Réka M. Cristian

University of Szeged, Ungaria

rekacristian@gmail.com

 

 

Peripheral Thrones:

Negotiating Borders in Contemporary Croatian Women’s Prose

 

 

Abstract: This article is a brief introspection into special negotiations on the issue of border/s applied to the composite realm of language, gender, and politics in the works of two Croatian women writers, Slavenka Drakulić and Dubravka Ugrešić, who depict the first transitional years from communism to post-communism and the effects of the war in Yugoslavia. Drakulić’s Café Europa: Life After Communism (1996) and Ugrešić’s The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1996) feature an array of unconventional histories, exiles stories, memories and vernacular constructions of perimeters, demarcations, margins, liminalities, boundaries, as well as their multiple deconstructions within the (more or less fictive) world their “middle worlder” narrators inhabit.

Keywords: Croatia; Postcommunism; Slavenka Drakulić; Dubravka Ugrešić; National border(s); Europe; Gender; Women’s writing; Exile; Memory.

 

 

Motto:

Writing was just the immediate consequence of letting go of my disbelief in the impossible.

(Vesna Krmpotić)

 

The borderline work of culture demands an encounter with “newness” that is not part

of the continuum of past and present.

It creates a sense of the new insurgent act of cultural translation.

(Homi K. Bhabha)

 

The title of this text was inspired by the dialogue between two female characters from an excerpt from Hana Dalipi’s yet untraslated Weekend at Mother’s [Vikend u materini] (Belgrade: BIGZ, 1986) with which literary critic Jasmina Lukić started her pioneering analysis on women-centered narratives in Serbian and Croatian literature in 1996. These characters, Tina and Vilja, wonder about what topics would have William Shakespeare’s works treated if the author was a woman: Tina’s argument is based on the fact that the great number of Shakespearian dramatic battles are indispensable because the playwright’s characters are “competing over a throne,” to which Vilja (sic!) replies by saying that “the throne” is, anyhow, “peripheral” and suggests that the “already big enough” individual problems of the characters should rather be placed into the center of conflicts instead of mael-dominated, senseless wars (Dalipi qtd. in and translated by Lukić 223). The two women in Dalipi’s narrative world are pointing at an obvious intertextual link to Virginia Woolf’s celebrated A Room of One’s Own; however, additionally, their conversation signals a lacuna of individual voices that represent the lack of the acknowledgement of women’s writing in their Yugoslav cultural context and also symbolically prefigures some stories of battles over political ‘thrones’ in a less fictional war that wrapped up and shook the Balkans a couple of years after Dalipi’s work was published.

Vilja’s “peripheral thrones” will be re-contextualized in the following within the Croatian literary context through the works of Slavenka Drakulić and Dubravka Ugrešić as examples. The ‘throne’ in the given circumstances of contemporary Croatian women’s female voices and writing should be read with an ironic twist, assigned to suggest a (mostly domestic and yet not canonized) place of multiple subversions and transgressions against the power that a royal seat is supposed to represent in a predominantly male ‘kingdom’; its ‘peripheral’ location will stand for the still less acknowledged position in the mainstream literary histories and critical discourses of these texts as well as for their metaphorical role in their negotiation of more or less fictive borders that marginalized characters of Balkan women, refugees, ethnic groups in diasporas negotiate by seeing, transforming, reinterpreting, building or simply erasing.

The dismemberment of the former Yugoslavia together with the breakup of the war in 1991 changed significantly not only the map of the region but also the literary scene of the former communist republic; this political turn implicitly affected women’s writing (Lukić 238) because some women authors in the countries that were part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia were stigmatized for their anti-nationalist and anti-war stance. On the Croatian literary scene, women writing and the feminist presence in prose productions was more influential than in the other ex-Yugoslav countries (233). However, today there is still a considerably low number of women writers in the official literary world of the region and even less that are part of the literary establishment. With many Croatian writers such as Vesna Krmpotić, Jasminka Domaš, Stanka Gjurić, Irena Vrkljan, Maša Kolananović and with Serbian authors like Isidora Bjelica, Svetlana Velmar-Janković, Jelena Rvović, Jasmina Mihaljović, Ljubica Arsić to name only a few from the contemporary list, a comprehensive history of women’s writing from Croatia and Serbia – as well as that of women writers from Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Kosovo, not to mention those from other Central and Eastern European countries – is still to be written.

