“Women's Writing” in the Nationalist Discourse In

INTRODUCTION: WOMEN AND NATION/ALISM Communities... n his Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and ISpread of Nationalism (1983), Benedict Anderson put forth an influential definition of the nation as an "imagined political community." A more sophisticated version of Gellner's invention of nations by nationalism and a groundwork for subsequent studies of the processes of imagining particular nations, Anderson's definition established the nation as a system of cultural representation, which enables identification with the larger community through an imagining of a shared experience.1 What he sees as instrumental for this system APPROPRIATION of representation are the media of novel and newspa- AND MANIPULATION per, and it is the convergence of "capitalism, print OF “WOMEN’S WRITING” technology and the fatal diversity of human language" that provides the basis for the emergence of the nation IN THE NATIONALIST as an imagined community.2 DISCOURSE IN SERBIA For his postulation of the "modular" nationalisms of IN THE NINETIES the Americas and Western Europe, he has, however, NEVENA IVANOVIĆ been criticized by those who view the anti-colonial nationalist movements of Asia and Africa as having a particular national(ist) imagination of their own. In her essay, "Whose Imagined Community?", Partha Chat- terjee voices this discontent by terming the implica- tion of the exclusive availability of "modular" nationalisms as the perennial colonization of colonial people's

1 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1983, p. 6. Anne McClintock, "Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family," Feminist Review 44 (1993), 61. 2 Anderson, p. 46. imaginations.3 Criticism that has more rele- of Ljiljana Habjanović-Đurović as a particu- vance for my essay, however, is the question- larly interesting example of women's contri- ing of Anderson's neglect to consider the bution to the nationalist discourse in Serbia. gendered nature of the constructed national This journalist-turned-author, whose per- imaginaries, and the possibly different ways sonal and political 'credos' shall be elabora- men and women come to imagine themsel- ted later, has used women's themes (in the ves part of a nation (imagined community). words of a critic, themes "that touch the Different feminist scholars and scholars of women readers' nerves") and a "woman- nationalism have in the years following the centered" (moreover, a professedly autobio- publication of Imagined Communities theorized graphical) narrative to formulate and pro- the relationships of gender and nation, duce what some newspaper-"literary"-critics women and nationalism, feminism and na- (and the author herself, no doubt) like to 4 tionalism, and written extensively on their think is an example of "žensko pismo" and particular regional and historical manifesta- what I will read as, ultimately, a patriarchal- tions. nationalist text that is constructed through an appropriation and manipulation of the ... and Imagining concept of women's writing and the use of In the context of what Rada Iveković calls ex- the trivial romance genre and the populist 5 treme nationalisms of the former Yugosla- aesthetics of the (new) historical novel. 246 via, and against the background of particular The text functions as the ideological mecha- discussions of other nationalisms and natio- nism enabling women's participation in the nalist discourses, I will consider the novels (extreme) project of Serbian nationalism,

3 Partha Chatterjee, "Whose Imagined Community?," in The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), p. 5. 4 Neither l'ecriture feminine nor the Anglo-American 'women's writing'–of which, in academic use, this is a translation–convey the exact implications of the Serbian phrase when used in its popular, journalistic or scholarly-misogynist sense, which can express alternatively both denigration of any work which is somehow women's, in its content or form, and an ignorant valorification of a work because of the same thing. 5 Much as Svetlana Slapšak's comments on Dragojević's film Lepa sela lepo gore (“Žensko telo u jugoslovenskom filmu: status zene, paradigma feminizma"), my reading is not intended as literary analysis, but as a reading of the ideological, gendered models and constructs which, although nominally "giving voice" to women/women's sensibilities, are ultimately deeply patriarchal, in their dual commitment to extolling of women's (sexually defined, essentialized) qualities and occasional misogynist outbursts, and as such, constitutive of and participating in the dominant nationalistic discourse.

R. E. Č. no. 59/5, septembar 2000 but it also invites the postulation of a speci- literature that is also marked and coded as fic female nationalist text. Whereas the grea- specifically "women's" to discern the ways of test part of the nationalist discourse is bo- appropriation at this level, to expose them und to be produced by men, and can, from for what they are. The reading should lay our point of view, be criticized for its objec- bare this ideological mechanism which ap- tivization of woma/en, or her/their use as propriates (we could say sucks in) all forms of "symbolic capital,"6 her texts are an example discourse-production – the "low" and the of a woman speaking/writing, as a subject. "female" in this case – in order to homoge- But this is only to mimic the discourse, work nize the public and popular discourse, and through and function as a part of the same restore, maintain, and reinforce the patri- mechanism. In the specific case of Ljiljana archal order. What it should also do is de- Habjanović-Đurović, it is the extolling of monstrate nationalism's constitutive relian- the essentialized 'otherness of woman' that ce on gendered, sexualized imagery, the serves as her starting-point: she manipulates control of (women's) sexuality, and the ide- the concepts of femininity, female, women's, fixes als of sacrifice, purity and respectability – them, to assign them one and only possible all of which figure prominently in the three meaning – the one prescribed by the domi- novels of Ljiljana Habjanović-Đurović Ana nant nationalist discourse, masking it as an Maria Didn't Love Me, Iva, and Female Lineage 247 7 affirmation of the "feminine." (Ženski rodoslov). That this appropriation of the supposedly marginal, "other," back into the dominant, Gender and Nation: The Difference of is executed as bad "women's" literature Implications (which, in another act of self-deception and The work of Nira Yuval-Davis in particular self-congratulation, ubitiquous in contem- recognized the invisibility of women in most porary Serbia, claims for itself the status of nationalist discourse as well as in theories of art) is not to be read back as "all bad nationalism, which often concentrated ex- "women's" literature is nationalist." But it is clusively on the formation of male national important to carefully read through this bad identity and men's incorporation into the

6 Rada Iveković, "(Ne)predstavljivost ženskog u simboličkoj ekonomiji. Žene, nacija i rat nakon 1989." ("The (Un)Representability of Woman in the Symbolic Economy. Women, Nation and War after 1989.") Text written for Women's Studies (Belgrade), December 1998. 7 In an interview: "I believe that women make up the better, stronger and more creative half of the human- ity. That it is a much more beautiful and fulfilling experience to be a woman..."

Časopis za književnost i kulturu, i društvena pitanja national community, without considering is derived. The differences are not restric- either the differential implications of the ted, however, to the 'private' sphere – national/ist projects for men and women or women's citizenship is often predicated up- the inevitable genderedness of structures of on their racial and ethnic background, and nationalist discourse.8 In an attempt to finally, the legislative practices of a state can bring out this hidden element in the con- differentiate between men and women, to struction of "Andersonian 'imagined com- women's disadvantage more often than munities'" she differentiates between three not.11 kinds of nationalist projects/ideologies (Sta- In the cultural constructions of national atsnation, Kulturnation and Volknation), in order communities, the role gender plays is in- to analyze their connection with and depen- strumental, from female bodies posing as dence on a certain modality of male-female symbols of the Nation, to women's behavior 9 relations. being supervised and prescribed as "proper" In the discussion of gender relations and ci- for "our" community. Women, writes tizenship, Yuval-Davis dismisses the 'evolu- Yuval-Davis, "symbolize the national collec- tionary' model of citizenship rights when it tivity, its roots, its spirit, its national pro- simply sees women as "late comers to citi- ject....†Their role is to transmit‡ cultural zenship rights....Their exclusion was part traditions, songs, customs, cuisine, and...the 248 and parcel of the construction of the entitle- mother tongue."12 In cultural communities ment of men to democratic participation which are struggling to maintain their "es- which conferred citizen status...upon men sence" or "spirit" in the medley of "multi- in their capacity as members and represen- culturalism," it is both the dominant/ma- tatives of a family."10 In many cases (coun- jority culture's request and the wish of the tries which respect Muslim laws) it is from traditionalists within the minority culture to the private sphere, defined by the state, that attain homogeneity (of that minority cultu- women's access to rights in the public sphere re), which is most often manifested in at-

8 Nira Yuval Davis, "Gender and Nation," Ethnic and Racial Studies 16 (October 1993), 621-632. With Floya Antheas (eds.) Woman-Nation-State. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989). 9 Yuval-Davis, pp. 623-24. 10 Ibid., p. 625. 11 Ibid., p. 626. 12 Ibid., p. 627.

R. E. Č. no. 59/5, septembar 2000 tempts to curb women, control their behavi- In her account, Nira Yuval-Davis stresses or.13 the importance of gender as a factor in dif- But it is ultimately in their role as reprodu- ferential behavior and policies directed to cers of the nation that women's subjugation women by their collectivities, but also in- is most clearly manifest: in the regulations sists, at the end of her essay, that women (either legal or stemming from local or reli- "may be parties to these ideologies, as the ac- gious custom) that seek to define and deli- tive participation of women in various reli- neate the family unit, its beginning and end, gious fundamentalist and fascist movements and to determine the legality and national clearly show."15 This issue, the issue of "membership" of children. In communities women's participation, is what is elsewhere which harbor the myth of the common ori- explored in more detail, and women's diffe- gin, an outsider's only chance of getting 'in' rential involvement has been emphasized in is by intermarriage. The preoccupation with the form of a questioning of Yuval-Davis' racial or ethnic purity has always been asso- conclusions.16 ciated with the obsession with sexual relationships between members of different com- Women and Nation/alism: The Differen- munities. Whether a child (of 'mixed' pa- ce of Involvement rentage) will be included in a community or It is exactly the gendered nature and sym- not depends on an intricate web of laws and 249 bolic structure of national identities that, in regulations which seek to determine its "value" to the race/nation. States confront the opinion of some, implies a necessary li- women inevitably, as the (re)producers of mitation or difference in the assumption by the nation, with various techniques of con- women of a national identity. One scholar trolling birth-rates, which in many cases de- has shown how the American national iden- pends on their ethnic, racial or national be- tity was constituted through a process of ex- longing. Moreover, these techniques can be clusion and the erection of boundaries be- either encouraging or discouraging, as states tween the white man and others: the new na- may want more or fewer offspring "produ- tion was first defined in opposition to white ced" by different groups.14 American women, black men, black women,

13 Ibid., p. 628. 14 Ibid., pp. 628, 630. 15 Ibid., p. 630. 16 Sylvia Walby, "Woman and Nation," in Gopal Balakrishnan (ed). Mapping the Nation (London: Verso, 1996)., p. 238.

Časopis za književnost i kulturu, i društvena pitanja Indian men and women.17 The metaphors me see as just-another-imperialist obstacle of home, the familial-patriarchal language to the liberation movements of colonial pe- of the nationalist discourse, and of the na- oples. While insisting that the alleged "grea- tion as female are all claimed to show natio- ter pacifism of women" is another element nalism as an ultimately masculinist discour- of gender ideology, Walby still maintains the se. National histories and constitutive histo- argument for a "different extent to which rical narratives and myths are said to "often women share in the same group identity as marginalize or demonize women,"18 and men."22 In this she stands opposed to nationalist movements have "typically sprung Yuval-Davis and Antheas' position that from masculine memory, masculine humili- women are "as committed †to the natio- ation and masculine hope.19 Sylvia Walby nal/ist project‡ but in different ways."23 goes so far as to assert that there could be Walby suggests that the history of feminism different (better?) nationalisms if only and nationalism (mostly in the Third women's experiences, and not only men's, World) could be used to prove the possibili- were taken into account in the "building of ty of the 'tempering' of (and thus the diffe- this culture and project."20 rences between men's and women's) natio- This brings up the question of whether it is nalist projects: it is when women struggle for their interests to be incorporated in the na- really possible to "temper" these communi- 250 ty/national identities – whether it is not the tionalist project that they are also more likely to support it, because they have contributed 'male principle' that lies at the very founda- 24 tion of the national idea, which would then to its formulation. be taken to mean that the nation exactly is Without trying to determine when women the "apex of patriarchal organization"?21 are "more likely" to support a nationalist This would in turn have to be questioned – project or to assume to a lesser or greater ex- following postcolonial criticism's efforts to tent some national identity, I will move to undermine the ('eurocentric') idea of patri- more specific discussions of women and the archy as the universal (most important) re- contemporary nationalisms in the former lation of domination, a theoretical stand so- Yugoslavia and (the former) Eastern Euro-

17 Carol Smith Rosenberg, "Captured Subjects/Savage Others: Violently Engendering the New American," Gender and History 5 (Summer 1993), pp. 177-195. In her essay on the "forgotten" Serbian writer Jelena Dimitrijević, Svetlana Slapšak cites the same process as constitutive of the identity of the ancient Greek man (as well as the modern Balkan man, she claims): it is in relation to the outside, in the opposition to others – women, slaves, barbarians, animals, nature...that this man comes into possession of an identity. "Cogito er-

