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Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften | 17. Nr. |
November 2008 |
| Sektion 5.4. | Women’s Performances in Transnational Migration |
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Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften | 17. Nr. |
November 2008 |
| Sektion 5.4. | Women’s Performances in Transnational Migration |
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Costinela Drãgan (University of Bucharest)
Email: Costinela.Dragan@rompetrol.com
In this essay I will examine the ways in which a totalitarian regime influenced and put a mark on the life of Romanian people in general, and of intellectuals in particular. The escape from Communism to the New World, the changing of identity across borders, the memories of the past, life in exile, which implies a problematic dialogue between home-country and host-country, are issues discussed in this essay.
The corpus analyzed consists of the memoirs of a writer (Nina Cassian) who has provided highly modulated perspectives on the problem of the past. Memory as Dowry is written from the perspective of a Romanian who remembers nostalgically the mother country overlapping with the mythical time of childhood and adolescence. On the other hand, these enchanting images are obscured by the representations of a totalitarian Romania and a terrifying leader.
Nina Cassian is one of the distinguished Romanian authors who have left their country during the Communist regime; the wave of intellectual emigration, starting in the mid-1960s but becoming stronger in the late 1970s and 1980s, included poets, novelists, and critics such as Paul Goma, Gabriela Melinescu, Mihai Spăriosu, Virgil Tănase, Dorin Tudoran, Gelu Ionescu, Lucian Raicu, Norman Manea, Thomas Pavel, Virgil Nemoianu, to mention only a few.
She started her career as a poet in Romania, and at the age of 60, after her husband’s death, the writer and critic Al. I. Stefanescu, Cassian was permitted to leave Romania for three months to accept a position teaching creative writing at New York University, though at the time she was not fluent in English. Although she loved New York, living there did not seem a possibility.
During her stay in America, a friend of hers, Gheorghe Ursu, was arrested by the Securitate for possessing a diary in which he recorded his thoughts and opinions. The diary contained several of Cassian's poems which satirized [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satire] the Communist regime and which the authorities thought to be inflammatory. He was beaten to death soon after, while in the custody of the Securitate. This event is recorded in her diary: “Oh God! Babu has been tried and sentenced to seven years in prison, but after few days, Sorana, his wife, and Andrei, his son, were asked to come and pick him up at the morgue. So, Babu is dead. More exactly, he has been murdered. Because of his journal!” (Cassian III, 8)(1). After Ursu's diary was confiscated, his friend Nina Cassian chose not to return to Romania and later she was granted asylum in the United States.
Nina Cassian is a personality of many facets and the contradictions of her life reflect in a way the tragedy of many Romanian intellectuals, whose career started before the war and who subsequently had to adapt in order to survive, some of them more zealously than others. For the generation that grew up immediately after the war in Communist Romania, Cassian’s poems were the staple diet of Marxist text books – of “approved” literature. After Ceausescu’s fall she said that she compromised “without conviction” whilst she “tortured her artistry”.(2)
It was difficult to live in a country that stifled artists, but to leave that country could also be a hardship. "It is a terrible tragedy to leave your country at the age 60 and live in a place where you are surrounded by a foreign language and with two impossible professions – poetry and classical music, I had had my share of fame and glory, and didn't expect more",(3) said Cassian. Soon after, the Romanian government took over Cassian's former residence, seizing all of her possessions, including her writings, paintings, and compositions. Her publications were banned, and she was turned into a non-entity in her own country. All of her works were written out of the canon of Romanian literature and removed from textbooks.
During the Communist years, there were dissident writers, but on the whole literary dissidence was sporadic in Romania. Because of the fear of repression, the pressure on dissidents and potential dissidents to leave the country was enormous, especially when the cult of Ceausescu was at its most delirious level. This fear of repression, in a system of total censorship and total control of everyday life by an all-powerful secret police can hardly be understood in abstract terms. Dissenting intellectuals were therefore tried, or threatened with arrest, they were confined to psychiatric institutions and were subjected to all kinds of blackmail (e.g. Dragos Protopopescu was among those who disappeared, Ion Caraion, Paul Goma were imprisoned) (Deletant 166). Intellectuals were hated by the Ceausescu family, Cassian notes in her journal: “Ceausescu’s aversion – and Elena’s – to intellectuals was of all kinds. She removed Catrinel Oproiu, Carmen Dumitrescu (and me, of course) from the TV program and replaced us with fat activists with their hair shaped like a bun (…) He had already stated the idea that between Eminescu(4) and an ordinary person was no difference” (Cassian III, 192). (5)
Exile in the West had, in spite of its difficulties (primarily of a linguistic nature), certain undeniable advantages: even the poorest émigré lived a better life, in material terms, than he or she would have in Ceauşescu's Romania, transformed into an impoverished concentration camp where everyone was supposed to simulate happiness. More important, a sense of elementary dignity or self-respect was infinitely easier to attain in the West, even at the bottom of the social scale, than at home, where very few could afford to pay the extraordinary price for it: internal exile in a country with a long-standing tradition of submission to the powers that be, strengthened by the communist-induced "hostage mentality".(6) Few literary intellectuals had the courage to sustain internal exile for a longer period of time.
