Facing the so called syndrome of forgetting their ex-Yugoslav past (“The people were invited to deny their former life and forget it.”), Tanja Lucić, a professor of Yugoslavistics, a subject which practically ceased to exist with the breakdown of SFRY, proposed a “project” to her students, a class game, work on cataloguing the former Yugoslav everyday life. Each of the students tells a fragment, some “Yugo-nostalgic” exhibit, some personal experience of his former country – Yugoslavia. They started by reconstructing an imaginary museum of “Yugoslav-hood”. Instead of the classical figure of the Teacher, whose key attributes were authority, knowledge and power – professor Lucić started a “group therapy”: telling stories and memories of the “former” life was in the function of putting together the jigsaw called – identity. Unlike the so called sleepers, emigrants who establish a normal life, learn the language, get integrated, adapt and live a life without bigger doubts, Lucić’s students are in a space in-between: on one hand there is the imperative to forget everything that used to be, and on the other hand, in the new space – the Netherlands, they still have no identity:
We did not want to belong to those over there nor to these here. At moments we were identifying with this dim collective identity, at moments we rejected it with disgust.8F
The search for one’s identity thus obtains an ontological value. This “in-between space” seems to be quite precisely determined by Amin Maalouf: “As if you have no feeling that you live in a world that belongs to others, in a world where you are but an orphan, foreigner, freak or despised.”9F
The category of subalterality, which determines an individual or groups that are particular/inferior with respect to the universal, is actualized in the novel in the category of Home. The sublater individuals or groups live on the border between two or more homes. The home for the sublater ones is a metaphor for the yearning. The home as a yearning!
The home in the novel The Ministry of Pain is de-centered, binary, realistically-imaginary. The very housing has a character of search, of a movement through a labyrinth. Amsterdam, the new home of the narrator, Tanja Lucić, is presented as a labyrinth via the metaphor of the spider’s net:
I saw Amsterdam and its heart, which had a shape of a spider’s net cut in half.10F
In her dreams, the narrators experiences her own home in Zagreb as a labyrinth:
I knew in my dream how to discover some stairs, some doors, some passage that will take me to a parallel part of the house which I never knew existed.11F
Besides being a real space for existence, the home also appears as an imaginary one:
I thought about living in the biggest doll house in the world, where everything is only simulations and where nothing is real.12F
After finishing the first semester in Amsterdam, the narrator leaves for a short visit to her mother, her home in Zagreb; then she comes to realize:
“Home” was “home” no longer.13F
The home of her mother is a space of self-suffocation. The woman-daughter is under the pressure of the obsessive care and domination of her mother figure. The traditional understanding of home as a place of being rooted in is fully redefined; there is no single home for the subaltern ones. Housing is a metaphor for the search, the movement from one place to another, one home to another.
Provocative, disturbing and exceptionally brave is the end of the novel! Via an essay-ised narration, the narrator “settles the bill” with the new neocolonialism, whose main representatives are: the “transition mutants”, new people of the new time; people who speak several languages and have PhD-s; people “quick at self-defining and self-positioning”, people for whom the main terms are: “flexibility”, “mobility” and “fluidity”; specialists in other’s misfortune – emigrants, Gypsies, prostitutes, minorities; planners of others’ lives and their own careers. The “new speech” of the new time, which is nothing else but a subtle way of colonizing, is “dismantled” to its real essence!
Literature:
1. Амин Малуф, „Погубни идентитети“, Матица Македонска, Скопје, 2001
2. Дубравка Угрешиќ, „Министерството на болката“, Сигмапрес, Скопје, 2005
3. Edward W. Said, Orientalism, New York, Pantheon, 1978
4. Елизабета Шелева, „Културолошки есеи“, Магор, Скопје, 2000
5. Mарија Тодорова, „Замислувајќи го Балканот“, Магор, Скопје, 1999
6. Радомир Константиновиќ, „Филозофија на паланката“, Лист, Скопје, 2000
7. Антропологија, (Зборник текстови), Догер, Скопје, 2000
Translated by: Elizabeta Bakovska
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8. Угрешиќ, стр. 24
9. Амин Малуф, „Погубни идентитети“, Матица Македонска, Скопје, 2001, стр. 77
10. Угрешиќ, стр. 229
11. Угрешиќ, стр. 207
12. Угрешиќ, стр. 208
13. Угрешиќ, стр. 98