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

This is home as the constant object of our desire, as a relation between
global and intimate, the space in the world and emotional space. Home is a
metaphor for feeling at ease in the world.
The meaning of displacement
The real displacement in my life, in my autobiography, came in the form of
a landslide which deprived me of the framework of my identity references.
It occurred when the war in Yugoslavia started, when the partition of the
country generated inexpressible brutality, crime, ethnic cleansing, when my
country and its multiculturalism, the historic experience of Southern Slavs
living together with their differences, started to disappear. I was transformed
into a mere observer, an impotent observer of its agony from a neighbouring
foreign country. That was the time when most Yugoslav citizens became losers,
and many of us were losing our plural cultural identity. We lost our history,
our biographies, our collective memory, our freedom of movement through
the territory. The territory became ‘former’, the country itself became ‘former’
and we were all transformed into ‘former citizens’. In that dark time, exercising
the memory became subversive; it was considered an unpatriotic political act
against a new ethnic dream and the building of the nation-state(s).
Under pressure from this tragic and coercive emotional rupture, of which
Biljana Kasic reports in this book and recalls the ‘claiming of feminist togetherness
or longing for pre-war feminist engagement’, I myself, for the first time in
my life, understood – with an unpleasant awareness felt on my very skin – the
powerful meaning of history, the concept to which Hannah Arendt dedicates a
significant part of her philosophical thoughts. In this perception the meaning
of history and the identity building are tightly linked. “If we lose the connection
with history or tradition, we become orphans of inherited ideas, dislocated from our
origins and an identity crisis occurs.” 9
My roots were no more partly situated in ‘another country’; that country
simply ceased to exist. Dubravka Ugrešić, the Yugoslav writer who took herself
into exile from the Balkan nationalistic madness, posed in one of her works
the question that became the paradigm of our/my living abroad. The simple
question, addressed to the immigrant hundreds of times, receives an illogical
and bizarre answer:
9
Hannah Arendt, Between past and Future, New York, Penguin, 2006, 150-151.
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