R. E. Č. no. 59/5, septembar 2000 pe, and the way that the legacies of socialism, 'first' Balkan nationalisms and state-building processes, and of zadruga-based patriarchate have coped and intertwined with the "oldest" difference: how this sexual difference is incorporated, expressed, made fundamental in the dominant nationalist discourses in the countries once ruled by differing degrees of socialism. While it seems/will seem evident that the resurgent nationalisms in countries such as Hungary, Poland or Romania grounded themselves in a "return to traditional values" (that is, the (re)establishment of traditional male and female roles) and their extreme counter- parts of Serbia and Croatia easily shifted between the ("modular") instrumentalization of women as symbolic capital, as the means of "self-preservation, self-legitimation, confirmation, propaganda, normalization go sum" means nothing to him, he has and the imposition of a certain order, a certain hier- not achieved the "internalization of archy †of values‡"25 and the extreme of rape, women 251 identity." "Haremi, nomadi: Jelena Di- mitrijević," Pro Femina 15/16 (Fall 1998), in these countries did not reject nationalism en masse. p. 144. Iveković's insisting that "while women can be, and are, 18 Catherine Hall, "Gender, Nationa- nationalists, nationalism does not offer them the same 26 lisms, and National Identities," Feminist possibility of homogenization as it does to men," Review 44 (1993), p. 101. even if fully assented to, may be less interesting than 19 Walby, p. 241. the actual exploration of how women do use this ("les- 20 Ibid. ser") possibility to quite an impressive extent, and 21Iveković, "(Ne)predstavljivost žen- what the reasons, motivations (fantasies?) behind this skog...", p. 3. may be in different countries in question. 22 Walby, pp. 242-43. 23 And Yuval-Davis and Antheas have Women, Nation/alism, Socialism: criticized the notion of the state as an ex- Continuities & Excesses pression of male interests. While supporting the idea of differential involvement 24 Ibid., pp. 244-45. and integration of women into the nationalist project, 25 Iveković, p. 5. one theorist finds it is the contradictions of the gender 26 Ibid., p. 3. agenda of specific nationalist projects that make it pos-

Časopis za književnost i kulturu, i društvena pitanja sible for women to both "participate actively ily, but...itself a family."30 She connects this in, and become hostages to, such pro- to the historical legacy of the zadruga31, and jects."27 Every state must embody a "gender extends this to label the socialist state the regime," and it is through the nationalist "zadruga-state." The ideological commitment histories and identity-politics of states that to the equality of women and men was con- this regime is transformed, created anew.28 comitant with the project of full employ- In socialism, a peculiar gender regime is ment and rapid (labor-intensive) industria- thought to have been produced, a regime lization: moreover, the latter very much de- that indeed 'contained' to a great extent an pended on it. The assumption by state of ambiguity: the ambiguity of "women's one part of housework and child-care activi- emancipation." Katherine Verdery writes ties (formerly women's tasks) on the one about the gender regime of socialism, as well hand and of decision-making on the other as about the Romanian national/ist discour- contributed to a shift in the balance of au- se under socialism (or more precisely, under thority in single family units – so that the Ceausescu) to investigate the legacy of the division into gendered 'public' and 'private' official ideology, which, while not exactly spheres of 19th-century Western European "solving" (as it sought to) both the 'national' capitalism was significantly altered in these and the 'women's' questions, had actually zadruga-states. The private, or domestic reshaped them both, as well as their intercon- sphere was increasingly the sphere where 252 nections.29 both men and women "realized pride and 32 She describes a prominent characteristic of a self-respect" while "resisting socialism." socialist society, its 'familiarism': the Party Also writing about this "unofficial elevation" was the paternal power, the wise patriarch, of the private sphere (in the countries of Ea- while the society was not merely "like a fam- stern Europe), Barbara Einhorn stresses,

27 Deniz Kandiyoti, "Identity and Its Discontents: Women and the Nation," in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, (eds.) Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory: A Reader., p. 378. 28 She adopts "gender regime" from R. W. Connell ("The state, gender and sexual politics: theory and ap- praisal," Theory and Society, 19, 5, 1990, pp. 507-44). 29 Katherine Verdery, "From Parent-State to Family Patriarchs: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Eastern Europe," East European Politics and Societies 8 (Spring 1994), p. 225. 30 Ibid., p. 230. 31 The zadruga, which, according to Charles and Barbara Jelavich, had by the middle of the 19th century become an "inefficient rural collective agricultural unit," was a union of nuclear families assembled into one

R. E. Č. no. 59/5, septembar 2000 however, the contradiction of state's assumption of women's tasks, as well as its inadequacy. The communist state is seen to have enacted a shift from "private" to "public" patriarchy, one indicator being this "per- petuation of †the‡ existing division of domestic labor": the official ideology did not address the question of sharing, but instead "paid" women to do housework or provided for their replacements.33 In many cases, the official ideology, one of whose fundamental principles was the "emancipation of women," fit all too easily 34 'family,' strictly guided by the principle with the patriarchal puritanism of its protagonists. of patriarchal authority. In The (This "failure," however, is nothing new in the history Establishment of the Balkan National States, of feminism, or the women's movement. But, while 1904-1920, (Seattle: University of the acceptance of women's breaking out of the(ir) pri- Washington Press, 1977)., p. 60. vate sphere in times of need and their subsequent for- 32 Verdery, pp. 230-32. ced "return" is surely an example of instrumentaliza- 33 Barbara Einhorn, "New for Old? tion, it should not obscure the fact that the breaking- Ideology, the Family and the Nation," in out has its effects one way or the other). Barbara Einhorn (ed). Cinderella Goes to 253 Market: citizenship, gender, and women's move- In the Romanian case, while the new homogenization ments in East Central Europe (London: Verso, was to eschew sexual difference, and both women and 1993). men were expected to be 'fraternized' into the com- 34 For example, in the Yugoslav case, munity (and women also to be ""heroines" of socialist where, as Milovan Đilas testified, most of the cadre was recruited from patriarchal labor"), the state organization and its imagery were mountainous regions. In Predrag deeply masculinist. Even if the zadruga-state did strip Marković, "Mesto žene u javnom mnjen- its men of authority and empower its women, its patri- ju Beograda 1918-1965," in Srbija u mod- archy was deep-seated.35 Regardless of the changes, ernizacijskim procesima 20. veka, Položaj žene kao there was a continuity of traditional values under soci- merilo modernizacije. (Beograd: Institut za alism, as could be seen in the patterns and near-uni- noviju istoriju Srbije, 1998)., p. 383. versality of marriage. Still, reasons for this prevalence 35 Verdery, p. 237. such as economic and practical, as well as the already 36 And then, the ubiquity of marriage mentioned valorization of the family and family life as was accompanied by high rates of divor- ce, ranging from 33-44 % in Hunary, "refuge" from the oppression of 'public' life, are to be 36 and the former Czechoslovakia, GDR taken into consideration. But in the relegation of and Soviet Union. "resistance" to the private sphere, it was again women

Časopis za književnost i kulturu, i društvena pitanja whose role was seen as vital for the preserva- the 'genocidal' social policies (like the avail- tion of national values and traditions, inside ability of abortion, state child-care, the this family-as-refuge.37 Thus it was women right to work), and were also accused of be- and the family that became the focus of the ing willing accomplices of socialism. The new regimes, which, in their revived ethno- desired reversal of the 'abnormal', 'unnatu- nationalism, could become outright misogy- ral' gender divisions of socialism, the return nist. to the 'natural' ways, meant the new essenti- The new regimes have often accused socia- alization of women and femininity, the insi- lism of a conscious policy of de-population, stence they be given (back) their primary or "biological destruction" of their respecti- nurturing qualities and responsibilities, 39 ve (ethno-)nations, connecting this pheno- those eroded by socialism. menon to the alleged processes of the "ma- Thus the traditional family model and the sculinization" of women and the "femini- nurturing qualities of women have become zation" of men.38 Thus it was in the sphere the focal points of the constructions of the of male-female relations and the relation- new/'renewed' national identities. Women ships in the family that they sought to "re- are required to participate in the "return to store" the "original," idealized pre-socialist traditional values" for the good of the na- community, by reimposing the traditional tion, as their (traditional) role is instru- 254 gender roles and division of labor. Women mental for the restoration of the old imagi- were accused of having taken advantage of ned community, the homogenous unit from

37 Einhorn, pp. 56-58, 60. And as Deniz Kandiyoti has warned, in most of the cases of the valorization of the "'private' as the site of resistance against repressive states...the integrity of the so-called private is predicated upon the unfettered operations of patriarchy." "Identity and Its Discontents," p. 388. 38 In Hungary, Kata Beke, the HDF's 1990 Minister of Education, argued for a return to "the European model of marriage †which‡ has proved to be the most successful and resilient, †b‡ecause it corresponds to hu- manity's two-sexed nature." Verdery, pp. 236, 253. In Serbia, the vice-president of the Serbian Radical Party, Maja Gojković, put the greatest blame (for the 'demographic crisis') on men, who grew weak under communism, claiming that "women succeeded in preserving their femininity," but could not be expected to give children to wimps. Duga, 16 Aug 1992, p. 52. Wimps is exactly what many a political text in Hungary claimed men have grown to be (in socialism), and a Hungarian magazine-article was much less generous than Ms. Gojković: "socialism liberates woman from family shackles...and in exchange asks for an alliance in crushing male obstinacy. The women take on their part in the alliance with their usual violent moods and aggressiveness." Verdery, p. 251 ff. 39 Verdery, pp. 250-52.

R. E. Č. no. 59/5, septembar 2000 a harmonious past. This reversal, this re- tral importance of the themes of sacrifice turn, must still be seen in the context of the and creative death for Romanian historiog- more or less sustained continuity of patri- raphy and folklore.41 archy. In the Romanian case of the gende- It is in these patterns that the emotional co- ring of nationalism under socialism, for ex- re of nationalism is revealed, the way the na- ample, there is much evidence of this deep- tional subject comes to feel him/herself na- seated ("unofficial") patriarchy. tional: it is the eroticized, feminized home- Its obsessions were not unique to Romania: land that inspires the love and heroism of her the territorial extension of the nation/nati- sons. Moreover, writes Verdery, Romania onal state, its borders, and the continuity, becomes a "feminine" space/body while her both cultural and 'biological,' of Roma- sons and heroes reside in(side) her, constitu- nian'ness. In the part of a contested region te her masculine soul; she is the object of the of Transylvania where men had gone to work love of men – who are "historically acting in industry, and the agricultural production subject†s‡."42 The elements of the feminiza- was left to women, the regime made women tion of territorial borders and (national) into the privileged bearers of traditional space will be important elements in the con- Romanian values, as they were 'untouched' structions of contemporary Serbian and by modernity (unlike their men), and had Croatian nationalisms, as well as the metap- 255 preserved their localism better. This femi- hor of the homeland as female body (virgi- nization of tradition (as a means of claiming nal/mutilated/raped/threatened by rape/"torn territory), went hand in hand, however, with asunder"). These nationalisms have also the narrativization of Romanian history been closely related to the ambiguities and through patrilineage, a sequence of male the problematic development of the Yu- heroes.40 But more striking than that, it se- goslav socialist project of "women's equali- emed that in this lineage, women were ex- ty." For Rada Iveković, there is an unques- cluded even as reproducers of the nation: the tionable continuity between the tendencies national spirit was reproduced through of the late socialist regime and the upsurge "culture (created by men) or through men's of nationalism in the republics of the form- creative death," thus bringing forth the cen- er Yugoslavia in the 1980s.43

40 Ibid., pp. 238-41. 41 Ibid., pp. 242-43. 42 Ibid., p. 248. 43 Iveković, p. 6.

Časopis za književnost i kulturu, i društvena pitanja One of the common nationalist portrayals of Part of these tendencies was the already women, that of women as "icons of moder- mentioned "return to traditional values," nity,"44 functioned also as the principle of which in the Yugoslav case can be identified the communist engagement of women, and within the development differing from the the fulfilment of its promise as the ideologi- East European pattern(s). For Serbian nati- cal basis for the later official policy, ex- onalism of the 1980s, one of the main pressed in legislation, of the new Yugoslav fixations was the threat of the "biological ex- state. The "emancipated" woman (awarded tinction" of the Serbian nation, and the for her support in the war/liberation ef- main trauma and conflict that defined its forts) was a "symbol of Yugoslav modernity core and ultimately brought its catastrophic and socialism,"45 but as much of what was defeat, was the "Kosovo question." The said above testifies, the principle of equality imaginary of Serbian nationalism is said to was plagued by many ambiguities and embo- have "intertwined with the sexual phanta- died at another level the surviving patriar- smagorias"47 – in its focus on the alleged chal values. These "emancipated" women, systematic 'ethnic rapes' of Albanian men with a double/triple burden, became the and the "demographic war" of the Albanians "norm (and the ideal picture) of successful against the Serbs in Kosovo. In 1986, which patriarchal self-managing socialism."46 It can be taken as the date of the "opening of took a few decades for this post-war visibility the †Serbian‡ national question,"48 the 'Pe- 256 and representation of women in public life tition of Belgrade Intellectuals' "exposed" and their greater participation in the work- the "demographic explosion" of the Alba- force to be reduced, circumscribed, for the- nian population as a nationalist ploy to dri- ir presence to be eliminated, and required ve the Serbs away from Kosovo. From this in another sphere. It is the tendencies of la- moment on, the motive of women as "icons te socialism that Iveković saw as a warning, of modernity" will crop up again, in the pit- not of an inescapable war, but of the creating of the modern, Serbian woman, against tion of a violently nationalist atmosphere her primitive, backward, Albanian other, which would execute this alleged fatality into the us/them opposition taking form as "our" reality. against "their" women.49 This superiority of

44 This portrayal is characteristic of some anti-colonial, national liberation movements, where the backwardness of women serves as a symbolic representation of the whole nation's backwardness, and women's emancipation is "part...of a national regeneration project." The other side of this relationship of women and modernity is exhibited in the ideology of strongly anti-modernist, cultural nationalist movements, for whom the ideal of gender equality means capitulation to Western cultural imperialism. Kandiyoti, p. 379.

