Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Series Editors
ShaneWeller
School of European Culture and Languages
University of Kent
Canterbury,UK
ThomasBaldwin
Centre for Modern European Literature
University of Kent
Canterbury,UK
BenHutchinson
Centre for Modern European Literature
University of Kent
Canterbury,UK
Linked to the Centre for Modern European Literature at the University
of Kent, UK, this series offers a space for new research that challenges
the limitations of national, linguistic and cultural borders within Europe
and engages in the comparative study of literary traditions in the modern
period.
v
CONTENTS
Notes on Contributors xi
1 Introduction 1
Andrew Hammond
vii
viii CONTENTS
Bibliography 301
Index 343
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
erature, and has written in the areas of literary and cultural modernism, critical
theory, genre studies, loss, mourning and the theory of the novel. His immediate
research plans involve work on the interstices of mourning, protest and resistance
with a particular focus on the post-2008 Greek crisis.
Peter Morgan is Director of the European Studies Program at the University of
Sydney and has written widely on German literature, comparative literature and
European studies. Recent publications include Coming out in Weimar: Crisis and
Homosexuality in the Weimar Republic, Thesis Eleven (2012), Translating the
World: Literature and Re-Connection from Goethe to Gao, Revue de Littrature
compare (2013) and Ismail Kadare: The Writer and the Dictatorship 195790
(2010). A second volume is underway on Ismail Kadares work since the fall of the
regime, dealing with issues of postcommunism and Albanian identity.
MihaelaMoscaliuc is Assistant Professor of English at Monmouth University. She
is the author of the poetry collections Father Dirt (2010) and Immigrant Model
(2014), the translator of Carmelia Leontes The Hiss of the Viper (2014) and the
editor of a collection of essays on Gerald Stern. Her research interests lie in world
literature, American immigration literature, Roma/Gypsy studies and translation
theory and practice. Her articles and reviews have been published in numerous
journals, including The Georgia Review, TriQuarterly, Soundings, Vestoj and
Interculturality and Translation.
Christoph Parry is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the
University of Vaasa, where he also works in the Intercultural Studies Programme.
He studied German and Russian at Edinburgh and Marburg/Lahn, where he sub-
mitted his doctoral thesis on Osip Mandelstam and Paul Celan in 1978. His pub-
lications include Menschen, Werke, Epochen (1993) and Peter Handkes Landscapes
of Discourse (2003), as well as numerous articles on contemporary German and
Austrian literature and on questions of intercultural literary transfer and
reception.
Esther Pujolrs-Noguer is Lecturer in American and Post-Colonial Literature at
the Autonomous University of Barcelona. A specialist in African literatures and
cultures, her current research focuses on the convergence of race/ethnicity and
constructions of whiteness in Indian Ocean writing. She is a member of the
research projects Relations and Networks in Indian Ocean Writing and Ratnakara:
Indian Ocean Literatures and Cultures. She has written on postcolonial fiction
and cinema and is the author of An African (Auto)Biography: Ama Ata Aidoos
Literary Quest (2012).
Donald Rayfield is Emeritus Professor of Russian at Queen Mary University.
Since visiting Georgia in 1973, he has written a history of Georgian literature,
edited a comprehensive Georgian-English dictionary and published Edge of
Empires: A History of Georgia (2012). He is also the author of Anton Chekhov: A
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Life (1997) and Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for
Him (2004). He has translated a number of Russian and Georgian poets, play-
wrights and prose writers and written on a variety of topics in comparative
literature.
Guido Snel is a writer, translator and Assistant Professor of European Studies at
the University of Amsterdam. He has written on the literatures of central Europe,
eastern Europe and the Balkans and is currently working on a book about the
persistence of East-West and Balkanist imaginaries in European literature. He has
translated Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian fiction into Dutch and written a series of
novels. His latest book is Naar Istanbul (To Istanbul, 2014), a mixture of travel-
ogue and cultural history.
MetkaZupani is Professor of French and Modern Languages at the University
of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. Her research in French, Francophone and more general
comparative literature deals with feminism, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, myth
criticism and translation studies. Her major publications include three mono-
graphs, Les crivaines contemporaines et les mythes (2013), Hlne Cixous: texture
mythique etalchimique (2007) and Lectures de Claude Simon (2001), and a num-
ber of edited volumes, notably Death, Language, Thought (2005) and Hermes and
Aphrodite Encounters (2004).
1
Introduction
AndrewHammond
A. Hammond (
)
School of Humanities, University of Brighton, Falmer Campus, Brighton,
BN1 9PH, UK
the work of Martin Travers, who in two studies from 1998 and 2001
defined European literature as a collection of movementsromanticism,
realism, modernism, post-modernism and the literature of political
engagementthat spread across the continent from the late eighteenth
century. While admitting that his research still serves to privilege cer-
tain nations, Travers determines to broaden the national base of these
cultural formations, challenging the literary great powers with work
on Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Romanian and Serbian traditions.12 A
more pronounced challenge came with Ursula Keller and Ilma Rakusas
landmark collection, Writing Europe (2003). Composed of essays by
creative writers themselves, the volume presents literary Europe not as
a circumscribed, divided, tiered terrain, but as a transnational cultural
echo-chamber in which Europes many different voices come together
[] and form a network.13 The contribution by the Serbian author
Dragan Veliki, for example, describes how his textual world is built from
Cervantes humor, Italo Svevos tensions, James Joyces circular routes,
Danilo Ki Pannonian remembrances [and] Hermann Brochs sleepwalk-
ing.14 Similarly, the imagination of Turkish-German author Emine Sevgi
zdamar has been formed from childhood readings of Flaubert, Defoe
and Dostoyevsky, and later, as a student travelling between the Asian
and the European side of Istanbul, from readings of Kafka, Bchner,
Hlderlin, Bll, Joyce, Conrad, and Borchert.15 The volumes notion
of a cultural echo-chamber was reinforced by Theo Dhaen and Iannis
Goerlandts edited Literature for Europe? (2009). The editors intention
is to analyse the relationship between literary studies and the matter of
Europe and to elucidate the ways in which literary texts, genres, and
forms [] shape ongoing processes of European self-understanding.16
While often successful in this aim, the volume also reveals the potential
perils of the approach. As Dhaens introduction details, its underlying
aim is to endorse EU attempts to use cultural production as a spur to
Europeanness (a process discussed below), testing the notion of literature
as a possible policy instrument for Europe.17 The more inclusive account
offered in the present volume has no connection to EU integrationism.
The critical approach being sought is one that does not homogenise, does
not service political or economic goals and does not seek to recreate the
borders, boundaries, hierarchies and exclusions of the imagined commu-
nity on a supranational level.
The achievement of this fuller account, however, requires more than
a repositioning of marginalised eastern and western European literatures.
INTRODUCTION 5
What are the Dutch to do with a Moroccan writer, who, instead of writing
profitable prose about the cultural differences between the Moroccans and
the Dutch, which everyone would understand, has undertaken to recreate
the beauty of Dutch language of the nineteenth century, which present-day
Dutch authors have forgotten. What are the French to do with an Arab who
aspires to be the new Marcel Proust, and what are the Germans to do with
a Turk who aspires to be the new Thomas Mann?21
way to China. Indeed, it was difficult to avoid the impression that Europe
was merely a peninsula of a larger continent, or what Icelandic novel-
ist Halldr Laxness later termed an unimportant little headland.28 The
impression was heightened by its exposure to Tatar incursions into south-
ern Russia in the thirteenth century and the Ottoman conquest of eastern
Europe from the fourteenth century. The search for the eastern frontier
was an obsession of Renaissance geographers, although little progress was
made. Drawing on such desiderata as soil, climate and vegetation, map-
makers devised a host of competing boundaries: amongst them, the River
Dnieper to Lake Ladoga, the River Don to the White Sea, the River Don
to the River Dvina and the Ural Mountains.29 Such geographical limits
not only divided Russia in two but also conflicted with the opinions of
Russias own cartographers. During the Europeanisation of its aristoc-
racy in the early eighteenth century, Moscovy was shifted as eastward
as possible, as later consolidated by Catherine the Great, who set the
European boundary to the east of the larger part of her lands, thrust-
ing Europe deep into Central Asia. By the late nineteenth century, the
popularity of the neologism Eurasia seemed an acknowledgement that
no distinct Europe existed, a view which largely held during the twenti-
eth century despite many western geographers regarding Soviet Russia
as non-European if not anti-European, as the geographical antithesis
of Europe.30 The absence of an eastern boundary clearly problematises
self-definition and helps to explain why Europe remains such a contested
category. It also explains the bewilderment of many of the continents
most prominent writers. The Danish author Jens Christian Grndahl has
commented that Europe is a thing as strange as literature, while the Irish
author Colm Tobn has refused to comment altogether: I cannot speak
about [] Europe, since I do not know what Europe is.31
The anti-Sovietism of the Cold War reminds us that there are ways
of defining territorial categories other than geographical. Of these, the
political definition of Europe as a continent-wide structure of power,
either real or imagined, has had the longest duration, although is equally
fraught with irregularities, erasures and omissions. There is something
paradoxical, for example, in Europes foundational myth lying in Ancient
Greece, an entity marginal to the geographical continent which defined
itself as much against Scythian hordes to the north as against Persians to
the south. The Roman Empire, again centred on the Mediterranean, gov-
erned a larger portion of Europefrom the south-east to Portugal and
Britainbut again found a source of alterity in native barbarism. After
INTRODUCTION 9
the sixth century, the Frankish kings spread Catholicism across a similar
expanse, with Charlemagnes Holy Roman Empire controlling much of
central and western Europe, although this soon conflicted with Orthodox
Byzantium and later with Protestantism. A measure of unity was imposed
on Christian Europe by the threat of Islam, manifest not only in the
Ottoman invasions in the east but also in the Moorish invasion of parts of
Spain, Portugal, Italy and France. As Henri Pirenne put it, Charlemagne
without Muhammad would have been inconceivable.32 By this time,
however, a continent grounded in faith (termed Christendom) was giv-
ing way to one grounded in secularism (increasingly termed Europe).
The Enlightenment, driven by expanding imperial and scientific discov-
ery, helped to establish liberty, progress and rationality as the key com-
ponents of Europeaneity, now defined as much against eastern Europe as
the East. By the early nineteenth century, this had crystallised into the
European Concert of Powers, which sought both the continental balance
of power and the location of a European civilisation or spirit. The utopia-
nism came to a head in Victor Hugos calls for a United States of Europe,
by which he urged the nations of the continent, without losing your dis-
tinctive qualities and your glorious individuality, [to] forge yourself into a
close and higher unity.33
Yet even this brief historical sketch of political Europe shows a continent
distinguished by conflict rather than cohesion. If there is any consistency
to be found in the Greater Europe project then it lies in the projects age-
old contradictions: it has always excluded parts of geographical Europe,
always found itself internally divided, always functioned for the service of
autocratic or imperial power and always omitted entities that threatened
that power. At the same time, it has always included elements external to
the continent, most obviously Ancient Greece and Rome, which were as
much northern African and Middle Eastern, but also the Christian tradi-
tion, originating in Judaea, and the imperial project, centred on Africa,
Asia and the Americas. Such inconsistencies continued in the twentieth
century. Despite a renewed wave of idealism in the 1920s and 1930s
(seen in Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi and Aristide Briands movement
for a pan-European union), the internecine conflicts that raged between
1914 and 1989, and the alternative plans for Europe propounded by Nazi
Germany and Soviet Russia, undercut any sense of a unified civilisation,
consciousness or heritage. Indeed, with post-1945 western Europe being
bankrolled by the USA, defended by a US-led NATO and increasingly
influenced by US culture, the continent was still joined to a territory
10 A. HAMMOND
This was not only a form of shock therapy which further impoverished
the impoverished European fringe (Andrej Nikolaidis) but also an erosion
of national sovereignty, a submergence into a system where the old mem-
bers are in charge (Tnu nnepalu).37 Miroslav Penkov, Robert Perii,
Alexander Garros and Aleksei Evdokimov are equally scathing about the
shift from actually existing socialism to actually existing democracy. As
Penkov has written on Bulgaria:
When combined with protectionist measures for western trade (at a time
when the EU had a nominal GNP of $6 trillion), integration could be
considered a reworking of the white mans burden discourse, a civilising
mission aiming to ensure that the East European periphery [is] incor-
porated into the Western sphere of interest.39 Yet the power of the EU
does not stop there. The authority it wields over its 500 million residents
also extends to western non-member states, who are obliged to frame
their economies in relation to it, as well as to non-member countries on
the eastern and southern margins. The European Neighbourhood Policy
obliges the so-called wider Europe (Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, the
Caucasus, the Mahgreb and parts of the Balkans) to observe many of the
terms of the acquis communautaire, particularly on issues of trade and
security, despite EU membership being withheld.40 The extraterritorial-
ity of EU governance even encompasses (post)colonial countries. France,
Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Britain and the Netherlands retain a number
of dependencies, or ultra-peripheral regions, whose inclusion in the EUs
sphere of influence indicates that the organisations outer borders are as
far-flung as the Caribbean and Pacific.41 In short, alongside asymmetry
and inequality are the continuing territorial anomalies of political Europe,
which remains both smaller and larger than geographical Europe.
What the EU failed to foresee is the level of dissent that the discourse
of integrationknown variously as Europeanism or Europismwould
draw from eastern and western populations. Alongside left-wing antipathy
to the brutalising logic of marketisation is a general alarm at the democratic
12 A. HAMMOND
Most contentious is the creation of Central Europe, which had been evolv-
ing from the 1970s in the writings of Danilo Ki, Vclav Havel, Gyrgy
Konrd, Adam Michnik and Milan Kundera. In The Tragedy of Central
Europe (1983), Kundera classifies the region as Czechoslovakia, Hungary
and Poland and considers it a portion of western Europe that is kidnapped,
displaced, and brainwashed by an other civilisation, that of Orthodox/
Soviet Russia.53 The tragedy lies in the fact that this was always a great
cultural centre, perhaps the greatest, an heir to the supreme moral and
political values of Graeco-Roman, Christian and Enlightenment civilisa-
tion, not least of them democracy, rationalism, individualism and human-
ism.54 This ideologically charged construction of geopolitical space sought
to realign the three countries during the late Cold War, but also, when
the queue for EU membership began to form, to privilege them above
Muslim and Orthodox populations to the east. Indeed, Kunderas Central
Europe looks little different to the EUs grand narrative of Europeaneity
which, if one examines the eastern border of the EU drawn up at the
Helsinki Summit (1999), looks itself suspiciously like a Huntingtonian
clash of civilisations.55
Far from being a deviation from European political norms, the totali-
tarianism of the 1930s and 1940s was repeated in other decades dur-
ing the twentieth century. For example, although Schindel attempts to
exclude Russia from Europe, neither the GULag nor the millions who
died in the camps were external to the continent. When factoring in the
numbers killed in the purges, famines and forced collectivisations of the
Great Terror, the death-toll in Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1953
was around 54 million, a figure that competes with the 6070 million
soldiers and civilians killed during the Second World War. To extend
the point, the actually existing socialism that began with the Bolshevik
Revolution of 1917 spread across east-central and south-eastern nations
after 1945 and, despite the collapse of the eastern bloc, retains traces in
Belarus and Transnistria. At the same time, right-wing authoritarianism
informed European state systems from the 1920s, stretching through
Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia,
Estonia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Albania, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey,
and continuing in Greece, Portugal and Spain into the 1970s. Although
Europes most famous periphery lies in the east, others have existed in the
north, east, south and centre, the products of political oppression and iso-
lationism.59 Of course, there was nothing un-European about all this for
novelists, who regularly speak about the horror-filled history of Europe,
about cold harsh Europe, about that wonderful, murderous continent,
about the Old Continent, saturated with blood and history and about a
Europe poisoned by suspicion, betrayal, and death.60
Such writing mounts a clear challenge to the idealistic, self-congratulatory
notions of Europe current amongst EU elites. An air of triumphalism has
16 A. HAMMOND
informed not only the internal growth of political and economic integra-
tion but also the continents (neo)imperialist advances in other parts of
the world. From the fifteenth century onwards, the empires of Britain,
France, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Belgium, Russia, Italy, Germany and
the Netherlands extended across three quarters of the globe, gaining sway
over most of Africa, Asia, the Americas and the Middle East. The colo-
nies offered an abundant source of the raw materials and markets nec-
essary for industrialisation and an ideal destination for mass emigration,
which helped to ease social tensions. The conquest of other continents
also helped to consolidate the image of a mighty, autonomous, superior
Europe so beloved by Euro-enthusiasts (such as Denis de Rougemont,
whose arrogant claim in the early 1960s that Europe has produced a
civilisation which is being imitated by the whole world, whilst the converse
has never happened, is being echoed by European leaders even today).61
For Hayden White, this Europe exists only in the talk and writing of
visionaries and scoundrels seeking an alibi for a civilisation whose princi-
pal historical attribute has been an impulsion to universal hegemony and
the need to destroy what it cannot dominate, assimilate, or consume.62
In part, the modern awareness of imperial oppression and exploitation
has been spread by literature, originally that emerging from the colo-
nies. The anger of writers such as Tayeb Salih, Ahdaf Soueif, Chinua
Achebe, George Lamming, Nayantara Sahgal and Bahaa Taher, with their
denunciations of the greatest European violence and the disasters the
Europeans have brought, has gradually emerged in metropolitan writing,
as seen in Grndhals comment that the universalism of terror is part of
our European heritage.63 Yet metropolitan attitudes to the imperial past
can still oscillate between nostalgia and denial. Over the last few decades,
postcolonial criticism has done much to expose the residual imperialism
of western European culture, with Edward Said, most famously, analysing
the work of novelists [], travel writers, film-makers, and polemicists
whose speciality is to deliver the non-European world either for analysis
and judgement or for satisfying the exotic tastes of European and North
American audiences.64 Although the following essays focus on literature
during the age of decolonisation, traces of imperial ambition and outlook
were evident both in the counterinsurgencies of the 1950s and 1960s,
illustrating what V.G.Kiernan calls the delirium of dying empires, and in
the economic neoimperialism that developed from the 1960s.65 As the lat-
ter reminds us, another key aim of the EU was to create, through political
union between the western European empires and their colonies, a Cold
INTRODUCTION 17
War bloc to rival those of the superpowers, making the EU simply the
newest manifestation of European civilizations drive for mastery of the
rest of the world.66
Alongside the presumption of superiority, a second major legacy of
empire is the hostility shown in many European countries towards immi-
grants from formerly colonised regions. As mentioned, migration has
been one of the defining features of a continent that is, after all, named
after a migrant (the Phoenician princess Europa, abducted and brought
to Europe from what is now southern Lebanon). In the centuries that fol-
lowed, successive waves of Huns, Avars, Slavs, Bulgars, Magyars, Mongols,
Tartars and Moors provided plenty of evidence for Adrian Favells point
that Europe historically has been made, unmade, and remade through
the movements of peoples.67 In the twentieth century, migration resulted
from the forced displacements caused by international conflict and from
the importation of labour for western European reconstruction, which
brought workers from as far afield as south-east Asia, Africa, the Indian
sub-continent, the Middle East and the Caribbean. With the end of the
Cold War, movement from the former colonies accelerated to such an
extent that by the turn of the twenty-first century some 20 million immi-
grants were resident in the EU.68 Tragically, one of the consequences
has been a resurrection of the racial definition of Europe that has long
shadowed the geographical, political and cultural definitions. Right-wing
calls for a Europe for Europeans are also informed by culturalist rac-
ism, a sort of racism without race, in Stephen Castless phrase, which
constructs belief, custom and lifestyle as immutable differences that
make co-existences between varying cultural groups in one society impos-
sible.69 Such attitudes have encouraged a raft of prejudicial legislation,
not least an EU security policy that links migration to international crime
and terrorism. The notion of migration as detrimental for Europe is par-
ticularly offensive for asylum seekers fleeing military conflicts which origi-
nate in (neo)imperial practice; as the Somalian-born novelist Nuruddin
Farah lamented, if refugees are the bastards of the idea of empire, then
how can one blame this highly disenfranchised, displaced humanity for
all Europes ills?70 The exclusionary practices have been so wide-ranging
that tienne Balibar speaks of a virtual European apartheid, an institu-
tionalised framework of classification, discrimination and exclusion which
was formulated historically for the colonies but which, in the face of post-
colonial immigration, has now been reintroduced and naturalized in
the metropole.71 Clearly, the framework attempts to deny contemporary
18 A. HAMMOND
some sections of society are still calling for secession. Indeed, contem-
porary Europe remains entirely encircled by colonised or disputed ter-
ritories, contains separatist movements even towards its geographical core
and includes a number of minority ethnicitiesthe Roma, Smi, Pomaks,
Crimean Tartarswhose experiences have resembled those of colonised
populations elsewhere.76 In this sense, the eastern expansion of the EU
takes its place in a long history of endocolonialism, making Europe as
much a (post)colonial as a (post)imperial space.
Could anything be more barren than [this] moldy garbage heap of stereo-
types, prejudices, and accepted ideas? And yet it is impossible to dislodge
these traditional garden gnomes with their navely painted faces: the taciturn
Scandinavian, blonder than straw; the obstinate German, beer stein in hand;
the red-faced, garrulous Irishman, always smelling of whisky; and, of course,
the Italian with his moustache, forever sensual but regrettably unreliable,
brilliant but lazy, passionate but scheming [].78
The same complaint could have been made in response to every act of west-
ern decision-making in the region since the eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century Eastern Question. The abiding western European belief that it
has the authority to define, evaluate and decide for its eastern counter-
part is as evident in the realm of culture. As illustrated by the traditional
canon of European literature, the geopolitical marginalisation of eastern
Europe is mirrored by the regions cultural marginalisation, the canon
looking a lot like Europism adapted to literary studies: a territorialisa-
tion of literary-critical entities with critics drafted in to police the border.
Casanova is surely right to suspect that the desired role of scholarship in
EU culture-building exercises is not to draw up a list of the candidates to
be included as legitimate members of Europe but to stigmatize and thus
to designate those to be excluded.98 Perhaps unsurprisingly, the excluded
writers of the former eastern bloc are mounting the strongest challenge
to EU hierarchies. As Andrew Wachtel and Predrag Palavestra detail, their
fiction offers an internationalist treatment of the East-West dialogue
which, drawing on an alternative culture of resistance, is often marked
INTRODUCTION 23
THE CONTRIBUTIONS
It is from this range of discussions that the themes of the volume are
drawn. Taking Europe as the starting point of study, rather than texts or
authors, the volume addresses what I term the guiding features of the
continental literary debateideas of Europe, conflict, borders, empire,
unification, migration and marginalisationeach of which appears as a
specific focus of the contributions and as a motif running throughout the
volume. Despite the multiple disparities that exist in Europe, the seven
features are pertinent to populations across the continent, however widely
perspectives upon them differ, allowing the critic to link multiple literary
traditions for the purposes of comparative study. At the same time, the vol-
ume seeks to show how a subject as vast as Europe may be accommodated
in a single novel. Although this is not a primary object of study, it is worth
outlining the ways in which coverage is achieved before going on to sum-
marise the contributions. Of the four techniques identified, the first is the
exchange of a single national setting for a narrative that ranges through
much of Europe. As a form, the transcontinental narrative developed dur-
ing the tensions of the 1930s and found its most obvious reappearance
after 1945in Holocaust fiction.100 For example, Andr Schwarz-Barts Le
Dernier des justes (The Last of the Just, 1959) evokes a continent united
in suffering through references to York, Cologne, Karlsrhr, Mantua,
Bordeaux, Seville, Moscow, Vilnius, Kiev, Warsaw, Biaystok, Drancy and
Auschwitz. As examples from other types of writing, Jean Genets Journal
du voleur (The Thiefs Journal, 1949) and the linked stories of Danilo
Kis Grobnica za Borisa Davidovia (A Tomb for Boris Davidovich,
1976) mention almost every European nation south of latitude 54, many
of them several times.101 The second technique, and the most common in
the chosen novels, is the use of a particular textual featurea character,
a historical event, a geographical locationas a metonym for the wider
continent. For example, the East German protagonist of Christa Wolfs
Der geteilte Himmel (Divided Heaven, 1963), torn between loyalty to the
GDR and flight to the West, crystallises Europes ideological choices of
24 A. HAMMOND
the early Cold War. In a similar way, treatments of such historical features
as cultural tradition or modernisation concern not only the nation from
which the text emerges but the continent as a whole, as exemplified by
Mukhtar Auezovs Abai Zholy (Abai, 19421956), Chingiz Atmatovs
Jamila (Jamilia, 1958), Idris Bazorkins Iz Tmy Vekov (Dark Ages, 1963),
Fazil Iskanders Sandro iz Chegema (Sandro of Chegem, 1977) and
Hamid Ismailovs Zheleznaya doroga (The Railway, 1997).102 The same
can be said about the usage of specific locations, such as the imagined
city-state of Jan Morriss Last Letters from Hav (1985) or the real Berlin
of Ugreis Muzej bezuvjetne predaje (The Museum of Unconditional
Surrender, 1996), which explore cultural interpenetration in ways that
resonate far beyond the particular settings. The third technique is the
method of exploring Europe through textual reflections on European
literature. For example, Mati Unts Brecht ilmub sel (Brecht at Night,
1997), a postmodernist assault on left-wing writing, ranges through such
authors as George Bernard Shaw, Hella Wuolijoki, Alexander Fadeyev,
Martin Anderson Nex, Henrik Ibsen, Gerhart Hauptmann, Kersti
Bergroth, August Jakobson, Lion Feuchtwanger, Andr Malraux and
John Buchan. A similar web of transcontinental (and often interconti-
nental) relations is achieved via the inclusion of literary events or meta-
fictional stylistic effects: examples are the creative writing congresses,
storytelling festivals, networks of literary influence and overlapping nar-
ratives found in Lasha Bughadzes Literaturuli ekspresi (The Literature
Express, 2009), D.M. Thomass Swallow (1984), Tvrtko Kulenovis
Istorija bolesti (Natural History of a Disease, 1994) and Italo Calvinos
Se una notte dinverno un viaggiatore (If on a Winters Night a Traveller,
1979). The final technique is the use of continental symbols at points in
a narrative which ostensibly focuses on a single nation, thus reposition-
ing it, if only momentarily, in the wider geopolitical context. Examples
include lists of European national anthems, languages, currencies, salaries,
radio stations, television channels and city centres, as well as allusions to
European train and tram networks, weather systems, library collections,
bird migrations and geological formations.103 Perhaps the most effective
symbol is the map of Europe. Depending on the effect desired, this can
be torn up, reduc[ing] Europe to a heap of shredded paper, as one of
Ognjen Spahis characters does, or rearranged to produce unity, as Elias
Canetti recalls doing as a child to a jigsaw depicting a map of the con-
tinent, when he tossed all the pieces into a heap and then put Europe
together again lightening-fast.104
INTRODUCTION 25
as Ismail Kadares Dosja H (The File on H, 1981), the subject of the next
essay. As Peter Morgan details, Albanias long history of foreign occupa-
tion and domestic tyranny led many nationalist intellectuals to seek an
affirmative, sustaining vision of national identity, one that Kadare tests by
imagining the preservation in Albania of the supposed Homeric-Illyrian
roots of European culture. While this may express the authors own desire
for an alternative to what he considered eastern communism, as well as a
unifying basis for continental identity, the novel cannot sustain the ideal-
ism, finally viewing the foundational myth as illusionary and divisive. This
loss of faith in an ideal (western) Europe is experienced by many eastern
European characters (who admit that the West got inside my brain, that
I carried in my blood the rabies of the West or that [I was] in love with
the West) and equally by postcolonial characters, such as the Egyptian
narrator of Waguih Ghalis Beer in the Snooker Club (1964), who is sure
that Life was in Europe (that is, in western Europe).111 Typically for
such characters, disillusionment is swift: Ghalis narrator, for example,
soon realises that his yearning [f]or dreamed-of Europe, for civiliza-
tion, for freedom of speech, for culture, for life is misguided,
that this was always an imaginary world.112
As Ghali illustrates, reflection on the faiths and practices of imperial
Europe, the third theme of the collection, has been a particularly powerful
current in postcolonial writing. Novels such as Joseph Zobels La rue cases-
ngres (Black Shack Alley, 1950), Albert Memmis Agar (Strangers, 1955),
Vincent Eris The Crocodile (1970), Isabel Allendes La casa de los espri-
tus (The House of the Spirits, 1982), Ahlam Mosteghanemis Dhakirat
al-jasad (Memory in the Flesh, 1985) and Robert Sols Le Tarbouche
(Birds of Passage, 1992) offer insight into the devastation that western
Europe has caused through its multiple conquests, coups and counter-
insurgencies around the world. In the next contribution, Peter Beardsell
explores the postcolonial response in a study of Nstor Taboada Terns
Angelina Yupanki (Angelina Yupanqui, 1992). Set during the sixteenth-
century Spanish conquest of Peru, the novel not only charts some of the
most atrocious acts of early imperial violence but also suggests the psy-
chological consequences of foreign rule for the indigenous population,
which as Beardsell details are still impacting on Latin American identity,
culture and political debate today. Alongside the postcolonial portrait of
physical destruction has been a common antipathy towards the cultural
suprematism of western European empires. While the presumption of cul-
tural authority continued during the Cold War (Kundera was not alone in
28 A. HAMMOND
believing that the European novel [] has no equal in any other civili-
sation), the increasing prestige of postcolonial writing has marked what
Nayantara Sahgal terms a wind of change, an indication that [t]he day
of pure literatures, like pure or ruling races, is over.113 This simultane-
ous challenge to political and cultural privilege is the subject of Esther
Pujolrs-Noguers essay on Ama Ata Aidoos Our Sister Killjoy (1977).
Describing the journeys of a young Ghanaian woman to Germany and
Britain, the novel is an indictment of the cultural effects of neoimperialism,
not least in the way that the protagonists account of her time in the dark
heart of western European rewrites Homers Odyssey (c. 800 BC), the cor-
nerstone of imperial literary culture (as Christa Wolf once wrote, Western
literature begins with the glorification of a war of piracy).114 Revulsion
at western empire, however, is not just a property of postcolonial litera-
ture. Although mainstream fiction still shows traces of imperial nostalgia,
a critique of imperial history from slavery to humanitarian intervention-
ism has long informed the work of European elites, as seen in novels by
Marguerite Duras, Jean Rhys, Hella Haasse, Didier Daeninckx, Jakob
Ejersbo, Bernardo Atxaga, Antnio Lobo Antunes, Lennart Hagerfors,
Arthur Japin, Mia Couto, Sarah May and Lukas Brfuss, as well as in
the work of eastern European writers such as Gabriela Babnik and Iliya
Troyanov.115 At the same time, fiction has shown an increasing concern
with the iniquities of the Ottoman, Habsburg, Russian and Soviet empires.
When placed alongside the corpus of anti-imperial writing from other con-
tinents, novels such as Nikos Kazantzakiss Kapetan Mihalis (Freedom
and Death, 1953), Anton Donchevs Vreme razdelno (Time of Parting,
1964), Mea Selimovis Dervi i smrt (Death and the Dervish, 1966),
Jaan Krosss Keisri Hull (The Czars Madman, 1978) and Aki Ollikainens
Nlkvuosi (White Hunger, 2012) indicate that transnational power is one
of the richest themes in post-1945 literature.
The theme has also appeared in literature that reflects on European
borders. Although relatively new to literary studies, the critical field of
Border Poetics has produced a growing awareness of the intellectual
and aesthetic responses in European and global literatures to territorial
demarcation.116 A common focus is on the personal encounter with either
national frontiers or ideological boundaries. In terms of the latter, the bar-
riers of Fortress Europe are shown to be as insurmountable as those of the
Iron Curtain, with both postcolonial and postcommunist writing charting
the tortuous journeys to what Ukrainian novelist Oksana Zabuzhko calls
the real, Schengen-visa regime Europe.117 At the same time, modern
INTRODUCTION 29
has produced anxieties not only about the consequences of erased borders
but also about the lack of alternatives to the hyper-capitalism of a global
age, features seen in Malcolm Bradburys Dr Criminale (1992), Fabrice
Humberts La Fortune de Sila (Silas Fortune, 2010) and Davide Longos
LUomo Verticale (The Last Man Standing, 2010). More dramatically,
eastern European fiction addressing the post-1989 changesthe so-called
Wenderomanhas charted the collapse of an entire way of life, reveal-
ing how the imagined Europe of wealth, progress and democracy quickly
became an actually existing Europe of boredom, poverty and power-
lessness.120 Novels by Imre Kertsz, Ivan Klma, Peter Pitanek, Victor
Pelevin, Roman Senchin, Andrzej Stasiuk, Ingo Schulze and Jchym
Topol depict not the democratic idyll trumpeted by EU jargon (Citizens
Europe, Peoples Europe), but what David Williams calls the division of
Europe into victors and vanquished, the replacement of the Iron Curtain
with one sewn at Schengen.121 Gordana Crnkovis essay explores this
drift to disillusionment via a study of Tnu nnepalus Piiririik (Border
State, 1993). The novel follows the fortunes of a young gay Estonian
who, during a study year in Paris, experiences both the superficiality of
western consumerism and the audacity of western power, with his treat-
ment at the hands of his lover, a German-French academic, starting to
resemble the EUs high-handed behaviour towards the former eastern
bloc. As scathing as such fiction has been, its disaffection with Euroland
rarely derives from nostalgia for communism. Indeed, to the Cold War
canon of anti-communist writing (by Miha Mazzini, Theodore Odrach,
Vladimir Voinovich, Norman Manea, Brian Moore, Riardas Gavelis) has
been added such widely translated novels as Viivi Luiks Ajaloo ilu (The
Beauty of History, 1991), Fatos Kongolis I Humburi (The Loser, 1992),
Luan Starovas Koha e dhive (The Time of the Goats, 1993), Thomas
Brussigs Helden wie wir (Heroes Like Us, 1995), Rustam Ibragimbekovs
Solnechnoe spletenie (Solar Plexus, 1996) and Daniela Kapitovs Samko
Tle: Kniha o cintorne (Samko Tles Cemetery Book, 2000), all of
which suggest that the western market for anti-communist literature
has not collapsed with the Iron Curtain.122 Nevertheless, another strain
of post-1989 fiction expresses concern about what the end of the Cold
War means for socialism. Per Pettersons Jeg forbanner tidens elv (I Curse
the River of Time, 2008), Wolfgang Hilbigs Das Provisorium (The
Temporary Solution, 2000) and John Bergers trilogy Into Their Labours
(19791990) lament the decline in left-wing sentiment, struggling against
what seems to be the end of hope, [] the final denouement of all grand
INTRODUCTION 31
NOTES
1. Casanova, European Literature: Simply a Higher Degree of Universality?,
in Theo Dhaen and Iannis Goerlandt, eds, Literature for Europe?
(Amsterdam and NewYork: Rodopi, 2009), p.15. For Andersons discus-
sion of the imagined community, see Anderson, Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, new edn (1983;
London and NewYork: Verso, 2006), pp.57.
2. Quoted in Elaine Rusinko, Straddling Borders: Literature and Identity in
Subcarpathian Rus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), p.131.
3. Casanova, European Literature, p.20. Literary studies [] still have not
come up with a true theory of European literature, Ottmar Ette writes: in
fact, they havent even noticed that such a theory is currently missing
(Ette, European Literature(s) in the Global Context: Literatures for
Europe, in Dhaen and Goerlandt, eds, Literature for Europe?, p.155).
4. Lavrin, Studies in European Literature (London: Constable and Co.,
1929), p.58.
5. See Croces European Literature in the Nineteenth Century (1924),
Curtiuss Essays on European Literature (1950), Weigands Critical
Probings: Essays in European Literature (1982), Boyle and Swaless edited
Realism in European Literature (1986), Hewitts edited The Culture of
Reconstruction (1989) and Morettis Atlas of the European Novel (1997).
Similar shortcomings are found in Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Herbert
Lindenberger and Egon Schwarzs edited Essays on European Literature
36 A. HAMMOND
(1972), Edward Timms and David Kelleys edited Unreal City: Urban
Experience in Modern European Literature and Art (1985), Douwe
Fokkema and Elrud Ibschs Modernist Conjectures: A Mainstream in
European Literature (1987), Peter Collier and Judy Daviess edited
Modernism and the European Unconscious (1990) and David Jasper and
Colin Crowders European Literature and Theology in the Twentieth
Century (1990).
6. Gaskell, Landmarks in European Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1999), p.1.
7. Dubravka Juraga and M. Keith Booker, Introduction to Juraga and
Booker, eds, Socialist Cultures East and West: A Post-Cold War Reassessment
(Westport and London: Praeger, 2002), p.5.
8. William Edgerton, Russian Literature, in Bd and Edgerton, eds,
Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature, new edn (1947;
NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1980), p.702.
9. Lubonja, Between the Local and the Universal, in Ursula Keller and Ilma
Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe: What is European about the Literature of
Europe?, new edn (2003; Budapest and New York: Central European
University Press, 2004), p.201.
10. Nooteboom, My Ten Most European Experiences, in Christopher Joyce,
ed., Questions of Identity: A Selection from the Pages of New European
(London and NewYork: I.B.Tauris, 2002), p.134.
11. This is not to say that the more exclusivist approach is not continuing.
Pericles Lewiss edited The Cambridge Companion to European Modernism
(2011) offers only a chapter on the literatures of eastern Europe, while
Michael Bells edited The Cambridge Companion to European Novelists
(2012) and Alexis Grohmann and Caragh Wellss edited Digressions in
European Literature (2011) make barely any reference to them.
12. Travers, An Introduction to Modern European Literature: From Romanticism
to Postmodernism (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1998), p. ix;
Travers, Preface to Travers, ed., European Literature from Romanticism to
Postmodernism: A Reader in Aesthetic Practice (London and New York:
Continuum, 2001), p. xiii.
13. Keller, Writing Europe, in Keller and Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe, p.8.
It matters little whether they are reading in the east or in the west or how
they feel about Europe, Keller continues: as European authors they are
embedded in a cultural context that shapes and contributes to their texts
and that they, as writers, continue to mould through their texts (ibid.,
p.9).
