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crossing physical borders, as many people wished during communism, Popescu is happy to cross the
endless and harmless borders of imagination, where time and space can gain other meanings. She
wrote: “Time – the biggest trick, the most fascinating game or toy.” 7 Her book is more about her own
subjective time as a child and adolescent rather than about real chronotopes, an archive of feelings,
sensations and ideas.
Although not a declared feminist writer, Simona Popescu proposes a transgressive type of writing
and insists on its general functions rather than focusing on gender issues. In a survey about feminism
conducted by Ruxandra Cesereanu, Popescu mentioned that: “I used to be influenced by the deep
absence of feminine solidarity, caused by the masculine cultural environment, in which my education
as a young intellectual began […] today I believe in feminine solidarity, not against something or
against men, but just for the sake of it.” 8 If there is an interest in gender aspects, then that is
centered on being a woman writer, even a woman poet, rather than on family bonds, sexuality or
social relationships, mainly because the other characters are considered as pretexts for selfdiscovery.
Her substantial reflections on the reading and writing processes, on the meaning of certain
words that gain almost magical power, because they nurture readers’ intelligence itself, constitute a
huge step forward on the way of understanding the world in a more complex mode than before, at
least as far as Romanian literature written by women is concerned.
In Aglaja Veteranyi’s novel, entitled Why the Child is Cooking in the Polenta, published first in
German and immediately translated into Romanian, the majority of what could qualify as
philosophical reflection is centered on the interplay between identity and alterity in the context of
becoming and on the ideas of happiness and God. A circus family’s daughter, the child narrator or
woman author (so closely interrelated) tries to understand her place in the world, both as a migrant
child, living in between cultures, and as a girl, overwhelmed by the life experience she has gained by
the age of adolescence. Without knowing much about geography, because she only attended school
sporadically before the age of seventeen, she perceives homeland from abroad through her eccentric
and sometimes careless acrobat mother, who depicts it as a distant repressive place. Thus, the child
grows up with a negative image of it, which contrasts with Popescu’s endeavor to build a positive
one, starting from her own inner reality.
On the other hand, living in another country becomes an experience of exceptional alterity. Torn
by abnormal family relations, in which betrayal and promiscuity weigh too much, the girl in
Veteranyi’s book suffers “a painful process of disenchantment” 9 , as she confessed in an interview
with Rodica Binder. In this view, the author’s sense of belonging is extremely altered: “we are all
‘abroad’ in this world” 10 , she told Binder, about two years before she committed suicide in 2002. Her
family’s encounter with cultural otherness takes different shapes in her consciousness, among which
the poetic discourse surfaces like oil on water, so that some critics considered her book a poem in
prose. For example, the girl imagines her father speaking to his tuxedo as if it were a man:
A man born in a foreign country lost his shoes. He left them in his house and threw the
house into a river.
Or did the house throw itself in?
The foreign man went from river to river.
Once he found an old man under water, with a sign around his neck: HEAVEN HERE.
The foreigner asked: What do you mean, heaven?
The old man shrugged his shoulders and pointed to the sign.
The house then resurfaced, but in a totally different place.
It was probably a different house, because it couldn’t remember anything about the
foreigner’s shoes.
Later the house lost its door.
Did your tuxedo make this story up? I ask.
No, my father says, this is our story. 11