R. E. Č. no. 59/5, septembar 2000 "our women," complete with racist undertones, which are also present in the rape stories of "out-of control, over-sexed animals" – Albanian men, invites in turn, however, the activation of the very same, nationalist- "procreative" policy. The superiority is hardly eno- ugh: Serbian women, those icons-of-modernity are to become "baby-factories," that is, sacrifice their independent status, their "selfish" impulses not to breed for the survival of the Serbian nation.50 The place of women in the great project of the "revi- 45 Wendy Bracewell, "Women, Mother- val," rejuvenation," "recreation" of (the ideal of) the hood and Contemporary Serbian Serbian national community, is to assume their "natu- Nationalism," Women's Studies International ral" roles in order to insure and confirm the "natural- Forum, 18 (5/6)., p. 3. ness" of the organic whole that the nation "is," that it 46 Iveković, p. 5. claims/wants to be.51 In the recreation of this (imagi- 47 Tanja Rener and Mirjana Ule, ned) community, that almost forgot and denied itself "Nationalism and Gender in Post in the common Yugoslav and socialist past, the new Socialist Societies – Is Nationalism collectivism, that easily slips from socialism into nati- 257 Female?," in Ana's Land: Sisterhood in Eastern Europe (Boulder: Westview Press, 1997)., onal(social)ism, may serve as a refuge from, or an at- p. 229. tempted answer to the questions once asked long befo- 48 Dubravka Stojanović, "Traumatični re (and all throughout the history of the Serbian sta- krug srpske opozicije," in Nebojša Popov te). The new collectivism does not only ground its ru- (ed). Srpska strana rata. (Republika: Beo- le in the symbolic use of women, their subordination grad, 1996)., p. 509. to the patriarchal principles for the sake of a higher 49 Bracewell, p. 5. ideal, the imposition on them of roles of mothers-of- 50 Julie Mertus, "Gender in Service of the-nation, but it powerfully attracts real women as Nation: Female Citizenship in Kosovar well, write Rener and Ule, exactly through offering them Society," Social Politics (Summer/Fall the refuge of the patriarchal social matrix that natio- 1996), p. 266 and Bracewell, pp. 5-7. 52 The latter quotes the 1993 work Preporod nalism always adopts and takes over. But if the nati- srpskog naroda by Milan Vojnović. onalist experience is a sexualized experience, and if, as 51 Rener and Ule, p. 222. they claim, the way it "relates" to women is through 52 Ibid., p. 228. Rada Iveković, "Wo- masculinist metaphors and male-centered "stories," men, Nationalism and War: Make Love what could possibly our female nationalist experience Not War," Hypatia 8 (Fall 1993), p. 115. from the beginning of the essay be (like)? What of the

Časopis za književnost i kulturu, i društvena pitanja "stories," like the three novels of Ljiljana the female can be seen as the first of all "ot- Habjanović-Đurović, which (should) tell of herings" – coming before, and constituting, women, of the relationships of mothers and the construction of an extreme national/ist daughters, of women's lives and histories? identity, which is constructed as a male nati- And do they really do that, are they that? Or onal identity, in opposition to, first, women and then other "enemy" nations or ethnic are they simply and clearly internalizations 55 of the dominant discursive prescriptions, yet groups. It is these assumptions that in- another homogenizing, totalizing effort of form Rada Iveković's stand on women's differential identification with the national/ist Serbian nationalism? The effort that wants cause – their inevitably different relation- to take the "women's" from the "women," ship to the Other. Women are less "obsessed seen and constructed as other, as marginal, by boundaries," she writes, and the way the- as subordinated in the binary relationship ir identity is constructed bases itself on the that defines its world, and to remove the incorporation and acceptance of, relating to negativity necessarily awarded one of the the other – women (have to) adapt to hus- terms, by implicating it in the dominant bands' families, countries, cultures. They practice? See to it that the female/the feminine represent (for men) the "space of mixture participates actively in that which is said by and meeting," which mixture often attracts definition to exclude her, be against her?53 the response of appropriation, control, sub- To play on the active construction of identi- ordination. While for a male nationalist the 258 ty-as-woman as a reinforcement and a con- nationalist experience and identification is firmation of the identity-as-member-of- that with and of the same (or: exclusion of the the-Serbian-nation? other), for women, this exclusion is hardly a principle of involvement; on the contrary, Women, Nationalism, Balkans: for them it means exactly coexistence with the other (sex; as in identification with the Resistance 56 "Othering" as a process is constitutive of the Father-of-the-Nation). nationalist projects: the "very symbolic sys- However, as it has been pointed out, this tem of nationalism needs the construction may "temper" their nationalism somewhat of "the Other"".54 And the "othering" of (or its violence), but takes away little from its

53 Iveković, "Women, Nationalism and War," p. 117. 54 Ibid., p. 115. 55 Ibid., passim. 56 Ibid., pp. 117-18, 121.

R. E. Č. no. 59/5, septembar 2000 relentlessness and conviction. The(se) wo- gon...†became‡ increasingly incomprehen- men are not only able to relate to the sexed, sible," the ruling elite quietly gave in to the patriarchal stereotypes of the newly created predominant models available. From this si- nationalist mythologies, but they can also be lence, some other women's voices have found to reproduce these by and for them- emerged, in a resistant attempt to inscribe selves, possibly in a different form, yet par- themselves into and across male inventions, ticipating in the nationalist discourse, while by knowing and using, in order to subvert, often denying their complicity. Complicity those same oppressive patterns.58 is taken away from "women and mothers," in But in that oral tradition as well, specifically an attempt to obscure that mechanism of ex- in the works of "women's poetry" (collected treme nationalism's appropriation of sexual by Vuk Stefanović-Karadžić, and defined by difference and its organization to serv- him as such), there are these subversive e the destructive nationalist cause. women's voices. A poem about Queen Mili- These new mythologies, or narratives, sho- ca, the supposedly bereaved widow of King uld also be considered in the context of the Lazar, tells of her wishing he stays "there" Balkan tradition, since, as Svetlana Slapšak (in heaven), rather than come back for her writes, the new, or contemporary "inventi- to see him – she having coped with the situ- ons" of women in most of the cases corre- ation after his "heroic" death. Other sub- 259 spond very closely to and rely on the corpus of versions can also be found that point to the the Balkan tradition, which she takes to con- "ideological differences between the nation sist of "the oral tradition, along with the of men and the nation of women." The loss, complying texts of the cultured literature sacrifice, and tragedy of women from the and the stereotype-producing media."57 It is epic poems stand in clear opposition to the the oral epic tradition that can be singled post-Kosovo-battle achievements of women out as a remarkable source of repressive mo- (like Queen Milica) in "women's poetry": dels of female behavior. In the clash of this their cooperation with the Turks (the ot- powerful, deep-seated patriarchal culture her), their techniques of "survival, negotia- and the communist ideology of equality and tion...solidarity," of creating an everyday li- emancipation, and as the "Communist jar- fe, as opposed to a heavenly one.59

57 Svetlana Slapšak, "What Are Women Made Of? Inventing Women in the Yugoslav Area," in Gisela Brinkler- Gabler and Sidonie Smith, (eds). Writing New Identities: Gender and Immigration in Contemporary Europe. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997)., p. 359. 58 Ibid., pp. 360-63. 59 Ibid., pp. 364-66.

Časopis za književnost i kulturu, i društvena pitanja A special case of a woman's resistance to in- not merely a symbolic status (as the national corporation into and constructions of the culture would wish it).61 Through this act dominant national/ist discourse and narra- she denies and hampers the efforts of the tives was Jelena Dimitrijević, a Serbian new Balkan national states of the nineteenth writer from the late nineteenth-early twen- century: to create historical narratives that tieth centuries. Her Letters from Niš on the Ha- would remove the living, barely expelled rems, writes Svetlana Slapšak, are usually de- oriental/Turkish culture and heritage, into scribed as travel literature, but are actually the distant past, where it should continue to 60 more anthropological in spirit. In the exist and function as a historical stage in the theoretical context of discussions of the ima- evolutionary process of "civilization."62 gining, or colonizing the other in the Bal- kans, she stands out as the paradigmatic co- It is the peculiar Orientalism of the Balkan lonizing "white woman" who goes to the national cultures that neither Edward Said "oriental" women to "liberate" them, yet she in his seminal Orientalism, nor Maria Todo- is not quite that, as she does not return from rova in her Imagining the Balkans consider in that experience. Because, in the process of detail: the dependence of national cultures knowing them, she loses her place in the na- of the Balkans on orientalist narratives, nar- 63 tional culture, the one she should have come ratives of their Turkish past. One of the back to. The reason this culture is lost for elements of that orientalism is the image of 260 her, or, rather, that she becomes lost for the sexually depraved, amoral Muslim that culture, lies precisely in the her refusal women, who are in the Letters actually "desex- to construct the oriental past, the negation or ualized," "exposed" as real Muslim women, neglect of which should become a focal point living in their Christian neighbors' midst. in the formation of a new national identity. In the dominant discourse, female sexuality She forges for the oriental an ontological, and and desire are often constructed as a "privi-

60 Slapšak, "Haremi, nomadi," p. 138. 61 Ibid., p. 141. 62 As Maria Todorova writes in her Imagining the Balkans, the oppositionary relationship between East and West was some time in the 18th century further accentuated with the addition of the element of time. "†M‡ove- ment from past to future was not merely motion but evolution from simple to complex, backward to deve- loped, primitive to cultivated." Todorova, Imagining the Balkans. (Miami: University of Florida Press, 1996)., p. 12. 63 In the Introduction, there is a brief reference to the construction of Balkan identities through opposition with the ""oriental" other." Todorova, p. 20.

R. E. Č. no. 59/5, septembar 2000 lege/guilt of the other" (in this case a double getting and terrors by remembering.65 In other), and Jelena Dimitrijević thus broke the Croatian case, it is the continuity of na- yet another commandment of the national tional, Croatian identity that must be esta- culture.64 Her effort, which started out as a blished, and the danger of a remembering "colonizing" one, and evolved into an at- or a re-establishment of a Yugoslav one that tempt of integration of the other(s) into a must be dispelled. The building of the Cro- different national program, was in a direct atian identity thus depends on the erecting clash with the project of either (or both) of the line of difference, and is formulated physical expulsion or relegation to a histori- in what appears to be another, nesting ori- cal past of the other(s). Not knowledge and entalism, a discursive strategy common in remembrance of its own other past, of its re- the region, characterized best by the ubiqui- alities and continuities, but oblivion (or tous "we are the saviors of Christianity," the "orientalization") was the guiding principle drawing of the East-West borderline to suit of the emerging national culture, the cultu- the national/ist idea of its own past, of where re she had willingly removed herself from. it "actually," historically, belongs to (and this can be drawn by Hungarians as well as THE "TRILOGY," PARTS ONE AND TWO Bulgarians). But this Croatian self-identity, that Todo- 261 "Balkans" & "Europe" rova would call a "Balkan self-identity, erec- The remembering, or rather, "remembe- ted against an "oriental" other" (while she ring," of one's own, separate (from the ot- speaks of the nesting orientalisms of former her(s), whose every trace needs to be either Yugoslavia), denies its Balkanness first. As denied or be kept to function symbolically as Todorova writes, the former Yugoslavs "had a threat), unique, better past is the other side of in toto rejected their belonging to the Bal- the pattern of forgetting, of oblivion. The kans," and moreover, used Balkanness (as strategies of oblivion were not foreign to the the quality of a "down there" of Europe) to new Yugoslav nationalisms, and they worked "sustain their Croatianness, Serbian- concomitantly with the strategies of "re- ness...pure and innocent, or at least salvage- membering." These strategies Dubravka able," projecting on some other Balkans Ugresic also calls "terrors," terrors by for- (that further "down") "their darker side."66

64 Slapšak, "Haremi, nomadi," p. 144. 65 Dubravka Ugrešić, The Culture of Lies. (London: Phoenix House, 1998)., p. 80. 66 Todorova, p. 53.