14. Veliki, B-Europe, in Keller and Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe, p.342.
15. zdamar, Guest Faces, in Keller and Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe, p.229.
INTRODUCTION 37
27. Quoted in Timothy Garton Ash, Catching the Wrong Bus?, in Peter
Gowan and Perry Anderson, eds, The Question of Europe (London and
NewYork: Verso, 1997), p.119; Ash, Catching the Wrong Bus?, p.120;
Joll, Europe: A Historians View (Leeds: Leeds University Press, 1969),
p. 5; Hobsbawm, The Curious History of Europe, in Hobsbawm, On
History, new edn (1997; London: Abacus, 1998), p229. As further exam-
ples, Hugh Seton-Watson argues that [t]here have been and are many
different Europes, while Norman Davies illustrates his belief that the
parameters of Europe have always remained open to debate with a literary
reference: In 1794, when William Blake published one of his most unin-
telligible poems entitled Europe: A Prophecy, he illustrated it with a
picture of the Almighty leaning out of the heavens holding a pair of com-
passes (quoted in Kevin Wilson, General Preface to What is Europe, in
Wilson and van der Dussen, eds, History, p.8; Davies, Europe: A History,
new edn (1996; London: Pimlico, 1997), p.8).
28. Laxness, The Fish Can Sing, trans. by Magnus Magnusson (1957; London:
The Harvill Press, 2001), p.169.
29. See W.H.Parker, Europe: How Far?, The Geographical Journal, Vol. 126,
No. 3 (1960), pp.2814.
30. Oscar Halecki and Gonzague de Reynold quoted in ibid., p.289. Feeling
that Eurasia privileges the smaller portion of the landmass, Joseph
Brodsky suggests that the term Asiopa is more representative of the true
ratio of Asia and Europe (Brodsky, Democracy, Granta, Vol. 30 (1990),
p.200).
31. Grndahl, Notes of an Escapist, in Keller and Rakusa, eds, Writing
Europe, p.127; Tobn, The Future of Europe, in Keller and Rakusa, eds,
Writing Europe, p.311.
32. Quoted in Norman Davies, Europe East and West, new edn (2006; London:
Pimlico, 2007), p.10.
33. Quoted in Wintle, Europes Image, p.55.
34. Tommy Wieringa, Caesarion, trans. by Sam Garrett (2007; London:
Portobello Books, 2012), p. 41; Marie NDiaye, Three Strong Women,
trans. by John Fletcher (2009; London: MacLehose Press, 2012), p.253;
Tim Parks, Europa, new edn (1997; London: Vintage, 1998), p.5.
35. Parks, Europa, pp.26, 100.
36. The six original members were Belgium, France, Germany, Italy,
Luxembourg and the Netherlands. These were joined by Britain, Denmark
and Ireland in 1973, by Greece in 1981, by Portugal and Spain in 1986
and by Austria, Finland and Sweden in 1995. In the twenty-first century,
Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta,
Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia joined in 2004, Bulgaria and Romania
joined in 2007 and Croatia joined in 2013.
INTRODUCTION 39
37. Nikolaidis, The Son, trans. by Will Firth (2006; London: Istros Books,
2013), p.78; nnepalu (Emil Tode), Europe, a Blot of Ink, in Keller and
Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe, p.305. As a Czech diplomat lamented, [w]
hat can we do? If we want to become members of the Union, we have to
accept what is decided (Vclav Kuklik quoted in Charlotte Bretherton,
Security Issues in the Wider Europe: The Role of EU-CEEC Relations,
in Mike Mannin, ed., Pushing Back the Boundaries: The European Union
and Central and Eastern Europe (Manchester and NewYork: Manchester
University Press, 1999), p.200).
38. Penkov, Cross Thieves, in Penkov, East of the West, new edn (2011;
London: Sceptre, 2011), p.136. In a jointly authored novel, Garros and
Evdokimov lament the transformation of eastern Europe into presentable
euro-standard euro-real estate, while Perii condemns a neoliberal
Croatia in which all our banks were sold to foreigners (Garros-Evdokimov,
Headcrusher, trans. by Andrew Bromfield (2003; London: Vintage, 2006),
p.58; Perii, Our Man in Iraq, trans. by Will Firth (2007; London: Istros
Books, 2012), pp. 1378). Perhaps the most powerful critique was
expressed via the faux naivet of one of Etel Adnans novels: Europe
knows what its doing, she wrote in the year of Maastricht: The new
Europe will settle every possible question (Adnan, Paris, When Its Naked
(Sausalito: The Post-Apollo Press, 1993), pp.22, 28).
39. Bo Strth, Multiple Europes: Integration, Identity and Demarcation to
the Other, in Strth, ed., Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other
(Brussels: P.I.E.Peter Lang, 2000), p.419; David Wills, When East Goes
West: The Political Economy of European Re-Integration in the Post-Cold
War Era, in Wintle, ed., Culture and Identity, p.158.
40. See Sandra Lavenex, EU External Governance in Wider Europe,
Journal of European Public Policy, Vol. 11, No. 4 (2004), pp.680700.
41. See Karis Muller, Shadows of Empire in the European Union, The
European Legacy, Vol. 6, No. 4 (2001), pp.43951.
42. Weldon, Darcys Utopia, new edn (1990; London: Flamingo, 1991),
p. 250. The antipathy has often shown up in the Euro-baromtre, the
European Commissions survey of public opinion: see Jack Citrin and John
Sides, More than Nationals: How Identity Choice Matters in the New
Europe, in Richard K.Herrmann, Thomas Risse and Marilynn B.Brewer,
eds, Transnational Identities: Becoming European in the EU (Lanham:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), pp. 1659; Michael Bruter, Citizens of
Europe? The Emergence of a Mass European Identity (Basingstoke and
NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp.1349; and David Dunkerley,
Lesley Hodgson, Stanisaw Konopacki, Tony Spybey and Andrew
Thompson, Changing Europe: Identities, Nations and Citizens (London
and NewYork: Routledge, 2002), pp.1205.
40 A. HAMMOND
43. Jacques Delors once said that [y]ou dont fall in love with a common
market; you need something else and Jean Monnet is supposed to have
remarked that if the European construction process had to be started
again afresh, it would be better to start with culture (quoted in Jeremy
MacClancy, The Predicable Failure of a European Identity, in Barrie
Axford, Daniela Berghahn and Nick Hewlett, eds, Unity and Diversity in
the New Europe (Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2000), p. 112; quoted
in Franois Nectoux, European Identity and the Politics of Culture in
Europe, in Axford, Berghahn and Hewlett, eds, Unity and Diversity,
p.149).
44. Quoted in Nectoux, European Identity, p.150.
45. Barrie Axford, Daniela Berghahn and Nick Hewlett, Analysing Unity and
Diversity in the New Europe, in Axford, Berghahn and Hewlett, eds,
Unity and Diversity, p.21.
46. See Cris Shore, Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European
Integration (London and NewYork: Routledge, 2000), pp.5660.
47. Frykman, Belonging in Europe: Modern Identities in Minds and Places,
Peter Niedermller and Bjarne Stoklund, eds, Europe: Cultural Construction
and Reality (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2001), p.15.
48. Pollen, On the European Ingredient in the Text (With a Sidelong Glance
at an Eel in a Bathtub), in Keller and Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe,
p.236.
49. For the definitions and origins of these concepts, see Iver B. Neumann,
Russia and the Idea of Europe: A Study in Identity and International
Relations (London and NewYork: Routledge, 1996), pp.2839.
50. Wallace, Where Does Europe End? Dilemmas of Inclusion and Exclusion,
in Jan Zielonka, ed., Europe Unbound: Enlarging and Reshaping the
Boundaries of the European Union (London and New York: Routledge,
2002), p.79.
51. Crtrescu, Europe Has the Shape of My Brain, in Keller and Rakusa,
eds, Writing Europe, p.63.
52. Quoted in Iver B. Neumann, From the USSR to Gorbachev to Putin:
Perestroika as a Failed Excursion from the West to Europe in Russian
Discourse, in Mikael af Malmborg and Bo Strth, eds, The Meaning of
Europe: Variety and Contention within and among Nations (Oxford and
NewYork: Berg, 2002), p.194.
53. Kundera, The Tragedy of Central Europe (1983, trans. by Edmund
White), The NewYork Review of Books, 26 April 1984, pp.33, 34 (Kunderas
italics).
54. Ibid., pp.37, 34. As David Williams remarks, Kunderas constructions of
Central Europe have seen him taken to task by postcolonial scholars for
othering Russia and attempting to hang a new Iron Curtain further to
INTRODUCTION 41
See also Soueifs The Map of Love (1999), Achebes Things Fall Apart
(1958), Lammings In the Castle of My Skin (1953) and Sahgals Rich Like
Us (1985).
64. Said, Culture and Imperialism, new edn (1993; London: Vintage, 1994),
p. xix.
65. Kiernan, European Empires from Conquest to Collapse, 18151960 (London:
Fontana, 1982), p.208.
66. White, Discourse of Europe, p.68.
67. Favell, Immigration, Migration, and Free Movement in the Making of
Europe, in Jeffrey T. Checkel and Peter J. Katzenstein, eds, European
Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p.167.
68. See Roland Hsu, The Ethnic Question: Premodern Identity for a
Postmodern Europe?, in Hsu, ed., Ethnic Europe: Mobility, Identity, and
Conflict in a Globalized World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010),
p. 2; and Peter A. Poole, Europe Unites: The EUs Eastern Enlargement
(Westport: Praeger, 2003), p.153. This is not to discount intra-European
migration: as the German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck once wrote, Europes
peoples, with or without wars, had always crisscrossed the continent, inter-
mixing and seeking out new homes whenever their one bit of land pro-
duced too little or life became unbearable (Erpenbeck, The End of Days,
trans. by Susan Bernofsky (2012; London: Portobello Books, 2014),
p.50).
69. Quoted in Graham Huggan, Perspectives on Postcolonial Europe,
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Vol. 44, No. 3 (2008), p.243.
70. Quoted in Sandra Ponzanesi and Bolette B.Blaagaard, Introduction: In
the Name of Europe, in Ponzanesi and Blaagaard, eds, Deconstructing
Europe, p.3. In 1990, the Italian writer Umberto Eco was already claiming
that African migration was of greater significance for Europe than the dis-
mantling of the Iron Curtain (see Sidonie Smith and Gisela Brinker-Gabler,
Introduction to Brinker-Gabler and Smith, eds, Writing New Identities:
Gender, Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary Europe (Minneapolis
and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p.6).
71. Balibar, We, The People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship,
trans. by James Swenson (2001; Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2004), pp. x, 39 (Balibars italics).
72. Ponzanesi and Blaagaard, Introduction, p.7.
73. This does not discount the involvement of other European empires. For
example, at the Congress of Berlin (1878) decisions taken collectively by
the Great Powers created what one British politician termed a kind of
protectorate in parts of south-east Europe (Lord Palmerston quoted in
A.L. Macfie, The Eastern Question, 17741923 (London and New York:
Longman, 1989), p.22).
INTRODUCTION 43
74. Andri, Bosnian Chronicle: or The Days of the Consuls, trans. by Celia
Hawkesworth and Bogdan Raki (1945; London: The Harvill Press,
1996), p.68.
75. See Moore, Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward
a Global Postcolonial Critique, PMLA, Vol. 116, No. 1 (2001), p.115.
76. Amongst the colonised or disputed territories are Greenland, Northern
Ireland, the Faroe Islands, the Canary Islands, the Azores, Madeira, Ceuta,
Melilla, Gibraltar, northern Cyprus, Akrotiri, Dhekelia, Nagorno-
Karabakh, Chechnya and Abkhazia.
77. Anthony Pagden, Introduction to Pagden, ed., Facing Each Other: The
Worlds Perception of Europe and Europes Perception of the World (Aldershot
and Burlington: Ashgate, 2000), p. xviii. According to this discourse,
Albert Memmi writes, the whole world [] fell into two. In the upper
part of the globe were the peoples of the North, orderly, clean, controlled
and self-sure, wielders of political and technical power; while lower down
were the peoples of the South, noisy and vulgar (Memmi, Strangers, trans.
by Brian Rhys (1955; NewYork: The Orion Press, 1960), pp.1289).
78. Enzensberger, Europe, Europe: Forays into a Continent, trans. by Martin
Chalmers (1987; NewYork: Pantheon Books, 1989), pp.77, 76.
79. In a study of race and racism in Europe, the British-Caribbean novelist
Caryl Phillips concludes by saying that Europe must begin to restructure
the tissue of lies that continues to be taught and digested at school and at
home for we, black people, are an inextricable part of this small continent
(Phillips, The European Tribe, new edn (1987; London and Boston: Faber
and Faber, 1988), p.129).
80. Neziraj, The Demolition of the Eiffel Tower (Tragicomedy of the Absurd for
Four Actors), trans. by Robert Elsie and Janice Mathie-Heck, Albanian
Literature, http://www.albanianliterature.net/authors_modern2/neziraj
_drama.html (accessed 24 July 2015).
81. See John M. Hobson, Revealing the Cosmopolitan Side of Oriental
Europe: The Eastern Origins of European Civilisation, in Gerard Delanty,
ed., Europe and Asia beyond East and West (London and New York:
Routledge, 2006), p.108.
82. Eberhard Bort, Illegal Migration and Cross-Border Crime: Challenges at
the Eastern Frontier of the European Union, in Zielonka, ed., Europe
Unbound, p.204; Joep Leerssen, Europe from the Balkans, in Michael
Wintle, ed., Imagining Europe: Europe and European Civilisation as Seen
from Its Margins [etc.] (Brussels: P.I.E.Peter Lang, 2008), p.120; Sorin
Antohi, Habits of the Mind: Europes Post-1989 Symbolic Geographies,
in Antohi and Vladimir Tismaneanu, eds, Between Past and Future: The
Revolutions of 1989 and Their Aftermath (Budapest: Central European
University Press, 2000), p.69.
44 A. HAMMOND
83. Quoted in Charles Briffa, The Essential Oliver Friggieri: National Author
of Malta (Msida: Malta University Publishing, 2012), p.386.
84. As Matti Bunzl points out, the physical border is reinforced by racial, reli-
gious and ethnic prejudices, which are now as much a means of fortifying
Europe as a means of expanding Europe abroad (Bunzl, Anti-Semitism
and Islamophobia: Some Thoughts on the New Europe, American
Ethnologist, Vol. 32, No. 4 (2005), p.502).
85. See Peter Andreas, Redrawing the Line: Borders and Security in the
Twenty-First Century, International Security, Vol. 28, No. 2 (2003), p.78.
86. Newman, On Borders and Power: A Theoretical Framework, Journal of
Borderlands Studies, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2003), p.14.
87. Perry Anderson, The Europe to Come, in Gowan and Anderson, eds,
Question of Europe, p.141.
88. Lewycka, Two Caravans, new edn (2007; London: Penguin, 2008),
p.157.
89. Pieterse, Fictions of Europe, Race & Class, Vol. 32, No. 3 (1991), p.5.
90. Quoted in Zygmunt Bauman, Europe: An Unfinished Adventure (Cambridge
and Malden: Polity Press, 2004), p.21.
91. Verhulst, Problemski Hotel, trans. by David Colmer (2003; London and
NewYork: Marion Boyars, 2005), p.74.
92. For examples, see Wintle, Introduction, p.21; Bauman, Europe, pp.734;
Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role
of the Writer in Eastern Europe (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 2006), p.119; and David Willis, When East Goes West:
The Political Economy of European Re-Integration in the Post-Cold War
Era, in Wintle, ed., Culture and Identity, p.149.
93. Quoted in Hannelore Scholz, Life from Its Very Beginning at Its End:
The Unhomely Boundaries in the Works of Bulgarian Author Blaga
Dimitrova, in Brinker-Gabler and Smith, eds, Writing New Identities,
p.256. Of equal relevance is the comment by Hungarian novelist Gyrgy
Konrd that our brains have been cut in half by the armistice line separat-
ing East and West (Konrd, The City Builder, trans. by Ivan Sanders
(1977; Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2007), p.68).
94. Ash, Catching the Wrong Bus?, pp.1201.
95. Ash, Where Is Central Europe Now?, p.396.
96. Habermas and Derrida, Feb. 15, or, What Binds Europeans Together:
Pleas for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in Core Europe, in Daniel
Levy, Max Pensky and John Torpey, eds, Old Europe, New Europe, Core
Europe: Transatlantic Relations after the Iraq War (London and NewYork:
Verso, 2005), p.6.
97. Quoted in Holly Case, Being European: East and West, in Checkel and
Katzenstein, eds, European Identity, pp.11213.
INTRODUCTION 45
Julia Kristeva, The Samurai, trans. by Barbara Bray (1990; New York:
Columbia University Press, 1992), p.216; for bird migrations, see Milan
Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. by Aaron Asher
(1978; London: Faber and Faber, 2000), pp. 2678; and for geological
formations, see Lszl Krasznahorkai, Satantango, trans. by George Szirtes
(1985; London: Atlantic Books, 2013), p.49. For other examples of con-
tinent-wide imagery, see Hans Koning, Acts of Faith, new edn (1986;
London: Alison and Busby, 1990), p.12; Richard Flanagan, The Sound of
One Hand Clapping, new edn (1997; Sydney: Picador, 1998), pp.2278;
Fabrice Humbert, Silas Fortune, trans. by Frank Wynne (2010; London:
Serpents Tail, 2013), p.116; Ivan Klma, Waiting for the Dark, Waiting
for the Light, trans. by Paul Wilson (1993; London: Granta Books, 1998),
pp.14650; Per Petterson, I Curse the River of Time, trans. by Charlotte
Barslund and Per Petterson (2008; London: Vintage Books, 2011),
pp.1301; and Herta Mller, The Land of Green Plums, trans. by Michael
Hofmann (1994; London: Granta Books, 1998), p.108.
104. Spahi, Hansens Children, p. 75; Canetti, The Tongue Set Free:
Remembrance of a European Childhood, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel
(1977; London: Granta Books, 1999), p. 47. For other examples, see
Bohumil Hrabal, Closely Observed Trains, trans. by Edith Pargeter (1965;
London: Abacus, 1990), pp. 523; Marina Lewycka, A Short History of
Tractors in Ukrainian, new edn (2005; London: Penguin, 2006), pp.32,
309; Robert Schofield, The Fig Tree and the Mulberry (Luxembourg:
ditions Saint Paul, 2011), pp.245, 207; Oksana Zabuzhko, The Museum
of Abandoned Secrets, trans. by Nina Shevchuk-Murray (2009; Las Vegas:
AmazonCrossing, 2012), p.138; and Leila Aboulela, The Translator, new
edn (1999; Edinburgh: Polygon, 2008), p.16.
105. Richard Rose, What is Europe? A Dynamic Perspective (New York:
HarperCollins, 1996), p. 2. See Fenoglios Una Questione Privata (A
Private Affair, 1963), Haviarass When the Tree Sings (1979), Chwins
Hanemann (Death in Danzig, 1995), Schofields The Fig Tree and the
Mulberry (2011), Jelineks Die Ausgesperrten (Wonderful Wonderful
Times, 1980), Grasss Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1959),
kvorecks Bassaxofon (The Bass Saxophone, 1967), Adamovichs
Khatynskaya povest (Khatyn, 1972), Andrzeyevskis Popiol i Diament
(Ashes and Diamonds, 1957), Macaulays The World My Wilderness (1950),
Ebejers Requiem for a Malta Fascist (1980), Sartres Les Chemins de la
libert (Roads to Freedom, 19459), Nggs A Grain of Wheat (1967),
Levys Small Island (2004) and Feraouns Le fils du pauvre (The Poor
Mans Son, 1950).
106. Miosz, The Seizure of Power, trans. by Celina Wieniewska (1953; London:
Abacus, 1985), pp.214, 15.
INTRODUCTION 47
107. Levi, The Periodic Table, trans. by Raymond Rosenthal (1975; London:
Abacus, 1986), p.37; Weil, Life with a Star, trans. by Rita Klimova and
Roslyn Schloss (1949; London: Penguin, 2002), p.95; Levi, The Truce, in
Levi, If This is a Man and The Truce, trans. by Stuart Woolf (1958, 1963;
London: Abacus, 1987), p.293. Elie Wiesel also writes that there was a
time, in Europe, when Jews were forbidden to possess a body and that
the earth and sky of Europe had become great, haunted cemeteries
(Wiesel, The Gates of the Forest, trans. by Frances Frenaye (1964; London:
Heinemann, 1967), pp. 223, 120). See also Hans Keilsons Komdie in
Moll (Comedy in a Minor Key, 1947), Hana Demetzs Ein Haus in Bohmen
(The House on Prague Street, 1970), Jorge Sempruns Le Grand Voyage
(The Cattle Truck, 1963), Yoel Hoffmanns Bernhart (Bernhard, 1989)
and Imre Kertszs Sorstalansg (Fateless, 1975).
108. Szyszkowitz, On the Other Side, trans. by Todd C.Hanlin (1990; Riverside:
Ariadne Press, 1991), p. 58; Shteyngart, The Russian Debutantes
Handbook, new edn (2002; London: Bloomsbury, 2004), p.274; trpka,
Oh, Children Smeared with Honey and with Blood, in Keller and Rakusa,
eds, Writing Europe, p.275. See also Voznesenskayas Zvezda Chernobyl
(The Star Chernobyl, 1986), Koestlers The Call-Girls (1972), Wu Mings
54 (2002), Celasins Svart Himmel, Svart Hav (Black Sky, Black Sea,
2007), Dovlatovs Kompromiss (The Compromise, 1981), Bezmozgiss
The Free World (2011), Drrenmatts Der Auftrag (The Assignment,
1986), Wolfs Strfall: Nachrichten eines Tages (Accident/A Days News,
1987), Koningsbergers The Revolutionary (1968) and Chatwins Utz
(1988).
109. See Krasons ar sem djflaeyjan rs (Devils Island, 1983), Ulitskayas
Veselye pokliorony (The Funeral Party, 1998), McEwans The Innocent
(1990), Nabokovs Pnin (1957), Dundys The Dud Avacado (1958),
Sterns Europe (1961), Buschs War Babies (1988) and Konings Acts of
Faith (1986).
110. Stern, Europe, p. 75. Ulitskaya describes the American envy of Old
Europe, with its cultural subtlety [], and also Europes disdainful, but
fundamentally envious, attitude to broad-shouldered, elemental America
(Ulitskaya, The Funeral Party, trans. by Cathy Porter (1998; London:
Indigo, 2000), pp.1023).
111. Ingo Schulze, New Lives: The Youth of Enrico Trmer in Letters and Prose
[etc.], trans. by John E.Woods (2005; NewYork: Alfred A.Knopf, 2008),
p.89; Penkov, Buying Lenin, in Penkov, East of the West, p.59; Andre
Makine, Once upon the River Love, trans. by Geoffrey Strachan (1994;
London: Penguin, 1999), p.176; Ghali, Beer in the Snooker Club, new edn
(1964; London: Serpents Tail, 2010), p.56.
112. Ghali, Beer in the Snooker Club, pp.60, 55.
48 A. HAMMOND
113. Kundera, Sixty-Three Words, in Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. by
Linda Asher (1986; London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p.145; Sahgal, The
Schizophrenic Imagination, in Anna Rutherford, ed., From Commonwealth
to Post-colonial (Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1992), pp.36, 36.
114. Wolf, Travel Report, about the Accidental Surfacing and Gradual
Fabrication of a Literary Personage, in Wolf, Cassandra, trans. by Jan van
Heurck (1983; NewYork: The Noonday Press, 1988), p.155.
115. See Durass Un Barrage contre le Pacifique (A Sea of Troubles, 1950), Rhyss
Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Haasses Oeroeg (The Black Lake, 1948),
Daeninckxs Meurtres pour memoire (Murder in Memoriam, 1984), Ejersbos
Eksil (Exile, 2009), Atxagas Siete Casas (Seven Houses in France, 2009),
Antuness Os Cus de Judas (The Land at the End of the World, 1979),
Hagerforss Valarna i Tanganyikasjn (The Whales in Lake Tanganyika,
1985), Japins De zwarte met het witte hart (The Two Hearts of Kwasi
Boachi, 1997), Coutos O ltimo voo do flamingo (The Last Flight of the
Flamingo, 2000), Mays The Internationals (2003), Brfusss Hundert Tage
(One Hundred Days, 2008), Babniks Suna doba (The Dry Season, 2012)
and Troyanovs Der Weltensammler (The Collector of Worlds, 2006).
116. See Johan Schimanski and Stephen Wolfe, Entry Points: An Introduction,
in Schimanski and Wolfe, eds, Border Poetics De-Limited (Hannover:
Wehrhahn Verlag, 2007), pp.1011.
117. Zabuzhko, Museum of Abandoned Secrets, p.41.
118. Balibar, We, the People of Europe?, p.8.
119. ODowd and Wilson, Frontiers of Sovereignty in the New Europe, in
ODowd and Wilson, eds, Borders, Nations and States: Frontiers of
Sovereignty in the New Europe (Aldershot: Avebury, 1996), p.7.
120. See Williams, Writing Postcommunism, p.128; and Rajendra A.Chitnis,
Literature in Post-Communist Russia and Eastern Europe: The Russian,
Czech and Slovak Fiction of the Changes, 19881998 (London and
NewYork: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), p.1. At the end of the Cold War, the
Europist belief seemed more common amongst eastern Europeans than
western Europeans, a fact captured in Tadeusz Mazowieckis claim that
we bring to Europe our belief in Europe (quoted in Barbara Trnquist-
Plewa, The Complex of an Unwanted Child: The Meanings of Europe in
Polish Discourse, in Malmborg and Strth, eds, Meaning of Europe,
p.236). The point was also crystallised by Ismail Kadare who, in 2008, was
exhorting compatriots to adapt to what he termed Atlantic Europe: If we
pretend to be a European country, he argued, first of all we need to con-
struct Europe within ourselves, and then naturally to integrate in Europe
(quoted in Adrian Brisku, Bittersweet Europe: Albanian and Georgian
Discourses on Europe, 18782008 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn,
2013), p.169).
INTRODUCTION 49
126. With this in mind, Balibar was undoubtedly right to say that [t]he fate of
European identity as a whole is being played out in Yugoslavia, but less
convincing in his claim that Europe has learned the lesson of tragedy
(Balibar, We, the People of Europe?, pp.6, 222). For direct criticism of west-
ern European policy, see Juan Goytisolo, State of Siege, trans. by Helen
Lane (1995; London: Serpents Tail, 2003), p.5; Saa Stanii, How the
Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, trans. by Anthea Bell (2006; London:
Phoenix, 2009), pp.1267; and Armand, Clair Obscur, p.34.
127. See Hanssons Steinhof (Steinhof, 1998), Albaharis Svetski Putnik
(Globetrotter, 2001), Todorovis Diary of Interrupted Days (2009),
Kims Die gefrorene Zeit (Frozen Time, 2008), Sadulaevs Yachechenets!
(I Am a Chechan!, 2006), Voloss Khurramabad (Hurramabad, 2000),
Lefteris A Watermelon, a Fish and a Bible (2010), Makiss The Spice Box
Letters (2015), Bohjalians The Sandcastle Girls (2012), Cercass Soldados
de Salamina (Soldiers of Salamis, 2001) and McGaherns Amongst Women
(1990).
128. For example, see Christian Jungersons Undtagelsen (The Exception,
2004), Nadeem Aslams The Wasted Vigil (2008), Kamila Shamsies Burnt
Shadows (2009) and Jrme Ferraris O jai laiss mon me (Where I Left
My Soul, 2010).
129. Ette, European Literature(s), p.123.
130. McLeod, Fantasy Relationships: Black British Canons in a Transnational
World, in Gail Low and Marion Wynne-Davies, eds, A Black British
Canon? (Basingstoke and NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p.102.
131. Charef, Tea in the Harem, trans. by Ed Emery (1983; London: Serpents
Tail, 1989), p.13; Ulitskaya, Funeral Party, p.99.
132. The gender imbalance in the new Europe is coming under critical scru-
tiny. For example, commentators point out that female Members of the
European Parliament are generally white, middle class women, while
migrant women are not only underrepresented in political frameworks but
also end up having access to a very limited number of positions in society
and in the labour market (Jane Freedman, Women in the European
Parliament, in Axford, Berghahn and Hewlett, eds, Unity and Diversity,
p.298; Helma Lutz, The Limits of European-ness: Immigrant Women in
Fortress Europe, Feminist Review, Vol. 57 (1997), p.96).
133. See Kristevas Les samouras (The Samurai, 1990), Veteranyis Warum das
Kind in der Polenta kocht (Why the Child is Cooking in the Polenta, 1999),
Rabinowichs Spaltkopf (Splithead, 2009), Mllers Reisende auf einem
Bein (Travelling on One Leg, 1992), Honigmanns Eine Liebe aus nichts
(A Love Made out of Nothing, 1991), Plebaneks Nielegalne zwiqzki
(Illegal Liaisons, 2010) and Oksanens Puhdistus (Purge, 2008). For other
examples, see Salman Rushdies The Satanic Verses (1988), Beryl Gilroys
INTRODUCTION 51
TheodoreKoulouris
INTRODUCTION
In Cultural Criticism and Society (1967), Theodor Adorno writes that
even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into
idle chatter and that [t]o write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.1 Far
from calling on poets to lay down their pens, Adorno asserts that nothing,
including the critic, exists outside the material basis of culture; therefore,
to write about the barbarism of the Holocaust should be to acknowledge,
and be prepared to scrutinise, the socio-economic and political conditions
that have bred conflict. And there is certainly no shortage of conflict in
Europe after 1945. Besides the spectrum of the Cold War which haunted
Europe for decades, subsequent short-term and long-term conflicts have
indelibly marked the continent with torment, deprivation and woe: the
break-up of Yugoslavia and the ensuing wars in Kosovo and Bosnia, the
fighting in such former Soviet republics as Georgia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan
and Ukraine and the European engagements in Africa and the Middle
East. The last of these has resulted in scores of thousands of displaced
people seeking refuge on the shores of Italy and Greece, a phenomenon
to which the EU, in blithe obeisance to the dogma of Fortress Europe,
T. Koulouris (
)
College of Arts and Humanities, University of Brighton, Mithras House,
Brighton, BN2 4AT
National confirms that Max was interned, and probably died, in a con-
centration camp at Gurs, in the Pyrenean foothills, in 1942. As the text
draws to its conclusion, the protagonist contemplates the eerie emptiness
of Pariss Gare dAusterlitz and resolves to continue looking for his father,
whose continued absence and uncertain fate signifies the permanence of
loss in Austerlitzs life.
the Nazi atrocities were neither rationalfor being consistent with the
monstrous rationality of the Nazi projectnor irrational, for that would
raise important problems in terms of responsibility and culpability. The
difficulty is further complicated when it comes to narrating the Holocaust.
Any literary portrayal of the event unleashes a host of potential problems
pertaining not only to the aesthetic investment(s) made in and by a liter-
ary work, but also to the legitimacy and objectives of writing literature
about the systematic slaughter of a whole people. Although Dominick
LaCapras meticulous work on the historico-theoretical representations of
the Holocaust mobilises the important semasiological and performative
dimensions of acting out and working through past traumas, it comes
to the conclusion that the Holocaust as a reality goes beyond powers
of both imagination and conceptualization.17 I suggest, therefore, that
to narrate the Holocaust we need to invest in a value which transcends
the borders of rational, irrational or, indeed, counterrational thought.
In so far as there can be no thought beyond the parameters delineated
above, Derridas unthinkability constitutes a useful framework of refer-
ence. Situating the Holocaust in the realms of unthinkability need not
constitute a form of betrayal; rather, it may be seen as an ethico-political
stance which suggests that the act of narrating the Holocaust necessitates a
kind of textual mourning which should, first and foremost, consider itself
impossible. As such, a notion of unthinkability which, in tandem, generates
a kind of impossible textual mourning may be said to encapsulate Diners
counterrationality and LaCapras sustained theoretical explorations of
working through trauma, whilst also succeeding in highlighting the speci-
ficity of the Jewish historico-political experience from the 1920s onwards.
What is especially noteworthy about Austerlitz is that Sebald resists nar-
rating the Holocaust itself. Instead, he offers an oblique commentary on
Europes past and present with a view to situating the atrocities of World
War Two within the socio-historical framework that produced them. The
novel starts with a scene in Antwerp Zoo, specifically in the Nocturama,
the zoos enclosure for night animals, which is redolent of the dark eeriness
of what is to come (lavenir) in the dark enclosure of the Terezn ghetto
that will slowly come to blight Austerlitzs memory. The first sixty-odd
pages set out to establish that the industrial carnage of the Second World
War and the Holocaust did not happen in a socio-political vacuum, but
was the upshot of over two hundred years of colonial and military expan-
sion. After the Nocturama scene comes Sebalds first foray into European
imperial history as he describes the building of Antwerps central station.
58 T. KOULOURIS
The clock is placed some twenty metres above the only baroque element in
the entire ensemble, the cruciform stairway which leads from the foyer to
the platforms, just where the image of the emperor stood in the Pantheon
[]; as a governor of a new omnipotence it was set even above the royal
coat of arms and the motto Eendracht maakt macht [Union is Power].21
power, finance and major industrial conglomerates. And let us not forget
that whole peoples are still demonised for either refusing to adhere to,
or keep up with, the socio-economic vision of the EU, or for trying to
flee from the conflicts in Africa and the Middle East, the seeds of which
western Europe itself was instrumental in sowing.54 Austerlitz reminds the
reader that western Europes state-of-the-art central stations and transport
infrastructure, its magnificent architecture and fascination with open bor-
ders, are in place to facilitate flows of financial, industrial and commercial
capital. When it comes to flows of ordinary people, or indeed of peoples
democratic will, insurmountable barriers are routinely raised.55
Our concern with history, argues Sebald in Austerlitz, is a concern
with pre-formed images already imprinted on the brain, images at which
we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, some-
where as yet undiscovered.56 There is no doubt that history and truth in
contemporary Europe are so often left to transnational media networks,
to financial technocrats and to an array of governmental experts. As
such, the principles which have underpinned one of the major strands
of European thought since the Enlightenmentsocial justice, freedom,
respect for the democratic process and for human rightsare treated as
unaffordable frivolities that have no place in the relentlessly financialised
reality of homo economicus.57 That being said, in reading Austerlitz we
realise that beyond the economic reasons for the persecution of the Jews
lay a deep socio-cultural (if not metaphysical) belief in the indescribable
genetic evil that the Jewish people were supposed to contain.58 Far from
considering such matters unthinkable in the twenty-first century, it seems
that contemporary Europe is once again preoccupied with, and seeks to
protect itself from, similar evils, be they cultural, religious, economic or,
indeed, genetic.59 Austerlitz warns us that this is the worst possible sce-
nario for Europe and the wider world.60
NOTES
1. Adorno, Cultural Criticism and Society, in Adorno, Prisms, trans. by
Samuel M.Weber (1955; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), p.34.
2. For a comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon, see Amnesty International,
The Human Cost of Fortress Europe: Human Rights Violations against
Migrants and Refugees at Europes Borders (2014), Amnesty International,
http://www.amnesty.eu/content/assets/Reports/EUR_050012014_
Fortress_Europe_complete_web_EN.pdf (accessed 2 September 2015).
66 T. KOULOURIS
32. For an interesting elaboration on this point, see Katja Garloff, The Task of
the Narrator: Moments of Symbolic Investiture in W.G.Sebalds Austerlitz,
in Scott D. Denham and Mark Richard McCulloch, eds, W.G. Sebald:
History, Memory, Trauma (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006), pp.15769.
33. Sebald, Austerlitz, pp.33142.
34. Ibid., p.332.
35. Ibid., p.331.
36. Ibid., pp.337, 338, 3412.
37. See Sebald, Air War and Literature: Zrich Lectures, in Sebald, On the
Natural History of Destruction, trans. by Anthea Bell (1999; London:
Penguin, 2004), pp.3106). Whilst generally well received, especially after
Sebalds untimely death in 2001, a number of commentators criticised
Sebalds tone, in so far as it raised a number of problematic issues pertaining
to collective memory and the task of works of literature vis--vis social issues
of magnitude: specifically, the Holocaust in parallel examination of the suf-
fering of German civilians during the Allied bombings (see, for example,
Andreas Huyssen, Rewritings and new Beginnings: W.G.Sebald and the
Literature on the Air War, in Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests
and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003),
pp. 13857; and Simon Ward, Responsible Ruins? W.G. Sebald and the
Responsibility of the German Writer, Forum for Modern Language Studies,
Vol. 42, No. 2 (2006), pp.18396).
38. Derrida, Shibboleth, in Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, eds, The
Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2003), p.307.
39. See Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century
19141991, new edn (1994; London: Abacus, 1995), pp.369.
40. See Stjepan G.Metrovi, The Balkanization of the West: The Confluence of
Postmodernism and Postcommunism (London and New York: Routledge,
1994), p.32.
41. See Elena Crespi, Matthias Sant-Ana and Sylvain Aubry, Downgrading
Rights: The Cost of Austerity in Greece (Paris: FIDH, 2014), pp.46. A num-
ber of thinkers have written very eloquently about the issue of neoliberal-
isms democratic deficit: see, for example, Wendy Browns Undoing the
Demos: Neoliberalisms Stealth Revolution (2015) and Tariq Alis The
Extreme Centre: A Warning (2015).
42. Lapavitsas, Profiting without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All
(London: Verso, 2013), p.290.