The radical voices of antiauthoritarianism in Eastern and Western Europe at times of political oppression were frequently women's voices, speaking through poetry (Ana Blandiana, Constanţa Buzea, Ioana Crăciunescu, Daniela Crăsnaru, Nora Iuga, Ileana Mălăncioiu, Angela Marinescu, Mirela Roznoveanu etc.), the novel (Carmen Firan, Gabriela Adameşteanu), theater (Luminiţa Gheorghiu), and cinema (Silvia Popovici, Leopoldina Bălănuţă). In Romania there was no feminist movement as such, but there have been a great number of gifted writers. Nina Cassian stands out as an example of a narrator who writes about her experiences as a woman and about women’s lives. Her art offered a means both of communicating with others, and hence breaking the silence, and of sharing experiences.
As a European traveler to the New World, Nina Cassian found that much of what she had read and imagined did not exist in reality, but one thing was certain: that the American republic with its democratic principles was certainly vastly different from the Eastern-European totalitarian regimes.
Her Memory as Dowry is not only a book written in exile, but it is also a very consistent and provocative book from multiple perspectives as it shows different angles of 20th century decades of Romanian history and American life without respecting the chronological order of events. The first volume is a rewriting of her Romanian journal where she expresses the fact that only in the USA can she be a free writer with no hesitations in expressing her feelings. In the first book she talks about her childhood, the landscapes and the people she met in her life, the stories she used to read or the games she played with the children from her neighborhood. She kept a sense of veneration for the everyday life and the pleasures of the country, especially the outdoor aspects: the gardens, woods and fields and the different meanings attached to it. These meanings are very often complex, resembling Cassian’s general complex attitude to her own past. The physical images of her youth are both of the painful sort “Somebody who has recently returned from Romania tells me horrible things. No functional heating devices, no electricity, no water (for the toilet)” (Cassian III, 33)(7) and of the secure and peaceful sort: “Braşov – my childhood town, with its wood entrance gates, and mysterious interior gardens hiding behind them, with its fragrance of an old burg, and The Black Church (…), the fair in front of the mayor’s house where ginger bread was sold (…), dolls with skirts made of feathers” (Cassian I,8).(8)
For Nina Cassian, an artist who had to relocate, geographic displacement represents the practical enactment of an imaginative concept of space. And therefore relocation appears in many of her poems(9) and her diary – Memory as Dowry, explaining how painful the experience was. Once the dislocation took place she feels her return to Romania will not be accepted: "They don't want me there, I'm not sure why. They used to consider me eccentric and rebellious... But now maybe it's because they resent that I'm living a better life in America."(10)
She thought she would never be able to reconstruct her identity across the ocean, to make a name for herself as a poet there. She thought her name as a poet was lost forever because in Romania her name had been erased from all anthologies and from all the literature books. However, at age 60, she found strength and courage like the man in her poem: “>From that moment on, he set himself to do/ everything with twice as much enthusiasm.”(11)
Memory as Dowry is an autobiographical, “confessional” book, in which Cassian focuses on describing the difficulties which the individual writer had to overcome to escape from Communism. In this context, the truth-status of the text is given by the strength of the narrator figure. The journal is constructed within a range of discursive pressures. Cassian’s writing cannot be analyzed as if the texts originated from one determining factor, such as the author, “reality”, or femininity, but rather that the texts are produced in the interaction and clashing of a variety of constraining factors. The texts are heterogeneous, made up of various elements in response to different constraints on the writing process.
The author traveled and wrote about her experiences within a multiplicity of constraints – gender, class, purpose of her journey, textual conventions, audience and so on – which acted upon and formed her writing. These factors determine that the texts will be constructed differently, both from texts by other women and also those by men.