Časopis za književnost i kulturu, i društvena pitanja The new outburst of balkanist discourse in kanist discursive insistence on the Balkans as Western media, following the bloody break- the down-under, the dark side of Europe. up of Yugoslavia, has been joined by the But it is important to note that the nationa- Croatian insistence on the un-Balkanness of list discourse in Serbia accepted the fault-li- Croatia, where Balkans is synonymous with ne of civilizations, turning around, howev- violence, dirt, barbarity, illiteracy, uncultu- er, the valuation awarded these "civilizations," redness, and so on.67 and the East-West opposition itself. In Serbia however, a development had oc- Much before the new Serbian-Croatian war curred that Todorova would perhaps see had started, the language of victimization stemming from the "need for solidarity in and hate and the construction and populari- the abyss," but that has its roots back in the zation of specific historical narratives began nineteenth century dilemmas of the emer- to prepare the ground for the real violence. ging Serbian state: the issues of moderniza- The narratives that concern us here would tion and "westernization" vs. the Slavic and be the narratives of the Serbian victimhood Eastern – as the "genuinely" Serbian – way. under the Ustaše regime in the Second This was a central dilemma and had served as World War, and the narrative of the ill-fated- a framework for virtually every issue that the ness, and unnaturalness of the union of the So- newly independent Serbian state had to fa- uth Slavs (Slovene, Croats and Serbs) in 262 ce.68 The contemporary embrace of the 1918, and of its successor, the Communist, "Balkans" as a site of genuine feeling, of the federal Yugoslavia, including the view of this place where the lost soul of Europe resides, state as a "historical mistake," in which time seems like a (positive) variation on the bal- and again the "national question" has to

67 An influential book has given official Croatia an enormous boost in its quest for recognition as the safe- guard of Western civilization: Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations. Huntington includes the Catholic Croatia whose history has been mostly with the (Western) Empire of the Habsburgs in the "European" realm, while the Serbs belong to a different "civilization," outside of "Europe," on the account of their Orthodoxy and Byzantine-Ottoman historical-cultural legacy. 68 Thus, the parliamentary debates on the introduction of railway in the 1880s can perfectly illustrate the chasms between the "pro-Western," "pro-European" forces, and those who opposed such a step, believing it was Serbia's mission to resist this novelty. They thought Serbia belonged in "future, victorious Slavic culture," whose task was to alleviate the "egotistical struggle of the Western culture and to create a harmonious relationship between culture and the pure Orthodox faith, whose defender...is the great Russian people." See Latinka Perović, "Politička elita i modernizacija u prvoj deceniji nezavisnosti srpske države," Srbija u mod- ernizacijskim procesima XX veka. (Beograd: Institut za noviju istoriju Srbije, 1994)., pp. 235-245.

R. E. Č. no. 59/5, septembar 2000 emerge. By the time the situation in Kosovo seeks a place, legitimation for itself as yet changed and the "Serbian tragedy," marked another "proof" of a historical necessity, by the loss of Serbian dominance in the pro- masked as a personal (women's) narrative. vince, was readdressed, it was clear that the Its language is also, from the very beginning, solution for the "national question" of Serbs unmistakeably devoted to a certain construc- in Yugoslavia found expression in the dan- tion of "woman," home," and "mother- gerous mechanism of invention and "staging land." There are the inescapable roses, em- of reality" that operated and manipulated broidery, female aptness in fitting a room, with the existent fears and animosities of the tidiness, the rural-provincial motifs and at- population.69 The mechanism worked to mosphere: the first elements of an aesthetics "attribute hostile feelings to everything done of kitsch emerge. by the others." By doing this, it hoped, and Immediately the image of the mother takes succeeded in constructing "the feeling of hurt its shape: she usually "embraces gently, pride, based on which the feeling of endange- comfortingly, encouragingly, softly, com- redness is "naturally" spread and the actual fortably warm" (7). Her bosom is protec- preparations for "defence" activated."70 tively soft, and her whispers "wet" (9). She is an undesired (but misfortunately desiring) The Unloving Grandmother mother as well, and the impossibility of co- 263 or on the History existence of proper motherhood and sexual of Serbo-Croatian Relations appeal is bestowed on Vera by her daughter, These nationalist sentiments have been the narrator: "her flannelette nightgown was widely disseminated by the time the first no- pink, with blue and red little flowers, butto- vel of Ljiljana Habjanović-Đurović was pu- ned to the top, with a "bubi" top edged with blished in 1991. Ana-Maria Didn't Love Me ex- lace. Now I know †sic!‡: that was the night at- actly corresponds to and feeds off the already tire of a practical housewife, devoted wife virulent nationalist discourse and can be and caring mother, and not of a lover." The read as a fictional contribution to the whole desexualization of motherhood is accepted opus of works mentioned earlier.71 It de- and approved from within the text: as it will pends and relies on this discursive practice, become clear in Ženski rodoslov, a mother's ac-

69 Vesna Pešić, "Rat za nacionalne države," in Srpska strana rata, p. 35. 70 Ibid., p. 36. 71 And as such, it is by no means a lone example. Late Slobodan Selenić's Timor Mortis, published in 1989, al- beit of a not quite the same literary quality, can be argued to function in the same way.

Časopis za književnost i kulturu, i društvena pitanja tive sexual desire shall always be hampered ded by a portrait of this Serb-hating Croa- and proscribed, "punished" by suffering tian woman: and indignity. "On her head is a black hat. Her strange The idyll of home is overshadowed by the elegance is completed by a big black bag "mysterious" woman of the "foreign-soun- and black leather gloves....†S‡he consi- ding" name, Ana Maria, who is identified as dered Zagreb the center of the world, "the mother of my father Tomislav" (10), and the Catholic church was for her an instead of the expected "my grandmother," absolute sanctity. Accordingly, only pu- which immediately establishes a distance be- re-bred Croat women and devout, true tween the narrator and her grandmother, a believers were women awarded respect. confirmation to the reader that something is The rest were not worthy of any atten- definately 'wrong' with this character. Fat- tion" (10-11). her's departure to Zagreb is given further meaning through the recounting of his mot- When Iva, the girl, and her mother, leave her's first reaction to his marriage to Vera Kruševac, a small Serbian town the Croatian (from a letter 'accidentally' found, and writ- grandmother "has never heard of," it is the ten in a "Croatian" dialect): smells of their provincial home, of the warm and loving Serbian baba-Marica's home-ma- 264 "If you bring that Serbian Gypsy to my de sweets and of the "Fresh Hay" perfume of house, I will kill her without a doubt. I the carriage that see them off, the last re- will cut her throat, most definitely, like minders of "home" before they face the fo- in Kulušic's street, where, alas, the wil- reign, already feared Zagreb. lows don't grow, and they are, you sho- As the two innocents, symbols of Serbian uld never have forgotten that, my son, good will and naivety, their simplicity and the best place for Serbs!"72 roughness of manner described with pride, Iva and mother are confronted by a hostile, This, the text goes on, "example of ferocity conceited, arrogant Zagreb. The mantra-li- of thought and feeling in the expression of ke "You are in Zagreb now" becomes the untameable nationalist hatred" (11) is prece- constant signifier of a Serbian traumatiza-

72 In the original: "Ak buš dopelal tu srbijansku ciganku v moju hižu, bum je bez dvojbe ubila. Zaklala bum je, vjerojatno, kak v Kulušicevoj, kaj me, pak, žalosti, ne rastiju vrbe, a one su, to nigdar nisi smio pozabit, sinek si moj, najbolše mjesto za Srbe!" p. 11.

R. E. Č. no. 59/5, septembar 2000 tion at the hands of Croatian insolence and Serb-hatred in the "historical" character of scorn, but thus also begins the seduction of Eugen Vitek, the grandfather of Ana Maria, Croatia-as-West, the seduction by language, and an "embittered, ferocious enemy of the history and manners. "You have come from union of the South Slavs" (184). Balkans to Europe and you must learn how Croatian nationalism is thus defined as to behave," is the first thing Ana Maria tells Serb-hatred and Yugoslavia and the "Yugo- her daughter-in-law. Ana Maria is made in- slav idea" can unimpededly function as what to a diabolic figure (her other daughter-in- every Croatian nationalist anyway holds it to law describes her as a witch, who "drinks the be: a historical embodiment of Serbian blood of everyone who lets her by day, and hegemony, the unfortunate replacement of walks on Mirogoj †the city cemetery‡ by one yoke for another. But this is the hege- night" (26)), the fanatical Catholic who is mony that dare not speak its name: through "hiding" something – and it is all but obvi- embracing and appropriating the "Yugoslav ous that what is being hidden is the past of idea," the Serbian nationalist discourse can converting and murdering of Serbs, the denounce Croatian wish for separateness as images of which have already overflooded the a murderous, blood-thirsty drive, that needs Serbian imaginary, waiting for yet another to be combated and crushed. The "reality- ultimate confirmation, that is, contempo- 265 content" of these propositions is only slight- rary self-fulfilment. ly relevant for this analysis: what seems more In an interview which introduces Ana Maria significant are the investments into the ima- Didn't Love Me as the first part of the trilogy of ges of perpetrator and victim, where the vic- the "biography of her soul" and as the "story timhood is always a Serbian privilege, and of her childhood," Ljiljana Habjanović-Đu- the destructive impulse is attributed to the rović confesses that, in order to write it, she other. (And, as Homi Bhabba has observed, "did research on the history of Yugoslav pe- it is the nation's paranoia of victimization 73 oples and the Yugoslav idea" (unfortunately, that feeds its aggressiveness.) she doesn't reveal her sources). In the novel, But prior to the moment of recognition and the Yugoslav idea is constructed as a very in- separation, comes the period of coexistence, timate relationship between Croats and which is in the novel a period of Croatian Serbs. It introduces, "exposes," and defines seduction of the girl, Iva, of her abandoning Croatian anti-Yugoslavism as pathological the true 'home' and 'motherland' of Serbia

73 Homi Bhabba, Location of Culture. (New York: Routledge, 1994).

Časopis za književnost i kulturu, i društvena pitanja (that is, the rejection and neglect of her Neither active participation in social life nor mother – as an act symbolic of that), the tri- attention to physical appearance are the teness and simplicity of the "primitive de- 'qualities' that the text lets women possess if cor" of Serbian provincial backwaters for the they are to be good women, that is, mothers. glamour and sophistication of the Croatian Without the doting and housewifeliness of capital, its (Western, European) past and Vera, a woman's only refuge – and a resen- "character." In this process, the different ted, even if perhaps an envied one – is be- constructions of womanhood become impli- ing a "lady." And that latter quality distinct- cated with ethnic othering: Iva's aunt Vilma, ly belongs with the ethnic others. just as her mother Ana Maria, is a "lady," The seduction of Iva, even if only tempo- and her (Croatian) femininity is in a clear rary, is important as it builds up the mo- opposition with the femininity of Iva's mot- mentum towards the terrible scene of recog- her: while Vera is denounced by her hus- nition, as if to accentuate the perversity, in band as a woman who "rather stays home all its strength, of the appeal of civility, high †than goes out, tries to be a lady‡, a genuine (Western) culture, and noble history – all a mere mask for brutality and hatred (in the home-fly with an apron, fussing all the time words of one critic, we have here "bitter, de- around her sweetie, her dear" (37), Vilma is vastating scenes from Zagreb, in which an in turn denounced by the narrator as a image of fake nobility, pretentiousness and 266 woman who "has neither will nor interest for 74 noble-bloodedness, Catholic fanaticism and such triviality as children and home." Ne- Ustashe nazism are driven to paroxysm"). ither has she time, further ironizes the nar- The fascination with the grandmother be- rator, because she has to gins with her speech, in which she

