THE NOVEL AND EUR O P E

IMAGINING THE CONTINENT

IN POST-1945 FICTION

EDITED BY ANDREW HAMMOND

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN MODERN EUROPEAN LITERATURE

Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature

Series Editors
ShaneWeller
School of European Culture and Languages
University of Kent
Canterbury,UK

ThomasBaldwin
Centre for Modern European Literature
University of Kent
Canterbury,UK

BenHutchinson
Centre for Modern European Literature
University of Kent
Canterbury,UK
Linked to the Centre for Modern European Literature at the University
of Kent, UK, this series offers a space for new research that challenges
the limitations of national, linguistic and cultural borders within Europe
and engages in the comparative study of literary traditions in the modern
period.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14610
 Andrew Hammond
Editor

The Novel and

Europe
Imagining the Continent in Post1945 Fiction
Editor
Andrew Hammond
University of Brighton
Brighton, UK

ISBN 978-1-137-52626-7 ISBN 978-1-137-52627-4 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016953742

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,
electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now
known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the pub-
lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made.

Cover image hanohikirf / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks go out to Ryan Jenkins, Paloma Yannakakis, Peter Cary, Paula

Kennedy, Natasha Perova, Max Mendor, Rebecca Gould, Robert Elsie,
Donald Rayfield, Peter Morgan, Hamid Ismailov, Lasha Bughadze,
Elizabeth Wilson, Nigel Foxcroft, Semezdin Mehmedinovi and Frauke
Strey. I am particularly grateful to Susan Curtis-Kojakovi at Istros
Books and Seid Serdarevi at Fraktura for their kindness and support.
An extended version of Sarah de Muls essay was published as Becoming
Black in Belgium: The Social Construction of Blackness in Chika Unigwes
Authorial Self-Representation and On Black Sisters Street, The Journal of
Commonwealth Literature (2014), and is reprinted here with the permission
of Sage Publications. A version of Peter Beardsells contribution originally
appeared in his Europe and Latin America: Returning the Gaze (2000) and
is reprinted with the permission of Manchester University Press.
Andrew Hammond
Brighton 2015

v
 CONTENTS

Notes on Contributors xi

1 Introduction 1
Andrew Hammond

2 Traumatic Europe: TheImpossibility ofMourning

inW.G.Sebalds Austerlitz 53
Theodore Koulouris

3 gota Kristfs Europe: (Un)Connectedness and

(Non-)Belonging inThe Third Lie 71
Metka Zupani

4 Between Yearning andAversion: Visions ofEurope in

Hilde Spiels The Darkened Room 85
Christoph Parry

5 The European Origins ofAlbania inIsmail Kadares

The File onH 101
Peter Morgan

vii
viii CONTENTS

6 Images ofConquest: Europe andLatin American Identity 115

Peter Beardsell

7 Sissies Odyssey: Literary Exorcism inAma Ata Aidoos

Our Sister Killjoy 129
Esther Pujolrs-Noguer

8 European Fiction ontheBorders: TheCase of

Herta Mller 143
Marcel Cornis-Pope and Andrew Hammond

9 Borders, Borderlands andRomani Identity inColum

McCanns Zoli 161
Mihaela Moscaliuc

10 A Betrayal ofEnlightenment: EU Expansion andTnu

nnepalus Border State 177
Gordana P. Crnkovi

11 The Dilemmas ofPost-Communism: Elizabeth

Wilsons The Lost Time Caf 193
Andrew Hammond

12 Minorities andMigrants: Transforming theSwedish

Literary Field 211
Anne Heith

13 My Dream Can Also Become Your Burden: Semezdin

Mehmedinovis Poetics ofSelf-Determination 227
Guido Snel

14 Blowing Hot andCold: Georgia andtheWest 243

Donald Rayfield
 CONTENTS ix

15 Becoming Black inBelgium: Chika Unigwe andthe

Social Construction ofBlackness 257
Sarah de Mul

16 Undivided Waters: Spatial andTranslational Paradoxes in

Emine Sevgi zdamars The Bridge oftheGolden Horn 271
Gizem Arslan

17 Amara Lakhouss Divorce Islamic Style: Muslim

Connections inEuropean Culture 287
Daniele Comberiati

Bibliography 301

Index 343
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Gizem Arslan is Visiting Assistant Professor of German Studies at the Catholic

University of America. Her primary interests are post-1945 literatures in German,
French, Japanese and Turkish, translation studies, migration studies, theories of
language and intermedial approaches to print literature. She is currently complet-
ing a book project entitled Metamorphosis of the Letter: Translation as Transformation
in Paul Celan, Georges Perec, Yoko Tawada and Emine Sevgi zdamar. She has
written on the materiality of translation in Perec, Tawada and zdamar.
PeterBeardsell is Emeritus Professor of the University of Hull and has also held
posts in the Universities of Manchester and Sheffield. He has written books on the
Argentine novelists Ricardo Giraldes and Julio Cortzar, the Ecuadorean poet
Jorge Carrera Andrade, the Uruguayan short-story writer Horacio Quiroga and
the Mexican dramatist Rodolfo Usigli, as well as a book on Latin American litera-
ture and culture, Europe and Latin America: Returning the Gaze (2000). His
present research interests are Mexicos Theatre of the North and the interface
between literature and science.
DanieleComberiati is Associate Professor of Italian Literature at the University
of Montpellier. His research focuses on migrant and postcolonial Italian literature
and contemporary Italian poetry and his publications include La quarta sponda:
Scrittrici in viaggio dallAfrica coloniale allItalia di oggi (2009), Scrivere nella
lingua dellaltro: La letteratura degli immigrati in Italia (19892007) (2010), Tra
prosa e poesia: Modernit di Sandro Penna (2010), Affrica: Il mito coloniale ital-
iano attraverso i libri di viaggio di esploratori e missionari dallUnit alla sconfitta
di Adua (2013) and Nessuna citt dItalia pi crepuscolare di Roma (2014).
Marcel Cornis-Pope is Professor of English and Media Studies at Virginia
Commonwealth University. His publications include Anatomy of the White Whale:

xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

A Poetics of the American Symbolic Romance (1982), Hermeneutic Desire and

Critical Rewriting: Narrative Interpretation in the Wake of Poststructuralism
(1992), The Unfinished Battles: Romanian Postmodernism Before and After 1989
(1996) and Narrative Innovation and Cultural Rewriting in the Cold War Era
and After (2001). He has recently written New Literary Hybrids in the Age of
Multimedia Expression (2014) and has edited with John Neubauer the four-vol-
ume History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe (200410).
GordanaP.Crnkovi is Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature, Cinema
and Media at the University of Washington. Her research fields include compara-
tive and eastern European literature and film, with a particular interest in Bosnian,
Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian fiction, as well as in American and English
literature. Amongst her many publications are Post-Yugoslav Literature and Film:
Fires, Foundations, Flourishes (2012) and Imagined Dialogues: Eastern European
Literature in Conversation with American and English Literature (2000).
Sarahde Mul is Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies at the Open University in the
Netherlands. Her publications and research interests are situated in the field of
comparative postcolonial studies with a particular focus on literatures in Dutch and
English. Her books include Colonial Memory (2011) and Een leeuw in een kooi: De
grenzen van het multiculturele Vlaanderen (2009, with Karel Arnaut, Sarah Bracke,
Bambi Ceuppens, Nadia Fadil and Meryem Kanmaz). She has also co-edited three
collections of essays on cultural theory and multiculturalism in Scandinavia and the
Low Countries.
Andrew Hammond is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of
Brighton. In both teaching and research, he has specialised in Cold War literature,
twentieth-century British fiction, postcolonial writing and cross-cultural represen-
tation. Previous publications include British Fiction and the Cold War (2013),
Global Cold War Literature: Western, Eastern and Postcolonial Perspectives (editor,
2012), British Literature and the Balkans: Themes and Contexts (2010) and The
Debated Lands: British and American Representations of the Balkans (2007).
AnneHeith is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature in the Department
of Culture and Media Studies, Ume University, and between 2008 and 2012 she
was a guest researcher at Troms University and Uppsala University. She has par-
ticipated in networks and projects working on border practices and identities and
is currently affiliated to the Centre for Smi Research (CeSam)/Vaartoe and the
Arctic Research Centre (Arcum), both at Ume University. Her research interests
include national and postnational identities, ethnicity and migration in literature,
postcolonialism, indigenous studies and critical race and whiteness studies.
Theodore Koulouris is Lecturer in Media and Critical Theory at the University of
Brighton. He is the author of Hellenism and Loss in the Work of Virginia Woolf (2011),
a study of the authors relationship with British Hellenism and classical Greek lit-
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii

erature, and has written in the areas of literary and cultural modernism, critical
theory, genre studies, loss, mourning and the theory of the novel. His immediate
research plans involve work on the interstices of mourning, protest and resistance
with a particular focus on the post-2008 Greek crisis.
Peter Morgan is Director of the European Studies Program at the University of
Sydney and has written widely on German literature, comparative literature and
European studies. Recent publications include Coming out in Weimar: Crisis and
Homosexuality in the Weimar Republic, Thesis Eleven (2012), Translating the
World: Literature and Re-Connection from Goethe to Gao, Revue de Littrature
compare (2013) and Ismail Kadare: The Writer and the Dictatorship 195790
(2010). A second volume is underway on Ismail Kadares work since the fall of the
regime, dealing with issues of postcommunism and Albanian identity.
MihaelaMoscaliuc is Assistant Professor of English at Monmouth University. She
is the author of the poetry collections Father Dirt (2010) and Immigrant Model
(2014), the translator of Carmelia Leontes The Hiss of the Viper (2014) and the
editor of a collection of essays on Gerald Stern. Her research interests lie in world
literature, American immigration literature, Roma/Gypsy studies and translation
theory and practice. Her articles and reviews have been published in numerous
journals, including The Georgia Review, TriQuarterly, Soundings, Vestoj and
Interculturality and Translation.
Christoph Parry is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the
University of Vaasa, where he also works in the Intercultural Studies Programme.
He studied German and Russian at Edinburgh and Marburg/Lahn, where he sub-
mitted his doctoral thesis on Osip Mandelstam and Paul Celan in 1978. His pub-
lications include Menschen, Werke, Epochen (1993) and Peter Handkes Landscapes
of Discourse (2003), as well as numerous articles on contemporary German and
Austrian literature and on questions of intercultural literary transfer and
reception.
Esther Pujolrs-Noguer is Lecturer in American and Post-Colonial Literature at
the Autonomous University of Barcelona. A specialist in African literatures and
cultures, her current research focuses on the convergence of race/ethnicity and
constructions of whiteness in Indian Ocean writing. She is a member of the
research projects Relations and Networks in Indian Ocean Writing and Ratnakara:
Indian Ocean Literatures and Cultures. She has written on postcolonial fiction
and cinema and is the author of An African (Auto)Biography: Ama Ata Aidoos
Literary Quest (2012).
Donald Rayfield is Emeritus Professor of Russian at Queen Mary University.
Since visiting Georgia in 1973, he has written a history of Georgian literature,
edited a comprehensive Georgian-English dictionary and published Edge of
Empires: A History of Georgia (2012). He is also the author of Anton Chekhov: A
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Life (1997) and Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for
Him (2004). He has translated a number of Russian and Georgian poets, play-
wrights and prose writers and written on a variety of topics in comparative
literature.
Guido Snel is a writer, translator and Assistant Professor of European Studies at
the University of Amsterdam. He has written on the literatures of central Europe,
eastern Europe and the Balkans and is currently working on a book about the
persistence of East-West and Balkanist imaginaries in European literature. He has
translated Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian fiction into Dutch and written a series of
novels. His latest book is Naar Istanbul (To Istanbul, 2014), a mixture of travel-
ogue and cultural history.
MetkaZupani is Professor of French and Modern Languages at the University
of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. Her research in French, Francophone and more general
comparative literature deals with feminism, postcolonialism, psychoanalysis, myth
criticism and translation studies. Her major publications include three mono-
graphs, Les crivaines contemporaines et les mythes (2013), Hlne Cixous: texture
mythique etalchimique (2007) and Lectures de Claude Simon (2001), and a num-
ber of edited volumes, notably Death, Language, Thought (2005) and Hermes and
Aphrodite Encounters (2004).
 1

Introduction

AndrewHammond

THE EUROPEAN THEME INLITERATURE

The following collection of essays will explore the ways in which Europe
has been debated in post-1945 fiction. The emphasis will be on responses
to the historical conditions of the continent from the Second World
War to the twenty-first century as displayed by a wide range of novelists
from Europe and elsewhere. While recognising that many authors still
function within the specificities of national cultures, the collection will
focus on texts that explore areas of experience, belief, activity and iden-
tity which have traversed national borders and circulated through Europe
and beyond, highlighting the intellectual relations between heteroge-
neous literary traditions and emphasising the intercontinental roots of the
European imaginary. At the heart of the collection will be an interest in
the literary (de)construction of Europe and Europeanness. Influenced by
the work of Bo Strth, Gerard Delanty, Luisa Passerini, Zygmunt Bauman,
tienne Balibar and others, the volume will examine Europe not only as
a construct under continual revision but also as one that literature has
occasionally helped to forge. At the same time, it will analyse the lived
experiences of social and political transformation shared by eastern and

A. Hammond ( )
School of Humanities, University of Brighton, Falmer Campus, Brighton,
BN1 9PH, UK

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 1

A. Hammond (ed.), The Novel and Europe,
DOI10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4_1
2 A. HAMMOND

western populations, as well as the accelerated modernity, globalisation

and geopolitical conflict affecting the wider world. In doing so, the essays
will raise questions about the forms of power operating across and radiat-
ing from Europe, challenging both the institutionalised divisions of the
Cold War and the triumphalist narrative of continental unity currently
being written in Brussels.
In seeking to locate a literature about Europe, the volume will
depart from mainstream scholarship on European literary production.
Traditionally, criticism has constituted the field as a corpus of national liter-
atures originating from and operating within geographical Europe, singling
out for study those canonical authors and texts disseminated around the
continent via translation. Its typical mode of exegesis, however, has tended
to remain within the national context, underplaying the processes of cross-
border exchange that so often typify intellectual and cultural life. As Pascale
Casanova details, the emergence of national-literary spaces was integral to
continental development from the sixteenth century onwards, when cul-
ture played a vital role in the creation of discrete, autonomous nation-
states. Indeed, so central has literature been to the imagined community,
in Benedict Andersons phrase, that when a national space emerges and
demands the right to political existence and independence, it proclaims
at the same time that it possesses (i.e. nationalizes) a cultural, linguis-
tic, historical and literary heritage.1 The point is as relevant to minority
cultures as it is to dominant cultures. In 1911, writing on the primacy of
German over Czech and Yiddish literatures, Franz Kafka championed the
literatures of small people, aware of the pride which a nation gains from
a literature of its own.2 It may be the case that national literature depart-
ments have started to acknowledge minority cultures, most obviously in
their inclusion on courses of postcolonial writing and theory. As yet, how-
ever, little has been done to advance what Casanova terms denational ways
of analysing European literature or to theorise about what the Europe in
European literature actually means.3 The present volume emerges from
the need for a more comparative approach in research and teaching, one
that draws together cultural heritages without suggesting cultural unanim-
ity and that explores how writers have risen above the national context to
debate the continents divisions, hierarchies, belongings and exclusions.
The failure to denationalise critical practice is linked to a second short-
coming in European literary studies, which is the tendency to privilege
western Europe. As an example from the early twentieth century, Janko
Lavrins Studies in European Literature (1929) focuses mainly on French,
 INTRODUCTION 3

German and Scandinavian literatures, although includes discussion of

a few Russian authors, recognising in Russia one of the literary great
powers.4 This was unusually generous for twentieth-century scholarship.
Publications by Benedetto Croce, E.R. Curtius, Herman J. Weigand,
Nicholas Boyle, Martin Swales, Nicholas Hewitt and Franco Moretti
select from dominant western European traditions, with only occasional
forays into Kafka, Kundera or a Russian author of the Tsarist era.5 On the
cusp of the twenty-first century, Philip Gaskells Landmarks in European
Literature (1999) treads a predictable path through Dante, Petrarch,
Ronsard, Montaigne, Cervantes, Molire, Voltaire, Goethe, Balzac,
Flaubert, Ibsen, Hamsun, Zola, Proust, Mann, Pirandello and Brecht.
Gaskells stated aimto identify [] a canon of European authors
overlooks the fact that this canon was already firmly in place.6 The erasure
of eastern European achievement was partly the result of Cold War poli-
tics. As critics point out, the cultural campaigns of the period insisted that
socialist political commitment [was] inimical to the production of genuine
art and that the socialist realist works of the East were [] such ideologi-
cal tripe that there was no point in reading them.7 Evidence is found in
Horatio Smiths A Dictionary of Modern European Literature (1947) and
Jean-Albert Bd and William Edgertons Columbia Dictionary of Modern
European Literature (1980). Despite being cosmopolitan in scope, the
coverage of the eastern bloc is mostly limited to dissident or experimental
writing that can be linked to western European traditions, with the entire
corpus of socialist realism dismissed as a bureaucratized, dehumanized
official culture based on the threadbare myths of Marxism-Leninism.8
Yet the distortion of the geographical scope of literary Europe is not only
due to East-West division. What writer and historian Fatos Lubonja terms
[t]he reluctance of Europe to accept writers from small countries may be
especially true of his own Albania but has also affected Belgium, Denmark,
Norway, Luxembourg, Switzerland and other western nations.9 Cees
Nooteboom rightly views his native Netherlands as another periphery
in literary Europe, an exotic land fifty minutes by air from Paris but []
with an unknown literature that is only just beginning to be translated.10
Ironically, the literatures which fare most poorly in the European cultural
marketplace are often the best for analysing literary discussions of Europe,
no doubt because their authors have been obliged to think much more
about its entrenched structures of patronage and prejudice.
It is only in recent years that traditional scholarship has been contested
by a more internationalist approach.11 An indication of change came in
4 A. HAMMOND

the work of Martin Travers, who in two studies from 1998 and 2001
defined European literature as a collection of movementsromanticism,
realism, modernism, post-modernism and the literature of political
engagementthat spread across the continent from the late eighteenth
century. While admitting that his research still serves to privilege cer-
tain nations, Travers determines to broaden the national base of these
cultural formations, challenging the literary great powers with work
on Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Romanian and Serbian traditions.12 A
more pronounced challenge came with Ursula Keller and Ilma Rakusas
landmark collection, Writing Europe (2003). Composed of essays by
creative writers themselves, the volume presents literary Europe not as
a circumscribed, divided, tiered terrain, but as a transnational cultural
echo-chamber in which Europes many different voices come together
[] and form a network.13 The contribution by the Serbian author
Dragan Veliki, for example, describes how his textual world is built from
Cervantes humor, Italo Svevos tensions, James Joyces circular routes,
Danilo Ki Pannonian remembrances [and] Hermann Brochs sleepwalk-
ing.14 Similarly, the imagination of Turkish-German author Emine Sevgi
zdamar has been formed from childhood readings of Flaubert, Defoe
and Dostoyevsky, and later, as a student travelling between the Asian
and the European side of Istanbul, from readings of Kafka, Bchner,
Hlderlin, Bll, Joyce, Conrad, and Borchert.15 The volumes notion
of a cultural echo-chamber was reinforced by Theo Dhaen and Iannis
Goerlandts edited Literature for Europe? (2009). The editors intention
is to analyse the relationship between literary studies and the matter of
Europe and to elucidate the ways in which literary texts, genres, and
forms [] shape ongoing processes of European self-understanding.16
While often successful in this aim, the volume also reveals the potential
perils of the approach. As Dhaens introduction details, its underlying
aim is to endorse EU attempts to use cultural production as a spur to
Europeanness (a process discussed below), testing the notion of literature
as a possible policy instrument for Europe.17 The more inclusive account
offered in the present volume has no connection to EU integrationism.
The critical approach being sought is one that does not homogenise, does
not service political or economic goals and does not seek to recreate the
borders, boundaries, hierarchies and exclusions of the imagined commu-
nity on a supranational level.
The achievement of this fuller account, however, requires more than
a repositioning of marginalised eastern and western European literatures.
 INTRODUCTION 5

