v »življenju kot aktualnosti« 72 Mobiliziranje nepodkupljivega življenja: politika sodobne poezije v Bosni in Hercegovini
AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ 82 Ženske pisave v Bosni in Hercegovini: model za alternativno politiko kulturnega spomina?
ŠEJLA ŠEHABOVIĆ 95 V kakšnem razmerju ste? Pogajanje o intimnem življenju in migracijah v sodobni bosanski ženski poeziji
BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST RENATA JAMBREŠIĆ KIRIN 108 Osebno kot politično: hrvaške državljanke v (po)vojni republiki besed
DUBRAVKA ĐURIĆ 135 Izzivalne literarne prakse v Srbiji po letu 2000
SVETLANA SLAPŠAK 159 Nomadski spomini, sedentarna pozaba: primer Kosova
SUZANA TRATNIK 199 Prevpraševanje neodvisnega založništva
225 Avtorski izvlečki in predstavitve
BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST CONTENTS
JELENA PETROVIĆ, KATJA KOBOLT 185 Introduction
MARUŠA KRESE 190 Women Writers in Eastern Europe Women Writers in Western Europe
KATJA KOBOLT 199 A Plea for a Comparative Approach to Post-Yugoslav Literatures as (Transnational) Political Practice or What National Philologies Could Learn from Feminism
JELENA PETROVIĆ 217 The Politics of Feminist Writing/Reading/Translation
DAMIR ARSENIJEVIĆ 235 The Politics of Memory in “Life as an Actuality” 244 Mobilising Unbribable Life: The Politics of Contemporary Poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina
AJLA DEMRAGIĆ 254 Women’s Writings in Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Model of an Alternative Politics of Cultural Memory
ŠEJLA ŠEHABOVIĆ 267 What Kind Of Relationship Are You In? Negotiating Intimate Life and Migration in Contemporary Bosnian Female Poetry
BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST RENATA JAMBREŠIĆ KIRIN 288 The Personal as the Political: Croatian Women’s Citizens in a (Post)War Republic of Words
DUBRAVKA ĐURIĆ 315 Challenging Writing Practices in Serbia after Year 2000
SVETLANA SLAPŠAK 339 Nomadic Memories, Sedentary Oblivion: the Case of Kosovo
SUZANA TRATNIK 359 Re-investigating Freelance Publishing
367 Author’s abstracts and presentations
247
BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST 10 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST SPOL, LITERATURA IN KULTURNI SPOMIN V POJUGOSLOVANSKEM PROSTORU
PRISPEVKI Z MEDNARODNEGA SIMPOZIJA
11 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST 12 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST JELENA PETROVIĆ, KATJA KOBOLT
UVOD
Znotraj etnonacionalne politike spomina, kateri smo (bili) priča na (po)vojnem območju nekdanje Jugoslavije, igrata književnost in zlasti književni kanon pomembno vlogo. Izključitev žensk iz tega kanona zato pomeni tudi cenzuro ali brisanje njihovega ustvarjanja in javnega delovanja iz politike spomina in iz širšega kulturnega konteksta. Da bi raziskali izbrisani, cenzurirani spomin in ustvarjalnost pisateljic onkraj etnocentričnih meja, so nujni drugačni, predvsem angažirani in meddisciplinarni pristopi h književnosti, literarni teoriji in kritiki. V sodobni literarni produkciji žensk v kontekstu nekdanje Jugoslavije se namreč velikokrat udejanjajo emancipacijski diskurzi in tako imenovane emergentne prakse. Nova feministična branja ženske ustvarjalnosti in teoretsko posodobljene intervencije v obstoječe postopke marginalizacije in cenzuriranja literature sprožajo nov val emancipacijske politike ženskega avtorstva, saj vplivajo na povezovalno kulturo pisanja, branja in prevajanja v pojugoslovanskem prostoru. Besedila, ki jih objavljamo pod skupnim naslovom »Spol, literatura in kulturni spomin v pojugoslovanskem prostoru«, po istoimenskem simpoziju v okviru 12. mednarodnega festivala sodobnih umetnosti Mesta žensk, so nastajala zadnji dve leti in so prav tako rezultat podobnega povezovalnega posega. Pisateljice, teoretičarke in avtorice/avtorji zbornika so na osnovi lastnih ustvarjalnih in kritičnih praks (re)aktualizirale/i izhodišča in vprašanja tako imenovane »ženske pisave« ter feminističnih strategij kljubovanja dominantnim modelom literarne kanonizacije, pogojene z
13 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST etnonacionalnimi politikami in obstoječimi patriarhalnimi kulturnimi modeli v literarni teoriji, kritiki in produkciji. Najpomembnejše značilnosti takšnega vpogleda v obstoječo literaturo in njene kritične in teoretske paradigme kažejo na pomembnost jezikovne, kulturne in spolne transgresije. Prav ta prodiranja čez različne omejitve omogočajo ženskam, da si skozi feministične prakse, njihovo angažirano in refleksivno kritiko družbeno-zgodovinskega umeščanja izborijo mesto v literarni in spominski kulturi, ne nazadnje tudi v javnem prostoru. Pesnica Maruša Krese že z naslovom svojega prispevka, »Pisateljice v Vzhodni Evropi/Pisateljice v Zahodni Evropi«, osvetljuje novo opredeljevanje do geopolitične kulturne identitete pisateljic v tranzicijskem obdobju. Postavlja niz vprašanj, ki se jim post/tranzicijski politiki in tudi nova intelektualna elita še vedno zelo radi izogibajo: »Vsa ta zadnja leta, polna plakatiranja, postavljanja v vrste in predale. Iste barve ... zahodni Balkan, vzhodni Balkan in Balkan nasploh ... Jugovzhodna Evropa, demokratične dežele, dežele, ki se šele učijo biti demokratične (sicer ne vem več, kdo je učitelj), nova Evropa ... novi sosedje ... stara, stara Evropa ... Pisateljice v Vzhodni Evropi? Ženske pisateljice? Ženske? Jugovzhodna Evropa? Vzhodna Evropa? Kaj je pravzaprav to? Kje so meje? V glavi Zahoda? V moji? Preračunljivost na Vzhodu? Le kje naj začnem?« Odgovore na ta vprašanja Maruša Krese razgrinja v avtopoetičnem besedilu, s kritiko vztrajnih družbenih, kulturnih, zgodovinskih stereotipov na poti iskanja lastne pozicije, ki se v refleksivni recepciji hkrati preobraža v zrcalo skupne ženske preteklosti v pojugoslovanskem in tudi širšem prostoru. S stališča literarne in feministične teorije in kritike Katja Kobolt in Jelena Petrović posebej problematizirata etnonacionalne politike akademskih literarnih in jezikovnih paradigem, ki so v (po)vojnem obdobju vzpostavljale etnocentrični kanon, jezikovno politiko in cenzurirano kulturo spomina. V tem revizionističnem procesu nacionalne purifikacije so (bili) (po)vojni ženski diskurzi izobčeni tako iz nacionalno grajenih akademij kakor tudi iz javnega prostora. Katja Kobolt v prispevku »Zagovor primerjalnih pristopov k pojugoslovanskim književnostim kot (transnacionalne) politične prakse ali česa se lahko filologije naučijo od feminizma« skozi triado jezik–književnost–spol izpostavlja pomembnost feminističnega pristopa pri ustvarjanju novega epistemološkega modela, ki bi z znova ovrednotenimi merili izbora in interpretacije omogočil novo definiranje (po)vojnega literarnega kanona in vključitev zapostavljene vojne književnosti literatk v kanon vojne literature kakor tudi drugih
14 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST književnosti, ki podajajo vojno onkraj frontnih črt in bojevitosti. Jelena Petrović pa se v prispevku »Politika feminističnega pisanja/branja/ prevajanja« osredotoča na kritiko reprezentacije, prisvajanja in etnizacije vojnih diskurzov; pokaže, kako lahko feministično pisanje/branje/ prevajanje posega v proces zgodovinjenja in se tako uveljavlja kot možna strategija transformativne emancipacijske politike v pojugoslovanskem prostoru. Antropologinja Svetlana Slapšak se je kritike zgodovinopisja in nacionalnega kanona lotila na primeru nacionalnega mita o Kosovu kot najusodnejšem političnem mitu, ki ni vplival samo na literarne in akademske tokove, ampak tudi na katastrofalno državotvorno prosrbsko politiko in njene posledice v času razpada Jugoslavije. V prispevku »Nomadski spomini, sedentarna pozaba: primer Kosovo« odkriva še drugačno, žensko branje in zapise o kosovskem mitu, ki so v zgodovini nastajali praviloma v sporu z nacionalno politiko in zaradi česar so bili cenzurirani in označeni kot izdajalski. Etnologinja Lada Stevanović pa v članku »Tradicija in upor: prvine pogrebnih obredov v mirovnem gibanju ‘Ženske v črnem’ med jugoslovanskimi vojnami« razčlenjuje aktivistično prakso upora proti kosovskemu mitu; z antropološko primerjalno analizo, z lokom od antike do danes, predstavlja pomen, ki ga ima gibanje Ženske v črnem za lokalni kontekst že od samega začetka vojne v nekdanji Jugoslaviji. O (po)vojni literarni produkciji in vlogi ženskega avtorstva v Bosni in Hercegovini pišejo literarni in kulturni teoretik Damir Arsenijević, pesnica in pisateljica Šejla Šehabović in literarna komparativistka Ajla Demiragić. Z medsebojnim referenčnim povezovanjem opredeljujejo žensko poezijo in prozo kot prostor, ki lahko poraja politiko upanja in odpira možnosti za razumevanje in ustvarjanje kolektivnega spomina na preteklo vojno, ki jo najbolj krvavo označuje politika genocida. Damir Arsenijević v članku »Politka spomina v ‘življenju kot aktualnosti’« opredeljuje žensko poezijo kot emancipacijski diskurz. Tak potencial te poezije se opira na zaznamovanost življenja v sedanjosti, skozi dejavno žalovanje ustvarja nove načine simbolizacije travmatičnih izkušenj in dogodkov, ki so se zgodili v Bosni; preteklost je v tem okviru pričanje za sedanjost in za bodočnost. Drugi avtorjev prispevek, »Mobiliziranje nepodkupljivega življenja: politika sodobne poezije v Bosni in Hercegovini«, opozarja na dominantne nacionalne in mednarodne politike, ki pa takšne pristope k spominjanju obširno zavračajo in cenzurirajo. V tej svoji intervenciji avtor predlaga in obravnava nov teoretski koncept »nepodkupljivega
15 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST življenja«, ki lahko vpreže emancipacijski naboj angažirane kulturne produkcije. Na podlagi primerov ženske poezije in lastne izkušnje Šejla Šehabović v prispevku »V kakšnem razmerju ste? Pretresanje intimnega življenja in migracij v sodobni bosanski ženski poeziji« ugotavlja, da je ženska poezija mesto neposrednega političnega govora, ki izraža tako subjektivnost žensk kakor tudi njihov nemogoč položaj med etnonacionalno izključevalno ter mednarodno migracijsko politiko do Drugega, medtem ko se Ajla Demiragić v razmišljanju z naslovom »Ženska pisava v Bosni in Hercegovini: model za alternativno politiko kulturnega spomina?« osredotoča predvsem na bosanskohercegovsko žensko prozo, ki se upira dominantnim patriarhalnim in etnocentrističnim pripovedim. Tako zaključi, da je ženska pisava alternativna praksa, ki omogoča emergentne prakse ustvarjanja in ohranjanja kulturnega spomina. Skozi prizmo postkolonialne kritike, kulturnih študij in feministične literarne kritike etnologinja Renata Jambrešić Kirin v prispevku »Osebno kot politično: hrvaške državljanke v povojni republiki besed« razčlenjuje na primeru najbolj znanih hrvaških pisateljic (zdomk) razloge, zakaj protivojna, protinacionalistična in politična pisava še vedno nima zaslužnega mesta v literarnem kanonu. Pri tem opozarja na novo generacijo pisateljic, ki iščejo nišo za lastni izraz in politiko upora proti poindustrijskemu neokolonializmu zunaj akademskega kanona in novejših praks delovanja ter povezovanja literarnega trga in institucij. Nove generacije to udejanjajo zlasti v stikih s staro in novo jugoslovansko diasporo – kot vodilom za ustvarjanje neideološkega, duhovnega in umetniškega »sestrstva« v 21. stoletju. O novih premikih v literarni produkciji na začetku tega stoletja piše tudi literarna teoretičarka in pesnica Dubravka Đurić: v članku »Kljubovalne literarne prakse v Srbiji po letu 2000« primerja posamezna literarna besedila mlajših avtoric in avtorjev glede na njihov odnos do pretekle vojne, socialistične in tranzicijske ideologije ter avtorstva. Vprašanje literarne produkcije, vpete v tranzicijske in nove tržne in kulturne politike, izpostavlja tudi pisateljica, prevajalka in publicistika Suzana Tratnik, ki se v svojem – sklepnem – članku osredotoča zlasti na neodvisno (freelance) založništvo, njegove pomene, prednosti in slabosti, ter na položaj manjšinske književnosti oziroma kanonsko nepriznane manjšinske literature v širšem kontekstu. Novi načini branja in ustvarjanja literature izpod prstov žensk, ki presegajo utečene kanonske interpretacije, so postali nujnost, kar sporočajo tudi prispevki v tem zborniku. Njegov namen je usmeritev na nekoč povezan knjižni trg, na katerem so obstajale založniške, prevajalske ter
16 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST medbesedilne in kulturne vezi, ki so se zaradi nacionalističnih spopadov in krvavega razdiranja Jugoslavije nasilno pretrgale. S soočenjem različnih generacij avtoric, teoretičark in založnic želimo usmeriti pogled na premike, ki potekajo v pojugoslovanski književnosti in širši literaturi znotraj ženskih povezovalnih praks. Prispevki ne osvetljujejo le iztočnic za depatriarhalizacijo in deetnifikacijo literarnega kanona in kulturnega spomina, saj obravnavajo zlasti nove modele branja in razumevanja literarne produkcije, reprezentacije in kanonizacije po meddisciplinarnem ključu ustvarjanja novih vednosti, ki črpajo iz neudomačenih študij spolov kot novih praks govora, pisanja, vednosti, in ne nazadnje iz vsakdanjega življenja v tem prostoru.
17 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST »Ne obupajte, prosili ste na ne živeti.« Spominjam se generacije svoje matere ... ženske, ki so se borile proti fašizmu, ženske, ki so gradile deželo, ženske, ki so študirale in delale ... ženske, ki so imele otroke ... ženske, ki niso razmišljale o emancipaciji, ker so enostavno bile emancipirane ... Tako je odrasla tudi moja generacija ... Vse to pa smo očitno jemale preveč lahkotno ... samoumevno ... Ampak to mi je postalo jasno šele v zadnjih letih ... in tako sem prvič razumela svarjenje Virginie Wolf ...
MARUŠA KRESE
18 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST MARUŠA KRESE
PISATELJICE V VZHODNI EVROPI PISATELJICE V ZAHODNI EVROPI
Bliža se božič. Stopim iz hiše v mali ulici starega berlinskega židovskega predela. Od tu so nekoč vozili Žide v koncentracijska taborišča. In tu živim. Te dni je ulica zaprta za promet, ker se bliža, kakor sem že dejala, božič, in prav v tej mali ulici so postavili božični trg. Prebijam se med stojnicami, kjer se dobi... Kako se že tako lepo reče? »Vse, kar ti srce poželi.« Prebijam se med stojnicami, kjer diši po kuhanem vinu, cimetu, svežem pecivu, palačinkah in pečenih klobasah. Nekdo se je spomnil in prodaja vroče marone. To spominja na dom. Moram hitro do banke, da vidim, ali so mi že nakazali zadnji honorar, in če so ga, se lahko mirno vrnem k pisanju o pisateljicah v Vzhodni in Zahodni Evropi. Če je denar na računu, bom lahko lažje in bolje pisala. Mimogrede, to je prvo pravilo, kar se tiče pisateljic, in pravilo, ki velja tako za ženske na Vzhodu kot za ženske na Zahodu. Veliko lažje, prijetneje in lepše je pisati, če se ti ni treba neprestano boriti za preživetje ... pa še mirno se spi ... sicer pa to velja tudi za moške ... Delo sem rada sprejela. Sedaj pa sem jezna. Sama nase. Polna ambivalence. Vsa ta zadnja leta, polna plakatiranja, postavljanja v vrste in predale. Iste barve ... Zahodni Balkan, Vzhodni Balkan in Balkan nasploh ... Jugovzhodna Evropa, demokratične dežele, dežele, ki se šele učijo biti demokratične (sicer ne vem več, kdo je učitelj), nova Evropa ... novi sosedje ... stara, stara Evropa ... Pisateljice v Vzhodni Evropi? Ženske pisateljice? Ženske? Jugovzhodna Evropa? Vzhodna Evropa? Kaj je pravzaprav to? Kje so meje? V glavi
19 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Zahoda? V moji? Preračunljivost na Vzhodu? Le kje naj začnem? S svojo jezo, dvomi, podobami, ki me preganjajo? S politično situacijo? S cerkvijo? Z angeli, ki zapuščajo domača ognjišča? S hitro hojo med božičnimi stojnicami, s tisočimi božičnimi večeri, ki sem jih pripravljala otrokom, medtem ko sem si želela biti sama, sama in pisati, pisati ... tam ob morju, na soncu ... brez najmanjše skrbi ... Ob »pisateljici« se vedno spomnim Virginie Woolf in njene Lastne sobe (A room of One’s Own, 1928). Vem, da je to delo neštetokrat citirano. Vedno sem mislila, da je to pisanje, ki mi je pisano na kožo, ampak moram priznati, da sem vrsto stvari razumela šele v zadnjih letih. Lastna soba je delo, ki ga je pisateljica pisala za mlajšo intelektualno generacijo žensk. Posredovala jim je svoje izkušnje, za katere se ji je zdelo, da so pomembne za mnoge. Hotela jim je svetovati, na kakšnih temeljih naj začenjajo svojo pot. Mlado generacijo žensk je svarila, naj stopijo na pot brez jeze in sovraštva. To so čustva, ki le škodijo, jih je opozarjala. Odkrivanje resnice mora biti ženski, človeku vrhovno vodilo. Skoraj rotila jih je, naj izkoristijo svoje možnosti, možnosti, ki jih imajo na razpolago v obstoječem trenutku. Zapisala je, da je zgodovina pokazala, da je treba te možnosti neprestano uporabljati in nadgrajevati, če jih nočejo zaradi moči nasprotnih interesov izgubiti. Istočasno pa jim je pisateljica zavidala, ker so ženske mlajše generacije obiskovale univerzo, kar njena generacija žensk v Angliji še ni smela. In tako vedno ob Virginii Wolf pomislim na pisanje žensk v devetnajstem stoletju v Rusiji. V času pred revolucijo je bilo v Rusiji veliko več znanih žensk, ki so se borile za enakopravnost z moškimi, za socialne in politične spremembe v deželi, kot kjer koli drugje v Zahodni Evropi. Niso kot Virginia Wolf z zavidanjem gledale svojih bratov, kako odhajajo na univerzo, temveč so skupaj z njimi sedele v učilnicah. In mnogokrat so bile radikalnejše od njih. Ne samo v besedah ... Vsake toliko časa, ko mi zmanjka poguma, se vrnem k njihovim zapiskom ... Vzhodna Evropa? Ženska? Tisoč prizorov. Mojih? Naših? Leta 1971 sem prišla iz Jugoslavije na študij v Ameriko. S seboj sem imela svojo malo hčerko. Ne pozabim obrazov dekana in profesorjev in njihovih tajnic, ko so me zagledali ... »Hipijka iz komunističnega režima,« je bil po nekaj minutni tišini njihov komentar. Ženska ... z otrokom ... iz komunizma ... Kazali so me naokrog kot eno izmed sedmih svetovnih čudežev ... Priznam, da sem kmalu zapustila ta ameriški kraj ... Ženska, moški ... Prvič sem razumela potrebo po »women liberation« na Zahodu ... in si zaželela domov ... Podobno se
20 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST mi je zgodilo v Londonu, južni Nemčiji, Avstriji ... zgodba se mi je velikokrat v podobni obliki ponovila v »zahodnih« deželah. Naenkrat se je bilo treba boriti za pravice, s katerimi so ženske moje generacije v Jugoslaviji odrasle ... Pravice, ki so se mi zdele samoumevne, pravice, o katerih nisem niti razmišljala, da so kakšne posebne pravice ... Torej Jugovzhodna Evropa ... ali Vzhodna Evropa? Ne vem pravzaprav, kaj se je zgodilo v zadnjih petnajstih, dvajsetih letih. Včasih se mi zdi, da se je zavrtelo kolo časa vsaj za sto let nazaj ... kot da bi brala roman o življenju, ki ga nisem nikoli poznala ... Nazaj v vsakdanjem življenju ... v političnem življenju ... v literarnem življenju ... Spominjam se generacije svoje matere ... ženske, ki so se borile proti fašizmu, ženske, ki so gradile deželo, ženske, ki so študirale in delale ... ženske, ki so imele otroke ... ženske, ki niso razmišljale o emancipaciji, ker so enostavno bile emancipirane ... Tako je odrasla tudi moja generacija ... Vse to pa smo očitno jemale preveč lahkotno ... samoumevno ... Ampak to mi je postalo jasno šele v zadnjih letih ... in tako sem prvič razumela svarjenje Virginie Wolf ... Res ne vem, kaj se je potem zgodilo ... Pred letom devetdeset v prejšnjem stoletju se je začelo vse, kar smo imele za samoumevno, podirati ... še preden se je podrl berlinski zid ... Res, Virginia Wolf je imela prav, ko je dejala, da je treba izkoristiti trenutne možnosti, da jih je treba neprestano uporabljati, dograjevati, negovati, če nočemo, da nas bo moč drugih prisilila k izgubi. In tako smo naenkrat začele prebirati in poslušati govore o ženskah, ki naj kraljujejo doma, za štedilnikom, ob številnih otrocih ... naj ne splavijo, ker bodo postale morilke ... In moški so spet dobili glavno besedo, pravzaprav so si jo vzeli, in me smo to mirno dopustile ... Tiste, ki niso, so bile izločene in velikokrat zamolčane ... V vsej bivši Jugoslaviji so bile prav ženske tiste, ki so se najmočneje in najglasneje postavile po robu vojni in nacionalizmu ... Na trenutke sem pomislila, da je cela zgodba na Balkanu en sam velik protifeministični puč naših moških junakov ... Utrujena sem ... Z grozo se spominjam prvih let nove »demokracije« v naši nekdanji deželi – in potem v naši novi deželi. V imenu »demokracije« so se počele stvari, ki niso imele zveze s pametjo. Nacionalizem v imenu demokracije, pesniki na demokratičnih barikadah, literati, ki cenzurirajo vsako drugačno misel in istočasno razširjajo zgodbe o svojih junaštvih in življenju, polnem cenzure v prejšnjem življenju ... V sosednjih deželah so mnogi pozivali k orožju
21 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST in krvi – in kar precej jih je vzelo puško v roke ... Nove »demokracije« iz vzhodne Evrope, demokracije nekdanjih socialističnih dežel, so začele prodajati klišejske podobe ... podobe, ki jih je Zahod pričakoval ... podobe junaških »mehkih« revolucionarjev ... podobe, ki so poveličevale življenje na Zahodu ... In k tem podobam je spadal tudi kliše »ženske v Vzhodni Evropi«, pisateljice v Vzhodni Evropi ... in dolga je pot do emancipacije, so nas učile kolegice na Zahodu ...
Emancipacija
Na kredit sem si kupila, dejali so, da nima smisla, ker so obresti prevelike.
Oh, sedela sem v kopalnici, bili smo veseli, ker se je pralni stroj na obresti vrtel ...
In potem sem vzela Spinozo. O, bog, da se pralni stroj ne bi nehal vrteti, potrebujem še čas za živeti ...
Res ne vem, kje smo se izgubile ... Kje smo klonile ... Tiste, ki so bile najbolj glasne v bivši Jugoslaviji, so druga za drugo odšle ... Kam? Na Zahod? Mnoge so bile doma ožigosane s čarovništvom ali histerijo in mnoge so bile vržene v koš norosti ...
Ženske norosti so nežne, polne metuljev in slik. Ženske norosti so drobne, s princi obdane, v medenino vkovane, z barvami pokrite, v svilo zavite, v zemljo zakopane, da bodo nove zrasle.
Nekatere izmed njih so se dobro znašle ... Ni bilo težko prodajati klišeja o Jugovzhodni Evropi ... o Vzhodni Evropi ... Ni težko prodajati
22 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST zgodb, kako so bile ženske dvojno uporabljene v socializmu ... Ni težko napisati, da je bilo pisateljicam v Vzhodni Evropi težko ... Veliko težje je dopovedati, da smo to, kar smo imele, zapravile ... Težko pa je dopovedati, da je treba tudi v literarnem svetu, prav tako kot v političnem, stvari malo razlikovati ... Tako kot so se od leta 1989 druge za drugo odvijale »mehke revolucije« v Jugovzhodni Evropi, in je na Zahodu zavladalo veselje, ker je bil »komunizem mrtev«, in ko ni bil nihče pozoren, kdo vse se imenuje »demokrat«, ko ni bil nihče občutljiv do različnih preteklosti teh »bivših komunističnih« dežel, ko se je vse metalo v isti koš, tako se tudi v zadnjem času poljubno obrača literature Vzhodne Evrope, ženske iz Vzhodne Evrope, pisateljice iz Vzhodne Evrope ... Ali je res tako težko dopovedati, da mi je po življenjskih izkušnjah morda bližja pisateljica iz New Yorka ali Stockholma kot iz Sofije ali Bukarešte? Da bo pisateljica iz Bratislave težko našla skupni jezik s pisateljico iz Tirane ... Mogoče bo pesnica iz Jordanije ali Nikaragve napisala podobno pesem kot pesnica v Oslu ... recimo o morju ... ali ljubezni ... ali o svoji mami ... Ne vem, kako naj se identificiram z Vzhodno Evropo, kako s Slovenijo, bivšo Jugoslavijo? Vzhodna Evropa? Takole hodim po božičnem trgu. Do banke še nisem prišla ... Berlin ... Židje ... Rusi, ki so pribežali sem v dvajsetih letih prejšnjega stoletja ... Ženske v Petrogradu v devetnajstem stoletju ... Kje so njihove sledi? Ljudje, ki so pribežali v Berlin iz strahu pred »demkracijo« ... prijateljice, pisateljice z Balkana ... po celem svetu ... Izgubila sem se ... v delu, otrocih, preživetju ... tu, na Zahodu, ženske podirajo tabuje svojih mater, podirajo klišeje starejših generacij ... in pri nas, vsaj na Balkanu, bomo spet potrebovale celo večnost, da se bomo vrnile v položaj, ki so ga naše matere in mnoge od nas že imele ... utrujena sem, res ... Spominjam se podijske diskusije na dan žena v Bruslju. Osmega marca, leta... vseeno. Moderatorka se obrne k meni in reče: »Gospa, sedaj morajo biti ženske v Sloveniji srečne?« »Le zakaj,« jo cinično vprašam. »EU vam prinaša emancipacijo, vendar.« Zaslišim svoj glas. Je moj? Poslušam se. Saj sem kot Klara Zetkin, ali Vida Tomšič, ali moja mati. Sama sebi se moram smejati, da se ne izgubim v besu ali obupu. Ne vem. Na kavi srečam slovenskega pesnika ... poslušam ... to branje, tisti festival, ta pesnik, drugi pesnik, te nagrade ... te knjige ... nova generacija ni drugačna ... mladi pesniki sedijo po uredniških odborih ...
23 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST moški, ki odločajo, ali je ženska pesnica ali ne ... Poslušam ... pesnik je poklic ... resen poklic ... ženske tega ne jemljejo dovolj resno, ker pišejo pesmi ob kuhanju špagetov, vrtenju pralnih strojev, pozno ponoči ... ker napišejo pesem, ko čakajo otroke pred šolo ... kar tako hitro nekaj načečkajo na rob dnevnega časopisa ... Recimo:
Ti mali vulkani me vznemirjajo. Želim si jih vsak dan in vem, da je otrokom treba zašiti hlače.
Hlače, mogoče jim lahko prišijem mala sončka na kolena, morda ladjo z dimnikom. Ali majhne hiške. Ana hoče pikapolonico. Mogoče mušnico.
Kako naj izpolnim vse te želje na kolenih. Vulkani moji ostudni ljubi, bojim se, da morate še čakati.
Ko se naposlušam uspehov slovenskih pesnikov, si le drznem odpreti usta: »Ampak za pesnice kaže v Sloveniji bolj slabo.« »No, ja, res,« pravi pesnik. »Boriti se morate, skupaj morate stopiti in napasti moško literarno sceno.« Nasmehnem se. Boriti. Po glavi se mi prepleta stavek Marine Cvetajeve: »To, kar je za vas (moške) ‘igra’, je za nas ena sama resničnost. Bolj resnične ne bomo niti na smrtni postelji.« Vseeno, kje. V južni, vzhodni, zahodni ali severni Evropi.
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26 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST KATJA KOBOLT ZAGOVOR PRIMERJALNIH PRISTOPOV K POJUGOSLOVANSKIM LITERATURAM KOT (TRANSNACIONALNE) POLITIČNE PRAKSE ALI ČESA SE LAHKO FILOLOGIJE NAUČIJO OD FEMINIZMA Raziskovanje različnih spominskih vidikov pojugoslovanskih vojn, kakor jih je mogoče razbrati iz bosanske, hrvaške in srbske (ženske) vojne književnosti, je zaznamovano z metodološkimi težavami. Izvor teh težav je bržkone iskati v dominantni paradigmi etnocentrizma južnojugoslovanskih filologij.1 Namen pričujočega besedila je zato razmislek o metodologijah južnoslovanskih filologij, ki so spremljale nacionalistične politične projekte, kot so jezikovno načrtovanje (language planning) ali jezikovna restandardizacija, redefinicija literarnega kanona in pretolmačenje nacionalnih literarnih zgodovin. Ker se spol izkaže za bolj ali manj slepo pego raziskovanja vojne književnosti, je prav študij spolov ta, ki razkriva težave opisanih etnocentrističnih pristopov. Prvič, teorije vojne književnosti, kakor jih razvijajo filologije, središčijo v tradicionalni semantiki vojne, v podobi vojskujočega se moškega. Zato pogled skozi prizmo tradicionalne teorije vojne književnosti ne samo spregleduje vojno pisanje žensk, ampak zaobide tudi vse reprezentacije vojn, ki odstopajo od opisanega modela. Drugič, nacionalistična perspektiva, ki trenutno prevladuje v
27 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST južnoslovanskih filologijah, skoraj popolnoma onemogoča medkulturni študij semantik pojugoslovanskih vojn, le-te pa so srčika politike nacionalnega spomina na Balkanu. Trenutni kanonizacijski procesi in politika spomina na pojugoslovanske vojne morajo zato postati predmet kritičnega akademskega pretresa.
INSTRUMENTALIZACIJE KOLEKTIVNEGA SPOMINA KOT DISKURZIVNA MATRICA POJUGOSLOVANSKIH VOJN
Pojugoslovanske vojne so z vso tragiko pokazale na središčnost vloge, ki jo imajo za nacionalna politična dejanja politike spomina v procesih nacionalne homogenizacije in mobilizacije. Različne strani v sporu, ki so se formirale ob razpadu večetnične (in večnacionalne) Jugoslavije, so vse promovirale (mono)nacionalni model države. V tem procesu so se vse strani naslonile na zgodovino oziroma so, da bi dosegle svoje cilje, bolj ali manj preoblikovale zgodovinski spomin.2 Njihove konstrukcije jugovzhodnoevropske preteklosti so (bile) v pogledu na konstrukcijo etničnosti oziroma nacionalnosti izrazito podobne in so tako predstavljale idealno odskočno desko za medetnične konflikte.3 Te različne konstrukcije preteklosti so temeljile na predstavi nacionalne kontinuitete, ki naj bi ji bilo možno slediti vse do zgodnjega srednjega veka. Sugerirale so, da naj bi bila edina možna pot zagotovitve nadaljnje kontinuitete nacionalnega znotraj (mono)nacionalne državne ureditve. Tako so nacionalistične zgodovinske naracije postale glavni diskurzivni motor dezintegracije Jugoslavije in pojugoslovanskih vojn. Po eni strani so nacionalistični projekti izkoristili posamezne verzije nacionalne preteklosti ter jih uporabili kot orodje politične mobilizacije in militarizacije. Po drugi strani pa so te iste zgodovinske naracije kot dominantni interpretacijski model dezintegracije federativne države Jugoslavije uporabile tudi družbene vede in kulturne študije – v želji, da bi razložile mednacionalne konflikte. Medetnično sovraštvo je bilo pravzaprav povzdignjeno v eno izmed poglavitnih značilnosti Jugovzhodne Evrope.4 Na ta način je diskurz družbenih ved in kulturnih študij ne samo potrdil nacionalistične zgodovinske konstrukcije, ampak tudi nolens volens podprl nacionalistične politične projekte. V članku, naslovljenem »Spol, orientalizem in zgodovina etničnega sovraštva v nekdanji Jugoslaviji« je sociologinja Dubravka Žarkov zapisala:
28 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST »Če je edina zgodovina zgodovina etničnega sovraštva, potem je edini način bivanja – biti etničen. [...] Morda je najbolj pogubna možna posledica ‘zgodovine etničnega sovraštva’ na ‘orientaliziranem Balkanu’ dejstvo, da se je začelo prihodnost predstavljati z etničnim besednjakom. Kajti z izključevanjem alternativnih projektov ekskluzivna ‘etnična prihodnost’ v zgodovini naturalizira etnično bivanje. Konstruira tudi etnično vojno, in sicer ne kot zgolj zgodovinsko bivanjsko pot, ampak kot naravno. Na ta način se vzpostavlja kontinuiteta med ‘etnično preteklostjo’ in ‘etnično prihodnostjo’, spominske sledi, ki bi kazale na druge možnosti, pa so zakrite, uničene ali na novo interpretirane.«5 Kljub genocidnim politikam devetdesetih let ostaja Jugovzhodna Evropa večetnična in večkulturna regija, zato je potreben kritičen pretres (eno)nacionalnih zgodovinskih naracij. Nujnost oblikovanja in promoviranja transnacionalnih konstrukcij preteklosti Jugovzhodne Evrope je znotraj epistemološkega modela, ki po eni strani poudarja, da sama metoda neizogibno sooblikuje predmet raziskovanja, po drugi pa jemlje v zakup diskurzivno moč akademskega diskurza,6 še toliko očitnejša. Pojugoslovanske vojne so namreč jasno pokazale tudi moč širjenja diskurzov, ki dejansko proizvajajo učinke,7 zato so taki diskurzi plodna tla tako za vojne kot za spravo.
JEZIKOVNO NAČRTOVANJE IN NJEGOVE POSLEDICE ZA ŠTUDIJ JUŽNOSLOVANSKIH LITERATUR
Kakor so prepričljivo pokazali Ivan Čolović, Svetlana Slapšak, Andrew Baruch Wachtel in drugi,8 je bila pot širjenja nacionalističnih diskurzov, ki so eksplodirali v medetnično sovraštvo, vertikalna – nacionalizem je pronical z »vrha« družbene zgradbe navzdol. Nacionalizem kot model družbene in politične ureditve so najprej sprožili diskurzi iz akademske in umetniške sfere, od koder jih je prevzela tudi politična oligarhija.9 V nacionalistični matrici, razviti predvsem pod okriljem nemške romantike, naj bi književnosti pripadla privilegirana vloga, saj naj bi jezik predstavljal jedro nacionalnega načina bivanja.10 Primer (po)jugoslovanskih nacionalizmov priča o pomembnosti tako imenovanega nacionalnega jezikovnega načrtovanja oziroma restandardizacije nacionalnega jezika in oblikovanja nacionalnega
29 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST literarnega kanona. V času redefiniranja kulturnih in spominskih politik pojugoslovanskega konteksta v devetdesetih letih sta postala predvsem tako imenovani srbohrvaški jezik in književnost predmet redefinicij, reinterpretacij in restandardizacij.11 Proces oblikovanja novih parametrov srbohrvaškega jezika in književnosti v tem jeziku je sovpadal z določitvijo novih teritorialnih in političnih meja v nekdanji Jugoslaviji: ta jezik je razpadel na štiri jezike in književnosti – na bosanski, hrvaški, srbski in nedavno še črnogorski jezik in književnost. Značilnosti jezikovnega načrtovanja, kot ga je opisal Joshua A. Fishman v svoji študiji Language and Nationalism, izkazujeta predvsem restandardizaciji hrvaškega in bosanskega jezika. Poglavitne značilnosti nacionalistične jezikovne (re)standardizacije se nanašajo na leksiko, socioleksiko in deloma sintaktično restandardizacijo.12 Redefinicija literarne zgodovine in nacionalnega književnega kanona nekdanje srbohrvaške književnosti je potekala predvsem glede na etnično pripadnost samih avtorjev. Ta diferenciacija, ki še vedno poteka, ostaja, čeprav v sozvočju z romantično idejo »en narod, ena kultura, ena država«, izredno problematična – v epistemološkem, metodološkem in političnem smislu. Namreč, z lingvističnega gledišča tvorijo bosanski, hrvaški, srbski in črnogorski jezik še vedno en jezik, četudi je ta razčlenjen v več standardiziranih jezikovnih različic. Ti jeziki oziroma ta jezik je standardiziran na podlagi različnih narečij in leksikalnih tradicij, ki izvirajo iz različnih zgodovinskih in družbenopolitičnih kontekstov oziroma heterogenih vplivov, katerim so bili izpostavljeni. Razlike v standardizaciji so tako večinoma rezultat jezikovne oziroma sociolingvistične diverzifikacije, ki se izraža predvsem na leksikalni in morfološki ravni, ne toliko na sintaktični.13 Obravnavani južnoslovanski jeziki se sintaktično še vedno dokaj ujemajo – z lingvističnega gledišča še vedno predstavljajo en jezik, katerega govorci se med seboj lahko sporazume(va)jo.14 Poskusi toge diferenciacije južnoslovanskih jezikov in filologij pa se izkažejo za problematične tudi s komparativističnega vidika. Čeprav so bile te književnosti – vzporedno z družbenozgodovinskim razvojem – izpostavljene različnim družbenopolitičnim, kulturnim in estetskim gibanjem, med njimi še vedno obstajajo pomembne podobnosti. Kanonizacija tako bosanske, hrvaške, srbske kakor tudi črnogorske književnosti je temeljila na južnoslovanski epski tradiciji, katere prepoznavnost v mednarodnih akademskih krogih je morda najbolj spodbudila študija Milmana Parryja
30 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST in Alberta Lorda Singer of Tales – prispevala je k razrešitvi »homerskega vprašanja«.15 Naslednje nesporno dejstvo je, da so obravnavani književni kanoni sledili vzporednim estetskim smernicam tudi pozneje: bosansko- hercegovsko, hrvaško, srbsko in črnogorsko književnost so še posebej zaznamovale estetike realizma, modernizma in socialnega realizma. Ob primerjalnem razčlenjevanju tematskih referentov, ki so lastni vsem pojugoslovanskim kulturam, se dominantni interpretacijski model posameznih nacionalno določenih južnoslovanskih filologij izkaže za še posebej pomanjkljiv pristop h književnosti teh kultur. To ugotovitev opiram na svoj študij pomenov in vidikov spomina na pojugoslovanske vojne v sodobni bosanski, hrvaški in srbski književnosti. Raziskovanje spominskih modelov pojugoslovanskih vojn sem osredotočila na vprašanje, kakšne so bile konstrukcije teh vojn v posameznih nacionalno definiranih kulturah pojugoslovanskega prostora. Pri iskanju odgovorov na to vprašanje sem se soočala z omenjenim problemom naturalizacije nacionalističnih konstrukcij jugovzhodnoevropske preteklosti. Drug problem pa je dejstvo, da obstoječi metodološki in interpretacijski modeli posameznih južnoslovanskih filologij niso primerna orodja za analizo in razumevanje sodobnih literarnih del o pojugoslovanskih vojnah, še zlasti ne v okviru študije s primerjalnim poudarkom.
VOJNA KNJIŽEVNOST IN KANON KOT ZAKLADNICA SPOLNO ZAZNAMOVANEGA SPOMINA NA VOJNO
Mnogi raziskovalci so kolektivnemu spominu na vojno pripisali glavno vlogo v kontekstu nacionalne države, zato zaseda vojna književnost pomembno mesto znotraj kanona in s tem kolektivnega spomina.16 Nekdanja Jugoslavija ni bila izjema pri tem. Po Andrewu Wachtelu, ki je vzpon in padec ideje o jugoslovanskem narodu analiziral na primeru jugoslovanske arhitekture, vizualne umetnosti, akademskih učnih načrtov in literature, je bil popularni vojni roman eno izmed najpomembnejših sredstev za širjenje jugoslovanske ideje na eni strani in nacionalističnih idej na drugi.17 Kraljevina Srbov, Hrvatov in Slovencev je bila ustanovljena po prvi svetovni vojni kot rezultat dezintegracije avstroogrske monarhije. Zaradi tega je bila razumljena kot posledica vojne. S te perspektive je bil vojni žanr v Kraljevini SHS in v njeni naslednici, Kraljevini Jugoslaviji, še posebej razvit.
31 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Še več, politike spomina druge Jugoslavije so se naslonile predvsem na poveličevanje partizanstva, boja proti okupacijskim silam. Wachtel je potrdil osrednjo vlogo vojnega romana socialnega realizma znotraj književnega kanona socialistične Jugoslavije in hkrati ugotovil, da so nacionalistični intelektualci kot eno svojih prvih »glasil« za artikulacijo svojih stremljenj k odcepitvi oziroma (eno)nacionalni državi uporabili in izrabili ravno ta žanr.18 Pojugoslovanske vojne so v mnogih državah nekdanje Jugoslavije uporabljene kot temelj teh novih nacionalnih držav – v tem primeru predvsem na Hrvaškem, v Bosni in Hercegovini, na Kosovu kot tudi v Sloveniji. Prva literarna dela o pojugoslovanskih vojnah so izšla kot neposredni odziv na sprožitev teh vojn že v začetku devetdesetih let. Tipologije in definicije, kaj naj bi pravzaprav zaznamovalo vojni žanr in predvsem književnost pojugoslovanskih vojn, so v vsaki posamezni južnoslovanski filologiji različne. V okviru hrvaške – kakor tudi bosansko-hercegovske – sodobne filologije zaznamuje pojem »vojna književnost« sodobno literarno produkcijo, ki je bodisi nastala v času vojn v devetdesetih letih bodisi se tematsko navezuje nanje oziroma opisuje oborožene spopade ali obleganja. Srbski in črnogorski literarnokritični in zgodovinski diskurz pa »vojno literaturo«, v navezavi na sodobno produkcijo, misli zlasti časovno – kot književnost, ki je nastala v »železnih letih«, v devetdesetih, v Srbiji in Črni gori zaznamovanih z vladavino Slobodana Miloševića ter gospodarjev vojne in tranzicije. Čeprav sta Srbija in Črna gora odigrali v pojugoslovanskih vojnah glavno vlogo, je v okviru srbske in črnogorske literarne produkcije izšlo bore malo literarnih del, ki se neposredno navezujejo na te vojne. Opisane razlike samih definicij sodobnih južnoslovanskih vojnih književnosti so posledica heterogenosti literarnih reprezentacij pojugoslovanskih vojn v različnih nacionalnih kontekstih. Če književnost razumemo kot medij kulturnih procesov in kulturnega spomina,19 moramo opisane razlike razumeti kot razlike (politik) spomina na te vojne. Pri raziskovanju kulturnih semantik in modelov spomina ter spominskih politik pojugoslovanskih vojn, kakor se te odražajo v zrcalu sodobne književnosti oziroma kakor jih ta konstruira, se torej soočamo z omejitvami, ki jih postavljajo posamezne nacionalne filologije. Če želimo zaobjeti heterogenost spominskih vidikov pojugoslovanskih vojn, se ne moremo izogniti primerjalnemu pristopu in s tem prestopu strogih meja posameznih južnoslovanskih filologij. Če upoštevamo dejstvo še vedno raznolike etnične podobe
32 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST pojugoslovanskega konteksta, kjer se marsikatera etnična skupina konstruira v eksonormativnem registru, je primerjalni pristop videti še toliko nujnejši.20 Obstoječa tematska definicija »vojnega žanra«, ki je v uporabi zlasti v hrvaški in bosansko-hercegovski filologiji, se pravzaprav opira na tako imenovani »kanon svetovne književnosti«, predvsem o prvi svetovni vojni. V tem kanonu prevladujejo ameriška, angleška, nemška, francoska in ruska književnost realizma in modernizma. Samuel Hynes v svojem znanem delu A War Imagined ugotavlja, da se definicija vojnega žanra navezuje na neposredno (po možnosti avtobiografsko) izkušnjo bojišča in da na ta način jasno sugerira spolno zaznamovano subjektno pozicijo.21 Iz te zvrstne omejitve sledi, da dela, ki opisujejo vojno onkraj fronte ali neposrednih bojev, pravzaprav sploh ne spadajo v vojno književnost. Še več, ta definicija predlaga tudi jasen model avtorstva vojne književnosti: vojskujoči se moški ali vojni veteran sta videti najprimernejša avtorja vojne književnosti: »Posledice, ki jih ima takšna estetika neposrednega izkustva za vojno umetnost, so očitne: resnična umetnost je tista, ki prikazuje, kar je bilo spoznano in videno, zato jo lahko verodostojno ustvarjajo le vojaki. In razumeli jo bodo samo tisti, ki so tudi sami doživeli takšno izkušnjo, torej jo bodo zmožni ceniti in razumeti le vojaki. Na umetnost se naslavlja popolna ločitev med moškimi, ki se borijo, in tistimi, za kogar se borijo. V okviru te točke je ta ločitev razvidna v vojni poeziji kot strukturno načelo – jaz, ki je doživel vojno, naslavlja Vas, ki je niste – in tematsko – Vi [je] ne morete razumeti, niste verodostojni, [je] ne poznate, ne občutite, ste stari ali ženska, vsekakor se niste borili in ste zato izključeni tako iz prikazane izkušnje kot tudi iz samega prikazovanja. Rezultat je svojevrsten elitizem, ki niti ni tako drugačen od odnosa avantgardnega umetnika do buržoazne družbe, le da je postavljen v okvire vojne.«22 Dejstvo, da je avtorstvo vojne književnosti spolno determinirano, so poleg Hynesa potrdili tudi drugi raziskovalci. Feministična literarna zgodovinarka Margaret R. Higonnet tako opozarja, da moramo, če želimo razumeti tudi žensko pisanje o vojni, redefinirati tradicionalne norme vojne književnosti.23 Spolno določeno avtorstvo vojne literature narekuje namreč tudi kanonizacijo, zaradi česar so pisateljice v procesu kanonizacije vojne književnosti načeloma spregledane.24 Lahko celo rečemo, da tradicionalna definicija vojnega žanra narekuje nekakšno fragmentacijo kolektivnega spomina. Če so v procesu kanonizacije
33 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST upoštevana le tista dela, ki opisujejo neposredni boj in ki jih je podpisala moška roka, potem lahko govorimo vsaj o spolno določeni fragmentaciji kolektivnega spomina, ki jo povzroča takšen spolno determiniran kanon. Glede na pomembno vlogo kolektivnega spomina na vojno25 pomeni izključitev pisateljic iz vojnega literarnega kanona hkrati tudi njihovo izključitev iz (politike) kolektivnega spomina na vojno. Če si prizadevamo za demokratične politike spomina, ki bi upoštevale širši spekter spominov na vojno, potem je nujen kritičen pretres vojne književnosti in kanonizacije.
SPOL – PREZRTA KATEGORIJA NACIONALNIH FILOLOGIJ IN PROCESOV KANONIZACIJE
Če književnosti ne interpretiramo le kot medij kulture, ampak tudi kot medij (kolektivnega) spomina, potem razumemo, da nosi tradicionalna definicija vojnega žanra jasne posledice za kolektivno spominjanje na vojno. Opisi neposrednih bojev na frontni črti niso le dominantni reprezentacijski model vojne, marveč vplivajo tudi na druge načine kolektivnega spominjanja na vojno ter pripomorejo k temu, da se velik del spominov na vojno, ki ne sovpadajo z izkušnjo vojskujočega se moškega, enostavno ne upošteva. Toda vojna se kajpak razteza čez fronto črto. Zaradi premikov v načinih vojskovanja v dvajsetem stoletju so se vojna in spopadi razširili onkraj frontnih črt, zajemajo tudi civilno prebivalstvo, kar je dodaten argument za kritičen pretres obstoječih definicij vojne literature.26 Zgoraj opisana odsotnost tematske navezave na vojno ali na vojskovanje iz srbske in črnogorske sodobne literarne produkcije je po eni strani sama po sebi zgovorna. Kaže namreč, da so pojugoslovanske vojne v okviru srbskega in črnogorskega kolektivnega spomina na vojno nekakšna slepa pega kolektivnega spomina teh kultur. Po drugi strani pa časovna definicija vojne književnosti, kakor jo uporabljata ti dve nacionalni filologiji, ustreza raznolikosti pojugoslovanske vojne književnosti. Pogoj za kovanje nove definicije vojne književnosti, ki bi bolj ustrezala dejanski sodobni produkciji, je dinamično razumevanje književnih zvrsti, saj te niso monolitne tvorbe, ampak so dinamičen proces.27 Ko raziskujemo pojugoslovansko književno produkcijo, moramo nekoliko pozabiti naše znanje literarnega teorije, uporabiti induktivni pristop in zaupati enostavnemu vprašanju: Kakšne oblike
34 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST v okviru te literarne produkcije zavzemajo pojugoslovanske vojne? Medetnični spopadi, izkušnja begunstva, eksila in taborišča, množična posilstva, uničenje družbenih in osebnih vezi, izguba družinskih članov in lastnine, nove konstrukcije kolektivnega spomina so le nekatere izmed tem, ki se navezujejo na pojugoslovanske vojne. Ko smo enkrat razširili tematsko razumevanje vojne književnosti, moramo narediti še drugi korak in razviti primeren model kanonizacije, ki bi tudi dejansko upošteval heterogene izraze vojne književnosti. Da pa ne bi znova izumljali tople vode, kakor nas pametno uči obče znani južnoslovanski pregovor, se je ob našem drugem koraku pametno razgledati naokoli in raziskati obstoječe modele kanonizacije, ki so nastali v kritičnem odzivu na monolitnost tradicionalnega kanona. In res, v zakladnici feminističnega spomina ali feministične literarne teorije najdemo cel spekter alternativnih modelov kanonizacije.28 Že feministične literarne teoretičarke tako imenovanega prvega in drugega vala feminizma so vedele, da morata vsak književni kanon, če naj bi le-ta književna dela »pravilno« posredoval poznejšim generacijam, spremljati kanona kriterijev selekcije in (pravilne) interpretacije. Poleg tega so te raziskovalke začele o literarnem ustvarjanju žensk razmišljati kot o ženski pisavi ali posebni ženski obliki literature, ki naj bi bila radikalno drugačna od moške.29 Kot pogoj razvitja novih modelov kanonizacije so zato feministke zagovarjale misel, da je za razumevanje literarne produkcije žensk treba najprej razviti primeren teoretski diskurz, ki bi upošteval radikalno drugačnost te književnosti.30 Glede na to, da so bile v večini nacionalnih literarnih kanonov literatke izpuščene, tudi zaradi dejstva, da so bile pred letom 1850 pišoče ženske bolj izjema kot pravilo, je feministična literarna teorija šestdesetih in sedemdesetih let prejšnjega stoletja stavila predvsem na redefinicijo kanona kriterijev selekcije in interpretacije.31 Z redefinicijo meril, ki pogojujejo vključitev literarnih del v literarni kanon, so feministične literarne teoretičarke in kritičarke pričakovale, da se bo bolj ali manj patriarhalno urejen literarni kanon razširil in zajel dela literatk, obenem pa so predlagale nekakšen kontrakanon ženske pisave.32 To feministično prakso so s protiesencialističnega gledišča močno kritizirale feministke tretjega vala feminizma v poznih osemdesetih in devetdesetih letih prejšnjega stoletja. Ker so zagovarjale konstrukcijo subjektov onkraj pozitivnih določil, kot so spol, razred, rasa in religija, so opozarjale na družbeno konstrukcijo teh določil, ki subjektom torej niso inherentna, temveč so jim vsiljena.33 Iz nezaupanja v hierarhično
35 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST urejene strukture subjektivacije, ki jih obvladujejo kategorije moči, so raziskovalke in raziskovalci spola, queera in postkolonializma zavračali pojem kanona. Tako so multikulturalisti, sklicujoč se na pluralnost kanona, kritizirali kanon sam po sebi in zagovarjali njegovo »nereprezentativnost«: »Da bi si vnovič ogledali, kako izbiramo romane, bi se lahko v luči razrešenega, destabiliziranega kanona odločili, da ne reprezentiramo reprezentativnega, tako kot se to običajno počne ali implicira, ampak da reprezentiramo nereprezentativnost samo. Ta paradoks lahko ponazarja nemožnost vsake razumljive reprezentacije. Skupek romanov v končni točki ne more ‘reprezentirati’ kulture ali subkulture, vendar pa bodo romani reprezentirali – v smislu ‘zavzemati se’ – kulture in subkulture, četudi deloma in pristransko, v smislu, da nas nobena oblika teoretske previdnosti ne more zavarovati pred tem, da bi prej ali slej pristali na takšni ali drugačni vrsti reprezentacije. Če nas neizogibnost vsaj delnega konsenza varuje pred popolno izločitvijo kanoničnosti, potem nas morda prizadevanje, da bi reprezentirali nereprezentativnost, vsaj pomakne proti postkanonu, v smeri kanona, katerega kanoničnost je, čeprav neizbežna, ironična, strateška, multipla in protislovna sama s seboj.«34 Čeprav je v okviru poststrukturalistične misli takšen anti- oziroma postkanonski model razumljiv, je predlog reprezentacije nereprezentativnega težko prenesti v dejanskost procesa kanonizacije. V kolikor je cilj vsake kulture in družbenopolitičnega reda reprodukcija – ali ni namreč vsaka kultura »naučena« konvencija? –, v tolikor razglasitev temeljne neveljavnosti kanona ne more biti relevantna politika kanona. Predlagam, da si na tej točki, z znanjem poststrukturalistične paradigme, znova ogledamo paradigmo kritičnega pretresa obstoječega kanona kriterijev selekcije in interpretacije, ki je spodbujal (bolj ali manj izključno) kanonizacijo literarnih del moškega avtorstva. Kanonizirana dela prenašajo namreč posebne kulturne in ideološke konstelacije in se vzpostavljajo kot mediji kolektivnega spomina le, če je poskrbljeno tudi za primeren kontekst sprejemanja. Povedano drugače, če naj bi literarna dela pripomogla k reprodukciji kulture, potem mora kultura poskrbeti tudi za primeren kontekst reprodukcije. Feministična paradigma redefinicije kanona kriterijev selekcije in interpretacije nikakor ne predpostavlja esencializacije literature v smislu spola. Niti pojem »ženska pisava« sam po sebi ne hipostazira književne produkcije žensk na nekakšno literaturo radikalne
36 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST drugačnosti. Namesto načelnega odklanjanja obeh idej, na temelju v šestdesetih in sedemdesetih letih popularnega esencializiranja razlik med spoloma, se zdi veliko bolj smiselno njuno vnovično ovrednotenje. Če vzamemo pod drobnogled kanonizacijske procese književnosti pojugoslovanskih vojn, opazimo, da še vedno izstopa nekakšna homosocialna povezava, ki deluje v prid kanonizaciji del moškega avtorstva. Ko pustimo za seboj identitetne politike, ki temeljijo na naturaliziranih pozitivnih določilih, tedaj omogoča na novo ovrednoteni pojem redefinicije kanona kriterijev selekcije in interpretacije vključitev ne samo sicer zapostavljene vojne književnosti literatk v kanon vojne literature, ampak tudi drugih književnosti, ki vojno prikazujejo onkraj dogajanj na fronti črti.35 Na ta način bi vojna književnost in njen kanon postala veliko bolj odporna proti bojevitim nacionalističnim instrumentalizacijam, ki razglašajo herojsko žrtvovanje za domovino. Spremembe v obstoječem dojemanju vojne literature s tem ne bi le odprle nacionalno definiranih literarnih kanonov k alternativnim reprezentacijam vojne, ampak bi tudi spodbudile politike spomina k bolj transnacionalnim perspektivam in tako krepile proces sprave. Te spremembe bi poudarile tudi pomembnost prestopa meja med posameznimi južnoslovanskimi filologijami in literaturami. Zaradi očitne stičnosti med posameznimi južnoslovanskimi jeziki in literarnimi zgodovinami se južnoslovanske filologije preprosto morajo znova odpreti primerjalnim pristopom k bosansko-hercegovski, hrvaški, srbski in črnogorski literaturi, še zlasti če se želijo uveljavljati kot utemeljene in relevantne kulturne kritike, ki zagovarjajo kulturni dialog in ne vojne. Južnoslovanske filologije se lahko veliko naučijo od feminizma: prvič, feministke pojugoslovanskega konteksta tudi med vojno niso prenehale sodelovati med seboj, se učiti druga od druge in se vzajemno podpirati; in drugič, feminizem se je v navezavi na raziskovanje vojne književnosti in politik spomina na vojno znova izkazal za bogato zakladnico metod, ki zagovarjajo spravo in ne vojne.
37 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST OPOMBE
1 Izraz »pojugoslovanske vojne« se nanaša na vojne, ki so sledile oziroma zaključile dezintegracijo Socialistične federativne republike Jugoslavije. Vključuje vojno v Sloveniji v letu 1991, vojno na Hrvaškem med 1991 in 1995, vojno v Bosni in Hercegovini med 1992 in 1995, vojno na Kosovu in bombardiranje Srbije in Črne gore v letu 1999 ter makedonski konflikt. 2 Prim. Wolfgang Höpken, »Krieg und historische Erinnerung auf dem Balkan«, v: Eva Behring, Ludwig Richter idr. (ur.), Geschichtliche Mythen in den Literaturen und Kulturen Ost-, Mittel- und Südosteuropas, Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart, 1999, str. 371–379; Holm Sundhaussen, »Das Ustaša-Syndrom. Ideologie – Tatsachen – Folgen«, v: Reinhard Lauer idr. (ur.), Das jugoslawische Desaster. Historische, sprachliche und ideologische Hintergründe, Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden, 1995, str. 149–187, in »Geschichte und Vergangenheitspolitik«, DAAD Newsletter, let. 3, 2003, št. 1, http://web.fu-berlin.de/soeg/newsletters_de.pdf. 3 V tem prispevku razumem »etnijo« in »nacionalnost oz. narodnost« kot družbeni in kulturno izgrajeni kategoriji družbene ali kulturne pripadnosti. Razlikujemo lahko med (vsaj) tremi teoretskimi gledišči, ki se nanašajo na kategoriji »etnije« in »nacionalnosti oz. narodnosti«: a) primordialna koncepcija se osredinja v ideji skupnega izvora (Edwards Shils, Clifford Geertz); b) modernistični koncept postavlja v žarišče skupno zgodovino ali idejo o skupni usodi, jeziku, veri in družbeni ureditvi (Benedict Anderson, Nira Yuval - Davis); c) poudarjanje države postavlja v prvi plan politično reprezentacijo v obliki nacionalne države (Anthony Smith and Charles Taylor). Pojem »etnija« se v kontekstu pričujočega besedila nanaša predvsem na prvi dve koncepciji – primordialno in modernistično –, medtem ko se »narodnost« razteza čez vse tri, primordialno, modernistično in državno. Za delovanje pojma »narodnost« je osrednjega pomena pojem politične reprezentacije. Vse opisane koncepte pa je treba razumeti kot družbene, kulturne in s tem ideološke konstrukte. 4 Gl. npr. Reinhard Lauer, »Das Wüten der Mythen. Kritische Anmerkungen zur serbischen heroischen Dichtung«, v: Das jugoslawische Desaster, 1995, str. 107–148; John B. Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia, Hurst & Co., London, 2000; Lynda E. Boose, »Crossing the River Drina: Bosnian Rape Camps, Turkish Impalement, and Serb Cultural Memory«, SIGNS, let. 28, 2002, št. 1, ur. Marianne Hirsch in Valerie Smith, str. 71–96. 5 Dubravka Žarkov, »Gender, Orientalism and the History of Ethnic Hatred in the Former Yugoslavia«, v: NiraYuval - Davis, Helma Lutz, Ann Poenix (ur.), Crossfires: Nationalism, Racism and Gender in Europe, Pluto Press, London, 2005, str. 111. 6 Prim. Michel Foucault, Die Ordnung der Dinge, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt na Majni, 1994; Die Ordnung des Diskurses, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt na Majni, [1970] 1991. 7 Prav tam. 8 Prim. Ivan Čolović, Bordell der Kriege – Folklore, Politik und Krieg, Fibre, Osnabrück, 1994; Svetlana Slapšak, Rat je počeo na Maksimiru. Govor mržnje u medijima (analiza pisanja “Politike” i “Borbe” 1987–1991), Medija Centar, Beograd, 1997, in Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation,
38 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Breaking a Nation – Literature and Politics in Yugoslavia, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1998. 9 Prim. Slapšak, Wachtel, nav. deli. 10 Prim. Joshua A. Fishman, Language and Nationalism. Two Integrative Essays, Newbury House Publishers, Rowley, Massachusetts, [1972], 1975, in Benedicentury Anderson, Die Erfindung der Nation. Zur Karriere eines folgenreichen Konzepts, Ullstein Buchverlage, Berlin, 1998. V svojem najpomembnejšem delu Imagined Communities je Anderson opisal nacionalizem kot sopotnika industrializacije in širjenja kapitalističnih načinov produkcije. Ti premiki so v srednjem veku spodbudili razvoj deželnih narečij na račun latinščine kot jezika duhovščine in kralja (Anderson, nav. delo, str. 39– 47). V času nemške romantike so (nemško) deželno narečje povzdignili v bistvo skupnosti, opredeljene kot nemški narod, ki naseljuje določeno ozemlje in deli skupne korenine in preteklost (prim. Johann Gottfried Herder, »Über den Ursprung der Sprache«, Werke, knj. II, ur. Wolfgang Pross, Carl Hanser Verlag, München, 1987). Kakor je ugotovil zgodovinar Holm Sundhaussen, je v Jugovzhodni Evropi prišlo do križanja tako imenovanega citoyen modela nacionalizma, sicer značilnega za francosko revolucijo, z nacionalizmom, značilnim za nemško romantiko (prim. Sundhaussen, nav. delo). 11 Prim. Barbara Kunzmann - Müller, »Die slawischen Sprachen im ehemaligen Jugoslawien – Kontinuität und Diskontinuität der Entwicklung«, v: Boris Forost Neusius (ur.), Sprache und Kultur in Südosteuropa, Arbeitspapier 26, München, 2005, str. 47–63; Zvonko Kovač, Poredbna i/ili innterkulturna povijest književnosti, Hrvatsko filološko društvo, Zagreb, 2001, in »Kanon u ‘medjuknjiževnim zajednicama’ i interkulturna povijest književnosti (u tezama)«, Sarajevske sveske, št. 8–9, Sarajevo, 2005, str. 87–100. 12 Za nove standardizacije »srbohrvaščine« glej npr. Nataša Bašić, »Nasilna kroatizacija«, Jezik, let. 41, št. 5, Zagreb, 1994, str. 157–160; Kunzman - Müller, nav. delo; Senahid Halilović, Pravopis bosanskog jezika, Preporod, Sarajevo, 1996; Dževad Jahić, Jezik bosanskih muslimana, Biblioteka Kljucanin, Sarajevo, 1991, in Dževad Jahić, Bosanski jezik u 100 pitanja i 100 odgovora, Ljiljan, Sarajevo, 1999. 13 Gl. Kunzmann - Müller, nav. delo, str. 56. Narečna diverzifikacija bosanskega, hrvaškega, srbskega in črnogorskega jezika izvira iz različnega izgovora staroslovanskega »ě«: v srbščini in črnogorščini se izgovarja kot »e«, v bosanščini in hrvaščini »ije«. Največkrat omenjeni primer za to razliko je beseda »mleko«, ki se izgovarja kot »mleko« ali »mlijeko«. Drugo narečno razlikovanje izhaja iz izgovorjave besede »kaj«, in sicer kot »što«, »kaj« in »ča«. Te razlike so predvsem rezultat različnih zgodovinskih in družbenopolitičnih procesov, ki zaznamujejo Jugovzhodno Evropo. Hrvaški jezik se je razvil v stiku z italijanskim, madžarskim in nemškim, zapisuje se v latinici, medtem ko je v bosanskem in srbskem besedišču precej izposojenk, jezika pa se zapisujeta bodisi v latinici bodisi v cirilici. 14 Gl. prav tam. 15 Gl. obe nav. deli Zvonka Kovača. 16 »Javni spomin na vojno postane del tiste gramatike nacionalizma, ki so jo od izteka 18. stoletja pisali povsod po Evropi, nikakor ne zgolj na Balkanu, in ki je vse do danes ohranila velik del te
39 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST svoje navezave. [...] Neoslabljen je ostal celó spomin na izgubljene vojne – kot na tiste poskuse bojevite dovršitve sanj o nacionalni državi, ki so se ‘izplačali’, četudi so spodleteli,« je zapisal Höpken v svoji študiji o politikah spomina na vojno v Jugovzhodni Evropi (Höpken, nav. delo, str. 371–372). 17 Prim. Wachtel, nav. delo, str. 197–226. 18 Prav tam, str. 197–198. 19 Prim. Aleida Assmann, Jan Assmann (ur.), Kanon und Zensur. Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation II, Fink, München, 1987; Aleida Assmann, »Was sind kulturelle Texte?«, v: Andreas Poltermann (ur.), Literaturkanon – Medienereignis – Kultureller Text, Erich Schmidt Verlag, Berlin, 1995, str. 232–244; Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses, Beck, München, 2003; Jan Assmann, »Kollektives Gedächtnis und kulturelle Identität«, v: Jan Assmann, Tonio Hölscher (ur.), Kultur und Gedächtnis, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt na Majni, 1988, str. 9–19, in Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen, Beck, München, 1999. 20 Pojma »eksonormativen« in »endonormativen« [jezik] izhajata iz sociolingvistike, kjer ju uporabljajo za opise večjezičnih skupnosti. Eksonormativen jezik se ravna po jezikovnem standardu, ki se uporablja v drugi državi (npr. bosanski Hrvati se v svojem jezikovnem standardu navezujejo na matico; to deloma velja tudi za bosanske Srbe). Standard endonormativnega jezika je določen po standardu države, v kateri skupnost tudi živi. Tukaj pojma uporabljam v smislu navezave na kulturo. 21 Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, Maxwell Macmillan International, New York , 1991, str. 159. 22 Prav tam. 23 Margaret R. Higonnet, »Cassandra’s Question. Do Women Write War Novels?«, v: ista (ur.), Borderwork, Feminist Engagements with Comparative Literature, Cornell University Press, Ithaca – London, 1994, str. 150. 24 Prav tam, str. 160. 25 Gl. Höpken, nav. delo. 26 V prvi svetovni vojni je bilo med vsemi civilnimi žrtvami 15 odstotkov civilnega prebivalstva. Število civilnih žrtev je v drugi svetovni vojni naraslo na 65 odstotkov, v pojugoslovanskih vojnah pa kar na 90 odstotkov (Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites, Henry Holt, New York, 1997, str. 206–227). 27 Prim. Philippe Lejeune, Der autobiographische Pakt, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt na Majni, 1994. 28 Spominjam se, ko sem prvič slišala za feministične pristope h književnosti, ko sem študirala primerjalno književnost na Univerzi v Ljubljani. Znan in ugleden profesor je takrat pravzaprav izredno zanimivo predaval o metodologiji literarnih ved. Predaval je dva semestra, za opis feministične literarne teorije pa je porabil »celih« pet minut: omenil je le nekaj imen, »ki naj bi se ukvarjala z reprezentacijami žensk v literaturi«.
40 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST 29 Renate von Heydebrand, Simone Winko, »Geschlechterdifferenz und literarischer Kanon. Historische Beobachtungen und systematische Überlegungen«, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, let. 19, 1994, št. 2, str. 141–152. 30 Prav tam. 31 Prav tam. 32 Primer takšnega protikanonskega modela je koncept Elaine Showalter – »ginokritika« (»gynocriticism«). Gl. avtoričino študijo A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1977. 33 Judith Butler, Težave s spolom, Škuc, Ljubljana, 2001. 34 Dale Robert Parker, »Material Choices: American Fictions, the Classroom, and the Canon«, American Literary History, let. 5, 1993, št. 1, str. 105. 35 Izsledki raziskav pojugoslovanskih vojnih književnosti jasno kažejo, da prestopanje strogih zvrstnih definicij nikakor ni le značilnost tako imenovane »ženske pisave«.
LITERATURA
Allcock, John B., Explaining Yugoslavia, Hurst & Co., London, 2000. Anderson, Benedict, Die Erfindung der Nation. Zur Karriere eines folgenreichen Konzepts. Ullstein Buchverlage, Berlin, [1983] 1998 (orig.: Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, New York, 1983). Assmann, Aleida in Jan Assmann (ur.), Kanon und Zensur. Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation II, Fink, München, 1987. Assmann, Aleida, »Was sind kulturelle Texte?«, v: Andreas Poltermann (ur.), Literaturkanon – Medienereignis – Kultureller Text, Erich Schmidt Verlag, Berlin, 1995, str. 232–244. Assmann, Aleida, Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses, Beck, München, [1999], 2003. Assmann, Jan, »Kollektives Gedächtnis und kulturelle Identität«, v: Jan Assmann, Tonio Hölscher (ur.), Kultur und Gedächtnis, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt na Majni, 1988, str. 9–19. Assmann, Jan, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen, Beck, München, [1992], 1999. Assmann, Jan, »Erinnerung und Identität – der ägyptische Weg«, v: Ulrich Baumgärtner, Waltraud Schreiber (ur.), Geschichts-Erzählung und Geschichts-Kultur. Zwei geschichtsdidaktische Leitbegriffe in der Diskussion, Herbert Utz Verlag, München, 2001, str. 137–158. Bašić, Nataša, »Nasilna kroatizacija«, Jezik, let. 41 (1994), št. 5, str. 157–160.
41 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Boose, E. Lynda, »Crossing the River Drina: Bosnian Rape Camps, Turkish Impalement, and Serb Cultural Memory«, v: Marianne Hirsch, Valerie Smith (ur.), SIGNS, let. 28 (2002), št. 1, str. 71–96. Butler, Judith, Das Unbehagen der Geschlechter, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt na Majni, 1991 (orig.: Gender Trouble, Routledge, New York, 1990). Čolović, Ivan, Bordell der Kriege – Folklore, Politik und Krieg, Fibre, Osnabrück, 1994. Ehrenreich, Barbara, Blood Rites, Henry Holt, New York, 1997. Fishman, Joshua, A., Language and Nationalism. Two Integrative Essays, Newbury House Publishers, Rowley, Massachusetts, [1972], 1975. Foucault, Michel, Die Ordnung der Dinge, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt na Majni, 1974b. Foucault, Michel, Die Ordnung des Diskurses, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt na Majni, [1970], 1991. Geertz, Clifford, Old Societies and New States, Free Press, New York, 1963. Halilović, Senahid, Pravopis bosanskog jezika, Preporod, Sarajevo, 1996. Herder, Johann Gottfried, »Über den Ursprung der Sprache«, v: Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke, zv. II, ur. Wolfgang Pross, Carl Hanser Verlag, München, [1772], 1987. Heydebrand, von Renate – Winko, Simone, »Geschlechterdifferenz und literarischer Kanon. Historische Beobachtungen und systematische Überlegungen«, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, let. 19, 1994, št. 2, str. 96–165. Higonnet, Margaret R., »Cassandra’s Question. Do Women Write War Novels?«, v: Margaret Higonnet (ur.), Borderwork. Feminist Engagements with Comparative Literature, Cornell University Press, Ithaca – London, 1994, str. 144–161. Höpken, Wolfgang, »Krieg und historische Erinnerung auf dem Balkan«, v: Eva Behring, Ludwig Richter idr. (ur.), Geschichtliche Mythen in den Literaturen und Kulturen Ostmittel-und Südosteuropas, Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart, 1999, str. 371–379. Hynes, Samuel, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, Maxwell Macmillan International, New York, [1990], 1991. Jahić, Dževad, Jezik bosanskih muslimana, Biblioteka Ključanin, Sarajevo, 1991. Jahić, Dževad, Bosanski jezik u 100 pitanja i 100 odgovora, Ljiljan, Sarajevo, 1999. Kovač, Zvonko, Poredbna i/ili innterkulturna povijest književnosti, Hrvatsko filološko društvo, Zagreb, 2001. Kovač, Zvonko, »Kanon u ‘medjuknjiževnim zajednicama’ i interkulturna povijest književnosti (u tezama)«, Sarajevske sveske, št. 8–9, 2005, str. 87–100. Kunzmann - Müller, Barbara, »Die slawischen Sprachen im ehemaligen Jugoslawien – Kontinuität und Diskontinuität der Entwicklung«, v: Boris Neusius (ur.), Sprache und Kultur in Südosteuropa, forost, München, 2005, str. 47–63. Lauer, Reinhard, »Das Wüten der Mythen. Kritische Anmerkungen zur serbischen heroischen Dichtung«, v: Reinhard Lauer (ur.), Das jugoslawische Desaster, Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden, 1995, str. 107–148. Lejeune, Philippe, Der autobiographische Pakt, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt na Majni, 1994.
42 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Lord, Bates Albert, Der Sänger erzählt – Wie ein Epos entsteht, Carl Hanse Verlag, München, 1966 (orig.: The Singer of Tales, Atheneum, New York, 1960). Parker, Dale Robert, »Material Choices: American Fictions, the Classroom, and the Canon«, American Literary History, let. 5, 1993, št. 1, str. 89–110. Shils, Edward, »Primordial, personal, sacred and civil ties«, British Journal of Sociology, št. 7, 1957, str. 113–145. Showalter, Elaine, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1977. Smith, Anthony, The Ethnic Origin of Nations, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1986. Slapšak, Svetlana, Rat je počeo na Maksimiru. Govor mržnje u medijima (analiza pisanja »Politike« i »Borbe« 1987–1991), Medija Centar, Beograd, 1997. Sundhaussen, Holm, »Das Ustaša-Syndrom. Ideologie – Tatsachen – Folgen«, v: Reinhard Lauer idr. (ur.), Das jugoslawische Desaster. Historische, sprachliche und ideologische Hintergründe, Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden, 1995, str. 149–187. Sundhaussen, Holm, »Geschichte und Vergangenheitspolitik«, v: DAAD Newsletter, let. 3, 2003, št. 1, http://web.fu-berlin.de/soeg/newsletters_de.pdf. Taylor, Charles, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1992. Ugrešić, Dubravka, Muzej bezuvjetne predaje, Samizdat – Konzor, Zagreb – Beograd, 2002. Wachtel, Brauch Andrew, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation – Literature and Politics in Yugoslavia, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1998. Yuval - Davis, Nira, Geschlecht und Nation, Die Brottsuppe, Emmendingen, 2001 (orig.: Gender and Nation, Sage, London, 1997). Žarkov, Dubravka, »Gender, Orientalism and the History of Ethnic Hatred in the Former Yugoslavia«, v: Nira Yuval - Davis, Helma Lutz, Ann Poenix (ur.), Crossfires: Nationalism, Racism and Gender in Europe, Pluto Press, London – East Haven, 1995, str. 105–121.
43 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST
44 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST JELENA PETROVIĆ
POLITIKA FEMINISTIČNEGA PISANJA/BRANJA/ PREVAJANJA
Nova družbenospolna razmerja na območju nekdanje Jugoslavije, ki odražajo spremembe v ideologiji, družbenih razmerjih, političnih ureditvah, nacionalnih kartiranjih in kulturnih pogajanjih, nekaterih dokaj nasilnih, so spodbujala omahljivo akademsko refleksijo: pomislimo samo na obsežen politični in nacionalni pritisk na akademsko skupnost ter na (pred kratkim še) prevladujočo držo sprejemanja ideoloških in političnih smernic, ki so bile sprejete brez kakršne koli resne razprave. Seveda moram k temu dodati še očitno interesno območje, odprto za nacionalno preurejanje in ki zadeva tiste akademike in znanstvenike, ki so (bili) pripravljeni izražati »sprejemljiva« stališča in so zato (bili) medijsko podprti ali privilegirani, zagotovljena so jim (bila) projektna sredstva in druge netransparentne ugodnosti, ki jih omogoča državni aparat. Tisti pa, ki so bili dovolj trmasti, da so predstavili stališča, ki niso sovpadala z nacionalnimi merili (ali celo rezultate raziskav), so bodisi tvegali oznako »izdajalec« bodisi so bili utišani v vseprežemajočem procesu etnonacionalnega oblikovanja znanosti, umetnosti, kulture. Seveda so (bile) feministične avtorice in ženska aktivistična združenja na vrhu seznama za tovrstno »izključevanje«. Prav zato je tematika sprememb na področju družbenospolne »distribucije« in (vnovične) emancipacije javnega in akademskega prostora še vedno občutljiva in morda obsojena na veliko tveganje, kar se tiče lokalnih visokošolskih in znanstvenih ustanov, saj je (bila) najprej in najbolj povezana s kritiko (etno)nacionalistične ideologije.
45 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Veliko žensk, zlasti feministk, se je med jugoslovansko vojno in v pojugoslovanskih tranzicijskih preobratih1 ves čas dejavno odzivalo na vztrajne etnonacionalistične diskurze, arbitrarne politike retradicionaliziranih spolnih vlog in na izrabljanje javnih reprezentacij žensk. Te feministične intervencije v (zavajajoče) interpretacijske modele zgodovine, spomina, kulture, jezika, umetnosti in politike bližnje preteklosti sicer niso bile dovolj močne, da bi premagale virulentne etnonacionalistične naracije in delitve v (po)vojnem obdobju, vendar so zagotovo potegnile rdečo nit, upoštevajoč emancipacijske politike vsakdanjega življenja za prihodnost. Na tej točki si prizadevam prikazati nekaj primerov feminističnega (literarnega) pisanja/branja/prevajanja, ki so zelo pomembni za sedanje procese zgodovinjenja (po)jugoslovanskega prostora. Namen takšnega pristopa je pokazati, kako se ženski diskurz upira nastrojenosti do žensk, šovinizmu, etnonacionalizmu in politični izgubi spomina.
ZGODOVINA VS. SPOMIN: APROPRIACIJA IN ETNIZACIJA ŽENSKIH TELES
Kljub emancipaciji žensk po drugi svetovni vojni, sprva v urbanih območjih Jugoslavije, in kljub uradnim razglasitvam spolne enakosti je ostal literarni kanon, strukturiran v »zlatih letih« jugoslovanskega socializma, pristranski – nagibal se je k moškim in njihovi perspektivi. V času socializma, oziroma v obdobju od leta 1945 vse do konca sedemdesetih let, ko so ženske pridobile novo, jugoslovansko identiteto, so bile reprezentacije žensk, ki so se opirale na veroizpoved in narodnost, dovoljene le, v kolikor je bil njihov namen dekonstrukcija zastarelih kulturnih kategorij v prid novih, nadnacionalnih, ki so izhajale iz ideologije bratstva in enotnosti. Po novih zahtevah socialistične družbe je morala biti literatura politično primerna, izjeme so bile le redke, denimo v zvezi s posameznimi kulturnimi uokvirjanji kmečkih ali mestnih žena – včasih so bile te podobe stereotipno uokvirjene glede na predpostavljeno etnično ozadje teh žensk. V okviru nacionalističnega diskurza na začetku osemdesetih let so bila ženska telesa simbolno uporabljana za označevanje etničnega ozemlja. Geslo »bratstvo in enotnost« kot simbol enakih pravic in velike bratske ljubezni se je preobrnilo v »bratomorno vojno« – pod okriljem novega, vendar hkrati dobro poznanega simbola boja za »poenoteno, čisto
46 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST in vrednejšo etnično identiteto«. Pogled oblasti, moški pogled, je bil neposredno podan prek simbolne podobe ženskega telesa: v javnosti in skozi ta pogled je bilo žensko telo preoblikovano v abstraktni pojem Nacije, Domovine, Svobode itn.2 V svoji analizi takih izhodišč Julie Mostov poudarja: »To pomeni, da ženska telesa niso zgolj simboli narodove plodnosti in nosilke njegove reprodukcije, temveč so tudi teritorialni markerji. Oziroma: matere, žene in hčere označujejo prostor nacije, hkrati pa so tudi last te nacije in njenih sinov.«3 Med vojno so bile ženske v javnem diskurzu uporabljane ali izrabljane kot ambivalenten semiotični konstrukt, ki naj bi bil označevalec za »naše« in »vaše«: predstavljal je matere ali sestre »naših« junakov ter matere ali sestre »Drugega«, sovražnika. Posledica tega je bila, da je v nacionalističnem diskurzu postala pozicija žensk nekaj poljubnega – z njo se je dejansko manipuliralo. Ženska telesa so bila uporabljena kot reprezentativni simboli, ki so označevali meje nacije in globoko zakoreninjene nacionalistične ideologije ter vojne propagande. Manipuliranje z ženskimi telesi, v nacionalnem diskurzu simbolično označenimi kot »etnično ozemlje«, izvira že iz medijskih reprezentacij v osemdesetih letih preteklega stoletja, ko so mediji razširjali zgodbe o sistematičnem »etničnem« posiljevanju Srbkinj, storilci pa naj bi bili Albanci, in zgodbe o albanski demografski vojni proti srbskemu narodu na Kosovu, ki naj bi jo Albanci udejanjali v obliki čezmerne rodnosti. To obdobje bi lahko opredelili kot začetek vznika etnonacionalističnega diskurza v javnosti. Srbske državne oblasti in javne osebe, kot so znani novinarji, nacionalni pesniki in drugi, so proizvedli različne zgodbe in besedne zveze, ki so bile tesno povezane s poezijo in epsko tradicijo (obe izvirata iz srbskega mita o Kosovu) in ki so takrat postale del priročnega kulturnega in znanstvenega besednjaka. Prenovljena teorija o veliki nacionalni zaroti proti srbskemu narodu je ženske vključila v arbitraren etnonacionalistični kontekst. Javni diskurz je vseboval opredelitve kot »biološko iztrebljenje«, »srbske matere«, ki so bile sinonim za »sodobne ženske«, medtem ko naj bi bile Albanke »mašine« za razmnoževanje. Negotov obstoj redkih Albancev, ki bi pričali o srbskem nacionalizmu, je obudil spomine na »plemenitega divjaka« literarne in tudi kolonialne tradicije.4 Po padcu berlinskega zidu leta 1989 so postali spol, razred in narodnost označevalci obnovljenih nacionalnih identitet, ki so se razvijale iz tranzicijskih preobratov in nacionalističnega govora. Poleg tega so bile znova vpletene stereotipne reprezentacije ženske, tokrat
47 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST za potrebe vojne propagande. Na začetku devetdesetih let je postala »tradicionalna« zgodba o hrvaškem trpinčenju srbskega naroda vse od druge svetovne vojne vélika téma obnovljene literarne in javne nomenklature. Nacionalni spori, ki imajo korenine že v drugi svetovni vojni, so bili prikazovani kot nadaljevanje barbarskih, krutih dejanj ustašev. Spomine na čas fašizma in ustaštva so obujali tudi v javnih govorih, napevih nogometnih navijačev na stadionih in s hiperprodukcijo nacionalistične literature.5 Istočasno so hrvaški mediji redno objavljali poročila o množičnih posilstvih muslimank v Bosni, ki naj bi jih zakrivili izključno Srbi. Po uradnih medijih naj bi bilo posiljenih neprimerno manj Hrvatic. Vse te zgodbe o muslimankah, kjer so te nastopale kot šibkejše v samoobrambi – oviralo naj bi jo »njihovo primitivno tradicionalno okolje« –, so bile zelo povezane s prepoznavno propagando. Nedvomno je bil za nacijo (družbeni) spol temeljni kamen izgradnje viktimizirane identitete.6 Etnonacionalistični govor, ki je uporabljal in zlorabljal posilstva muslimank – storilci so bili nacionalni vojaki – Srbi –, ni bil v interesu žensk, ampak v službi oblikovanja etnične identitete za vojno propagando. Enačenje ženskih teles z nacijo in bojiščem izvira iz tako globoko nacionalistične ideologije, ki dodeljuje dejavne vloge oziroma »subjektno pozicijo« moškim – oni se bodo vojskovali, branili in širili ozemlje in lastnino: »utirajo si torej identiteto moških, zastopnikov naroda tako na simbolnem in fizičnem ozemlju domovine, ki jo morajo varovati in ubraniti pred transgresijo in ki nosi seme in kri nekdanjih in prihodnjih bojevnikov, kot tudi nad in prek dejanskih teles žensk, ki omogočajo reprodukcijo naroda, določajo njegove fizične meje in ohranjajo njegovo svetost. Ženska telesa je mogoče obravnavati kot zagotavljanje bojišča za moške vojne: na tem bojišču ženskih teles poteka prestopanje meja in njihovo novo začrtovanje.«7 Med vojno so podobne ideološke reprezentacije muslimank razširjali senzacionalistični članki in knjige, obrabljeni stereotipi so se ponavljali celo v akademskih publikacijah; v prispevkih na Zahodu so se takšni prikazi pojavljali v funkciji informacij o ostudnih zločinih, ki so jih nad ženskami storili med vojno. Na primer: po mnenju novinarja, Pulitzerjevega nagrajenca Roya Gutmana, ki je poročal o genocidu v Bosni, so med vojno posiljene muslimanke tudi po vojni živele v strahu pred zavračanjem in pregnanstvom, njihov položaj pa naj bi najverjetneje izhajal iz tradicionalnega načina življenja v tišini, ki je bil »konzervativen in primitiven«. V uvodu v zbornik člankov, ki
48 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST ga je uredila Alexandra Stiglmayer, Gutman trdi, da je posiljevanje žensk del vsake vojne, v primeru vojne v Bosni pa so vojna posilstva igrala neprimerljivo vlogo, ki je zato imela toliko globlje posledice. Znova torej naletimo na stereotipno podobo o muslimankah, ki naj bi odraščale in živele v bosanskih vasicah, v »konzervativni družbi«, kar pomeni, da do poroke ohranjajo deviškost, da so tihe, konzervativne in primitivne, brez lastnega političnega glasu. Po Gutmanu so to razlogi, zakaj med vojno posiljene muslimanke še vedno živijo v strahu pred »zavračanjem in pregnanstvom«, a tudi v strahu, da bodo ostale »samske in brez otrok«.8 Dva članka v omenjenem zborniku je prispevala tudi feministka Catherine MacKinnon: »Preobračanje posilstva v pornografijo: postmoderni genocid« ter »Posilstvo, genocid in človekove pravice žensk«. Razpravljala je o tem, kako so bila dejanja posilstva muslimank distribuirana kot pornografija za namene vojne propagande. Vodilna borka proti pornografiji v Ameriki je uporabila vojna posilstva v Bosni kot ilustrativen argument za svoje aktivistično raziskovanje (Srbi so med vojno v Bosni posiljevali zato, ker je bil srbski trg že pred tem preplavljen s pornografijo). Ocenila je tudi, da je bilo več kot trideset tisoč primerov nosečnosti v Bosni posledica posilstva. Da bi dokazala svojo tezo, je objavila neutemeljene podatke; tako bi jo lahko kjer koli ponavljali, brez večjega premisleka, kakor da bi neobstoječa, tako imenovana pornografija neprekinjeno obstajala. S protipornografskim prizadevanjem Catherine MacKinnon pa očitno delimo enak cilj – prepoznavanje zlorabe, depolitizacije vojnih žrtev in manipuliranja z njimi.9 Leta 1999 je feministična pisateljica, ostra nasprotnica nacionalističnega diskurza v zgodnjih devetdesetih letih Slavenka Drakulić objavila roman S.: Roman o Balkanu. Nekaj let po »lovu na čarovnice«,10 na kar je bil obsojen njen roman, je objavila še enega, o posilstvih muslimank, ki so jih zagrešili srbski vojaki; osnova tega romana je dokumentarno gradivo, osebne izpovedi žrtev vojne v Bosni. Črka »S« v naslovu romana o Balkanu označuje glavni lik, resnično učiteljico iz bosanske vasice. Zgodba se začne z materinskim domom na Švedskem, kjer se S nenehno spominja strahotne »ženske sobe« v srbskem taborišču, kjer je bila skupaj z drugimi taboriščnicami vsak dan izpostavljena priložnostnemu posiljevanju in nasilju. Ne ve, kaj naj stori z novorojenčkom; ne more predelati travmatičnih taboriščnih izkušenj niti dejstva, da je eden od tistih srbskih vojakov dojenčkov
49 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST oče. Knjiga vsebuje številne grozljive podobe, monstruozna dejanja, spremlja pot uničenega življenja ženske, od sovraštva do ljubezni, ki ga lahko premaga z dejanjem rojstva otroka ... Ob izidu slovenskega prevoda romana v Ljubljani je avtorica pojasnila, da je hotela podati literarno rekonstrukcijo emocionalnega in psihološkega stanja ženskih žrtev vojne v Bosni, o čemer je bilo zanjo zelo težko poročati na osnovi individualiziranih dokumentarcev, osebnih zgodb in celo zaupnih pogovorov z žrtvami. Odločila se je, da literarno rekonstruira kolektivni glas žrtve – glas posiljenih žensk.11 Prvotni naslov romana – Kot da me ne bi bilo – je bil spremenjen v S.: Roman o Balkanu, na zahtevo ameriškega založnika, ki je hotel, da bi naslov knjige zvenel »privlačneje« za zahodne bralce. Za mnoge recenzente je roman zelo prepričljiv literarni prikaz pošastne strani vojne v Bosni in nasilja nad muslimankami: »Težko je oceniti število muslimank, ki so bile žrtve posilstva (bilo naj bi jih okoli 60.000), in morda je še težje doumeti vse razsežnosti škode. V ozadju časopisnih poročil – osupljivih političnih sprememb, začrtanih in na novo postavljenih meja in spremenljivih statistik – se skrivajo zgodbe o tem, kaj se je zgodilo na tisoče muslimankam in kako so se spoprijele s temi izkušnjami.«12 Ocene romana po prvi, ameriški izdaji so potrdile predhodne medijske prikaze vojne v Bosni – kot poenostavljene različice boja med dobrimi in slabimi fanti na Balkanu, ki poteka nekje onkraj televizijskih zaslonov –, obenem pa so novo knjigo Slavenke Drakulić promovirale kot prodajno uspešnico. Ta primer kaže, kako se »nejasno« pisanje ulovi v past na etničnem izvoru utemeljenih esencialističnih prikazov žrtev in v past ponavljanja stereotipov o Balkanu kot o temačni provinci prepirljivega barbarstva – med drugim z namenom uspešnejšega trženja in prodaje, ki bi presegla lokalne meje. Vzporednica tem večplastnim pripovedim o vojnih posilstvih je dobro ilustrirana tudi v akademskih prikazih istega problema, saj kaže na zelo podoben manipulativni obrat. Vzemimo za primer omenjeni zbornik Alexandre Stiglmayer, na katerega se feministične teoretičarke pogosto sklicujejo v svojih raziskavah vojnega nasilja. Čeprav je očitno, da imamo opravka z raznovrstnimi pojavi, z različnimi politikami in nameni – eni so zgolj nerodni, drugi pa koristoljubni –, je vsak od njih naslavljal kritični feministični pristop, poglobitev v travme žensk, ki so jih doživele v resničnem življenju.
50 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST FEMINISTIČNI NASPROTNI POGLED
Ženske, ki se niso prepustile evforiji etnonacionalistične reprezentacije in propagande, ovite v kvaziparlamentarno demokracijo zgodnjih devetdesetih let in njene tranzicijske obljube, je javnost surovo diskvalificirala (kot čarovnice, trobila, izrodke, apatride itn.) – kljub dejstvu, da v nobeni od novih držav na območju nekdanje Jugoslavije niso imele velikega vpliva. Tako so postale tarča zadrtih etnopatriotov in nacionalnih bojevnikov, obtoževali so jih izdaje domovine. V navezavi na nove, etnonacionalistične prioritete in delitve so številne pisateljice opozarjale na iz/rabo reprezentacij in vlog žensk v etnonacionalistični in vojni propagandi. Različne generacije pisateljic – denimo Dubravka Ugrešić, Daša Drndić, Alma Lazarevska, Maruša Krese, Ljiljana Đurđić, Ferida Duraković, Marija Ivanović, Irena Vrkljan, Šejla Šehabović, Tanja Stupar, Adisa Bašić idr. – so izzvale in še vedno kljubujejo konvencionalnim literarnim oblikam reprezentacij žensk, ki se naslanjajo na patriarhalne kode, medijsko (pre)obračanje in nove nacionalistične vrednote. Uvedle so alternativo mitu »o balkanskem sindromu recipročne tragedije«, »ujetnikih nedokončane zgodovine« in »nemočnih žrtvah nasilja«. Kot pravi Renata Jambrešić Kirin, občutek simbolne in kulturne dezorientacije je bil za marsikatero žensko vplivnejši od vseh občutkov deteritorializacije. Potreba po soočenju z moralno krizo v družbi je bila odločilnejša od vseh občutkov izkoreninjenosti oziroma dejstva zgodovinske diskontinuitete. Poleg tega je za marsikatero pisateljico ali pesnico izguba vsakršnega razumnega in razumljivega pogleda na prihodnost bolj razdirajoča kot kateri koli razkroj tradicionalnih vrednot, na katerega se sklicuje poljubna vélika kolektivna identiteta, kjer ne bi bilo možnosti individualnega vpliva na to »identiteto«. Njihovo občutje izgube mesta ali premestitve jih je pripeljalo v položaj, ki ga Renata Jambrešić Kirin oriše z oksimoronom: brezdomka doma.13 Tovrstna fragmentacija – transgresija klasičnih žanrov in tém, ki jih protežira literarni kanon, in medbesedilnost kot preplet zgodovinskih, političnih, družbenih in aktualnih dogajanj – je spodbudila politično ozaveščen in emancipacijski diskurz. Poleg naštetih pisateljic in pesnic so tudi mnoge teoretičarke – profesorice in hkrati aktivistke – organizirale več javnih dogodkov, protestov, objavljale so članke in knjige, da bi se po tej poti uprle etnonacionalističnim pritiskom in vojnim diskurzom (Svetlana Slapšak, Rada Iveković, Biljana Kašić, Staša Zajović, Reana
51 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Senjković, Ines Prica in številne druge).14 Vsa ta dela književnic, skupaj s feminističnimi študijami in drugimi besedili o vojnih zločinih, travmah in beguncih, so mnoge feministke spodbudila k nadaljnjemu in nekompromisnemu razvijanju tega diskurza. Naraščanje del o feminizmu in spolu v nekdanji Jugoslaviji ves čas kaže na obseg in raznolikost današnjega pisanja žensk, zato ni jasno, zakaj v posameznih republikah nekdanje Jugoslavije še vedno zanemarjajo to področje in ga obravnavajo kot splet zadrege, nostalgije in izgube, čeprav je hkrati zelo bogato izhodišče za izpraševanje meril verodostojnosti dominantnih etnocentričnih in mizoginih ideologij v pojugoslovanskem prostoru. Novo raziskovanje na terenu v vmesnem območju med politiko gibanja in politiko vednosti omogoča vizijo, ki hoče preseči stanje razočaranja in trmoglavosti, ki so ga izkusile številne feministične teoretičarke in pisateljice v regiji nekdanje Jugoslavije v zadnjem desetletju in pol.15 V tej viziji imajo osebne povezave, ki se razvijajo iz osebnih poznanstev, še vedno vodilno vlogo v iskanju alternativnih poti v feministični teoriji in kritiki, v razpravah o emancipacijski politiki in emergentnih vednostih. Osebne vezi pa nikakor ne izgrajujejo nekih samotnih in varnih pristanov, temveč spodbujajo razvijanje načinov produkcije in izmenjave vednosti, ki temeljijo na sodelovanju, in konkretne korake, ki bodo podpirali sodelujoče. Gre torej za mobilne in tehnološko podprte »epistemološke celice«, ki se ne izogibajo konfrontacijam z utrjenim akademizmom, obenem pa promovirajo kritično razmišljanje in akademske raziskave na posameznih področjih.16 Tovrstno kolektivno in nomadsko delo omogoča platformo za feministično kritiko, teorijo in prakso, ki so v tesni povezavi z lokalnimi in primerjalnimi specifičnostmi, in vznik nove teorije iz lokalnih praks in spoznanj, ki se jim vladajoče ideologije izogibajo ali jih zatirajo, ker so preveč boleče in zagatne, da bi se z njimi soočile. Politika takšnega povezovanja ter intelektualnega in vsakdanjega življenja, ki intervenira v lokalno, regionalno in mednarodno akademsko skupnost, omogoča skupne temelje za individualna ali skupna razmišljanja in prizadevanja na področju (družbenega) spola ter druge vrste meddisciplinarnih del, vključenih v oblikovanje novih feminističnih strategij in epistemoloških modelov produkcije vednosti.
