Literary Homelessness: Identity between Memory and Migration in post-Yugoslav Writers
1. Introduction
One of the far reaching critiques of postcolonial studies and its theoretical framework under which can be seen concepts used by postcolonial theorists such as hybridity, difference, otherness, and in-betweeness (Bhabha, 1994), was namely the critique of its uniformed universality and therefore, its incapability of applying the theory of postcoloniality to diverse and peculiar socio-political and cultural topoi. Critiques of the postcolonial texts directly address their “pseudoresistance and their metropolitan context” (San Juan, 1998:11). According to that type of critique, migration, with its manifestations in exile and/or migrant literature, can be seen as an event that differs from situation to situation. In other words, it is extremely important to examine the reasoning behind leaving the home country and how that is transposed inside the (literary) text.
Research of post-Yugoslav writers and their texts, within which the peculiar socio-political and cultural background play a decisive role, is a realm of study that deserves extended research and closer attention. Not only does the post-Yugoslav writer as an individual find himself or herself confronted with collective interpellation of some ideology at home, and consequently the decision to leave the country, but also the very experience of writing later, in exile, becomes something that requires new forms of identification through language and/or cultural adaptation. Distinctions in the literature of post-Yugoslav writers are characterized as well by the disturbing (and sometimes traumatic) past marked by the direct or indirect experience of war. Thus memory and remembrance related to the war past also play important roles both in the process of writing in the present and, accordingly, in the process of shaping a new type of identity open to the new space; a space with diverse “echoes” from the past.
Therefore, instead of asking “Where do I belong?", the post-Yugoslav exiled writer furthers his or her reflection with the query, “Am I guilty? Did I make the right choice to write about it?" This move opens a new set of questions demonstrating that the post-Yugoslav literary and cultural situation demands not only (postcolonial) analyses of migration, but also a broader psychoanalytical approach (Kristeva) such as the one that opens questions of trauma theory (Caruth, Felman).
2. Background
Within this project I am interested not only in the categorization and evaluation of recent post-Yugoslav writers, but also, concerning the aforementioned set of problems; the examination of different types of migrant post-Yugoslav literature according to these key questions:
1. What significance does the past have and how does it function in the literary works of post-Yugoslav writers?
2. What significance does the (exile, urban, foreign, local, or virtual) space have and how is this space interlaced with the concept of time in the literary works of post-Yugoslav writers?
3. What significance for the narrator does the (native or foreign) language have in shaping the literary text and how does intertextual autotematisation of language affect the literary subject and his utterance?
4. How much of migrant post-Yugoslav literature can be seen as autobiographical? Where is the border-line between testimonial literature and fiction?
5. What types of identification of literary subjects can be found in the works of post-Yugoslav writers? Can post-Yugoslav literature be seen as a critique of two concepts of identity: individual and collective?
Research of exile and migrant literature in the recent years has been attracting significant attention. According to the development of the intercultural studies, scholars have been motivated toward the closer investigation of writers whose works were marked by migrant or exile contextual circumstances. Several interesting books were published recently under the area of South-Slavic and South-East-European Studies (for example: Neubauer, 2009; Gutthy, 2009; Beganović, 2009 and Crnković, 2012). Similarly, investigating of exile and migrant literature under the research of intercultural, transcultural or migration cultural studies in last fifteen years resulted in some insightful and theoretically intriguing achievements (see Frank, 2008; Moslund, 2010 and especially Seyhan, 2001).
Nevertheless, a concise and focused study of post-Yugoslav writers and their works in context of exile/migrant literature is still missing. Therefore, the motivation for applying for this project is directly related to the research that has not been investigated within this theoretical framework yet. According to the growing number of exile or migrant titles (writers like Dubravka Ugrešić, Aleksandar Hemon, David Albahari, Slavenka Drakulić, Bora Ćosić, Dževad Karahasan, Saša Stanišić, Marica Bodrožić, Semezdin Mehmedinović, Vladimir Pištalo, Vladimir Tasić, Bekim Sejranović, Ismet Prcić and their literary works will be considered inside the project), it can be clearly seen that this research is useful in the South-Slavic studies of culture and literature especially related to the western contemporary migrant cultural practices.