43. In other words, this is a form of financial centralism which favours the EUs
core at the expense of Europes peoples, especially the peoples of the so-
called European periphery. For example, western European countries with
grave financial problems include Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain which,
TRAUMATIC EUROPE 69
MetkaZupani
After the Second World War, especially between 1948 and 1989, European
social and political life was dominated by the Cold War. In the West, finan-
cial support from the USA aimed at warding off the expansionist tenden-
cies of the Soviet Union, while the Truman Doctrine (1947) reaffirmed
US leadership of the free world. During his March 1946 visit to the
USA, Churchill addressed the problem of divided Europe and used the
term Iron Curtain to describe the increasing separation between East
and West. The appearance of the Cominform (1947), the Prague coup
(1948) and the Soviet blockade of Berlin (1948) encouraged the forma-
tion of the Brussels Pact in April 1948 and the creation of NATO in April
1949. The USSR took control of the countries beyond the Iron Curtain
East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania,
Albania and Yugoslaviaand, with the exception of Yugoslavia, which split
with Moscow in 1948, imposed dictatorial systems maintained through
repression. Soviet rule in the satellite countries went through a number
of stages between the death of Stalin and the revolutions of 1989. The
post-Stalinist era, which began with Khrushchevs speech at the Twentieth
Party Congress in 1956, promised a less repressive society, yet dissent was
M. Zupani (
)
Department of Modern Languages and Classics, University of Alabama, 870246,
Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0246, USA
not Lucas, as the towns people tend to believe? Can Claus be entrusted
with the notebooks, a testimony Lucas left of the time he did not share
with his brother? The anagram of the double name, Claus-Lucas, certainly
contributes to the increasing sense that the twin brothers are a single con-
sciousness, one that has been torn in two by Cold War division. Is one to
believe Clauss stories about his 30 years spent on the other side and his
reasons for not wanting to stay there?13 In a statement that again shows
the divide between East and West, as well as the disillusionment of an
expatriate, Claus declares that he has lived in a society based on money.
There is no place for questions about life.14 His acute awareness of the
environmental problems in the western town he lived in undermines any
idyllic perception that people may have of the free world:
At one time, when I first came, it was a charming small town with a lake,
forest, low old houses, and many parks. Now it is cut off from the lake by
a highway, its forest has been decimated, its parks have disappeared, and
tall buildings have made it ugly. [] The old bistros have been replaced by
soulless restaurants and fast-food places where people eat quickly, sometimes
even standing up.15
At the end of The Proof, Claus T., aged fifty, holder of a valid passport and
a thirty-day tourist visa, is being held in the prison of the town of K. and
is about to be repatriated.16 The most incriminating documents are the
notebooks written in the same handwriting as his own, which means that
there is no proof that their real author, Lucas, actually exists.17
In her in-depth analysis of the trilogy, Martha Kuhlman emphasises
the political dimension of the novels and the architecture of a fictional
labyrinth that can be read as a parable for Europe during the Cold War
years.18 In her words, the division between Eastern and Western Europe
appears through the model of an unnamed Central European country
that has endured the three successive shocks of Nazism, Socialism and
Capitalism.19 Kuhlman posits that readers, instead of trying to identify
the countries whose histories may have generated these narratives, should
view the novels in a broader sense, since they hold a wider relevance
to a number of countries on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain.20 The
novels address more than one clear-cut situation, as the reader is left in
the unsettling position of negotiating and deciding between conflicting
versions of the same event.21 Nevertheless, Kuhlman finds a clear focus in
the trilogy on the way that life in Cold War Europe continually inclined
76 M. ZUPANI
towards the frontier that divided it. In The Notebook, the pressures on the
unnamed twins to flee the country produces movement from the East to
the West, whereas in the second novel, The Proof, the energies are directed
from the West to the East, with one of the brothers, Lucas, keeping track
of events in the East while expecting the return of Claus, the twin who
managed to cross the border. In her analysis of The Third Lie, Kuhlman
explores the dramatic tensions in a post-1989 East that is again gravitating
towards the West, but in a different way than apparent during the Cold
War. Claus is on the verge of being expelled from the country as his visa
expires. The situation becomes even more complicated in a final encounter
with his supposed twin, who pretends not to recognize his brother []
and turns him away.22 This is where Kuhlman brings in Freuds notion of
the uncanny, the Unheimlich, to explain that [t]he elements of the scene
are always the same, but their placement and disposition shift: there is one
child or two, a border between East and West, and a man who must cross
a mine field to escape to the other side; all the rest is a matter of inter-
pretation, depending upon which perspective we occupy.23 Kuhlman con-
cludes that she reads the changing and contradicting narrative elements of
the novels as a warning of how malleable the past actually is, especially
in Central European countries who must reconstruct their history after
decades of Communist subterfuge, while also attempting to memorialize
the victims of the Second World War.24
More specifically, the trilogy analyses the atmosphere of violence
and repression that characterised the Cold War. The parabolic nature of
Kristfs prose is particularly effective for capturing the uncertainty of
truth in a period defined by heightened clandestinity, propaganda, sus-
picion and paranoia. In The Third Lie, situations abound where nothing
is stable, everything may be a lie and there is hardly any way to discover
whether there is truth to be found in the complicated relationships. The
novel initially reverts to a first-person narrative by the prisoner, Claus, who
uses his time in confinement to write, although the content of his writing
may be held against him. His hesitations over the true stories he wishes
to relate, as opposed to an imagined reality that may be less painful, are
certainly a mise en abyme for Kristfs own writing dilemmas.25 Reliving
his past through his notes, Claus explains that his childhood was spent in
hospitals and that he was in a coma at the beginning of the war. After the
bombing of a rehabilitation centre in the area, the boy was placed with an
elderly widow whose description was found at the end of The Proof. In The
Third Lie, the official notice, Mrs. V., ne Maria Z., is deceased without
GOTA KRISTFS EUROPE 77
heirs, is an indication of the old womans demise; at this time the boy is
almost 15 and alone, with no brother by his side (378). The period must
be that of the early 1950s, as references are made to a repressive communal
social system that paradoxically leaves the boy homeless after the authori-
ties reclaim the putative grandmothers house. At this point, he accepts to
guide across the border an unknown man who inevitably perishes in a land-
mine explosion, allowing the boy to cross over safely. The situation from
The Notebook is faithfully repeated here, but the man is not the father and
there is again no mention of a brother. In a flash-forward, after an absence
of nearly forty years, Claus dreams in the prison of a brother whom he
kills, a fratricide that finally makes them inseparable (367). Metaphorically,
this murdera dream, a nightmarerelates to all the killings in this coun-
try and to the harrowing obligation placed on the living to remember
the dead. In Clauss own writing within the novel, the discussions about
the brother suggest that the latter has always been a mental figment that
allows Claus to endure the unbearable solitude (395). If we are to read
the trilogy as a parable for the Cold War, we understand Clauss tribula-
tions as an example of the (inner) conflicts on both sides of the political
divide: the dream of closeness and understanding in opposition to a sys-
tem that continues to insist on continental division. This comes to light
when the authorities do not believe in the authenticity of the notebooks
and see Claus as one of the emigrants who have now returned in search
of belonging (398). The pompous affirmation by the officials that [o]
ur country currently belongs to the free world is a clear reference to the
political changes of 1989 (398). But Claus does not care about this appar-
ent freedom, doubting its reality and claiming that he has returned home
to die.
The events from the past continue to surface as the novel, now in a
third-person discourse, reveals a story that has not yet been told in the
trilogy. On the western side of the border, soldiers once rescued a boy
who crossed no mans land by walking over the corpse of a deceased man.
He pretends to be Claus T.Age eighteen, but since he has no identifica-
tion papers, the truth about him may never come to light (404). As we
are told:
The child signs the statement, in which there are three lies.
The man he crossed the frontier with was not his father.
The child is not eighteen, but fifteen.
His name is not Claus. (405)
78 M. ZUPANI
The third lie on the list offers a key to interpreting the novels title. In order
to survive in a new environment, an emigrant assumes a new identity. A nec-
essary lie may initially facilitate integration, but may also have harsh reper-
cussions when the person returns to the home country, especially to a place
like Hungary, where suspicion was an important part of bureaucratic repres-
sion even after the apparent change of the system. In this context, Clauss
doppelgnger, or possibly his brother (now said to be an important poet
who writes under the penname Klaus Lucas), navigates between his own
lies and the different identities he assumes, often with regard to outer cir-
cumstances, so that he comes to develop a duality within himself. Symbolic
of the larger political dimensions, the situation becomes even more intricate
when the insider (Lucas or Klaus Lucas) is to face the intruder (Claus) and
decides to forge yet another set of lies to preserve his status.
In his life in the West, lies have been a necessary dimension for the
presumed Claus. He wants to use the notebooks he has brought with
him to become a writer in the language of his new country. (Clearly, at
this juncture, we cannot trust any longer the information presented about
the notebooks in The Proof.) By his avowal, in one version of the note-
books Claus has written [s]tories that arent true but might be (410).
His need to sufficiently master the adoptive language, in order to share
his memories, mirrors Kristfs own experience in Neuchtel: while she
never translated her poetry from Hungarian into French, she must have
wondered whether the language community in which she lived after 1956
would accept the realities of her native country as she transformed them
into French in her fiction. From her writing and her interviews, it is obvi-
ous that she followed closely the political events in Hungary, while also
maintaining a detached or rather disenchanted attitude close to that of her
characters, one that bordered on emotional anaesthesia, doubtless a way of
dealing with the consequences of the trauma that we find in her novels.26
After Claus is brought to the embassy of his adopted western country,
the embassy officials pursue the quest for the presumed brother, finally
locating a Klaus T., with a K., the important poet (412). The separate
narratives now seem to be moving closer together, as Claus recognises the
old house in which he lived until he was four years old, and then dreams
of becoming all of the characters we have encountered so far: Claus, Lucas
and Klaus. Part Two of the book then offers a first-person narrative from
Klauss perspective. He admits to having had a twin brother, Lucas, whose
possible return after 50 years of absence could trigger major psychological
reactions in the woman with whom Klaus shares his house, reopening the
terrible wound of her involuntary infanticide (421). The two men will
GOTA KRISTFS EUROPE 79
meet, but it takes several pages before we discern the truth behind a series
of lies Klaus tells his unwelcome guest. Klaus invents a married life, with
twin grandsons, Klaus and Lucas, living in the same town, K., where the
presumed brother had recently been imprisoned (429). With the emi-
grant brothers manuscripts left behind, the encounter triggers Klauss
desire to write his own testimony of past events.
At this point, we learn a number of things about the familys history.
The father, a journalist recently drafted into the army and already dressed
in a uniform, wanted to abandon his family for another woman pregnant
with his child. The desperate wife grabbed his pistol and killed him, while
inadvertently hurting Lucas, then four years old. For some years, Klaus
lived with Antonia, his fathers lover, and his half-sister Sarah, from whom
he was later separated because of an incestuous episode.27 Towards the
end of the war, an eight-year-old Klaus discovered the grave of his father,
with the name Klaus-Lucas T. inscribed on it. He unsuccessfully searched
for his brother at a bombed rehabilitation centre in a remote country
town where Antonia had taken the children. Nobody saw a connection
between Lucas and a very poor limping boy who played harmonica in bars
and lived with a grandmother. Because Klaus blamed Antonia for all his
misfortunes, no recognition or reconciliation between them was possible.
He then began to take care of his mother, who had been living in the old
house after her release from a psychiatric hospital, all that time valorising
her absent twin son and blaming herself for the accident. To earn a liv-
ing as a young boy, Klaus distributed papers, later becoming a typesetter
and starting to write poems that he would eventually publish. Although
typesetting ultimately brought about saturnism, a disease of printers and
typesetters, he was able to experience at first-hand the gulf between social
reality and the political slogans in the newspapers (474). His critique of
the regimes prosecution and brainwashing of the population includes a
reference to the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary:
returned to the capital at the age of 18, Klaus made no allowances for
personal fulfilment and rejected all further contact with her. In a situation
that mirrored the impossible brotherly connection between Claus and his
twin, the only way that Klaus could confide in his absent brother Lucas
was through an inner monologue:
I tell him that if hes dead hes lucky and Id like very much to be in his
place. I tell him that he got the better deal, that it is I that is pulling a greater
weight. I tell him that life is totally useless, that its nonsense, an aberration,
infinite suffering, the invention of a non-God whose evil surpasses under-
standing. (471)
After 1989, the horrors of the Cold War cannot easily be overcome or
consigned to the past. In the last chapter, we return to more recent times,
with the final separation between the alleged brothers; in Klauss words,
Lucas came back and left again. I sent him away. He left me his unfin-
ished manuscript. I am trying to complete it (477). The completion of the
alleged manuscript requires the involvement of both brothers, regardless of
all the separations and obstacles caused by the Iron Curtain. Symbolically
speaking, literature is again the bridge between eastern and western Europe
that may bring about some mutual understanding. Tragically, however, we
learn that Claus T. [] committed suicide today [], just as he was being
repatriated (477). Although Klaus has been waiting for Lucas his whole
life, he finally doesnt accept the possible reunion, which remains unreach-
able, unattainable, while still sought after. On the last page of the novel,
in a letter to Klaus that is now signed Lucas, Claus asks to be buried next
to his parents. Klaus does not consider the man to be his real brother, but
is almost ready to replace the name Claus with Lucas and even plots his
own possible suicide in a manner that mirrors the other mans demise. In
short, the (non-)identity of the twin brothers is determined by their dop-
pelgnger. Is Klaus really the one who remains in the country? Has Lucas
become a double of his own brother by choosing the name of Claus, a
perfect anagram of Lucas, as we saw earlier? Or is Claus simply an impos-
ter, now a citizen of a country run by money who returns to his homeland
to die? The thread that connects these complementary yet antagonistic
characters, while also dividing them, are the notebooks that Claus brings
to Klaus, asking him to finish them. The brothers, both on the verge
of death due to self-poisoning through alcohol and cigarettes, may be a
metaphor for the way that Cold War society affected the inner dimensions,
GOTA KRISTFS EUROPE 81
the ones that are never disclosed. In the home country, the continual
violence of war and dictatorship and the lies disseminated by the regime
have moulded the destructive behaviour of the brothers, who internalise
the political and military brutality of their times. As the only optimistic
feature of the trilogy, writing serves as a modification of reality and as a
challenge to all ideological positions, helping individuals to survive under
dire conditions, regardless of the lies it may also convey.
A recent British reprint of The Notebook contains an afterword by the
Slovene philosopher Slavoj iek, first published in The Guardian in
2013.28 iek sees The Notebook as a novel through which I discovered
what kind of a person I really want to be []: an ethical monster with-
out empathy, doing what is to be done in a weird coincidence of blind
spontaneity and reflexive distance, helping others while avoiding their dis-
gusting proximity.29 To ieks mind, [t]he young twins are thoroughly
immoralthey lie, blackmail, killyet they stand for authentic ethical
naivety at its purest and, in doing so, suggest a preferable world in which
sentimentality would be replaced by a cold and cruel passion.30 ieks
typically ironic, even arrogant, position may not correspond to what
Kristf had in mind when she wrote the trilogy, or any of her other novel-
istic or theatrical works. Yet iek manages to capture the way that, for the
characters in the trilogy, only this detached cruelty allows them to survive
in a fragmented, war-torn Europe, in which the belief in human goodness
is impossible to maintain. In the face of the unbearable human suffering
of twentieth-century Europe, Kristf does not suggest that belonging is
likely or indicate that it is possible to survive either the totalitarianism
of the Cold War or the upheavals that followed it. Despite her distance
from the feminist movements of her times, gota Kristf, with a strong
and independent voice, claimed the right to speak out about her country
while living elsewhere and using a language she had acquired as a grown
woman. But the hiatus, as we have seen, was never mended.
NOTES
1. Davies, Europe, p.1103.
2. See Judt, Postwar, pp.60810.
3. She alludes to the conditions of her Neuchtel life in her novel Hier
(Yesterday, 1997).
4. Many Algerian-born women writers were schooled in French and quite
naturally gravitated towards France to further their education. Such is the
case of Assia Djebar, the first Arab woman to become a member of
82 M. ZUPANI
Acadmie Franaise and the author of Femmes dAlger dans leur apparte-
ment (Women in Algiers in Their Apartment, 1980). Lela Sebbar, born to
an Algerian father and a French mother, often wrote about her heritage, as
seen in Je ne parle pas la langue de mon pre (I Dont Speak My Fathers
Language, 2003). Also relevant here is Julia Kristeva, originally from
Bulgaria, whose novel Les samoura (The Samurai, 1990) describes the life
of an intellectual raised behind the Iron Curtain who arrives in France and
has to adapt to a highly strung avant-garde environment.
5. In one of her interviews with Erica Durante, Kristf states that it took her
three years to write The Notebook, a relatively short novel of about 180
pages, because of the in-depth corrections and continuous fine-tuning
(Durante, Entretien dErica Durante Agota Kristof, Vivre, pome indit
dAgota Kristof: Introduction de Marie-Thrse Lathion, Viceversa: Revue
suisse dchanges littraires, Vol. 2 (2008), p.32).
6. See Durante, Agota Kristof: Du commencement la fin de lcriture,
Recto/Verso, No. 1 (2007), pp.16.
7. See the writers avowals about this period quoted in Manuela Cavicchi,
Il ny a que le prsent: la maledizione dellesilio nelle opera di Agota
Kristof, Altre modernit/Otras Modernidades/Autres Modernits/Other
Modernities, No. 2 (2009), pp.1756.
8. Kristf, The Proof, in Kristf, The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie, trans.
by Alan Sheridan, David Watson and Marc Romano (1986, 1988, 1991;
NewYork: Grove Press, 1997), p.259.
9. Ibid., p.261.
10. Ibid., p.285.
11. Ibid., p.287.
12. Ibid., p.324.
13. Ibid., p.259.
14. Ibid., p.334.
15. Kristf, The Third Lie, in Kristf, The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie,
p.367.
16. Kristf, Proof, p.336.
17. By this stage, the only fact we can be sure of is the former existence of the
deceased grandmother, Maria Z., wife of V., who during the war []
was entrusted with the care of one or more children (ibid., p.338).
18. Kuhlman, The Double Writing of Agota Kristof and the New Europe,
Studies in 20th Century Literature, Vol. 27, No. 1 (2003), p.122. This
article matches quite closely the tenor of the present essay, while future
investigation might make use of volumes such as Marta Di Benedetos La
question de lidentit dans luvre dAgota Kristof (2008) and Tijana
Miletics European Literary Immigration into the French Language:
Readings of Gary, Kristof, Kundera and Semprun (2008).
GOTA KRISTFS EUROPE 83
ChristophParry
C. Parry (
)
Faculty of Philosophy, German Language and Literature,
University of Vaasa, 65200 Vaasa, Finland
its writing and with respect to its contents. It deals with a heterogeneous
group of exiles and emigrants in NewYork in the late 1940s, all of them
busy imagining their own versions of Europe. But before presenting the
writer, her attitude to Europe and her novel in detail, I shall briefly discuss
some traditions and pitfalls in the business of imagining Europe.
According to Bo Strth, [n]ations and other kinds of belonging are
constructed socially. In the process of social construction the discursive
character takes on essential proportions. In other words essentialization is
the goal of social construction.3 If we accept this proposition then we can
say that, in the case of most modern nations, the goal has to a large extent
been reached.4 The predominance of the nation as an object of allegiance
over the regional, religious and ethnic community is of relatively recent
origin and dependent on certain historical conditions connected with
modernity. It was the development of civil society with a public sphere
not wholly dependent on the institutions of power that fundamentally
promoted the idea of national identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Functioning public spheres emerge gradually within society and
their importance lies in the fact that they represent the society as a whole
rather than solely the state, thus helping to forge a sense of community.
As Jrgen Habermas has long emphasised, literary life played a consider-
able part in establishing the public sphere during the evolution of mod-
ern nations in Europe.5 Not only did it provide a forum for debating the
mores and values of society but individual literary works themselves could
be instrumental in imagining national communities.6
One current weakness of the European project, as compared with the
development of nation-states, is the continents comparatively underde-
veloped civil society. In particular there are no genuinely European parties
and no widely visible, politically active transnational European media.7 In
this situation literature might not carry the same weight in the European
project as it did in the national projects of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, but it is certainly present. In fact literature in Europe has always
had a double allegiance. While it has had an indisputable function in
strengthening individual nations, not least through its reinforcement of
national languages, it has also upheld a broader European heritage that is
far older than the nation-state, thus consolidating a continent-wide cul-
tural space.8 And it is a fact of European literary culture that continental
and national identities have coexisted throughout the modern era. Just as
there are national canons so there is an embarrassingly Eurocentric canon
of World Literature which serves as a point of reference for national lit-
BETWEEN YEARNING ANDAVERSION 87
eratures. In the same way that individual works can partake in imagining
the nation they can contribute to imagining the broader cultural space of
Europe. Obvious examples from the beginning of the twentieth century
are Romain Rollands Jean-Christophe (19041912) and Thomas Manns
great philosophical novel, Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain, 1924).9
How is Europe imagined in such texts? Obviously, by analogy to national
imaginings, reference can be made to foundational myths and to a long
common history which, while seldom peaceful, generally revolved around
the same recurring issues. Indeed, the fact that we recognise Europe at
all as a coherent and identifiable space is the result of its cultural and reli-
gious history.10 Historically and culturally European nations have enough
in common to provide the foundation for a common identity, although
this identity cannot be defined too narrowly. The long-standing and wide-
spread narrative that explains Europe in terms of a synthesis of Judaic,
Greek/Hellenic and Christian influences may be intellectually appealing
for some, but has never been sufficient to prevent bitter strife between
Europes component dynasties, religions, ethnicities and nations and is
also far too remote from contemporary life to command practical alle-
giance.11 Furthermore, this heritage is no longer specific to Europe, but
is shared by many societies across the globe. Features that seem to define
what is European also serve as attributes of such contentious, and often
conflated, categories as Christendom or so-called western civilisation.
Equating European civilisation with Christianity gives a false picture, for it
not only denies the Jewish and Islamic contributions but also ignores the
characteristically European process of secularisation that has been going
on for centuries.
A second way of imagining Europe is to focus on its inclusions and
exclusions: in short, to look at Europe through its others. Since the
Crusades the Islamic world has been a major source of alterity and, despite
the term for the collective self evolving in the late Middle Ages from the
religiously defined Christendom to the more secular and more specifi-
cally geographical Europe, the oriental Other remained a target of the
European imperialist enterprise.12 Colonised regions such as Africa and
Asia were found equally useful for setting off the supposed civilisation of
(western) Europe, although tended to provoke imperial competition rather
than continental unity.13 Ironically, if Europeans had difficulty in seeing
themselves as a coherent entity, they were certainly seen as a single aggres-
sor by the colonised peoples.14 From the perspective of Europes occidental
other (that is, the New World as created by European emigrants), Europe
88 C. PARRY
has also come to be seen in the singular, despite the folkloristic attachment
of many Americans to the respective lands of their ethnic roots.15 It was to
America that the largest group of emigrants and exiles from Europe went
before and during World War Two, and it is America that serves as a setting
for Hilde Spiels European novel.
Neither the recourse to foundational historical narratives nor the delin-
eation of Europe in opposition to its others seems to offer an adequate way
of building up a viable European identity today. Both approaches share
the essentialising properties that marked the nation-building process of
the nineteenth century. But the fact that the nation-state is still the norm
does not mean that it is destined to remain so for all times, especially since
many of the conditions that privileged it have begun to erode since the
middle of the twentieth century. On the one hand economic globalisation
has undermined national sovereignty in Europe and forced governments
into international cooperation in order to maintain at least a modicum of
authority in the face of rival global actors. On the other hand the presence
of sizeable immigrant populations in larger cities severs the traditional tie
between ethnic homogeneity and specific geographical location that had
once driven nationalist projects. In this respect, as Gerard Delanty points
out, [n]ational identity has ceased to fulfil the function of social integra-
tion; the nation no longer fits into the sphere of the state, providing the
latter with an identity and cultural legitimation.16 This being the case, it
is unlikely that the kind of heroic grand narrative that formerly legitimised
the nation can be effective in the case of Europe, especially since neither
the experience of World War Two nor the grudging process of decolonisa-
tion show Europe in a heroic light.
Clearly, different discourses of legitimation are now called for. Recent
writing on European identity has therefore started to focus on cosmo-
politanism as a way of conceptualising what it means to be European. As
commentators have shown, cosmopolitanism is useful for illustrating the
frequent rootlessness of identity in contemporary Europe, as well as for
discussing allegiances to Europe which operate in terms of process rather
than place.17 This view fits in well with the reality of literary production.
The authors most likely to reflect on European and transnational identity
are those who for one reason or another have direct experience of living
in different countries and whose work falls into the category of literatures
without a fixed abode, in Ottmar Ettes phrase.18 The cosmopolitan is
at home everywhere and at the same time is everywhere a foreigner and
as such can meet with the same kind of prejudice that traditionally con-
BETWEEN YEARNING ANDAVERSION 89
New Statesman, and also spent time with her husband in Berlin. She thus
had first-hand experience of the early Cold War in Europe which forms an
important part of the background of The Darkened Room.
The novel is set in NewYork in the late 1940s when American politics
was increasingly overshadowed by the Cold War and McCarthyism. At
the time of publication, Spiel had little experience of the USA.In 1952
she made a relatively short tour of the country with her husband, spend-
ing some two weeks in NewYork. There, and in Los Angeles where she
visited Thomas Mann, she met a large number of migrs, many of them
troubled by the dilemma of having permanently left the Old World and
of being unable to acclimatise to America.25 This is precisely the dilemma
Spiel deals with in her novel. The darkened room of the title is the home
of the main protagonist, Lisa, who regularly holds a kind of salon for a
mixed collection of European expatriates. Symbolically Lisa usually keeps
the blinds of her room closed, keeping out not only the light but also
any outside influence. Lisa is an extravagant non-practicing Austrian Jew,
whose personal moral code is anything but conventional and who has left
behind her a trail of ex-lovers, some of whom are among her guests.26
Lisa survived Fascism and most of the war by hiding in Italy where she
had dealings with the black market and developed a drug problem before
being brought to America by her future husband Jeff Curtis, an officer
and son of a Protestant pastor from Indiana.
The main plot of the novel tells of Lisas gradual decline and death
from the perspective of the first-person narrator, Lisas maid, the Latvian
Lele, who has lost both parents in the war, one killed by the Nazis, the
other by the Russians. Only one short chapter is devoted to Leles experi-
ences before arriving in America with her young fatherless son. Lele had
worked for the German occupational forces in Latvia and, at the end of the
war, she found employment as a maid in the household of a British officer
in Austria. In America she is briefly employed by an unqualified Jewish
psychiatrist, Kati Langendorf, before joining Lisas household where she
is soon treated more as a friend than as a servant. Lele does not hide her
antipathy towards her first employer or her initial surprise and relief at her
first meeting with the eccentric Lisa in her darkened bedroom.
It is within this broad international framework that Spiel deals with
the question of European identity, and does so in two ways. On the one
hand there is the plot itself, which illustrates the different life choices faced
by the expatriate community, who need to decide whether to return to
Europe, to assimilate into American society or to retain their Europeanness
BETWEEN YEARNING ANDAVERSION 91
within a tightknit diaspora. On the other hand there are the discussions
among the Central European migrs in Lisas salon which reflect the
nature of Europe on a discursive level. Lisas regular guests are, in Leles
words, relics from the past and the far-away, ciphers for something that
was dead and gone, lemures haunting a graveyard.27 They include Jews
and Gentiles, a number of writers, an industrialist, a psychoanalyst, a soci-
ologist from the New School, an Austrian Socialist (Lisas former lover
Thomas Munk, who has found work with Voice of America) and a pair of
sinister Hungarians who are somehow involved in Munks denunciation
to the FBI as a communist towards the end of the novel.
Not unlike the sanatorium in Manns The Magic Mountain, Lisas
darkened room provides a locus for the meeting of ideas. Several larger
gatherings are described in some detail.28 The first is held in honour of a
young first-generation American pilot on leave from Berlin, where he is
engaged in the 1948 airlift and has personal experience of the situation in
divided Europe. The description of this party provides the opportunity
not only to introduce the members of Lisas circle but also to reveal the
inherent antagonisms within the group. While all are equally curious to
hear what the pilot, Stephen Kline, has to say about Berlin, they argue
vociferously about the causes of the discord between the allies. It is the
second gathering, however, that provides the discursive crux of the novel.
It is here that the contrast between the Old and New Worlds is discussed
most extensively, and it is significant that Spiel herself quotes extensively
from this chapter in her later essay, Das Sternbild Europa (The European
Constellation, 1977).29 The party is held for Paul Bothe, a successful
writer who has already moved from his American exile to the peaceful
enclave of Switzerland and now returns for a visit. It is he who encourages
Lele to write a book and who insists that the other guests, whatever their
opinions about Europe may be, have never really internalised their move
to America.30
By and large Lisas guests constantly think and talk about Europe but
are reluctant to return. It is a love-hate relationship in which hate domi-
nates the discourse and love holds the group together. Bothe introduces a
kind of foundational myth when he claims that [o]ur ethics, our beliefs,
our cosmologyall are derived from a handful of peoples nestling around
the shores of the Mediterranean.31 One voice, that of the respected but
unproductive writer Winterstein, makes a plea for European unity in spite
of the misguided enterprises of Napoleon and Hitler: There is only one
tragic mistaketo make the orchestra play a single monotonous tune
92 C. PARRY
Every morning when I enter the lovely steel and plate-glass building of the
New School, I go down on my knees and thank Hitler for driving me out
of that smelly old University at Frankfurt on Oder. Back there as a young
graduate I felt ancient, yes, ancient and hoary and positively covered with
fungus! Here, fifteen years older, I seem to be re-born everyday!35
high society, relates a story in which her own role is more than a little
ambiguous. Her account seems relatively objective and her mixture of
sympathy for Lisa and astonishment at the latters lifestyle appears con-
vincing. But should this be taken at face value?44 In earlier sections, Lele
shows a general appreciation for an employer who treats her well, takes her
into her confidence and even gives her fine clothes to wear. Lele also seems
unaware of Lisas drug problem and, during the final party described in
the novel, seems to show remorse at not having called a doctor when Lisa
has an emotional breakdown, an event that foreshadows Lisas death from
a morphine overdose. Nevertheless, Leles attitude changes dramatically
during her narrative, in spite of the fact that it is narrated in retrospect.
A hint at what is to come appears at the start of the opening chapter. Set
after the events in NewYork, Lele is here comfortably installed in a house
in California, having put her life with Lisa firmly behind her. This she calls
a bad dream, citing an expression which Lisa herself uses in connection
with Europe.45 The same attitude is clear in the final chapters, when the
earlier hints of admiration for Lisa give way to disgust and Lele is more
than relieved at her employers demise:
Suddenly Lisa [] turned for me into the incarnation of Europe. She was
the woman arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and
precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of the
abominations and filthiness of her fornication. She was the great whore of
Babylon. And I did not want to see her face again.46
not only clothes from her employer but also two lovers and a husband.
One of the lovers is, as mentioned, the socialist Thomas Munk, but this
attachment is discarded at the end along with all other memories of Leles
life in NewYork. In marrying Jeff she puts all else behind her. But Jeff,
too, is less straightforward than at first appears. In one scene his refusal to
spend Christmas with European flops and niggers reveals a fundamen-
tally racist mindset that raises serious questions about the society that Lele
has joined.48 Without going as far as Dagmar Lorenz, who sees Lele as
an unreformed anti-Semite and Jeff, with his Midwestern background, as
representative of the crypto-fascist tendencies of McCarthys America, we
could say that there is an egocentric single-mindedness in Leles actions
which is somewhat at odds with the story she tells.49
The reliability of Leles narrative is finally disqualified by a disparaging
afterword by the writer Bothe who originally encouraged her to write
her story. Bothe now reveals that he himself edited the manuscript, espe-
cially the conversations in Lisas room which, he claims, Lele had neither
the opportunity nor the education to follow properly. This ultimate dis-
claimer with respect to the reliability of Spiels narrator opens the novel
to quite divergent readings. What is certain, however, is that Lele has
totally immersed herself in mainstream American life and that the price of
her assimilation is the loss of her European roots and a total rejection of
any remaining trace of cosmopolitanism. By letting Bothe challenge the
very authorship of Leles book Spiel injects into the narrative the plurality
that is the essence of the European cosmopolitanism which, finally, the
novel champions against more exclusivist forms of continental or national
identity.
For the author, total immersion was not an option. By the time the
novel was completed, Spiel was working on her next major work in
German, Fanny von Arnstein (1962), the historical account of a cosmo-
politan predecessor, and was seriously considering returning to Austria.
Despite her 25 years in Great Britain assimilation was proving more dif-
ficult than expected. After experiencing warmth and solidarity during
the war years, she became increasingly frustrated at her social isolation
and at the lack of attention she received as an intellectual.50 Britain sim-
ply did not feel European in the way that France, Italy and Austria did,
and it is no coincidence that among the guests visiting Lisas darkened
room there are no British. Indeed in Das Sternbild Europa Spiel com-
ments on the English Channel being one of Europes external borders and
says that London and NewYork are closer to each other in atmosphere
than London and Paris.51 But as a setting for her novel London, with its
96 C. PARRY
NOTES
1. See Anderson, Imagined Communities, p.6.
2. See, for example, Paul Michael Ltzeler, Die Schriftsteller und Europa: Von
der Romantik bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: Piper, 1992), p.11.
3. Strth, Belonging and European Identity, in Gerard Delanty, Ruth
Wodak and Paul Jones, eds, Identity, Belonging, and Migration (Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 2008), p.24.
4. The nation has come to be taken so much for granted that Anthony D.Smith
can claim that of all the identities in which human beings share today,
national identity is perhaps the most fundamental and inclusive (Smith,
National Identity (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1991), p.143).
5. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry
into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989),
pp.3143.
6. See Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp.2636.
BETWEEN YEARNING ANDAVERSION 97
7. See Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande, Cosmopolitan Europe, trans. by Ciaran
Cronin (2004; Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p.137.
8. See, for example, Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. by
M.B.Debevois (1999; Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press,
2004), pp.10810.
9. See Christoph Parry, Gibt es eine europische Literatur (auf Deutsch)?, in
Peter Hanenberg and Isabel Gil, eds, Der literarische Europa-Diskurs:
Festschrift fr Paul Michael Ltzeler zum 70. Geburtstag (Wrzburg:
Knigshausen & Neumann, 2013), pp.5062.
10. See Wolfgang Huber, Die jdisch-christliche Tradition, in Hans Joas and
Klaus Wiegandt, eds, Die Kulturellen Werte Europas (Frankfurt am Main:
Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, 2005), p.69.
11. These are the supposed pillars of European culture on which Ernst Robert
Curtius based his seminal study Europische Literatur und lateinisches
Mittelalter (European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 1948) and
which have recurred more recently in Rmi Bragues Europe, la voie
romaine (Europe, The Roman Road, 1992).
12. On the shift from Christendom to Europe, see Denys Hay, Europe: The
Emergence of an Idea, new edn (1957; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1968), pp.589, 7396.
13. Gerard Delanty maintains that it was colonialism and conquest that united
Europe and not peace and solidarity (Delanty, Inventing Europe: Idea,
Identity, Reality (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), p.7).
14. See Edgar Morin, Penser lEurope (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), p.56.
15. See Gerard Delanty and Chris Rumfords discussion of hyphenated identi-
ties as a typically American option in Delanty and Rumford, Rethinking
Europe, pp. 712. Europe as Americas other is discussed in Daniel
J. Boorstin, America and the Image of Europe: Reflections on American
Thought (New York: Meridian Books, 1960), pp.1939.
16. Delanty, Is There a European Identity?, Global Dialogue, Vol. 5, Nos 34
(2003), p.80.
17. See, for example, Beck and Grande, Cosmopolitan Europe, p. 137, and
Delanty and Rumford, Rethinking Europe, pp.214.
18. Ette, European Literature(s), p.129.
19. As Julia Kristeva points out, even in the eighteenth century the cosmopoli-
tan could be regarded as a threat to the identity of the community (Kristeva,
Strangers to Ourselves, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (1988; New York:
Columbia University Press, 1991), pp.1403).
20. On Anna Gmeyner and other exiles in Britain, see J.M.Ritchie, German
Exiles, British Perspectives (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), pp.20117.
21. Only recently has more attention been paid to issues of foreignness and
acculturation: see Drte Bischoff and Susanne Komfort-Hein, Introduction
98 C. PARRY
40. See Christoph Parry, Von der Un-Kultur der neuen Welt, Ein Stereotyp,
seine Struktur und sein Vorkommen bei Thomas Mann und Theodor
W.Adorno, in Peter Pabisch, ed., Patentlsung oder Zankapfel? German
Studies fr den internationalen Bereich als Alternative zur Germanistik
Beispiele aus Amerika (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), pp.91109.
41. Grster, Geistige Aspekte der amerikanischen Zivilisation (Fortsetzung),
Die Neue Rundschau, Vol. 3 (1951), pp. 256. Similar comparisons are
not unknown in the USA, with its consciousness of having evolved as an
alternative to Europe. America holds up a mirror to Europe just as Europe
does to America (see Boorstin, America and the Image of Europe,
pp.1939).
42. See Spiel, Darkened Room, p.18.
43. Ibid., p.83.
44. Some critics have evidently done so: see, for example, Peter Pabisch, Hilde
SpielFemme de Lettres, Modern Austrian Literature, Vol. 12, Nos 34
(1979), pp.339421.
45. Spiel, Darkened Room, p.7.
46. Ibid., p.183.
47. Elisabeth Bronfen sees Leles conversion as a device used by Spiel to intro-
duce the religious dimension of exile as the banishment from paradise (see
Bronfen, Entortung und Identitt: Ein Thema der modernen Exilliteratur,
The Germanic Review, Vol. 69, No. 2 (1994), p.77).
48. Spiel, Darkened Room, p.92.
49. Lorenz considers the conscious negligence of Lele and Jeff to be largely
responsible for Lisas death (see Lorenz, Hilde Spiel: Lisas Zimmer
Frau, Jdin, Verfolgte, Modern Austrian Literature, Vol. 25, No. 2
(1992), pp.7995).
50. Spiel, Welche Welt ist meine Welt?, pp.1867. The difference between the
public role and status of the intellectual in Great Britain and those in main-
land Europe has been noted elsewhere. See, for example, Anna Boschetti,
La recomposition de lespace intellectuel en Europe aprs 1945, in Gisle
Sapiro, ed., Lespace intellectuel en Europe: De la Formation des tats-
nations la mondialisation XIXeXXIe sicle (Paris: La Dcouverte,
2009), p.170. The fact that Spiel devoted much energy to cultivating an
enormous social network in Britain was obliquely but recognisably satirised
by Norbert Gstrein in his novel Die englischen Jahre (The English Years,
1999), with its unflattering reference to the autobiography of die Katz
(Gstrein, Die englischen Jahre, new edn (1999; Munich: DTV, 2008),
pp.1568).