Slavenka Drakulić’s Café Europa: Life After Communism (1996) and Dubravka Ugrešić’s The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1996) are essential collections of unconventional histories written by a journalist and a free-lance writer (both born in 1949). Published in the same year, these two works, which constitute a dual vision on a common topic, deal specifically with the negotiation of boundaries by recalling individual narratives from a region that has been a border zone of many tragedies in the period of post-communist years on the territory of the former Yugoslavia. Both Drakulić and Ugrešić employ the quasi-autobiographical model where the author’s personal experience is perceived as unmediated presence; gender roles, therefore “may be seen” in their prose “as a sort of genre, with given repertoire of recognizable clichés” that “belong as much to the context as to the text itself” (Lukić 231).

One of these patterns of women-centered narratives is the first-person narrator and Drakulić set the agenda for this strategy when she claimed that “[W]riting meant testing out the borders of both language and genres, pushing them from editorials and first person plural and towards the first-person singular” (2-3). In Café Europa: Life After Communism, a multilayered narrative with different perspectives on people and (new) borders written between 1992 and 1996, Drakulić ingeniously tests the gendered first-person narrator: on the one hand to erase the aesthetic distance between the readers and the text and on the other, to show the palpable political boundaries the language entails. The negotiation of peripheries starts with the use of pronouns in singular and plural in marking personal and collective frames. These are the basic constituents ma(r)king the individual and the group, delineating the private and the public realm of one’s own boundaries. Gloria Anzaldúa defined “ethnic identity as twin skin to linguistic identity,” claiming that language itself constitutes the individual (Anzaldúa 898). If the language in Borderlands/La Frontera is “an orphan tongue” (897) of multiple tongues, in the case of this Croatian author, the wording does not have to fight the “cultural tyranny” (888) of hierarchically competing parlances in the linguistic zone of Yugoslavian lingua-franca, the Serbo-Croat, as it has been the case of Anzaldúa’s hybrid, mestiza dialect; it is enough if it overcomes the tradition of silence by introducing a “conscious female voice” to speak (Lukić 224).

In Café Europa the “I” is the peripheral throne of the feminine subject, of the author-narrator of the stories to come, while “we” and “us” signals the boundaries of a political group which was once (thought to be) a homogenous entity and has become very much heterogeneous since:

 

… I constantly use the pronouns ‘we’ and ‘us.’ When I am speaking of my everyday life I rarely do so – quite the contrary. I can see that they come to me naturally in the context of this book, but they trouble me nonetheless.  […] Why do they come naturally? Am I representing someone – a group, a party, a state? No, I am not. Am I appointed by someone? Not that I know of. Am I aware that other people think like me, and subconsciously identifying with them, even though I don’t know them? No. So where do these pronouns come from, and whom do they represent? Clearly, in the context of this book, ‘we’ and ‘us’ mean the people of ex-communist countries, and as I am one of them I believe that I can justify using the first-person plural to describe our common experience. Yet, at the same time, I am annoyed by this first person plural; I fell uneasy using it, as if I had something personal against it. (Drakulić 1)

 

The author verifies the “borders of both language and genres” by “pushing them away from editorials and first-persons plural and towards the first-person singular” (2-3) in order to escape the political connotation – which seems unavoidable at this point, too. The “hideous first-person plural” (3) was thought to be the seed of nationalism, aggression and murders; moreover, this very “fatal difference in grammar” divided groups of people from the rest of their compatriots – many of them even family members – in the war of “us” and “we” (ibid.) which redrew maps and lives in the Balkans.