3. Methodology
Starting from Joseph Brodsky’s fascinating objection taken from his essay written short before his death: “Exile brings you overnight where it would normally take a lifetime to go” (Brodsky, 1995:32), we can conceive exile as something that opens the ultimate stimulus for the act of writing. In other words, if exile brings something positive, it also brings a need for the representation of life experiences. For that reason, Brodsky paradoxically sees exile “as a kind of success” (ibid: 28), he says for the exiled person: “taking the route of exile is, in many ways, like going home – because he gets closer to the seat of the ideals which inspired him all along” (ibid: 24). However that thought can sound paradoxical, it seems that exile and literature are not related like exile and the quest of identity or, expressed differently, exile and (exile) literature are mutually interlaced on different scales than perception of exile and (exile) identity. Speaking of identity and cultural difference, Homi Bhabha profoundly says: “Hybridity is heresy” (Bhabha, 1995:322) but, “if hybridity is a heresy, then to blaspheme is to dream” (ibid: 324). The main theoretic aim of this project lies in approaching these two concepts separately. From one point: what forces the exile writer to write about his or her experience, why does exile demand being written about, and from another: how does that process impact one’s own perception of identity? Or, if we continue Bhabha’s metaphor: is writing (exile) literature a writer’s attempt to dream, a dream that unites past and present, memory and exile, that shows either blasphemy of hybrid identity or shapes specific version of nostalgic identity?
The interdisciplinary approach planned in this project is generated in pursuing possible answers to the aforementioned problem. Literary questions of writing are related to the analyses of narration, discourse and relationship between fictional and factual in post-Yugoslav writers (autobiography or fiction, literature or historical memory?) and on the other hand, questions of identity are related to the questions of language, signification, nomadism, migration, mimicry and individual and/or collective belonging. Of course, these two positions are analytically imposed and yet in every text are becoming mutually interlaced.
In addition to the approaches mentioned above; concerning the peculiarity of the South-Slavic post-war cultural situation, this project will problematize traumatic and post-traumatic aspects of exiled writers. Trauma and aspects of traumatic implications in the texts of some post-Yugoslav writers (especially in Ugrešić, Karahasan and Stanišić) will therefore play an important role both in writing and in shaping a new type of identity. But, the contemporary theory of trauma presents here an interesting problem that is crucial both for the trauma and its relationship to questionable truth and also for the possibility of transposing trauma into literary text. Namely, according to Caruth, one of the major problems relating trauma is the “danger of trauma stories to lose their impact by reducing them to cliches or turning them all into versions of the same story” (Caruth, 1995: vii). This problem corresponds to the methodological problem of trauma research both in literary studies and in history as well (LaCapra).
In order to contextualize the research field of Post-Yugoslav literature, this project will also problematize some aspects of national, postnational, and global relations seen inside the field of South-East European states. Hence, the concept of “Balkan” will be closely examined mainly concerning its performative (Todorova, 1997, Bjelić-Savić, 2002) and psychoanalytical (Močnik in: Bjelić-Savić, 2002; Žižek, 1993) character in the literary texts of post-Yugoslav writers.
The methodological framework mention above is enabled by the key questions from the previous chapter (see: Background), because every question opens investigation toward some new approach, but rich literature from German-speaking sources on the topics of Migrationenliteratur and Interkulturelle Literaturwissenschaft (Hoffman, 2006) is still missing because of the incapability of reaching that literature. Therefore, the benefit of conducting research at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena with the usage of German library sources will be of immense help for successful and argumentative discussion.
4. Conclusion
During last semester I taught a seminar called “Writing Exile: Displacement in Contemporary South Slavic Literature” at the undergraduate level at Humboldt University in Berlin and this investigation would be a continuation of my interest in that topic. After realizing how insightful the topic of exile or migration literature under the framework of South-Slavic and post-Yugoslav writers is, and furthermore, after discovering an interesting and rich tradition of the studies of migrant literature in Germany, plurality of its approaches and conclusions (first titles in that area I discovered in the summer of 2011 at the library of Erfurt University while I was intensively learning German), I found the motivation for this research. If we follow Greenblatt's notion in one of the his recent articles about cultural mobility that „reality is (…) more about nomads than the natives“(Greenblatt, 2009:6), then the research of the causes of one particular part of that (global) mobility (namely, the one presented under post-Yugoslav literature) can be seen as something that is directly connected with the research of our reality. Finally, I am sure that the topic of post-Yugoslav migrant literature between memory and exile with its provoking questions, problems that it faces, expanding numbers of the works that deserves broader interpretative and analytical scientific attention and at the end, with the impact that it has on the contemporary description of some social and cultural issues of our reality, deserves an opportunity to be closely investigated. Platform of the “Cultural Orientations and Institutional Order in South-East Europe” at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena gives, undoubtedly, a perfect environment for this research.
5. References:
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