51. Spiel, Sternbild Europa, p.434.
52. Delanty, Inventing Europe, p. viii.
5
PeterMorgan
The tiny western Balkan land of Albania has lain at the crossroads of
European cultures and on the fault lines of civilisational conflict for over
two millennia. Greek, Roman, Byzantine and even Norman influences
penetrated this land before the arrival of the Ottoman Turks in the late
fourteenth century. Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, living and working
under the socialist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha in the late 1970s, drew on
the national history of incursion and occupation and developed the theme
of Albanias European identity in his Aesopian critique of the regime,
Dosja H (The File on H, 1981). The novel provides a valuable insight into
the literary imagining of Europe on the other side of the Iron Curtain
during the Cold War era.
As a young man in the early 1960s, Ismail Kadare had high hopes
for Enver Hoxhas programme of communist modernisation of Albania.
Hoxha, after all, with his French education and admiration for western
European culture, his patriotism and rejection of Yugoslav interference
and Soviet control, was unlike most of the eastern European leaders.
But after the withdrawal from the Soviet alliance under Khrushchev in
1961, the writer began to realise how wrong he was, as Hoxha ruthlessly
P. Morgan (
)
School of Languages and Cultures, University of Sydney, A18 Brennan-
MacCallum Bldg, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia
factory owner and soap-maker, Mr. Rrok, suggests the scepticism of urban
society when querying the link between the ancient Greek poet Homer
and the scholars research: Please excuse my ignorance, but tell me what
connection can there be between Homer and your esteemed journey to
Albania? If I am not mistaken, Homer lived four or five thousand years ago
and quite a long way away from here, didnt he? (24). The two scholars
are not distracted from their task, however. In the oral epics of the north-
ern Albanians, Bill and Max hope to discover the embalming process
that preserves the pieces of history in formulaic phrases (47). Like their
models, the philologists Lord and Parry, they aim to establish the status
of the Homeric poems as products of an oral tradition, as the accrued
compilations of generations of poets rather than of a single originary fig-
ure. Essential to this conception is a view of oral tradition as the product
of a linguistic consciousness over the longue dure of GreekAlbanian,
Europeanhistory.
The scholars main discovery is that the epic tradition is characterised
by a process of elimination and forgetting as well as of creative addition.
This process of forgetting enables the rhapsode to pass over in silence
those periods in history which are ultimately unimportant in the national
narrative, such as the Ottoman, the Zog and the communist eras; indeed
for Kadare, Albanian modernity has not yet taken place, but has long been
on ice (another of his metaphors for the state of Albania in, for example,
The Wedding Procession Turned to Ice). The tragedy of Albania, as Kadare
describes it in the later literary essay, Eskili, ky humbs i madh (Aeschylus,
This Great Loser, 1985), is that it fell on the wayside of history after the
Roman and Byzantine periods, remaining static and even fossilising as a
culture, as a result of the separation from its cultural and civilisational
roots in Europe. (Kadare has continued to pursue this argument force-
fully in the post-communist period, leading to rancorous polemics with
Kosovar writer and intellectual, Rexhep Qosja, in particular, who takes a
more measured approach to questions of Ottoman influence on the devel-
opment of Albanian cultural identity.)11
Analysing and interpreting the recordings of the oral epics, Bill and
Max hypothesise not only about the processes of transmission over time
but also about the links between Homeric and Albanian legend, between
Ancient Greek and Albanian culture, and hence between European and
Albanian origins. Referring to nineteenth-century German philological
scholarship, Bill and Max speculate, for example, that an ancient Albanian
tale such as that of the treacherous Ajkuna, wife of the valiant Muj, is a
blood-curdling version of Helen of Troy, and that the story of Zuk the
THE EUROPEAN ORIGINS OFALBANIA 107
exist in the language of two nations that are enemies. And both sides, the
Serbs and the Albanians, use the epic in exactly the same way, as a weapon, in
a tragic duel that is quite unique. A ballad in one of the two languages is like
an upside-down version of the same ballad in the other language: a magic
mirror, making the hero of the one the anti-hero of the other []. (1012)
The issue of the dual provenance of the epicsin Albanian and Serbo-
Croatiancomes to a head with the visit of the sinister Serb Orthodox
monk Dushan from the western Kosovar town of Pe (Serb) or Peja/Pej
(Albanian). He questions Max and Bill about their research, asking why
108 P. MORGAN
they only study the Albanian versions and poisonously admiring their
work on behalf of the Albanian epic, and the Albanian people in gen-
eral (113). Dushan later contacts the hermit, Frok, to incite suspicion of
the scholars and their equipment among the singers, provoking them to
destroy the machinery. The assault on the scholars and the destruction
of their equipment and recordings brings the novel to its denouement.
The collection of epic remnants are now scattered again, just as it was
before, and the hope for national regrouping and redemption lost (160).
This latest catastrophe merely reiterates the national syndrome of frag-
mentation (160). As Bill and Max reflect, [t]he age of the epic really was
over in this world, and it was only by the purest chance that they had had
the possibility of glimpsing its last flickering before it went out for good.
They had captured the final glow, and then lost it. The veil of night had
fallen forever over the epic land (162). And yet, at the end of the novel,
the epic does live on, reassembling itself through the foreigners, bring-
ing Bill into its universe, transforming him into a rhapsode as he intones
lines of verse, compressing their adventure into the formulaic language
of the epic:
Bill pulled his right arm from under his cape, raised it to his face, splayed
his fingers, placed his palm against his upper cheek and ear so that his fin-
gers made a kind of ridge visible over the top of his head. Majekrah, Max
thought, but he had no time to ponder on it because his companion had
meanwhile begun to chant, in a flat and expressionless voice, the lines of
verse that he had just heard read to him.12
It was their first encounter with highlanders from the true epic zone. []
Looking at these highlanders, you were looking at the boundary between
men and gods, the watershed, the point of contact or of separation, how-
ever you wanted to see it. Epic poetry spoke of them, there was even an old
Albanian word to describe them, hyanjeri, or god-man []. (73)
As the language of the passage suggests, the modern writer can only evoke;
he can no longer believe in the single origin or narrative coherence of this
discursive tradition. The time is long past for this type of unitary existen-
tial and discursive experience, and it is one which Kadare, as the voice of
Albanian modernity, will not replicate. His modern epic must embrace
the contradictory realities of his nation, of highland simplicity and urban
sophistication, of north and south, highlander and lowlander, Gheg and
Tosk, Albanian and Kosovar.
There can be little doubt that Ismail Kadare was powerfully influenced
by the qualities of the Albanian epics. At the same time, he had early on
shown himself to be a clear-sighted critic of Albanian traditions in his
short story The Song (1967), for example, in which an ironic ending to a
story of romantic nationalism leaves unresolved the conflict between tradi-
tional and modern consciousness. In The File on H, Max and Bill become
the mouthpieces for the contradictions and complexities of the ancient
epic. They recognise the profundity of the epic processes still at work in
the Albanian rhapsodes, but also stumble onto the political implications of
their studies in the contemporary environment. Particularly in their deal-
ings with the Serb monk, Dushan, they become aware of the instrumen-
talisation of the epic in the territorial claims of the modern Balkan states,
in the competing claims to primacy of Serbs and Albanians alike, and in
the references to Nazi theories of race and belonging in relation to these
claims (76).
110 P. MORGAN
reality among, as well as within, nations. They must engage with the exis-
tence of multiple narratives rather than forget them by attempting to cre-
ate a single strand of truth. The future lies with Daisy and her illegitimate
child (conceived under ambiguous circumstances and, presumably, to be
born like Kadare himself in the mid-1930s), not with the rhapsodes whose
lives will be changed forever by the passing of their generation and the
coming of communist modernity, and not with the research of Max and
Bill, which will end up on library shelves or in mechanised reproductions
in the archives of the future. The epics have moved into the realm of world
heritage, rescued in their death throes by a pair of scholars at a time when
they have already been largely forgotten by their own people.
Critical reception of The File on H has fallen into two main camps.
Galia Valtchinova focuses on the national enmities in the novel, censuring
Kadare for placing his literary skills in the service of Albanian chauvinism,
as does the critic Arshi Pipa.13 Anne White and Robert Crawshaw, by con-
trast, note the ironies and narrative complexities of the work. White argues
that Kadares worldview is permeated by a sense of links or border cross-
ings from one identity to another and the potential for dual identities.14
In Crawshaws view, Kadare comments obliquely on the myths of cultural
independence which had long underpinned Albanias claim for national
sovereignty and, in doing so, deconstructs the processes by which his-
torical evidence is made to serve political ends, since there are no real
winners in the novel.15 Each side of this debate is right in its own way and
wrong in its own way, rather like the epics themselves with their represen-
tations of national identities. Kadare does not embody the level of post-
modern narrative consciousness suggested by White and Crawshaw, nor
is he simply the anti-Serb Albanian patriot represented by Valtchinova.16
In The File on H, as in Drago, nj jet e shkurtr, nj emr jetgjat
(The General of the Dead Army, 1962), Dasma (The Wedding, 1968),
Doruntine, The Palace of Dreams and elsewhere in his oeuvre, Kadare
evokes the power and profundity of the Albanian epic tradition while at
the same time recognising that the epic can no longer function in Europe
as anything other than a cultural memory. It is not viable as a basis for
the modern political nation. Like many literary engagements with popular
national myths, Kadares conceptualisation of the Albanians as an indig-
enous Balkan people sharing an ancient culture with the Greeks is a sort
of literary scaffolding. For this writer, who would become wedded to the
vision of a modern, western European future for his country, the founding
myth of commonality with the origins of European civilisation in Greece
112 P. MORGAN
NOTES
1. See Peter Morgan, Ismail Kadare: The Writer and the Dictatorship
19571990 (London: MHRA/Maney Publishing, 2010), p.54.
2. See Istvn Bib, Die Misere der osteuropischen Kleinstaaterei, trans. by
Bla Rsky (1946; Frankfurt am Main: Verlag neue Kritik, 1992), p.47.
3. See Anon, Legends of Mujo and Halili, trans. by Robert Elsie, Albanian
Literature, http://www.albanianliterature.net/oral_lit3/OL3-05.html
(accessed 31 July 2015), and Anon, The Ballad of Constantine and
Dhoqina, trans. by Robert Elsie, Albanian Literature, http://www.alba-
nianliterature.net/oral_lit2/OL2-04.html (accessed 31 July 2015).
4. The first full edition of The Highland Lute was published in 1912 and was
edited and enlarged over the decades until the definitive edition appeared
in 1937, only three years before Fishtas death.
5. The Albanian epics originated in Illyrian antiquity, he writes, but were sup-
pressed in the long night of the Turko-Islamic occupation and by the
fierce chauvinist passions of neighbouring lands (Kadare, Foreword to
Qemal Haxhihasani, Luka Kol, Alfred Ui and Misto Treska, eds, Le
Chansonnier pique albanais, trans. by Kol Luka (Tirana: Academie des
Sciences de la RPS DAlbanie, Institut de Culture Populaire, 1983),
pp.710). See also Morgan, Ismail Kadare, pp.2415.
6. Kadare, Foreword, p.9.
7. Ethnic unrest began to escalate in Kosovo in the early 1980s, shortly after
the death of Marshall Tito unleashed the forces of destabilisation which
would come to a head at the start of the next decade in the break-up of
Yugoslavia.
8. Kadare considered Hoxhas silence a betrayal of Albanian ethnic identity,
attributing it to the dictators fear of information about his private life held
by the wartime Yugoslav partisan leaders (see Morgan, Ismail Kadare,
p.120).
THE EUROPEAN ORIGINS OFALBANIA 113
9. The northern Muslim tribal leader, Ahmed Bey Zogu, ruled as King Zog
1 until 1939. Zog stabilised the economy with Italian financial support,
but also opened the way for the Italian fascist regime of Benito Mussolini
to use Albania as a bridgehead for military expansion into the Balkans. On
the night of 67 April 1940 the Italians invaded Albania in preparation for
the October 1940 attack on Greece.
10. See Kadare, The File on H, trans. by David Bellos (1981; London: Harvill
Press, 1997), p.8. Page references are to the English translation of The File
on H and are given in parenthesis after quotations.
11. See, for example, Rexhep Qosja, Realiteti i shprfillur: Vshtrim kritik mbi
pikpamjet e Ismail Kadares pr identitetin shqiptar (2006).
12. Kadare, File on H, p. 169. The term majekrah (wing-tip) refers to the
ritual gesture accompanying the rhapsodes performance (see ibid., p.87).
13. See Valtchinova, Ismail Kadares The H-File and the Making of the
Homeric Verse: Variations on the Works and Lives of Milman Parry and
Albert Lord, in Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers and Bernd J.Fischer, eds,
Albanian Identities: Myths, Narratives and Politics (London: Hurst,
2002), pp.11113; and Pipa, Contemporary Albanian Literature (Boulder:
East European Monographs; New York: Columbia University Press,
1991), p.94.
14. White, Kosovo, Ethnic Identity and Border Crossings in The File on H,
in Peter Wagstaff, ed., Border Crossings: Mapping Identities in Modern
Europe (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004), p.23.
15. Crawshaw, The File on H.: Metahistory, Literature, Ethnography, Cultural
Heritage and the Balkan Borders, in Reginald Byron and Ullrich Kockel,
eds, Negotiating Culture: Moving, Mixing and Memory in Contemporary
Europe (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2006), p.61.
16. Both White and Crawshaw tend to assume that Kadare is being ironic at
those points where the text does not tally with their arguments. Whites
border crossings thesis avoids the questions raised by Kadares deep com-
mitment to the Albanian epic tradition and his inclusion in the novel of
anti-Serb elements. Crawshaw, in a similar vein, notes that Kadare cannot
be seen as wholly neutral, but tends to rely on irony and ambiguity wher-
ever he cannot square his thesis with the text (ibid., p.68).
17. Revision of this chapter has benefited greatly from the constructive critical
input of Andrew Hammond and Danica Jenkins, to both of whom I offer
my thanks.
6
PeterBeardsell
It is the USA rather than Europe that occupies the attention of post-1945
Latin American writers when they deal with immediate socio-political
realities. When it comes to their identity, however, they focus more on
the persisting effects of European involvement in the continent. This has
taken many forms, among them the study of origins, a search for civilisa-
tion as opposed to native barbarism, the assimilation of European values,
a resentment towards domination by a white elite, a yearning for political
and cultural independence and the affirmation of indigenous nationalism.
But one overall effect commands particular attention in Latin American
literature: the conquest of native peoples by Europeans in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, which has produced profound psychological and
cultural results that persist in the present era. A sense of having been con-
quered is fundamental to the psyche of many nations.
It must be emphasised that these consequences are not uniform
throughout the region. In Argentina, for example, where the vast major-
ity of people descend directly from European immigrants, and where the
views of the minority of indigenous or mestizo people tend to attract rela-
tively little attention, the notion of conquest is essentially alien in purely
nationalas opposed to continentalterms. Modern colonialism certainly
P. Beardsell (
)
Faculty of Arts, University of Hull, Hull, HU6 7RX, UK
The notion that the Conquest has not ended is not confined, however, to
the rural indigenous communities. From the point of view of many white,
mestizo and urban indigenous people, the present sense of belonging to a
conquered race derives, not from a view of the divisions within their own
society, but chiefly from something that they would regard as an external
relationship: what Adoum calls the economic and political control and
the cultural influence of the USA.3 In this context, there is room for a
wide variety of attitudes towards the European Conquest. Although there
is a generally negative attitude, Adoum admits that all Latin American
countries have among their population descendants of conquistadores or
encomenderos (colonists granted land and indigenous workers) and that
many of them are proud of the fact, nostalgic for colonialism and capable
of translating these sentiments into political policies when they occupy
positions of power.
One of the factors that have impinged on peoples perception of the
Conquest at all levels of society has been social and political change.
Martnez has shown that in Mexico a movement to rescue and study the
indigenous past as an act of national affirmation began as early as the years
following the Spaniards defeat of the Aztecs.4 Despite all the conflicting
political tendencies, he argues, this current has never been interrupted.
Indeed, during the nineteenth century indigenismo became an integral
part of the main ideological position of the Liberals, while hispanismo
was espoused by the Conservatives.5 Pursuing this line of argument we
may easily see how, during the twentieth century, under the influence of
Marxism and other ideologies of the Left, there was a general elevation
of the status of indigenous culture and a corresponding critique of the
system that had suppressed it. Socio-economic revolution enhanced this
trend. It is in Mexico after the Revolution of 19101920 that the cultural
consequences have been most notable, but the effects in Andean republics
such as Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador are also extensive.
In the middle of the twentieth century the Nobel laureate Octavio
Paz began to publish a series of essays in which he analysed the socio-
psychological reality of Mexico. Although some of his views have caused
offence in some quarters, there is a general acknowledgement that in sig-
nificant respects he was able to express the essence of the Mexican psyche,
and there is no doubt that his thinking has had a profound effect on that
of intellectuals in his country.6 The most influential collection of essays
is El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude, 1950) which
includes important material on the impact of the Conquest. An essay enti-
tled Los hijos de la Malinche (The Children of Malinche) takes up the
118 P. BEARDSELL
(Atau Huallpa) and Francisco Pizarro (1532) to shortly after the execution
of the Inca, a period in which the teenage beauty Angelina picks her way
through the confusion and decides that her future lies with Pizarro, for
whom she has developed an obsessive passion. Libro Segundo (Second
Book) covers the extension of the foreign occupation, the indigenous
resistance and the consolidation of colonial power, while at the same time
dealing with Angelinas marriage to Pizarro.14 Like the first section, it
ends with Angelina filled with passion for a new man, this time Juan de
Betanzos. Libro Tercero (Third Book) begins with the campaign against
the Inca rebel leader Manco Capac (Manko Cpaj) and ends after the
death of Pizarro with the arrival in 1547 of Pedro de La Gasca, who had
been sent to Peru to arrest the usurper Gonzalo Pizarro. Angelinas for-
tunes also change in this period, as she transfers her affections to Juan de
Betanzos, marries him and has two children. This aspect of the novel is
rounded off in Madrid with the marriage of Doa Francisca (daughter of
Francisco Pizarro by one of Atahualpas widows) to her uncle Hernando
following his release from prison. By developing the military and personal
aspects of the Conquest simultaneously, the text denies predominance to
conventional historical record, introduces an important focus on women
and enables a greater emphasis to be given to the idea of the continuity of
Inca blood in the mestizos of the future.
In keeping with the basic method of the parallel presentation of mili-
tary/political developments and personal lives, the text has two main nar-
rative modes. Most pages are narrated in the third person, but they are
interspersed with pages narrated in the first person by Angelina. Setting
aside for the present the more difficult third-person narrative, let us con-
sider Angelinas passages with a view to determining what image of her
emerges from the novel. Occasional hints allow us to realise that the pas-
sages have been composed a considerable time after the events and that
they are based on her memory of scenes that she witnessed or on intimate
conversations in which she took part. For example, when she narrates
how Pizarro harangued his men about their duty to treat the indigenous
population with consideration and respect, she mentions that she can still
remember the moment (103). And when she narrates Pizarros last night
with Doa Juana Azarpay she affirms, as though Juana or Pizarro had con-
fided in her, that she knows that they made love with the special fervour
of farewells (104). As an eye-witness she can recall Pizarros reactions to
situations, such as one in which Pizarros hunches were something to see
(105). This sense of Angelinas ability to offer a privileged insight into
IMAGES OFCONQUEST 121
Angelina for easing her out of Pizarros household (because she is a beau-
tiful rival), but Angelina demonstrates her hardness when she remembers
the fact with the comment, Im not bothered by that judgement (226).
Though apparently distressed when she learns of Atahualpas death sen-
tence, she adjusts with remarkable ease after the execution, envisaging
a radiant future with Pizarro. Affection does not appear to play a large
part in her relationship with men, although sexual appetite, heightened by
thoughts of danger and transgression, is a continual motivation. What the
text of the novel presents, then, is a portrayalostensibly a self-portrayal
in which Angelina is neither idealised nor condemned. She is a beautiful
woman, proud of her royal descent, who learns to survive in dangerous
circumstances and successfully satisfies her powerful sexual drive. But as
she herself briefly and defiantly acknowledges, her reputation has a nega-
tive side, in which her great beauty is associated with licentiousness.15 On
the basis of both her own text and the few occasions in which she figures
in the third-person narrative, we infer that loyalty is not one of her notable
characteristics and that self-interest is her principal motivation. It is impor-
tant to bear in mind that Angelinas narrative occupies a relatively minor
proportion of the novel as a whole and that, despite the implication of the
title, Angelina is not in herself the main theme. She acts as a focal point in
the story of Atahualpas widows, provides an insight into intimate situa-
tions and serves as one means by which the novel presents a non-Hispanic
view of the Conquest.
Angelinas is the only voice that expresses itself in isolated narrative
units. The remainder of the text consists principally of narrative in the
third person, within which a multiplicity of voices is quoted. On rare
occasions the voices are presented in the form of dialogue, but in general
they are inserted into the narrative sequence without conventional typo-
graphical signals. There are reasons for ascribing some of the third-person
narrative text to Pizarros scribe Juan de Betanzos. Towards the end of
the novel, occasional allusions are made to a text that he is writing under the
title Suma y narracin de los Incas (Synoptic Account of the Incas). At the
point where he enters the novel as a character, unusual attention is given
to his life and career to date, stating his origins in Spains ruined nobility
and explaining his assiduous efforts to learn the Inca language. He is privy
to inside information and is even named as one who remembers words
spoken by the Inquisitor.16 However, he is not the only character who is
shown to be capable of producing the text from his notes. Long before
Betanzos arrives on the scene, the chronicler Pedro de Ciezo de Len is
IMAGES OFCONQUEST 123
said to have interviewed Manko Cpaj, and he appears to provide the text
with the Incas actual complaints (126). Pedro Pizarro is a further possible
source, among many others. The text abounds, moreover, with interjected
comments, opinions and exclamations from a great variety of sources,
whose identity is sometimes clearly implied, sometimes left obscure. The
best inference, therefore, is that the third-person narrative is a compilation
of texts derived from chronicles, testimonies and memories.17
With its variegated style, which ranges from the prosaic to the poetic,
the third-person narrative is unified by an overarching sense of irony. For
example, when it informs the reader that diseases hit the Indian popu-
lation, it quotes words that ostensibly explain the epidemic: Why fight
against illnesses sent by God to punish the unfaithful? (30). Whether
these are the resigned thoughts of indigenous people who are suffering
or the message conveyed to them by the friars, the idea that this should
be an explanation is so incongruous that the words mock the Christian
Churchs teaching. At the critical moment when the signal is given for
the massacre of Atahualpas warriors, the narrator interjects the words:
Hell, youve got to seize the moment! (17). This seems to explain the
philosophy and tactic of good timing, but the vulgarity of the expression
contradicts the solemnity and epochal importance of the concept, sardoni-
cally reducing it to the level of Pizarros personal adventure. The later
repetitions of the interjection convert it into a kind of leitmotif to ironise
Pizarros justification of violent action; it occurs again, for example, when
Pizarro decides to execute Atahualpa without waiting for confirmation of
a supposed uprising (62). In fact, the narrator/compiler uses irony abun-
dantly. The overview of the Spaniards highly favourable situation when
colonisation has been consolidated is typical: A life of colonial order and
peace prevailed, smiling on all the conquistadors across the wine, the cards
and the grille, endorsed by gold and drugs. And the sexiness of the Indian
women, and the grace of God (116).
The choice of descriptive material often supports the effects of irony
in conveying an attitude sympathetic to the conquered and hostile to
the conquerors. An especially powerful instance is the description of
Atahualpas execution. Garrotted after being persuaded to convert to
Christianity in order to avoid being burned alive, he is burned regard-
less of the agreement. At first the narrator appears to treat this moment
of death with mystery and supernatural feeling, telling of how the earth
shook and the sky darkened as a storm began, but then adds that [t]he
angels in heaven sang in silence (64). It is clear from the contradictory
124 P. BEARDSELL
They come from a distant country, a fanatical country driven mad by suffer-
ing and hunger, with fields that are a barren wasteland with the odd hillock,
land that is old and worn out, with rash tyrannical kings and a god as bad-
tempered and immoderate as themselves, who dies, is born again, and dies
again in a tale without end, people whose religion is laughable, preaching
the opposite to what it practises. (58)
The effectiveness of this passage lies in the fact that, although its vision
of Europe is recognisably a grotesque distortion of reality, it still retains
a sufficient hint of truth for its conclusions to be eminently justified.
Fanaticism, suffering, hunger, barren soil, tyrants and religious hypoc-
risy were, of course, all found abundantly in Europe. What may rankle is
that the other should deduce these features to be the essence of a land
it does not know at first hand. If Atahualpas picture looks distorted,
either it must be based upon exaggerated behaviour witnessed among
the invaders who hold him captive or else those who find it distorted
are unaware of the reality of the European scene. In both cases the con-
sequence for Eurocentric readers is one of defamiliarisation, andas is
usual when a familiar truth is defamiliariseda new level of awareness
becomes possible.
As I have noted previously, Angelina Yupanki constitutes a narrative
of material that other books present mainly in summary. The effect that
many passages have on the reader is emotional rather than intellectual. For
an example of the more usual method let us consider the moment when
the American historian William Prescott writes of Atahualpas execution.
The account devotes space to the Incas choice of the garrote, his baptism,
his last wishes and the subsequent funeral service, and it pauses to appraise
his treatment at the hands of Pizarro, but passes over the spectacle of the
mans death: Then, recovering his stoical bearing, which for a moment had
been shaken, he submitted himself calmly to his fate: while the Spaniards,
gathering around, muttered their credos for the salvation of his soul! Thus,
by the death of a vile malefactor perished the last of the Incas!18 Only
in a footnote does he give any detail of what it means to be executed by
the garrote. By contrast with this account, Taboadas novel includes the
horrific spectacle leading to the moment when the flames begin to lick
his body: They fitted the iron rung around his neck and a thick dark-
ness spread through all the land. [] Felipillo was surprised to notice that
when they tightened the shackle to break the bones in his neck incoherent
words came from his lips (64). The text gives sufficient detail to arouse
126 P. BEARDSELL
NOTES
1. Martnez, Hernn Corts (Mexico: UNAM/FCE, 1990), p.834. In this
essay all translations into English are mine.
2. Adoum, El proceso de emancipacin no ha concluido , in Heinz
Dieterich Steffan, ed., La interminable Conquista: Emancipacin e identi-
dad de Amrica Latina 14921992 (Mexico: Joaqun Mortiz/Planeta,
1990), p.259.
IMAGES OFCONQUEST 127
EstherPujolrs-Noguer
E. Pujolrs-Noguer (
)
Department of English and German, Autonomous University of Barcelona,
08193 Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain
she is married to a man called Adolf and is mother to a son likewise called
Adolf, is not gratuitous, but indicative of Germanys historical legacy (48).
Similarly, when the students work in the Bavarian fields, planting pine
trees, they worry about the hidden truths lurking in the earth. If they
didnt plant trees, Sissie wonders, would
Something else,
Sown there,
Many many years ago,
In
Those Bavarian woods
SPROUT?21
Almost deprived of energy after her plunge into Europes white hole,
Sissies Odyssean journey takes her back by aeroplane to her Ithaca-Africa.
This conscious return to Africa is the outcome of an excruciatingly pain-
ful decision, that of leaving her lover, a Ghanaian, in Britain. Like Kunle,
SISSIES ODYSSEY 137
My dear young man, [] to give you the decent answer your anxiety
demands, I would have to tell you a detailed history of the African conti-
nent. And to do that, I shall have to speak every day, twenty-four hours a
day, for at least three thousand years. And I dont mean to be rude to you
or anything, but who has that kind of time? (111).
her abroad, Aidoo must face the aesthetic and cultural limits posed by
a genre articulated within a clearly imperialistic framework. The result is
this narrative expedition, in which omniscient and first-person narrator
fuse with each other and the public realm, as expressed through oratory
and political discourse, blends with the private realm of letter writing. It
may be argued that Aidoos view of Europe, mediated by her determina-
tion to disclose the defects of the continent, deliberately obscures its more
alluring traits. Like all artistic constructs, Our Sister Killjoy is the outcome
of a certain time and place: here, the throes of neo-colonialism and the
disillusionment of independence. Spatial and temporal demarcations not-
withstanding, what Aidoo confronts us with is a view of imperial Europe
from without that postcolonises Eurocentric discourse by making it neces-
sarily strange.
In a manner that resembles Odysseuss instinct for survival, Sissie
resists the tempting mermaids song which extols the beauty and civilisa-
tion of Europe; she listens to the song, digests it, nurtures it and, finally,
discards it. Her mast is her irreverent, implacable and inexorable black-
eyed squint. This literally kills joy, but whose joy is she killing and why?
Her denunciation of Eurocentric discourse is geared both towards the
accomplices of such discourse, the Africans who willingly acquiesce to
European/western assimilation, and towards the Europeans/westerners
whose colour and gender perpetuate a system that empowers maleness and
whiteness. Her gradual acquisition of knowledge is harmonised via the
four sections that configure her Odyssean quest and culminate in her final
spiritual growth: her acknowledgement of whiteness as master signifier
(Into a Bad Dream), her realisation that loneliness resides at the heart of
imperialism (The Plums), her intellectual apprehension of the dangers of
acculturation (From Our Sister Killjoy) and her emotional investment in
the act of decolonisation (A Love Letter). While sailing alongside Sissie,
readers are confronted, often brutally, sometimes tenderly, with a post-
colonial Europe which, far from promising equality and hope, tightens
and reinforces colonial attachments. In Our Sister Killjoy, Eurocentric and
pan-Africanist discourses are dissected and revealed as constraining forces
that stifle Aidoos growth as an African woman writer. This literary sur-
gery expurgates the real heart of darknessEurocentric discourseand
replaces it with her own writing odyssey that achieves two apparently irrec-
oncilable ends: her inscriptionhowever reluctantin the whole of the
literature of Europe from Homer and her Homeric demolition of this
very same tradition.25
SISSIES ODYSSEY 141
NOTES
1. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, new edn (1899; NewYork: W.W.Norton &
Company, 1988), p.50.
2. Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections from a Black-eyed Squint, new edn
(1977; Harlow: Longman, 1988), p.93. Further references to this book
will be indicated by page numbers inserted in the text.
3. Analyses of Our Sister Killjoy as a re-writing of Heart of Darkness are so
common that enumerating them all is beyond the scope of this article.
However, I would like to highlight Hildegard Hoellers Ama Ata Aidoos
Heart of Darkness (2004) since she provides us with an extremely valuable
insight into how the text encourages readersboth western and non-west-
ernto re-position themselves in a postcolonial world (see Hoeller, Ama
Ata Aidoos Heart of Darkness, Research in African Literatures, Vol. 35,
No. 1 (2004), pp.13047).
4. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, in David Lodge, ed., 20th
Century Literary Criticism: A Reader (London: Longman, 1972), p.73.
5. Ibid., p.74.
6. See Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, new edn (1978;
London: Penguin, 1995), pp.14.
7. Ibid., pp.967.
8. Macaulay, Minute on Indian Education, The Norton Anthology of English
Literature, http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/victorian/
topic_4/macaulay.htm (accessed 25 July 2015).
9. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p.84.
10. Robert C.Young identifies the connection between race and gender when
he affirms that race was defined through the criterion of civilization, with
the cultivated white Western European male at the top, and everyone else
on a hierarchical scale either in a chain of being, from mollusc to God, or,
in the later model, on an evolutionary scale of development from a femi-
nized state of childhood (savagery) up to full (European) manly adult-
hood (Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race
(London and NewYork: Routledge, 1995), p.94).
11. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtins study of the literary text, Kristeva elaborates
her own theory of intertextuality which she captures in the following sen-
tence: any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the
absorption and transformation of another (Kristeva, Desire in Language,
trans. by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez (1977;
NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp.367; see also Bakhtin,
The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael
Holquist (1938; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp.2705).
12. Walcott, Omeros, new edn (1990; London: Faber and Faber, 2002), Book
Two, Chapter XVII, p.96.
142 E. PUJOLRS-NOGUER
MarcelCornis-Pope andAndrewHammond
Borders have long been a major feature of European life. Although many
are recent creations, resulting from settlements drawn up after the First
and Second World Wars, there are traces of the ebb and flow of earlier
national and imperial projects, with even the remains of the Roman impe-
rial limites still present in the landscape. Confirming the significance of
continental borders is the fact that, existing alongside national bound-
aries, or statutory lines between contiguous nations, are lines of ideo-
logical division, more abstract in their distinction between spatial entities,
but no less performative. An example is the Iron Curtain which, as Josef
Langer observes, was both an abstract marker of ideological difference
and one of the most hermetical lines of division between people in mod-
ern times.1 These divisions have not only affected the lives of those living
in borderlands but also circumscribed and defined life towards the met-
ropolitan centre. Indeed, so pervasive are Europes geopolitical barriers
that one wonders about the uncertainties and anxieties that lie behind
M. Cornis-Pope (
)
Department of English, Virginia Commonwealth University, 900 Park Avenue,
842005, Richmond, VA 23284-2005, USA
A. Hammond
School of Humanities, University of Brighton, Falmer Campus, Brighton,
BN1 9PH, UK
the regime, is viewed with suspicion by her Swabian male friends, who
believe that she is collaborating with the authorities. In depicting the trials
of female characters in particular (anti-abortion laws, sexual abuse, forced
prostitution), Mller offers a stark and shocking portrait of life behind
closed borders.22
Although no literal borderline is ever described in the text, Romanias
militarised frontiers are a constant presence in peoples minds. While many
eastern bloc regimes allowed their citizens to travel to other communist
countries (a key part of their attempt to create a transnational commu-
nist identity), Ceauescu curtailed this relative freedom of movement,
even preventing Romanians from travelling to the neighbouring coun-
tries of Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. Nevertheless, with
the regime becoming steadily more oppressive, and its austerity measures
driving the population deeper into poverty and illness, [e]veryone lived
by thinking about flight.23 The desire for escape, for passage from one
state of social being to another, often produces a romanticised vision of
the border crossing, with characters dreaming [o]f running after the corn
until the soil becomes another country, of swimming across the Danube
until the water becomes another country and of climb[ing] onto freight
trains so they can roll away (47, 47, 48). The three images, which recur
through the narrative, signify mobility and freedom, the attainment of
agency through the very act of physical movement. Yet the association of
flight and life is shown to be fantasy.24 Ironically, another association that
borders have for the population is with the dictator, who is rumoured to
take continual trips abroad (to France or China, Belgium or England)
to receive treatment for a fatal illness, rumours that create an ominous
coupling of flight and mortality (61). More directly, the many flights that
punctuate the narrative are mostly cut short by the dogs and the bullets of
the guards, associating the process of escape with subjugation, oppression
and murder (61). As the narrator writes:
The flowing water, the moving freight trains, and the fields full of grain
were all places of death. When the farmers harvested their cornfields, they
found withered or bloated corpses, picked over by crows. The farmers took
the corn and left the corpses, because it was better not to see them. In late
autumn, the tractors ploughed them under. (61)
Inverting natural images of fertility and growth, the passage evokes the
border as a landscape of absolute negation. So persistent are these images
EUROPEAN FICTION ONTHEBORDERS 149
We sat together at a table, but our fear stayed locked within each of our
heads []. We laughed a lot, to hide it from each other. But fear always
finds an out. If you control your face, it slips into your voice. If you man-
age to keep a grip on your face and your voice, as if they were dead wood,
it will slip out through your fingers. It will pass through your skin and lie
there. (745)
In short, the regime impacts not only on thoughts and feelings but also
on appearance, comportment and behaviour, wielding authority over the
most intimate aspects of citizens identity. Significantly, such authority is
linked to the disciplinary mechanisms of the border. When the narrator
remarks that no one ever asked me in what house, in what place, at what
table, in which bed and country I would prefer to walk, eat, sleep or love,
she insists that the lack of transnational mobility determines day-to-day
existence as much as political, family or sexual life (34). Just as borders
create the conditions of communist Romania, so they are evoked by those
conditions. The difficulty that citizens have in retaining loyalty to the state
is revealed by the narrators comment that [e]verything around us smelled
of farewell and by an acquaintances candid remark that ciao was the first
syllable of Ceauescu (81, 134). Any sense of agency gained by these
moments of rebellion is undermined by the fact that they perfectly suit
the regime, which is not averse to escape attempts. Aware that ordinary
misdemeanours are insufficient for exposing political unorthodoxy, that
[i]ts not enough to catch people stealing meat or matches, the secret
police aggravate the mood of dissatisfaction in order to drive dissidents
towards the frontiers, the intention being to get people to flee and then
catch them (50). To extend the point, when the narrator refers to the
dictator and his guards hovering over all the escape plans she expresses
a literal and symbolic truth, while also indicating that, in communist
Romania, there is no distinction between the murderousness of the border
regime and that of the country it encompasses (48). In this way, the novel
shows how hard borders define the nation-state or, in Anthony Cohens
words, how the boundary encapsulates the identity of the community.26
Mller not only analyses how a regime obstructs the outward move-
ment of people but also examines its treatment of the inward flow of
foreign influence. The novel is partly an exploration of ideological
boundaries during the Cold War, when anything associated with the rival
bloc threatened to subvert domestic stability. For example, western goods
are a dangerous intrusion into Romanian society, hinting at lands where
EUROPEAN FICTION ONTHEBORDERS 151
there were bluejeans and oranges [] and whisper-thin nylons and real
mascara (47). Such goods rarely appear, but those which do clearly con-
trast to the shoddy products of local industry, summarised by Mller as
tin sheep and wooden melons (29). The seditious potential of western
consumer items is seen when the narrators friend Tereza regularly turns
up at work in foreign fashions (dresses from Greece and from France.