52 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST SOOČANJE Z NE/ZNANIMI SPOMINI IN ZAPISI
V širokem kontekstu ženske in feministične produkcije na območju nekdanje Jugoslavije želim posebej opozoriti na primer zelo zamolčevane in skoraj nepoznane avtorice Svetlane Đorđević, ki je napisala svojevrsten dokumentarni roman; ta zvrst spada med najpomembnejše med (vojnimi) zapisi žensk. Pričevanje o Kosovu je eno redkih pričevanj in dokumentov, ki jih je mogoče opredeliti kot dokumentarno avtobiografsko prozo, ker neposredno prevaja dogodek v pripoved in natančno ozavešča težke izkušnje, obenem pa omogoča družbenopolitično branje vojne. Avtorica, ki ni literarna strokovnjakinja in nima literarnih izkušenj, jasno definira namen svojega pisanja – pričevanje. Zato ne gre za klasični avtobiografski roman kot literarno zvrst, ampak bolj za prevajanje realnosti, prepletanje dokumentarne proze, političnih komentarjev, osebnih izpovedi, spominskih prizorov grozljivih izkušenj, in včasih za prevajanje ženske kulture, ki preseva skozi samorazmislek o strašljivih vojnih dogodkih. Avtorica priča o doživetem življenju na Kosovu in zavrača vsakršno varljivo univerzalno pomembnost velikih zgodovinskih pripovedi; prizadeva si ozavestiti dejstvo, da je treba vsako individualno tragedijo brati kot zgodovinsko tragedijo. Čeprav njena knjiga obuja osebne izpovedi in spomine, je bila z razlogom uvrščena v zbirko Dokumenti, ki jo izdaja beograjski Sklad za humanitarno pravo, saj je dokaz, ki razkriva vojno nasilje in zločine, ki so jih konstruirane zgodovinske in vojne podobe o Kosovu izrinile – osvetljuje potvorjene podobe, ki so med srbskimi elitami in oblastjo delovale in še vedno veljajo kot nedvomna resnica. Ta skoraj nepoznani primer avtobiografskega ženskega pisanja, ki priča o realnosti vojne z vidika nepoklicne pisateljice, Svetlane Đorđević, je pomemben in zanimiv na več ravneh: kot pričevanje o vojnih zločinih in vsakdanjem življenju med vojno; kot poročilo o brutalnem družinskem in nato državnem nasilju – najprej v Bosni, nato na Kosovu; kot diskurzivna prekoračitev meja in kršitev pravil nacionalistične politike in patriarhalnih kodov; kot osebno prizadevanje za službo, dostojno življenje in vse tiste človekove in državljanske pravice, ki ji po njenem prepričanju pripadajo; kot ženska, ki je nekoč živela v egalitarni socialistični družbi. Vsi ti členi spenjajo aktualnost vojnih dogodkov z avtoričinimi spoznanji in izkušnjami, in subvertirajo dominantni govor nacionalistične propagande. V tem smislu je avtorica priča zgodovine – s tem ko se upira vsem političnim zvezam in
53 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST omejitvam, ki jih postavljajo vladajoče nacionalistične elite, razkriva in ohranja sledi kolektivnega spomina na »Drugega«. Objava njene knjige je zaradi njenega političnega naboja sprožila nasilna nasprotovanja – do te mere, da avtoričino življenje ves čas ogrožajo omenjene elite in da zato ne more več varno živeti.17 Svetlana Đorđević je bila priča strahotnemu nasilju. Obravnava ga kot del etnonacionalne tradicije in kot vitalno orodje za izgradnjo države med vojno. Svoje pričevanje začne z zadržanim opisom vidikov »dóma« in svoje izkušnje domačega nasilja, nato pa se usmeri na nasilje, ki ga nad lastnimi državljani izvaja država – včasih sistematično, pogosto pa povsem spontano; bilo je logična posledica državne izprijenosti, ki jo je povzročila državna etnonacionalistična politika. Uvodno poglavje knjige se dogaja v Bosni, kjer avtoričin brat postane del ene od »junaških« legend o oboroženih silah, »ustanovljenih« v Beogradu (»Rdeče baretke«), za kulisami pa je kmalu zatem žrtev prav takih političnih zločinov, kot jih je prej sam zagrešil. Sestra ga sredi vojnega kaosa poskuša obiskati v Bosanskem Šamcu, kjer je priprt. Poskuša mu pomagati, odloči se, da gre v dve vojni središči, Beograd in Novi Sad (četudi naj država uradno sploh ne bi bila v vojni), kjer se sreča s tistimi, ki so jih pozneje na haaškem Mednarodnem sodišču obtožili vojnih zločinov; med njimi sreča tudi najbolj razvpitega Franka Simatovića Frankija. Opisuje razsežnost teh izkušenj in nevarnost situacij, v katerih se je znašla, pri tem pa tudi natančno navaja imena oseb in krajev dogodkov. Njeno osredotočenje na takšne podrobnosti je bil glavni razlog za gonjo in nasilno nadlegovanje po izidu knjige. Drugi del knjige se osredotoča na avtoričin poskus samostojnega in dostojnega življenja. Po nekaj letih, poleti 1995, ko si je Svetlana Đorđević poskušala urediti eksistenco, jo je zavedel državni program za Kosovo, o katerem so pisali v srbskih medijih. Preselila se je na Kosovo in tam ostala do sklenitve kumanovskega sporazuma. Najprej je delala kot taksistka na prištinskem letališču. Od leta 1995 do 1998 je Albance vozila skozi številne kontrolne točke in si tako pridobila njihovo zaupanje, obenem pa nakopala čedalje večjo jezo srbskih taksistov, krajevnih oblasti in drugih vladajočih nacionalistov. Ker se je sklicevala na ohranjanje človeške vesti – in ne na spodbujanje »nacionalne vesti« –, je nenačrtovano postala priča vsakodnevnega poniževanja in nadlegovanja albanskih civilistov. Ta dogajanja so dosegla višek leta 1998, ko se je začelo odkrito etnično čiščenje, avtorica pa je postala žrtev policijske brutalnosti. Njena pretresljiva izpoved razkriva skrite
54 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST kraje in imena odgovornih za dogodke v tistem času, zlasti pa dokazuje njen pogum, ko se je soočala z zaroto molka glede zločinov, za katere so ljudje na Kosovu ves čas vedeli. Svetlano Đorđević spoznavamo zlasti kot žensko industrijskega, socialističnega časa – prizadeva si za popolno neodvisnost, poudarja potrebo po finančni samostojnosti in socialistični ideal, ki je naslavljal ženske, ujete v precepu med patriarhalno tradicijo in obljubljeno emancipacijo v vsakdanjem življenju – kljub realnosti, ki jo je prisiljena živeti. S tem ko v svoji dokumentarni pripovedi priča o motečih dogodkih, ki jih družba molče opravičuje, država pa ves čas zakriva, osvetljuje povezave med vzroki etnonacionalistične vojne in njihovimi posledicami, žrtvami, zločinci in obtoženci. Proces transformacije realnosti vojne in širše vpetosti tega procesa v svet so z različnimi situacijami, ki jih avtorica doživlja, in njenimi burnimi reakcijami v kriznih trenutkih speti v snov žive dokumentarne pripovedi. Velik politični pomen knjige je – kljub njeni občasni nedorečenosti zaradi spodletelih poskusov usvojitve literarne dovršenosti in kljub zagatam, kako bi jo zvrstno opredelili – prav v izredno avtentičnih opisih, dialogih in zdravorazumskih razmišljanjih, iz katerih izhaja pričevanje o grozljivih dogodkih na Kosovu: o pohabitvah, požigih, trpinčenju, beguncih, nadlegovanju – in o poimensko navedenih storilcih za te zločine. Kljub avtoričini pomanjkljivi literarni izobrazbi in veščosti pisanja pa feministično branje njenega literarnega pričevanja sproža nova vprašanja o angažirani politiki spomina in ženskem pisanju, spodbuja produkcijo vednosti, ki bo zagovarjala politiko enakopravnosti, solidarnosti in skupnostnega duha, ki bo torej kršila pravila, ki jih vsiljuje etnonacionalistična in patriarhalna hegemonija, zlasti v nedavni preteklosti.
NOVA PRAKSA GOVORJENJA, PISANJA, VEDENJA IN V KONČNI INSTANCI ŽIVLJENJA
Politika feminističnega pisanja, branja, prevajanja na območju nekdanje Jugoslavije, ki je rdeča nit prispevka, ima emancipacijski potencial – ne samo za »stari« koncept literarnega diskurza, ampak tudi za družbo v širšem pomenu. V prvi vrsti jo lahko uporabimo kot metaforo za niz družbenih, političnih in kulturnih transformacij v smeri produkcije (g)lokalne in emergentne vednosti. S svojimi analitičnimi
55 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST orodji, ki jih črpa iz sodobnih ženskih študij in ženskega pisanja od devetdesetih let preteklega stoletja do danes, si prizadeva oblikovati transformativne strategije, ki vztrajajo pri politiki enakopravnosti in oblikujejo družbenopolitični in kulturni prostor. S temi strategijami je mogoče raziskovati in okrepiti žensko avtorstvo sredi »kulture politične amnezije«, ki smo ji priča, in zasnovati glavne kategorije, ki bi jih lahko uporabili za izgradnjo razločno feminističnih epistemologij. Po Rosi Braidotti in njeni (feministični) materialistični teoriji postajanja je namen vztrajanja pri feminističnih strategijah oblikovanja in produkcije vednosti »na novo osnovati subjekt v materialno podprtem čutu za odgovornost in etično presojo«, zavzemanje za družbo in okolje. Kot »alternativa globalnemu procesu prečenja, ki bo edino širjenje številnih razlik in ne kvalitativno razsrediščenje hiperindividualizma«, vnovična opredelitev političnega subjekta pomeni vztrajno premeščanje oziroma spremembe, ki jih sprožajo nomadski subjekti s svojim vztrajnim upiranjem, da bi zapadli poblagovljenju svoje lastne raznolikosti. Za tak koncept »postajanj« je najznačilnejše to, da je »njihov časovni okvir vselej prvenstvo prihodnosti, to je povezava čez sedanjost in preteklost v dejanje konstruiranja in aktualiziranja možnih prihodnosti«.18 V širšem kontekstu, ko epistemologija feminističnega pisanja, branja in prevajanja obravnava omenjene »težke téme«, podčrtuje pomen vzajemne povezanosti med družbenozgodovinskim kontekstom, politično predanostjo in redefinicijo subjekta v procesu učenja o preteklosti, ne nazadnje v emergentnem procesu transformacije vsakdanjega življenja.
56 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST OPOMBE
1 Besedno zvezo »tranzicijski preobrat« tu uporabljam zato, da bi podčrtala usmeritev kavzalnega mišljenja – ne zgolj iz ekonomske v politično sfero, temveč k etnonacionalistični retoriki; ta usmeritev zajema prostor pomena, vzorčenja in umeščanja turbulentnih transformacij javne sfere in si prizadeva konceptualizirati vladajočo politiko kot oblastni boj za identitete ali »kulturne« sisteme oziroma kontekstualizirati ta boj kot arbitraren, revizionističen in manipulativen aparat za oblastne in kapitalske boje. 2 Prim. Rada Iveković, »Women, Nationalism and War: ‘Make Love, Not War’«, Hypatia, let. 8, 1993, št. 4, str. 113–127. 3 Julie Mostov, »‘Our Women’/‘Their Women’: Symbolic Boundaries, Territorial Markers and Violence in the Balkans«, Pro Femina – Časopis za žensku književnost i kulturu, št. 3, Beograd, 1995, str. 210. 4 Wendy Bracewell je te prvine nacionalistične ideologije analizirala v članku »Women, Motherhood and Contemporary Serbian Nationalism«, Women’s Studies International Forum, let. 19, 1996, št. 1–2, str. 25–33. Gl. še Svetlana Slapšak v: Nevena Ivanović, »Appropriation and Manipulation of Women’s Writing in the Nationalist Discourse in Serbia in the Nineties«, R.E.Č., let. 59, št. 5, september 2000, str. 199–243. 5 Številni ilustrativni primeri tovrstne popularne »etno« kulture so razčlenjeni v: Ivan Čolović, Bordel ratnika: folklor, politika i rat, Biblioteka XX vek, Beograd, 1994; Svetlana Slapšak, Ogledi o bezbrižnosti, Radio B92, zbirka Apatridi, Beograd, 1994, idr. 6 Po ugotovitvah Dubravke Žarkov je bil konstrukt »kolektivne žrtve« v Bosni poistoveten s podobo »posiljene muslimanke«. V Srbiji so kolektivno žrtev istovetili kar z vsemi »Srbi« (ta kolektivni konstrukt žrtve ne dopušča, da bi kdor koli drug postal legitimna žrtev, prav tako pa onemogoča vsakršno razpravljanje ali raziskovanje srbskih vojnih zločinov, zlasti posilstev žensk in celo v primerih, ko so bile žrtve Srbkinje), na Hrvaškem pa je to bila sama »Hrvaška, domovina«, ne hrvaško ljudstvo. Prim. Dubravka Žarkov, »War Rapes in Bosnia: On Masculinity, Femininity and Power of the Rape Victim Identity«, Tijdschrift voor Criminologie, let. 39, 1997, št. 2, str. 140–151. 7 Mostov, nav. delo, str. 213. 8 Roy Gutman, »Foreword«, v: Alexandra Stiglmayer, Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia- Herzegovina, University of Nebraska Press, 1994, str. ix–xiii. 9 Catherine A. MacKinnon, »Turning Rape into Pornography: Postmodern Genocide«, »Rape, Genocide, and Women’s Human Rights«, v: Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia- Herzegovina, str. 73–81, 183–193. 10 Pet novinark in pisateljic (Dubravka Ugrešić, Jelena Lovrić, Rada Iveković, Vesna Kesić in Slavenka Drakulić) je vladajoča nomenklatura obtožila zaradi njihovih javnih in provokativnih izjav o posilstvih, storjenih med vojno v Bosni. Eden od najagresivnejših časopisnih naslovov iz tistega časa je sporočal, da hrvaške feministke posiljujejo Hrvaško (»Čarovnice iz Ria, hrvaške feministke posiljujejo Hrvaško«, Globus, 11. december 1992). Hrvaške feministke so ustanovile center za
57 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST pomoč vsem ženskam, ki so bile posiljene med vojno. Izjave teh feministk so bile označene kot fašistične, njihovo javno nastopanje, zlasti v tujini, pa je bilo ožigosano kot sovražno in nevarno za Hrvaško. V očeh hrvaške javnosti so postale »orodje srbske rasistične in imperialistične politike« – tej izjavi je sledila še objava njihovih osebnih podatkov (o nacionalnosti, »potrjeni s preštevanjem krvnih celic«, družini, naslovih ipd.), tako da se je lahko vsak, ki jih je hotel nadlegovati, oborožil z vsemi potrebnimi podatki iz omenjenega članka. Pet hrvaških feministk je bilo označenih kot pet čarovnic iz Ria po 58. kongresu PEN-a v Riu de Janeiru, kjer naj bi bile te feministke razlog za ponižanje hrvaškega naroda – to je bil sklep preiskovalne skupine popularnega hrvaškega časopisa Globus. Lov na čarovnice v hrvaški javnosti je imel obredni pomen, predstavljal je iniciacijo (rite de passage) obnovljenega nacionalnega patriarhalnega sistema. 11 Promocija slovenske izdaje v Ljubljani leta 2002. 12 Iz uredniške ocene ameriške izdaje romana iz leta 2000, ki jo je napisal John Ponycsanyi. 13 Renata Jambrešić Kirin, »Personal Narratives on War: A Challenge to Women’s Essays and Ethnography in Croatia«, in: War Discourse, Women Discourse, TOPOS, let. 2, št. 1–2, ISH, Ljubljana, 2000, str. 285–323. 14 Gl. projekt 1000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize for 2005 (vključeval je veliko žensk iz nekdanje Jugoslavije, mdr. Svetlano Slapšak, Stašo Zajović, Azro Hasanbegović, Sonjo Biserko), http:// www.1000peacewomen.org/eng/friedensfrauen.php. 15 Prim. Sanja Potkonjak, Damir Arsenijević, Ajla Demiragić, Jelena Petrović, »Između politike pokreta i politike znanja – feminizam i ženski/rodni studiji u Hrvatskoj, Bosni i Hercegovini i Sloveniji«, Studia ethnologica Croatica, let. 20, št. 1, Filozofski fakultet sveučilišta u Zagrebu, 2009; Damir Arsenijević, Ajla Demiragić, Jelena Petrović, Sanja Potkonjak, Maja Bogojević, »Mapping the Key Concepts in Gender Studies and Creating a Cartography of their Balkan Specificities«, Identities, št. 12, Research Center in Gender Studies, Euro-Balkan Institute, Skopje, 2007; Damir Arsenijević, Ajla Demiragić, Jelena Petrović, »Women Writing in Red ink: Women’s Writing and Socio-political Change in ex-Yugoslavia«, v: Gender and Identity: Theories from and/or on Southeastern Europe, Women’s Studies and Gender Research Center, Beograd, 2006. 16 Nova platforma si prizadeva vzpostaviti redne akademske izmenjave: prek konferenc, skupnih raziskovalnih projektov in publikacij, zunanjega preverjanja, gostovanja predavateljev in predavateljic, skupnih uredniških odborov revij. Npr.: HESP ReSET Regional Seminar (2004– 2006): Gender and Women’s Studies in South-Eastern Europe: Rethinking Ideologies and Strategies of their European Integration, Euro-Balkan Institute, Skopje; HESP ReSET Seminar 2007–2010: Cultures of Memory and Emancipatory Politics: Past and Communality in the Post-Yugoslav Spaces, Tuzla; mednarodna platforma Jugoslovanske študije; publikacije: ProFemina – revija za ženske študije in kulturo, Srbija; časopis Front slobode, Tuzla; festival sodobne umetnosti Mesto žensk, Ljubljana, itn. 17 »Pišem knjigo o svojem življenju – zase, a tudi za vse ženske in deklice, ki imajo za seboj ali pred seboj življenja, podobna mojemu. Objavijo jo in znova grem skozi pekel – obtožbe, prostaške kletve, žalitve in grožnje. Živim v strahu; družina me razglasi za izdajalko, mislim, da zato, ker bi
58 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST tako želeli upravičiti očetova dejanja. Ostudne grožnje iz bratovih ust in njegovih vojnih pajdašev in njihovih privržencev. Neznani moški me napade (in ne bo nikoli razkrit v javnosti, čeprav to ni bil njegov edini zločin), in spremlja ga še en moški, čigar obraza ne vidim in glasu ne slišim. Upiram se; imata injekcijo, napolnjeno s tekočino, ne uspe jima jo vbrizgniti vame. Zbudim se v bolnišnici. Še en pekel, hujši od tistega, skozi katerega sem šla v zadnjih nekaj letih ... Na zahtevo NVO-jev me stražijo policisti (večina od njih je bila na Kosovu, dobro me poznajo). Maščevanje se še kar nadaljuje: namesto da bi se počutila varneje, sem v hišnem priporu, nikogar ne smem poklicati, prisluškujejo mi, pisma mi pregledujejo (zato pišem samo o stvareh, ki lahko gredo skozi), provocirajo me, zaslišujejo v moji lastni hiši. Znova čutim smrt, zre vame, ona v moje oči ali jaz v njene, ni pomembno. Devetega avgusta začnem gladovno stavkati. Policisti vedo, nekaj se mi posmehujejo, in to je vse; ves čas so okrog mene, nikamor ne morem brez njihovega ‘spremstva’, z nikomer ne morem govoriti. Po treh dneh grem v Beograd, v spremstvu dveh policistov iz Vranjega, upam, da mi bo prisluhnil kdor koli iz beograjske policijske centrale (hotela sem jih prositi, naj razveljavijo ‘zaščitne’ ukrepe, seveda tudi sami vedo, da gladovno stavkam, smejejo se mi in pravijo: ‘Moraš se vrniti v Vranje, danes, prostovoljno ali na silo, ker imajo naši kolegi iz Vranja še druge obveznosti’). Sredi avgusta: beograjski intelektualci napišejo odprto pismo za mojo podporo. Z gladovno stavko nadaljujem do 27. avgusta. Staša Zajović in Zorica Trifunović mi pomagata iz Vranja in otresti se vranjskega spremstva, in od 28. avgusta do 4. septembra živim v beograjskem hotelu Balkan, vendar me ‘varuje’ policijska Enota za zaščito oseb in prič [...]. Z njuno pomočjo odpotujem na Hrvaško, to je moja priložnost, da ostanem v tujini in se nikoli več ne vrnem v Srbijo, toda v tem času mojemu možu grozijo s smrtjo. Zato se vrnem, da bi mu pomagala in tudi njega nekako izkopala iz Srbije. Od 15. septembra do 14. januarja 2005 ilegalno živim pri Veri, nato z družino odpotujem – z upanjem, da se mi prav nikoli več ne bo treba vrniti.« (Http://www. alexandria-press.com/Bio/svetlana_djordjevic.htm) 18 Prim. Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, Polity, Cambridge in Malden, 2006.
LITERATURA
Arsenijević, Damir, Ajla Demiragić, Jelena Petrović, “Women Writing in Red Ink: Women’s Writing and Socio-political Change in ex-Yugoslavia”, v: Gender and Identity: Theories from and/or on Southeastern Europe, Women’s Studies and Gender Research Center, Beograd, 2006. Arsenijević, Damir, Ajla Demiragić, Jelena Petrović, Sanja Potkonjak, Maja Bogojević, “Mapping the Key Concepts in Gender Studies and Creating a Cartography of their Balkan Specificities”, Identities, Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, št. 12, Research Center in Gender Studies, Euro-Balkan Institute, Skopje, 2007.
59 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Bracewell, Wendy, “Women, Motherhood and Contemporary Serbian Nationalism”, Women’s Studies International Forum, let. 19, št. 1–2, 1996, str. 25–33.���� Braidotti, Rosi, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, Polity, Cambridge - Malden, MA, 2006. Čolović, Ivan, Bordel ratnika: folklor, politika i rat, Biblioteka XX vek, Beograd, 1994. Đorđević, Svetlana, http://www.alexandria-press.com/Bio/svetlana_djordjevic.htm. Đorđević, Svetlana, Svedočanstvo o Kosovu, Fond za humanitarno pravo, Beograd, 2003. Drakulić, Slavenka, Kao da me nema, Feral Tribune, Split, 1999. Gutman, Roy, “Foreword”, v: Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, ur. Alexandra Stiglmayer, University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Ivanović, Nevena, “Appropriation and Manipulation of Women’s writing in the Nationalist Discourse in Serbia in the nineties”, R.E.Č., let. 59, št. 5, september 2000. Iveković, Rada, “Women, Nationalism and War: ‘Make Love, Not War’”, Hypatia, let. 8, št. 4, 1993. Jambrešić - Kirin, Renata, “Personal Narratives on War: A Challenge to Women’s Essays and Ethnography in Croatia”, v: War Discourse, Women Discourse, TOPOS, let. 2, št. 1–2,�������������� 2000, ISH, Ljubljana, str. 285–323. MacKinnon, Catherine A., “Turning Rape into Pornography: Postmodern Genocide and Rape, Genocide, and Women’s Human Rights”, v: Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia- Herzegovina, prev. Marion Faber, University of Nebraska Press, 1994, str. 73–81,������������� 183–193. Mostov, Julie, “‘Our Women’/‘Their Women’: Symbolic Boundaries, Territorial Markers and Violence in the Balkans”, Pro Femina, Časopis za žensku književnost i kulturu, št. 3, Beograd, 1995. Potkonjak, Sanja, Damir Arsenijević, Ajla Demiragić, Jelena Petrović, “Između politike pokreta i politike znanja – feminizam i ženski/rodni studiji u Hrvatskoj, Bosni i Hercegovini i Sloveniji”, Studia ethnologica Croatica, let. 20, št. 1, Filozofski fakultet sveučilišta u Zagrebu, Zagreb, 2009. Skjelsbaek, Inger, “Sexual Violence in the conflicts in Ex-Yugoslavia”, v: War Discourse, Women Discourse, TOPOS, let. 2, št. 1–2,������������������������� ISH, Ljubljana, 2000. Slapšak Svetlana, Ogledi o bezbrižnosti, Radio B92, edicija Apatridi, Beograd, 1994. Slapšak, Svetlana, “Yugoslav war: A Case of/for Gendered History”, v: War Discourse, Women Discourse, TOPOS, let. 2, št. 1–2,������������������������� ISH, Ljubljana, 2000. The Project 1,000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize for 2005, http://www.1000peacewomen.org/ eng/friedensfrauen.php. “Witches from Rio, Croatia Feminist Rape Croatia”, Globus, 11. december, 1992. Žarkov, Dubravka, “War Rapes in Bosnia On Masculinity, Femininity and Power of the Rape Victim Identity”, Tijdschrift voor Criminologie, let. 39, št. 2, 1997.
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61 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST
62 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST DAMIR ARSENIJEVIĆ
POLITIKA SPOMINA V »ŽIVLJENJU KOT AKTUALNOSTI« 1
Proti koncu septembra 2005 so reklamni panoji na sarajevskih ulicah kar tekmovali za pozornost mimoidočih: ponujali so večji avtomobil, oglaševali boljšo pijačo ali zapeljevali z elegantnejšim hladilnikom. Med temi oglasi je najbolj izstopal pano z zanikrno, zamazano pilotsko jakno Spitfire, raztegnjeno čez belo površino in s pripisom na kosu papirja – »282 KRA«. Na daleč je bilo mogoče razpoznati le jakno, napis in gromozanske črno-rdeče črke: »Srebrenica Podrinje identification project«. Če vas je vsa ta postavitev pritegnila, ste prebrali še preostanek: »Oblačilo, najdeno na žrtvi genocida, 282 KRA.« Desno spodaj je bil še en plakat, ki je oglaševal šov ameriškega čarodeja Davida Copperfielda, ki naj bi se zgodil prvega oktobra 2005 z odobritvijo hrvaškega člana bosanskega predsedstva. Tako je ta plakat, postavljen vzporedno oglaševalskemu panoju o projektu identifikacije srebreniških žrtev in kot da bi bil s kakšnim Copperfieldovim trikom, z iluzijo, fikcijo bolj poudarjen in izostren kot živo življenje samo, govoril več o depolitizirajočem učinku, ki ga ima na prebivalce Bosne suveren biopolitični red, in o »konfiskaciji«2 njihovega spomina. Ne gre samo za to, da je telo, ki je nekoč nosilo to jakno, pogrešano in izgubljeno za vedno, ampak tudi za to, da se preživelim – med njimi je po uradnih podatkih 44 odstotkov brezposelnih, 25 odstotkov pod pragom revščine – prodaja iluzija, ki naj bi jo kupili in ki stane eno desetino povprečne mesečne plače.3 O tem se lahko vprašamo tole, parafrazirajoč Marxovo pretresanje religije: »Katero bolečo odtujitev klavrno kompenzira takšna transcendenca?«4
63 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Kaj je ta »boleča odtujitev«? Sesutje socializma? Vojna in njena posledica – izguba ljudi? Povojna neoliberalna tranzicija in telesa, še vedno pogrešane žrtve genocida? Ali, kar je verjetneje, vse to skupaj? Kar koli že, posledici takšne »odtujitve« sta konstruiranje in vnovično pisanje kolektivnega spomina pod taktirko vladajočih etnonacionalističnih elit. Kajti, kot je zapisala Dubravka Ugrešić: »Politični boj je boj za teritorij kolektivnega spomina.«5 Istočasno poteka še proces »družbene amnezije« med pojugoslovanskimi »liberalnimi konformističnimi« intelektualci, ki se zavzemajo za analizo, ki naj bi bila osvobojena ideologije in politike, in katerih razmišljanje je uglašeno tudi s tema smernicama: »Ali nas nista prav ideologija in politika pognali v vojno in revščino? Ali torej ne potrebujemo prav dejstvenega teoretskega diskurza, ki naj bo apolitičen in razvezan od ideologije, da bi nam tako dal zatočišče pred norostjo nacionalizma in vojne?«6 Po tem prikazu lahko slika Bosne izgleda takole – in tu se opiram na predelavo Ciceronove zgodbe o Simonidu s Keosa, ki jo je Dubravka Ugrešić postavila v kontekst razbitja Jugoslavije: streha se je podrla na ljudi, ki so sedeli za banketno mizo; »Simonid, preživeli, ki ga svojci zaprosijo, naj identificira žrtve, ne uspe opraviti spominskega dela in povezati spominov, ker se nenadoma zrušijo preostale stene, pokopljejo njega in svojce, ki so prišli, da bi pokopali umrle. Nove priče prizora, ki jih je prizadela dvojna nesreča, naj bi mogle prepoznati žrtve, vendar le tiste, ki se jih spominjajo s prizorišč, na katerih so bile tudi same v trenutku, ko so se zrušile še preostale stene. In tako se vsak spominja in objokuje svoje. Druge žrtve ne obstajajo. Če ne omenjamo prvih.«7 In medtem ko vsaka etnonacionalistična elita petrificira in objokuje žrtve »svoje« etnije, konformistični liberalni intelektualci žalujejo za skupnim seštevkom vseh žrtev kot »enotnost v različnosti«, pri čemer konstruirajo spomin na resnično bistvo bosanskosti, katere temelji so »stvarna, vibrantna substanca«8 naroda, obenem pa – iz razkošja zaznanega »zunajideološkega« mesta izrekanja – obžalujejo konstrukcijo celotne stavbe, katere streha in stene naj bi bile sestavljene tako, da bi se v vsakem primeru razstavile. V takšni simbolni ekonomiji je »spominska transakcija« videti »uspešna«. In vendar, od znotraj se ni nič zares pozabilo niti zares ohranilo v spominu«.9 Sredi zmešnjave večkratnih »spominskih transakcij«, ki depolitizirajo »‘preteklost’, ‘sedanjost’ in ‘prihodnost’ [...] [potrebujemo] nove poglede, da bi razrešili povsod prisotna siva območja«,10 ki jih ustvarjajo te transakcije. »Nove poglede« moramo poiskati v drugi skupini »žalujočih«, v tisti,
64 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST ki govori o travmatičnih izkušnjah vojne in povojne tranzicije tako, da sprašuje, vznemirja in demistificira vnaprej dane in ustaljene načine »komemoriranja«, pri tem pa ustvarja radikalno drugačne imaginarije, ki prečijo in znova politizirajo vladajoče politične identifikacije. Področje kulturne produkcije gosti te nove poglede v vojni in povojni Bosni, v tem prispevku pa se bom osredotočil na poetične zapise, nastale na robu bosanske družbe in ki spodbujajo – to zagovarjam – emancipacijsko, produktivno soočenje s travmatičnimi izkušnjami in spodkopavajo depolitizirajoče težnje etnonacionalističnih in neoliberaln okapitalističnih projektov.
NOVI POGLEDI NA PODROČJU KULTURNE PRODUKCIJE
Kot so opazili številni kritiki v Bosni in Hercegovini in v tujini, je v polju kulturne produkcije – prepoznano je bilo kot privilegiran položaj v konstrukciji in artikulaciji identitet in političnih praks – vse od osemdesetih let prejšnjega stoletja prevladoval etnonacionalistični diskurz. Odločilni položaj kulturne sfere je najbolj razviden v kontekstu diskreditiranja jugoslovanskega socializma – »dejanski proces razbitja jugoslovanske enotnosti se je primarno vršil v kulturni areni«.11 Pri razvijanju etnonacionalističnih projektov v Bosni so imeli poseben vpliv nekateri književniki. Ultimativni način, na kakršnega je nacionalizem utrjeval polje kulturnih praks, da bi pripomogel k uresničevanju svojih ideoloških ciljev, je mogoče najbolje ponazoriti s tem, kar je Žižek poimenoval »poetično-vojaški kompleks, ki ga pooseblja Radovan Karadžić, bosanski Srb, pesnik bojevnik«.12 Vendar prav konkretne materialne prakse pesnikov, ki imajo, kot pravi Elie Wiesel, »pogum povedati oblasti resnico«,13 pretresajo načine, kako so bili travmatični dogodki v času vojne in povojne tranzicije simbolizirani in katera dejanja so upravičevala tovrstne simbolizacije. Poleg tega so to glasovi, ki se spoprijemajo s travmatičnimi dogodki in izgubo »obetajoče politike«.14 Kako se udejanja takšna politika? Kako trdnost preteklosti preči konkretna praksa dejavnega pričevanja, v katerem se preteklost – po Benjaminu – »uveljavlja kot pričevalka sedanjosti – kot mesto vznika, instanca vznika in trenutek produkcije«?15 Na kratko se bom ustavil pri dveh primerih, pesmih Feride Duraković.
65 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST PISEC OPAZUJE DOMOVINO, MEDTEM KO UČENI POSTMODERNIST VSTOPA V NJEGOVO MESTO
Surovo in dolgo se ponavlja vse in vse se dogaja prvič: obraz mladega moškega, čigar življenje je celo noč odtekalo skozi tvoje roke, skozi luknjo na njegovem hrbtu. Obraz vojaka pri avtobusni postaji, odprtih oči, v katerih je zastalo blago majsko nebo – Domišljaš si, rečem – to ni mirno in oddaljeno obličje Zgodovine. In jezerce krvi: sredi jezerca kruh, natopljen v krvi kakor v jutranjem mleku z bregov – Domišljaš si, ponavljam, prvič: svinčena sarajevska ilovica, ki pada na fantova velika stopala v teniskah Reebok na prekratkem tabutu iz omarnih vrat ... Ne, tebi ni za verjeti, ti prihajaš iz srca teme, ki se je prelila in prodrla v dnevno svetlobo. Nezanesljiva priča si, in pri tem pristranska. Zato pa je prišel Profesor, povsem pariški: Mes enfants, je začel, in njegovi prsti so ponavljali: Mes enfants, mes enfants, mes enfants, sredi Akademije znanosti so sive glave razmišljale samo o njegovi srajci, do vriska beli, Mes enfants, tu umira Evropa. Potem je vse umestil v film, v slike, v velike besede, kot histoire, Europe, kot responsabilité in, seveda, les Bosniacs. Tako se namreč gleda v obličje Zgodovine, ne pa kot ti: v surovih neodgovornih ulomkih, v snajperskem strelu, ki zadene v lobanjo, v grobovih, že preraščenih z neumorno travo, v tvojih dlaneh, položenih čez Edvarda Muncha, ki si je, nekoč, tudi sam vse domišljal, zaman.
ZA B. H. LEVYJA, S pestjo soli, SARAJEVO, 1993.
66 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Pesem se začne s paradoksnim povzetkom izkušnje vojne, utelešene v sopostavitvi dveh podob, obraza umirajočega moškega in obraza vojaka pri avtobusni postaji, ki se pojavita prvič in se neprenehoma ponavljata. Paradoks usmerja na to, kar se upira reprezentaciji, na travmatično jedro pesmi. Razgrinja se kot telesni trepet subjektov, ujetih v agambenovsko izredno stanje, v katerem je zabrisana razlika med življenjem in smrtjo; zamegljena je ločnica med »obrazom mladega moškega, čigar življenje je celo noč / odtekalo skozi tvoje roke, skozi luknjo / na njegovem hrbtu«, in »obrazom vojaka / pri avtobusni postaji, odprtih oči, / v katerih je zastalo blago majsko nebo«. Do skrajnosti prignana biopolitika se razgrinja kot izpoved o izjemi življenja. Kajti, kot pravi Agamben, današnja politika »ne pozna nobene druge vrednote (in posledično nobene druge ne- vrednote) razen življenja [...] Golo življenje se v politiki ohranja v obliki izjeme, to je nečesa, kar je vključeno edino z izključitvijo«.16 Opisani telesni trepet je neskončno ponavljanje zdajšnjosti izjeme življenja, vsakič novo in vendar vsakič eno in isto, tako da jemlje moč političnim subjektom in razkraja spomin. Ali kot neizpodbitno opominja Jasmina Husanović: »Skrajni pritisk na ljudi, da se predajo golemu življenju/smrti, jih depolitizira kot subjekte, sili jih k življenju v trajni zdajšnjosti biopolitičnega nasilja.«17 V kontekstu, v katerem se ponavlja telesni trepet in s tem ustvarja prekoračenje doživljanja, lirični subjekt samoironično ponavlja svoje performativno dejanje naštevanja podrobnosti pozabljenih individualnih zgodovin in ustvarjanja presežnega pomena: sarajevska ilovica, zgrnjena na velika fantova stopala in telovadne copate Reebok, ki visijo iz začasne gomile. To je pristen diskurz komemoracije: spominjanje na posamezne materialne dokaze, kot so oblačila, in njihovo vpisovanje kot družinskih označevalcev v kulturni spomin. Ti konkretni materialni dokazi nazadnje postanejo sledi minulega resničnega življenja in bodo imeli pomembno vlogo v povojnih ekshumacijah in identifikacijah številnih ubitih in pokopanih v množičnih grobiščih. »Srce teme«, ki se je »prelila in prodrla v dnevno svetlobo«, je vdor tistega, kar je realnejše od realnosti same in kar prelamlja reprezentacijo in simbolizacijo – Realno. In vendar, kako obraze umrlih in njihove zgodovine vpisati, zabeležiti in ohraniti v spominu, da ne bi pozabili nanje – v kontekstu, kjer sta reprezentacija in simbolizacija prekinjeni? Možen
67 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST odgovor najdemo v lacanovskem pogledu na vpisovanje zavedanja Realnega. Stavrakakis v svojih komentarjih o Lacanovi poziciji trdi, da je prav »prek spodletelih poskusov simbolizacije – igre paradoksa, torišč nekonsistentnosti in necelovitosti, nepolnosti – mogoče dojeti ‘meje, točke zastoja, slepe ulice, ki kažejo resnično predajanje simbolnemu’«.18 Če je najneposrednejši način označevanja Realnega subvertiranje samega označevalnega procesa, potem je to »obkrožanje realnega« najuspešnejše takrat, ko se »na najbolj nepričakovanem mestu razkriva spodletelost reprezentacije in realnega«.19 V tej pesmi se lirični subjekt posveča raziskovanju izgube kot potencialnosti, ki poraja »svet preostankov kot svet novih reprezentacij in alternativnih pomenov«.20 Spodletelost reprezentacije pesnica osvetljuje z gradnjo ironične drže, v kateri dobesedno spodkopava samo sebe in s tem zanikuje svojo lastno zmožnost reprezentacije: »domišljaš si«; »tebi ni za verjeti« in »nezanesljiva priča si, in pri tem pristranska«. Takšno zavedanje realnega je globoko politično in implicira jasno etično držo. Sledeč Žižku, lahko trdimo, da je, namesto da bi »povzdigovali [Realno] v nedotakljivo entiteto, izvzeto iz zgodovinske analize [...], edina resnično etična drža polno prevzemanje nemogoče naloge simboliziranja Realnega, vključno z njeno nujno spodletelostjo«.21 Preidimo zdaj na kratko k naslednji pesmi, k Srebrenici Feride Duraković.
SREBRENICA
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68 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Ko bi se lahko vsaj ulegla v to gomilo, ki je ni tam, poleg mojega otroka, ki ga ni tam, da še enkrat bi njegove roke ogrela...
Ta pesem kar najneposredneje in prodorno izreka »resnico moči« in vztraja pri živosti preteklosti za politično relevantno prakso sedanjosti v kontekstu, kjer se sleherna priča spominja svoje žrtve. Tu preteklost priča sedanjosti in prihodnosti, zato da bi omajala interpretacije, ki jih vsiljuje uradna politika. S poetično intervencijo se žalovanje preobraža v kreativni proces in izgrajuje prizorišče komemoracije in pogrešano telo. Skozi nenehno nihanje na robu brezna Realnega se pesem preobraža v neko prekoračitev – elipso. Ta eliptična prekoračitev bi lahko bila odmev Freudovega opisa, da je »žalovanje vselej odziv na izgubo ljubljene osebe ali na izgubo neke abstrakcije, ki je zavzela njeno mesto, tako kot denimo posameznikova domovina, svoboda, ideal in tako naprej«.22 Podobno kot bi Freudov opis lahko brali kot prekoračitev »restriktivnega zapiranja melanholije kot patologije, negativnosti ali negacije«,23 tudi prekoračitev v pesmi, s tem ko izraža pravico do žalovanja v sedanjosti in prihodnosti, ne zavrača le konca, temveč tudi patologizacijo predanosti žalovanju. Prav ta etična voljnost tvorno ohranja odprtost prostora za naglaševanje izgube. Obe pesmi in podobne sedanje umetniške prakse v Bosni uprizarjajo »politiko upanja« prek svojih tvornih negacij med preteklostjo, sedanjostjo in prihodnostjo. Njihov potencial je v dojemanju »življenja kot aktualnosti«, kjer je zgodovina priklicana zato, da bi pričala sedanjosti in prihodnosti z ustvarjanjem novih načinov simbolizacije travmatičnih dogodkov, ki preganjajo Bosno. Njihova politika je politika upanja, dejavnega žalovanja kot nasprotja »indolenci srca«,24 ki jo lahko opazujemo pri etnonacionalističnih in (neo)liberalnih konformistih v današnji Bosni.
69 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST OPOMBE
1 Aleksandar Hemon v intervjuju z Jenifer Berman, Bomb Magazine, poletna št. 2000, www.bombsite.com/hemon/hemon.html. 2 Izraz si izposojam iz eseja Dubravke Ugrešić, »The Confiscation of Memory«, v: The Culture of Lies, Phoenix House, London, 1998, str. 227. 3 Gl. http://www.indexmundi.com/bosnia_and_herzegovina/unemployment_rate.html, zadnji dostop 17. januar 2006. 4 Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture, Blackwell, Oxford, 2000, str. 21. 5 Ugrešić, nav. delo, str. 227. 6 Prim. Nebojša Jovanović, »Yet another Effort, Intellectuals, if You Would Become Amnesiacs: against post-Yugoslav Liberal Conformism«, v: Katrin Klingan in Ines Kappert (ur.), Leap into the City. Chişinău, Sofia, Pristina, Sarajevo, Warsaw, Zagreb, Ljubljana. Cultural Positions, Political Conditions. Seven Scenes from Europe, DuMont Literatur in Kunst Verlag, Köln, 2006, str. 302–311. 7 Ugrešić, nav. delo, str. 227. 8 Lovrenović v: Jovanović, nav. delo. 9 Ugrešić, nav. delo, str. 235. 10 Prim. Jasmina Husanović, »Bosanska formacija: Pitanje nostalgije i/li pitanje pripadanja / Bosnian Formation: The Question of Nostalgia or the Question of Belonging«, Razlika / Difference, revija za kritiko in umetnost teorije, št. 10–11, Tuzla, 2005, str. 95–111. 11 Andrew B. Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998, str. 198. 12 Slavoj Žižek, »What lies beneath«, The Guardian, 1. maj 2004, str. 7. 13 Elie Wiesel, nav. v: Daniel Goleman, Vital lies, simple truths: The psychology of self-deception and shared illusions, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1985, str. 13. 14 David L. Eng in David Kazanjian (ur.), »Introduction: Mourning Remains«, v: Loss: the politics of mourning, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003, str. 2. 15 Prav tam, str. 5. 16 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998, str. 10–11. 17 Jasmina Husanović, Bosnia Paradox, International Politics, doktorska naloga, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, 2003, str. 196. Šesto poglavje je še posebno pomembno za povezavo med literarnimi glasovi in potencialom za delovanje v vojni ter povojni Bosni. 18 Yannis Stavrakakis, Lacan & the Political, Routledge, London in New York, 1999, str. 85. 19 Prav tam. 20 Eng, nav. delo, str. 5. 21 Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, Verso, London, 1994, str. 199–200. 22 Sigmund Freud, »Mourning and Melancholia«, v: Eng, nav. delo, str. 3. 23 Prav tam, str. 5.
70 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST 24 Prim. Walter Benjamin, »Thesis on the Philosophy of History«, v:Illuminations , Fontana/Collins, London, 1970, str. 255–266 (sedma teza).
LITERATURA
Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998. Benjamin, Walter, »Thesis on the Philosophy of History«, v: Illuminations, Fontana/Collins, London, 1970, str. 255–266. Eng, David L. in David Kazanjian (ur.), »Introduction: Mourning Remains«, v: Loss: the politics of mourning, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003, str.1–25. Goleman, Daniel, Vital lies, simple truths: The psychology of self-deception and shared illusions, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1985. Hemon, Aleksandar, »The interview with Jenifer Berman«, Bomb Magazine, poletna št., 72, 2000, www.bombsite.com/hemon/hemon.html. Ugrešić, Dubravka, »The Confiscation of Memory«, The Culture of Lies, Phoenix House, London, 1998, str. 217–235. Eagleton, Terry, The Idea of Culture, Blackwell, Oxford, 2000. Husanović, »Jasmina, Bosanska formacija: Pitanje nostalgije i/li pitanje pripadanja / Bosnian Formation: The Question of Nostalgia or the Question of Belonging«, Razlika / Difference, revija za kritiko in umetnost teorije, št. 10–11, Tuzla, 2005, str. 95–111. Husanović, Jasmina, Bosnia Paradox: International Politics, doktorska naloga, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, 2003. Jovanović, Nebojša, »Yet another Effort, Intellectuals, if You Would Become Amnesiacs: against post-Yugoslav Liberal Conformism«, v: Katrin Klingan in Ines Kappert (ur.), Leap into the City. Chişinău, Sofia, Pristina, Sarajevo, Warsaw, Zagreb, Ljubljana. Cultural Positions, Political Conditions. Seven Scenes from Europe, DuMont Literatur in Kunst Verlag, Köln, 2006, str. 302–311. Stavrakakis, Yannis, Lacan & the Political, Routledge, London in New York, 1999. Wachtel, Andrew B, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1998. Žižek, Slavoj, The Metastases of Enjoyment, Verso, London, 1994. Žižek, Slavoj, »What lies beneath«, The Guardian, 1. maj 2004.
71 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Posebno vprašanje je, iz česa se bomo sestavili mi, če se bomo znova odločili, da bomo ljubili.
JOZEFINA DAUTBEGOVIĆ, »Neidentificirani«, SARAJEVSKE SVESKE, ŠT. 4, 2003, STR. 271.
72 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST DAMIR ARSENIJEVIĆ MOBILIZIRANJE NEPODKUPLJIVEGA ŽIVLJENJA: POLITIKA SODOBNE POEZIJE V BOSNI IN HERCEGOVINI
O tej vsebini sem začel pisati že pred enim letom, ko sem poskušal izpostaviti načine, na kakršne del sodobne poezije v Bosni in Hercegovini prikazuje alternativne poti pripadnosti in solidarnega identificiranja z izključenimi, s čimer si prizadeva za pravičnejšo družbeno preobrazbo. V tem prispevku nadaljujem s tem prvotnim poskusom kljub časovnemu odmiku in upoštevajoč nekatere ključne dogodke, ki so se zgodili od avgusta 2008 – ključne za razumevanje, kaj naj bi ta pravičnejša družbena preobrazba pomenila v vsakdanjem življenju. Na podlagi teh dogodkov sem spoznal, kako poezija zmore in tudi dejansko vznemirja udoben in vodilni konsenz med podporniki zgodovinskega revizionizma in tistimi, ki se okoriščajo s preganjanjem sovražnega govora, da bi v današnji Bosni in Hercegovini propagirali pozabo. Prav ti dogodki so mi pomagali odkriti tudi vsebine in ravni, ki se mi zdijo politično pomembne in spodbudne v takšni poeziji, ali z drugimi besedami, zakaj in kako me takšna poezija še vedno navdaja z upanjem, da se stvari vendarle lahko in da se dejansko izboljšujejo. Ta prispevek torej izhaja iz situacije vsakdanjika, iz konkretne prakse, v kateri poezija, kadar govorimo o pričanju o vojni in o povojni tranziciji, premore moč, da vznemirja vladajoči politični konsenz. Toda moč te poezije ne izhaja samo iz njene zmožnosti vznemirjanja in provokacije, ampak tudi iz njene odprtosti glede vrste univerzalne normativnosti, ki jo zagovarja in v imenu katere nas nagovarja. Ta poezija govori naglas in razločno o krivicah, vendar to počne s stališča
73 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST mobiliziranja in vzgajanja življenja, ki že v osnovi ne pristaja na to, da bi se pogreznilo v lepljivo mrežo tranzicijske politične ekonomije, kjer gre, ne glede na ceno, za igro, imenovano gonja za krvavim kapitalom. To nepristajanje je univerzalna normativnost tega, kar sem naslovil nepodkupljivo življenje, pri čemer mislim na življenje, ki se ne pusti podkupiti in kljubuje politiki, ki si prizadeva življenje oropati občutljivosti v smeri delovanja in učinkovanja strahovlade neenakosti. Gre za življenje, ki udejanja svojo nepodkupljivo zahtevo po politiki enakosti za vse – in pri tem tudi vztraja. Leta 2008 so v Bosni in Hercegovini obeležili 30. avgust – mednarodni dan pogrešanih oseb – kot dan, ki naj bi vidno poudaril in spodbudil idejo, da je problem pogrešanih – trenutno jih je 13.500, ki so še vedno pokopani v prikritih množičnih grobiščih – odgovornost nas vseh. V tistem času sem koordiniral dejavnosti Oddelka za iniciative civilne družbe pri Mednarodni komisiji za pogrešane osebe (ICMP) v Sarajevu. Skupaj s sodelavkami in sodelavci tega oddelka sem poskušal spodbuditi in podpreti prakse, ki solidarnost z družinami pogrešanih v Bosni in Hercegovini opirajo na takšno odgovornost. Moj cilj je bil soočiti etnonacionalno mitologizacijo pogrešanih in nabiranje političnih točk vladajočih političnih elit (nekateri med njimi vedo, kje se nahajajo prikrita množična grobišča). Poleg tega sem želel soočiti vse nas, ki živimo v Bosni in Hercegovini in ki večinsko, čeprav nas preganja in prevzema vztrajno brezoblična prihodnost, dojemamo pogrešane kot enega od številnih problemov. Toda kljub temu je treba vztrajno iskati pogrešane, in sicer prek njihovih preživelih družinskih članov, eksekutorjev ali tistih, ki so žrtve pokopali in jih pozneje prekopali v prikrita množična grobišča, in prek tistih, ki trdijo, da se tako imenovana pot naprej, ven iz prevladujočega občutka paralize, ne bo odprla, dokler ne bomo začeli odkrito zahtevati imen odgovornih za usmrtitve, pokope in skrivanje pogrešanih. Javna pobuda 30. avgusta 2008 je potekala pod geslom »Imam pravico vedeti«; osredotočala se je na pravico družin pogrešanih, da izvedo, kje so pokopani njihovi svojci. Pobudo sta enoglasno podprla in izvrševala mednarodna komisija ICMP in Mednarodni odbor Rdečega križa (ICRC) v Bosni in Hercegovini. Del te pobude je bila tudi obveza parlamenta, da se sestane na posebni seji, na kateri bo javno razglasil svojo namero, da razreši usodo in mesta grobišč pogrešanih ter podpre družine pogrešanih pri njihovih temeljnih družbeno-ekonomskih pravicah. Pobudo so množično podprli mediji in tudi številni pesniki.
74 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST V znak solidarnosti je vsak pesnik prispeval po eno pesem, ki naj bi pospremila dela družin pogrešanih, vse te stvaritve pa naj bi bile na ogled na vhodu v parlament Le nekaj ur pred zaključkom priprav na obeležitev 30. avgusta so predstavniki ICRC-ja v Bosni in Hercegovini oznanili svoje nestrinjanje z nekaterimi od ponujenih pesmi, natančneje, z dvema pesmima: Tri cigarete Marka Vešovića in Srebrenica, Potočari, 9. 5. 2004 Šejle Šehabović.
TRI CIGARETE
Proti večeru sem šel ven, da bi se črnil na belem. Sonce je kovanec, ki ga polagajo na pokojnikove veke. Povsod božja tišina, še bolj neprebojna od oklepnika. Življenje je strašljivo, kakor odmev korakov, ki muslimanom ponoči v srbskih taboriščih naznanjajo prihod batinašev. Prižgal sem si eno, da bi mi oči v soju cigaretnega dima za trenutek odtavale iz tega taborišča. Spomnil sem se svojih včerajšnjih sanj: v rokah sem imel nit, privezano na glog, ki je zrasel iz očetovega groba v sandžaškem bogu za hrbtom. Nit, po kateri se je mogoče potegniti iz pekla. Prižgal sem si še eno. Da bi mi duša po dimu odtavala do utvar iz gluhe in sive davnine. Ki še vedno šepetajo: en sam korak iz nikoli videnega v nikoli več – to je vse tvoje življenje. A svet je grozen kot krohot oslepelih iz Goranove Jame. Prižgal sem si še zadnjo. Da bi me, za trenutek, spominjala na zvezdo, med sredincem in kazalcem. Zvezdo večernico. In da bi skozi modrikasto meglico zagledal, čim bolj razločno, Karadžićevo vesolje, v katerem je Lager – Logos.
MARKO VEŠOVIĆ,
75 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST SREBRENICA, POTOČARI, 9. 5. 2004
Izpod rut so jim štrleli lasje. Ena je bila ogrnjena z dvema rutama; drugo si je povesila čez ramena. Barve se niso ujemale. Dišala je po milu. Ruta ji je padala čez svileno bluzo v zlatih odtenkih. Ko jo je pridržala, je roke sklenila na trebuhu. Druga je imela naličene ustnice. Pripeljali smo skupino nizozemskih najstnikov. Prevajali v dva jezika. Ste dobro potovali? so nam rekle. Kako ste? so vprašale pred vhodom na pokopališče. Lepi otroci! Pogledale so vsakega. Nato so rekle: Pridite! Zajokale so, druga za drugo; po vrsti so pokazale albume s fotografijami mrtvih. Postavili smo se v polkrog, kot da bi sedeli na kotni zofi. One na sredini, z rokami na trebuhu. Domačno. Ponudile so se, da nas peljejo k Hrastu. (Ko tam stojiš, vidiš na vse strani, kamor so pripeljali ljudi na klanje!) In v tovarno akumulatorjev, kjer so zavezani ljudje prebedeli tri dni. Sinove so odpeljali pozneje, lačne. Ponudile so se, da pokažejo, kako so unproforovci dajali četnikom uniforme, kot da bi popotniku ponujali hrano in pijačo. Ko smo se poslavljali, sem objela eno po eno.
76 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Tako se objemajo tetke, ko goste pospremijo do na hišnih vrat.
ŠEJLA ŠEHABOVIĆ
Vodja ICRC-ja Henry Fournier mi je v telefonskem razgovoru sporočil, da teh dveh pesmi ni mogoče razstaviti v parlamentu, ker naj ne bi bili »dobra poezija«, saj Vešovićeva pesem omenja »koncentracijska taborišča« za muslimane, pesem Šejle Šehabović pa besedo »četnik«. Na koncu mi je še povedal, da je ICRC kril del stroškov pobude, zato je mogoče sklepati, da ima pravico odrejati, kaj naj bi dogodek vključeval oziroma česa ne bo zajemal. Najin pogovor se je obrnil v spor, nakar sem poklical Marka Vešovića in mu pojasnil podrobnosti tega, kar sem ocenil kot primer cenzure in kršitev pravice do spominjanja. Nato sem Marku posredoval še elektronsko pošto z vsemi podrobnostmi okrog izbora pesmi, vključno s kopijo pesmi Šejle Šehabović. Vešović je javno reagiral, svoje delo je 29. avgusta 2008 objavil v časopisu BH Dani.1 Vodja ICMP-ja Kathryne Bomberger je podlegla pritiskom ICRC- ja, kar je pomenilo, da pesmi nista bili v parlamentu ne objavljeni ne brani. Kmalu zatem, ko sem bil zaradi soudeležbe pri javnem nasprotovanju cenzuri pertinentne sodobne bosanske poezije uradno premeščen, sem zapustil ICMP. Gonilna sila primera »30. avgust« je politika tistih predstavnikov mednarodne skupnosti, ki ne le diktirajo in postavljajo pogoje, kako naj bi se v javnem diskurzu spominjali pogrešanih, ampak – in to je še bolj zahrbtno – ki državljanom Bosne in Hercegovine odrekajo vsakršno pravico, da bi opravili univerzalne analize in orisali univerzalne lekcije, ki so se jih naučili iz izkušnje vojne in genocida. In končno je to zanikanje in oviranje politike nepodkupljivega življenja – življenja, ki pravi, navezujoč se na sklepni verz Vešovićeve pesmi, da taborišče ne more biti Logos. Cenzura, ki so jo izvajali predstavniki mednarodne skupnosti, je bila preoblečena v »zaščito« diskurza večkulturnosti in prepovedi žaljivega in sovražnega govorjenja. V tem primeru je zanimiva perspektiva, s katere so vsebino cenzuriranih pesmi prepoznali kot problematično. Marka Vešovića so cenzurirali zato, ker v svoji pesmi omenja koncentracijska taborišča za muslimane, Šejlo Šehabović pa zaradi omenjanja besede četnik. V svojem podrobnem branju pesmi in na osnovi »čiščenja«
77 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST poezije po etničnih smernicah so člani mednarodne skupnosti predpostavljali perspektivo imaginarnega člana vsake od treh etničnih skupnosti in napovedovali, čemu naj bi nasprotoval. Kaj drugega naj bi to bilo, če ne prav prvovrstni primer načina operiranja birokratskega terorja mednarodne skupnosti? Pesmi so pregledovane po geslih in govorečemu subjektu je dovoljeno govoriti le v jeziku, ki je očiščen vse neprimerne vsebine, predpisane s točke imaginarne etnične perspektive. Poleg tega mednarodna skupnost z zatrjevanjem, da zavzema nevtralno stališče, ohranja cinično distanco do tega stališča, kajti zelo dobro se zaveda, da problem pesmi ni v omenjanju domnevno sporne vsebine (in kar se tega tiče, se zelo dobro zaveda tudi, da so koncentracijska taborišča in četniki zares obstajali). Neprimerno večji problem za mednarodno skupnost je, da govorca obeh pesmi v razmerju do vseh tistih, ki so bili usmrčeni in žrtvovani v gonji za kapitalom, ukradenim v krvi vojne in genocida ter v povojni zapuščini vsakodnevnega nasilja, ne sprejemata omejitev lažnega razločevanja med zasebnim in javnim jezikom. Drugače povedano, govorca obeh pesmi ne sprejemata pogleda, da je trpljenje zasebni dogodek, s tem pa predpostavljata in zavzemata stališče, da ustrezen javni jezik že obstaja in da omogoča izražanje trpljenja, in da tudi poezija lahko dejansko omogoča tak jezik. Torej je cenzura omenjenih pesmi s predpostavke »žaljive vsebine« naravnost laž. Ideološko rečeno, postavlja takšna cenzura večkulturnostne smernice za branje teh dveh pesmi in reducira družbene konflikte na trenja med etničnimi identitetami. Znotraj teh oslabljenih, depolitiziranih smernic so kulturne, verske in etnične razlike preurejene kot »prizorišča konflikta, ki ga je treba utišati in obvladovati s prakticiranjem tolerance«.2 Tak scenarij podpira etnični element kot dominantno referenco politične kolektivnosti, kar vodi v retroaktivno vnovično vpisovanje vojne kot konflikta med tremi etničnimi skupinami. Takšno izravnavanje politike, ki ga opravlja mednarodna skupnost, je del vladajočega konsenza in ne del njegove razrešitve. Najpomembneje pa je, da so resnični razlogi za cenzuro v absolutnem nasprotovanju tistih, ki sprejemajo vladajoči konsenz v današnji Bosni in Hercegovini, proti stališču tistih preživelih, ki si prizadevajo ustvarjati obetavnejšo prihodnost, ki bo razdrla omejitve in prepovedi vsakodnevne tranzicijske groze. Takšno stališče zagovarja dve pomembni premisi: prvič, trpljenje, ki izhaja iz vojne in genocida,
78 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST je učinek družbene nepravičnosti in je prav zato javna zadeva par excellence; drugič, v povezavi s tem trpljenjem se emancipacijski proces subjektivacije lahko razvija samo ob razrešitvi iz spon pozicije žrtve ali katere koli druge take pozicije, ki se osredinja v glavnem na eno od partikularnih identitet. Nepodkupljivo življenje zaživi prav v privzemanju zahtev po pravičnejši socialnosti za vse.
O LJUBEZNI IN PONOVNEM SESTAVLJANJU NAS SAMIH
Naj bi v skupni grobnici vsak umrl za svojo smrtjo, baje iz ljubezni za isto stvar
Kaj počne njegova ključnica pri tej čelnici in čemu bo podoben ta, ki je sestavljen iz različnih delov, ko bo prišel dan vstajenja
Posebno vprašanje je, iz česa se bomo sestavili mi, če se bomo znova odločili, da bomo ljubili [...]
JOZEFINA DAUTBEGOVIĆ
O mrtvih – »Mrtvi so mrtvi, zakaj jim niste ponudili roke, ko so bili živi?«, je spraševal Damir Avdić.3 V današnji Bosni in Hercegovini, ob podpori mednarodne skupnosti, so pomešani ostanki umrlih iz množičnih grobišč postavljeni v pravno-znanstveno-religiozni proces vnovičnega povezovanja in identificiranja »pogrešanih«. Tako kot pri retroaktivnem ponovnem vpisovanju vojne kot vojne med etničnimi identitetami so tudi žrtve na novo povezane in prepoznane kot etnične žrtve. Protislovno je, da je perspektiva procesa vnovičnega povezovanja
79 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST perspektiva prvega krivca zločina – tako kot je prvi pogled gledal ostanke pobitih, tako jih tudi ta pogled sestavlja in imenuje, pri čemer privzema pogled storilcev pobojev, kajti v fantazmi storilca je usmrčena oseba etnični drugi. Če so mrtvi mrtvi in če se nikoli nismo odločili, da jim podamo roko, kaj naj povemo o živih? Če parafraziramo pesem Jozefine Dautbegović in rečemo, da je povojna tranzicija kakor množično grobišče, kjer vsak živi svoje življenje, vendar očitno ne iz ljubezni do iste stvari. Kolektivnost preživelih zajema tiste, ki so »živi, vendar mrtvi«.4 Te sintagme ne bi smeli brati v pomenu »živi mrliči«, temveč dobesedno – kot najbolj živi drobec preminulega, preostanek, ki vztraja in se upira usmrtitvi – nepodkupljivo življenje samo. Prav nanj se naslavlja pesem Jozefine Dautbegović – »neidentificirani« niso zgolj tisti, ki so pokopani v zakritih množičnih grobiščih, ali tisti, katerih ostanki so trenutno na mizah v centrih vnovičnega sestavljanja in povezovanja. Gre za tisti »mi«, katerega imena še vedno nimamo. »Mi« bo moral privzeti pozicijo neidentificiranega, »če se bomo znova odločili,/ da bomo ljubili« drug drugega in pri tem zahtevali univerzalno normo za to, kar smo »mi«, in za to, kar je svet. Če je ljubezen stvar odločitve, je tudi stvar prepoznanja in priznavanja ljubljenega, ki odgovarja na moje vprašanje – »Kdo sem?«.5 Skupnost nepodkupljivega življenja bo prepoznala odgovor na to vprašanje in pod nobenim pogojem ne bo privzela pogleda storilca zločina. Morala bo tudi preseči teritorialnost, in sicer tako, da se ne bo odpovedala pravici definiranja teritorialnega. Nova opredelitev teritorija bo ozemlje ljubezni in prstí, tista, ki bo premostila množično grobišče živih, in to je res publica nepodkupljivega življenja.
80 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST OPOMBE
1 Gl. Fokus, BH Dani, št. 585, 29. avgust 2008. 2 Gl. Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, Princeton University Press, Princeton in Oxford, 2006. 3 Damir Avdić v svojem songu Mrtvi so mrtvi. 4 Prav tam. 5 Gl. intervju z Jacquesom-Alainom Millerjem na povezavi http://www.lacan.com/symptom/?page_ id=263, nazadnje dostopni 24. oktobra 2009.
LITERATURA
Avdić, Damir, Mrtvi su mrtvi, performans, 2009. Brown, Wendy, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, Princeton University Press, Princeton – Oxford, 2006. Dautbegović, Jozefina, »Neidentificirani«, Sarajevske sveske, št. 4, Medija centar, Sarajevo, 2003, str. 271. Miller, Jacques-Alain, Interview, http://www.lacan.com/symptom/?page_id=263 (zadnji dostop 24. oktober 2009). Šehabović, Šejla, »Sreberenica, Potočari, 9. 5. 2004«, BH Dani (Fokus), št. 585, 29. avgust 2008. Vešović, Marko, »Tri cigare«, BH Dani (Fokus), štr. 585, 29. avgust 2008.
81 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST »Neuporabljeni spomini zbledijo, izginejo in se razblinijo v nič – strahotna misel. Zaradi tega se mora razviti zmožnost ohranjanja, spominjanja. [...] Vedno znova nas mučijo ponavljajoča se vprašanja: Kaj je zločin? Kdo je storilec in kdo žrtev? Če je mati v kulturi, ki se pretvarja, da nima polpretekle zgodovine, prenašalka kulturnih vrednot, kje je potem mesto hčerke v tem kontinuumu? Postavljanje takšnih vprašanj na takšen način, spregovoriti, nazadnje pomeni prestopanje sprejemljivih kulturnih omejitev.«
CHRISTA WOLF, nav. v Brodzki 1998
82 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ ŽENSKE PISAVE V BOSNI IN HERCEGOVINI: MODEL ZA ALTERNATIVNO POLITIKO KULTURNEGA SPOMINA? Trenutna situacija glede vidnosti in prisotnosti umetnic, visokošolskih profesoric in intelektualk v Bosni in Hercegovini je po večplastnem procesu arhiviranja in ustvarjanja kulturnega spomina zelo podobna situaciji, ki jo je opisala Alice Walker v delu V iskanju vrta naše matere.1 Alice Walker se namreč zdi skoraj nemogoče že našteti svoje predhodnice, čeprav trdno verjame, da so zares obstajale in se ukvarjale s pisanjem. Izhajajoč iz bosanskega konteksta, tudi sama težko govorim o svojih predhodnicah. Obstoječe kanonske študije navajajo le prgišče avtoric. Ciklično plimovanje stoletij in kanonizacij pogosto preživi le golo ime, ne pa tudi delo. Vsekakor je še zlasti zaskrbljujoče dejstvo, da so zapostavljene celo sodobne bosansko-hercegovske ustvarjalke, ki ostajajo ne(po)znane. Sistematično spregledovanje njihovih imen in del briše nujno sled, po kateri bi jih lahko vključili v prostor kulturnega spomina.2 Glede na to, da kulturni spomin prenaša družbene norme in vrednote in je pomemben del kulturne identitete, se lahko vprašamo, kakšna je kolektivna identiteta v Bosni in Hercegovini, če se sistematično gradi z brisanjem drugega, predvsem ženskega? To vprašanje nas morda približa spoznanju, zakaj je bosansko-hercegovska družba konzervativna, patriarhalna in globoko razdeljena. Pričujoče besedilo skuša z nasprotovanjem praksam in njihovemu vodilu, da bi kulturni spomin gradili na umetnosti pozabljanja (ars oblivionis), vsaj nekoliko prispevati k oblikovanju alternativnega modela
83 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST spomina. Ta se opira na proces interpretacije3 nekaterih bosansko- hercegovskih feminističnih naracij4 in njegov cilj ni zgolj vključiti ustvarjalke, ampak tudi preoblikovati prevladujoči kulturni spomin – ravno z vključevanjem doslej spregledanih perspektiv. Izhajajoč iz uvodnega vprašanja Christe Wolf, bom poskušala prikazati, da hčerke, vsaj v kontekstu povojne Bosne in Hercegovine, postavljajo neprijetna vprašanja o naši nedavni »tragični preteklosti« in da s tem, ko rišejo konture alternativnega spomina, ustvarjajo nekakšen »tretji prostor« in razgrinjajo strategije odpora proti vladajočemu (patriarhalnemu) diskurzu. Po mnenju Damirja Arsenijevića »je polje kulturne produkcije v današnji Bosni in Hercegovini križišče spominov, na katerem se je treba odločiti, kateri poti slediti, saj ta določa posamezne načine soočanja s travmo. Takšne odločitve so zato predvsem etična in politična dejanja.«5 Arsenijević trdi, da ravno nova generacija umetnic, kot so Šejla Kamerić, Jasmila Žbanić, Šejla Šehabović, Adisa Bašić, če omenimo le nekatere, ustvarja najbolj imaginativne umetniške prakse in intervencije, povezane z emancipacijsko repolitizacijo travmatičnih izkušenj. V tem prispevku se bom osredotočila na kratko prozo Šejle Šehabović in Jasmile Žbanić. Pokazati želim, da obe ustvarjalki kljubujeta patriarhalnemu razmišljanju in »razkrivata preteklost kot spremenljivo v odgovarjanju sedanjosti in kot zmožno preoblikovanja sedanjosti in prihodnosti«.6 Obe avtorici pripadata skupini posameznic in posameznikov, katerih umetniške prakse Jasmina Husanović opredeljuje kot »geste v polju umetnosti in kulturne produkcije«, ki se upirajo procesu »konfiskacije spomina«, kakor ga je poimenovala Dubravka Ugrešić.7 V prvem delu prispevka bom analizirala Ruvejdo (2007) Šejle Šehabović,8 zgodbo, objavljeno v avtoričini zadnji zbirki kratke proze Zgodbe, ženski spol, množina, v drugem delu pa se bom osredotočila na kratko zgodbo Vera Jasmile Žbanić. Šejla Šehabović je še posebno zanimiva ustvarjalka, saj se v kulturni sferi ne udejstvuje le kot pisateljica, ampak tudi kot literarna teoretičarka in kritičarka. Širša javnost jo je spoznala prek pesniške zbirke Make up,9 ki je bila leta 2004 nagrajena kot najboljša pesniška zbirka v okviru regionalnega programa Sarajevskega knjižnega sejma. Njena prva zbirka kratkih zgodb, Car Trojan ima kozja ušesa,10 je bila objavljena leta 2005, zadnja zbirka z naslovom Zgodbe,
84 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST ženski spol, množina11 pa leta 2007. Ena od glavnih in svojevrstnih značilnosti avtoričinega dela, nakazana že v njeni poeziji, je odločno in konsistentno umeščanje na obrobja, v položaje »vselej nedoločenega« subjekta. Zgodba Ruvejda je zgrajena okoli motiva vrnitve v »domovino« zaradi identifikacije posmrtnih ostankov, telesnih delov, ki naj bi pripadali dedku ne(po)imenovane protagonistke. Na eni strani je to zgodba o težavnem otroštvu in o odraščanju deklice ter o procesu njenega samorazumevanja kot osebe, ki ne živi le med dvema svetovoma, ampak tudi med dvema identitetama: ena od njih je pomembno zaznamovana z dejstvom Ruvejdine fantazme, druga pa s telesom, ki ga obupana junakinja poskuša sestaviti iz koščkov preteklosti. Zgodba se na drugi strani zoperstavlja velikim, »znanstvenim« sistematizacijam majhnih človeških tragedij v eno in univerzalno podobo. Avtorica se osredotoča na zgodbo posameznice o njenem travmatičnem srečanju z domovino, ki jo simbolizira mrtvašnica oziroma center za identifikacijo pogrešanih oseb. Protagonistka ne želi prepoznati dedkovih oblek in s tem dedka identificirati. »Dali so mi njegovo majico in športno jakno. Ta je bila včasih modra, preden jo je zasula zemlja. Od takrat ni več modra, razkrojila se je in ne pripada več mojemu dedku. Poznala sem mojega dedka, ne prepoznam pa te jakne.«12 Ruvejda je naslovni lik in nekdo, ki postavlja uganko, ki jo poskušamo razrešiti, ko zgodbo beremo. Obenem pa je tudi nekakšno skrivnostno »bistvo«, zavest, ki jo osrednja junakinja poskuša doseči, da bi si olajšala pot in se naučila, kako ljubiti samo sebe ali se vsaj sprejeti. Ne smemo pozabiti, da je ta avtodiegetična pripovedovalka oblikovana po liku emigranta, ki je zelo pomembna figura v povojni književnosti, ne samo v Bosni in Hercegovini, ampak povsod drugje v nekdanji Jugoslaviji. V študiji o življenju v eksilu Edward Said takole povezuje eksil in bolečino: »Eksil je nezaceljiva razpoka med človeškim bitjem in njegovim domačim krajem, med sebstvom in njegovim resničnim domom.«13 Kljub temu pa ta pluralnost pogleda vsaj deloma nadomešča psihološko selitev: »Večina ljudi se načeloma zaveda ene kulture, ene ureditve, enega doma; eksilant pa se zaveda vsaj dveh, in iz te pluralnosti pogleda vznika zavedanje hkratnih razsežnosti, zavedanje, ki je – če si sposodim izraz iz glasbe – kontrapunktično.«14
85 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Zares, junakinja, ki je naturalizirana Američanka, je predstavljena kot figura meje ali praga, kot nekdo, ki živi v nekakšnem »interludiju«.15 Čeprav svet presoja skozi binarne opozicije »tukaj« in »tam«, to niso rigidna nasprotja. Zdi se, da avtorica uporablja takšne opozicije bolj zato, da bi opisala svet diaspore, v katerem se izseljenci (ki so bili pregnani ali so se preselili ali pa so pobegnili) ne morejo poistovetiti le z eno stranjo, ampak živijo v nenehnem primerjanju med svetom, ki je tukaj, in tistim, »v katerem živijo«. »Sociologinja sem. Če gledam z gledišča tukajšnjega študija, sem diplomirala. V Ameriki pa greš neposredno na magisterij, če le imaš kaj pameti. Jaz jo imam, le da to leto pavziram. Sicer pa delam, tako kot sem delala že med rednim študijem. In tega nisem prekinila zaradi dela. Tam se temu ne reče prekiniti, ampak da se nisi uspel vpisati. In tam tudi ni rednega ali izrednega študija, temveč študiraš, kadar hočeš. Kadar koli to hočeš.«16 Avtorica uporablja zelo zanimive stilizacije govora. Govoreči subjekt je nekdo, ki je »zapustil« svoj materni jezik razmeroma mlad, torej nekdo, ki materinščine ne govori najbolj artikulirano in tekoče. Junakinja se izraža nekako otročje, a zato je njena govorica toliko bolj neposredna in učinkovita. Pripovedujoči glas se skozi besedilo premešča, izmenično poroča o sedanjosti in preteklosti. Ne moremo ga locirati v času ali prostoru – kakor da bi visel v zraku. Takšno pripoved lahko razumemo tudi kot »disidentifikacijo«, kakor jo opredeljuje Teresa de Lauretis: skozi takšno pripoved naj bi ženske izražale svoje težave ob poskusih pomiritve lastne podobe o sebi in tiste, ki jo poskušajo ukrojiti po vsiljenih, patriarhalnih predstavah ženskosti. 17 Spominjanje poustvarja drugačen tip eksila, ki se razvija iz dejstva, da živi ženska v patriarhalni družbi. Ko protagonistka oriše svoje otroštvo, ne opisuje toliko, kakšna je bila kot otrok, ampak kakšna tedaj ni bila – kakor da bi izražala »disidentifikacijo« z življenjem, ki ji je bilo vsiljeno: »Moj dedek pravi, da je Ruvejda stara pet let, toliko kot sem jaz. In lepa je, kot sem jaz, le več ve kot jaz in lepše se obnaša. Nikoli se ne obnašam lepo, vedno se nekaj razburjam. To je grozno.«18 Avtorica v pripoved protagonistke vključuje dedkov pogled, ki zastopa patriarhalno avtoriteto. Ta od nje zahteva, da se obnaša ženskam primerno. Ded se ne trudi, da bi jo vpeljal v skrivnosti in veščine njegovega poklica. To znanje si mora od njega »ukrasti«, ko ga pozorno opazuje ob
86 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST delu. Na drugi strani pa je videti, da si on najbolj želi zgolj to, da svojo vnukinjo disciplinira in jo spravi v Red: »Ko Ruvejde ni, mi dovoli, da sedim ob njem cel dan in ga opazujem. On šiva in govori o Ruvejdi. - Ah, kako se je Ruvejda včeraj lepo obnašala! Ko bi le videla, kako ni ničesar ušpičila! Ni zameštrala mojih niti, ni pomakala rok v vazo, bila je pridna ves dan, sama od sebe! Niti enkrat ni zagrabila vročega likalnika!«19 Zgodba ima zelo zanimiv prostorski okvir, skozi katerega avtorica riše zemljevid poti, po kateri hodi junakinja, ko zasleduje svojo identiteto. Prvi topos je dedkova in babičina hiša. Delitev hiše na zgornji (ženski) in spodnji (moški) del ni inverzija patriarhalne binarne dihotomije, ampak ravno nasprotno – kaže na položaj ženske: zapornice v »stolpu«, v katerem je visoko in na varnem pred pogledi in vplivi iz zunanjega sveta, kakor tudi pred vezmi z njim. V ta stolp mlado žensko zapre moški, ki ni le pater familias, ampak tudi steber družine. Ta arhitektura avtoritete je v zgodbi nazorno predstavljena – dedkova obrt in javno življenje se odvijata v kleti, v samih temeljih hiše: »V dedkovi hiši so bile vse stopnice stare in škripave, razen tistih na koncu, ki so vodile v klet. Te so bile ravne, trdne, betonske.«20 Ko se pripoved polagoma razvija, se vzpostavlja povezava med toposom stare hiše, ki jo preplavlja duh fantazmagorične Ruvejde, in toposom velike ameriške hiše, ki pripada prijatelju protagonistke. Ta povezava se vzpostavlja z motivom skrivnostnih glasov iz kleti. Ko se patriarhalni arhitekturni red v dvonadstropni hiši ameriškega ljubimca protagonistke za trenutek obrne na glavo, se razkrije še ena povezava, namreč v prizoru, v katerem junakinja prestopi meje in vztrajno ponavlja moški vzorec – vzpenjanje proti spalnici. Uporaba anahronizmov zmoti linearni pripovedni čas in ga spremeni v med seboj prepletene sočasnosti, ki tako ne povezujejo le referenčnih točk v prostoru, ampak tudi figuri dedka in ljubimca. Na ta način se vzpostavlja vzporednica z dedkom kot dejavnim likom, pri čemer ostaja breme nezavednega vpliva Ruvejdine podobe trajna ovira za popolno simetrijo simbolnega reda in za popolno emancipacijo. Ker junakinji nikoli ni uspelo »prijeti« ali vsaj za trenutek videti dedkovo skrbno varovano ljubljenko Ruvejdo, ostaja njeno življenje v Ameriki nekakšna zbirka ne dovolj razvitih razmerij, prekinjenih projektov in neizpolnjenih želja. Odnos med junakinjo in dedkom je vseskozi predstavljen kot konflikt. Konec zgodbe ostaja odprt,
87 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST saj junakinja, kot edina v družini, ki je pristala na identifikacijo posmrtnih ostankov in je zato njena kri pravzaprav edina primerna za ta postopek,21 zahteva vračilo svoje krvi. Tako prepreči, da bi se identifikacijski postopek zaključil, istočasno pa prepreči tudi razrešitev svojega imaginarnega »konflikta« z dedkom. Po drugi strani ta nepričakovani konec namiguje, da junakinja ne dovoli, da bi njena življenjska zgodba postala del neke magistrske ali doktorske naloge.22 Konec torej priča o zavedanju junakinje, da je treba osebne spomine ohranjati in ceniti, jih upoštevati kot edinstvene in dragocene, ne pa jih obravnavati kot poenostavljene primere in statistične podatke, gola dejstva v neizbežnem posploševanju.
Kratko zgodbo Vera Jasmile Žbanić, ki je medtem postala ugledna filmska režiserka in scenaristka, sem prebrala v eni izmed povojnih številk sarajevske literarne revije Lica (Obrazi), leta 1998 ali morda 1999. Takrat sem bila še študentka in na srečo sem besedilo pretipkala in ga shranila v svojem prenosniku – in si tako prihranila težavno in verjetno jalovo iskanje številke revije, v kateri je bila zgodba objavljena. To je kratka zgodba, napisana v obliki monologa, kot da bi pripoved »objektivno«, dokumentarno zapisovala zgodbo. Vjera je ganljiv in energičen zapis o neimenovani ženski, ki jo omožijo daleč premlado in jo po dveh letih potrpežljivega čakanja njenega moža na prvo menstruacijo končno pošljejo domov kot »nesposobno« (osebo z napako). Trenutek, ko junakinja dobi to »žensko bolezen«, označuje preobrat v njenem življenju, saj napelje njenega smrtno bolnega brata, da jo drugič omoži, tokrat z vdovcem, ki mu, kot se izkaže pozneje, rodi dvajset otrok. Vrhunec zgodbe se navezuje na odločitev junakinje, da se bo uprla: z belo blazinico, ki jo bo sama sešila in v katero bo lahko usmerila moževo seme in se tako zaščitila pred še eno nosečnostjo. Motiv zapravljanja moškega semena je povezan z naslovom (Vera), saj mož, navajen na ženino slepo poslušnost, ženo po vsakem »ljubljenju« ali bolj po vsakem »praznjenju« zmerja s komunistko, ker meče stran to, kar pripada Bogu. Pripovedovalka v svojem zadnjem stavku zelo učinkovito pove, da je vernica, kar potrdi v prizoru pranja blazinice.23
88 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST V tej pripovedi je posebno zanimiva neverjetna natančnost izražanja in rabe besednih figur, denimo primerjave,24 ki jo lahko razumemo kot »poskus označevanja razlike v upiranju proti najbolj zadrtemu moškemu diskurzu.«25 Takšni primeri odpora z rabo sloga pričajo o obstoju posebnega ženskega jezika, ki se razvija v izolaciji in togih patriarhalnih strukturah, kar ponazarja tudi ta pripoved. To seveda ni emancipacijski jezik, vendar ima zelo pomembno vlogo, saj opozarja na kategorije, ki v opisanem kontekstu kreirajo žensko identiteto. To so kategorije prisile, nasilnega in nerazumnega obnašanja tistih, ki zasedajo pozicije moči. Ženska se takšni retoriki upira z vero, razumom, skrbnim opazovanjem in zavestnim sobivanjem z naravo. Zdi se, da ta zgodba predstavlja znak, ki po Nirman Moranjak - Bamburać kaže na »ženski odpor in upiranje nasilju in sovraštvu, [na] zmožnost žensk, da se borijo za svoj obstoj in preživetje družin v kaotični politični in ekonomski situaciji [...], da javno spregovorijo o svojih travmah, da vedno znova začenjajo v imenu življenja in proti kulturi smrti.«26 Ta kratka pripoved postavlja tudi pomembna vprašanja o lastništvu in o nadzorovanju procesov družbenega izgrajevanja. Zgodba opozarja na nepričakovane strategije emancipacije oziroma vsaj na »enako udeležbo« v patriarhalnem diskurzu in na ustvarjanje prostora za pogajanja o bistvenih spremembah. Zgodba je pomembna tudi zato, ker opozarja na razlike v načinih oblikovanja osebne identitete in razkriva vlogo ženskega subjekta v vsakdanjem življenju patriarhalne skupnosti.
Da bi ustvarila alternativni spomin, se Šejla Šehabović disidentificira oziroma distancira od predpostavk vladajočih pripovedi sodobne bosansko-hercegovske zgodovine in literarne produkcije. V ospredje postavlja strategije »disidentifikacije« na več ravneh, zato je njena zgodba za današnji čas posebno relevanten model spomina. Ne ponuja nobenih rešitev ali odgovorov, njen subjekt je razcepljen, fragmentiran, slaboten in razsrediščen, brez zaščite; sebe in druge postavlja pred tisoč dilem in vsakogar izda: dedka, ljubimca, bralce, ki jih vznemirja z odprtim koncem.
89 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Avtorica je »izdajalka«, zaveda se tega, na kar je opozarjal že Deleuze: biti izdajalec svojega lastnega kraljestva, izdajalec svojega lastnega spola, razreda in veličine – kaj drugega naj bi bil razlog za pisanje? Avtorica se torej vsekakor »zaveda [...], da literatura ne more ničesar spremeniti, da to zmorejo samo ljudje«.27 Zato piše, da bi provocirala, evocirala in zbirala svoje spomine, spomine koga drugega, moje spomine, potlačene spomine na mojega dedka, ki je prav tako nosil klobuk in me učil, kako naj primem papir z levo roko, z radirko v desni pa brišem nepravilno zapisano, ne da bi pri tem zmečkala papir. Vera, kratka, na pol strani strnjena zgodba o celotnem življenju neke ženske, nas spodbuja k razmišljanju in dejavnemu odnosu do kontekstov okolja, v katerem še vedno prevladuje patriarhalna ideologija. Ideologija, ki v Bosni in Hercegovini temo »zaželene« in »nezaželene« nosečnosti še vedno prikazuje kot nekakšen njen problem. Kakor koli že se ona odloči, je to vselej narobe ali »komunistično«. Spomini v obravnavanih zgodbah Šejle Šehabović in Jasmile Žbanić so neuradne pripovedi ali narobna stran vladajočih pripovedi o patriarhalni zgodovini. Pojavljajo se kot predstava v teku, ki je plod vzajemnega delovanja številnih subjektov, vključno z vsemi bralci in bralkami. Obe zgodbi predlagata kulturno prevrednotenje vseh oblik njenih zgodb in »drobnarij« vsakdanjih dogodkov, v katerih so sodelovale in še vedno sodelujejo ženske.
90 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST OPOMBE
1 Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mother’s Garden, Hardcover, Harcourt, 1983. 2 Za Jana Assmanna je kulturni spomin način, kako si družba zagotavlja kulturno trajnost, denimo s hranjenjem svojega kulturnega spomina, norm in vrednot ter z njihovim prenašanjem iz roda v rod. Po tej poti lahko zanamci rekonstruirajo svojo kulturno identiteto. Prim. Jan Assman, Kulturno pamćenje: pismo, sjećanje i politički identitet u ranim visokim kulturama, prev. V. Preljević, Vrijeme, Zenica, 2005. 3 Poleg arhiviranja in kanonizacije je tudi interpretacija pomemben proces oblikovanja kulturnega spomina. Prim. Vahidin Preljević, »Kulturno pamćenje, identitet i književnost«, Razlika, št. 10–11, Tuzla, 2005, str. 126. 4 Gayle Green opozarja: »Feministično leposlovje ni isto kot ‘žensko leposlovje’ ali leposlovje izpod peresa žensk. Ne pišejo vse pisateljice in pesnice v ženski pisavi in niso vse književnice feministične pisateljice, saj pisati o ženskih temah ne pomeni nujno pisati s feminističnega gledišča. [...] Feministično leposlovje je samo po sebi moteče, saj predpostavlja, da je spol, ki se zdi naravna kategorija, pravzaprav stvar konvencije in zato spremenljiv – prav s tem nasprotuje ustaljenim načinom razmišljanja. Vendar pa, kot predlaga Rosalinda Coward, da bi lahko razločili med besedili, ki so le na zunaj zapisana feminizmu, in tistimi, ki so globoko zasidrana v feminizmu, se moramo vprašati, na kakšen način ta besedila ‘oblikujejo realnost’, ‘kako deluje reprezentacija’ [...], iz kakšne prakse pisanja se je razvilo posamezno besedilo in v katere ideologije je vpeto.« (Gayle Greene, »Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory«, Signs, let. 16, št. 2, 1991, str. 290–321.) 5 Damir Arsenijević, »Prema politici nade: poezija i postratni period u BiH«, v: Jasmina Husanović (ur.), Na tragu novih politika: kultura i obrazovanje u Bosni i Hercegovini, Centar za istraživački, stvaralački i građanski angažman Grad, Tuzla, 2006, str. 276–277. 6 Green, nav. delo, str. 292. 7 Jasmina Husanović, »Politika svjedočenja nasuprot stanja poricanja: Ogledi o repolitizirajućim praksama u polju kulture i umjetnosti u BiH«, v: Na tragu novih politika: kultura i obrazovanje u Bosni i Hercegovini, str. 47. 8 Vsi citati v pričujočem prispevku so iz različice zgodbe, ki je objavljena v antologiji Na trećem trgu. Antologija nove kratke priče Bosne i Hercegovine, Hrvatske, Srbije i Crne Gore (2006). 9 Zoro, Sarajevo – Zagreb, 2004. 10 Buybook, Sarajevo, 2005. 11 Nezavisne novine, Banja Luka, 2007 12 Šejla Šehabović, Ruvejda, v: Na trećem trgu. Antologija nove kratke priče Bosne i Hercegovine, Hrvatske, Srbije i Crne Gore, Narodna biblioteka Jovan Popović, Kikinda, 2006, str. 36. 13 Edward Said, »The Mind of Winter«, Harper’s Magazine, New York, 1984, str. 49. 14 Prav tam, str. 55. 15 Šehabović, Ruvejda, str. 37. 16 Prav tam, str. 39.
91 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST 17 Prim. Teresa De Lauretis, »Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness«, Feminist Studies, let. 16, št. 1, 1990, str. 115–150. 18 Šehabović, Ruvejda, str. 39. 19 Prav tam. 20 Prav tam, str. 42. 21 »Vnukinje so primerne za identifikacijo. Ničesar se ne spominjajo; ne jočejo in ni jih strah igel. V redu so tudi zato, ker so njihovo meso in kri. Kri je najpomembnejša. Nenadomestljiva« (Šehabović, Ruvejda, str. 40). 22 »Uradnica je bila tokrat sočutna. Bila je iz ene od evropskih držav in verjetno bo doktorirala iz tega« (Šehabović, Ruvejda, str. 45). 23 »Ko perem blazinico, se z nje steka v vodo gosta bela tekočina. Zemlja postaja bela in potem črna. In spomladi, tukaj, kakor povsod drugje, vzklije trava. In jaz verujem v Boga« (Jasmila Žbanić, Vera). 24 »Blazinica, velika kot pest, ki jo stisneš, ko želiš koga udariti«, »Ječanje kot pri vzdigovanju 30-litrskega kanistra« (Žbanić, prav tam). 25 Nirman Moranjak - Bamburać, »Signature smrti i etičnost ženskog pisma«, v: Babić - Avdispahić idr. (ur.), Izazovi feminizma, Forum Bosnae, Sarajevo, 2004, str. 154. 26 Prav tam, str. 150. 27 Sara Lenoks, nav. v: Rachel Blau Du Plessis, »Etrurkama«, Genero, št. 1, prev. D. Đurić, Beograd, 2002, str. 124.
LITERATURA
Arsenijević, Damir, »Prema politici nade: poezija i postratni period u BiH«, v: Jasmina Husanović (ur.), Na tragu novih politika: kultura i obrazovanje u Bosni i Hercegovini, Centar za istraživački, stvaralački i građanski angažman Grad, Tuzla, 2006, str. 275–298. Assman, Jan, Kulturno pamćenje: pismo, sjećanje i politički identitet u ranim visokim kulturama, prev. V. Preljević, Vrijeme, Zenica, 2005. Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space, prev. M. Jolas, Beacon, Boston, 1994. Brodzki, Bella, Celeste Schenk (ur.), Life/Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1988 (nav. v: Irina Novikova, Žena i rat/rod i žanr/autobiografija i istorija u Dalekoj tutnjavi Elene Rževske, http://www.womenngo.org.rs/sajt/sajt/izdanja/zenske_studije/ zs_s10/irina.html) De Lauretis, Teresa, »Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness«, Feminist Studies, let. 16, št. 1, 1990, str. 115–150.
92 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Du Plessis, Rachel Blau, »Etrurkama«, Genero, št. 1, prev. D. Đurić, Beograd, 2002, str. 109–124. Greene, Gayle, »Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory«, Signs, let. 16, št. 2, 1991, str. 290–321. Husanović, Jasmina, »Politika svjedočenja nasuprot stanja poricanja: Ogledi o repolitizirajućim praksama u polju kulture i umjetnosti u BiH«, v: Jasmina Husanović (ur.), Na tragu novih politika: kultura i obrazovanje u Bosni i Hercegovini, Centar za istraživački, stvaralački i građanski angažman Grad, Tuzla, 2006, str. 47–72. Moranjak - Bamburać, Nirman, »Signature smrti i etičnost ženskog pisma«, v: Babić - Avdispahić idr. (ur.), Izazovi feminizma, Forum Bosnae, Sarajevo, 2004, str. 150–163. Preljević, Vahidin, »Kulturno pamćenje, identitet i knjizevnost«, Razlika, št. 10–11, Tuzla, 2005, str. 121–133. Said, Edward, »The Mind of Winter«, Harper’s Magazine, New York, 1984, str. 49–55. Šehabović, Šejla, »Ruvejda«, v: Na trećem trgu. Antologija nove kratke priče Bosne i Hercegovine, Hrvatske, Srbije i Crne Gore, Narodna biblioteka Jovan Popović, Kikinda, 2006, str. 36–47. Walker, Alice, In Search of Our Mother’s Garden, Hardcover, Harcourt, 1983.
93 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST
94 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST ŠEJLA ŠEHABOVIĆ
V KAKŠNEM RAZMERJU STE?