As a second development in contemporary criticism, there is an increas-

ing awareness of how migrant and diasporic writing is unsettling received
notions of Europe and Europeanness. In the twentieth century, schol-
arship on literary migration tended to focus purely on intra-continental
mobility, a not inconsiderable phenomenon that certainly helped to shift
attention from national to international currents. Reflecting on the sub-
ject, Nooteboom insists on the vital contribution that exiles have made to
discussions of the idea of Europe:

James Joyce in Trieste, Marcel Proust in Venice, Rilke in Muzot, Kundera

in Paris, Couperus in Florence, Orwell in Catalonia, Diderot in Amsterdam,
Seferis in London, Stendhal in Rome, Strindberg in Berlin: our discussion
[] is bound to be derivative, based on thousands of similar discussions of
writers with themselves, writers with others, in the present and the past.18

Although the list seems suitably internationalist, it is limited to solely male

western European authors residing in western European locations. Such
exclusivity tends to emerge in all accounts of how writers have engaged
with Europe, which highlight Jos Ortega y Gasset, Albert Camus,
Hermann Hesse, Hermann Broch, Klaus Mann, Stefan Zweig and Andr
Gide, while ignoring the host of eastern European participants, male and
female, from Tirana to Tashkent, Poznan to Yamsk. Crucially, it has also
excluded writers from the former European colonies, whose work is radi-
cally altering our understanding not only of Europe but also of European
literature, which can no longer be considered autonomous of literatures
elsewhere. Properly expanded, Nootebooms list would mention Ngg wa
Thiongo in Leeds, Tayeb Salih in London, Lela Sebbar in Paris, Sembne
Ousmane in Moscow, Kader Abdolah in Delft and Abdelkader Benali in
Rotterdam, as well as numerous other migrant and diasporic authors,
such as Monica Ali, Dambudzo Marechera, Jamal Mahjoub, Attia Hosain,
Okot pBitek, Sunetra Gupta, Aamer Hussein, Hussain al-Mozany, Sam
Selvon, Susan Akono, Donato Ndongo, Sherko Fatah, Laila Wadia and
Azar Mahloujian.19 Dubravka Ugrei, one of the most dynamic com-
mentators on Europe, eloquently captures the threats that migrant and
diasporic authors pose to the European cultural subconscious.20 If such
authors, she argues, stuck to exotic portraits of their heritage cultures, a
penchant of western publishers and readers, the traditional classification
of discrete national and regional cultures could be maintained. But what
happens when cultural boundaries are broken down?
6 A. HAMMOND

What are the Dutch to do with a Moroccan writer, who, instead of writing
profitable prose about the cultural differences between the Moroccans and
the Dutch, which everyone would understand, has undertaken to recreate
the beauty of Dutch language of the nineteenth century, which present-day
Dutch authors have forgotten. What are the French to do with an Arab who
aspires to be the new Marcel Proust, and what are the Germans to do with
a Turk who aspires to be the new Thomas Mann?21

Although Ugrei uses textual commonalities to question the autonomy

of national literatures, this could as easily be done through biography. It
would seem absurd to squeeze into national categories the Romanian-
born Vintil Horia, who lived in Italy and Argentina before settling in
Spain, the German-Polish Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who grew up in Britain,
lived in India and died in the USA, or the Russian Victor Serge, who
lived in Belgium, Britain, Germany, Austria, Spain, France and Mexico.22
Such instances do not problematise the concept of European literature,
but perfectly express it. The new wave of twenty-first-century criticism on
the topic, led by Sandra Ponzanesi, Gisela Brinker-Gabler, Sidonie Smith
and Ottmar Ette, demonstrates that migrant, diasporic, exophone and
transnational writers are better equipped to evoke a new global poetics
that cuts across literary compartments based on political boundaries and
untenable cultural essentialisms.23
It is from this multiplicity of origins that one begins to discern how
the field may be redefined for the contemporary age. Rather than limit-
ing itself to canonical writers from a few dominant European cultures,
the study of literature about Europe needs to be extended to any text
that speaks about continental realities. This would include work from
all of the 56 recognised or partly recognised nations that currently com-
prise western and eastern Europe, would combine texts written in global
languages with those in regional or local languages and would draw in
literatures both from the former colonies and from those few global ter-
ritories unvanquished by western empires. If the main criterion for study
is a writers success in exploring Europe as a lived experience, then one
would find Ama Ata Aidoo, Etel Adnan, Julio Cortzar and Shusaku Endo
as worthy of study as Tolstoy or Proust.24 Moreover, it is only by accom-
modating literatures from various parts of the world that criticism can
discern how certain ideas of Europe have come to dominate and how
those ideas have been resisted. This internationalist approach to the con-
tinental theme would also help to reduce the Eurocentrism of literary
 INTRODUCTION 7

studies: as the Bosnian novelist Tvrtko Kulenovi writes, in Asia youll

see what you can see on the map, that Paris is not the centre of the world
and that Europe is small.25 Yet if the multiple origins of literature about
Europe are clear, its themes still need to be configured. What are the areas
of debate that can connect such diverse literary traditions? While accept-
ing that other modes of arrangement are possible, the present volume will
focus attention on seven guiding concerns: namely, ideas of Europe, con-
flict, borders, empire, unification, migration and marginalisation. These
overlapping concerns will be explored through an analysis of the locations,
characterisations and narrative forms of selected post-1945 novels, specifi-
cally of those which take a critical line on the continent. One of the con-
tentions of the volume is that this largely unresearched field of literature
is best explored through the body of theory, context and interpretation
being achieved on European issues in the disciplines of Politics, History,
Economics and the Social Sciences, which has yet to be drawn into literary
studies. Before introducing the essays, therefore, it is worth outlining this
body of work in some detail, particularly its discussions of our seven con-
cerns, in order to show its critical relevance to literature on the European
theme.

THE IDEA OFEUROPE THROUGH HISTORY

To begin with the first of the concerns, there has been some dispute about
the object of study itself. Europe is hardly a fixed, autonomous category
with a shared meaning and stable essence, but a region so varied in its politi-
cal, economic, social and cultural attributes that many view it as merely an
idea, une notion pseudogographique, in Manfred Fuhrmanns phrase,
with no stable core, no fixed identity, no final answer.26 Even historians
have doubted that any a priori category exists or that any shared experi-
ence, identity or value system can be found. Arnold Toynbees sense in
1954 that Europe is not an intelligible field of historical study resurfaced
in later historiography: Timothy Garton Ash calls it the most ill-defined
of continents, James Joll is tempted to give up the attempt to define
what we mean by Europe and Eric Hobsbawm insists that [t]here is
no historically homogeneous Europe.27 The problem recurs in the sup-
posedly empirical realm of cartography. Emerging in antiquity as a des-
ignator for the lands north of Greece, Europe slowly became clarified by
the bodies of water to its north, south and west, although lacked any clear
demarcation in the east, where it blurred into a landmass stretching all the
8 A. HAMMOND

way to China. Indeed, it was difficult to avoid the impression that Europe
was merely a peninsula of a larger continent, or what Icelandic novel-
ist Halldr Laxness later termed an unimportant little headland.28 The
impression was heightened by its exposure to Tatar incursions into south-
ern Russia in the thirteenth century and the Ottoman conquest of eastern
Europe from the fourteenth century. The search for the eastern frontier
was an obsession of Renaissance geographers, although little progress was
made. Drawing on such desiderata as soil, climate and vegetation, map-
makers devised a host of competing boundaries: amongst them, the River
Dnieper to Lake Ladoga, the River Don to the White Sea, the River Don
to the River Dvina and the Ural Mountains.29 Such geographical limits
not only divided Russia in two but also conflicted with the opinions of
Russias own cartographers. During the Europeanisation of its aristoc-
racy in the early eighteenth century, Moscovy was shifted as eastward
as possible, as later consolidated by Catherine the Great, who set the
European boundary to the east of the larger part of her lands, thrust-
ing Europe deep into Central Asia. By the late nineteenth century, the
popularity of the neologism Eurasia seemed an acknowledgement that
no distinct Europe existed, a view which largely held during the twenti-
eth century despite many western geographers regarding Soviet Russia
as non-European if not anti-European, as the geographical antithesis
of Europe.30 The absence of an eastern boundary clearly problematises
self-definition and helps to explain why Europe remains such a contested
category. It also explains the bewilderment of many of the continents
most prominent writers. The Danish author Jens Christian Grndahl has
commented that Europe is a thing as strange as literature, while the Irish
author Colm Tobn has refused to comment altogether: I cannot speak
about [] Europe, since I do not know what Europe is.31
The anti-Sovietism of the Cold War reminds us that there are ways
of defining territorial categories other than geographical. Of these, the
political definition of Europe as a continent-wide structure of power,
either real or imagined, has had the longest duration, although is equally
fraught with irregularities, erasures and omissions. There is something
paradoxical, for example, in Europes foundational myth lying in Ancient
Greece, an entity marginal to the geographical continent which defined
itself as much against Scythian hordes to the north as against Persians to
the south. The Roman Empire, again centred on the Mediterranean, gov-
erned a larger portion of Europefrom the south-east to Portugal and
Britainbut again found a source of alterity in native barbarism. After
 INTRODUCTION 9

the sixth century, the Frankish kings spread Catholicism across a similar
expanse, with Charlemagnes Holy Roman Empire controlling much of
central and western Europe, although this soon conflicted with Orthodox
Byzantium and later with Protestantism. A measure of unity was imposed
on Christian Europe by the threat of Islam, manifest not only in the
Ottoman invasions in the east but also in the Moorish invasion of parts of
Spain, Portugal, Italy and France. As Henri Pirenne put it, Charlemagne
without Muhammad would have been inconceivable.32 By this time,
however, a continent grounded in faith (termed Christendom) was giv-
ing way to one grounded in secularism (increasingly termed Europe).
The Enlightenment, driven by expanding imperial and scientific discov-
ery, helped to establish liberty, progress and rationality as the key com-
ponents of Europeaneity, now defined as much against eastern Europe as
the East. By the early nineteenth century, this had crystallised into the
European Concert of Powers, which sought both the continental balance
of power and the location of a European civilisation or spirit. The utopia-
nism came to a head in Victor Hugos calls for a United States of Europe,
by which he urged the nations of the continent, without losing your dis-
tinctive qualities and your glorious individuality, [to] forge yourself into a
close and higher unity.33
Yet even this brief historical sketch of political Europe shows a continent
distinguished by conflict rather than cohesion. If there is any consistency
to be found in the Greater Europe project then it lies in the projects age-
old contradictions: it has always excluded parts of geographical Europe,
always found itself internally divided, always functioned for the service of
autocratic or imperial power and always omitted entities that threatened
that power. At the same time, it has always included elements external to
the continent, most obviously Ancient Greece and Rome, which were as
much northern African and Middle Eastern, but also the Christian tradi-
tion, originating in Judaea, and the imperial project, centred on Africa,
Asia and the Americas. Such inconsistencies continued in the twentieth
century. Despite a renewed wave of idealism in the 1920s and 1930s
(seen in Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi and Aristide Briands movement
for a pan-European union), the internecine conflicts that raged between
1914 and 1989, and the alternative plans for Europe propounded by Nazi
Germany and Soviet Russia, undercut any sense of a unified civilisation,
consciousness or heritage. Indeed, with post-1945 western Europe being
bankrolled by the USA, defended by a US-led NATO and increasingly
influenced by US culture, the continent was still joined to a territory
10 A. HAMMOND

outside its boundaries (known as Oceanic or Atlantic Europe). Again,

the geopolitical anomalies help to explain the scepticism found in literary
circles. It is not uncommon to find characters in modern fiction try[ing]
to remember exactly what Europe was, wondering what Europe was
[and] where it was situated and finding themselves genuinely unaware
that such an entity existed.34 The uncertainty is especially apparent in such
post-Maastricht novels as Etel Adnans Paris, When Its Naked (1993),
Andre Makines Le Testament Franais (1995), Tim Parkss Europa
(1997) and Orhan Pamuks Kar (Snow, 2002). For example, a character
in Parkss Europa, reflecting on this Europe that may or may not exist,
concludes that the only way to unite Europe was to run backwards and
forwards across it with an army.35

INTEGRATION AFTER THECOLD WAR

The longue dure of continental unification has extended to the current
enlargement of the EU, set to be the most successful expression of politi-
cal Europe. Originally termed the European Economic Community, the
EU was founded in 1957 when six nations forged closer political ties in
the face of economic recession and ideological rivalry from the eastern
bloc, establishing supranational institutionsthe European Parliament,
European Court of Justice, European Monetary Systemwhich also
aimed to reduce the risk of conflict amongst themselves. After expansion
in the 1970s and 1980s, a 12-nation EU emerged from the Cold War with
sole mastery over an apparently unbounded continent.36 After the euphoria
of reunification, however, EU elites faced the thorny issue of membership
bids from a bankrupt, and recently communist, eastern Europe. The solu-
tion was twofold. Firstly, there was an absolute insistence on the nature of
Europeannessthe continent was heir to Graeco-Roman, Christian and
Enlightenment values, not to Marxismand secondly an insistence on
the political and economic forms of free-market capitalism. As set out by
the European Council in 1993, admission would be allowed only after
structural reforms of governance, legislature, finance and trade. More spe-
cifically, by the terms of the Single Market Programme and the Stability
and Growth Pact, the enlargements of 2004, 2007 and 2013 were con-
ditional on the privatisation of industry, the removal of trade barriers, the
opening up of economic competition and the reduction of investment in
social services, with punishment set for non-compliance. The terms pro-
duced widespread anger in the affected nations, not least amongst writers.
 INTRODUCTION 11

This was not only a form of shock therapy which further impoverished
the impoverished European fringe (Andrej Nikolaidis) but also an erosion
of national sovereignty, a submergence into a system where the old mem-
bers are in charge (Tnu nnepalu).37 Miroslav Penkov, Robert Perii,
Alexander Garros and Aleksei Evdokimov are equally scathing about the
shift from actually existing socialism to actually existing democracy. As
Penkov has written on Bulgaria:

November 1989. It was a spectacular collapsethe [] people choked

the streets in mass protests and walls crumbled all over Eastern Europe.
Bulgaria held its first democratic elections and since then the governments
have dropped like rotten pears. 1990, 1992, 1994. Hyperinflation, devalu-
ation. My father now makes 15,000 levs a month and a loaf of bread costs
600. And the zeros keep piling up.38