Sweaters from England and jeans from America), which are viewed by
her colleagues as things [] worth fleeing for (108). For the narrators
circle, however, the most significant import is foreign literature. In partic-
ular, smuggled books from Germany, a country where authors think and
write differently, offer the promise of personal growth and transforma-
tion (118). Indeed, so used are the friends to national-communist culture
forging emotional and physical change that they expect the same from
western books: We sniffed at the pages and caught ourselves sniffing
our own hands out of habit. We were surprised our hands didnt blacken
as we read, the way they did from the ink in the newspapers and books
printed in our country (47). The impression that the friends have allied
themselves to the free world recurs in a scene in which Tereza mocks
the pomposity of a state official by swaggering in front of him as though
she werent walking on the pavement, but on top of the world (118).
The narrator sees in the act the difference between this country and the
world, presuming that in a world without guards people would walk
differently (118). Later, however, she doubts such easy generalisations:
Tereza was not the world, she writes, only what people in this country
thought of as the world when they wanted to flee (118). Although this
indicates a loss of faith in the West, the narrators circle is pushed irre-
vocably towards it. After university, when they begin work as teachers,
translators and engineers, some are dismissed as a result of the authorities
doubts about their ideological allegiance. This is the second-to-last stop,
they realise: the last one is out of the country (185). In despair, Georg
rushes to a passport office and fills out an emigration application, falling
into the trap of exposing his disloyalty to the regime. Although the act
could therefore be interpreted as a bid for death (his one wish, Georg
admits, is never to take another step on this earth), it also frees him from
the crushing humiliation the friends have always felt under Ceauescu
(207). Now I feel better, he tells the others, almost like a human being
(208). As chimerical as it proves to be, the crossing of ideological barri-
ers, of entering a world without guards, is linked to the attainment of
humanity.
152 M. CORNIS-POPE AND A. HAMMOND
You and your Swabian forgetfulness. You and your Swabian impatience,
or your Swabian lolling about. You and your Swabian penny-pinching. You
and your Swabian clumsiness. You and your Swabian hiccups, or sneezing;
you and your Swabian socks, or shirts, we said []. We needed the rage
from all those words to separate us. We invented them like curses to gain
distance from one another. (75)
The feeling was repeated in the work of Mllers former husband, Richard
Wagner, another member of the Aktionsgruppe Banat who escaped to
Germany. In Die Muren von Wien (Viena, Banat, 1990), a novel explor-
ing a life fractured by national borders, the protagonist is aware that his
flight has only exchanged marginalisation as an ethnic German in Romania
for marginalisation in Germany, where he is at best a Swabian from the
Banat, a member of a vanishing breed who speaks German like a for-
eigner.32 In short, the crossing of borders does not bring the transforma-
tion, freedom or growth that the would-be escapees in The Land of Green
Plums expect. The point is made formally in the way that the novel ends
with the same sentence as it began: this is the comment by Edgar that
[w]hen we dont speak [], we become unbearable, and when we do,
we make fools of ourselves (1, 242). In formulating the exact same limit
to the opening and ending of the novel, Mller creates a sort of bordered
text, one whose formal qualities of circularity and entrapment denote the
stasis, enclosure and rigidity of a life lived within hard borders.
Despite its pessimism, the experimentalism of The Land of Green Plums
exemplifies how the twentieth-century convulsion in border space, in
Richard Robinsons phrase, has also taken place in the realms of conscious-
ness, identification and the creative imagination.33 In eastern European
fiction, such features as polyphony, dialogised narratives, magic realism
and fantasy dramatise the way that uprooting, border crossing and exile
have problematised any coherent representation of identity. Mllers oeu-
vre also shows how gender has played a significant role in this context,
adding itself to generational, ethnic and political issues. More broadly,
women writers have had an increasingly notable presence in the literature
of borders and emigration from the 1980s onward. The work of Slavenka
Drakuli, Dubravka Ugrei, Kinga Dunin, Tatiana Tolstaya, Liliana Ursu,
Gabriela Melinescu and Carmen-Francesca Banciu, to mention just a few,
all exhibit the formal experimentation that can result from a positioning
at the crossroads of different ethnic traditions. Traces of the historical
shifts in borders, and the corresponding shifts in national and imperial
power, have been especially marked in urban writing: multicultural cit-
ies such as Timioara/Temesvr/Temesburg, Cernui/Czernowitz,
Danzig/Gdask, Lviv/Lww/Lemberg, Sibiu/Szeben/Hermanstadt
and Shkodra/Ikodra/Skadra have inspired a reconstruction of cultural
definitions, a hybridisation of styles and genres and a development of alter-
native social and ethnic rapports. Contrasting to the devastation caused by
closed borders is the release of creative energies at those places where such
EUROPEAN FICTION ONTHEBORDERS 155
borders meet and intersect. For example, during the late 1970s and 1980s
Timioara became a metaphor of resistance against ideological oppression
and nationalist homogenisation through the experimental poetry of Ion
Monoran and Duan Petrovici, the innovative fiction of Sorin Titel and
Daniel Vighi and the political literature of the Aktionsgruppe Banat. In
the work of these writers, Timioara functions as what Alexander Gelley
has termed a city text, as one of those nodes or points of confluence
where sociocultural and textual identities are continually articulated and
tested.34 By exposing the contradictory impulses of the bordered state,
the Timioara city text as reconstructed by Mller and others challenged
the totalitarian levelling of differences through an attempt to reconcile the
divided geographies of their lives.
There is a danger in assuming that Mllers analysis of hard borders
is irrelevant to todays globalised landscape. In an age commonly defined
by interconnection, transnationality and mobility, it is easy to feel
that we all live in a traversable worlda world not of borders, but a
space of flows.35 Hilary Cunningham, whose words these are, urges us
to remember that borders are still heavily politicised locations where, for
the worlds asylum seekers and economic migrants, you might just be the
wrong sort of flow, where you might be incarcerated and fingerprinted
or apprehended and deported and where you might be denied mobility
to the worlds centres of capital and safety.36 The point is evidenced by
the national and civilisational barriers which persist in Europe. Although
the Single European Act (1986) proclaimed a Europe without Frontiers,
some 8000 miles of new border were erected in the 1990s and the EU
continues to reinforce its 55,000 miles of external land and sea borders
against the rest of the world.37 While boundaries within the Schengen area
were being dismantled, a cordon sanitaire was erected around Fortress
Europe, particularly along maritime borders in Portugal, Spain, Italy and
Greece and along land borders with Turkey, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus,
Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Albania, Russia and the Russian enclave
of Kaliningrad. Revealing its centrality to EU governance, border security
has also been dispersed inwards, with control activities now embedded in
train terminals, road networks, travel agencies, hotels and social services, a
regulatory omnipresence not dissimilar to that seen in Mllers novel. To
return to the idea of paradox, this was a proliferation of borders at exactly
the time that continental division was supposed to be ending.38 Needless
to say, the theme continues to feature in European novels: amongst them,
Gerald Szyszkowitzs Auf der anderen Seite (On the Other Side, 1990),
156 M. CORNIS-POPE AND A. HAMMOND
NOTES
1. Langer, Towards a Conceptualization of Borders: The Central European
Experience, in Heikki Eskelinen, Ilkka Liikanen and Jukka Oksa, eds,
Curtains of Iron and Gold: Reconstructing Borders and Scales of Interaction
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), p.25.
2. Balibar, We, the People of Europe?, p.219 (Balibars italics).
3. See, for example, Tassilo Herrschel, Borders in Post-Socialist Europe:
Territory, Scale, Society (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), p. 6;
Gallya Lahav, Immigration and Politics in the New Europe: Reinventing
Borders (Cambridge and NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 2004),
p.42; Sandra Lavenex, The Politics of Exclusion and Inclusion in Wider
Europe, in Joan DeBardeleben, ed., Soft and Hard Borders? Managing
the Divide in an Enlarged Europe (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate,
2005), p. 123; and Glynn Custred, The Linguistic Consequences of
Boundaries, Borderlands, and Frontiers, Journal of Borderlands Studies,
Vol. 26, No. 3 (2011), p.272.
4. Walters, Border/Control, European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 9, No.
2 (2006), pp.187, 198.
5. See Michel Foucher, The Geopolitics of European Frontiers, in Malcolm
Anderson and Eberhard Bort, eds, The Frontiers of Europe (London and
Washington: Pinter, 1998), p.235. Another etymological link can be found
between margins and marches: see Noel Parker, Integrated Europe and
Its Margins: Action and Reaction, in Parker and Bill Armstrong, eds,
Margins in European Integration (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan,
2000), p.7.
6. See Roy J. Eidelson and Ian S. Lustick, National Identity Repertoires,
Territory, and Globalization, in Mabel Berezin and Martin Schain, eds,
Europe without Borders: Remapping Territory, Citizenship, and Identity in
a Transnational Age (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2003), pp.8990.
EUROPEAN FICTION ONTHEBORDERS 157
MihaelaMoscaliuc
M. Moscaliuc (
)
Department of English, Monmouth University, West Long Beach, NJ 07764,
USA
ined borders and identity formation. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth
century, historical documents and anti-Roma legislations from various
European territories reveal anxieties about the impact that their alleged
lawlessness might have on the communities they come into contact with.
The legislations also record attempts to regulate the Romas border-
crossing and to restrict or force an end to nomadism.8 These measures
correlate with imputations that they are devilish, disloyal, debased, lazy
and criminal.9 In the twentieth century, prejudice not only led to the
extermination of between a quarter of a million to a million Roma (mostly
during the 19331945 Porrajmos, or Gypsy Holocaust, steered by Hitler
and fuelled by nationalistic tendencies already at work within most eastern
European states) but also encouraged the enforced assimilation of Roma
during the Cold War, particularly under communist regimes that fortified
national borders and dismantled internal social, economic and cultural
boundaries in order to unify and control the body politic. The regimes
banned encampments, relegated the Roma to ghettoes, placed their chil-
dren in schools for students with special needs and attempted to reduce
the birth rate by non-consensual sterilisation of women. These measures
were seen as means of addressing the minority question and eradicating
parasitism.10 Though civilian hostilities towards the Roma in the eastern
bloc deepened during this period, the fear of repercussions kept manifesta-
tions of intolerance under relative control. It was following the dissolution
of the communist regimes and the lifting of barriers to freedom of speech
that latent prejudice towards the Roma fully erupted. While the loosen-
ing of border controls within the European Union and the weakening of
national controls over the movement of citizens appear to have rescinded
the ban on their migration and to have reinstated, at least in theory, their
rights as a travelling culture, the Roma remain one of the most vulnerable
and excluded of European minorities, their presence either ignored or per-
ceived as problematic for Europes re-imagining of itself as an integrated
community.
McCanns novel fleshes out these historical contexts through a narra-
tive that engages realistically and metaphorically with the effects of physi-
cal and cultural borders on Romani identity and psychology. After Zolis
family is killed by the Slovak pro-Nazi Hlinkas (the paramilitary created
in 1938 by Catholic priest Andrej Hlinka), the six-year-old girl and her
grandfather join another kumpanija, whose admiration Zoli garners with
her talent for singing. She and the kumpanija survive the war by hiding in
a forest, where she is married off to an older man and starts to compose
164 M. MOSCALIUC
her own songs. In post-war Czechoslovakia, both Zoli and her grandfather
embrace the socialist dream of equality and tolerance. Prodded by the
publisher Martin Strnsk and journalist Stephen Swann, she allows her
songs to be turned into poems and promoted by the communist govern-
ment as the harbinger of a literate proletariat.11 Despite the apparent
egalitarianism of the aim, the government is actually planning to assimilate
the Roma through a campaign known in the novel as the Big Halt, a
fictional version of the Act on Permanent Settlement of Nomadic People
(1958).12 Nomadism is banned, wagon wheels are burned, horses req-
uisitioned or sent to glueyards, musical instruments registered and the
Roma are corralled, inoculated and placed into housing projects. Betrayed
by the Czechoslovakian authorities which had turned her into a poster
girl for communism, and tried and condemned by her own people for
collaborating with those authorities, Zoli journeys on foot across three
countries to Italy, where she eventually settles with a new husband.13 The
end of the novel introduces us to Zolis daughter Francesca, an activist
settled in Paris, whose three-day conference, From Wheel to Parliament:
Romani Memory and Imagination, calls for the end of ethnic hierarchies
in Europe.14 However, the seven dividers that signal the novels peripatetic
geography and chronology (Slovakia 2003; Czechoslovakia 1930s1949;
England-Czechoslovakia 1930s1959; Czechoslovakia-Hungary-Austria
19591960; Slovakia 2003; Italy 2001; Paris 2003) reveal a Europe still
marked by discontinuity, juxtaposition, interruption and shifting borders.
Textual disunity may also be a strategy that McCann employs to work
through the complicated politics of representation. In penning the story
of a Romani artist who is ousted by her people for allowing outsiders
insights into their culture, McCann dramatises his own disputable author-
ity as an outsider attempting to narrativise anothers voice.15
While historical documents place the Roma at the peripheries of
European nation-states through disparagement and censure, fictional
accounts tend to romanticise and eroticise them. Romance novels, pulp
fiction, childrens literature, film scripts and song lyrics have turned the
Roma into hackneyed metaphors for illicit desire or ploys for challenging
forms of normative thinking and behaviour. As critics such as Abby Bardi,
Kirstie Blair, Deborah Nord, David Mayall and Katie Trumpener point
out, the Gypsies/Roma who appear in the pages of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century European fiction correlate with explorations of borders
and boundaries, both national and private.16 When literature wishes to
challenge or question matters of national identity, social and economic
BORDERS, BORDERLANDS ANDROMANI IDENTITY 165
This is what happens when Swann and Strnsk turn Zolis songs into
Gypsy literature.22 The two do not limit themselves to transcribing her
songs phonetically, but manipulate the songs by speaking them to one
another, quoting them back and forth, raking them, bending them, prais-
ing them, making them theirs.23 In other words, they replicate the assimi-
lationist practices that operate on a larger scale in the regimes approach
to the Gypsy problem, which claims, in colonialist fashion, to be liberat-
ing the Roma from the troubles of primitivism.24 In taking possession
of the Romas repertoire of embodied memories and re-branding them,
the dominant culture attempts to neutralise the power of a non-material
culture, intervening in its transmission and preservation of collective iden-
tities. Unwittingly, Zoli has sold [her] voice [] to the arguments of
power.25
Working at the peripheries of two cultures, and hoping to render per-
meable the boundaries that polarise them, Zoli ends up being ousted by
both.26 Benedict Anderson notes that with the possible exception of what
he calls primordial villages, human communities exist as imagined enti-
ties: as he puts it, people will never know most of their fellow-members,
meet them or even hear of them, yet in the mind of each lives the image
of their communion.27 Twenty-nine-year-old Zoli has lost her place in
the collective memory of the village, to which the repertoire she released
into print belongs, and has also been denied membership of the non-
Roma community in whose image of itself she is not included. Alaina
Lemon aptly observes that gypsiness figures in the majoritys national
identity as its wild, imagined other, but the Roma themselves are denied
entrance into the majoritys imagined nation.28 Zolis attempt to undo
this positioning and to align the historical with the fictional fails, and she
is left suspended in empty air like a shirt from a branch.29 An extended
metaphor for suspended, abandoned or yet-to-be inhabited identities, the
image recurs, with variations, at least a dozen times in the novel, connect-
ing vastly different settings (Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, France) and trac-
ing Zolis engagement with physical borders and the human landscapes
they demarcate.
This leads to the second way in which the novel engages with European
borders, which is through reflection on their political and psychological
implications. McCann uses the particulars of Zolis experience at national
frontiers to debunk the persistent myth of Gypsy nomadism as rooted in
the desire to evade accountability and to roam irresponsibly. Traversing
Europe on foot, Zoli slips across national frontiers illegally, using the
BORDERS, BORDERLANDS ANDROMANI IDENTITY 167
safety of forests and abandoned huts for respite and wondering how many
borders, barbwire fences, troopers and roadblocks lie ahead. The Europe
as she knows it differs from the Europe of national desires, its physical
geography much simpler than its human geography. In the initial journey
westward through Czechoslovakia, her body becomes an extension of the
scorched camps and caravans she passes, with the makeshift bandages
that she wears becoming part of her skin, a metaphor for the borders that
enclose her and for the wounds she acquires in crossing them.30 She walks
to survive, not to escape, although she hopes to gain from her journey a
freedom so complete that nothing can catch her, not even the sound of
[her] voice.31 At times, Zoli is startled by how, despite the clear divisions
that national frontiers create, they may remain elusive and invisible to the
eye.32 On her approach to Hungary, she knows she has to cross a hard
border, but three afternoons later it occurs to her from roadsigns that
she is in the new country: there has been no concertina of barbed wire
and no high concrete watchtower to mark her illegal passage, and the
landscape appears wholly alien and yet so much the same.33 However,
as she approaches the hard border of the West (the other border, as
she calls the Iron Curtain), the army trucks, watchtowers and searchlights
remind her of the brutality of state boundaries: How many dead bodies
lie along these imaginary lines? How many men, women, children shot as
they made the short trip from one place to another?34 Towards the end of
the novel, Zoli reflects again on the metonymic dimension of borders and
their function as ideological processes. It was only a few years ago now,
she muses, that the Wall fell, though perhaps it has never been a wall so
much as an idea grown away from its own simplicity.35
The ways in which Zoli affects those with whom she comes into contact
illustrates how the cultural, ideological and psychological characteristics
of national frontiers can condition identity. Living outside the borders
of her peoples collective identity and on the fringes of others imagined
communities, Zoli has become a de-territorialised, borderland presence, a
shadow sidling along geopolitical lines. Her liminal identity recalls Gloria
Anzaldas conceptualisation of a borderland as a vague and undeter-
mined place created by the emotional residual of an unnatural boundary.
[] The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.36 An embodiment
not only of borders but also of what might lie beyond them, Zoli comes
across as a disruptive marker of foreignness/otherness that produces anxi-
ety, but that also triggers a re-framing of desire and (self-)identification.
Some of the people that Zoli meets along the way respond to her forbid-
168 M. MOSCALIUC
den presence by leering and calling her names, spitting in her face and
pelting her with stones, a response that reveals a mixture of abjection and
desire.37 Some of the gade act on fantasies in which Zoli embodies the
stereotype of the easily available, hypersexualised Gypsy, while others
show her kindness because they like her singing or share an affinity for
travelling. Their own imagined gypsiness seems to free them, if momen-
tarily, from whatever mores throttle their ambitions, exemplifying how, at
times, the impulse of othering derives from the sublimated desire to give
ourselves permission to recognise ourselves in the image of the other.
An example is a woman that Zoli meets near Bratislava. On their first
encounter, the woman acts as an enforcer of official hierarchies by threat-
ening Zoli with her gun, indicating the clear lines of division between
them and of the position of authority she is speaking from: inside the law,
on property she owns. Her attitude slowly begins to change, however.
Seeing that her mute son responds positively to Zoli, the woman starts to
perceive a link between the two of them, understanding Zolis lowly and
lawless state to be as untranscendable and isolating as her own sons condi-
tion. At the same time, Zoli reminds the woman of the sense of betrayal
she feels at the hands of the communist regime. But theres one good
thing I like about your people, the woman says:
You steal a chicken, you steal a chicken. The others, they come in, they
steal all your chickens and dont even call it stealing. I am sure you know
what I mean. Im too old for double-talk. I suppose theyll put me in the
ground for it. You go ahead and eat now. There are no five-year plans on
that bread.38
organisers have to drop the word Romani from the title, responding to the
hotel managements insistence that [w]e cant have Gypsies, an attitude
that seems to come right out of Zolis tortuous past in Czechoslovakia.55
The anachronism of the Parisian hotel clerks questionof whether the
conferees will have horsecartsreveals how ossified thinking about the
Roma remains even in the imagination of a transnationalised Europe.
However, since the prospect of economic gain supersedes other concerns,
the hotel agrees to accommodate the Gypsies, but at a cost so extortion-
ate that the organisers almost have to cancel. Only a few miles away lies
a suburban ghetto that confines what Zoli terms our people, a danger-
ous and dilapidated neighbourhood that even the gendarmes sometimes
refuse to enter.56 Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, and especially since the
accession of various former communist countries to the European Union,
thousands of Roma have migrated west, with the largest number settling
in France on the outskirts of cities, often in makeshift camps regarded as
burdens on the economy and as health hazards. Dozens of these illegal
encampments have been razed during the presidencies of Nicolas Sarkozy
and Franois Hollande and thousands of Roma have been sent back to
Bulgaria and Romania. While transnational dialogues on Romani issues
and organised structures of representation can help to articulate their
shared interests, there is a sense that the message of Francescas confer-
ence will fail to reach the audiences that most need them: non-Roma like
the hotel clerk or the tiny Romani girl whom Zoli sees running though the
gloomy ghetto with a folded red paper flower stuck on a coat hanger. Who
will help her disentangle her identity as Gypsy from associations with
warranted poverty and delinquency? What borders confine her to this des-
olate fringe and how will she be able to cross them? To whose Europe does
she belong? The Paris that Zoli once dreamed about in Czechoslovakia is
not a European epicentre of civilisation and tolerance, but a version of a
permanent elsewhere, a place defined by the exclusionary practices and
power structures which have long enforced the East-West divide.
During the expansion of the European Union, debates about what con-
stitutes Europe and Europeanness have been compounded not only by
revisions to physical frontiers but also by ongoing changes in the nature
and roles of frontiers in reconfiguring, dividing or suturing the continent
and its constituents. For instance, Malcolm Anderson and Eberhard Bort
point out that a blurring of the distinction between international and
sub-state boundaries within the EU [has] raised the possibility that, as
international frontiers lose the visible trappings of police, border check
BORDERS, BORDERLANDS ANDROMANI IDENTITY 173
NOTES
1. Anderson, Frontiers: Territory and State Formation in the Modern World
(Oxford: Polity, 1996), pp. 12. In his introduction, Anderson outlines
the distinguishing traits of frontier, boundary and border, but thereaf-
ter often uses the terms interchangeably, a practice followed in this essay
(see ibid., pp.910).
2. Ibid., p.189.
3. See Donnan and Wilson, Borders, p.61.
4. Malcolm Anderson and Eberhard Bort, The Frontiers of the European
Union (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p.21.
5. Anderson, Frontiers, p.5. There is a tension between the term Gypsy and
the people known by it. Roma, Rroma and Romani (derived from
Rom, meaning man in Sanskrit) are the endonyms used by academics
and activists, as well as by Roma and non-Roma sensitised to the commu-
nitys political and historical circumstances. The terms stand in stark con-
trast to Gypsy, the exonym which derives from the incorrect hypothesis
that the Roma originated in Egypt and by which many European Roma
continue to refer to themselves. At the same time, both terms are mislead-
ing in suggesting the existence of a cohesive ethnic and cultural identity.
The Roma are probably the largest, most dispersed and most heteroge-
neous minority in Europe and many of its constituents identify themselves
only by their group name (such as Cldrai, Cale, Ludar, Lovari, Romnichel
or Sinti). Currently, there is an estimated population of 12,000,000 people
in Europe who identify as Gypsy/Roma, though national statistics vary
174 M. MOSCALIUC
greatly, especially since many Roma do not register their childrens births,
do not take part in a census and do not retain their official documents in
order to reduce the possibility of deportation.
6. Anderson, The Frontiers of Europe, in Anderson and Eberhard Bort, eds,
Boundaries and Identities: The Eastern Frontier of the European Union
(Edinburgh: International Social Sciences Institute, University of
Edinburgh, 1996), p.21. See also Okely, The Traveller-Gypsies (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 778; and Fredrik Barth,
Introduction to Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social
Organization of Culture Difference, new edn (1969; Long Grave: Waveland
Press, 1998), pp.1037.
7. Donnan and Wilson, Borders, p.5.
8. See, for example, Ian Hancock, We Are the Romani People (Hatfield:
University of Hertfordshire Press, 2002), p. 26; David M. Crowe, A
History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia (New York: St. Martins
Griffin, 1994), p. xii; and Elena Marushiakova and Vesselin Popov,
Historical and Ethnographic Background: Gypsies, Roma, Sinti, in Will
Guy, ed., Between Past and Future: The Roma of Central and Eastern
Europe (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001), pp.423.
9. For example, Crowes research finds categorisations of Gypsies as lazy,
untrustworthy thieves and outlandish claims of excessive Gypsy criminal-
ity (Crowe, History, pp.236, 238).
10. As Crowe points out, the communist regimes of eastern Europe were par-
ticularly nationalistic in their refusal to grant the Roma minority status and
in their attempt to transform them, through forced integration, into little
Hungarians, Romanians, or Russians (ibid., p.238).
11. McCann, Zoli (New York: Random House, 2006), p.83.
12. Ibid., p. 125. For historical details about the Act, see Crowe, History,
pp. 5561. Despite restrictions followed by a ban on crossing national
borders, the Roma managed to sustain a sense of collective identity as a
trans-border, diasporic, travelling culture. McCann emphasises this
through a reference to the grandfathers five languages, through Zolis
mention of our Czech brothers, our Polish sisters, our Hungarian cousins
and through Zolis comment that what happened [during the Porrajmos]
to the least of us happened to all of us (McCann, Zoli, pp.34, 478, 48).
13. Ibid., p.128.
14. Ibid., p.298.
15. In a conversation with McCann, Frank McCourt remarked that Zoli is in
many ways McCanns most foreign character, a woman, a poet, a Rom,
an exile, an Eastern European, to which the novelist replied that this was
the biggest leap [he] had ever made and that the novel merges memories
of anti-traveller prejudice he observed as a child in Dublin with his interest
BORDERS, BORDERLANDS ANDROMANI IDENTITY 175
34. Ibid., p.198, 199. She traverses this unnatural border with the aid of the
natural world, including a deer that distracts the guards, a cypress tree in
which she ducks for shelter and soft earth into which she buries her face.
35. Ibid., p.273.
36. Anzalda, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco:
Aunt Lute Books, 2007), p.7. Akhil Gupta and James Fergusons reading
of a borderland as an interstitial zone of displacement and deterritorializa-
tion speaks to Zolis case as well, though the borderlands she crosses do
not shape her, as the two scholars would argue, into a hybridized subject
(Gupta and Ferguson, Beyond Culture: Space, Identity, and the Politics
of Difference, Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1992), p.18).
37. As Julia Kristeva points out, abjection is a manifestation of our response to
that which disturbs identity, system, and order and that which does not
respect borders, positions, rules (Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on
Abjection, trans. by Leon S.Roudiez (1980; New York: Columbia Universi
ty Press, 1982), p.4).
38. McCann, Zoli, p.154.
39. Ibid., p.193.
40. Ibid., pp.28, 151.
41. Ibid., p.197.
42. Ibid., p.200.
43. Ibid., pp.143, 236.
44. Ibid., p.198.
45. Ibid., p.236.
46. Ibid., p.231.
47. Ibid., pp.236, 237.
48. Ibid., p.237.
49. Pratt, Arts of the Contact Zone, p.34. Pratt defines contact zones as the
social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often
in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power (ibid., p.34).
50. McCann, Zoli, p.317.
51. Ibid., p.261.
52. Ibid., p.4.
53. Ibid., pp.3, 3, 4.
54. Ibid., p.82.
55. Ibid., p.308.
56. Ibid., p.303.
57. Anderson and Bort, Frontiers, pp.12, 21.
58. Hammond, Balkanism in Political Context: From the Ottoman Empire to
the EU, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, Vol. 3, No.
3 (2006), p.13.
10
GordanaP.Crnkovi
G.P. Crnkovi (
)
Department of Comparative Literature, Cinema and Media, University of
Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA
examining the novels engagement with the EU, several questions present
themselves: what Europe should one be looking for exactly and what
traits of EU expansion should one be trying to discern? To begin with,
nnepalus novel was published soon after the dissolution of the commu-
nist bloc and the Baltic republics proclamation of independence, or rather
the re-assertion of the independence of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia
(an independence established in the inter-war period and seized by the
USSR in 1940 and then again in 1944). This is a period in which the EU
was being formed but was not yet existent in its current shape: signed in
February 1992, the Maastricht Treaty will not be effective until the close
of 1993, the year in which nnepalus book appeared. In addition, given
that Estonia became an EU member state only in 2004, all the possibly
EU-related inferences in the novel can only be seen as pre-sentiments of
things to come. Nevertheless, Border State gives a clear sense of several
major issues that would fully emerge in the later 1990s. For example, the
influx of refugees fleeing violence in their home countries is indicated by
the Yugoslav refugees who appear in the pages of the novel. The passing
mention of these barely visible, silent people forces us to recall the wars in
the former Yugoslavia, their mostly marginal importance for the residents
of the western metropolis and the EUs divided and at times detrimental
responses to the violence and the prolonged carnage in the Balkans. At the
same time, the novel hints at growing economic disparities within Europe.
Border States accentuation of the combination of great wealth and con-
siderable poverty in Paris and the West in general may also be seen as a
metonym both for the inequalities between western and eastern Europe
and for the increasing wealth gap in Estonia itself, a country in which the
EUs neoliberal economic reforms went hand-in-hand with one of the
highest levels of inequality in the European Union.3
Another way to approach the relationship between EU expansion and
Border State is to focus on the EU as the self-understood and self-declared
heir to the European Enlightenment project of democracy, liberty, equal-
ity and progress. This approach works especially well in the context of
the Baltic States, whose switch to democracy from Soviet authoritarianism
may suggest parallels to the processes of democratisation that took place
in western Europe from the eighteenth century.4 The connection between
the idea of Europe and the Enlightenment is crucial: it was in the eigh-
teenth century that European identity started to be promoted by the eras
most prominent thinkers, such as Rousseau and Voltaire, and that the idea
of Europe became conflated with the newly embraced ideals of progress,
science and modernity. A distinct European identity was envisioned as
A BETRAYAL OFENLIGHTENMENT 179
Might not the terrorism of reason suppress the imagination, as the German
romantics feared? Had not the Napoleonic campaign of reason led to a new
imperial tyranny? Might not the world structured around scientific princi-
ples become repressive and restrictive, and had not the science, knowledge,
and reason played central roles in modern structures of domination?6
1970s and 1980s in Estonia, a distant, tiny borderland of the immense and
stagnating USSR, which was living out its final decades under Comrade
Brezhnev, a leader who, to a child terribly afraid of war, looked like
a big, friendly grandfather with his bushy eyebrows (48). Nevertheless,
Soviet rule was experienced as authoritarian by the narrators grand-
mother, a survivor of Siberian exile, who reads aloud from the Peoples
Voice and pretends to believe its propaganda in the hope that this would
ensure that she wouldnt be deported to Siberia again and that my future
would be more secure as well (48). Sudden shouts and menacing bursts
of abrasive Russian words whose speakers are never seen convey the vul-
nerability of Estonian citizens who are, as it were, surrounded by an invis-
ible, yet omnipresent, Soviet authority. The atmosphere of oppression is
made relevant to the wider communist bloc. Referred to only as a land up
North, Estonia is never actually named in the novel, but described as one
of a series of impoverished, dark countries that helplessly bemoan their
stillborn histories.9 As the narrator writes:
Amid these dark, heavy and melancholy realities, the narrator yearned
for sunshine, viewing the act of finding the sun as an imaginary rite of
passage (3). The sun, of course, was to be found away from north-east
Europe, in the south and west, and for the narrator, a professional transla-
tor from French, it was most obviously found in Paris, the city he dreamed
of for much of his childhood and adolescence. Indeed, this was a city
where so much of the worlds beauty and wealth is gathered, so many
gifts of the sun (3). Yet his eventual arrival there proves a painful disap-
pointment. Back home, living in a pre-fabricated apartment building with
his grandmother, the narrator imagined that [he] would flee to Paris one
day, would walk along the boulevards, would sit in cafs, would smile at
people who would smile at [him] (32). He now finds himself in this
unfriendly city, full of tourists, suffering from heat, lying in [his] den until
midday, not knowing what more to dream about (32).
The West, France and Paris are marked by their eerie lack of substance,
proving a chimera of what they were supposed to be. Places and things
A BETRAYAL OFENLIGHTENMENT 181
crumble and dissolve upon the narrators close inspection. Apples bought
from a street merchant look fresh but actually taste of death, bringing
to mind the [c]old, sensuous-smelling autumn apples collected secre-
tively at night from the ground under an ancient apple tree in Estonia
(53, 55). The Baltic visitors disappointment extends to all material items:
At first I was impressed with everything in store windows here. Now Ive
come to realize that almost all is trash, garbage (27). People, work and
passion also lose their presumed integrity and inner life, and prove to be
disappointing pretenders, empty shells that look authentic from a distance
but finally lack meaning.
The realms of life are deprived of their substance because they are pri-
marily moulded from the outside, by institutions, social hierarchies and,
most of all, by the needs of a pervasive and internalised market. If one uses
Marxs classic distinction between use value and exchange value, Border
State perceives the West as a place where the market system has denied
things their inherent purpose and transformed them largely into commod-
ities, into things that are practised and experienced in terms of their mar-
ket value. In this sense, even the narrators lover Franz becomes a symbol
of the Enlightenments betrayed promise, a thinker who does not think
on account of an unquenchable curiosity and inherent urge to understand
things. Instead, Franz practises philosophy as a job one does for good pay
and a solid social standing. The inherent use value of thought has been
displaced by its exchange value: Franz had worked and sweated all his
life, had read Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and Foucault, only in order to
become a well-paid professor (34).
While conventional religion does not play any part in Franzs secular
life, religious vocabulary appears in the narrators ironic description of
Franzs, or the Wests, reverential attitude towards material possessions.
In his apartment, the kitchen is a hallowed place, with its fridge being
an altar of food and a storage place for the sacred host (8). This reli-
gious imagery also appears in the context of the most pecuniary consider-
ations, those of Franzs potential gains and losses on the stock market. His
one prayer, indeed, is addressed to his stocks: I caught him poring over
stock prices in the business section of the newspaper, his nape bent like
a monks at prayer []. It turned out that his family owned a certain
part of some business that made warplanes, among other things (84).
(The novel, which repeatedly mentions war planes and bombardment,
makes an association here between Franz and the narrators grandmother,
who is the only survivor of a heavy aerial bombardment that destroyed
182 G.P. CRNKOVI
the farm she lived in.) The image of Franz checking stock prices as if at
prayer shows that religious or sacred value, though largely removed from
its links to the church, has not disappeared from western modernity, but
is now attached to property and possessions. In addition, Franzs refusal
to really engage or even acknowledge his own existential paradox, that of
a pacifist who benefits from the arms industry, shows his refusal to think
about uncharted or uncomfortable topics. As the narrator comments,
[o]wning these stocks apparently didnt agree with his otherwise leftist
leanings, but in the end he claimed that it didnt really matter who owned
the stocks, that it would not make any difference (84). Irritating in its
generic nature, such a conventional excuse displays a cowardly betrayal of
the Enlightenments call to subject the world to rigorous thought, as sum-
marised in Kants motto, Sapere aude (Dare to Know).10
The cumulative result of Franzs commitment to exchange value, his
refusal to engage in (self-)critical thought and his fetishisation of material
possessions, is that he appears less than a real person. Where do I even get
the notion that this Franz existed as a person?, the narrator wonders, con-
cluding that his lover is one of those marginally real figures, or a ghost
(25, 26, 26). Franzs loss of substance could also be seen as a certain loss of
aura, to use Walter Benjamins concept.11 Though commonly understood
as describing the work of art in the pre-modern era, the concept of aura
indicating something sacred and non-reproducible, with full being, gravi-
tas or genuine existenceis in this essay employed more broadly to mean
an elusive phenomenal substance, in Miriam Bratu Hansens phrase, or
the impalpable, meaningful side of life that has been lost in the West.12
Harsh though it was, the narrators native country endowed books, poetry
and the world as a whole with an indisputable aura. The narrator describes
himself as a victim of books who swallowed books in the school library
and who has always been overwhelmed by the beauty of the world (83,
49, 64). Given the absence in the Soviet Union of the stronger market sys-
tem and its internalisation, these realms were never seen in terms of their
possible exchange value, but as supremely important in themselves. One
read and translated books and poetry because this was the most beautiful
way of living ones life, indeed the only way to survive for some people.
The narrator experiences poetry as literally lifesaving, as it comforts and
eases that constantly constricting leash around my neck (35).
In Franzs West, however, everything has been discarded long ago
(20). The aura of artistic and intellectual life has been destroyed because
these realms have been hollowed out by ingrained utilitarianism and
A BETRAYAL OFENLIGHTENMENT 183
turned, to a great extent, into the means for the only real goal left as
worth pursuing: a comfortable life. In France, the narrators own transla-
tion work (of poems from the French into Estonian to create an anthology
of French post-war poetry) becomes senseless in any real terms (34). The
work has a market value (They pay me. Its my work), but bears little
relation to the Enlightenments passion for knowledge of the new, for
understanding for its own sake (34). In the end, senselessness pervades
everything: I live a life that doesnt interest me, say things I dont believe,
spend money that isnt mine. [] I have the feeling that just as Im spend-
ing money that doesnt exist, Im living a life that doesnt exist (567).
There is a strong link here to Heideggers work on the quantification of
the qualitative, particularly his point that thinking in terms of values is
[a] murdering that kills at the roots.13 As Iain Thomson elucidates it,
Heidegger believed that
only the invaluableonly that which we would never exchange for any-
thing else, that is, only nonquantifiable qualitiescan truly matter to us or
give genuine worth to our lives. Heidegger does not deny that values exist
[but] denies that what matters to us can ever be satisfyingly reduced to (or
understood in terms of) the value that a subject determines for an object
(let alone for another human being).14
tude at the expense of any other mode of being in the world, dramatising
the exclusiveness of reason that prevailed in some strands of Enlightenment
thought. Visiting the Louvre, the narrator notices a crowd of German
tourists that, to him, seems to know the meaning of art as well as the
meaning of it all, while he does not know the meaning of anything (32).