POGAJANJE O INTIMNEM ŽIVLJENJU IN MIGRACIJAH V SODOBNI BOSANSKI ŽENSKI POEZIJI
Pozimi leta 2007 sem prvič zaprosila za turistični vizum – za vsa potovanja v svojem odraslem življenju, torej po zadnji vojni v Bosni, sem vizum dobila prek vrste evropskih in ameriških ustanov: univerz in drugih izobraževalnih organizacij, pisateljskih združenj itn. Jamčili so zame, pošiljali garantna pisma neposredno na veleposlaništva, vnaprej plačevali dokumente, organizirali prav vsak moj obisk v njihovi državi (in takih gostovanj ni bilo malo), vse pa je bilo povezano z mojo kariero, pisanjem, predstavitvijo političnih idej in predstavljanjem nečesa iz moje države. To zimo nisem predstavljala ničesar od tega – želela sem na Švedsko, preprosto zato, da bi obiskala fanta. Tako sem zaprosila za turistični vizum na švedskem veleposlaništvu v Sarajevu. Uradnica za debelim okencem je proučevala garantno pismo mojega fanta in me v lepi bosanščini vprašala: »Je on vaš fant?« Mogoče ker sem zardela ali zajecljala, ali pa ker se je njej zdelo, da je nisem razumela, je počasi in z zanimanjem ponovila vprašanje: »V kakšnem razmerju ste z njim?« Zakaj pa mi je bilo ob tem preprostem vprašanju tako neprijetno – razen dejstva, da neka uradnica za okencem sprašuje o mojem zasebnem življenju in osebnem razmerju v instituciji, ki večino časa porabi za to, da bosanskim državljanom ne dovoli približati se bogatim in uspešnim schengenskim državam? Dejstvo, da je spolno določeno razmerje med institucijami in socialno mobilnostjo žensk z roba schengenskega območja omogočilo tem ženskam nakup socialne mobilnosti, če so se na primer poročile (ali pa
95 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST zgolj registrirale zunajzakonsko skupnost z državljanom države višjega ranga, kar denimo omogoča skandinavska zakonodaja), je za ženske v Bosni po zadnji vojni vpeljalo pomembno razliko med možnimi izbirami, kako doseči prosto gibanje in svobodo. V današnji bosanski mainstream popularni kulturi zasledimo kar nekaj očitnih receptov, kako naj ženske dosežejo cilj mobilnosti (potovanja, delo in ostale ugodnosti z Zahoda); pogosto se pojavlja naslov, vzet iz ženske revije – »Fantje iz diaspore so bolj zaželeni!«. O konceptih mobilnosti in intimnosti raznovrstno razpravlja sodobna bosanska ženska poezija, ki razgrinja pogled popularne kulture in izpodbija tako spolne kot tudi institucionalne norme. Sodobna bosanska ženska poezija označuje neke vrste renesanso, opazno na številnih ravneh v regionalni literarni kritiki. Kot zanimiv prispevek k postmoderni literaturi v bosanskem, hrvaškem in srbskem jeziku je poleg feministične kritike razširjena tudi praksa »mainstreaminga« ženske poezije. Pojav feministične in drugih zvrsti ženske poezije, ki je prevladal po vojnah na območju nekdanje Jugoslavije, ima družbeno in teoretsko ozadje, ki ga pogosto obravnavajo teoretska besedila v regiji in napisana v omenjenih jezikih. Nekaj pomembnih vprašanj na to temo izpostavljajo ideje Nirman Moranjak Bamburać, objavljene v zborniku Forum Bosniae. V članku z naslovom »Je vojna v vojnem pisanju?« (»Ima li rata u ratnom pismu?«) avtorica uporablja feministično metodologijo in specifičen slog, ko govori o povojnem feminističnem pisanju in drugih vrstah pisave v sodobnih bosanskih dramah, ki se navezujejo na vojno.1 Vez med vojnami na območju nekdanje Jugoslavije in porastom feministične kulture razčlenjujejo številne discipline, med drugim tudi književnost, kot rada poudarjam. V zborniku iz leta 2000 z naslovom Vojni diskurz, ženski diskurz: eseji in študije primerov iz Jugoslavije in Rusije (War Discourse, Women’s Discourse: Essays and Case-Studies from Yugoslavia and Russia) 2 Zorica Mršević analizira ženski aktivizem v obdobju vojn na območju nekdanje Jugoslavije, sledi in označuje pozicije ženskega subjekta, ki je postal vidnejši v kulturi nasilja. Ženska subjektivnost v tem obdobju se je oblikovala nasproti prevladujoči mačistični kulturi in znova obujeni »tradicionalni« spolni normi – obe te ravni je zgradila uradna politika med vojno. Čeprav se avtorica pri analiziranju opira na položaj v Srbiji in se posebej osredotoča na področje političnega aktivizma, je mogoče enake ugotovitve o vidnosti in nujnosti ukrepanja v javnem življenju zaslediti v številnih drugih sferah medvojnih in povojnih skupnosti nekdanje Jugoslavije, ki so se razvile med
96 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST posameznimi ženskami in ženskimi organizacijami na socialnem in kulturnem področju. To »prebujenje« vključuje sodobno žensko poezijo v Bosni in Hercegovini. Kot poudarja znani bosanski in črnogorski pesnik in kritik Marko Vešović, ga pri urednikovanju Antologije sodobne poezije v Bosni in Hercegovini3 ni presenetilo dejstvo, da pesnice prevladujejo, saj se vsa zadeva ni zgodila prav za njegovim hrbtom, lahko pa jo razumemo kot dobro novico. Kot nadaljuje Vešović, »pred vojno so bile pesnice v Bosni in Hercegovini redke kot ‘jagode na grobovih’ [...]. Med petnajstletno vojno anarhijo in v času brezzakonja – kajti vojna v Bosni in Hercegovini se ni nikoli končala, le spremenila je svojo obliko – so ženske naredile nujno potrebne korake proti absolutni, torej neprimerni moški prevladi v poeziji teh držav«. 4 Ta izzvana prevlada je bila pogosto predmet razprav, skupaj z drugimi neenakostmi, namreč z vprašanji državljanstva in socialne mobilnosti v simbolnem in dobesednem pomenu v sodobni ženski poeziji. Tu se bom opirala na raziskave Damira Arsenijevića, ki pomembno prispevajo k analizi bosanske ženske poezije.5 Leta 1996 je Nermina Omerbegović6 v pesmi Pisati (Moški piše)7 premišljevala o premeščenem ženskem subjektu, ki se zoperstavlja herojski podobi moške vojne literature. Po tej poti je ustvarila zlasti sliko odmika iz tradicionalnega vzorca moške poezije, bolj kot iz dejanskega prostora vojnih grozot. Osredotočila se je na odmik iz tistega stvarnega kraja (Sarajeva), ki ga v pesmi označuje kot področje naslovnega pesnika. Le na tej točki je v pesmi omenjeno resnično ime – univerzalnost trpljenja povezuje z dejanskim prostorom in obstoječo vojno. Ženski subjekt pesmi je zgrajen kot nasprotje estetskemu vzroku, na katerem temelji moško pisanje. Podoba vojnih grozot se kaže v ostrem nasprotju s tesnobnim bojem »moškega pesnika«, da jih naredi predstavljive. Premestitev ženskega glasu v tekstu vznemirja v smislu lažnega ločevanja umetnosti od življenja. Lirski subjekt pesmi prikaže, da imajo otroški jok, velik rdeči madež in pika nekaj skupnega, da trpljenje in smrt pripadata istemu modelu linearne teleološke zgodovine. Prikaz postane celota vsega prikazovanega, proces pisanja je odvisen od moči produkcije, bolj kot od resnice. Primerjanje ženskega subjekta z moškocentričnim procesom pisanja in odmik le-tega od dejanskega vojnega prostora proizvajata učinek odtujitve – ne od vojne, trpljenja, bolečine in otroškega krika, temveč od
97 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST procesa, ki vse to postavlja v spodobno zgodovinsko obliko. Negotovost resnice v pesmi je le en izid tega odmika:
In v Sarajevu je sonce zahajalo, ali pa so to bile hiše v plamenih.
Hladen oddaljeni ton pesmi, ki ga poraja pozicija premeščenega subjekta, poudarja hipokrizijo prikazovanja, ki jo sopostavlja z ozadjem resničnosti same. Medtem ko pesem Nermine Omerbegović govori o migraciji v prenesenem pomenu in upošteva razdaljo med konstrukcijo moškosti in prevladujočimi prikazi vojne v Bosni in Hercegovini ter konstrukcijo ženske subjektivnosti in upodabljanjem vojne v razmerju do simbolne razdalje, se druge značilno ženske pesnice previdno dotikajo vprašanj ženske subjektivnosti, vojne in povojnih migracij s stališča intimistične lirike in drugih zornih kotov intimnih razpravljanj. Adisa Bašić8 denimo v svoji drugi pesniški zbirki – Travma Market9 – izvede strateški premik k postmodernističnemu razpravljanju o simulakru, intimna doživetja vojne prikazuje ironično. Del zbirke, po katerem je le-ta poimenovana, ima moto: – od česa? / (odgovor Juda, ki je preživel holokavst, na vprašanje, ali je odšel na Novo Zelandijo, da bi bil čim bolj stran).10 Pesmi v tem delu zbirke so vpete v svetovno produkcijo pripovedi o neizbežnem trpljenju, ki ga prikazujejo kot globoko intimno in osebno izkušnjo. Naslovna pesem, Travma-market,11 razgrinja intelektualno izkušnjo povojne migracije. Pesniški subjekt, postavljen v dialog z »Zahodom« – ta je predstavljen kot »[...] blondinka s Harvarda, katere možgani so ocenjeni na pol milijona« –, se postavlja v neenak položaj migrantke, katere travma je edina stvar, s katero lahko trguje. Angleščina, jezik »Zahoda«, v katerem subjekt ni zmožen tekoče govoriti o svoji travmi, postavlja za središčnega, vseobsegajočega označevalca prav besedo travma, s čimer onemogoča vsakršen prostor za izgradnjo subjektivnosti v ozadju. Ta specifična izkušnja »izgubljenosti s prevodom« ne more obstajati, če ne »séde« v prevedene reference koncepta travme.
Devet smrti, krvaveči bobniči, izmikanje kroglam – vse séde v besedo travma.
Prevajanje podob krivice in smrti, produkcija številnih prevodov le-teh v poenostavljeno sliko, zelo oddaljeno od subjektove intimne izkušnje,
98 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST deluje kot Baudrillardov opis »koridorjev« za vojno območje: »Vsi ti ‘koridorji’, ki smo jih odprli, da bi poslali naše zaloge in našo ‘kulturo’, so v resnici koridorji žalosti, skozi katere vnašamo njihovo lastno moč in energijo, ki pa jo proizvaja njihova nesreča. Še ena neenaka menjava.«12 Nirman Moranjak Bamburać opominja, da Baudrillardov koncept »neenake menjave« ne zajema pojma »spomina« na preživele .13 V navedeni pesmi Adise Bašić grozljiva možnost vrednosti, ki jo nosi travma, vnaša ironičen pogled na intimno izkušnjo, saj vedno znova sili k razlaganju in ponavljanju – tako se preobrača v morbidno valuto, menjavo, ki vključuje popolno zavedanje osebne neenakosti. Posebna značilnost te menjave, poleg odpovedovanja kulturni izmenjavi v liberalnem pomenu in subjektivnosti kot taki v celoti, je, da subjektu ne dopušča nobene druge možnosti – »travmo« mora zastavljati kot edino vredno stvar za menjavo. Ta pozicija subjekta, čigar ironija je usmerjena v njega samega, ni pa več stvar razpravljanja na ravni iluzij, ustvarja tendenco subjekta, da trguje z edino stvarjo, ki jo ima v lasti, torej s seboj. Ta dragocena osebna trditev pesnice, da poseduje svojo identiteto, da se zaveda krhkosti svoje identitete in cene, ki jo mora plačati lirski subjekt, je ena glavnih vrednosti poezije Adise Bašić. Preostale pesmi v zbirki Travma-market govorijo o prostoru konstitucije subjekta, vpetem v dinamičen prostor migracije in ženskosti v povojnih tranzicijskih okoliščinah. V pesmi Krožna pot14 avtorica sestavlja nelinearno sliko vpogleda, ki se razvija z izkušnjo migracije. Tudi v tej pesmi izgrajevanje subjektivnosti s premikanjem, dinamiko kot načelom procesa samozavedanja ne izključuje ironije in samoizpraševanja. Seznam glagolov (čakati, oditi, vrniti se, izrekati dobrodošlico itn.) pripoveduje zgodbo o neskončnem trudu za vredno življenje, čeprav to obliko življenja, ki prestopa meje državljanstva, poraja polno zavedanje pesničinega žrtvovanja:
Stečem stran – da bi samo sebe zapeljala da bi se mučila da bi se utrudila da bi me oropala širša obzorja da bi se vrnila
99 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST »Krog« torej ne prikazuje življenja v gibanju proti zagotovljenemu srečnemu koncu, temveč izraža le upanje za »širša obzorja« – v nasprotju s stabilnostjo, v smeri katere simbolni subjekt izgrajuje svoje življenje. Povratni glagoli, kot sta »zapeljati se«, »mučiti se«, učinkujejo kot ojačevalci pesniškega glasu. Slog pesmi je, tako kot naslov, krožen, izpovedni glas se vrača k avtorici in podčrtuje avtobiografski pristop. Prav zaradi poudarjanja izgrajenega avtobiografskega tona pesem vztraja pri na videz enostavni, »navadni« izbiri besed, zaradi katerih metafizična vprašanja o gibanju in napredovanju zvenijo banalno, vsebina pesmi pa usmerjena v prizemljeno zahtevo po preživetju. Pesem sklenejo vprašanja, ki ne dopuščajo relativizacije. Boj za pomene, ki se brez instance avtoritete bije v naslednji pesmi Adise Bašić, Emigrant to be (Bodoča emigrantka),15 se konča v »sestavljenem življenju«, pripravljenosti za gibanje, konstrukciji elementov, ki se razstavljajo pred življenjskim potovanjem. Kot pogoj življenja je tu predstavljena podoba pomanjkljive stabilnosti – celo nobene oblike stabilnega življenja ni mogoče »ukalupiti«. Intimno življenje žensk v tej pesmi ima specifične poudarjene pogoje:
če me ljubiš, mi ne kupuj velikih knjig.
Subjekt se »sestavlja«, torej nima doma, ne more »vzeti doma« s seboj. Izvirni naslov pesmi je v angleščini – »emigrant to be« uporablja frazo, žargon, ki je že utečen v svetovnem besednjaku. Kraj in čas dogajanja v pesmi zato nista abstraktna, temveč sta specifična za določeno pojmovanje migracije – iz zamolčanega prostora »brez jezika« do tistega bolj znanega območja govorice v ustaljenih besednih zvezah. Ideja zapuščanja opuščenega prostora, oropanega pomenov, brez zagotovila pristanka v označenem, imenovanem prostoru, se pogosto pojavlja v poeziji Feride Duraković.16 V pesmi Lepotica in zver17 se primerjalno izgrajuje lažna podobnost med stereotipom ženskosti iz pravljic – Izdajalska Lepotica – in podobo feminizirane Domovine. Primerjava proizvaja ženski glas, ki prepoznava napačne posplošitve in istočasno spodbuja prekoračenje jezikovnih omejitev. Velike začetnice samostalnikov (Lepotica, Domovina) kažejo na položaj subjekta, ki je postavljen med dve pripovedi z omejenim dostopom do interpretacije. Subjekt se bori, da bi ustvaril prostor ironije – in prikazal smrtonosne posledice lažne podobnosti, ki jo poraja mizoginija:
100 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Torej, Izdajalska Lepotica in Domovina imata nekaj skupnega: obe puščata za seboj dečke, ki morajo umreti za njiju.
Lirski subjekt, zajet v sintagmi »puščata za seboj«, torej zapušča dejansko simboliko pripovedi, ki so ustvarile srhljivo sliko smrti »dečkov«. Postavljanje »Izdajalske Lepotice« v kontekst vojne proizvaja občutek tesne povezanosti med na videz različnimi pripovedmi, ustvarja pozicijo pesniškega subjekta, ki niha od podob »podobnosti« do grozljive metafore smrti, ponazorjene s simbolom domovine. Povezavo med pravljičnimi liki iz popularne kulture in konceptom domovine uporablja avtorica tudi v pesmi Desetletna deklica med opazovanjem oceana zaznava domovino.18 Opomba kot integralni del pesmi poudarja odnos med avtorstvom in pesniškim subjektom. Fiktivni pesniški prostor s tolkienovsko pokrajino in fiktivni prostor »dóma«, ki ga upodablja »pogrebnikov« poskus, povezuje opomba o avtoričinem obisku Združenih držav Amerike. S pomočjo otroške perspektive avtorica upodablja svet umetno narejenih podob: »gozd« je naslikal J. R. R. Tolkien, »domovinico« pa avtor, ki je na žalost umrl, še preden mu je uspelo zamisliti si srečen konec. Avtorica izrecno poudarja, da sta »gozd« in »domovinica« stvaritvi istega avtorja, vendar nimata skupnih okoliščin ustvarjalnega procesa, zato v teh dveh svetovih konec nikoli ne more biti enak. Avtorjeva smrt, ki se je zgodila »nenadoma«, podčrtuje ustvarjeno naravo pripovedi (Združene države in »domovina«). Alegorija humanitarne intervencije, ki jo predstavlja lik »gospoda predsednika«, na drugačen način izprašuje proces poustvarjanja, vnovičnega zapisovanja pripovedi. Pesniški subjekt se ironično distancira, hkrati pa je njegova pozicija smrtno resna, ko gre za globalne herojske pripovedi o vojnah na Balkanu in za ameriško intervencijo v Bosni:
Kakor koli že, verjetno bom kar posedela tu in nekaj časa počakala. Mislim, da si to zaslužim. Konec koncev sem bila pridna punčka.
101 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Tako kot v pravljici »pridnost« omogoča ženskemu subjektu določene ugodnosti. Toda zgodba o reševanju subjekta ne obdari s srečnim koncem, čeprav »pridne punce« tako učijo. Konča se s simbolno vrnitvijo od »daleč z druge strani oceana«, z vrnitvijo v Sarajevo, za vedno. Opomba, kot del pesmi, poudarja, da je bila pesem napisana v angleščini – da je bila prevedena še pred dejanskim prevodom, kot da bi se avtorica hotela izogniti poznejšemu procesu prevajanja, ki je neizbežen in zato mora postati del umetniškega ustvarjanja. Zavedanje o nujnosti (v angleščini) predstavljive pripovedi intimne, individualne zgodbe v pesmi se kosa z avtoričinim neposrednim posegom – opomba je bila napisana zato, da bo v pesmi – in pojasnjuje proces, ne poskuša ga skriti v sam proces pisanja. Kot tvorni del te pesmi je mogoče videti celó občinstvo – subjekt mu posreduje svoje sporočilo, pri čemer hoté izključuje tiste, ki »ki ne vedo / o čem pišem«, in ponižno izraža svoje stališče o možnih dosežkih umetniškega ustvarjanja.
V prispevku sem prek »vzorčnih« pesmi treh sodobnih bosanskih avtoric razpravljala o možnih interpretacijah, kako se spoprijemati z intimnim življenjem in migracijami v sodobni bosanski kulturi. Ženska poezija zaseda vidno mesto v bosanski povojni kulturi, zato je prostor za neposredne politične govore kot tudi prizorišče interpretacij, ki tekmujejo za zapuščino pomena. Omenjene pesmi govorijo o položaju in subjektivnosti žensk, ki so se znašle v vojni in povojni kulturi heroičnega pripovedovanja, ki jim ponuja sprejemanje pisanja o socialni mobilnosti z odpovedovanjem specifičnim področjem intimnega življenja. Sram, ki sem ga občutila na švedskem veleposlaništvu v Sarajevu, in skoraj popolno odpovedovanje »sentimentalnosti« ter izogibanje razpravljanju o osebnem in intimnem v tradicionalnem pomenu ločenosti osebnega in intimnega, so značilnosti sodobne bosanske ženske poezije. S širjenjem intimnega prostora v politiko – vzeto v simbolnem in dobesednem pomenu – daje ta poezija ženski subjektivnosti novo kvaliteto, ki ne obstaja v popularni kulturi in ki krši spolne in institucionalne norme. Ko se lirski subjekti (in njihove avtorice) selijo v »dobro razvite« države – in poudarjajo intelektualne ugodnosti migracij kot jedro in najpomembnejšo intimno pridobitev –, obenem privzemajo določen jezik (kot v pesmih Nermine
102 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Omerbegović), zavest o sebi (npr. v pesmih Adise Bašić), ironijo in razmišljanje o sebi (npr. v pesmih Feride Duraković). Tak proces ustvarjanja subjektivnosti nujno zahteva dinamično intelektualno življenje, a tudi zavedanje njegovih omejitev.
OPOMBE
1 Nirman Moranjak Bamburać nedvomno povezuje vojno s feminizmom in ženskim subjektom v Bosni: »Ali niso ženske iz Srebrenice zadnja mutacija zahteve Antigone, da je treba ohranjati razliko med politično ekonomijo in ekonomijo smrti, izpodbijajoč vojno pisanje z ženskim pisanjem v posebnih okoliščinah moških diskurzov vojne in prizadevanja za ohranjanje razlike, ki jo izraža žensko pisanje.« (Nirman Moranjak Bamburać, »Ima li Rata u ratnom pismu?«, Izazovi feminizma, Forum Bosniae, let. 26, št. 4, str. 175–176.) 2 Prim. Svetlana Slapšak (ur.), War Discourse, Women’s Discourse, v: Topos, let. 2, št. 1–2, ISH, Ljubljana, 2000. 3 Sarajevske sveske, Media centar, Sarajevo, 2007. 4 BH Dani, št. 532, 24. 8. 2007, http://www.bhdani.com. 5 Gl. Damir Arsenijević, Contemporary women’s poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina: an agency with emancipatory promise (v tisku); isti, Gendering the bone, Beograjsko društvo psihoanalitikov Annals, Beograd (v tisku); isti, »Prema politici nade: poezija posle rata«, ProFemina, št. 43–44, Beograd, 2006, str. 196–204; isti, »Arts: Poets and Poetry. Southeast Europe«, v: Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures: Practices, Interpretations, and Representations, ur. Suad Joseph, knj. 5, Brill Academic Publishers, Leiden, 2007, str. 89–91; isti, »Bosna Pharmakos – ka političkoj kritici culture«, Sarajevske sveske, št. 15–16, Media centar, Sarajevo, 2007, str. 115–141; isti, »Poezija Razlika u Bosni i Hercegovini – ‘Negiranje Dominantne Ideologije Monopola Na Vjerodostojnost’«, Zeničke sveske, let. 2, št. 4, Zenica, 2005, str. 127–133; isti, »Prema politici nade: poezija i postratni period u BiH«, v: Na tragu novih politika: kultura i obrazovanje u Bosni i Hercegovini, ur. Jasmina Husanović, Centar za istraživački, stvaralački i građanski angažman Grad, Asocijacija Bosna i Hercegovina, Tuzla, 2005, str. 275–298; Damir Arsenijević, Ajla Demiragić, Jelena Petrović, »Women Writing in Red Ink: Women’s Writing and Socio-Political Change in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia«, v: Gender and Identity: Theories from and/or on Southeastern Europe, ur. Jelisaveta Blagojević, Katerina Kolozova, Svetlana Slapšak, Women’s Studies and Gender Research Center, Beograd, 2006, str. 239–265; Francis R. Jones in Damir Arsenijević, »(Re)constructing Bosnia: ideologies and agents in poetry translation«, v: Translation and the
103 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Construction of Identity: IATIS Yearbook, ur. J. House, M. R. M. Rosario in N. Baumgarten, IATIS (International Association for Translation & Intercultural Studies), Seul, 2005, str. 68–95. 6 Nermina Omerbegović (roj. 1964, Sarajevo), pesnica, novinarka in kritičarka. Avtorica dveh pesniških zbirk: Odrastanja, Društvo pisaca BiH, 1996, Prizivanje dodira, Synopsis, 2006. Njena dela so prevedena v poljščino, nemščino in angleščino. Zaposlena je kot novinarka na Tiskovni agenciji Bosne in Hercegovine (FENA BiH) ter kot urednica kulturne rubrike časopisa Oslobođenje. 7 Odrastanja, Lica, Sarajevo, 1996, str. 16 (gl. prevod pesmi v Prilogi / Appendix 1, str. 276). 8 Adisa Bašić (roj. 1979), pesnica, novinarka in kritičarka. Avtorica dveh pesniških zbirk: Havine rečenice, Omnibus, Sarajevo, 1999, in TRAUMA MARKET, Omnibus, Sarajevo, 2004. Štipendistka DAAD (štipendija za germanistiko in medijske študije v Marburgu) in prejemnica posebne štipendije za pisatelje, ki jo podeljuje State Department. Nagrajenka Unesca za kratko zgodbo Kako preživjeti auto-stop?. Njena dela so prevedena v nemščino, angleščino in bolgarščino. Urednica kolumen za literarno kritiko pri reviji Slobodna Bosna v Sarajevu. 9 Omnibus, Sarajevo, 2004. 10 – from what? / (a Jewish Holocaust survivor answering the question, ‘Are you going to New Zealand to be as far away as you can be?’) // – od čega? / (odgovor Židova koji je preživio holokaust na pitanje da li je otišao na Novi Zeland da bi bio što dalje). 11 Gl. prevod pesmi v Prilogi / Appendix 2, str. 277. 12 Jean Baudrillard, Screened Out, prev. Chris Turner, Verso, London, 2002. 13 Na kaj Baudrillard ni mogel ali ni hotel biti popolnoma pozoren v svoji odi o »realnejšem od realnega«? Spomnimo se, da je spominjanje temeljni zakon komemorativnega diskurza, da »oni ne verjamejo v to, kar se jim dogaja«, tako kot »mi ne verjamemo v to, kar se dogaja nam« (Nirman Moranjak Bamburać, nav. delo, str. 182). 14 Gl. prevod pesmi v Prilogi / Appendix 3, str. 278. 15 Gl. Prevod pesmi v Prilogi / Appendix 4, str. 279. 16 Ferida Duraković (roj. 18. 4. 1957, Olovo), avtorica pesniških zbirk: Bal pod maskama, Svjetlost Sarajevo, 1977, Oči koje me gledaju, Svjetlost, Sarajevo, 1982, Mala noćna svjetiljka, Svjetlost, Sarajevo, 1989, Selidba iz lijepog kraja gdje umiru ruže, Vodnikova domačija, Ljubljana, 1994, Srce tame, Bosanska knjiga, Sarajevo, 1994, Sarajevski pisci djeci, Praga, 1995; proznih del: Još jedna bajka o ruži, Dom mladih, Sarajevo, 1989, Mikijeva abeceda, Vodnikova domačija, Ljubljana, 1993 in 1994, Amilina abeceda, IPC, Sarajevo, 1999, Locus minoris, Connectum, Sarajevo, 2008. Njena dela so prevedena v poljščino, turščino in angleščino (Heart Of Darkness, zbirka pesmi, White Pine Press, Fredonia, New York, 1998). Nagrade: Hellman-Hammet Fund for Free Expression Award, New England, ZDA, 1993; Vasyl Stus Freedom-to-Write Award by P.E.N. New England, 1999, International Board on Books for Young People Honour List 2000. 17 Ljepotica i Zvijer, v: Nedelja, medvojna številka, 1. 11. 1992, str. 32 (gl. prevod pesmi v Prilogi / Appendix 5, str. 280). 18 Http://www.blesok.com.mk/books/01poetry/durakovic/tekst.asp?lang=mac&id=95 (gl. prevod pesmi v Prilogi / Appendix 6, str. 281−283).
104 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST LITERATURA
Arsenijević, Damir, Ajla Demiragić, Jelena Petrović, »Women Writing in Red Ink: Women’s Writing and Socio-political Change in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia«, v: Gender and Identity: Theories from and/or on Southeastern Europe, ur. Jelisaveta Blagojević, Katerina Kolozova, Svetlana Slapšak, Women’s Studies and Gender Research Center, Beograd, 2006, str. 239–265. Arsenijević, Damir, »Arts: Poets and Poetry. Southeast Europe«, v: Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures: Practices, Interpretations, and Representations, ur. Suad Joseph, zv. 5, Brill Academic Publishers, Leiden, 2007, str. 89–91. Arsenijević, Damir, “Bosna Pharmakos – ka političkoj kritici culture”, Sarajevske sveske, no. 15–16, Media centar, Sarajevo, 2007, p. 115–141. Arsenijević, Damir, Contemporary women’s poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina: an agency with emancipatory promise (v tisku). Arsenijević, Damir, Gendering the bone, Beograjsko društvo psihoanalitikov Annals, Beograd (v tisku). Arsenijević, Damir, »Poezija Razlika u Bosni i Hercegovini – ‘Negiranje Dominantne Ideologije Monopola Na Vjerodostojnost’«, Zeničke sveske, let. 2, št. 4, Zenica, 2005, str. 127–133. Arsenijević, Damir, »Prema politici nade: poezija i postratni period u BiH«, Na tragu novih politika: kultura i obrazovanje u Bosni i Hercegovini, ur. Jasmina Husanović, Centar za istraživački, stvaralački i građanski angažman Grad, Asocijacija Bosna i Hercegovina, Tuzla, 2005, str. 275–298. Arsenijević, Damir, »Prema politici nade: poezija posle rata«, ProFemina, št. 43–44, Beograd, 2006, str. 196–204. Bašić, Adisa, Havine rečenice, Omnibus, Sarajevo, 1999. Bašić, Adisa, TRAUMA MARKET, Omnibus, Sarajevo, 2004. Baudrillard, Jean, Screened Out, prev. Chris Turner, Verso, London, 2002. BH Dani, št. 532, 24. 8. 2007, http://www.bhdani.com. Duraković, Ferida, Amilina abeceda, IPC, Sarajevo, 1999. Duraković, Ferida, Bal pod maskama, Svjetlost, Sarajevo, 1977. Duraković, Ferida, Još jedna bajka o ruži, Dom mladih, Sarajevo, 1989. Duraković, Ferida, Ljepotica i Zvijer, Nedelja, ratno izdanje, 1. november 1992, str. 32. Duraković, Ferida, LOCUS MINORIS, Connectum, Sarajevo, 2008. Duraković, Ferida, Mikijeva abeceda, Vodnikova domačija, Ljubljana, 1993, 1994. Duraković, Ferida, Sarajevski pisci djeci, Check, Praga, 1995. Duraković, Ferida, Selidba iz lijepog kraja gdje umiru ruže, Vodnikova domačija, Ljubljana, 1994. Duraković, Ferida, Srce tame, Bosanska knjiga, Sarajevo, 1994. Duraković, Ferida, Ten Year Old Girl Perceives Her Homeland while Watching the Ocean, http://www.blesok.com.mk/books/01poetry/durakovic/tekst.asp?lang=mac&id=95. Duraković, Ferida, Mala noćna svjetiljka, Svjetlost, Sarajevo, 1989. Duraković, Ferida, Oči koje me gledaju, Svjetlost, Sarajevo, 1982.
105 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Jones, Francis R., Damir Arsenijević, »(Re)constructing Bosnia: ideologies and agents in poetry translation«, v: Translation and the Construction of Identity: IATIS Yearbook, ur. J. House, M. R. M. Rosario in N. Baumgarten, IATIS (International Association for Translation & Intercultural Studies) Seul, 2005, str. 68–95. Moranjak Bamburać, Nirman, »Ima li Rata u ratnom pismu?«, v: Izazovi feminizma, Forum Bosniae, let. 26, št. 4, str. 175–176. Omerbegović, Nermina, Odrastanja, Društvo pisaca BiH, Sarajevo, 1996. Omerbegović, Nermina, Prizivanje dodira, Synopsis, Sarajevo, 2006. Sarajevske sveske, Media centar, Sarajevo, 2007. Slapšak, Svetlana (ur.), War Discourse, Women’s Discourse, v: Topos, let. 2, št. 1–2, ISH, Ljubljana, 2000.
106 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST
107 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST »Ali se ni danes težišče poguma kot družbenega fenomena pod imenom civilne korajže v odločilnem smislu že pomaknilo od moškega k ženskemu? In ali ni naša napoved te spremembe zgolj stranski učinek iste moške strahopetnosti, ki nas je pripeljala tudi v tole zagato in nas vanjo še kar naprej tlači?«
BORIS BUDEN (1998, str. 159)
108 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST RENATA JAMBREŠIĆ KIRIN OSEBNO KOT POLITIČNO: HRVAŠKE DRŽAVLJANKE V (PO)VOJNI REPUBLIKI BESED
V tem kratkem prispevku – okrnjenem zaradi poenostavljanja in radikalnosti posameznih sklepov – želim pokazati, da je protivojno, protinacionalistično in politično pisanje Dubravke Ugrešić, Slavenke Drakulić, Daše Drndić in Ivane Sajko najprepoznavnejši, najvitalnejši in najbolj prevajani del sodobne hrvaške književnosti, čeprav teh avtoric ne zasledimo med zaslužnimi v »jedru literarnega kanona«. Njihov »notranji eksil« v nacionalnem kanonu je posledica še vedno utečene predpostavke, da je naloga resne književnosti kreirati nacionalno identiteto in nacionalni ponos, in ne zgolj estetsko delovati na področju besedne umetnosti. Toda za distancirano sprejemanje teh književnic ni treba obsojati samo konzervativnih jezikoslovcev in paternalističnih čuvajev književnega kanona, katerim je v prid, da neka slovanska »minorna literatura« ne postane del integrirane (prevodne) postkomunistične ali feministične književnosti, h kateri bi morali pristopati z ustreznim teoretskim aparatom postkolonialne kritike, kulturnih študij ali feministične literarne kritike.1 Namreč, moški sotovariši na »levih barikadah« proti nacionalizmom, šovinizmom, lokalpatriotizmom in mizoginiji so sicer spoštovali in upoštevali svoje uspešnejše kolegice, vendar so se od njih tudi distancirali, ko je emancipacijska republika besed, ki so jo skupaj gradili na ruševinah vojne kulture,2 privzela nove, tržno narekovane oblike.3 Gre za neurejene tranzicijske pogoje, v katerih neoliberalni knjigarniški trg, kiosk- in spletno založništvo ter knjigarne-trgovine z darili živijo v sožitju z
109 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST založniki, ki prejemajo izdatne državne subvencije in objavljajo dela domačih in »vrednih« piscev. Tako se je znova pokazalo, da se proklamirana solidarnost in resnična spolna enakopravnost na levici težko udejanjata.4 Ambivalentno stališče književnic do feminizma je deloma posledica socialistične nastrojenosti do politično dejavnih neofeministk, ki vsakič znova nadgrajujejo cilje ženskega gibanja, deloma pa odpor proti povojnemu segmentiranju in profesionalizaciji ženske civilne scene.5 Takšno stališče je tudi vzrok za izostanek sodobne hrvaške ženske književnosti kot edinstvene diskurzivne formacije s poudarjeno (para)literarno emancipacijsko vlogo. Glede na to, da ni bilo skupnega programskega zbiranja niti manifestnega izražanja ideološke in poetične sorodnosti, je velik del nakopičene, vendar razpršene energije te singinegrafije6 izgubljen. Na primer, pobudniška vloga Dubravke Ugrešić pri zasnavljanju Leksikona YU mitologije kot prvega digitalnega arhiva (po)socialistične kulture v regiji in ki bi lahko bil model izgrajevanja digitalnega arhiva regionalne ženske zgodovine, ni bila prav ovrednotena. Tak zunajinstitucionalni, vsem dostopni način prikazovanja ženskih spominov na življenje v socializmu bi pokazal relevantnost feministične rabe metode življenjskih zgodb in omogočil primerjavo izkustev »navadnih žensk« v socializmu in literarnih prikazov le-teh. Ali kot o tem ugotavlja madžarska zgodovinarka Andrea Petö: dodeljevanja glasu zgodbam žensk ni mogoče odpravljati kot zgolj lažno generalizacijo, prav nasprotno – »raziskovanje zgodb naših prednic za feministične genealogije nam je skozi različno razumevanje naše preteklosti lahko le v oporo«.7 Po feministični predpostavki nas pisanje zgodovine žensk Vzhodne Evrope sooča s problemom interpretacije njene »diskontinuitete, prekinitve in zaostajanja«, s (tipično postkolonialnim) vtisom, da se »zgodovina žensk začne, ponovno začenja in nato še enkrat začenja«.8 Torej moramo kot feministične znanstvenice epistemološko opredeliti alternativno zavzemanje za proučevanje zgodovine književnosti, ki so jo pisale in jo še vedno pišejo ženske v svoji regiji,9 in razložiti, zakaj so heterotopije »podmornice« in »zaklenjene novinarske sobe« zaznamovale hrvaško zgodovino ženske književnosti v prvi polovici dvajsetega stoletja, simbolno in prek eksistencialnega pregnanstva pa še njegovo drugo polovico. Dva taka vzorčna prostora sta namreč z zunanje strani zaklenjena kamrica brez oken, kot so v redakciji Obzora opisali zatočišče Zagorke, in »podmornica«, ozki hodnik, »kamor dnevna svetloba ne pronica«, v stanovanju na Demetrovi ulici, kjer so
110 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST se sestajale članice »zavrženega« Društva hrvaških književnic v letih 1937–1945. Bojevito, feministično navdahnjeno domoljubje Zagorke, avtističnost književnic, ki so med drugo svetovno vojno nadaljevale s pisanjem in razpravljanjem v svojih »podmornicah«, ter apolitičnost ženskega pisma v času jugoslovanskega socializma10 niso uspeli navdihniti ženskih avtoric in intelektualk; zgoditi se je »morala« še ena vojna, da bi književnice in intelektualke končno – za ceno izgona in pregnanstva – etično-estetsko suvereno kritizirale patriarhalno trdnjavo moči, od koder se (neodgovorno) kroji usoda nacije.11 Žensko kritična interpretacija vojne je z dokumentarnostjo, prodornostjo, slogovno izvrstnostjo in natančnostjo kulturne analize dala tehtno in zahodni javnosti dostopno razlago zapletene jugoslovanske zgodovine krvavega razpada. Obenem je uresničila feministično parolo »Osebno je politično« – na način, ki je bil tedaj novost v jugoslovanski literarni kulturi, kajti politično subverzivne teme in zgodovinsko »zagatne teme« so bile, z izjemo Danila Kiša, prikazovane s potezami klasične romaneskne, dramske ali esejistične forme. Obravnavanje teh vsebin je zagotavljalo, da je ambiciozen jugoslovanski pisec pridobil pozornost medijev in kritikov ter tako vzpostavljal javno sfero kot moško domeno kompetence – in tiste pristojnosti, znotraj katere se rešujejo družbeno pomembna vprašanja. Če je za zgodovinsko razumevanje Jugovzhodne Evrope vselej potrebna »dodatna doza politike«,12 je literarna (anti)politika hrvaških avtoric v devetdesetih letih pokazala, da so dosledno politično stališče, intelektualna in moralna integriteta ter kritično samozavedanje jamstvo reprezentativnosti in univerzalnosti »osebnega« literarnega jezika. Povezanost »paralaktičnega« umeščanja zunaj ali znotraj nacionalnega korpusa oziroma opusa z žanrskimi premostitvami med faktičnim in fiktivnim načinom izražanja, med »kulturnimi formami in modusi samoopredeljevanja«, ki je bila značilna za vojne knjige Dubravke Ugrešić in Slavenke Drakulić, je trebe šele razbirati v kontekstu radikalnih sprememb družbene in kulturne krajine devetdesetih let. Skratka, po postmoderni senzibilnosti, ki je prežemala hibridno, medbesedilno in refleksivno »žensko pismo« v osemdesetih letih – v delih Nede Mirande Blažević, Rade Iveković, Božice Jelušić, Dubravke Ugrešić, Irene Vrkljan in drugih –, so v devetdesetih letih hrvaške avtorice popisovale polemične strani z izrazito politično kulturno razčlembo vojne. Toda ta političnost ni bila zgolj odlika semantične plasti. Političnost nove feminizirane »republike besed« – v kateri so
111 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST oblastna razmerja na literarnem prizorišču ogrozile tudi pisateljice tržno uspešne popularne književnosti (Arijana Čulina, Vedrana Rudan) – se izraža skozi različne oblike reprodukcije, distribucije, promocije in sprejemanja literarnih besedil, torej skozi nove, »demokratizirane« komunikacijske kode, v katerih se literarni, publicistični in znanstveni izrazi vzajemno in bogato prepletajo.13 Če poskušamo povzeti, kaj naj bi sestavljalo jedro političnosti teh žanrsko hibridnih in ideološko »angažiranih« besedil, v katerih je poudarjeno samozavedanje z vidika spola, moramo upoštevati kar nekaj prvin: neodvisnost avtorske pozicije književnic v eksilu od nacionalne (intelektualne in književniške) skupnosti; moč, ki izhaja iz njihovega položaja »medkulturnih prevajalk« in posrednic med Vzhodom in Zahodom, Balkanom in preostalo Evropo ter svetom, pri čemer je avtoriteta govorečega subjekta pogosto pomembnejša od vsebine govora;14 transformativni potencial, ki ga ustvarja zavest o diskontinuiteti in marginalizaciji ženskega avtorstva, ženskih poetik in feminističnih subverzij v nacionalnem kanonu in vzorčnih besedilih ideologije domoljubja; samozaupanje, ki ustvarja zavest o tem, da umetniška samozavest o raznolikosti ženskih izkustev lahko vpliva na družbene prakse konstituiranja ženskosti; opiranje na nove komunikacijske mreže in njihovo čeznacionalno kulturno menjavo, in ne samo na knjigarniški trg.
Po drugi strani je dominantna kritičnost odraz bolj ali manj ozaveščene feministične potrebe po ideološkem opredeljevanju in zagovorniškem zavzemanju za ljudi na družbenem obrobju. Posledica tega so občasno neobičajni uvidi in pripovedi o razčlovečenih pokrajinah globaliziranega sveta, včasih pa o »totalizirajočih zgodbah o Vzhodu in Zahodu«,15 na katere niso odporne niti avtorici kot Dubravka Ugrešić, še zlasti v knjigi Lep dan!: Od balkanske vojne do ameriškega sna (1994), in Slavenka Drakulić v knjigi Kako smo preživeli komunizem in se celo smejali (1992). Temeljne oporne točke kulturne kritike, ki jo v svojih literarnih in esejističnih delih na sodobnem hrvaškem prizorišču izražata priznani predstavnici dveh literarnih generacij – Dubravka Ugrešić in Ivana Sajko –, so tudi naslednje: kritika ideologije domoljubja, ki depolitizira in moralistično ovaja »jezikave hčerke« – v nasprotju z ideološko »izgubljenimi sinovi«16
112 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST – in ki torej daje prednost tistim s »premalo možganov in s preveč pirotehnike«, zapostavlja pa travmatizirane ženske, žrtve in junakinje domovinske vojne;17 kritika katoliške hipokrizije in demagogije, proti katerima se lahko uspešno upira edino emancipacijski ostri »zlobni jezik«, s katerim se izrekajo »zlobne misli«18 o tem, da je konsolidiran ženski subjekt kompetenten zagovornik reprodukcijskih ženskih teles; kritika posocialistične privatizacije in »divjega kapitalizma«; kritika na videz pravičnih in naprednih evropskih institucij; poziv k subverziji globalne hierarhije v imenu neme večine, »babje internacionale«, zapostavljenih, izkoriščanih, ekspatriiranih ter zlorabljenih žensk povsod v prvem, drugem in tretjem svetu.19
Ozaveščena političnost literarnih besedil, ki jih ženske iz nekdanje Jugoslavije večinoma pišejo v eksilu,20 (post)kolonialnih in liminalnih prostorih, vključuje tudi »normativizacijo« heteroglosirane, izpahnjene pozicije depriviranega sonarodnjaka (begunca, gastarbajterja, azilanta, obstranca), čigar preteklost in prihodnost sta enako netransparentni in boleči. Toda za razliko od propagandne politične vizije prihodnosti mu pretekla izkušnja jugoslovanskega komunizma omogoča varnejšo oporo za razumevanje samega sebe.21 Prav zato je »kritična jugonostalgija«22 pomemben modus spoprijemanja s surovim vsakdanjikom v tranziciji in diaspori, medtem ko je liberalna politika spomina enako pomembna za demokratizacijo družbe kot za razvojno politiko. Ena od značilnosti tranzicijskega vsakdanjika je regresivno dojemanje ženskih spolnih vlog v zasebnem in javnem družbenem prostoru. V sodobni Hrvaški je vzorna žena in mati osvobojena socialističnih mitov o enakopravni sopotnici »novega človeka« in vsakršnih družbenih zahtev in pričakovanj, ki bi jih pred njo postavila »nova demokracija«. Z medijskim propagiranjem neoliberalnega »režima resnice« ženskam vsiljujejo krščanske in predrevolucionarne ideale ženskosti, zato ni neobičajno, da so socialne in sindikalne pravice žensk v tranzicijskih družbah permanentne krize podobne tistim iz časa velike evropske krize v tridesetih letih prejšnjega stoletja, ko je prva množična komercialna distribucija proizvedla razna administrativna dela, prodajne usluge in nov niz nekvalificiranih delovnih mest, za katera so iskali mlado žensko delovno silo, in sicer bolj stereotipno žensko.23
113 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST MED MATERINSKIM IN KAČJIM JEZIKOM RADIKALNE AVTOBIOGRAFIJE O/V EKSILU
»Kje si bila, Marija, ko je bilo vsem jasno, da bi ta svet lahko le sprejel osvobodilni protiudarec, če bi ta trajal največ osem dni, kajti potem bi se namreč začela svetovna vojna in bi stopili v diplomatski drek, in zato bodimo raje na tesnem, precizni in smrtni. ... Strelivo uporabljamo kakor Rusi in Američani, je na to zavzdihnil predsednik, že zaskrbljen za lokalno zmago in svetovni mir.« 24 IVANA SAJKO
Morda morje naplavi tvoje kosti. Morda trava požene skozi tvoje kosti. Morda vidiš črno in tvoje oči obelijo. Morda se spremeniš v prah in pepel. Morda Bog izžge tvoje oči in pusti jamici. Morda tvoja usta ne izustijo več besede. 25 DUBRAVKA UGREŠIĆ
Povezanost družbenih praks konstituiranja ženskosti in literarnih načinov vzpostavljanja ženskega jaza skozi umetniško samozavedanje je nedvoumna.26 Ta, bolj ali manj ozaveščena predpostavka je spodbujala hrvaške avtorice, zlasti Ireno Vrkljan in Dubravko Ugrešić, da svoje doživljanje sveta v zmešnjavi vojne, limbu in eksilu oblikujejo kot avtobiografski prostor heterogenih izkustvenih fragmentov, diskurzivnih drobcev stekla razbitega ogledala, pri čemer vsak odseva šele del travme razbite in raztelešene skupnosti tistih, ki so jih vojne vihre iztrgale iz poznanih referenčnih svetov in rutinskega življenja. Osebne in tuje življenjepisne črtice,27 odlomki iz etnografskega intervjuja, izpovedi žrtev posilstev in borcev,28 citirana pisma, intervjuji in odlomki iz dnevniških zapisov žensk,29 časopisni komentarji in reklamna besedila,30 časopisni naslovi in enciklopedična gesla31 sestavljajo diskurzivno nit (po)vojne ženske avtobiografske proze. Posebno mesto v tej literaturi imata zaradi resnične »radikalne avtobiografije«32 roman-esej Muzej brezpogojne predaje Dubravke Ugrešić in roman iz osmih monologov Rio bar Ivane Sajko, polifona literarna diskurza, ki s soočanjem ženskih zgodb in spominov spodbujata dvom v objektivno in dokumentirano stvarnost, vendar s tem ne zmanjšujeta odgovornosti pripovedovalk za
114 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST presojo konkretnih zgodovinskih dogodkov in oseb. Tovrstni teksti s tem, ko opozarjajo na problem avtorstva in retorične konvencije vsake prvoosebne pripovedi, rahljajo vez, »avtobiografski pakt« med avtorji in bralci, denimo z ad hoc opredelitvami zvrsti kot dokumentarni roman, knjiga proze, rokopis, »davorije« (domoljubne pesmi), osem monologov o vojni za osem igralk, odetih v poročne obleke. Večina teh žanrsko hibridnih in »angažiranih« ženskih publikacij spada med feministično (vendar ne feminilno) književnost, ki jo je Rita Felski opredelila kot skupino tekstov, ki »spol obravnavajo kot problematično kategorijo«. Glede na to, da omenjene pisateljice pišejo v južnoslovanskih jezikih, se ne morejo izogniti premisleku o medsebojni povezanosti spolnih, genealoških in žanrskih postavk, o imanentni sorodnosti povojnih ženskih zgodb, napisanih v obliki »romana-reke«,33 »muzeja« nepotrebnih stvari34 ali samorazgradljivih besedilnih »žensk-bomb«.35 Vzporedni proces postajanja ženska in postajanja neudomačena, ki ga življenje v eksilu strukturira skozi pisanje in ki s teksti nenehno razgrajuje oporišča identitete, je premeščenim avtoricam omogočil pesniško in intelektualno osvoboditev od srednjeevropske moškocentrične tradicije, ki eksil dojema kot modernistično metaforo evropske (metafizične) usode. Dubravka Ugrešić je lahko vzorčni primer pisateljice v eksilu, ki je lastno zavedanje o prikrajšanem, simbolno in politično manjšinjskem položaju drugega ali celo tretjega (ki pripada postkolonialni književnosti) interpretirala v smislu pojma neudomačenosti, kot ga opredeljuje Homi Bhabha.36 Občutek nepripadnosti matični monoetnični kulturi, znotraj katere jo ocenjujejo kot izdajalko »domače skrivnosti«, je za pisateljico enako obremenjujoč, kot je zahteva evropskih birokratov, novinarjev in založnikov ter bralcev, naj se narodnostno-kulturno opredeli, pa četudi kot »multikulturalistka«. Ali kot pravi sama: »Moja težava je dejstvo, da nisem in nočem biti drugačna. Mojo drugačnost in mojo identiteto vztrajno določajo drugi. Tisti doma in tisti zunaj.«37 Nihče razen teoretikov ne ponuja oznake »vernakularni kozmopolit« vsem tistim, ki se, podobno kot alter ego Dubravke Ugrešić, počutijo doma v metropolah (Berlinu, New Yorku, Lisboni), v vseh nadzorovanih ureditvah in sistemih pa kot »odpadniki«. V Muzeju brezpogojne predaje govorita o izkušnji eksila močan glas ženske nomadske subjektivnosti in pisanje, ki se uspešno izmika »konstitutivni slepoti«38 avtobiografskega subjekta. Avtorica vešče prepleta raznolike življenjske zgodbe žensk, s fotografskim »samoosvetljevanjem in samozatemnjevanjem« sestavlja
115 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST heterogeno pripovedno in esejistično jedro besedila. Namesto edinega in koherentnega, suverenega prvoosebnega pripovedovalca razcepljeni pripovedni subjekt prek svojih mnogokratnih pripovednih instanc sestavlja niz (faktografsko in fotografsko) impresivnih podob o nasilnem vpisovanju, šivanju in paranju ženskih identitet v tranzicijskem vsakdanu in diaspori. Vrzeli, ki se pokažejo pri novem jeziku, zaradi prisile jezikovnega in kulturnega prevajanja, niso več osnovna umetničina bojazen v »prostovoljnem eksilu«. Svoje moči preusmerja v vnovično spoznavanje lastne (literarne in kulturne) zgodovine, raziskovanje molka svojih prednic, soočanje z dejstvom, da »ne obstaja nič takega, kot je materinščina«, kajti »vsi jeziki prenašajo ime očeta in so ožigosani v njegovem registru«.39 Zato za avtorico, ki mora postati večjezična, biti »med jeziki« in hkrati ne dopustiti, da »jezik govori njo«, prinaša teza Josepha Brodskega – »eksil je pretežno jezikovni dogodek« – več možnosti interpretacije. Po Brodskem je »eksil dogodek, v katerem pisec sam sebe popolnoma izloči iz svojega jezika, potem pa se, obdan z drugim jezikom, znova popolnoma vpotegne v svoj lastni jezik«.40 Toda feministična kritika nas opominja, da je esencializacija družinskosti materinščine v osnovi vsake fundamentalistične in nacionalistične politike.41 Mar ni običajno sumničenje poliglotov posledica dejstva, da so »večjezične prakse nekakšna uglajena promiskuiteta z različnimi jezikovnimi podlagami, ki jih je on/ona že zdavnaj osvobodil/a od vsakršnega pojmovanja jezikovne ali etnične čistosti«?42 Vsekakor pisatelj ali pisateljica iz nekdanje Jugoslavije ni samo nomadski43 in migrantski subjekt, ampak tudi postkolonialni, in zanj njegova prvotna kultura »deluje kot referenčni standard«, saj »smisel domovine ali kulture, iz katere izhaja, aktivirajo politične in druge oblike odpora proti pogojem, ki jih predpisuje gostiteljeva kultura«.44 Ne glede, ali pisatelj in pisateljica v eksilu še naprej pišeta v materinščini (kot npr. D. Ugrešić ali D. Albahari) ali pa se privajata na nov jezik (kot S. Drakulić, A. Hemon, S. Mehmedinović), izhaja njuna »izredna« moč brez poetskih vzorov iz njunega lastnega poetskega jezika. Ta postavlja pod vprašaj prav vse lástnosti in tujosti in izraža splošno (postkolonialno) prvino »nedomačnosti – tisto, ki po Homi Bhabhi »travmatične ambivalence osebne, duhovne zgodovine povezuje s širšo disjunkcijo politične eksistence«45 in ki avtobiografski zgodbi daje prepričljivost kolektivnega portreta oseb, ki jim je skupna izkušnja nerazumljenosti, ne sebi lastnosti, stigmatiziranja, izkoriščanja, političnega in kulturnega
116 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST rasizma. Skratka, svetovljanske avtorice v eksilu, ki pripadajo tako hrvaški kot prevodni postkolonialni književnosti, v svojih najboljših stvaritvah ne izvajajo več postmodernih eksperimentov, značilnih za prozo osemdesetih let prejšnjega stoletja, temveč se vračajo k esejistični prozi, novinarski kolumni in romanu-eseju, poleg tega pa skrbno spremljajo teoretsko, aktivistično in umetniško prizorišče, da bi si po tej poti razširile zavedanje omejitev in potencialov lastnega postkolonialnega-pregnanega-nomadskega položaja. Zanje dom ni fiksacija, točka, okrog katere bi spletale »mit o domovini in vrnitvi«, tako tipičen za diasporo in emigracijo, temveč je zgolj eden od naslovov, mesto večinoma bolečega in tveganega, obenem pa tudi možnega emancipacijskega premeščanja, ki krepi politično, spolno in poklicno samozavest. Intenzivno doživljanje prekinitve, izgube, žalovanja in soočanja z lastnimi fantazmami, zavračanje trdnih temeljev eksistence je lahko – ali pač tudi ni – pogonska sila »radikalne kreativnosti« v eksilu.46 Ali kot ugotavlja Edward Said: kreativnost je notranje povezana s stanjem eksila, podobno kot refleksija, zelo močno žalovanje in melanholija. Tudi za Hamida Naficyja sta eksil in transnacionalnost »skrajno procesna, diskurzivna in ambivalentna« v značilnih čustvenih nihanjih, pri čemer se izmenjujejo »zeniti ekstaze in zaupanja in nadiri malodušja in dvoma«.47 Za ženski avtorski subjekt v sponah patriarhalnih političnih in medijskih strategij, za katere je »domači prostor kot prostor postopkov normaliziranja, pastoraliziranja in individuacije«,48 je potreba po prikazovanju nedomačnosti tujine kot enako sprejemljivega, varnega in spodbudnega okolja za kreativno samouresničitev še toliko večja. Medtem ko intelektualka emigrantka v sedemdesetih in osemdesetih letih preteklega stoletja s svojim meditativnim glasom ni mogla pojasniti, kaj jo je pravzaprav pregnalo na pot – »Neka nesreča, brezposelnost. Propadli zakon. Nekaj radovednosti«49 –, sedaj razločno prepoznava razloge za svojo (intelektualno in emocionalno) privrženost novemu okolju – navkljub svojim pogosto razdvojenim občutkom nepripadnosti »ne tu ne tam« in izčrpavajočemu boju za vsakodnevno preživetje.
117 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST MOŠKE ZGODBE O EKSILU
»Dobrodošli na robu smrti, jugoslovanski štiridesetletniki. Zahvalite se vojni, kajti nikoli se še niste tako približali nesmrtnosti. Zahvalite se vojni, da vas je minimum vesti zavedno izvrgel iz vsakdana in hipokrizije. Zahvalite se vojni, da so se izostrile emocije, do skrajnosti povečalo tveganje, izkoreninjenost postala je vsesplošna. Zahvalite se vojni, da nam je izenačila možnosti. Zahvalite se vojni, da nam je ubila sleherno samozadovoljstvo. Zahvalite se vojni, da vas je vrgla v svet, ki ste se ga bali.« 50 SVETLANA SLAPŠAK
V nasprotju z ženskim vpletanjem avtobiografskega glasu v pripovedni écriture circulaire med seboj zavozlanih usod je moška pripoved o intelektualnem eksilu nadaljevala hagiografsko tradicijo zgodbe o izgubljenem sinu. Intelektualec v eksilu, ki si je ustvaril mednarodno kariero, je kljub obtožbam, da je izdal »nacionalne zadeve«, še vedno spoštovan v matičnem okolju, kjer ga še vedno občudujejo, ker naj bi utelešal svoje najvišje težnje in moralne vrline – pogum, resnicoljubnost, uporniško individualnost, čistost srca, politični eros, pedagoško jasnost, trpek (krausovski) humor.51 Toda »lucidni otrok« radikalne družbene kritike ne išče sogovornikov med protagonistkami resnične »civilne korajže«, ki jih, med drugim, le redko poimensko navaja,52 temveč raje polemizira z nacionalističnimi in psevdoliberalnimi intelektualci – s tistimi, ki dajejo ogromno gradiva za kritiko, ironično distanco ali groteskno portretiranje. Pod težo tesnobe ob pogledu na »babilonsko razsulo« za seboj in na banalnost evropskega velemestnega vsakdana, ki ga živi, teoretsko najbolj zavedni »bastard hrvaških in nekdanjih jugoslovanskih prilik«53 pretvarja svoje migrantsko izkustvo refleksivne deteritorializacije v nesentimentalno, zabavno, poučno, vendar tudi herojsko-metafizično zgodbo54 o Cioranovem »padcu v praznino«, ki se ji balkanski intelektualec med odhajanjem na Zahod le stežka izogne.55 Govorimo o vrzeli nerazumevanja, zablod, slepih peg in hegemonih preseganj tam, kjer epistemološko negotovost (in prav tako tudi ekspertizo) prehitro nadomeščata netransparentnost univerzalne kritike in kratkovidnost lokalne kritike,56 torej zavezništvo dveh praznin – zahodne postmoderne, »nezadovoljne in porogljive«, ter vzhodne, budistično »zatopljene v sebe«.57 V tej simbolični praznini in politični bedi – kjer
118 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST se namesto kreiranja nove politike solidarnosti, partnerstva in dialoga postkolonialne, postmarksistične in feministične misli »zviška gleda na Balkan s tistega še strahotnejšega Balkana, ki sebi pravi Evropa«58 – odmeva revolt poslednjega gnevnega intelektualca pravičnika izzivajoče in močno, a vendar ne najde sogovornikov ne tu ne tam, zato mu ne preostaja nič drugega, kot da naslavlja duhove velikih mož, kot sta Krleža in Kiš.59 Prav v tej naravnanosti na tradicijske oporne točke avtoritete in spolne identitete (na mrtve očete) vidim glavno oviro za učinkovito transspolno in transdiskurzivno »bastardno« povezovanje taktičnih partnerjev med radikalnimi teoretskimi teroristi v vojni proti (ideološki in ontološki) praznini v izčrpani zahodni civilizaciji. Smrtna resnost, na katero so obsojeni herojski osamljenci med lokalnimi radikalnimi kritiki družbe, da bi si drznili »pogledati v brezno« sedanje krize, je enaka grožnji pred samoutišanjem: »Ravno tako ni mogoče artikulirati refleksivno učinkovite kritike na lokalni ravni. Lokalni, politični esencializem utiša vsakršno kritično mišljenje, tako kot se refleksivno univerzalistična kritika ne dotakne nobenega lokalno učinkovitega političnega dejanja. Prizadevanje, da bi presegli ta razkol, je lahko plemenita naloga, vendar to ni naloga kritike. Njen namen ni vnovič uravnotežiti svet, ki je padel s tečajev, temveč prodreti v globino krize, v kateri se je znašel ta svet. Zato si mora drzniti pogledati v brezno, celo če pri tem onemi. To spada k njenemu zgodovinskemu izkustvu.«60 Aktivisti in aktivistke mirovnih, feminističnih, ekoloških in queerovskih gibanj so bili usklajeni, enotni, glasni in kot taki »nadnaravno močni«61 v boju proti sovražnemu govoru, kršitvah človekovih pravic ter proti simbolnemu in telesnemu nasilju. Toda ta enotna fronta državljanov in pacifističnih intelektualcev je v povojnem okolju boja za preživetje na civilni sceni, za prepoznavnost in pravico do drugačnosti pokazala daleč manj solidarnosti in tolerantnosti do drugih v lastnih vrstah. Sinovi in hčere civilne scene so veliko lažje uresničevali svoj projekt uveljavljanja pravice do diskurza razlike ter avtoritete manjšinskega glasu, ki poraja transnacionalna zavezništva, kot pa (družbeno)spolno ozaveščeno politiko prijateljstva,62 ki izhaja iz zaupanja, utopične imaginacije in izmenjav pripovedi o lastni (travmatični) poškodbi in lastni viziji demokratične prihodnosti.
119 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST OD AKTIVNE DO AKTIVIRANE ŽENSKE – RADIKALIZACIJA POLITIČNEGA IN POETSKEGA
»Sterilna, hinavska meščanska kultura trdi, da je revolt nekaj nezrelega, nekaj, kar z leti mine, če si normalen. Vendar nas prav upor proti sistemom ščiti pred okužbo s splošno veljavnimi stališči, pred tujo, a tudi lastno neumnostjo, pred staranjem, ščiti nas pred tem, da ne utonemo v sanje, kjer so vse avtoritete neizpodbitne.« 63 IVANA SAJKO
V družbenem okolju podaljšane travme, nenaravnih političnih zvez, duhovne otopelosti, korporativnega mišljenja,64 socialnega razslojevanja in komercializacije literarnega trga iščejo avtorice najmlajše, še ene povojne generacije nove načine, s katerimi bi izrazile svoje doživljanje časa in družbe ter se soočile z institucionalnim, strukturnim nasiljem tega okolja. Tako kot je civilna korajža književnic in novinark na začetku vojnih devetdesetih let veljala za »nenaravno«, nadčloveško, čarovniško delovanje, tako se tudi danes že sama možnost upora proti neoliberalne družbenoekonomske ureditve obravnava kot delovanje, ki presega okvire človeškega in družbeno sprejemljivega in ki se – v duhu časa – anatemizira kot terorizem. Da bi psihološko in epistemološko približala pozicijo (diskurzivne) teroristke, ki premišlja spektakel samouničenja kot edino preostalo spoštovano obliko delovanja v svetu, Ivana Sajko (2004) piše manifest ženske-bombe (Bombenfrau/ womanbomb). S tem udejanja metaforo o ženskem telesu kot »palimpsestu, v katerega se vpisujejo razmerja moči«,65 o telesu kot prvi in zadnji trdnjavi (post)feminističnega boja. Žensko telo, naddoločeno kot (rasni, družbeni, kulturni, spolni) znak, ni zgolj »nevarno dopolnilo diskurzivnih vojn«,66 temveč je tudi vselej živo prizorišče političnih, pravnih, biomedicinskih, filozofskih in verskih bojev za utrjevanje, tj. spremembo obstoječe razporeditve moči. Podobno kot Olga, junakinja filma J. L. Godarda Notre musique (2003), posnetega v »poapokaliptičnem« Sarajevu in Mostarju, Ivana Sajko razgrinja globino razočaranja sodobne intelektualke, sicer prevzete s teorijami uglednih filozofov in mislecev, vendar ko poskuša soočiti njihove konkurenčne teorije z obstoječo »svetovno revščino«, ji ne preostaja nič drugega, kot da iz nahrbtnika raztovori knjige in ga napolni z eksplozivom.67 Zagovornica »konceptualnega terorizma«68 prekinja vse povezave z lokalnimi sestrami Joan d’Arc, fanatičnimi »sužnjami«,
120 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST ki so se pripravljene žrtvovati za dobrobit ali osvoboditev kolektiva; s tem prvič prevzema nadzor nad načini produkcije in recepcije lastnega (literarnega) življenja. Moč teatra, da lahko ruši konvencije, omejitve in stereotipe državljansko in politično korektnega govora, uporablja tudi v drugih sferah »teatraliziranega« družbenega življenja – na promocijah, literarnih festivalih in sejmih, televizijskih nastopih. Kot večmedijska umetnica želi režirati lastne dramske tekste, s svojimi intervjuji, teoretskimi in esejističnimi besedili pa dejavno usmerja njihovo sprejemanje. S tem ko v središče svojega »performativnega romana« Rio bar, dramskih besedil – manifestov in konceptualnih monologov, ki sledijo postdramski poetiki – postavlja podrejen, razlaščen, odpisan, zapostavljen ženski glas, skozi javni preklinjajoči govor proizvaja možnost »robnega in postkolonialnega delovanja«. Zanj je značilna sposobnost razmišljanja o mejah, razmišljanja, ki presega meje danosti; omogoča, da zaslišimo glas travmatiziranega subjekta, pod vprašaj postavlja opozicijo med balkanstvom in evrocentrizmom, s katero politiki vsebinsko zapolnjujejo prazno »jedro evropskega sna«.69 Zgodovinske pripovedi travmatiziranih žensk, v telesa katerih je vpisana regionalna zgodovina nasilja in oblasti, modernizacije in regresije, paradoksa in molka, a tudi zgodovina spopadov okrog legitimnosti govorjenja v imenu žrtve, sestavljajo posebno skupino proznih del, nastalih na Hrvaškem v zadnjih petnajstih letih. Ali kot sta natančno ugotovili Wendy S. Hesford in Wendy Kozol, »trenutki travme ali krize običajno razkrivajo našo odvisnost od ‘realnega’, pristnega in resničnega.«70 Zato avtorice, ki travmo posiljenih žensk na novo pišejo po pričevanjskem ključu (npr. Slavenka Drakulić, As If I Am Not There, 1999) ali ki z uporabo zgodovinske metafikcije in žanra dokumentarnega romana odstirajo nepredelane travme iz druge svetovne vojne (npr. dela Daše Drndić Totenwande, 2000; Doppelgänger, 2002, Leica format, 2003, Sonnenschein, 2007) ali prek bogokletne govorice »nelegitimnih«, avtodestruktivnih žrtev vojne oporekajo uradni hrvaški zgodbi o »domovinski vojni« (npr. Ivana Sajko v romanu Rio bar, 2006), večplastno protipostavljajo literarno in dokumentarno, zgodovinopisno in življenjepisno, fotografsko in poetično. Tako nas znova opominjajo, da »realno« ni transparentno, marveč se skozi tekst »na novo vpisuje, prevaja, radikalno premišljuje in temeljito predeluje«.71 To tezo podpirajo tudi dokumentarni filmi o (ne)možnosti pričevanja o travmah, denimo filmi Mandy Jacobson in Karmen Jelinčić (Calling the Ghosts, 1996), Biljane Čakić - Veselić (Dečko kojem
121 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST se žurilo, 2001) in Jasmile Žbanić (Slike s ugla, 2003). Podobno kot v primeru prej navedenih književnic ne gre za to, da bi režiserke ovirala teoretska podmena o neizrekljivosti in nepredstavljivosti travmatičnih izkušenj, ampak za to, da »raziščejo pogoje in okoliščine individualnega spomina in da to njihovo proučevanje postane vsebina in obenem metoda njihovih filmskih pripovedi«.72 Drugače kot književnice, ki so svojo pozicijo določale po feminističnih postavkah, najmlajše avtorice, zlasti pesnice (Tatjana Gromača, Dorta Jagić, Darija Žilić, Marija Andrijašević), večinoma povezuje anarhična senzibilnost – »spoprijemajo se s stvarnimi, neposrednimi vprašanji, ki vznikajo iz načrta transformacije«.73 Odrekajo se literarni tradiciji in zavetju ustanov, kolikor morejo uporabljajo nekomercialni prostor mreženja in »taktične medije«, vstopajo v javni prostor tribun, klubov, radijskih programov. Z vidika poezije to pomeni zlasti odrekanje romanu, pripovedništvu in življenjepisnim oblikam, njihovi dovzetnosti za posnemanje in zapeljivosti, ter nadaljevanje diskurzivnega in performativnega iskanja »drugih mest vpisovanja in poseganja, drugega hibridnega, ‘neumestnega’ prizorišča izrekanja«.74 Tematsko je to problematiziranje balkanske izkušnje postkolonialnega stanja – hibridnosti, mimikrije, paradoksa, stereotipnega obravnavanja, časovnega zaostajanja, eksotiziranja, zlasti v stiku s staro in novo jugoslovansko diasporo75 – kot podlage za ustvarjanje neideološkega, duhovnega in umetniškega »sestrstva«. Kot je v svojem eksperimentalnem romanu Rio bar pokazala Ivana Sajko, govorimo bolj o ambivalentnem, intuitivnem, manj o racionalnem izkustvu poindustrijskega (neo)kolonializma, v katerem je dominacija zahodnega pogleda na »terensko« eksistenco evropskih drugih – ki si istočasno prizadevajo, da bi bili »najboljši v razredu« – sestavljena iz konglomerata turističnega, podjetniškega, bančniškega, svetovalnega in medijskega (neo)kolonialnega interesnega pogleda. Sodeč po vitalnosti in izvirnosti ženskih (para)literarnih strategij, je morda prav književnost – v zavezništvu z domačo feministično kritiko in teorijo – sposobna izraziti številna protislovja življenja na evropskem polobrobju in zlasti časovno zaostajanje v srcu nostalgične pripovedi o »pretekli bodočnosti«, o vnovič preloženi utopiji o enakopravni in napredni skupnosti ponosnih državljanov, ki bi bili zmožni »učinkovitega redefiniranja koncepta Evrope«.76 V tem smislu pomeni hrvaška ženska književnost 21. stoletja zgoščeno literarno stičišče v času, »kjer se srečujejo raznoteri pripovedni tokovi, ne da bi pri tem izoblikovali
122 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST neko jedro ali bistvo organske enote«,77 obenem pa omogoča prikaz sodobnega ženskega izkustva, ki presega nacionalne okvire.
OPOMBE
1 Dubravko Jelčić v Zgodovini hrvaške književnosti obsoja štiri hrvaške književnice in književnike, ker niso »prepoznali zgodovinskega trenutka«, to je, ker so se »razšli s stoletnimi ideali in plebiscitarno voljo hrvaškega naroda«. Gl. Dubravko Jelćić, Povijest hrvatske književnosti, Naklada Pavičić, Zagreb, 2004, str. 615. Ideološko »diskvalifikacijo« je opravil tudi Slobodan Prosperov Novak v svoji Zgodovini hrvaške književnosti, v kateri sicer priznava, da so »politični teksti« Dubravke Ugrešić »zelo dobro napisani«, vendar jih istoveti z resničnostnim, novinarskim in faktografskim diskurzom, saj trdi, da v teh tekstih sicer obstaja »cel niz dobrih silogizmov, vendar s povsem napačnimi sklepi« (prim. Slobodan Prosperov Novak, Povijest hrvatske književnosti, Marjan tisak, Split, 2004, 4. zv., str. 108). Avtorici priznava, da je dosledna v postmoderni poetiki, ki spodkopava in ontološko zamegljuje mejo med fiktivnim in faktografskim, istočasno pa jo obtožuje, da meša »stvarnost z literaturo« (prav tam, str. 109) in da izpisuje »nesprejemljiva« politična stališča. Takšen spoj dociranja, razločevanja, ideološkega nadzora in literarnoteoretskega paroksizma s pozicije zgodovinopisne oblasti je treba razumeti ne samo kot eksces neke avtistične literarne skupnosti, ampak tudi kot potrditev postavke, da niz zunajestetskih kriterijev upravlja z vzpostavljanjem (nacionalnega) kanona, ki avtorje in avtorice vsakič znova razmejuje – primerne od neprimernih, svobodne od »nesvobodnih« (prim. Jelčić, nav. delo, str. 615), in v tej smeri še resne žanre od trivialnih, relevantne teme in slogovne postopke od marginalnih. 2 Prim. Ivan Čolović Politika simbola, Biblioteka XX. vek, Štampa Čigoja, Beograd, 2000. 3 Prim. Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe (srb. prevod: Endru Baruh Vahtel, Književnost Istočne Europe u doba postkomunizma: uloga pisca u Istočnoj Europi, prev. Ivan Radosavljević, Stubovi kulture, Beograd, 2006), kjer avtor definira Vzhodno Evropo kot tisti del sveta, kjer so bili resna književnost in njeni ustvarjalci od vedno precenjeni. Meni, da so komunistične nomenklature vzdrževale družbeni ugled in status književnikov ter skrbele za reputacijo »očetov nacije« v maniri devetnajstega stoletja, konec komunističnega obdobja pa sta bila družbeni prestiž in simbolna moč (opozicijskih) piscev še večja. Z oblikovanjem civilne družbe, demokratičnih oblasti in tržnega gospodarstva pisci niso bili več »glasovi vesti« nacije, z odpiranjem trga za prevodno in popularno književnost pa so postali intelektualno in ekonomsko marginalizirani. No, Wachtel kljub vsemu upravičeno ugotavlja, da so pisci – odvisno od izobrazbe, ugleda in okoliščin – uporabljali različne strategije, da svoj simbolni kulturni kapital razvijejo v položaje v politiki, novinarstvu in založništvu. V primeru Hrvaške niz
123 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST književnikov gradi vzporedno novinarsko kariero v časopisih z visoko naklado, in vendar nobeden od njih – beseda teče o moških pisateljih – ni dosegel takega publicističnega uspeha, kot sta ga v tujini dosegli Slavenka Drakulić in Dubravka Ugrešić. 4 Prim. Svetlana Slapšak, »Between the vampire husband and the mortal lover: a narrative for feminism in Yugoslavia«, Research on Russia and Eastern Europe, št. 2, 1996, str. 201–224. 5 Čeprav Dubravka Ugrešić zavrača, da bi jo etiketirali kot feministko, se v nizu razmišljanj zahvaljuje feministični analizi simbolne zveze militarizma, nacionalizma, patriarhalnosti in protiintelektualizma (to analizo so teoretsko postavile Susan Brownmiller, Cynthia Enloe, Nira Yuval Davis, Caroe Pateman, Sara Ruddick idr., pri nas pa Biljana Kašić, Vesna Kesić, Staša Zajović, Svetlana Slapšak (gl. njeno nav. delo iz leta 1996 ter Ratni Kandid, Radio B92, Beograd, 1997, in Mala crna haljina: eseji o antropologiji i feminizmu, prev. Jelena Petrović, Centar za ženske studije, Beograd, 2007) idr.), nato feministični kritiki spolnih stereotipov v sovražnem govoru (prim. Cooke in Woollacott 1993; Žarkov 2007) in feminističnemu samopremisleku o omejenem izboru identitet za intelektualko, ki je duhovna pregnanka iz lastnega doma ali domovine, natanko tako kot tudi iz »provincializirane« Evrope z gentrifikacijsko mentalitetotrdnjave za situirane bele staroselce. 6 Andrea Zlatar, Tekst, tijelo, trauma, GZH, Zagreb, 2004, str. 135. 7 Andrea Petö, »Stories of Women's Lives: Feminist Genealogies in Hungary«, v: Miroslav Jovanović in Slobodan Naumović (ur.), Gender Relations in South Eastern Europe, zv. II/33, Udruženje za društvenu istoriju – Zur Kunde Südosteuropas, Beograd – Gradec, 2002, str. 212. 8 Prav tam. 9 Forum feministične revije Aspasia (let. 2, 2008) začne obravnavo teme »Pisateljice in intelektualke« z vprašanjem, kaj pomeni biti pisateljica ali intelektualka iz Srednje, Vzhodne in Jugovzhodne Evrope danes. Kot sta urednici preprosto omenili: »Odzvalo se je devet avtoric iz različnih držav in generacij in podalo paleto pogledov, ki nam pomagajo sestavljati vsaj delni pogled na zelo večplastno sliko, saj se današnje okoliščine za žensko pisanje čedalje bolj raznovrstno povezujejo s prostorom in kulturnim kontekstom. Te pripovedi [...] vnovič predstavljajo energično zavzemanje za nujno boljšo integracijo ženskih pisav v širšo kulturno zgodovino te regije.« (Maria Bucur in Francisca de Haan, »Editorial«, Aspasia, let. 2, 2008, str. vii.) 10 Relevantno feministično vprašanje je, zakaj v delih Irene Vrkljan, Slavenke Drakulić in Dubravke Ugrešić v osemdesetih letih ni političnosti in kritičnega opazovanja na račun ideološke produkcije avtoritarne oblasti v socialistični družbi. To vprašanje so profesorici Gordani Crnković postavili tudi ameriški študenti hrvaške književnosti na washingtonski univerzi: »Zakaj te pisateljice v svoja zgodnja dela niso vključile politike? Kako to, da avtobiografije I. Vrkljan, humorna proza D. Ugrešić ali pa romani S. Drakulić niso zajeli naraščajoče politične krize v Jugoslaviji kot eno od tematik, saj je ta kriza nazadnje pripeljala do vojne? [...] Zakaj so bile na tisti stopnji svojega dela tako apolitične ali pa so premeščale svojo političnost v druge vidike svojega življenja, tako kot je to počela S. Drakulić (kot angažirana novinarka)?« (Gordana P. Crnković, »Women Writers in Croatian and Serbian Literatures«, v: Sabrina P. Ramet (ur.), Gender Politics in the Western Balcans,
124 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST The Pennsylvania State University Press, Pennsylvania, str. 239–240.) G. Crnković meni, da naj bi v socialistični literarni kulturi že »najmanjši vdor tega političnega diskurza obtoževali naddoločenega pomena in s tem preusmerili žarišče del z individualnih in zasebnih vidikov življenja žensk na družbene in politične vidike teh življenj« (prav tam). 11 Prim. Renata Jambrešić Kirin, Dom i svijet: o ženskoj kulturi pamćenja, Centar za ženske studije, Zagreb, 2008, str. 128–130, 154. 12 Petö, nav. delo, str. 217. 13 Prim. Wachtel, nav. delo, str. 170–199. 14 Prim. prav tam, str. 181. 15 Prav tam, str. 149. 16 Dubravka Ugrešić, Ministarstvo boli, Faust Vrančić, Biblioteka 90 stupnjeva, knj. 5, Zagreb, 2004, str. 191–216. 17 Prim. Ivana Sajko, Rio bar, Meander, Zagreb, 2006. 18 Prav tam, str. 60. 19 Dubravka Ugrešić, Baba Jaga je snijela jaje, Vuković & Runjić, Zagreb, 2008, str. 309–312. »Da bi se vsi ti milijoni žensk – namesto v cerkve, džamije in svetišča, ki že tako nikoli niso bila njihova – odpravili iskat svoj hram, hram Zlate babe, če je že tako, da so prav hrami to, brez česar ne morejo... Da se prenehajo klanjati moškim okrvavljenih oči, ki so krivi za smrt milijonov ljudi in s tem še nadaljujejo.« (Prav tam, str. 312.) 20 Ada Mandić Beier je v svoji nedokončani doktorski nalogi Motiv egzila u hrvatskom romanu (2008) raziskala pomemben vpliv, ki so ga imeli vodilni hrvaški avtorji in avtorice dvajsetega stoletja, od A. G. Matoša do D. Ugrešić in ki so del svojega življenja pisali v eksilu, na proces kulturne modernizacije družbe, v kateri je prostora tudi za »tiste druge«, manjšinjske in alternativne identitete. 21 Prim. Nataša Kovačević, Narrating Post/Communism: Colonial discourse and Europe’s borderline civilization, Routledge, London – New York, 2008, str. 156–188. »Resnična Jugoslavija je daleč večja grožnja, ker njena jugoslovanska identiteta (tako kot fenomen jugonostalgije med zagovorniki etnij) presega razlage, ki jih razširjajo zgodbe o zatiralskem komunizmu in liberalno-demokratični večkulturni toleranci« (prav tam, str. 158). 22 Prim. Mitja Velikonja, Titostalgija – študija nostalgije po Josipu Brozu, Mirovni inštitut, Biblioteka Media Watch, Ljubljana, 2008. 23 Renate Bridenthal ugotavlja, da je prva velika preureditev zahodnega kapitalističnega gospodarstva v tridesetih letih prejšnjega stoletja potrebovala poceni žensko delovno silo z izrazitimi ženskimi atributi: »Videz in všečnost sta bila pomembna nova atributa pri teh službah, ki so bile tako odločilno odvisne od razširjenega socialnega stika. Tako je ženska doživljala protislovja: pridobila je večjo ekonomsko neodvisnost, vendar je bila ta pogojena s starostjo in vedênjem. Novi spolni pristopi so ji omogočali večjo svobodo, vendar so hkrati komercialno izkoriščali žensko seksualnost v medijih.« (Renate Bridenthal, »Something Old, Something New: Women Between the Two World Wars«, v: R. Bridenthal in C. Koonz (ur.), Becoming Visible: Women in European History, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1977, str. 422.)
125 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST 24 Ivana Sajko, Rio Bar, prev. v nemščino Alida Bremer, Matthes & Seitz, Berlin, 2008, str. 73. 25 Dubravka Ugrešić, The Ministry of Pain, prev. v ang. M. H. Heim, SAQI, London, 2005, str. 252. 26 Irina Novikova, »Žena i rat/rod i žanr/autobiografija i istorija u Dalekoj tutnjavi Elene Rževske«, Ženske studije 10, Beograd, 1998, str. 156–159. 27 Npr. Irena Vrkljan, Berlinski rukopis, GZH, Zagreb, 1988; ista, Pred crvenim zidom, Durieux, Zagreb, 1994; Dubravka Ugrešić, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, prev. Celia Hawkesworth, Phoenix House, London, 1998; Tatjana Gromača, Crnac, Durieux, Zagreb, 2004. 28 Npr. Slavenka Drakulić, Café Europa: Life after Communism, Abacus, London, 1996, str. 147–153; ista, As If I Am Not There: A Novel about the Balkans, prev. Marko Ivić, Abacus, London, 1999. 29 Npr. Daša Drndić, Canzone di guerra, Meander, Zagreb, 1998. 30 Npr. Dubravka Ugrešić, Kultura laži, Arkzin, Zagreb, 1996; Daša Drndić, Marija Czestochowska još uvijek roni suze: ili umiranje u Torontu, Adamić, Reka, 1997. 31 Npr. Ivana Sajko, Rio bar, Meander, Zagreb, 2006. 32 Mirna Velčić, Otisak priče, August Cesarec, Zagreb, 1990. 33 Prim. Dubravka Ugrešić, Forsiranje romana-reke, August Cesarec, Zagreb, 1989. 34 Prim. Dubravka Ugrešić, Muzej brezpogojne predaje, Konzor (Zagreb) in Samizdat B92 (Beograd), 2002. 35 Prim. Ivana Sajko, Žena bomba, Meandar, Zagreb, 2004. 36 Gl. Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, Routledge, London – New York, 1994, kjer avtor opredeljuje neudomačenost kot zavračanje lojalnosti eni sami kulturi ali naciji oziroma državi in kot osnovno značilnost postkolonialne ekstrateritorialnosti za migrante in vse tiste, ki so premeščeni iz svojega primarnega »prostora« identifikacije – bodisi zaradi kolonialne preteklosti, nasilja bodisi zaradi obsežnih družbenoekonomskih sprememb. Biti neudomačen ne pomeni »biti brez doma«; neudomačeni imajo moč »stalnega pogajanja glede lastnega prostora v svetu«, v »tretjem prostoru« nove mednarodne kulture, ki ga zaznamuje hibridnost, ne pa večkulturnost. 37 Dubravka Ugrešić, The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays, prev. Celia Hawkesworth, Phoenix House, London, 1998b, str. 237. 38 Peter Sloterdijk, Doći na svijet, dospjeti u jezik, prev. Mirjana Stančić, Meandar, Zagreb, 1992. 39 Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, Columbia University Press, New York, 1994, str. 11. 40 Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason, Penguin Books, London, 1995, str. 32. 41 Prim. Jambrešić Kirin, Dom i svijet, str. 130–136. Dubravka Ugrešić razkriva globoko tujost (ino/zemskost, hr. ino/stranost) materinščine, ki se kaže v kulturnem spominu kolektiva, saj slednji vsakega Drugega dojema kot dvakratno tujega in nezaželenega, dvakratno nedostojnega svojega ideala jaza. V takem jeziku je težko razbrati zdravo jedro za gradnjo identitet in odnosov, ki bi presegali nacionalnost in temeljili na zaupanju do drugih. Etimološko je inozemec (tj. inoroden, tujeroden, nedomačen) tisti, ki je drug, drugačen, ki se razlikuje in ruši »celokupnost« (universalità, generalità, universitas), univerzalni horizont izkustva, moralnih načel in vrednot znotraj skupnosti. Ker pa se skupnost niti trenutno ne more konstituirati že kot homogena, »organska« celota, tedaj v procesu nenehnega premeščanja in vzajemnega spodkopavanja po spolni, versko-kulturni idr. oseh
126 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST vselej in vsakič deluje mehanizem izključevanja, »pri čemer ena izmed njih [osi] v vsakem trenutku prevzema hegemoni položaj in definira 'podobo sovražnika'« (Vladimir Biti,Strano tijelo pri/povjesti, Hrvatska sveučilišna naklada, Zagreb, 2000, str. 196). Dolgi niz strahotnih kletvic, preklinjanja in izrekov na koncu romana Ministrstvo bolečine (Ministarstvo boli) razkriva sadistično uživanje udeležencev »kolektivnega nezavednega« prek diaboličnih podob izgona, uničevanja, mučenja in pohabljenja tistih, ki so bili vse do trenutka izključitve ali izobčenja – še preden so postali sovražniki ali kako drugače neprimerni – del skupnosti. Zlovešča senca »mačehovske tujine« v sami materinščini spremlja razdedinjene sinove in hčere, nadnje kliče zlo usodo, »kjer koli že bodo«. 42 Braidotti, nav. delo, str. 13. 43 »Čeprav podobo o 'nomadskem subjektu' navdihuje izkustvo ljudstev in kultur, ki so dejansko nomadski, se nomadstvo, ki ga tu obravnavamo, nanaša na vrsto kritične zavesti, ki se upira ustalitvi v družbeno kodirane mišljenjske in vedenjske vzorce.« (Braidotti, nav. delo, str. 5.) 44 Prav tam, str. 25. 45 Bhabha, nav. delo, str. 15. 46 Elizabeth Bachner je raziskala odnos »radikalne kreativnosti« in družbene oblike »prostovoljnega eksila« vodilnih umetnikov v dvajsetem stoletju, pri čemer se je opirala na koncept avanturista, kot ga je opredelil sociolog Georg Simmel, in na psihoanalitični koncept tujca Julie Kristeve. Umetnik in avanturist se ujemata v posebnem, »radikalnem« občutju časovnosti, odstopanju od rutine in vsakdanjih ritmov ter v kvaliteti prizadevanja k »totalizaciji« izkustva epifanije. Na drugi strani pa književnik, za razliko od avanturista, svoje intenzivno doživljanje sveta večplastno vpleta v domišljijsko predelavo le-tega. Po Kristevi se umetnik in umetnica v eksilu počutita predvsem kot tujca, ki je hkrati marginalen in nujen za delovanje družbe, počutita se kot nekdo, ki ga vsi vidijo kot drugega in ki »perverzno uživa« v svoji lastni odtujitvi. Prim. Elizabeth Bachner, Mad and Navigating Blood: Exile and Radical Creativity, 2002, http://www.newschool.edu/tcds/ elizabeth%20bachner.pdf. 47 Hamid Naficy, »Fobični prostori i liminalne panike: žanr nezavisnoga transnacionalnog filma«, prev. Lovorka Kozole, Kolo, let. 15, št. 1, 2005, str. 358. 48 Bhabha, nav. delo, str. 15. 49 Vrkljan, Berlinski rukopis, str. 15. 50 Slapšak, Mala crna haljina, str. 35. 51 Gre za kvalitete, ki jih Boris Buden, avtor Barikad, navaja v svojem uvodu (2. izd., Arkzin, Zagreb, 1998, str. 9–19) kot avtorski kredo. Sodeč po navedenih odlomkih na ovitku knjige, mu prav te vrline priznavajo tudi številni interpreti in recenzenti njegovega dela. 52 Prim. Boris Buden, Kaptolski kolodvor: politički eseji, Centar za savremenu umetnost, Beograd, 2002, str. 228–229, 235. 53 Prim. Buden, nav. dela Barikade (obe izdaji) in Kaptolski kolodvor. 54 Herojska gesta samopredstavitve skozi dejanje pripovedovanja po Hannah Arendt povezuje grškega junaka in grškega državljana, saj oba izkazujeta edinstveni »vzgib, da nastopata ali se razkrivata z besedo ali dejanjem«, kar je »sine qua non za politiko« (Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One
127 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Voice, prev. P. A. Kottman, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2005, str. xxiv). Za vsako javno državljansko gesto, zlasti pa vsako nasprotovanje avtokraciji, je značilna herojska veličina. Toda herojski diskurz predpostavlja poslušalce, ne sogovornikov. 55 Glede na to, da je Buden poskušal psihoanalitično redefinirati Cioranovo metaforo praznine kot zeva med imaginarnim in realnim, ohranja fascinacijo nad apokaliptičnim prizorom intelektualca pred prepadom: »S tem ko je Cioran odkrito poistovetil evropski jugovzhod z grozo, se je začudeno vprašal, zakaj ima človek, ko končno zapusti ta balkanski svet in odide na Zahod, občutek, kot da bi padal v prazen prostor. Tudi to pismo bo zagotovo padlo v praznino. In vendar, odgovornosti za to ne bi smeli iskati v nevzdržnem protislovju med barbarskim vitalizmom Balkana in značajem sodobne evropske civilizacije, v čemer je Cioran videl izvor omenjenega občutka praznine. [...] Prazni prostor, v katerem je Cioran videl ljudi, ki ob svojem odhodu z Jugovzhoda proti Zahodu padajo v praznino, je pravzaprav prazen prostor, v katerega padajo junaki zgodbe, ko se želijo iz nje iztrgati in zakoračiti v stvarnost.« (Buden, Kaptolski kolodvor, str. 4, 5.) 56 Prim. Boris Buden, Strategic universalism, 2007, http://eipcp.net/transversal /0607/buden/en. 57 Prim. Sergej Kornev, Sudar praznina, Tretji program Hrvaškega radia, 1999, str. 333. 58 Buden, Barikade 2, str. 205. 59 Prim. Buden Kaptolski kolodvor, str. 22–27. 60 Buden, Strategic universalism, poudarek Renata Jambrešić Kirin. 61 Dokumentarni film o hrvaški civilni sceni avtorice Martine Globočnik je simbolno naslovljen s »Hudiči rdeči, rumeni, zeleni« (»Vragovi crveni, žuti, zeleni«, 2007) – opira se na znameniti demonološki »katalog« stigem, ki jih je za pripadnike hrvaških družbenih gibanj uporabil predsednik Franjo Tuđman v svojem razvpitem govoru iz leta 1996: »Mi ne bomo popustili tistim, ki se proti hrvaški svobodi in neodvisnosti povezujejo še s črnim hudičem, in niti zelenim niti rumenim hudičem [...] Ne bomo popustili tistim, ki se povezujejo z vsemi nasprotniki hrvaške samostojnosti – ki se z njimi ne le povezujejo, ampak se jim tudi ponujajo, in ne samo ponujajo, temveč se jim prodajajo za Judeževe groše.« (Http://www.kcm.hr/default.asp?mode=DisplayNews& id=373) 62 O ontoloških in slovničnih ovirah, ki onemogočajo udejanjanje moško-ženskega prijateljstva v patriarhalni kulturi piše tudi Derrida v Politikah prijateljstva: »Morda ne boste pozabili zabeležiti: pišemo o prijateljih in opisujemo jih v moškem spolu, nevtralno-moškem. Ne razumite tega nepozornost ali spodrsljaj. Bolj gre za težavno pot, da zaorjemo brazdo določenega vprašanja. Kajti z njim, po njem so nas morda usmerjali že od prvega koraka: Kaj je prijateljica, in prijateljica prijateljice? Kaj je razlog, da 'naše' filozofije in 'naše' religije, naša 'kultura' tako okrnjeno priznavajo nezvedljivo pravico, izostren pomen, svojstven za takšno slovnico?« (Jacques Derrida, Politika prijateljstva, prev. Ivan Milenković, Beograd, Čigoja štampa, 2001, str. 102.) 63 Ivana Sajko, »Na jesen ću virusom napasti hrvatska kazališta« (pogovor vodil Edo Popović), Tema, št. 8–9, 2004, str. 11. 64 »[Problem je] pomanjkanje osebne odgovornosti v času, ko so holdingi, konzorciji in korporacije popolnoma nadomestili logiko kolektiva. In ta logika kolektivnega je poudarjeno postavljena proti
128 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST feminističnim postavkam o osebni odgovornosti in osebnem družbenem aktivizmu.« (Andrea Zlatar, »Predfeminizam, feminizam i postfeminizam u hrvatskoj književnosti«, 2008, http://www. hrvatskiplus.org/ispis.php?id_doc=23.) 65 Maria Fernández, Postcolonial Media Theory, The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ur. Amelia Jones, Routledge, London - New York, 2003, str. 522. 66 Nirman Moranjak - Bamburać, »Političke i epistemologijske implikacije postkolonijalne teorije«, Sarajevske sveske, št. 6–7, 2004, str. 86. 67 S pojmovanjem subverzije, revolta, upora proti sistemom kot resnične naloge, ki jih razlikuje od z estrado koketirajočih »paraumetnikov«, Ivana Sajko pojasnjuje svoje temeljno stališče o javnem govoru (»moja moč je v govoru«) in pisanju: »Prevzeti neki model boja je stvar osebnega dostojanstva – zame boj ni rušilen, temveč je vselej kreativen. [...] Dobra umetnost je zagotovo revoltirana in preklinja, kar ne pomeni, da je vulgarna.« (Sajko, »Na jesen ću virusom napasti hrvatska kazališta«, str. 4, 11.) 68 Sajko, Žena-bomba, str. 11. 69 Nirman Moranjak - Bamburać, nav. delo, str. 99. 70 Wendy Hesford in Wendy Kozol (ur.), Haunting Violations: Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the »Real«, University of Illinois Press, Urbana - Chicago, 2001, str. 8. 71 Prav tam. 72 Michaela Schäuble, »Očevid: (auto)biografski pripovjedni oblici u dokumentarnim filmovima o ratu u bivšoj Jugoslaviji«, Treća 1/9, Centar za ženske studije, Zagreb, 2007, str. 56. 73 David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Prickly Paradigm Press, Chicago, 2004, str. 9. 74 Fernández , nav. delo, str. 524. 75 Dubravka Ugrešić pazljivo sledi in podrobno opisuje telesno držo in gestikuliranje, razpoznavne znake nekdanjih rojakov (naših) v evropskih mestih, ki za sabo puščajo »dolgo senco naroda« (Bhabha, nav. delo, str. 159); po tej poti postajajo kulturno zaznamovani drugi, nanje domačini projicirajo ksenofobične fantazme o ogroženosti svoje identitete: »'Naši ljudje' imajo na obrazih nevidno sled klofute. Imajo tisti zajčji pogled vstran, posebno telesno napetost, instinkt živali, ki zavoha v zraku smer, iz katere prihaja nevarnost. Našost se kaže v njihovih potezah, ki izražajo določeno tesnobno melanholijo – neznatna senca na obrveh, komajda vidna, skoraj domača sključenost. [...] In vsi smo 'naši'« (Ugrešić, The Ministry of Pain, str. 20). Dislociranost, kulturna dezorientacija in postopna izguba upanja na vrnitev, možnost »pristnega«, skupnostnega sožitja z drugimi, je splošna struktura občutij med tistimi, ki so jih prisilne (vojne ali ekonomske) migracije pripeljale v stanje prisilne, vendar pričakovane transnacionalnosti. 76 Kovačević, nav. delo, str. 196. 77 Marcel Cornis - Pope, John Neubauer, »Introduction to Part I: Literary nodes of political time«, v: A Comparative History of the Literary Cultures of East Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, str. 34.