When combined with protectionist measures for western trade (at a time
when the EU had a nominal GNP of $6 trillion), integration could be
considered a reworking of the white mans burden discourse, a civilising
mission aiming to ensure that the East European periphery [is] incor-
porated into the Western sphere of interest.39 Yet the power of the EU
does not stop there. The authority it wields over its 500 million residents
also extends to western non-member states, who are obliged to frame
their economies in relation to it, as well as to non-member countries on
the eastern and southern margins. The European Neighbourhood Policy
obliges the so-called wider Europe (Russia, Ukraine, Moldova, the
Caucasus, the Mahgreb and parts of the Balkans) to observe many of the
terms of the acquis communautaire, particularly on issues of trade and
security, despite EU membership being withheld.40 The extraterritorial-
ity of EU governance even encompasses (post)colonial countries. France,
Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Britain and the Netherlands retain a number
of dependencies, or ultra-peripheral regions, whose inclusion in the EUs
sphere of influence indicates that the organisations outer borders are as
far-flung as the Caribbean and Pacific.41 In short, alongside asymmetry
and inequality are the continuing territorial anomalies of political Europe,
which remains both smaller and larger than geographical Europe.
What the EU failed to foresee is the level of dissent that the discourse
of integrationknown variously as Europeanism or Europismwould
draw from eastern and western populations. Alongside left-wing antipathy
to the brutalising logic of marketisation is a general alarm at the democratic
12 A. HAMMOND

deficit of a remote, unaccountable superstate, a government of bureau-

crats as British author Fay Weldon terms it, that often acts in the interests
of wealthier nations and that, via the European Commission and European
Court of Justice, can dictate to elected national governments the terms of
national life.42 This crisis of legitimacy provoked one of the most remark-
able components of EU policy-making. Throwing greater weight behind
concepts of a European citizenship, Brussels has sought to encourage a
transfer of allegiance from the national to supranational level, hoping that
the psychological attachment to a European polity will build consent for
new forms of governance. Specifically, a European identification is desired
which can more successfully align the properties of individual life (beliefs,
ideals, customs) with those of institutional life. To this end, the European
Parliament has co-opted the traditional emblems of the state, including a
flag, anthem, currency and national day, and has standardised such items
as passport covers, driving licences, product tags and vehicle number
plates. More insidiously, it seeks to build social cohesion and consensus
in the symbolic realm of culture, hoping that its greater emotional appeal
will create a cultural Europe that works to endorse political Europe.43
According to the Maastricht Treaty (1993), the EU is determined to assist
the flowering of the cultures of the Member States, while respecting their
national and regional diversity and at the same time bringing the common
heritage to the fore (with the proviso that this assistance does not affect
trading conditions and competition).44 What this European pan-cultural-
ism means in practice is the insertion of an elusive Euro-content into
citizens lives via cultural heritage programmes, university exchanges and
written, audio and visual materials (including Eurimages, the European
Film Academy Awards, the EU Prize for Literature and transnational
TV channels, which introduce the same cultural icons, advertising slo-
gans [] and pop stars to living rooms both in Europes capitals and its
remotest villages).45 With no shared historiography to dissipate national
histories, the EU has also promoted a sanitised narrative of the European
past (dubbed From Plato to NATO), which it has distributed around
schools in booklet form.46 The aim of what Jonas Frykman calls one of
the most dramatic culture-building processes since the nationalization of
Europes geography is an homogenised collective self, a unity in diver-
sity, as the European Commission calls it, that is not that different to the
multiculturalism by which national-political elites have defined and man-
aged cultural difference for the purposes of assimilation.47 In this sense,
Europism entails not only the essentialist logic of the nation-state adapted
 INTRODUCTION 13

to an entire continent but also a reformulated Europeanisation, amended

from its former usage on colonised populations abroad to the ideological
reeducation of Eurosceptics at home.
One senses that the intensity of Project Europe is driven by the fear
that there is no homogeneous identity, no common heritage, around
which the continent can converge. As Norwegian author Geir Pollen puts
it, Europeanness probably has something in common with the medi-
eval proof of God: only when human beings start doubting the existence of
God does it become absolutely necessary to prove that He does.48 Clearly,
the majority of Europeans have no reason to believe in classical or Judeo-
Christian traditions, nor to feel any connection to the wealth, mobility and
power exhibited by the continents corporate elites. At the same time, the
EU has not only failed to dissolve national loyalties into a single supra-
nationality but also failed to erode the divergent interpretations of the
continent that exist within national traditions. In The Meaning of Europe
(2002), Mikael af Malmborg and Bo Strth argue that nation-building has
always entailed modes of conceptualising Europe that are unique to the
countries concerned. For example, the centrality assumed by republican
France after 1789 differs from Russian ambivalence, crystallised in the
dispute between Westernisers and Slavophiles that has drawn in writ-
ers from Turgenev, Tolstoy and Gogol to Solzhenitsyn and Zinovev.49 As
further examples, French secularism has at times clashed with Austrian,
Swedish and Polish Christianity and social groups in Britain, Sweden and
Norway still view the continent as the other against which the national
self is defined. William Wallaces belief that the Europe you see depends
on where you live is undoubtedly correct.50 This is further complicated
by the macro-regional identities that persist in political and cultural dis-
course. The most obvious of these is the historical breach between north
and south that in literature stretches from Goethe and Madame de Stal to
such modern novels as Thomas Bernhards Extinction (1986) and Carmine
Abates Between Two Seas (2002) and that the Romanian author Mircea
Crtrescu summarised as the great divide [] between the cold, sen-
sible and hardheaded north and the Dionysian South.51 The easing of the
East-West division that predominated during the Cold War only created
a more tortuous dissection of European space, with macro-regionalism
in Scandinavia, Transcarpathia, Transcaucasia, the Mediterranean, the
Atlantic seaboard, the Baltic states, the Black Sea countries, the Visegrd
nations, the Western Balkans and the Celtic fringe problematizing
what Mikhail Gorbachev once called the common European home.52
14 A. HAMMOND

Most contentious is the creation of Central Europe, which had been evolv-
ing from the 1970s in the writings of Danilo Ki, Vclav Havel, Gyrgy
Konrd, Adam Michnik and Milan Kundera. In The Tragedy of Central
Europe (1983), Kundera classifies the region as Czechoslovakia, Hungary
and Poland and considers it a portion of western Europe that is kidnapped,
displaced, and brainwashed by an other civilisation, that of Orthodox/
Soviet Russia.53 The tragedy lies in the fact that this was always a great
cultural centre, perhaps the greatest, an heir to the supreme moral and
political values of Graeco-Roman, Christian and Enlightenment civilisa-
tion, not least of them democracy, rationalism, individualism and human-
ism.54 This ideologically charged construction of geopolitical space sought
to realign the three countries during the late Cold War, but also, when
the queue for EU membership began to form, to privilege them above
Muslim and Orthodox populations to the east. Indeed, Kunderas Central
Europe looks little different to the EUs grand narrative of Europeaneity
which, if one examines the eastern border of the EU drawn up at the
Helsinki Summit (1999), looks itself suspiciously like a Huntingtonian
clash of civilisations.55

EUROPES INTERNAL ANDEXTERNAL CONFLICTS

Although literature is one of the fields of culture that the EU hopes will
assist the Greater Europe project, writers are typically more sceptical
than Kundera about the existence of shared political, religious or social
values. This is particularly true of writers from eastern Europe, where an
older generation, used to the culturalist projects of political elites, have
had a long training in disobedience. Significantly, it is the continents lit-
erary east that describes how Europe just couldnt quite unify (Jchym
Topol), how Europe can only ever be plural (Ilma Rakusa) and how
not for one moment of its history [] did Europe have spatial unity
which would define it as a cultural identity (Devad Karahasan).56 More
widely, both eastern and western writers have pointed out the many con-
ceptual disjunctures in the idea of Europe: between Christianity and secu-
larism, individualism and collectivism, xenophobia and cosmopolitanism,
democracy and autocracy, high cultural achievement and low cultural
populism. Moreover, the typical Europe one meets in modern literary fic-
tion is less a free-market paradise than an uninhabitable dystopia of tyranny,
genocide and war. Michael Wintles point that the Third Reich and the
Holocaust are as essential to European identity as Charlemagne and the
 INTRODUCTION 15

EU is expanded by the Austrian author Robert Schindel, for whom the

Holocaust was the defining feature of mid-twentieth-century Europe.57
Combining the multiple nationalities interned within the camps (the
Italians, the Poles, the Germans, the Greeks, the Czechs, the Slovaks, the
French and the Dutch) with the multiple locations from which they were
drawn, Schindel perceives a sort of alternative European community:

Auschwitz? It was the European answer to the Gulag Archipelago, a finely-

meshed spiders web holding thousands of flies, a city of death serving so
many places: from Natzweiler to Majdanek, from Neuengamme to Saloniki
and back to Stutthof, from Drancy, Strutthof and Westerbork to Jasenovac.
This was the United Europe of the slaves, and the victims and the killed.58

Far from being a deviation from European political norms, the totali-
tarianism of the 1930s and 1940s was repeated in other decades dur-
ing the twentieth century. For example, although Schindel attempts to
exclude Russia from Europe, neither the GULag nor the millions who
died in the camps were external to the continent. When factoring in the
numbers killed in the purges, famines and forced collectivisations of the
Great Terror, the death-toll in Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1953
was around 54 million, a figure that competes with the 6070 million
soldiers and civilians killed during the Second World War. To extend
the point, the actually existing socialism that began with the Bolshevik
Revolution of 1917 spread across east-central and south-eastern nations
after 1945 and, despite the collapse of the eastern bloc, retains traces in
Belarus and Transnistria. At the same time, right-wing authoritarianism
informed European state systems from the 1920s, stretching through
Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia,
Estonia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Albania, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey,
and continuing in Greece, Portugal and Spain into the 1970s. Although
Europes most famous periphery lies in the east, others have existed in the
north, east, south and centre, the products of political oppression and iso-
lationism.59 Of course, there was nothing un-European about all this for
novelists, who regularly speak about the horror-filled history of Europe,
about cold harsh Europe, about that wonderful, murderous continent,
about the Old Continent, saturated with blood and history and about a
Europe poisoned by suspicion, betrayal, and death.60
Such writing mounts a clear challenge to the idealistic, self-congratulatory
notions of Europe current amongst EU elites. An air of triumphalism has
16 A. HAMMOND

informed not only the internal growth of political and economic integra-
tion but also the continents (neo)imperialist advances in other parts of
the world. From the fifteenth century onwards, the empires of Britain,
France, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Belgium, Russia, Italy, Germany and
the Netherlands extended across three quarters of the globe, gaining sway
over most of Africa, Asia, the Americas and the Middle East. The colo-
nies offered an abundant source of the raw materials and markets nec-
essary for industrialisation and an ideal destination for mass emigration,
which helped to ease social tensions. The conquest of other continents
also helped to consolidate the image of a mighty, autonomous, superior
Europe so beloved by Euro-enthusiasts (such as Denis de Rougemont,
whose arrogant claim in the early 1960s that Europe has produced a
civilisation which is being imitated by the whole world, whilst the converse
has never happened, is being echoed by European leaders even today).61
For Hayden White, this Europe exists only in the talk and writing of
visionaries and scoundrels seeking an alibi for a civilisation whose princi-
pal historical attribute has been an impulsion to universal hegemony and
the need to destroy what it cannot dominate, assimilate, or consume.62
In part, the modern awareness of imperial oppression and exploitation
has been spread by literature, originally that emerging from the colo-
nies. The anger of writers such as Tayeb Salih, Ahdaf Soueif, Chinua
Achebe, George Lamming, Nayantara Sahgal and Bahaa Taher, with their
denunciations of the greatest European violence and the disasters the
Europeans have brought, has gradually emerged in metropolitan writing,
as seen in Grndhals comment that the universalism of terror is part of
our European heritage.63 Yet metropolitan attitudes to the imperial past
can still oscillate between nostalgia and denial. Over the last few decades,
postcolonial criticism has done much to expose the residual imperialism
of western European culture, with Edward Said, most famously, analysing
the work of novelists [], travel writers, film-makers, and polemicists
whose speciality is to deliver the non-European world either for analysis
and judgement or for satisfying the exotic tastes of European and North
American audiences.64 Although the following essays focus on literature
during the age of decolonisation, traces of imperial ambition and outlook
were evident both in the counterinsurgencies of the 1950s and 1960s,
illustrating what V.G.Kiernan calls the delirium of dying empires, and in
the economic neoimperialism that developed from the 1960s.65 As the lat-
ter reminds us, another key aim of the EU was to create, through political
union between the western European empires and their colonies, a Cold
 INTRODUCTION 17

War bloc to rival those of the superpowers, making the EU simply the
newest manifestation of European civilizations drive for mastery of the
rest of the world.66
Alongside the presumption of superiority, a second major legacy of
empire is the hostility shown in many European countries towards immi-
grants from formerly colonised regions. As mentioned, migration has
been one of the defining features of a continent that is, after all, named
after a migrant (the Phoenician princess Europa, abducted and brought
to Europe from what is now southern Lebanon). In the centuries that fol-
lowed, successive waves of Huns, Avars, Slavs, Bulgars, Magyars, Mongols,
Tartars and Moors provided plenty of evidence for Adrian Favells point
that Europe historically has been made, unmade, and remade through
the movements of peoples.67 In the twentieth century, migration resulted
from the forced displacements caused by international conflict and from
the importation of labour for western European reconstruction, which
brought workers from as far afield as south-east Asia, Africa, the Indian
sub-continent, the Middle East and the Caribbean. With the end of the
Cold War, movement from the former colonies accelerated to such an
extent that by the turn of the twenty-first century some 20 million immi-
grants were resident in the EU.68 Tragically, one of the consequences
has been a resurrection of the racial definition of Europe that has long
shadowed the geographical, political and cultural definitions. Right-wing
calls for a Europe for Europeans are also informed by culturalist rac-
ism, a sort of racism without race, in Stephen Castless phrase, which
constructs belief, custom and lifestyle as immutable differences that
make co-existences between varying cultural groups in one society impos-
sible.69 Such attitudes have encouraged a raft of prejudicial legislation,
not least an EU security policy that links migration to international crime
and terrorism. The notion of migration as detrimental for Europe is par-
ticularly offensive for asylum seekers fleeing military conflicts which origi-
nate in (neo)imperial practice; as the Somalian-born novelist Nuruddin
Farah lamented, if refugees are the bastards of the idea of empire, then
how can one blame this highly disenfranchised, displaced humanity for
all Europes ills?70 The exclusionary practices have been so wide-ranging
that tienne Balibar speaks of a virtual European apartheid, an institu-
tionalised framework of classification, discrimination and exclusion which
was formulated historically for the colonies but which, in the face of post-
colonial immigration, has now been reintroduced and naturalized in
the metropole.71 Clearly, the framework attempts to deny contemporary
18 A. HAMMOND

Europes most obvious attribute: its nomadic, cosmopolitan demograph-

ics. As Sandra Ponzanesi and Bolette Blaagaard point out, Europe has
been revisioned, resignified and remoulded by its so-called strangers, who
are forging a renewed understanding of political citizenship, cosmopoli-
tanism and human rights [that] challenges ongoing or previous definitions
of Europeanness.72 The fact that Europe once tried to create the world
in its own image and is now being recreated by that world is a vital and
exhilarating theme of modern European literature.
The postcolonialism that has done so much to expose imperial atti-
tudes towards the (former) colonies has been less cognisant of imperialism
within Europe itself. As illustrated by its usage of such terms as Euro-
expansionism, Euroimperialism and Eurocentrism, the theory often
classifies the entire continent by imperial policies, overlooking the fact
that many parts of Europe have been the victim of these policies, not only
of incursions from Asia and Africa but also of the internal manoeuvrings of
Prussia, Austria-Hungary and Tsarist Russia.73 By the nineteenth century,
most of the eastern sections of the continent were either engaged in intra-
European imperialism or subjected to it. The Russian Empire, most obvi-
ously, ranged through Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan,
Turkmenistan, Dagestan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia, Ingushetia,
Ossetia, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and a sec-
tion of Poland. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire held sway over Greece,
Bulgaria, Albania, Macedonia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Serbia, Romania and
parts of Montenegro and the Habsburgs controlled Hungary, the Czech
Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia and parts of Poland and Serbia. In
the twentieth century, the urge to conquer Europe country by coun-
try, in Ivo Andris phrase, resurfaced in Germany, Italy and the Soviet
Union.74 The last of these extended its dominion from Kunderas Central
Europe to the Caucasus and Central Asia, mirroring so closely the politi-
cal, cultural, military, economic and linguistic patterns of colonial rule
that David Chioni Moore expresses astonishment at postcolonialisms ret-
icence on the subject.75 Yet eastern Europe is only one of the continental
peripheries where occupation has occurred. Between the eighteenth and
early twentieth centuries, Gibraltar, Cyprus and Malta in the south fell
under British rule, while in the north Iceland was controlled by Denmark
and Norway, Poland by Prussia, Russia and Habsburg Austria, Finland by
Russia and Sweden and the Baltic States by Russia, Sweden, Poland and
Prussia. In the west, the roots of European imperialism can conceivably
be sourced in the thirteenth-century English conquest of Wales, where
 INTRODUCTION 19

some sections of society are still calling for secession. Indeed, contem-
porary Europe remains entirely encircled by colonised or disputed ter-
ritories, contains separatist movements even towards its geographical core
and includes a number of minority ethnicitiesthe Roma, Smi, Pomaks,
Crimean Tartarswhose experiences have resembled those of colonised
populations elsewhere.76 In this sense, the eastern expansion of the EU
takes its place in a long history of endocolonialism, making Europe as
much a (post)colonial as a (post)imperial space.