More accurately, even though the narrator is aware of scholarship on art
and actually know[s] quite a few things, he does not equate this kind of
cognitive knowledge with the authentic and full experience of art and the
world in general, just as he does not equate Franzs graduate research into
the relativity of moral values with true insight into ethical dilemmas (32,
20). The Louvre painting in front of which the tourists pause is Watteaus
Pierrot (c. 1718), the portrait of a doleful clown standing in a moment of
inaction and stasis with arms by his side. A reproduction of the painting
hung in the narrators childhood home as a calendar picture and its com-
manding presence, produced by the figures large size and slightly lower
viewers perspective, so affected the narrator that he even dreamt about
it. Despite the opposition between the knowing German crowd and the
non-knowing Estonian individual, the narrators youthful experience of
this artwork was profound, and the way in which he sympathized with
the clown and felt that the two of them were coconspirators, perhaps on
account of their shared sadness and stillness, is remembered many years
after in the Louvre (31). In other words, the novel articulates the narrators
unknowing not as a surrender to ignorance (as he also knows quite a few
things) or to indifference, the motive suggested by Watteaus LIndiffrent
(c. 1717), another painting he sees in the Louvre, but as another kind of
attitude altogether, one of not approaching the world cognitively.
Again, the meaning of nnepalus scene is elucidated by Heidegger,
for whom the revolutionary value of great art lies in its ability to chal-
lenge inherited ontology. By beginning to open up a new sense of what
is and what matters, Thomson summarises, great art either extends or
transforms the ontotheology through which we make sense of the world
and our place in it.15 Predicated on the division between subject and
object, a cognitive relation to art and the world in general prevents the
recognition of the potential of an artwork such as Watteaus Pierrot to
open up a new sense of what is and what matters. Heidegger sees such
cognitive relation as a secondary relationship that comes only after the
more foundational experience of a persons full entwining with the world,
including the world of art. Such foundational experience can be reclaimed
[i]f, instead of trying to obtain a kind of cognitive mastery over art [],
A BETRAYAL OFENLIGHTENMENT 185
I once saw the words border state in a newspaper. That was how they
labeled the country from which I came []. A border state is nonexistent.
There is something on one side and something on the other side of the
border, but there is no border []. Its invisible. And if you should happen
to stand on the border, then you too are invisible, from either side (967).
Although the narrator passively goes along with this state of affairs for
a while, he reacts with a decisive and destructive gesture once he realises
that staying with Franz would oblige him to change himself from within,
as it were, to change his core integrity. Franz, outraged by the narrators
suggestion that he might leave for Estonia, demands that he chooses Paris
rather than return there, unable even to name the narrators country (92).
I didnt want what I was supposed to have wanted []. Maybe Id go back;
how did I know? I must have looked rather listless and passive, because
Franz became angry and started yelling at me []. He shouted: Youre
crazy! No normal person would refuse what Im willing to give you, but
A BETRAYAL OFENLIGHTENMENT 187
you want to go back there there there! (He never did find the right
word.) (92)
Things do not turn out the way they were meant to, and the EU may not
be the best place in which to live, given its inequalities of wealth and power
and its failure to provide meaning for its citizens. As the narrator himself
finds out, people simply shouldnt live in houses with glass furniture.29
NOTES
1. As Maire Jaanus writes, Piir means border, boundary, frontier, threshold,
limit, end, terminus, line, borderline. Riik is a state, body politic, nation,
country, community, kingdom, domain, realm, empire, government.
Thus, Piiririik could be translated in so many ways (as Boundary Nation,
Border State, Limit Realm, etc) (Jaanus, Estonias Time and Monumental
Time, in Violeta Kelertas, ed., Baltic Postcolonialism (Amsterdam and
NewYork: Rodopi, 2006), p.227).
2. nnepalu, Border State, trans. by Madli Puhvel (1993; Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 2000), p. 33. Hereafter, citations are
marked by page numbers inserted in the main body of the text.
3. Viljar Veebel and Ramon Loik, Estonia, in Donnacha Beachin, Vera
Sheridan and Sabina Stan, eds, Life in Post-Communist Eastern Europe
after EU Membership: Happy Ever After? (Abingdon and New York:
Routledge, 2012), p.176.
4. In his fascinating novel The Czars Madman (1978), Jaan Kross, arguably
the most well-known Estonian writer internationally, uses the Russian Czar
and the novels hero Timotheus von Bock, a Baltic German nobleman, to
symbolise the opposition between tyranny and Enlightenment (see Maire
Jaanus, Estonia and Pain: Jaan Krosss The Czars Madman, in Kelertas,
ed., Baltic Postcolonialism, pp.30929).
5. See Delanty, Inventing Europe, pp.6574.
6. Berman, Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), pp.212.
7. Kohn, Colonialism, in Edward N.Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/colonial-
ism (accessed 29 July 2015). Kohn also emphasises that some major
Enlightenment thinkers (Kant, Smith, Diderot) criticised colonialism and
the arguments that supported it.
8. Berman, Enlightenment or Empire, p.17.
9. nnepalu, Border State, pp.4, 5. The stillborn history includes Estonias
brief period of inter-war independence that ended with the Molotov-
Ribbentrop Pact and the USSRs annexation of the Baltic countries in the
1940s. The colonisation of Estonia started as early as the thirteenth cen-
tury with the invading German knights and continued with Denmark,
Germany, Sweden and Russia fighting over the territory thereafter.
190 G.P. CRNKOVI
AndrewHammond
Since its origins in the 1950s, the European Union has been shadowed
by the left-wing blueprints for continental unity which began to emerge
in the nineteenth century. As far back as 1848, Engels spoke of how the
European brotherhood of peoples will come to pass not through mere
phrases and pious wishes but only as a result of thorough revolutions.1 The
cosmopolitan ideal of pan-European revolution was advanced at the First and
Second Internationals and later informed both Lenins belief that socialism
in a single country is [] impossible and the Cominterns consideration
of a Soviet-led United States of Europe.2 The ideal may have retreated
under Stalin (who saw himself as no European but a Russified Georgian-
Asian), but persisted in Trotskys desire for a radical federation of nations
that would ensure political harmony, establish a single market and recognise
common cultural traditions, with class solidarity erasing differences in eth-
nicity, language and tradition.3 Although similarities exist between left-wing
and liberal-democratic models of European unity, both are relational and
exclusionary. Regarding the notions of Europeanness dominant in the West,
Jeremy MacClancy is insistent that by defining what being European is
they necessarily and simultaneously create, by opposition, a definition of
A. Hammond (
)
School of Humanities, University of Brighton, Falmer Campus, Brighton,
BN1 9PH, UK
Communism may have become a prison for some artists and a barracks
for many more, but it was [] the distant shining city of the future for
many others. Aragon, Anand, Becher, Biermann, Brecht, Breton, Calvino,
Ehrenberg, Eisler, Eluard, Fast, Gorki, Guillen, Guthrie, Hughes, Hikmet,
Kastner, Koestler, Leger, Lukacs, Mayakovsky, Neruda, Picasso, Pritchard,
Reed, Rivera, Robeson, Sartre, Seghers, Shostakovitch, Sholokov, Silone,
Tikhonov, Tzara, Wolf, Wright, Yevtushenkodespite its own instinctive
suspicion of the world of the imagination, the international Communist
movement enjoyed, however briefly, the energy and commitment of most
major European and American twentieth-century writers and artists.12
all transition economies sank to below that of the late 1980s.18 Driving the
EUs eastern expansion has been the fear of a relapse into communism,
with Brussels and Washington pumping money into non-socialist parties
in Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and the former Yugoslavia in an effort to
export democracy. As one US advisor admitted, [w]e taught them what
to say, how to say it, and even what to wear when saying it.19 Nevertheless,
the neoliberal United States of Europe dreamt up by financiers and busi-
ness leaders has not entirely shaken off its political adversary, which remains
insistent that [t]he failure of Soviet socialism does not reflect on the pos-
sibility of other kinds of socialism.20 In eastern Europe, the transition has
left many feeling exiled from their own life experiences and regretting the
ban on further political experiment. In 1989, Stefan Heym, Volker Braun
and Christa Wolf were already calling for a rejuvenated socialism, a sort
of third way socialism or revival of Dubeks socialism with a human
face.21 The call was echoed by many in the West, who saw the loss of
the command economies not as a repudiation of progressive politics, but
as a chance to revive the true spirit of collective agency. This may entail
a return to revolutionary Marxism, viewed as the libertarian heritage of
Marx, Trotsky, Luxemburg and Gramsci rather than as the degenerate,
oligarchical centralism of the Soviet Union. Alternatively, it may entail the
social-democratic practice of ameliorating the worst excesses of a market
economy, a practice Adam Michnik termed the market with a human face
and Iris Murdoch termed welfare capitalism.22 Either way, many would
agree with Alex Callinicoss belief that the East European revolutions
should be seen not primarily as a crisis for the left, but as an opportunity
finally to free socialism from the incubus of Stalinism.23
This essay will examine the crisis of the European left through a study
of Elizabeth Wilsons The Lost Time Caf (1993), a British dystopian
thriller set towards the millenniums end. This was published in the same
year as the Treaty of Maastricht which, through its reduction of social
spending and deregulation of the labour market, announced that cradle
to grave security would now be less important for Europe than price sta-
bility. To question the assumptions of Maastricht, the novel reflects on the
little known history of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Founded
in 1920 and dissolved in 1991, the year of the Soviet collapse, the CPGB
had marginal relevance to political life, gaining only a few parliamentary
seats in the 1930s and 1940s, but retained a huge symbolic resonance: in
the words of Beatrix Campbell, a former member, the Party was a con-
densation of all the crises and collisions within the labour movement.24
198 A. HAMMOND
prime real estate near the bay, the caf is a thriving enterprise that typifies
the Europeanisation of British society. Arranged around its salons and
parterres is an eclectic array of Czech mirrors, Italian chairs and Victorian
chaise-longues, where the clientele or habitus enjoy French breakfasts,
Polish pastries and Italian wines, served to them by east Europeans who
are work[ed] like slaves (161, 10, 10, 127, 11). While illustrating the
homogenising effects of EU membership, the caf also symbolises the his-
toric decline of working-class politics. In the days before the waterfront
development, when the city still had a functioning port, the caf was a
public house for dockers, then developed as a meeting place for leftist
radicals seeking to associate with the proletariat, and later still attracted a
young bohemian set, which felt the hint of radicalism was giving the place
tremendous cachet (12). Although some radicals still occupy a table, the
owner, Adam, prefers to cater for wealthy media types and business-
men, or at least for the bohemians, who are mostly small-time entre-
preneurs with disposable incomes (89, 10, 47). To make matters worse,
Adam is an ex-Communist Party member now involved in shady deals
with the government which he hopes will fund a chain of cafs from Tokyo
to Manhattan. As he explains himself to Justine, we were all a bit nave,
werent we? As if our meetings and our marches and our protests could
ever change the world (1415). Justines response illustrates the two sides
of her political nature. Shocked at her friends materialism, she never-
theless admires his success, finding in the caf a sort of golden glow, a
youthful energy and vision that propelled us all forward in time.33
The post-modern vacuity of the caf finds its antithesis in her fathers
house, where the investigation takes Justine on a contrary journey into
the past. Professor Charles Hillyard, an academic and writer born into
the working class, was an important figure on the intellectual wing of the
CPGB, but became an anachronism after 1989, when the bottom []
dropped out of the Marxism market (69). The house is evoked by Justine
as a symbol of this irrelevance, of something old-fashioned, from another
era, but also of enduring values that continue to haunt the present (78).
Just as she finds the dark, dilapidated exterior casting a shadow across the
old university quarter, so the dusty piles of research material cramming the
interior, the out-of-date papers and books overflowing from files, draw-
ers and cupboards, lived on, inert and malignant, as if my fathers ghost
had returned to haunt me (7, 30, 61). Her task of sorting through this
dead matter, all of which is on the CPGB and the wider left-wing move-
ment, sets loose an unwanted trail of memories:
THE DILEMMAS OFPOST-COMMUNISM 201
her fathers mantra: Socialism or barbarism; theres no third way (64, 61).
Again, it is her fathers jumble of books and papers that crystallises the
task ahead:
The labyrinth also testified to a great vision, and I knew that at the end of
his life my father in his last work had been excavating [the Partys] history in
order to uncover the reasons for defeat, indeed it had been more than that,
it had been intended as the rediscovery of a lost past, a kind of resurrection,
at least a reassertion of its value. (62)
is the grassroots consortium that fights the governments plans for the
waterfront, an example of the attempt by social democracy to ameliorate
the savage exploitation that capitalism brings (67). Alternatively, there
is a band of Russian communists aiming to reinstate the Soviet Union
(the way of totalitarianism that Professor Hillyard turned to before his
death) and a radical youth underground that, with the collapse of actu-
ally existing socialism and the dissolution of the CPGB, aims to rebuild
revolutionary socialism from scratch. In this way, the novel dramatises
the options facing the left after the Cold War. The dilemma of 1989,
Callinicos writes, is simply stated:
Do we let the market rip, with all the disastrous consequences that will
have for the well-being of humankind []? Do we seek to humanize it, as
social democracy has sought ineffectually to do since the beginning of the
[twentieth] century? Or do we struggle to replace the anarchy and injustice
of capitalism with a social system based on the collective and democratic
control of the worlds resources by working people?39
NOTES
1. Quoted in Case, Being European, p.116.
2. Quoted in Alex Callinicos, The Revenge of History: Marxism and the East
European Revolutions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p.26.
3. Quoted in Erik van Ree, Heroes and Merchants: Joseph Stalin and the
Nations of Europe, in Wintle, ed., Imagining Europe, p.53.
4. MacClancy, The Predictable Failure of a European Identity, in Axford,
Berghahn and Hewlett, eds, Unity and Diversity, p.116.
206 A. HAMMOND
5. Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left
in the Twentieth Century (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1996),
p.230.
6. Judt, Postwar, p.197.
7. Kevin Morgan, Gidon Cohen and Andrew Flinn, Communists and British
Society 19201991 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 2007), p.14.
8. Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth
Century, trans. by Deborah Furet (1995; Chicago and London: University
of Chicago Press, 1999), p. x. As Couze Venn writes, [t]he end of the
Cold War/Third World War has released capitalism from needing to
respond to calls for responsibility []. It has lost the ability to respond to
suffering (quoted in Bauman, Europe, p.24). A similar point is made by
one of Ingo Schulzes characters: We, in the East, had been the guarantors
that capitalism in the West had worn a human face (Schulze, New Lives,
p.194).
9. Bonnett, Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia (New
York and London: Continuum, 2010), p.35.
10. M.Keith Bookers remark in the 1990s that the suppression of British left-
wing culture has been one of the major cultural/political phenomena of
the century is relevant to many other national cultures (Booker, The
Modern British Novel of the Left: A Research Guide (Westport and London:
Greenwood Press, 1998), p.3).
11. Quoted in Williams, Writing Postcommunism, p.24.
12. Croft, Authors Take Sides: Writers and the Communist Party 192056,
in Geoff Andrews, Nina Fishman and Kevin Morgan, eds, Opening the
Books: Essays on the Social and Cultural History of British Communism
(London and Boulder: Pluto Press, 1995), p.83.
13. Quoted in ibid., p.85.
14. de Beauvoir, The Mandarins, trans. by Leonard M. Friedman (1954;
London: Collins, 1957), p. 239; Taher, Love in Exile, trans. by Farouk
Abdel Wahab (1995; Cairo and New York: The American University in
Cairo Press, 2001), p.56. With similar despair, Anita Konkka describes a
character as one of the rare people who still believed in the socialist revolu-
tion and Victor Serge has a Russian character say [n]o one will forgive us
for having begun Socialism with so much senseless barbarity (Konkka,
Fools Paradise, p. 66; Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, trans. by
Willard R. Trask (1948; New York: New York Review of Books, 2004),
p.286).
15. Juraga and Booker, Introduction to Juraga and Booker, eds, Socialist
Cultures, p.3.
16. Christa Wolf quoted in Williams, Writing Postcommunism, p.11; Jrgen
Habermas, The New Obscurity: The Crisis of the Welfare State and the
THE DILEMMAS OFPOST-COMMUNISM 207
30. The effects of privatisation are exemplified by the local university, now run
for the benefit of shareholders, which has sacked its porters (permanently
employed men who belonged to trade unions) and hired cheap student
labour (Wilson, Lost Time Caf, p.41).
31. See Lynn Guyver, Post-Cold War Moral Geography: A Critical Analysis of
Representations of Eastern Europe in Post-1989 British Fiction and
Drama (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Warwick, 2001), p.64.
32. Wilson, Lost Time Caf, pp. 75, 227, 86, 224, 47. Although European
culture is the major influence, it is only one feature of the globalisation
reshaping city space, with American and Asian influences also apparent. As
Justine says of the post-modern topography that results, Kakania is many
cities in one, all cities in one (ibid., p.25).
33. Ibid., p.19. Although unconnected to Justines divided selfhood, Wilson
herself admits to being prone to internal divisions, writing about how her
flights into escapist identities have come into conflict with the pragma-
tism of the committed protester, who only live[s] fully in the present on
political demonstrations (Wilson, Mirror Writing: An Autobiography
(London: Virago, 1982), pp.82, 1).
34. Wilson, Lost Time Caf, p.170. One ex-member of the CPGB once termed
the Party a little private world of our own, or [a] large or extended family
(Samuel, Lost World of British Communism, p.13).
35. Bonnett, Left in the Past, p.169. See also Svetlana Boyms notion of coun-
termemory, a clandestine recording of the past that point[s] at seams and
erasures in the official history (Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York:
Basic Books, 2001), p.61).
36. See Frederick Kranz, George Rud and History from Below, in Krantz,
ed., History from Below: Studies in Protest and Popular Ideology, new edn
(1985; Oxford and NewYork: Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp.36.
37. Marquand, After Socialism, Political Studies, Vol. 41 (1993), p. 51;
Wilson, Lost Time Caf, p.134.
38. Kingdoms real background helps to explain the novels reference to the
Forest Brothers, which were a collection of nationalist resistance move-
ments in the Baltic States fighting a guerrilla war against Soviet occupation
in the 1940s and 1950s (see Mart Laar, The Power of Freedom: Central and
Eastern Europe after 1945 (Brussels: Centre for European Studies, 2010),
pp.7783).
39. Callinicos, Revenge of History, p.135.
40. See Robertss The Aachen Memorandum (1995), Aldisss Super-State
(2002) and Grants Incompetence (2003).
41. Wilson, Lost Time Caf, p.64.
42. Peter Rietbergen, Europe: A Cultural History (London and New York:
Routledge, 1998), p.464. For the estimate of capitalisms ruinous impact,
THE DILEMMAS OFPOST-COMMUNISM 209
AnneHeith
A. Heith (
)
Department of Culture and Media Studies, Ume University, S-901 87 Ume,
Sweden
that extends from Norway in the west to Russias Kola Peninsula in the
east. One major aim of modern Smi imaginative literature is the decon-
struction of the temporal, spatial and identity claims of the nationalist dis-
courses which have marginalised them. Writers like the Smi national poet
Nils-Aslak Valkeap argue that there is a specific Smi culture, history and
homeland which distinguish them from other peoples.13 In connection
with the anticolonial currents which were developing across the world in
the mid-twentieth century, Smi activists saw the suppression of their cul-
ture and the denial of their land claims as a form of internal colonialism.
Activists such as the artist Sofia Jannock also resist the categorisation of
the Smi as a minority by highlighting that they are an indigenous people
who inhabited the northern part of Scandinavia before the arrival of set-
tlers, tradesmen and missionaries.
Challenges to homogenising nationalism also prevail in the Swedish-
Tornedalian literature which began to emerge in the 1970s. Until then,
Tornedalian culture had been suppressed and the Tornedalian people had
been put under pressure to assimilate. Their status in the northern border-
lands between Sweden and Finland changed dramatically when Sweden
lost Finland in the peace treaty of 1809 that ended the war between
Sweden and Russia. Finland then became a Russian Grand Duchy and
the new border was drawn in a way which divided the Tornedalians, so
that those living to the east became separated from those residing to the
west. As the Tornedalian language is a Finno-Ugric language and the
Tornedalians themselves are a Finno-Ugric people, the division was more
problematic for those positioned on the Swedish side of the border.14
The Swedish security elite, fearing Russian expansionism from the Grand
Duchy of Finland, saw the Tornedalians not only as an alien element in the
Swedish nation but also as a potential threat.15 The nationalising pedago-
gies that resulted worked to marginalise the minority and create negative
self-images, as depicted in contemporary Swedish-Tornedalian literature.
In the poem Jag r fdd utan sprk (I Was Born without Language,
1973), which was widely disseminated among the Tornedalians in the
1970s, Bengt Pohjanen presents a lyrical monologue that expresses the
communitys sense of disempowerment and identity loss:
plate on the cold ground, only to find that his lips have frozen onto a
Tibetan prayer plaque. This episode functions as a Proustian madeleine
cake which calls to mind his childhood in Pajala and fills him with what
he later calls a sense of loss, a melancholy.24 In the period which Niemi
depicts, Pajala was seen as a remote district far from the metropolitan
centres of southern Sweden. Matti comments upon this by drawing atten-
tion to connections between distances and exclusion: It was a long way
from Pajala to the rest of the world.25 While the Swedish economy was
growing in the 1960s, modernity came later to Pajala. Indeed, the Pajala
of Niemis novel is not only backward in comparison to the south but is
also a community in decline:
While the establishment of the modern Swedish state improved living con-
ditions for large segments of the population, modernity also had negative
effects on rural areas, which were depopulated due to the loss of tradi-
tional livelihoods and to the lure of work elsewhere. Niemi describes the
response to this social change as an awareness that moving away was the
only option if you wanted to be something: There was an enormous evac-
uation. A flood of refugees that emptied our village, but strangely enough
it felt voluntary.27 As with many other sections of the text, the passage
describes the arrival of modernity as a rather ambiguous phenomenon.
The choice of the term refugees is significant, indicating that the people
of the Tornedalian villages feel themselves to be victims of a process that
they have no control over. As interesting, however, is the comment that
the process felt voluntary, which may suggest a colonisation of peoples
minds: is Niemi saying that people have been made to believe that they
are living in a remote backwater without any culture or future and that
their only viable option is to look forward to moving, convinced it was
our only chance in life?28 Matti and his Tornedalian friends are fully aware
of the benefits of modern global youth culture, particularly the popu-
lar music of the title, which they view as a liberating force. Yet the full
implications of modernisation are not necessarily as appealing as in the
218 A. HEITH
We gradually caught on to the fact that where we lived wasnt really part of
Sweden. Wed just been sort of tagged on by accident. A northern append-
age, a few barren bogs where a few people happened to live, but could only
partly be Swedes. [] We didnt have any deer or hedgehogs or nightin-
gales. We didnt have any celebrities. We didnt have any theme parks, no
traffic lights, no mansions, no country squires. All we had was masses and
masses of mosquitoes, Tornedalian-Finnish swearwords and Communists.33
In school, Matti even finds that the landscape of Skne in southern Sweden
came first in the atlas, printed on an extra-large scale, whereas Norrland
came last, printed on an extra-small scale in order to fit onto the page.35
The inevitable outcome is a conviction that, [a]s a citizen of Pajala, you
were inferior.36
tion, despite the fact that there are local publishers in the Torne Valley
which publish in Menkieli. Still, both the original Swedish text and the
English version use phrases in Menkieli which are not rendered in trans-
lation (kotimaassa, kuppari, ummikko, lyly), although not to the extent
that readers unfamiliar with Menkieli or Finnish are excluded. Such usage
of a marginalised language is a common feature of postcolonial literary
resistance to imperial cultures. The Swedish language started gaining
ground when the north was colonised, and, as part of the Swedification
of the region, the languages of the minorities were suppressed, with all
minority languages of the North Calotte today facing extinction.42 But
there are also linguistic revitalisations going on: not only is there a move-
ment for the preservation and development of Menkieli, but Menkieli
is also one of the officially recognised minority languages in Sweden.
This implies that official policies and attitudes have changed considerably
from the period described in Popular Music. Matti is clear about the dif-
ficulties the Tornedalians faced in the 1960s: We spoke with a Finnish
accent without being Finns, and we spoke with a Swedish accent without
being Swedish, a plight that leads him to conclude, [w]e were noth-
ing.43 The experiences of exclusion related to linguistic proficiencyor
lack of proficiency when viewed from the vantage point of homogenising
national pedagogiescorrespond with the theme of Pohjanens poem I
Was Born without Language quoted above.
To extend the link to postcolonial writing, a specific experience explored
in Smi and Tornedalian literature is that of having been subjected to rac-
ism due to ethnicity. As critical whiteness studies have shown, there are
many shades of white in the racist hierarchies which have been established
in order to legitimise ideas of superiority.44 In a British and American con-
text, for example, the Irish have been categorised as not quite white, and
in the regulations of the American Immigration Authorities there have
been categorisations which have placed Italian immigrants on a lower
level than people from northern Europe. In the early twentieth century,
there was a similar prejudice shown towards the Finno-Ugric minorities in
the north on the part of Swedish race biology. After the establishment of
the State Institute for Race Biology in Uppsala in 1922, researchers went
north in order to collect material for use in the mapping of the racial char-
acters of the Swedish nation. Today, the memory of having been subjected
to humiliating physical examinations, as well as the knowledge that there
is material in archives related to the categorisation of family members,
constitute traumas for the Smi and Swedish Tornedalians.45 Although
222 A. HEITH
Niemi does not mention race biology explicitly in Popular Music, he does
depict feelings of lack and of being nothing. At the same time, there are
powerful descriptions of ethnocentric attitudes that are projected onto,
and internalised by, the Tornedalians:
Our home villages were too small to appear on maps. We could barely sup-
port ourselves, but had to depend on state hand-outs. [] Our school exam
results were the worst in the whole country. We had no table manners. We
wore woolly hats indoors. [] We were useless at conversation, reciting
poems, wrapping up presents and giving speeches. We walked with our toes
turned out.46
Although the marketing of Popular Music describes the book as funny and
full of humour, and while most readers probably agree that it is an enter-
taining read, it also relates to a painful history. Finno-Ugric ethnicity and
how it intersects with disempowerment is an important theme for Niemi,
who views the history of recent decades through a filter of humour in
which stoicism and understatement are important elements.
As Eriksson has pointed out, the discourse about Norrland as a periph-
ery has been constructed for some time through representations in politics,
media and art.47 However, Niemis book, as well as other representations by
people who define themselves as members of a minority, contribute some-
thing new by improving our understanding of the many processes which
contribute to marginalisation and othering in Europe. Niemi suggests that
some peripheries are more peripheral than others, and that all the factors
which go to make up the marginalisation of the Tornedalians cannot be
resolved merely by economic redistribution. According to Eriksson the
category of class is suppressed in the discursive construction of Norrland
as a periphery, a process that essentialises difference as a matter of choice
and life style. While this is true in some instances, experiences of belonging
to a cultural minority contribute to differentiations within the category of
Norrlanders. In present-day Smi and Tornedalian cultural mobilisation,
the temporal, spatial and identity claims of nationalist discourse are being
deconstructed, which is not the case with discourses about Norrland as
a whole. In the field of literature, for example, scholarship on working-
class writing makes no suggestion that class per se excludes people from
feelings of national belonging. In fact the working class constitutes the
backbone of the Swedish Social Democratic Peoples Home which domi-
nated nation-building during most of the twentieth century. As commen-
tators have pointed out, [t]he Swedish Peoples Home [] was without
MINORITIES ANDMIGRANTS 223
doubt meant for ethnic Swedes, although this was never acknowledged
or thought to be necessary to acknowledge.48 In the case of ethnic and
linguistic minorities, on the other hand, there is a long tradition of being
perceived as alien elements in the nation.
In conclusion, Popular Music depicts the emotional responses to
internal colonialism along one of Europes most northern margins. In
Norrland, seen as a multiplicity of rural space, there are binaries not only
between the south and the north, the urban and the rural, the mod-
ern and the backward, the wealthy and the poor, but also between the
Swedish majority and the Tornedalian Finno-Ugric minority.49 Like many
other regions in Europe, Norrland as a whole has been seen simulta-
neously as a provider of raw materials for the nation and as a kind of
peripheral hinterland of the nation, often constructed through the ste-
reotypes of backwardness and stagnancy.50 This discourse of Norrland as
an internal colony tends to disregard the disempowerment of the Smi
and Tornedalian minorities, while also overlooking the complexities of
rurality that are always found in such regions, which are characterised by
complex divisions related to class, ethnicity, language and gender. The
major theme of Niemis novel is the experience of these divisions seen
from the vantage point of a Swedish-Tornedalian protagonist who grew
up in a periphery of a periphery.
NOTES
1. See Umut zkirimli, Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction, new
edn (2000; Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010),
pp.2089.
2. Quoted in Daniel Martin, Nation States are Dead: EU Chief Says the
Belief that Countries Can Stand Alone Is a Lie and an Illusion, Mail
Online, 11 November 2010, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti-
cle-1328568/Nation-states-dead-EU-chief-says-belief-countries-stand-
lie.html (accessed 25 April 2014).
3. See Anne Heith, Europeanization and Regional Particularity: The
Northern Lights Route and the Writings of Bengt Pohjanen, in Dhaen
and Goerlandt, eds, Literature for Europe?, pp.34261.
4. See Anne Heith, Beyond Hegel and Normative Whiteness: Minorities,
Migration and New Swedish Literatures, Multiethnica, Vol. 34 (2012),
pp.1820.
5. See Ingvar Svanberg and Harald Runblom, Det mngkulturella Sverige,
in Svanberg and Runblom, eds, Det mngkulturella Sverige: En handbok
om etniska grupper och minoriteter (Stockholm: Gidlunds, 1989), p.9.
224 A. HEITH
42. See Sari Pietikinen, Leena Huss, Sirkka Laihiala-Kankainen, Ulla Aikio-
Puoskari and Pia Lane, Regulating Multilingualism in the North Calotte:
The Case of Kven, Menkieli and Smi Languages, Acta Borealia, Vol. 27,
No. 1 (2010), pp.123.
43. Niemi, Popular Music, p.71.
44. See Ulrika Kjellman, A Whiter Shade of Pale: Visuality and Race in the
Work of the Swedish State Institute for Race Biology, Scandinavian
Journal of History, Vol. 38, No. 2 (2013), pp.180201.
45. In Maja Hagermans documentary Hur gr man fr att rdda ett folk?
(What Is There To Do in Order to Save a People?, 2015), which is about
Herman Lundborg, the director of the State Institute for Race Biology in
Uppsala, there are interviews with an old Smi woman who was examined
by race biologists and who describes the shame connected with it. There
are many such testimonies, and some people even wish to forget the expe-
rience in order to leave the pain behind.
46. Niemi, Popular Music, p.71.
47. Eriksson, People in Stockholm, pp.95104.
48. Bjrn Hettne, Sverker Srlin and Uffe stergrd, Den globala nationalis-
men: Nationalstatens historia och framtid (Stockholm: SNS Frlag, 2006),
p.400 (my translation).
49. In one critical analysis of Niemis use of humour in Popular Music it is
claimed, falsely, that Pajala is a region with no identity (Juha Ridanp,
Politics of Literary Humour and Contested Narrative Identity (of a
Region with No Identity), Cultural Geographies, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2014),
p.720).
50. See Madeleine Eriksson, (Re)producing a Periphery: Popular Representations
of the Swedish North (Ume: Department of Social and Economic
Geography, Ume University, 2010), pp.25.
13
GuidoSnel
What will we talk about? It doesnt even matter. What matters here is not the
meaning but the sound of words []. I ask if it is alright if I make a drawing
of him during our conversation. Yes, yes, of course thats alright! And he
already positions himself in profile, probably the same pose he adopts when
G. Snel (
)
Department of European Studies, University of Amsterdam, 134 Spuistraat,
Amsterdam 1012VB, Netherlands
For all its irony, the above scene can be taken as a pars pro toto of the cur-
rent state of Bosnian literature, a term that first and foremost connotes the
displacement of many of its authors around western Europe and north-
ern America. Moreover, as a phenomenon Bosnian literature is in con-
stant interaction with the western gaze, and never on equal terms. As Alex
Jeffrey argues, Bosnia has mostly acted over the last two decades as a ful-
crum for Balkanist imaginaries: that is, for a set of stereotypes (violence,
savagery, backwardness) which qualify the Bosnian cultural space either as
Balkan or as Eastern European, and always as inferior and marginal with
respect to western Europe or the West at large.3 As in the above example,
such imaginaries reduce voices from the region to sound devoid of mean-
ing. When the image speaks, as in the case of Mehmedinovi, it does so
in a language that speaks to a small, fragmented audience. Within these
constraints, Bosnian literature seeks for ways to write back, in Salman
Rushdies phrase, to reclaim the discourse about its own identity and its
own specificity in the constellation of post-1989 Europe.4 The actuality of
Mehmedinovis work is that it does so in a manner conscious not only of
the marginal role of a linguistic space such as the Bosnian, but also of the
increasingly marginal role of the written word amidst the omnipresence of
visual culture. This, I contend, is how the literature of Bosnia (as an exten-
sion of Mehmedinovis work) has been carving out a space for itself ever
since the beginning of the war in the spring of 1992.
In an odd way, Bosnian literature owes its existence to the break-up of
Yugoslavia and the subsequent wars of independence. The war in Croatia
(19911995) and especially the war in Bosnia (19921995) put two lit-
eratures on the cultural map of a continent that had hitherto been accus-
tomed to Yugoslav literature, albeit as a marginal phenomenon. Specifically,
the writers of Bosnia, most of whom were caught in the 1425-day long
siege of Sarajevo, found themselves part of a global media spectacle. This
is why the work of Mehmedinovi is of significance beyond its obvious
literary merits. Ever since his war classic Sarajevo Blues (1995), his writing
has shown a deep awareness not just of the effects of exile and cultural
marginalisation. It has also sought for ways to reclaim space for the writ-
ten word at a time when it is increasingly challenged by an overpowering
visual culture. As we shall see in Self-Portrait with a Satchel, a book of
semi-autobiographical prose texts and drawings, his work constantly hovers
MY DREAM CAN ALSO BECOME YOUR BURDEN 229
between the modes and meanings of written discourse and visual repre-
sentation, resulting in what can qualify as a hybrid of various genres and
media, where narrative prose, poetry and visual art intersect.
of opinions about the war, its mediatisation and Sontags own role in this.
Opinions about Sontag ranged from praise and admiration to fierce criti-
cism and outright disgust. Thus Jean Baudrillard spoke of her cultural
soul-boosting and the condescending manner of all those visitors whose
good conscience basks in the sun of so-called solidarity.9 Whatever the
sentiments surrounding her visit (and those of other renowned foreign
artists, intellectuals and politicians), her sojourn can still be said to have
raised serious questions about the EUs politics of non-intervention and
to have revealed a direct link between its failure to act and the tradition in
western European thought of viewing Bosnia as a quasi-oriental Islamic
culture.10 On being confronted with such stereotypes in the questions she
was asked after returning to the States, Sontag wrote: What such ques-
tions show is that the questioner has bought in to the propaganda of the
aggressors: that this war is caused by age-old hatreds [], that the Serbs
are saving Europe from Muslim fundamentalism.11
Sontags view that Sarajevo stood for the secular, anti-tribal ideal was
the central motive, if not the justification, of her prolonged sojourn in the
besieged city.12 She believed that, at least temporarily, the production of
Beckett restored a sense of normalcy to the lives of the actors with whom
she worked, as well as to the lives of the audience. And that normality was
intrinsically related to being European, to being of Europe: What my pro-
duction of Godot signified to them [] is that this is a great European play
and that they are members of European culture.13 On the issue of why
other foreign writers and artists havent gone to Sarajevo, she downplayed
the dangers involved, bringing up the Spanish Civil War and mentioning the
names of George Orwell and Simone Weil to point out that Barcelona in
the 1930s was as dangerous as Sarajevo in the 1990s.14 Instead, she argued
that the ultimate reason that more people dont volunteer to go to Sarajevo
is a failure of identificationenforced by the buzz-word Muslim.15 What is
clear, I think, is not so much that Sontag insisted on Bosnia being the centre
of Europe (in fact, she refers to the sparseness of pre-war cultural life in
Sarajevo), but that such cultural peripheries are inevitably part of Europe,
even if the centre does not wish to acknowledge them.16
The second effect of her stay in Sarajevo was a flurry of debate about the
role of the writer or artist in wartime and about the (non)sense of artistic
representation of military conflict. Despite the abundant media coverage
of the war in Bosnia, it was clear to Sontag that such coverage would
not encourage Europe to intervene and prevent further atrocities from
taking place. The impact of media coverage, and especially of the role of
MY DREAM CAN ALSO BECOME YOUR BURDEN 231
write back, even when their writings failed to circulate in Europe (or cir-
culated after a significant delay). Authors like Miljenko Jergovi, Antonije
alica and Nenad Velikovi wrote extensively about the siege, although
their work only became available in translation after the war, if at all.20
One should also ask: from where did they write back? If there exists such
a thing as Bosnian literature, one has to acknowledge first of all its extra-
territorial nature. Perhaps its most prominent novelist (at least in terms of
his polemic media presence in the republics of the former Yugoslavia) is
Miljenko Jergovi, who has been based in Zagreb since 1993 and is actu-
ally a figure in Croatian literary life, not Bosnian, as is novelist and politi-
cal scientist Igor tiks. Similarly, Antonije alica is living in Amsterdam,
the Netherlands, and Adnan Mahmutovi is living in Sweden. Aleksandar
Hemon and Semezdin Mehmedinovi, arguably the two most innovative
and daring writers who came of age on the eve of the war, are both based in
the USA.Hemon writes his fiction in English and Mehmedinovi, though
writing in Bosnian, has his books published in Zagreb and English transla-
tions published through City Lights in San Francisco. What Hemon wrote
in the year 2000in the Sarajevo weekly BH Dani perhaps still counts today:
the ashtray was filling up and my mother was hoping that, when Susan
Sontag left, she could take all those butts from the ashtray, unroll them, and
there would be Marlboros for three days at least. But then, at some point,
Sontag decided to play host, [] so she got up, took the ashtray and emp-
tied it outside in a bin full of snow and rubbish.26
Faced with such ignorance of the needs of local people, Jergovi concludes
that Susan Sontag didnt know certain important things without which
there can be no life and no poetry.27
Mehmedinovi also recalls Sontags visit and introduces his memory of
it with an account of a friends response to her arrival: Has Ms Sontag
brought oranges?28 As Mehmedinovi explains, [w]hen you visit someone
in prison or hospital [] you bring oranges in order to show sympathy
for their suffering, and in the same way his friends reaction to Sontags
visit, like the reactions of all of us at the time, required those who came
to town to define their position toward our pain.29 When Mehmedinovi
comes to speak of Regarding the Pain of Others, he writes that it is almost
like a sublimation of the Sarajevan experience expressed in the question:
What do we feel and how do we feel regarding the pain of others?30 At this
point, he begins to defend Sontag against Jergovis criticisms. Instead of
referring back to her sojourn in the city, he recalls a photograph that Annie
Leibovitz made of Sontag lying on a hospital bed after her death in 2004:
for Mehmedinovi, this decision finally to show herself in that state, to close
the circle, is an expression of the sort of emancipation that is nothing if not
sheer poetry.31 His suggestion is that Sontags posthumous image provides
the ultimate justification both of her visits to Sarajevo and of her intellectual
endeavours to probe the limits of human identification with someone elses
suffering. By exposing her own physical vulnerability, he claims, Sontag
moved beyond the limits of politics and made a genuine statement. As with
his earlier quotation on the war in Vietnam, Mehmedinovis argument cen-
tres on the human body, or rather the vulnerability of it (the precarious-
ness, as Judith Butler would say).32 Equally central to his argument is the
entanglement of language (Sontags essays) and visual image (Sontags final
234 G. SNEL
I think more and more often of the human body as a ruin. I am tired, and
so all the others look tired to me. Ever since I started to draw, Ive noticed a
more or less visible asymmetry on peoples faces. [] They have a tired eye;
MY DREAM CAN ALSO BECOME YOUR BURDEN 235
its where our defeats in life accumulate. Unlike the rested eye, time seems
to pass more rapidly in the tired one.35
Why is it that I started drawing, where does it come from? From a concrete
deprivation. I feel the urge to visually represent the world to myself, and a
camera would offer a solution. In the outside world I am fascinated by people,
but people dont like it when you take their picture [] and the majority of
them would say: no! Everybody aggressively protects their privacy.37
the wall. The images that are fragments from my dream can also become
your burden.39 In short, it is through the act of self-representation that
the reality of Sarajevo (the burden) can be communicated, albeit in an
oblique, fragmented manner.