So in Eastern European countries, the difference between ‘we’ and ‘I’ is to me far more important than mere grammar. ‘We’ means fear, resignation, submissiveness, a warm crowd and somebody else deciding your destiny. ‘I’ means giving individuality and democracy a chance. … Why then, have I used ‘we’ and ‘us’ so frequently in this book? Because a common denominator is still discernible, and still connects us all, often against our will. It is not only our communist past, but also the way we would like to escape from it, the direction in which we want to go. It’s our longing for Europe and all that it stands for. Or, rather, what we imagine Europe stands for. (4)

Apart from the pronouns, in the chapter “Café Europa” Drakulić describes a special kind of “Brechtian alienation effect” (7) materialized in the addition of a national adjective to vernacular objects with no previous political connotation, thus imposing a metaphorical border with a quite negotiable meaning on the perception of the object itself. Drakulić illustrates this alienation effect in detail by a coffee shop in Sofia where coffee served is not the traditional kind of “Bulgarian coffee” or – as she emphasizes – “Macedonian, Turkish, Serbian or Greek coffee, depending on where it is drunk” (6) but is prepared differently from the traditional way people used to drink it and served with lots of additional products (whipped cream, cinnamon, chocolate) like the coffees in Vienna. The local coffee, as a specific cultural product, is endowed with national attributes in these regions, while in other countries people are less concerned with how the drink is called and or what way it is presented; anywhere else a coffee shop is a coffee shop, the coffee is mostly coffee.  Nevertheless, the coffee has gained special connotation in some regions and seems to have negotiated its own metaphorical borders after the war in the Balkans.

Furthermore, the Viennese konditoreien becomes a metaphor for negotiating borders in Eastern Europe. So does food. The sarma (tightly wrapped minced meat with chopped onions and spices in sauerkraut or vine leaves), the burek (popular pie of thin layered pastry stuffed with ground meat or cheese), the čevapčiči (ground meat rolls grilled) and the baklava (a rich, sweet pastry with nuts and heavy sugar/honey syrup) are all part of the negotiation of borders in the case of the Bosnian family in “Bosnia, or What Europe Means to Us” (204). For Zijo, Fatima and Amira – similar to many refugees living in diasporas around the world – finding the ingredients for their specific meals, preparing and eating the national foods of their region makes their home (more) real in Sweden. Despite the comforting properties of ‘home’- made food, the character’s internal borders appear within the domestic realm of their Stockholm kitchen. Food, as the weight of grammar in ‘we’ and ‘us,’ is a semantic problem assembling invisible walls with the help of imported words from the former ‘home.’ The name of food items – as the dual properties of medicinal drugs – reflects nostalgia, memory, and trauma but also alludes to a certain kind of regional, ethnic coherence; food is a border between ‘we’ now and former ‘us.’

Zijo, Fatima and Amira are thus, in Breyten Breytenbach’s terms, “middle-worlders,” vagrant “un-citizens” who are “defined by what they are not, or not longer, and not by what they oppose or even reject” (Breytenbach 47). Their own “Middle World” is a place of both “belonging and not belonging” (48) because theirs is a space by definition liminal. Rooted in the rites of passage embodied in acts of separation, transition and incorporation (as enounced by Arnold van Gennep) the liminal condition (defined by Victor Turner) of the Yugoslav war refugees here entails a potentiality for new (b)orders. Their liminoid circumstances make up a ludic space-time coordinate (Spãriosu 33) that has a strong potential for subversion. These Bosnian refugees in Sweden are similar to an “emerging archipelago of forced freedom and unintentional estrangement” (Breytenbach 49), where one suddenly becomes a foreigner with multiple boundaries around. Julia Kristeva’s main concepts used to describe and define the foreigner in “Toccata and Fugue for the Foreigner” demarcate the status and state of these individuals: the newcomer has overcome loss and challenges, experiences suffering, ebullience and wears masks, has an aloof dignity, confidence, and is subject to parceling, melancholia, and irony; the outlander values liberty and knows what hatred is; the alien is synonymous with the immigrants and the orphans, and enjoys the silence of polyglots (Kristeva 1-39). The status of refugees and the political asylum, the feeling of persecution combined with the hospitality and interpersonal realities of the new country, as well as the sum of all attitudes of indifference and solidarity combined with the feeling of home and exile, all configure the interstitial condition of the Middle-World (Breytenbach 50), a border or frontier state that Homi K. Bhabha called “in-between each other” (Bhabha 943).