THE DISCOURSE ANDPRACTICE OFEXCLUSION

As this history reveals, the idea of Europe is inseparable from the binar-
istic practice of defining the self against the other and the centre against
periphery. In imperialistic cultures, the justification of conquest has been
achieved through the denigration of (formerly) colonised populations,
typically viewing non-Europeans and non-Christians [] in terms of the
ancient Greek distinction between the Greek and the barbarian.77 The
relational identification of western Europe, however, has entailed a much
wider range of internal and external others, as has that of eastern Europe.
These have reflected political anxieties, threats or challenges which, after
1945, included Soviet enslavement, fascist militarism and US hegemony.
Europes imaginative geography has even entailed stereotyping between
dominant nations, emergent during power struggles but residual in the
cultural imaginary. Hans Magnus Enzensberger is scathing about these
completely plagiarized [] platitudes that have figured in European lit-
erature for two hundred years:

Could anything be more barren than [this] moldy garbage heap of stereo-
types, prejudices, and accepted ideas? And yet it is impossible to dislodge
these traditional garden gnomes with their navely painted faces: the taciturn
Scandinavian, blonder than straw; the obstinate German, beer stein in hand;
the red-faced, garrulous Irishman, always smelling of whisky; and, of course,
the Italian with his moustache, forever sensual but regrettably unreliable,
brilliant but lazy, passionate but scheming [].78

Although Enzensberger treats national stereotypes with a measure of

amusement, there is tremendous danger in the current resurgence of ori-
entalist and Africanist discourses, as well as in the ongoing prejudice against
black, Asian, Roma and Jewish populations.79 Contemporary prejudice is
20 A. HAMMOND

most evident in post-9/11 Islamophobia, which focuses hostility both

on Muslim migrants from North Africa and the Middle East and on EU
membership applications from the (partly) Muslim countries of Bosnia,
Albania and Turkey. As Kosovan writer Jeton Neziraj has remarked, [t]he
message is that theyre unwanted in Europe, that theyre the black sheep
of Europe.80 The paradox, of course, is that theres nothing un-European
about Islam, or about any of the worlds religions. Pope John Paul IIIs
notorious call for a rejuvenation of Christian Europe revealed ignorance of
the fact that Middle Eastern philosophies, technologies and commodities
have flowed into the continent from medieval times onwards.81 It should
also be remembered that fundamentalist Islam is only the most recent
source of alterity for contemporary Europe. Before 2001, the Balkans
filled the so-called threat vacuum caused by the loss of the Soviet other,
the peninsula having been constructed in western discourse during the
1990s as an ontological margin of the European imaginary, composed
of barbarous factions and predatory refugees seeking to become competi-
tors for the limited resources of the West.82 In short, beneath the shiny
surfaces of pluralist brand Europe are a mass of nationalist, regionalist,
separatist and racist groups determined to protect a perceived centre from
its imputed margins. In the words of Maltese novelist Oliver Friggieri, for
inclusivity to develop as a continental ideal the European Union itself will
have to be convinced that there is more than one single Europe.83
These conflicts, divisions and hierarchies are nowhere more evident
than in the border regimes which have proliferated across the modern
continent. As detailed in the burgeoning field of Border Studies, these
regimes have developed over the centuries into institutionalised mecha-
nisms of power which define and police the perimeters of nations, regions
and civilisations.84 Although the role of national frontiers has shifted in
recent years from military defence and economic control to the regulation
of population movements, they remain central to identity and cultural
belonging.85 The essence of a border is to separate the self from the
other, David Newman writes, to act as a barrier, protecting the us
insiders from the them outsiders.86 The symbolic function of borders
was evident in the renewed securitisation that greeted the end of the Cold
War, which for 45 years had produced for NATO and the EEC a stable
eastern border and a stable sense of self. Indeed, at the heart of EU activ-
ity since the Maastricht Treaty has been a 20-year rebordering exercise
for Eurasia, a reassertion of the boundaries of the self after the loss of
the Iron Curtain. Just as national frontiers between member states have
 INTRODUCTION 21

been relaxed by the terms of the Schengen Agreement, so frontier controls

have been intensified along the outer edges of accession states to protect
Schengenland from an arc of potential threat curving from Murmansk
to Casablanca.87 Much of the EU funding received by accession states
has been directed towards what the British-Ukrainian novelist Marina
Lewycka termed this new boundary across Europe, paying for the instal-
lation of surveillance technology and military personnel, not to mention
the creation of refugee camps outside EU territory to prevent those flee-
ing poverty and persecution from claiming asylum on the inside.88 In this
way, Fortress Europe has recreated the former Soviet satellites as a ring of
heavily securitised buffer states, or as what Jan Nederveen Pieterse terms
the ramparts of the European world.89 In part, the aim is to reposition
the EU in a global economy, facilitating the greater mobility of goods,
services, capital and people while maintaining strict control of people of
the wrong sort (as determined by race, religion, ethnicity and class). How
do you stay open for business and closed to people? Naomi Klein asks:
Easy. First you expand the perimeter. Then you lock down.90 It is the
existence of this external border, which does so much to define political
Europe, that makes the notion of post-western Europe premature, with
what the Dutch author Dimitri Verhulst calls the Old Continentals still
very much in charge.91
So powerful has the creation of centres and peripheries been that it
continues to inform the work of commentators that one would expect to
know better. Western historians, sociologists and political scientists are still
speaking of the dominant EU states as old Europe, mainstream Europe
or simply Europe, and still referring to the effects of the EUs eastward
expansion as Europeanisation, thereby reactivating old hierarchies, fault
lines and privileges.92 As the Bulgarian novelist Blaga Dimitrova laments,
[t]he Berlin Wall [] is still standing, deaf and monstrous, in our souls, in
our consciousness, and in our subconscious.93 That division is still flour-
ishing in contemporary Europe is evidenced by the continuing support for
Kunderas Central Europe, with its crude mixture of nationalism, xeno-
phobia and economic opportunism. Timothy Garton Ash, a supporter
of the Central Europe thesis, further complicated things in 1997 by
dividing Europe into three: the so-called EU-rope of member states, the
second Europe of candidate countries and the third Europe of countries
(Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Serbia) which are supposedly ambivalent about
their own historical belonging to Europe.94 Ash is unapologetic about
the prejudices which inform his thesis. We know, he asserts, that the
22 A. HAMMOND

following pairings will be difficult to achieve: Balkan tolerance, Ukrainian

prosperity, Russian democracy, Turkish respect for human rights.95 As is
often the case in academic writing, the usage of the pronoun we relegates
an undesirable object in order to empower the addressee, here, presum-
ably, Ashs EU-rope. A similar bias was shown by Jrgen Habermas and
Jacques Derrida in early 2003, shortly before the US-led invasion of Iraq.
Noting the wave of anti-war protests in Britain, Italy, Spain, France and
Germany, the two radical philosophers praised the creation of a public
sphere that was prepared to challenge the hegemonic unilateralism of
the United States; by referring to the five countries as Core Europe,
however, they consigned the larger part of the continent to the non-core
peripheries, thus endorsing hegemony closer to home.96 The Hungarian
novelist Pter Esterhzy was scathing about the bewildering array of iden-
tities projected onto his region after 1989:

Once I was an Eastern European; then I was promoted to the rank of

Central European []. Then a few months ago, I became a New European.
But before I had the chance to get used to this statuseven before I could
have refused itI have now become a non-core European. [] I see no
serious reason for not translating this new division (core/non-core) with the
terms first class and second class [].97

The same complaint could have been made in response to every act of west-
ern decision-making in the region since the eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century Eastern Question. The abiding western European belief that it
has the authority to define, evaluate and decide for its eastern counter-
part is as evident in the realm of culture. As illustrated by the traditional
canon of European literature, the geopolitical marginalisation of eastern
Europe is mirrored by the regions cultural marginalisation, the canon
looking a lot like Europism adapted to literary studies: a territorialisa-
tion of literary-critical entities with critics drafted in to police the border.
Casanova is surely right to suspect that the desired role of scholarship in
EU culture-building exercises is not to draw up a list of the candidates to
be included as legitimate members of Europe but to stigmatize and thus
to designate those to be excluded.98 Perhaps unsurprisingly, the excluded
writers of the former eastern bloc are mounting the strongest challenge
to EU hierarchies. As Andrew Wachtel and Predrag Palavestra detail, their
fiction offers an internationalist treatment of the East-West dialogue
which, drawing on an alternative culture of resistance, is often marked
 INTRODUCTION 23

by non-acceptance of the ruling ideology.99 These literatures of resis-

tance, combined with associated criticism by Marcel Cornis-Pope, John
Neubauer, Kathleen Starck, Nataa Kovaevi, David Williams, Rajendra
A.Chitnis and Elka Agoston Nikolova, form an intellectual project intent
on reconceiving the cultural and mental maps of the continent.

THE CONTRIBUTIONS
It is from this range of discussions that the themes of the volume are
drawn. Taking Europe as the starting point of study, rather than texts or
authors, the volume addresses what I term the guiding features of the
continental literary debateideas of Europe, conflict, borders, empire,
unification, migration and marginalisationeach of which appears as a
specific focus of the contributions and as a motif running throughout the
volume. Despite the multiple disparities that exist in Europe, the seven
features are pertinent to populations across the continent, however widely
perspectives upon them differ, allowing the critic to link multiple literary
traditions for the purposes of comparative study. At the same time, the vol-
ume seeks to show how a subject as vast as Europe may be accommodated
in a single novel. Although this is not a primary object of study, it is worth
outlining the ways in which coverage is achieved before going on to sum-
marise the contributions. Of the four techniques identified, the first is the
exchange of a single national setting for a narrative that ranges through
much of Europe. As a form, the transcontinental narrative developed dur-
ing the tensions of the 1930s and found its most obvious reappearance
after 1945in Holocaust fiction.100 For example, Andr Schwarz-Barts Le
Dernier des justes (The Last of the Just, 1959) evokes a continent united
in suffering through references to York, Cologne, Karlsrhr, Mantua,
Bordeaux, Seville, Moscow, Vilnius, Kiev, Warsaw, Biaystok, Drancy and
Auschwitz. As examples from other types of writing, Jean Genets Journal
du voleur (The Thiefs Journal, 1949) and the linked stories of Danilo
Kis Grobnica za Borisa Davidovia (A Tomb for Boris Davidovich,
1976) mention almost every European nation south of latitude 54, many
of them several times.101 The second technique, and the most common in
the chosen novels, is the use of a particular textual featurea character,
a historical event, a geographical locationas a metonym for the wider
continent. For example, the East German protagonist of Christa Wolfs
Der geteilte Himmel (Divided Heaven, 1963), torn between loyalty to the
GDR and flight to the West, crystallises Europes ideological choices of
24 A. HAMMOND

the early Cold War. In a similar way, treatments of such historical features
as cultural tradition or modernisation concern not only the nation from
which the text emerges but the continent as a whole, as exemplified by
Mukhtar Auezovs Abai Zholy (Abai, 19421956), Chingiz Atmatovs
Jamila (Jamilia, 1958), Idris Bazorkins Iz Tmy Vekov (Dark Ages, 1963),
Fazil Iskanders Sandro iz Chegema (Sandro of Chegem, 1977) and
Hamid Ismailovs Zheleznaya doroga (The Railway, 1997).102 The same
can be said about the usage of specific locations, such as the imagined
city-state of Jan Morriss Last Letters from Hav (1985) or the real Berlin
of Ugreis Muzej bezuvjetne predaje (The Museum of Unconditional
Surrender, 1996), which explore cultural interpenetration in ways that
resonate far beyond the particular settings. The third technique is the
method of exploring Europe through textual reflections on European
literature. For example, Mati Unts Brecht ilmub sel (Brecht at Night,
1997), a postmodernist assault on left-wing writing, ranges through such
authors as George Bernard Shaw, Hella Wuolijoki, Alexander Fadeyev,
Martin Anderson Nex, Henrik Ibsen, Gerhart Hauptmann, Kersti
Bergroth, August Jakobson, Lion Feuchtwanger, Andr Malraux and
John Buchan. A similar web of transcontinental (and often interconti-
nental) relations is achieved via the inclusion of literary events or meta-
fictional stylistic effects: examples are the creative writing congresses,
storytelling festivals, networks of literary influence and overlapping nar-
ratives found in Lasha Bughadzes Literaturuli ekspresi (The Literature
Express, 2009), D.M. Thomass Swallow (1984), Tvrtko Kulenovis
Istorija bolesti (Natural History of a Disease, 1994) and Italo Calvinos
Se una notte dinverno un viaggiatore (If on a Winters Night a Traveller,
1979). The final technique is the use of continental symbols at points in
a narrative which ostensibly focuses on a single nation, thus reposition-
ing it, if only momentarily, in the wider geopolitical context. Examples
include lists of European national anthems, languages, currencies, salaries,
radio stations, television channels and city centres, as well as allusions to
European train and tram networks, weather systems, library collections,
bird migrations and geological formations.103 Perhaps the most effective
symbol is the map of Europe. Depending on the effect desired, this can
be torn up, reduc[ing] Europe to a heap of shredded paper, as one of
Ognjen Spahis characters does, or rearranged to produce unity, as Elias
Canetti recalls doing as a child to a jigsaw depicting a map of the con-
tinent, when he tossed all the pieces into a heap and then put Europe
together again lightening-fast.104
 INTRODUCTION 25

The most common theme to inspire such pan-continental techniques

is military conflict: its political causes, ideological divisions and material
and psychological consequences. The Second World War, for example,
has inspired major novels by Beppe Fenoglio, Stratis Haviaras, Stefan
Chwin, Robert Schofield, Elfriede Jelinek, Gnter Grass, Josef kvoreck,
Ales Adamovich, George Andrzeyevski, Rose Macaulay, Francis Ebejer
and Jean Paul Sartre, as well as by Ngg wa Thiongo, Andrea Levy and
Mouloud Feraoun, who remind readerships that the 19391945 conflict
was not the solely European civil war it is sometimes termed.105 The
pessimism of such writing is captured in Czesaw Mioszs comment that
a European community of nations was hardly likely to emerge from a
period in which Europe [] had slowly brewed the poison that would
kill it.106 Literary reflection on the continent as a whole is especially com-
mon in writings about the Holocaust, which often uses pan-continental
imagery (the night of Europe, the forced labor from all over Europe,
the pestilence which had prostrated Europe) to evoke Schindels notion
of a European community defined by persecution and death.107 In
the opening essay, Theodore Koulouris analyses the treatment of the
Holocaust in W.G. Sebalds Austerlitz (2001). Set in the latter decades
of the twentieth century, this transcontinental novel depicts a Europe that
has not moved on from the Second World War, but remains tormented
by a collective inability to know, express and mourn the periods multiple
atrocities, as well as by a tendency to repeat the offences (prejudice, vio-
lence, exclusion) which caused those atrocities. The notion of trauma as a
continent-wide experience recurred in fiction about the Cold War. Works
by Julia Voznesenskaya, Arthur Koestler, Wu Ming, Izzet Celasin, Sergei
Dovlatov, David Bezmozgis, Friedrich Drrenmatt, Hans Koningsberger
and Bruce Chatwin may focus on a different feature of the Cold War
(nuclearism, propaganda, espionage, containment), but are all unanimous
in condemning the divisiveness of the times, describing the Iron Curtain
as an electrically charged wall of shame (Gerald Szyszkowitz), as a gray
and nonporous entity (Gary Shteyngart) and as the border of borders
that divided the world (Ivan trpka).108 As Metka Zupani discusses in
the next essay, the Cold War gained one of its most harrowing portrayals
in gota Kristfs Le troisime mensonge (The Third Lie, 1991). The tril-
ogy from which this novel is taken finds a metonym for European conflict
in two brothers who, growing up in an unnamed east-central European
country, are torn apart by the upheavals of the Second World War. By the
time of The Third Lie, the brothers reach adulthood separated by national
26 A. HAMMOND

and ideological borders and tormented by the alienation and brutality of

the age, capturing something of the psychic and physical shock of a divided
continent. In their treatments of militarised totalitarianism, Kristf and
Sebald can be linked to the dystopian current in fiction, which commonly
focuses on manifestations of political violence in Europe. Novels such
as Vladimir Nabokovs Bend Sinister (1947), George Orwells Nineteen
Eighty-Four (1949), Lszl Krasznahorkais Stntango (Satantango,
1985), Buket Uzuners Balk zlerinin Sesi (The Sound of Fishsteps,
1993), Jos Saramagos Ensaio sobre a Lucidez (Seeing, 2004), Dmitry
Bykovs ZhD (Living Souls, 2006), Ninni Holmqvists Enhet (The Unit,
2006) and Peter Terrins De Bewaker (The Guard, 2009) evoke regimes
that are as likely to wage war on domestic populations as they are on for-
eign ones.
The Cold War had a profound effect on the process of imagining
Europe and Europeanness, the second theme of the collection. With
the continent split between the western and eastern blocs, the idea of
Europe became a particularly fraught and contested category, riven by
competing myths, ideologies and political agendas. For western Europe,
paradoxically, the attempt to contain the threat of the Warsaw Pact via
integrationism came at a time when it was too weak to resist the influ-
ence of the USA.It was the USA, after all, which pushed for a United
States of Europe after 1945, making economic integration a condition
for Marshall Plan aid and encouraging the creation of the European Coal
and Steel Community, the forerunner of the EEC.The parlous state of
western Europe is examined in Christoph Parrys contribution on Hilde
Spiels The Darkened Room (1961). Set in NewYork during the early Cold
War, the novel focuses on a group of European exiles who, by collec-
tively reconstructing their continent in conversation, illustrate the pro-
cess of imagining a transnational community, but prove unable to agree
on a single feature, thereby demonstrating both the futility of Project
Europe and the scale of European enervation. Spiels novel typifies one
of the constituent genres of Cold War fiction, the transatlantic narrative,
a fictional treatment of US-European relations that was utilised by Einar
Krason, Ludmila Ulitskaya, Ian McEwan, Vladimir Nabokov, Elaine
Dundy, Richard Stern, Frederick Busch and Hans Koning.109 While out-
lining the power struggles that existed within the western bloc, the genre
also dwells on the idealised Europe, the European life of the spirit, which
often informed US images of the old continent.110 This notion of an
idealised (western) Europe also appeared in such eastern European texts
 INTRODUCTION 27