129 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST LITERATURA
Bachner, Elizabeth, Mad and Navigating Blood: Exile and Radical Creativity, 2002, http://www. newschool.edu/tcds/elizabeth%20bachner.pdf. Bhabha, Homi K., The Location of Culture, Routledge, London – New York, 1994. Biti, Vladimir, Strano tijelo pri/povjesti, Hrvatska sveučilišna naklada, Zagreb, 2000. Braidotti, Rosi, Nomadic Subjects, Columbia University Press, New York, 1994. Bridenthal, Renate, »Something Old, Something New: Women Between the Two World Wars«, v: Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ur. R. Bridenthal in C. Koonz, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1977, str. 422–444. Brodsky, Joseph, On Grief and Reason, Penguin Books, London, 1995. Bucur, Maria, de Haan, Francisca, »Editorial«, Aspasia journal 2, 2008, str. vi–viii. Buden, Boris, Barikade, Arkzin, Zagreb, 1996. Buden, Boris, Barikade 2, Arkzin, Zagreb, 2. izd., 1998 Buden, Boris, Kaptolski kolodvor: politički eseji, Centar za savremenu umetnost, Beograd, 2002. Buden, Boris, Strategic universalism, 2007, http://eipcp.net/transversal /0607/buden/en. Cavarero, Adriana, For More Than One Voice, prev. P. A. Kottman, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2005. Cornis - Pope, Marcel, Neubauer, John, »Introduction to Part I: Literary nodes of political time«, v: A Comparative History of the Literary Cultures of East Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, ur. M. Cornis - Pope, J. Neubauer, John Benjamins, Amsterdam – Philadelphia, 2004, str. 33–38. Crnković, Gordana P., »Women Writers in Croatian and Serbian Literatures«, v: Gender Politics in the Western Balkans, ur. Sabrina P. Ramet, The Pennsylvania State University Press, Pennsylvania, 1999, str. 221–241. Čolović, Ivan, Politika simbola, Biblioteka XX vek, Štampa Čigoja, Beograd, 2000. Derrida, Jacques, Politika prijateljstva, prev. Ivan Milenković, Beograd, Čigoja štampa, 2001. Drakulić, Slavenka, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, Norton, New York, 1992. Drakulić, Slavenka, Café Europa: Life after Communism, Abacus, London, 1996. Drakulić, Slavenka, As If I Am Not There: A novel about the Balkans, Abacus, London, 1999. Drndić, Daša, Marija Czestochowska još uvijek roni suze ili: Umiranje u Torontu, Adamić, Rijeka, 1997. Drndić, Daša, Canzone di Guerra, Meandar, Zagreb, 1998. Drndić, Daša, Totenwande, zidovi smrti, Meandar, Zagreb, 2000. Drndić, Daša, Leica format, Meandar, Zagreb, 2003. Drndić, Daša, Sonnenschein: dokumentarni roman, Fraktura, Zagreb. 2007. Fernández, Maria, »Postcolonial Media Theory«, v: The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ur. Amelia Jones, Routledge, London – New York, 2003, str. 520–528. Graeber, David, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Prickly Paradigm Press, Chicago, 2004.
130 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Gromača, Tatjana, Crnac, Durieux, Zagreb, 2004. Hesford, Wendy, Kozol, Wendy, ur., Haunting Violations: Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the »Real«, University of Illinois Press, Urbana – Chicago, 2001. Jambrešić Kirin, Renata, Dom i svijet: o ženskoj kulturi pamćenja, Centar za ženske studije, Zagreb, 2008. Jelčić, Dubravko, Povijest hrvatske književnosti, Naklada Pavičić, Zagreb, 2004. Kornev, Sergej, Sudar praznina, Tretrji program Hrvaškega radia, 1999, str. 55–56, 327–337. Kovačević, Nataša, Narrating Post/Communism: Colonial discourse and Europe’s borderline civilization, Routledge, London – New York, 2008. Mandić Beier, Ada, »Kroatische Autoren und das Exil«, v: Fantom slobode: književni časopis, št. 1–2, 2008, str. 509–576. Moranjak - Bamburać, Nirman, »Političke i epistemologijske implikacije postkolonijalne teorije«, Sarajevske sveske, št. 6–7, 2004, str. 86–101. Naficy, Hamid, »Fobični prostori i liminalne panike: žanr nezavisnoga transnacionalnog filma«, prev. Lovorka Kozole, Kolo, let. 15, št. 1, 2005, str. 345–372. Novak, Slobodan Prosperov, Povijesti hrvatske književnosti, Marjan tisak, 4. zv., Split, 2004. Novikova, Irina, »Žena i rat/rod i žanr/autobiografija i istorija u Dalekoj tutnjavi Elene Rževske«, Ženske studije 10, Beograd, 1998, str.156–174. Petö, Andrea, »Stories of Women’s Lives: Feminist Genealogies in Hungary«, v: Gender Relations in South Eastern Europe, ur. Miroslav Jovanović, Slobodan Naumović, zv. II/33, Udruženje za društvenu istoriju – Zur Kunde Südosteuropas, Beograd – Gradec, 2002, str. 211–218. Sajko, Ivana, Žena-bomba, Meandar, Zagreb, 2004. Sajko, Ivana, »Na jesen ću virusom napasti hrvatska kazališta« (intervju, pripravil Edo Popović), Tema, št. 8–9, 2004, str. 4–12. Sajko, Ivana, Rio bar, Meandar, Zagreb, 2006. Sajko, Ivana, Rio Bar, Matthes & Seitz, prev. Alida Bremer, Berlin, 2008. Schäuble, Michaela, »Očevid: (auto)biografski pripovjedni oblici u dokumentarnim filmovima o ratu u bivšoj Jugoslaviji«, Treća 1/9, Centar za ženske studije, Zagreb, 2007, str. 39–56. Slapšak, Svetlana, »Between the vampire husband and the mortal lover: a narrative for feminism in Yugoslavia«, Research on Russia and Eastern Europe 2, 1996, str. 201–224. Slapšak, Svetlana, Ratni Kandid, Radio B92, Beograd, 1997. Slapšak, Svetlana, Mala crna haljina: eseji o antropologiji i feminizmu, prev. Jelena Petrović, Centar za ženske studije, Beograd, 2007. Sloterdijk, Peter, Doći na svijet, dospjeti u jezik, prev. Mirjana Stančić, Meandar, Zagreb, 1992. Ugrešić, Dubravka, Have a Nice Day: From Balkan War to the American Dream, prev. C. Hawkesworth, Jonathan Cape, London, 1994. Ugrešić, Dubravka, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, Phoenix House, London, 1998. Ugrešić, Dubravka, The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays, Phoenix House, London, prev. Celia Hawkesworth, 1998.
131 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Ugrešić, Dubravka, Muzej bezuvjetne predaje, Konzor, Zagreb, in Samizdat B92, Beograd, 2002. Ugrešić, Dubravka, Ministarstvo boli, Faust Vrančić, Zagreb, 2004. Ugrešić, Dubravka, The Ministry of Pain, prev. M. H. Heim, SAQI, London, 2005. Ugrešić, Dubravka, Baba Jaga je snijela jaje, Vuković & Runjić, Zagreb, 2008. Vahtel, Endru Baruh [Wachtel, Andrew B.], Književnost Istočne Europe u doba postkomunizma: uloga pisca u Istočnoj Europi, prev. Ivan Radosavljević, Stubovi kulture, Beograd, 2006. Velčić, Mirna, Otisak priče, August Cesarec, Zagreb, 1990. Velikonja, Mitja, Titostalgija – študija nostalgije po Josipu Brozu, Mirovni inštitut, Biblioteka Media Watch, Ljubljana, 2008. Vrkljan, Irena, Berlinski rukopis, GZH, Zagreb, 1988. Vrkljan, Irena, Pred crvenim zidom, Durieux, Zagreb, 1994. Zlatar, Andrea, Tekst, tijelo, trauma, Naklada Ljevak, Zagreb, 2004. Zlatar, Andrea, »Predfeminizam, feminizam i postfeminizam u hrvatskoj književnosti«, 2008, http://www.hrvatskiplus.org/ispis.php?id_doc=23.
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134 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST DUBRAVKA ĐURIĆ
IZZIVALNE LITERARNE PRAKSE V SRBIJI PO LETU 2000
OKVIR BRANJA: IDEOLOGIJA TEKSTA
Književnost je pomembno področje, v katerem se konstituirajo nacionalne identitete. Njen pomen je še večji v tako imenovanih »manjših kulturah«, katerih jezik govori in se uči razmeroma malo ljudi. Povezavo med književnostjo in nacijo poudarjam zato, ker je obdobje postsocializma, še posebej na prostorih nekdanje Jugoslavije zaznamovalo ustanavljanje ali nagnjenje k formiranju enonacionalne državne skupnosti. Čeprav je bil ta proces predstavljen kot »naraven«, želim poudariti, da nacionalna država, nacionalizem in nacionalna identiteta kot kolektivna forma organizacije in identifikacije niso »naravni« pojavi, temveč so pogojene zgodovinsko- kulturne formacije. Chris Barker jih je takole opredelil: »Nacionalna država je politični koncept, ki se nanaša na administrativni aparat. Ta naj bi imel suverenost nad specifičnim prostorom ali ozemljem znotraj sistema nacionalne države. Nacionalna identiteta je oblika imaginarne identifikacije s simboli in diskurzi nacionalne države. Nacije torej niso zgolj politične formacije, temveč sistemi kulturne reprezentacije, skozi katere se nacionalna identiteta nenehno reproducira kot diskurzivno delovanje. Nacionalna država kot politični aparat in kot simbolna forma vsebuje časovno razsežnost v smislu, da politične strukture trajajo in se spreminjajo, medtem ko simbolne in diskurzivne razsežnosti nacionalne identitete govorijo in ustvarjajo idejo o izvoru, kontinuiteti in tradiciji.«1 Po Stuartu Hallu je nacionalna identiteta način povezovanja kulturne različnosti, Homi Bhabha pa trdi, da jo izgrajujejo pripovedi o narodu
135 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST in naciji, katerih zgodbe, slike, simboli in rituali predstavljajo »skupne« pomene nacije.2 V tem prispevku se bom ukvarjala z družbeno funkcijo književnosti in njeno vlogo v konstrukciji nacionalne identitete. V prvem delu se bom osredotočila na ideologijo vladajočih književnih praks na srbskem literarnem prizorišču v devetdesetih letih prejšnjega stoletja in na ideologijo njihovega sprejemanja. Za tak pristop je ključno dojemanje ideologije umetnosti, kot ga je v začetku osemdesetih let prejšnjega stoletja opredelila Griselda Pollock. Opozarjala je namreč na prevladujoče napačno prepričanje, da naj bi bila umetnina ali umetniški predmet sredstvo za reprezentiranje ideologije, zgodovine ali psihologije, ki pa naj bi se proizvajale nekje drugje: »Moramo razumeti, da umetnost ni le del družbene proizvodnje, temveč da je sama umetnost proizvajalna, torej da aktivno producira pomene. Umetnost je konstitutivna za ideologijo, ni zgolj preprosta ilustracija ideologije. Je ena izmed družbenih praks, s katero se izgrajujejo, producirajo in tudi redefinirajo določeni pogledi na svet, definicije in identitete, po katerih naj bi mi živeli.«3 Umetniška ali literarna dela je zato treba razumeti kot označevalno prakso ali kot organizacijo elementov, ki proizvajajo pomene, ustvarjajo poglede na svet, si prizadevajo uveljaviti določene pomene, vplivati na določene ideološke prikaze sveta. Griselda Pollock torej poudarja, da bi morali umetniška dela in umetniške prakse obravnavati kot aktivno intervencijo v družbeni kontekst in jih ne jemati kot sredstva za golo prenašanje vnaprej oblikovanih pomenov ali kot izraze določenih identitet. James H. Kavanagh pravi, da beseda »ideologija« označuje nujno prakso, ki zajema tudi »sisteme reprezentacij«. Ti so njeni produkti in podpora, prek njih pripadniki različnih razredov, ras in spolov presojajo svoje žive odnose do družbenozgodovinskih projektov. Ideološka analiza proučuje, kako se ti živi odnosi in sistemi reprezentacij ustanavljajo, preoblikujejo in povezujejo z različnimi specifičnimi političnimi programi; poudarja torej, da vsa literarna in kulturna besedila ustanavljajo ideološko prakso družbe, medtem ko literarna in kulturna kritika ustanavljata dejavnost, ki se političnim učinkom te nujne družbene prakse bodisi podreja bodisi jih poskuša transformirati.4 V tem kontekstu bom najprej pregledala vladajoče literarne modele v Srbiji v devetdesetih letih, nato pa bom obširneje obravnavala posamezne transgresivne literarne prakse.
136 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST IDEOLOŠKE KONSTRUKCIJE FIKCIJE
V zgodnejših analizah stanja poezije in proze sem ugotovila, da je bila v devetdesetih letih prejšnjega stoletja prevladujoči model v Srbiji proza, ki se je uveljavljala kot protimodernistični literarni model.5 V tem smislu je bila pomembna obnova zgodovinskega romana, katerega funkcija je re/konstrukcija posocialistične realnosti v Srbiji. Naloga tovrstnega romana je re/konstrukcija podobe preteklosti, ki bralcu ali bralki daje oporno točko za izgradnjo lastne nacionalne (in spolne) identitete z esencialistične pozicije. Večji del literarne produkcije devetdesetih let lahko opišemo kot »sopotniško prozo«, kakor jo je v letih 1994/95 opredelila Svetlana Slapšak. V analizi romana Lagum (1990) kanonske pisateljice Svetlane Velmar Janković je presodila, da je ta roman »sopotniška proza« dominantne srbske nacionalistične politike, ker po ideološki plati »vzpostavlja komunistično krivdo za uničevanje meščanstva ...« Roman je sopotniški tudi zato, ker vsebuje »vrsto sporočil, ki niso povezana z logiko romana, temveč so namenjena nacionalistični identifikaciji; sopotniški je tako po izumljanju stereotipov kot po odsotnosti zanimanja za ženske in žensko, in tudi po konzervativnih poetičnih značilnostih.«6 Svetlana Velmar Janković konstruira zgodovino, razločno demarkira (družbeno)spolne vloge tako, da razredni, spolni in nacionalni stereotipi in predsodki gradijo identifikacijske matrice, ki jih bralci in bralke uporabljajo kot vzorce pri izpeljevanju koherentnih, nedvoumnih identitet. Ta roman, kot tudi velik del prozne in pesniške produkcije devetdesetih let, sodeluje pri ustvarjanju »režima resnice« srbske posocialistične družbe. Večji del celotne prozne in pesniške produkcije iz tega obdobja prikazuje etnično pripadnost kot »naravno« pripadnost določeni organski celoti. Tovrstna literarna produkcija vzpostavlja močne povezave med nacijo, religijo in ozemljem. Pri vsem tem pridobi folklorna dediščina posebno mesto v posocialističnih simbolizacijah, kar kaže na tradicionalne oblike »organskega« življenja v podeželski skupnosti. Ruralno je postavljeno kot izvor, usmerja na temeljno izhodišče oziroma na bistvo nacionalne identitete. Meščanstvo se vzpostavlja kot pozicija v dvojnem razmerju do procesov modernizacije. Življenje v urbanih okoljih je organizirano tako, da kaže »zavest« o bistveni ukoreninjenosti posameznika in kolektiva v nacionalno tradicijo. Izpostavlja se zahteva, da se je treba opirati na tradicijo, saj se po tej poti ohranjata domnevna kontinuiteta in sistem vrednot v
137 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST praktični urejenosti sodobnega življenja in njegovih ritualih. Takšno odkrito ali prikrito konstrukcijo realnosti zasledimo v romanih in kratkih zgodbah avtorjev in avtoric, ki so izgrajevali ali bili tesno povezani s političnimi in kulturnimi elitami v času vladavine Slobodana Miloševića. Iz tistega obdobja obstajajo romani, ki so bili napisani ali promovirani pod okriljem tako imenovane visoke kulture, katere predstavnica je tudi Svetlana Velmar Janković, in romani, ki so nastali ali so jih promovirali v popularni kulturi in ki so zato izhajali v neverjetno visokih nakladah, denimo romani Ljiljane Habjanović Đurović.7 Poleg prevladujoče »sopotniške proze« je obstajal še en tip proze, ki je nostalgično usmerjal pogled v za vedno izgubljeni svet z začetka dvajsetega stoletja, ki smo ga doživljali kot progresivno, urbano realnost. Nostalgija za izgubljenim časom pa zaznamuje obe omenjeni struji, čeprav se razlikujeta po politični usmeritvi delovanja avtoric in avtorjev. Performativna razsežnost obeh struj se ni dogajala na isti ravni. Na eni strani imamo avtorje in avtorice, ki aktivno sodelujejo v konstrukciji nacionalne identitete in prevladujoče nacionalne oziroma nacionalistične ideologije. Romani teh pisateljev so konstituirani kot neizpodbitna »resnica« o preteklosti družbe. Na drugi strani srečujemo pisatelje in pisateljice, ki so se temu upirali in pisali postmodernistične romane ali »zgodovinopisno metafikcijo«, kot je takšno zvrst opredelila Linda Hutcheon. To so avtorefleksivni teksti in v svojih pripovednih strategijah povezujejo ali mešajo resnične zgodovinske dogodke in osebe s fiktivnimi.8 Najbolj prepoznavna dela takega modela pisanja so romani Dragana Velikića, ki so rekonstruirali izgubljeni meščanski prostor, obenem pa označujejo prostor nacionalne emancipacije in vključenost v takratne evropske ali srednjeevropske tokove, ki so nasprotovali političnim procesom v devetdesetih letih, saj so ti državo oddaljevali od političnih, ekonomskih in kulturnih smernic sodobnega sveta. Omeniti je treba tudi zanimiv fenomen in funkcijo proze Dubravke Ugrešić. Do konca devetdesetih let je avtorica vse svoje knjige izdala v Beogradu (pri založbi B92, nato pri Fabriki knjig), saj je bila kot ena od razvpitih »čarovnic« (avtorice, ki so kritizirale hrvaško nacionalistično državno politiko) pregnana iz hrvaške kulture, njena dela pa so navduševala številne demokratično usmerjene kritike in bralce. Dubravka Ugrešić zaseda prazno mesto v prozni produkciji srbske kulture. Literarne institucije srbske kulture namreč niso dopuščale
138 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST pojavov pisateljic ali pisateljev, ki bi kazali na travmatično mesto lastne kulture v samem pisateljskem pristopu, ki bi bil dovolj ekspliciten, da bi ga kultura zavrgla, kot se je to zgodilo z Dubravko Ugrešić v hrvaški kulturi v devetdesetih letih, ko je potekal zelo hrupen in travmatičen javni obračun z nespodobnimi pisateljicami in pisatelji. V srbski kulturi so bili neprimerni pisatelji preprosto izbrisani, kot da nikoli ne bi obstajali. Za ponazoritev bom iz več razlogov omenila nezaželenega Boro Čosića, saj za srbsko kulturo ni bil problematičen samo zaradi ostrega kritiziranja srbske državne politike v devetdesetih letih in odločitve za prostovoljno izgnanstvo, temveč tudi zaradi poetičnih lastnosti svojega opusa, ki izhaja iz neoavantgardne pisateljske in umetniške prakse. In čeprav postaja delo Dubravke Ugrešić pomembno za demokratične literarne kroge v Srbiji, je treba vendarle poudariti, da sta se njeno delo in politično delovanje oblikovala predvsem v razmerju do hrvaške kulture. Povedano z drugimi besedami, po razpadu jugoslovanskega kulturnega prostora je hrvaška kultura postala njena bistvena referenčna točka, zato je za srbsko kulturo avtoričina kritika ostala nevplivna in neškodljiva in v tem kontekstu tudi kulturno sprejemljiva. Čeprav so v devetdesetih letih obstajali avtorji in avtorice, ki so v svojih romanih kritizirali srbsko politično prizorišče (npr. zlasti prvi roman Vladimira Arsenijevića, V podkrovju, 1994), mislim, da so to počeli dokaj cinično, zato je bil njihov pristop dvoumen. Črni humor in cinizem sta namreč v končni instanci relativizirala politično ost teh romanov in prav zaradi dvoumnosti jih je vladajoča literarna nomenklatura sprejela in hvalila (Arsenijevć je za prvi roman prejel prestižno nagrado revije NIN). Pomembno je poudariti tudi to, da se je literarna kritika v Srbiji do leta 2000, a tudi pozneje, upirala ideološkim analizam literarnih del. Uveljavljena novinarska, časopisna in univerzitetna kritika se je opirala na (pozno)modernistične postavke, denimo da so literarna dela avtonomno estetsko dejstvo, torej če je literarno delo zares vredno samo po sebi, tedaj ne sme biti vpleteno v diskurze ideologije in politike. Po tej poti je bila funkcija kritike prikrivanje ideološke funkcije literature. V omenjenem kritičnem besedilu o literarnem delu Svetlane Velmar Janković je Svetlana Slapšak vpeljala kulturni in ideološki pristop k analizi proze. Po letu 2000 so Srbijo tako rekoč preplavili prevodi romanov, ki tematizirajo konstrukcijo sodobnih urbanih prostorov, organizacijo življenja v teh prostorih, na drugi strani pa konstrukcijo privatnosti,
139 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST subjektivnosti in identitete zlasti v razvitih zahodnih državah ali v državah nekdanje Vzhodne Evrope, ki so se vključile v aktualne politične, ekonomske in kulturne tokove. Gre za prozo ameriških, britanskih, italijanskih, poljskih, madžarskih in drugih avtorjev – in za obdobje, ko je bil na območju nekdanje Jugoslavije končno vzpostavljen mir. Toda za Srbijo je to bilo tudi obdobje, ko se je pod površjem navidezne normalnosti skrivalo globoko travmo ideoloških, političnih in vojaških porazov, s katerimi se družba še ni (bila) pripravljena soočiti. Lahko rečemo, da večina avtorjev in avtoric zavrača palimpsestne pisateljske strategije, ki so poudarjale pretekle zgodovinske epohe – bodisi v smislu postmoderne književnosti bodisi v smislu nacionalnega realizma, ki sta bila prevladujoča literarna modela. Videti je tudi, da želi večji del prozne pisateljske prakse prekriti, skriti ali zakamuflirati travmatično sodobnost in nerazrešene politične, ekonomske in družbene probleme.
TRANSGRESIVNE LITERARNE PRAKSE
Dosedanje splošno shematsko mapiranje literarne produkcije v zadnjih šestnajstih letih je hotelo pokazati dominantno literarno produkcijo tega obdobja oziroma osvetliti tisto književnost, ki so jo v institucijah Kulture postavljali kot ključno za pojem vrednih sodobnih literarnih dosežkov. Cilj te »mape« je izostriti kontrast z literarnimi deli, ki jih bom podrobneje obravnavala v naslednjih poglavjih. Z drugimi besedami, namesto da bi se osredotočila na »velika« in »dragocena« dela sodobne nacionalne produkcije, se bom usmerila na tiste pisateljske prakse, ki tej sicer pripadajo, vendar jo obenem tudi spodnašajo. Na drugi strani bom na podlagi sodobne kritike v središče postavila literarne prakse, ki se ne ujemajo z dominantnim sistemom literarnih vrednot. Zaradi izključenosti iz tega sistema postajajo simptomatične za kulturo, ki jih marginalizira in/ali cenzurira.
RECEPCIJA ROMANA SAŠE ILIĆA »BERLINSKO OKNO« KOT SIMPTOM KULTURE
V središče pozornosti bom najprej postavila odzive na roman Berlinsko okno (2005) Saše Ilića.9 Ta roman je izzval zelo burno reakcijo kritikov,
140 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST saj se ukvarja z aktualno, skrito, neizgovorjeno in neizgovorljivo travmo srbske kulture. Saša Ilić (rojen leta 1972) je pripadnik nove generacije pisateljev in pisateljic, ki so se uveljavljali v poznih devetdesetih letih. Kritika ga je od vsega začetka podpirala in priznala kot enega najbolj nadarjenih pisateljev te generacije. Kritik vladnega dnevnega časopisa Politika Slobodan Vladušić je že v uvodu v svoj članek »Humanistični žanr« napisal: »Saša Ilić je nedvomno eden najbolj talentiranih predstavnikov generacije sedemdesetih v srbski prozi in njegovo naslednjo samostojno knjigo, po obetavni knjigi Slutnja državljanske vojne, sem pričakoval z veliko radovednostjo.«10 Saša Ćirić pa svojo recenzijo, objavljeno v reviji ProFemina, začenja takole: »Moram priznati, da sem novo knjigo Saše Ilića nestrpno pričakoval. Že zgodba Ladjedelec iz mini antologije najmlajše srbske proze Pasje stoletje (Beopolis, 2000), zbirke kratkih zgodb, objavljene po državljanskih vojnah, me je prepričala, da imamo opravka z resnično nadarjenostjo za prozo, ki izstopa iz generacijskega kroga, rojenih sredi sedemdesetih let prejšnjega stoletja [...]«11 Obe kritiki bom obravnavala kot paradigmatična in med seboj nasprotna odziva na roman Berlinsko okno. Slobodan Vladušić je potem, ko je pohvalil Ilića kot najpomembnejšega pripovednika nove generacije, opravil še politično kritiko. Pravi, da je bil roman napisan z zavestjo o angažiranosti, nato pa pripomni, da je angažiranost mogoča samo »z jasnim stališčem o zločinu i kazni«. Po Vladušiću je Ilić obdelal tudi prizorišča srbskih zločinov v Bosni, kar ocenjuje kot avtorjevo zelo pomembno etično dejanje. Toda ko se ta prizorišča in prizori vgradijo v konstrukcijo, v kateri prevladuje analogija med nacističnimi in srbskimi zločini, ki tudi poantira knjigo, tedaj se »avtentična kapaciteta te knjige počasi razvodeni v (neavtentično) politično retoriko, in ta potencialno odlična knjiga postane še eden izmed številnih izdelkov ‘humanističnega žanra’.«12 Kritik »objektivno« presoja vrednost knjige in njeno »angažirano« razsežnost kritizira kot nekaj, kar prispeva k pisateljski zgrešenosti romana. Zaradi »objektivne« kritičnosti deluje Vladušić kot varuh, ki nadzira in predpisuje kulturne vrednote in kako naj bi jih izražali. Dopušča možnost, da je književnost »angažirana«, vendar pri tem predpisuje merila, kako naj bodo taka dela »pravična«, »poštena« in »bliže resnici«, oziroma pod kakšnimi pogoji so sprejemljiva za vladajočo politično in kulturno nomenklaturo v Srbiji. Svoj prikaz zaključi takole: »Potopljena v žanr, v katerem so se preizkusili tudi manj nadarjeni pisatelji, je Ilićeva knjiga primer zamujene priložnosti.
141 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Priložnosti, da bi napisal knjigo, ki bi jo vsi v Bosni brali z občutkom sramu, knjigo, ki bi resnično imela moralno moč pomiritve maščevalnih sanj, še vedno živih v Bosni in ki čakajo, da se luč vnovič ugasne. To bi bila knjiga, ki bi popisala vse zločine, metonimično povezala vse krvnike in vse žrtve, ne glede na njihovo tečajno vrednost, torej knjiga, ki bi ohranjala čim večji odmik od samovoljnih primerjav.«13 Vladušić izraža prevladujoče politično mnenje. »Resnica« je, da so med vojno v Bosni zločine zagrešile vse strani in da vsako drugačno prikazovanje »realnosti« (npr. prikazovanje zločinov zgolj ene, in to »naše« strani) govori o tem, da imamo opravka z izdajalskimi dejanji tujih plačancev. To stališče vzpostavlja polarizacijo domoljubov in izdajalcev, ki je bila v devetdesetih letih pomemben politični konstrukt. Recenzijo Saše Ćirića je mogoče brati kot prikaz drugega političnega spektra, ki pripada političnemu obrobju. Trdi namreč, da je Saša Ilić naredil pogumen korak, saj je po pisanju izključno kratkih zgodb in novel napisal roman. Ta prehod je obenem prehod od intimističnega, »pretanjenega borgesovskega raziskovanja in komponiranja (psevdo)biografij, jezikovno nepretenciozne reduktivnosti in fluidne simbolike, kar vse spominja na določeno prozo iz osemdesetih ter zgodnjega Dragana Velikića«, na obliko neorealistične poetike, in brez obotavljanja tudi na vélike zgodovinske teme in sedanje družbene procese. Ilić se je, kot piše Ćirić, ukvarjal z usodo nekdanje Vzhodne in sedaj predvsem Srednje Evrope po padcu berlinskega zidu, z rušenjem družbenega reda, vojnimi zločini, ki so jih v devetdesetih letih storili Srbi, in z odgovornostjo za ta dejanja, ki jo nosi »(naša) celotna družba, kot neka predpostavljena, organizirana celota, katere delovanje se opira na moralne premise in ki je, ko se te naenkrat izmaknejo pod nogami, kot preproga (ali ćilim).« Ćirić odkrito načenja travmo srbske družbe: »V tem smislu Berlinsko okno pogumno zaobjema aktualnost tovrstne ‘romaneskne tematike’ (vred s pomenljivo obsesivno intrigantnostjo, ki jo ta še vedno vzbuja v naši družbi in za katero sta osebna odgovornost in etični imperativ soočanja s preteklostjo slepa pega kolektivne zavesti in javnega dikurza).«14 Za razliko od navedenih recenzij je večina kritikov in kritičark ta roman komentirala zgolj z vidika njegove »umetniške« vrednosti. Njihov diskurz zato zakriva travmatično mesto romana, odpravlja njegovo nevarnost in ga s tem spreminja v kulturno sprejemljivega.
142 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST FEMINISTIČNI PISATELJSKI PROJEKT JASMINE TEŠANOVIĆ
V tem razdelku se bom osredotočila na delo Jasmine Tešanović (rojene leta 1954),15 saj je edina feministična pisateljica v Srbiji, ki kot avtorica ne obstaja v srbski kulturi. Gre za avtorico z obsežno knjižno produkcijo, vendar ne obstaja ne za kritike prevladujočega toka ne za feministične kritičarke! Sprašujemo se, zakaj? Očitno je, da v svoji literarni praksi postavlja pod vprašaj temeljne dejavnike koncepta »Velike Literature«, kot tudi pojem »Ženske Književnosti«, ki jih določa srbska kultura v zadnjih šestnajstih letih. »Velika Literatura« je književnost, ki jo pišejo moški, odlikuje se z velikimi zgodovinskimi temami ali jih vsaj jemlje kot samoumevne. Je mojstrsko pripovedovana zgodba ali zgodba, ki mojstrsko ustvarja občutek junaštva, brezupa, nesmisla, upanja. Ukvarja se z liki in jim sledi od rojstva, spremlja njihovo odraščanje, zrela leta in smrt. Liki trpijo, ljubijo, se borijo. Velika Literatura v Srbiji je pisana kot bolj ali manj koherentna zgodba, ki gradi določeno vzdušje, običajno pa gre za nostalgično zgodbo. Toda najpomembneje je, da Velika Literatura ni nikoli pisana s pozicij marginalnih skupin, kot so ženske, spolne, etnične, rasne in druge manjšine. Implicitno ali eksplicitno se ukvarja z Nacijo, z nacionalnimi miti, konstruira matrico nacionalne identitete, ki je idealizirana in izdelana kot univerzalna za dano kulturo. Veliko Literaturo se ustvarja tako, da se pisatelj vpisuje v nacionalni kanon velikih del, ki ga sestavlja majhno število »velikih« pisateljev, ki so vsi povzdignjeni v nacionalne veljake in ki so kot takšni postavljeni za nujne vzornike. Če se v nacionalni kanon vpisujejo pisatelji (moški), nacionalni kritiki (večinoma moški), budni varuhi tradicije, lažje spodbujajo še eno pomembno ime nacionalne kulture. Ko gre za pisateljico, je proces mnogo bolj zapleten. Ali z drugimi besedami: tudi če je katera od sodobnih pisateljic vključena v nacionalni kanon, še vedno ostaja na obrobju. Čeprav obstajajo pisateljice, ki so v kanonu sodobne nacionalne književnosti, zagotovo nikoli ne postanejo (ali postanejo le redko) osrednje osebnosti. Skladno s temi razmerami imamo tudi feministične teoretičarke in kritičarke, ki so spremljale sodobno literarno in kritiško sceno, se ukvarjale s pisateljicami, ki so prisotne na aktualni sceni in spoštovane, vendar nikoli (ali redko) umeščene kot nedotakljive Velikanke nacionalne kulture. Toda po drugi strani sta si bili feministična in (moška) kritika glavnega toka v Srbiji enotni
143 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST glede meril za Veliko nacionalno književnost, še zlasti glede prepričanja, da Velika in resnično pomembna književnost nikakor ne nastaja v marginalnih skupinah, četudi gre za ženske skupine, saj je bistveni dejavnik književnosti univerzalnost. Nasproti prevladujočim feminističnim kritičnim praksam v Srbiji me zanimajo cenzurirane pisateljske prakse, in Jasmina Tešanović je njihov najboljši primer. Je feministična aktivistka, deluje v protivojnih ženskih organizacijah, kot so Ženske v črnem, (Žene u crnom), Ženski center (Ženski centar), Center za ženske študije in komunikacijo (Centar za ženske studije i komunikaciju). Okvir njenih proznih knjig je feministična scena, na kateri že dolgo deluje kot mirovna aktivistka in urednica založbe Feministička 94 (ustanovila in vodila jo je s Slavico Stojanović). Poleg tega je tudi filmska režiserka in pisateljica. Njeno prozo zaznamuje feministični aktivizem, v srbski kulturi je zasnovala žanr feministične proze, ki ga po mojem mnenju edina tudi prakticira. V tem smislu njena proza ne korespondira s sodobno srbsko prozo glavnega toka. Njena proza se udejanja kot hibridna. Ta hibridnost izhaja iz avtoričinega političnega stališča, upiranja prevladujočim političnim dogajanjem v Srbiji devetdesetih let, nato pa še iz avtoričine izkušnje izkoreninjenosti in nepripadnosti, saj je več let živela v Italiji, Kairu in drugje. Jasmina Tešanović govori o svoji trojezičnosti, saj piše v srbščini, italijanščini in angleščini. Pravi, da ji je pri pisanju pomembna resnica, vendar ne tista s stališča realizma, ker ta piše lažne izpovedi, ki so sicer izražene izpovedno, v prvi osebi ednine, vendar je morda bolje reči, da so »psevdoizpovedna« pripoved v prvi osebi ednine.16 Zgodbe so diskontinuirane, pripoved je zapletena in večpomenska. Oglejmo si najprej Sirene (1997), hibridno, diskontinuirano feministično prozo.17 Knjiga je posvečena »otrokom, ki so doživeli nasilje«. Pisana je v prvi osebi ednine, nato pa prehaja med prvo in tretjo osebo. Avtorica uporablja dialoge, pisemsko obliko, obliko dnevniških zapiskov in, kar je še posebej zanimivo, elektronsko pošto. Slednjo vpeljuje v kontekst sodobne proze, ki se piše v Srbiji v devetdesetih letih. Vključuje tudi vizualne podobe, ki predstavljajo mitološke in arhetipske figure iz različnih kultur in zgodovinskih obdobjih in so imaginarij konstrukcije ženskosti, tako kot so sirene ali Mati Božja ali katere druge. Obstajata dve vzporedni pripovedni ravni. Na eni ravni se avtorica ukvarja z nasiljem nad ženskami, in v tem okviru posebej z incestom. Postopoma uvaja like, vendar razmerja med njimi niso takoj jasna. Na drugi ravni opravlja revizijo moških
144 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST mitov in gradi ženske mite. Na ta način se izgrajuje kontinuiteta ženske civilizacije in vzpostavlja ženska tradicija. Pripovedni ravni ustvarjata binarno opozicijo: področje mitskega, ki je idealno žensko, in področje realnosti, ki je kruta in v kateri je ženska postavljena kot žrtev. Zdi se, kot da avtorica uvaja nekakšen hipertekst, saj pripoveduje tako, da simulira naracijo in okoliščine, vzete iz pravljic, legend, realističnega romana, modernističnega romana in feminističnih teoretskih diskurzov, medtem ko v pisateljski postopek pogosto uvaja avtorefleksivnost in poudarja konvencije pripovedne proze kot žanra. Naslednje avtoričino delo, Matrimonium,18 je izšlo leta 2004. Na začetku je omenjeno, da gre za »dnevnik/esej«, ki ga je avtorica pisala od novembra 1999 do novembra 2000. Matrimonium je pisan kot avtobiografska proza, vendar, kot je povedala avtorica v enem od najinih osebnih pogovorov, to ni izpovedna proza, marveč (psevdo)avtobiografska proza,19 v kateri pisateljica sicer uporablja značilnosti avtobiografije, ampak z namenom sestavljanja fiktivnega lika in fiktivnega sveta. Knjiga ne obravnava neposrednega družbenega okolja (ta vsaj na prvi pogled ni v prvem planu), ne ukvarja se z rekonstrukcijo izgubljenega sveta ali meščanske družbe za potrebe in zaradi konstruiranja posocialistične družbe. Ta roman ni zgolj to, kar se v kontekstu ginokritike imenuje ženska proza, kjer so v središču ženski liki in pripoved o ženskih izkušnjah. Odlika proze Jasmine Tešanović ni romaneskna in monumentalna konstrukcija dejstev, temveč je feministična – avtorica jo izrecno artikulira kot feministično prozo. V knjigi večkrat poudarja, da gre za vzpostavljanje ženske genealogije nasproti moški, ki je v Literaturi institucionalno utemeljena. Matrimonium je feministična knjiga, ker se avtorica ukvarja z odnosom med materjo in hčerjo, ki je po oceni francoskih feminističnih teoretičark iz sedemdesetih let, kot so Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous in Julia Kristeva, konflikten in boleč, v zahodnih literarnih krogih pogosto spregledan. Patriarhalni jezik nima sistema prikazovanja, s katerim bi to razmerje simbolno predstavili. V patriarhalni kulturi je pomembno samo razmerje med očetom in sinom, pomembna in družbeno priznana je samo moška genealogija. Jasmina Tešanović dramatizira odnos med materjo in hčerjo v razponu od skrajne ljubezni do skrajnega sovraštva. Razgrinja močna čustva, ki so v tem odnosu vedno dramatična. Ker je zgodba pripovedovana s hčerinega vidika, ta odnos in ženska duševnost nista več nepredstavljiva in skrivnostna, temveč v jeziku ženske pisave ali ženske govorice pridobivata simbolni izraz. Govorica v
145 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST knjigi osvetljuje žensko uživanje (jouissance) v jeziku in telesu. Avtorica pogosto opisuje mlado ali staro telo, in pomen telesnega stika, ki ga izraža sam dotik. Odnos med materjo in hčerjo se s časom spreminja, vendar nenehno poteka med konflikti, antagonizmi in ljubeznijo. Proza je strukturirana kot zamišljeni dialog z materjo – oziroma kot monolog, v katerem junakinja knjige govori v prvi osebi ednine. Knjiga je napisana kot spomin, v katerem se junakinja premika skozi časovne ravni sedanjosti, preteklosti in prihodnosti, vendar se te nikoli ne pojavljajo diahrono. Mati je prikazana kot posesivna ženska, ki hoče usmerjati hčerino življenje, želi si, da bi bila hči pridna punčka, in ne more sprejeti dejstva, da to ni, vsaj ne po materinih merilih. Hčerka se upira, problematična je, hoče živeti lastno življenje, daleč od materinega nadzorovanja. Trenutek, ko matere ni več, je kot trenutek sprave in razumevanja. Takrat se hči spominja skrbne matere in žaluje za njo. Knjiga je artikulirana kot ritualno žalovanje za materjo, v katerem junakinja ali, če že želite, avtorica knjige ozavešča zase in za nas to travmatično razmerje. Knjiga ima tudi politično konotacijo. Vključuje čas prehoda iz socializma v posocializem, govori o političnem razhajanju med materjo in hčerjo. Mati, kot tudi večina nekdanjih komunistov, zagovarja novo, posocialistično nacionalistično ideologijo, medtem ko se hči opredeljuje kot mirovnica in feministka, ki odločno nasprotuje nacionalističnim diskurzom v srbski družbi.
POLITIKA PROZE: MILICA KRSTANOVIĆ
Milica Krstanović (rojena leta 1961) ni veliko objavljala in kot pisateljica v srbski kulturi ne obstaja. Govorila bom o njeni prozi, objavljeni leta 2004 (oz. 2005) v reviji ProFemina. Označila jo bom enako kot prozo Jasmine Tešanović, torej s pojmom psevdoavtobiografske proze. Avtorica duhovito in lucidno umešča spremembe v nekdanji Jugoslaviji, ki jih je povzročil najprej razpad države, nato pa še krvave vojne. V preprostem jeziku in tonu pripovedovalka (sama avtorica kot glas, ki artikulira zgodbo) pripoveduje o svetu, v katerem smo, nekdanji Jugoslovani, živeli – in o svetovih, v katerih živimo danes. Zgodbe se razvijajo v času, ko se vojne na ozemlju nekdanje SFRJ zaključujejo in ko so že izoblikovane
146 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST nove nacionalne države. Pisateljica popisuje razpad nekega sveta, sveta socialistične samoupravne ureditve, in se z nostalgijo in cinizmom spominja ideoloških konstruktov nekdanje skupne države, njenih simbolnih identifikacijskih matric in vsakdanjih ritualov. Zgodbo pripoveduje v prvi osebi ednine, a v središču je njen odnos s hčerjo. Opisujoč vsakdanjik, se ideološko opredeljuje do tega, v komentarjih o vsakdanjih dogodkih in plehkosti vsakdanjega življenja, ki so bistvenega pomena v starih in novih identifikacijskih sistemih socialistične oziroma posocialistične družbe. Zgodba Prvič s hčerko na Hrvaško opisuje potovanje, ki je nabito z močnimi čustvi, potovanje po lastni preteklosti, po konstrukciji lastne identitete, po znani geografiji in zgodovini, ki ne obstajata več. Ko govorimo o identifikacijski matrici v teh zgodbah, mislim na geografska območja, kjer je pripovedovalka nekoč živela in odraščala in ki so bila definirana z mejami nekdanje države, ter na prijateljske in družinske vezi, na ideologijo državne skupnosti, ki je konstruirala (več)nacionalno identiteto/identitete. Zgodba se ukvarja z ideološko konstrukcijo »materinščine«, saj jezik ustvarja svet in nas v tem svetu. O tem nekdanjem jeziku avtorica zapiše: »Spet sem govorila v tistem izumrlem jeziku, ki se mi zdi bolj mrtev od latinskega, v materinščini, v srbohrvaščini.« Primerjajoč ta jezik z latinskim, pripomni: »Ko sem razmišljala o tem, da je latinščina v korenu vseh živih in živahnih romanskih jezikov in v korenu jezika znanosti, in da tako živi v različnih govoricah tudi danes, obstojno in vztrajno, kot puljska Arena in rimski vodnjak, se sprašujem, v korenu česa je SH-HS? V korenu nekega velikega nepotrebnega trpljenja.« Zgodba o ideološki konstrukciji jezika je zgodba o dramatični spremembi identifikacijskega prostora. Razrešitev drame spremenjenih identifikacijskih matric je takole opisana: »Prvič sem bila v tej deželi, ne da bi bila v svoji hiši, in sem uživala v tem, da sva kupovali spominke, ki sem jih včasih prezirala – kavno skodelico z Areno, plastične delfinčke .«20 V zgodbi Berem po čakalnicah avtorica opisuje duševno stanje, ki ga imenuje čakanje. Čakanje je stanje stasisa družbe, ki je zašlo v slepo ulico in ne more ven iz nje. Čakanje pomeni, da je neka etapa končana in da se začetek naslednje odlaša. Ta zgodba govori o tem, kako čakanje vpliva na življenje posameznika. Avtorica na začetku našteva družbeno kontekstualizirane nize čakanja: čaka na rezultate volitev, na konec vojn, na to, da se nekdo spametuje, čaka na tramvaj (v devetdesetih letih so v Beogradu ljudje ure in ure čakali na mestni prevoz, da bi z enega konca mesta prišli na drugega). Čakanje na rezultate volitev je
147 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST pomenilo upanje, da bo v srbski družbi končno prišlo do političnih sprememb. Čakanje na konec vojn je pomenilo prenehanje ubijanja in izgona ljudi. Čakanje tramvaja opozarja na razmere, v katerih so prebivalci Srbije (ki ni bila v vojni) pokorni in ko primanjkuje hrane. Na ta način je vladajoča politična garnitura na čelu z Miloševićem vladala in ropala lastno ljudstvo, in sodelovala v vojnah, v katerih domnevno ni sodelovala. Avtorica nato omenja čakanja, ki se nanašajo na konstrukcijo ženskosti v družbi, na »čakanje na princa«, navaja tudi romantični citat, v angleščini, iz romana Roddyja Doyla. Citat govori o obdobju globalizacije in prevladi anglofonske kulture. V tem postopku se pokaže, kako globalna kultura prebija oklep lokalne kulture, kar ima v pogojih srbske politične in kulturne scene poseben politični pomen, saj pripovedovalka bere v kulturi, ki se ekonomsko in politično upira sodobnim trendom globalizacije. Najdemo tudi citate iz znanih romanov, ter njihove komentarje na opise, ki pokažejo, da večina »navadnih« ljudi nima politične zavesti. Ko pripovedovalka čaka svojo hčer, bere prozo Dubravke Ugrešić ali Slavenke Drakulić oziroma knjigo SFRJ za začetnike, medtem ko drugi starši, ki prav tako čakajo svoje otroke, berejo časopis Lepota in zdravje. Omenjanje Dubravke Ugrešić in Slavenke Drakulić ima tudi avtoreferenčno vlogo, ki nas seznanja s tem, kakšno vrsto proze piše avtorica: gre za obliko, ki je v srbski kulturi devetdesetih sploh ni, vsaj ne na ravni modela. Proza Milice Krstanović je medžanrska. Lahko rečemo, da gre za enostavno esejistiko, ki dokumentira čas, v katerem živimo. Omenjanje zagrebških pisateljic (čarovnic), navajanje popularnih romanov zahodnih pisateljev, kot tudi popularnih ženskih časopisov, ki so jih brali v Srbiji v devetdesetih letih, opisuje popolnoma nasprotne ideološke pozicije, ki so pomembne za konstrukcijo identitete. Po eni strani gre za vse pomembnejši vpliv literature, ki se danes piše na »Zahodu« (uporabljam termin Zahod, ker je Srbija za današnjo Evropo država, ki sebe še vedno opredeljuje v opoziciji do »gnilega« in »pokvarjenega« Zahoda, kot žrtev globalizirajočih tendenc). Po drugi strani so avtorice, kot so Dubravka Ugrešić in Slavenka Drakulić, v kontekstu srbske kulture čedalje bolj oznaka za medžanrsko književnost pojugoslovanskega obdobja z izrazitim kritičnim političnim odnosom do nacionalistične evforije in vojne. In po tretji strani: produkcija časopisov, namenjenih ženskam, je zelo pomembna, saj konstruira posocialistično telo idealne ženske v novo oblikovanih nacionalnih kulturah. S poudarkom na razlikah med socialistično družbo in
148 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST posocializmom pisateljica opisuje enega od krajev, kjer bere: »Moji kraji, kjer berem, so prekrasni. Eden med njimi je hodnik Otroškega kulturnega centra, ki mu vztrajno pravim Dom pionirjev. Stoji se v centru mesta, takoj za stavbo RTS-ja, ki je sestavljena iz stare, načete stavbe, na vrhu katere plapola razcapana zastava, in nove, stekleno-kovinske, ki jo ravnokar urejajo. Dom pionirjev razpada in izgleda enako kot takrat, ko sem pred tridesetimi leti sodelovala na tekmovanjih ...«21 Avtorica opisuje brezup in revščino posocialistične Srbije, mračne in zamorjene ljudi, propadle stavbe in revno opremljene javne prostore (ambulante, kulturne centre, igralne prostore za otroke). Simbolen in za Srbijo simptomatičen je odlomek z opisom glasbene šole, kamor hodi hči na ure klavirja. Pripovedovalka opazuje uokvirjene diplome in pohvale, ki visijo na šolski steni: »Vojska Jugoslavije se zahvaljuje glasbeni šoli za doprinos v odporu proti agresiji NATA v času bombardiranja leta devetindevetdeset. Tako nekako. Nimam moči, da bi pravilno napisala ... postane mi slabo. Potem se usedem na klop, odmahujem z glavo in se spominjam, kako mi učiteljica klavirja govori, da včasih ne more delati. Namreč, prvi sosed glasbene šole je prometna šola in se v času šolskega premora po celotnem kvartu sliši hreščeči folk, ki ga predvajajo prek razglasa. Direktor te šole je pojasnil, da je to edini način, da bi učence zadržal na dvorišču, da ne bi nekam zbežali in delali, kdo ve kaj.«22 Ta kratki odlomek iz vsakdanjega življenja govori o konstrukciji realnosti v Srbiji in njenih paradoksih. Glasbena šola lahko simbolizira pripadnost lokalne kulture evropski tradiciji. Omenjanje bombardiranja oziroma Natove agresije kaže na politične procese, ki so se v Srbiji ločili od procesov evropskih integracij in ki so pripeljali do travme, ki je politične in kulturne elite ne želijo in ne znajo zapustiti. Evropska tradicija klasične glasbe je nasproti kultu folk glasbe. V devetdesetih letih je kultura turbo folka postala identifikacijska matrica, ki je ključnega pomena za srbsko posocialistično družbo. V obdobju Miloševićeve vladavine ta kultura ni samo zavirala klasično evropsko dediščino, ampak je to počela tudi s sodobno popularno glasbo urbane mladine, kot pomembne identifikacijske matrice kulture. V zgodbi Tuneli pripovedovalka bere stenski grafit »Ne bi vstopila v / ta tunel / niti za karton / vinjaka«. Ob tem se ji porajajo razne asociacije. Sprašuje se, ali je citat prevzet iz kakšnega filma, spominja se tunelov, skozi katere se je peljala, tistih, ki jih je imela rada, kot so tuneli na avtocesti od Zagreba do Pule, ker so osvetljeni in široki,
149 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST potem tuneli na progi Beograd–Bar, ki so »popolno črni in slepi«. Spominja se tudi pesmi, ki so jo peli na ekskurzijah v SFRJ: »U tunelu usred mraka sija zvezda peterokraka«, ki je bila pomembna za socializacijo mladih v »idealni« socialistični družbi, ki se je razlikovala od slabega potrošniškega Zahoda, in tudi od slabega totalitarno socialističnega Vzhoda. Slišati je bilo tudi parodijo te pesmi oziroma tega socialističnega konstrukta: »U tunelu usred mraka sija flaša od vinjaka.« Na koncu zgodbe opisuje tunel pod Donavo v Budimpešti, skozi katerega je potovala, ko se je leta 1999 z mamo in hčerjo umaknila pred bombardiranjem. Materin komentar na vprašanje vnukinje, kdaj bodo prišli iz tunela, je bil: »Nikoli, srček, iz tega tunela, ki se imenuje Srbija, ne bomo nikoli šli.« Zgodba se sklene s pisateljičinimi besedami: »Eh, če bi vsaj še živeli v tem tunelu. Na koncu bi zagledali svetlobo, vpeljali bi celo nekakšno ventilacijo, prvo pomoč, in postavili osvetlitev. Potem so barabe pokradle žarnice, prezračevalni sistem se je pokvaril in tista pričakovana svetloba, ki jo pričakujemo na izhodu, se je nekako izmuznila, kljubujoč vsem naravnim zakonom.«23 Konec zgodbe govori o političnih nemirih v Srbiji na začetku 21. stoletja. Pripoved pokaže, da je Srbija družba brez upanja, družba, ki je zapadla v mračni tunel, iz katerega še dolgo ne bo našla izhoda.
HIBRIDNE EKSPERIMENTALNE BESEDILNE PRAKSE: AŽINOVA ŠOLA POEZIJE IN TEORIJE
V zadnjem razdelku izpostavljam delo skupine avtoric, ki so se zbrale pri projektu Ažinove šole poezije in teorije, ki se je začel leta 1997. Govorila bom ne samo kot »objektivna« kritičarka-teoretičarka, temveč kot »kritičarka na delu«, ki z mlajšimi avtoricami dela na konstituiranju drugačne koncepcije poezije, v smislu »druge linije« (ta opredelitev se nanaša na eksperimentalno besedilno-poetsko prakso). Šola je najprej delovala kot poletna šola v okviru Centra za ženske študije in komunikacije, ko se je ta center leta 1998 razdelil na Center za ženske študije, ki postaja del univerzitetnega diskurza, in na aktivistični del – Asociacija za žensko iniciativo. Ažinova šola poezije in teorije je bila ustanovljena kot permanentni alternativni izobraževalni program. Delo te šole je temeljilo na modelih visokega modernizma in postmodernizma, ki v imenovanih »manjših« nacionalnih kulturah,
150 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST kakršna je srbska, le redko postane prevladujoči tok. V navezavi na sodobna pojmovanja družbe, po katerih družba in kultura, ki se razvija v njej, nista organska celota, so v središče naše pisateljske prakse postavljeni primeri radikalnih pesniških praks 20. stoletja, medtem ko so primeri avtorjev, priznanih v nacionalnem kanonu – večinoma tistih, katerih delo lahko opredelimo kot antimodernistično in zmerno modernistično ali postmodernistično –, izpuščeni kot referenčne točke, pomembne za to pesniško prakso. Povedano z drugimi besedami: avtorji, ki jih kultura ne priznava kot kulturno vredne, so vključeni kot pomembna referenčna točka, medtem ko so avtorji, ki jih kultura vključuje kot temeljne za njen kanon, izključeni. V prvem obdobju šole, v letih 1997–2004,����������������������������� se je intenzivno bralo poezijo in poetike ruskih, ameriških, slovenskih, hrvaških in srbskih avtorjev, kot so Ezra Pound, Velimir Hlebnikov, Denise Levertov (zgodnja dela), Allen Ginsberg, Tomaž Šalamun, Slobodan Tišma, Vladimir Kopicl, Ivana Milankov, Jelena Lengold, Nina Živančević, Jasna Manjulov, Jelena Marinkov idr. To obdobje je v svojih pesmih najbolj nazorno izrazila Natalija Marković (rojena leta 1977), ki ustvarja protofeministično poezijo kot kompleksno mesto srečevanj visoke in popularne kulture. Ukvarja se tudi s konstrukcijo novih modelov ženskosti. Uporablja omenjene post/modernistične pesniške paradigme, kaže na konstrukcijo ženskosti v filmih, popularni glasbi, videospotih itn. V antologiji Diskurzivna telesa poezije24 (2004) so objavljene pesmi in avtopoetična besedila avtoric, ki večinoma izhajajo iz konteksta Ažinove šole: Ljiljana Jovanović, Natalija Marković, Danica Pavlović, Sanja Petkovska, Dragana Popović, Snežana Roksandić, Jelena Savić, Ana Seferović, Ksenija Simić, Tamara Šuškić, Jelena Tešanović, Ivana Velimirac, Snežana Žabić. Besedilo Ljiljane Jovanović (rojene leta 1980) je paradigmatično za drugo obdobje dela te pisateljske skupine.25 Avtorica je dekonstruirala običajne navade bralcev in posamezne dele teksta postavila vzvratno. Tako je prisilila bralke in bralce, da se soočijo s knjigo kot s predmetom, ki ga morajo obračati v rokah, če želijo prebrati napisano. Besedilo, ki teče z ene strani, kot da bi trčilo v besedilo, ki teče v obratno smer, zelo otežuje branje in ustvarja odpor do tovrstne kompozicije teksta. Avtorica opozarja na materialnost knjige, besedila in besed, za katere pričakujemo, da se bodo linearno raztezale na listu papirja. Berljivost besedila dodatno zapletejo opombe, ki so natisnjene nad in ne pod besedilom, ki ga dojemamo kot glavno.
151 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Besede v opombah so pisane z velikimi črkami, tako da se sprašujemo, katero besedilo je pravzaprav primarno – opombe ali tekst, na katerega se nanašajo? To delo Ljiljane Jovanović je izzvalo številne negativne komentarje, večina bralcev in kritikov zbornika njenega teksta tako rekoč ni niti omenjala. Na ta način je bilo njeno delo izključeno, izbrisano oziroma cenzurirano – zato ker je avtorica radikalno postavila pod vprašaj pojem poezije, besedila in njunega pojavljanja na listu papirja. Izjemen uspeh zbornika – kar dokazujejo številne pozitivne recenzije in prevodi posameznih del v slovenščino, poljščino in madžarščino – je spodbudil odločitev za resnejši pristop k teoretskemu delu in besedilnim praksam. To je bilo drugo obdobje delovanja šole, v letih 2004–2006. Tamara Šuškić (1981) in Jelena Savić (1981) sta skupaj z Ljiljano Jovanović artikulirali diskurzivni prostor, zavrgli prakso pisanja poezije in zasnovali hibridno eksperimentalno besedilno prakso, ki se je razvila v navezavi na: 1) zgodovinsko avantgardo, še posebej na italijanski futurizem, ruski konstruktivizem in jugoslovanski zenitizem; 2) francosko žensko pisanje; 3) ameriško poststrukturalistično poezijo in 4) internetno kulturo. Kot rečeno, je bila za drugo obdobje značilna večja usmerjenost na teorijo. Brale smo in se pogovarjale o tekstih Michela Focaulta, Rolanda Barthesa, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julie Kristeve, o italijanskem futurizmu, Charlesu Bernsteinu. Nekatere sodelavke so reflektirale tudi pisateljsko prakso beograjske teoretsko-performerske skupine Teorija koja hoda. Ljiljana Jovanović, Jelena Savić in Tamara Šuškić (ki se je julija 2006 dramatično razšla z ostalimi članicami šole) so razvijale hibridno pisateljsko prakso. Pomembna značilnost te produkcije je bila mešanje teoretske in poetične govorice, kar je v svojem zgodnejšem delu že napovedala Ljiljana Jovanović. Besedila Tamare Šuškić, Jelene Savić in Ljiljane Jovanović so nastala v interakciji. Ljiljana Jovanović26 svoje pisanje gradi na vzorčni poeziji, igri besednih konfiguracij na listu papirja ter njihovih pomenih, poigrava se s tavtologijami, uporablja pisane latinske črke v tiskanem besedilu in z novimi prijemi otežuje udobno branje kompleksnih pomenov teksta. Tamara Šuškić in Jelena Savić se posvečata hipertekstualnosti ali simulaciji le-te, ki kaže na materialne vidike jezika. Uporabljata različne pisave in različno velikost črk, list papirja dojemata kot platno, nanj postavljata slike in risbe. Tekst sestavljata iz fragmentov, vzetih iz
152 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST različnih diskurzov, kombinirata teorijo in poezijo, uvajata vizualne elemente kot integralne dele teksta. Pri tem pa se gibljeta v nasprotnih smereh: Tamara Šuškić27 je intenzivno proučevala Baudrillardovo razmišljanje o zapeljevanju, Barthesovo idejo uživanja v besedilu, kot tudi reprezentacijo žensk in konstrukcijo ženskosti v visoki post/ modernistični literaturi, vizualni umetnosti, filmu, fotografiji in reklamah. Jelena Savić28 pa se zanima za pisanje kot politično dejanje. Hibridna besedila je povezala s proučevanjem ideologije vsakdanjega življenja, nasilja nad ženskami, rasizma, mizoginije, seksizma, vladajočega političnega diskurza v srbski družbi, položaja pesnice v patriarhalni mizogini posocialistični kulturi. Opisane besedilne prakse niso tipične za posocialistične družbe, saj posocializem potrebuje premočrtne pripovedi v funkciji identifikacije kot konstrukcije nacionalne identitete. Premočrtna pripoved dojema naivno pojmovanje jezika kot nekaj neproblematičnega, transparentnega. Naloga jezika kot medija je, da komunicira in opisuje realnost, ki naj bi obstajala objektivno, neodvisno od jezika. Te prakse so transgresivne, poudarjeno intelektualne, medtem ko je književnost v prevladujočem toku zastavljena kot antiintelektualistična: ukvarja se s privatnim, emocionalnim življenjem posameznika. Te prakse so problematične, ker se izvajajo po izročilu avantgardnega eksperimentiranja, medtem ko kanoni nacionalnih književnosti, zlasti v Srbiji, izključujejo avantgardo, saj ta postavlja pod vprašaj dominantne politične in poetične družbene vrednote. Te prakse so in niso poezija, so in niso proza, so in niso teorija. So politične, feministične, intelektualne, zastrašujoče, izzivalne, transgresivne.
SKLEP
Srbska družba v zadnjih nekaj letih znova postaja čedalje bolj politično, medijsko, ideološko in umetniško homogena. Moj namen v tem prispevku je bil, da bi vsaj na ravni svojih simbolnih kompetenc kritičarke-teoretičarke v središče pozornosti postavila pisateljske prakse, ki zelo raznovrstno spodjedajo ideologijo homogenizirajočih, totalizirajočih pripovedi nacionalne kulture.
153 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST OPOMBE
1 Chris Barker, Cultural Studies – Theory and Practice, Sage Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi, 2000, str. 197. 2 Nav. prav tam, str. 198. 3 Griselda Pollock, »Vision, Voice and Power: feminist art histories and Maxism«, v: Griselda Pollock, Vision and Differance: Femininity, feminism and histoies of art, Routlegde, London – New York, 1988, str. 30. 4 James H. Kavanagh, »Ideology«, v: Critical Terms for Literary Study, ur. Frank Lentricchia, Thomas McLaughlin, 2. izd., The University of Chicago Press, Chicago – London, 1990, 1995, str. 319– 320. 5 Gl. eseje v: Dubravka Đurić, All-over, Feministička 94, Beograd, 2004. 6 Svetlana Slapšak, »Saputnička proza: Lagum Svetlane Velmar Janković«, ProFemina, št. 1, Beograd, 1994/95, str. 163. 7 Gl. Damir Arsenijević, Ajla Demiragić, Jelena Petrović, »Women Writing in Red Ink: Women’s Writing and Socio-political Change in Bosnia and Hercegovina, Croatia and Serbia«, v: Gender and Identity – Theories from and/or on Southeastern Europe, ur. Jelisaveta Blagojević, Katerina Kolozova, Svetlana Slapšak, Belgrade Women’s and Gender Research Center, Beograd, 2006, str. 248–249. 8 Linda Hačion, Poetika postmodernizma, prev. Vladimir Gvozden, Ljubica Stanković, Svetovi, Novi Sad, 1996, str. 19 (izvirnik: Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, Routledge, New York – London, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992). 9 Saša Ilić, Berlinsko okno, Fabrika knjiga, 2005, 2. izd. 2006. 10 Slobodan Vladušić, »Humanistički žanr«, Politika, »Kultura*Umetnost*Nauka«, 27. 8. 2005, str, 15. 11 Saša Ćirić, »’Ich bin eine Berliner’ ili čovek istražuje posle rata«, ProFemina, št. 37–40, Beograd, 2004 (številka je izšla leta 2005), str. 207. 12 Gl. op. 10, str. 15. 13 Prav tam. 14 Glej op. 11, str. 207. 15 Zahvaljujem se Slađani Radulović, ki me je v šolskem letu 2003/04 prosila, da bi sodelovala kot somentorica pri njeni raziskavi literarnih del Jasmine Tešanović, ki jo je opravljala na Fakulteti za politične vede v okviru specialističnega študija družbenega spola in kulture. Ob vztrajni podpori me je spodbudila, da sem se začela ukvarjati z deli Jasmine Tešanović, poleg tega pa me je prepričala, da je delo te avtorice neupravičeno spregledano; opozorila me je na predsodke, omejitve in slepe pege feministične kritike v Srbiji, vključno z mojimi lastnimi. 16 Gl. pogovor z Jasmino Tešanović, objavljen v reviji ProFemina (v tisku). 17 Jasmina Tešanović, Sirene, DevedesetČetvrta, Beograd, 1997. 18 Jasmina Tešanović, Matrimonium, Feministička 94, Beograd, 2004.
154 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST 19 Renata Jambrešić Kirin v članku »Egzil i hrvatska ženska autobiografska književnost 90ih«, Reč, let. 61, št. 7, Beograd, 2001, str. 175–197, uporablja formulacijo »(psevdo)avtobiografska proza«, ki ga povzemam tudi sama in postavljam v drug kulturni kontekst. 20 Milica Krstanović, »Prvi put s ćerkom u Hrvatsku«, ProFemina, št. 37–38, Beograd, 2004. Vsi trije citati so na str. 55. 21 Milica Krstanović, »Čitam po čekaonicama«, ProFemina, št. 37–38, Beograd, 2004. Vsi trije citati so na str. 58. 22 Prav tam, str. 62. 23 Milica Krstanović, »Tuneli«, ProFemina, št. 37–38, Beograd, 2004, str. 64. 24 Diskurzivna tela poezije – Poezija i poetike nove generacije pesnikinja, Asocijacija za žensku inicijativu, Beograd, 2004. 25 Prav tam. 26 Ljiljana Jovanović, »Intimno zašto«, ProFemina, št. 41–42, Beograd, 2005/06, str. 13–27. 27 Tamara Šuškić, »Death by jam«, ProFemina, št. 41–42, Beograd, 2005/06, str. 19–41. 28 Jelena Savić, »O važnim stvarima«, ProFemina, št. 41–42, Beograd, 2005/06, str. 42–69.
LITERATURA
Arsenijević, Damir, Ajla Demiragić, Jelena Petrović, »Women Writing in Red Ink: Women's Writing and Socio-political Change in Bosnia and Hercegovina, Croatia and Serbia«, v: Jelisaveta Blagojević, Katerina Kolozova, Svetlana Slapšak (ur.), Gender and Identity – Theories from and/or on Southeastern Europe, Belgrade Women’s and Gender Research Center, Beograd, 2006. Barker, Chris, Cultural Studies – Theory and Practice, Sage Publications – Thousand Oaks, London – New Delhi, 2000. Ćirić, Saša, »‘Ich bin eine Berliner’ ili čovek istražuje posle rata«, ProFemina, št. 37–40, Beograd, 2004 (razprodano leta 2005). Diskurzivna tela poezije – Poezija i autopoetike nove generacije pesnikinja, ur. Danica Pavlović, Asocijacija za žensku inicijativu, Beograd, 2004. Đurić, Dubravka, All-over, Feministička 94, Beograd, 2004. Hačion, Linda, Poetika postmodernizma, prev. Vladimir Gvozden in Ljubica Stanković, Svetovi, Novi Sad, 1996 (izvirnik: Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, Routledge, New York – London, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992). Ilić, Saša, Berlinsko okno, Fabrika knjiga, 2005, 2. izd. 2006. Jambrešić Kirin, Renata, »Egzil i hrvatska ženska autobiografska književnost 90ih«, Reč, let. 61, št. 7, Beograd, 2001. Jovanović, Ljiljana, »Intimno zašto«, ProFemina, št. 41–42, Beograd, 2005/06, str. 13–27. Kavanagh, James H., »Ideology«, v: Frank Lentricchia, Thomas McLaughlin (ur.), Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2. izd., The University of Chicago Press, Chicago – London, 1990, 1995.
155 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Krstanović, Milica, »Čitam po čekaonicama«, ProFemina, št. 37–38, Beograd, 2004. Krstanović, Milica, »Prvi put s ćerkom u Hrvatsku«, ProFemina, št. 37–38, Beograd, 2004. Krstanović, Milica, »Tuneli«, ProFemina, št. 37–38, Beograd, 2004, str. 64. Pollock, Griselda, »Vision, Voice and Power: Feminist Art Histories and Marxism«, v: Griselda Pollock, Vision and Differance: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of art, Routlegde, London– New York, 1988. Savić, Jelena, »O važnim stvarima«, ProFemina, št. 41–42, Beograd, 2005/06, str. 42–69. Slapšak, Svetlana, »Saputnička proza: Lagum Svetlane Velmar Janković«, ProFemina, št. 1, Beograd, 1994/95. Šuškić, Tamara, »Death by jam«, ProFemina, št. 41–42, Beograd, 2005/06, str. 19–41. Tešanović, Jasmina, Matrimonium, Feministička 94, Beograd, 2004. Tešanović, Jasmina, Sirene, DevedesetČetvrta, Beograd, 1997. Vladušić, Slobodan, »Humanistički žanr«, Politika, 27. 8. 2005.
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157 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST
158 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST SVETLANA SLAPŠAK
NOMADSKI SPOMINI, SEDENTARNA POZABA: PRIMER KOSOVA
Kosovski mit je osrednji srbski nacionalni mit. Znamenita bitka med turško osvajalsko vojsko pod poveljstvom sultana Murata in njegovih dveh sinov ter srbsko vojsko, ki jo je vodil knez Lazar (večinoma so ga naslavljali kot kralja), se je odvijala na Kosovem polju 28. junija 1389. Srbi so se odločili, da se raje borijo, kot da bi se pogajali o možnem vazalstvu, ali kot pravi epsko in versko izročilo, izbrali so nebeško kraljestvo, ne zemeljskega. Vojska srbskih vitezov in zaveznikov je bila baje poražena po dramatičnem preobratu v razvoju bitke. Srbski plemič Miloš Obilić se je pretihotapil v turški tabor in ubil sultana Murata. Sultanov sin Bajazit si je zagotovil pot na prestol tako, da je dal zadaviti lastnega brata, nato mu je uspelo predreti srbske vrste ter zajeti in obglaviti kneza ali kralja Lazarja – pred truploma očeta in brata ter glavo že prej obglavljenega Miloša Obilića. Po tem dogodku je bila usoda srbske kraljevine zakoličena: Srbija je padla v turške roke za naslednjih petsto let. Ta temeljna zgodba o porazu, ki je določil nacionalno usodo Srbov, ima več pripovednih izpeljav in te so opora za različne ideološke tvorbe in neposredne politične potrebe za uspele pripovedi: verski razvoj znotraj srbskega pravoslavja, vključno s kultom Sv. Vida, ki se ga časti 28. junija; žrtvovanje srbskega vladarja in njegovih vitezov, ki so zemeljsko kraljestvo zamenjali za nebeško; in posvetitev kralja Lazarja. Ideološka raven vključuje še nekakšno parazgodovinsko pripoved o Srbih, ki branijo preostalo krščansko Evropo pred islamsko nevarnostjo in v procesu izgubljajo pravočasno integracijo v Evropo. Nacionalni
159 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST konstrukt, ki se opira na kosovskem mitu, je pomagal pri oblikovanju srbske in nato jugoslovanske države. Pripoved o kosovski bitki je osrednja za celotno ustno izročilo o Srbih in recepcija te pripovedi v besedilih literarnega izročila je izjemno pomembna. V določenih obdobjih je bila pripoved o kosovski bitki uporabljana in preoblikovana kot osrednji mit za konstrukcijo nove jugoslovanske identitete, zlasti pred prvo svetovno vojno. Kot v prvi vrsti intelektualna izmišljotina, ki je vključevala freudovski vpliv in večino ekspresionističnega pesimizma, hkrati pa tudi jasne demokratične projekte bodoče države kot republike,1 ki jo je močno popačila Kraljevina Srbov, Hrvatov in Slovencev pod vladavino srbske dinastije; ta pozneje postane Kraljevina Jugoslavija. V zadnjem času ni bila le reaktualizirana, temveč tudi instrumentalizirana v javnem diskurzu hujskanja k etničnim delitvam, segregacijam in nazadnje vojnam, sprva k političnim spremembam, ki so predhodile vojni v Jugoslaviji in so bile osredotočene na albanske prebivalce Kosova.2 V tej točki je kosovski mit definiran kot temeljni konstrukt kolektivnega spomina, ki nima težav z avtentičnostjo ali popravki, ampak le z zaščito pred zunanjim svetom, sam spočet kot popolna celota. Kosovo je predstavljeno kot kraj spomina za Srbe, ki mora ostati del domovine in vprašanje izgube ozemlja, kar je pravi problem za vsako državo, se stalno zakriva, vsaj v akademskih in intelektualnih krogih v Srbiji, kot manj pomemben od mitske naracije. To ni le razprava o »zgodovinskih pravicah«, ki se je odvijala v različnih delih Jugoslavije v preteklosti in sedanjosti, niti kar se tega tiče v nasprotujočih si regionalnih in državnih interesih povsod po svetu: »zgodovinske pravice« imajo nejasno vlogo, saj jih je mogoče instrumentalizirati za zaščito pravic staroselcev, za odpravljanje posledic kolonizacije, kakor tudi za zagovarjanje agresije. Stanje je dodatno zapleteno na Balkanu, kjer so »zgodovinske pravice« podeljene le Grkom, ker naj bi bili legitimni predhodniki Zahodnega sveta, medtem ko se je barbarskega dvorišča zibelke civilizacije podobna kulturna kolonizacija izognila, dokler se romanticizem in orientalizem nista združila v stvarne politične in kolonizacijske interese na Balkanu.3 Mnogi albanski akademiki in intelektualci so dokazovali, da so Albanci na Kosovu prisotni dlje kot Srbi – od tod »ilirska« teorija, ki pa je imela posledice tudi v političnem in vsakdanjem življenju. Na primer, število Albanskih otrok na Kosovu, ki so dobili imena po starodavnih ilirskih voditeljih, se je zelo povečalo z naraščanjem nacionalne zavesti v času privilegijev in od Tita
160 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST zaukazane večetnične složnosti in ki se je nadaljevala v časih nemirov in represije. V vzporednih razpravah v drugih delih Jugoslavije so uporabljali različne»prednike« in v javnih debatah manipulirali z njimi, v profani mešanici javne in akademske besede in celo v samem akademskem diskurzu – kot na primer Veneti v Sloveniji, hrvaški »iranski« predniki, Etruščani, Dardanci in skoraj vsako starodavno pleme, ki so ga omenjali antični avtorji. V celi vrsti sterilnih debat o ius primi possidentis je arheologija postala odločilna disciplina in bojno polje avtoritet, ki se je nevarno približevalo ali celo prestopilo meje amaterskosti. Nejasen položaj arheologije, vedno lačne državnih subvencij, dovoljenj in administrativne podpore za temeljne raziskave in kljub temu prav nič manj tankovestne glede vprašanja akademske svobode kot katera koli druga družbena veda, je bil pogosto predmet zagatnih raziskav. Kosovski mit, čeprav je povzročil goreče razprave o »prednikih«, ni toliko povezan s pomembnimi spomeniki ali arheološkimi izkopavanji: samostani na področju Kosova, ne samo na Kosovem polju, so povezani s srbsko srednjeveško zgodovino in so dodatek k osrednji nacionalni zgodbi – kosovski bitki. Kraj spomina je torej prazen, z nekaj razpršenimi spominskimi nagrobnimi ploščami in grobnicami, postavljenimi po prvi svetovni vojni in po ponovni osvojitvi leta 1912 – z izjemo grobnice (turbe) sultana Murata, postavljene skoraj stoletje po kosovski bitki. Na istem kraju spomina sta dva kolektivna spomina postavila svoje spomenike. V času jugoslovanske države sta bili v dveh fazah – med obema svetovnima vojnima in po koncu druge – obiskani obe strani kraja spomina. Zgodovinski dogodek so si na srbski strani zapomnili skozi pripoved, ki je služila izmišljotini nacionalne države, veliko let po bitki. Turški spomin na bitko se ni razvil v zgodbo velikih razsežnosti: turški kronisti so zapisovali življenje in dosežke Bajazita, Muratovega sina, v vojnah in bitkah na Bližnjem Vzhodu, daleč stran od Balkana, vendar teh zgodb niso ponazarjali v razsežnostih, primerljivih z narativno interpretacijo dogodka na srbski strani. Vprašanje sodobne interpretacije kosovske bitke se je v veliki meri razvilo zaradi nekoliko nejasne interpretacije izida bitke: cela vrsta tedanjih pričanj kaže v smeri srbske, ne turške zmage, kot na primer zgodbe o zvonjenju zvonov v katedrali Notre- Dame v Parizu kot znak veselja ob še eni krščanski zmagi. To interpretacijo pogosto dodatno podpira tradicionalni zgodovinski diskurz – zaradi domnevne turške nenaklonjenosti nadaljnjemu prodiranju na Balkan po kosovski bitki; namesto tega so se odločili za
161 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST vazalne odnose z ovdovelo kraljico in vzpostavili družinske vezi. Dejansko je vidna razlika med zgodovinsko in mitsko naracijo odprla problem, ki so ga svoje čase uporabljali za konstrukcijo specifične »srbske mentalitete«, ki ji je ljubši poraz kot zmaga. Ta fatalistična različica korenin kosovskega mita je bila mamljiva za nacionalistične avtorje mitov in njihove somišljenike, kakor je pogosto primer v podobnih nacionalističnih in kolonialističnih načrtih. Metoda je dokaj preprosta, sestavljena je iz priprave javnega mnenja z agresivnimi pripovedmi v medijih (kolektivna izguba, nepravičnost, storjena skupnosti, maščevanje, povrnitev zasedenega ozemlja), čemur smo v 20. stoletju pogosto bili priče. Srbski kraj spomina je v tej perspektivi potrjeno prazen, prazno mesto, obkroženo z drugimi spomeniki v bližnji in daljni okolici, kronotopos v Bakhtinovem smislu,4 trenutek/ mesto post quem (po katerem je) mistificiran srbski fevdalec, krščansko kraljestvo ne obstaja več. Porajata se dve mogoči primerjavi: francoski kompleks Gergovia–Alesia je primer koordiniranega dela v spominjanju in pozabi, teksaški Alamo pa kot kraj organiziranega spomina, tokrat na ponovno osvojenem ozemlju. Kar zadeva izgradnjo skupnega spomina, obe vzporednici dejansko kažeta na zelo specifičen položaj Kosova. Verodostojno vzporednico je mogoče najti v približno isti regiji – padec Konstantinopla, šestinštirideset let po kosovski bitki. Na podoben način je bila zgodba o izgubi Konstantinopla glavna pripoved grške nacionalne in državne identitete, vključno z izgradnjo mita in politične ali vojaške akcije, sprožene z namenom ponovne osvojitve Polisa. Toda vzporednica se tu konča: Polis je bil ves čas naseljen z Grki, služil je kot zibelka modernega grškega nacionalnega gibanja in nikdar ni bilo prazno mesto ali kraj spomina. Čeprav je v kolektivnem grškem spominu torek slab dan, ker je po tradicionalni grški pripovedi Konstantinopel padel ravno v torek. Polis je bil v kulturnem in političnem smislu produktivno mesto in nekatere pomembne grške institucije, kot je Patriarhija, so še vedno tam. Primer Konstantinopla vpeljuje problematiko različnih, domnevno nasprotujočih si spominov zgodovinskih dogodkov. Osnovno mapiranje takih spominov v primeru Kosova bi vsebovalo srbske, bizantinske (Grki, grška diaspora), turške in albanske tradicije in konstrukte kolektivnega spomina. Vsi vključujejo dva vzporedna diskurza, zgodovinskega in literarnega, ustnega in pisnega. Čeprav bom o njih razpravljala drugje, je večji del mojega zanimanja usmerjen v iskanje pripovedi, ki se ne prikaže na nobenem od projekcijskih ekranov zgodovinopisja omenjenih
162 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST nacionalnih zgodovin. Sledi tega skritega Drugega je mogoče najti v najbolj znamenitem kosovskem mitskem konstruktu – srbskem. Ta skrita pripoved, ki jo proizvaja nejunaška, manj nacionalna in kolektivna, toda nemočna skupnost, se nahaja v ženski zgodovini, v nenapisani, celo v današnjem času v lokalni srbski kulturi, zanemarjani in nesprejemljivi. Izziv take perspektive je bil očiten, še posebej, ko mi je postalo jasno, da ponuja nekaj nepričakovanih vidikov mita in nekaj še manj pričakovanih bežnih vpogledov v žensko politiko in kulturo. Kar je sprva bilo videti kot začetna ideja, je postalo močan argumentacijski cilj raziskave. Ne le da so ženske vodile kreativno politiko po bitki za Kosovo in očitno nasprotovale politiki aristokracije, ki je bila izbrisana v bitki, ženske so si tudi izmislile začetni kosovski mit v verskem diskurzu dobro desetletje po bitki; ženske so vpeljale novi kult svetnika, ki je bil primeren za populacijo žensk v novem političnem, družbenem in ideološkem kontekstu. Sčasoma so si ženske kosovski mit zapomnile na povsem drugačen način, namesto junaške, epske tradicije. To me je opogumilo, da sem začela raziskovati v manj subtilnih in manj vidnih manifestacijah ženskih različic kosovskega mita, namreč v ženskih glasovih znotraj junaške epske tradicije. Tam je bilo treba zgodovinski diskurz kombinirati z diskusijo o določenem razvoju v poetiki ustnega pripovedovanja in celo ženskega pisanja (écriture féminine). Rezultati takih diskusij, mešanje politike in poetike, so na več načinov potrdili kosovsko tradicijo, ki jo, kar ni potrebno poudarjati, srbski akademiki, tako starejši kot mlajši, dokaj zapostavljajo. To pa seveda ne pomeni da zmanjšujem pomen zgodovinopisnega dela o kosovski bitki srbskih in jugoslovanskih avtorjev, temveč da opozarjam na manjkajoče vidike in vzroke za pomanjkanje interesa, ki so po mojem ideološkega izvora. V zelo bogati akademski tradiciji južnih Slovanov je večina vprašanj o različnih ustnih in besedilnih različic kosovske pripovedi že bilo raziskanih in prediskutiranih. Kronološki problemi, poskusi definiranja zgodovinskega in mitičnega, jezikoslovna natančnost in pozitivistična točnost so postavili solidno osnovo za analizo izvorov – srbskih, turških, grških, italijanskih, ruskih, poljskih in drugih. Akademsko proučevanje kosovskega mita so že v 19. stoletju pričeli Ilarion Ruvarac, ki je prvi ločil mitsko in zgodovinsko naracijo. Stojan Novaković, zgledni srbski pozitivist s konca 19. stoletja, je objavil ogromno zgodovinskih virov, med njimi Zgodbo o kosovski bitki, anonimno pripoved in eno prvih proznih različic pripovedi.5 Pripoved o Kosovu je bila ena od najbolj priljubljenih tem ustne epske tradicije, nekatere zgodnje inačice segajo v
163 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST 16. stoletje. Kosovski epski cikel, ki sestavlja nekakšen fantomskih ep, je spodbudil zelo različne interese, od poznega 18. stoletja naprej, pri čemer je razpon segal od romantičnega zanimanja, vključno z mistifikacijami in vzporednicami s Homerjem, pa vse do znanstvenih raziskav pripovedne tehnike in osupljivih podobnosti s homerskim prepevanjem zgodb, kot sta pokazali študiji Millmana Parryja in njegovega naslednika Alberta Lorda.6 V tej vrsti znanstvenega zanimanja za kosovsko pripoved posebno omembo zaslužita dve sodobni publikaciji. Zborik o knezu Lazarju iz leta 19757 je dal širok razpon del različnih strokovnjakov in je spodbudil politično razpravo: vladajoča nomenklatura je bila dokaj občutljiva na kakršne koli znake srbskega nacionalizma, tudi v dokaj zaprtem in objektiviziranem znanstvenem diskurzu. Ista, na splošno tiha akademska populacija je ogorčeno reagirala na delo beograjskega univerzitetnega profesorja Miodraga Popovića o kosovskem mitu ter s tem priznala, da je pogled Zveze komunistov blizu avtorjevim pogledom. Knjiga je hitro postala tarča kritike prevladujoče skupine akademikov, zbranih okrog zgoraj omenjene zbirke o knezu Lazarju. Debata je bila tako rekoč žametna, saj nihče ni želel, da bi se nomenklatura spet vmešala. Toda Miodrag Popović je bil zelo izoliran in na njegovem oddelku ga je čakala zgodnja upokojitev. Njegova knjiga o kosovskem mitu je bila vnovič izdana šele leta 1998 v Beogradu, v seriji neodvisnega, protinacionalističnega urednika, prav tako akademika – Ivana Čolovića.8 Med sodobnimi zahodnimi deli o zgodovinskem spominu ima knjiga Fables de la mémoire: La glorieuse bataille des trois rois Lucette Valensi9 najpomembnejše mesto za mojo temo: Valensi se ukvarja s konstrukcijo spomina v treh različnih etničnih in kulturnih okoljih, portugalskem, maroškem (islamskem) in judovskem, o »bitki treh kraljev«, ki se je zgodila leta 1578 pri kraju Al-Kasr al-Quibir (Wâd al-Makhâzin). Dva muslimanska vladarja in portugalski kralj Sebastian so padli med bitko, Portugalci so bili premagani, islam rešen in Judje so se počutili osvobojene iberske grožnje: spomin na Španijo leta 1492 je bil še vedno močen. Osnovni pripovedni model v mnogih elementih sovpada s pripovednim modelom kosovske bitke: spopad med islamom in krščanstvom, oba vladarja, Lazar in Murat, sta padla med bitko, poraz Srbov in zmaga Turkov. Kosovska bitka se je odvila dobri dve stoletji prej, leta 1389. V srbski pripovedi ni Judov (Sefardi, ki so v turško provinco Bosno prišli iz Španije, niso imeli nobenega posebnega interesa za zgodnejšo legendo), toda bile so druge skupnosti, ki bi se jih
164 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST lahko izkoristilo za prelaganje krivde v poznejšem razraščanju pripovedi. Poleg tistih, ki so zamudili na bojišče ali enostavno bili izdajalci, so bili tu še Albanci in Bosanci, v veliki meri islamizirani, potem ko je večini Balkana vladal otomanski imperij; oboji so se zdeli idealne tarče za moralni očitek v pripovedi, reproducirani v mnogih poznejših političnih razlagah, ki so uporabile mitski konstrukt v argumentaciji o kolektivnih in državnih pravicah, zahtevah ali zgolj izgovorih za politična dejanja z različnimi, včasih zelo oddaljenimi motivi. Delo Lucette Valensi je nastavilo metodološki model, kako organizirati raziskave bolj ali manj sodobnih virov in dokumentov, ustno tradicijo in cerkvene kulte, zasnovane na kosovski pripovedi, in postaviti osnovne prvine za delo na konstrukciji. Dvojni zaključki, kronološki preskoki, sledi ideološke cenzure ali vsiljena pozaba – vse omenjene tehnike so zelo pomembne pri vzpostavljanju posameznih konkurenčnih interpretacijskih smernic. Poraz, odgovornost, kaznovanje, sprava, maščevanje, zahteve po vračanju: vse to so močni pripovedni elementi, ki so služili v obeh primerih – kosovske bitke in bitke treh kraljev, in ustvarili so različne, toda primerljive in včasih presenetljivo podobno razvejane in sodobne ideološke konstrukte. Delo Valensijeve je lahko zgled za bodoče raziskave v različnih konstrukcijah kolektivnega spomina na Kosovu. Rada bi pokazala, da obstaja še ena skupnost, ki je zgradila svoj lasten, pogosto nasprotujoč in subverziven spomin – ženske. Nasprotujoči etnični spomini imajo svoje nasprotje, ki prekaša etnične razlike in se upira kakršni koli etnični, junaški, moškocentrični pripovedi o kosovski bitki. Upira se z žensko kritično preiskavo junaškega vedenja in s pacifistično ideološko in politično pozicijo. Osnovno kronologijo tekstov, ustnih in pisnih, je mogoče prikazati na naslednji način in s ciljem slediti razvoju pripovedi in njene uporabe v izgradnji kolektivnega spomina, etničnega in spolno določenega: večinoma tedanji zgodovinski viri ali tisti iz naslednje generacije, in sicer srbski, bizantinski, turški, albanski, vzhodno- in zahodnoevropski; verska posvetitev kralja Lazarja, ki je predhodila njegovi razglasitvi za svetnika; proces se je začel dobro desetletje po bitki; epski cikel o Kosovu, sestavljen iz več epskih pripovedi, ki opisujejo različne dogodke in osebe, v glavnem aristokrate, pred, med in po bitki. Cikel je bil sestavljen v različnih časih in krajih, nekatere pripovedi so nastale vse do 16. in 17. stoletja, nekatere so iz 18. in 19. stoletja, kakor so jih prepevali pevci zgodb, zapisal pa Vuk Karađić;10
165 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST ponovna oživitev kosovskega mita v boju za nacionalno osvoboditev in neodvisnost Srbije v 19. stoletju, v literaturi, religiji, političnem, javnem in zgodovinskem diskurzu; ponovna oživitev kosovskega mita v krogih mladih jugoslovanskih intelektualcev v avstroogrskem cesarstvu na začetku 20. stoletja, podpiranje modernizma, republikanske demokracije, večkulturnosti in novih moralnih vrednot za celoten bodoči jugoslovanski prostor; »resrbizacija« kosovskega mita v jugoslovanski monarhiji in integracija mita v državno pripovedništvo srbskega junaštva v prvi svetovni vojni, trpljenja in zaščita časti – utišanje kosovskega mita kot simbolne pripovedi srbskega nacionalizma, navzkrižnega z jugoslovansko komunistično ideologijo po drugi svetovni vojni; ponovna oživitev kosovskega mita v poznih osemdesetih, kot močno orodje za nov začetek srbskega nacionalizma.
Spolno-žanrska razdelitev Vuka Karađića, ki je jugoslovanski akademiki niso nikoli podrobneje proučevali (kar se tega tiče, niti M. Parry in A. Lord), ne daje jasne slike: ženske izvajajo vse ustne žanre, razen epske poezije, vendar bi lahko izvajale tudi epsko poezijo (»slepice« – slepe ženske, pevke pripovedi). Ženski glasovi v epskem ciklu o Kosovu so navzkriž z junaškimi in aristokratskimi moškimi vrednotami, še posebej pri uporabi blazona, dobro znane tehnike zahodnega pesništva srednjega veka, kar je analiziral Roland Barthes. Srbski zgodovinarji tistega časa ponujajo prepričljivo sliko sobivanja s Turki po bitki (sin kraljice Milice kot turški vazal, njena hčer, poročena z Bajazitom). Predvsem pa vpeljava novega svetnika v Srbijo, svetega Petka (grška različica Paraskevi, »Petek«, zaščitnik žensk), po kompleksni misiji Milice in prijateljice, nune Jefremije, pokaže na nov ideološki zasuk.11 Parodije na kosovsko povest iz 17. stoletja, kjer je Milica kot ženska nasprotnica junaške pripovedi, potrjuje ločen ženski skupinski spomin in različico kosovskega mita.12 Določeno tradicijo mesarjenja kosovskega mita in njegovih vrednosti je mogoče najti v moderni srbski ženski literaturi (Danica Marković v dvajsetih, Marija Ivanović v devetnajstih) in mogoče jih je primerjati s tehnikami ženskih pacifističnih gibanj (Ženske v črnem). To je splošni pogled na mojo argumentacijo. O problemu žensk – slepih pevk zgodb – bom razpravljala v posebnem članku. Do izginotja slepih žensk – pevk zgodb – iz performativnega prostora patriarhalne družbe in zanimanja večine akademikov, ki se ukvarjajo z ustnim pesništvom, je po mojem prišlo
166 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST zaradi sprememb v nacionalni državni kulturi v 19. stoletju, ko je prišlo do izgube patriarhalnih niš za ženske aktivnosti – zaradi splošne »poravnave« ali kulturnega poenotenja kolektiva (prek identitetnega pripovedništva), ki si drugače lasti patriarhalne ideale, vendar jim ustreže glede na njihove ideološke potrebe. Tri ženske predstavljajo spolno zaznamovan pogled in držo v kosovskih epskih ciklih: Carica Milica, Mati Jugovićev in Kosovska devica. Vse tri nasprotujejo moški odločitvi boja proti Turkom, uporabljajo svoje ženske strategije, da bi preprečile odhod svojih ljubljenih v bitko, in nosijo posledice vedenja moških. Mati Jugovićev umre, potem ko njenih devet sinov in mož padejo v bitki, Milica zaman poskuša preprečiti svojim devetim bratom in nato še svojemu možu Lazarju, naj ne odidejo v boj, kosovska devica pa je zaročenka viteza, ki pade v bitki, in v nadaljnjem življenju je obsojena na neplodnost. V vseh teh epizodah je telo (moško ali žensko) v središču vseh teh podob v tekstu. Srce matere Jugovićev poči, ko krokarji z bojišča prinesejo roko njenega najmlajšega sina. V nekaterih inačicah jo dobesedno »napihne in raznese« od bolečine. Milica čaka pri vhodu v mesto in poskuša prepričati brate in moža, naj ne pridejo ven in naj ne odidejo proti Kosovu, in ko njene prošnje ne zaležejo, pade v nezavest. Služabniku Milutinu je naročeno, naj skrbi zanjo, toda ne more se upreti junaškemu klicu, na koncu pa se le vrne z bojišča, »noseč levo roko v svoji desni«. Kosovska devica se po bitki potika po Kosovu, pomaga ranjenim in išče svojega zaročenca. Hudo ranjen Pavle Orlović pokaže na mesto, kjer je večja gmota, polomljeno orožje in mrtveci – to je mesto, kjer so junaško padli njen zaročenec in njeni krvni bratje. V kateri koli homersko in literarno zavedni predelavi pesmi v ciklu bi morale naslednje zadnje besede v tej pesnitvi zaključiti epski cikel:
»Če bi se jaz, nesrečnica, za zeleni bor prijela, bi se bil še zeleni bor osušil.