Drakulić compartments her book into several narrative alcoves which depict mundane petit récits or, in other words, the “alternative histories of the excluded” (Bhabha 937). Each of these chapters focuses on different points of view about the emblematic erasure of symbolic borders. While the concept of the café entails a transnational content and promotes a cosmopolitan reading of the context at the beginning of “Café Europa,” the destruction of Hotel Europa during the war in Sarajevo does the opposite towards the end of the book’s chapter; the downfall of the ‘hotel’ as a quasi-oriental location where cultures meet signals the erection of new borders and shows those hidden faces of Europe which the continent – perceived as a ‘café’ – cannot display. The author quotes the Bosnian writer Djevad Karahasan, who described Hotel Europa as an “old Austro-Hungarian establishment in the middle of Sarajevo,” as “a geographical and cultural point where West and East met” (Drakulić 12) which was destroyed in the shelling of Sarajevo during the recent war in the Balkans. By erasing the hotel (during the war that lasted from 1992 until 1995) Europe disappeared from Sarajevo and symbolically ‘left’ the city “because most of the country, the city, and its people left, too, deceived by Europe. So Europe has many faces, and we should not forget that” (ibid.). What is left is a rim, a wound that needs time to heal in a place where now multinational European Union Force helps the transition.

Europe has indeed many faces and Istria has some that need be mentioned. Drakulić is fascinated by the Istrian attitudes towards borders in the chapter about “People from Three Borders.” She recalls the way her mother used to cross the frontier – situated on a bridge in the middle of the divided city – every day from Sušak (then part of Yugoslavia), her home, to Rijeka/Fiume (then part of Italy), where she worked during the Second World War (161). This continuous shift through demarcation lines left the narrator with an unanswered question about the migratory identity of Istrians. During the communist period borders were mostly imperceptible in the Istrian region – even between Italy (considered the West) and the rest of Istria (considered the East)  – but after the Balkan war in the nineties the concept of the border was re-considered: frontiers became the main components of national and ethnic identities, at least at the level of official politics. What was once a regional, cosmopolitan place has become a territory of border-crossings where post-nationalist discourses finally prevailed through the existing cultural pluralization that further helped redefined difference (Cristian 35). In this sense, the epitome of Istria became its people who are even today engaged in a “continual reshaping of mainstream and margins” (ibid.) regardless of any political demarcations.

 

Istria is a rather small and compact geographical unit, and because of that, borders here have always been intangible. There was no iron curtain here: people got married, worked and lived together, not only across the Croatian-Slovenian border, but also across the Yugoslav-Italian one. Now that a real border has been erected, in the first place between Croatia and Slovenia, you become aware of just how small Istria is. This partition is the consequence of a political decision, not of the way people here live. […] People understand each other on a deeper level. They do not make problems out of their differences; it is other who do that. (162-163)

 

The war in Yugoslavia destroyed the common cultural milieu that the previously artificially assembled country had, which led to a complete break in the communication with the others (Lukić 240) and led the “navigational allegory” (Bhabha 939) into the categories of ‘we’ and ‘us,’ into the-same-and-yet-others, living on the sides of the new frontiers with new identity papers to fit the changing political times. Drakulić describes the cultural intimacy of the region’s symbolic geography materialized in particular border negotiations which boycott the artificial boundaries when she recalls her short trip to Trieste she took with a friend who owned three passports but only one regional identity.