"make it to the hair-dresser's, manicu- "most naturally mixed Croatian and re's, beautician's, dress-maker's, do the German, in the ways of 19th- and 20th- window-shopping and carefully study century nobility...Her sentences! Long, the foreign journals so that she doesn't embellished, high style. Cultivated to miss by any chance some fashion news, the maximum....†W‡ords carefully cho- go for a riding or tennis lesson, in order sen, to sound as beautiful as possible, to stay fit and slim, attend an important but convey the meaning as adequately. concert, show, exhibition" (33). The speech that is shaped through edu-

74 Later in the text (53), Vilma is additionally reviled, since she had a German lover during the war.

R. E. Č. no. 59/5, septembar 2000 cation, which is refined, as precious sto- acceptance, we soon learn. It is Iva who must nes are, with the dust of a line of gene- change in her aspiration to the status of rations...whose beauty cannot be reac- "nobilitation" from the pit of "unbaptized hed and attained by careful listening Serbian trash," it is that change that beco- and simple reproduction" (38). mes the precondition of acceptance. So Iva is baptised. In the episode of her baptism, Mother's attempts at mimicry of this "holy however, her resilience, and the persistence speech" are noted with pity that will later of her true origins is given away: confirming surface as pride, and can be seen as the pre- the view of Catholicism as a formal religion, vailing of her base-but-honest, Serbian ori- devoid of feeling, mystery, real communica- gins, that are impossible to hide (be spoiled, tion with God, she proclaims that her Cat- that is) under the influence of "Zagreb." holic baptism "left absolutely no trace in The mother remains true to Serbia/herself, †her‡" (60). This episode also exposes the but her (failed) attempts to escape this pre- true project, and the true nature of Croa- dicament are also a monument to the ill-fa- tian acceptance of Serbs: (forced) baptism, tedness, the impropriety of her union/mar- as the one element of the Ustaše "Serbian riage to Tomislav, to the "truth" of his/Cro- solution" (one third to the pits, one third atian thorough rejection of her. Vera's mar- baptized, one third back to Serbia). 267 riage outside of the ethnos stands out as the As the history of the Viteks, which is also the metaphor of the failed Yugoslav project, and history of the "national and cultural consci- her stubborn, desperate, unreturned and ousness of Croats," is recounted with both unsatisfied sexual desire for him as the fascination and repellence, the strong Croa- good-natured, honest, best-intentioned, tian sentiments of belonging "naturally" but obviously silly Serbian wish for a union with Vienna and the Austro-Hungarian with those who cannot desire them back, Empire and indelible distinction from the those 'who hate and have been hating us.' 'down under' of "Kalemegdan and Sava Ma- As Iva's wish for recognition by Ana Maria is la" (70) are used to further erect the line of rewarded after she announces her decision difference, the ultimate incongruity of the to be a "writer," the relationship of seduc- two nations. The image of the arrogant, ha- tion and initiation takes full sway. Iva is en- ting Croats, who think of themselves as Eu- tranced by the fairy-tales of the "family his- ropean, but are also seen as "impure," tory of Viteks," the family that she desires to somehow contaminated by all that German become part of, that she, for a brief time, is and Hungarian influence, looking down on allowed "into." But there can never be real the provincial, but honest, "uncivilized" and

Časopis za književnost i kulturu, i društvena pitanja "barbaric," but pure-bred Serbs, explodes they put everything that crosses their way into their own barbarity, under a mask of ci- in pockets and sacks, under their sweaty vility (in the scene of Ana Maria's knife-at- shirts and shabby coats. They fight and tack on Iva). grab from each other who will take what, who will take more....Those damn de- Jasenovac and Other Fantasies vils, fools and vagabonds, that wild But before the Ana Maria the grandmother, herd: not knowing what they are doing, there is Ana Maria the young girl, whose they will destroy everything that's worth "inner" life becomes the subject of the now anything...Their mares, fit only for omniscient narrator's account. As in drudgery and child-bearing, would re- Theweleit's Freikorps texts, the language is he- main the only women! And who will re full of "strangely ambivalent emotions" in then give birth to and raise gentlemen?" its constructions of femininity, sexuality, and male-female relations: the constitutive While the demise of Croatian nobility and of elements, it seems, in the making of Ana the "ladies," women who "raise gentlemen," Maria the hating grandmother.75 Ana Ma- is gleefully observed, it is not simply the glee ria's relationship to her father is one of of the ideologically correct egalitarianism "adoration," such adoration that leads her to that is at stake here – but the reconstitution renounce her faith in God after her father, of another, competing, "our" nobility, the 268 Alexander Vitek, is killed at the hands of claiming of that status for one's own, "histo- "filthy peasants." The peasant-revulsion of rical" upper class, which process will take the character of Ana Maria's father is cou- shape in another novel of Ljiljana Habjano- pled by the pleasure invested by the text in vić-Đurović. the images of the rampaging, looting brutes: But to go back to Ana Maria. As the father- daughter relationship prevails over her de- "There are already there, in the house. voutness, she leaves the nunnery for this- They storm through the rooms in rage. wordly life, finding another object to relate While they are looking for him †Alexander‡ to, a man who will become her husband.

75 In his introduction to Male Fantasies, Klaus Theweleit explains his inquiry is directed to the way fascist language of his Freikorps "soldier males" speaks of men's relations with women, and of their relationship to "ex- ternal reality and its bodily location," which "grows out of one's own relationship to one's own body and to other human bodies." The analysis of the males' relations to women reveals "strangely ambivalent emotions" of "interest and indifference, aggressiveness and veneration, hatred, anxiety, alienation and desire." Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies. (vol 1). (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984)., pp. 24-26.

R. E. Č. no. 59/5, septembar 2000 Thus defined through relationships of frustrated sexuality, the constant seeking of "adoration" and full identification, "suc- union (with man or God), and the rejection cumbing completely to her enchantment and betrayal of man, and then her willing with Branislav" (96), Ana Maria also excites constriction of sexuality, that made Ana Ma- her husband "almost unbearably." For him, ria one of the collaborators in the Ustaše she is the project of the return of the Serbs to the Ro- man-Catholic faith. "reticent, Madonna-like Jesus' fiancée, This revelation follows the animal-like scre- who...hasn't been touched, even by am "Slaughtered! Slaughtered! You should wind. To make love to her!...To melt all be slaughtered!" which comes as a reac- that ice! To make that quiet, composed tion to Iva's faux-pas, the description of Bis- voice to moan passionately! What unt- hop Stepinac as a "criminal. Executioner hought-of pleasures those will be!" under a mask of faith..." The images and But this time as well, female sexuality is not words of the hate of Serbs keep flooding: "understood" in its difference: she gives "Our and their slaughter is not the sa- herself to him in her "quiet, reticent way, li- me....They kill for vengeance, retribution, ving it deeply inside, without surface reacti- passion, and we make God happy by remo- 269 ons †sic!‡, without revealing herself" (98). ving from Croatia †lijepe naše‡ all those...infi- As the impossibility, the ban on relating, dels, schizmatics who reject His mercy and drives the "insensitive" Branislav to procla- return to the Faith!" The representations of im her "samostanska puca" and her body "smel- murder ("their screams filled her with plea- ling of wax," he seeks to replace her "cold- sure") and later of the rape of Ana Maria's ness" with the warmth of other bodies. This Jewish look-alike †sic!‡ by an "ideologically betrayal, in turn, makes Ana Maria deny the appropriate" perpetrator are recounted in pleasures of the flesh, and returns her to such a way that they can be said to function God, from whom she now awaits a task so as a "release of emotion."76 The fictional that she may prove "the strength of her faith initiator of this latter crime is the priest who and the limitlessness of her love for God" "craved greatly after Ana Maria," in an "al- (115). Thus ultimately, it was the dangerous, most inhuman way." She in turn was "excit-

76 Theweleit analyses the description of a murder of a German woman by a Polish soldier as containing the identification of the author with the soldier who does it; and this representation, like many others, is yet another "release of emotion" that the soldier males are occupied with. p. 190.

Časopis za književnost i kulturu, i društvena pitanja ed by his folly. Her insides would tremble forming an action outside the context of the remain- lightly....And she knew: he wouldn't be able der of the sentence‡ to take his place. to caress her gently. He would tear her The woman did not defend herself. She apart" (118). But her fantasy and his desire was lying lifelessly and whined softly will find union through the body of another †well, she either lied lifelessly or whined‡. Like a woman, the "Viennese Jew." lost, beaten dog. †The reader simply shudders at the amount of sympathy expressed in this senten- "...Three young, strong, raw Ustaše ce. It is not clear here whether the tone that defiles jumped on the woman and brought her the suffering of the Jewish girl ("like a lost, beaten down to the floor. They tore her dress dog") belongs to Ana Maria or the narrator herself. and underwear, until she was fully na- The next sentence ("Ana Maria knew...") however ked. She was lying with her legs spread proves that there is an unusual shrinkage of the dis- apart and arms open. Like Christ on the tance and partial identification between Ana Maria cross. †It is not known to me whether there is any and the narrator in this scene.‡ image of Christ on the cross with his legs spread apart‡. Ana Maria knew: that woman was no- body. She does not exist. Hers is only ....†Ana Maria‡ tried not to watch. the body. And the Ustaše are in fact ra- ....†But‡ something in the man's voice ping her" (119-120). made her obey. She leant on the wall and 270 As the scene culminated in the blood-suc- clenched her hands behind her back. king of the woman by the priest, Ana Maria One of the men already had his pants tries to flee, and the priest pronounces the down and jumped on the woman bru- words we have already read before: "Slaug- tally. He slapped her, bit her cheeks, her htered! Slaughtered! You should all be sla- neck, her breasts, moaned and grunted, ughtered!" This "you" seems to be a diffe- put his hands into her hair and painful- rent you, a trinity of women-Jews-Serbs, ly pinched her all over her body, his but that returns in the text in the scene with hairy buttocks moved back and forth. Iva, this time with singular meaning, as a Even before he calmed down after the last, strong cramp, already the other discharge of a sexual humiliation, the tur- Ustaša was there, terribly excited, impa- ning of a defiled, almost-raped Ana Maria tiently ready †perhaps just: impatient, not to on the unyielding, un-remodelled and un- mention the man's buttocks which, both grammati- reformable Serbian grandchild. cally and syntactically have assumed the status of an The construction of the Serb-hating Ana independent subject in the previous sentence, per- Maria has its complement in the misogynous

R. E. Č. no. 59/5, septembar 2000 investment of the text in the monologue of attraction anymore. And your belly is a Tomislav, Iva's father, which is formulated disgusting, sagging sack of fat. Leave my as his rejection of Vera, his answers to her hand alone. It's wet and sticky between (sexual, among other) entreaties (for the re- your thighs, I will have to go and wash ader muted, silent, unseen). His vileness myself..." (83) finds "proof" in the dismissal of the already mentioned housewifely qualities of Vera This passage can hardly justify itself as only ("what use do I have from a "good wife, mot- the final gesture attributed to the father, be- her and housewife?....Bara †the maid‡ can fore Iva can in turn renounce him, nor co- be that too."). As his words again draw the uld it ever be a childhood memory; it is yet line between desired and undesired femi- another instance, the final one, of Toma's ninity, narrator's sympathy for the mother, non-desire for the mother, but more than but also disgust for her, and pleasure in the just verbalizing this rejection and sending father's verbal humiliation, can be discerned them back to Kruševac, it also formulates the in the following: proscription of the direct expression of female sexual desire; the misfortune that it And what, for Christ's sake, are you try- brings, the inappropriateness of woman's ing to do?! You don't intend to seduce sexual advancing, and the (deserved) humi- 271 me, do you? For your sake, or you think liation that awaits her. It also passes the final I need it? Well, you can stop trying, I decision on the inappropriateness and un- don't. Come on, stop touching me. desirability of Vera's marriage: not only did Can't you notice, really, how my body she marry out of (the Orthodox) faith, out retreats before your hand? I don't want of the nation, but she also married "for lo- to kiss you either. I don't want your ton- ve." So serves her right: as one of baba-Mari- gue on my neck and chest. You needn't ca's "eternal female wisdoms" goes, "for a have undressed. Your body is uncom- moment of happiness, an eternity of misfor- fortably warm and wet, you know I never tune."77 liked that. Neither do I want your fat, disgusting ass which you try to wiggle se- The Second Grandmother ductively into my lap. Leave my hand Iva's return to Krusevac introduces the real alone. Your tits are still prima, congratu- motherly figure of the three novels, the ot- lations, you managed to save something, her, Montenegrin grandmother Marica. Af- but for me, unfortunately, they have no ter "This is no Zagreb!" becomes the new

