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

Where you are from?
From Yugoslavia.
Does this country exist?
No, but I do still come from there. 10
This no-land was exactly the place in which my self was pushed and
started to float without points of reference, and at the same time to resist
the forced choice of only one identity and the erosion of my plural cultural
belonging. More then ever before, certainly more than at any other time of my
geographical and cultural dislocation due to the experience of migration, I was
convinced of the necessity to reinforce my pertinence not to the single reality,
but to a multiplicity of spaces. As never before, I kept remembering irrationally
the shape of my country still entire and unbroken, without the scars of the new
borders drawn on a mainly historically incorrect ‘ethnic basis’. My imagined
country was visible only from the window of a plane flying over the Balkans,
as only from the air are the new states’ borders and walls of ethnic separation
invisible. In my stubborn conviction I was keeping all the scattered pieces
together as a mental map of my non-existent homeland.
I needed its past for my future and for my own existence, for being my
Self and travelling through the world.
Reflexive nostalgia
I was/am not alone in this sensation of loss transformed by reconstructing
mental spaces in spite of the awareness of the irreversibility of time and place.
There are many sons and daughters of a disappeared Atlantis scattered all over
the world who are forced to reorganise and negotiate their memory and personal
recollections, who are mediating feelings of belonging and a new marginality.
The Kurdish author Mehmed Uzun, 11 born in a little village of Anatolia
and a political refugee in Sweden, speaks about the uneasiness of attachment
to the living past in which whoever writes from exile lives: “Exile is separation,
10
Dubravka Ugrešić, “La confisca della memoria”, in Nostalgia. Saggi sul rimpianto del comunismo, ed. Filip Modrzejewski
and Monika Sznajderman (Milano: Bruno Mondadori, 2003), 276.
11
One of the main Kurdish writers, born in southern Anatolia. Uzun lives in exile in Sweden and writes in Turkish
and in Swedish. He is the author of an anthology of Kurdish literature.
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