as Ismail Kadares Dosja H (The File on H, 1981), the subject of the next
essay. As Peter Morgan details, Albanias long history of foreign occupa-
tion and domestic tyranny led many nationalist intellectuals to seek an
affirmative, sustaining vision of national identity, one that Kadare tests by
imagining the preservation in Albania of the supposed Homeric-Illyrian
roots of European culture. While this may express the authors own desire
for an alternative to what he considered eastern communism, as well as a
unifying basis for continental identity, the novel cannot sustain the ideal-
ism, finally viewing the foundational myth as illusionary and divisive. This
loss of faith in an ideal (western) Europe is experienced by many eastern
European characters (who admit that the West got inside my brain, that
I carried in my blood the rabies of the West or that [I was] in love with
the West) and equally by postcolonial characters, such as the Egyptian
narrator of Waguih Ghalis Beer in the Snooker Club (1964), who is sure
that Life was in Europe (that is, in western Europe).111 Typically for
such characters, disillusionment is swift: Ghalis narrator, for example,
soon realises that his yearning [f]or dreamed-of Europe, for civiliza-
tion, for freedom of speech, for culture, for life is misguided,
that this was always an imaginary world.112
As Ghali illustrates, reflection on the faiths and practices of imperial
Europe, the third theme of the collection, has been a particularly powerful
current in postcolonial writing. Novels such as Joseph Zobels La rue cases-
ngres (Black Shack Alley, 1950), Albert Memmis Agar (Strangers, 1955),
Vincent Eris The Crocodile (1970), Isabel Allendes La casa de los espri-
tus (The House of the Spirits, 1982), Ahlam Mosteghanemis Dhakirat
al-jasad (Memory in the Flesh, 1985) and Robert Sols Le Tarbouche
(Birds of Passage, 1992) offer insight into the devastation that western
Europe has caused through its multiple conquests, coups and counter-
insurgencies around the world. In the next contribution, Peter Beardsell
explores the postcolonial response in a study of Nstor Taboada Terns
Angelina Yupanki (Angelina Yupanqui, 1992). Set during the sixteenth-
century Spanish conquest of Peru, the novel not only charts some of the
most atrocious acts of early imperial violence but also suggests the psy-
chological consequences of foreign rule for the indigenous population,
which as Beardsell details are still impacting on Latin American identity,
culture and political debate today. Alongside the postcolonial portrait of
physical destruction has been a common antipathy towards the cultural
suprematism of western European empires. While the presumption of cul-
tural authority continued during the Cold War (Kundera was not alone in
28 A. HAMMOND

believing that the European novel [] has no equal in any other civili-
sation), the increasing prestige of postcolonial writing has marked what
Nayantara Sahgal terms a wind of change, an indication that [t]he day
of pure literatures, like pure or ruling races, is over.113 This simultane-
ous challenge to political and cultural privilege is the subject of Esther
Pujolrs-Noguers essay on Ama Ata Aidoos Our Sister Killjoy (1977).
Describing the journeys of a young Ghanaian woman to Germany and
Britain, the novel is an indictment of the cultural effects of neoimperialism,
not least in the way that the protagonists account of her time in the dark
heart of western European rewrites Homers Odyssey (c. 800 BC), the cor-
nerstone of imperial literary culture (as Christa Wolf once wrote, Western
literature begins with the glorification of a war of piracy).114 Revulsion
at western empire, however, is not just a property of postcolonial litera-
ture. Although mainstream fiction still shows traces of imperial nostalgia,
a critique of imperial history from slavery to humanitarian intervention-
ism has long informed the work of European elites, as seen in novels by
Marguerite Duras, Jean Rhys, Hella Haasse, Didier Daeninckx, Jakob
Ejersbo, Bernardo Atxaga, Antnio Lobo Antunes, Lennart Hagerfors,
Arthur Japin, Mia Couto, Sarah May and Lukas Brfuss, as well as in
the work of eastern European writers such as Gabriela Babnik and Iliya
Troyanov.115 At the same time, fiction has shown an increasing concern
with the iniquities of the Ottoman, Habsburg, Russian and Soviet empires.
When placed alongside the corpus of anti-imperial writing from other con-
tinents, novels such as Nikos Kazantzakiss Kapetan Mihalis (Freedom
and Death, 1953), Anton Donchevs Vreme razdelno (Time of Parting,
1964), Mea Selimovis Dervi i smrt (Death and the Dervish, 1966),
Jaan Krosss Keisri Hull (The Czars Madman, 1978) and Aki Ollikainens
Nlkvuosi (White Hunger, 2012) indicate that transnational power is one
of the richest themes in post-1945 literature.
The theme has also appeared in literature that reflects on European
borders. Although relatively new to literary studies, the critical field of
Border Poetics has produced a growing awareness of the intellectual
and aesthetic responses in European and global literatures to territorial
demarcation.116 A common focus is on the personal encounter with either
national frontiers or ideological boundaries. In terms of the latter, the bar-
riers of Fortress Europe are shown to be as insurmountable as those of the
Iron Curtain, with both postcolonial and postcommunist writing charting
the tortuous journeys to what Ukrainian novelist Oksana Zabuzhko calls
the real, Schengen-visa regime Europe.117 At the same time, modern
 INTRODUCTION 29

border fiction has addressed the issues of containment, ideological conflict

and the oppressiveness of bounded states, as found in Graham Greenes
The Third Man (1950), Peter Schneiders Der Mauerspinger (The Wall
Jumper, 1982), Giuliana Morandinis Caff Specchi (The Caf of Mirrors,
1983), Vladimir Lorchenkovs Vse tam budem (The Good Life Elsewhere,
2008) and Aleksandar Hemons The Lazarus Project (2008). There is also
an emphasis on what Balibar has termed the subjective interiorization of
constructed boundaries: that is, the way individuals represent their place
in the world [] by tracing in their imaginations impenetrable borders
between groups to which they belong or by subjectively appropriating
borders assigned to them from on high.118 A number of these themes are
explored in Marcel Cornis-Pope and Andrew Hammonds contribution
on Herta Mllers Herztier (The Land of Green Plums, 1994). The novel
returns to late Cold War Romania to examine the effects of hard borders
on the material and psychological well-being of the population, for whom
the desire to flee the frontiers of the state is matched in intensity only by the
fear of certain death. As pessimistic as the novel is, Mller also hints at the
disruptive potential of border zones, which are as much spaces of exchange
as they are lines of division. As Liam ODowd and Thomas M. Wilson
comment on this apparent contradiction, [o]n the one hand, borders may
be seen as ends or barriers, on the other as passages, filters or gateways
between systems contiguous to each other.119 Mihaela Moscaliucs essay
on Colum McCanns Zoli (2006) shows how the outer edges of national
states produce communication as much as conflict, even for the Roma,
one of the continents most persecuted minority groups. The protagonist,
a fictionalised portrayal of the Polish-Roma singer Papusza, is consecu-
tively a survivor of the Porrajmos, a victim of communist oppression in her
native Slovakia and latterly a target of the EUs hard border policy. Yet
alongside their propensity for institutional oppression, the frontiers that
Zoli crosses (Slovakian, Hungarian, Austrian, Italian, French) allow her to
evade national and continental proscriptions for identity and belonging,
mapping new connections between demographic binaries and exposing
the provisionality of European cartography.
McCanns transcontinental narrative, which traces the continuity of
East-West division from the Cold War to the EU, is also a critical study
of integrationism, the next theme of the collection. As mentioned,
political projects for European unity had been a feature of continental
arrangements from the days of Ancient Greece, but found their most pow-
erful expression in Project Europe. In western European literature, this
30 A. HAMMOND

has produced anxieties not only about the consequences of erased borders
but also about the lack of alternatives to the hyper-capitalism of a global
age, features seen in Malcolm Bradburys Dr Criminale (1992), Fabrice
Humberts La Fortune de Sila (Silas Fortune, 2010) and Davide Longos
LUomo Verticale (The Last Man Standing, 2010). More dramatically,
eastern European fiction addressing the post-1989 changesthe so-called
Wenderomanhas charted the collapse of an entire way of life, reveal-
ing how the imagined Europe of wealth, progress and democracy quickly
became an actually existing Europe of boredom, poverty and power-
lessness.120 Novels by Imre Kertsz, Ivan Klma, Peter Pitanek, Victor
Pelevin, Roman Senchin, Andrzej Stasiuk, Ingo Schulze and Jchym
Topol depict not the democratic idyll trumpeted by EU jargon (Citizens
Europe, Peoples Europe), but what David Williams calls the division of
Europe into victors and vanquished, the replacement of the Iron Curtain
with one sewn at Schengen.121 Gordana Crnkovis essay explores this
drift to disillusionment via a study of Tnu nnepalus Piiririik (Border
State, 1993). The novel follows the fortunes of a young gay Estonian
who, during a study year in Paris, experiences both the superficiality of
western consumerism and the audacity of western power, with his treat-
ment at the hands of his lover, a German-French academic, starting to
resemble the EUs high-handed behaviour towards the former eastern
bloc. As scathing as such fiction has been, its disaffection with Euroland
rarely derives from nostalgia for communism. Indeed, to the Cold War
canon of anti-communist writing (by Miha Mazzini, Theodore Odrach,
Vladimir Voinovich, Norman Manea, Brian Moore, Riardas Gavelis) has
been added such widely translated novels as Viivi Luiks Ajaloo ilu (The
Beauty of History, 1991), Fatos Kongolis I Humburi (The Loser, 1992),
Luan Starovas Koha e dhive (The Time of the Goats, 1993), Thomas
Brussigs Helden wie wir (Heroes Like Us, 1995), Rustam Ibragimbekovs
Solnechnoe spletenie (Solar Plexus, 1996) and Daniela Kapitovs Samko
Tle: Kniha o cintorne (Samko Tles Cemetery Book, 2000), all of
which suggest that the western market for anti-communist literature
has not collapsed with the Iron Curtain.122 Nevertheless, another strain
of post-1989 fiction expresses concern about what the end of the Cold
War means for socialism. Per Pettersons Jeg forbanner tidens elv (I Curse
the River of Time, 2008), Wolfgang Hilbigs Das Provisorium (The
Temporary Solution, 2000) and John Bergers trilogy Into Their Labours
(19791990) lament the decline in left-wing sentiment, struggling against
what seems to be the end of hope, [] the final denouement of all grand
 INTRODUCTION 31

universal narratives.123 Andrew Hammonds essay on Elizabeth Wilsons

The Lost Time Caf (1993) examines the search for a more socialist basis
for European integration. A dystopian novel set in Britain, The Lost Time
Caf follows the fortunes of a young lapsed communist who, in the face of
the EUs intensifying neoliberalism, returns to the belief that continental
justice is dependent on a continuation of the post-1945 labour move-
ment. Wilsons deviation from mainstream literary discourse on European
politics indicates that socialist literature did not end in 1989, but remained
a vital component of intellectual debate.
The critique of neoliberalism is connected to the next theme of the
volume, that of centres and peripheries. Despite its much touted policy
of unity in diversity, Brussels persists in arrogating power to the core
EU nations and in assigning particular regions, religions, races, classes
and ethnicities to the continental margins, processes discussed by a num-
ber of European writers. Amongst many other examples, Igor Klekhs
Khutor vo vselennoi (A Tiny Farmstead in the Universe, 1993), Alan
Cherchesovs Rekviem po zhivushchemu (Requiem for the Living, 1994),
Bogdan Suceavs Miruna (2007), Dmetri Kakmis Mother Land (2008),
Dmitry Vachedins Snezhnye nemtsy (Snow Germans, 2010) and Arslan
Khasavovs Smysl (Sense, 2010) all turn to what novelists have called those
astronomically remote province[s] of Europe which are so far from the
centre of the world [] one couldnt even imagine going there.124 Anne
Heith picks up the theme in her essay on Mikael Niemis Populrmusik
frn Vittula (Popular Music, 2000). Addressing the Tornedalian minority
in northern Sweden, Niemi raises concerns more commonly associated
with postcolonial literature, lamenting the Tornedalian experience of pov-
erty, alienation, assimilation and the internalisation of majority discourse.
The resemblance to postcolonial writing back recurs in literary produc-
tion from many parts of eastern Europe.125 The EUs disinterest in the
region was evident during the war in Bosnia, where some 100,000 people
were killed and over 20,000 Muslim and Croatian women were raped
as a result of Bosnian Serb aggression. In literature, Nenad Velikovis
Konaari (Lodgers, 1995), Juan Goytisolos El sitio de los sitios (State of
Siege, 1995), Slavenka Drakulis Kao da me nema (As If I Am Not There,
1999) and Selvedin Avdis Sedam strahova (Seven Terrors, 2012) refer
to the EUs failure to stop the genocide, raising serious questions about
the state of European civilisation at the millenniums end.126 Guido Snel
explores the issue in the context of Semezdin Mehmedinovis Autoportret
s Torbom (Self-Portrait with a Satchel, 2012). With central Bosnia having
32 A. HAMMOND

been an enduring target for western media stereotypes, this autoethno-

graphic novel seeks ways of writing back to the western gaze and securing
an entrance into European public debate, thereby regaining some mea-
sure of self-determination. Many of the same themes recur in literature
from the Caucasus. Further peripheralised in the east, Georgia, Armenia
and Azerbaijan remain subject to the legacy of imperial conquest and to
the diktats of the wider Europe project. Focusing on Otar Chiladzes
Avelumi (Avelum, 1995), Donald Rayfields essay analyses Georgias
relationship to EU-rope during the civil war of the 1990s. The novel
not only questions the wave of western cultural imports then sweeping
the country but also expresses anger at the Wests refusal to take a stand
against Russian hegemony, which a decade later led to an annexation of a
large swathe of the country. As Chiladze shows, the theme of war and its
psychological and emotional aftershocks remained a staple of European
fiction. Novels by Carola Hansson, David Albahari, Dragan Todorovi,
Anna Kim, German Sadulaev, Andrei Volos, Christy Lefteri, Eve Makis,
Chris Bohjalian, Javier Cercas and John McGahern address not only post-
1945 conflicts (in Hungary, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Tajikistan
and Cyprus) but also the lasting trauma of the Armenian genocide, the
Spanish Civil War and the Irish War of Independence.127 Indeed, a signifi-
cant current in twenty-first-century fiction focuses on the continuum of
conflict in modern Europe, evoking war as an almost permanent state of
being.128
The deconstruction of centres and peripheries recurs in fiction deal-
ing with migrant culture and experience, the final theme of the collec-
tion. The importance of what Ottmar Ette terms literature with no fixed
abode is evidenced by the fact that most of the writers covered in the
following essays have crossed national, ideological and civilisational
borders.129 Once silenced by the European canon, their work is having
an increasing influence on the narrative forms, genres and approaches of
European literature, mixing multiple histories, locations, languages and
identities to produce what John McLeod terms a transformative transcul-
tural consciousness, one addressing themes which have a pan-continental,
even global, reach.130 While the fiction often deals with loss, trauma and
estrangement, it also celebrates the new forms of belonging, identity and
insight consequent on transcultural encounters in modern Europe. The
wealth of migrant and diasporic literatures from former colonies, as one
example in kind, is illustrated by writing in France. Lela Sebbars Shrazade
(Sherazade, 1982), Mehdi Charefs Le th au harem dArchi Ahmed
 INTRODUCTION 33

(Tea in the Harem, 1983), Mahi Binebines Cannibales (Welcome to

Paradise, 1999), Faza Gunes Du rve pour les oufs (Dreams from the
Endz, 2006) and Marie NDiayes Trois femmes puissantes (Three Strong
Women, 2009) explore characters who are caught between two cultures,
two histories, two languages and who are familiar with the tearing up of
old roots and putting down of new ones in new earth, with its new colours,
smells and structures.131 Shifting attention to Belgium, Sarah de Muls
analysis of Chika Unigwes On Black Sisters Street (2009) examines the mul-
tiple intersections of ethnicity, nationality, gender and class which comprise
modern European identity. Unigwes portrait of African women trafficked
into Belgium to service the European sex trade emphasises the resilience
of female migrants but also details their vulnerability to (post)imperial
discourses and practices.132 The focus on female experience continues in
intra-European migrant literature by Julia Kristeva, Aglaja Veteranyi, Julya
Rabinowich, Barbara Honigmann, Grayna Plebanek and Sofi Oksanen.133
A particularly fertile strand of the genre has emerged from Turkey, a coun-
try situated within geographical Europe but denied membership of the
European Union for being [t]oo large, too poor, and too Muslim.134 The
issue is discussed in Gizem Arslans study of Emine Sevgi zdamars Die
Brke vom Goldenen Horn (The Bridge of the Golden Horn, 1998). Here,
the narrator is a young Turkish woman who, moving to West Berlin in the
late 1960s as a gastarbeiter, starts to develop the cosmopolitanism of the
author herself (which included periods of residence in Berlin, Munich,
Paris, Vienna, Barcelona, Madrid, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Florence,
Venice, and Athens).135 Refusing to accept peripheralisation, zdamars
novel challenges the legitimacy of East-West binaries by positioning the
narrator within transitional, transcultural and translingual currents and
spaces of residence and employment, which are viewed not as marginal or
external to European identity but as core properties of Europeanness.
The importance of Turkey in debates about Europe and Europeanness
has become even more evident after 9/11, when Brussels and Washington
have sought closer ties to Ankara. In part, the increased interest has
stemmed from Turkeys combination of a large Muslim population and a
political commitment to secular democracy: as Fuat Keyman points out,
drawing Turkey closer to the EU may help to bring about the possibility
of co-existence, tolerance and unity in diversity, which is needed in the
post-September/11 world to resist [] the essentialist discourse of the
clash of civilizations.136 As worthy as this is, the war on terror aggra-
vated one of the worst instances of chauvinism towards migrant, diasporic
34 A. HAMMOND

and minority populations in contemporary Europe. Reminding us of the

Cold War roots of modern Islamophobia, the kind of prejudices found in
Michel Houellebecqs infamous Plateforme (Platform, 2001) stretch back
to work by Gyrgy Dalos, Friedrich Drrenmatt and Anthony Burgess
in the twentieth century.137 Yet a more complex and insightful engage-
ment with Islam has also emerged. Amongst other examples are Tariq
Alis Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (1991), Orhan Pamuks Kar (Snow,
2002), Florian Zellers La Fascination du pire (The Fascination of Evil,
2004), Giancarlo De Cataldos Il padre e lo straniero (The Father and
the Foreigner, 2004) and Lela Marouanes La vie sexuelle dun islamiste
Paris (The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris, 2007). In the final con-
tribution to the volume, Daniele Comberiati examines the discursive and
material effects of the war on terror through a study of Amara Lakhouss
Divorzio allislamica a viale Marconi (Divorce Islamic Style, 2010). Set in
a multicultural district of Rome, the novel problematises the stereotypes
projected onto European Muslim communities in its complex portrayal of
the two protagonists: an Egyptian Muslim who displays a tolerance and
compassion lacking within the majority population and an Italian under-
cover agent whose role in the war on terror encourages him investigate
his family connections to northern Africa. To borrow a phrase from Gerard
Delanty, the novel not only understands Islam as fundamental to Europe
but also understands Europe as a civilizational constellation rather than as
a single civilizational model.138 As with other contributions, Comberiatis
essay advocates a cultural pluralism that contests the grand narrative of
Europeaneity, dismantling hegemonic notions of national and continental
identity and exploring the multiple ways of being European.139
There are doubtless alternative methods of organising a collection of
essays on post-1945 literature and Europe.140 The choice of the seven
themes is a preliminary attempt to connect critical approaches to European
literary production with the burgeoning work on Europe, European iden-
tity and the European Union taking place in Politics, History, Economics
and the Social Sciences. The 16 novels under study also represent a pre-
liminary attempt to find what Dhaen calls an open canon of European
literature, one defined here as the most useful texts for exploring the
European theme and for shifting European literary studies away from
solely western national traditions.141 As inclusive as the volume attempts
to be, however, there are inevitable limitations. Alongside the constraints
of space are the difficulties of access imposed by the translation indus-
try (those working in the English language, for example, still appear to
 INTRODUCTION 35

lack translated fiction from Andorra, Armenia, Lichtenstein, Monaco and

San Marino). As importantly, much more work needs to be done on the
intercontinental aspect of the European imaginary, especially on fiction
emerging from imperial, anti-imperial and postcolonial literary currents.142
Indeed, just as the guiding motifs of Europismmodernity, democracy,
civilisationcan hardly be considered European preserves, so the con-
cerns explored here in specifically European social and political contexts
are trans-global in their origins, advances and practices. Nevertheless, the
volume at least indicates the wealth of literary engagement with Europe.
Alongside the chosen novelists are a multitude of other authors who have
turned their attention to micro-regional or pan-continental concerns
and, in doing so, have produced an invaluable space for thinking across
Europe, in Lars Jensens phrase.143 Out of this internationalist debate may
come all manner of insight into how the exclusivity of EU discourse can be
challenged and how the lived experience of Europe, in all its variety, can
be more fully understood.