The problematics of representation continue when Mehmedinovi
introduces a drawing he has made of his son (who, incidentally, is a pho-
tographer by profession). He catches H. asleep and decides to make a
drawing, although confesses that there is something disquieting in watch-
ing someone sleeping (What a violation of someones privacy! Because
privacy, if it exists, is most present when someone is asleep).40 Reminded
of the need for a respectful form of visual representation, he finishes
quickly, looks at the drawing and is satisfied:
The portrait is precise, there is something in the way the hands are posi-
tioned, in the overall expression, which makes me think: these lines on paper
are definitely H., much more precise than if I had portrayed him with a
camera: 41
MY DREAM CAN ALSO BECOME YOUR BURDEN 237
I would argue that there is no primacy of word over image here, even
though the former precedes and frames the latter. The written text explains
how the drawing came about, why it was made and how it polemically
relates to photography. It does not limit the possible impact of the draw-
ing, and the final colon integrates the drawing with the writing. One could
argue that the drawing has the last say, but once the reader comes to it,
the linear logic of reading has been replaced by a more complex shifting
between visual and written text. One senses that only through this merger
can the author achieve the precision that is his ultimate aim.
The encounter is between the here and now and a space that is not just
geographically remote but also at a temporal distance from the present.
This is the very configuration by which Bosnia is cut off from Europe and
the West, the space-time anomaly which Sontag so vehemently rejected
by insisting that Bosnia is part of European culture. The traveller from
Bosnia will cross the line once he lights the cigarette, unaware that smok-
ing has been banned in restaurants. His former compatriot, who observes
him from within the West, realises that it is he himself who conceives of
his friend (and perhaps his own past in their former country) as being at
a distance. When the scene then stops, or is frozen, while the mirror is
shaking, we have a symbol of Mehmedinovis inner disturbance at find-
ing, in his own consciousness, one of the imagined civilisational fault
lines of the post-1989 global order. The distancing in space and time
turns out to be a mere matter of perspective, that of the Bosnian author
who, through recognising the conditioning effects of the western gaze,
manages to turn his attention upon them and thereby achieve his own
viewpoint.
If this scene drifts from personal to public history, then the following
passage from The Window Book involves the reader in a more sweeping
reconfiguration of Bosnia in contemporary geopolitics:
Adnan, a painter and writer with origins in the city of Beirut and the
cosmopolitan commonwealth of the late Ottoman Empire and its post-
imperial afterlife, reminds Mehmedinovi of an alternative layer of history,
with profound consequences for the way he conceives of both his own
biography and the cultural configuration of Bosnia and Europe as a whole.
Her remark frames their identity in a historical experience which is radi-
cally different from the (western) European notion that cultures are to be
defined by their distance from or proximity to the centres of continental
power. The act of recognising that Beirut and Sarajevo are not only post-
Ottoman peripheries, but also two of the worlds war zones, establishes
MY DREAM CAN ALSO BECOME YOUR BURDEN 239
NOTES
1. Mehmedinovi, Autoportret s Torbom (Zagreb: Fraktura, 2012), p. 160.
All translations from the text are my own.
2. Ibid., p.160.
3. Jeffrey, The Masks of Europe in Contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina,
in Luiza Bialasiewicz, ed., Europe in the World: EU Geopolitics and the
Making of European Space (London: Ashgate, 2011), p.82.
4. See Rushdie, The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance, The Times, 3
July 1982, p.8.
5. Mehmedinovi, Sarajevo Blues, trans. by Ammiel Alcalay (1995; San
Francisco: City Lights, 1998), p.83.
6. Ibid., p.83.
7. This account first appeared in an abridged version in the New York Review
of Books of 21 October 1993. It was printed in full in the Performing Arts
Journal in May 1994 and later reprinted in her collection of essays, Where
the Stress Falls (2001).
8. I am pointing at an instant public sphere which is Europeanising in the
sense that it crosses national borders and language zones and that Europe
is both the issue and the addressee.
9. Baudrillard, No Reprieve for Sarajevo (1994), trans. by Patrice Riemens,
The European Graduate School, http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-bau-
drillard/articles/no-reprieve-for-sarajevo/ (accessed 18 September 2015).
10. For a full discussion of the issue, see David Toole, Waiting for Godot in
Sarajevo: Theological Reflections on Nihilism, Tragedy, and Apocalypse, new
edn (1997; London: SCM Press, 2001), pp.14.
11. Sontag, Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo, Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 16,
No. 2 (1994), p.93.
12. Ibid., p.93.
13. Ibid., p.90.
14. Ibid., p.90.
15. Ibid., p.93.
16. Ibid., p.90. tienne Balibar, in a lecture delivered in Thessaloniki during the
Kosovo War, makes a similar statement when he writes that border areas
zones, countries, and citiesare not marginal to the constitution of a public
sphere but rather are at the center. If Europe is for us first of all the name of
an unresolved political problem, Greece is one of its centers, not because of
the mythical origins of our civilization [] but because of the current prob-
lems concentrated there (Balibar, We, the People of Europe?, p.2).
17. Butler added to Sontags discussion of visual culture a concern about the
widespread use of embedded journalism in the US invasion of Iraq,
although this shifted the focus from Bosnia to the involvement of the West
(the USA and western Europe) with war and trauma elsewhere.
MY DREAM CAN ALSO BECOME YOUR BURDEN 241
DonaldRayfield
Despite Greek colonisation of the Black Sea coast from 600 BC, and
intermittent invasions by, and alliance with, the Romans from the time of
Pompey, Georgia remained on the periphery of Classical Greco-Roman
culture. Its inhabitants were even more cut off than their neighbours,
the Armenians, who at least had performances of Euripides until the first
century AD.For the classical world, Georgia did not exist as a concept:
there was the western half, Colchis, important only for its Greek cities,
and Iberia, its eastern half, seen as a Persian or Parthian possession, only
occasionally a battlefield for the Roman legions. Constantine the Great
in the fourth century AD seemed to finally include Georgia in Europes
sphere (once Christianity had brought Georgia literacy, Orthodoxy and
the culture of Byzantium), but the political history of the country was
still a tug-of-war between Byzantium and Persia, interrupted only by
Arab and Turkic invasions. When secular literature was established in the
eleventh century, it was under Persian, not European, influence. Even
for Georgians who travelled there, Europe was only a potential source of
intercession with oriental tyranny and, despite the trickle of Italian and
Polish missionaries, centuries would pass before western European culture
D. Rayfield (
)
Department of Russian, Queen Mary University, Mile End Road, London
EI 4NS, UK
itself was felt to have any relevance at all. After the fall of Byzantium, the
Georgian clergy forgot their Greek, and the countrys second languages
became Turkish and Farsi until, in the late eighteenth century, Russian
began to supplant them, thus becoming an intermediary for European
cultural forms.
Georgian literature can be dated back to the sixth century AD.From
the sixth to eleventh century it was primarily Orthodox religious, its fin-
est achievements being in hymns, chronicles and lives of the saints and
fathers of the church. Just one work can be classified as a novel, the anony-
mous Balahvariani (Tale of Balahvar and Iodasap, c.1000). Interestingly,
Georgian literature here acted as a vector to Europe; as shown by Elguja
Khintibidze, Balahvariani is a free version of an Arab tale (deriving from
the Buddhist Sanskrit Lalita-vistara, c.250 AD) which, after a Greek ver-
sion was translated from the Georgian, spread throughout Europe, one late
manifestation being in Lev Tolstoys Ispoved (A Confession, 18791882).1
After the eleventh century, Georgian literature made a volte-face and,
while remaining Christian, underwent a secular flowering influenced by
Persian romance. Although Persian-inspired poetry and prose resembled
the courtly literature of western Europe, the development was parallel, as
the non-secular nature of Byzantine culture obstructed any direct liter-
ary influence from the region. This immunity is striking, because Georgia
periodically sought political help from Europe against Persian domination,
the first appeal being a visit by a Georgian king to Rome in 140 AD.There
was a fatal asymmetry in relations between western Europe and Georgia:
while Georgians appealed for attention at some point in almost every cen-
tury in the Christian era, western Europe turned to them only when it, too,
felt threatened by resurgent Islam: in the twelfth century, the Crusaders
had an informal alliance with the Georgian kingdom, and after the fall
of Constantinople Papal envoys and Venetian merchants visited Georgian
rulers in the hope of opening an eastern front against the Ottomans and of
bringing the Georgian church into the fold of the Catholic church. When
Europe responded to a typical Georgian request for 20,000 armed men,
however, it sent only missionaries, merchants and diplomats, and they cer-
tainly had no interest in Georgias secular literature. The Augustinians,
who restored to King Teimuraz I the remains of his martyred mother in
1628, praised his poetry only for its piety in versifying the story of Joseph
and Potiphars wife.
In the eighteenth century, after a hopeless diplomatic mission to seek
help from Louis XIV and the Pope, the King of Kartlis uncle, the writer and
BLOWING HOT ANDCOLD 245
Leave Paris and go running back to crappy Georgia! Ive got to leave the
beautiful princesses here and attach myself to some frump in the backwoods!
Ive got to leave a palace and go to live in some chicken shed in Samtredia
or Tbilisi! [] The whole world is my motherland!3
World War One drives Kvachi back to Russia, where a series of treasonable
acts brings him alternately enormous riches and death sentences. As war
descends into revolution, and Georgian independence is achieved, Kvachi
sees his country abandoned by Europe: Up till now we had two paths:
either Russia or Europe. Now were left with one: the Moscow path.4
Revolution (and a recent brush with the OGPUs executioners) convinced
Javakhishvili that contact with western Europe had been a dangerous
flirtation, although in his best-known novel, Arsena marabdeli (Arsena
from Marabda, 1935), he seemed no more complimentary about Russian
attempts at modernisation: Russia is pursuing Europe on horseback, and
dragging us behind by a rope and telling us, dont lag behind. But we
are running, covered in blood, and we think the Russians are doing us a
favour.5 No doubt that remark was one of the many reasons why Lavrenti
Beria had Javakhishvili tortured and executed in 1937.
In 1947, there was a false dawn when Beria repatriated many Georgians
from France, including both revered scholars and those who had fought
alongside the Nazis; these European Georgians were exempted from the
GULag and allowed to walk free. But writers hopes of liberalisation were
BLOWING HOT ANDCOLD 247
In the mid-1990s, only one major novelist stood his ground. Otar
Chiladzes fifth and angriest novel, Avelumi (Avelum, 1995), recounts
the life story of the eponymous hero (his name is the Sumerian for free
citizen), a writer who hates the Soviet system, but whose own empire of
love falls apart together with the empire of evil.6 The timeframe of the
novel is Avelums entire adult life, which spans two massacres of unarmed
Georgian protesters by Soviet special forces: the first in March 1956, after
Khrushchevs de-Stalinisation speech aroused the fury of Tbilisis young
people with its contempt for Georgians, and the second in April 1989,
when Gorbachevs forces attacked a crowd demanding independence with
nerve gas and spades. The intervening 33 yearsas Avelum points out,
the span of Christs life on earthare measured by the slow but steady
increase in contact between Georgians and western Europeans (largely
tourists, fellow-travellers or diplomats) and, as a result, an increasingly
evident discrepancy between Georgians illusions about the free world
and the reality of the gullible, inconsiderate visitors to their country, who
are mainly shepherded by Intourist around the antiquities of Tbilisis State
Museum.7 (Ironically, most of the exhibits in the museum were effectively
a gift from France: in 1921 the fleeing Menshevik government had man-
aged to crate up all the treasures of its palaces, churches and museums and
ship them into exile in France; in 1944, as a gesture of post-war solidarity
with Stalin, de Gaulle repatriated the surviving crates and their curator,
Professor Ekvtime Taqaishvili, to Georgia.)
The contrasting psychology and morality of French and Georgian, capi-
talist and Soviet, are the main threads of this tragic novel. In its chapters set
in France, with typical Georgian ambiguity, the hero is both envious and
disapproving of a free-thinking, hedonistic society which makes happiness
and individual decision-making too easy and blinds its inhabitants to the
tragic realities of life, which the hero sees only too clearly. Nevertheless,
Avelum is portrayed, without apology, as a womaniser. His fame as a writer
brings him an entry into Moscow intellectual life and, with it, a Russian
mistress. It also allows him contact with diplomats, and in the early 1970s,
when the restrictions on meeting foreigners are slightly eased, a French
diplomat facilitates the relationships Avelum has with French mistresses.
After an affair with Ccile, a French visitor to Tbilisis museums, the hero
embarks on an enduring love affair with Franoise, a French woman who
finds work as a translator in Moscow and with whom Avelum, thanks in
part to his all-tolerant wife, can maintain contact while the USSR still
exists. Their time together is severely limited, however. Because Avelum,
250 D. RAYFIELD
in traditional Georgian fashion, does everything to fence off his wife and
daughter from his mistress, they meet in Moscow, rather than Tbilisi; at
the same time, even though Franoise is a Russophile with no antagonism
towards the Soviet system, the authorities treat her with suspicion, allow-
ing her to enter the country for brief periods as a tourist and only for one
extended period as a translator for the propaganda media. Nevertheless,
she has a daughter by Avelum and, when perestroika begins, he is finally
allowed to visit France to see them. At first France seems so heavenly that
he has no wish to take Franoise to the USSR.It would be monstrous to
get her from Paris, the velvety banks of the Seine, the blossoming chestnut
trees intoxicating scent, and transport her back to the eternal dankness
and cold of the grim labyrinth and let her inhale its torpid air, void of
function and so hard to breathe.8 Avelum has equally strong reasons not
to make a move in the opposite direction. Asking himself why he didnt
profit from his good fortune in attracting a foreign woman by marrying
her with the hope of being allowed to emigrate to France, as many in his
situation would have done, he reveals a fidelity to the culture he hates that
is as strong as his fidelity to a family he is so constantly unfaithful to. He
senses that the life of a dissident in the Soviet Union, which he is on the
verge of becoming, may be hard, even perilous, but the life of a Soviet
exile in France would be utterly meaningless and devoid of status.
Contact with French visitors to the USSR has already persuaded Avelum
that their values are alien and, to his fastidious mind, even repulsive. The
family of Lon Fouchet, his diplomat friend, keeps a pet white rat called
Friedrich, while Fouchets friend, Rmy-Louis, who takes an interest in
Georgia purely as a surviving part of the ancient Hellenic world, does not
notice a cockroach crawling over his shirt collar. As Avelum wonders, if
the French can keep a pet rat, give it food and water and clean up after it,
whats to stop them training and taming a cockroach []?9 The visit of
Rmy-Louis to Georgia irritates Avelum as much as it flatters him: while
the French academic is thrilled by the survival of Dionysian traditions in
rural life, he is utterly unaware of the countrys tragic subjugation, like
somebody visiting a prison and ignoring the fact that his host is a prisoner
of conscience. Even the beloved Franoise, once she has found a way of
staying in Moscow for months, rather than days, upsets Avelum by her
easy acceptance of the privileged life that she, as a foreigner, and her con-
tacts, as the sons and daughters of the party and intellectual lite, enjoy.
Franoises so-called European fun entails singing mildly dissident songs,
riding at the Hippodrome and sitting with her degenerate fellow guests
BLOWING HOT ANDCOLD 251
NOTES
1. Khintibidze, Georgian-Byzantine Literary Contacts, trans. by Arrian
Tchanturia (1969; Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1996), pp.192291.
2. Javakhishvili, Kvachi, trans. by Donald Rayfield (1925; Champaign and
London: Dalkey Archive, 2015), p.238.
3. Ibid., p.263. The passage continues: I can live in any developed country.
I love culture, civilization, progress, clean streets, a nice tidy apartment,
really good entertainments; I like a well-starched shirt, a top hat, patent-
leather shoes; I love women of good breeding who are scrubbed and
bathed, wear silk underwear, and change it at least twice a week; I cant
understand how anyone can live in a town where there arent several col-
leges, a dozen theatres, arts and sciences, a town where intellectual life is
extinguished or never existed (ibid., pp.2634).
4. Ibid., p.451.
5. Javakhishvili, Arsena marabdeli (Tbilisi: Pederatsia, 1935), p.571.
6. Chiladze, Avelum, trans. by Donald Rayfield (1995; London: Garnett
Press, 2013), p.59.
7. Ibid., p.68.
8. Ibid., p.90.
9. Ibid., p.122.
10. Ibid., p.272.
11. See ibid., pp.8, 15, 46, 122, 154, 176, 226, 227.
12. Ibid., p.55.
13. Ibid., p.266.
14. Ibid., p.212.
15. Ibid., p.177.
16. This subject matter was soon exhausted, as shown by his monologue
Kagdata in jorjia (Once a Time in Georgia, 2008), which compared 1990s
Georgia to the world of Hollywood westerns and New York gangsters.
Morchiladze has since relied on sci-fi and alternative history for inspiration.
256 D. RAYFIELD
Sarahde Mul
INTRODUCTION
The Nigerian-Belgian writer Chika Unigwe wrote the satirical article Zwart
worden in zeven lessen (Becoming Black in Seven Lessons, 2010) after
being inspired by the Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainainas piece How to
Write about Africa (2005).1 In the article, Unigwe remarks that before com-
ing to Europe she had no clear idea of what it meant to be black, suggesting
that she did not experience race to be the defining social identity in Nigeria.
She goes on to describe, with great irony, what she has learned about black-
ness since living in Europe: I now learn that being black means that I am
perceived as a charity project. That I must be grateful for the opportunity
granted to me by being in Europe.2 The lessons further include dressing in
an authentically African way, always being prepared for police control and
being able to dance. Stating that blackness has no connotation on its own,
but is assigned meaning from the outside, Unigwes Becoming Black in
Seven Lessons reminds us of the social construction of blackness.
In this essay, I explore the social construction of black identity in relation
to, on the one hand, Unigwes position and authorial self-representation
S. de Mul (
)
Faculty of Humanities, Open Universiteit, 6419 AT Heerlan, Netherlands
Africa as Europes ultimate other, but also sought for multiple ways to
resist these perceptions. When Frantz Fanon enters the white world of
Europe and discovers himself as a black man with an inferiority com-
plex, his socio-psychoanalytical commentary concludes that one is black
to the degree to which one is being perceived as wicked, spineless, evil,
and instinctual. Everything that is the opposite of this black behaviour is
white.4 Becoming Black in Seven Lessons transposes Fanons insights to
the twenty-first-century predicament of blackness in the heart of Europe
and, as a consequence, suggests that these insights are still actual.
At the same time, however, Unigwes contemporary focus also involves
a translation to a new European context, specifically to Flanders, the
Dutch speaking region of Belgium. In so doing, she brings to mind Stuart
Halls contention that if blackness is something constructed, told, spo-
ken, not simply [] found, it can be pluck[ed] out of its articulation and
rearticulate[d] in a new way, thereby creating new processes of identifica-
tion.5 Following Hall, we need to consider the particular socio-cultural
context in which constructions of blackness are narrated and by means of
which these stories can subsequently be told anew. The specific context
of Unigwes writings is a Flemish literary culture whose lack of ethnic
minority writers was (and still is) perceived as problematic, as an absence
in need of clarification. In framing the absence of ethnic minority authors
as a problem, interlocutors have projected onto this desired category of
author their own ideas about the nature of Flemish society and about what
Flemish literature should be. Indeed, in a newspaper article entitled Wij
spreken pas als jullie luisteren (We Only Speak when You Listen, 2004),
Moroccan-Flemish writer Jamila Amadou argues that ethnic minority
writers have been absent from the Flemish literary field since they reject
the only position in the field available for an allochtonous writer: namely,
that of spokesperson for his or her ethno-cultural community.6
Published in 2005, Unigwes first novel for adults, De Feniks (The
Phoenix, 2005), was announced as the first book of fiction written by a
Flemish author of African origin.7 The reception of De Fenix indicated
not only that Chika Unigwe was eagerly awaited as a Flemish author of
African origin, but also that a range of expectations was already circulating
among reviewers about the content of such an authors work. For example,
reviewers clearly wanted her fiction to deliver a new Nigerian perspec-
tive. In his review of De Fenix, Flemish literary critic Marc Cloostermans
complained that the Nigerian protagonist Oge did not have a particularly
interesting view of our country []. To draw our attention to these kinds
260 S. DE MUL
of banalities, we really did not need a Nigerian writer.8 Unigwe has not
overtly criticised such culturalist readings of her work, which may seem
surprising in light of her satirical Becoming Black in Seven Lessons. While
the article suggests Unigwes acute awareness of commonplace ideas of
blackness affecting her life and (as we may also assume) her writing in a
European society like Flanders, her modes of self-representation in meta-
literary textssuch as interviews and book blurbsdo not clearly counter
or question these ideas. This distinguishes her from other ethnic minority
writers in Flanders, such as the Moroccan-born Rachida Lamrabet and
Hafid Bouazza, who vehemently refute ethnic or cultural labels and refer-
ences to allochthony that distinguish them and possibly exclude them
from imaginations of what home-grown Flemish literature is and should
be in the future.9
For an understanding of Unigwes authorial self-representation, it
seems useful to build on the notion of strategic exoticism as put forward
in the studies by Graham Huggan and Sarah Brouillette of the intersec-
tions between postcolonialism and the global literary market place.10 In
The Postcolonial Exotic (2001), Huggan defines a global alterity industry
in which cultural difference is processed through exoticism, a mode of
aesthetic perception [that] effectively manufactures otherness even as it
claims to surrender its immanent mystery.11 For Huggan, the most notice-
able feature of writing by authors such as Salman Rushdie and Arundhati
Roy is the way in which they balance their ostensibly anti-colonial politics
with their commercial viability as globally successful postcolonial novelists,
a balance that suggests their work is designed as much as to challenge as
to profit from consumer needs.12 Sarah Brouillette critiques Huggans
notion of strategic exoticism for implicitly distinguishing between those
consumers who seek [] mythic access to exotic experience and those
who actually have access to the reality that the other consumer can only
ever wish to possess.13 Brouillette convincingly argues that it is more
fruitful to understand strategic exoticism, and likewise general postcolo-
nial authorial self-consciousness, as comprised of a set of literary strate-
gies that operate through assumptions shared between the author and
the reader, as both producer and consumer work to negotiate with, if not
absolve themselves of, postcolonialitys touristic guilt.14
Similarly, one may assume that while being confronted with the expec-
tations and limitations of the position of ethnic minority writer in Europe,
Unigwe strategically acts out the exoticism to which she and her work
are relegated. This position allows her to launch her work and partake
BECOMING BLACK INBELGIUM 261
when Sisi tries to escape the world of prostitution and is murdered that
Ama, Efe and Joyce work through her death by gradually revealing their
painful histories to each other and to the reader.
Composed of fictional autobiographies of the four women, On Black
Sisters Street invites us to consider the continued relevance of autobi-
ography as a central explanatory category in understanding postcolonial-
ism and its relation to subjectivity. The latter exercise has been the focus
of a series of recent studies that examine autobiographys philosophical
resistance to universal concepts and theories and that explore its intersec-
tions with the postcolonial enterprise of rethinking norms of experience
and knowledge.16 On Black Sisters Street firmly situates the life narratives
of the four African women within todays geopolitical power relations.
These narratives include tragic episodes of poverty, war, sexual abuse and
families torn apart in their home countries, which made them vulnerable
to a global womens trafficking network run by Oga Dele. On arrival in
Belgium, however, they soon find out that they have escaped their cir-
cumstances for a mirageor fata morgana, to use the Dutch title of
the noveland their dreams of a better and wealthier life in Europe are
shattered. That the novel draws on life writing to portray the experiences
and memories of the protagonists may not seem entirely unexpected. In
their reinterpretation of Fanons Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin,
White Masks, 1952) as an autobiographical narrative, C.L.Innes and Bart
Moore-Gilbert suggest that, for Fanon, the autobiographical mode has
partly emanated from a colonial oppression that obliges colonised subjects
to ask the question constantly Who am I?.17 From this perspective, it
is not surprising that On Black Sisters Street also deploys the (fictional)
autobiographical mode to recount the four womens deprived circum-
stances. Specifically, the novel offers a dreary portrayal of the submerged
world of illegal prostitution in the red-light district of Antwerp. It suggests
the descent into disorientation and denial of worth that the protagonists
face, a recurring theme in many autobiographical works by postcolonial
women.18 Employed as sex workers, the protagonists must pay back in
monthly instalments to Dele the fee of 30,000 euros, the cost of their
exportation to Belgium. With their fake passports withheld by Madam
and living under her close surveillance, the four women are almost liter-
ally imprisoned in the house in the red-light district and also objectified in
the position of black sex workers satisfying white mens sexual desires. As
Dele tells Efe, black women [are] in great demand by white men, tired
BECOMING BLACK INBELGIUM 263
of their women and wanting a bit of colour and spice.19 Primarily, the
women are socially constructed through exotic, sexualised codes of black
womanhood.
On Black Sisters Street centres on the experiences and voices of the
women, who are usually observed from the outside, as sexual spectacles
sitting under red spotlights behind the windows of the Schipperskwartier
of Antwerp. At first sight, the novel offers the reader a voyeuristic glance
into these womens lives, and seems to draw from the kind of tragic sen-
sationalism with which recent accounts of victimised Muslim women have
allowed western readers a supposed peek behind the veil.20 Although
lengthy scenes describe how the women are confronted by all sorts of
deprivation, violence and abuse both in Nigeria and in Belgium, the nov-
els aim is not to deplore the miserable fate of black sex workers who are
victims of Deles womens trafficking network and of the male-dominated
western sex industry. Rendering her account of the journey to Belgium,
Ama says: I made this choice, at least, I was given a choice. I came here
with my eyes wide open (114). Indeed, the novel shows how the four
women are not victims but agents in a transnational world, making strate-
gic choices that are restricted by circumstance.
If they want to be successful as sex workers, the women are to abide by
gendered and racialised norms and codes of behaviour. On Black Sisters
Street is not so much an account of four African sex workers than an
exploration of how they become black sex workers. A depiction of Joyces
working costume is indicative of their transformation: Blue bra sprinkled
with glitter and a matching G-string, boots up to her thighs, she stood
behind the glass and prayed that no one would notice her (234). The
novel clearly suggests the constructed nature of black sexualised woman-
hood by describing how the four women dress up and act out the role that
is expected of them. If it is true, as Eva Pendelton argues, that sex work is
drag in that it is a mimetic performance of highly charged feminine gender
codes (to which we may also add racial codes), then the novel portrays
the four protagonists in the process of performing these highly charged
exoticist codes of black femininity.21
It is worth considering at this point whether Brouillettes notion of stra-
tegic exoticism is not only illuminating for Unigwes authorial position in
the Flemish literary field but also for how her novel relates the African
diasporic sex workers position in the Antwerp sex industry. The four pro-
tagonists cannot generally be seen to change or subvert the normative
264 S. DE MUL
scripts they must follow; until Sisis failed attempt to escape at the end of
the novel, the women almost conscientiously behave as Madam and others
tell them to. The disruptive potential, however, resides not in the wom-
ens rewriting of the codes of black sex workers, but in the narration of
how they act out these codes. Unigwe juxtaposes scenes of the womens
performance as black sex workers with self-reflexive passages which, by
explicating their doubts, uncertainty, embarrassment or feelings of free-
dom in the role, show the women to take an emotional and critical dis-
tance from their job. Unigwe describes what goes on in the minds of the
women as they try their best to please the men who approach them. In so
doing, their work is revealed to the reader as a strategic lie. For example,
Joyce piously scrubs the make-up off her face on the request of a regular
customer who calls her Etiennes Nubian princess (234). She is ready
to change the script and to change costume, as it were, whenever this is
desired. Yet her ultimate goal is not to satisfy white mens desire, but to
achieve economic purpose and upward social mobility. In the words of
Ama: the men she slept with were [] just tools she needed to achieve
her dream. And her dream was expansive enough to accommodate all of
them (169).
The constructed, performative dimensions of black female sex workers
identity may suggest an illusion of a behind where the women act out
their real, core selves. However, we are soon made aware that, in their
daily lives, the womens identities also consist of a series of provisional
narratives. More specifically, On Black Sisters Street inherently connects
the issue of storytelling to constructions of black womanhood. Narrating
their histories to each otherlife writing being a formal way to under-
score the narrative dimension of identitythe women change their stories
about themselves in response to their rapidly changing circumstances. For
example, Sisi and Joyce have changed their names from Chrisom and Alek,
Sisi reveals herself to be Sudanese, not Nigerian as she has made everyone
in the house believe, and Joyce refers to the UN refugee camp she lived in
for a while as a collection of sad stories (194). On arrival in Belgium, Sisi
is determined to shed her skin like a snake and emerge completely new
(98). Madam invents the story of an escape from Liberia that Sisi must
tell about herself in the immigration office. Reiterating one of Unigwes
points in Becoming Black in Seven Lessons, Madam adds that [w]hite
people enjoy sob stories. They love to hear about us killing each other,
about us hacking each others heads off in senseless ethnic conflicts. The
more macabre the story the better (121). After Sisi agrees to be Liberian,
BECOMING BLACK INBELGIUM 265
we are told that in the next months she would be other things. Other
people. A constant yearning to escape herself would take over her life
(121). While the performance of sexualised definitions of black woman-
hood is central to the four womens lives in Europe, their personal and
family histories emphasise their identities as a series of narratives invented
strategically to suit the circumstances.
On Black Sisters Street complicates and refutes unilateral defini-
tions of black womanhood, which in the words of the Nigerian author
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie are vulnerable to the danger of a single
story, suggesting that if we hear only a single account of another person
or country we risk a critical misunderstanding.22 To borrow a phrase from
Paul Gilroy, Unigwes concept of identity also embraces contingency,
indeterminacy and conflict.23 The novel deploys a range of genres and
narrative techniques which refute the static and single-sided ideas about
female blackness with which the four women are confronted during their
work in the red-light district. Not only are elements of the coming-of-
age novel and the Bildungsroman evident in their stories, but aspects of
the detective novel are incorporated in the whodunit surrounding Sisis
death, features of travel writing appear in Sisis jaunts about Antwerp
disguised as a tourist and magical realism characterises Sisis flight from
her body after death to visit her parents and to curse Deles family. On
Black Sisters Street integrates and interweaves these generic traditions in
a composite form, refusing to prioritise a single authorial voice or to pres-
ent a teleological journey of a single protagonist. As suggested above, it
could be seen as a fictional autobiography, or rather as a series of fictional
autobiographies, as it focuses on not one but several interspersed life
narratives. Its form could also be described as a particular type of short
story cycle, a narrative of community, in Sandra A. Zagarells sense
of the term.24 Zagarell advances a theory of a womens genre that, in
its textual ethos and subject matter, privileges community over self and
shows a concern with process rather than with the conflict or progress
found in linear narrative. Though Zagarells focus is on nineteenth-cen-
tury womens short story cycles, her insights are relevant to twentieth-
century narratives of community which may be inspired most strongly
by writers own racial, ethnic, class, and or cultural traditions, and the
changing roles of gender.25 Zagarells view of the short story cycle rever-
berates in unexpected ways with the relationality of subjectivity that
Moore-Gilbert identifies as one of postcolonial autobiographys central
features.26
266 S. DE MUL
she vehemently replies that she is not his sister and turns her back on him.
The rejection of family ties is suggestive both for Ama and for the mutual
relationships among the four protagonists. Though they share the same
house, their conceptions of home and family are not defined in national or
cultural terms. The house, a spatial metaphor for the four black womens
community in Europe, is a place of conflict that offers no true sense of
belonging: it is a cold place without a heart(h), the conventional symbol
of the beating heart of the home, the fireplace, proving fake (32).
In earlier sections of the novel, the women know little about each other
and feelings of hostility and suspicion prevent them from developing inti-
mate relations. They shroud their histories in ambiguity or keep them
covered: They were strangers without words between them, given to
maintaining the silence which has [] become the community they share
(115, 39). In the course of narrating their histories to each other, how-
ever, they develop a sense of belonging in each others company. Through
the intimacies of storytelling, the women discover their communal bond
and shared predicament, which gradually ignite a sense of home. Indeed,
it is the act of storytelling that constitutes the womens community in the
house, which in the penultimate section is described like a family home:
The communal kitchen and the shared living room bound the women. They
met there when they yearned for company but could always retire to their
rooms for some privacy. It was where they could escape the glare of the
Schipperskwartier, live a life that did not include strange men with some-
times stranger requests. (273)
CONCLUSION
In this essay, I have explored how social constructions of blackness affect
and inform the authorial self-representations and textual thematics of
the Nigerian-Belgian writer Chika Unigwe. It has been shown that insti-
tutionally endorsed ethno-cultural ideas of authorship shape notions of
Unigwes literary identity and affect the ways in which her oeuvre is read.
Although it may be argued that taking up the role of black author in the
heart of Europe is a form of strategic exoticism, the role does not entirely
define or confine Unigwe, considering that she deploys it to launch her
work and participate in a global literary system of African diaspora writ-
ing, while transcending the exoticised position of ethnic minority writer
available to her in the Flemish literary field. Unigwes writings are indeed
written, printed, translated and read not only in Flanders and Europe but
in multiple places throughout the world, indicating our growing need to
adopt a more transnational perspective if we are to accommodate the sev-
eral communities in which cultural products are nowadays produced and
received and in which various authorial positions can be asserted.
In the light of this latter point, On Black Sisters Street is not only a tale
of choices and displacement set against the backdrop of prostitution in
Antwerp, but also reveals itself to be a book that theorises its own cultural
mobility. While the four protagonists enter a social imaginary in which
they perform the already pronounced role of the exotic black woman,
the novel situates their performance in the larger context of their indi-
vidual biographies, suggesting it is but one of many strategic narratives
they choose to narrate about themselves. Similarly, On Black Sisters Street
exposes how black womanhood in Europe is not merely about taking
up the role of the exotic sexualised black woman of popular European
perception, but also, and perhaps more importantly, about how women
across the limits of cultures and social forces of power and domination
improvise and find spaces to re-describe themselves while creating their
transnational worlds anew.28
BECOMING BLACK INBELGIUM 269
NOTES
1. Unigwes article is also digitally available as How to be an African, albeit
in revised form (see Unigwe, How to be an African, African Writing
Online, http://www.african-writing.com/nine/chikaunigwe.htm (accessed
29 March 2013).
2. Unigwe, Zwart worden in zeven lessen, MO: Mondiaal Nieuws, 11
February 2010, http://www.mo.be/opinie/zwart-worden-zeven-lessen
(accessed 29 March 2013). This and all further translations are my own.
3. Unigwe, How to be an African.
4. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p.169.
5. Hall, Minimal Selves, in Lisa Appignanesi, ed., Identify: The Real Me
(London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1987), p.45.
6. Amadou, Wij spreken pas als jullie luisteren, De Standaard, 13 October
2004, http://www.standaard.be/cnt/g339ete9 (accessed 21 September
2015).
7. This description appears on the back cover of On Black Sisters Street. Before
making her appearance on the Flemish-Belgian literary scene in 2005, Chika
Unigwe had already successfully debuted with English-language publica-
tions in Nigeria and Britain. Her poetry was published in Nigeria in the early
1990s, her short stories won the 2003 BBC Short Story Competition and a
Commonwealth Short Story Award and were published in Wasafiri and a
number of anthologies of contemporary African writing and she wrote the
two childrens books, A Rainbow for Dinner (2003) and Ije at School
(2003). After her debut in Belgium, Unigwe has continued to publish short
stories, essays and translations and editions of her writings in both Dutch
and English.
8. Cloostermans, As en confetti: Grote emoties bij Chika Unigwe, De
Standaard, 22 September 2005, http://www.standaard.be/cnt/gpai4d5b
(accessed 21 September 2015).