77 In the original: "Za jedan časak radosti, sto godina žalosti."

Časopis za književnost i kulturu, i društvena pitanja predicament of poor Iva, and once a woman Montenegrin myth: čojstvo i junastvo..." harasses her in the street as a child of soon- (144).78 His greatest tragedy was, without a to-be-divorced parents, baba-Marica comes doubt, the marriage of his daughter to To- to the rescue: "Her eyes! God, how much mislav, her "betrayal" (148). To parents' en- warmth, love, pity and pain! I took hold of treaties, which are nothing but a faithful her with both my arms around the hips and rendering of the everyday production of put my face into her soft, big belly. I was cry- newspapers and popular historical "studies" ing" (127). This grandmother is different ("Brothers! What brothers, child? Brothers from Ana Maria, "completely different in who, whenever there is an occasion, stab you †her‡ nature, mentality, cultural heritage in the back! Always, in all wars, they were and system of values." On the one side the against us!"), Vera replies in an idealism seductive fairy-tales of the noble Croatian that the nationalist discourse constructs as past, and on the other, the simple, crude the other side of the "Serbian predicament": stories of baba-Marica, "devoid of magic, a faith in the principles of brotherhood and tension, Romanesque †sic!‡ atmosphere, unity. "And we against them," she replies. pathos, mysticism, fine layering" (144). The "But not because we wanted to. This is just narrator asks to be forgiven, for not telling an outcome of our unfortunate past, the the false glamour of the "ladies'" stories from tactics of our enemies of all sorts: divide and the more genuine, "manly" history of her conquer!..." (149). The eventual rejection 272 other family line – for at this point, Ljilja- (by Iva) of this Croatian father will become na Habjanović-Đurović has not yet tapped an important element in the construction of into the "women's" themes, as they themsel- the feeling of ethnic-Serbian communality, ves have not won their place in the public of the possibility of an "us" and of "they," discourse. which are relied upon, and taken for gran- And so the first "story" of the other side of ted in the later novels. The weak Oedipal the family tree belongs to the (so far neglec- (Croatian) father can be replaced by the ted) grandfather "Pero, son of Boško," a he- Father-of-the-Nation, and the "impurity" ro, "an imposing figure firmly grounded in of origin is vindicated by an act of proper the two cult-qualities of the man of the mating, and the giving birth to a Son.

78 Čojstvo: "to be honest, just, principled, a man of his word, to firmly stand behind your beliefs and be guided by your moral being, without paying attention to blackmail, economic hardships, abandonment of friends, loss of social status and identity...all that requires a great deal of personal courage that I place higher that bravery in war and thus consider real heroism" (145).

R. E. Č. no. 59/5, septembar 2000 Writers and Other Intellectuals am, through participation in the official Already in Ana Maria Didn't Love Me there are ideology, which invites it in and needs it in the first signs of what will become in Iva a order to function. It was that specific sub- full-fledged, nauseatingly repetitive claim by culture that had been formed parallel with the narrator-author to the status of "writer," socialist, state-sponsored kitsch, the "rural" "intellectual," "artist," to the self as gifted, subculture of the population which, having talented, special. In her essay "Gingerbread migrated to the towns, had not accepted the Heart Culture,"79 Dubravka Ugresic quotes city culture, but preserved their own ways Nabokov on the one kind of poshlost (a Rus- (necessarily altered in form), which seems to have been susceptible ground for the sprea- sian word Nabokov preferred to English ding of the new, nationalist kitsch, which equivalents "such as cheap, inferior, sorry, trashy, replaced the old one in the role of ideologi- scurvy, tawdry and the like"), the "disturbing" cal preservation, constitution and dissemi- one: †it is‡ particularly strong and pernicio- nation of dominant values.81 us when the falsity is not obvious and when it is believed, rightly or not, that the values it Read Kundera's "need for kitsch...†as‡ the imitates belong to the highest reaches of art, need to gaze into the mirror of the beautify- ing lie and to be moved to tears of gratifica- thought or sensibility."80 tion at one's own reflection"82 in: The seriousness of this belief seems quite 273 grotesque, even more so if contrasted with "My literary talent and the need to write the tendencies of removal from the 'seriou- were my one stable point in life....Wri- sness' of "high" culture, and the attempts at ting was the magical armor that made imploding the very opposition of "high" me less vulnerable....My poetry was the culture and "low" culture itself. But in our magical Cinderella dress....Obsession case, the "low" seeks legitimation through to write...gave a name and a content to the imitation of what it believes are the valu- my difference. It made sense out of my es belonging to the "highest reaches of art, loneliness. They will live, and I will be a thought or sensibility," and in these parti- writer, I spoke in a trance, spoke loud- cular times, it becomes part of the mainstre- ly..." (48-49)

79 She is here referring to Danilo Kiš' metaphor for nationalist kitsch – the gingerbread heart (a type of cake, sold at village fairs). Ugrešić, p. 50. 80 Ibid., p. 49. 81 Ibid., p. 51. 82 Milan Kundera, Art of the Novel. (New York: Harper & Row, 1993)., p. 135.

Časopis za književnost i kulturu, i društvena pitanja In an interview, Ljiljana Habjanović-Đuro- the "spiritual" one, that Iva's status as a vić reveals that she expects to receive the No- "writer" is to be achieved, and her righteous bel Prize in the 21st century. And on the co- femininity erected as a dam against the tide ver of the novel Iva, "the story of her adole- of "powerful forces" whose existence inside scence," described in a blurb-review as "be- her "self" is acknowledged, but pathologized. longing to the genre of the romance no- Višnja, a girl from Iva's home-town, and la- vel...but elevated from the world of...banal- ter girlfriend and wife of her "spiritual ma- ity...to universality," the unmistakeably tri- te," Dane, takes on the role of predating, vial-romance design "reveals" in fact (lift sexual femininity. She at first does not resist the cover, and there is it, another cover) the sexual advances ("When I touched her bre- pretensions of this work-of-art, work of ge- asts, she did not resist. I was simply ecstatic. nius: the Authoress herself, writing, posing Otherwise, you were supposed to talk girls with a self-important and deadly serious air; into every next level of intimacy....Višnja an image of what it thinks must be an artist. was really different" (31)), and in spite †sic!‡ of her virginity, her "moves and ways were "The Story of An Adolescence" brimming with mature sensuality...so that it and the Ideology of Virginity all looked like experience."83 Yet the disgust And indeed, Iva is so much more than "just a overwhelms her once the sexual act is finis- 274 romance": it is an attempt to construct an hed. Iva, on the other hand, is for Dane a "artistic," "literary" subjectivity based on the "sister he never had," whom he "doesn't exclusion and denial of the corporeal, to de- fancy as a girl," his asexual queen. But this is fine the intellectual, the "mind" (as in the because her "spiritual" being excluded me- long tradition of Western philosophy), in an re, ordinary, base sexuality ("the nothing- oppositionary relationship of dominance to ness of Dane's love for Višnja....†Its‡ essence the "body," and sexuality, in which process it was instinct, mere surface sensations which mimics again the patriarchal coupling of inflame the senses" (64)); she was special. body with femaleness. It is through the denial She craved love, "unordinary," "intense," of a certain (uninhibited, non-procreative) and "dramatic." Since that love "goes (kao female sexuality, and the assertion of a diffe- avan uz tučak!) with understanding," it would rence between "two kinds of love" (the "spi- seem that Dane, who "understands" her is ritual" and the "bodily"), where her realm is the "right" one.

83 It seems like the authoress here implies that there is a causal relationship between the loss of virginity and sensuality, or even better, between virginity and frigidity.

R. E. Č. no. 59/5, septembar 2000 But she sees him with Višnja, and in that ex- married to" (128)), are the "powerful for- clusive, monogamous, overstated world ces" of sexual desire, whose destructive con- where "belonging" is one and "complete," sequences will be elaborated on in Ženski rodo- and "love" can be commanded ("I would ne- slov, permitted expression. "Lazar came and ver agree †italics mine‡ to love someone who, kissed me. First on the neck. Then on the knowing me, loved someone else" (73)), Da- mouth. After all these years, it still took on- ne can only become somebody else, a "brot- ly a single touch for me to start trembling, her." Once her relationship with Dane is hot....It was a mute sign of passion which constructed as one of "understanding," an needed no encouragement as it grew on its asexual, spiritual one, his later attempts to own . . ." (178). break it are considered near-incestuous, This new-old imperative of virginity fits in- and Iva will, untouched by a man, enter a to the context of the 'return of traditional marriage ("I need security and peace. I shall values,' and is a central concept of female marry Lazar" (105)) with a student she bare- rightist propagators of Serbian nationalism, ly knows, and who has been in love with her like Isidora Bjelica. One of the founders of a for three years. women's group "Samo Srpkinja Srbina Spa- Marriage to Lazar is "destiny" ("when I woke sava" (Only Serbian Women Can Save Ser- up, I knew I would marry the man who talks bian Men), Bjelica's other expectations of 275 to me first that day"), but it is also, it will Serbian women include "creating little become clear, a very prudent decision. As Serbs," and "putting their talents and intel- Dane observes, Lazar is "elegant, polite, with ligence where it is most needed - and at the a fresh hair-cut...reliable, calm, thorough. present moment that is in the service of the An economist." Once marriage to Lazar is Serb who is prepared to give his life for the decided, all boys whom she "allowed †!‡ to defence of the Orthodox faith and Serb- court her" are cast aside. As Lazar will dom."85 In her prose works, Bjelica intro- proudly comment in Ženski rodoslov: "I would duces virginity as a glamorous, noble quali- never have married you if you hadn't been a ty, a long-forgotten skill that Serbian mot- virgin!"84 Only in the normative marital re- hers must again teach their daughters (so lationship ("I could sleep with anyone I was they could again be "princesses").86

84 In the original: "Da znaš, nikada te ne bih uzeo da si dala devojčicu na bubanj! rekao mi je više puta moj muž. Nije krio zadovoljstvo što sam do dvadeset pete godine opnicu sašuvala netaknutom" (105). 85 Bracewell, pp. 9-10. Bjelica quoted from Pogledi, Sept 7, 1992. 86 Isidora Bjelica, Ozloglašena, ili, Moderna Pandora.

Časopis za književnost i kulturu, i društvena pitanja The Historical Novel, ment. In the nationalist division of labor, if or Reincarnations Serbian men die for the defence of Serb- What Iva also does is rediscover history, give dom, women live, to maintain the nation, to the Kosovo myth yet another articulation, preserve its continuity. The language of Iva thus including itself in the nationalist disco- speaks the masculinist language of myth, the urse through its fictional offspring, the hi- "male" oral tradition, speaks of the death of storical novel. This attempt to legitimize the heroes, of a world ending with their tragedy, "love story," raise it to the level of "univer- not of the life that comes immediately after, sal" (to be understood as national) through life of coexistence, of survival. its interweaving with the greatest Serbian myth, which is itself, in turn, "sexualized," "News is brought about the demise of includes a brazenly act of the appropriation Lazar's kingdom...The bewidowed of Dubrovnik and its history as "Serbian." Queen Milica asks protection from the The Ragusan republic is an 'organic-spiri- Ragusan republic. There is no more tual' part, a complement of the medieval Serbian nobility. No knights have rema- Serbian kingdom (Milo( and Frane, the Ra- ined alive. The heroes stayed at Kosovo. gusan noble, as "the two sides of one and the Their bones and attires mixed. Without same bright shining sun"), to be severed graves. From their blood peonies have from its source by the "Asian infidel," but sprung....And in their midst, one white 276 preserving its heritage, carrying in its womb lily has bloomed" (187). the seed of Serbdom (the child of the Ragu- san beauty and the Serbian noble, conceived But in this world of red peonies, "eternal" in the eve of the battle). white lilies and "sugar-pink" roses (of Lazar, The demise of Lazar's kingdom, whose cen- the stranger-husband-to-be: "He has style...hol- ter is importantly (and in yet another in- ding those seven sugar-pink roses. Not many stance of the strategy of kitsch) also the ho- men can do that" (75)) the tragedy, the tra- me-town of the narrator-author, is recon- uma of the past is to be redeemed by the structed in the novel through the painful present: Iva and Lazar of today are meant to choice of Bogdan, a young Serbian noble, be together as "reincarnations" of the Bog- between loyalty and love for the motherland dan and Iva of the past, thus uniting in the and the carnal love for a (Dubrovnik) present what was divided in the past, and the woman (another Iva); in his case, of course, first Iva, who rejected Ragusan legitimacy for death, that is, heavenly life prevails, a life of her child and remained "true" to her Ser- unattained bliss of love, of unsatisfied desi- bian hero, being "reincarnated" as "our" re, in a victory over their this-wordly fulfil- Iva, the future Serbian mother.