 

On one weekly food-shopping excursion to Trieste I took a friend along, a neighbor from my little town up in the hills. As we approached the Croatian stet border, he took out his Croatian passport to the police officer. But on entering Slovenia he showed a Slovenian passport to the police officer. To my surprise, this was not the end of the story: when we reached Italy, he produced a third document, a brand-new Italian passport! I asked him why he possessed three passports. ‘It is a matter of survival; no one knows what will happen here,’ he answered simply. […] his identity is not defined by changing his nationality from one to another, or again to a third, but incorporation all of them. He, too, is a strong regionalist and is an advocate of transregionalism, the practice of economically connecting parts of the same geographic area across state borders. (168-169)

 

Apart from this particular example, the post-communist condition in the post-Yugoslav zone in general has many common points with the post-colonial approaches to ethnicity in particular; both feature a Zeitgeist that goes along the ideological lines of the postmodern nation. Bhabha defined the significance of the postmodern condition by drawing attention to the “awareness” of epistemological limits of ethnocentric ideas that become boundaries of “dissident histories and voices” (Bhabha 936). These constitute the records of “postcolonial migration, the narratives of cultural and political diaspora” that are visible in the “major social displacements of peasant and aboriginal communities” and in “the grim pose of political and economic refugees,” which reflect a special “poetics of exile” (ibid.).

Such poetics of exile does Drakulić elaborate in the “Invisible Walls Between Us” where the subtlety of the argument is bound with a crushing narrative bit caught in a snapshot of border-crossing. The border-zone strategy is imbued with power relations that fuse with the refugees’ confined middle-worlder status; everyone feels the invisible barriers and walls blending in an atmosphere of suspicion; the perimeters of the East and the West are there to outline the nomadic space of a Fourth World inhabited by groups of people or nations without states (such as the Roma in Europe, the First Nations in the U.S.A and Canada, Tibetans in China, aboriginals in Australia, etc.) caught in the no man’s land between borders waiting for their right to pass.

 

Perhaps this is what Purgatory is like, I say to myself as I am about to pass to the other side. My eyes, accustomed to border-crossing scenes, glance at a small group of gypsies, Albanians or Bosnian refugees, separated even from us in order to be really humiliated. And as I look at them for a moment, I know, they know and the police officers know that barriers do exist and that citizens from Eastern Europe are going to be second-class citizens still for a long time to come, regardless of the downfall of communism or the latest political proclamations. Between us and them there is an invisible wall. Europe is a divided continent, and only those who could not travel to see it for themselves believed that Easterners and Westerners could become equal. The simple truth, which I can read in the police officer’s eyes, is that we are not. Moreover, it seems to me that the citizens of the new democratic countries are suspected even more than before, since more of them are able to travel abroad than in the past. (21)

 

The status of second-class citizens alludes to the former Second World condition of post-communist subjects, an aspect that still lingers on together with other ‘ghosts’ of the recent past.  “Because of their indefinable character,” Maria Todorova writes in Imagining the Balkans, “persons or phenomena in transitional states, like marginal ones, are considered dangerous, both being in danger themselves,” similar to the small group of gypsies and Albanian and Bosnian refugees in the example above shows, but they are also “emanating danger to others,” (17), as is the case of practically everyone involved in the episode of passing the aforementioned border.

Dubravka Ugrešić’s The Museum of Unconditional Surrender is “a precious portrait of exile as internal displacement” (Eder 1999) and chronicles individual, vernacular stories of this past told as a pastiche of photographs, pictures, recipes, vernacular objects (coffee pots, temporary rented apartments, cheap little radios, stamps in passports, abandoned hairdryers), friends, loves, verbal snapshots, fragments of memory collected in an album written as a pretext to revisit the post-1990s transition period from the gendered perspective of a Croatian academic in exile. The (first-person) narrator lives in Berlin with and on the reminiscences of her past, which shape a metaphorical “museum” of no (wo)man’s land that has an almost exoticized “heavy, stale, sweetish smell” (Ugrešić 224), a panopticon that alludes to the inescapability from memories and traumas by the choice of the words in ‘unconditional surrender.’ A “confused archeologist,” she has been “leaving the wrong labels everywhere” (221); the narrator catalogues her belonging and memories (that she carries in albums and suitcases) as items in a museum and places them in symbolic files that deal with “deracination, disruption of national boundaries, migration, war, and the chaotic cultural phenomena of Eastern European transitions” (Popescu 4). The labels of museums, collections, and photo albums, however, are quite relative “because these forms of memory preservation flow and ebb into each other, borrowing strategies and recreating themselves anew as genres” (5) within the worl(d)s of Ugrešić’s compilation.

