By locating the funeral as a chronotope in this story, Gordana Mihailova Bošnakoska puts the first stamp of women’s writing on it. As least in our Macedonian context, the end of life (as well as its beginning) are women’s moments; the graveyard, just as the delivery rooms are women’s chronotopes, and the mourners, just as midwives, are usually women. The tone of the story itself also sounds like a lament, with moans and sobs that repeat as refrains through the text; true to the intertwining of Eros and Thanatos, they later slide from pain and sorrow into passion: “Oooooh sighs of touches of our wet summer skin, our unforgotten noon love in our friends’ bed in ninety forty three while we licked the occupier’s lollypops of caramel sugar, plum strudels and white horse squadrons, while they were cutting the fresh lines of our dreams, that oooooh, while we were lying fresh, young, and beautiful in the white Anglé sheets… my dear companion, she is met by his dry mouth as we land her finaaal body on his finaaal body, to join finaaally…”
The transfer of laments to love sighs also marks the transfer of one subject into another – the subject that is present at the funeral becomes the dead husband who awaits fro the woman that is being buried. The sliding of the subject from one into another, its multiple appearance does not only bring into the story the well known taste of postmodernism, but it also introduces additional elements of women’s writing – the corporal, pre-lingual, the one from the other side of consciousness, is manifested via the voice of the dead husband, who, on his side marks the phalocentric axis to which what is womanly, corporal strives: “… he has been waiting for her all in a fourteen year erection, he has been waiting for her young eighty year old body fragrant of white wine to drink it under the deep dry earth in the Skopje Butel summer.” This voice of the “old” dead is even joined by the voice of the “newly” dead, his wife, a bit further: “ What did you prepare for me fourteen years ago her painful question arises?”
The game of voices that mix, moving from one to another, after the reunion of the man and the woman, the lovers in life and death, brings the voice again to the initial subject, This unnamed, not fully defined subject that speaks in first person singular (and thus it can be interpreted as the voice of the author herself) makes another sudden twist, revealing that the burial is just a memory: “Brutal memories, why should I burden you now as you are passing Epiphany noon, when the cross has been thrown in the waters, around here, filled with snow and ice?” Suddenly, the summer becomes a winter, and the subject, the keeper of memories, confirms its feminine character – as it remained in our tradition, the memories of the dead men are kept alive by women. Women actually maintain the relation between “this” and “that” world – at a practical level, they organize the commemorations for the close dead. At another, magical, surreal level, women are most often the ones who communicate with the dead, in their dreams, in the deep levels of subconscious, in a non-verbal proto-language.
The subject of this story, the woman who continues the tradition and customs, remembers the summer funeral on Epiphany, a winter holiday: “Ooooh sweet customs, ancient promises that return this funeral to me, that return this summer August Skopje Butel funeral to me in the cold January Epiphany days with a color of a forgotten rose cut with iron scissors of the cold steel of her utilitarity, her insensitiveness.” In her memory, in her direct address to the other woman, the one close to her, most probably her mother, she [the subject] keeps her alive and says: “GOOD-BYE to our forgetfulness of YOUR SOUL!” So one comes back to the title of the story, the name that is to be remembered (that is, not to be forgotten): the author has hidden this name in the riddle of another holiday1F: “PALM SUNDAY – my dear soul, our happy forgetfulness, our dear historical pregnancy… My dear girl, remind me of the past…”
Gordana Mihailova Bošnakoska’s story, as an outburst of women’s writing, a lyrical lament, an album of emotional images sealed in women’s genes, inevitably leads to Erikson’s words (1968) that man’s identity is minted in relation to the world, while the woman’s identity is revealed in the relations of intimacy with another person. As early as the nineteenth century, Margaret Fuller, an American writer and feminist, almost disappointed in herself, said: “I have always thought that I shall not write like a woman, of love and hope and disappointment, but like a man, of the world of intellect and action”. However, the urge of the women’s writing is unstoppable, and many women authors can not write any differently than “too personal” and “too exposed”. If and how it can penetrate the predominant concept of (conditionally said) “men’s” writing, breaking it and revising it in the process (or, in other words, deconstructing it), is a question that is yet to be answered.
Translated by the author
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1. In Macedonian, the name of Palm Sunday is Cvetnici; it is the name day of women whose names are Cveta.