R. E. Č. no. 59/5, septembar 2000 THE DISCOVERY OF "WOMEN'S": THE ty....It also seems that they are more in- TRILOGY, PART THREE teresting, complex personalities, and thus a greater literary challenge....And "Women's"? the dominant personages in my life, and Female Lineage (Ženski rodoslov), the last of the in my lineage, were women. Therefore, three novels, was published in 1996, and it is logical that female characters and advertised as "an exciting family saga, a female sensibility †sic‡ dominate my blood-stained anthology of women's pains, a writing too." dictionary of eternal women's destinies."87 Ljiljana Habjanović-Đurović, claims her in- But in what way do these women "domina- terviewer, is the only writer who has "exclu- te"? And what is the ideological commit- sively women as *characters* in her works." ment of this domination in the text, if there Characters=heroes (junaci, not junakinje, and is any? For one, it is certainly not feminist. certainly not likovi, this is an epic, historical It may be a) about women ("centrality of fe- narrative, and we know these feature heroes, male characters"); b) written by a woman; c) not simply characters), following what Rada speaking, among other things, on the su- Iveković observes as a tendency of nationa- bjects of love, sexual desire and "concrete lism to "award" women male nationalist women's experiences," although in the lan- 277 qualities like "courage, bravery, sacrifice." guage of trivial romance, but its commit- The woman(=hero) here stands for somet- ment is somewhere else, outside of femi- hing else, it seems – is the feminine figure nism, and these efforts should not be cha- again, as Ivekovic writes, a carrier, an embo- racterized as women's literature (provided diment of a male principle, men's activity we do not use the term women's literature to and experience?88 Or are the intentions label any work written by a woman about slightly different, and the activities and ex- women). The ideological commitment of periences markedly different from "male" this "domination" is in the vindication of ones, and precisely interesting because of the- patriarchy, and the preservation of a certain ir, in this work specifically defined and pre- modality of male-female relations, that is, scribed, femininity? the obscuring of their social conditioning, the assumption of their "naturalness," "I believe women are the stronger, more permanence ("everything had changed and resolute, more creative half of humani- yet nothing did" (245)), immutability, all

87 The blurb on the back cover of Ženski rodoslov (Beograd: Narodna knjiga, 1998). 88 Iveković, "Women, Nationalism and War," p. 116.

Časopis za književnost i kulturu, i društvena pitanja throughout the national "histories," con- In the framework of Foucault's theory of the structed here as "women's," and thus all in changing treatment of sexuality, and the the service of the idea of Nation. contemporary investment in speaking about it, Of "centrality": women-centered novels have what used to be considered a Victorian been with us since the novel emerged as a "genre" of pornographic novel can well be form of entertainment, and have at that ti- redefined as a form of autobiographical lite- 92 me been "preoccupied with questions of sex- rature, or confession, just as the new ual morality," and with the entry of the he- women's sexual "confessions" can be seen as roine into marriage.89 While the nineteenth a continuation of that autobiographical tra- 93 century, and especially its popular literatu- dition. But as the speaking of sex has (fi- re, continued relying on events concerning nally) become a female prerogative as well, the heroine's marriage as a "central narrati- the preoccupation with female sexuality is ve device," it also proceeded to construct fe- viewed by some critics as carrying another male sexuality as dangerous and destructive, danger: the new ideological definition of and its female heroines as silent, speaking women "in relation to their sexual history;" with the body only.90 The female body, as and their personal narratives, the "knowing- Theweleit writes, was encoded with the pro- themselves" processes, again revolving around sexual experience.94 mises of freedom, and in the face of failure 278 of their fulfilment, men "took vengeance on The "speaking of sex" in the case of roman- that body itself."91 Of the "erotic" (the autho- tic fiction (which can, in some of its varieti- ress, again): "there is as much erotics in my es, reach the label of "pornography") is es- novels as in the lives of my heroes †sic‡. The pecially prone to a critique of this kind. erotic, as an important part of life, must Women write and read these novels, and re- surely be an important part of literature as ading them is sometimes considered an "op- well." positionary" practice, an act which in its

89 Rosalind Coward, "The True Story of How I Became My Own person," in The Feminist Reader, Catherine Belsey and Jane Moore (eds). (London: Macmillan, 1989)., p. 36. 90 Ibid., pp. 37-9. 91 Theweleit, p. 359. 92 Rastko Močnik, "Trivijalni ne-žanr: pornografski "roman." Prilog tipologiji trivijalne literature," in Trivijalna književnost, Svetlana Slapšak (ed). 93 Coward, p. 41. 94Ibid., pp. 44-45.

R. E. Č. no. 59/5, septembar 2000 "uselessness" counteracts the workings of area" (their bearing, sacrifice, morality) and patriarchy, of the social order and the domi- the traditional "occupations" of women nant modality of social relations. But as an elsewhere: childbearing, love, marriage – analysis of the narrative devices and the ide- and as consequence of this, with the produc- ological implications of romantic fiction has tion of a certain "national" femininity that shown, it functions mostly as yet another re- is one necessarily implicated with mother- affirmation of that order, as it disseminates hood and sexual restraint (not non-feeling). among women a compliance with a traditio- Some of the narrative strategies of romantic nal concept of femininity, bound to the "so- fiction are used by Ljiljana Habjanovic Đu- cial roles of lover, wife and mother," roles rovic in Ženski rodoslov, although her "histori- "essential to the maintenance of the current 95 cal romance" corresponds to different cul- organization of life." tural codes and myths than those the Mills & Reducing women to the sex, defining them Boon paperbacks relate to. At the first glan- through their sexuality is a common "sin" of ce, in its structure, Ženski rodoslov is not a sin- women-centered novels.96 It is also the gle "retelling of myth," but a composite of main tenet of nationalist practice, the one different myths of the Balkan, or Montene- nationalist mechanism needs to appropriate grin patriarchal and Yugoslav tradition.97 It in order to insure its functioning and domi- claims a historical "reality" for its stories, 279 nation. Having said that, I feel the need to and it insists on its historicism through the modify the "centrality" of "women" in Lji- technique employed also in the rendering of ljana Habjanović-Đurović's novels. What is the (contemporary) imaginary world of the "central" in Ženski rodoslov seems rather to be novel real: the "profusion of commodities," an obsession with (non)experiencing a cer- the intense attention to detail, the highly tain kind of male-female relations, the im- sophisticated description of the "articles, portance and value given to the traditional landscapes and events apparently inessential female qualities of women in the "Balkan to the course of the story."98 But in the po-

95 Janice Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature. (London: Virago, 1987)., pp. 207-8. 96 Coward, pp. 46-47. 97 Radway compares the popular romances with the myths of oral cultures, "in the sense that they relate a story already familiar to the people who chose to read them." She draws on Umberto Eco to state later that the "act of retelling...functioned as the ritual reaffirmation of fundamental cultural beliefs and collective af- firmations." p. 198. 98 Radway, p. 194, quoting Umberto Eco.

Časopis za književnost i kulturu, i društvena pitanja pular historical novel, the kind revived in important in the signification of ethnic ot- Serbia during the last two decades, these de- herness, "otherness of style," and thus colla- scriptions are very essential to the story as borates in the proliferation of new varieties they map and delineate the nationalist imag- of nationalist kitsch, the "feminine" ones. inary, the inventory of its architecture, co- Telling is the episode of Vera's unfortunate stume, cuisine. attempt to "lighten up" the grim interior of their, that is, Ana Maria's, Zagreb flat: "Scattered on the crags, the houses of Dub were made of broken or roughly "When she wasn't sawing, she embroi- hewn stone, unpainted, covered by dered....She picked bright colors...and straw. Low, tight, dark, with an earth- embroidered only flowers, and someti- floor, they consisted of one room divi- mes, when the weather was very quiet, ded in two parts....Only such houses did and her sorrow as flat and spacious as a Krstinja know. So she stared in awe into field, the room would be filled by the the white-stone two- and three-floored smell of those flowers. Once she decora- houses, with green venetian blinds, and ted the kitchen with her work. the baroque palaces nearly hidden in the - What, in the name of God, is this? - gardens of laurel, figs and oranges, not screamed Ana Maria.... - You can't find knowing how to name this beauty" (22). this even in Dolac! Such primitive dé- 280 And the "respectable and mighty" Petrović cor! In my house! Disgusting! "had on him the embellished Montenegrin costume of finest making, and on his waist Lineages hung a džeferdan coated with silver and mot- What Ženski rodoslov is also "centrally" concer- her-of-pearl, whose splendor and beauty te- ned about, as a historical novel, is the recre- stified to the dignity of its owner" (50). ation of a community, of ethnic belonging, Then there is the preoccupation with other, that is seeks to ensure through the notion of contemporary detail, which has the function female lineage, as the traditional guarantee of marking the text as feminine, as women of the "continuity of the masculine disconti- are known to be universally interested in do- nuity."99 The lineage, even more interest- ilies, furniture, pans and buckets, and of ingly, is a Montenegrin one. An another, course, clothes. This detail, however, is also perhaps less brazen act of appropriation

99 Iveković, "Women, Nationalism and War," p. 124.

R. E. Č. no. 59/5, septembar 2000 (but what times may come...!) this "female death not come until you beg of me to lineage" becomes an organic part of an im- be forgiven! And I shall never forgive plied "we" that is common for the author you! What have you done to me and my and her (Serbian) reading public. The fe- six wretched, misfortunate, brotherless male lineage is female in misfortune, con- daughters!" (73) stituted as the consequence of a failure to yield a male descendant. The "tragic" narra- is later referred to in the text as a "just cur- tivization of this failure, as well as the tradi- se," which, having been said on the "holy day tionally strong Montenegrin patriarchism, of Sunday," always finds it way to the right- institutionalized in many social practices ful, that is, sinful, owner. Joke indeed does and the national classic of "high" literature, end up as her brother had cursed her: seem at first to be criticized in Ženski rodoslov. "Sin has destroyed me! I cannot get up But as the narrative of Krstinja, first woman on my feet! For nine years I have been of the lineage (and what a most unwilling sick and rotting. The Montenegrin head of that, female lineage, she is) unfolds, woman cuts her hair and pounds her examples abound of the vindication of patri- bosom for her brother. And kills her- archy, of the understanding and exculpation self, like the sister of Batrić! And I took of male violence, and the sharing in the ob- 281 my only brother to court, wretched session with the producing of a male descen- me....I will pay for this before God! dant – all masked as their criticism. But the (92) text clearly devotes itself to this task, as it, for example, "punishes" the character of the sister of Niko, Krstinja's husband, for invi- Love and Marriage ting the foreign laws to trespass onto the tra- The next in the lineage, Krstinja's daughter ditional territory of Montenegrin family re- Milena, and incidentally, the first to direct lations, and customary laws regulating them, "reproach and rebellion" to her mother's which provide for the exclusion of women non-love of her daughters, will also be pu- from the inheritance of the family fortune. nished for another sin: the marriage of love. Niko's curse of Joke: Just as Iva's mother Vera, who "was born after †Milena's‡ death †and‡ repeated her li- "Be it damned for you, Joke! Let God fe," was punished too. Iva yearned, as we ha- make you fall and rise on your feet ve learned earlier, for a love "unordinary, again! Let you be sick for nine years, let intense and dramatic, †dreamt‡ about grass grow through your bones and you permeation of souls, perfect understanding.

Časopis za književnost i kulturu, i društvena pitanja When two know they are one" (106). Only ing conditioned by men, begins already with later will she "learn to accept †italics mine‡ gen- this false criticism, that will eventually evolve erosity and tolerance" in place of under- into full embracing and acceptance of this standing, "physical union" instead of "com- predicament. plete permeation." Why this change? Sacrifice without limits: Love is in Ženski rodoslov to At first, there is seemingly the "determina- "sacrifice without limits," but its sacrifices tion" to escape "woman's destiny," part of are misdirected, its end predetermined: the whole schizophrenic insistence on the tragedy, or end-in-marriage ("in the mise- "emancipated and successful woman" sta- ries of common everyday life"). Its "one tus,100 and the alleged criticism of the kind" is a dangerously strong passion that "men's conditioning of women's lives" (98). demands much greater (the "right kind" of) They are hard to reconcile with the confes- sacrifice in order to be contained and not sion, at the beginning of the book, that baba- allowed to destroy a woman's life. A woman Marica's stories and morality "have been the consumed by passion cannot make a good most important part of †her‡ education," decision, thus corroding the health of the which she has "never rejected."101 Another family unit, and by extension, the greater, instance of a "tragic" narrativization is the national community. The "other kind of lo- lament on post-war Yugoslav sexual mores ve" comes as an acceptance of other prioriti- and mentality: the hippy costumes "were es, for example, marrying "the man a 282 only decor. The children of self-managing woman can grow old with," a man who can, socialism grew up as the inheritors of their by extension, take on the masculine respon- grandmothers' pedagogical luggage" (99). sibility of providing security and status to his The imposition of a "women's" tragic des- family. Baba-Marica's "For one day of happi- tiny, of the inevitability of women's lives be- ness a thousand days of misfortune," casts a

100 Which, in another patriarchal stipulation, means not having children, as women's mothering and pro- fessional roles are deemed impossible to reconcile. "One cannot belong to another and create, I believed. And I wanted to create" (110). 101 In the same interview where her ambition and "accomplishment," as well as the "centrality" of female characters/heroes are emphasized, Ljiljana Habjanović-Đurovic betrays herself in the description of her un- cle: He was intelligent, authoritative †sic!‡, reliable, gentle on second look, and charming, he formed some of my ethical criteria and taste. When I started high school, he told me: You don't have to be a good student, but you have to be a good girl." When I was in my first year of university, he took me to the cinema to see "Gone With the Wind." "So that you see what a woman who doesn't know what she wants gets in life," he told me. Those two lessons I remembered forever.

