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

Let us see what Kenka Lekovich, a young writer from Rijeka/Fiume, the
important Mediterranean city on the Bay of Quarnaro, Croatia, says about her
family experience:
In our house, at the table, we used to pass each other the salt in Italian, Serbo-
Croatian or Croatian-Serbian, German, Hungarian, Turkish, in the dialect
of Trieste and Fiume, in Istrian-Venetian dialect, in the dialect of Napoli, in
ciakavo 3 and in kajkavo 4, sometimes in English and in French, as my mother
spent a good deal of time in London and her father, my grand-father, died
in Paris in a minefield. When things are like that, when during an everyday
ordinary lunch you find yourself passing the salt in twelve different idioms,
you understand that to be multilingual cannot be a question of distinction,
but simply a factual matter, normality, I would say. The real anomaly or even
near madness was, and still is, being forced to choose, to opt for only one
language, only one dialect, and finally, for only one culture. 5
Why do I think that similar segmented life stories should illuminate the
distinctive points of my self-location? I am convinced that the past experience
of being able to cross the inner borders of different cultural segments and doing
it as a normal part of everyday life, experiencing it first in the framework of
the ‘national’, reinforced my multicultural being and my mental orientation
towards being open to others.
There is no travel without going beyond borders. I was already traversing
the world when I was still at home. A mixed marriage was not a surprise in
my biography, nor my migration to Italy. When it occurred, I was saved, at
least partly, from cultural shock by moving to Trieste, a city of the same Austro-Hungarian
past as my native city, Zagreb. The Mediterranean and mitteleuropean
Trieste was where I founded my family. I did not feel dislocated from
my emotional roots. I knew the language, I was studying Italian language and
literature at university level before I moved. Another crucial factor was that I
received my new citizenship at the same moment that I was married. There was
not a single day, a single hour, in which I lost my civil rights. I added the new
citizenship to my citizenship. I was not willing at all to accept loss but I was
open to addition. That was my normal expectation.
Perhaps I was fortunate, but I still think it was too self-evident to pretend
otherwise. To me it was absolutely normal, that people moving from their own
3
The dialect spoken in the heart of Istria, Croatia.
4
The dialect spoken in the area close to Zagreb, Croatia.
5
Kenka Lekovich, I speak Gulasch und andere Texte (Klagenfurt/Celovec: Drava Verlag, 2006), 44.
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