Teaching Subjectivity. Travelling Selves for Feminist ... - MailChimp

space’. The intention is to illuminate my migrant life by seeking what may exist
beyond the boundaries of the history and geography of my no-land(s), to see if
there are still forgotten or unexplored experiences which mark my subjective
displacement.
Looking more intently inside my autobiographical framework – a
modality with which I am not familiar at all and which is intentionally dislocated
and left to exist in a kind of parallel reality – I can perceive, emerging from
a forgotten world, a daily border crossing of cultural and linguistic patterns
already existing during my childhood in the family environment in my birthplace,
Zagreb.
My great grandfather came to Zagreb from the Sudeten region, an area
in the Czech lands where a substantial German minority lived until the end
of the Second World War. He emigrated during the nineteenth century when
his home region was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. My father was
born at the beginning of the twentieth century (1900) when the memories of
his grandfather’s migration were still alive within the family. The transmitted
familial saga memories were rich in anecdotes, although these were more linked
to great grandpa’s geographical journey than to real cultural displacement. Most
citizens of the so-called smaller nations within the Austro-Hungarian Empire
were trilingual or multilingual, most of them travelled throughout the territory
of the Empire and many were in contact with individuals from other ethnic and
cultural communities or member peoples of the Empire. Briefly, this means that
in my family, part of the not large but culturally dominant Agramer 2 middle–
class, it was not at all surprising to meet people using German, Hungarian and
Latin in addition to the Croatian and Serb language, and this rich linguistic
mixture was further elaborated with French, Russian and Turkish expressions.
In our family gatherings the sounds of languages and music coming from afar,
from Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, Slovenian, Serbian, Macedonian, Bosnian
and Russian cultural milieux became familiar to us, the youngest generation.
Nobody was specifically teaching us anything but we acquired the multiethnic
‘mark’ by just existing, breathing, eating, playing and singing during family
celebrations, and listening to stories about the world existing before our birth.
I should add that such kind of crossing of different cultural and psychological
borders was not exceptional or surprising, nor did it only occur in middle-class
old Zagreb.
2
Agram, the old German name of Zagreb.
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