R. E. Č. no. 59/5, septembar 2000 light on the female lineage, once Iva realized When Milena marries Mihajlo, and her love what this appeal to precaution and restraint and daring ("which is the same as folly," meant. judges the text) are confronted with betray- Restraint, or abstinence from: from what, it al, with the disappearance of his feelings and will become clear in the doubled tragic story respect for her, by the full expression of his of Milena and Vera, the mother and the gre- cruelty, his inability to be faithful (he is at-grandmother. Milena started "waiting for "that kind of man"), this tragedy and demi- love when she was fourteen." She "identified se are deserved. Milena brought it on herself, with the heroes tortured by love and yearn- by not abiding by the traditional laws and ing, secretly envying them for the intensity customs, by not restraining herself, by not of their feelings." Hers is the first "hunger thinking about the future ("Ljubav je dok se gu- without a name," the hunger that will beco- zica ne oladi!"). It is not sympathy, but glee, me a "bird plucking between her thighs," glee-as-warning, that is invested in Milena's "dog-like hunger," "a pang without a na- character. And Mihajlo, who is never doing me." Milena's love for Mihajlo, when it co- anything but "acting out" his true self (and mes, will be a "magical and intoxicating that can't be helped), will become the sym- whirlpool of a self-destructive folly in two" bol of that desiring force which is "inside," (119). Mihajlo is an "inappropriate" match, but must be fought, resisted, only fantasized about. 283 he is beneath her, she already has a fiancé her father found for her. Her love is a direct "Centrality of women" is exposed in the fa- act of disobedience and rebellion. This love scination with Mihajlo, Milena's adulterous, is destructive, even in a dream: his hands undependable husband, in the sentimenta- "burned her skin," it is unsettling: "she had lism and forgiveness his return from a long no peace anymore. At night she turned in stay in Alasca and other distant localities is bed and bit the pillow..." Her loneliness, shrouded in. Milena, left by her husband, being without him, is an "icy abyss," and the "accepts her guilt for the first wrong choice" words about him were "suffocating her." (195). Mihajlo, the one who abandoned Her yearning was finally satisfied, "by one without a word, is good-hearted and meant thing only." And so on and so on...There is for the best. After all, as we find out, his be- an abundance of the "erotic" here that is trayal (promising reunion in the New danger itself: the danger of "self-destructi- World, then never sending the money) was veness." not intentional, it was just a lapse of his na- The text also shows a great (erotic) fascina- ture, a breakout of his passions: in a drin- tion with Mihajlo, the reason behind all this king-spree, Mihajlo spent his three-year's "folly," and the object of Milena's yearning. savings and was too ashamed to admit it, so

Časopis za književnost i kulturu, i društvena pitanja he disappeared. After returning to Cetinje, in her marriage with dependable, gentle, he soon abandons the family again. It co- considerate Pero, she will only "start" to feel uldn't matter less. love as an extension of "gratitude, which can Mihajlo, the destructive presence that must also be a second name for love" (222). We only be fantasized about, is also what his da- have a case here of ruin as the "second name ughter Marica sees in her first suitor, and re- for passion," or at least for the female, het- sponds with a "soft trembling, feeling this erosexual, non-procreative kind. trembling moves something in her, something yet unknown" (213). But Milena, the Motherhood as the Only Passion Again in the episode of Marica and Pero, the mother who was devastated and ruined as she incompatibility of passion and genuine dared touch and experience the living presen- motherly feeling and competence is demon- ce and not only be satisfied with the fantasy, strated: the text dwells elaborately on Mari- knows better: she drives the suitor away. Ma- ca's, whose love is at most "gratitude," wish rica "understood her mother, and became li- for children, for a child, and the pain and ke her. But she never forgave her" (214). Mi- emptiness that the lack of it creates, in spite hajlo, or rather, his specter, will emerge of their "quite, harmonious marriage." again, as the first time Vera ever sets her eye When a child finally comes, it dies and thus on Tomislav, he is talking about Mihajlo, the "creates the final bond that tied Marica and 284 "famous Mihajlo Pantov," this being "a warn- Pero together. The same pain, understan- ing †Vera‡ did not then understand yet." ding and devotedness often bring two people The restriction, the urge for restraint, must closer together than impetuous, intoxicating be transmitted down the family line, and so desire" (223). The verdict is clear: as Mari- must the disgust for "bodily things." The ca becomes a mother who is "obsessively pas- disgust is insisted on during the period prior sionate" about motherhood, a good mother, to an actual event of marriage: on its own, an just as passionate about children as "Milena act of love and the forces that drive one to it was about love...and Vera about Tomislav" stand as the ultimate ruination, the "proof" (224), the impossibility of coexistence of of which is Milena's fate itself. The instution non-procreative female desire (constructed of marriage awards "passion" respectability, as dangerous) and proper, productive and but it is only the husband's passion that achi- fulfilling motherhood is reinforced. eves expression and satisfaction. Marica is The good mother is a being asexual in her pas- never allowed to feel that same "pang" as sion and devotion to children, and not only when she felt seeing Mihajlo, her first suitor, that: the restraint, non-indulgence in sexual an eery resemblance to Mihajlo, her father: passion actually becomes a precondition for

R. E. Č. no. 59/5, septembar 2000 (good) motherhood. A woman's life, her des- munity through an imagining of shared ex- tiny, her fortunes, are determined at the very perience, the nation cannot be seen just as a moment of the coming to life of her sexual be- passive spectrum of possible choices offered ing, for she must decide to what use she will put to the members of a community. On the her sexual energy, the craving of her "insides". contrary, the idea of the nation has a strong If she allows herself, and her "insides" to follow homogenizing effect as it imposes identities the first impulse, a natural and ever-present on all members of a given community. In one, but still manageable, she is doomed. It is most nationalist discourse though, the this doom of Vera and Milena that Marica ma- women are invisible or excluded, yet this in- naged to escape, that our narrator escapes too— visibility and exclusion do not mean that the yet her escape is at some point described as an women are not encompassed by the idea of act of pardon "of some good God"—a pardon of the nation. Indeed, nationalist discourse exclusion from the universal history of women's needs women, in a very specific way, as it de- suffering, a rare pardon. pends on a certain modality of male-female In the final part of the Ženski rodoslov, Vera's relations and also relies on gendered, sexu- story is told all over again, with more yet alized imagery and the control of women's conviction, more judging, more reinforce- sexuality. So, in some cases, it is not the in- ment of the same proscriptive, cruel moral: visibility of women, but rather their use as 285 a woman who is consumed by love and desi- symbolic capital, their objectivization, and re for a man, even if that man "agrees" to be the appropriation of what otherwise consti- her husband, shall be punished, and her tutes the marginal or marginalized "femini- punishment shall be two-fold: she will not ne" that best characterizes a nationalist di- be desired back, her marriage will be rui- scourse or its particular manifestation. ned, and she will not be able to love her The three novels of Ljiljana Habjanović- children, be a good mother to them. Đurović, often referred to as her "trilogy" REINFORCEMENT OF THE PATRIARCHAL and sold in amazing numbers in the context 102 IN AN ATTEMPT OF "WOMEN'S WRITING": of contemporary Serbia were interpreted CONCLUSIONs in this essay as contributions to the nationa- As a system of cultural representations which list discourse in Serbia, and contributions of enables identification with the larger com- a specific kind. What Ljiljana Habjanović-

102 By May 2000, Iva was published in 18 000 copies, Ana Marija me nije volela in 24 000 copies, and Ženski rodoslov in more than 93 000 copies. Her latest novel, Peacock's Feather, has been published in 21 000 copies over the period of 7 months. Politika, Internet edition, May 16 2000.

Časopis za književnost i kulturu, i društvena pitanja Đurović did in the first of the three novels women characters bear the title 'heroes,' analyzed here, Ana Marija Didn't Love Me, was quite appropriate for characters in epic di- simply to repeat the patriarchal models and scourse. In her literary world, women can be preserve the stereotypes already heavily dis- happy and satisfied, and their lives "fulfil- seminated by popular forms of nationalist led" only if they accept the well-defined, discourse. She worked within this discourse, carefully prescribed, "natural" role that they trying to "sell" her work as "a story of a are given inside the patriarchal system of va- childhood" or later, in Iva, "a story of an lues. Every attempt to break out of that role, adolescence". It was also just simply bad to become independent, to seek different writing, with flat characters for whom "real- kinds of fulfilment, following their own life" existence was claimed in order to award wishes or feelings, is severely punished, with- them literary credibility, but who actually in the world of the novel itself, as their failu- res are contrasted (not even subtly) with the served the author to make points that were in happiness and wisdom of those women who agreement with the nationalist parlance of conformed to the roles prescribed to them. the time. In Ženski rodoslov, though, this bad writing emerges masked as "women's writ- The characterization of Ženski rodoslov as a ing" (both ceaselessly promoting itself as "dictionary of eternal women's destinies," such, and being thusly promoted by others), reinforces yet again the conclusion that what seeking to project this "quality" to the previ- is at work in Ljiljana Habjanović-Đurović's 286 ous two novels. In the examples given above novels is the totalitarian mechanism of patriarchal discourse, which lies at the founda- earlier, I tried to illustrate the level and ex- tion and enables the functioning and effec- tent of appropriation that occurs througho- tiveness of the homogenizing efforts of nati- ut the novel . onalism. The imposition of a "women's" Ženski rodoslov, the authoress claims in an in- (tragic) destiny, of the inevitability of terview, has "exclusively women as charac- women's lives being conditioned by men be- ters†=heroes, not heroines‡." Already at that gan already in Ženski rodoslov with the false, point a careful reader should be able to ex- pseudo-feminist criticism of "grandmot- pose the mimicry of nationalist discourse, to hers' pedagogical baggage," and eventually discern the "awry" taste of the appeal to evolves into full embracing and acceptance "women's writing," of the claim that these of this "women's" predicament. To change novels are about women. What Ljiljana Ha- that "eternal," "natural" destiny is inconce- bjanović-Đurović is doing here is "transla- ivable, and a woman will stay imprisoned ting" from one discourse to another, and within that circle of "eternity" whether she her (Freudian) slip reveals just that, as her conforms in happiness or "strays" in misery.

R. E. Č. no. 59/5, septembar 2000 The women's predicament, it seems, can The three things nationalism 'wants' from only be escaped through "metamorphosis" women are satisfied, tasks accomplished, de- into the other sex. Not without relief and stinies fulfilled: biological preservation, glee, Ljiljana Habjanović-Đurović announ- cultural continuity, maintenance of moral ces the end of her "female lineage," which standards and traditional values. The has yielded the Only Son (finally) as she "has women as carriers of a moral revolution: been given back what was taken away from "Serbian mothers must return to the morals Krstinja" (286). "Taken away": "deprived of their mothers...The traditional ornament of" a value highest of all, now confirmed as of our woman is sacrifice without limits for the "happy end," of the "bloody anthology of her family, her existence."103 Rather than women's pains." The birth of Aleksandar, making women invisible, the mechanism at her son, makes sense of all former pains, in work here seeks to implicate women directly, that he is part (kopča) of that lineage, and at supposedly as "heroes" of their own lives, the same time, this lineage is, as well as the not by assigning them masculine qualities of history of pain, interrupted by him. He will "courage, bravery, sacrifice," but on the not get the two figurines, which Milena in- contrary, affirming but in effect essentiali- stituted as the gift of a mother to her first- zing and fixing those "feminine" qualities born daughter, down the family line, as they that will make possible the preservation of 287 are the symbol of women's pain and suffe- patriarchal order and thus also enable nati- ring too (the pain of having daughters?). onalist identification.

103 Milan Vojnović, Preporod srpskog naroda. (Beograd: Mimico, 1993)., p. 29. Quoted in Bracewell, p. 10. 59

Časopis za književnost i kulturu, i društvena pitanja