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us that there were people who were able to act against the regime, dream of a better lifestyle and
fight for their beliefs. In contrast with the other three books, Burying the Typewriter is both a political
statement, which incriminates the communist regime and its worst representatives, and a modality
of coming to terms with a traumatic past by unearthing personal memories.
Bugan’s father protested against the communist regime more than once, by printing manifestos
using an unregistered typewriter and distributing them to people’s mailboxes. The family had two
typewriters: one official, one unofficial. Whereas the children could learn typing on the official one,
they did not know about the other, which their parents buried every morning after long nights spent
on typing manifestos. One of his significant protests was that he traveled alone to the center of
Bucharest and distributed manifestos against the political regime, an act which attracted
international public attention, without him even knowing it. His act was very unusual since dissidents
usually had connections abroad. He was soon sent to prison and his family had to suffer public shame
and even change their most intimate communication practices. On account of the microphones
planted in their house, family members began to write messages instead of speaking to each other,
which clearly meant they lived an abnormal life. However, part of the local community still supported
the Bugan family. Later, the father survived prison treatment in Aiud and was released due to a
national amnesty two years before they emigrated, in 1989.
If Aglaja Veteranyi seems to have no other linguistic choice, Carmen Bugan’s determination of
writing in English is radical. In an interview with Patrick Barkham for New Statesman, she said:
When I finished this book, I had an email from an old friend who confessed that he was
a Securitate informer. He congratulated me on my doctorate from Oxford and my
achievements in my life. I was freaked out. I felt violated. It’s been 22 years and you’re
congratulating me on my doctorate? So, no – I couldn’t go back, I couldn’t say it all in
Romanian. 18
Her perspective shows that experiencing childhood trauma in the mother country may mean
there will be no happy return and hating mother tongue is – at least partially – justified. Bugan’s
language choice might seem in line with the destiny of Onchorhynchus Keta, the fish that Simona
Popescu wrote about in her novel, which changes its shape irreversibly during migration. However,
things are not that simple. Onchorhynchus Keta is not driven away by the secret police. “I think I
belong on the border. I feel safer psychologically if I have two countries, two places to go,” Bugan
declared in the same interview with Barkham. “The government has created identities for us and I
am struggling to fight my way to clarity form all the surreal mess of these files,” 19 she said.
In contrast with Bugan’s choices, Popescu’s struggle is neither against mother tongue nor against
foreign languages, but against gobbledygook and langue de bois, no matter the language. If one
cannot do things with words – to quote philosopher J. L. Austin – then what is the purpose of
language? Her point of view is radical from this other angle. On the contrary, Veteranyi’s and Sandu’s
works show both the aesthetic value and the risks of performing linguistic vividness, either in a
language different than one’s mother tongue or, respectively, from the unborn’s surreal and
obviously mute viewpoint.
Whether for them writing was or has been a pleasure or a necessity, these women took the bull
by the horns, not simply as an artificial reaction to western models of écriture féminine, but as a way
to reconcile themselves with a changing self and a disruptive, chaotic and more and more transitory
world. Interestingly enough, none of them appears to have extensively discussed the coloniality of
the communist and postcommunist life, as theorized by Romanian scholar Bogdan Ștefănescu (2013).
Only Carmen Bugan has timidly tackled the topic, by focusing on her family ordeal. Instead, probably
aware that “the point is not to know who we are, but rather what, at last, we want to become” 20 ,
they all managed to translate geographical or/and inner exile and self‐exploration into significantly
dialogic cultural instruments, specific to the postcommunist decades, rooted in the very real or
surreal experience of the communist epoch, when cultural values – as well as the conception of
identity itself – were more stable.