The Museum of Unconditional Surrender displays household objects and family matters of synchopated people lost in the process of transition and migration after the war in Yugoslavia; less in a Proustian verbose manner in search of a lost time (and place) and more in the unusual visual assemblage in the gusto of Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain (2001) or that of an earlier emblematic character from the oeuvre of Dubravka Ugrešić, Štefica Cvek/Steffie Speck from The Jaws of Life and Other Stories [1981] (1993). The textual collection of albums is a symbolic ‘peripheral throne’ on which small scale histories, in other words, “traces of other people’s lives” (Ugrešić 4) are finally exhibited/told/written down. This ‘exhibition’ is partitioned into seven parts that break the boundary of the author’s native language and alternately plunge, from chapter to chapter, into the realm of German by disclosing the cultural hybridity of the exiled middle-worlder in search of home in wor(l)ds: 1. Ich Bin Müde [I Am Tired], 2. Family Museum, 3. Guten Tag, 4. Archive: Six Stories with the Discreet Motif of a Departing Angel, 5. Was ist Kunst? [What Is Art?] 6. Group Photograph and 7. Wo Bin Ich? [Where am I?].

In terms of transgression, each part of the book is itself a “sabotage attempt at a coherent genre” (Popescu 5). The book blurs the boundaries of a compact category; the text resists solid classification because it is partly autobiographical writing, partly travel narrative marked with a documentary component, seasoned with essayistic segments, magic-realist appearances and bitter humor. Knowing that one cannot “resist the poetic thought that with time the objects have acquired some subtler, secret connections” (Ugrešić xi), the reader as visitor – and sometimes as interloper into the private segment of the public version of photographs – is warned to see the ‘artifacts’ in the belief that “their museum-display fate has been determined by chance” (ibid.) similar to the collector’s life events. Ugrešić, the writer of the unhomely home, goes beyond official and unofficial borders and transforms private objects into public matters. She “pays great attention to the pathologies of memory” and in despite the fact that “former Eastern Bloc countries have erased many memories of their communist regimes” Ugrešić’s prose is there as a monument of the unsaid, a topos of a former Yugoslav vernacular space that “stands out in the eagerness with which new mythologies and bodies of cultural memory have been shaped” (Popescu 9).

Photographs and albums embody cultural memory that accommodates internal borders. The existence – or absence thereof – of canned moments is part of the identity of the fugitives. Ugrešić quotes a Bosnian émigré, who notices in an aphoristic way that “[R]efugees are divided into two categories: those who have photographs and those who have none” (Ugrešić 5). However, these two categories are hardly discernable for anyone not having his or her own museum of unconditional surrender. “[O]n Saturdays and Sundays” in Gustav-Meyer Allee, “the country that is no more, Bosnia, draws its map once again in the air, with its towns, villages, rivers, and mountains” (Ugrešić 230) as to negotiate its new margins and also to capture a picture of its own through its displaced people. These aliens are the middle-worlders from chapter six “Group Photograph:” Nuša, The Queen of Wands, Alma, The Queen of Pentacles, Nina, The Page of Pentacles, Hana, The Queen of Cups, Dinka, The Queen of Swords, Doti, The Knight of Swords, Ivana, The Empress, and the narrator as The Fool, all figured through tarot-card symbolism standing for missing photographs and displaced people. As middle-worlders, they all have a “vivid consciousness of being the Other” (Breytenbach 57). They also “recognize affinities with other middle worlders” (58) and are “aware of the moral implications of the narrative” (60) that is only theirs. The novel illustrates this point in an emblematic scene in which the émigré-narrator is recognized as a middle-worlder by another foreigner, whose smile bonds the two into the same discourse:

 

[A]n elderly Gypsy was playing Hungarian Gypsy songs on a violin. He caught my passing glance, gave me a smile that was both deferential and brazen at the same time, recognizing me as “one of his.” (Ugrešić 7)

 

An expatriate feels that “the state of his exile is a constant, special sensitivity,” (7) to which others answer in certain ways. The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, together with Café Europa: Life After Communism are some of these responses.