Svetozar Koljević je interpretiral te verze v nacionalnem kontekstu, s kosovsko devico kot simbolom žalujoče skupnosti: »Njen krik bolečine zopet govori s stoterimi glasovi iz preteklosti, z osebnim občutkom bridkosti in s celotnim nacionalnim patosom kosovske legende ... Ali je v naravi zimzelena, da se osuši zaradi dotika nedolžne roke?«13 Presenetljivo je, da tu ni niti poskusa branja slik ali nečesa, vsaj blizu antropološkemu pristopu. Koljević je globoko zakoreninjen v nacionalno-romantičnem načinu, akademskim in intelektualnim
167 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST zahtevam ne posveča veliko pozornosti v svoji interpretaciji. Kar se tiče Balkana in mnogih antičnih in modernih kultov, držanje za drevo ali vejo pomeni gesto, povezano s plodnostjo. Pesniška slika je jasna in se nanaša na neplodnost, ki grozi devici. Ne le njen zaročenec, v eni sami bitki je padla vsa moškost. Potemtakem gre za kolektivni glas, glas žensk, ki ne izraža le bridkosti in bolečine, temveč tudi skriti očitek moškim, ki so se odločili o bodočnosti celotne skupnosti. Seveda je tu nekaj nenaravnega, toda prav gotovo se ne nanaša na »naravo zimzelena«, temveč na dejstvo, da so vse ženske postale nenaravno neplodne. Če se Iliada konča tragično s smrtjo enega človeka, se kosovski cikel konča z ne-rojstvom. Moško telo v kosovskem ciklu je pohabljeno, žensko telo neplodno. O telesih je v kosovskem ciklu mogoče še marsikaj prebrati. Zgodovinsko in kulturno pripadajo srednjeveškemu konstruktu dvornega telesa in z njim povezanega diskurza. Ni potrebno poudarjati, da so dvorne dame tistega časa na vzhodu in zahodu Evrope prebirale iste ljubezenske zgodbe in da so bile srbske dinastije prek porok povezane tako z bizantinskimi kot tudi z zahodnoevropskimi dvori. Toda tudi brez te dokaj šibke kontekstualne povezave že bežna analiza pesniškega žanra, v večini primerov posvečenega poveličevanju ženske lepote, izpod peresa Rolanda Barthesa14 ponuja drugačen način branja telesa v kosovskem ciklu. Blazon je svoj razcvet doživel v 16. stoletju, toda zaslediti ga je mogoče že v trubadurskem konceptu ženskega telesa in celo do opisov v biblijski Visoki pesmi: ženska je lepa »elle était belle quant aux bras, qunat aux cou, quant aux sourcils, quant au nez, quant aux cils, etc.«, kot pravi Barthes.15 Čeprav Barthes ne razloži zgodovinskega ozadja, je jasno da odkriva heraldično semiotično premočrtnost blazona, kar je za današnje literarne avtoritete »nepravilno«. Barthes definira blazon kot žanr, ki izraža prepričanje, da lahko celotno imetje reproducira totaliteto telesa. Ne more ga: »Personne ne peut voir la Zambinella, profilée à l’infini comme un total impossible, parce que linguistique.«16 Toda poleg nezmožnosti katalogiziranega prikaza in nezmožnosti prikaza telesa v tekstu so tu še druge možnosti, da pesem beremo kot blazon. V tekstu je telo razsekano na kose, razdrobljeno v slovar objektov – fetišev. V izrazu feministične poezije je to moški katalog ženskega telesa, kanibalistični pristop tekstovnega zaužitja telesa v njegovi razdrobljeni obliki. V kontekstu kosovskega epskega cikla je ta tehnika besedilne predstave telesa na splošno usmerjena proti moškemu, ne ženskemu telesu. Ženske so tiste, ki gledajo moške in dajejo pomen njihovim
168 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST telesom. Na tem mestu je odveč špekulirati o ženskem avtorstvu, upoštevajoč, da so bili oboji, moški in ženske, epski izvajalci – pevci in pevke pripovedi.Toda ženski pogled je nekakšen večno prisoten bralec epov: moški paradirajo pred ženskami v kosovskem ciklu, stereotipno pisanje o junaškemu moškem telesu, nemogoči katalog moškosti:
Za njim ide Kosančić Ivane, Krasan junak na ovome svetu, Sablja mu se po kaldrmi vuče, Svilen kalpak, okovano perje, Na junaku kolasta azdija, Oko vrata svilena marama, Na ruci mu burma pozlaćena Kosovka devojka
Ona stade gradu kod kapije, Al’ eto ti vojske na alaje, Sve konjici pod brojnim kopljima, Pred njima je Boško Jugoviću Na alatu vas u čistom zlatu Krstaš ga je barjak poklopio, Pobratime! Do konja alata; Na barjaku od zlata jabuka, Iz jabuke od zlata krstovi, Od krstova zlatne kite vise, Te kuckaju Boška po plećima; Car Lazar i carica Milica
Jasno, prikaz moškega telesa poudarja fragmentacijo skozi elemente kostuma in dekoracije (fetišov) in učinek praznine znotraj takega telesa (Barthesov »la statue creuse«) vzbuja pozornost. Ženski pogled v kosovskem ciklu je prisoten v vsakem opisu moškega telesa, kar ni primer v modernejših epskih pesnitvah. Junaško fevdalno telo potrebuje drugega, da ga gleda. Lahko bi sklepali, da je junakov jaz sestavljen od zunaj, notranjost utegne biti prazna.Vloga drugega ni le, da potrjuje ta jaz; junaško fevdalno telo ne more obstajati brez drugega, je nevidno, če ni pogleda drugega. Vse to naravnost vabi k primerjavi zelo uspešne interpretacije antičnega pogleda Françoise Frontisi-Ducrouxa in Jean-Pierra Vernanta,17 ali pa o moškem jazu
169 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST in njegovem ženskem drugem v grški drami avtorice Frome Zeitlin.18 Fragmentacija junaškega fevdalnega moškega telesa se ponovi dvakrat – prvič v svoji veličastni, sijajni, paradni obliki, nato pa v svoji gnusni bojevniški realnosti – raztrgani in odrezani udi, polomljena kopja, obglavljena telesa, konji in psi brez gospodarja itn. Ženski pogled je v obeh primerih navzoč zato, da ocenjuje, dobi celoto in nosi posledice fragmentacije. V eni od različic pesmi o Materi Jugovićev ženski (materin) pogled privzame lastnost vzvišene, univerzalne opazovalke: Bog podari zaskrbljeni materi krila in sokolje oko, da lahko odleti na Kosovo in preišče prizorišče bitke. Med obema fazama prikaza moškega telesa obstaja določen ženski diskurz, ki je očitno proti vojni in junaštvu ... Žensko kritiko moškega vedenja je mogoče brati v drugih tekstih, ki sestavljajo pripovedni sklop kosovskega mita. Alternativni zgodovinski tekst, drugačno pripoved pokosovske tragedije je mogoče razbrati v tradicionalnem zgodovinopisju. Carica Milica je očitno preživela. Svojo hčer je dala v možitev mlademu sultanu, njen sin je služil kot turški vazal in se je bojeval po vsem Balkanu in Mali Aziji. Zaobljubila se je v samostanski red in v ovdoveli plemkinji in nato nuni Jefimiji našla zvesto svetovalko. Jefimiji je bilo pred tem ime Jelena, v samostanski red je vstopila, ko je njen mož padel v bitki proti Turkom, potem pa se je preselila v Kruševac, kjer je živela na Lazarjevem dvoru. Za Jefimijo velja, da je prva srbska pisateljica. Med drugim je napisala molitev za umrlega otročička in čaščenje Lazarja, ki je postal temeljni tekst Lazarjevega kulta v Srbiji. Besedilo čaščenja je napisano v dobesedno ženskem slogu – v vezenini.19 Očitno je bilo treba neomajnost oblasti okrepiti še z ideološko podporo, temu namenu pa bi najbolje služil kult junaka. Toda Milica in Jefimija se nista ustavili pri junakih, kajti tu so bili še deli prebivalstva, ki so bili potrebni tolažilne pripovedi in verske ali ideološke podpore. Obema ženskama je bila jasna kompleksna politična misija, ki je zahtevala veliko diplomatske in retorične spretnosti: potovali sta po celem Balkanu, da bi izposlovali prenos svetnika v Srbijo. Snov iz Slovarja Vuka Karađića veliko razkrije: Sveta Petka je svetnik, ki ščiti ženske in kaznuje moške, povezana je z Luno (še posebej z mlado Luno), zdravilnimi rastlinami, nočnim časom in petkom.20 Specializirana je za ženske bolezni in rojstva. Sumljivo blizu je beli magiji. Moškemu, ki nosi ženska oblačila, se reče »ženski Petko«. V srbskem in balkanskem ustnem izročilu se pogosto pojavlja skupaj s hčerjo, Sveto Nedeljo, podobno kot božanski par Demetra–Cora. Popularnost Svete Petke, očitno podobne drugim italskim kultom
170 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Venere, ki so se ohranili iz antike, je mogoče razložiti z različnimi privlačnimi pogledi – koledarjem,21 apokrifnimi besedili, mestom v cerkvenem kultu. Toponime s Petkinim imenom, pogosto v povezavi s cerkvijo, je še danes pogosto mogoče zaslediti v Srbiji, Bolgariji in Makedoniji. Kult svetnice je priljubljen tako v mestih kot na podeželju in med nomadskimi romskimi skupnostmi. Milica in Jefimija sta imeli jasno predstavo, kako uporabiti tako svetnico – omenjene ljudske oblike kulta to potrjujejo v veliko večji meri kot pa visoko stilizirane razlage dogodka srbskih zgodovinarjev in teologov. Zadnji element, ki potrjuje to spolno razločevanje in obstoj vsaj dveh različic kosovskega mita, je kontinuiteta. Med nekaterimi krajšimi pesmimi iz zbirke Vuka Karađića, kar je sam označil kot »ženska« poezija, sta dve pesmi – parodiji, ki se nanašata na ženski položaj glede kosovskega mita.22 V obeh je uporabljena forma blazona, ki predstavlja Lazarja, ne le junaka, temveč tudi svetnika. Ta uporaba očitno uvaja potrebne povezave z epsko poezijo, toda obrat je radikalen: ptice, ki priletijo k Milici, niso krokarji, temveč »večbarvne ptice«. Potem ko Lazarja opišejo kot tradicionalni blazon, ji ponudijo možnost, da ga dobi nazaj, toda Milica jih zavrne. Poroči se s svojimi sinovi in hčerami, Lazarja ne potrebuje več. V ustnem pesništvu so jo pripovedovale ali pele ženske – za žensko publiko je bil ta radikalni pogled na moško vedenje in njihov najpomembnejši junaški mit nenehno prisoten. Toda njegovo prisotnost je mogoče zaslediti še pozneje, saj je čedalje bolj pridobival na smislu v zadnjem času, ko je feminizem rasel neločljivo od pacifizma in ko so prazne oblike kosovskega mita služile prozornim nacionalističnim političnim ciljem. Dober ilustratitvni primer je poezija Danice Marković, ki je prelila podobe Kosova v podobe krutega ljubimca.23 Običajni blazon epske poezije se je uporabljal za prikaze krutosti ljubimcev do žensk in njihovega primanjkljaja človeških emocij. Ko ga beremo in interpretiramo z vidika spola, dobi ta podoba različna in nasprotujoča si pomena, odvisno od tega, kdo je avtor (pevec/pevka) in kdo publika. V pred kratkim izdanem romanu Esej o junaku se Marija Ivanović24 poigrava z istimi možnostmi parodije kosovske mitske in junaške mentalitete, predrugačene v vsakdanje moške prijeme izogibanja odgovornosti, povezovanja epskega junaštva in sodobnega srbskega nacionalizma, poudarjajoč njegov izrazito spolni značaj. Ta smernica različnih ženskih dojemanj kosovskega mita v različnih zgodovinskih obdobjih kaže na določeno doslednost v (družbeno)spolnih prikazih mitske pripovedi in
171 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST njene politične ter ideološke uporabe. Ženske, začenši z sodobnicami ter naprej skozi petnajsto, sedemnajsto, osemnajsto (verjeten izvor lirskih pesmi, ki jih je zbral Vuk Karađič), vse do dvajsetega stoletja, so imele različen pogled na pomen mita: nasprotovale so junaški drži, ki je vodila naravnost v vojno in uničenje, iznajdljive so bile pri iskanju kompromisov in za preživetje v novih političnih in družbenih okoliščinah z drugimi etničnimi in verskimi skupinami, skrbele so za iskanje novih zgodb in novih kultov, da bi olajšale bolečino obeh, moške in ženske skupnosti, in v njihovem ločenem (družbeno)spolnem prostoru ustnega ustvarjanja so se norčevale iz kosovskega visokega junaškega tona in vedenja, pri čemer so uporabljale znane epske formule. Dovolj značilno je, da se v devetnajstem stoletju pojavi praznina, v času, ko se je izgrajevala nacionalna pripoved, z jasnim ciljem, da se združi in predstavi tradicijo kot nase osredinjeno celoto. Ta celota je bila patriarhalna, kjer je bil prostor za ženske večinoma v domeni simboliziranja in abstrakcije. Da so bile »sprejete« v novo družbo, v kateri sta bila država in nacija središčni kolektivni strukturi, so ženske morale ponovno prevzeti iste vloge, kot so jih imele v patriarhalni družbi – žene, matere, z malo novih pravic in veliko novih obveznosti do skupnosti. Ustvarjanje pripovedi, nekoč deljeno in s prepletajočimi kompetencami, je postalo del predstavniškega in identitetnega mehanizma, in hkrati patriarhalna niša, v katero so ženske izginile v izgradnji družin kot družbenih celic in v omejevanju žensk v prejšnjih kompetencah. Izolacija žensk v meščanski družini je prikazana kot največji ženski dosežek v skupnosti. Ženski spomin na kosovski mit je bil izgrajen v izredno spolno zaznamovani kulturi in preživele so še v drugi obliki spolno razmejene kulture. V navzkrižju je bil z nacionalno kulturo in vnovič se je prikazal v trenutkih, ko so bile nacionalne politike in interesi žensk v hudem nasprotju, denimo med razpadom Jugoslavije.25 Nimam niti najmanjšega namena, da bi se spustila v kakršno koli »naturalistično« razlago o tem, da imamo ženske prirojen odklonilni odnos do vojne in nasilja, toda rada bi poudarila politične momente, v katerih so bili interesi žensk v nevarnosti, poleg pristnega interesa žensk za ohranitev družin in otrok, kot na primer izguba pravic (vključno z brezplačnim zdravstvenim in socialnim varstvom ter mesečno državno pomočjo za otroke) v novih političnih okoliščinah, zmanjšanje pravic do izobrazbe, čedalje večji pritisk verskih institucij itn. Kosovski mit, kakor so ga uporabile ženske, kaže na jasne
172 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST opozicijske, subkulturne, karnevalske vrednosti. Opravka imamo s kritičnim spominom, definiranim z družbenim položajem kritikov – žensk. Ko je prebran, ta specifični spomin ne samo razširja meje kolektivnega spomina, temveč tudi osvetljuje travmatične spolne razlike, za katere se ustaljeni zgodovinarji nikoli ne zmenijo. Občuteni in shranjevani so bili tako globoko, da so celo potem, ko je prišlo do »brušenja« patriarhalne družbe, preživeli, dovolj močni, da se znova pojavijo v ženskem diskurzu v času krize. Sporočilo glede trenutnega stanja na Kosovem bi bilo dvojno: prvič, pomenilo bi protest proti stereotipnemu predstavljanju mentalitete kosovskih Albancev in Srbov (»štirinajst stoletij sovraštva« – z besedami Bernarda Kouchnerja), in drugič, priporočilo bi, da se posluša ženske, seznanjanje z njihovimi vsakdanjimi strategijami, da postanejo vidne s svojimi preprostimi političnimi zahtevami za mir, stabilnost in komunikacijo, če ne že spravo. Z drugimi besedami, potrebno je slediti spremembam, modernim in kritičnim zgodovinskim debatam, in pridobiti enako količino in kakovost znanja, samo da se ne bi z njim ukvarjali v dnevni politiki, reševanju problemov in kompromisov. Že delna ali načrtna pozaba z majhno možnostjo vračanja k informacijam je boljša od stereotipov, ki omogočajo hitre, posplošene odgovore in nobenega upanja.
OPOMBE
1 Ideja Jugoslavije kot večetnične in večkulturne republike se je porodila med mladimi intelektualci, v glavnem med tistimi, ki so študirali v tujini, še posebej na Dunaju. Vizualni koncept, ki je temeljil na mitu kosovske bitke, je v slikah in s spremnimi besedili »jugoslovanskih« avtorjev leta 1911 na razstavi v Rimu prikazal Hrvat Ivan Meštrović, pozneje svetovno znan kipar. Milan Budimir iz Bosne, klasicist, je v svoji zgodnji politični karieri v Sarajevu, kmalu po koncu prve svetovne vojne, predlagal razdelitev Jugoslavije na regije, sledeč primeru turškega urbanizma in kulturne mreže. Večino teh utopičnih idej je kmalu obšla politična realnost kraljestva pod vladavino srbske dinastije, in intelektualci so se poskrili v svoje ustanove. 2 Prim. Svetlana Slapšak, »Mehanizam stvaranja stereotipa: Politikina rubrika ‘Odjeci i reagovanja’, januar–juli 1990«, in Ogledi o bezbrižnosti, Apartidi, B92, Beograd, 1994. Študija proučuje nastanek stereotipov o Albancih in Slovencih (slednjih kot političnih zaveznikih prvih) v vodilnem srbskem časopisu (Politika).
173 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST 3 Prim. Maria Todorova, Imaginining the Balkans, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997. 4 Prim. Mihail M. Bahtin, Voprosy literatury i estetiki, Moskva, 1975. 5 Priča o boju kosovskom, ur. Stojan Novaković, reprint Prosveta, Beograd, 1989. 6 Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales, Howard University Press, 1960. 7 O knezu Lazaru, zbirka del znanstvenega srečanja v Kruševcu, 1971, Beograd, 1975. 8 Miodrag Popović, Vidovdan i časni krst, Biblioteka XX vek (izd. in ur. Ivan Čolović), Beograd, 1998. 9 Lucette Valensi, Fables de la mémoire. La glorieuse bataille des trois rois, Seuil, Pariz, 1992. 10 Vuk Karađić, Narodne srpske pjesme, knj. II u kojoj su pjesme junačke najstarije, Lepzig, 1823. 11 Prim. Slovo in Stihira (religiozna pesniška oblika, podobna psalmu) o prenosu relikvije Svete Petke, v: Grigorije Camblak, Literarno delo v Srbiji, Prosveta – SKZ, Beograd, 1989, str. 117–130. 12 Prim. Vuk Karađić, Srbske ljudske pesmi iz neobjavljenih rokopisov, I, Različne ženske pesmi, SANU, Beograd, 1973. 13 Svetozar Koljević, The Epic in the making, Claredon Press, Oxford, 1980, str. 172. 14 Roland Barthes, S/Z, Seuil, Pariz, 1970. 15 Prav tam, str. 120. 16 Prav tam, str. 121. 17 Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Dans l'oeil du miroir, ur. Odile Jacob, Pariz, 1997. 18 Froma Zeitlin, Playing the Other, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1996. 19 Danes v Narodnem muzeju v Beogradu. 20 Vuk Karađić, Srpski rječnik, istolkovan njemačkim i latinskim riječima, Dunaj, 1818. 21 Prim. Svetlana Slapšak, »Petka i Nedeljka, dve antroponimičke prevedenice«, Onomatološki prilozi, zv. I, SANU, Beograd, 1979, str. 81–86. 22 Glej op. 12, str. 213–214. 23 Danica Marković, Trenuci i raspoloženja, Beograd, 1930. V pesmi z naslovom »Podoba viteza« Danica Marković uporablja enako tehniko blazona v opisovanju svojega ljubimca in ga poveže z enim od junakov bitke. 24 Prim. Marija Ivanović, Eseji o junaku, Biblioteka ProFemina, Beograd 92, Beograd, 1996. 25 Prim. Svetlana Slapšak, »Between the Vampire Husband and the Mortal Lover: A narrative for Feminism in Yugoslavia«, v: Research and Eastern Europe, ur. M. Spencer in B. Wejnert, knj. 2, JAI Press, 1996, str. 201–224.
174 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST LITERATURA
Bahtin, Mihail M., Voprosy literatury i estetiki, Moskva, 1975. Barthes, Roland, S/Z, Seuil, Pariz, 1970. Camblak, Grigorije, Književni rad u Srbiji, Prosveta – SKZ, Beograd, 1989. Frontisi-Ducroux, Françoise, in Jean-Pierre Vernant, Dans l’oeil du miroir, ur. Odile Jacob, Pariz, 1997. Ivanić, Marija, Eseji o junaku, Biblioteka ProFemina, Beograd 92, Beograd, 1996. Karađić, Vuk, Narodne srpske pjesme, knj. II: Knj. II u kojoj su pjesme junačke najstarije, Leipzig, 1823. Karađić, Vuk, Serbian Folk Songs from the Unpublished Manuscripts, knj. I: Diverse Women’s Songs, SANU, Beograd, 1973. Karadžić, Vuk, Srpski rječnik, Dunaj, 1818. Koljević, Svetozar, The Epic in the Making, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980. Lord, Albert B., The Singer of Tales, Howard University Press, 1960. Marković, Danica, Trenuci i raspoloženja, Beograd, 1930. O knezu Lazaru, zbirka del z znanstvenega srečanja v Kruševcu 1971, Beograd, 1975. Popović, Miodrag, Vidovdan i časni krst, Biblioteka XX vek (izd. in ur. Ivan Colović), Beograd, 1998. Priča o boju kosovskom, ur. Stojan Novaković, reprint Prosveta, Beograd, 1989. Slapšak, Svetlana, »Between the Vampire Husband and the Mortal Lover: A narrative for Feminism in Yugoslavia«, v: Research on Russia and Eastern Europe, ur. M. Spencer and B. Wejnert, let. 2, JAI Press, 1996, str. 201–224. Slapšak, Svetlana, »Mehanizam stvaranja stereotipa: Politikina rubrika ‘Odjeci i reagovanja’, januar– juli 1990«, v: Ogledi o bezbrižnosti, Apatridi, B 92, Beograd, 1994. Slapšak, Svetlana, »Petka i Nedeljka, dve antroponimike prevedenice«, v: Onomatološki prilozi, zv. I, SANU, Beograd, 1979, str. 81–86. Todorova, Maria, Imagining the Balkans, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999. Valensi, Lucette, Fables de la mémoire. La glorieuse bataille des trois rois, Seuil, Pariz, 1992. Zeitlin, Froma, Playing the Other, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1996.
175 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST
176 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST SUZANA TRATNIK
PREVPRAŠEVANJE NEODVISNEGA ZALOŽNIŠTVA
Verjamem, da ima tako imenovano svobodno ali neodvisno (freelence) pisanje različne pomene v različnih kulturah in kontekstih. Biti neodvisen in svoboden (npr. delo neodvisnega politika ali svobodnega novinarja) lahko pomeni delovanje brez vplivanja ali pa brez zaščite katere koli uredniške politike. V idealnih okoliščinah bi pomenilo tudi veliko svobode pri izbiranju teme. Včasih pa, tako kot v Sloveniji, pomeni preprosto, da so tvoji dohodki popolnoma odvisni od količine dela, ki ga opraviš, saj nimaš rednega dohodka. V tem primeru dobi neodvisnost socialno konotacijo: pomeni preprosto to, da nimaš redne službe oziroma plače. Toda ali gre pri tem le za obliko (ne)zaposlenosti ali se nanaša tudi na (neodvisno) vsebino? Govorim s stališča neodvisne pisateljice, prevajalke in tudi občasne založnice in urednice, pri čemer zadnji dve funkciji nista moj glavni poklic. Sodelujem z nekomercialno založbo ŠKUC (Študentski kulturni in umetniški center), zbirko Lambda. Druga zbirka te založbe se imenuje Vizibilija in je specializirana za lezbične publikacije. In verjamem, da neodvisno delo v tem primeru ključno vpliva na vsebino. Ali drugače povedano: izgrajevanje platforme za določene vsebine lahko spodbuja in usmerja manjše in marginalne založbe k temu, da si prizadevajo za neodvisno pridobivanje sredstev in neodvisno delovanje nasploh, torej da niso odvisne zgolj od neodvisnega pisanja. Omeniti moram še, da ŠKUC-Lambda izdaja LGBT (lezbična, gejevska, biseksualna, transspolna, queerovska in deloma feministična) literarna
177 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST in neliterarna dela, ki veljajo za »specializirana« – obravnavajo pretežno politične teme ali raziskave, in res niso v kategoriji literature. Zakaj je tako? Mogoče bi morala razložiti, zakaj in kako je bila Lambda ustanovljena leta 1991. Prva knjiga z naslovom Modra svetloba je bila antologija odlomkov poezije, kratkih zgodb in romanov slovenskih pisateljev in pisateljic, in dejansko zgodovinski dokument že objavljenih, vendar pozabljenih hoemoerotičnih motivov. Tako je že prvi projekt pokazal, da takšni motivi sploh niso bili tako redki v »uradni« slovenski književnosti. Brane Mozetič, eden od dveh urednikov, je dobil pobudo za ta projekt, ko mu je profesor na fakulteti povedal, da niti ne bo mogel pisati magistrske naloge o homoerotični književnosti v Sloveniji, ker ta preprosto ne obstaja, nima zgodovine, torej ni snovi za pisanje. Manjšinska pisanja so seveda politično vprašanje. Obstaja le večinska ali celo »glavna« književnost, ki se po svoji personificirani naravi ovija z nacionalnimi temami. Torej, kakšna je uredniška ali založniška politika ne zgolj po velikosti »manjših« založb, ampak tudi vsebinsko manjšinskih, kot je ŠKUC- Lambda? Jasno je, da gre za preplet objavljanja pozabljenih ali nevidnih del, kar velja še zlasti v državi, ki ima »le« dvajset in nekaj let lezbičnega in gejevskega gibanja, in spodbujanja novih avtorjev in avtoric ter različnih postopkov pridobivanja sredstev. Ni treba posebno poudarjati, da je ŠKUC-Lambda – v univerzalnem jeziku – tudi »zgolj založba«, ki si prizadeva objavljati dobro literaturo. To pomeni, da je ne zanima objavljanje komercialnih knjig, kot so gejevske ali lezbične ljubezenske zgodbice, kriminalke in podoben šund, prav tako je ne zanimajo fotografske knjige ali različni priročniki. Tako deluje pod blagim pritiskom vključevanja v nepolitično večinsko »zgolj književnost«, ki verjame v kakovost kot edino merilo. Vsekakor je treba reči, da ima založba Lambda določeno svobodo: kot prevajalka sem lahko večinoma svobodno izbirala knjige za prevod in objavo. Moje priljubljene avtorice so bile Leslie Feinberg, Kate Bornstein, Mary Dorcey, Judith Butler, Adrienne Rich, Jackie Kay in veliko drugih. Ko sem ugotovila, katera knjiga se mi zdi vredna objave, sem začela iskati še finančno podporo. Sprva so lezbične knjige iz Lambdine zbirke podpirale večinoma zahodne fundacije, kot sta Mama Cash iz Nizozemske ali The Global Fund for Women and The Astraea Foundation iz Združenih držav Amerike. Danes te ustanove ne podpirajo več knjig, temveč so se osredotočile predvsem na ženske aktivistične projekte – poleg tega Slovenija ni več na prednostnem seznamu teh ustanov.
178 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Kljub temu je mogoče reči, da imamo srečo, saj večina vzhodnih držav Evropske unije še vedno podpira založništvo. ŠKUC-Lambdo podpira Ministrstvo za kulturo oziroma Javna agencija za knjigo, ki še posebej podpirata slovenske avtorje in avtorice. Našo založbo podpirajo tudi mednarodni skladi Next Page Foundation iz Sofije, Pro Helvetia, Kultur Kontakt z Dunaja in evropski program za prevode (Culture 2000). To dokazuje, da še vedno obstajajo možnosti objavljanja nekomercialnih knjig. Težava pri nekaterih financerjih pa je v tem, da nakazujejo sredstva šele po zaključku projekta, zato manjše založbe sploh ne morejo tekmovati z večjimi. Največji problem pri nekomercialnih knjigah je verjetno distribucija. Razmeroma enostavno je izdati knjigo, lahko pa se zgodi, da brez jasne marketinške strategije ostane v skladišču. Trženje seveda pomeni denar. Na primer, večina knjigarn in celo knjižnic ni pripravljena prodajati ali se oskrbeti s komercialno marginalnimi zvrstmi, kot so poezija, drama ter LGBT teorija in teorija spolov. Veliko manjših založnikov je zato vpeljalo spletno prodajo ali tiskanje na zahtevo – to pomeni, da natisnejo in prodajo le toliko knjig, kolikor naročil dobijo. Zdaj pa že obstaja še ena možnost – spletno objavljanje, tako da lahko knjigo vsakdo prebere ali si jo natisne – in to pomeni, da založnik nima stroškov z distribucijo, hkrati pa, da nima nobenega zaslužka.
POVEZOVANJE Z ZALOŽBAMI V DRUGIH DRŽAVAH
ŠKUC-Lambda je povezana z založniki v Združenih državah Amerike, Angliji in v nekaterih drugih državah Evropske unije. Veliko njihovih knjig je po tej poti objavljenih v slovenskem prevodu. Toda to je tipično enosmerno trgovanje ali komunikacija. Zahodni izdajatelji niso zainteresirani za avtorje in programe manjših vzhodnih založb. Ta izmenjava je včasih uspešnejša, če gre za projekte, ki zajemajo še druge vzhodne države EU. Celo za že prevedene in podprte knjige velja, da je sodelovanje odvisno od tega, na kateri stopnji izdajateljskega procesa so ponujene. Na primer, lahko se zgodi, da so knjigo zmožni ali pripravljeni natisniti, vendar pa nimajo možnosti ali jih ne zanima trženje in niti prodaja.
179 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST SODELOVANJE Z ZALOŽBAMI IN/ALI AVTORJI IZ NEKDANJE JUGOSLAVIJE
Verjamem, da so LGBT ali queer založniki vsaj na začetku usmerjeni na izdajanje večinoma zahodnih knjig. Pred nekaj leti je Zavod za odprto družbo (The Open Society Institute) sprožil pobudo »Vzhod prevaja Vzhod« (»East translates East«), ki si prizadeva spremeniti omenjeno prakso. Kot svetovalka pri tej pobudi se spominjam, da smo naredili sezname nacionalnih del žensk, ki bi lahko zanimala založbe v drugih vzhodnih državah Evropske unije. Običajno pa naše povezave in sodelovanja temeljijo na osebnih stikih in izmenjavi informacij. Lambda je tovrstno izmenjavo doslej vzpostavila s srbsko queer založbo Deve in s hrvaško Žensko infoteko, pred kratkim pa je objavila dela več avtorjev in avtoric iz Makedonije, Hrvaške, Srbije in Češke ter jih vključila v evropski program Culture 2000.
180 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST LITERATURA
ŠKUC-Lambda Publisher: http://www.ljudmila.org/siqrd/lambda.php ŠKUC-Vizibilija Publisher: http://www.ljudmila.org/lesbo/vizibilija.htm Tratnik, Suzana, »Z navodili v roki«, Literatura, Ljubljana, 2001, str. 121–122. Tratnik, Suzana, »Male založbe: homoseksualnost in poezija nista tržni«, Sektor ½, Ljubljana, 2003. Tratnik, Suzana, Lezbična zgodba – literarna konstrukcija seksualnosti, ŠKUC-Lambda, Ljubljana, 2004.
181 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST 182 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST GENDER, LITERATURE, AND CULTURAL MEMORY IN THE POST-YUGOSLAV SPACE
A COLLECTION OF PAPERS FROM THE INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM
183 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST 184 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST JELENA PETROVIĆ, KATJA KOBOLT
INTRODUCTION
Literature and the literary canon in particular play an essential role in ethno-national memory politics, which we have the opportunity to observe during the (post) war period in the area of former Yugoslavia. This is why the exclusion of women from the canon simultaneously brings with it the censure or erasure of both their creative and public presence, on the one hand, from memory politics itself and on the other, also from the wider cultural context. In order to explore this erased or censured memory and the creativity of women writers beyond ethnic, Lilliputian borders, new paths for engaged and interdisciplinary approaches to literature, literary theory, and critique are crucial. In last two decades, emancipatory discourses and so called emergent practices in the post-Yugoslav context have played an active and significant role in the contemporary literary production of women’s authors. These new feminist readings of women’s writing and newly updated theoretical interventions into mainstream literary practices are managing to engender a new wave of emancipatory politics that originates from a marginalized and censured female authorship and are intervening in remaking connections within the culture of writing, reading and translating within the post-Yugoslav context. The book: Gender, Literature, and Cultural Memory in the Post-Yugoslav Space, which was conceived over the last couple of years on the basis of a symposium of the same name, within the framework of the 12th City of Women festival, is the result of a connected intervention of this sort. Woman writers, theoreticians and authors have re(articulated) their premises and
185 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST questions, based on their own creative and critical practices, and related it to so called “women’s writing”. They have also allied themselves to the issue of establishing feminist strategies towards dominant models of literary canonization, as determined by ethno-national politics and legitimate patriarchal cultural models in literary theory, critique, and production. The most important contributions of such an approach to existing mainstream literature and to its critical-theoretical practices reveal the importance of language, cultural and gender transgression. These feminist passageways throughout the different kinds of barriers encountered enable engaged and reflective critique of socio-political positions and, at the same time, they have potential to assure a rightful place for women in literary and memory culture, as well as in the public space. The poet Maruša Krese suggests a new positioning that confronts a range of different geopolitical cultural identities of writers in this transitional period, indicating the problem in the title of her article: “Women Writers in Eastern Europe/Women Writers in Western Europe”. She raises, at the same time, many questions that are still uncomfortable for most of the post/transitional politicians and intellectual elites in the area: “All these recent years, full of bill-sticking, of lining up and pigeonholing. The same colours ... the Western Balkans, the Eastern Balkans, and the Balkans in general ... South Eastern Europe, democratic states, states still learning how to be democratic (I forget who the teacher is, though), a new Europe ... new neighbours ... old, old Europe ... Women writers in Eastern Europe? Women writers? Women? South Eastern Europe? Eastern Europe? What exactly is that? Where are the borders? In the head of the West? In mine? And the self- interest of the East? Where do I start?” Maruša Krese answers these questions through her critique of the commonplace social, cultural and historical stereotypes, using a form of auto-poetical writing. Striving to identify her own position, she finds a way that, at one and the same time, becomes a reflection of the common women’s past and a wider illumination of the post-Yugoslav space. Feminist literary theoreticians and critics, Katja Kobolt and Jelena Petrović, problematize particularly ethno-nationalist politics of academic literary and language paradigms that have been generated by the divisions in ethno-centric canons, language politics and the censured politics of memory in the post-war period. The revisionist process of national purification has banished (post)war women’s discourses, on the one hand, from the newly constructed national academy and, on the other, from public space. It is because of this phenomenon that Katja Kobolt, in her
186 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST article “A Plea for a Comparative Approach to Post-Yugoslav Literatures as (Transnational) Political Practice or What National Philologies Could Learn from Feminism” points out the importance of the feminist approach to the conception of a new epistemological model throughout the triad: language – literature – gender. These re-evaluated redefinitions of the “criterion- and interpretation-canon” not only allow the inclusion of women’s war writing into the canon of war literature but also that of other literature, which depicts war beyond the frontline and bellicosity. In the article “The politics of the Feminist Writing/Reading/Translating”, Jelena Petrović goes further, focusing on the critique of representation, appropriation and ethnicisation of war discourses, demonstrating how feminist writing/reading/ translating could intervene in the process of historisation. At the same time, an approach such as this offers a possible strategy towards transformative emancipatory politics in the post-Yugoslav area. Anthropologist Svetlana Slapšak deals with the critique of historiography and of national canon by analysing the case of the most important nationalist myth of Kosovo. This myth operates as a fatal political narrative influencing not only literary and academic knowledge production, but also, during the decay of Yugoslavia, influencing the catastrophic consequences of pro-Serbian state politics. In her article “Nomadic Memories, Sedentary Oblivion: The Case of Kosovo”, in addition to the critique of this myth, she reveals the Other, women’s readings and re/writings of the Kosovo myth which, in the past, have been raised in opposition to nationalist politics and which, because of that, have at the same time been censured and have marked such writers as traitors. From the viewpoint of an anthropological comparative analysis from antiquity until today, ethnologist Lada Stevanović in the article “Tradition and resistance: the element of the funeral rite in the pacifist movement of Women in Black during the Yugoslav wars”, exposes activist practices of resistance to the Kosovo myth during the war in Yugoslavia, explaining the meaning of the activist movement “Women in Black” in its local context. Literary and cultural theoretician Damir Arsenijević, poet and writer Šejla Šehabović and literary comparator Ajla Demiragić all especially draw attention, in post-war literary production, to the role of women’s authorship in Bosnia and Herzegovina. By mutual and referential linkage, they focus on women’s poetry and prose exposing it as a site that has the potential to generate the politics of hope and to open up the possibility to understand and create collective memory about the recent war – particularly scarred by the politics of genocide. Damir Arsenijević in his article “The Politics
187 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST of Memory in ‘Life as an Actuality’” identifies women’s poetry as an emancipatory discourse. Its potentiality lies in perceiving ‘life as an actuality’, wherein history is brought to bear witness to the present and future through an active mourning that creates new modes of symbolisation of the traumatic events that haunt Bosnia. Arsenijević also warns of the dominant national and international politics that, in a wider context, reject and censure such approaches to memory via his additional textual intervention: “Mobilising Unbribable Life: the Politics of Contemporary Poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina”. In this intervention, he proposes and theorises a novel theoretical concept of “unbribable life” that can harness the emancipatory potential of engaged cultural production. In the article “What Kind of Relationship are You in? Negotiating Intimate Life and Migration in Contemporary Bosnian Female Poetry” Šejla Šehabović, using examples of women’s poetry and her own experience, recognizes woman poetry as a place of direct political speech that expresses women’s subjectivity and, at the same time, their impossible position, repressed by both the ethno-national politics of exclusion and international migration policy towards the Other. Ajla Demiragić’s article, “Women’s writing in Bosnia and Herzegovina: a Model for an Alternative Politics of Cultural Memory”, focuses on women’s prose that confronts dominant patriarchal and ethnocentric narratives. Demiragić sees such women’s writing as an alternative space which enables emergent, creative and sustainable models of cultural memory. From the point of view of cultural studies, postcolonial and feminist literary critique, ethnologist Renata Jambrešić Kirin explains a number of reasons why anti-war, anti-nationalist and political writings have not secured a place in the literary canon thus far, using examples of the best known Croatian women (exiled) writers in her article “The Personal as the Political: Croatian Women’s Citizens in the (Post)War Republic of Words”. At the same time, she draws attention to new generations that are looking for a niche for own expression and for the politics of resistance to the post-industrialist neo-colonialism. This is being sought outside of the academic canon and its newly institution-literary market networking and outside of that market’s approach to literary production. These young generations’ work is conducted especially in contact with and between the old and new Yugoslav diaspora – which functions as the basis for the creation of a non-ideological, spiritual and artistic “sisterhood” in the 21st century. Literary theoretician and poet Dubravka Đurić also writes about these new shifts in literary production at the beginning of this century. In
188 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST her article “Challenging Writing Practices in Serbia after Year 2000”, she compares, in particular, the literary texts of younger authors that refer to the recent war, socialist and transitional ideology and notions of authorship. Writer, translator and publisher Suzana Tratnik deals with modes of literary publishing and translating that are being shaped by transitional, new market and cultural politics. In the article which concludes this book, written by her, “Reinvestigating Freelance Publishing”, she explains the different meaning, advantages and weakness of the freelance publishing that tackles literature unacknowledged by the mainstream literary canon. Under the patronage of women, these new paths for reading and creating literature that travel beyond the borders of conventional approaches to canonical interpretations become an obligation. That is the reason why this collection of papers is focused on the previous or former shared literary “market” that keep alive all kinds of intercultural and intertextual alliances, as well as the mutual publishing and translating practices that were so violently broken up by the nationalist divisions and bloody devastation of Yugoslavia. Different generations of women writers, theoreticians and reader-authors in this reader have re(formulated) their premises and questions concerning the connective practices of women in the context of post-Yugoslav literary space. Not only do the contributions offer an impetus for the process of the de-patriarchalization and de- ethnicisation of the literary canon and cultural memory, but they also open a space for future literary production, representation and canonisation of new interdisciplinary knowledge in the field. The very knowledge that, in this space, can spring out of non-domesticated women’s discourses and new practices of speech, writing, and – last but not least – out of life itself.
189 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Do not despair, You have asked us not to live.
190 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST MARUŠA KRESE
WOMEN WRITERS IN EASTERN EUROPE WOMEN WRITERS IN
WESTERN EUROPE
Christmas is coming. I step out of a house on a little street in old Berlin’s Jewish quarter – a house from where Jews were once transported to concentration camps. And this is where I live. The street has been closed to traffic for a few days because, as I said, Christmas is coming, and a Christmas fair has been set up in this very street. I make my way among the stalls, where one can find ... What is that lovely phrase, now? “Everything your heart may desire.” I make my way among the stalls with their scents of mulled wine, cinnamon, fresh pastries, pancakes, roast sausages. Someone has thought of selling hot chestnuts. This makes me think of home. I better hurry over to the bank and check if my latest royalty fee has been paid yet. If it has, I can relax and go back to writing about women writers and Eastern and Western Europe. With the money in my account, I can write more easily and better. This, by the way, is Rule Number One when it comes to women writers, one that applies to women in the East as well as in the West. It is so much easier, cosier and pleasanter to write without a constant struggle to get by ... one sleeps soundly, too ... though the same goes for men ... I accepted this job gladly. But now I am angry. With myself. Filled with ambivalence. All these recent years, full of bill-sticking, of lining up and pigeonholing. The same colours ... the Western Balkans, the Eastern Balkans, and the Balkans in general ... South Eastern Europe, democratic states, states still learning how to be democratic (I forget
191 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST who the teacher is, though), a new Europe ... new neighbours ... old, old Europe ... Women writers in Eastern Europe? Women writers? Women? South Eastern Europe? Eastern Europe? What exactly is that? Where are the borders? In the head of the West? In mine? And the self-interest of the East? Where do I start? With my anger, with my doubts, with the haunting images? With the political situation? With the Church? With angels leaving their hearths? With my fast walk through the Christmas stalls, with the thousand Christmas eves I had prepared for my children when what I wanted was to be alone, alone, writing, writing ... there by the sea, in the sun ... without a care in the world ... The phrase “woman writer” always puts me in mind of Virginia Woolf and A Room of One’s Own (appeared at 1928). I know it has been quoted countless times. I have always found this writing just my cup of tea, but admittedly there is much I have only come to grasp in the last few years. A Room of One’s Own is a work intended for a younger generation of intellectual women. To these the author conveyed her experiences, which she believed were important for many. She wanted to advise them on the foundations from which to start their journey. She encouraged the young generation of women to set out on their way without anger or hate. These feelings will do nothing but harm, she warned them. A woman, a human being, must ultimately be guided by the quest for truth. She almost begged them to seize their opportunities, the opportunities available at that very moment. According to her, history had proved that these opportunities had to be continually used and upgraded if they were not to be lost to the force of opposing interests. At the same time, she envied the younger women their university studies, which, in England, had been denied to her generation of women. And so Virginia Woolf always reminds me of women’s writing in nineteenth-century Russia. Outstripping any part of Western Europe, before the revolution, Russia could boast a number of well-known women who fought side by side with men for social and political change in the country. Rather than enviously watch their brothers leaving for university, as Virginia Woolf did, they sat together with them in the lecture rooms. The women were often the more radical ones. And not in word alone ... Every now and then, when I run out of courage, I return to their notes ...
192 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Eastern Europe? Woman? A thousand scenes. Mine? Ours? In 1971 I moved from Yugoslavia to study in the States, bringing with me my little daughter. I cannot forget the faces of the dean and the professors and their secretaries as they caught sight of me ... After a few minutes pause, came the comment “a hippie from the communist regime”. A woman ... with a child ... from communism ... they paraded me around like one of the world’s seven wonders ... I admit that it was not long before I left that American institution ... A woman, a man ... This was the first time that I grasped the need for “women’s liberation” in the West ... and longed for home ... I had similar experiences in London, southern Germany, Austria ... in one form or another, the story was repeated in a number of “western” countries. Suddenly I had to fight for the rights with which the Yugoslav women of my generation had grown up ... The rights I had taken for granted, the rights I had never even considered as something special ... Well then: South Eastern Europe ... or Eastern Europe? I cannot really explain what has happened over the last fifteen, twenty years. Sometimes I feel as if the wheel of time had rolled back a hundred years at least ... as if I was reading a novel about a life I had never known ... Rolled back in everyday life ... in political life ... in literary life ... I remember my mother’s generation ... women who fought against fascism, women who built the country, women who studied and worked ... women who had children ... women who never gave a thought to emancipation because, simply, they were emancipated ... That was how my generation grew up as well ... Yet we seem to have taken it all so lightly ... too much for granted ... I have only realised this, however, in recent years ... and so I have come to understand Virginia Woolf’s warning for the first time ... I really cannot say what happened later ... By 1990, everything we had taken for granted had begun to crumble ... even before the Berlin Wall did ... Indeed, Virginia Woolf had been right in saying that the opportunities of the moment had to be seized and continually used, upgraded, fostered, if we did not want to be forced out of them. And so we suddenly began to read and hear speeches asserting that women should rule at home, standing at the stove, surrounded by a bevy of children ... that they should not have abortions because that would make them murderesses ... And men again had the final word, or rather, they usurped it and we let it happen ... Those who did not were
193 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST ostracised and often suppressed ... In all of former Yugoslavia, women had been the fiercest and loudest protesters against war and nationalism ... There were moments when the whole Balkan story struck me as a single huge anti-feminist putsch by our male heroes ... I am tired ... I shudder to remember the first years of the new “democracy” in our former country, and then in our new country. Things were done in the name of “democracy” which had nothing to do with common sense. Nationalism in the name of democracy, poets on democratic barricades, men of letters censoring every dissenting thought, while spreading stories of their heroic deeds and the censorship-haunted life of their former lives ... In the neighbouring countries, many were called to arms and bloodshed, and not a few did take up guns ... The new “democracies” of Eastern Europe, the democracies of former socialist countries, began to sell hackneyed images ... images expected by the West ... images of heroic “soft” revolutionaries ... images extolling life in the West ... And part of these images was the cliché of “woman in Eastern Europe”, the woman writer in Eastern Europe, and ... The path to emancipation is a long one, our colleagues in the West would tell us ...
Emancipation
I purchased it on credit, they said there was no point, with the interest rate so high.
Oh, I sat in the bathroom, all of us happy that the washer could spin away on credit ...
And I took up Spinoza. Oh God, don’t let the washer stop its spinning, I still need time for living ...
I really cannot say where we lost our way ... Where we gave in ... Those women who had been loudest in former Yugoslavia went away, one after another ... Where? West? Many were branded at home as witches or hysterics, and many were thrown into the wicker cage of madness ...
194 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Women’s madnesses are tender, full of butterflies and pictures. Women’s madnesses are dainty, with princes thronged and set in bronze, with colours filled, wrapped up in silk, and buried deep below, that others still may grow.
Some of them have managed very well ... It was not hard to sell the cliché of South Eastern Europe ... of Eastern Europe ... it is not hard to sell the tale of women’s double exploitation in socialism ... not hard to write that women writers in Eastern Europe suffered hardships ... What is far harder to get across is that we have wasted what we used to have ... It is hard to get across that distinctions need to be drawn in the literary world too, no less than in the political one ... Just as the West rejoiced at the “death of communism” when South Eastern Europe began its string of “soft revolutions” in 1989, without paying attention to the motley crew of the newly-dubbed “democrats”, without sensitivity to the differences in the past of these “former communist” countries, simply lumping everything together, the same random treatment has been meted out lately to the literatures of Eastern Europe, to the women of Eastern Europe, to the women writers of Eastern Europe ... Is it really so hard to grasp that, in terms of her life experience, a woman writer from New York or Stockholm may be closer to me than one from Sofia or Bucharest, that a woman writer from Bratislava may not easily find a common language with one from Tirana ... a woman poet from Jordan or Nicaragua may compose a poem evoking that by a woman poet in Oslo ... say, about the sea ... or love ... or her mother ... How am I supposed to identify with Eastern Europe, with Slovenia, former Yugoslavia? Eastern Europe? Here I am, walking through the Christmas fair. I have not reached the bank yet ... Berlin ... Jews ... Russians who fled here in the 1920s ... Women in nineteenth-century Petersburg ... Where are their tracks? People who fled to Berlin in fear of “democracy” ... my women friends, women writers from the Balkans ... all over the world ...
195 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST I lost myself ... in my work, in my children, in making ends meet ... here in the West, women are overturning the taboos of their mothers, overturning the clichés of the older generations ... and for our part, in the Balkans at least, we will need another eternity to regain the position once held by our mothers, by many of us even ... I am tired indeed ... I remember a podium discussion in Brussels on Women’s Day. March 8th, in the year ... does not matter ... The moderator turns to me, saying, “Madam, the women in Slovenia must be happy now?” “Why must they?” I ask, cynically. “Surely the EU is bringing you emancipation,..” I hear my voice. Is it mine? I listen to myself. I sound like Clara Zetkin, or Vida Tomšič, or my mother. I have to laugh at myself, or I will get lost in rage or despair. I do not know. I meet a Slovenian poet, a man, over a cup of coffee ... I listen ... this reading, that festival, this poet, that poet, these awards ... these books ... the new generation is no different ... young poets sitting on editorial boards ... men deciding whether a woman is a poet or not. I listen ... becoming a poet is a vocation ... a serious vocation ... women do not take it seriously enough, writing poems while spaghetti is cooking, while washers are spinning, late at night ... writing a poem while waiting to pick up their children after school ... just scribbling something on the edge of the daily newspaper ...
For instance:
These little volcanoes disturb me. I long for them every day and know that the children’s trousers need mending.
Trousers, perhaps I can sew little suns on their knees, maybe a ship with a chimney. Or tiny houses. Ana wants a ladybird. Perhaps a fly agaric.
How can I fulfill all these wishes on knees. Volcanoes, my disgusting dear, I am afraid you must go on waiting.
When I have had an earful of the successes of Slovenian men poets, I do venture to open my mouth. “The women poets in Slovenia aren’t
196 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST doing so well, though,” I offer. “Well, yes, that’s right,” says the poet. “You ought to fight, you ought to team up and attack the male literary scene.” I smile. Fight. My head is spinning with a sentence by Marina Tsvetayeva. “What is a ‘game’ for you (men) is nothing but stark reality for us. We will never be more real, not even on our deathbed.” No matter where. In Southern, Eastern, Western or Northern Europe.
197 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST
198 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST KATJA KOBOLT A PLEA FOR A COMPARATIVE APPROACH TO POST- YUGOSLAV LITERATURE AS (TRANSNATIONAL) POLITICAL PRACTICE; OR, WHAT NATIONAL PHILOLOGIES COULD LEARN FROM FEMINISM Looking at different aspects of memory as they relate to the way the post-Yugoslav wars appear in Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian women’s war writing one is being confronted with methodological difficulties, which mainly originate in the dominant paradigm of ethnicized ex- Yugoslav philologies.1 The objective of this paper is therefore to rethink the methodology of the separate national South Slavic philologies that went hand in hand with nationalist political projects such as language planning, the redefinition of the literary canon, and the rewriting of national literary histories. As gender dimension appears to be a blind spot in the research on war literature, it is exactly this field, gender research, which proves suitable for unveiling difficulties of such ethnicized approaches. First, theories of wartime literature – mainly developed in the separate national philologies, defined by the traditional semantics of war, and usually made in the image of the fighting man at the front – not only overlook the war writings by women but also fail to grasp the diversity of representations of war in general. Second, the nationalist perspective, currently dominant in South Slav philologies, renders a cross-cultural study of the semantics of war almost impossible, and yet, this is the very focal point of the politics of national memory in
199 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST the Balkans. Indeed, it is for this reason that the ongoing canonization processes and politics of memory of the post-Yugoslav wars should receive critical academic attention.
USE OF COLLECTIVE MEMORY AS A DISCURSIVE MATRIX FOR THE POST-YUGOSLAV WARS
The post-Yugoslav wars tragically demonstrated the centrality of the politics of collective memory in the processes of national homogenisation and mobilisation for national political action. The different parties in the conflict built upon the dissociation inherent in the multiethnic (and multinational) Yugoslav state in order to promote a (mono)national state concept. In the process, all of the parties made ample use of the politics as a so-called recourse to history.2 Their constructions of a Southeast European past were emphatically homogenous with regard to the ethnic or national context and thus they set the stage perfectly for armed century of interethnic conflict.3 These diverse constructions of the past were based on an idea of national continuity that could supposedly be traced back to the early Middle Ages. They suggested that the only proper political form for assuring continuity in the future resided in the (mono)national state. Indeed, nationalist historical narratives may be considered one of the central discursive drives for the disintegration of the second Yugoslav state and for the post-Yugoslav wars.4 On the one hand, these nationalist political projects made use of specific versions of the national past, using them as an instrument of political mobilisation and militarization. On the other hand, the dominant social and cultural studies interpretative model of the disintegration of the federal Yugoslav state and the subsequent wars offered mainly historical explanations of these conflicts. In fact, interethnic conflict was put forward as one of the historical continuities of Southeast Europe.5 In this way, social and cultural studies discourse often not only confirmed the nationalist constructions of the Southeast European past, but also consolidated the ongoing nationalist political projects. In the paper entitled Gender, Orientalism and the History of Ethnic Hatred in the Former Yugoslavia, the social scientist Dubravka Žarkov wrote the following: “If the only history is the history of ethnic hatred, then, the only way of being is of being ethnic. [...] Perhaps the most devastating possible
200 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST consequence of the “history of ethnic hatred” in the “Orientalised Balkans” is the fact that the future begins to be imagined in ethnic terms. For, by precluding alternative projects, this exclusive “ethnic future” naturalises, in history, the ethnic way of being. It also constructs the ethnic war not only as a historical way of being, but as natural. The continuity between the “ethnic past” and the “ethnic future” is thus established and the reminders of other possibilities are hidden, erased, or reinterpreted.”6 Despite the genocidal politics of the nineties, Southeast Europe remains a multiethnic and multicultural region and therefore we are left with the urgent need to critically question these (mono)national historical narratives. In an epistemological model, which underlines the inevitable forming of research objects through methodological and theoretical presuppositions of cognition on the one hand and pays attention to the discursive power of academic discourse itself on the other,7 the necessity of developing and promoting transnational constructions of the Southeast European past becomes even more evident. The post-Yugoslav wars demonstrated above all the enormous power of disseminated discourse, a power that can produce actual material effects, and thus is capable of creating the conditions for war or for reconciliation.
LANGUAGE PLANNING AND ITS CONSEQUENCES FOR THE STUDY OF SOUTH SLAVIC LITERATURES
As Ivan Čolović, Svetlana Slapšak and Andrew Baruch Wachtel8 convincingly argue, the dissemination of nationalist discourses that exploded into interethnic conflict was vertical – that is to say that nationalism trickled down gradually from the “top” of the social edifice. Nationalism as a model of the social and political order was implanted first by discourses in the spheres of academia and art and these discourses were eventually taken over by the political oligarchy.9 In the nationalist matrix developed mainly during German Romanticism, literature occupies a privileged role, the national language being postulated as one of the core premises of the national way of being.10 The case of post-Yugoslav nationalisms demonstrates the relevance of national language planning and the construction of national literary canons. During the period of national cultural and memory politics in
201 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST post-Yugoslav states in the 1990s, the so-called Serbo-Croatian language and literature became subjects of redefinition, reinterpretation, and restandardization.11 The process of fixing new parameters for the Serbo- Croatian language and its literature overlapped with the defining of new territorial and political boundaries in the former Yugoslavia, which have been divided into four different languages and literatures: Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin. The emerging standardizations of the Croatian and Bosnian languages, in particular, revealed the main characteristics of national language planning as demonstrated by Joshua Fishman in his book Language and Nationalism.12 Namely, the main features of nationalistic language planning were lexical, socio-lexical, and partly syntactical.13 The redefinition of literary history and of the national canon of what was formerly called Serbo-Croatian literature was guided above all by the ethnicity of the authors. This ongoing differentiation, though in agreement with the Romantic idea of a single nation state that possesses a single national culture, remains highly problematic in terms of epistemological, methodological, and political ramifications. From a linguistic standpoint, the Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin languages are still one language, albeit one that has diversified into different standardized language variations. The language(s) were standardized on the basis of different dialects and lexical traditions arising from their differing historical and socio- political contexts i.e. the heterogeneous influences to which each of them were exposed. Differences in standardization have mostly been the result of language differentiation in socio-linguistic terms and affect the lexical and morphological, though not the syntactical characteristics, of the languages.14 In terms of their syntax, the South Slavic languages in question remain congruent with one another, which is why, from the linguistic standpoint, they still represent one language, the speakers of which can understand each other.15 Moreover, the attempt to rigidly differentiate the South Slavic languages and philologies is problematic from the standpoint of literary history as it fails to capture literatures and languages in a comparative perspective. Although these literatures have been – parallel to the socio-historical and language development – exposed to differing socio-political, cultural, and aesthetic movements, there are still important similarities between them. The canonisations of the Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin literatures are all based on the South Slavic epic tradition, which is best known
202 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST in academic circles through Albert Lord’s study Singer of Tales that helped to resolve the so-called “Homeric question”.16 Furthermore, it is indisputable that the literary canons in question also followed in parallel aesthetic lines in later periods. Specifically, the canons of Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and Montenegrin literatures were all given shape by the realist, modernist and social-realist aesthetics. The dominant interpretative model of the distinct national South Slavic philologies turns out to be a highly deficient mode of approach to this literature, especially in the case of comparative studies that concentrate on thematic referents shared by all post-Yugoslav cultures. I found this to be the case in my own study of semantics and aspects of memory of the post-Yugoslav wars in contemporary Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian literature. My research of memory models of the post- Yugoslav wars focused on the question of how these wars were being constructed in the individual nationally-defined post-Yugoslav cultures and I was almost immediately confronted with the above-mentioned problem of how implanted nationalist constructs of the Southeast European past have been naturalised. A second problem was the fact that existing methodological and interpretative models of the separate South Slavonic philologies fail to offer theoretical and methodological tools for the analysis of contemporary literature production and the understanding of the post-Yugoslav wars from a comparative perspective.
(CANON OF) WAR LITERATURE AS A DEPOSITORY FOR GENDERED COLLECTIVE MEMORY OF WAR
The centrality of the collective memory of war in the context of the nation state, stated by many researchers, makes the war genre a privileged literary medium.17 The former Yugoslavia has not been an exception to this rule. According to Andrew Baruch Wachtel18 who analysed the rise and fall of the idea of the Yugoslav nation in examples of Yugoslav architecture, visual arts, academic curricula and literature, the genre of the popular Yugoslav war novel was among the most important media for the dissemination of the Yugoslav idea on one hand and nationalist ideas on the other.19 The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was established after World War One, which was a result of the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian state.
203 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Because of this, the Kingdom was itself perceived to be an effect of the war and, as a consequence of this perspective; the war genre was cultivated between the two World Wars in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes and in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia that replaced it. Moreover, the memory politics of the second Yugoslavia depended immensely on the glorification of the Partisans who fought against the Axis occupiers. Wachtel confirms the crucial role of the social- realist war novel in the literary canon of socialist Yugoslavia and, not coincidentally, it was also the Yugoslav war novel that was first exploited by nationalist intellectuals and used as one of the primary discourses for the articulation of secessionist tendencies.20 The post-Yugoslav wars have been in many post-Yugoslav countries constructed as a core of the new nation states – this is the case in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo as well as Slovenia. Works of literature about the post-Yugoslav wars have been coming out virtually from the moment the wars began in the early nineties, and yet typologies and definitions of what the war-genre actually is remain exceedingly incongruous in each of the separate national philologies. Croatian and Bosnian contemporary philology refers to the notion that “war literature”, also seen as contemporary literature, was produced during the warfare of the 1990’s or thematically describes war, especially combat. Serbian and Montenegrin literary studies discourse however, denotes “war literature”, in reference to contemporary literature, as produced and published during the so-called “iron years” of the 1990’s. Even though Serbia and Montenegro played a crucial role in the post-Yugoslav wars, there have been only a few literary works that deal explicitly with these wars. These differences in the definition of the newly produced “war literature” arise in part from the obvious heterogeneity of literary representations of the post-Yugoslav wars in the different national contexts. As far as literature is understood as a medium of cultural processes and cultural memory,21 these differences must be interpreted as differences in the (politics of) collective memory of the wars. Studying culturally specific semantics and models of memory and politics concerning the post-Yugoslav wars as they are reflected in the contemporary literature one finds herself confronted with the immediate need to transcend the strict boundaries between the individual South Slavic philologies and take advantage of a comparative approach in order to grasp the heterogeneity of memory. Especially when one takes into account the vivid ethnic picture of the post-
204 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Yugoslav context and the fact that many ethnic groups have understood themselves in exonormative terms.22 The existing thematic definition of the “war genre”, used mainly in the Croatian and Bosnian philology, refers primarily to the canon of so-called “world literature”. Such literature focuses on the First World War and is obviously dominated by American, English, French, German and Russian literature. In the very significant book A War Imagined, Samuel Hynes claims that the war genre is mainly derived from direct (preferably autobiographical) experience on the battlefield and so suggests a clearly gendered subjectivity.23 This genre restriction implies on the one hand that works of literature describing war beyond the front are not considered to be war literature at all. On the other it also suggests a “proper” model of authorship of war literature: a fighting man or a veteran seems to serve as a perfect model for it: “The implications of this aesthetic of direct experience for war art are obvious: true art will be that which renders what has been known and seen, so only soldiers will be qualified to create it. And it will only be understood by those who have shared the experience, so that only soldiers will be able to appreciate and understand it. It is absolute separation between the men who fight and those they are fighting for, applied to the arts. This separation will be evident in war poems from about this point on, both as structural principle – an “I” who has experienced war addresses a “You” who has not, and as a theme – the “You” cannot understand, is unworthy, ignorant, insensitive, old or female, in any case a non-combatant and therefore excluded both from the experience rendered and from the rendering. The result is a curious kind of elitism, not unlike the attitude of the avant-garde artist towards bourgeois society, but set in terms of war.”24 The fact that authorship of war literature is defined in gendered terms has been confirmed by other researchers besides Hynes. The feminist literary historian, Margaret R. Higonnet, draws attention to the necessity of redefining the traditional norms of the war genre in order to be able to comprehend the literary production of women writers.25 The gendered construction of authorship of war literature also dictates its canonization and, as a result, women writers are overlooked in the canonization process of war literature.26 In a certain sense, the traditional definition of the war genre dictates a sort of fragmentation of collective memory. Insofar as only works of literature that render war in terms of immediate warfare and are therefore written by male
205 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST authors are canonized, then such a war-canon causes the fragmentation of the collective memory of war at least in gendered terms. Considering the important role of the collective memory of war – in the opinion of the historian Wolfgang Höpken27 it should properly be regarded as one of the central vehicles of remembrance in the cultures of nation states – the exclusion of women writers from the literary canon must also be understood as their exclusion from the politics of the collective memory of war. On the way to a more democratic politics of memory, which would take into account a wider spectrum of war memories, a critical examination of war literature definitions and its canonization turns out to be a desideratum.
GENDER – AN OVERLOOKED CATEGORY IN NATIONAL PHILOLOGIES AND CANONIZATION PROCESSES
When literature is understood not only as a medium of culture but also as a medium of collective memory, then the definition of the war genre begins to have obvious implications for the collective memory of war. Depictions of direct front-line fighting have not only been the dominant representational model of war, but have also influenced other modes of collective memory of war, excluding the substantial number of war experiences that don’t correspond with the experience of fighting male. But war, of course, is much more than just the front line. Due to the changes in methods of warfare during the 20th century, war as a practical matter has expanded beyond the front lines and has an immense effect on civil populations – additional argument, which speaks in favour of a critical confrontation with the existing definition of war literature.28 The absence of a thematic dimension of war and combat, respectively, which one observes in Serbian and Montenegrin contemporary literature production is significant. It suggests that post-Yugoslav wars are a blind spot of the Serbian and Montenegrin collective memory. The temporal definition of war literature used in these national philologies is on the other hand much more correspondent to the heterogeneity of the post-Yugoslav literature on war. Looking for a new definition of war literature, more just to contemporary literature production, one should first understand literary genres as dynamic processes.29 When looking
206 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST at the post-Yugoslav literature production one should forget a bit of her knowledge of literary theory, take an inductive approach und trust a simple question: What kind of forms take post-Yugoslav wars in the frame of contemporary literature production? Issues, such as the rise of interethnic conflict, displaced persons, the experience of exile and mass rapes, the loss of family members and property, the transformation of collective memory, the destruction of social relations, and many other topics are all themes present in the post-Yugoslav wars. Once, the stage for the representations of war is set more widely than in the framework of the traditional definition of war, one should take another, second step, and search for a suitable canonization model, which would take into account diverse works of literature. In order not to come up with “warm water” as a well-known South Slavic proverb teaches us, it is recommended here to take advantage of a depository of feminist memory – feminist literary theory.30 It has been feminist literary theoreticians of the so-called first and second wave of feminism that have paid attention to the idea of each literary canon being accompanied by a criterion- and interpretation- canon in order to reinforce and assure the proper mediation of canonized works of literature. In addition, women’s writing began to be considered as a special form of literature, which is as a form radically different from that produced by male authors.31 As a result, canonization models were based upon the assumption that women’s writing could only be adequately grasped if a new kind of theoretical discourse emerged that would take into account the radical otherness of this literature.32 In the eye of the under-representation of female authors in the canons of most national literatures, before the mid-19th century when women writers were rather exceptional, feminist literary theory of the late sixties and seventies mainly developed canonization models that proposed the redefinition of the so-called “criterion- and interpretation-canon”.33 By redefining criteria by which works of literature have been selected for the literary canon, feminist researchers have hoped to extend the existing and more or less patriarchal organization of the literary canon to works written by women writers and at the same time they have proposed a kind of a contra-canon of women’s writing.34 This feminist practice was strongly criticised by the anti-essentialist position of the third wave feminists. Rather than defining subjects through positive attributes of gender, class, race, and religion,
207 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST these feminists pointed a finger at the primarily social construction of such categories – which are not inherent to the subjects but are imposed upon them.35 Questioning hierarchical structures of subjectification that are dominated by power relations, gender/ queer and postcolonial scholars ultimately rejected the notion of the canon itself. Multiculturalists evoked the principle of canon plurality, evolved a substantive critique of the canon, and pleaded for “unrepresentativeness”: “To reconceive how we select novels, then, in light of a dissolving, destabilized canon, we might set out to represent not, as has usually been said or implied, the representative but instead to represent unrepresentativeness itself. That paradox can stage the impossibility of any comprehensive representation. A group of novels cannot finally “represent” a culture or subculture, yet they will represent – in the sense of “stand for” – cultures and subcultures, however partially and distortedly, in the sense that no theoretical caution can keep us from landing sooner or later on one kind of representation or another. If the inevitability of at least partial consensus keeps us from eliminating canonicity altogether, then striving to represent unrepresentativeness might at least move us toward a post-canon, a canon whose very canonicity, though inescapable, is ironic, strategic, multiple, and self- contradictory.”36 Though plausible in terms of post-structural theoretical thought, such an anti- or post-canon model that represents unrepresentativeness can hardly be translated into a canonization practice. Since every culture and socio-political order aims at reproduction – for what is culture if not a socially “learned” convention? – a proclamation of the principle invalidity of the canon can by no means be relevant to the politics of the canon. It is on this point I want to suggest a re-evaluation of the paradigm, which critically questions existing criterion- and interpretation-models that have reinforced (more or less exclusively) the canonization of literary works of male authorship. Namely, canonized literary texts transmit specific cultural or ideological constellations and are elevated as a medium of collective memory only if a proper reception-context is provided. In other words, if literary texts are intended to contribute to the reproduction of culture, the culture must also produce a proper context for its reproduction. The feminist paradigm of the redefinition of “criterion- and interpretation-canon” by no means presupposes that all literature is essential with regard to
208 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST gender. In addition, neither does the notion of a women’s literature hypostatize literary production of women to some literature of radical “otherness”. Rather than simple renunciation of both ideas, on the ground of the 1960’s and 70’s popular essentialization of gender differences, I advocate their re-evaluation. Looking at the current canonization processes of these literatures, we again face mainly methods grounded in a kind of a homosocial bonding, working in favour of male authorship. Leaving behind the identity politics based on naturalized positive attributes, the re- evaluated notion of redefinition of “criterion- and interpretation- canon” allows not only the inclusion of women’s war writing into the canon of war literature but also of other literature, which depicts war beyond the frontline.37 In this way, war literature would be far less sensitive to bellicose nationalist instrumentalizations promoting heroic dying for a motherland. Redefining the existing perception of war literature would not only open nationally defined literary canons to alternative representations of war but in this way also push the politics of war memory toward a more transnational perspective and so reinforce reconciliation processes. In regards to Southern Slavic literary production, this would underline the importance of transcending boundaries between singular South Slavic philologies and literatures. Because of the obvious contiguities between Southeast European languages and literary histories, Southern Slavic phililogies should once again open to comparative approaches between Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and Montenegrin literatures, especially if they want to distinguish themselves as well-founded and relevant cultural critiques promoting cultural understanding and not war. Feminists of the ex- Yugoslav context have never stopped collaborating, learning from each other and supporting each other. Feminism proves once again to be a rich depository of methods, even in regard to the research of war literature or politics of memory of war promoting reconciliation.
209 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST NOTES
1 The term “post-Yugoslav wars” refers to the wars that followed and at the same time completed the disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. It includes the war in Slovenia in 1991, the war in Croatia from 1991–1995, the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1992–1995, the Kosovo war, the NATO bombardment of Serbia and Montenegro in 1999, and the Macedonian conflict. 2 Cf. Wolfgang Höpken, “Krieg und historische Erinnerung auf dem Balkan”, Geschichtliche Mythen in den Literaturen und Kulturen Ost-, Mittel- und Südosteuropas, eds. Eva Behring, Ludwig Richter [… et al.], Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart, 1999, pp. 371–379; Holm Sundhaussen, “Das Ustaša- Syndrom. Ideologie – Tatsachen – Folgen”, Das jugoslawische Desaster. Historische, sprachliche und ideologische Hintergründe, ed. Reinhard Lauer [… et al.], Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden, 1995, pp. 149–187, and “Geschichte und Vergangenheitspolitik”, DAAD Newsletter, 3/01, 2003, http://web. fu-berlin.de/soeg/newsletters_de.pdf. 3 The present article understands “ethnicity” and “nationality” as socially and culturally constructed categories of social and cultural affiliation defined by the idea of common origins. There are at least three theoretical perspectives related to these categories: a) the primordial conception defined by the idea of common origins (Edwards Shils, Clifford Geertz), b) the modernist concept of a common history, language, religion and social order (Benedict Anderson, Nira Yuval - Davis) and c) the common political representation in the form of the national state – state emphasis (Anthony Smith and Charles Taylor). The notion of “ethnicity” refers in the context of this paper mainly to the first two conceptions – primordial and modernist – while “nationality” is understood as incorporating all three of the above mentioned ideas – primordial, modernist, and state. In the functional notion of “nationality”, the dimension of political representation is of decisive importance. However, all three concepts should be thought of as social and cultural, and therefore ideological, constructs. 4 The first Yugoslav state was the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes formed in 1918 and renamed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1929. The latter dissolved after the occupation of the Axis- forces in 1941. The second and socialist Yugoslav state was founded with the AVNOJ-document in 1943 and dissolved in 1991 when the Republic of Slovenia and the Republic of Croatia declared their sovereignty. 5 For such an interpretative model, cf. Reinhard Lauer, “Das Wüten der Mythen. Kritische Anmerkungen zur serbischen heroischen Dichtung”, Das jugoslawische Desaster, 1995, pp. 107–148; John B. Allcock, Explaining Yugoslavia, Hurst & Co., London, 2000; Lynda E. Boose, “Crossing the River Drina: Bosnian Rape Camps, Turkish Impalement, and Serb Cultural Memory”, SIGNS 28/1, eds. Marianne Hirsch and Valerie Smith, 2002, pp. 71–96. 6 Dubravka Žarkov, “Gender, Orientalism and the History of Ethnic Hatred in the Former Yugoslavia”, Crossfires: Nationalism, Racism and Gender in Europe, eds. NiraYuval - Davis, Helma Lutz und Ann Poenix, Pluto Press, London, 2005, p. 111.
210 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST 7 Cf. Michel Foucault, Die Ordnung der Dinge, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1994; Die Ordnung des Diskurses, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, [1970] 1991. 8 Cf. Ivan Čolović, Bordell der Kriege – Folklore, Politik und Krieg, Fibre, Osnabrück, 1994; Svetlana Slapšak, Rat je počeo na Maksimiru. Govor mržnje u medijima (analiza pisanja “Politike” i “Borbe” 1987–1991), Medija Centar, Beograd, 1997, and Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation – Literature and Politics in Yugoslavia, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1998. 9 Cf. Slapšak, op. cit., and Wachtel, op. cit. 10 Benedict Anderson in his seminal work Imagined Communities described the rise of nationalism as going hand in hand with industrialisation and the expansion of capitalist modes of production. These movements served to reinforce vernacular languages at the expense of Latin, the language of clergy and king that had been dominant through the Middle Ages (cf. Benedicentury Anderson, Die Erfindung der Nation. Zur Karriere eines folgenreichen Konzepts, Ullstein Buchverlage, Berlin, 1998, pp. 39–47). During German Romanticism, the (German) vernacular was put forwards as the essence of the group that understood itself to be a nation that inhabited one territory and shared a common origin and history (Johann Gottfried Herder, “Über den Ursprung der Sprache”, Werke, vol. II, ed. Wolfgang Pross, Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich, 1987). As the historian Holm Sundhaussen claims, the citoyen-model of nationalism promoted by the French revolution and the nationalism of the German Romanticism intersect in the Southeast European context (cf. Joshua A. Fishman, Language and Nationalism. Two Integrative Essays, Newbury House Publishers, Rowley, Massachusetts, 1975, and Anderson, op. cit.). 11 Cf. Barbara Kunzmann - Müller, “Die slawischen Sprachen im ehemaligen Jugoslawien – Kontinuität und Diskontinuität der Entwicklung”, Sprache und Kultur in Südosteuropa, ed. Boris Forost Neusius, Arbeitspapier 26, Munich, 2005, p. 47–63; Zvonko Kovač, Poredbna i/ili innterkulturna povijest književnosti, Hrvatsko filološko društvo, Zagreb, 2001, and “Kanon u ‘medjuknjiževnim zajednicama’ i interkulturna povijest književnosti (u tezama)”, Sarajevske sveske, 8/9, Sarajevo, 2005, pp. 87–100. 12 Cf. Fishman, op. cit. 13 For the new standardizations of Serbo-Croatian, cf. Nataša Bašić, “Nasilna kroatizacija”, Jezik 41/5, Zagreb, 1994, pp. 157–160; Kunzman-Müller, op. cit.; Senahid Halilović, Pravopis bosanskog jezika, Preporod, Sarajevo, 1996; Dževad Jahić, Jezik bosanskih muslimana, Biblioteka Kljucanin, Sarajevo, 1991, and Dževad Jahić, Bosanski jezik u 100 pitanja i 100 odgovora, Ljiljan, Sarajevo, 1999. 14 The dialectal diversification of the Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian and Montenegrin derives from the different pronunciation of the Old Slavonic ě which is in the Serbian and Montenegrin variant pronounced as “e” and in the Croatian and Bosnian as “ije”. The most quoted example for this difference is the word “milk”, which is pronounced either as mleko or as mlijeko. Another dialectical differentiation comes from the articulation of the word “what” as either što, kaj or ča. These differences are, first of all, the result of the varying historical and socio-political contexts that marked Southeast Europe. The Croatian language was developed in contact with Italian, Hungarian, and
211 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST German and is written with Latin alphabet, while the Bosnian and Serbian language, in contrast, accepted many loanwords from Turkish and Arabic and are orthographically permissible in either the Latin or Cyrillic alphabets. Kunzmann-Müller, op. cit., p. 56. 15 Ibid. 16 Cf. Kovač, op. cit. 17 “Die öffentliche Erinnerung an den Krieg wird zum Teil jener Grammatik des Nationalismus, die überall in Europa, und keinesfalls nur auf dem Balkan, seit dem ausgehenden 18. Jahrhundert geschrieben worden ist und die bis heute vieles von ihrer Verbindlichkeit bewahrt hat. [...] Selbst verlorene Kriege wurden als ‘lohnende’, wenn auch gescheiterte Versuche kriegerischer Vollendung nationalstaatlicher Träume ungebrochen wachgehalten,” wrote Höpken in his study of the politics of war memory in Southeast Europe (cf. Höpken, op. cit., pp. 371–372). 18 Cf. Wachtel, op. cit. 19 Cf. ibid., pp. 197–226. 20 Ibid., pp. 197–198. 21 Cf. Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann (eds.), Kanon und Zensur. Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation II, Fink, Munich, 1987; Aleida Assmann, “Was sind kulturelle Texte?”, Literaturkanon – Medienereignis – Kultureller Text, ed. Andreas Poltermann, Erich Schmidt Verlag, Berlin, 1995, pp. 232–244; Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses, Beck, Munich, 2003; Jan Assmann, “Kollektives Gedächtnis und kulturelle Identität”, Kultur und Gedächtnis, eds. Jan Assmann and Tonio Hölscher, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1988, p. 9–19, and Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen, Beck, Munich, 1999. 22 The terms “exonormative” and “endonormative” are borrowed from the sociolinguistic where they are used to describe multilingual societies. An exonormative language orients itself on the language standard used in another state (e.g. Bosnian Croats orient themselves in their language on the language standard in Croatia). 23 Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, Maxwell Macmillan International, New York , 1991, p. 159. 24 Ibid. 25 Margaret R. Higonnet, “Cassandra’s Question. Do Women Write War Novels?”, Borderwork, Feminist Engagements with Comparative Literature, ed. Margaret Higonnet, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1994, p. 150. 26 Ibid., p. 160. 27 Cf. Höpken, op. cit. 28 In World War one, civilians comprised only 15% of all of war victims. The number of civilian victims increased to 65% in World War Two, and was 90% in the post-Yugoslav wars. Cf. Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites, Henry Holt, New York, 1997, pp. 206–227. 29 Cf. Philippe Lejeune, Der autobiographische Pakt, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1994.
212 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST 30 I remember the first time I heard about feminist approach to literature while studying comparative literature at University of Ljubljana. A well-known and respected professor offered eventually a very interesting lecture on methodology of literary theory. He though mentioned feminist literary theory only with couple of names of feminist literary researches, who “apparently have been occupied by representations of women in literature”. He “wasted” some five minutes of the whole year on going lecture on feminist literary theory. 31 Renate von Heydebrand, Simone Winko, “Geschlechterdifferenz und literarischer Kanon. Historische Beobachtungen und systematische Überlegungen”, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, 19/2, 1994, pp. 141–152. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 E.g. Elaine Showalter’s gynocriticism represents a contra-canon model. Cf. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1977. 35 Judith Butler, Das Unbehagen der Geschlechter, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1991. 36 Dale Robert Parker, “Material Choices: American Fictions, the Classroom, and the Canon”, American Literary History, 5/1, 1993, p. 105. 37 The case of post-Yugoslav war literatures teaches us that trespassing of strict genre definitions is by no means to be considered as a feature of only women’s writing.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allcock, John B., Explaining Yugoslavia, Hurst & Co., London, 2000. Anderson, Benedicentury, Die Erfindung der Nation. Zur Karriere eines folgenreichen Konzepts, Ullstein Buchverlage, Berlin, 1998. Assmann, Aleida and Assmann, Jan (eds.), Kanon und Zensur. Archäologie der literarischen Kommunikation II, Fink, Munich, 1987. Assmann, Aleida, “Was sind kulturelle Texte?”, Literaturkanon – Medienereignis – Kultureller Text, ed. Andreas Poltermann, Erich Schmidt Verlag, Berlin, 1995, pp. 232–244. Assmann, Aleida, Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses, Beck, Munich, 2003. Assmann, Jan, “Kollektives Gedächtnis und kulturelle Identität”, Kultur und Gedächtnis, eds. Jan Assmann, Tonio Hölscher, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1988, pp. 9–19. Assmann, Jan, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis. Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen, Beck, Munich, 1999.
Assmann, Jan, “Erinnerung und Identität – der ägyptische Weg”, Geschichts-Erzählung und 213 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Geschichts-Kultur. Zwei geschichtsdidaktische Leitbegriffe in der Diskussion, eds. Ulrich Baumgärtner, Waltraud Schreiber, Herbert Utz Verlag, Munich, 2001, pp. 137–158. Bašić, Nataša, “Nasilna kroatizacija”, Jezik 41/5, Zagreb, 1994, pp. 157–160. Boose, E. Lynda, “Crossing the River Drina: Bosnian Rape Camps, Turkish Impalement, and Serb Cultural Memory”, SIGNS 28/1, eds. Marianne Hirsch, Valerie Smith, 2002, pp. 71–96. Butler, Judith, Das Unbehagen der Geschlechter, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1991. Čolović, Ivan, Bordell der Kriege – Folklore, Politik und Krieg, Fibre, Osnabrück, 1994. Ehrenreich, Barbara, Blood Rites, Henry Holt, New York, 1997. Fishman, Joshua, A., Language and Nationalism – Two Integrative Essays, Newbury House Publishers, Rowley, Massachusetts, 1975. Foucault, Michel, Die Ordnung der Dinge, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1994. Foucault, Michel, Die Ordnung des Diskurses, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1991. Geertz, Clifford, Old Societies and New States, Free Press, New York, 1963. Halilović, Senahid, Pravopis bosanskog jezika, Preporod, Sarajevo, 1996. Herder, Johann Gottfried, “Über den Ursprung der Sprache”, Werke, vol. II, ed. Wolfgang Pross, Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich, 1987. Heydebrand, von Renate, und Winko, Simone, “Geschlechterdifferenz und literarischer Kanon. Historische Beobachtungen und systematische Überlegungen”, Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, 19/2, 1994, pp. 96–165. Higonnet, Margaret R., “Cassandra’s Question. Do Women Write War Novels?”, Borderwork, Feminist Engagements with Comparative Literature, ed. Margaret Higonnet, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London, 1994, pp. 144–161. Höpken, Wolfgang, “Krieg und historische Erinnerung auf dem Balkan”, Geschichtliche Mythen in den Literaturen und Kulturen Ost-, Mittel- und Südosteuropas, eds. Eva Behring, Ludwig Richter [… et al.], Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart, 1999, pp. 371–379. Hynes, Samuel, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, Maxwell Macmillan International, New York, 1991. Jahić, Dževad, Jezik bosanskih muslimana, Biblioteka Kljucanin, Sarajevo, 1991. Jahić, Dževad, Bosanski jezik u 100 pitanja i 100 odgovora, Ljiljan, Sarajevo, 1999. Kovač, Zvonko, Poredbna i/ili interkulturna povijest književnosti, Hrvatsko filološko društvo, Zagreb, 2001. Kovač, Zvonko, “Kanon u ‘medjuknjiževnim zajednicama’ i interkulturna povijest književnosti (u tezama)”, Sarajevske sveske, 8/9, Sarajevo, 2005, pp. 87–100. Kunzmann - Müller, Barbara, “Die slawischen Sprachen im ehemaligen Jugoslawien – Kontinuität und Diskontinuität der Entwicklung”, Sprache und Kultur in Südosteuropa, ed. Boris Forost Neusius, Arbeitspapier 26, Munich, 2005, pp. 47–63. Lauer, Reinhard, “Das Wüten der Mythen. Kritische Anmerkungen zur serbischen heroischen Dichtung”, Das jugoslawische Desaster, ed. Reinhard Lauer, Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden, 1995, pp. 107–148.
214 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Lejeune Philippe, Der autobiographische Pakt, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1994. Lord, Bates Albert, Der Sänger erzählt – Wie ein Epos entsteht, Carl Hanse Verlag, Munich, 1966. Parker, Dale Robert, “Material Choices: American Fictions, the Classroom, and the Canon”, American Literary History 5/1, 1993, pp. 89–110. Shils, Edward, “Primordial, personal, sacred and civil ties”, British Journal of Sociology, 7, London, 1957, pp. 113–145. Showalter, Elaine, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1977. Smith, Anthony, The Ethnic Origin of Nations, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1986. Slapšak, Svetlana, Rat je počeo na Maksimiru. Govor mržnje u medijima (analiza pisanja “Politike” i “Borbe” 1987–1991), Medija Centar, Beograd, 1997. Sundhaussen, Holm, “Das Ustaša-Syndrom. Ideologie – Tatsachen – Folgen”, Das jugoslawische Desaster. Historische, sprachliche und ideologische Hintergründe, ed. Reinhard Lauer [… et al.], Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden, 1995, pp. 149–187. Sundhaussen, Holm, “Geschichte und Vergangenheitspolitik”, DAAD Newsletter, 3/01, 2003, http://web.fu-berlin.de/soeg/newsletters_de.pdf. Taylor, Charles, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1992. Ugrešić, Dubravka, Muzej bezuvjetne predaje, Samizdat and Konzor, Belgrade – Zagerb, 2002. Wachtel, Brauch Andrew, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation – Literature and Politics in Yugoslavia, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1998. Yuval - Davis, Nira, Geschlecht und Nation, Die Brottsuppe, Emmendingen, 2001. Žarkov, Dubravka, “Gender, Orientalism and the History of Ethnic Hatred in the Former Yugoslavia”, Crossfires: Nationalism, Racism and Gender in Europe, eds. Nira Yuval - Davis, Helma Lutz and Ann Poenix, Pluto Press, London, 2005, pp. 105–121.
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216 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST JELENA PETROVIĆ
THE POLITICS OF FEMINIST WRITING/READING/ TRANSLATION
The new sex/gender distribution in (post)Yugoslavia, reflecting the changes in ideology, social relations, political arrangements, national mapping and cultural negotiations – some of which were rather violent – fostered some hesitant academic reflection: we only need to think of the implied political/national pressure on the academic population, and of the (until recently) prevailing attitude that accepted ideological and political recommendations without much debate. And I should add, of course, the obvious zone of interest being opened up in the national setting concerning academics who are all too ready to express acceptable views, and subsequently to be granted certain media attention, certain privileges inside the state apparatus, project funds and other potential non-transparent gains. Those who were/would be stubborn enough to present views (or even research results) which do not coincide with the national criteria could risk being labelled “traitors” or find themselves silenced in the vast process of the forming of a national science, art, culture. Of course, women’s academic and activist networks were and still are the first on the list for this kind of “exclusion”. For this reason, the topic of changes in sex/gender “distribution” and of the re/ emancipation of public and academic space is still very sensitive and could be deemed to be high-risk for local academia because it is strongly connected, first and foremost, with the critique of the (ethno)nationalist ideology.
217 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST The Yugoslav war and the post-Yugoslav transitional reversals1 continuously activate an array of women, in particular, feminist responses to perpetuating ethno-nationalist discourse, to the arbitrary politics of gender (re-traditionalised) roles and to the abuse of women’s public representations. These feminist interventions into mis/ interpretatative models of history, memory, culture, language, art and politics of the recent past, were not powerful enough to break through the virulent ethno-nationalist narratives and divisions in the (post)war period, but they certainly have drown a red line with regard to the emancipatory politics of everyday life for the future. At this point, my intention is to offer some examples of women’s writing/reading/ translation that are very important for the ongoing process of the historization of post/Yugoslav space. This concept is being highlighted to resist the misogyny, chauvinism, ethno-nationalism and the political loss of memory.
HISTORY VS. MEMORY: THE APPROPRIATION AND ETHNICISATION OF WOMEN’S BODIES
Despite the emancipation of women after World War II, initially in the urban areas of Yugoslavia, and in spite of official proclamations of gender equality, the literary canon that was structured during the “golden years” of Yugoslav socialism remained biased towards men and a male perspective. During the socialist period from 1945 through the 1970s, as women acquired a new – Yugoslavian identity, representations of women based on religion and ethnicity were allowed only insofar as they served to deconstruct outdated cultural categories in favour of new national ones based on an ideology of “brotherhood and unity”. Responding to the new demands of socialist society, the requirement was for literature to be politically eligible, with a few exceptions being made such as pertained to the particular cultural settings of rural/ urban women, sometimes stereotyped by her/their presumed ethnic background. At the beginning of the 1980s, women’s bodies were symbolically used to mark ethnic territory within nationalist discourse. Slogan: “brotherhood and unity”, as a symbol of equal rights and great love between brothers, turned into “fratricidal war” under the new, but at the same time a well-known symbol of struggle for “unique, pure, and
218 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST more valuable ethnic identity”. The gaze in power, the male gaze, is immediately informed by this woman’s body; in the public, through this gaze, the body of a woman is transformed into an abstract notion of Nation, Motherland, Liberty...2 Julie Mostov, analysing this asserts: “That is, not only are women’s bodies, symbols of the fecundity of the nation and the vessels for its reproduction, but they are also territorial markers. That is mothers, wives, and daughters designate the space of the nation and are at the same time the property of the nation and its sons.”3 During the war, women were ab/used in the public discourse as an ambivalent semiotic construct, presenting “our” and “inimical”, mothers/sisters of our heroes and mothers/sisters of “the Other”, the enemy. As a result, women’s positions in the nationalist discourse becomes arbitrary – in fact, manipulative. The women’s bodies themselves became boundaries of the nation and the deeply established nationalist ideology and the war propaganda. The manipulation of women’s bodies, symbolically marked as “ethnic territory” in national discourse, has its origins in the media in the 1980s, where stories were spread about the systematic “ethnic” rape of Serbian women perpetrated by Albanian men, and about an Albanian demographic war in Kosovo against the Serbian nation, effected by an “excessive” birth rate. This period could be identified as the beginning of the emerging nationalist discourse in public. The Serbian state authority and people in the public eye such as journalists, national poets and others have fabricated various stories and verbal clusters, liminal with poetry and epic tradition (originating in Kosovo myth) which have been used in cultural and in scientific discourse ever since. The theory of a great national conspiracy against the Serbian nation included women in the arbitrary ethno-nationalist context. The new public discourse included terms such as “ biological extermination”. Serbian mothers, it was asserted, were burdened with “modernity” whereas Albanian women were “machines” for reproduction. The volatile existence of such rare Albanians who would provided evidence for this Serbian nationalism, evoked a reminiscence of the “noble savage” of literary, as well colonial tradition.4 After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, gender, class, and ethnicity became the markers of the renewed national identities that arose from transitional reversals and nationalist discourse. In addition, stereotypical representations of woman were again warped, this time to be used in war propaganda. At the beginning of the 1990s, the “ traditional”
219 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST story about the molestation of the Serbian nation by Croats since the time of World War II became the great topic of a renewed literary and public establishment. National conflicts, dating back to World War II, were now presented as a barbaric and cruel continuation of the acts of those collaborators of fascism known as the Ustashe. Memories of that period and of this military formation were recalled also in public speeches, the songs of football fans at stadiums, and in the hyper- production of nationalist literature.5 At the same time, the media in Croatia carried regular reports about mass rapes of Muslim women in Bosnia, exclusively by Serbian soldiers. According to the official media, Croatian women were raped in incomparable fewer numbers. All these stories of Muslim women, in which they were represented as less capable of defending themselves due to “their primitive traditional backgrounds”, were very close to recognizable propaganda. There is no doubt that gender was the basic element for the construction of a victimized identity for the nation.6 Ethno-nationalist discourse, based on the rape of Muslim women by national soldiers – Serbs – was clearly used for war propaganda, not in the interests of women, but in the interests of ethnic identity. The identification of woman’s bodies with the nation and with the battleground originated in such deep nationalist ideology as assigns active roles – the “subject position” to men who will wage war, protect and expend their territory and possessions: “that is, they forge their identities as males, as agents of the nation over the symbolic and physical territory of the feminine homeland which must be secured and protected from transgression and which holds the seeds and blood of past and future warriors, and over and through the actual bodies of women who reproduce the nation, define its physical limits, and preserve its sanctity. Women’s bodies can be seen as providing the battleground for men’s wars: over this battleground of women’s bodies-borders are transgressed and redrawn”.7 During the war, similar ideologically-charged representations of Muslim women – appearing in Western accounts as information about atrocities against women in the war – were spread around the world by sensational articles and books and even the repetition of hackneyed stereotypes in academic publications. For example, according to Pulitzer prize winning journalist, Roy Gutman, who reported on the genocide in Bosnia, Muslim women raped in the war continued to live in fear of rejection and ostracism, a situation that was most likely due to their traditional practice of living in silence, which was “conservative
220 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST and primitive.” In the foreword of the collection of articles, edited by Alexandra Stiglmayer, Gutman says that rape of women is a part of every war, but, in the case of the war in Bosnia, the war rapes played a unique role with considerably deeper consequences. Again we come across the stereotypical construct of Muslim women – Muslim women grow up and live in Bosnian villages in “conservative society”, meaning that they stayed virgins until marriage – silent, conservative and primitive, without their own political voice. This is the reason, Gutmun claims, why raped Muslim women continue to live in fear of “rejection and ostracism” as well as in fear that they will stay “unmarried and without children”.8 The feminist, Catherine MacKinnon, also contributed to this collection of articles, with two articles: Turning Rape into Pornography: Postmodern Genocide and: Rape, Genocide, and Women’s Human Rights. argues that the rape of Muslim women was distributed as pornography for the purposes of the war propaganda. A leading campaigner against pornography in America, she used the war rapes in Bosnia as an illustrative argument for her activist research (Serbs raped women in Bosnia’s war because the Serbian market was overrun by pornography before it). MacKinnon also estimated that there were over 30,000 cases of pregnancy as a consequence of rapes in Bosnia. She published the uninformed data to prove her thesis. Thus, it could be repeated everywhere, without justification, as if the non- existent, so-called pornography continues to exist. Obviously, we share the aim of identifying abuse, depolitisation and the manipulation of war victims with MacKinnon’s anti-pornography campaign.9 In 1999, the feminist writer, Slavenka Drakulić, an opponent of nationalist discourse in the early 90’s, published a novel: S.: a Novel about the Balkans. A few years after the “witch hunt”10 to which this novel was subjected, she published a novel about the rape of Muslim women committed by Serbian soldiers, which was based on documentary material and personal narratives of war victims in Bosnia. The letter “S” in the title, a signifier of the main character in the novel, represents a real teacher from a small village in Bosnia. The story begins in a maternity ward in Sweden where S incessantly recollects the terrible “women’s room” in a Serbian camp where, together with the other women there, she was exposed every day to casual rape and violence. She does not know what to do with her newborn child; she can not overcome her traumatic experiences in the Serbian camp, nor the fact that one of those Serbian soldiers is the father of her
221 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST child. The book contains many terrifying images, many monstrous acts, and follows the journey of a damaged women’s existence from hatred to the love that can triumph over it through giving a birth to a child... At the launch of the Slovenian edition in Ljubljana, the author explained that it was her intention to produce a literary reconstruction of the emotional and psychological state of women victims in the Bosnian war, which was very difficult to relate from the individualized documentaries, personal stories, and even from intimate conversations with them. She decided to give a reconstructed collective voice to her fictionalised victim.11 The original title of the book: Kao da me nema (As I was not there) was changed into: S.: a Novel of the Balkans. This was done at the behest of the American publisher to make it more “attractive” to the Western reader. For many reviewers, this was a very convincing literary rendition of the monstrous side of the Bosnian war and the violence against Muslim women: “The number of Muslim rape victims has been hard to establish (estimates are as high as 60,000), and the depths of the damage even more difficult to comprehend. Hidden behind the newspaper accounts – the mind-numbing policy changes, drawn and redrawn borders, and fluctuating statistics – are the stories of what happened to thousands of Muslim women and how they have dealt with their experience.”12 Reviews after the first, American edition, confirmed the earlier media presentation of the Bosnian war, as a simplified version of the struggle between good and bad guys from the Balkans, happening somewhere beyond the TV screen, whilst at the same time promoting Slavenka Drakulić’s new book as a bestseller. This example shows how “blurred” writing can fall into the trap of essentialising victim by ethnic origin and of repeating the stereotype of the Balkans as a dark province of bickering barbarisms in order to be commercial beyond the local borders. The parallel to those complex narratives on war rapes is also well illustrated in an academic presentation of the same problem, offering very similar manipulative twists; as, for instance, in the Alexandra Stiglemayer’ collection of articles – often serving as a source for feminist theoreticians who research war violence. Obviously, we are dealing with various phenomena here, with different policies and different intentionalities, some merely clumsy, others deliberately exploititative for gain; however, each of them has required the requisition, in-depth, of a real life women’s trauma by a critical feminist approach.