NOTES
1. Casanova, European Literature: Simply a Higher Degree of Universality?,
in Theo Dhaen and Iannis Goerlandt, eds, Literature for Europe?
(Amsterdam and NewYork: Rodopi, 2009), p.15. For Andersons discus-
sion of the imagined community, see Anderson, Imagined Communities:
Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, new edn (1983;
London and NewYork: Verso, 2006), pp.57.
2. Quoted in Elaine Rusinko, Straddling Borders: Literature and Identity in
Subcarpathian Rus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), p.131.
3. Casanova, European Literature, p.20. Literary studies [] still have not
come up with a true theory of European literature, Ottmar Ette writes: in
fact, they havent even noticed that such a theory is currently missing
(Ette, European Literature(s) in the Global Context: Literatures for
Europe, in Dhaen and Goerlandt, eds, Literature for Europe?, p.155).
4. Lavrin, Studies in European Literature (London: Constable and Co.,
1929), p.58.
5. See Croces European Literature in the Nineteenth Century (1924),
Curtiuss Essays on European Literature (1950), Weigands Critical
Probings: Essays in European Literature (1982), Boyle and Swaless edited
Realism in European Literature (1986), Hewitts edited The Culture of
Reconstruction (1989) and Morettis Atlas of the European Novel (1997).
Similar shortcomings are found in Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Herbert
Lindenberger and Egon Schwarzs edited Essays on European Literature
36 A. HAMMOND

(1972), Edward Timms and David Kelleys edited Unreal City: Urban
Experience in Modern European Literature and Art (1985), Douwe
Fokkema and Elrud Ibschs Modernist Conjectures: A Mainstream in
European Literature (1987), Peter Collier and Judy Daviess edited
Modernism and the European Unconscious (1990) and David Jasper and
Colin Crowders European Literature and Theology in the Twentieth
Century (1990).
6. Gaskell, Landmarks in European Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1999), p.1.
7. Dubravka Juraga and M. Keith Booker, Introduction to Juraga and
Booker, eds, Socialist Cultures East and West: A Post-Cold War Reassessment
(Westport and London: Praeger, 2002), p.5.
8. William Edgerton, Russian Literature, in Bd and Edgerton, eds,
Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature, new edn (1947;
NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1980), p.702.
9. Lubonja, Between the Local and the Universal, in Ursula Keller and Ilma
Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe: What is European about the Literature of
Europe?, new edn (2003; Budapest and New York: Central European
University Press, 2004), p.201.
10. Nooteboom, My Ten Most European Experiences, in Christopher Joyce,
ed., Questions of Identity: A Selection from the Pages of New European
(London and NewYork: I.B.Tauris, 2002), p.134.
11. This is not to say that the more exclusivist approach is not continuing.
Pericles Lewiss edited The Cambridge Companion to European Modernism
(2011) offers only a chapter on the literatures of eastern Europe, while
Michael Bells edited The Cambridge Companion to European Novelists
(2012) and Alexis Grohmann and Caragh Wellss edited Digressions in
European Literature (2011) make barely any reference to them.
12. Travers, An Introduction to Modern European Literature: From Romanticism
to Postmodernism (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1998), p. ix;
Travers, Preface to Travers, ed., European Literature from Romanticism to
Postmodernism: A Reader in Aesthetic Practice (London and New York:
Continuum, 2001), p. xiii.
13. Keller, Writing Europe, in Keller and Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe, p.8.
It matters little whether they are reading in the east or in the west or how
they feel about Europe, Keller continues: as European authors they are
embedded in a cultural context that shapes and contributes to their texts
and that they, as writers, continue to mould through their texts (ibid.,
p.9).
14. Veliki, B-Europe, in Keller and Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe, p.342.
15. zdamar, Guest Faces, in Keller and Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe, p.229.
 INTRODUCTION 37

16. Dhaen, Introduction to Dhaen and Goerlandt, eds, Literature for

Europe?, p.5.
17. Ibid., p.7. Dubravka Ugrei had already derided such aims, commenting
scathingly on notions of European literature moulded by EU politicians
as much as by old-fashioned university departments (Ugrei, European
Literature as a Eurovision Song Contest, in Keller and Rakusa, eds,
Writing Europe, p.327).
18. Nooteboom, Ten Most European Experiences, p.129.
19. For an excellent survey of migrant and diasporic writers in Europe, see
Daniela Merolla and Sandra Ponzanesi, Introduction to Ponzanesi and
Merolla, eds, Migrant Cartographies: New Cultural and Literary Spaces in
Post-Colonial Europe (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005), pp.2034.
20. Ugrei, European Literature, p.332.
21. Ibid., p.333.
22. As critics have argued, diasporic or transcultural processes which have con-
ditioned the lives of millions of people in Europe have made it almost
impossible to connect their identity to a specific and unitary location. In
this context, the question who am I? needs to be asked not only in con-
nection to ones roots which are often found in different continents, but
also in relation to ones routes (Lourdes Lpez Ropero and Alejandra
Moreno lvarez, Multiculturalism in a Selection of English and Spanish
Fiction and Artworks, in Sandra Ponzanesi and Bolette B.Blaagaard, eds,
Deconstructing Europe: Postcolonial Perspectives (London and New York:
Routledge, 2012), p.93).
23. Merolla and Ponzanesi, Introduction, p.4. It should be said that even the
best criticism on the European theme suffers from a lack of inclusivity,
either overlooking post-colonial writing from other continents or margin-
alising eastern European writing.
24. See Aidoos Our Sister Killjoy (1977), Adnans Paris, When Its Naked
(1993), Cortzars Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1963) and Endos Ryugaku
(Foreign Studies, 1965).
25. Kulenovi, Natural History of a Disease, trans. by Amila Karahasanovi
(1994; Sarajevo: Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina,
2012), p.75.
26. Quoted in Michael Wintle, Europes Image: Visual Representations of
Europe from the Earliest Times to the Twentieth Century, in Wintle, ed.,
Culture and Identity in Europe: Perceptions of Divergence and Unity in Past
and Present Times (Aldershot and Brookfield: Avebury, 1996), p.52; Kevin
Wilson, Introduction to Book 1, in Wilson and Jan van der Dussen, The
History of the Idea of Europe, new edn (1993; Milton Keynes: The Open
University; London and NewYork: Routledge, 1995), p.11.
38 A. HAMMOND

27. Quoted in Timothy Garton Ash, Catching the Wrong Bus?, in Peter
Gowan and Perry Anderson, eds, The Question of Europe (London and
NewYork: Verso, 1997), p.119; Ash, Catching the Wrong Bus?, p.120;
Joll, Europe: A Historians View (Leeds: Leeds University Press, 1969),
p. 5; Hobsbawm, The Curious History of Europe, in Hobsbawm, On
History, new edn (1997; London: Abacus, 1998), p229. As further exam-
ples, Hugh Seton-Watson argues that [t]here have been and are many
different Europes, while Norman Davies illustrates his belief that the
parameters of Europe have always remained open to debate with a literary
reference: In 1794, when William Blake published one of his most unin-
telligible poems entitled Europe: A Prophecy, he illustrated it with a
picture of the Almighty leaning out of the heavens holding a pair of com-
passes (quoted in Kevin Wilson, General Preface to What is Europe, in
Wilson and van der Dussen, eds, History, p.8; Davies, Europe: A History,
new edn (1996; London: Pimlico, 1997), p.8).
28. Laxness, The Fish Can Sing, trans. by Magnus Magnusson (1957; London:
The Harvill Press, 2001), p.169.
29. See W.H.Parker, Europe: How Far?, The Geographical Journal, Vol. 126,
No. 3 (1960), pp.2814.
30. Oscar Halecki and Gonzague de Reynold quoted in ibid., p.289. Feeling
that Eurasia privileges the smaller portion of the landmass, Joseph
Brodsky suggests that the term Asiopa is more representative of the true
ratio of Asia and Europe (Brodsky, Democracy, Granta, Vol. 30 (1990),
p.200).
31. Grndahl, Notes of an Escapist, in Keller and Rakusa, eds, Writing
Europe, p.127; Tobn, The Future of Europe, in Keller and Rakusa, eds,
Writing Europe, p.311.
32. Quoted in Norman Davies, Europe East and West, new edn (2006; London:
Pimlico, 2007), p.10.
33. Quoted in Wintle, Europes Image, p.55.
34. Tommy Wieringa, Caesarion, trans. by Sam Garrett (2007; London:
Portobello Books, 2012), p. 41; Marie NDiaye, Three Strong Women,
trans. by John Fletcher (2009; London: MacLehose Press, 2012), p.253;
Tim Parks, Europa, new edn (1997; London: Vintage, 1998), p.5.
35. Parks, Europa, pp.26, 100.
36. The six original members were Belgium, France, Germany, Italy,
Luxembourg and the Netherlands. These were joined by Britain, Denmark
and Ireland in 1973, by Greece in 1981, by Portugal and Spain in 1986
and by Austria, Finland and Sweden in 1995. In the twenty-first century,
Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta,
Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia joined in 2004, Bulgaria and Romania
joined in 2007 and Croatia joined in 2013.
 INTRODUCTION 39

37. Nikolaidis, The Son, trans. by Will Firth (2006; London: Istros Books,
2013), p.78; nnepalu (Emil Tode), Europe, a Blot of Ink, in Keller and
Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe, p.305. As a Czech diplomat lamented, [w]
hat can we do? If we want to become members of the Union, we have to
accept what is decided (Vclav Kuklik quoted in Charlotte Bretherton,
Security Issues in the Wider Europe: The Role of EU-CEEC Relations,
in Mike Mannin, ed., Pushing Back the Boundaries: The European Union
and Central and Eastern Europe (Manchester and NewYork: Manchester
University Press, 1999), p.200).
38. Penkov, Cross Thieves, in Penkov, East of the West, new edn (2011;
London: Sceptre, 2011), p.136. In a jointly authored novel, Garros and
Evdokimov lament the transformation of eastern Europe into presentable
euro-standard euro-real estate, while Perii condemns a neoliberal
Croatia in which all our banks were sold to foreigners (Garros-Evdokimov,
Headcrusher, trans. by Andrew Bromfield (2003; London: Vintage, 2006),
p.58; Perii, Our Man in Iraq, trans. by Will Firth (2007; London: Istros
Books, 2012), pp. 1378). Perhaps the most powerful critique was
expressed via the faux naivet of one of Etel Adnans novels: Europe
knows what its doing, she wrote in the year of Maastricht: The new
Europe will settle every possible question (Adnan, Paris, When Its Naked
(Sausalito: The Post-Apollo Press, 1993), pp.22, 28).
39. Bo Strth, Multiple Europes: Integration, Identity and Demarcation to
the Other, in Strth, ed., Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other
(Brussels: P.I.E.Peter Lang, 2000), p.419; David Wills, When East Goes
West: The Political Economy of European Re-Integration in the Post-Cold
War Era, in Wintle, ed., Culture and Identity, p.158.
40. See Sandra Lavenex, EU External Governance in Wider Europe,
Journal of European Public Policy, Vol. 11, No. 4 (2004), pp.680700.
41. See Karis Muller, Shadows of Empire in the European Union, The
European Legacy, Vol. 6, No. 4 (2001), pp.43951.
42. Weldon, Darcys Utopia, new edn (1990; London: Flamingo, 1991),
p. 250. The antipathy has often shown up in the Euro-baromtre, the
European Commissions survey of public opinion: see Jack Citrin and John
Sides, More than Nationals: How Identity Choice Matters in the New
Europe, in Richard K.Herrmann, Thomas Risse and Marilynn B.Brewer,
eds, Transnational Identities: Becoming European in the EU (Lanham:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), pp. 1659; Michael Bruter, Citizens of
Europe? The Emergence of a Mass European Identity (Basingstoke and
NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp.1349; and David Dunkerley,
Lesley Hodgson, Stanisaw Konopacki, Tony Spybey and Andrew
Thompson, Changing Europe: Identities, Nations and Citizens (London
and NewYork: Routledge, 2002), pp.1205.
40 A. HAMMOND

43. Jacques Delors once said that [y]ou dont fall in love with a common
market; you need something else and Jean Monnet is supposed to have
remarked that if the European construction process had to be started
again afresh, it would be better to start with culture (quoted in Jeremy
MacClancy, The Predicable Failure of a European Identity, in Barrie
Axford, Daniela Berghahn and Nick Hewlett, eds, Unity and Diversity in
the New Europe (Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2000), p. 112; quoted
in Franois Nectoux, European Identity and the Politics of Culture in
Europe, in Axford, Berghahn and Hewlett, eds, Unity and Diversity,
p.149).
44. Quoted in Nectoux, European Identity, p.150.
45. Barrie Axford, Daniela Berghahn and Nick Hewlett, Analysing Unity and
Diversity in the New Europe, in Axford, Berghahn and Hewlett, eds,
Unity and Diversity, p.21.
46. See Cris Shore, Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European
Integration (London and NewYork: Routledge, 2000), pp.5660.
47. Frykman, Belonging in Europe: Modern Identities in Minds and Places,
Peter Niedermller and Bjarne Stoklund, eds, Europe: Cultural Construction
and Reality (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2001), p.15.
48. Pollen, On the European Ingredient in the Text (With a Sidelong Glance
at an Eel in a Bathtub), in Keller and Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe,
p.236.
49. For the definitions and origins of these concepts, see Iver B. Neumann,
Russia and the Idea of Europe: A Study in Identity and International
Relations (London and NewYork: Routledge, 1996), pp.2839.
50. Wallace, Where Does Europe End? Dilemmas of Inclusion and Exclusion,
in Jan Zielonka, ed., Europe Unbound: Enlarging and Reshaping the
Boundaries of the European Union (London and New York: Routledge,
2002), p.79.
51. Crtrescu, Europe Has the Shape of My Brain, in Keller and Rakusa,
eds, Writing Europe, p.63.
52. Quoted in Iver B. Neumann, From the USSR to Gorbachev to Putin:
Perestroika as a Failed Excursion from the West to Europe in Russian
Discourse, in Mikael af Malmborg and Bo Strth, eds, The Meaning of
Europe: Variety and Contention within and among Nations (Oxford and
NewYork: Berg, 2002), p.194.
53. Kundera, The Tragedy of Central Europe (1983, trans. by Edmund
White), The NewYork Review of Books, 26 April 1984, pp.33, 34 (Kunderas
italics).
54. Ibid., pp.37, 34. As David Williams remarks, Kunderas constructions of
Central Europe have seen him taken to task by postcolonial scholars for
othering Russia and attempting to hang a new Iron Curtain further to
 INTRODUCTION 41

the east (Williams, Writing Postcommunism: Towards a Literature of the

East European Ruins (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2013), pp.223).
55. See Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, Facing the Desert of Tartars: The Eastern
Border of Europe, in Zielonka, ed., Europe Unbound, p. 51; and Ash,
Where Is Central Europe Now?, in Ash, History of the Present: Essays,
Sketches and Despatches from Europe in the 1990s (London: Allen Lane, The
Penguin Press, 1999), p.388.
56. Topol, City Sister Silver, trans. by Alex Zucker (1994; North Haven:
Catbird Press, 2000), p. 390; Rakusa, Impressions and Conversations
during the Intervals, in Keller and Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe, p. 27;
Karahasan, Europe Writes in Time, in Keller and Rakusa, eds, Writing
Europe, p.188.
57. Wintle, Introduction: Cultural Diversity and Identity in Europe, in
Wintle, ed., Culture and Identity, p.17.
58. Schindel, Were All Right: Europes Influence on My Writings, in
Keller and Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe, pp.2545.
59. Indeed, isolationism could be said to be as important a theme of European
literature as integrationism. For example, authors have referred to
Portugal and its capital, particularly under Salazar, as [t]he fringe of
Europe, as the last city in Europe and as EUROPES BEST-KEPT
SECRET (Cees Nooteboom, The Following Story, trans. by Ina Rilke
(1991; London: Harvill, 1993), p.39; Jens Christian Grndahl, Silence in
October, trans. by Anne Born (1998; Edinburgh: Canongate, 2000),
p. 264; Jos Cardoso Pires, Ballad of Dogs Beach: Dossier of a Crime,
trans. by Mary Fitton (1982; London and Melbourne: J.M.Dent & Sons,
1986), p.3).
60. Pter Ndas, In the Intimacy of Literary Writing, in Keller and Rakusa,
eds, Writing Europe, p. 214; Christos Tsiolkas, Dead Europe, new edn
(2005; London: Atlanta Books, 2011), p.181; Amos Oz, A Tale of Love
and Darkness, trans. by Nicholas de Lange (2002; London: Vintage,
2005), p.2; Ognjen Spahi, Hansens Children, trans. by Will Firth (2004;
Bristol: Istros Books, 2011), p. 39; Agate Nesaule, In Love with Jerzy
Kosinski (Madison: Terrace Books, 2009), p.112.
61. de Rougemont, The Meaning of Europe, trans. by Alan Braley (1962;
London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1965), p.12.
62. White, The Discourse of Europe and the Search for a European Identity,
in Strth, ed., Europe, p.67.
63. Salih, Season of Migration to the North, trans. by Denys Johnson-Davies
(1966; London: Penguin, 2003), p. 95; Taher, Sunset Oasis, trans. by
Humphrey Davies (2007; London: Sceptre, 2010), p. 37; Grndhal,
Notes of an Escapist, in Keller and Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe, p.128.
42 A. HAMMOND