In the case of Cassian’s Memory as Dowry the texts present the example of a strong, exceptional woman who somehow managed to escape the structures of patriarchy. The text of her diary is not a simple transcription of her adventures; her travel is simply seen as a personal escape from boredom and repression. In her diary she notes: “The Ceausescu obsession is still alive, but not to forget: I have slipped from seeing and continuously hearing him lapped in feasts, cheers and wishes – although it was all about feelings of hate” (Cassian III, 34).(12)
She feels very proud of herself for managing to write poems or articles without mentioning Ceausescu’s name, but suggesting the presence of a supreme leader as he should have been, not as he was. In Communist Romania, a scholar could give public opinions only if he/she mentioned at the beginning of the speech that the research constituted a success due to Ceausescu’s precious suggestions and his theoretical works. Cassian writes in her diary: “I call on trumpets that I have never written the name I hated, but it happened once when a chief editor enabled himself to attribute unspoken words to me in an interview that I gave him” (Cassian I, 366).(13)
The title of her three-volume book Memoria ca zestre – Memory as Dowry is very suggestive, in her first book Cassian asserts: “If my memory is a dowry – that means I’m very rich – with all the profoundness of the acquired elements, landscapes, flavors, colors, books, arts, music, human beings that wander through my self with a vitality and freshness that I can hardly handle.”(14)
In Ricoeur’s opinion memory is notoriously fallible and historical accounts, since they cannot represent the past just as it was, are at best only partial and are therefore subject to the charge that they misrepresent, rather than represent, the past.(15) There is the individual's memory of what he or she has encountered or done or suffered, and there is a set of memories that individuals share with other members of their group, in Cassian’s case the past is a terrific period shared by a whole nation constrained by Ceausescu’s personal ambitions.
As Ricoeur asserts, traces of the past remain. Through them we try to represent the past in the present. We do so through memory and through the writing and reading of history. Testimony of this sort, given and received, underpins a group's collective memory, its “common knowledge”. It also shows that there is a social bond among the group's members that undergirds their trust in one another's words.
Many thinkers regard memory as the foundation of our selfhood and identity (Locke, Hume, Husserl and others). Cassian’s autobiographical memories normally begin with a brief and passive recollection which makes the experiencer explore that specific past experience. Memory in revisionist movements forces the human being to see yesterday in today’s light and the self as more complex than the person is at the present moment. Her writing is built upon the concept of time and memories of the past, a natural outcome of the worlds here and there and now and then colliding in her writing, both on a personal and literal level, is a sense of opposition shown in dichotomy, ambivalence or ambiguity most often caused by memories of the past. As Cassian searches for an identity to be confident with, strong memories of the mother-country overwhelm her.
As Pierre Nora puts it in Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire, “Modern memory is (…) archival. It relies entirely on the materiality of the trace, the immediacy of the recording, the visibility of the image” (Nora 13). At the same time, “The Past could also be resuscitated by an effort of rememoration; the present became a sort of recycled, up-dated past (…)”. Nina Cassian rememorizes the past, her memory is open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, it is affective and magical, it nourishes recollections that may be out of focus or telescopic, global or detached, particular or symbolic, it is collective, plural, and yet individual.
In fact, the memory of Romania is a postmemory “because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation” (Hirsch 420). Memories of a totalitarian past in Eastern Europe, especially for a migrant to the New World, seem to imply a dialogue with home, re-imagined as a version of alterity. The totalitarian homeland is cast as the origin of exile. Cassian’s approach to the exilic shows how the New World is constituted as a place, a narrative of displacement, always recreating the endless desire to return to “lost origins”. She questions herself: “Shall I return home? Where? Back to solitude? With my freedom threatened by Ceausescu’s horrors and exasperation? I must not forget: I reached a point without return” (1987). This nostalgia for lost origins, the “return to the beginning” is like the imaginary in Lacan – it can neither be fulfilled nor requited.
As Edward Said says, it is not a fixed origin to which we can make some final and absolute Return. Cultural identity has its histories – and histories have their real, material and symbolic effects. The past continues to speak to us. But it no longer addresses us a simple, factual “past”, since our relation to it, like the child’s relation to the mother, is always-already “after the break”. It is always constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth.