222 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST FEMINIST COUNTER VIEW
Women who were not misled by the euphoria of ethno-nationalist representation and the propaganda enveloped by the quasi-parliament democracy of the early 1990s and its transitional promises were heavily attacked by the public (qualified as witches, horns, bastards, apatrids etc.) in spite of the fact that their influence, across Yugoslavia as a whole, was marginal. So, they became the targets of the oppressive ethno-patriots and national warriors and were declared traitors to their own country. In the context of these new ethno-nationalist priorities and divisions, many women writers pointed out the ab/use of women’s representation and role in ethno-nationalist and war propaganda. A different generation of female writers, such as: Dubravka Ugrešić, Daša Drndić, Alma Lazarevska, Maruša Krese, Ljiljana Đurđić, Ferida Duraković, Marija Ivanović, Irena Vrkljan, Šejla Šehabović, Tanja Stupar, Adisa Bašić and others, confronted and continue to confront the conventional literary forms of women’s representations based on patriarchal codes, media spin and new nationalist values. These writers and poets have introduced an alternative to the myth “about the Balkan syndrome of reciprocal tragedy”, about “prisoners of an unfinished history” and about “helpless victims of violence”. In reference to Renata Jambrešić Kirin, for many women’s writers, the feeling of symbolic and cultural disorientation was of more significance than any feeling of de-territorialization. The need to face up to the moral crisis in society was more decisive than any feeling of uprootedness, or than any fact of historical discontinuity. Furthermore, for them, the loss of any rational and reasonable vision of the future was more destructive than any decay of the traditional values claimed by some great collective identity, where there could be no individual input to that “identity”. Their feeling of displacement put those authors in the position described by Jambrešić Kirin in the oxymoron: homeless at home.13 This auto-referential fragmentation, a transgression of the classical genres and favorable themes implied by the literary canon – as well as the textuality engaged between historical, political, social and actual events – has led to a politically aware and emancipatory discourse. Beside those women writers, many women’s academics and, activists produced a number of public events, protests, publications in order to resist ethno-national oppression and war discourses (Svetlana Slapšak, Rada Iveković, Biljana Kašić, Staša Zajović, Reana Senjković, Ines Prica and many others).14
223 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST All these women’s writings, feminist academic works and other texts concerning war crimes, traumas and refugees are engaging many feminists to develop this discourse further still, and in uncompromising ways. The proliferation of work on feminism and gender in former Yugoslavia continuously draws attention to the quantity and variety in women’s writing today. Yet, uniquely, on the ground of the former Yugoslavia, individual-country treatment of women’s writing has tended to neglect this area as a knot of embarrassment, nostalgia and loss, which at the same time, is a knot full of potential for questioning the criteria of plausibility of the dominant ethno-centric and misogynist ideologies across the whole region. New research in the field, that shifts in-between the politics of movement and the politics of knowledge, offers a vision that aims to go beyond the state of disappointment and stubbornness which many feminist scholars and women’s writers in post-Yugoslav region have felt in the last decade and a half.15 In this vision, affective networks of personal relationships continue to have a prominent role in finding alternative routes in feminist theory and criticism for discussing emancipatory politics and developing emergent knowledge. These personal relationships do not in any way build secluded safe-havens, but rather give an impetus for developing more collaborative ways of knowledge production and exchange and for taking concrete steps to foster those subjects in the region. These are “epistemological cells”, mobile and technologically-savvy, not eschewing confrontations with entrenched academia, but at the same time promoting critical thinking and academic research in the field.16 This method of collective work sets up a platform for creating feminist critique, theory and practice rooted in local/comparative specificities in such a way that new theory can emerge from local practices and from insights which are too painful and embarrassing for the dominant ideologies to deal with and, as such, need to be repressed by them. Such politics of intellectual and everyday life as intervenes in local, regional and international academia provides common ground for reflection by any individual or collaborative effort in the field of gender and indeed other kinds of interdisciplinary works involved in shaping new feminist strategies and epistemological models of knowledge production.
224 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST DEALING WITH UN/KNOWN MEMORIES AND WRITINGS
It the wide context of women’s and feminist production in the post- Yugoslav region, I would like, in particular, to draw attention to the case of a heavily suppressed and little known female author Svetlana Đorđević. She wrote a kind of a documentary diary, representing one of the most important genres of (war) women’s writings. The book by Svetlana Đorđević Testimony about Kosovo, is one of those rare testimonies and documents that can be recognized as documentary autobiographical prose, directly translating an event into a narration and rationally transforming difficult experience into consciousness whilst, at the same time, offering a socio-political reading of the war. The author, who has had neither a literary education nor literary experience, clearly defines the purpose of her writing as a testimony. This is not, therefore, in classical literary terms, an autobiographical novel, but more a kind of transmission of reality, intertwining documentary prose, political commentaries, personal confessions, flashbacks of horrific experiences and, at times, a translation of women’s culture woven through auto-reflection on terrifying war events. Svetlana Đorđević testifies to the experience of life in Kosovo and denies every illusion about the false universal importance of great historical narratives, encouraging awareness that the tragedy of each individual destiny needs to be read as a historical one. Although it evokes memories of personal confessions, this book is completely published in an edition of Documents of the Belgrade Fund for Humanitarian Law. It stands as evidence of war violence and crimes that were suppressed by the fabricated historical war images of Kosovo. This evidence exposes the falsified images that operated as and still holds sway as the unquestionable truth among the Serbian elites in power both then and now. This almost unknown example of autobiographical women’s writing, witnessing the reality of war from the perspective of a non-professional female author, Svetlana Đorđević, is important and interesting from many perspectives: as a testimony to war crimes and everyday life in the context of war, as an account of brutal family and state violence, first in Bosnia and then in Kosovo, as a discursive transgression of the limits and rules established and demanded by nationalist politics and patriarchal codes, as a personal struggle for a proper job and a
225 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST decent life, as well as all those human and civil rights to which she believes she is entitled, as a woman who lived, once upon a time, in an egalitarian socialist society. All the elements of her writing merge the actuality of war events with her insights and experiences and subvert the dominant language of nationalist propaganda. In that sense, she is the witness of history who, by opposing all the political bonds and restrictions of the dominant nationalist elites, reveals and saves pieces of the collective memory of the “Other”. After publication, because of its political potency, violent opposition to her book has meant that her life is permanently threatened by these same elites and she can no longer live safely.17 Svetlana Đorđević was witness to the brutal violence that was considered both a part of ethno-national tradition and a vital state- building tool during the war. At the start of her account, she describes, in a restrained way, aspects of the “home” and domestic violence she experienced and then directs her memories to the violence of the state against its own citizens. This state violence was sometimes carried out systematically, but often quite spontaneously, and was a logical consequence of the state depravity caused by its ethno-nationalist politics. The introductory chapter of the book takes place in Bosnia where, coincidentally, the brother of Svetlana Đorđević became part of one of the “heroic” legends in the armed forces that was “created” in Belgrade (known as the red berets unit). However, shortly after, behind the scenes, the brother then becomes a victim of the very political crimes of which, previously, he had also been a perpetrator. She tries to find a way to get to Bosanski Šamac in the middle of the war chaos to visit her brother who has been arrested. Trying to help him, she decides to travel to two of the nerve-centres of the war – Belgrade and Novi Sad (although the state was never been officially at war) – where she confronted those who were later accused of war crimes in the International Tribunal in The Hague – the most notorious of these being Franko Simatović Franki. She describes the enormity of these experiences and the danger of the situations she found herself in – noting, at the same time all the names and places of the events. This attention to detail was the main reason for the pursuit and harassment she experienced after the publication of her book. Several years later, in the summer of 1995, looking to improve her living conditions, Svetlana Đorđević was misled by the state program for Kosovo which was publicised in the Serbian media. She moved
226 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST to Kosovo and started to work as a taxi driver at the Priština airport where she stayed until the ratification of the Kumanovo agreement. From 1995 until 1998, Đorđević drove Albanians through the many checkpoints in Kosovo, gaining their confidence, but at the same time, anger towards her grew among the Serbian taxi-drivers, local authorities and other nationalists in power. Because she called for the preservation of human conscience, instead of waking “national consciousness”, Svetlana Đorđević unwittingly became a witness to the daily humiliation and harassment of Albanian civilians. This culminated in 1998, when open acts of ethnic cleansing commenced and at the same time, she became a victim of police brutality. This shocking confession reveals the evidence of hidden places and names from the very recent past and above all demonstrates her courage in confronting a conspiracy of silence concerning crimes that people in Kosovo were well aware of throughout that time. Svetlana Đorđević is a woman of the industrial, socialist times: she strives for absolute independence, emphasizes the need for financial autonomy and the socialist ideal that addresses the woman who is trapped between patriarchal tradition and promised emancipation in the real world. In her documentary prose, she testifies to the disturbing events which society silently condones and the state continuously hides, making visible the connection between the causes and consequences, on and between victims, perpetrators and defendants, of the corrupting ethno-nationalist war. The different situations that she experiences, and her impetuous reactions in moments of crisis, render the process of the transformation of the reality of war and its mundane-ness into the stuff of vivid documentary narration. Although occasionally falling short, because of unsuccessful attempts to espouse a literary aesthetic, and although hard to categorise by genre, this politically significant book, through its highly authentic descriptions, dialogues and common sense reflections, testifies to the horror that happened in Kosovo – the mutilation of bodies, burnings and molestations, refugees, harassments, as well as naming those responsible for those crimes. Notwithstanding the lack of literary education and writing skills, a feminist reading of her literary testimony, prompts new questions of the engaged politics of memory and women’s writing, towards a knowledge production that will stand for the politics of equality, solidarity and communality and will break the rules imposed by the ethno-nationalist and patriarchal hegemony, particularly that of the recent past.
227 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST A NEW PRACTICE OF SPEAKING, WRITING, KNOWING AND, ULTIMATELY, LIVING
The politics of the feminist writing/reading/translation in the post- Yugoslav space has emancipatory potential, not only for the “old” concept of literary discourse, but also for society in a broader sense, as well. It is used, in the first place, as a fusing metaphor for a range of social, political and cultural transformations towards g/local and emergent knowledge production. Harnessing the analytic tools provided by current gender studies and women’s writing from the 1990s until today, we must engage transformative feminist strategies, which insist on the politics of equality, and which shape the socio- political and cultural space. Using these strategies it is possible to explore and strengthen women’s authorship amidst the ongoing “culture of political amnesia” and to establish the main categories that must be employed in constructing distinctive feminist epistemologies. Following Rosi Braidotti and her (feminist) materialist theory of becoming, this sustainability argues for “a re-grounding of the subject in a materially embedded sense of responsibility and ethical accountability” for the society and environments. As “an alternative to a global process of queering that would be merely a proliferation of quantified differences and not a qualitative de-centering of hyper-individualism”, Braidotti’s redefinition of the political subject is the sustainable shifts or changes emerged by nomadic subjects in their active resistance against being subsumed in the commodification of their own diversity. What is most significant for this concept of “becomings” is that “their time frame is always the future anterior, that is to say a linkage across present and past in the act of constructing and actualising possible futures. “18 Broadly speaking, this epistemology of feminist writing/reading/ translation shows the importance, when it is dealing with these “difficult subjects”, of a strong interconnection between socio-historical context, political commitment and subject redefinition in the process of learning about the past and, in the last instance, in the emergent process of the transformation of everyday life.
228 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST NOTES
1 The term “transitional reversal” at this point is being used to indicate the direction of causal thinking, not simply from the economic to the political sphere, but towards ethno-national rhetoric, as the locus of meaning, patterning and relating a turbulent transformation of the public sphere which is tending to conceptualise dominant politics as a power contest about identities or a “cultural” system/s – contextualising this power contest as an arbitrary, revisionist and manipulative apparatus for the struggles of power and capital. 2 Cf. Rada Iveković, “Women, Nationalism and War: ‘Make Love, Not War’”, Hypatia, vol. 8, no. 4, 1993, pp. 113–127. 3 Julie Mostov, “‘Our Women’/‘Their Women’: Symbolic Boundaries, Territorial Markers and Violence in the Balkans”, Pro Femina, Časopis za žensku književnost i kulturu, no. 3, 1995, Beograd, p. 210. 4 Wendy Bracewell has analyzed these elements of nationalist ideology in: “Women, Motherhood and Contemporary Serbian Nationalism”, Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 19, no. 1/2, 1996, pp. 25–33. Cf. Nevena Ivanović, “Appropriation and Manipulation of Women’s writing in the Nationalist Discourse in Serbia in the nineties”, R.E.Č., vol. 59, no. 5, September 2000, pp. 199–243. 5 Many illustrative examples of this type of popular “ethno” culture were analysed in: Ivan Čolović, Bordel ratnika: folklor, politika i rat, Biblioteka XX vek, Beograd, 1994. Cf. Svetlana Slapšak, Ogledi o bezbrižnosti, Radio B92, edicija Apatridi, Beograd, 1994, etc. 6 According to Dubravka Žarkov’s analysis, the construct of the “collective victim” in Bosnia was “the raped Muslim woman”. In Serbia the collective victim was the “Serbs” (this collective construct of victim does not allow anybody else to be a legitimate victim, furthermore it obstructs any conversation or investigation of Serbian war crimes, particularly women’s rape, even where the victims are Serbian women), and in Croatia, it was “Croatia, the Motherland”, not the Croatian people. Cf. Dubravka Žarkov, “War Rapes in Bosnia On Masculinity, Femininity and Power of the Rape Victim Identity”, Tijdschrift voor Criminologie, vol. 39, no. 2, 1997, pp. 140–151. 7 Julie Mostov, op. cit., p. 213. 8 Roy Gutman, “Foreword”, in: Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, ed. Alexandra Stiglmayer, University of Nebraska Press, 1994, p. ix–xiii. 9 Catherine A. MacKinnon, “Turning Rape into Pornography: Postmodern Genocide and Rape, Genocide, and Women’s Human Rights”, in: Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia- Herzegovina, pp. 73–81, 183–193. 10 Regarding their activities, five women journalists and writers (Dubravka Ugrešić, Jelena Lovrić, Rada Iveković, Vesna Kesić and Slavenka Drakulić) were accused by the establishment for their public and provocative statements about war rapes in Bosnia. One of the most aggressive newspaper’s titles from that period was: Croatia’s Feminist Rape Croatia (“Witches from Rio, Croatia Feminist Rape Croatia”, Globus, December 11, 1992). The Croatian feminist activists founded a
229 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST centre for help for all raped women in the war. Their statements were declared as fascist, and their appearance in the public, especially abroad, was considered dangerous for Croatia. In the eyes of Croatian public, they became “instruments��������������������������������������������������������������������� of Serbian racist and imperial politics”. That statement was followed by the publication of their personal information (national identities – “confirmed by recount of blood cells”, family statistics, addresses, and similar) in already quoted article, so that anyone wanting to harass them was now equipped with the necessary data. Then, five feminists from Croatia were declared to be five witches from Rio (at 58th PEN Congress hold in Rio de Janeiro), five feminists from Croatia were the reason of humiliation of Croat nation toward investigatory team of popular newspaper Globus. Witch-hunt in the Croatia public had a ritual meaning and represented an initiation (rite de passage) of the renewed national patriarchal system. 11 Promotion of the Slovenian edition in Ljubljana, 2002. 12 American editorial review written by John Ponycsanyi, 2000. 13 Renata Jambrešić Kirin, “Personal Narratives on War: A Challenge to Women’s Essays and Ethnography in Croatia”, in: War Discourse, Women Discourse, TOPOS, vol. 2, no. 1–2, 2000, ISH, Ljubljana, pp. 285–323. 14 Cf. The Project 1,000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize for 2005 (including also several women from the former Yugoslavia: Svetlana Slapšak, Staša Zajović, Azra Hasanbegović, Sonja Biserko and others), http://www.1000peacewomen.org/eng/friedensfrauen.php. 15 Cf. Sanja Potkonjak, Damir Arsenijević, Ajla Demiragić and Jelena Petrović, “Između politike pokreta i politike znanja – feminizam i ženski/rodni studiji u Hrvatskoj, Bosni i Hercegovini i Sloveniji”, Studia ethnologica Croatica, vol. 20, no. 1, Filozofski fakultet sveučilišta u Zagrebu, 2009; Damir Arsenijević, Ajla Demiragić, Jelena Petrović, Sanja Potkonjak, Maja Bogojević, “Mapping the Key Concepts in Gender Studies and Creating a Cartography of their Balkan Specificities”, Identities, Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, no. 12, Research Center in Gender Studies, Euro-Balkan Institute, Skopje, 2007; Damir Arsenijević, Ajla Demiragić and Jelena Petrović, “Women Writing in Red ink: Women’s Writing and Socio-political Change in ex- Yugoslavia”, in: Gender and Identity: Theories from and/or on Southeastern Europe, Women’s Studies and Gender Research Center, Beograd, 2006. 16 This new platform aims to set up regular academic exchanges: through conferences, joint research projects and publications, external examining, visiting lecturing, joint journal editorial-board memberships. For example: HESP ReSET Regional seminar (2004–2006): Gender and Women’s Studies in South-Eastern Europe: Rethinking Ideologies and Strategies of their European Integration, Euro-Balkan Institute, Skopje, Macedonia, HESP ReSET Seminar 2007–2010: Cultures of Memory and Emancipatory Politics: Past and Communality in the Post-Yugoslav Spaces, Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina, The International platform of Yugoslav studies, publications: ProFemina, Journal for Women’s Writings and Culture, Belgrade, Serbia; Newspaper: Front slobode, Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Festival of women’s contemporary art – City of Women, Ljubljana, Slovenia, etc. 17 “I write a book about my life – for myself, but also for all the women and little girls who have behind them, or in front of them, the lives similar to mine. It gets published and I walk through
230 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Hell one more time – condemnations, curses in foul language, insults, and threats. I live in fear; family proclaims me a traitor because, I think, they want to justify the actions of my father. Hideous threats come from my brother, from his war pals, and from their sympathizers. An unknown man assails me (and will never be known to the public, although it is not his only crime), but he is accompanied by another man, whose face I do not see and whose voice I do not hear. I struggle; they do not succeed to inject me with the full amount of liquid which they had prepared in a syringe. I awake in a hospital. Yet another hell, larger than the one I’ve been passing through in these last few years … At the insistence of NGOs, policemen guard me (most of them had been in Kosovo and know me very well). Retaliation goes on and on: instead of feeling safer, I am under house arrest, I am forbidden to contact anyone, my phone is listened to, my letters are examined (so, I write only the things that can ‘pass’), they are provoking me, cross- interrogating me in my own house. One more time I feel death staring me in the eye or me staring it in the eye, doesn’t matter which. On 9th August I start a hunger strike. Police knows it, they laugh a little at me and that is all, they are constantly around me, I cannot go anywhere without their ‘accompaniment’, cannot talk to anyone. Three days later I leave for Beograd (Belgrade), accompanied by two policemen from Vranje, hoping to be received for talk by anyone in Belgrade police central (I meant to ask them to annul the ‘protection’ orders, they of course know that I am on a hunger strike, they laugh at me a little and say ‘you must return to Vranje today, willingly or by force, because our colleagues, from Vranje, have other obligations too’). Mid-August: Belgrade intellectuals speak up with an open letter in my support. Hunger strike continues until 27th August. Staša Zajović and Zorica Trifunović help me to get out of Vranje and to shake off my Vranje escort, and from 28th August to 4th September I live in the hotel Balkan in Belgrade, but ‘guarded’ by the policemen from the Unit for protection of persons and witnesses. […] With their assistance I leave for Croatia, this is my chance to stay abroad and never again return to Serbia, but in the meantime my husband gets ghastly threats. So back I go to help him to somehow extricate himself from Serbia also. From 15th September to 14th January 2005 I live incognito in Vera’s place, and then I depart, with my family, hoping that I will never, ever, have to go back again.” (Http://www. alexandria-press.com/Bio/svetlana_djordjevic.htm) 18 Cf. Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, Polity, Cambridge –������������������� Malden, MA, 2006.
231 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arsenijević, Damir, Ajla Demiragić and Jelena Petrović, “Women Writing in Red ink: Women’s Writing and Socio-political Change in ex-Yugoslavia”, in: Gender and Identity: Theories from and/or on Southeastern Europe, Women’s Studies and Gender Research Center, Beograd, 2006. Arsenijević, Damir, Ajla Demiragić, Jelena Petrović, Sanja Potkonjak, Maja Bogojević, “Mapping the Key Concepts in Gender Studies and Creating a Cartography of their Balkan Specificities”, Identities, Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture, no. 12, Research Center in Gender Studies, Euro-Balkan Institute, Skopje, 2007. Bracewell, Wendy, “Women, Motherhood and Contemporary Serbian Nationalism”, Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 19, no. 1/2, 1996, pp. 25–33.���� Braidotti, Rosi, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, Polity, Cambridge and Malden, MA, 2006. Čolović, Ivan, Bordel ratnika: folklor, politika i rat, Biblioteka XX vek, Beograd, 1994. Đorđević, Svetlana (authors and contributors), http://www.alexandria-press.com/Bio/svetlana_ djordjevic.htm. Đorđević, Svetlana, Svedočanstvo o Kosovu, Fond za humanitarno pravo, Beograd, 2003. Drakulić, Slavenka, Kao da me nema, Feral Tribune, Split, 1999. Gutman, Roy, “Foreword”, in: Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, ed. Alexandra Stiglmayer, University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Ivanović, Nevena, “Appropriation and Manipulation of Women’s writing in the Nationalist Discourse in Serbia in the nineties”, R.E.Č., vol. 59, no. 5, September 2000. Iveković, Rada, “Women, Nationalism and War: “‘Make Love, Not War’”, Hypatia, vol. 8, no. 4, 1993. Jambrešić-Kirin, Renata, “Personal Narratives on War: A Challenge to Women’s Essays and Ethnography in Croatia”, in: War Discourse, Women Discourse, TOPOS, vol. 2, no. 1–2,�������������� 2000, ISH, Ljubljana, pp. 285–323. MacKinnon, Catherine A., “Turning Rape into Pornography: Postmodern Genocide and Rape, Genocide, and Women’s Human Rights”, pp. 73–81,����������������� 183–193, in: Mass Rape: The War against Women in Bosnia-Herzegovina, transl. by Marion Faber, University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Mostov, Julie, “‘Our Women’/‘Their Women’: Symbolic Boundaries, Territorial Markers and Violence in the Balkans”, Pro Femina, Časopis za žensku književnost i kulturu, no. 3, Beograd, 1995. Potkonjak, Sanja, Damir Arsenijević, Ajla Demiragić and Jelena Petrović, “Između politike pokreta i politike znanja – feminizam i ženski/rodni studiji u Hrvatskoj, Bosni i Hercegovini i Sloveniji”, Studia ethnologica Croatica, vol. 20, no. 1, Filozofski fakultet sveučilišta u Zagrebu, Zagreb, 2009. Skjelsbaek, Inger, “Sexual Violence in the conflicts in Ex-Yugoslavia”, in: War Discourse, Women Discourse, TOPOS, vol. 2, no. 1–2,������������������������� ISH, Ljubljana, 2000. Slapšak Svetlana, Ogledi o bezbrižnosti, Radio B92, edicija Apatridi, Beograd, 1994.
232 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Slapšak, Svetlana, “Yugoslav war: A Case of/for Gendered History”, in: War Discourse, Women Discourse, TOPOS, vol. 2, no. 1–2,������������������������� ISH, Ljubljana, 2000. The Project 1,000 Women for the Nobel Peace Prize for 2005, http://www.1000peacewomen.org/ eng/friedensfrauen.php. “Witches from Rio, Croatia Feminist Rape Croatia”, Globus, December 11th, 1992. Žarkov, Dubravka, “War Rapes in Bosnia On Masculinity, Femininity and Power of the Rape Victim Identity”, Tijdschrift voor Criminologie, vol. 39, no. 2, 1997.
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234 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST DAMIR ARSENIJEVIĆ
THE POLITICS OF MEMORY IN “LIFE AS AN ACTUALITY” 1
In late September 2005, in the streets of Sarajevo various billboards competed for your attention, selling you a bigger car, advertising a better drink, or luring you to buy a swankier fridge. Hauntingly, among them, was a billboard showing a tatty, soiled, Spitfire bomber jacket spread out on a white surface, a piece of paper next to it reading 282 KRA. From a distance, you could just make out the jacket, the inscription, and in huge black and red letters: Srebrenica Podrinje identification project. If the spectacle lured you in, you could read the rest: Article of clothing found on a victim of genocide, 282 KRA. Right below it was another poster advertising USA illusionist David Copperfield’s show scheduled for 1 October 2005, endorsed by the Croat member of the Bosnian Presidency. And as if by one of Copperfield’s tricks, an illusion, through fiction more focused and sharpened than lived life itself, this poster, juxtaposed to the Srebrenica identification project billboard, spoke more about the depoliticising effect of the sovereign biopolitical order on the citizens of Bosnia and the “confiscation” of their memory.2 Not only is the body that once wore the jacket missing and gone forever, but those who stayed alive, 44% of whom are unemployed, 25% of them living below poverty line, according to the official figures,3 are sold an illusion, which to buy, cost 1/10 of an average monthly salary. Of this, one can ask, paraphrasing Marx’s inquiry on religion: “For what grievous estrangement is such transcendence a poor compensation?”4
235 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST What is this “grievous estrangement”? Is it the collapse of socialism; war and human loss that is entailed in it; post-war neo-liberal capitalist transition and the bodies, victims of genocide that are still missing; or, which is more likely, all of these combined? Whichever it is, the implications of such “an estrangement” are the constructing and re- writing of the collective memory by the ruling ethno-nationalist elites. For, as Dubravka Ugrešić writes, “[t]he political battle is a battle for the territory of collective memory”.5 Simultaneous to this is the process of “social amnesia” in the post-Yugoslav “liberal conformist” intellectuals, who argue for an ideology-free, post-political analysis, and whose thinking may go along these lines: “Wasn’t it ideology and politics that flung us into war and poverty? Don’t we therefore need a fact-driven theoretical discourse, apolitical and de-ideologized, to give us refuge from the madness of nationalism and war”.6 Presented in this way, the picture of Bosnia may look like this, and here I’m adapting Ugrešić’s retelling of Cicero’s story of Simonides of Ceos in the context of the disintegration of Yugoslavia: the roof has collapsed on people sitting around a banquet table; “Simonides, the survivor, asked by the relatives to identify the victims, does not manage to do his mnemotechnical job and relate what he remembers, because suddenly the remaining walls collapse, killing him and the relatives who had come to burry their dead. The new witnesses of the scene, struck by a double misfortune, are, admittedly in a position to identify the victims, but only those they remember from the places where they happened to be when the remaining walls collapsed. And so each one remembers and mourns his own. The other victims do not exist. Not to mention the original ones.”7 And while each ethno-nationalist elite petrifies and mourns the victims of “its” ethnie, the liberal conformist intellectuals mourn the sum total of victims as “unity in diversity”, constructing the memory of the true essence of Bosnian-ness whose foundations are “the tangible, vibrant substance”8 of the nation, and at the same time, for the luxury of the perceived “out-of- ideological” site of speaking allows them, they bemoan the construction of the whole edifice, arguing that the roof and the walls were bound to collapse anyway. In such a symbolic economy, it seems that “the memory transaction has been successful. However, from the inside, nothing is ever really forgotten nor is it really remembered.”9 Amidst this chaos of multiple “memory transactions” that depoliticises “‘the past’, ‘the present’ and ‘the future’… [We need] new optics to untangle the omnipresent zones of indistinction”10 that these transactions create. The “new optics”
236 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST are to be located in another group of “commemorators”, a group that speaks of the traumatic experiences of war and post-war transition in such a way so as to question, disturb and demystify the pre-given and entrenched ways of “commemoration”, creating radically alternative imaginaries that traverse and repoliticise the dominant political identifications. The sphere of cultural production hosts the new optics in war and post-war Bosnia and today I will focus on poets writing on the margins of the Bosnian society whose poetry creates, I will argue, an emancipatory and productive negotiation with the traumatic experiences and the disturbance of depoliticising efforts by both ethno-nationalist and neo-liberal capitalist projects.
THE NEW OPTICS IN THE FIELD OF CULTURAL PRODUCTION
As many critics in Bosnia and Herzegovina and abroad have noted, the field of cultural production, recognised as having a privileged status in the construction and articulation of identities and political practices, has been dominated by the ethno-nationalist discourse since the 1980s. It is in the context of the discrediting of Yugoslav socialism that the crucial status of the cultural sphere is most clearly visible – “the actual work of dismantling Yugoslav unity was carried out primarily in the cultural arena.”11 Some writers were particularly influential in the advancement of ethno-nationalist projects in Bosnia. The ultimate way in which nationalism, in order to assist it in achieving its ideological aims, recruits the field of cultural practice may be best illustrated in what Žižek calls the “poetic-military complex, personified in Radovan Karadžić, the Bosnian- Serb poet warrior.”12 However, it is the concrete material practices of those poets who, as Elie Wiesel has put it, have “the courage to speak truth to power”,13 thus questioning how traumatic events of war and post-war transition have been symbolised and what kind of acts such symbolisation has justified. Furthermore, they are the voices that harness traumatic events and loss for “hopeful politics”.14 How is this “hopeful politics” enacted? How is fixity of past traversed through the concrete practice of active witnessing wherein, in Benjamin’s commitment, “past is brought to bear witness to the present – as a flash of emergence, an instant of emergency, and a moment of production”?15 I shall briefly touch on two examples and they are both by a woman poet Ferida Duraković.
237 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST THE WRITER CONTEMPLATES HIS HOMELAND WHILE A FAMOUS POSTMODERNIST ENTERS THE CITY
For a long time everything has repeated itself most cruelly and yet everything is happening for the first time: the face of a young man whose life all night has been draining out through your hands, from the hole in his back. The face of the soldier by the bus station, with the pleasant May sky frozen permanently in his open eyes – you are making it up, I declare – this is not the calm and distant face of History And a little pool of blood; in its middle a hunk of bread soaked in blood like that now fabled morning Bregov milk – you’re making it up, I repeat, for the very first time: the Sarajevan clay that falls on the big feet of the boy in his Reebok trainers as they dangle from a makeshift bier made from a cupboard door. No, you are not to be trusted, you have entered the heart of darkness that erupted and gushed forth into daylight. You are an unreliable witness, and biased at that. That’s why the professor has arrived, entirely Parisian in mien, Mes enfants he started, and his fingers repeat it for him: Mes enfants, mes enfants, mes enfants, in the middle of the Academy of Science the old greybeards could think only of his shirt, glaringly and conspicuously white. Mes enfants, this is the death of Europe. Then he changes it all into a film, into frames, into mouthfuls like histoire, Europe, like responsibilité and, of course les Bosniacs. Look here, that’s the right way to look History in the face, not like you: in the crude irresponsible fragments, the sniper shot that penetrates deep into the skull, the graves already covered over by irredeemable grass, your hands placed across the image of Edvard Munch, who himself, once upon a time, also made everything up, with no hope.
(TRANSLATION: NUALA NI DHOMHNAILL / ANTONELA GLAVINIĆ)
238 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST The poem opens up with the paradoxical grip of wartime experience embodied in the juxtaposed images of the faces of a dying man and a soldier at the bus station that occur for the first time and are ceaselessly repeated. The paradox points to that which resists representation, the traumatic kernel of the poem. It reveals itself as the bodily horror of subjects locked in the Agambenian state of exception in which the life/death divide is indistinct; the borderline “between a young man whose life all night/has been draining out through your hands, from the hole/in his back” and “the face of the soldier/by the bus station, with the pleasant May sky/frozen permanently in his open eyes” is blurred. It is biopolitics taken to an extreme and revealed as being predicated on the exception of life. For, as Agamben notes, politics today “knows no value (and, consequently, no non-value) other than life … Bare life remains included in politics in the form of exception, that is something that is included solely through an exclusion.”16 This bodily horror is a repetition ad infinitum of the now of the exception of life, always new, yet always the same, that dis-empowers political subjects and obliterates memory. As Jasmina Husanović cogently notes, “[t]he extreme pressure on people to turn into bare life/death is depoliticising them as subjects who are being forced to reside in the permanent now of biopolitical violence.”17 In a context where bodily horror is repeated, creating an excess of experience, the lyric subject, in a self-reflexive ironic manner, repeats her performative act of enumerating minute details of individual forgotten histories and creating an excess of meaning: the Sarajevan clay falling on the big feet of the boy and his Reebok trainers dangling from a makeshift bier. This is in the true sense the discourse of commemoration: the recollection of those concrete material records, such as garments, and their inscription as familiar signifiers into cultural memory. These concrete material records become in the end the only traces of life that once existed. They will play an important role in the post-war exhumations and identifications of those numerous killed and buried in mass graves. The “heart of darkness” that “erupted and gushed forth into daylight” is the intrusion of that which is more real than reality itself, that which disrupts representation and symbolisation – the Real. Yet how to inscribe, record, and remember the faces of the dead and their histories, so that they are not forgotten, in a context where representation and symbolisation are disrupted? A possible answer to
239 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST this lies in the Lacanian view on inscribing the awareness of the Real. Commenting on Lacan’s position on such inscribing, Stavrakakis claims that “[i]t is through the failures of symbolisation – the play of paradox, the areas of inconsistency and incompleteness – that it becomes possible to grasp “the limits, the points of impasse, of dead- end, which show the real yielding to the symbolic”.18 If the most direct way of signifying the Real is to subvert signification itself, then this “encircling the real” is most successful “… by revealing in the most unexpected place the failure of representation to capture the real, ‘showing’ the real by revealing the distance between representation and the real”.19 In this poem, the lyric subject is committed to exploring loss as potentiality that produces “a world of remains as a world of new representations and alternative meanings.”20 The failure of representation is made obvious by creating an ironic stance in which she literally undermines herself and thus negates her own capacity for representation: “you are making it up”; “you are not to be trusted” and “You are an unreliable witness, and biased at that”. Such awareness of the real is deeply political and implies a clear ethical stance. Following Žižek, it can be claimed that rather than “elevating [the Real] into an untouchable entity exempted from historical analysis … the only true ethical stance is to assume fully the impossible task of symbolizing the Real, inclusive of its necessary failure”.21
Now briefly onto the second poem (Ferida’s Srebrenica).
SREBRENICA
1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005…
240 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST I wish I could At last Lie me down In that grave Which is not there
By my child Who is not there To keep his hands warm again ...
(TRANSLATION: DAMIR ARSENIJEVIĆ)
This poem speaks most directly and most intrusively “truth to power” and is committed to aliveness of the past for the politically relevant practice of the present in the context in which each witness remembers her own victim. Here, past bears witness to the present and to the future in order to disturb interpretations offered by official politics. In the intervention of the poem, mourning is a creative process, constructing a site for commemoration and the very body that is missing. Constantly verging on the abyss of the Real, the poem also creates a certain excess – ellipsis. This excess-in-ellipsis may be said to echo that of Freud when he writes that “mourning is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on.”22 Just as Freud’s could be read as exceeding “the restrictive enclosure of melancholia as pathology, negativity, or negation,”23 the excess in the poem, not only refuses closure by claiming the right to mourning in the present and the future, but it also depathologises the commitment to grieving. Its ethical commitment productively maintains the space open for signifying loss. Both poems, and similar artistic practices that are on-going in Bosnia, enact “hopeful politics” through their productive negations between past-present-future. Their potentiality lies in perceiving “life as an actuality” in which history is brought to bear witness to present and future in such a way so as to create new modes of symbolisation of traumatic events that haunt Bosnia. Theirs the politics of hope, that of an active mourning as opposed to the “indolence of the heart”24 of both ethno-nationalists and (neo)liberal conformists in Bosnia today.
241 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST NOTES
1 Aleksandar Hemon in an interview with Jenifer Berman, Bomb Magazine, summer 2000, on www. bombsite.com/hemon/hemon.html. 2 A term borrowed from an essay by Dubravka Ugrešić, “The Confiscation of Memory”, in: The Culture of Lies, Phoenix House, London, 1998, p. 227. 3 Http://www.indexmundi.com/bosnia_and_herzegovina/unemployment_rate.html, accessed on 17 January 2006. 4 Terry Eagleton, The Idea of Culture, Blackwell, Oxford, 2000, p. 21. 5 Ugrešić, op. cit., p. 227. 6 Cf. Nebojša Jovanović, “Yet another Effort, Intellectuals, if You Would Become Amnesiacs: against post-Yugoslav Liberal Conformism”, in: Leap into the City. Chişinău, Sofia, Pristina, Sarajevo, Warsaw, Zagreb, Ljubljana. Cultural Positions, Political Conditions. Seven Scenes from Europe, ed. Katrin Klingan and Ines Kappert, DuMont Literatur and Kunst Verlag, Cologne, 2006, pp. 302–311. 7 Ugrešić, op. cit., p.227. 8 Lovrenović in: Jovanović, op. cit. 9 Ugrešić, op. cit., p.235. 10 Cf. Jasmina Husanović, “Bosanska formacija: Pitanje nostalgije i/li pitanje pripadanja/Bosnian Formation: The Question of Nostalgia or the Question of Belonging”, Razlika/Difference, Journal for Critique and the Art of Theory, 10/11, Tuzla, 2005, pp. 95–111. 11 Andrew B. Wachtel, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1998, p. 198. 12 Slavoj Žižek, “What lies beneath”, The Guardian, 1 May 2004, p. 7. 13 Elie Wiesel as quoted in: Daniel Goleman, Vital lies, simple truths: The psychology of self-deception and shared illusions, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1985, p. 13. 14 David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (eds.), “Introduction: Mourning Remains”, in: Loss: the politics of mourning, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003, p. 2. 15 Ibid, p. 5. 16 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1998, pp. 10–11. 17 Jasmina Husanović, Bosnia Paradox, International Politics, PhD thesis, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, 2003, p. 196. Chapter 6 of the dissertation is particularly useful on the link between literary voices and potential for agency in war and post-war Bosnia. 18 Yannis Stavrakakis, Lacan & the Political, Routledge, London and New York, 1999, p. 85. 19 Ibid. 20 Eng, op. cit., p. 5. 21 Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, Verso, London, 1994, pp. 199–200. 22 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia”, in: Eng, op. cit., p. 3. 23 Ibid, p. 5.
242 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST 24 Cf. Walter Benjamin, “Thesis on the Philosophy of History”, in: Illuminations, Fontana/Collins, London, 1970, pp. 255–266 (Thesis VII).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1998. Benjamin, Walter, “Thesis on the Philosophy of History”, in: Illuminations, Fontana/Collins, London, 1970, pp. 255–266. Eng, David L. and David Kazanjian, eds., “Introduction: Mourning Remains”, in: Loss: the politics of mourning, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2003, pp. 1–25. Goleman, Daniel, Vital lies, simple truths: The psychology of self-deception and shared illusions, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1985. Hemon, Aleksandar, “The interview with Jenifer Berman”, Bomb Magazine, summer 72, 2000, www.bombsite.com/hemon/hemon.html. Ugrešić, Dubravka, “The Confiscation of Memory”, The Culture of Lies, Phoenix House, London, 1998, pp. 217–235. Eagleton, Terry, The Idea of Culture, Blackwell, Oxford, 2000. Husanović, Jasmina, “Bosanska formacija: Pitanje nostalgije i/li pitanje pripadanja/Bosnian Formation: The Question of Nostalgia or the Question of Belonging”, Razlika/Difference, Journal for Critique and the Art of Theory, 10/11, Tuzla, 2005, pp. 95–111. Husanović, Jasmina, Bosnia Paradox, International Politics, PhD thesis, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, 2003. Jovanović, Nebojša, “Yet another Effort, Intellectuals, if You Would Become Amnesiacs: against post-Yugoslav Liberal Conformism”, in: Leap into the City. Chişinău, Sofia, Pristina, Sarajevo, Warsaw, Zagreb, Ljubljana. Cultural Positions, Political Conditions. Seven Scenes from Europe, ed. Katrin Klingan and Ines Kappert, DuMont Literatur and Kunst Verlag, Cologne, 2006, pp. 302–311. Stavrakakis, Yannis, Lacan & the Political, Routledge, London – New York, 1999. Wachtel, Andrew B, Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia, Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1998. Žižek, Slavoj, The Metastases of Enjoyment, Verso, London, 1994. Žižek, Slavoj, “What lies beneath”, The Guardian, 1 May 2004.
243 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST
It is a particular question From what will we reassemble ourselves If again We decide to love one another.
JOZEFINA DAUTBEGOVIĆ, The Unidentified
244 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST DAMIR ARSENIJEVIĆ MOBILISING UNBRIBABLE LIFE: THE POLITICS OF CONTEMPORARY POETRY IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA
I first started writing on this subject over a year ago in an effort to highlight the ways in which some contemporary poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina imagines alternative modes of belonging and identification in solidarity with the excluded, and in doing so, argues for a more equitable societal transformation. Despite the time-gap, this paper continues my original effort, with some crucial events having taken place in the intervening time since August 2008 – crucial, that is, to understanding what this equitable societal transformation actually means in everyday life. These events have clarified for me how poetry can and does disturb the comfortable and dominant consensus between those who support historical revisionism and those who use the ban on hate-speech to propagate oblivion in Bosnia and Herzegovina today. It is these events that have also helped me discover what I consider to be politically relevant and enjoyable in such poetry. In other words – why and how it continues to give me hope that things can and do change for the better. This paper, therefore, builds from a situation that is occurring in everyday life, from a concrete practice, wherein, when it comes to bearing witness to war and post-war transition, poetry has power to disturb a dominant political consensus. However, the strength of this poetry lies not only in its capacity to disturb and provoke, but also in its openness about the type of universal normativity it claims and on behalf of which it speaks. This poetry speaks loud and clear about injustices, but from the position of mobilising and fostering such life
245 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST whose minimum is that it refuses to be drawn into the sticky web of the transitional political economy, in which, whatever the cost, the name of the game is the chase after bloodied capital. This is the universal normativity of what I entitle unbribable life, by which I mean life that refuses to be bought off in the face of a politics that aims to desensitise it in relation to the workings and effects of the terror of inequality. It is a life that enacts its refusal to be bribed in its demand for and its insistence on the politics of equality for all. The 30th August, as the International Day of Missing Persons, was marked in 2008 in Bosnia and Herzegovina as a day which was to make visible and encourage the idea that the problem of missing persons – at that point, 13,500 of them, still buried in clandestine mass graves – is the responsibility of us all. At the time, I coordinated the activities of the Department for Civil Society Initiatives at the International Commission of Missing Persons (ICMP) in Sarajevo. Together with other colleagues in the Department, I wanted to encourage and support practices in which solidarity with the families of missing persons in Bosnia and Herzegovina is based on such responsibility. My aim was to confront both the ethno- national mythologisation of missing persons and political point-scoring by the dominant political elites (some of whom know the whereabouts of these clandestine mass graves). I also wanted to confront all of us living in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the majority of whom, although haunted and overwhelmed by an ever-shapeless future, see missing persons as just one of so many problems. Missing persons, however, insist on being found; through their surviving families; through those who executed, buried and subsequently relocated and hid them in clandestine mass graves; and through those who claim that what we term as the way ahead, out of the predominant feeling of paralysis, will not happen unless we start openly requesting that those responsible for the execution, burial, and hiding of those who are now missing must be named. The 30th August 2008 public initiative was entitled “I have the right to know” and it focused on the right of families of missing persons to know where their loved ones are buried. The initiative was jointly supported and carried out by the ICMP and the International Committee of Red Cross (ICRC) in Bosnia and Herzegovina. As part of the initiative, the state Parliament was committed to convening a special session to declare publicly its commitment to resolving the fate and whereabouts of missing persons as well as to assist families of missing persons with their basic socio-economic rights. The initiative was widely supported by the
246 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST media and also by a number of poets. As an act of solidarity, each poet contributed a poem to accompany works by families of missing persons which, collected together, were to be displayed at the entrance of the Parliament. Just hours before the preparations for the marking of 30th August were completed, ICRC representatives in Bosnia and Herzegovina made known their strongly antipathetic reaction to some of the poetry that was to be offered—to be more precise, to two poems:Tri cigare/Three Cigarettes by Marko Vešović and Srebrenica, Potočari, 9.5.2004. by Šejla Šehabović.
THREE CIGARETTES
At day’s end, I went outside to right myself in black and white. The sun, a coin descending onto a dead man’s eyelids. My God, the speechlessness all round me, harder to pierce than tank armour. Life’s as brutal as the nightly sound of bootsteps in the logor, the Serbian camp, announcing to the Muslim captives that a squad of thugs is coming. I light a first cigarette, so my eyes can briefly wander, screened by its smoke, out of this logor. Last night’s dream came back again: my hands held a thread, tied to the hawthorn growing from my father’s grave in the Sandžak, in the gorge called God-Never-Seen. A thread which can guide you out of hell. I light my second. So my soul can float away on its smoke towards the ghosts from a deaf and grizzled past. Which whisper to my soul: a single stride between never-seen and nevermore, that’s all there is to your life. And the world’s as grim as the guffaws of laughter from the blinded in Canto 2 of Kovačić’s Pit. And then I light the last. So I can hold, for a moment, a star between my middle and index finger. An evening star. And to give me, through its bluish veil, a clearer insight into Karadžić’s universe whose Logos is the Logor.
(MARKO VEŠOVIĆ, TRANSLATION: FRANCIS JONES)
247 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST SREBRENICA, POTOČARI, 9. 5. 2004
From under the scarves their hair was sticking out. One of them had covered herself with two scarves; the second scarf lying over her shoulders. The colours did not match. She smelled of soap. The second scarf hung over her silk blouse with its gold sheen. Holding scarf-ends, her hands were clasped over her stomach. Another of them wore lipstick. We had brought a group of Dutch teenagers translating into two languages. Did you travel well? the women enquired. How are you? they asked at the entrance to the cemetery. These youth look so lovely! Their looks dwelt on each of them in turn. Later, they said: Come over! They wept, one by one; they all showed albums with photos of their dead. We stood in a semi-circle, as if sitting on a corner sofa. They were in the middle with hands clasped over their stomachs. Hospitable. They offered to take us to the Oak tree (standing there you can see the places where people were led to the slaughter!) and to the battery factory where they were kept tied up for three days. The sons were taken later, all hungry. They offered to show us how UNPROFOR soldiers gave their uniforms to Chetniks as if offering food and drink to a traveller. On departure, I hugged them, one by one.
248 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST They hugged me back, like aunties hug their guests when they see them off from the doors of their homes.
(ŠEJLA ŠEHABOVIĆ, TRANSLATION: DAMIR ARSENIJEVIĆ)
I was informed by Henry Fournier, Head of ICRC, in a phone call, that these two poems could not be displayed in the Parliament. The reasons given were that this was “not good poetry” because Vešović’s poem mentions “concentration camps” for Muslims and, in her poem, Šehabović uses the word četnik. At the end of the call, I was told that ICRC was covering part of the expenses of the initiative – therefore implying that it had the power to determine of what the event would or would not comprise. The phone call turned into an altercation with Henry Fournier, after which I rang Marko Vešović and explained to him the details of what was, for me, a clear case of censorship and a confiscation of the right to remember. I then forwarded Marko an email with all the details surrounding the poetry selection, including with it a copy of Šehabović’s poem. Vešović reacted publically, publishing a piece in BH Dani, the 29th August 2008 issue of that magazine.1 ICMP’s Head Kathryne Bomberger acquiesced to the ICRC demands, with the result that the two poems were not displayed or spoken in the Parliament. Shortly after, as I was de facto suspended for having facilitated a public reaction against the censorship of pertinent, contemporary Bosnian poetry, I left ICMP. The driving force in the “30th August” case is the politics of those representatives of the international community, who not only dictate and set conditions as to how missing persons ought to be remembered in the public discourse but, more insidiously, deny any right to citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina to make universal analyses and draw universal lessons from the war and the genocide. Ultimately, this is a denial of and a gag on the politics of unbribable life – life that claims that “Camp cannot be Logos”, as in the final line of Vešović’s poem. This censorship by the international community representatives came in the guise of the “protection” of multiculturalist discourse and the ban on insulting language and hate-speech. Interesting in this case is the perspective from which the poems’ content was recognised as problematic. Marko Vešović was censored on grounds that his poem mentions concentration camps for Muslims and Šehabović because her
249 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST poem mentions the word četnik. In their close reading of the poems, the international community members assumed the perspective of an imagined member of each of the three ethnic communities, predicting what one or other of them might object to, and on that basis, “cleansing” the poetry along ethnic lines. What is this if not a prime example of how the bureaucratic terror of the international community operates? Poems are scanned for shibboleths and the speaking subject is given permission to speak only in a language cleansed of what is deemed to be inappropriate content from an imagined ethnic perspective. Furthermore, in claiming that it occupies a neutral position, the international community simultaneously maintains a cynical distance from it: it knows very well that the problem of the poems is not because they mention what is deemed to be inappropriate content (and for that matter it knows really well that both the concentration camps and the četniks did exist). The far greater problem for the international community is that the speakers of both poems do not accept the bounds of a false distinction between private and public language in relation to all those who have been executed and sacrificed in the chase for the capital that was stolen through the blood of war and genocide, and the post-war legacy of everyday violence. In other words, the speakers in both poems do not accept the view that suffering is a private event. In doing so, they assume and uphold a position that an adequate public language already exists through which suffering can be expressed and that poetry can and does provide such a language. Therefore, the censorship of these two poems on the grounds of “insulting content” is a downright lie. Ideologically speaking, such censorship sets multiculturalist parameters for the reading of these two poems, reducing social conflict to a friction among ethnic identities. Within these weak, de-politicised parameters, cultural, religious and ethnic differences are recast as “sites of conflict that need to be attenuated and managed through the practice of tolerance”.2 This scenario further supports the ethnic element as the dominant reference of political collectivity, which then leads to a retroactive re-inscription of the war as a conflict between three ethnic groups. Such levelling politics by the international community is part of the dominant consensus rather than part of its solution. Most importantly, the true reasons for censorship lie in the total opposition of those who comprise the dominant consensus in Bosnia
250 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST and Herzegovina today to the position insisted on by those who have survived and who are striving to produce a hopeful future that breaks the bounds of the everyday horror of transition. Such a position maintains two important premises: the first is that suffering, which results from war and genocide, is the effect of societal injustice and, as such, a par excellence public matter; the second is that, in relation to this suffering, the emancipated process of becoming a subject can only take place when freed from the shackles of a victimised position or any other position that is merely focused on the interests of any particular identity. It is in the espousal of claims for a more equitable sociality for all that unbribable life is mobilised.
OF LOVE AND OF REASSEMBLING OURSELVES
Like in a mass grave, everyone has died of one’s own death, apparently, love of the same cause
What is his collar bone doing being next to this frontal bone And what will he look like Reassembled from different parts When the day of resurrection comes
It is a particular question From what will we reassemble ourselves If again We decide to love one another
(JOZEFINA DAUTBEGOVIĆ, TRANSLATION: DAMIR ARSENIJEVIĆ)
As for the dead – the dead are dead, why didn’t you give them a hand when they were alive?”, as Damir Avdić asks.3 Today in Bosnia and Herzegovina, supported by the international community, the commingled remains of the dead from mass graves are put through a juridico-scientific-religious process of re-association and identification
251 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST of “missing persons”. Just as in a retroactive re-inscription of the war as a war among ethnic identities, victims are re-associated and identified as ethnic victims. Paradoxically, the perspective taken in the process of this re-association is the perspective of the original perpetrator of the crime – just as the original gaze that looked on the remains of those who were executed, this gaze puts them together and names them, assuming the gaze of the execution’s perpetrators, for it is in the fantasy of the perpetrator that the executed person is the ethnic other. If “the dead are dead” and if we never decided to give them a hand, what about the living? To paraphrase Jozefina Dautbegović’s poem and say that post-war transition is like a mass grave, where everybody lives their own life, apparently, love of the same cause, but not. The collectivity of those who have survived is comprised of those who are “alive but dead”4. One should read this not as the “living dead” but, literally, as the most alive bit of the dead, as that which insists and refuses to be murdered – unbribable life itself. This is precisely what the title of Dautbegović’s poem refers to – the unidentified are not just those who are buried in clandestine mass graves or those whose remains are currently on tables in the re-association centre, but more importantly, it is this “we” for whom we still have no name. “We” will have to assume the position of the unidentified, “if again/we decide to love another” and, in doing so, claim a universal norm for who “we” are and what the world is. If love is a matter of decision, it is also a matter of recognition of the loved one who answers my question – “who am I?”5 This community of unbribable life will recognise the answer to this question and will not under any circumstances uphold the gaze of the perpetrator. It will also have to go beyond the territorial, but in such a way that it does not give up on the right to define the territorial. This new definition of territory will be one of love and soil, one that goes beyond the mass grave of the living, and is a res publica of unbribable life.
252 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST NOTES
1 See Fokus section of BH Dani, no. 585, 29 August 2008. 2 Cf. Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, Princeton University Press, Princeton – Oxford, 2006. 3 Damir Avdić and his song-performance Mrtvi su mrtvi. 4 Ibid. 5 See an interview with Jacques-Alain Miller on http://www.lacan.com/symptom/?page_id=263, accessed on 24 October 2009.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Avdić, Damir, Mrtvi su mrtvi, performance, 2009 Brown, Wendy, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, Princeton University Press, Princeton and Oxford, 2006. Dautbegović, Jozefina, “Neidentificirani”,Sarajevske sveske, no. 4, Medija centar, Sarajevo, 2003, p. 271. Miller, Jacques-Alain, Interview, http://www.lacan.com/symptom/?page_id=263, accessed on 24 October 2009. Šehabović, Šejla, “Sreberenica, Potočari, 9. 5. 2004”, Fokus section of BH Dani, no. 585, 29 August 2008. Vešović, Marko, “Tri cigare”, in: Fokus section of BH Dani, no. 585, 29 August 2008.
253 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST
“Unused memories fade, disappear, and melt into nothing – a terrifying thought. Because of that, ability to preserve, to memorize has to be developed. [...] We keep to be tortured by the repeated questions: what is crime? Who is the perpetrator and who is the victim? If a mother is conveyor of cultural values in a culture that pretends not to have recent history, where is the place of a daughter in this continuum? To raise such questions in such a way, to break silence, at the very least means to overstep acceptable cultural bounds.”
CHRISTA WOLF, qtd. in Brodzki 1998
254 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ WOMEN’S WRITING IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA: A MODEL FOR AN ALTERNATIVE POLITICS OF CULTURAL MEMORY
The current situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina (B&H) when it comes to the visibility and presence of female artists, academics, and intellectuals in the complex process of archiving and creating cultural memory is very similar to the situation described by Alice Walker (In Search of Our Mother’s Garden),1 who finds it impossible to even name her female predecessors, despite her firm belief that they indeed existed and were engaged in writing. Similarly, speaking from the Bosnian context, I find it very hard to talk about my own predecessors. Existing canonical studies typically cite a handful of female authors. Very often, it is only the name of an author that survives the tides of centuries and of the many cycles of canonization. What is particularly alarming, however, is the fact that even the contemporary B&H female authors remain neglected and unknown. Systematic ignoring of their names and works erase the trace necessary for them to be incorporated into the space of cultural memory.2 Having in mind that cultural memory mediates the societal norms and values and contributes to the realization of a collective identity, one could ask what kind of a collective identity B&H has if its identity is systematically built as a project of erasing the other — women in particular? This question might also lead us a few steps closer to realizing why B&H society remains conservative, patriarchal and deeply divided. Opposing the practices of building cultural memory on the art of forgetting (ars oblivionis), this paper attempts to modestly contribute
255 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST to building an alternative model of memory based on the process of interpretation3 of several B&H feminist narratives.4 This alternative model aims not to merely incorporate female authors, but to transform the dominant cultural memory through including the perspectives of the ignored. Starting from Christa Wolf’s question cited as a motto of this text, I will attempt to show that daughters, at least in post- war Bosnian and Herzegovinian context, raise unpleasant questions about our recent “tragic past” and create a “third space” by drawing the contours of an alternative memory and revealing the strategies of resistance to the dominant (patriarchal) discourse. According to Damir Arsenijević: “[t]he field of cultural production in Bosnia and Herzegovina today is a crossroad of memory in which decisions as to which path to take, determining particular ways of bearing witness to trauma, need constantly to be made. Such decisions are, above all, ethical and political acts.”5 Furthermore, Arsenijević argues that some of the most imaginative artistic practices and interventions related to the emancipatory re-politicisation of traumatic experiences are made by the new generation of artists such as Šejla Kamerić, Jasmila Žbanić, Šejla Šehabović, Adisa Bašić, to name only a few. In this article I shall focus on short fiction prose by Šejla Šehabović and Jasmila Žbanić. As I intend to show, Šejla Šehabović and Jasmila Žbanić are engaged in posing a challenge to the patriarchal thought and “revealing the past as changing in response to the present and as capable of transforming present and future as well”.6 These two authors belong to the grouping of individuals whose artistic practices Jasmina Husanović sees as “gestures in the fields of art and cultural production” that make up the sites of resistance to the process which Dubravka Ugrešić terms as the “confiscation of memory”.7 In the first part of the paper I will analyse Šejla Šehabović’s Ruvejda,8 a story published in her last collection of stories titled Priče, ženski rod, množina (Stories, female gender, plural). In the second part the focus of the paper shifts to Jasmila Žbanić’s short story Vjera (Faith). Šejla Šehabović is a particularly interesting female author, given that she inhabits the cultural space not only as an author of fiction work, but also as a literary theorist and critic. She has become known to the wider audience through her book of poetry Make up9 for which she received the award for the best poetry book within the regional program of the Sarajevo Book Fair in 2004. Her first collection of stories titled Trajan the Tsar has Goat’s Ears (Car Trojan ima kozije uši10)
256 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST was published in 2005. Her latest collection of stories titled Priče-ženski rod, množina11 was published in 2007. What seem to be particular and distinctive characteristics of her work, announced already in her early poetry, is her decisive and consistent positioning on the margins, in the situation of a “permanently undetermined” subject. The structure of the story Ruvejda is built around the motif of a return to the “homeland”, for the purpose of identifying mortal remains that are believed to be the body parts of unnamed female protagonist’s late grandfather. On one hand, this inspiring story narrates the troubles of childhood and growing up a girl and the process of her self-understanding as a person living not only between two worlds, but also between two identities: one crucially marked by the presence of Ruvejda’s phantasm, and the other one whose flesh and blood the heroine is desperately trying to assemble from the pieces of the past. On the other hand, the story opposes big, “scientific” systematisations of small human tragedies into one, wider, universal picture. The author focuses on an individual story, narrating about a traumatic encounter with the homeland, symbolically represented in the form of a morgue, i.e. a centre for identification of missing persons. The main protagonist refuses to recognize her grandfather’s clothes and identify him. “I’ve been given his T-shirt and a sports jacket. The jacket used to be blue before it was covered by earth. Since then, it is not blue anymore, it is decayed and does not belong to my grandfather. I knew my grandfather’s, but I don’t recognize this one.”12 Ruvejda, the character from the title, and someone who represents a riddle that we are trying to resolve by reading the story, is the secret “essence” — a consciousness that the central character is trying to reach in order to make her path easier and to learn how to love or at least accept herself. It is important to notice that this autodiegetic narrator is built through the character of an emigrant, a very significant figure in the postwar literature, not only of Bosnia & Herzegovina but also of the entire ex-Yugoslavia. In his inquiry into the life in exile, Edward Said defines it in terms of pain: “Exile is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home”.13 Nevertheless, this plurality of vision recompenses, at least in part, for the psychological dislocation: “Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives
257 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, awareness that — to borrow a phrase from music — is contrapuntal.”14 Indeed, the heroine, a naturalized American, is introduced as a figure of a limen, somebody who lives “in interludes”.15 Although she defines the world in binary oppositions of “there” and “over here”, that is still not a rigid, strong opposition. Rather, it seems that the author uses it to depict the world of a diaspora in which those who emigrated (who were expelled, who went over or escaped) are not able to commit themselves, to take only one side, so they live in a continuous comparison between the world over here and “there where they live”. “I major in sociology. Actually, I’ve graduated, if I look at the studies over here. In America, you immediately go to master’s studies if you have any brains at all. I do, I’m just taking a break for a year. I’ve been working. And I didn’t drop my studies because of that. There, they don’t say you dropped it but that you failed to enrol. And there’s no full-time or part-time studying, it’s when you want it. Whenever you want it.”16 The author makes use of a very interesting stylisation of speech. The subject who speaks is someone who “left” her native language as a relatively young person, that is to say, somebody who hasn’t made her language more “eloquent” and articulate. Therefore, her expression remains somewhat childish and, hence, all the more direct and effective. The narrator’s voice shifts throughout the text, alternating between the present and the past. Her voice is not fixed in time or space, but is rather suspended. This type of narrative voice can be seen as a textual manifestation of ‘disidentification’ which, according to Teresa de Lauretis,17 women express the difficulty inherent in their efforts to reconcile the images of themselves that they want to forge with the images of femininity that patriarchal society imposes upon them. Remembrance recreates another type of exile that emerges from the fact of being a woman in a patriarchal society. In the sketch of her childhood, the protagonist describes herself not so much in terms of who she was, but rather in emphasizing who she was not, as if to express her “disidentification” with the way of life being imposed on her: “My grandpa says Ruvejda is five, the same age as I am. And that she is as beautiful as I am, except that she knows more than I do and behaves well.
258 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST I never behave, I tamper with everything. That’s awful.”18 The author incorporates into the main character’s narration the point of view of her grandfather, who represents the patriarchal authority who demands that women exhibit appropriate feminine behaviour. The grandfather does not try to make her familiar with the secrets and skills of his profession. She has to “steal” that knowledge from him by watching him work in a perceptive and careful manner. He, on the other hand, does not seem to want more than to discipline his granddaughter and bring her into Order: “When Ruvejda is not here, he lets me sit all day and watch him sew. He sews and talks about Ruvejda: – Ah, how well Ruvejda behaved yesterday! And if you only saw how she didn’t mess anything up! She didn’t tangle up my threads, didn’t dip her hands into the bowl, she was behaving all day long, just like that! Never ever did she grab the hot iron!”19 This story has a very interesting space frame of reference through which the author seems to draw a map of the heroine’s travel in her pursuit of identity. The first topos introduced is the house of her grandfather and grandmother. Division of the house into two parts, upper (women’s) and lower (men’s) does not suggest the inversion of the patriarchal binary dichotomy, but rather the opposite – it points to the position of a woman: a prisoner in “a tower”, at a safe height and distance from being looked at, contacted and influenced by the rest of the world. The young woman is imprisoned there by the man who is not only a pater familias but also the pillar of the family. This architecture of authority is literally represented here by positioning the grandfather’s business and public life in the basement, that is, in the very foundation of the house: “In grandpa’s house all the stairs were old and creaky, except the last ones, leading to the basement. They were smooth, massive, made of concrete.”20 As the narrative develops, a connection is established between this topos of an old house, overwhelmingly inhabited by the phantasmagoric character of Ruvejda, and the topos of a big American house belonging to the main character’s friend, by using the motif of the mysterious voices that are heard from the basement of the house. Another connection is made with the duplex apartment of her lover, where the patriarchal architectural order is reversed in one scene, by an awkward
259 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST repetition of the masculine pattern of climbing towards the bedroom. By using anachronisms, linear narrative temporality is distorted into the interconnected temporalities which link not only the points of reference in space, but also the characters of the grandfather and the lover. In this way a parallel is established with the grandfather as an active character, whereby the burden of an unconscious effect of Ruvejda’s figure remains a permanent barrier to reaching the full symmetry of the symbolic orders and full emancipation. Since she never succeeded to “grab”, or at least catch a sight of the closely guarded grandfather’s favourite girl Ruvejda, the heroine’s subsequent life in America remains a collection of insufficiently developed relationships, unfinished projects and unfulfilled wishes. The relationship between the main character and her grandfather is built as a conflict throughout the story. The very end of the story remains open since she, as the only family member who decided to try to identify the mortal remains and the only one whose blood is good for that purpose,21 eventually takes that blood back and thus doesn’t allow the completion of the identification procedure, simultaneously preventing her imaginary “conflict” with her grandfather from being brought to an end. On the other hand, such an unexpected ending indicates that the heroine does not accept that her life story becomes part of somebody’s master’s thesis.22 Such an ending is evidence of her awareness of the need to preserve and validate personal memories and treat them as unique and valuable, not as simple exemplars and statistical data, mere facts in the inevitable generalization.
I have read the short story Vjera (Faith) by Jasmila Žbanić (who, in the meantime has gained prominence as a film director and a screenwriter) in one of the postwar issues of the Sarajevo literary journal Lica (Faces), in 1998. or 1999. I was fortunate to have copied it spontaneously in my notebook while I was a student and kept it, thus saving myself today from a painstaking and, probably, futile effort to find the issue in which the story was published. In terms of length, this is a short story and was written entirely in the form of a monologue, as if documenting a story in an objective. Vjera
260 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST is a moving and powerful story about an unnamed woman who was married off too early the first time, before her first period, and who, after two years of her first husband’s patient waiting for her first period to finally come, was sent back home as “a reject”. The moment she got “that woman’s disease” represents a turning point in her life, for it induced the decision of her terminally ill brother to re-marry her to a widower to whom, as we find out later in the story, she bore twenty children. The culmination of the story is linked with her decision to start a “rebellion” in the form of a little white cushion that she intended to sew and into which she could direct her husband’s semen and thus protect herself from pregnancy. The motif of wasting the man’s sperm is connected with the very title of the story, in a way that the husband, used to her blind obedience, every time after “making love” or rather after his “discharging”, he accuses her of being a communist because she is wasting what belongs to God. In her last sentence, the narrator very effectively states that she has faith, and proves it in the scene when she washes the cushion.23 What particularly draws attention in this story is its remarkable accuracy to the expression and usage of rhetorical figures, such as comparison,24 which can be understood as “an attempt to mark a difference in resistance to the roughest male discourse.”25 Such instances of stylistic resistance are indicative of the existence of the woman’s language, fostered in isolated and rigid patriarchal structures, just like the one depicted in the story. Certainly, this is not an emancipatory language, but it is extremely important as it points to the categories through which a woman’s identity is created in such a context. These are the categories of force, violence and unreasonable behaviour by those who are in the position of power. A woman opposes such rhetoric by faith, reason, careful observance and conscious coexistence with nature. This story seems to represent an indication of what Moranjak- Bamburać describes as: “[F]emale resistance and rebellion against violence and hatred, the women’s ability to fight for their own survival and survival of their families in a chaotic political and economic situation (...) to speak in public about their traumas, to start over and over again in the name of life and against the culture of death.”26 It can also be said that this short text poses important questions, such as those related to ownership and control over the processes of social
261 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST reconstruction. The story points towards the unexpected strategies of emancipation or, at least, “equal participation” in a patriarchal discourse and creation of a space for negotiating the substantial change. The importance of this story is also in its ability to raise an awareness regarding the different ways of shaping personal identity and, also, reveals the role of a female subject in everyday life within a patriarchal community.
In order to create an alternative memory, Šejla Šehabović is “disidentifying” with the presuppositions of the dominant narrative of contemporary Bosnian and Herzegovinian history and literary production. With its foregrounding of strategies of “disidentification” on so many levels, her story can be seen as a particularly relevant model today. Šehabović does not offer a solution or answers, her subject is divided, fragmented, and becomes a feeble subject without centre, without protection who poses numerous dilemmas and betrays everybody: her grandfather, her lover, the readers who are deprived of a complete ending. Šejla Šehabović is a betrayer because she is aware that, in Deleuze’s words, being a betrayer of their own kingdom, being a betrayer of their own gender, their own class and greatness – what else could be a reason to write? Indeed, the author “understands ... that literature doesn’t change anything, people do”.27 Thus, she writes to provoke, evoke and collect her memories, somebody else’s memories, my memories, pent-up memory of my grandfather who also wore a hat and taught me how to hold the paper using my left hand while holding an eraser in my right hand with which I would erase what was written incorrectly, without crumpling the paper itself. Vjera, the short, condensed story of one entire woman’s life in half of a page inspires an active attitude toward the external context in which patriarchal ideology still prevails, the ideology which, even today in Bosnia and Herzegovina, treats the issue of “wanted” and “unwanted” pregnancy as her problem whose solution, whatever decision she makes, remains wrong and “communist”.
262 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST The memories recollected in these two stories are unofficial narratives belonging to the underside of official narrations of patriarchal history. They emerge as an ongoing performance based on the interaction of many subjects, including all readers of their texts. These stories suggest a re-evaluation, from a cultural perspective, of the various her/stories and “small” everyday events in which women have taken (and are taking) part.
NOTES
1 Cf. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mother’s Garden, Hardcover, Harcourt, 1983. 2 For Jan Assmann the cultural memory is the way a society ensures cultural continuity by preserving its collective knowledge, norms and values from one generation to the next, making it possible for later generations to reconstruct their cultural identity. Cf. Jan Assman, Kulturno pamćenje: pismo, sjećanje i politički identitet u ranim visokim kulturama, trans. V. Preljević, Vrijeme, Zenica, 2005. 3 Apart from archiving and canonization, interpretation is also an important process shaping the cultural memory. Cf. Vahidin Preljević, “Kulturno pamćenje, identitet i knjizevnost”, Razlika 10/11, Tuzla, 2005, p. 126. 4 As Greens points out: “Feminist fiction is not the same as “women’s fiction” or fiction by women. Not all women writers are women’s writers and not all women’s writers are feminist writers, since to write about “women’s issues” is not necessarily to address them from a feminist perspective. […] Feminist fiction is inherently unsettling, for by suggesting that a category as seemingly “natural” as gender is conventional and subject to change, it challenges established assumptions. Yet-as Rosalind Coward suggests-in order to distinguish between texts that have “a surface commitment to feminism” and those that have a deeper commitment, we must ask how “they achieve their versions of reality,” “how representations work [...] how the text is constructed by writing practices and what ideologies are involved in it.” (Gayle Greene, “Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory”, Signs, vol. 16, no. 2, 1991, pp. 290–321.) 5 Damir Arsenijević, “Prema politici nade: poezija i postratni period u BiH”, in: Jasmina Husanović (ed.), Na tragu novih politika: kultura i obrazovanje u Bosni i Hercegovini, Centar za istraživački, stvaralački i građanski angažman Grad, Tuzla, 2006, pp. 276–277. 6 Greene, op. cit., p. 292. 7 Jasmina Husanović, “Politika svjedočenja nasuprot stanja poricanja: Ogledi o repolitizirajućim praksama u polju kulture i umjetnosti u BiH”, in: Na tragu novih politika: kultura i obrazovanje u Bosni i Hercegovini, p. 47. 8 All the quotations in this paper are from the version of the story from an anthology titled Na trećem trgu. Antologija nove kratke priče Bosne i Hercegovine, Hrvatske, Srbije i Crne Gore (2006) [At the
263 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Third Square. Anthology of the New Short Stories from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro], where the story was initially published. 9 Zoro, Sarajevo–Zagreb, 2004. 10 Buybook, Sarajevo, 2005. 11 Nezavisne novine, Banjaluka, 2007. 12 Šejla Šehabović, “Ruvejda”, in: Na trećem trgu. Antologija nove kratke priče Bosne i Hercegovine, Hrvatske, Srbije i Crne Gore, Narodna biblioteka Jovan Popović, Kikinda, 2006, p. 36. 13 Edward Said, “The Mind of Winter”, Harper’s Magazine, New York, 1984, p. 49. 14 Said, op. cit., p. 55 15 Šehabović, op. cit., p. 37. 16 Ibid, p. 39. 17 Cf. Teresa De Lauretis, “Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness”, Feminist Studies, vol. 16, no. 1, 1990, pp. 115–150. 18 Šehabović, op. cit., p. 39. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid, p. 42. 21 “Granddaughters are good for identification. They don’t remember anything; they don’t cry and are not afraid of the needles. They are good also because they are of their own flesh and blood. Blood is the most important. Irreplaceable.” (Šehabović, op. cit., p. 40.) 22 “The woman clerk was compassionate this time. She was from one of the European countries and she would probably make her master dissertation out of it.” (Ibid., p. 45.) 23 “When I rinse that cushion, thick white water pours into clear water. The earth turns white and then black. And in the spring, here, like everywhere, the grass springs up. And I believe in God.” (Jasmila Žbanić, Vjera.) 24 “Cushion as big as a fist you make when you want to hit somebody”, “Groaning like when you lift a 30-liter canister.” (Ibid.) 25 Nirman Moranjak - Bamburać, “Signature smrti i etičnost ženskog pisma”, in: Izazovi feminizma, ed. Babić-Avdispahić [... et al.], Forum Bosnae, Sarajevo, 2004, p. 154. 26 Ibid., p. 150. 27 Sara Lenoks qtd. in: Rachel Blau Du Plessis, “Etrurkama”, Genero, no. 1, trans. D. Đurić, Belgrade, 2002, p. 124.
264 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arsenijević, Damir, “Prema politici nade: poezija i postratni period u BiH”, in: Na tragu novih politika: kultura i obrazovanje u Bosni i Hercegovini, ed. Jasmina Husanović, Centar za istraživački, stvaralački i građanski angažman Grad, Tuzla, 2006, pp. 275–298. Assman, Jan, Kulturno pamćenje: pismo, sjećanje i politički identitet u ranim visokim kulturama, trans. V. Preljević, Vrijeme, Zenica, 2005. Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space, trans. M. Jolas, Beacon, Boston, 1994. Brodzki, Bella, and Schenk, Celeste (eds.), Life/Lines: Theorizing Women’s Autobiography, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1988 (as qtd. in Irina Novikova, Žena i rat/rod i žanr/autobiografija i istorija u Dalekoj tutnjavi Elene Rževske, http://www.womenngo.org.rs/sajt/sajt/izdanja/ zenske_studije/zs_s10/irina.html). De Lauretis, Teresa, “Eccentric Subjects: Feminist Theory and Historical Consciousness”, Feminist Studies, vol. 16, no. 1, 1990, pp. 115–150. Du Plessis, Rachel Blau, “Etrurkama”, Genero, no. 1, trans. D. Đurić, Belgrade, 2002, pp. 109–124. Greene, Gayle, “Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory”, Signs, vol. 16, no. 2, 1991, pp. 290–321. Husanović, Jasmina, “Politika svjedočenja nasuprot stanja poricanja: Ogledi o repolitizirajućim praksama u polju kulture i umjetnosti u BiH”, in: Na tragu novih politika: kultura i obrazovanje u Bosni i Hercegovini, ed. J. Husanović, Centar za istraživački, stvaralački i građanski angažman Grad, Tuzla, 2006, pp. 47–72. Moranjak - Bamburać, Nirman, “Signature smrti i etičnost ženskog pisma”, in: Izazovi feminizma, eds. Babić - Avdispahić [... et al.], Forum Bosnae, Sarajevo, 2004, pp. 150–163. Preljević, Vahidin, “Kulturno pamćenje, identitet i knjizevnost”, Razlika 10/11, Tuzla, 2005, pp. 121–133. Said, Edward, “The Mind of Winter”, Harper’s Magazine, New York, 1984, pp. 49–55. Šehabović, Šejla, “Ruvejda”, in: Na trećem trgu. Antologija nove kratke priče Bosne i Hercegovine, Hrvatske, Srbije i Crne Gore, Narodna biblioteka Jovan Popović, Kikinda, 2006, pp. 36–47. Walker, Alice, In Search of Our Mother’s Garden, Hardcover, Harcourt, 1983.
265 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST
266 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST ŠEJLA ŠEHABOVIĆ
WHAT KIND OF RELATIONSHIP ARE YOU IN?
NEGOTIATING INTIMATE LIFE AND MIGRATION IN CONTEMPORARY BOSNIAN FEMALE POETRY
In the winter of 2007 I applied for my first tourist visa ever. For all of my travels in my grown- up life, that is, after the last Bosnian war, I have gotten visas via a range of institutions in Europe and US – universities, writers associations, educational organizations etc. Someone has guaranteed that invitation letters were sent directly to the embassy at stake, documents were paid in advance, and my visit to every single country (and this has not been a small number) was organized all of which was for my career, my writing, presenting my political ideas, and representing my country. In that winter of 2007, though, I was not representing anything or anyone. I simply wanted to go to Sweden to see my boyfriend. So I applied for a tourist visa at the Swedish embassy in Sarajevo. The officer behind the thick glass asked me, in beautiful Bosnian, looking at my boyfriend’s invitation letter in front of her: “Is he your boyfriend?” Maybe because I blushed and stammered or because she thought I didn’t understand, she said again, in a very slow and interested way: “What kind of relationship are you involved in with him?” Now, why was this simple question so embarrassing for me? It wasn’t except for the fact that some officer behind the glass asked me about my intimate life and personal relationship at an institution that spends most of its time keeping Bosnian citizens away from rich and prosperous Schengenstater? Gendered relationships between institutions and the social mobility of women from the margins of Schengen zone gave them the opportunity
267 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST to buy social mobility through marriage (or through simple registration of partnership with the citizen of the country with the higher rank – as Scandinavian legislation, for example, allows) made a strong difference between possible choices for achieving mobility and freedom for Bosnian women after our last war. In popular culture we can find some very obvious recipes for women who wish to have mobility in travel, work and receive other benefits from the West. A title in a women magazine Boys from diaspora are more desirable! is a common phenomenon of the Bosnian mainstream popular culture today. Expanding the scope of popular culture, contemporary Bosnian female poetry engages in different ways of negotiation regarding the concepts of mobility and intimacy, contesting gendered and institutional norms at once. Contemporary Bosnian female poetry marks some kind of renaissance, noted on many levels in literary critiques in the region. Besides feminist critique, there is a widespread praxis of “mainstreaming” female poetry as an interesting contribution to postmodern literature in the Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian languages. The phenomenon of feminist and other female poetry “taking over” after wars in ex- Yugoslavia has its social and theoretical background, often touched on in theoretical studies in the region and the language(s) in question. Some important questions raised on this topic are the ideas of Nirman Moranjak Bamburać in the reader published by Forum Bosniae. In the article entitled: Is there a War in War Writing? (Ima li rata u ratnom pismu?), the author is using a feminist methodology and a specific style to talk about postwar feminist and other writings related to the war in Bosnian contemporary drama.1 The link between wars in ex-Yugoslavia and the upheaval of feminist culture in the region has been theorised in several disciplines, among them literature. In 2000th edition of War Discourse Women’s Discourse, Essays and Case-Studies from Yugoslavia and Russia2 Zorica Mršević analyses women’s activism in the period of ex-Yugoslav wars, marking the position of the female subject as she has become more visible in the culture of violence. Female subjectivity in the period has been constructed in contrast to mainstream macho culture and newly refreshed “traditional” gender norms have been constructed by official politics from the war period. Although the author bases her analysis on the situation in Serbia – and targets specifically the area of political activism, the same conclusions about visibility and the urge
268 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST to act in the sphere of public life can be noted in many more spheres of war and post-war societies of ex-Yugoslavia among individual women and women’s organisations in the social and cultural arenas. This “awakening” includes contemporary female poetry from Bosnia and Herzegovina. As the famous Bosnian and Montenegrian poet and critic Marko Vešović points out, writing about his editorial work for the Anthology of Contemporary Poetry of Bosnia and Herzegovina,3 the fact that women poets are taking over is not a surprise for him, since the whole thing didn’t happen behind his back, and can be understood as good news. As Vešović continues, “before the war, women poets in BiH were rare, as “strawberries on the grave” […]. Using 15-years of war anarchy and lawlessness – because the war in BiH has never stopped, it only has changed its shape – women took much needed measures against absolute, and therefore inappropriate, domination of men in these countries poetry.”4 This challenged domination has often been negotiated together with other inequalities, namely the issues of citizenship and social mobility in a symbolic and literal way in contemporary female poetry. I will extensively draw here on the works of Damir Arsenijević, who has made a significant contribution to an analysis of Bosnian women’s poetry.5 In 1996, Nermina Omerbegović6 writes of the displaced female subject, confronting the heroic picture of masculine war literature, in the poem Pisati7 (A Male Poet Writes), creating a picture of displacement from the traditional matrix of male poetry, rather than from the actual place of war horrors. The author imagines displacement as from its actual place (Sarajevo) and is marked in the poem as the area in reference to the male poet from the title. This is the only place with a real name mentioned in the poem – connecting universality of suffering with the actual place and the real war going on. The female subject of the poem is constructed as an opposition to the aesthetic cause on which male writing has been based. The picture of war horrors in the poem stands in sharp contrast to the anguished struggle of the “male poet” to make them presentable. The displacement of the female voice in the text is upsetting in the terms of the false separation of art from life. Showing that child’s cry, big red stain and full stop have something in common, the lyrical subject displays that suffering and death belong to the same model of linear teleological history. The presentation becomes a whole with what is
269 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST being presented, as the process of writing depends on the power of production, rather than truth. Contrasting female subject with the male-oriented process of writing and displacing it from the actual place of war produces the effect of estrangement, not from the war, the suffering, the pain in the child’s scream, but from the process that puts it in a presentable form of history. The uncertainty of the truth in the poem is one of the outcomes of this displacement:
And in Sarajevo, the sun was setting or maybe the houses were in flames.
The cold, distant tone of the poem, resulting from the position of the displaced subject, only serves to underline the hypocrisy of the presentation against the background of reality. While Omerbegović’s poem speaks of migration in a symbolic sense, taking into account the distance between the construction of masculinity and the dominant war presentation in Bosnia and constructing female subjectivity and speaking of the war in relation to the symbolic distance, other significant female authors carefully address questions of female subjectivity and war and after-war migration from the point of intimate authorship, but also from other angles of intimate negotiations. In her second poetry book Trauma Market8 Adisa Bašić9 makes a strategic move towards postmodern discussions on simulacrum – in which she presents an intimate experience of war in an ironic manner. One of the sections of her book that the work has been named after goes under the motto: – from what? (a Jewish Holocaust survivor answering the question, ‘Are you going to New Zealand to be as far away as you can be?’).10 The themes of the poems in this section cover the global production of narratives of inescapable suffering, forming it as a deeply intimate and personal experience. The title poem, TRAUMA-MARKET11 analyzes the intellectual experience of afterwar migration. The subject in the poem, set in the dialogue with “West”, represented in “[...] Harvard blonde/with the brains worth half a million” is placing herself in an unequal position of a migrant whose trauma is the only thing with which to trade. English, the language of the “West”, in which the subject cannot speak fluently of her trauma, makes the very word trauma as the central, all-encompassing signifier, leaving no space for the construction of subjectivity behind it. This specific “lost in
270 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST translation” experience cannot exist if it does not “fit” into translated references of the concept of trauma.
Nine deaths, bleeding eardrums, Dodging bullets – It all fits in the word trauma.
Translating the images of harm and death and the production of their many translations into their simplified picture, far away from the subject’s intimate experience works as Baudrillard’s description of “corridors” in a war zone: “All these ‘corridors’ we open up to send our supplies and our ‘culture’ are, in reality, corridors of distress though which we import their strength and the energy generated by their misfortune. Once again, an unequal exchange.”12 Nirman Moranjak Bamburać notes that Baudrillard’s concept of “unequal exchange” lacks the notion of “reminiscence” of survivors.13 In Bašić’s poem, the horrifying possibility of value that trauma carries provides an ironic view on intimate experience because it must be explained and repeated. It is becoming a morbid currency, in an exchange that includes full awareness of personal inequality. The special quality of this exchange, besides giving up cultural exchange in a liberal sense and subjectivity altogether, leaves no choice to the subject but to make “trauma” the only valuable thing for exchange. This position of the subject whose irony is self-directed, no longer negotiating with any illusions, creates the subject’s tendency to bargain over the only thing in her possession: herself. This precious personal claim of possessing her identity, her awareness of the fragility of the identity and of the price the lyrical subject has to pay is one of the main themes of Bašić’s poetry. Other poems in the book TRAUMA-MARKET speak of the place of a subject’s constitution in a dynamic space of migration and femininity under postwar, transitional circumstances. In the poem Kružni put14 (Cycle Trip) the author is constructing a non-linear picture of insight through migration. The construction of subjectivity through movement and dynamics as a principle of working on self-consciousness in this poem does not exclude irony and the self-questioning process. The list of verbs (“waiting/leaving/ coming back/welcoming”…) tells the story of an endless effort to
271 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST achieve valuable life – even if that form of life, one that transgresses the borders of citizenship is made up with full awareness of her sacrifice:
I run away – to trick myself to torture myself to get tired to get robbed with wider horizons to be back
A “cycle”, thus, does not picture a life in movement with a guaranteed happy ending, rather it gives only a hope for “wider horizons” which is in contrast to the stability against which the symbolic script subject is building her life. Reflexive forms: “to trick myself/to torture myself” function as a resonator of the voice in the poem. The style, just as the title, is cyclical with its voice coming back to the author in the underlined autobiographical form. Because of the emphasis put on the constructed autobiographical tone, the poem insists on seemingly simple, “ordinary” choices of words, making the metaphysical questions of moving and progress sound banal. The poem changes its contents in a down-to-earth survival request, ending with questions that do not leave any place to relativization. A struggle over meanings in an absence of authority in Bašić’s poem Emigrant to be15 ends up in an “assembled life” – readiness for movement, constructions of elements, disassembling before a journey of life. As a condition of life there is a picture of lack of stability – for any stable life can never “fit into one case”. The intimate lives of the women in this poem has specific, noticeable conditions:
if you love me, don’t buy me big books.
The subject is “assembling”, therefore, she does not have a home, cannot “take home” with her. The title of the poem in its original language is written in English – emigrant to be uses the phrase, jargon that already marked in global network, so the place and time in the poem are not abstract, they are specified to a certain notion of
272 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST migration – from an unmentioned place “without language” to the one that is better known, set in phrases, marked in language. The notion of leaving the deserted place, emptied of meanings, with no certainty of ending up in a designated one is a common place in Ferida Duraković’s16 poetry. In her poem Ljepotica i zvijer17 (Beauty and the Beast) there is a false similarity constructed on the ground of comparison between the feminine stereotype from fairytales – The Treacherous Beauty – and the image of the feminized Homeland. The comparison produces a female voice that recognizes false universalizations and transgresses the limits in language at the same time. The capital letters of the nouns show the position of the subject that is placed between the two narratives with restricted access to interpretation. The subject struggles to create a space of irony and to visualise the deadly consequences of the false similarity produced on the ground of misogyny:
So, the Treacherous Beauty And the Homeland Have something in common: They both leave behind Boys Who are to die For them.
“Leaving behind” here includes the lyrical subject leaving the actual symbolism of the narratives that have produced the disturbing picture of death of the “boys”. Situating The Treacherous Beauty in the context of war produces the sense of togetherness between seemingly different narratives and engenders the position of the subject in the poem, which is vacillating from the images of “similarities” to the terrifying metaphor of death, given in the symbol of the motherland. Duraković connects fairytale models from popular culture with the concept of homeland in her poem Ten Year Old Girl Perceives Her Homeland while Watching the Ocean.18 The note, made as integral part of the poem, emphasizes the relationship between authorship and the subject in the poem. The fictional space of the poem, with its Tolkien-esque landscapes and the fictional space of “home”, gained through the “undertaker’s” attempt are connected through the note of the author’s visit to the U.S. Duraković utilizes the perspective of an
273 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST infant to picture a world of artificially produced images: “the forest” was “made by J. R. R. Tolkien” just as “tiny homeland” whose author, unfortunately had died before he managed to imagine a happy ending. Explicitly stating that both “the forest”, and “tiny homeland” are the product of the same author, but do not share the circumstances of the imaginative process and, thus, the ending for those two worlds could never be the same. The death of the author, which occurred, “all of a sudden” underlines the constructionist nature of the narratives (U.S. and the “homeland”). The allegory of humanitarian intervention, represented in the figure of “Mr. President” questions the process of reinventing, rewriting the narratives in a different manner. The subject in the poem positions herself within the realm of irony, simultaneously being deadly serious about the global heroic narratives on the Balkans’ war and American intervention in Bosnia:
Anyway I guess I will just sit here and wait for a while. I think i deserve it. I have been a good girl, after all.
Just as in a fairy-tale, being a “good girl” provides the female figure with certain benefits, but the story of rescue does not endow her with a happy ending, in spite of the way in which “good girls” have been taught: it ends up in a symbolic return from “far away across the Ocean” and coming back to Sarajevo, forever. The note, a part of a poem, underlines that it was written in English – translating itself before the actual translation, just if the author had wanted to escape the afterward process of translation, which is inevitable and thus must become a part of the creative process itself. The awareness of the urge for presentable (in English) form of telling the intimate, individual story in the poem is negotiated with the direct intervention of the author – the note is made to be in the poem – explaining the process, rather than hiding it in a process of writing. Even the audience might be seen as a constructive part of this poem. The subject communicates her message, willingly excluding those “who do not know /what I am writing about”, making a humble statement of possible achievements of art’s creation. I have used sample poems from three contemporary Bosnian authors to discuss interpretative ways of negotiation of intimate life and
274 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST migration in contemporary Bosnian culture. Given a visible place in Bosnian post-war culture, women’s poetry is a place of direct political speech, as well as a site of interpretations contesting for a legacy of meaning. The poems discussed speak of the position and subjectivity of women who found themselves in war and a postwar heroic narratives culture, which offered them to adopt social mobility scripts through the giving up of specific spaces of intimate life. The shame I felt in the Swedish embassy in Sarajevo, as well as almost complete giving up of “sentimentality” and avoidance of negotiations over personal and intimacy in a traditional sense of separation between personal and intimate, characterizes Bosnian women’s poetry today. By expanding their intimate space to politics in a symbolic and literal sense, this poetry is giving female subjectivity a new quality: the one that does not exist in popular culture, the one that transgresses gendered and institutional norms. Speakers in lyric poems (as well as their authors) migrate to “well-developed” countries the underlying intellectual benefits by migration, as the core and most important intimacy gain. At the same time they appropriate language (as in the poems of Nermina Omerbegović), self-consciousness (as in the poems of Adisa Bašić) and irony of self-reflection (as in Ferida Duraković’s poems). The inevitable condition of this subjectivity-making process is the dynamics of intellectual life and awareness of its constraints.
275 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST APPENDIX 1 (NOTE 7)
A MALE POET WRITES
At the beginning of the poem one hears a shot followed by a child’s cry At the end is a big red stain. You put a full stop, wiped your glasses, straightened the sleeve of your shirt, thinking what to do so that pain can be felt in the child’s scream, and maybe the big red stain should be described differently. Bigger, thicker, redder. And in Sarajevo, the sun was setting or maybe the houses were in flames.
NERMINA OMERBEGOVIĆ
TRANSLATION: DAMIR ARSENIJEVIĆ
276 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST APPENDIX 2 (NOTE 11)
TRAUMA-MARKET
Aren’t you just a victim selling your own trauma? asked the Harvard blonde with the brains worth half a million. I couldn’t find the words in English to say Do you have any idea how right you are? Nine deaths, bleeding eardrums, Dodging bullets – It all fits in the word trauma. And yes, I was unable to say in English, I’m afraid that’s the only valuable thing I have.
ADISA BAŠIĆ
TRANSLATION: DAMIR ARSENIJEVIĆ
277 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST APPENDIX 3 (NOTE14)
CYCLE TRIP
airport station room waiting leaving coming back welcoming a break-���up�� kisses –� I get ready take away bring back, I run away – to trick myself to torture myself to get tired to get robbed with wider horizons to be back
ADISA BAŠIĆ
TRANSLATION: ŠEJLA ŠEHABOVIĆ
278 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST APPENDIX 4 (NOTE 15)
EMIGRANT TO BE
Carefully I build up my assembled�������������� life always to fit into one case- if you love me, don’t buy me big books. I am not a snail, I cannot take my home with me. But I am getting ready to go. I am building up my assembled life.
ADISA BAŠIĆ
TRANSLATION: ALAN PEJKOVIĆ
279 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST APPENDIX 5 (NOTE 17)
BEAUTY AND THE BEAST
The Treacherous Beauty Has slammed the door Announcing the end Like the Homeland And has vanished Into History
So, the Treacherous Beauty And the Homeland Have something in common: They both leave behind Boys Who are to die For them.
FERIDA DURAKOVIĆ
TRANSLATION: DAMIR ARSENIJEVIĆ
280 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST APPENDIX 6 (NOTE 18)
TEN YEARS OLD GIRL PERCEIVES HER HOMELAND WHILE WATCHING THE OCEAN
I
This morning I took a long walk through the forest which was made by J. R. R. Tolkien when he was in a real good mood. Than I sat there on the sunlit mountain slope looking at the ocean waiting for a huge whale to come up from all that water. But he did not show and I ate an apple instead.
281 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST II
Those (I think) who know what I am writing about will not need to keep on reading there lines. And those who do not know what I am writing about will start another war, back there far far away, in my tiny homeland which was also made by J.R.R. Tolkien when he was in a good mood, but ALL OF A SUDDEN SOMEBODY KNOCKED AT HIS STUDY DOOR AND the happy ending (which he was really good at) simply slipped off his mind. After he died at the age of two fifty and never finished the story.
282 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST III
Today I am awaiting him to come up from all that water: somebody has to give an end to my tiny homeland story. I do not know whether Mr. President can do something to make him return – he has, you know, those Striders and all that stuff –
Anyway I guess I will just sit here and wait for a while. I think i deserve it. I have been a good girl, after all. I am just a little bit afraid of the dark coming form far away across the Ocean.
FERIDA DURAKOVIĆ FOR A. OTIS,* OREGON, FEB. 26, 1995
* This poem was “thought up” and written in English during my stay in Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Oris, Oregon. I did not feel at home there until the day I boarded a private plane of a man who turned out to be an undertaker. Which he told me only when we were high up in the sky. Which means that all places are equal, only Sarajevo is more equal to death. So I got back to my hometown, Sarajevo, forever.
283 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST NOTES
1 The theoretician links war unmistakably with feminism and the female subject in Bosnia, stating: “Aren’t women of Srebrenica the last mutation of Antigona’s request for the neccesity of maintaining the difference between political economy and economy of death?, contestingwar writing to female writing in specific circumstences of masculinist discources of war and battle for difference in female writing.” Nirman Moranjak Bamburać, “Ima li Rata u ratnom pismu?”,Izazovi feminizma, Forum Bosniae, vol. 26, no. 4, pp. 175–176. [Author translation]. 2 Cf. Svetlana Slapšak (ed.), War Discourse, Women’s Discourse, in: Topos, vol. 2, no. 1–2, ISH, Ljubljana, 2000. 3 Sarajevske sveske, Media centar, Sarajevo, 2007. 4 BH Dani, no. 532, 24. 8. 2007, http://www.bhdani.com. 5 Cf. Damir Arsenijević, Contemporary women’s poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina: an agency with emancipatory promise (forthcoming); Damir Arsenijević, Gendering the bone, Belgrade Society of Psychoanalysts Annals, Belgrade (forthcoming); Damir Arsenijević, “Prema politici nade: poezija posle rata”, ProFemina, no. 43–44, Belgrade, 2006, pp. 196–204; Damir Arsenijević, “Arts: Poets and Poetry. Southeast Europe”, in: Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures: Practices, Interpretations, and Representations, ed. Suad Joseph, vol. 5, Brill Academic Publishers, Leiden, 2007, pp. 89–91; Damir Arsenijević, “Bosna Pharmakos – ka političkoj kritici culture”, Sarajevske sveske, no. 15–16, Media centar, Sarajevo, 2007, pp. 115–141; Damir Arsenijević, “Poezija Razlika u Bosni i Hercegovini – ‘Negiranje Dominantne Ideologije Monopola Na Vjerodostojnost’”, Zeničke sveske vol. 2, no. 4, Zenica, 2005, pp. 127–133; Damir Arsenijević, “Prema politici nade: poezija i postratni period u BiH”, in: Na tragu novih politika: kultura i obrazovanje u Bosni i Hercegovini, ed. Jasmina Husanović, Centar za istraživački, stvaralački i građanski angažman Grad, Asocijacija Bosna i Hercegovina, Tuzla, 2005, pp. 275–298; Damir Arsenijević, Ajla Demiragić, Jelena Petrović, “Women Writing in Red Ink: Women’s Writing and Socio-political Change in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia”, in: Gender and Identity: Theories from and/or on Southeastern Europe, eds. Jelisaveta Blagojević, Katerina Kolozova, Svetlana Slapšak, Women’s Studies and Gender Research Center, Belgrade, 2006, pp. 239–265; Francis R. Jones and Damir Arsenijević, “(Re)constructing Bosnia: ideologies and agents in poetry translation”, Translation and the Construction of Identity: IATIS Yearbook, eds. J. House, M. R. M. Rosario and N. Baumgarten, IATIS (International Association for Translation & Intercultural Studies), Seoul, 2005, pp. 68–95. 6 Nermina Omerbegović (1964, Sarajevo), poet, journalist and critic. Author of two poetry collections: Odrastanja, Društvo pisaca BiH, 1996, Prizivanje dodira, Synopsis, 2006. Translated to Polish, German and English. Works as journalist in Federal agency FENA BiH and editor on cultural department in magazine Oslobođenje, Sarajevo. 7 Odrastanja, Lica, Sarajevo, 1996, p. 16 (see the translation – A Male Poet Writes – in Appendix 1). 8 Omnibus, Sarajevo, 2004.