See also Soueifs The Map of Love (1999), Achebes Things Fall Apart
(1958), Lammings In the Castle of My Skin (1953) and Sahgals Rich Like
Us (1985).
64. Said, Culture and Imperialism, new edn (1993; London: Vintage, 1994),
p. xix.
65. Kiernan, European Empires from Conquest to Collapse, 18151960 (London:
Fontana, 1982), p.208.
66. White, Discourse of Europe, p.68.
67. Favell, Immigration, Migration, and Free Movement in the Making of
Europe, in Jeffrey T. Checkel and Peter J. Katzenstein, eds, European
Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p.167.
68. See Roland Hsu, The Ethnic Question: Premodern Identity for a
Postmodern Europe?, in Hsu, ed., Ethnic Europe: Mobility, Identity, and
Conflict in a Globalized World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010),
p. 2; and Peter A. Poole, Europe Unites: The EUs Eastern Enlargement
(Westport: Praeger, 2003), p.153. This is not to discount intra-European
migration: as the German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck once wrote, Europes
peoples, with or without wars, had always crisscrossed the continent, inter-
mixing and seeking out new homes whenever their one bit of land pro-
duced too little or life became unbearable (Erpenbeck, The End of Days,
trans. by Susan Bernofsky (2012; London: Portobello Books, 2014),
p.50).
69. Quoted in Graham Huggan, Perspectives on Postcolonial Europe,
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Vol. 44, No. 3 (2008), p.243.
70. Quoted in Sandra Ponzanesi and Bolette B.Blaagaard, Introduction: In
the Name of Europe, in Ponzanesi and Blaagaard, eds, Deconstructing
Europe, p.3. In 1990, the Italian writer Umberto Eco was already claiming
that African migration was of greater significance for Europe than the dis-
mantling of the Iron Curtain (see Sidonie Smith and Gisela Brinker-Gabler,
Introduction to Brinker-Gabler and Smith, eds, Writing New Identities:
Gender, Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary Europe (Minneapolis
and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p.6).
71. Balibar, We, The People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship,
trans. by James Swenson (2001; Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2004), pp. x, 39 (Balibars italics).
72. Ponzanesi and Blaagaard, Introduction, p.7.
73. This does not discount the involvement of other European empires. For
example, at the Congress of Berlin (1878) decisions taken collectively by
the Great Powers created what one British politician termed a kind of
protectorate in parts of south-east Europe (Lord Palmerston quoted in
A.L. Macfie, The Eastern Question, 17741923 (London and New York:
Longman, 1989), p.22).
 INTRODUCTION 43

74. Andri, Bosnian Chronicle: or The Days of the Consuls, trans. by Celia
Hawkesworth and Bogdan Raki (1945; London: The Harvill Press,
1996), p.68.
75. See Moore, Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward
a Global Postcolonial Critique, PMLA, Vol. 116, No. 1 (2001), p.115.
76. Amongst the colonised or disputed territories are Greenland, Northern
Ireland, the Faroe Islands, the Canary Islands, the Azores, Madeira, Ceuta,
Melilla, Gibraltar, northern Cyprus, Akrotiri, Dhekelia, Nagorno-
Karabakh, Chechnya and Abkhazia.
77. Anthony Pagden, Introduction to Pagden, ed., Facing Each Other: The
Worlds Perception of Europe and Europes Perception of the World (Aldershot
and Burlington: Ashgate, 2000), p. xviii. According to this discourse,
Albert Memmi writes, the whole world [] fell into two. In the upper
part of the globe were the peoples of the North, orderly, clean, controlled
and self-sure, wielders of political and technical power; while lower down
were the peoples of the South, noisy and vulgar (Memmi, Strangers, trans.
by Brian Rhys (1955; NewYork: The Orion Press, 1960), pp.1289).
78. Enzensberger, Europe, Europe: Forays into a Continent, trans. by Martin
Chalmers (1987; NewYork: Pantheon Books, 1989), pp.77, 76.
79. In a study of race and racism in Europe, the British-Caribbean novelist
Caryl Phillips concludes by saying that Europe must begin to restructure
the tissue of lies that continues to be taught and digested at school and at
home for we, black people, are an inextricable part of this small continent
(Phillips, The European Tribe, new edn (1987; London and Boston: Faber
and Faber, 1988), p.129).
80. Neziraj, The Demolition of the Eiffel Tower (Tragicomedy of the Absurd for
Four Actors), trans. by Robert Elsie and Janice Mathie-Heck, Albanian
Literature, http://www.albanianliterature.net/authors_modern2/neziraj
_drama.html (accessed 24 July 2015).
81. See John M. Hobson, Revealing the Cosmopolitan Side of Oriental
Europe: The Eastern Origins of European Civilisation, in Gerard Delanty,
ed., Europe and Asia beyond East and West (London and New York:
Routledge, 2006), p.108.
82. Eberhard Bort, Illegal Migration and Cross-Border Crime: Challenges at
the Eastern Frontier of the European Union, in Zielonka, ed., Europe
Unbound, p.204; Joep Leerssen, Europe from the Balkans, in Michael
Wintle, ed., Imagining Europe: Europe and European Civilisation as Seen
from Its Margins [etc.] (Brussels: P.I.E.Peter Lang, 2008), p.120; Sorin
Antohi, Habits of the Mind: Europes Post-1989 Symbolic Geographies,
in Antohi and Vladimir Tismaneanu, eds, Between Past and Future: The
Revolutions of 1989 and Their Aftermath (Budapest: Central European
University Press, 2000), p.69.
44 A. HAMMOND

83. Quoted in Charles Briffa, The Essential Oliver Friggieri: National Author
of Malta (Msida: Malta University Publishing, 2012), p.386.
84. As Matti Bunzl points out, the physical border is reinforced by racial, reli-
gious and ethnic prejudices, which are now as much a means of fortifying
Europe as a means of expanding Europe abroad (Bunzl, Anti-Semitism
and Islamophobia: Some Thoughts on the New Europe, American
Ethnologist, Vol. 32, No. 4 (2005), p.502).
85. See Peter Andreas, Redrawing the Line: Borders and Security in the
Twenty-First Century, International Security, Vol. 28, No. 2 (2003), p.78.
86. Newman, On Borders and Power: A Theoretical Framework, Journal of
Borderlands Studies, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2003), p.14.
87. Perry Anderson, The Europe to Come, in Gowan and Anderson, eds,
Question of Europe, p.141.
88. Lewycka, Two Caravans, new edn (2007; London: Penguin, 2008),
p.157.
89. Pieterse, Fictions of Europe, Race & Class, Vol. 32, No. 3 (1991), p.5.
90. Quoted in Zygmunt Bauman, Europe: An Unfinished Adventure (Cambridge
and Malden: Polity Press, 2004), p.21.
91. Verhulst, Problemski Hotel, trans. by David Colmer (2003; London and
NewYork: Marion Boyars, 2005), p.74.
92. For examples, see Wintle, Introduction, p.21; Bauman, Europe, pp.734;
Andrew Baruch Wachtel, Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role
of the Writer in Eastern Europe (Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 2006), p.119; and David Willis, When East Goes West:
The Political Economy of European Re-Integration in the Post-Cold War
Era, in Wintle, ed., Culture and Identity, p.149.
93. Quoted in Hannelore Scholz, Life from Its Very Beginning at Its End:
The Unhomely Boundaries in the Works of Bulgarian Author Blaga
Dimitrova, in Brinker-Gabler and Smith, eds, Writing New Identities,
p.256. Of equal relevance is the comment by Hungarian novelist Gyrgy
Konrd that our brains have been cut in half by the armistice line separat-
ing East and West (Konrd, The City Builder, trans. by Ivan Sanders
(1977; Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2007), p.68).
94. Ash, Catching the Wrong Bus?, pp.1201.
95. Ash, Where Is Central Europe Now?, p.396.
96. Habermas and Derrida, Feb. 15, or, What Binds Europeans Together:
Pleas for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in Core Europe, in Daniel
Levy, Max Pensky and John Torpey, eds, Old Europe, New Europe, Core
Europe: Transatlantic Relations after the Iraq War (London and NewYork:
Verso, 2005), p.6.
97. Quoted in Holly Case, Being European: East and West, in Checkel and
Katzenstein, eds, European Identity, pp.11213.
 INTRODUCTION 45

98. Casanova, European Literature, p.20.

99. Wachtel, Remaining Relevant, p.124; Palavestra, Literature as Criticism
of Ideology in Contemporary Serbian Culture, in Celia Hawkesworth,
ed., Literature and Politics in Eastern Europe (Basingstoke and London:
Macmillan, 1992), pp.11, 11.
100. For examples from the 1930s, see Miroslav Krleas Povratak Filipa
Latinovicza (The Return of Philip Latinowicz, 1932), Georges Batailles
Le Bleu du Ciel (Blue of Noon, 1957; composed 1935), Albert Camuss
La Mort heureuse (A Happy Death, 1971; composed 19368), Irmgard
Keuns Kind aller Lnder (Child of All Nations, 1938) and Eric Amblers
The Mask of Dimitrios (1939).
101. For further examples, see Jean-Paul Sartres Le Sursis (The Reprieve,
1945), Primo Levis La Chiave a Stella (The Wrench, 1978), Bernardine
Evaristos Soul Tourists (2005), Alessandro Gallenzis Interrail (2012),
Christos Tsiolkass Dead Europe (2005) and Aleksandar Hemons The
Lazarus Project (2008). On occasion, transcontinental narratives are able
to discuss continent-wide issues by utilising only several locations: see
Dubravka Ugreis Ministarstvo boli (The Ministry of Pain, 2004), Gregor
von Rezzoris Memoiren eines Antisemiten (Memoirs of an Anti-Semite,
1979) and Cees Nootebooms In Nederland (In the Dutch Mountains,
1984).
102. Of course, modernisation was a theme in European literature long before
1945. For example, see Hein Brs Fegar Fer (The Old Man and His
Sons, 1940), Andrey Platonovs Dzhan (Soul, 1935) and Kurban Saids
great meditation on East-West division, Ali und Nino (Ali and Nino,
1937).
103. For anthems, see Jos Saramago, Death at Intervals, trans. by Margaret
Jull Costa (2005; London: Vintage, 2008), p. 54; for languages, see
Nooteboom, Following Story, p. 28; for currencies, see Parks, Europa,
p.68; for salaries, see Heinrich Bll, The End of a Mission, trans. by Leila
Vennewitz (1966; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), p.71; for radio sta-
tions, see Richard Stern, Europe: Or Up and Down with Schreiber and
Baggish, new edn (1961; Evanston: TriQuarterly Books, 2007), p.51; for
television, see Elif Shafak, The Bastard of Istanbul, new edn (2007; London:
Penguin, 2008), pp.2823; for city centres, see Kjartan Flgstad, Dollar
Road, trans. by Nadia Christensen (1977; Baton Rouge and London:
Louisiana State University Press, 1989), pp.1201; for train networks, see
Louis Armand, Clair Obscur (Vokovice: Equus, 2011), p.58; for tram net-
works, see Anita Konkka, A Fools Paradise, trans. by A.D.Haun and Owen
Witesman (1988; Normal and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2006),
p.21; for weather systems, see Stefan Chwin, Death in Danzig, trans. by
Philip Boehm (1995; London: Vintage, 2006), p. 244; for libraries, see
46 A. HAMMOND

Julia Kristeva, The Samurai, trans. by Barbara Bray (1990; New York:
Columbia University Press, 1992), p.216; for bird migrations, see Milan
Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. by Aaron Asher
(1978; London: Faber and Faber, 2000), pp. 2678; and for geological
formations, see Lszl Krasznahorkai, Satantango, trans. by George Szirtes
(1985; London: Atlantic Books, 2013), p.49. For other examples of con-
tinent-wide imagery, see Hans Koning, Acts of Faith, new edn (1986;
London: Alison and Busby, 1990), p.12; Richard Flanagan, The Sound of
One Hand Clapping, new edn (1997; Sydney: Picador, 1998), pp.2278;
Fabrice Humbert, Silas Fortune, trans. by Frank Wynne (2010; London:
Serpents Tail, 2013), p.116; Ivan Klma, Waiting for the Dark, Waiting
for the Light, trans. by Paul Wilson (1993; London: Granta Books, 1998),
pp.14650; Per Petterson, I Curse the River of Time, trans. by Charlotte
Barslund and Per Petterson (2008; London: Vintage Books, 2011),
pp.1301; and Herta Mller, The Land of Green Plums, trans. by Michael
Hofmann (1994; London: Granta Books, 1998), p.108.
104. Spahi, Hansens Children, p. 75; Canetti, The Tongue Set Free:
Remembrance of a European Childhood, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel
(1977; London: Granta Books, 1999), p. 47. For other examples, see
Bohumil Hrabal, Closely Observed Trains, trans. by Edith Pargeter (1965;
London: Abacus, 1990), pp. 523; Marina Lewycka, A Short History of
Tractors in Ukrainian, new edn (2005; London: Penguin, 2006), pp.32,
309; Robert Schofield, The Fig Tree and the Mulberry (Luxembourg:
ditions Saint Paul, 2011), pp.245, 207; Oksana Zabuzhko, The Museum
of Abandoned Secrets, trans. by Nina Shevchuk-Murray (2009; Las Vegas:
AmazonCrossing, 2012), p.138; and Leila Aboulela, The Translator, new
edn (1999; Edinburgh: Polygon, 2008), p.16.
105. Richard Rose, What is Europe? A Dynamic Perspective (New York:
HarperCollins, 1996), p. 2. See Fenoglios Una Questione Privata (A
Private Affair, 1963), Haviarass When the Tree Sings (1979), Chwins
Hanemann (Death in Danzig, 1995), Schofields The Fig Tree and the
Mulberry (2011), Jelineks Die Ausgesperrten (Wonderful Wonderful
Times, 1980), Grasss Die Blechtrommel (The Tin Drum, 1959),
kvorecks Bassaxofon (The Bass Saxophone, 1967), Adamovichs
Khatynskaya povest (Khatyn, 1972), Andrzeyevskis Popiol i Diament
(Ashes and Diamonds, 1957), Macaulays The World My Wilderness (1950),
Ebejers Requiem for a Malta Fascist (1980), Sartres Les Chemins de la
libert (Roads to Freedom, 19459), Nggs A Grain of Wheat (1967),
Levys Small Island (2004) and Feraouns Le fils du pauvre (The Poor
Mans Son, 1950).
106. Miosz, The Seizure of Power, trans. by Celina Wieniewska (1953; London:
Abacus, 1985), pp.214, 15.
 INTRODUCTION 47

107. Levi, The Periodic Table, trans. by Raymond Rosenthal (1975; London:
Abacus, 1986), p.37; Weil, Life with a Star, trans. by Rita Klimova and
Roslyn Schloss (1949; London: Penguin, 2002), p.95; Levi, The Truce, in
Levi, If This is a Man and The Truce, trans. by Stuart Woolf (1958, 1963;
London: Abacus, 1987), p.293. Elie Wiesel also writes that there was a
time, in Europe, when Jews were forbidden to possess a body and that
the earth and sky of Europe had become great, haunted cemeteries
(Wiesel, The Gates of the Forest, trans. by Frances Frenaye (1964; London:
Heinemann, 1967), pp. 223, 120). See also Hans Keilsons Komdie in
Moll (Comedy in a Minor Key, 1947), Hana Demetzs Ein Haus in Bohmen
(The House on Prague Street, 1970), Jorge Sempruns Le Grand Voyage
(The Cattle Truck, 1963), Yoel Hoffmanns Bernhart (Bernhard, 1989)
and Imre Kertszs Sorstalansg (Fateless, 1975).
108. Szyszkowitz, On the Other Side, trans. by Todd C.Hanlin (1990; Riverside:
Ariadne Press, 1991), p. 58; Shteyngart, The Russian Debutantes
Handbook, new edn (2002; London: Bloomsbury, 2004), p.274; trpka,
Oh, Children Smeared with Honey and with Blood, in Keller and Rakusa,
eds, Writing Europe, p.275. See also Voznesenskayas Zvezda Chernobyl
(The Star Chernobyl, 1986), Koestlers The Call-Girls (1972), Wu Mings
54 (2002), Celasins Svart Himmel, Svart Hav (Black Sky, Black Sea,
2007), Dovlatovs Kompromiss (The Compromise, 1981), Bezmozgiss
The Free World (2011), Drrenmatts Der Auftrag (The Assignment,
1986), Wolfs Strfall: Nachrichten eines Tages (Accident/A Days News,
1987), Koningsbergers The Revolutionary (1968) and Chatwins Utz
(1988).
109. See Krasons ar sem djflaeyjan rs (Devils Island, 1983), Ulitskayas
Veselye pokliorony (The Funeral Party, 1998), McEwans The Innocent
(1990), Nabokovs Pnin (1957), Dundys The Dud Avacado (1958),
Sterns Europe (1961), Buschs War Babies (1988) and Konings Acts of
Faith (1986).
110. Stern, Europe, p. 75. Ulitskaya describes the American envy of Old
Europe, with its cultural subtlety [], and also Europes disdainful, but
fundamentally envious, attitude to broad-shouldered, elemental America
(Ulitskaya, The Funeral Party, trans. by Cathy Porter (1998; London:
Indigo, 2000), pp.1023).
111. Ingo Schulze, New Lives: The Youth of Enrico Trmer in Letters and Prose
[etc.], trans. by John E.Woods (2005; NewYork: Alfred A.Knopf, 2008),
p.89; Penkov, Buying Lenin, in Penkov, East of the West, p.59; Andre
Makine, Once upon the River Love, trans. by Geoffrey Strachan (1994;
London: Penguin, 1999), p.176; Ghali, Beer in the Snooker Club, new edn
(1964; London: Serpents Tail, 2010), p.56.
112. Ghali, Beer in the Snooker Club, pp.60, 55.
48 A. HAMMOND