To return to the origin after any long absence is to experience again the shock of the “doubleness” of similarity and difference. The boundaries of difference are continually repositioned in relation to different points of reference – otherland (the hybrid American space) and motherland (never satisfies the returned traveler’s nostalgia). Cassian’s texts restore an imaginary fullness or plenitude, they are resources of resistance and identity. She manages to reshape her identity as an exiled Romanian by breaking cultural boundaries, by wrapping her writings in new imagery and expressing herself in a new language – the language of her new home, America. This new found home does not use her and does not send her to war to harm her but instead gives her wings to replace her “broken limbs”. The past, the mother country with both its political and mythological dimensions, anticipating free world utopias, represents a memory of the origin, continuously enriching the readings of the present.
Works Cited:
Notes:
(1) Original text in Romanian: “Dumnezeule! Babu a fost judecat şi condamnat la şapte ani închisoare iar, după câteva zile, Sorana, nevastă-sa şi Andrei, fiul lui, au fost chemaţi la morgă. Deci, Babu a murit. Mai exact, a fost ucis. Pentru jurnalul lui!”
(2) On http://www.blouseroumaine.com/freeexcerpt_p5.html
(3) http://www.feminista.com/archives/v2n7/yeatts.html
(4) Mihai Eminescu was a late Romantic poet, the best-known and most influential Romanian poet.
(5) Original text in Romanian: “Ura lui Ceauşescu – şi a Elenei – fa ţă de intelectuali se exercita în fel şi chip. Dumneaei le eliminase din program pe Catrinel Opriu, pe Carmen Dumitrescu (bineînteles şi pe mine), înlocuindu-le cu actviste grase şi cu coc (…). El proferase deja ideea că între Eminescu şi un om obişnuit nu e nicio deosebire”.
(6) Calinescu, Matei. “Romanian Literature: Dealing with the Totalitarian Legacy”, World Literature Today. Vol. 65, Issue: 2, 1991, 244.
(7) In Romanian: “Cineva care s-a întors recent din ţară îmi comunica lucruri înfiorătoare. Nu e caldură, nu e lumină, nu e apă (pentru closet).”
(8) In Romanian: “Braşovul (…) cu porţile lui de lemn, îndăratul cărora se ascundeau misterioase curţi interioare, cu atmosfera lui de burg străvechi, cu Biserica Neagră, (…) cu iarmarocul din piaţa primăriei unde se vindeau figurine de turtă dulce (…), păpuşi cu fuste de pene…”
(9) I Left Those Walls: “I left those walls / smeared with my blood— / it was an atrocious massacre. / Now I’m flying over the city/ not like a Chagall bride / beside her bridegroom, the violinist,/ but like a winged nightmare / with an entire biography of dirty feathers.”
(10) http://www.blouseroumaine.com/freeexcerpt_p5.html
(11) Cassian, Nina. “ A Man”. World Writers Today. Contemporary Literature from Around the World. Ed. Jamaica Kincaid. Glenview: Scott Foresman, 1995.
(12) In Romanian: “Obsesia Ceauşescu e încă în funcţie dar să nu uit: am scăpat de a-l vedea şi auzi continuu, înconjurat de sărbătoriri, urale şi urări – deşi, de fapt, numai de ură”
(13) Text in Romanian: “Singurul mod în care un savant – şi am asistat cu stupoare la intervenţiile televizate ale unor celebrităţi în vârstă – îşi poate pomeni creaţia este, avertizând la început, că aceasta a fost posibilă datorită strălucitei opere teoretice a tov. N.C. sau preţioaselor indicaţii ale tov. N.C. (...) (Mă laud că nu am pomenit niciodată în scris numele hulit de mine decât o singură dată când un redactor şi-a permis să-mi atribuie fraze nerostite de mine într-un interviu.)”
(14) Original text in Romanian: “Dacă memoria mea e o zestre sunt foarte bogată, prin profunzimea de elemente acumulate, peisaje, arome, culori, cărţi, artă, muzică, fiinţe etc. care mă cutreieră şi azi, cu o vitalitate şi o prospeţime aproape insuportabile.” (Cassian I,6)
(15) Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey & David Pellauer, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004.
5.4. Women’s Performances in Transnational Migration
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For quotation purposes:
Costinela Drãgan: The Role of Women (Writers) in the Identity Development of Ethnic Minorities.
In: TRANS.
Internet-Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften. No. 17/2008.
WWW: http://www.inst.at/trans/17Nr/5-4/5-4_dragan.htm
Webmeister: Gerald Mach last change: 2008-11-09