engleski

Writing socialism / writing trauma: in Slavenka Drakulić and Dubravka Ugrešić's essays

In this paper I analyze the mechanisms of the process of remembering in essays of Croatian female writers, Dubravka Ugrešić and Slavenka Drakulić. Their essays are closely linked with a shared and to some extent similar, traumatic personal experience: because of their public exposure of the nationalistic heteronormative ideology, that accompanied a process of the building of new nation states in the former Yugoslavia in the early 90's, they were publicly disqualified with "the persecution" that “Croatia’s feminists rape Croatia”. Finally, they both left their homeland, which was followed by complex feelings of loss and alienation. However, all their books remained intimately connected to the Balkans, and to the „Yugoslav idea“ respectively, through the various main aesthetical and memory strategies. In this paper I won’t focus on their critical analysis of intriguing riddles of the Balkan's latest history, but on some potentially problematic memory mechanisms, that are visible in textual passages that contains memories about socialist Yugoslavia, i. e. about the time before the actual trauma happened. Namely, in Ugrešić's and Drakulić's essays witnessing socialist experience has emerged not only as a privileged mode of access to their personal and collective (Yugoslav) past, but also to their (personal and collective) trauma itself.

socialism; trauma; Drakulić; Ugrešić

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