284 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST 9 Adisa Bašić (1979), poet, journalist and critic. Author of two poetry collections: Havine rečenice, Omnibus, Sarajevo, 1999; TRAUMA MARKET, Omnibus, Sarajevo, 2004. Awarded with DAAD scholarship for germanistics and mediology, Marburg, Germany, and State Department special scholarship for writers. UNESCO award for short story Kako preživjeti auto-stop?. Translated to English, German, Bulgarian. Works as an editor of literary critic column in magazine Slobodna Bosna in Sarajevo. 10 – od čega? (odgovor Židova koji je preživio holokaust na pitanje da��������������������������������������������������� li je otišao na Novi Zeland da bi bio što dalje) [author translation]. 11 See the translation in Appendix 2. 12 Jean Baudrillard, Screened Out, trans. Chris Turner, Verso, London, 2002. 13 What Baudrillard could not or did not want to keep under full attention in his ode to “more real that real” is – let’s remember, that reminiscence is a basic rule of commemorative discourse, that “they don’t believe in what is happening to them” just as “what we believe in is not happening to us” (Nirman Moranjak Bamburać, op. cit. [author translation]). 14 See poem’s translation – Cycle Trip – in Appendix 3. 15 See the translation – Emigrant To Be – in Appendix 4. 16 Ferida Duraković, poet, children writer, Secretary of the PEN center of Bosnia and Herzegovina, born in Olovo, BiH, 18. 4. 1957. Author of the books of poetry: Bal pod maskama, Svjetlost, Sarajevo, 1977; Oči koje me gledaju, Svjetlost, Sarajevo, 1982; Mala noćna svjetiljka, Svjetlost, Sarajevo, 1989; Selidba iz lijepog kraja gdje umiru ruže, Vodnikova domačija, Ljubljana, 1994; Srce tame, Bosanska knjiga, Sarajevo, 1994; Sarajevski pisci djeci, Prague, Check, 1995; prose: Još jedna bajka o ruži, Dom mladih, Sarajevo, 1989; Mikijeva abeceda, Vodnikova domačija, Ljubljana, 1993, 1994; Amilina abeceda, IPC, Sarajevo, 1999; LOCUS MINORIS, Connectum, Sarajevo, 2008. Translated to Polish, Turkish, English (Heart of Darkness, poetry, White Pine Press, Fredonia, New York, 1998). Awarded with Hellman-Hammet Fund for Free Expression Award, New England, U.S.A., 1993; Vasyl Stus Freedom-to-Write Award by P.E.N., New England, USA, 1999; International Board on Books for Young People Honour List 2000. 17 Ljepotica i Zvijer, in: Nedelja, ratno izdanje, 1 November 1992, p. 32 (see the translation – Beauty and the Beast – in Appendix 5). 18 Http://www.blesok.com.mk/books/01poetry/durakovic/tekst.asp?lang=mac&id=95 (see the translation in appendix 6).
285 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arsenijević, Damir, and Ajla Demiragić, Jelena Petrović, “Women Writing in Red Ink: Women’s Writing and Socio-political Change in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Serbia”, in: Gender and Identity: Theories from and/or on Southeastern Europe, eds. Jelisaveta Blagojević, Katerina Kolozova, Svetlana Slapšak, Women’s Studies and Gender Research Center, Belgrade, 2006, pp. 239–265. Arsenijević, Damir, “Arts: Poets and Poetry. Southeast Europe”, in: Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures: Practices, Interpretations, and Representations, ed. Suad Joseph, vol. 5, Brill Academic Publishers, Leiden, 2007, pp. 89–91. Arsenijević, Damir, “Bosna Pharmakos – ka političkoj kritici culture”, Sarajevske sveske, no. 15–16, Media centar, Sarajevo, 2007, p. 115–141. Arsenijević, Damir, Contemporary women’s poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina: an agency with emancipatory promise (forthcoming). Arsenijević, Damir, Gendering the bone, Belgrade Society of Psychoanalysts Annals, Belgrade (forthcoming). Arsenijević, Damir, “Poezija Razlika u Bosni i Hercegovini – ‘Negiranje Dominantne Ideologije Monopola Na Vjerodostojnost’”, Zeničke sveske, vol. 2, no. 4, Zenica, 2005, pp. 127–133. Arsenijević, Damir, “Prema politici nade: poezija i postratni period u BiH”, Na tragu novih politika: kultura i obrazovanje u Bosni i Hercegovini, ed. Jasmina Husanović, Centar za istraživački, stvaralački i građanski angažman Grad, Asocijacija Bosna i Hercegovina, Tuzla, 2005, pp. 275–298. Arsenijević, Damir, “Prema politici nade: poezija posle rata”, ProFemina, no. 43/44, Belgrade, 2006, pp. 196–204. Bašić, Adisa, Havine rečenice, Omnibus, Sarajevo, 1999. Bašić, Adisa, TRAUMA MARKET, Omnibus, Sarajevo, 2004. Baudrillard, Jean, Screened Out, trans. Chris Turner, Verso, London, 2002. BH Dani, no. 532, 24. 8. 2007, http://www.bhdani.com. Duraković, Ferida, Amilina abeceda, IPC, Sarajevo, 1999. Duraković, Ferida, Bal pod maskama, Svjetlost Sarajevo, 1977. Duraković, Ferida, Još jedna bajka o ruži, Dom mladih, Sarajevo, 1989. Duraković, Ferida, Ljepotica i Zvijer, Nedelja, ratno izdanje, 1 November 1992, p. 32. Duraković, Ferida, LOCUS MINORIS, Connectum, Sarajevo, 2008. Duraković, Ferida, Mikijeva abeceda, Vodnikova domačija, Ljubljana, 1993, 1994. Duraković, Ferida, Sarajevski pisci djeci, Prague, Check, 1995. Duraković, Ferida, Selidba iz lijepog kraja gdje umiru ruže, Vodnikova domačija, Ljubljana, 1994. Duraković, Ferida, Srce tame, Bosanska knjiga, Sarajevo, 1994. Duraković, Ferida, Ten Year Old Girl Perceives Her Homeland while Watching the Ocean, http://www.blesok.com.mk/books/01poetry/durakovic/tekst.asp?lang=mac&id=95.
286 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Duraković, Ferida, Mala noćna svjetiljka, Svjetlost, Sarajevo, 1989. Duraković, Ferida, Oči koje me gledaju, Svjetlost, Sarajevo, 1982. Jones, Francis R., and Damir Arsenijević, “(Re)constructing Bosnia: ideologies and agents in poetry translation”, in: Translation and the Construction of Identity: IATIS Yearbook, eds. J. House, M. R. M. Rosario and N. Baumgarten, IATIS (International Association for Translation & Intercultural Studies) Seoul, 2005, pp. 68–95. Moranjak Bamburać, Nirman, “Ima li Rata u ratnom pismu?”, Izazovi feminizma, Forum Bosniae, vol. 26, no. 4, pp. 175–176. Omerbegović, Nermina, Odrastanja, Društvo pisaca BiH, Sarajevo, 1996. Omerbegović, Nermina, Prizivanje dodira, Synopsis, Sarajevo, 2006. Sarajevske sveske, Media centar, Sarajevo, 2007. Slapšak, Svetlana (ed.), War Discourse, Women’s Discourse, in: Topos, vol. 2, no. 1–2, ISH, Ljubljana, 2000.
287 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST “Has not the tendency of courage as a social phenomenon, known today as civic courage, moved significantly from male to female? And isn’t our prediction of such a change merely a side effect of the male cowardice which led us to this gutter and keeps burying us deeper in it?” BORIS BUDEN (1998, p. 159)
288 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST RENATA JAMBREŠIĆ KIRIN THE PERSONAL AS THE POLITICAL: CROATIAN WOMEN’S CITIZENS IN (POST)WAR REPUBLIC OF WORDS
The purpose of my brief presentation – burdened with simplifications and the radicalism of certain conclusions – is to show that the antiwar, antinationalist and political writing of Dubravka Ugrešić, Slavenka Drakulić, Daše Drndić and Ivana Sajko represents the most recognizable, most vital and most translated part of contemporary Croatian literature, despite the seeming inability of these women writers to take the place they deserve at the heart of the literary canon. Their “internal exile” within the national canon is the consequence of the prevailing assumption that the purpose of serious literature is not only to function aesthetically through verbal artistry, but also to create national identity and national pride. However, the fact that these female writers are not recognized is not entirely the fault of conservative philologists and paternalistic guardians of the literary canon, who would rather not have a Slavic “minor literature” as part of the integrated (translated) post-communist or post-feminist literature, one that requires an appropriate theoretical apparatus – whether postcolonial criticism, cultural studies or feminist literary criticism.1 In particular, the male counterparts on the “left-wing barricades” who fought against nationalism, chauvinism, local patriotism and misogyny, have respected their more successful female colleagues, but have also distanced themselves when the emancipation-focused republic of words they built together on the ruins of the war culture2 gained new, market-dictated forms.3 The uncertain transition involves a neo-
289 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST liberal bookstore market, newsstand publishing, online publishing and bookstore/gift shops, all coexisting with government-subsidized publishers who publish the work of “worthy” local authors. This proves that the proclaimed solidarity and true gender equality of the left wing are not easily achieved.4 The ambivalent attitude of women writers towards feminism is partly a consequence of the socialist animosity towards politically active non-feminists who are constantly “updating” the aims of the women’s movement, and partly resistance to the postwar segmentation and professionalization of the civic scene for women.5 Such an attitude has caused contemporary Croatian women’s writing to function as a unique discursive formation with a distinct (para)literary emancipatory role. In the absence of joint gatherings and expressions of ideological and poetic similarity, a significant portion of the accumulated, but also dispersed energy of the sin-gynegraphy6 has been lost. For instance, Dubravka Ugrešić, initiator of the YU Mythology Lexicon as the first digital archive of (post)socialist culture in the region – which could serve as a model for a digital archive of regional women’s history – has not received due recognition for her idea. The independent and widely available form of presenting female memories of life under socialism would illustrate the relevance of the feminist use of the life stories method and enable comparison of the “ordinary” woman’s experience in socialism with literary counterparts. As Hungarian historian Andrea Petö states, giving voice to the stories of women cannot be dismissed as mere false generalization; quite the contrary: “Searching for the stories of our foremothers, for the feminist genealogies, can provide us with security in our present through a different understanding of our past.”7 The feminist assumption that writing the history of Eastern European women faces the problem of how to interpret its “discontinuity, disruption, and backwardness, with the (typically postcolonial) feeling that the history of women starts, restarts and starts once more”.8 We feminist scholars, should therefore define epistemologically an alternative agenda for researching the history of literature written by women in the region,9 and explain why the heterotopia of submarines and locked journalists« rooms marked the Croatian history of women’s literature in the first half of the twentieth century, and the symbolic and later existential exile in its second half. For instance, Zagorka’s windowless little room locked from the outside in Obzor, together with the “submarine”, the narrow corridor “untouched by
290 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST daylight” in the apartment in Demetrova Street, where the members of the “rebel” Croatian Female Writers Association met from 1937 to 1945, are two such heterotopias. Zagorka’s fierce, feminist-inspired patriotism, the autism of the female authors who persisted in writing and contemplating inside their “submarines” during the Second World War, together with apolitical women’s writing in Yugoslavian socialism,10 failed to inspire women authors and intellectuals; it took another war – at the cost of ostracism and exile – to criticize, ethically and esthetically, the patriarchal fortress of power from which the faith of the nation was (irresponsibly) shaped.11 A gynocritical interpretation of war – characterized by well- documented facts, perceptiveness, stylistic authenticity and precise cultural analysis – did a commendable job of explaining the complex Yugoslavian history of bloody secession, familiar to the Western- audience. At the same time, it fulfilled the feminist slogan “the personal is political” in a way that was previously not familiar in Yugoslavian literary culture. With the exception of Danilo Kiš, politically subversive topics and historically “difficult” subjects have been presented mostly in the classic novel, drama or essay forms. Their subject matter presented a safe way for an ambitious Yugoslavian writer to get the attention of the media and critics, thus establishing the public sphere as a male domain of competence and competition in which socially relevant issues were resolved. If a historical understanding of Southeastern Europe always requires “an extra dose of politics”12 then the literary (anti)politics/policies of Croatian women authors in the 90s showed that a consistent political stance, intellectual and moral integrity, together with critical self- awareness, guarantee the representative and universal qualities of “personal” literary language. The connection between “paraclitic” positioning outside and within a national corpus, with genre-shifting between the factual and fictional expressive modes, between “cultural forms and modes of self-definition”, are typical of war novels by Dubravka Ugrešić and Slavenka Drakulić, which must be read against the social and cultural backdrop of the 90s, with its radical changes. In short, after the postmodern sensibility which imbued the intertextual and reflexive “women’s writing” of the 80s – represented in the work of Neda Mirande Blažević, Rada Iveković, Božica Jelušić, Dubravka Ugrešić, Irena Vrkljan and others – Croatian women of the 90s wrote pages of politically charged cultural analysis of the war. However,
291 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST the focus on the political is not just another quality of their semantic layer. The capacity for political action of the new feminine “republic of words” – in which the power hierarchy of the literary scene was jeopardized by women writers of market-friendly popular literature (Arijana Čulina, Vedrana Rudan) – is expressed through the modes of reproduction, distribution, promotion and reception of literary texts; that is, through the newly “democratized” communicational codes in which literary, essayistic and scientific discourse intertwine in various ways.13 If we attempt to summarize the political capacity of such genre- blending and ideologically “coloured” texts, which emphasize gender self-awareness, there are several elements that we must consider: The non-dependence of the authorial position of exiled women writers on the national (intellectual and literary) community; The power that arises from their position as “intercultural interpreters” and mediators between East and West, the Balkans and the rest of Europe and the world, where the authority of the speaking subject is often more important than the subject matter itself;14 The potential for transformation, created by the awareness of discontinuity and marginalization of female authorship, female poetics and feminist subversions in the national canon and exemplary texts of patriotic ideology; Self-confidence arising from the awareness that artistic consciousness of the diversity of female experience can influence social practices of constructing the female; Reliance on new communicational networks and their transnational cultural exchange, no longer confined to only the book-shop market.
On the other hand, the dominant criticism is a reflection of more or less consciously feminist need for ideological commitment and advocacy on behalf of the socially marginalized. This often results in remarkable insights into, and stories about, the dehumanized landscapes of the world of globalization, and sometimes in “totalizing stories about East and West”15 recurred to by authors such as Ugrešić in Have a Nice Day: from Balkan War to the American Dream (1994), and S. Drakulić in How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (1992). The basis of the cultural criticism expressed in the literary and essay writing of two prominent women writers of the contemporary Croatian scene (members of two literary generations), Dubravka Ugrešić and Ivana Sajko, would be the following:
292 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST The criticism of patriotic ideology that depoliticizes and morally denounces the “shrewish daughters” and not ideologically “prodigal sons”;16 that is, ideology that favors those with “not enough brains and too much firepower”, but that sidelines traumatized women, the victims/heroines of the Croatian war of independence, known as the “Homeland War”;17 The criticism of Catholic hypocrisy and demagoguery that can only be combatted with the emancipatory “wicked tongue” that expresses “evil thoughts”18 and which explains the strengthened female subject is a competent spokesperson for the female reproductive body; The criticism of post-socialist privatization and “No-holds-barred capitalism”; The criticism of seemingly upright and progressive European institutions; The call to subvert the global hierarchy on behalf of the mute majority, the bablje internacionale of the discriminated, exploited, expatriated and abused women of the first, second and third world.19
The conscious politicization of the literary forms that women from former Yugoslavia mostly write in exile,20 (post)colonial and liminal spaces, includes “normatization” of the distorted heteroglossia position of the deprived compatriot (exile, Gastarbeiter, asylum seeker, outsider), whose past is equally non-transparent and painful as his or her future. However, unlike the propagandistic political vision of the future – the past experience of Yugoslavian communism offers a safer home base for self-understanding.21 Therefore, “criticism of Yugo-nostalgia”22 offers an important mode of coping with the everyday harshness of life typical for a country in transition and diaspora, whereas the liberal politics of memory represents an equally important element for democratization of society and development policy. One of the qualities of everyday life during transition is the regressive comprehension of female gender roles in the private and public arenas. In today’s Croatia, a model woman is wife and mother, deprived of the socialist myths which constructed her equal partner to the “new man”, free from all the social demands and expectations placed before her by the “new democracy”. The Christian and pre-revolutionary ideals of femininity propagated in media through the neo-liberal “truth regime” are being imposed on women. It is therefore not unusual that the social and labor rights of women in transitional societies are similar to those
293 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST typical of the great European crisis in the 1930s, when the first wave of commercial mass-distribution created low-level office, sales jobs and new unskilled jobs – stereotypically woman’s work, requiring a young female labor force.23
BETWEEN THE MOTHER AND SNAKE TONGUE OF THE RADICAL AUTOBIOGRAPHY ON/IN EXILE
Wo warst du, Maria, als allen klar wurde, dass diese Welt einen Befreiungsgegenschlag nur akzeptieren würde, wenn er maximal acht Tage dauert, weil danach nämlich ein Weltkrieg beginne und wir in diplomatische Scheisse treten würden, und deshalb seien wir besser knapp, präzise und tödlich…. Wir verbrauchen unsere Munition wie die Russen und die Amerikaner, seufzte darauf der Präsident, schon besorgt um den lokalen Sieg und den Weltfrieden. 24 IVANA SAJKO
May the sea cast up your bones. May grass sprout through your bones. May you see black and your eyes turn white. May you turn to dust and ashes. May God burn out your eyes and leave two holes. May your mouth utter never a word. 25 DUBRAVKA UGREŠIĆ
The connection between the social practices of constructing femininity and the literary means of establishing female selfhood through artistic self-awareness is indisputable.26 This more or less conscious assumption led Croatian women writers – mostly Irena Vrkljan and Dubravka Ugrešić – to shape their experience of the world in the chaos of war, limbo and exile as an autobiographical space of heterogenic fragments of experience, discursive shards of the broken mirror, each reflecting only a part of the trauma of the disarticluated and disembodied community of those who were displaced from familiar worlds and daily routines by the war. Autobiography and biography,27 ethnographic interviews to elicit the stories of rape victims and combatants,28 as well as quotes from letters, interviews and women’s diaries,29 newspaper editorials and advertisements,30 newspaper and encyclopedic
294 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST entries,31 all go to form the discursive backdrop to (post)-war female autobiographical prose. Among them, a special place is held by the novel-essay Muzej bezuvjetne predaje (The Museum of Unconditional Surrender) by Dubravka Ugrešić and the eight-monologue novel Rio bar by Ivana Sajko, which present true “radical autobiographies”32 polyphonic literary discourses which, by confronting female stories/ memories, invite doubt in objective and documented reality, but without diminishing the responsibility of the storytellers to assess concrete historical events and individuals. Drawing attention to the problem of authorship and rhetorical conventions of every first-person narration, these texts loosen the “autobiographical pact” between the author and reader through ad hoc generic pointers such as documentary novel, prose book, manuscript, davorije (patriotic poems), eight monologues on war for eight actresses dressed in wedding dresses. Most of this mixed- genre and engagée women’s publishing belongs to feminist (rather than feminized) literature which Rita Felski defined as a group of texts which “perceive gender as a problematic category”. Since they are writing in South-Slavic languages, writers (women or otherwise) cannot but reflect the interrelatedness of sex, genealogic and genre instantiations, the immanent similarity between the post-war female stories and “river-flow novel” form,33 the “museum” of unnecessary things34 or self-creating textual “womanbombs”.35 The parallel process of becoming a woman and becoming unhomed – which structures exile life through writing, and continually disintegrates identity strongholds through texts – has provided exiled women writers with poetical and intellectual emancipation from the Central European masculine tradition, which sees in exile a modernist metaphor for the (metaphysical) European destiny. Ugrešić, as an exemplary exile woman writer, has interpreted her consciousness of the deprived, politically and symbolically inferior position of the Other, or even the third (which belongs to postcolonial literature) through Homi Bhabba’s term unhomed.36 The feeling of not belonging to the mono-ethnic culture of origin, where she is regarded as having given away the “family secret”, was as much a burden as the constraint imposed by European bureaucrats, journalists, publishers, and readers to define the self ethnically and culturally, as multicultural if nothing else. “My problem consists in the fact that I am not and do not wish to be different. My difference and my identity are doggedly determined by others. Those at home and those outside.”37 No one except for the
295 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST theoreticians offers the label of “vernacular cosmopolitan” for all who, like Ugrešić’s alter ego, feel at home in capitals (Berlin, New York, Lisbon), yet like outcasts in any system of supervision and control. In Muzeju bezuvjetne predaje, exile discourse creates a powerful voice for the female nomad subjectivity and a piece of writing which successfully avoids the “constitutive blindness” of the autobiographical subject.38 Ugrešić skillfully intertwines diverse women’s life stories and through the photographic principle of self-lighting and self-shading, collects the heterogenic narrative and essayistic core of the text. Instead of a unique, coherent and confident narrative I, the divided narrative subject with its multiple narrative instantiations offers a variety of factually and photographically impressive images of violent silencing, the warp and weft of female identities in everyday life in a country in transition and diaspora. The knowledge gaps of a new language, the forced linguistic and cultural translation are no longer a primary dread of the female artist in “voluntary exile”. Her strengths are now directed to the process of regaining her own (literary and cultural) history, questioning the silence of her foremothers, facing the fact that “there is no such a thing as a mother tongue« since “all tongues carry the name of the father and are stamped by its register”.39 For the writer who is forced to become a polyglot, to be “between languages” without letting the language “speak” her, Joseph Brodsky’s contention that “exile is mostly a linguistic event” offers a variety of interpretations. For Brodsky in particular, “exile is an event in which a writer ejects himself totally from his language and then, surrounded by another language, totally withdraws back into his own language”.40 However, feminist criticism reminds us that the essentializing familiarity of the mother tongue is the foundation of every fundamental and nationalistic politics.41 Is the usual suspicion of polyglots not the consequence of the fact that “polyglot practices [are a] sort of gentle promiscuity with different linguistic bedrocks, that s/he has long since relinquished any notion of linguistic or ethnic purity”?42 However, an ex-Yugoslavian writer is not merely a nomad43 and a migrant, but also a postcolonial subject for whom the original culture “functions as a standard of reference” because “the sense of the home country or culture of origin is activated by political and other forms of resistance to the conditions offered by the host culture”.44 Regardless of whether writers continue writing in their mother tongue (like Dubravka Ugrešić or David Albahari) or
296 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST adopt the new language (like Slavenka Drakulić, Aleksandar Hemon, Semezdin Mehmedinović), the “extraordinary” power of the exile writer without poetic role models comes from the power of their poetic language which questions everything related to all aspects of selfhood and otherness, and expresses the general (postcolonial) “unhomely moment”. According to Homi Bhabha, the unhomely moment actually “relates the traumatic ambivalences of personal, psychic history to the wider disjunction of political existence”.45 In this way, an autobiographical story lends credibility to the collective portrayal of those who share the experience of unhomeliness, non-selfhood, stigmatization, exploitation, and political and cultural racism. In short, in their best works, cosmopolitan women authors in exile – who belong to Croatian literature as much as to translational postcolonial literature – no longer perform postmodern experiments typical of 1980s prose, but rather turn to essayistic prose, newspaper columns and novel-essays, keeping a close eye on the theoretical, activist and artistic scene in order to raise their awareness of the limitations and potentials of their postcolonial-exile-nomadic condition. For them, home is not a fixation, the point around which “the myth of homeland and return” revolves, so typical of diaspora and immigrant writers, but merely an address, a place of mostly painful and uncertain, but possibly emancipative displacement, which strengthens their political, gender and professional self-awareness. The intense experience of termination, loss, grieving, coming to terms with one’s ghosts and rejecting any strong existential basis can, but does not necessarily have to, be the driving force for “radical creativity” in exile.46 As E. Said observes, creativity is intrinsically connected to the exile state, just as are reflexivity, great sorrow and melancholy. Hamid Naficy also perceives exile and transnationality as “highly processual, discursive and ambivalent” with typical emotional oscillations “characterized by zeniths of ecstasy and confidence and nadirs of despondency and doubt”.47 For the authorial female subject exposed to patriarchal political and media strategies which represent “domestic space as the space of the normalizing, pastoralizing, and individuating techniques”48 the need to describe the unheimlich foreign country as an equally acceptable, safe and encouraging place for creative self-achievement, is even greater. Although the meditative voice of the female intellectual in the 1970s and 1980s could not have explained what actually made her leave her country: “An accident,
297 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST unemployment. A bad marriage. A dose of curiosity”49 she now recognizes clearly the reasons for her (intellectual and emotional) connection to the new environment, regardless of the common ambivalent feelings of not belonging “here or there” and exhausting struggle for everyday existence.
MASCULINE STORIES OF EXILE
Welcome to the edge of death, all you Yugoslavs in your forties. Thank the war, for you’ve never been so close to immortality. Thank the war, because the bare minimum of conscience has jolted you once and for all out of your day-to-day routines and hypocrisy. Thank the war, because every emotion has been sharpened, and the danger has never been higher, and everything is rootless now. Thank the war for the equal opportunities we’ve all been given. Thank the war for putting an end to everyone’s smug self-satisfaction. Thank the war for hurling you into the very midst of the world you always feared. 50 SVETLANA SLAPŠAK
Unlike the feminine intrusion of the autobiographical voice in narrative écriture circulaire of inextricably intertwined destinies, masculine narration of intellectual exile is continued through the hagiographic tradition of the story about the prodigal son. Despite accusations of betraying “family matters”, an exile intellectual with an international career arouses respect and admiration in his homeland, since he embodies the very tendencies and moral qualities – courage, veracity, rebellious individuality, purity of heart, political Eros, didactic clarity, sharp (Krausian) humor.51 However, the “lucid child” of radical social criticism does not seek for dialogical partners among female protagonists of the genuine “civic courage”, who are, for that matter, rarely named,52 but rather stir up controversy with nationalist and pseudo-liberal intellectuals – the ones who provide them with ample material for criticism, ironic distance or grotesque portrayal. With one eye behind him on the “wastes of Bablyon” and the banality of everyday cosmopolitan European life before him, the theory-savvy “bastard of Croatian and former-Yugoslav opportunities”,53 turns his migrant experience of reflexive de-territorialization into the non-sentimental, entertaining and enlightening heroic-metaphysical story54 of Cioran’s
298 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST “fall into emptiness”: the Balkan intellectual can hardly avoid moving towards the West.55 Here one sees a lack of understanding, misconceptions, blindness and hegemonic grasping where epistemological insecurity (just as expertise) is swiftly replaced by the non-transparency of the universal and myopia of the local criticism,56 i.e. the combination of two kinds of emptiness –the postmodern Western one, “the dissatisfied and scoffing”, and Eastern emptiness, Buddhistically “turned to oneself”.57 In this symbolic emptiness and political poverty – where “the Balkans are underappreciated by the Balkans that go by the label of Europe”,58 instead of creating new policies of solidarity, partnership and dialogue between postcolonial, post-Marxist and feminist thought – the revolt of the last livid intellectual-righteous person is powerful and challenging, but it does not encounter interlocutors neither here nor there, and he can thus do nothing but invite the ghosts of great men such as Krleža and Kiš.59 Turning to the traditional strongholds of authority and gender identity (dead fathers), is the main obstacle for effective transgender and transcursive “bastardly” joining of the tactical partners among radical theoretical terrorists in the war against the (ideological and ontological) emptiness of an exhausted Western civilization. The grave seriousness to which the convicted lonesome heroes among the local radical critics of the society in order to “dare to gaze into the abyss” of the contemporary crisis, is equivalent to the threat of self-silencing: “In the same way, it is impossible to articulate a reflexively effective critique at the local level. Local, political essentialism makes all critical thinking mute, just as reflexively universalist critique leaves every locally effective political act untouched. Seeking to overcome this division can be a noble task, but it is not the task of critique. It is not there to balance a world again that has lost its balance, but rather to probe the depth of the crisis in which this world finds itself. For this reason, it must dare to gaze into the abyss, even if it loses its tongue at the same time. This is part of its historical experience.”60 Activists of the peace, feminist, environment and queer movements were coordinated, united, loud and as such “supernaturally” powerful61 in their struggle against hate speech, human rights abuse, symbolic and physical violence. However, the united front of citizens and intellectual pacifists, struggling for survival in the postwar environment, for the ability to be representative and different, showed significantly less solidarity and tolerance towards others within their community. Sons
299 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST and daughters of the civic scene accomplished their aims, from the discourse of difference and rights to authority, of the minority voice which creates transnational alliances, much easier than the gendered friendship politics62 based on trust, Utopian imagination and exchange of stories of one’s own (traumatic) pain and vision of a democratic future.
FROM AN ACTIVE WOMAN TO AN ACTIVATED WOMAN – RADICALIZATION OF THE POLITICAL AND POETIC
A Sterile and hypocritical civic culture regards revolt as something immature, something that will gradually wear off, if you are normal. And it is precisely revolt against the system that protects us from the intoxication with the general stances, from the stupidity of others and ourselves; it protects us from aging, from falling into a dream where any authority is indisputable. 63 IVANA SAJKO
In the social environment of the prolonged trauma, unnatural political alliances, spiritual apathy, corporate mentality,64 social division and commercialization of the book market, writers of the youngest postwar generation, have found new ways to express their experience of time and society and face its institutionalized, structural violence. Just as the civic courage of the women writers and female journalists at the beginning of the 1990s was considered “unnatural”, superhuman, witchcraft, so is the possibility of rising up against a neo-liberal movement, today regarded as an act transgresses the boundaries of the humanly and socially acceptable, and is, in the spirit of the times, anathematized as a terrorist act. In order to familiarize psychologically and epistemologically the position of the (discursive) woman terrorist who is contemplating the spectacle of self-destruction as the only remaining respected course of action in the world, Ivana Sajko (2004) writes the manifesto of Bombenfrau/womanbomb, thus using the metaphor of the female body as “palimpsest on which relations of power are inscribed”,65 as the first and last resort of the (post) feminist struggle. The female body – overdetermined as a sign (racial, social, cultural, sexual) – is not only a “dangerous supplement of the
300 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST discursive wars”,66 but also a live stronghold for political, juridical, biomedical, philosophical, and religious struggles for strength, i.e. the change of the existing hierarchy of power. Just like Olga, the heroine of the movie Notre musique (2003) by J. L. Godard, filmed in “post-apocalyptic” Sarajevo and Mostar, I. Sajko portrays the deep disappointment of the contemporary female intellectual, fascinated by the theories of famous philosophers and thinkers, which occurs when she tries to confront their competitive theories and the existing “poverty of the world”; she is left with no other choice but to empty the books out of her rucksack and fill it up with the explosive.67 The advocate for the “conceptual terrorism”68 breaks all ties with her local sisters Joan d’Arc, fantastic “slaves” who sacrifice themselves eagerly for the wellbeing or collective emancipation; for the first time she takes control of the modes of production and reception of her own literary life. Sajko uses the power of the theatre to defy the conventions, limits and stereotypes of civil and politically correct speech, but also in the other spheres of the dramatic enactment, the theatrical quality of social life – in book festivals, promotions and fairs, and during TV appearances. This multimedia artist often directs her own drama texts and in her interviews, theoretical and essay writing she actively directs their reception. Focusing on the subaltern, disempowered, outcast marginal female voice in her “performance novel” Rio bar, drama text – manifestos and conceptual monologues, Sajko uses “cursing” to create a possibility “of subaltern and postcolonial agency”. The quality of the postcolonial agency is the art of thinking the limits, and the limits of thinking, of the Western world, giving voice to the traumatized subject, questioning the opposition Balkanism/Eurocentrism with which the politicians fill the empty “core of the European dream”.69 The narrative voices of traumatized women, whose bodies are inscribed with the regional history of violence and regression, paradox and silence, but also the history of struggle over the legitimacy of speech on behalf of victims, compose a particular group of prose works made in Croatia in the past fifteen years. Hesford and Kozol rightfully note that “the moments of trauma or crisis most often reveal our dependence on the “real”, the authentic, and the truthful”.70 Therefore, the authoresses who re-write and re-inscribe the trauma of rape victims through testimonies (Slavenka Drakulić, As If I Am Not There, 1999), who discover/uncover as-yet unrevealed trauma from the Second World War through historiographic metafiction and documentary
301 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST novels (D. Drndić in Totenwande, 2000; Doppelgaenger, 2002: Leica format, 2003; and Sonnenschein, 2007) or through the blasphemous discourse of “illegitimate” and self-destructive war victims who deny the official Croatian narrative of the Homeland War – who, like the author of Rio bar (2006), juxtapose and oppose the literary and the documentary, the historiographic and the biographic, the photographic and the poetic, thus reminding us, over and over again, that “the real” is not transparent, “but reinscribed, translated, radically rethought and fundamentally worked over by the text”.71 The same thesis is supported through documentary films on (im)possibility of witnessing to traumatic experiences, by the following authors – Mandy Jacobson and Karmen Jelinčić (Calling the Ghosts, 1996), Biljana Čakić - Veselič (Dečko kojem se žurilo / The Boy Who was in a Hurry, 2001) and Jasmila Žbanić (Slike s ugla / Images, Angles, 2003). These directors, just like the aforementioned authors, were not discouraged by the theoretcal dictum of the “unspeakable” and “non-representable” character of traumatic experiences; “instead, they scrutinize the terms and conditions of individual memory and turn they search into content as well as method of their filmic narratives”.72 Unlike the novel writers who determined their position with regards to feminist postulates, the youngest women writers, especially of poetry (Tatjana Gromača, Dorta Jagić, Darija Žilić, Marija Andrijašević) typically share an anarchist sensibility – “grappling with those real, immediate questions that emerge from a transformative project”73 – they renounce literary tradition and the protection offered by institutions, and use the non-commercial net space and “tactile and tactical media”, participating in public discussions, clubs and radio programs. In terms of poetics this includes renouncing novels, narrations and autobiographical forms with their mimetic susceptibility and their seduction and continuation of the discursive and performance search for “another locus of inscription and intervention, another hybrid, “inappropriate” enunciative site”.74 Thematically, this involves problematizing the Balkan experience of the postcolonial state – hybridism, mimicry, paradox, stereotyping, “time-lag” experience, exoticism, especially in contact between the old and new Yugoslav diaspora75 – which serves as the basis for creation of the non- ideological, spiritual and artistic “sisterhood”. As I. Sajko showed in her experimental novel Rio bar this is the case of ambivalent, intuitive, rather than rational, experience of the postindustrial (neo)colonialism
302 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST in which the dominant Western approach to the “territorial” existence of the European Other – who at the same time try to be “best in class” – is based on the conglomerate of the tourist, entrepreneurial, banking, advisory and media (neo) colonial interest point of view. Judging by the vitality and authenticity of the female (para) literary strategies, it seems that literature – together with local feminist critique and theory – is best capable of expressing the various paradoxes of life in the European half- periphery, most of all the time-lag in the heart of the nostalgic narration of “the future past”, of yet another postponed Utopia of egalitarian and prosperous community of proud citizens able to “effectively redefine the concept of Europe”.76 In this regard, Croatian women’s literature of the 21st century represents the thick literary node of time “at which various narrative strands come together without forming the heart or essence of an organic unit”,77 offering the insight into contemporary female experience which surpasses the boundaries of national.
NOTES
1 In his History of the Croatian Literature Dubravko Jelčić condemns the four Croatian writers for “not recognizing the historical moment” and “drifting apart from the centuries-long ideals and the plebeian will of the Croatian people”. Cf. Dubravko Jelčić, Povijest hrvatske književnosti, Naklada Pavičić, Zagreb, 2004, p. 615. Ideological “disqualification” is also made by Slobodan Prosperov Novak in his History of the Croatian Literature by admitting that the “political texts” by Dubravka Ugrešić are “well written”, but equal to authentic, journalistic and factual discourse, claiming that they are “abundant in syllogistic arguments, but completely false conclusions”. In: Slobodan Prosperov Novak, Povijesti hrvatske književnosti, Marjan tisak, 4, Split, 2004, p. 108. He praises the authoress for consistently applying the postmodern poetics which questions and ontologically blurs the boundary between factual and fictional, but at the same time accuses her of confusing “literature for reality” (op. cit, p. 109) and taking “unacceptable” political stances. The combination of lecturing and distinguishing ideological stances and literary-theoretical paroxysm from the position of the historiographic power is to be comprehended not as an incident made by an autistic literary community, but as a verification of the assumption that a series of extra-aesthetic criteria controls the establishment of the (national) canon, which, over and over again, distinguishes the acceptable from the unacceptable, free authors from the authors who are “not free” (cf . Jelčić, op. cit., p. 615), serious genres from the trivial ones, relevant from marginalized subject matters and stylistic procedures.
303 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST 2 Cf. Ivan Čolović, Politika simbola, Biblioteka XX vek, Štampa Čigoja, Beograd, 2000. 3 In his book Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe A. B. Wachtel defines Eastern Europe as the part of the world where serious literature and those who make it have always been overrated. He finds communist nomenclature responsible for maintaining prestigious social reputation and status of the writers and nineteen-century-old “fathers of the nation” and further notices that the social prestige and symbolic power of the (oppositional) writers was even greater by the end of the communist era. Creation of the civic society, democratic power and market economy the writers no longer voiced the “conscience” of the nation, whereas establishing the market for translational and popular literature made writers even more marginalized, intellectually and economically. However, Wachtel rightfully notices that writers – depending on their education, reputation and circumstances – used different strategies to turn their symbolic cultural capital into relevant positions in politics, journalism or publishing houses. In Croatia, a number of writers builds journalist career, but none of them – most of them are men – has reached the publishing success Slavenka Drakulić and Dubravka Ugrešić accomplished abroad. Cf. Endru Baruh Vahtel, Književnost Istočne Europe u doba postkomunizma: uloga pisca u Istočnoj Europi, trans. Ivan Radosavljević, Stubovi culture, Beograd, 2006. 4 Cf. Svetlana Slapšak, “Between the vampire husband and the mortal lover: a narrative for feminism in Yugoslavia”, Research on Russia and Eastern Europe 2, 1996, pp. 201–224. 5 Although she refuses to be labeled as a feminist, Ugrešić based her stances on feminist analysis of the symbolic connection between militarism, nationalism, patriarchal qualities and anti- intellectualism (developed theoretically by Susan Brownmiller, Cynthia Enloe, Nira Yuval - Davis, Carole Pateman, Sara Ruddick etc., and their counterparts from our region Biljana Kašić, Vesna Kesić, Staša Zajović, Svetlana Slapšak (1996, 1997, 2007) etc.), feminist criticism of the gender stereotypes in hatred (cf. Cooke and Woollacott 1993; Žarkov 2007), and feminist self-reflection of the limited choice of identities for a woman intellectual who is a spiritual exile from her own home/ homeland as well as from the “provincial” Europe with gentrification mentality of a fortress suitable for the affluent white inhabitants. 6 Andrea Zlatar, Tekst, tijelo, trauma, Naklada Ljevak, Zagreb, 2004, p. 135. 7 Andrea Petö, “Stories of Women’s Lives: Feminist Genealogies in Hungary”, in: Gender Relations in South Eastern Europe, eds. Miroslav Jovanović and Slobodan Naumović, vol. 2, no. 33, Udruženje za društvenu istoriju – Zur, p. 212. 8 Ibid. 9 The Forum of the feminist journal Aspasia focussing on the theme Women Writers and Intellectuals, starts with the question of what it means to be a woman writer or intellectual from Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe today. As editors simply noted: “nine respondents from different countries and generations provide an array of views that help us piece together at least a partial view of a very complex picture, for the circumstances of writing as a woman today have become linked to place and cultural context in increasingly varied ways. These narratives [...] present again a powerful argument for the need to better integrate women’s writing into the larger
304 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST cultural history of this region” (Maria Bucur and Francisca de Haan, “Editorial”, Aspasia journal 2, 2008, p. vii). 10 A relevant feminist issue is why the works by Irena Vrkljan, Slavenka Drakulić and Dubravka Ugrešić written in the 1980s lack political capacity and critical observation of the ideological creation of the authoritarian power in socialist society. Professor Gordana Crnković of Washington University was asked the same by the American students of Croatian literature: “Why did these writers not include any politics in their early works? How could I. Vrkljan's autobiographies, Ugrešić’s humorous prose, or Drakulić’s novels not take as one of their themes the growing political crisis in Yugoslavia, the crisis which eventually led to the war? [...] Why were they so apolitical at that stage of their work, or else relegating their politics to other aspects of their lives in the way Drakulić (an engaged journalist) did?” (Gordana P. Crnković, “Women Writers in Croatian and Serbian Literatures”, in: Gender Politics in the Western Balkans, ed. Sabrina P. Ramet, The Pennsylvania State University Press, Pennsylvania, 1999, pp. 239–240). Crnković argues that in socialist literary culture even “the slightest intrusion of this political discourse would be charged with overdetermined meaning, shifting the works’ focus from individual and private aspects of women’s lives to social and political aspects of these lives” (ibid.). 11 Renata Jambrešić Kirin, Dom i svijet: o ženskoj kulturi pamćenja, Centar za ženske studije, Zagreb, 2008, pp. 128–130, 154. 12 Petö, op. cit., p. 217. 13 Vahtel, op. cit., pp. 170–199. 14 Ibid, p. 181. 15 Ibid, p. 149. 16 Dubravka Ugrešić, Ministarstvo boli, Faust Vrančić, Biblioteka 90 stupnjeva, vol. 5, Zagreb, 2004, pp. 191–216. 17 Cf. Ivana Sajko, Rio bar, Meandar, Zagreb, 2006. 18 Ibid., p. 60. 19 Dubravka Ugrešić, Baba Jaga je snijela jaje, Vuković & Runjić Zagreb, 2008, pp. 309–312. “Instead of going to churches, mosques, temples and shrines that have never been truly theirs – all those millions of women should begin the search for their own temple, the Temple of Zlatna Baba (a Slavic goddess), if it is the temple that they need … and stop obeying the callous men, responsible for deaths of thousands of people” (ibid., p. 312). 20 In her unfinished dissertation The Motif of Exile in the Croatian Literature Ada Mandić Beier explores a significant influence the leading Croatian authors of the twentieth century, from A. G.Matoš to D.Ugrešić, who had spent a significant part of their lives in exile, had on the process of cultural modernization o the society which created enough space for the “other”, minority and alternative communities. 21 Nataša Kovačević, Narrating Post/Communism: Colonial discourse and Europe’s borderline civilization, Routledge, London – New York, 2008, pp. 156–188. “The real Yugoslavia is much more threatening because its Yugoslav identity (like the phenomenon of “Yugonostalgia” among the
305 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST warring ethnics) exceeds explanations supplied by narratives of iron-hand communism and of liberal-democratic multicultural tolerance” (ibid., p. 158). 22 Cf. Mitja Velikonja, Titostalgija – študija nostalgije po Josipu Brozu, Mirovni inštitut, Biblioteka Media Watch, Ljubljana, 2008. 23 According to Renate Bridenthal the first significant reconstitution of the western capital economy from the 1930s needed young, cheap female labor force with a more feminine appearance: “Appearance and pleasing demeanor were important new attributes in these jobs, which depended so heavily on extensive social contact. Thus, woman experienced contradictions. They had greater economic independence, but it depended on age and behavior. New sexual attitudes allowed them greater freedom but also commercially exploited female sexuality in the media” (Renate Bridenthal, “Something Old, Something New: Women Between the Two World Wars”, in: Becoming Visible: Women in European History, eds. R. Bridenthal and C. Koonz, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1977, p. 422). 24 Ivana Sajko, Rio Bar, Matthes & Seitz, trans. Alida Bremer, Berlin, 2008, p. 73. 25 Dubravka Ugrešić, The Ministry of Pain, trans. M. H. Heim, SAQI, London, 2005, p. 252. 26 Irina Novikova, “Žena i rat/rod i žanr/autobiografija i istorija u Dalekoj tutnjavi Elene Rževske”, Ženske studije 10, Beograd, 1998, pp.156–158. 27 E.g. Irena Vrkljan, Berlinski rukopis, GZH, Zagreb, 1988, and Pred crvenim zidom, Durieux, Zagreb, 1994; Dubravka Ugrešić, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, trans. Celia Hawkesworth, Phoenix House, London, 1998; Tatjana Gromača, Crnac, Durieux, Zagreb, 2004. 28 E.g. Slavenka Drakulić, Café Europa: Life after Communism, Abacus, London, 1996, pp. 147–153, and As If I Am Not There: A Novel about the Balkans, trans. Marko Ivić, Abacus, London, 1999. 29 E.g. Daša Drndić, Canzone di guerra, Meander, Zagreb, 1998. 30 E.g. Dubravka Ugrešić, Kultura laži, Arkzin, Zagreb, 1996; Daša Drndić, Marija Czestochowska još uvijek roni suze: ili umiranje u Torontu, Adamić, Rijeka, 1997. 31 E.g. Ivana Sajko, Rio bar, Meander, Zagreb, 2006. 32 Cf. Mirna Velčić, Otisak priče, August Cesarec, Zagreb, 1990. 33 Cf. Dubravka Ugrešić, Forsiranje romana-reke, August Cesarec, Zagreb, 1989. 34 Cf. Dubravka Ugrešić, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender. 35 Cf. Ivana Sajko, Žena bomba, Meandar, Zagreb, 2004. 36 In his book Location of culture Bhabha defines the concept of beingunhomed as a refusal of loyalty to one culture/nation/state, as the main characteristic of the postcolonial extraterritoriality for immigrants and those who were displaced from their original “position” of identification, either for their colonial history, violence or significant social and economic changes. To be unhomed “is not to be homeless”, an unhomed person has the power of “constantly negotiating his place in the world”, in the “third space” of a new intercultural culture marked by hybridity not multiculturalism. Cf. Homi Bhabha K., The Location of Culture, Routledge, London – New York, 1994. 37 Dubravka Ugrešić, The Culture of Lies: Antipolitical Essays, Phoenix House, London, trans. Celia Hawkesworth, 1998, p. 237.
306 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST 38 Peter Sloterdijk, Doći na svijet, dospjeti u jezik, trans. Mirjana Stančić, Meandar, Zagreb, 1992, p. 24. 39 Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, Columbia University Press, New York, 1994, p. 11. 40 Joseph Brodsky, On Grief and Reason, Penguin Books, London, 1995, p. 32. 41 Jambrešić Kirin, Dom i svijet, pp. 130–136. Ugrešić discloses the qualities typical of a foreign language in mother tongue through cultural memory of the community which regards the Other as alien, undesirable and unsuitable to its own ego ideal. Such a language hardly offers a basis for development of transnational identity and relationship based on trust towards the other. As the etymology of the word foreigner (ino-stranac) suggests, he is the one who is unusual, different, but also the one who transgresses the boundaries of the entirety (universalità, generalità, universitas), universal horizon of the experience, moral principles and values within the community. However, since the community can at no point be constituted as homogeneous, “organic” entity, the exclusion mechanism is constantly at work, repeatedly repositioning and undermining on gender, religious, cultural and other axes where they interchangeably take dominant hegemonic position defining the “image of the enemy” (Vladimir Biti, Strano tijelo pri/povjesti, Hrvatska sveučilišna naklada, Zagreb, 2000, p. 196). Numerous courses, damnations and sayings at the end of the novel Ministarstvo boli/The Ministry of Pain reveals sadistic satisfaction by the participants of the “common unconscious” in diabolic images of persecution, destruction, torture and mutilation of those who have, until the process of displacement or excommunication – before they became outcasts or the unsuitable ones – belonged to the very same community. The dreadful shadow of the “un-motherly foreign country” in a mother tongue follows the disinherited sons and daughters coursing them “wherever they may be”. 42 Braidotti, op. cit., p. 13. 43 “Though the image of “nomadic subject” is inspired by the experience of peoples or cultures that are literally nomadic, the nomadism in question here refers to the kind of critical consciousness that resists settling into socially coded modes of thought and behavior” (Braidotti, op. cit., p. 5). 44 Ibid., p. 25. 45 Bhabha, op. cit., p. 15. 46 Elizabeth Bachner analysis the relationship between “radical creativity” and social form of “self- exile” of the leading artists of the twentieth century employing sociologist Georg Simmel’s definition of the adventurer and Julia Kristeva’s psychoanalytical concept of foreigner. The artist and the adventurer share particular, “radical” feeling of temporality, they are removed from the everyday reality and express tendency to “totalize” the epiphanic experience. However, unlike the adventurer, the writer interprets in a complex manner his intense experience of the world in his imagination. Kristeva argues that the exile artist feels as a foreigner, at the same time marginalized and necessary for the functioning of the society, as the one who is perceived by others as the other and finds “perverse pleasure” in his/her self-alienation. Cf. Elizabeth Bachner, Mad and Navigating Blood: Exile and Radical Creativity, 2002, http://www.newschool.edu/tcds/elizabeth%20bachner.pdf. 47 Hamid Naficy, “Fobični prostori i liminalne panike: žanr nezavisnoga transnacionalnog filma”, trans. Lovorka Kozole, Kolo, vol. 15, no. 1, 2005, p. 358.
307 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST 48 Bhabha, op. cit., p. 15. 49 Vrkljan, Berlinski rukopis, p. 15. 50 Slapšak, Mala crna haljina, p. 35. 51 The author of the novel Barikada / Barricade describes these qualities in the foreword, as an authorial credo. Cf. Boris Buden, Barikade 2, Arkzin, Zagreb, 2nd edition, 1998, p. 9. Judging by the reviews on the cover of the book, he is praised for the same qualities by numerous critics. 52 Boris Buden, Kaptolski kolodvor: politički eseji, Centar za savremenu umetnost, Beograd, 2002, pp. 228–229, 235. 53 Cf. Buden, Barikade 2, Kaptolski kolodvor. 54 According to Hannah Arendt a heroic gesture of self-exposure through the act of narration establishes a relationship between a Greek hero and a Greek citizen, for they both posses a unique “impulse to appear, or to reveal oneself in word or deed” which represents “sine qua non of politics” (Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice, trans. P. A. Kottman, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2005, p. xxiv). Every public civic gesture, especially protest against autocracy has heroic qualities. However, a heroic discourse needs listeners, not counterparts in a dialogue. 55 Although he attempted to apply psychoanalytical approach in redefining the Cioran’s “metaphor of emptiness” as a gap between the imaginary and real, Buden remains fascinated with apocalyptic image of intellectuals in front of abyss: “openly equating the South-East Europe with terror, Cioran wonders why a man, who finally leaves the Balkans and moves to the West, feels he is falling into an abyss. This letter will probably end in an abyss, too. The responsibility however should not be sought in the inexplicable contrast between the barbarian vitality of the Balkans and the character of the contemporary European civilization, in which Cioran recognized the source of the feeling of emptiness […] The empty space that Cioran saw people fall into when moving from the South-Eats to the West is actually the empty space into which the main protagonists fall when they want to step out of the story into reality” (Buden, Kaptolski kolodvor, p. 4, 5). 56 Boris Buden, Strategic universalism, 2007, http://eipcp.net/transversal /0607/buden/en. 57 Cf. Sergej Kornev, “Sudar praznina”, Treći program Hrvatskog radija, 1999, p. 333. 58 Buden, Barikade 2, p. 205. 59 Cf. Buden, Kaptolski kolodvor, pp. 22–27. 60 Buden, Strategic universalism, emphasis Renata Jambrešić Kirin. 61 Documentary on Croatian civic scene by Martina Globočnik, was symbolically named Vragovi crveni, žuti, zeleni / Devils, red, yellow and green (2007) after the most famous demonology “catalogue” of stigmas used by the Croatian President, Franjo Tuđman, in his famous speech to the Croatian social activist movemenst of 1996: “We will fight those in alliance with the black devil against the Croatian freedom and independence, and the green and yellow devils […] We will fight those affiliated with the enemies of the Croatian independence, those who sell themselves to our enemies as Judas” (http://www.kcm.hr/default.asp?mode=DisplayNews&id=373). 62 An ontological and grammatical obstacle to friendship between men and women in patriarchic culture is one of the issues Derrida explores in his Politics of Friendship: “You will not, perhaps,
308 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST have failed to register the fact that we are writing and describing friends as masculine – neuter- masculine. Do not consider this distraction or a slip. It is, rather, a laborious way of letting a question furrow deeper. We are perhaps borne from the very first step by and towards this question: what is a friend in the feminine, and who, in the feminine, is her friend? Why do ‘our’ philosophers and ‘our’ religions, ‘our’ culture acknowledge so little irreducible light, so little proper and acute signification, in such grammar?” (Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. Ivan Milenković, Beograd, Čigoja štampa, 2001, p. 102.) 63 Ivana Sajko, “Na jesen ću virusom napasti hrvatska kazališta (razgovor vodio Edo Popović)”, Tema, no. 8–9, 2004, p. 11. 64 “[The problem is] the lack of personal responsibility in time when holdings, consortiums and corporations perfectly replace the logics of the ‘collective’. The logics of the ‘collective’ is juxtaposed with feminist postulates of personal responsibility and personal social activism” (Andrea Zlatar, “Predfeminizam, feminizam i postfeminizam u hrvatskoj književnosti”, 2008, http://www. hrvatskiplus.org/ispis.php?id_doc=23). 65 Maria Fernández, “Postcolonial Media Theory”, in: The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader, ed. Jones, Amelia, Routledge, London – New York, 2003, p. 522. 66 Nirman Moranjak - Bamburać, “Političke i epistemologijske implikacije postkolonijalne teorije”, Sarajevske sveske, no. 6–7, 2004, p. 86. 67 Describing subversion, revolt, protest against the system as the primary aim that distinguishes them from the “para-artists” who are flirting with show biz, Sajko explains her stance towards public speeches (“my strength is in my speech”) and writing: “it is a matter of personal dignity to accept some mode of struggle – and I do not find it destructive, but creative […] Good art is surely revolting and intriguing, but not vulga” (Sajko, “Na jesen ću ...”, p. 4, 11). 68 Ivana Sajko, Žena-bomba, Meandar, Zagreb, 2004, p. 11. 69 Moranjak - Bamburać, op. cit., p. 99. 70 Wendy Hesford and Wendy Kozol (eds.), Haunting Violations: Feminist Criticism and the Crisis of the “Real”, University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 2001, p. 8. 71 Ibid. 72 Michaela Schäuble, “Očevid: (auto)biografski pripovjedni oblici u dokumentarnim filmovima o ratu u bivšoj Jugoslaviji”, Treća, vol. 1, no. 9, Centar za ženske studije, Zagreb, 2007, p. 56. 73 David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, Prickly Paradigm Press, Chicago, 2004, p. 9. 74 Fernández , op. cit., 2003, p. 524. 75 Ugrešić pays attention to and thoroughly describes the body posture and gestures that help her recognize (our) expatriates in European cities who are followed by the “long shadow of the nation” (Bhabha, op. cit., p. 159) and thus culturally signified as the other, who are susceptible to xenophobic phantasms of the endangered identity by the indigenous population. “‘Our people’ had an invisible slap on their faces. They had that sideways, rabbit-like look, that special tension in the body, that animal instinct of sniffing the air to tell which direction danger is coming from. The ourness came through in a certain strained melancholy in their features, a slight cloud on their
309 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST brows, a barely visible, almost internal stoop. […] And we are all ‘ours’” (Ugrešić, The Ministry of Pain, p. 20). Cultural disorientation an gradual loss of faith in return, or possibility of “authentic” communal life with others, is the primary feeling among those who were forced (by war or financial situation) to migrate to a position of the forced, yet longed for position of subject in transition. 76 Kovačević, op. cit., p. 196. 77 Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, “Introduction to Part I: Literary nodes of political time”, in: A Comparative History of the Literary Cultures of East Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and 20th Centuries, p. 34.
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312 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST
313 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST
314 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST DUBRAVKA ĐURIĆ
CHALLENGING WRITING PRACTICES IN SERBIA AFTER 2000
FRAMEWORK FOR READING: IDEOLOGY OF THE TEXT
Literature is an important field where national identities are constructed. Its importance is even greater in so called “small cultures” where the culture’s language largely remains local used and learned. I stress the relationship between literature and nation because the period of post- socialism, especially in the territories of the former Yugoslavia, was marked by the formation, or tendency to form, single-nation-states. Even though this process was represented as “natural”, I wish to stress that nation-state, nationalism, and national identity as collective forms of organization and identification are not a “natural” phenomena but constructed historical-cultural formations. Chris Barker wrote: “The nation-state is a political concept which refers to an administrative apparatus deemed to have sovereignty over a specific space or territory within the nation-state system. National identity is a form of imaginative identification with the symbols and discourses of the nation-state. Thus, nations are not simply political formations but systems of cultural representation through which national identity is continually reproduced as a discursive action. The nation-state as a political apparatus and a symbolic form has a change, while the symbolic form has a temporal dimension in which political structures endure and change, while the symbolic and discursive dimensions of national identity narrates and creates the idea of origins, continuity and tradition.”1 According to Stuart Hall, national identity is a way to join cultural diversity, and Homi Bhabha explains that this unity is constructed upon
315 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST narratives about nation, according to which stories, images, symbols, and rituals represent “common” meanings of the nation.2 Since I will deal with the social function of literature and its role in a construction of national identity, the first part of this article will concentrate on the ideology of dominant literary practices reproduced on the literary scene in Serbia during 1990’s, as well as on the ideology of their reception. Using this approach, I find it important that the ideology of art which in the early 1980s was expressed by Griselda Pollock is understood. She anticipated that the dominant belief of art as a representative vehicle for ideology, history, or psychology was wrong. “Not only do we have to grasp that art is a part of social production, but we have also to realize that it is itself productive, that is, it actively produces meanings. Art is constitutive of ideology it is not merely an illustration of it. It is one of the social practices through which particular views of the world, definitions and identities for us to live are constructed, produced, and even redefined.”3 According to her, artistic or literary works are to be understood as the signifying practice, i.e. as organization of elements which produce meanings, construct worldviews, try to fasten certain meanings, to affect certain ideological representations of the world. She insists that it is necessary to instead of contemplating art works as means by which previously shaped meanings are transferred or as a reflection of given identities, we see this practise as active intervention within certain social context. James H. Kavanagh wrote that word “ideology” signifies necessary practise, which also includes “systems of representations” which are its products and supports, and by which some persons of various class, race, and gender affiliations revise certain “lived relation” towards a social-historical project. Ideological analysis studies the ways in which these “lived relations” and systems of representation are constituted, transformed, and joined together with various specific political programs. It stresses that all literary and cultural texts constitute society’s ideological practice, and literary and cultural critiques constitute the activity which either subordinates itself to political actors of this necessary social practice or consciously tries to transform them.4 Having this in mind, I will first map dominant literary models in Serbia during 1990’s, and then discuss more broadly the specific transgressive writing practices.
316 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST IDEOLOGICAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF FICTION
In the earlier analyses of the state of poetry and prose I announced that in Serbia during the 1990’s the dominant model was prose constituted as an anti-modernist literary model.5 In this sense, renewal of the historical novel, which has a function in the re/construction of post-socialist reality of Serbia, was relevant. The task of such a novel is to re/construct the image of the past, which gives the reader the foundation for a construction of personal, national (or gender) identity, from vital positions. Most of the literary production during the 1990’s can be described by the term “companion prose” (“saputnička proza”), introduced by Svetlana Slapšak in 1994–1995. Writing about the novel Lagum (1990) by canonical prose writer Svetlana Velmar Janković, Slapšak explained that this novel is a “companion prose” of the dominant Serbian nationalistic politics, because on the ideological ground it “determines Communist guilt for destruction of civic class”. It is a companion because “with the series of messages, unconnected with the logic of the novel, and intended for identification by nationalists; it is also a companion on the basis of the invention of stereotypes, and absence of interest for women or womanly, of conservative poetical features.”6 Velmar Janković constructs history, clearly demarcates gender roles, and class, gender, and national stereotypes and prejudices build identificational matrixes which readers use as models in production of coherent, unquestionable identities. This novel, as well as the great part of prose and poetry production during the 1990’s, takes part in creation of the “truth regime” of Serbian post-socialist society. Most of the entire prose and poetry production from that period shows ethnic affiliation in the sense of “natural” affiliation to one, organic group. This literary production establishes strong relationships between nation, religion, and territory. In all of this, folkloric heritage gets a special place in post-socialist symbolizations showing traditional forms of “organic” life in a rural community. Rural is set as the source and indicates substantial origin, i.e. substantiality of national identity. Civic is constructed as being in an ambiguous relationship with the processes of modernization. Life in urban spaces is organized in such a way that it shows “awareness” of relevant inveteracy of an individual and the collective in the national tradition. Imperative is set so that one should lean on it, maintaining thus alleged continuity and system
317 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST of values in the practical organization of the contemporary world and its rituals. We find such explicit or implicit construction of reality in novels and short stories by authors who constituted or were close to political and cultural elites during the period of Slobodan Milošević’s regime. There we find novels which were written or promoted within the so called high culture, whose representative is Velmar Janković, as well as novels written and promoted within the so-called popular culture, published large quantities, like novels by Ljiljana Habjanović - Đurović.7 Beside this dominant “companion” prose, there was an another type of prose, which nostalgically looked into a lost, forever perished world from the beginning of the twentieth century and was seen as progressive, urban reality. Nostalgia for lost time is characteristic for these two streams, but they differ in political dimension where the author takes part. Their performative dimension did not take place on the same level. On one hand there were authors who actively participated in the construction of national identity and dominant national/nationalistic ideology. Their novels were constituted as the ultimate “truth” a society’s history. On the other hand there were writers who opposed this, who wrote post-modern novels, which Linda Hutcheon called “historiographical meta-fiction”. They are self-reflexive and with narrative strategies they mix real historical and fictional events and persons.8 This second model of writing is best represented by novels written by Dragan Velikić, which re/constructed the lost civic space and marked the space of national emancipation and entrenchment into European streams of that time or Middle-European streams opposed to political processes of the 1990’s which separated the country from political, economic, and cultural streams of the contemporary world. I would like to look back at an interesting phenomenon – the function of prose by Dubravka Ugrešić, who has been publishing her books in Belgrade since the late 1990’s (publishers: B92, Fabrika knjiga). Many democratically oriented critics and readers were preoccupied and fascinated by the work of this prose writer who was during the 1990’s, one of the notorious “witches” (authors who criticized Croatian nationalistic state politics), driven away from Croatian culture. In Serbian culture she occupies an empty space in prose production. Literary institutions of Serbian culture did not allow the emergence of an author or writer who would point to a traumatic space of his or her own culture which would be explicit enough that a
318 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST culture would reject it, as happened with Dubravka Ugrešić in Croatian culture during 1990’s. The Croatian culture clash, with ostracised authors and writers, was loud and traumatictaking place in the public sphere. In Serbian culture ostracised writers were simply written off as if they had never existed. For example, I would like to mention the many reasons ostracised Bora Ćosić was problematic for Serbian culture not only because of his sharp critique of Serbian state politics in the1990’s, for which he went into voluntary exile, but also because of poetic characteristics of his work emanating from neo-avant-garde writing and art practices. Dubravka Ugrešić’s work becomes relevant for democratically oriented literary circles in Serbia, but the fact that her work and political actions were constituted above all in relation to Croatian culture should be stressed. In other words, after the collapse of the Yugoslav cultural space, Croatian culture was her relevant reference point. That is the reason why this critique remains ineffective and inoffensive, and thus culturally acceptable in Serbian culture. Even though there were novel writers who were during the 1990’s read as critical in relation to the Serbian political scene (here I think of the first novel by Vladimir Arsenijević, U potpalublju, 1994), it seems the readings were cynical which brought ambiguity into the author’s approach. Ambiguity emerged due to a strong cynicism and black humour that ultimately neutralized and relativised the political cutting edge. At the same time, ambiguity was the reason the literary establishment accepted and praised these novels (for his first novel, Arsenijević was awarded the prestigious NIN award). It is important to stress that literary critique in Serbia until the year 2000 resisted ideological analysis of literary products. The dominant newspaper, journal, and university critiques were based upon modernistic assumptions that literary works are autonomous aesthetic facts and that if a literary work is of value, it should not be involved in discourses of ideology and politics. This way the function of critique was to hide the ideological function of literature. With the above-mentioned text about Svetlana Velmar Janković, Svetlana Slapšak introduced a cultural and ideological approach to the critique of prose. After 2000 Serbia was inundated with translations of novels dealing with the construction of contemporary urban spaces, organization of life in these social spaces, as well as the construction of privacy, subjectivity, identity all of which took place in well-developed Western countries or countries of the former Eastern European bloc which
319 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST integrated into current political, economic, and cultural streams. Here, I refer to prose by American, British, Italian, Polish, Hungarian, etc. authors. This is the period when peace is finally set in the former Yugoslavia, but for Serbia it is the period which under the surface of apparent normality hides deep trauma of ideological, political, and military defeats that society is not ready to face. One could say that the majority of authors rejected palimpsests of writing that pointed at past historical epochs, either in the sense of post-modern literature or national realism. However, one gets impression that most of the prose writing functioned as a cover, or camouflage for traumatic, contemporary, and unresolved political, economic, and social problems.
TRANSGRESSIVE LITERARY PRACTICES
Hitherto general schematic mapping of literary production of the last sixteen years has been aimed at the dominant literary productions during this period, i.e. literature which in the cultural institutions was set as relevant for the notion of valuable contemporary literary accomplishments. The set map aims at strengthening the contrast in relation towards literary accomplishments, which will be addressed shortly. In other words, instead of concentrating on perceived great and valuable works of contemporary national production, I will concentrate on writing practices which, even when they belong to that corpus, they distort it in some way. On the other hand, I use the power of contemporary critique to focus on the literary practices which do not fit in the dominant system of literary values. The fact that these practices are excluded from that system makes them symptomatic of given culture which marginalizes and/or censors them.
RECEPTION OF THE NOVEL BERLINSKO OKNO (BERLIN SHAFT) BY SAŠA ILIĆ AS THE SYMPTOM OF THE CULTURE
At the centre of attention I will first put the reception of the novel Berlinsko okno9 (2005) by Saša Ilić. This novel raised strong, disparaging reactions. In it, Ilić deals with the current, hidden, unspoken, and unspeakable trauma of Serbian culture. Saša Ilić (born in 1972) belongs
320 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST to a new generation of writers which emerged in the late 1990’s. From the beginning, critics supported him and recognized him as one of the most talented of his generation. At the beginning of the review Humanistički žanr, a critic of the governmental daily Politika Slobodan Vladušić wrote: “Saša Ilić is undoubtedly one of the most talented representatives of the generation of the 1970s in Serbian prose, and his second independent book, after the promising Predosećanja građanskog rata, I have been awaiting with genuine curiosity.”10 At the beginning of the critique published in the journal ProFemina Saša Ćirić wrote: “I admit to having been impatiently awaiting the new book by Saša Ilić. The short story “Brodograditelj” in the mini-anthology of the youngest Serbian prose Pseći vek (Beopolis, 2000), collection of short stories published in the time when civic wars elapsed, assured me that one can speak of gift for writing prose distinguished from its generational surrounding of born in mid 1970s […].”11 I will look at these two critiques as paradigmatic opposite reactions to this novel. After giving rewards to Ilić as the most important narrator of the new generation Slobodan Vladušić begins the political critique. He explains that the book was written with the awareness of engagement, but adds that being engaged is possible only “with solid standpoint about the crime and punishment”. According to Vladušić, Ilić has, among other things, focused on the scenes of Serbian crimes in Bosnia. He considers this gesture in itself to represent a significant ethical act by the author. But, when these scenes are used to analogize Nazi and Serbian crimes, Vladušić’s states that, “then authentic capacity of the book slowly dissolves in (non-authentic) political rhetoric, and one potentially marvellous book becomes one of numerous products of “humanistic genre”.”12 The critic “objectively” evaluates the value of the book and criticizes its “engaged” dimension as contributing to the novel’s literary failure. By critical “objectivity” Vladušić acts as the guardian who overlooks and prescribes what is a value in culture, and how it may be articulated. He lets literature be “engaged”, but also prescribes the way in which it would be “righteous”, “fair”, and “closer to the truth”, i.e. in which way it is acceptable for the dominant political and cultural establishment in Serbia. The critic ends the review with the following words: “Buried into genre in which less talented writers than him tried themselves Ilić’s book is an example of a missed chance. Chance to write a book everyone in Bosnia could read with the feeling of shame, a book which will really have a moral power to pacify vindictive dreams
321 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST still present in Bosnia, and which wait for the light to turn off again, a book which would list all the crimes, which would metonymically join all murderers and all victims regardless of their course value, i.e. a book which would as long as it is possible refrain from arbitrary comparisons.”13 Vladušić articulates dominant political thought. The “truth” is that during the war in Bosnia all parties committed crimes and that each different representation of “reality” tells us we are dealing with traitorous acts of those who are foreign hirelings. This attitude creates political polarity between patriots and traitors, which was a relevant political construct of the 1990’s. Saša Ćirić’s review represents the other political spectre – the one of political margin. Ćirić wrote that with this novel, Saša Ilić makes a multi-brave stride. From writing short stories Ilić went over to writing novels. According to this critique, this crossing marked also a crossing from “delicately Borgesian research and composing (pseudo)biographies, lingual non-pretentious reduction and fluid symbolic, all of which evokes certain prose of 1980s and early works by Dragan Velikić”, to a sort of neo-realistic poetics while simultaneously avoiding big historical topics and social processes of our times. Ilić has, writes Ćirić, been dealing with the destiny of the former Yugoslavia, which is now mainly South-Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin wall, and the downfall of a social order, war crimes of the 1990’s committed by the Serbian party and a responsibility “of an entire society (our) for the crimes committed, a society as a presupposed organized unity whose functioning is based upon moral premises but which have all of a sudden been pulled off from under our feet, as a carpet (or rug).” Ćirić explicitly thematizes the trauma of Serbian society when he writes: “In that sense Berlinsko okno bravely embraces the actuality of such “romanesque thematic” (together with symbolic oppressive intrigue which is still present in our society for which personal responsibility and the ethical imperative of facing the past are just a blind spot on the collective consciousness and public discourse).”14 Contrary to these two reviews, most critics wrote about this novel treating only its “artistic” aspects. That way, their discourse hides the traumatic place of the novel and makes it harmless, thereby culturally acceptable.
322 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST FEMINIST WRITING PROJECT BY JASMINA TEŠANOVIĆ
I will concentrate now on work by Jasmina Tešanović (born in 1954),15 the only feminist prose writer in Serbia, who as an author in Serbian culture does not exist. Jasmina Tešanović has produced a considerable amount of literature but she does not exist either for mainstream or feminist critics. The question why is being raised. Her writing practice obviously questions basic determinants of the notion of “great literature”, as well as the notion of “female literature”, as they are both set in Serbian culture during the last sixteen years. “Great literature” is written by male writers and is characterized by considerable historical topics or at least assumes them. It is a masterly narrated story or a story which masterly leaves an impression of heroism, hopelessness, nonsense, and hope. It deals with characters and follows them from their birth through their youth, maturity and death. Characters suffer, love, and fight. The great literature in Serbia is written as a more or less coherent story which constructs an atmosphere of nostalgia. But what is most important is that the great literature is never written from particular positions of marginalized groups such as women, or sexual, national, racial and other minorities. Therefore, great literature is implicitly or explicitly concerned with nation, national myths, and it constructs a matrix of national identity which is idealized and produced as universal for the given culture. Great literature develops in such a way that a WRITER inscribes himself into the national canon of great works consisting of a small number of “great” writers, all of whom come into national greatnesses – and as such they are seen as undevious models. If in the national canon writers (male) are inscribed, national critics (mainly male), guardians of the tradition, will more easily promote one more relevant name of national culture. If there is a female writer, the whole process is considerably more complicated. In other words, contemporary female writers, even when they are put into the national canon, always remain on its margins. Even though there are female writers who belong to the canon of contemporary national literature, they can almost never become (or they rarely become) central figures. As a reaction to this state, feminist theoreticians and critics who followed the contemporary scene present female writers praise them on the contemporary public scene, but never (or rarely) centre them as inviolable greats of the national culture. But, on the other hand, it
323 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST can be said that feminist and mainstream (male) critique in Serbia had a common criteria of great national literature, above all the conviction that great and truly common literature must not emanate from marginalized groups, be them female groups, because the important determination of literature is universality. Contrary to dominant feminist critique practice in Serbia, I am interested in censored female writing practices, and Jasmina Tešanović is the best example. Jasmina Tešanović is a feminist activist, operating within anti-war female formations as are Women in Black, Women’s Centre, and Centre for Women’s Studies and Communications. The context of her prose novels revolve around a feminist arena within which she has been operating for a long time as a peace supporter, activist, editor of the publishing house “Feministička 94” (which she established and lead together with Slavica Stojanović), film director, and writer. This feminist activism gives mark to her prose, so that Jasmina Tešanović will establish in Serbian culture a genre of feminist prose, which only she, it seems, practices. In that sense, her prose does not correspond with contemporary Serbian prose of the dominant sphere. Her prose is a hybrid. This hybridity comes from the political position of the author, who opposes the dominant political streams of Serbia during the 1990’s, and even later, as well as from her experience of eradication, non-belonging, which can be explained by the fact that she has lived in Italy, Cairo, and so on, for a long time. She speaks about her three- lingualism, since she writes in Serbian, Italian, and English. Tešanović explains that in her writing what matters is the truth, but not the “truth” from a realistic standpoint because she writes false testimonials articulated by testimonial; or maybe better described as “pseudo- testimonial” narrative in the first person singular.16 Her stories are interrupted and the narrative is complex and equivocal. I will first concentrate on her book Sirene,17 published in 1997. Sirene is a hybrid of interrupted feminist prose. The author dedicates her book to “children who experienced violence”. The book switches between first and third person.and the author uses dialogue, written correspondence, diary writing, and, what is especially interesting, while also introducing e-mail correspondence into the context of contemporary prose written in Serbia during the 1990’s. We also find visual images representing mythical and archetypical figures from various cultures and various historical epochs which represent the
324 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST imaginary construction of feminine, such as sirens or Madonna, and many others. There are two parallel narrative plans. On one level, the author deals with violence to women with particular attention to incest. Characters are gradually introduced, and their relations are unclear from the beginning. At another level, she revises male myths and constructs female myths. Thus a continuity of female civilization is constructed and a female tradition is being established. These two levels of narration make a binary opposition: domain of mythical, which is ideally female, and the domain of reality which is cruel and in which a woman is positioned as a victim. It seems as if Jasmina Tešanović claims a sort of hypertext, since she produces narrative in a way that simulates narrative devices and narrated actions and situations from fairy tales, legends, realistic novels, modernistic novels, feminist theoretical discoursesand often introduces auto-reflexivity into the writing process and points at conventions of narrated prose as a genre. The book Matrimonium18 was published in 2004. At the beginning the author writes that it is a “diary/essay” she kept from November 1999 until November 2000. Matrimonium is written as autobiographical prose, but, as the author herself said in one of our private conversations, it is not a confessional prose. It is a (pseudo) autobiographical prose,19 since the author uses the elements of autobiography, but she uses them in order to build a fictitious character or a fictitious world. The book does not deal directly with social milieu (it is not the main focus on an initial reading), nor with the reconstruction of the lost world, bourgeois society, as a way of constructing post-socialist society. This novel is not simply situated in the context of gyno-critique called female prose in the centre of which there are female characters speaking about a female experience. The characteristic of Jasmina Tešanović’s prose is not construction of the action in a novelistic, monumental way. This book is feminist because the author consciously articulated it as a feminist prose. It is repeatedly emphasised that it establishes female genealogy in contrast to male often seen in literature. Matrimonium is a feminist book since the author deals with the mother-daughter relationship, which is, according to French feminist theoreticians from the 1970s, such as Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, and Julia Kristeva, conflicting and painful, often unseen in the Western circle of literature. Patriarchal language does not overtake the system of representation by which this relationship would symbolically be represented. In a patriarchal culture, the father-
325 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST son relationship is what matters. In other words, what matters is male genealogy. Jasmina Tešanović dramatizes the mother-daughter relationship ranging from extreme love to extreme hatred. She deals with strong emotions, which are always dramatically present in this relationship. By narrating the story from the daughter’s point of view the relationship as well as a female psyche is no longer non-performable and secretive. Within the language of the female voice they get a symbolic form. The language in this book points to female enjoyment (jouissance) in the language and the body. The author often describes a young or old body, as well as the importance of physical contact through touching. The relationship between mother and daughter changes with time, although it always happens in confrontations, antagonisms, and love. The prose is structured as imagined dialogue with the mother, i.e. as a monologue in which the main character of the book talks in the first person. The book is written as a remembrance in which the character moves at a temporal level, present-past-future, never appearing in diachronic continuity. The mother is represented as a possessive mother. She wants to rule her daughter’s life, wants her daughter to be a good girl and cannot cope with the fact that, according to her criteria, she is not abiding. The daughter opposes, is problematic, and wants her life out from under her mother’s eye. The moment when her mother is not alive any more is a moment of reconciliation and understanding. At that moment, the daughter remembers a caring mother and bemoans her. The book is articulated as a ritual bemoaning of the mother, in which the character awakens this traumatic relationship for herself and for the audience. The book also has political connotations. It covers the transition from Socialism to post-Socialism and talks about political discord between mother and daughter. The mother, as well as most former Communists, embraces new post-socialist nationalistic ideology, while the daughter defines herself as a pacifist and feminist who strongly opposes nationalistic discourse in Serbian society.
POLITICS OF THE PROSE: MILICA KRSTANOVIĆ
Milica Krstanović (born in 1961) has not published much and as a prose writer she does not exist in Serbian culture. I will write about
326 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST her prose published in 2004 (out of print in 2005) in ProFemina and I will mark her, as the prose by Jasmina Tešanović, by the notion of pseudo-autobiographical prose. In a witty, lucid way the author maps changes in the former Yugoslavia which were consequence of the conditions of dissolution of the country through bloody wars. Using a simple language and narrative, the narrator (the author herself as the voice which articulates the story) narrates about the world in which we, former Yugoslavs, lived and about the worlds in which we live today. Stories develop at the time when the territories of the former Social Federal Republic of Yugoslavia are at war’s end and when new nation-states have already been established. Krstanović maps the dissolution of one world, the world of the socialist self-governing state, and nostalgically and cynically remembers ideological constructs of the state, its symbolic identification matrices and everyday rituals. When I speak about an identificational matrix in these short stories, I think of geographical spaces where the narrator grew up defined by borders of a former state, of friendship and family relationships, of the ideology of a state which constructed (multi)national identity/ identities. The narrator tells the story in the first person and centred on her relationships with her daughter. By describing the everyday life, she ideologically positions herself within it, through comments about everyday occurrences and the banalities of everyday life, which have substantial meaning in old and new systems of identifications of the socialist, i.e. post-socialist societies. Her short story Prvi put s ćerkom u Hrvatsku (Taking my daughter to Croatia for the first time) describes a journey filled with strong emotions from her past, from the construction of her own identity to familiar geography and history, which does not exist any longer. The story also deals with an ideological construction of a “mother tongue”, since the language is what constructs the world and us within it. Regarding this former language the author writes: “I have spoken of that died off language again, more dead, it seems to me than Latin, my mother tongue, Serbo-Croatian.” Comparing this language with Latin, the narrator will add: “Later, I thought of the fact that Latin is in the root of each living language and lively Roman languages, as well as in the root of the language of science, it thus lives in many tongues even today, it existed as Arena in Pula and Rome as well, and Ser-Cro/Cro-Ser is in the root of – what? One big unnecessary pain.” The story about an ideological construction of language is a story about dramatic change of recognizable space. The
327 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST solution to the drama of changed identificational matrices is described: “I was in that country for the first time without being in my own house and I enjoyed buying souvenirs which I despised at that time – coffee mug with Arena and plastic dolphins.”20 In the short story Čitam po čekaonicama (I read in waiting rooms) the author describes the mental state which she calls waiting. Waiting is a state of stasis in a society which has come to a standstill and cannot restart. Waiting means that one phase has ended, and the beginning of the next is postponed. This short story describes how waiting affects the life of an individual. At the beginning, the author lists a socially contextualized series of waiting: she waits for election results, ends of wars, for someone to come to his/her senses, the tram (note: during the 1990’sin Belgrade people used to wait for hours for public transportation in order to get from one place to the other). Waiting for the election results meant hope that during the 1990’s political change would come to Serbian society. Waiting for the end of wars meant an end to the killing and deportation of people. Waiting for the tram indicates the situation in which Serbian citizens (on the edges of war) were kept obedientfollowed by shortages in food and ruled by a governing political assembly led by Milošević who was robbing their own population and supported wars in which it allegedly did not take part. The author then mentions waiting related to the construction of the feminine in the society, “waiting for the prince”, and then introduces a romantic quotation in English from the novel by Roddy Doyle. The quotation talks about the period of globalization and domination of Anglophone culture. In this process, the way in which global culture penetrates the armour of local culture is shown, which, in the conditions of the Serbian political and cultural scene has special political meaning since the narrator reads it within the contemporary trends of globalization of the economically and politically opposing culture to. We find quotations from well-known novels, and their commentaries, descriptions which highlight the way a majority of “common” people do not possess a political consciousness. While waiting for her daughter, the narrator reads prose by Dubravka Ugrešić or Slavenka Drakulić or the book SFRY for Beginners, while other parents waiting for their children read Beauty and Health magazines. Mentioning D. Ugrešić and S. Drakulić has an auto-referential function, showing us which sort of prose the author herself is writing: it is a type of prose, which in the Serbian culture of the 1990’s, lacks as model.
328 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Milica Krstanović’s prose is inter-genre. It could be said that it is simply essay writing which documents the time in which we live. By mentioning prose writers (witches) from Zagreb, by pointing to popular novels by Western prose writers, as well as to popular women journals read in Serbia during the 1990’s, she describes an entirely opposite ideological position relevant for the construction of identity. On the one hand, there is influence on literature written today in the “West” (note: I use term West, since Serbia is still today a country in Europe which defines itself in opposition to the “mean” and “wretched” West, as a victim of globalizing tendencies). On the other hand, authors like Ugrešić and Drakulić, in the context of Serbian culture, become signifiers of inter-genre literature of the post-Yugoslav period with a significant critical political relationship towards nationalistic euphoria and war. Finally, on the third hand, the production of journals assigned for women is relevant because in them the post-socialist body of an ideal woman in newly established national cultures is constructed. By concentrating on the differences between socialist society and post- Socialism, the narrator describes one of the places where she read by following the words, “My places for reading are wonderful. One is the hallway of a Children’s cultural centre which I persistently call Pioneers’ house. It is situated in the centre of the city, right next to the building of RTS consisting of an old, torn down building on the top of which a shredded flag flaunts and a new one, of glass and metal, which they are putting in order. Pioneers’ house is crumbling and looks the same as when I took part in competitions thirty years ago […].”21 Krstanović describes the despair and poverty of post-socialist Serbia from sombre and joyless people to ruined buildings and poorly decorated public spaces (ambulance stations, cultural centres, places where children play). It is a symbolic, and for Serbia a symptomatic paragraph, in which music school where her daughter takes piano lessons is described. The narrator looks at the enclosed diplomas and letters of thanks on the school wall: “Yugoslav Army shows its gratitude to the music school for the contribution to resistance to the NATO aggression and bombing in 1999. Or something like that. I don’t have strength to write it correctly. I get sick of that. Then I sit on the small bench, slightly wave my head and remember how the piano teacher told me that sometimes she cannot work. Namely, the closest neighbour to the music school is Traffic school and during the break the whole quart roars of folk music played there from their
329 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST local radio’s loud speakers. The principal of the school explained that it is the only way to keep pupils in the school yard and that they don’t run somewhere doing who knows what.”22 This short segment from everyday life shows the construction of reality in Serbia and its paradoxes. A music school can symbolize a local culture’s belonging to the European tradition. The mention of the NATO bombing indicates political processes that separated Serbia from the processes of European integration, which led to the trauma from which the political and cultural elite in Serbia cannot and do not want to get out from under. The European tradition of classical music is set as opposed to the cult of new folk music. During the 1990’s Turbo-Folk culture becomes a substantial identificational matrix of Serbian post-socialist society. During the period of Milošević’s reign this culture resists not only classical European heritage, but also the contemporary urban popular music listened to by young people as a relevant identification cultural matrices. In the short story “Tuneli” (Tunnels) the narrator reads the graffiti on the wall which says: “I would not enter / that tunnel/ not even for the box / of brandy”, which raises a series of associations. She asks herself whether that is the quotation taken from a movie and then remembers tunnels she used to go through, those she liked, such as tunnels on the high-way from Zagreb to Pula, light and wide, to tunnels on the rail-road Belgrade-Bar, which are “entirely sooty and blind”. She also remembers the song she used to sing on the excursions through SFRY, “In the tunnel in the middle of the dark, a five-sided star shines”, which was relevant in the process of socialization of young in the “ideal” socialist society distinguished from a bad consumerist West, but also from the bad totalitarian socialist East. There was also a parody to this song with the following verses: “in the tunnel in the middle of the night a bottle of brandy shines”, by which that socialist construct was parodied. At the end of the story she describes the tunnel under the Danube in Budapest through which she travelled when, during 1999, she sheltered herself together with her mother and daughter from the bombing. A comment by the narrator’s mother to her granddaughter’s question about when they will exit the tunnel was: “Never, sweetie, from this tunnel called Serbia, we will never exit”. The story ends by narrator’s words: “Eh, if we only still lived in that tunnel. In the meanwhile at its end the light could be seen, they even installed some ventilation and first aid and even light. Then teddy boys stole the light
330 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST bulbs and the ventilation system broke and the light awaited at the exit somehow slipped away, daring all the laws of nature”.23 The end of the story tells about political turbulences in Serbia at the beginning of the 21st century. The narrative shows how Serbia is a society without hope, a society fallen into a dark tunnel from which it will not exit for a long time.
HYBRID EXPERIMENTAL TEXTUAL PRACTICES: ASSOCIATION FOR WOMEN’S INITIATIVE’S SCHOOL OF POETRY AND THEORY
In the last segment of this article I will point out the work of a group of female authors gathered around the project AWIN’s school of poetry and theory launched in 1997. I will write not only as an “objective” critic-theoretician, but also as a “critic at work” who works with younger female authors on construction of a different conception of poetry in the sense of “other line” (this term relates to experimental textual-poetry practise). At first, the school worked as a summer school within the Centre for Women’s Studies and Communications. In 1998, when this centre transformed into theCentre for Women’s Studies andbecame part of university discourse and the activist arm’s, entitled the Association for Women’s Initiative (AWIN), school of poetry and theory became a permanent alternative educational program. Work of AWIN’s school was based on models of high modernity and post- modernity, which within the framework of so called “small” national cultures, as is Serbian, rarely become centred as dominant a stream. Starting from contemporary conceptions of society, according to which one society and its culture are not perceived as organic unity, in the centre of our writing practice examples of radical poetry practices of the 20th century were set, while examples of the authors relevant in the national canon, mainly those whose work can be described with terms like anti-modernism and moderate modernism/post-modernism, are omitted as reference points for this poetry practice. In other words, authors excluded by the culture as cultural values are included as relevant reference points, while authors included in the culture as basic to the canon, are excluded. The first phase of the work, from 1997 to 2004, included intensive reading of poetry and poetry of Russian, American, Slovene, Croatian,
331 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST and Serbian authors, as are Ezra Pound, Velimir Khlebnikov, early works by Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, Tomaž Šalamun, Slobodan Tišma, Vladimir Kopici, Ivana Milankov, Jelena Lengold, Nina Živančević, Jasna Manjulov, Jelena Marinkov, etc. Natalija Marković (born in 1977) has most explicitly articulated the first phase in her poems. She creates proto-feminist poetry as a complex meeting place of influences of high and popular culture. She deals with the construction of new models of femininity using mentioned modernistic/post- modernistic poetic paradigms, pointing out the construction of femininity in the movies, popular music, videos, etc. An anthology Diskurzivna tela poezije (Discoursive poetry bodies)24 was published in 2004. In it poetry and poetics written by female authors mainly coming out of AWIN’s school were published: Ljiljana Jovanović, Natalija Marković, Danica Pavlović, Sanja Petkovska, Dragana Popović, Snežana Roksandić, Jelena Savić, Ana Seferović, Ksenija Simić, Tamara Šuškić, Jelena Tešanović, Ivana Velimirac, and Snežana Žabić. In this anthology there is also work by Ljiljana Jovanović (born in 1980) which will become paradigmatic for the second phase of the work of this writing group. Ljiljana Jovanović25 adhered to the deconstruction of common reading habits in that she printed parts of the text the backwards, forcing the reader to face the book as an object, which we have to turn in our hands if we want to read what the author has written. The text which flows as if it collides with the backwards text makes reading harder and creates resistance towards this kind of composition and text. By this, the author points to the materiality of the book, the text and the words which we expect to linearly spread out on the paper. Readability of the text is additionally complicated by adding footnotes, which are printed above, and not under the text we perceive as the main text, and since letters of that part of the text are capitalized, we can ask ourselves what is the primary text, footnotes or the text they refer to? This work has provoked negative comments from the majority of critics and reviewers of the anthology, while others did not mention her work in their reviews. Thus, her work was excluded, erased, i.e. censured, since the author dramatically questioned the notion of poetry, text, and their appearance in print. The exceptional success of the anthology isreflected in a number of positive reviews and in the fact that a number of the authors were translated into to Slovene, Polish and Hungarian,, prompted a move
332 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST to more seriously adhere to theoretical work and textual practice. Thus comes the second phase, since 2004 to 2006. Tamara Šuškić (born in 1981) and Jelena Savić (born in 1981) together with Ljiljana Jovanović articulated the discursive space, rejecting the practice of writing poetry and establishing a hybrid experimental textual practice. This practice developed in relation to 1) historical avant-garde, especially Italian futurism, Russian cubo-futurism, and Yugoslav zenitism; 2) French women’s writing; 3) American post-structuralist language poetry; and 4) internet culture. The new phase of the work is also marked by a greater concentration on theory. We read and talked about texts by Michel Foucault, Roland Bartes, Helene Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, then about Italian futurism, Charls Bernstein, and some of the contributors had also in mind the working practice of a Belgrade theoretical-performative group Walking theory. At that moment Ljiljana Jovanović, Jelena Savić and Tamara Šuškić (who in July 2006 drifted apart in a dramatic way from other members of AWIN’s school of poetry and theory), developed a hybrid writing practice. The noticeable characteristic of this production is the mixing of theory discourse with the discourse of poetry, which was already foreshadowed in the work by Ljiljana Jovanović. Tamara Šuškić’s, Jelena Savić’s, and Ljiljana Jovanović’s texts emerge in the interaction. Jovanović26 starts to write referring to pattern poetry, playing with configurations of words in print and their meanings, and playing with tautologies. By using the handwritten type of Latin characters in the printed text, she again makes it hard to read comfortably the complex meanings of the text. Tamara Šuškić and Jelena Savić act within hypertextuality or simulation of hypertextuality, pointing to material aspects of the language. They use various types and sizes of letters, using the paper as a sheet, and using various images and drawings. The text emerges from the fragments torn from various discourses. They combine theory and poetry and introduce visual elements which are integral parts of the text. But they moved in opposite directions. Šuškić27 was obsessed with Baudrillard’s theorization of seduction, Barthes’ idea of taking pleasure in the text, as well as representations of women and construction of femininity in high modernistic/post-modernistic literature, visual arts, film, photography, and commercials. Contrary to that, Jelena Savić28 was interested in writing as a political act. By establishing hybrid textuality, she dealt with the ideology of everyday life, violence
333 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST over women, racism, misogyny, sexism, dominant political discourses in Serbian society, the status of a female poet within a patriarchal misogynistic post-socialist culture. This textual practice is not typical for post-socialist society since post-Socialism needs linear narratives which have the function of identification in the construction of a national identity. Linear narrative presupposes a naïve concept of the language as a non-problematic transparent medium whose function is to communicate, portray reality which objectively exists, it is believed, outside the language. This practice is transgressive since it is too intellectual, and literature is in the dominant sphere set as anti-intellectualistic: it deals with the private, emotional life of an individual. This practice is problematic because it is performed within an avant- garde and experimental tradition and canons of national literatures, especially in Serbia, exclude avant-garde, since it questions dominant political and poetic values of the society. This practice is and is not a poetry, is and is not prose, is and is not theory. It is political, feminist, intellectual, daunting, challenging, and transgressive.
CONCLUSION
During the last few years, Serbian society becomes again more and more homogeneous in politics, media, ideology, and art. My intention was to, at least on the level of symbolic competencies I as a critic- theoretician have, put writing practices at the centre of attention which, as I have shown, in completely different ways disturb the ideology of homogenizing and totalizing narratives of the national culture.
334 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST NOTES
1 Chris Barker, Cultural Studies – Theory and Practice, Sage Publications – Thousand Oaks, London – New Delhi, 2000, p. 197. 2 Qtd. in ibid, p. 198. 3 Griselda Pollock, “Vision, Voice and Power: Feminist Art Histories and Marxism”, in: Griselda Pollock, Vision and Differance: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art, Routlegde, London– New York, 1988, p. 30. 4 James H. Kavanagh, “Ideology”, in: Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (eds.), Critical Terms for Literary Study, second edition, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago – London, 1990, 1995, pp. 319–320. 5 See essays in: Dubravka Đurić, All-over, Feministička 94, Beograd 2004. 6 Svetlana Slapšak, “Saputnička proza: Lagum Svetlane Velmar Janković”, ProFemina, no. 1, Beograd, 1994/95, p. 163. 7 See Damir Arsenijević, Ajla Demiragić, and Jelena Petrović, “Women Writing in Red Ink: Women’s Writing and Socio-political Change in Bosnia and Hercegovina, Croatia and Serbia”, in: Jelisaveta Blagojević, Katerina Kolozova, Svetlana Slapšak (eds.), Gender and Identity – Theories from and/or on Southeastern Europe, Belgrade Women’s and Gender Research Center, Belgrade, 2006, pp. 248–249. 8 Linda Hačion, Poetika postmodernizma, translation from English by Vladimir Gvozden and Ljubica Stanković, Svetovi, Novi Sad, 1996, p. 19. (Original title: Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, Routledge, New York – London, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992.) 9 Cf. Saša Ilić, Berlinsko okno, Fabrika knjiga, 2005, second edition, 2006. 10 Slobodan Vladušić, “Humanistički žanr”, Politika, 27 August 2005, p. 15. 11 Saša Ćirić, “‘Ich bin eine Berliner’ ili čovek istražuje posle rata”, ProFemina, no. 37–40, Beograd, 2004 (out of print in 2005), p. 207. 12 Vladušić, op. cit. 13 Ibid. 14 Ćirić, op. cit., p. 207. 15 I thank Slađana Radulović, who during the school year 2003/04 asked me to be her co-tutor for her work about Jasmina Tešanović, she did at the Faculty of Political Sciences within specialist Gender and Culture Studies. Through her persistent insistence she made me deal with Jasmina Tešanović’s work and convinced that her work has been unjustly neglected pointing to the prejudices, limits and blind spots of feminist critique in Serbia, including my own. 16 Cf. conversation with Jasmina Tešanović in ProFemina (forthcomming). 17 Cf. Jasmina Tešanović, Sirene, DevedesetČetvrta, Beograd, 1997. 18 Cf. Jasmina Tešanović, Matrimonium, Feministička 94, Beograd, 2004. 19 Renata Jambrešić Kirin in the text: “Egzil i hrvatska ženska autobiografska književnost 90ih”, Reč, vol. 61, no. 7, Beograd, 2001, pp. 175–197, uses the term (pseudo)autobiographical prose, where I take it from and put in other cultural context.
