engleski

Homelands of the mind

“The past is a foreign country” claims David Lowenthal. However, as Salman Rushdie notes, this idea could be inverted. In this talk we analyse how for the first generation of Croatian migrant women in New Zealand, women who left Dalmatia between 1880 and 1950, the present was ”foreign“ and the past was seen as “home.” They were arriving with a variety of passports: Austrian, Italian, Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, and later, when their homeland was again renamed they were called “Yugoslavs” or “Croatians.” Regardless to their passports they were treated for various reasons by their host country as “different” and “other, ” and they withdrew into a community of their own, cultivating nostalgic memories of the “old country.” Their past, preserved in many different forms, in one way testified to their group's foreignness. We argue that they were living in the past and for the past, creating their own mental pictures about homeland which Rushdie calls “homelands of the mind.” Yet these “homelands of the mind” were vividly transmitted to the second generation too. We analyse how these “homelands of the mind” are represented in the work of Amelia Batistich, a New Zealand fiction writer of Croatian descent, and how they articulate with memories and identities of second and third generation Dalmatians in New Zealand.

Croatian diasporic literature

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