9. Lamrabet has elaborated her views in interview: see, for example, Erwin Jans,
Schrijven al seen vorm van archief, De Wereldmorgen, 12 December 2014,
http://www.dewereldmorgen.be/artikel/2014/12/12/schrijven-als-een-
vorm-van-archief (accessed 21 September 2015). For Bouazzas views, see
Bouazza, Een beer in bontjas (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2004), p.19.
10. On strategic exoticism in New African Writing such as Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichies Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Ahmadou Kouroumas Allah nest pas
oblig (Allah Is Not Obliged, 2000), see Akin Adesokan, New African
Writing and the Question of Audience, Research in African Literatures,
Vol. 43, No. 3 (2012), pp.120.
11. Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London:
Routledge, 2001), p.13.
270 S. DE MUL
GizemArslan
Relations between Turkey and western Europe have long been marked
by mutual wariness, even as western powers sought Turkish allegiance
in periods of war and Turks looked west in their modernisation efforts.
Shortly after the French Revolution, Ottoman rulers like Sultan Selim III
and Mahmut II sought to modernise the empires civil service, military,
education and civic life along western lines. After World War One, these
reforms found their radical potential in the administration of Mustafa
Kemal Atatrk, the founder of modern Turkey. For decades, however, the
fledgling Republic of Turkey remained isolationist. Even today, after the
end of political and economic isolationism and in the wake of long-term
partnerships with the West, Turkey is still considered Europes Muslim,
eastern other. This might explain Brusselss frosty reception of Turkeys
first application to join the European Community, submitted by Prime
Minister Turgut zal in 1987. Despite the Customs Union agreement
G. Arslan (
)
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures (MCM 208), The Catholic
University of America, 620 Michigan Ave., N.E., Washington, DC 20064, USA
(1996) and the official start of European Union accession talks (2005),
both Turkey and Europe remain ambivalent as the longest EU acces-
sion process drags on. The Turkish public and politicians identify, at
least partly, as European and profess a commitment to joining the club
of EU states, but they also bristle at statements by former and present
EU leaders (particularly Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel) and by reli-
gious leaders (notably Pope Benedict) about the irreconcilability of Islam
with European values, about the peripheral or even un-European status of
Turkey and, in recent years, about Turkeys rapprochements with Middle
Eastern states, especially Iran. The question of how European Turkey is
still lacks a satisfactory answer.
On the other hand, post-1945 transnational labour migration from
Turkey constitutes one of the most significant points of intersection
between Turkish and European histories of labour, capital and culture.
Migration has had transformative effects on Germanand by extension
Europeanlife and letters, and could impel us to pose the converse ques-
tion: how Turkish is Europe? Originally, Turkish guest-workers came to
Germany on short-term contracts after the two nations signed a labour
contract in 1961. Since then, labour migration has constituted Germanys
primary route into the more heterogeneous demographic and cultural
landscape we now often describe as New Europe.1 After similar contracts
were signed with the Netherlands, Belgium and Austria in 1964, with
France in 1965 and with Sweden in 1967, labour migration gradually
gave rise to the formation of a new type of membership in European
nation states.2 The German citizenship laws of 2000 granted citizenship
rights to long-term legal residents and to their children born in Germany,
and by 2013 some 20.5 per cent of the German population had a migra-
tion background.3 The fact that France, another key EU state, has an
immigrant population of 5.6 million, a figure that does not include natu-
ralised French citizens, offers some indication of the demographic changes
taking place across Europe as a whole.4
In the literary realm, authors of Turkish heritage have garnered varying
degrees of popularity and acclaim in western European letters with works
that directly or obliquely thematise migration. Important examples from
Belgium, France and the Netherlands are Mustafa Krs De lammeren (The
Lambs, 2007), Keniz Mourads Le jardin de Badalpour (The Garden
of Badalpour, 1998), Sevtap Baycls De nachtmerrie van de allochtoon
(The Nightmares of Immigrants, 1999) and Halil Grs Gekke Mustafa
(Mad Mustafa, 1984).5 The biggest and oldest literary scene, however, is
UNDIVIDED WATERS 273
Brcke vom Goldenen Horn (The Bridge of the Golden Horn). In the
first section, the unnamed Turkish narrator arrives in West Berlin as a
migrant worker and, while living in a women workers hostel, encounters
the political and cultural upheavals that took place in the Federal Republic
in the 1960s. The second part is set in Istanbul and in Turkeys southeast-
ern provinces. Turning to revolutionary ideology and practice, the narrator
witnesses, reports on and takes part in the student and labour movements
of the 1960s and 1970s, and eventually returns to Berlin to work as an
actress. The transnational dimensions of the novel are political, social, lit-
erary and linguistic. Politically and socially, the novel portrays the Cold
Wars ideological divisions from the narrators and zdamars leftist per-
spectives. For instance, the narrator observes the aftermaths of the deaths
of Vedat Demirciolu (in Istanbul) and Benno Ohnesorg (in Berlin), and
experiences the intellectual atmospheres of the Cinmathque in Istanbul
and of the womens hostel in Berlin under the mentorship of a communist
director.10 In the background are world events, such as the intervention
of the Soviet Army in Prague, the murder of Martin Luther King and the
death of Francisco Franco. On a literary level, the novel continually draws
on an international archive that primarily consists of texts and authors
committed to Marxist, communist and socialist ideals: these include
Friedrich Engelss Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des
Staats (The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1884),
Maxim Gorkis Mat (The Mother, 19067) and Lenins Gosudarstvo i
revoliutsiia (State and Revolution, 1918), as well as the work of Bertolt
Brecht, Federico Garca Lorca and Nzm Hikmet Ran. zdamers inter-
nationalist range of reference is also sustained linguistically. The Bridge of
the Golden Horn engages in multilingual language play, mostly involving
literal translation of proper names into titles or epithets, the elision or
reformation of German words in the everyday speech of migrants and
the narrators reversion to onomatopoeia or borrowed headlines from
German newspapers in everyday conversations in Germany and Turkey.
Existing scholarship on the novel addresses the transnational and mul-
tilingual dimensions of zdamars treatment of language, as well as the
authors concern with transnational histories of migration and political
resistance. Scholarship has also included discussions of zdamars con-
struction of cultural space, her challenges to dominant discourses about
migrant Muslim women, her critical contributions to public discourse
on the 1968 generation and her approaches to cultural translation and
memory work.11 A considerable number of these analyses pivot around
UNDIVIDED WATERS 275
European aspirin cured heart disease. With European cloth one could tell
from a distance of forty yards that it was good. European shoes never wore
out. European dogs had all studied at European dog schools. European
women were natural blonds. European cars didnt cause any accidents.15
Rather than fashioning hybrid cultural material, the novel often appears
much more invested in an internationaland apparently universalliter-
ary, philosophical and political archive of socialist and communist writings
that offer alternatives to national and continental parochialisms.
Nevertheless, the specificity of the novels historical, geographic and
literary references contrasts with its insistence on sites of transience as its
loci of action, the topic on which this essay will focus. The novel devel-
ops this tension into a literary project that treats transitional spaces like
bridges and railway stations paradoxically: as multinomial sites of dwelling,
translation and criss-crossing histories on the one hand, and as nameless
sites of deletion on the other. In this way, zdamar develops a literary
language adequate to addressing questions of translation and mobility in
the context of migration, Europeanisation and globalisation. The Bridge of
276 G. ARSLAN
the Golden Horn offers a model of multidirectionality and fluidity (of lan-
guages, spaces, histories, peoples) that does not obliterate human agency
or historical and geographic specificity. Instead, dislocation and translation
games in the novel produce environments in which borders and transi-
tional spaces no longer divide, exclude or exile, but become scenes of
spirited literary play. These spaces invite new critical engagement with sites
of enabling, opening and contact in flexible yet specific ways, while at the
same time destabilising familiar notions of centre and periphery, inside and
outside, self and other.
zdamars recasting of urban locations challenges and subverts influ-
ential conceptual frameworks for understanding spaces of transience. One
such framework is proposed by Marc Aug, whose work theorises two of
the primary realities constituting human space: the ends towards which it
is formed and the relations individuals have with it.16 In particular, Aug is
concerned with non-places, that is, with spaces such as airports, motor-
ways, shopping malls and train, bus and gas stations, which are formed in
relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure) and which
do not create identity or relation, only solitude, and similitude.17 In his
reflections on urbanity and literature, Ottmar Ette engages with much of
Augs thesis while illustrating that the place/non-place distinction may
not hold for zdamars writing. Instead, Ette offers the term transareal
spaces, designating spaces as created by the movements that criss-cross
them.18 Ette sees the transareality of zdamars prose as culturally and
historically specific, composed of [w]ords beneath words, places beneath
places, movements beneath movements, [] cities beneath cities.19 While
Ette astutely observes zdamars challenges to distinctions between place
and non-place, however, he does not sufficiently address two key elements
of her treatment of urban space. Firstly, Ettes critical language does not
capture zdamars own careful distinctions between various locations in
the urban context (streets, apartments, the Bosphorus, the S-Bahn), even
as she challenges those distinctions. Secondly, while Ettes concept of tran-
sareal space addresses the palimpsestic quality of urban portraiture in the
Berlin Trilogy, it fails to acknowledge that zdamars approach to inter-
stitial space is not only accumulative, but also paradoxical: accumulation
and deletion coexist, as when characters walk the same route forwards
and backwards, both retracing their steps and rewinding their movements.
In short, the full complexity of The Bridge of the Golden Horn, with its
manifold tensions between fluid, multidirectional and multilayered spaces
and identities, is not fully elucidated.
UNDIVIDED WATERS 277
As Ines Theilen astutely observes, the novels very choice of cafes, rail-
way stations and bridges as its loci of action suggest that zdamar resists
fixity in identity and language.20 More specifically, one of the authors pri-
mary modes of literary resistance is to move through languages and mean-
ing by means of translational strategies, drawing on the vocabulary of both
Turkish and German and using translation between them to problematise
linguistic and cultural fixity, as often happens in the novel to place names
and character names. In her incisive examination of literal translation in
zdamar, Yasemin Yildiz identifies her strategy as a mode of translation
that stays (too) close to the wording of the original, privileging individual
words over other aspects of the text, such as overall meaning, function,
or rhythm.21 The Bridge of the Golden Horn contains various instances of
literal translation (particularly of proper nouns) and mispronunciations
of expressions and names, as well as of Turkish onomatopoeia rendered
in German. One example of direct translation of proper nouns involves
the narrators friend Melek, a name that means angel in Turkish. Instead
of referring to her as Melek, the narrator translates the name directly
into its German equivalent, Engel, and refers to her as Engel through-
out. Relatedly, elisions and shifts of German proper nouns constitute one
of the most humorous elements in the novel. The workers pronounce a
factory managers name, Herr Schering, as Sherin or Sher; when they
add the word Herr to Sher, the managers name becomes Herscher,
intimating the German word Herrscher, meaning ruler.22 Onomatopoeia
makes frequent appearances, especially early in the novel. In the narrators
first days in Berlin, she and her fellow workers act out the groceries for
which they do not know the German word:
This mockery of normal linguistic process also occurs when the narra-
tor reads and repeats newspaper headlines in everyday conversation. For
example, when someone asks her, [w]hy do you make so much noise
when you walk?, she answers with a German headline, [w]hen household
goods become used goods, thus disrupting the protocols of everyday
communication.24
278 G. ARSLAN
The two prime sites where The Bridge of the Golden Horn introduces
language play, and negotiates the multilayered linguistic and cultural
tensions such play represents, are Anhalter Railway Station and The
Bridge of the Golden Horn, after which the two parts of the novel are
named. Anhalter Railway Station, to begin with, is a dominant feature
of the narrators cityscape. Once Germanys primary gateway to des-
tinations in the south, but heavily damaged during the Second World
War, the station is now no more than a battered wall and a project-
ing front section with three gateways.25 The narrators term for these
broken remains, the offended station, is a selective translation of one
of the meanings of the Turkish word krlm, meaning both broken
and offended. The translation is therefore both literal and figura-
tive. Moreover, this is a move in which names are made to accumulate
but are also simultaneously voided. An influentialalbeit not uncon-
testedtheory of proper nouns is the no-sense theory, according to
which such nouns simply stand for objects, without having any sense or
meaning other than standing for objects.26 That is to say, proper nouns
are void. To give one example of how zdamar draws attention to this,
she refers to the character Yamur (the Turkish for rain) as Regen
(the German for rain), and as a consequence she evacuates the mean-
ing of the proper noun and renders it descriptive.27 Because the noun
now refers to a generalised meaning (not just the person Yamur, but
to rain in a universal sense), its claim to designating a unique person is
undermined.
zdamars approach to proper nouns and transitional locations, how-
ever, not only voids space and expression, but also layers and populates
them. In one scene, for instance, the narrator walks with several of the
hostels youngest female migrant workers through the three entryways of
the Anhalter Railway Station. There on the ground of the offended sta-
tion, the narrator tells us, we lost sense of time. Every morning this dead
station had woken up, people had been walking there who were no longer
there.28 As she continues:
When the three of us walked there, it was as if my life had already been lived.
We went through a hole, walked to the end of the plot of land without
speaking. Then, without saying anything to one another, we walked back-
wards to the hole that once had perhaps been the door of the offended sta-
tion. And as we walked backwards we loudly blew out our breath. [] Then
we went back to the street again, I looked behind me to see the remainder
of our breath still in the air behind the door space.29
UNDIVIDED WATERS 279
separated the Byzantine Empire and the Ottoman Empire in the early fif-
teenth century, and was one of the most important sites of the siege that
yielded Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453. Although it separated
western and eastern empires, making [t]he Asian side and the European
side in Istanbul [] two different countries, as zdamar writes, the
Golden Horn does not separate Europe and Asia today, but rather the old
city from newer districts, with zdamars bridge being said in the novel
to link the two European parts of Istanbul.31 As Elizabeth Boa observes,
the bridge over the Golden Horn evokes European heterogeneity at the
heart of a city which is now a centre of Islamic culture. The choice of
the bridge rather than the ferry avoids an orientalist binary opposition of
Europe against Asia. Cultures do not provide monolithic, static pillars to
support bridges.32
The text highlights this feature of the bridge by drawing attention to
the arbitrariness and the politics of geographical division, in that it simul-
taneously recalls East-West conflict and foregrounds water and air, two
classical elements particularly unamenable to division in the natural world,
but all too susceptible to it in the political world. Political and historical
heterogeneity manifest themselves on the personal level as well, with the
emphasis placed on the bridge challenging customary conceptions of the
foreign and familiar, for characters as much as for nations and cultures.33
These literary strategies can all be observed in one key scene on the bridge,
in which the narrator replies to a postcard from her Spanish lover Jordi
with lines from a poem by Federico Garca Lorca:
can be said to have claimed Lorcas life when nationalist soldiers mur-
dered him in August 1936 for his socialist connections. Historically, the
personal and political experiences referenced in Lorcas poem foreshadow
the transnational student movements described in zdamars novel,
while also offering the text a suggestive framing device: the Spanish Civil
War both precedes the events in the novel and concludes them, since the
novel ends with Francos death. The figures of Lorca and Jordi share one
important feature with that of the bridge, which is their disruption of
East-West binaries. By incorporating the Spanish literary and historical
archives of resistance, the novel refuses the reductive binary of Turkey-
Germany by expanding it into a triad that encompasses another section of
Europe. As mentioned, the novel additionally highlights its resistance to
divisions and binaries in its reference to air and water. Like many scenes
in the second part of the novel, this one takes place on or above the bod-
ies of water surrounding Istanbul, with the air that is to carry the narra-
tors and Jordis love and the water that rains and flows under the bridge
being suggestive of the currents that connect the two lovers across the
continent.
zdamars redeployment of transitional spaces has broad implica-
tions for discourses on globalisation and for literatures of migration in
the European context. Her literary work calls for a critical language that
draws more precise contours around two interrelated terms that circu-
late widely in discourses on globalisation: translation and flow. The
latter is arguably one of globalisations prime metaphors and is often
linked to the former, another prominent term that is increasingly meta-
phorised in the study of literature and culture.35 Arjun Appadurai, one
of the leading theorists in the field, coined the term global cultural
flows to address the fluid, irregular shapes of the landscapes associ-
ated with globalisation.36 Although Mary Louise Pratt also observes
that modernity has permuted into globalisation, and the idea of dif-
fusion from a centre has been replaced by the idea of flow, she has
several important objections to the term.37 She observes that flow
does not sufficiently distinguish between different kinds of movement
(for instance, between movements of migrant labourers and tourists),
and also that it bypasses the question of the directionality of the move-
ment of cultural products. Moreover, flow makes it easy to ignore the
state policies, transnational arrangements, and structured institutions
that create these possibilities and impossibilities of movement, while
also obliterating human agency and intentionality, suggesting instead
282 G. ARSLAN
NOTES
1. Rita Chin, The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), p.6.
2. Ayhan Kaya and Ayegl Kayaolu, Is National Citizenship Withering
Away?: Social Affiliations and Labor Market Integration of Turkish-Origin
Immigrants in Germany and France, German Studies Review, Vol. 35, No.
1 (2012), p.116.
3. Anon, Population, Key Figures, Statistisches Bundesamt, https://www.
destatis.de/EN/FactsFigures/SocietyState/Population/Migration/Tables_/
lrbev07.html?cms_gtp=150354_list%253D2&https=1 (accessed 21 April
2015).
4. Anon, volution de la part des populations trangres et immigres
jusquen 2012, Insee (Institut national de statistique et des tudes
conomiques), http://www.insee.fr/fr/themes/tableau.asp?reg_id=0&ref_
id=NATTEF02131 (accessed 21 July 2015).
5. See Liesbeth Minnaard, Between Exoticism and Silence: A Comparison of
First Generation Migrant Writing in Germany and the Netherlands,
Arcadia: International Journal for Literary Studies, Vol. 46, No. 1 (2011),
pp. 199208; Graeme Dunphy, Migrant, Emigrant, Immigrant: Recent
Developments in Turkish-Dutch Literature, Neophilologus, Vol. 85, No. 1
(2001), pp. 123; and Sarah de Mul, The Netherlands Is Doing Well.
Allochtoon Writing Talent Is Blossoming There: Defining Flemish
Literature, Desiring Allochtoon Writing, in Elleke Boehmer and de Mul,
eds, The Postcolonial Low Countries: Literature, Colonialism, and
Multiculturalism (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012), pp.12346.
6. See Dals Wenn Ali die Glocken luten hrt (When Ali Hears the Bells Toll,
1979), rens Eine versptete Abrechnung (A Belated Settling of Accounts,
1988) and enocaks Gefhrliche Verwandschaft (Perilous Kinship, 1998).
7. See Leslie A. Adelson, Coordinates of Orientation: An Introduction, in
Zafer enocak, Atlas of a Tropical Germany: Essays on Politics and Culture,
19901998, trans. and edited by Leslie A.Adelson (1992; Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2000), pp. xxii-xxvi.
8. The only exception to zdamars preference for German-language publica-
tion is a collection in Turkish consisting of letters exchanged with the
Turkish poet Ece Ayhan and the diary zdamar kept while accompanying
him during his medical treatment in Switzerland: see Ayhan and zdamar,
Kendi Kendinin Terzisi Bir Kambur: Ece Ayhanl Anlar, 1974 Zrih
Gnl, Ece Ayhann Mektuplar (2007).
9. The first novel of the trilogy is Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei, hat zwei
Tren, aus einer kam ich rein, aus der anderen ging ich raus (Life is a
Caravanserai, Has Two Doors, I Came in One, I Went out the Other, 1992).
284 G. ARSLAN
13. zdamar, The Bridge of the Golden Horn, trans. by Martin Chalmers (1998;
London: Serpents Tail, 2007), p.53.
14. Ibid., p.78.
15. Ibid., p.193.
16. Aug, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans.
by John Howe (1992; NewYork: Verso, 1995), p.94.
17. Ibid., pp.94, 103.
18. Ette, Urbanity and LiteratureCities as Transareal Spaces of Movement in
Assia Djebar, Emine Sevgi zdamar and Ccile Wajsbrot, European Review,
Vol. 19, No. 3 (2011), p.367.
19. Ibid., p.375.
20. Theilen, Von der nationalen zur globalen Literatur: Eine Lese-Bewegung
durch die Romane Die Brcke vom Goldenen Horn von Emine Sevgi
zdamar und Caf Nostalgia von Zo Valds, Arcadia, Vol. 40, No. 2
(2005), p.321.
21. Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2012), pp.1434. One example of a literal
translation can be found in the scene when the narrators father asks her,
My child, why are you sitting there as if all your ships have sunk?, which
is an approximate literal translation of the Turkish expression, Karadenizde
gemilerin mi batt? (Have your ships sunk in the Black Sea?), typically used
to ask people if they are upset about something (zdamar, Bridge, p.134).
22. zdamar, Bridge, p.7.
23. Ibid., p.9.
24. Ibid., p.3.
25. Ibid., p.17.
26. Anon, Proper Names and Descriptions, in Paul Edwards, ed., The
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1972), p.487.
27. zdamar, Bridge, p.29.
28. Ibid., p.17.
29. Ibid., p.17.
30. Ibid., p.17.
31. Ibid., pp.171, 142.
32. Boa, zdamars Autobiographical Fictions: Trans-National Identity and
Literary Form, German Life & Letters, Vol. 59, No. 4 (2006), p.534.
33. See Theilen, Von der nationalen zur globalen Literatur, pp.3245; and
Azade Seyhan, From Istanbul to Berlin, German Politics & Society, Vol. 23,
No. 1 (2005), pp.1612.
34. zdamar, Bridge, pp.1767.
35. See Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 367; Doris
Bachmann-Medick, Introduction: The Translational Turn, Translation
286 G. ARSLAN
Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2008), pp.23; and Joo Ferreira Duarte, The Trials of
Translation: From Global Cultural Flow to Domestic Relocation, Journal of
Romance Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2011), pp.516.
36. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p.33.
37. Pratt, Reflections on Modernity and Globality, in Helena Carvalho
Buescu and Joo Ferreira Duarte, eds, Representaes do real na moderni-
dade (Lisbon: Edies Colibri, 2003), p.70.
38. Ibid., pp.71, 73.
39. Duarte, Trials of Translation, p.52.
40. Adelson, Against Between: A Manifesto, New Perspectives on Turkey, Vol.
29 (2003), p.21.
17
DanieleComberiati
D. Comberiati (
)
Department of Italian Studies, University of Montpellier, 34100, Montpellier,
France
comedic film tradition being evident even in the title of his later book, a
take on Pietro Germis Divorzio allitaliana (1961). This essay will look in
detail at Divorce Islamic Style, particularly at the novels central themes: the
interaction of migrant and non-migrant populations after 9/11 and the
construction of the Muslim community as a threat to Europe. By way of a
general introduction, however, I would like to highlight its keen observa-
tions on the relationship between European culture and Islam.
Operating through the perspective of two first-person narrators, the
novel alludes to the early Islamic presence in Europe and explores the con-
tribution of Arab culture to the formation and development of European
identity. Christian Mazzari, one of the narrators, hails from the town of
Mazara del Vallo, which has a complex history of departures and home-
comings. Founded by the Arabs, the town was the point of origin of the
dominion of Islam over Sicily, which lasted from 827 to the fall of Noto
in 1091, and like nearby Marsala (whose Italian name comes from the
Arab Marsa Allah, or port of Allah) it boasts a perfectly preserved old
medina.2 Its subsequent decline was due to the departure of many Italians
or Arab-Italians for Tunisia as a result of an agricultural crisis at the end of
the nineteenth century. Indeed, Mazzaris parents are Sicilian immigrants
from Trapani who settled in Tunisia and later returned to Mazara del
Vallo, a typical migratory path for Sicilians at that time. By 1900, Tunisia
had one of the largest and most developed Italian emigrant communities,
overshadowing even Libya; while only 300 Italians lived in Tripoli, some
27,000 lived in Tunis, which was developing into a flourishing commerical
port that occupied a strategic position on the Mediterranean. Over the last
30 years, Mazara del Vallo has again become a destination for immigration
from Tunisia as a new Arab fishing community is returning to the land of
its forebears, thus repopulating the medina. As Mazzari recalls of his child-
hood, I grew up with the children of the Tunisian fisherman [and] was
often taken for one of them: I had typically Mediterranean feaures and I
spoke Tunisian Arabic well.3
The town therefore works as a symbol not only of migration, but also
of the variegated ethnic composition that results, crystallising Italys posi-
tion as a crossroads where the major cultures of the Mediterranean have
converged for centuries. It was during the Middle Ages that about half
the population of Mazara del Vallo decided to convert to Islam (mostly
for economic reasons, since the non-Muslim subjects, the dhimmi,
were subjected to a much higher tax) and also that Sicily experienced a
great revival of art and culture. By returning to this historical moment,
AMARA LAKHOUSS DIVORCE ISLAMIC STYLE 289
In the first part of the novel, when the threat of an Islamist attack on
Rome seems urgent, Mazzari is led to suppose that his role in Operation
Little Cairo is essential for averting disaster. As a CIA operative remarks
on the terrorists supposed aim, [a]ttacking the American Embassy in
Rome means humiliating not only the U.S.A. but also Italy, the European
Union, and the Vatican (53). In these early sections, the writer alludes to
all the mediatised images and linguistic constructions of the war on ter-
ror: the discursive overlap between migrants and terrorists, the notion of
Muslims as the radicalised enemy within and the sacred alliance between
Europe and the USA in the name of a hypothetical western world (22).
Nevertheless, two passages raise doubts about Operation Little Cairo by
drawing attention to historical errors made by the Italian and US secret
services. The first, the so-called Abu Omar case, took place in Milan in
2003, when CIA agents seized the eponymous imam, a refugee suspected
of having links to international terrorism (141). After he was interned
and tortured in an American military base in Aviano, an investigation by
Italian judges not only found the imam innocent but also charged the CIA
with violating Italian sovereignty. The second is a cautionary tale told to
Mazzari by one of his handlers, a Captain Judas, who wants to encourage
his unit not to make amateurish mistakes (35). It involves three Egyptian
migrants in Anzio who, in 2002, were suspected of planning attacks on
several locations around Italy. The trial, however, soon turns into farce:
what was the connection of the three accused men with Islamic terror-
ism? Only the testimony of a neighbour, an old man who stated that, while
going up the stairs, he had heard one of them utter the name of bin Laden!
In April, 2004, the Court of Assizes acquitted the three Egyptians of the
charge of international terrorism, because no crime was committed. (36)
The misguided nature of much of the intelligence work, and the media-
tised images it produces, becomes fundamental both to the construction
of the plot and to the poetics of the narration.9 As in Clash of Civilizations,
the author creates and merges two apparently self-contained worlds in his
text: the world of reality and the world of fiction. If film is for Lakhous
a central source of inspiration, in Divorce Islamic Style his references to the
history of cinema (Italian as well as American) also function textually as a
device for highlighting the fictionality of the war on terror. In an early
reflection on his work, Mazzari/Issa uses images drawn from the cinema,
talking about his need to get into character and linking espionage to
292 D. COMBERIATI
I stroll around aimlessly for a good hour and a half, back and forth along
Piazza della Radio and the Marconi Bridge. [] There are all types: young
Africans and Asians selling counterfeit goods on the sidewalks, Arab children
walking with father and veiled mother, Gypsy women in long skirts begging.
In other words, Im in the Italy of the future, as the sociologists say! (14)
294 D. COMBERIATI
Italian who has converted to Islam, her husband is a real disaster: like
many Egyptians he cant pronounce p. A b is dragged into his place
(81). In this case, the increasing distance between Sofia and her husband
is partly a linguistic distance, aggravated by the fact that correct Italian
offers an opportunity to integrate more fully into national life.12
name, which ensures that in the eyes of others you are not (and never will
be) a purebred Italian (245). It is perhaps a result of these boundaries
that Sofia does not mind the change that Italians have made to her given
name, Safia (not only do Italians find Safia difficult, but they also believe
that without the veil she looks like Sofia Loren) (27). While suggestive
of yet another assumed or constructed identity, the change is considered
by Sofia to be acceptable:
To tell truth, Sofia is a name I really like a lot. Sofia Loren is a very beautiful
woman and Im fascinated by her story. She was a girl who was born into
poverty and became a movie star. Of course, there are always envious people
who say nasty things about her. Like that she married a big producer to help
her career. The truth is that Sophia Loren is a great dreamer, and Im like
her. (278)
This may imply that Sofia is succumbing to western ideals, most obvi-
ously those of individualism and celebrity. Yet the capacity to dream was
already integral to her personality in Egypt. She was named after a famous
Egyptian radical, Safia Zaghloul, who fought for the education of girls,
participated in the revolution against British occupation and is recalled
as the first Arab woman to publicly remove her veil (26). It is no sur-
prise, therefore, to find that Sofia has a fondness for books on feminism
by Nawal Saadawi, an ambition for a career in business and a hatred of
polygamy and female circumcision, often drawing on the Koran to sup-
port her views, although admitting that her opinion is unlikely to carry
weight: a womens interpretation of the Koran still doesnt exist. Not
one. Its a male monopoly (31, 61). A particular anger is reserved for
the veil. Detesting its connotations of mourning and grief, she mounts
a two-fold attack on the veil that her husband forces her to wear: I like to
combine colors: a pink, green, or purple scarf with a white, blue, or gray
outfit. I try always to be smiling. Our Prophet says: A smile is like giving
alms (63). As this indicates, Sofias effort to understand her culture is
not a rejection of it (she remains a Muslim) but an examination of its con-
tradictions, one that signifies intellectual freedom.15 More often than not,
Lakhous seems to say, womens lack of freedom in some Islamic cultures is
not the result of religion but of politics. The fact that Sofia gives the novel
its title, by finally calling for a divorce from her husband, means that she
assumes greater centrality than Mazzari, articulating Lakhouss vision of
an egalitarian Europe even more clearly than the male narrator. This vision
298 D. COMBERIATI
CONCLUSION
To conclude, we can say that Divorce Islamic Style succeeds in showing how
migrant identity, far from being flat and monolithic as often depicted by
the mass media, has a complexity and reflective depth, a point that Lakhous
makes by playing with islamophobic stereotypes, which he negates, eludes
or emphasises as best fits his purpose. An evident target of irony is the
so-called clash of civilisations theory (already satirised in his first novel),
but no less a target is the construction of Muslim women either as passive,
unthinking victims of male power or as active components of the enemy
within. Both narrative strands of the novel cast scorn on what Goody
calls the current tendency in European thought [] to consider Europe
in opposition to Islam.18 On this subject, there is relevance in the two
quotations from Italian writers that Lakhous introduces at the beginning
of the book. These are by Niccol Machiavelli, so important for rethink-
AMARA LAKHOUSS DIVORCE ISLAMIC STYLE 299
ing political power in Europe, and Ennio Flaiano, the author of the (post)
colonial novel Tempo di uccidere (A Time to Kill, 1947). The quotation
from Flaiano is a real poetic declaration:
For Lakhous, to use irony (or satire) against racism and culturalist ste-
reotype is the role of the writer, one that he fulfils admirably in Divorce
Islamic Style.
NOTES
1. See Daniele Comberiati, Scrivere nella lingua dellaltro: La letteratura degli
immigrati in Italia (19892007) (Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2010), pp.4554;
and Chiara Mengozzi, Narrazioni contese: ventanni di scritture italiane
della migrazione (Roma: Carocci, 2013), pp.527.
2. See Francesco Gabrieli and Umberto Scerrato, Gli Arabi in Italia (Milan:
Libri Scheiwiller, 1979), pp. 7121; and Alessandro Vanoli, La Sicilia
musulmana (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2012), pp.428.
3. Lakhous, Divorce Islamic Style, trans. by Ann Goldstein (2010; NewYork:
Europa Editions, 2012), p.141. Further page references to the novel are
given in parentheses in the text.
4. See Nagendra Kr. Singh, International Encyclopaedia of Islamic Dynasties:
Vol. 40, Spain and Eastern Europe (Nuova Delhi: Anmol Publications,
2000), pp.3179.
5. Goody, Islam and Europe, in Delanty, ed., Europe and Asia, p.144. As
Goody summarises, Islam has played a significant role in Europe since its
advent in Spain and the Mediterranean in the eighth century, followed by its
advance into Eastern Europe in the fourteenth and its movement into the
northern steppes soon afterwards (Goody, Islam in Europe (Cambridge:
Polity, 2004), p.8).
6. Hobson, Revealing the Cosmopolitan Side of Oriental Europe: The Eastern
Origins of European Civilisation, in Delanty, ed., Europe and Asia, p.108.
7. Coppola, Rented Spaces: Italian Postcolonial Literature, in Ponzanesi
and Blaagaard, eds, Deconstructing Europe, p.121.
8. Bassam Tibi, The Return of Ethnicity to Europe via Islamic Migration?:
The Ethnicization of the Islamic Diaspora, in Hsu, ed., Ethnic Europe,
p.127.
300 D. COMBERIATI
9. Lakhous does not claim that the object of the war on terror is entirely
chimerical. When Mazzari decides to accept the job of undercover agent, he
does so because Islamic terrorists do exist, theyre not an invention of the
media. Theyve already shown the world what theyre capable of (Lakhous,
Divorce Islamic Style, p.33).
10. See Alis Brick Lane (2003), Karas Selam Berlin (Hello Berlin, 2003) and
Abdolahs Spijkerschrift (My Fathers Notebook, 2000).
11. On this issue, I remember one conversation with Lakhous in which he
quoted a possibly apocryphal comment by Vincenzo Consolo, Arabic is one
of the languages of the Italian, remarking that he had kept this in mind
while writing the novel.
12. For Lakhouss discussions of hybridity and language, an important point of
reference is the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih. His well-known novel, Mawsin
al-Hijra il al-Shaml (Season of Migration to the North, 1966), is likewise
a detective story in which the analysis of immigration and the prejudices that
complicate the relationship between Europeans and non-Europeans is more
important than plot resolution.
13. Lutz, Limits of European-Ness, p.96.
14. Lakhous, Divorce Islamic Style, p. 63. With essentialism and exclusion in
Italy being so pronounced, Sofia is led to question the wisdom of her move
there: isnt immigration ultimately a form of gambling? Win everything or
lose everything? (ibid., pp.69, 151).
15. Importantly, Sofia also draws attention to the contradictions in Italian cul-
ture, most obviously the continuation of domestic violence. As she says at
one point, I thought women were victims of violence in war zones, like
Afghanistan or Iraq, or in countries where theres racism []. But not in
Italy! In other words, isnt Italy still a European country, Western, part of
the G-8, and so on, or am I wrong? (ibid., pp.1223).
16. Passerini, Introductory Note to Passerini, ed., Figures dEurope, p.17.
17. Lakhouss treatment of Sofia can also be examined in the light of a number
of great Middle Eastern poets and intellectuals. For example, Jamil Sidqi
al-Zahawi, a poet of Kurdish origin, has devoted considerable attention to
womens role in society, as has the poet Nzik al-Malikah, whose Dwn:
azy wa ram (Sparks and Ashes, 1979) supported the aspirations of
Middle Eastern women to free themselves from prejudice and oppression
(see Isabella Camera DAfflitto, Letteratura araba contemporanea: dalla
nahdah a oggi, new edn (1998; Rome: Carocci, 2002), pp.1334).
18. Goody, Europe and Islam, p.138.
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INDEX
Manea, Norman, 30 Middle East, 9, 16, 17, 20, 53, 62, 63,
Mann, Klaus, 5 65, 130, 272, 289, 2957
Mann, Thomas, 3, 6, 87, 90, 91, 246 Miville, China, 156
Mantua, 23 migrant literature, 5, 6, 26, 27, 314,
Marechera, Dambudzo, 5 7181, 8596, 17788, 213,
marginalisation, 4, 7, 15, 1923, 25768, 27182, 28799
313, 163, 21123, 22739, migration, 5, 7, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23,
24355 26, 32, 33, 62, 73, 8892, 95,
Marouane, Lela, 34, 298 149, 1535, 163, 166, 167, 172,
Marquand, David, 202 212, 228, 237, 239, 254,
Marsala, 288 25768, 27182, 28799
Marshall Plan, 26 Milan, 291
Martnez, J.L., 116, 117 Mill, J.S., 130
Martinican literature, 27 Miosz, Czesaw, 25, 146
Marxism, 10, 73, 117, 194, 197, 200, modernism, 4
202, 274 modernity, 1, 58, 59, 86, 101, 106,
Marxism-Leninism, 3 109, 110, 134, 135, 164, 178,
Marx, Karl, 181, 197 182, 217, 218, 271, 281
May, Sarah, 28 Moldova, 11, 18, 155
Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 195 Moldovan literature, 29
Mayall, David, 164 Molire, 3
Mazara de Vallo, 288 Monaco, 35
Mazzini, Miha, 30 Mongols, 17, 247, 289
McCann, Colum, 29, 16273 Monoran, Ion, 155
McCarthyism, 90, 95 Montenegrin literature, 11, 24
McEwan, Ian, 26 Montenegro, 18, 110, 155
McGahern, John, 32 Moore, Brian, 30
McIlvanney, William, 196 Moore, D.C., 18
McLeod, John, 32 Moore-Gilbert, Bart, 262, 265
Mecca, 296 Moors, 9, 17, 58
Mediterranean Sea, 8, 13, 91, 288 Morandini, Giuliana, 29, 146
Mehmedinovi, Semezdin, 31, 32, Morchiladze, Aka, 253
22739 Moretti, Franco, 3
Melinescu, Gabriela, 154 Moroccan literature, 5, 33, 259,
Memmi, Albert, 27 260, 298
Mensheviks, 249 Morocco, 5, 259, 260, 289, 291, 298
Merkel, Angela, 63, 272 Morris, Jan, 24
Merolla, Daniela, 212 Moscow, 5, 23, 201, 249, 250
Mexican literature, 117, 118 Moscow State Circus, 201
Mexico, 6, 11618 Mostar, 289
Michael, Livi, 205 Mosteghanemi, Ahlam, 27
Michnik, Adam, 14, 197 Motecuhzoma, 116
INDEX 355