335 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST 20 Milica Krstanović, “Prvi put s ćerkom u Hrvatsku”, ProFemina, no. 37–38, Beograd, 2004. 21 Milica Krstanović, ibid. All three quotations on p. 55. 22 Ibid., p. 62. 23 Milica Krstanović, “Tuneli”, ProFemina, no. 37–38, Beograd, 2004, p. 64. 24 Diskurzivna tela poezije – Poezija i autopoetike nove generacije pesnikinja, ed. Danica Pavlović, Asocijacija za žensku inicijativu, Beograd, 2004. 25 Ibid. 26 Ljiljana Jovanović, “Intimno zašto”, ProFemina, no. 41–42, Beograd, 2005/06, pp. 13–27. 27 Tamara Šuškić, “Death by jam”, ProFemina, no. 41–42, Beograd, 2005/06, pp. 19–41.Jelena Savić, “O važnim stvarima”, ProFemina, no. 41–42, Beograd, 2005/06, pp. 42–69.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arsenijević, Damir, Ajla Demiragić, and Jelena Petrović, “Women Writing in Red Ink: Women’s Writing and Socio-political Change in Bosnia and Hercegovina, Croatia and Serbia”, in: Jelisaveta Blagojević, Katerina Kolozova, Svetlana Slapšak (eds.), Gender and Identity – Theories from and/or on Southeastern Europe, Belgrade Women’s and Gender Research Center, Belgrade, 2006. Barker, Chris, Cultural Studies – Theory and Practice, Sage Publications – Thousand Oaks, London – New Delhi, 2000. Ćirić, Saša, “‘Ich bin eine Berliner’ ili čovek istražuje posle rata”, ProFemina, no. 37–40, Beograd, 2004 (out of print in 2005). Diskurzivna tela poezije – Poezija i autopoetike nove generacije pesnikinja, ed. Danica Pavlović, Asocijacija za žensku inicijativu, Beograd, 2004. Đurić, Dubravka, All-over, Feministička 94, Beograd, 2004. Hačion, Linda, Poetika postmodernizma, trans. Vladimir������������������������������������������������ Gvozden and Ljubica Stanković, Svetovi, Novi Sad, 1996 (original title: Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction, Routledge, New York – London, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992). Ilić, Saša, Berlinsko okno, Fabrika knjiga, 2005, second edition 2006. Jambrešić Kirin, Renata, “Egzil i hrvatska ženska autobiografska književnost 90ih, Reč, vol. 61, no. 7, Beograd, 2001. Jovanović, Ljiljana, “Intimno zašto”, ProFemina, no. 41–42, Beograd, 2005/06, pp. 13–27. Kavanagh, James H., “Ideology”, in: Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (eds.), Critical Terms for Literary Study, second edition, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago – London, 1990, 1995. Krstanović, Milica, “Čitam po čekaonicama”, ProFemina, no. 37–38, Beograd, 2004.
336 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Krstanović, Milica, “Prvi put s ćerkom u Hrvatsku”, ProFemina, no. 37–38, Beograd, 2004. Krstanović, Milica, “Tuneli”, ProFemina, no. 37–38, Beograd, 2004, p. 64. Pollock, Griselda, “Vision, Voice and Power: Feminist Art Histories and Marxism”, in: Griselda Pollock, Vision and Differance: Femininity, Feminism and Histories of art, Routlegde, London– New York, 1988. Savić, Jelena, “O važnim stvarima”, ProFemina, no. 41–42, Beograd, 2005/06, pp. 42–69. Slapšak, Svetlana, “Saputnička proza: Lagum Svetlane Velmar Janković”, ProFemina, no. 1, Beograd, 1994/95. Šuškić, Tamara, “Death by jam”, ProFemina, no. 41–42, Beograd, 2005/06, pp. 19–41. Tešanović, Jasmina, Matrimonium, Feministička 94, Beograd, 2004. Tešanović, Jasmina, Sirene, DevedesetČetvrta, Beograd, 1997. Vladušić, Slobodan, “Humanistički žanr”, Politika, 27. August 2005.
337 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST
338 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST SVETLANA SLAPŠAK
NOMADIC MEMORIES, SEDENTARY OBLIVION: THE CASE OF KOSOVO
The myth of Kosovo is the central national myth of Serbia. The famous battle between the Turkish invading army under the command of Sultan Murat and his two sons, and the Serbian army led by duke Lazar, most often referred to as king, took place on Kosovo Polje (Blackbird field) on June 28, 1389. The Serbs decided to engage in the battle rather than to negotiate a possible vassal position, or as it is put in the epic and religious tradition, they chose “the kingdom of heaven”, and not the “kingdom of earth”. The army of Serbian knights and allies was allegedly defeated, after a dramatic turn in the development of the battle. Serbian knight Miloš Obilić sneaked into the Turkish camp and killed the sultan Murat. Bajazit, his son, secured his succession to the throne by having his brother strangled, after which he managed to break the Serbian ranks and to capture and decapitate the duke/king Lazar, in front of the dead bodies of his father and brother, and the head of the previously decapitated Miloš Obilić. After this event, the destiny of the Serbian kingdom was decided as it fell into Turkish hands for the next five hundred years. This basic story of the defeat which defined the national destiny of Serbs has several different narrative branches serving different ideological constructs and direct political needs for successful narratives: religious development inside the Serbian Orthodoxy, including the cult of Saint Vid with the festivities on June 28; the sacrifice of the Serbian ruler and his knights, who exchanged the earthly kingdom for the kingdom in heaven; and later, the sanctification of the king Lazar. The ideological
339 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST layer includes also a kind of para-historic narrative of Serbs defending the rest of Christian Europe from the Islamic danger, and losing their timely integration into Europe in the process. The national construct based on the Kosovo myth was instrumental in forming the Serbian and then the Yugoslav state. The narrative of the Kosovo battle is central to the whole oral tradition of the Serbs, and its reception in the written literary tradition is of enormous significance. At certain periods, the Kosovo battle narrative was used and modified as the central myth of construction of the new Yugoslav identity, especially before World War I. As a primarily intellectual invention, which then included Freudian influence and much of the expressionist pessimism, but also clear democratic projects for the future state as a republic,1 it was heavily distorted by the Serbian dynasty ruled Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenians, which eventually became the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. Recently, it became not only re-actualised but also very instrumental in the public discourse instigating ethnic divisions, segregation and eventually war, first in the political changes preceding the war in Yugoslavia as related to the Albanian population of Kosovo.2 At this point, the Kosovo myth is defined as the basic construct of collective memory, which has no problems of authenticity or correction, but only of preservation from outside with itself conceived as a perfect whole. Kosovo is presented as the lieu de mémoire of Serbs that must remain integrated into the homeland, and the question of the loss of territory, which is a legitimate problem for any state, is being constantly masked, at least in the intellectual and academic circles in Serbia, as secondary to the more important mythic narrative. This is not the only debate on “historic rights” that was running in different parts of Yugoslavia in the past and in the present – nor, for that matter, in the conflicting regional and state interests all around the world: “Historic rights” have an ambiguous role, as they can be used both to protect the indigenous rights, to heal from the consequences of colonization, and to justify the aggression. The question is even more complicated in the Balkans, where “historic rights” have been accorded only to the Greeks as the legitimate ancestors of the Western world, while the barbaric backyard of the cradle of civilization remained untouched by similar cultural colonialism until romanticism and orientalism merged with real political and colonizing interests in the Balkans.3 Many Albanian academics and intellectuals argued that the Albanian presence in Kosovo in the past was older than the Serbian -hence the
340 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST “Illyrian” theory, which also had its political and social consequences. For instance, the number of Albanian babies in Kosovo named after ancient Illyrian chefs increased immensely with the rise of the national consciousness during the era of privileges and multiethnic harmony imposed by Tito, and continued into the times of unrest and repression. In parallel discussions in the rest of Yugoslavia, different “ancestors” have been used and manipulated in public discourse, in the unholy mélange of public discourse and academic discourse, and in academic discourse itself – like Veneti in Slovenia, Croat “Iranian” ancestors, Etruscans, Dardanians and almost every ancient tribe with a name mentioned by ancient authors. In a number of sterile debates on ius primi possidentis, archaeology became the crucial discipline and the battlefield of authorities, dangerously approaching or even trespassing the limits of amateurism. The ambiguous position of archaeology – always in need of state subsidies, permits and administrative support for basic research, and no less scrupulous of academic freedom than the other social sciences – was often at risk of examinations. The Kosovo myth, although it provoked heated debates around “ancestors”, is not so much linked to the important monuments or archaeological sites: the monasteries in the region of Kosovo, not only of Kosovo Polje, related to medieval Serbian history, are corollary of the central national narrative, the battle of Kosovo. Lieu de mémoire is therefore empty, with a couple of scattered commemorative steles and tombs erected after World War I, and after the “reconquista” of 1912 – except for a tomb (turbe) of sultan Murat, erected almost a century after the Kosovo battle. In the same lieu de mémoire, two collective memories have installed their monuments. During the time of the Yugoslav state in its two phases between the two world wars and after World War II, both sides of this lieu de mémoire were visited. The historic event was memorialised on the Serbian side through the narrative which served the invention of the nation-state, long after the battle. The Turkish memory of the battle did not develop into a major narrative. The life and accomplishments of Bajazit, Murat’s son in the wars and battles in the Middle East, away from the Balkans, were exploited by Turkish chronologists, but were not exemplified to a measure comparable with the narrative development of the event on the Serbian side. The question of the contemporary interpretation of the Kosovo battle developed mostly in connection with the somewhat dubious interpretation of the result of the battle. Several contemporary
341 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST testimonies point to the direction of the Serbian, not Turkish victory – for instance the story about Notre-Dame’s bells in Paris going off as a sign of joy for another Christian victory. This interpretation is often confirmed in the traditional historic discourse to some degree of reluctance by the Turks. By advancing into the Balkans after the battle of Kosovo they insured the vassal relations with the widowed queen and created family ties. In fact, the visible difference between the historic and the mythic narratives opened a problem which sometimes was used to construct a specific “Serbian mentality”, which preferred a defeat to a victory. This fatalist version of the origins of the Kosovo myth was quite attractive for the nationalist myth authors and supporters, as it is often the case in similar nationalist and colonial plans. The method is rather simple, it consists of preparing the public opinion with an aggressive narrative production in the media (collective loss, injustice done to a collective, revenge, re-possession), and we have seen it many times in the
20th century. The Serbian lieu de mémoire in this perspective is confirmed as a void; the empty spot surrounded by other monuments in the vicinity or remote areas as the chronotope in Michael Bakhtin’s sense4 or a moment/place post quem-after which the mythicised Serbian feudal, Christian kingdom does not exist any more. Two possible comparisons come to mind: the French Gergovia-Alesia complex as an example of a coordinated work both in memory and in oblivion; and Alamo, Texas, as a place of organized memory, this time on re-conquered territory. Both of the parallels in fact point to the very specific position of Kosovo, when it comes to the construct of collective memory. A plausible parallel can be found in the approximately same region – the fall of Constantinople, sixty-four years after the battle of Kosovo. In a similar way, the loss of Constantinople has been the major narrative of the Greek national and state identity, including myth construction and political or military actions waged in order to re-possess the Polis. But the parallel stops here: Polis was continuously inhabited by the Greeks, it served as a cradle of the Modern Greek national movement, it was never an empty spot nor did it have a position of a lieu de mémoire. Even if in the collective Greek memory Tuesday is a bad luck day because of the fall of Constantinople, which occurred on Tuesday according to the traditional narrative, Polis was a culturally and politically productive place, and some important Greek institutions, like the Patriarchy, are still based there. The example of Constantinople introduces the problematic of different, presumably conflicting memories of a historic event.
342 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST The basic mapping of such memories in the case of Kosovo would contain the Serbian, the Byzantine (Greek, Greek diaspora), the Turkish and the Albanian traditions and collective memory constructs. All of them include the two parallel discourses, the historic and the literary, both oral and written. Although I intend to discuss them elsewhere, my main interest is placed in the search for the narrative that does not appear on any of the projecting historiographic screens of the mentioned national histories. This hidden other can be traced in the most productive and the most notable Kosovo mythic construct, the Serbian one. This hidden narrative, produced by the non-heroic, less national and collective but powerless population, is placed in women’s history, the non-written, the neglected, the unaccepted even today in local Serbian culture. The challenge of such a perspective was obvious, especially when it became clear to me that it really was offering some unexpected aspects of the myth and some even less expected glimpses into women’s politics and culture. What seemed to be a starting point, became a strongly argumentative aim of the research. Not only was it women who led creative politics after the battle of Kosovo, clearly opposed to the politics of the aristocracy that was eradicated in the battle, but it was also women who invented the initial Kosovo myth in the religious discourse, about a decade after the battle. Women introduced a new saint cult that was appropriate for the population of women in a new political, social and ideological context. Eventually, women remembered the Kosovo myth in a completely different way than the heroic epic tradition. This encouraged me to search more subtle and less visible manifestations of women’s versions of the Kosovo myth, namely women’s voices inside the heroic epic tradition. This is where historic discourse had to combine with the discussion of developments in the poetics of oral narrative and even women’s writing (l’écriture féminine). The results of such discussion, mixing politics and poetics, confirmed in many ways this other Kosovo tradition which, needless to say, is rather neglected by Serbian academia, both older and recent. But saying this certainly does not mean to diminish the importance of the historiographic work on the Kosovo battle done by Serb and Yugoslav authors, but, instead, to point to the missing aspect and reason of this lack of interest, which in my view is of an ideological order. In the very rich academic tradition of the South Slavs, most of the questions of different oral and textual versions of the Kosovo
343 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST narrative have been researched and discussed. The chronological problems, the attempts at defining the historical and the mythical, the philological precision and the positivist accuracy have set a solid ground for any analysis of sources – Serbian, Turkish, Greek, Italian, Russian, Polish, and others. The academic study of the Kosovo myth goes back to the 19th century, with representatives like Ilarion Ruvarac, who was the first to separate the mythical and the historic narrative. Stojan Novaković, the paradigmatic Serbian positivist from the end of the 19th century published a huge amount of historic sources, among them The Story of Kosovo Battle, an anonymous account and one of the earliest prose versions of the narrative.5 The Kosovo narrative was one of the favourite topics of the oral epic tradition, and some early versions are dated to the 16th century The Kosovo epic cycle, which forms a kind of phantom epos, instigated very different interests from the late 18th century, ranging from romantic interest including mystifications and parallels with Homer, up to scientific research into the narrative techniques and also to the striking similarities with Homeric singing of tales, as the studies by Milman Parry and his successor Albert Lord showed.6 In this line of scientific interest for the Kosovo narrative, two modern publications deserve special attention. The collection on duke Lazar in 1975 offered a wide range of works by different specialists, and stirred some political debate.7 The ruling nomenclature seemed to be quite sensitive to any signs of the Serbian nationalism, even in the quite contained and objectified scientific discourse. The same, generally silent academic population reacted with indignation to the work by Belgrade university professor Miodrag Popović on Kosovo myth. This work, based on serious scientific research, had an openly critical approach to the myth, thus admitting that the Communist Party view was close to the author’s view. The book became immediately a target of criticism by the prevailing group of academics focused on the collection related to duke Lazar mentioned above. The debate wore velvet, so to say, because nobody wanted to see the nomenclature engaged again. But Miodrag Popović was quite isolated and headed for an early retirement from his department. His book on Kosovo myth was published again only in 1998, in a series by an independent, anti-nationalist editor, himself an academic, Ivan Colović, in Beograd.8 Among modern Western works on historic memory, Fables de la mémoire La glorieuse bataille des trois rois by Lucette Valensi9 holds the
344 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST most important place for my topic. Valensi deals with the constructs of memory in three different ethnic and cultural settings, the Portuguese, the Moroccan (Islamic) and the Jewish around the “battle of three kings” which occurred in 1578 at Al-Kasr al-Quibir (Wâd al-Makhâzin). Two Muslim rulers and the Portuguese king Sebastian died during the battle, the Portuguese were defeated, Islam saved and the Jews felt saved from the Iberian menace – the memory of 1492 and Spain was still strong. This basic narrative model corresponds in many elements to the Kosovo battle narrative: the clash between Islam and Christianity, both rulers, Lazar and Murat, killed during the battle, the defeat of Serbs and the Turkish victory. The Kosovo battle occurred about two centuries earlier, in 1389. In the Serbian narrative, there are no Jews (the Sephardim who came to the Turkish province Bosnia from Spain did not have any special interest for the earlier legend), but there are other groups that could be used to put the blame upon them in the further ramification of the narrative. Beside those who were late for the battle or just traitors, Albanians and Bosnians, who were largely Islamised after most of the Balkans was taken over by the Ottoman empire, seemed to be the perfect target for moral reproach in the narrative, reproduced in many later political explanations which used the mythical construction in the argumentation over collective and state rights, demands or just excuses for political actions with different, sometimes quite remote motivations. Lucette Valensi’s work set a model of methodology to organize the research of the more or less contemporary sources and documents, the oral tradition and the church cults based on the Kosovo narrative, and to place the basic elements for the work in the construct. Double endings, chronological jumps, traces of ideological censorship or imposed oblivion – all of these techniques are extremely important in establishing several competing interpretative lines. A defeat, responsibility, punishment, expiation, revenge, re-vindication: these are the strong narrative elements that served in both cases – the Kosovo battle and the battle of the three kings – and produced different, but comparable and sometimes stunningly similar ramifications and recent ideological constructs. Valensi’s work could be exemplary for any future research in different collectives’ constructs of memory of Kosovo. My interest is to show that there was yet another collective which formed its own, often opposing and subversive memory – women. Conflicting ethnic memories have their counterpart which transcends ethnic differences, and opposes any ethnic, heroic, male-centred
345 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST narrative of the Kosovo battle preferring a women’s critical examination of the heroic behaviour, and their pacifist ideological and political position. The basic chronology of the texts, oral and written, could be presented in the following way, in order to trace the development of the narrative and its use in constructing the collective memory, ethnic and gendered: almost contemporary or next generation historic sources, Serbian, Byzantine, Turkish, Albanian, East and West European; religious consecration of the king Lazar, preceding his sanctification, initiated as early as a decade after the battle; the epic cycle of Kosovo, consisting of several epic narratives related to different events and personalities, mainly aristocrats, before, during and after the battle. The cycle was composed in different times and places, some narratives dating back to the 16th and 17th century, some from the 18th and 19th century, from the singers of tales, which were written down by Vuk Karadidžić;10 re-invention of the Kosovo myth in the struggle for the national liberation and independence in Serbia in the 19th century, in literature, in religious, political/public and historic discourse; re-invention of the Kosovo myth by the circles of young Yugoslav intellectuals in the Austro-Hungarian empire at the beginning of the 20th century, promoting modernism, republican democracy, multiculturalism, and new moral values for the whole future Yugoslav space; “re-serbization” of the Kosovo myth in the Yugoslav monarchy, and integration of the myth into the state narrative of the First World War and Serbian heroism, suffering, and vindication; silencing of the Kosovo myth as a symbolic narrative of the Serbian nationalism conflicting with the communist Yugoslav ideology after the Second World War; re-invention of the Kosovo myth in the late eighties, as a powerful tool of constructing the Serbian nationalism anew.
The gender-genre division of Vuk Karadžić, never closely examined by the Yugoslav academia (or M. Parry and A. Lord for that matter), offers an ambiguous picture in which women perform all the oral genres except epic poetry. Still some may perform epic poetry (slepice, blind women – singers of tales). Women’s voices in the epic cycle on the Kosovo conflict with the heroic and aristocratic male values,
346 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST especially in the use of the technique well known in the Western poetry of Middle Ages, blason, as analysed by Roland Barthes. The Serbian historians of the time offer a convincing picture of co-habitation with the Turks after the battle (Queen Milica’s son as a Turkish vassal, her daughter married to Bayazed). Most of all, the introduction of a new saint in Serbia, Saint Petka (Greek version Paraskevi, “Friday”, protector of women) after a complicated mission by Milica and a friend, nun Jefimija, reveals a new ideological turn.11 Parodies of the Kosovo narrative in 17th century, with Milica as a feminine counterpart to the heroic narrative, confirms a separate women’s collective memory and version of the Kosovo myth.12 A certain tradition of carnivalisation of the Kosovo myth and its values can be found in modern women’s writing (Danica Marković in the nineteen twenties, Marija Ivanić in the nineteen nineties) in Serbia, and can be compared with women’s pacifist movement techniques (Women in Black). This is a general view of my argumentation. The problem of women- blind singers of tales is discussed in an article already given to an editor, and it will not be treated here in detail. The disappearance of blind women – singer of tales from the performative space of the patriarchal society and from the interest of most of the academics dealing with oral poetry is due, to my view, to changes in the national state culture in the
19th century, in which patriarchal niches for women’s activities are lost to a general “smoothing” or cultural unifying of a collective (through identity narratives) which otherwise claim its patriarchal ideals, but accommodates them according to its ideological needs. Three women represent gender views and attitudes in the epic cycle of Kosovo: Queen Milica, Mother of Jugović, and the Kosovo Maid. All of them oppose the men’s decision to fight the Turks, deploy their women’s strategies to prevent their loved ones from going to battle, and bear the consequences of men’s behaviour. Mother of Jugović dies after all of her nine sons and her husband are killed in battle. Milica tries in vain to stop her nine brothers and then her husband, Lazar, from going into battle. Kosovo Maid is fiancée of a knight that dies in battle, and her future life is cursed with sterility. In all of these episodes, body (male or female) is central to all of the images in the text. Mother of Jugović’s heart breaks when ravens bring the hand of her youngest son from the battlefield. In some versions she literally “inflates and bursts” from pain. Milica waits at the gates of the city, trying to convince her brothers and her husband coming out and heading for Kosovo to
347 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST retreat, and when her plea fails to convince them, she faints. A servant named Milutin is ordered to take care of her, but he cannot resist the heroic call, and eventually returns from the battle “bearing left arm in his right hand”. Kosovo Maid wanders in Kosovo after the battle, helping the wounded and looking for her fiancé. Severely wounded Pavle Orlović points to the spot where there is more rubble, broken weaponry, and dead bodies – that is where her fiancé and her blood- brothers heroically died. In any Homer-conscious and literary aware re- arrangement of the poems, the last words of this poem should conclude the epic cycle:
Unhappy, if I were to grasp a green pine, Even the green pine would wither.
Svetozar Koljević interprets these verses in a national context, with Kosovo Maid a mere symbol for the collective grief: “Her outcry of grief speaks again with a hundred voices of the past, with a personal sense of misery and with the full national pathos of the Kosovo legend […]. Is it in the nature of an evergreen to wither under the touch of an innocent hand?”13 Surprisingly enough, there is no attempt at reading the images here, or anything close to an anthropological approach. Koljević deeply rooted in a national-romantic mode, and does not pay much attention to academic and intellectual demands in his interpretation. In terms of Balkan and many Ancient and modern cults, holding a tree or a branch is a fertility-related gesture. The poetic image is clear, and relates to impending sterility of the maid. It is not only her betrothed, it is all the maleness who perished in one battle. Therefore there is a collective voice, the voice of women, which does not express only the misery and grief, but also a hidden reproach to men who decided the collective’s future. Of course there is something unnatural, but it certainly does not pertain to the “nature of evergreen”, but to the fact that women are left unnaturally barren. If the Iliad ends in a tragedy of the individual human death, the Kosovo cycle ends with a non-birth. The male body of the Kosovo cycle is mutilated, the feminine body barren. There is more to read in the Kosovo cycle bodies. Historically and culturally, they belong to the mediaeval court body construct and its related discourse. There is no great need to mention here that the court ladies read the same love novels in the East and in the West of
348 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Europe at that time, and that the Serbian dynasties were linked with both Byzantine and Western European courts through marriages. But even without this rather flat contextual linkage, the little analysis of the poetic genre devoted most often to a praise of women’s beauty by Roland Barthes14 offers another way of reading the body in the Kosovo
cycle. Blason flourished in the 16th century, but can be traced back to the troubadours’ concept of the female body, and even back to the descriptions of it in the biblical Song of the Songs: a woman is beautiful “elle était belle quant aux bras, quant aux cou, quant aux sourcils, quant au nez, quant aux cils, etc.”, as Barthes puts it.15 Although Barthes does not explain any historic background, it is clear he explores the heraldic semiotic lineage of the blason, considered “incorrect” by modern literary authority. Barthes defines blason as a genre expressing a belief that a complete inventory can reproduce the totality of a body. It�� cannot: “Personne ne peut voir la Zambinella, profilée à l’infini comme un total impossible, parce que linguistique, écrit.”16 ���������������But besides the impossibility of the catalogue representation, and the impossibility of the representation of the body in text, there are still other possibilities of reading blason. The body is cut into pieces in the text, fragmented into a dictionary of objects – fetishes. In terms of feminist poetics, this is a male catalogue of the female body, a cannibalistic approach to the textual consumption of the body in its fragmented form. In the context of the Kosovo epic cycle, this technique of the textual representation of the body is generally oriented toward the male, not the female body. It is women who gaze at men and give account of their bodies. It is needless to venture into the women’s authorship here, given that both men and women were epic performers – singers of tales. But a women’s gaze is a kind of ever-present reader of the epics: men parade in front of women in the Kosovo cycle, a stereotyped écrit of the heroic male body, the impossible catalogue of manhood:
Ivan Kosanić came after him, an honorable hero in this world, trailing a long sword on the cobbled road, and capped in silk and feathers set in silver and a tunic embroidered in circles and a handkerchief of silk around his neck and a gilded ring on his hand.
349 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST KOSOVO MAID
She stands in the gateway of the city, look, the men ride by in their regiments, the riders each under his battle-lance, and Boko Jugovic is the first, riding a chestnut, dressed in pure gold, with the flag of the cross covering him, O my brother, down to his chestnut horse; with and apple of gold over the flag, with golden crosses sprouting from the apple, with golden tassels dangling from crosses, dangling and tapping on Boko’s shoulders.
TSAR LAZAR AND TSARITSA MILITSA
Translation: ANN PENNINGTON
Clearly, the representation of a male body stresses the fragmentation through the elements of costume and decoration (fetishes), and the effect of a hollow inside of such a body (Barthes’ la statue creuse) is remarkable. Women’s gaze in the Kosovo cycle is present in all of the descriptions of the male body, which is not the case in epic poems of more recent times. The heroic feudal body needs the other to be gazed at. Hero’s self, we might conclude, is construed externally, the inside might be empty. The role of the other is not only to confirm this self: The heroic feudal body cannot exist without the other; it is not visible without the other’s gaze. One is compelled to compare very successful interpretations of the ancient gaze by Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux and Jean-Pierre Vernant,17 or of the male self and its feminine other in Greek drama by Froma Zeitlin.18 The fragmentation of the male heroic feudal body is repeated twice – first in its glorious, shining, parading form, and then in its gruesome battle-worn reality – torn and cut limbs, broken spears, beheaded bodies, horses and dogs without masters, and so on. Women’s gaze is there on both occasions to judge, collect the whole, and bear the consequences of the fragmentation. In one version of the poem on Mother of Jugović, a woman’s (mother’s) gaze is given the quality of a superior, universal observation: God gives the anxious mother wings and a hawk’s eye, so she flies to Kosovo to inspect the battlefield.
350 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Between the two phases of the male body representation, there is a certain women’s discourse, which is obviously against war and heroism. Women’s criticism of men’s behaviour can be read in other texts which form the narrative cluster of the Kosovo myth. An alternative text of history, a different narrative of the post-Kosovo tragedy can be in- read in the traditional historiography. Apparently, Queen Milica was a survivor. She gave her daughter to the young sultan in marriage and her son served as Turkish vassal and fought battles all over the Balkans and Asia Minor. She took the habit, and had a faithful counsellor in another widowed noblewoman who became a nun after her husband was killed in an earlier battle with Turks, and who came to Krusevac to live at Lazar’s court, Jefimija (former Jelena). Jefimija is considered the first Serbian woman-writer. Her work includes a prayer to a deceased baby-son, and praise to Lazar, which became the basic text of Lazar’s cult in Serbia. The text of the praise is executed in the form of embroidery.19 Obviously, the stability of the power had to be reinforced by ideological support, and nothing could serve better this purpose than the cult of a hero. But Milica and Jefimija did not stop at heroes, however, because there were other parts of the population that were in need of comforting narratives and religious/ideological support. The two women realized a complicated political mission which demanded high diplomatic and rhetoric skills: They travelled all over the Balkans to negotiate the transfer of a saint to Serbia. The material from Vuk Karadžić’sDictionary is quite revealing: Saint Petka is a saint who protects women and punishes men, she is connected to the Moon (especially a young Moon), healing plants, night-time and Friday.20 She specializes in women’s diseases and birth. She is suspiciously close to white magic. A man that wears woman’s clothes is called “feminine Petko”. In the Serbian and Balkan oral tradition, she appears often with her daughter, Saint Sunday, in a Demetra/Cora-like divine couple. The popularity of Saint Petka, obviously parallel to different Italian Venus cults that remained from Antiquity can be explained by different appealing aspects – calendar,21 apocryphal texts, a place in the church cult. Toponyms with Petka’s name, often connected to a church, are often found in Serbia, Bulgaria, and Macedonia today. The cult of the saint is popular both in cities and in villages, and in nomadic Roma communities. Milica and Jefimija had a clear idea of the use of such a saint – the mentioned vernacular forms of cult confirm this much more than the highly stylised Serbian historians’ and theologians’ accounts of the event.
351 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST The last element that confirms this gendered division and the existence of two different versions of the Kosovo myth, is continuity. In Vuk Karadžić’s collections of minor poems, mainly what he determined as “feminine” poetry, there are two parodic poems that refer to women’s position concerning the Kosovo myth.22 In both poems, the form of blason is used to represent Lazar, not only as a hero but also a saint. This use obviously introduces the necessary reference to epic poetry, but the turn is radical: The birds that come to Milica are not ravens, but “multicoloured birds”. After they describe Lazar as a traditional blason, they offer her a possibility of getting him back, but Milica refuses. She married her sons and her daughters, and she has no need of Lazar anymore. In oral poetry narrated/sung by women and for women’s public, this radical view of men’s behaviour and of their leading heroic myth was persistently present. But its presence can be followed even later, as it was acquiring even more sense in the recent times when feminism grew inseparable from pacifism, and when hollow forms of the Kosovo myth were serving transparent nationalist political goals. A good example in point is the poetry by Danica Marković, who blends images of Kosovo into the image of a cruel lover.23 A usual blason from epic poetry is used to represent the lover’s cruelty toward women and his lack of human emotions. When read and interpreted as gendered, this image has two different and conflicting meanings, depending on who is the author (a singer) and who is the public. In her recent novel Essay on Hero, Marija Ivanić24 plays with the same possibilities of parody of the Kosovo mythical and heroic mentality turned into everyday male manoeuvres of avoiding responsibility, connecting epic heroism and contemporary Serbian nationalism, and stressing its distinctive gendered character. This line of different historic receptions of the Kosovo myth by women shows a certain consistency in a gendered representation of the mythical narrative, and of its ideological and political use. Women, starting with contemporaries and continuing through the
15th, 17th–18th centuries (probable origin of lyric poems collected by Vuk Karadžić), up to the 20th century, have had a different view of the meaning of the myth: they opposed a heroic attitude which was leading directly to war and destruction, they were inventive in looking for compromises and for a survival in a new political and social situation with other ethnic and religious groups, they took care of procuring new narratives and new cults to ease the pain of both male and
352 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST female community, and, in their secluded gendered space of the oral production, they ridiculed the Kosovo high heroic tone and behaviour, using the familiar epic formulae. Characteristically enough, there is a discontinuity in the 19th century, at the time when the national narrative was being formed, with a clear aim to unify and represent the tradition as a self-cantered totality. This totality was a patriarchal one, with a place for women mostly in the domain of symbolism and abstraction. By being “accepted” by the new society with the state and nation as the pivotal collective structures, women re-assume the same roles they had in a patriarchal society – wives and mothers with a few new rights and lots of new obligations to the collective. The production of narratives, formerly shared and with overlapping competences, becomes part of the representative and identitarian mechanisms, and at the same time, the patriarchal niches for women disappear in the forming of the civil nuclear family and the limiting of women’s former fields of competence. Women’s isolation in a bourgeois family is represented as women’s highest achievement in the collective. Women’s memory of the Kosovo myth was constructed in a highly gendered culture, and survived in another form of a gendered culture. It conflicted with a national culture, and reappeared in moments in which national politics and women’s interests were gravely opposed, like during the dissolution of Yugoslavia.25 I do not have a slightest intention to go into any “naturalist” explanation of women’s innate refusal of war and violence, but I would like to underline the political points in which women’s interest were at risk, besides women’s genuine interest in preserving family and children, like a loss of rights (including free health and social security and state monthly aid for children) in a new political development, danger for multiethnic families, diminishment of the rights to education, rise of pressure from religious institutions, and so on. Women’s use of the Kosovo myth thus shows distinctive oppositional, subcultural, carnivalesque qualities. We deal here with a critical memory, defined by the social position of the critics – women. Once read, this specific memory not only broadens the limits of collective memory, but it also sheds light on traumatic gender differences which never caught the attention of traditional historians. They were felt and memorized so deeply, that even after the national “smoothing” of the patriarchal society; they survived, strong enough to reappear in women’s discourse in times of crisis.
353 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST The message concerning the actual situation in Kosovo would be two- fold. First, it would mean a protest against a stereotypical presentation of the Kosovo Albanian and Serbian mentality (“fourteen centuries of hatred” in Bernard Kouchner’s words), and second, it would recommend to listen to women, to find out about their everyday strategies, to make them visible with their political demands for peace, stability, and communication, if not reconciliation. In other words, it is necessary to follow the update, modern and critical historic debates and to acquire the same amount and the same quality of knowledge, only to be able not to care about it in the daily politics of problem solving and compromising. Even a partial or intended oblivion, with a slight chance of recurring information, is better than stereotypes that provide for easy answers and no hope at all.
NOTES
1 ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������The idea of Yugoslavia as a multiethnic and multicultural republic was conceived among the younger intellectuals, mainly studying abroad especially in Vienna. At the exhibition in Rome in 1911, the visual concept based on the myth of the Kosovo battle was presented by Ivan Meštrović, a Croat, and later a world famous sculptor, with paintings and accompanying texts by several “Yugoslav” artists. Milan Budimir from Bosnia, a classicist, in his early political career in Sarajevo just after WW I, proposed the division of the future Yugoslavia into regions, following the example of the previous Turkish urbanism and cultural network. Most of these utopian ideas were quickly bypassed by the political reality of the Serbian dynasty ruled kingdom, and the intellectuals found refuge in academia. 2 Cf. Svetlana Slapšak, “Mehanizam stvaranja stereotipa: Politikina rubrika ‘Odjeci i reagovanja’, januar–juli 1990”, in: Ogledi o bezbrižnosti, Apatridi, B 92, Belgrade, 1994. The study is about the forming of stereotypes of Albanians and Slovenians (as their political allies) in the leading Serbian daily (Politika). 3 Cf. Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1997. 4 Cf. Mihail M. Bahtin, Voprosy literatury i estetiki, Moscow, 1975. 5 Cf. Priča o boju kosovskom, ed. by Stojan Novaković, reprint Prosveta, Belgrade, 1989. 6 Cf. Albert B. Lord, The Singer of Tales, Howard University Press, 1960. 7 Cf. O knezu Lazaru, a collection of works of the scientific meeting in Kruševac 1971, Belgrade, 1975. 8 Cf. Miodrag Popović, Vidovdan i časni krst, Biblioteka XX vek (publisher and editor Ivan Čolović), Belgrade, 1998.
354 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST 9 Cf. Lucette Valensi, Fables de la mémoire. La glorieuse bataille des trois rois, Seuil, Paris, 1992. 10 Cf. Vuk Karadžić, Narodne srpske pjesme, vol. II: Knj. II u kojoj su pjesme junake najstarije, Leipzig, 1823. 11 Cf. Slovo and Stihira (a psalm-like religious poetic form) about the transfer of the relics of Saint Friday in: Grigorije Camblak, Literary Work in Serbia, Prosveta – SKZ, Belgrade, 1989, pp. 117–130. 12 Cf. Vuk Karadžić, Serbian Folk Songs from the Unpublished Manuscripts, vol. I: Diverse Women’s Songs, SANU, Belgrade, 1973. 13 Svetozar Koljević, The Epic in the Making, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980, p. 172. 14 Cf. Roland Barthes, S/Z, Seuil, Paris, 1970. 15 Ibid. p. 120. 16 Ibid. p. 121. 17 Cf. Françoise Frontisi-Ducroux, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Dans l’oeil du miroir, éd. Odile Jacob, Paris, 1997. 18 Cf. Froma Zeitling, Playing the Other, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1996. 19 Today in the National Museum in Belgrade. 20 Cf. Vuk Karadžić, Srpski Rječnik, istolkovan njemačkim i latinskim riječima, Vienna, 1818. 21 Svetlana Slapšak, “Petka i Nedeljka, dve antroponimike prevedenice”, Onomatološki prilozi, vol. I, SANU, Belgrade, 1979, pp. 81–86. 22 Vuk Karadžić, Serbian Folk Songs from the Unpublished Manuscripts, pp. 213–214. 23 In the poem entitled Image of a Knight, Danica Marković uses the same blason technique in a description of her lover, and relates him to one of the heroes from the battle. Cf. Danica Marković, Trenuci i raspoloženja, Belgrade, 1930. 24 Cf. Marija Ivanić, Eseji o junaku, Biblioteka ProFemina, Beograd 92, Belgrade, 1996. 25 Cf. Svetlana Slapšak, “Between the vampire Husband and the Mortal Lover: A narrative for Feminism in Yugoslavia”, in: Research on Russia and Eastern Europe, ed. by M. Spencer and B. Wejnert, vol. 2, JAI Press, 1996, pp. 201–224.
355 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bahtin, Mihail M., Voprosy literatury i estetiki, Moscow, 1975. Barthes, Roland, S/Z, Seuil, Paris, 1970. Camblak, Grigorije, Književni rad u Srbiji, Prosveta – SKZ, Belgrade, 1989. Frontisi-Ducroux, Françoise, and Jean-Pierre Vernant, Dans l’oeil du miroir, éd. Odile Jacob, Paris, 1997. Ivanić, Marija, Eseji o junaku, Biblioteka ProFemina, Beograd 92, Belgrade, 1996. Karadžić, Vuk, Narodne srpske pjesme, vol. II: Knj. II u kojoj su pjesme junačke najstarije, Leipzig, 1823. Karadžić, Vuk, Serbian Folk Songs from the Unpublished Manuscripts, vol. I: Diverse Women’s Songs, SANU, Belgrade, 1973. Karadžić, Vuk, Srpski Rječnik, Vienna, 1818. Koljević, Svetozar, The Epic in the Making, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980. Lord, Albert B., The Singer of Tales, Howard University Press, 1960. Marković, Danica, Trenuci i raspoloženja, Belgrade, 1930. O knezu Lazaru, a collection of works of the scientific meeting in Kruševac 1971, Belgrade, 1975. Popović, Miodrag, Vidovdan i časni krst, Biblioteka XX vek (publisher and editor Ivan Colović), Belgrade, 1998. Priča o boju kosovskom, ed. by Stojan Novaković, reprint Prosveta, Beograd, 1989. Slapšak, Svetlana, “Between the vampire Husband and the Mortal Lover: A narrative for Feminism in Yugoslavia”, in: Research on Russia and Eastern Europe, ed. by M. Spencer and B. Wejnert, vol. 2, JAI Press, 1996, pp. 201–224. Slapšak, Svetlana, “Mehanizam stvaranja stereotipa: Politikina rubrika ‘Odjeci i reagovanja’, januar– juli 1990”, in: Ogledi o bezbrižnosti, Apatridi, B 92, Belgrade, 1994. Slapšak, Svetlana, “Petka i Nedeljka, dve antroponimike prevedenice”, in: Onomatološki prilozi, vol. I, SANU, Belgrade, 1979, pp. 81–86. Todorova, Maria, Imagining the Balkans, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999. Valensi, Lucette, Fables de la mémoire. La glorieuse bataille des trois rois, Seuil, Paris, 1992. Zeitling, Froma, Playing the Other, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1996.
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358 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST SUZANA TRATNIK
REINVESTIGATING FREELANCE PUBLISHING
I believe that so called freelance writing is defined differently in different cultures and contexts. It can mean being independent of the influence or protection of any editing politics (for example, the work of an independent politician or journalist). In ideal circumstances, this would enable inclusion of a significant quantity of the writer’s own choice of topics. Sometimes, as in Slovenia, for example, freelancing simply means that your income depends entirely on the volume of your work as you do not receive a fixed monthly salary. In this case, being a freelancer acquires a social meaning: it can simply mean not having a proper job and/or income. But is it just a form of (un)employment or does it refer to the (independent) content as well? I speak from my position as a freelance writer, translator and also a part-time-publisher and part-time-editor – the last two functions not being my principle occupation. I am working with a non-commercial publishing house ŠKUC (Students’ Cultural & Art Centre) – the Lambda edition. Another of ŠKUC’s divisions is Vizibilija, which specialises in lesbian publications. And I believe that, in this case, freelancing has a crucial effect on the content. Or put another way: providing a platform for particular contents can encourage and enable small or marginal publishers to pursue freelance fund-raising and freelance functioning in general and thus, not depend on freelance writing alone. I must also mention that ŠKUC-Lambda publishes LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and partly feminist) fiction and non-fiction books
359 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST which are considered “specialist” and are categorised mostly as political themes or explorations, and really deemed to be a literary category. Why is this so? Perhaps I should mention why and how Lambda came to be established in 1991. Its first publication was a book entitledModra svetloba (The Blue Light) which was an anthology of excerpts from poems, short stories and novels of Slovenian writers and a de facto historical document of already published but forgotten homoerotic motifs. So, from the first project it was being demonstrated that such motifs were not so rare in Slovenian mainstream literature. Brane Mozetič, one of the two editors, was motivated to carry out this project because he was told by his university professor that he couldn’t write a Master’s thesis on homoerotic literature in Slovenia because it simply did not exist, it had no history and therefore there was nothing to write about. Minority writings are, of course, political questions. It is only the majority or indeed so-called “major” literature which, as its personified nature, wraps itself up in national themes. So, what is the editing or publishing politics of, not just a “smaller” in size but also minor vis a vis content, publisher such as ŠKUC-Lambda? Clearly, it lies in the interweaving of the publication of forgotten or invisible works, especially in a country with “only” twenty or so years of lesbian and gay movement, with the work of stimulating new authors, and of creative fund-raising techniques. Even though it goes without saying – speaking in the language of universalism – ŠKUC-Lambda is also “just a publisher” that anyway tends to publish good literature. This means that Lambda has no interest in publishing commercial books, such as lurid gay/lesbian love stories, crime stories and similar trash, nor even photo books or manuals. Thus it operates under the soft pressure of inclusion in the non-political majority of “just literature” which believes in quality as its only criterion. However, I should certainly stress that Lambda as publisher has certain freedoms. As a translator, in most cases, I have been free to choose the books that I really wanted to see translated and published. My favourite authors were Leslie Feinberg, Kate Bornstein, Mary Dorcey, Judith Butler, Adrienne Rich, Jackie Kay, and a number of others. When I discovered what I considered a worthwhile book for publication, I would then also start to look for financial support. Early on in its existence, Lambda’s first lesbian editions were mostly supported by foreign Western foundations such as Mama Cash in The Netherlands; The Global Fund for Women, or The Astraea Foundation
360 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST in the USA. Now those foundations do not any longer support book publication, but concentrate more on women’s activist projects – and Slovenia is no longer a priority for those founders. Despite this situation, we may consider ourselves lucky as most Eastern EU countries do still have the possibility of state support for publishers. Thus, in Slovenia, ŠKUC-Lambda is also supported by the Ministry of Culture which especially finances Slovenian authors. It is also supported by different international founders such as Next Page Foundation, based in Sofia; Pro Helvetia; the Vienna-based Kultur Kontakt, Germany, and the EU programme supporting translations, called Culture 2000. This demonstrates that there are still possibilities to publish non-commercial books. The problem with some founders is that the money is only forthcoming after the project is finished which makes it impossible for small publishers to compete with the mainstream. However, with regard to non-commercial books, the biggest problem is probably distribution. It is relatively easy to publish a book but, without a clear marketing strategy, it may then just end up warehoused. And marketing, of course, means money. For example, not all bookshops nor even libraries are happy to take commercially marginal genres, such as poetry, drama, some theory or LGBT and gender books. As a result, many small publishers have started to offer internet sales or print on demand services – which means they only print and sell as many books as are ordered. Although there is now, readily available, the possibility of publishing a book on the internet so that everybody can read it and print it themselves – and this means that distribution does not incur a cost to the publisher; it also means that neither is there any profit.
CONNECTIONS WITH PUBLISHERS IN OTHER COUNTRIES
ŠKUC-Lambda has connections with publishers in the US, UK and some other EU countries, through which many of their books have been published in Slovenian translation. Typically, however, this is a one-way traffic or communication. In general, Western publishers are not interested in the authors and programmes of small Eastern EU publishers. This exchange fares somewhat better where certain projects
361 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST in other Eastern EU countries are concerned. Yet, for translated books, even if they can raise the funds, it will also depend on which stages of the publishing process such publishers can offer. For example, they may be able and/or willing to print the book, but may not have the possibility to or interest in advertising it or even in selling it.
PUBLISHING COOPERATION WITH PUBLISHERS AND/OR AUTHORS FROM EX-YUGOSLAVIA
I believe that LGBT or queer publishers, at least initially, tend to publish a high proportion of Western books. An attempt to change the mindset that leads to this approach was shown in The Open Society Institute’s funding initiative of some years ago called “East translates East”. As an advisor to that initiative, I remember that we made lists of national women’s works that might be of interest to publishers in other Eastern EU countries. Otherwise, the connections and co-operations of LGBT or queer publishers are usually based on personal contacts and information exchange. So far Lambda has started an exchange with the Serbian queer publisher, Deve, and the Croatian Ženska infoteka. It has also recently published the work of a number of authors from the Republics of Macedonia, Croatia and Serbia, and also from the Czech Republic – and included them in the EU Culture 2000 funding programme.
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ŠKUC-Lambda Publisher: http://www.ljudmila.org/siqrd/lambda.php ŠKUC-Vizibilija Publisher: http://www.ljudmila.org/lesbo/vizibilija.htm Tratnik, Suzana, “Z navodili v roki”, Literatura, Ljubljana, 2001, pp. 121–122. Tratnik, Suzana, “Male založbe: homoseksualnost in poezija nista tržni”, Sektor ½, Ljubljana, 2003. Tratnik, Suzana, Lezbična zgodba – literarna konstrukcija seksualnosti (The lesbian story – a literary construction of sexuality), ŠKUC-Lambda, Ljubljana, 2004.
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365 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST 366 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST MARUŠA KRESE
PISATELJICE V VZHODNI EVROPI PISATELJICE V ZAHODNI EVROPI
Ženske pisateljice v vzhodni Evropi? Ženske pisateljice? Ženske? Jugovzhodna Evropa? Vzhodna Evropa? Kaj je pravzaprav to? Kje so meje? V glavi zahoda? V moji? Preračunljivost na vzhodu? Le kje naj začnem? S svojo jezo, s svojimi dvomi, s podobami, ki me preganjajo? S politično situacijo? S cerkvijo? Z angeli, ki zapuščajo domača ognjišča? S hitro hojo med božičnimi stojnicami, s tisočimi božičnimi večeri, ki sem jih pripravljala otrokom, medtem ko sem si želela biti sama, sama in pisati, pisati ... tam ob morju, na soncu ... brez najmanjše skrbi ... Ne vem pravzaprav, kaj se je zgodilo v zadnjih petnajstih, dvajsetih letih. Včasih se mi zdi, da se je zavrtelo kolo časa vsaj za sto let nazaj ... kot da berem roman o življenju, ki ga nisem nikoli poznala ... Nazaj v vsakdanjem življenju ... v političnem življenju.. v literarnem življenju ... Res ne vem, kje smo se izgubile ... Kje smo klonile ... Tiste, ki so bile najbolj glasne v bivši Jugoslaviji, so druga za drugo odšle ... Kam? Na Zahod? Mnoge so bile doma opečatene s čarovništvom ali histerijo in mnoge so bile vržene v koš norosti ...
MARUŠA KRESE (Ljubljana–Berlin) je pisateljica, pesnica, novinarka in psihoterapevtka; zadnjih dvajset let živi in dela v tujini. Med drugim je objavila niz pesniških zbirk in knjig. Poezijo piše v materinščini, vendar nasprotujoč (slovenskemu) nacionalizmu – njena prva knjiga v Sloveniji je izšla leta 2006 (Vsi moji božiči, Mladinska knjiga, zbirka Nova slovenska knjiga, 2009 je v tej zbirki izšla še njena druga knjiga: Vse moje vojne). Za svoje humanitarno delovanje med vojno v Bosni in Hercegovini je prejela nemško državno odlikovanje zlati križec.
MARUŠA KRESE
* WOMEN WRITERS IN EASTERN EUROPE WOMEN WRITERS IN WESTERN EUROPE
Women writers in Eastern Europe? Women writers? Women? South Eastern Europe? Eastern Europe? What exactly is that? Where are the borders? In the head of the West? In mine? And the self-interest of the East? Where do I start? With my anger, with my doubts, with the haunting images? With the political situation? With the Church? With angels leaving their hearths? With my fast walk through the Christmas stalls, with the thousand Christmas eves I had prepared for my children when what I wanted was to be alone, alone, writing, writing ... there by the sea, in the sun ... without a care in the world ... I cannot really explain what has happened over the last fifteen, twenty years. Sometimes I feel as if the wheel of time had rolled back a hundred years at least ... as if I was reading a novel about a life I had never known ... Rolled back in everyday life ... in political
367 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST life ... in literary life. I really cannot say where we lost our way ... Where we gave in ... Those women who had been loudest in former Yugoslavia went away, one after another ... Where? West? Many were branded at home as witches or hysterics, and many were thrown into the wicker cage of madness ...
MARUŠA KRESE (Ljubljana–Berlin) is a writer, journalist and psychotherapist; for the past twenty years she has lived and worked abroad. She has published several volumes of poetry and books. She has been writing poetry in Slovene language though opponent to (Slovene) nationalism – her first book in Slovenia was published in 2006 (Vsi moji božiči / All My Christmas Eves, Mladinska knjiga publishing house, edition Nova slovenska knjiga / New Slovenian Book; three years later and within the same edition was published her second book: Vse moje vojne / All My Wars). She has been awarded the German Federal Cross of Merit for her humanitarian engagement in the war of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
KATJA KOBOLT
ZAGOVOR PRIMERJALNIH PRISTOPOV K POJUGOSLOVANSKIM LITERATURAM KOT (TRANSNACIONALNE) POLITIČNE PRAKSE ALI ČESA SE LAHKO FILOLOGIJE NAUČIJO OD FEMINIZMA
Raziskovanje različnih spominskih vidikov pojugoslovanskih vojn, kakor jih je moč razbrati iz bosanske, hrvaške in srbske (ženske) vojne književnosti, je zaznamovano z metodološkimi težavami. Njihov izvor je bržkone iskati v dominantni paradigmi etnocentrizma južnojugoslovanskih filologij. Namen pričujočega besedila je zato razmislek o metodologijah južnoslovanskih filologij, ki so spremljale nacionalistične politične projekte, kot so t. i. language planning ali jezikovna re- standardizacija, redefinicija literarnega kanona in pretolmačenje nacionalnih literarnih zgodovin. Ker se spol izkaže za bolj ali manj slepo pego raziskovanja vojne književnosti, je prav študij spolov ta, ki razkriva težave opisanih etnocentrističnih pristopov. Prvič: teorije književnosti vojne, kakor jih razvijajo filologije, središčijo v tradicionalni semantiki vojne, v podobi vojskujočega se moškega. Zato pogled skozi prizmo tradicionalne teorije vojne književnosti ne samo spregleduje vojno pisanje žensk, ampak zaobide tudi vse predstave vojn, ki odstopajo od opisanega modela. Drugič: popolnoma onemogoča medkulturni študij semantik pojugoslovanskih vojn. Le-te pa so srčika politike nacionalnega spomina na Balkanu. Trenutni kanonizacijski procesi in politika spomina na pojugoslovanske vojne morajo zato postati predmet kritičnega akademskega pretresa.
KATJA KOBOLT živi in dela kot svobodna teoretičarka, kulturna producentka in kuratorka med Ljubljano in Münchnom. Doktorirala je na münchenski univerzi LMU na temo Frauen schreiben Geschichte(n): Krieg, Geschlecht und Erinnern im ehemaligen Jugoslawien (disertacija je bila leta 2009
368 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST objavljena pri celovški založbi Drava). Kot dolgoletna sodelavka ljubljanskega društva Mesto žensk je bila v letih 2007–2009 ena od njegovih programskih direktoric. Trenutno je gostujoča predavateljica na Humboldtovi Univerzi v Berlinu.
KATJA KOBOLT
* A PLEA FOR A COMPARATIVE APPROACH TO POST- YUGOSLAV LITERATURE AS (TRANSNATIONAL) POLITICAL PRACTICE; OR, WHAT NATIONAL PHILOLOGIES COULD LEARN FROM FEMINISM
Looking at different aspects of memory as they relate to the way the post-Yugoslav wars appear in Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian women’s war writing one is being confronted with methodological difficulties, which mainly originate in the dominant paradigm of ethnicized ex-Yugoslav philologies. The objective of the paper by Katja Kobolt is therefore to rethink the methodology of the separate national South Slavic philologies that went hand in hand with nationalist political projects such as language planning, the redefinition of the literary canon, and the rewriting of national literary histories. As gender dimension appears to be a blind spot in the research on war literature, it is exactly this field, gender research, which proves suitable for unveiling difficulties of such ethnicized approaches. First, theories of wartime literature – mainly developed in the separate national philologies, defined by the traditional semantics of war, and usually made in the image of the fighting man at the front – not only overlook the war writings by women but also fail to grasp the diversity of representations of war in general. Second, the nationalist perspective, currently dominant in South Slav philologies, renders a cross-cultural study of the semantics of war almost impossible, and yet, this is the very focal point of the politics of national memory in the Balkans. Indeed, it is for this reason that the ongoing canonization processes and politics of memory of the post-Yugoslav wars should receive critical academic attention.
KATJA KOBOLT lives������������������������������������������������������������������������������ and works as a freelance theorist, cultural producer and curator between Ljubljana and Munich. She������������������������������������������������ holds a PhD from the LMU University Munich (Frauen schreiben Geschichte(n): Krieg, Geschlecht und Erinnern im ehemaligen Jugoslawien, Klagenfurt/Celovec: Drava, 2009). She����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� has been a long term collaborator of the City of Women organisation, Ljubljana, where she was engaged as one of the programme directors (2007–2009). She is currently a visiting lecturer at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
369 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST JELENA PETROVIĆ
POLITIKA FEMINISTIČNEGA PISANJA/BRANJA/ PREVAJANJA
Jugoslovanska vojna in pojugoslovanski tranzicijski preobrati nepretrgoma aktivirajo množico ženskih, zlasti feminističnih odgovorov na vztrajni etnonacionalistični diskurz, na arbitrarno politiko (retradicionaliziranih) vlog spolov ter na omalovaževanje javnega delovanja žensk od devetdesetih let do danes. S tega gledišča članek prikazuje politiko feminističnega pisanja/branja/ prevajanja, ki je zelo pomembna za aktualni proces zgodovinjenja pojugoslovanskega prostora in ki se upira mizoginiji, šovinizmu, etnonacionalizmu in izgubi političnega spomina. V prvi vrsti je uporabljena kot krovna metafora za vrsto družbenih, političnih in kulturnih tranformacij na poti h g/lokalni in emancipacijski produkciji vednosti.
JELENA PETROVIĆ je feministka, humanistka in prevajalka, deluje na meddisciplinarnem področju lingvistike, diskurzivnih študij, književnosti, medkulturnih študij ter študij spolov. Leta 2009 je doktorirala na ISH v Ljubljani (Spol in žensko avtorstvo v literarni kulturi in javnih diskurzih v Jugoslaviji med obema svetovnima vojnama), je (so)avtorica številnih strokovnih humanističnih člankov in večdisciplinarnih projektov, kulturnih in akademskih dogodkov v povezavi s pojugoslovansko tematiko, soustanoviteljica ljubljanskega Zavoda za kulturno produkcijo in družbeno-politične študije Mina ter mednarodne platforme za teorijo umetnosti – Jugoslovanske študije, članica uredniškega odbora beograjske revije za žensko književnost in kulturo ProFemina ter tuzlanske aktivistične platforme in revije Front slobode.
JELENA PETROVIĆ
* THE POLITICS OF FEMINIST WRITING/READING/ TRANSLATION
The Yugoslav war and the post-Yugoslav transitional reversals continuously activate an array of women, in particular feminist responses to perpetuating ethno-nationalist discourse, to the arbitrary politics of gender (re-traditionalised) roles and to the abuse of women’s public representations from the nineties until today. From this point of view, the aim of the article is to display the politics of feminist writing/reading/translation that is very important for the ongoing process of the historization of post-Yugoslav space. This concept is being evoked to resist the misogyny, chauvinism, ethno-nationalism and the loss of political memory. It is used, in the first place, as a fusing metaphor for a range of social, political and cultural transformations towards g/ local and emancipatory knowledge production.
370 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST JELENA PETROVIĆ is a feminist, scholar and translator specialized in fields of linguistics and discursive studies, literature, cross-cultural and gender studies. She holds PhD at the Institutum Studiorum Humanitaties, Ljubljana Graduate School of the Humanities (Gender and Women Authorship in Literary Culture and Public Discourses in Yugoslavia between the two World Wars). (Co)Author of different scholar articles and multidisciplinary projects, cultural and academic events relating to the post-Yugoslav subjects, co-founder of the Ljubljana Association for Cultural Production and Socio-Political Studies – MINA, and of the intrenational art-theory platform – Yugoslav studies. Member of the editorial board of the Belgrade Journal for Women’s Writings and Culture – ProFemina, and of the Tuzla Public Activist Platform and Journal Freedom Front / Front Slobode.
DAMIR ARSENIJEVIĆ
POLITIKA SPOMINA V »ŽIVLJENJU KOT AKTUALNOSTI«
Politika spomina v »življenju kot aktualnosti« razpravlja o sodobni poeziji v Bosni in Hercegovini in o razsežnosti njenega razkrivanja vojne ter povojne tranzicije na osnovi preizpraševanja, motenja in demistificiranja vnaprej določenih ali ustaljenih načinov »komemoriranja«. Ustvarja radikalno drugačne imaginarije, ki presegajo in repolitizirajo dominantne politične identifikacije. S tvornimi povezavami med preteklostjo, sedanjostjo in prihodnostjo vzpostavlja nov pogled na polje kulturne produkcije, vpete v travmatične dogodke in neuspeh »politike upanja«. Zagovarja »življenje kot aktualnost«, v katerem je zgodovina pozvana, da priča sedanjosti in prihodnosti, da ustvarja nove načine simboliziranja travmatičnih dogodkov, ki preganjajo Bosno in Hercegovino.
MOBILIZIRANJE NEPODKUPLJIVEGA ŽIVLJENJA: POLITIKA SODOBNE POEZIJE V BOSNI IN HERCEGOVINI
Drugi esej Damira Arsenijevića govori o »brezizraznem opomniku« zgodovine, o tisočih še vedno pogrešanih teles, pokopanih v skritih množičnih grobiščih v Bosni in Hercegovini, ki jih – z instrumentalizacijo genocida – nasilno utišuje in onemogoča molk dominantne, uradne zgodovine (zgodovine zmagovalcev) – v odnosu do njih. Sodobna poezija v Bosni in Hercegovini priča v imenu tistih, ki jim je onemogočeno izražanje, hkrati pa ohranja odprto konstitutivno vrzel med travmo in vsemi simbolizacijami, ki poskušajo travmo zapleniti. Še več, z javnim izpostavljanjem trpljenja in zavračanjem pogleda, da je trpljenje privatni dogodek, kljubuje vzpostavljenemu statusu quo, pri čemer uteleša upanje na kaj več kot na nepristransko prihodnost. Zasnovana je na odprtosti do univerzalne normativnosti, ki jo zagovarja in v imenu katere govori, toda katere »minimum« je opisan
371 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST kot »nepodkupljivo življenje« – tisto, ki se ne pusti zvleči v lepljivo mrežo tranzicijske politične ekonomije, v igro, ki ne pozna nobene cene in ki se imenuje »lov na okrvavljeni kapital«.
DAMIR ARSENIJVIĆ je predavatelj kulturnih in literarnih študij na Univerzi v Tuzli. Je mednarodni kulturni delavec, kritik, teoretik, humanist in prevajalec na področjih kulturnih študijev, študijev spolov in literarnih študijev. Njegovo raziskovanje in umetnostnoteoretske politične intervencije proučujejo in vplivajo na teror neenakosti, solidarnost nepodkupljivega življenja, relevantne produkcije vednosti in materialnih spominov na vojno in genocid. Je član umetniško- teoretske skupine Grupa Spomenik in eden od ustanoviteljev mednarodne platforme Jugoslovanske študije – produkcijskega prostora za interakcijo umetnosti, teorije, izobraževanja in politike. Pred izidom je njegova knjiga, disertacija Forgotten Future: Politics of Poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Nomos: Baden-Baden).
DAMIR ARSENIJEVIĆ
* THE POLITICS OF MEMORY IN “LIFE AS AN ACTUALITY”
The article discusses contemporary poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the extent to which it negotiates war and post-war transition by questioning, disturbing and demystifying the pre-given and entrenched ways of “commemoration”, creating radically alternative imaginaries that traverse and re-politicise the dominant political identifications. It puts forward some new perspectives in the field of cultural production that harness traumatic events and loss for “hopeful politics” through productive negotiations between past, present and future. What is at stake here, is “life as an actuality” in which history is brought to bear witness to present and future in such a way so as to create new modes of symbolisation of traumatic events that haunt Bosnia and Herzegovina.
* MOBILISING UNBRIBABLE LIFE: THE POLITICS OF CONTEMPORARY POETRY IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA
Damir Arsenijević’s second essay in this volume is about history’s “expressionless remainder”, about those thousands of still-missing bodies buried in clandestine mass graves in Bosnia and Herzegovina, whose violent reduction, through genocide, to silence, is compounded by the silence of the dominant, official history (victor’s history) in relation to them. Contemporary poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina testifies to those denied expression, at the same time as it holds open the constitutive gap between trauma and all symbolisations that attempt the foreclosure of trauma. Moreover, in bearing public witness to suffering and refusing to accept the view that suffering is a private event,
372 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST this poetry challenges the existing status quo, embodying hope for a more just and equitable future, based upon an openness about the type of universal normativity it claims and on behalf of which it speaks, but whose “minimum” is what is termed “unbribable life”: life that refuses to be drawn into the sticky web of the transitional political economy, in which, whatever the cost, the name of the game is the “chase after bloodied capital”.
DAMIR ARSENIJEVIĆ is a lecturer in cultural and literary studies at Tuzla University, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He is an international cultural worker, critic, theorist, scholar, and translator working in the fields of cultural, gender, and literary studies. His research and art-theory political interventions examine and impact on the terror of inequality, the solidarity of unbribable life, relevant knowledge production, and material memories of war and genocide. He is a member of the artistic-theory group Grupa Spomenik and one of the founders of the international platform Yugoslav Studies – a production space for the interaction of art, theory, education, and politics. His forthcoming book (his PhD thesis) is Forgotten Future: Politics of Poetry in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Nomos: Baden-Baden).
AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ
ŽENSKE PISAVE V BOSNI IN HERCEGOVINI: MODEL ZA ALTERNATIVNO POLITIKO KULTURNEGA SPOMINA?
V enem od intervjujev je mlada bosanska pisateljica in pesnica Šejla Šebahović takole komentirala delitev žensk: »En del sveta sestavljajo ženske, ki so namenjene razkazovanju. So tiho in izgledajo prav. Drugi del sestavljajo ženske, ki so nekako našle pot v moški svet. Pišejo, govorijo in delujejo. Toda ne izgledajo prav. Na točno tem mestu se zvok in slika zamenjata, odvisno od zahtev dominantnih kulturnih obrazcev. Ker njihova kultura ne potrebuje žensk, ki jih je mogoče videti in slišati, so tiste prvega tipa povsem tiho, medtem ko so tiste drugega tipa verjetno slepe. Če niti ne omenjamo, da so ženske iz prve kategorije morilsko predane skrbi za svoj videz, medtem ko so tiste iz druge skupine prepričane, da jim ravno odsotnost dobrega videza (se pravi, da so videti kot moški) omogoča, da si zaslužijo in obdržijo položaj v svetu, ki ni njihov.« Pričujoči članek je interpretacija dveh kratkih zgodb mladih bosanskih avtoric: Ruvejde Šejle Šebahović in Vjere režiserke Jasmile Žbanić. Interpretacija želi pritegniti pozornost na način, kako avtorici pišeta, odpirata in ustvarjata »tretji prostor«, rišeta zemljevide alternativnega spomina in kažeta strategije upora proti dominantnemu (patriarhalnemu) diskurzu. Članek poskuša prispevati k izgradnji alternativnega modela spomina, zasnovanega na procesu interpretacije in nasprotovanja praksam, ki kulturni spomin gradijo na kulturi pozabe in umetnosti pozabljanja.
373 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ je asistentka lektorica na Oddelku za primerjalno književnost na Filozofski fakulteti v Sarajevu. Sedanji predmet njenih raziskav in dejavnosti je osredotočen na odnos med teorijo telesa in pripovedoslovjem.
AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ
* WOMEN’S WRITING IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA: A MODEL FOR AN ALTERNATIVE POLITICS OF CULTURAL MEMORY?
In one of her interviews a young writer and poet from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Šejla Šehabović, comments on the division of women: “One part of the world is composed of women who serve presentation purposes. They keep themselves silent and look right. The second part is comprised of women who have somehow made their way into the man’s world. They write, they speak, and they act. But they do not look right. This is exactly where the audio switches from the video interchangeably, depending on the requirements of the dominant cultural patterns. Since our culture has no requirements for women who can both be seen and heard, the ones of the former type are struck mute, while the latter must be struck blind. Not to mention that the women from the first category remain murderously devoted to their looks, while those of the second category remain convinced that it is precisely due to their absence of looks (i.e. by looking like a man) that they deserve and retain their place in a world which is not theirs.” The present paper is an interpretation of two short stories by two young female authors from Bosnia and Herzegovina: the short story Ruvejda by Šejla Šehabović, and of the Vjera (Faith) by the renowned movie director, Jasmila Žbanić. This interpretation is aimed at drawing attention * to the way that these two female authors write, open and create a “third space”, drawing the maps of alternative memory and revealing the strategies of resistance to the dominant (patriarchal) discourse. Opposing the practices of building cultural memory on the art of forgetting (ars oblivionis), this paper attempts to contribute to building an alternative model of memory based on the process of interpretation.
AJLA DEMIRAGIĆ works as an assistant lecturer at the Department of Comparative Literature of the Faculty of Philosophy (University of Sarajevo). Her current research interests and activities focus on the relationship between body theory and narratology.
374 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST ŠEJLA ŠEHABOVIĆ
V KAKŠNEM RAZMERJU STE? POGAJANJE O INTIMNEM ŽIVLJENJU IN MIGRACIJAH V SODOBNI BOSANSKI ŽENSKI POEZIJI
Za sodobno bosansko žensko poezijo je značilna nekakšna renesansa, ki jo je literarna kritika v regiji opazila na več ravneh. Poleg feministične kritike obstaja še razširjena praksa »mainstreaminga« ženske poezije kot zanimivega prispevka k postmoderni literaturi v bosanskem, hrvaškem in srbskem jeziku. Fenomen feministične in druge ženske poezije, ki »prevzema pobudo« po vojnah v nekdanji Jugoslaviji, ima družbeno in teoretsko ozadje, ki se ga pogosto dotaknejo teoretska dela, nastala v regiji in omenjenih jezik(ih). Ker ima ženska poezija vidno mesto v povojni bosanski kulturi, je tudi prostor neposrednega političnega govora in interpretacij, ki se borijo za pomensko zapuščino. V prispevku na podlagi vzorčnih pesmi treh sodobnih bosanskih avtoric – Nermine Omerbegović, Adise Bašić in Feride Duraković – razčlenjujem interpretativne načine razpravljanja o intimnem življenju in migracijah v sodobni bosanski kulturi.
ŠEJLA ŠEHABOVIĆ je pesnica, pisateljica in novinarka. Živi in dela v Tuzli. Poučuje bosanski, hrvaški in srbski jezik in književnost na Srednji jezikovni šoli v Tuzli. Dela tudi kot urednica pri reviji za kritiko in teorijo umetnosti – Razlika.
ŠEJLA ŠEHABOVIĆ
* WHAT KIND OF RELATIONSHIP ARE YOU IN? NEGOTIATING INTIMATE LIFE AND MIGRATION IN CONTEMPORARY BOSNIAN FEMALE POETRY
Contemporary Bosnian female poetry marks some kind of renaissance, noted on many levels in literary critiques in the region. Besides feminist critique, there is a widespread praxis of »mainstreaming« female poetry as an interesting contribution to postmodern literature in the Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian languages. The phenomenon of feminist and other female poetry »taking over« after wars in ex-Yugoslavia has its social and theoretical background, often touched on in theoretical studies in the region and the language(s) in question. Given a visible place in Bosnian post-war culture, women’s poetry is a place of direct political speech, as well as a site of interpretations contesting for a legacy of meaning. In her paper Šejla Šehabović uses sample poems from three contemporary Bosnian authors – Nermina Omerbegović, Adisa Bašić, Ferida Duraković – to discuss interpretative ways of negotiation of intimate life and migration in contemporary Bosnian culture.
375 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST ŠEJLA ŠEHABOVIĆ is a poet, writer and journalist who lives and works in Tuzla, Bosnia and Hercegovina. She teaches Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian language and literature at Tuzla grammar school. She also works as an editor of Razlika (Difference), a paper aimed at critics and art theorists. *
RENATA JAMBREŠIĆ KIRIN
OSEBNO KOT POLITIČNO: HRVAŠKE DRŽAVLJANKE V (PO)VOJNI REPUBLIKI BESED
Avtorica želi pokazati, da je protivojno, protinacionalistično in politično pisanje Dubravke Ugrešić, Slavenke Drakulić, Daše Drndić in Ivane Sajko najprepoznavnejši, najvitalnejši in najbolj prevajani del sodobne hrvaške književnosti, čeprav teh avtoric nikakor ne najdemo med zaslužnimi v »jedru literarnega kanona«. Po postmoderni senzibilnosti, ki je prežemala hibridno, medbesedilno in refleksivno »žensko pismo« v osemdesetih letih – v delih Nede Mirande Blažević, Rade Iveković, Božice Jelušić, Dubravke Ugrešić, Irene Vrkljan in drugih –, so v devetdesetih letih hrvaške avtorice popisovale polemične strani z izrazito politično kulturno razčlembo vojne. Sodeč po vitalnosti in izvirnosti ženskih (para)literarnih strategij, je prav književnost – v zavezništvu z domačo feministično kritiko in teorijo – videti sposobna izraziti številna protislovja življenja na evropskem polobrobju in zlasti časovno zaostajanje v srcu nostalgične pripovedi o »pretekli bodočnosti«, o vnovič preloženi utopiji o enakopravni in napredni skupnosti ponosnih državljanov, ki bi bili zmožni »učinkovitega redefiniranja koncepta Evrope«.
RENATA JAMBREŠIĆ KIRIN je raziskovalka, znanstvena sodelavka na Inštitutu za etnologijo in raziskovanje folklore v Zagrebu ter sodelavka zagrebškega Centra za ženske študije. Koordinira feministični podiplomski študij v Dubrovniku in je bila kot sodelavka Programa za proučevanje begunstva (Refugee Studies Programme) štipendistka oxfordske univerze, Srednjeevropske Univerze v Budimpešti, in državne univerze v Ohiu (Columbus). Izdala je zbirko prispevkov in člankov v hrvaških in mednarodnih znanstvenih revijah, v katerih razpravlja o pričevanjski literaturi, zgodovini spolov in etnografiji vojne na Hrvaškem v obdobju 1991–1995.
376 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST RENATA JAMBREŠIĆ KIRIN
* THE PERSONAL AS THE POLITICAL: CROATIAN WOMEN’S CITIZENS IN (POST)WAR REPUBLIC OF WORDS
In her paper the author shows that the antiwar, antinationalist and political writing of Dubravka Ugrešić, Slavenka Drakulić, Daša Drndić and Ivana Sajko represents the most recognizable, most vital and most translated part of contemporary Croatian literature, despite the seeming inability of these women writers to take the place they deserve at the heart of the literary canon. After the postmodern sensibility which imbued the intertextual and reflexive “women’s writing” of the 80s Croatian women of the 90s wrote pages of politically charged cultural analysis of the war. Judging by the vitality and authenticity of the female (para) literary strategies, it seems that literature – together with local feminist critique and theory – is best capable of expressing the various paradoxes of life in the European half-periphery, most of all the time-lag in the heart of the nostalgic narration of “the future past”, of yet another postponed Utopia of egalitarian and prosperous community of proud citizens able to “effectively redefine the concept of Europe”.
RENATA JAMBREŠIĆ KIRIN is a research associate at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research in Zagreb and collaborator with the Centre for Women’s Studies, Zagreb. She has coordinated feminist postgraduate courses in Dubrovnik and has been engaged as the grantee of the Refugee Studies Programme, Oxford University (UK), Central European University in Budapest (Hungary) and the Ohio State University in Columbus (USA). She has published collections of papers and articles in Croatian and international scientific journals discussing the issues of testimonial literature, gender history and the ethnography of war in Croatia (1991–1995).
DUBRAVKA ĐURIĆ
IZZIVALNE LITERARNE PRAKSE V SRBIJI PO LETU 2000
V svojih zgodnejših analizah stanja poezije in proze avtorica ugotavlja, da je bil v devetdesetih letih 20. stoletja prevladujoči model v Srbiji konstituiran kot antimodernistični literarni model. V tem smislu je bila pomembna obnova zgodovinskega romana, katerega funkcija je re/konstrukcija postsocialistične realnosti v Srbiji. Naloga tovrstnega romana je re/konstrukcija podobe preteklosti, ki bralcu ali bralki daje osnovo za oblikovanje lastne, nacionalne (ali družbenospolne) identitete, in sicer z življenjskih pozicij. Pomembno je poudariti, da se je literarna kritika v Srbiji do leta 2000 in tudi pozneje upirala ideološkim analizam literarnih del. V tem prispevku avtorica zato
377 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST poskuša izzvati ideologijo homogeniziranja in totaliziranja pripovedi nacionalne kulture. V središče pozornosti postavlja odzive na roman Berlinsko okno (2005) Saše Ilića, delo feministične avtorice Jasmine Tešanović, kratko prozo Milice Krstanović in delo skupine avtoric, združenih okrog projekta AWIN-ova šola poezije in teorije, ki je začela z delom leta 1997. Avtorica teh del ne razčlenjuje le kot »objektivna« kritičarka in teoretičarka, temveč tudi kot »kritičarka na delu«, saj sodeluje z mladimi avtoricami pri oblikovanju drugačne zasnove poezije, v smislu »druge linije« (ta izraz se nanaša na eksperimentalno besedilno-pesniško prakso).
DUBRAVKA ĐURIĆ je pesnica, esejistka in urednica iz Beograda. Predava na tamkajšnjem Centru za ženske študije in na Fakulteti za medije in komunikacije (Univerza Singidunum v Beogradu). Je tudi urednica revije za žensko književnost in kulturo ProFemina. Ukvarja se s teorijo kulture, medijev, moderne in postmoderne poezije, teorijo spolov ter umetniških in pesniških performansov.
DUBRAVKA ĐURIĆ
* CHALLENGING WRITING PRACTICES IN SERBIA AFTER 2000
In her earlier analyses of the state of poetry and prose, the author announced that in Serbia during the 1990’s the dominant model was constituted as an anti-modernist literary model. In this sense, renewal of the historical novel, which has a function in the re/construction of post-socialist reality of Serbia, was relevant. The task of such a novel is to re/construct the image of the past, which gives the reader the foundation for a construction of personal, national (or gender) identity, from vital positions. It is important to stress that literary critique in Serbia until the year 2000 resisted ideological analysis of literary products. In the present paper the author therefore attempts to disturb the ideology of homogenizing and totalizing narratives of the national culture. At the centre of attention she puts the reception of the * novel Berlinsko okno (Berlin’s Window, 2005) by Saša Ilić, the work by the feminist author Jasmina Tešanović, the short prose by Milica Krstanović, and work of a group of female authors gathered around the project AWIN’s school of poetry and theory launched in 1997. In her paper she writes not only as an “objective” critic-theoretician, but also as a “critic at work” who works with younger female authors on construction of a different conception of poetry in the sense of “other line” (this term relates to experimental textual-poetry practise).
DUBRAVKA ĐURIĆ is a poet, essayist and editor based in Belgrade. She lectures at the Belgrade Centre for Women’s Studies and at the Faculty of Media and Communications (Singidunum University Belgrade). She is also an editor of the Journal for Women’s Writings and
378 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Culture ProFemina. She is concerned with theory of culture, theory of media, theory of modern and postmodern poetry, theory of gender, artistic and poetic performance.
LADA STEVANOVIĆ
TRADICIJA IN UPOR: PRVINE POGREBNIH OBREDOV V MIROVNEM GIBANJU ŽENSKE V ČRNEM MED JUGOSLOVANSKIMI VOJNAMI
Vse od antike je dejstvo smrti zahtevalo posredovanje žensk. S svojim udeleževanjem v pogrebnem obredu in objokovanju ob grobu so pravzaprav posegle v javno sfero. Zavedajoč se moči objokovanja in prostora za manipulacijo, ki ga omogoča smrt (država ga po navadi uporablja v trenutkih krize in vojn), so že v antičnih polisih uvedli zakone, ki so omejevali vlogo žensk ob smrti. Sodobno uporabo nekaterih prvin tradicionalnih obredov je mogoče prepoznati ravno v nasprotovanju državnemu manipuliranju z mrtvimi in smrtjo, in sicer na primeru organizacije Ženske v črnem med vojnami ob razbitju nekdanje Jugoslavije.
LADA STEVANOVIĆ je diplomirala na oddelku za klasične študije na beograjski filozofski fakulteti, doktorirala je na ISH (Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis) v Ljubljani. Naslov njene doktorske disertacije je Smejanje na pogrebu: spol in antropologija v grških pogrebnih ritualih. V svojih raziskavah kombinira sodobne antropološke teme s tistimi iz polja antične in zgodovinske antropologije, s posebnim poudarkom na perspektivi spola in konstrukciji spolne identitete prek sinhronije in diahronije. Trenutno živi v Beogradu in je zaposlena na Etnografskem inštitutu SASA.
LADA STEVANOVIĆ
* TRADITION AND RESISTANCE: ELEMENTS OF FUNERAL RITE IN THE PACIFIST MOVEMENT OF WOMEN IN BLACK DURING THE YUGOSLAV WARS
From the antiquity on, the presence of death requested women’s interference. Through the participation in funeral ritual and lamentation on the grave, women actually intervened public sphere. Aware of the power of lamentation and of the space for manipulation that death offers (which state usually uses in the moments of crises and wars), still in antiquity polis introduced laws to restrict women’s role around death. The modern usage of some elements of traditional ritual may be recognized exactly in opposing state manipulation with the dead and death, by the organization of Women in Black, during the wars in ex-Yugoslavia.
379 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST LADA STEVANOVIĆ graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade at the department of the Classics and received PhD in Ljubljana, at Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis (ISH). The title of her PhD thesis was Laughing at the Funeral: Gender and Anthropology in Greek * Funerary Rites. In her researches she combines contemporary anthropological themes with those from the fields of anthropology of antiquity and historical anthropology, with the special emphasis on the gender perspective and gender identity construction through synchrony and diachrony. At the moment she lives in Belgrade and works at the Institute of Ethnography SASA.
SVETLANA SLAPŠAK
NOMADSKI SPOMINI, SEDENTARNA POZABA: PRIMER KOSOVA
Kosovski mit je osrednji nacionalni srbski mit. Kosovo je predstavljeno kot lieu de mémoire, mesto spomina Srbov, ki mora kot tako ostati del domovine. Vprašanje izgube ozemlja, ki je legitimno vprašanje vsake države, se vsaj v intelektualnih in akademskih krogih v Srbiji ves čas zastira kot drugotno v primerjavi z veliko pomembnejšo mitsko naracijo. Sčasoma so se ženske spominjale kosovskega mita povsem drugače, kot ga prikazuje tradicija heroičnega epa. To me je spodbudilo, da sem začela iskati finejše in manj vidne manifestacije ženskih različic kosovskega mita, namreč ženskih glasov znotraj te heroične epske tradicije. Žensko spominjanje kosovskega mita se je izgrajevalo v zelo spolno zaznamovani kulturi in je preživelo v neki drugi obliki spolno določene kulture. Nasprotoval je nacionalni kulturi in vznikal v obdobjih ostrih spopadov med interesi žensk in nacionalno politiko, kot na primer med razbitjem Jugoslavije. Sporočilo, ki se nanaša na aktualno situacijo na Kosovu, je dvoplastno: prvič, pomenilo bi protest proti stereotipnemu prikazovanju kosovskih Albancev in srbske mentalitete (»štirinajst stoletij sovraštva«, kot pravi Bernard Kouchner), in drugič, priporočilo bi, da prisluhnemo ženskam, da se seznanimo z njihovimi vsakodnevnimi strategijami, da bi postale vidne v svojih političnih zahtevah za mir, stabilnost in komunikacijo, če že ne kar spravo.
SVETLANA SLAPŠAK je klasična filologinja in antropologinja. Poučuje na ISH (Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis, Ljubljana). Njeno delo je v glavnem osredotočeno na raziskovanje ženskih kultur na Balkanu – od antične Grčije, prek romanticizma do konfliktov v devetdesetih letih in sodobnosti.
380 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST SVETLANA SLAPŠAK
* NOMADIC MEMORIES, SEDENTARY OBLIVION: THE CASE OF KOSOVO
The myth of Kosovo is the central national myth of Serbia. Kosovo is presented as the lieu de mémoire of Serbs that must remain integrated into the homeland, and the question of the loss of territory, which is a legitimate problem for any state, is being constantly masked, at least in the intellectual and academic circles in Serbia, as secondary to the more important mythic narrative. Eventually, women remembered the Kosovo myth in a completely different way than the heroic epic tradition. This encouraged me to search more subtle and less visible manifestations of women’s versions of the Kosovo myth, namely women’s voices inside the heroic epic tradition. Women’s memory of the Kosovo myth was constructed in a highly gendered culture, and survived in another form of a gendered culture. It conflicted with a national culture, and reappeared in moments in which national politics and women’s interests were gravely opposed, like during the dissolution of Yugoslavia. The message concerning the actual situation in Kosovo would be two-fold. First, it would mean a protest against a stereotypical presentation of the Kosovo Albanian and Serbian mentality (“fourteen centuries of hatred” in Bernard Kouchner’s words), and second, it would recommend to listen to women, to find out about their everyday strategies, to make them visible with their political demands for peace, stability, and communication, if not reconciliation
SVETLANA SLAPŠAK is a classical philologist and anthropologist who teaches at Ljubljana’s Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis (ISH). Her work is mainly focused on research into women’s cultures in the Balkans – from ancient Greece, through romanticism, to the conflicts of the 1990s and the present day.
SUZANA TRATNIK
PREVPRAŠEVANJE NEODVISNEGA ZALOŽNIŠTVA
Svobodno pisanje ima različne pomene: biti neodvisen, tj. odsotnost vpliva kakršne koli uredniške politike. Včasih preprosto pomeni ne imeti prave službe. Je le vrsta (ne)zaposlenosti – ali se nanaša tudi na vsebino? Če govorim s stališča avtorice, prevajalke in polzaložnice, ki dela z majhno založniško hišo Škuc-Lambda, verjamem, da ima neodvisnost veliko opraviti z vsebino. Literarna dela manjšin so seveda politične zadeve. Le literaturo večine je mogoče identificirati znotraj nacionalnega diskurza in jo kot tako netiti z nacionalizmom. Torej, kakšna je politika, ne le po velikosti, temveč tudi po vsebini manjšinskih založnikov, kot je Škuc-Lambda? Vsekakor ji gre za preplet objavljanja pozabljenih ali nevidnih del, spodbujanje novih avtoric in avtorjev ter veščin
381 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST zbiranja sredstev. Ne gre pozabiti, da je Škuc-Lambda »le« založnik, ki izdaja dobro literaturo. Ves čas pa deluje pod mehkim pritiskom vključevanja v literaturo večine, ki kot edino merilo priznava kakovost.
SUZANA TRATNIK je diplomirala iz sociologije na Fakulteti za družbene vede v Ljubljani. Magisterij je opravila na oddelku za Antropologijo spolov na ljubljanskem Institutum Studiorum Humaniatis. Živi in dela v Ljubljani kot pisateljica, prevajalka in publicistka. Je dolgoletna aktivistka za pravice lezbijk, novinarka in esejistka, ena od soorganizatoric ljubljanskega Festivala gejevskega in lezbičnega filma. Dvakrat je bila izbrana na letnem tekmovanju (1995 in 1996) za publikacijo/antologijo trinajstih najboljših zgodb slovenskih avtoric. Leta 2007 je prejela nagrado Prešernovega sklada.
SUZANA TRATNIK
* REINVESTIGATING FREELANCE PUBLISHING
Freelance writing bears different meanings: being independent, e.g. not being influenced by any editing politics. Sometimes it simply implies not having the proper job. Is it just a form of (un)employment or does it refer to the content as well? Speaking from my position as a writer, translator and a semi-publisher working with small publishing house Škuc-Lambda, I believe freelancing has a lot to do with the content. Minority writings are, of course, political issues. It is only the literature of majority that may be identified within the national discourse and as such usurped by the nationalism. So, what is the politics of – not “small” only by its size, but also minor by its content – a publisher such as Škuc-Lambda? It is clearly intertwining of publishing forgotten or invisible works, stimulating new authors, and fund-raising technics. Not to mention that Škuc- Lambda is also “merely” a publisher which publishes good literature. And it operates under soft pressure of inclusion into the literature of majority which considers quality its only criterion.
SUZANA TRATNIK graduated in sociology in Ljubljana at The Faculty of Social Sciences. She finished her MA in Gender Anthropology at The Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis (ISH). She lives and works as a writer, translator and publicist. She has been a lesbian activist for several years, a journalist and an essayist. She is one of the co-organizers of the Gay/Lesbian Film Festival in Ljubljana. She was chosen twice in an annual competition (1995 and 1996) for the publication/ anthology of the thirteen best stories written by women in Slovenia. In 2007 she was also awarded a national Slovene literary award by Prešernov sklad.
382 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST 383 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST NAVODILA AVTORJEM
Prispevke in drugo korespondenco pošiljajte na naslov: Uredništvo revije Borec, Publicistično društvo ZAK, Einspielerjeva 6, 1109 Ljubljana, p. p. 2620, ali na elektronski naslov: [email protected]
Uredništvo ne sprejema prispevkov, ki so bili objavljeni ali istočasno poslani v objavo drugam. Prednost imajo urejeni prispevki in v obsegu do 2 avtorskih pol. Monografske študije prijavlja izdajatelj na ločene razpise, tako da je objava študij odvisna od razpisnih rezultatov ali kako drugače pridobljenih sredstev; v vsakem primeru pa lahko društvo nastopa kot izdajatelj in poskrbi za vsebinsko in tehnično realizacijo publikacije. Nenaročenih prispevkov ne vračamo. Avtorsko pravico objavljenega prispevka zadrži izdajatelj, razen če se v pogodbi drugače določi.
Prispevki naj bodo poslani v dvojni obliki: na disketi oz. CD-ROMu ter izpisu na papir po običajni pošti. Krajše oziroma zgolj tekstovne članke lahko pošljete po elektronski pošti. Datoteke naj bodo v programu Word ali podobnem. Besedili na izpisu in v elektronski obliki naj se natančno ujemata, in izogibajte se, prosimo, pošiljanju več različic besedila; ob oddaji prispevka se le-ta šteje kot končna različica. V primeru razprav, študij ipd. člankov naj bo le-tem priložen bodisi izvleček (do 15 vrstic) ali povzetek (do 2 str.), v slovenščini in, po možnosti, angleščini. Posebej izpostavite tudi želene ključne besede (ok. 5). Prispevki naj ne presegajo obsega 1,5–2 avtorskih pol (1 ap = 30.000 znakov brez presledkov), vključno z vsemi opombami in prilogami. V besedilu dosledno uporabljajte dvojne narekovaje (»...«), npr. pri navajanju naslovov člankov, navajanih besedah ali stavkih, tehničnih in posebnih izrazih, razen pri navedbah znotraj samega navedka. Naslove knjig, periodike in tuje besede (npr. a priori, epoché, Umwelt, Self itd.) je treba pisati ležeče. Črtica, ki povezuje strani od–do, naj bo stični pomišljaj (–), ne vezaj (-). Slikovno gradivo (fotografije itd.) naj bo priloženo posebej in označeno na način, ki ne bo dopuščal zamenjav podnapisov. Opombe naj bodo označene z dvignjenimi indeksi – nujno uporabite samooštevilčenje! Indeksi opomb naj bodo smiselno postavljeni stično za besedo oziroma ločilo.
384 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST Načini navajanja: pri bibliografskih podatkih navedite vsaj naslednje podatke in po spodaj predloženem sistemu. Če je le mogoče, se izogibajte inicialkam pri navajanju imen avtorjev. Namesto latinskih kratic cf., ibid., op. cit. uporabljajte slovenske kratice prim., prav tam, nav. delo. Ko posamezno referenco podate prvič, navedite vse bibliografske podatke, pri nadaljnjem sklicevanju na že navedeni vir lahko le-tega smiselno okrajšate.
Navajanje knjig, zbornikov, katalogov: Ime in priimek avtorja, naslov knjige, ime založbe, kraj in letnica izdaje, navedene strani. Emile Cioran, Zgodovina in utopija, prev. Tanja Lesničar Pučko, ur. Zdravko Duša, Cankarjeva založba, Ljubljana 1996, str. 40. Prim. Catherine Chalier, »Obličje in ime«, v: Peter Kovačič Peršin (ur.), Personalizem in odmevi na Slovenskem, prev. Milena Šmit, Založba 2000, Ljubljana 1998, str. 352–360. Cioran, nav. delo, str. 31. Prav tam, str. 49.
Navajanje člankov, neobjavljenih disertacij ipd.: Ime in priimek avtorja, »naslov članka«, naslov revije ali časopisa, v katerem je članek objavljen, kraj izdajanja (za tujejezične revije), št. letnika, št. revije/časopisa, letnica (datum) izida, navedene strani.
Navajanje sekundarnih virov, povzetih oz. prepisanih citatov iz besedil nekega drugega avtorja, še neprevedenih del itd.: Ime in priimek avtorja izvirnika, naslov izvirnika knjige ali »naslov izvirnika članka«, nav. v (cit. iz): ime in priimek in vsi ostali podatki knjige ali revije, v kateri so navedeni deli iz izvirnika; v takih primerih navajajte tudi avtorja prevodov citiranih odlomkov iz izvirnika oz. označite v opombi, da ste prevajalci sami. Taka opomba je smiselna tudi, če predlagate drugačen prevod od že publiciranega, ustaljene rabe ipd.
385 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST INFORMACIJA ZA NAROČNIKE
Publikacije Publicističnega društva ZAK lahko naročite neposredno pri izdajatelju, kjer lahko uveljavljate možnost obročnega plačila, naročniki revije Borec pa še 20% popust na prodajno ceno.
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386 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST NAROČILNICA
OZNAČITE KNJIGO, KI JO ŽELITE NAROČITI:
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387 BOREC 662–665 ODDOGODENJEREVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO ZGODOVINE IN KNJIŽEVNOST – NAROČILNICA
PRIIMEK IN IME
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PROSIMO, DA IZPOLNJENO NAROČILNICO POŠLJETE NA NASLOV:
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t: 01/437 51 78 e: [email protected] www.drustvo-zak.si
388 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST 389 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST SPOL, LITERATURA IN KULTURNI SPOMIN V POJUGOSLOVANSKEM PROSTORU / GENDER, LITERATURE AND CULTURAL MEMORY IN THE POST-YUGOSLAV SPACE
BOREC, LX1/2009, št. 662–665 Revija za zgodovino, antropologijo in književnost / BOREC, LX1/2009, special issue, no. 662–665 Journal for history, anthropology and literature
Uredili / edited by: DAMIR ARSENIJEVIĆ, KATJA KOBOLT, JELENA PETROVIĆ, TANJA VELAGIĆ
Izdalo in založilo / Published by: DRUŠTVO MESTO ŽENSK, PUBLICISTIČNO DRUŠTVO ZAK, ZAVOD MINA
Prevod v slovenščino / Translation from English into Slovene: NATAŠA JANČIĆ, AIDA LONČAREVIĆ, JELENA PETROVIĆ, TANJA VELAGIĆ
Korektura prevodov: TANJA VELAGIĆ
Prevod v angleščino / Translation into English: DAMIR ARSENIJEVIĆ, NADA GROŠELJ, NADA JAČIMOVIĆ HARBAS, ALMA TANOVIĆ
Lektura angleških besedil / Proof-reading of English Texts: DAMIR ARSENIJEVIĆ, TAG MCENTEGART, MELISSA MENDELSON
Oblikovanje / Design: TOMAŽ PERME, KINETIK
Tisk / Printed by: TISKARNA HREN
Naklada / Print-run: 500 IZVODOV
Izid zbornika sta podprla Ministrstvo za kulturo RS in Javna agencija za knjigo RS / Financially supported by the Slovene Ministry of Culture and Slovenian Book Agency.
390 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST CIP - Kataložni zapis o publikaciji Narodna in univerzitetna knjižnica, Ljubljana
821.163.09”20”(082) 821(497).09”20”(082)
SPOL, literatura in kulturni spomin v pojugoslovanskem prostoru : prispevki z mednarodnega simpozija = Gender, literature, and cultural memory in the post-Yugoslav space : #a #collection of papers from the international symposium / ur., eds. Damir Arsenijević, Katja Kobolt, Jelena Petrović, Tanja Velagić ; [prevod iz angleščine v slovenščino Tanja Velagić]. - Ljubljana : Društvo Mesto žensk : Publicistično društvo ZAK : Zavod Mina, 2009. - (Borec : revija za zgodovino, antropologijo in književnost = journal for history, anthropology and literature, ISSN 0006-7725 ; 61, 662-665)
ISBN 978-961-6747-04-2 (Publicistično društvo ZAK) 1. Vzp. stv. nasl. 2. Arsenijević, Damir 249224960
391 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST
392 BOREC 662–665 REVIJA ZA ZGODOVINO, ANTROPOLOGIJO IN KNJIŽEVNOST