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GROWING UP IN ROMANIA IN THE 1970s AND 1980s:
CONTEMPORARY WOMEN WRITERS’ PERSPECTIVES
Monica MANOLACHI *
In 1978, when the women authors mentioned in this article 1 were still children, Romanian thinker
Constantin Noica published his philosophical work entitled Six Maladies of the Contemporary Spirit,
in which he assigned the malady of “todetitis” 2 – caused by the lack of individuality – to women in
general, as a uniform category. After about two or three decades, these women published their first
works. All four books considered here gravitate towards a young feminine character, now selfconscious,
now in search of her self, who boldly articulates reality and fiction, in order to weave and
unweave both her past and the future of her remembered subjectivity. While Popescu and Sandu
represent the individual child psyche from inside the country, Veteranyi and Bugan offer the
migrant’s point of view. All of them mingle memory and fiction, prose and poetry, to different
degrees and in very distinct ways, in order to perform identities which belong to the large puzzle of
Romanian life during communism and postcommunism.
Although the outline of philosophical thinking is more evident in Simona Popescu’s Exuviae –
because she devotes numerous pages to making sense of being and becoming, temporality, God
(whom she calls Dede), freedom, happiness or order – the other three authors project their own real
or invented stories on mental structures that favor the study of causes and principles underlying
more or less the same issues in communist and postcommunist contexts.
By adopting the role of the inquisitive child, Popescu’s character muses on some of her avatars: as
kindergarten girl, rebel pupil, now learning or meditating alone, now at play with her brother or
friends, and eventually adolescent, who, like a snake, painfully tries to leave the skin of her former
selves behind. Addressing one of her alter egos, she declares: “Your superego is a child. Powerful,
impassible, ferocious.” 3 However, this is just one of the facets of the complex personality she
weaves. Unhappy with any state of inertia and more comfortable in the context of a modern panta
rhei, she criticizes the classes of Romanian literature, her own mushy teenage diaries and the
bathetic agony of her aspirations, cultivating a Jungian inner life, full of Proustian intimate events,
experienced by her Platonic multiple selves. Like “a mother who takes care of the child she was” 4 ,
she describes the hybrid process of remembering (as a mix of truth and imagination), the pains of
friendship, idealistic love or revealing solitude and the often overlooked world of the senses at an
early age. In her attempt to cast light on the way a child’s consciousness is formed, she describes the
selective act of reading, the strenuous act of writing and her fascination with neologisms – many of
the usually taken‐for‐granted sensations a child feels when acquiring new knowledge.
Simona Popescu’s book is part memoir, part fiction, part essay, part poetry, part subjective
dictionary or encyclopedia – an amalgam of genres that captures the tensions of growing up. The
diffuse timeline that links the chapters has apparently nothing to do with the communist regime.
Perhaps Popescu’s declared autistic, positively self‐centered perspective regarding the whole
creative process is a significant, fruitful reaction to the oppressive system of the late 1980s. Asked
about her reaction to censorship as a very young poet during the late years of communism, Popescu
confessed in an interview that she preferred the “more complicated reality of human inner life” to
“primitive protest texts.” 5 The narrator becomes increasingly aware of the multiple physical or
imaginary “places,” to which she can freely “travel” and which she calls “nooks.” Her own body, the
books she reads, her wardrobe or her grandparents’ shed or attic – all constitute hideouts where
endless reflections on the “staying” versus “leaving” dichotomy are possible and harmless. Searching
for essence, the narrator is extremely aware of the difference and relationship between reality and
fiction, between being and becoming: “It crosses my mind that I might be sheer fiction. It horrifies
me. I am afraid of fiction. I write out of fear. I go ahead of the fiction about me.” 6 Instead of aiming at
*
University of Bucharest