While mainstream political, economical and social writings on the region are all aware of the dramatic changes that occurred after 1989 in the peninsula, “their discourse on the Balkans as a geographical/cultural entity is overwhelmed by a discourse utilizing the construct as a powerful symbol conventionally located outside historical time” (Todorova 7). Indeed, this geographical location of culture still evokes the liminal “image of bridge or crossroads” (15) and is home to “nesting orientalisms” (Milica Bakić-Hayden qtd. in Todorova 10) combined with many other eclectic, border zone constructions that mark and shape identities today in the region and well behind it. Nevertheless, the dynamic history of present-day Balkans – especially within and outside the borders of the countries that were once part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia – can be better understood by knowing individual (both his and her) stories and alternative narratives of those excluded from mainstream discourses that constitute the unconventional history of this part of the world. Curiously, these stories are mostly judicial texts, post-traumatic war testimonies and/or narratives embodied in semi-fictional, journalist works besides the (auto)biographical fictional work of a few women authors.

The unconventional histories of the excluded, of the refugees and exiles, of middle-worlders in the Balkans constitute exercises in polysemy (Todorova 22) for the women authors from the former Yugoslav territory. Slavenka Drakulić and Dubravka Ugrešić, the two Croatian women intellectuals in exile, middle-worlders themselves, assemble these histories of human artifacts in translating their lives in terms of negotiating, unraveling and disclosing boundaries and by crossing the thresholds of literature, journalism and life in a quality compendium of vernacular experience. Their narrative strategies dismantle pre-existing stereotypes and assemble them into eclectic fragments of individual poetics that commingle and continuously challenge the negotiation of borders, margins and periphery in the postcommunist narrative space of the Balkans.

 

 

Works Cited:

 Anzaldúa, Gloria. “Borderlands/La Frontera.” In Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, eds. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998, 887-902

Bhabha, Homi K. “The Location of Culture.” In Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, eds. Literary Theory: An Anthology, Malden, Mass.: Malden, 1998, 936-944.

Breytenbach, Breyten. “Notes from the Middle World.” In Heide Ziegler, ed. The Translatability of Cultures. Proceedings of the Fifth Stuttgart Seminar in Cultural Studies 03.08-14-08.1998. Stuttgart-Weimar: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 1999, 47-63.

Cristian, Réka M. “Border Stories and Pos-Nationalist American Identities: Reading Aurora Levins Morales and Bharati Mukherjee.” In Jan Chovanec, ed. Theory and Practice in English Studies, Vol. 4. Proceedings from the Eighth Conference of English, American and Canadian Studies (Literature and Cultural Studies), Brno: Masaryk University, 2005, 35-42

Drakulić, Slavenka. Café Europa: Life After Communism. London: Abacus, [1996] 1997.

Eder, Richard. “Books of the Times; Treating Exile as a Separate Country.” The New York Times, November 9, 1999. Available: http://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/09/books/books-of-the-times-treating-exile-as-a-separate-country.html

Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. Trans. Leon Roudiez. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991.

Lukić, Jasmina. “Women-Centered Narratives in Contemporary Serbian and Croatian Literatures.” In Pamela Chester and Sibelian  Forrester, eds. Engedering Slavic Literatures. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996, 223-243.

Popescu, Monica. “Imaging the Past: Cultural Memory in Dubravka Ugrešić’s The Museum of Unconditional Surrender.” Studies in the Novel, Fall, 2007, U of North Texas and Gale Cengage Learning. Available: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3440/is_3_39/ai_n29381282/pg_4/?tag=content;col1

Spãriosu, Mihai. The Wreath of Wild Olive: Play, Liminality, and the Study of Literature. New York: State University of New York Press, 1997.

Todorova, Maria. Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Ugrešić, Dubravka. The Museum of Unconditional Surrender. Trans. Celia Hawkesworth . New York: New Directions, [1996] 1999.