113. Kundera, Sixty-Three Words, in Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. by
Linda Asher (1986; London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p.145; Sahgal, The
Schizophrenic Imagination, in Anna Rutherford, ed., From Commonwealth
to Post-colonial (Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1992), pp.36, 36.
114. Wolf, Travel Report, about the Accidental Surfacing and Gradual
Fabrication of a Literary Personage, in Wolf, Cassandra, trans. by Jan van
Heurck (1983; NewYork: The Noonday Press, 1988), p.155.
115. See Durass Un Barrage contre le Pacifique (A Sea of Troubles, 1950), Rhyss
Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Haasses Oeroeg (The Black Lake, 1948),
Daeninckxs Meurtres pour memoire (Murder in Memoriam, 1984), Ejersbos
Eksil (Exile, 2009), Atxagas Siete Casas (Seven Houses in France, 2009),
Antuness Os Cus de Judas (The Land at the End of the World, 1979),
Hagerforss Valarna i Tanganyikasjn (The Whales in Lake Tanganyika,
1985), Japins De zwarte met het witte hart (The Two Hearts of Kwasi
Boachi, 1997), Coutos O ltimo voo do flamingo (The Last Flight of the
Flamingo, 2000), Mays The Internationals (2003), Brfusss Hundert Tage
(One Hundred Days, 2008), Babniks Suna doba (The Dry Season, 2012)
and Troyanovs Der Weltensammler (The Collector of Worlds, 2006).
116. See Johan Schimanski and Stephen Wolfe, Entry Points: An Introduction,
in Schimanski and Wolfe, eds, Border Poetics De-Limited (Hannover:
Wehrhahn Verlag, 2007), pp.1011.
117. Zabuzhko, Museum of Abandoned Secrets, p.41.
118. Balibar, We, the People of Europe?, p.8.
119. ODowd and Wilson, Frontiers of Sovereignty in the New Europe, in
ODowd and Wilson, eds, Borders, Nations and States: Frontiers of
Sovereignty in the New Europe (Aldershot: Avebury, 1996), p.7.
120. See Williams, Writing Postcommunism, p.128; and Rajendra A.Chitnis,
Literature in Post-Communist Russia and Eastern Europe: The Russian,
Czech and Slovak Fiction of the Changes, 19881998 (London and
NewYork: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005), p.1. At the end of the Cold War, the
Europist belief seemed more common amongst eastern Europeans than
western Europeans, a fact captured in Tadeusz Mazowieckis claim that
we bring to Europe our belief in Europe (quoted in Barbara Trnquist-
Plewa, The Complex of an Unwanted Child: The Meanings of Europe in
Polish Discourse, in Malmborg and Strth, eds, Meaning of Europe,
p.236). The point was also crystallised by Ismail Kadare who, in 2008, was
exhorting compatriots to adapt to what he termed Atlantic Europe: If we
pretend to be a European country, he argued, first of all we need to con-
struct Europe within ourselves, and then naturally to integrate in Europe
(quoted in Adrian Brisku, Bittersweet Europe: Albanian and Georgian
Discourses on Europe, 18782008 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn,
2013), p.169).
 INTRODUCTION 49

121. Williams, Writing Postcommunism, p. 13. See Kertszs Felszmols

(Liquidation, 2003), Klmas ekn na tmu (Waiting for the Dark,
1993), Pitaneks Rivers of Babylon (1991), Pelevins Zhizn nasekomykh
(The Life of Insects, 1993), Senchins Minus (Minus, 2002), Stasiuks
Biaty Kruk (White Raven, 1995), Schulzes Simple Storys (Simple Stories,
1998) and Topols Sestra (City Sister Silver, 1994). For other novels of
the changes, see Dubravka Ugreis Ministarstvo boli (The Ministry of
Pain, 2004), Eugen Ruges In Zeiten des abnehmenden Lichts (In Times
of Fading Light, 2011), Vladimir Makanins Laz (Escape Hatch, 1990)
and Daniela Hodrovs Visite prive: Prague (Prague, I See a City,
1991). A Russian character in Humberts Silas Fortune suggests that
power is basically unchanged after 1989: Weve gone from being ruled
by bureaucrats to being ruled by accountants (Humbert, Silas Fortune,
p.94).
122. See Mazzinis Drobtinice (Crumbs, 1987), Odrachs Voshchad (Wave of
Terror, 1972), Voinovichs Zhizn i neobichainye priklyucheniya soldata
Ivana Chonkina (The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan
Chonkin, 1969), Maneas Plicul Negru (The Black Envelope, 1986),
Moores The Colour of Blood (1988) and Gaveliss Vilniaus pokeris (Vilnius
Poker, 1989). Writers have compared life in the eastern bloc to being in an
enormous concentration camp and in the belly of [a] languid, listless
beast (Kundera, Slowness, trans. by Linda Asher (1995; London and
Boston: Faber and Faber, 1996), p. 64; Stasiuk, White Raven, trans. by
Wiesiek Powaga (1995; London: Serpents Tail, 2000), p.95).
123. Michael Cox, Ken Booth and Tim Dunne, Introduction to Cox, Booth
and Dunne, eds, The Interregnum: Controversies in World Politics,
19891999 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p.5.
124. Gregor von Rezzori, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, trans. by Joachim
Neugroschel and Gregor von Rezzori (1979; London: Picador, 2002),
p.1; Orhan Pamuk, Snow, trans. by Maureen Freely (2002; London: Faber
and Faber, 2005), p.101.
125. Even regional authors have added to the confusion over Europes eastern
limits. While Witold Gombrowicz argues that Europe starts to draw to an
end in Poland, Robert Perii suggests the edge of Europe is in the
Balkans and Kurban Said claims that the furthest eastern country of Europe
is in the Caucasus (Gombrowicz quoted in Silvana Mandolessi, Cultural
Hierarchies, Secondary Nations: The Tension between Europe and Minor
Cultures in Witold Gombrowicz and Jorge Luis Borges, in Nele Bemong,
Mirjam Truwant and Pieter Vermeulen, eds, Re-Thinking Europe: Literature
and (Trans)National Identity (Amsterdam and NewYork: Rodopi, 2008),
p.156; Perii, Our Man in Iraq, p.260; Said, Ali and Nino, trans. by Jenia
Graman (1937; London: Vintage, 2000), p.116).
50 A. HAMMOND

126. With this in mind, Balibar was undoubtedly right to say that [t]he fate of
European identity as a whole is being played out in Yugoslavia, but less
convincing in his claim that Europe has learned the lesson of tragedy
(Balibar, We, the People of Europe?, pp.6, 222). For direct criticism of west-
ern European policy, see Juan Goytisolo, State of Siege, trans. by Helen
Lane (1995; London: Serpents Tail, 2003), p.5; Saa Stanii, How the
Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, trans. by Anthea Bell (2006; London:
Phoenix, 2009), pp.1267; and Armand, Clair Obscur, p.34.
127. See Hanssons Steinhof (Steinhof, 1998), Albaharis Svetski Putnik
(Globetrotter, 2001), Todorovis Diary of Interrupted Days (2009),
Kims Die gefrorene Zeit (Frozen Time, 2008), Sadulaevs Yachechenets!
(I Am a Chechan!, 2006), Voloss Khurramabad (Hurramabad, 2000),
Lefteris A Watermelon, a Fish and a Bible (2010), Makiss The Spice Box
Letters (2015), Bohjalians The Sandcastle Girls (2012), Cercass Soldados
de Salamina (Soldiers of Salamis, 2001) and McGaherns Amongst Women
(1990).
128. For example, see Christian Jungersons Undtagelsen (The Exception,
2004), Nadeem Aslams The Wasted Vigil (2008), Kamila Shamsies Burnt
Shadows (2009) and Jrme Ferraris O jai laiss mon me (Where I Left
My Soul, 2010).
129. Ette, European Literature(s), p.123.
130. McLeod, Fantasy Relationships: Black British Canons in a Transnational
World, in Gail Low and Marion Wynne-Davies, eds, A Black British
Canon? (Basingstoke and NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p.102.
131. Charef, Tea in the Harem, trans. by Ed Emery (1983; London: Serpents
Tail, 1989), p.13; Ulitskaya, Funeral Party, p.99.
132. The gender imbalance in the new Europe is coming under critical scru-
tiny. For example, commentators point out that female Members of the
European Parliament are generally white, middle class women, while
migrant women are not only underrepresented in political frameworks but
also end up having access to a very limited number of positions in society
and in the labour market (Jane Freedman, Women in the European
Parliament, in Axford, Berghahn and Hewlett, eds, Unity and Diversity,
p.298; Helma Lutz, The Limits of European-ness: Immigrant Women in
Fortress Europe, Feminist Review, Vol. 57 (1997), p.96).
133. See Kristevas Les samouras (The Samurai, 1990), Veteranyis Warum das
Kind in der Polenta kocht (Why the Child is Cooking in the Polenta, 1999),
Rabinowichs Spaltkopf (Splithead, 2009), Mllers Reisende auf einem
Bein (Travelling on One Leg, 1992), Honigmanns Eine Liebe aus nichts
(A Love Made out of Nothing, 1991), Plebaneks Nielegalne zwiqzki
(Illegal Liaisons, 2010) and Oksanens Puhdistus (Purge, 2008). For other
examples, see Salman Rushdies The Satanic Verses (1988), Beryl Gilroys
 INTRODUCTION 51

Boy-Sandwich (1989), Carlo Gblers Life of a Drum (1991), Tarek

Eltayebs Mudun bila nakhil (Cities without Palms, 1992), Didier van
Cauwelaerts Un Aller Simple (One-Way, 1994), Kader Abdolahs
Spijkerschrift (My Fathers Notebook, 2000) and David Bezmozgiss The
Free World (2011). Although East-West migration is not associated with
the pre-1989 period, so many dissidents arrived from the eastern bloc that
one critic, writing at the end of the Cold War, estimated that 200 writers
had come to the West from Soviet Russia alone (see Arnold McMillin,
Introduction to McMillin, ed., Under Eastern Eyes: The West as Reflected
in Recent Russian migr Writing (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan,
School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 1991), p. x).
134. Gerard Delanty and Chris Rumford, Rethinking Europe: Social Theory and
the Implications of Europeanization (London and New York: Routledge,
2005), p.129. Its no good to be in between, one of Elif Shafaks char-
acters remarks: International politics does not appreciate ambiguity
(Shafak, The Bastard of Istanbul, p.145).
135. zdamar, Guest Faces, p.229.
136. Keyman, Turkey between Europe and Asia, in Delanty, ed., Europe and
Asia, p.204.
137. See Daloss 1985 (1985: A Historical Report, 1982), Drrenmatts Der
Auftrag (The Assignment, 1986) and Burgesss 1985 (1978).
138. Delanty, Introduction: The Idea of a Post-Western Europe, in Delanty,
ed., Europe and Asia, p.3.
139. We can be more positive than Tariq Modood, who has suggested, tenta-
tively, that multiculturalism means a new way of being French, a new
way of being German, a new way of being Britishand perhaps also a
new way of being European (Modood, Introduction: The Politics of
Multiculturalism in the New Europe, in Modood and Pnina Werbner,
eds, The Politics of Multiculturalism in the New Europe: Racism, Identity
and Community (London and NewYork: Zed Books, 1997), p.24).
140. Apart from the themes covered here, Tony Judt, James Joll, Richard
Hoggart and Douglas Johnson suggest further possibilities in the relation
to the USA, the inability to learn from the past, the extension of the wel-
fare state, the conflict of religious and scientific beliefs and the tension
between elites, communities and individuals (see Judt, Postwar: A History
of Europe since 1945, new edn (2005; London: Pimlico, 2007), pp.710;
Joll, Europe, pp.512; and Hoggart and Johnson, Ideas about an Idea of
Europe, in Joyce, ed., Questions of Identity, pp.98100).
141. Dhaen, Introduction, p.7.
142. This includes fiction that examines imperial and post-imperial migrations
away from Europe, as illustrated by Vladimir Nabokovs Pnin (1957),
Michael Ondaatjes In the Skin of a Lion (1987), David Maloufs
52 A. HAMMOND

Remembering Babylon (1993), Albert Camuss Le Premier Homme (The

First Man, 1994), Richard Flanagans The Sound of One Hand Clapping
(1997) and Amlie Nothombs Stupeur et tremblements (Fear and
Trembling, 1999). Speaking of the need for more research into views of
Europe from elsewhere, Ottmar Ette is in no doubt that European litera-
ture [] cannot be adequately understood if one neglects [its] global con-
texts (Ette, European Literature(s), p.156).
143. Jensen, Deconstructing Europe: Postcolonial Perspectives (Review),
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Vol. 49, No. 4 (2013), p.497.
 2

Traumatic Europe: TheImpossibility

ofMourning inW.G.Sebalds Austerlitz

TheodoreKoulouris

INTRODUCTION
In Cultural Criticism and Society (1967), Theodor Adorno writes that
even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into
idle chatter and that [t]o write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.1 Far
from calling on poets to lay down their pens, Adorno asserts that nothing,
including the critic, exists outside the material basis of culture; therefore,
to write about the barbarism of the Holocaust should be to acknowledge,
and be prepared to scrutinise, the socio-economic and political conditions
that have bred conflict. And there is certainly no shortage of conflict in
Europe after 1945. Besides the spectrum of the Cold War which haunted
Europe for decades, subsequent short-term and long-term conflicts have
indelibly marked the continent with torment, deprivation and woe: the
break-up of Yugoslavia and the ensuing wars in Kosovo and Bosnia, the
fighting in such former Soviet republics as Georgia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan
and Ukraine and the European engagements in Africa and the Middle
East. The last of these has resulted in scores of thousands of displaced
people seeking refuge on the shores of Italy and Greece, a phenomenon
to which the EU, in blithe obeisance to the dogma of Fortress Europe,

T. Koulouris ( )
College of Arts and Humanities, University of Brighton, Mithras House,
Brighton, BN2 4AT

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 53

A. Hammond (ed.), The Novel and Europe,
DOI10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4_2
54 T. KOULOURIS

shows a curious inability (or unwillingness) to respond in a humane way.2

This is not even to mention the several contemporary crises caused, by and
large, by the relentless financialisation of the EU.3 Therefore, a genuine
aesthetics that would transcend what Adorno calls idle chatter ought to
comprise, first and foremost, a praxis; that is to say, an intervention that
would problematise the extreme violence occurring in modern Europe
and the political/material conditions that have led to it. However, the act
of writing conflict opens up a series of epistemological challenges at the
heart of which lies the concept of representation: namely, how to histori-
cise and aestheticise brutality that exists on an unimaginable scale in ways
that would reveal the traumas of both past and present.
In this essay, I attempt to address these issues by offering a reading of
W.G.Sebalds Austerlitz (2001) influenced by Jacques Derridas work on
mourning and the unthinkability of death. In the first part of the essay,
I argue that the narrative choices made by Sebald enable him to reprob-
lematise the dilemmas long attached to narrating the Holocaust.4 In the
second part, I read Sebalds novel as a cultural product of our historical
conjuncture and suggest that, despite the pronounced historical specificity
of its subject-matter, this seminal text also bespeaks the ills of contempo-
rary Europe, especially post-1992, a period in which the European project
has sought to negotiate crucial challenges pertaining both to its nature as
a union of sovereign states and national cultures and to its post-Maastricht
neoliberalist socio-economic vision. Essentially, I read Austerlitz as an
example of a deeply European narrativised historiography preoccupied
with past traumas and their repercussions in contemporary European cul-
ture and politics.
Through an unnamed narrator, the novel tells the story of Jacques
Austerlitz, a London art historian who, as the narrative unfolds, comes to
discover the secret of his childhood. Being of Jewish descent, Austerlitz
was sent to Britain on kindertransport in 1939, when he was only four
and a half years old, and grew up in Wales as Daffyd Elias, adopted son
of a Calvinist minister and his wife. After Oxford and a successful schol-
arly career, Austerlitz traces his roots to the Czech Republic, to which he
returns after five decades. Once there, his childhood is gradually revealed
to him by Vera, his mothers closest friend. He discovers that his mother,
Agta, an actress and light opera singer, perished in the Terezn ghetto
(Theresienstadt) organised by the Nazis in 1939. Austerlitz then travels
to Paris to trace the whereabouts of his father, Max, who had fled there
before the outbreak of war. Austerlitzs research in the new Bibliotque
 TRAUMATIC EUROPE 55

National confirms that Max was interned, and probably died, in a con-
centration camp at Gurs, in the Pyrenean foothills, in 1942. As the text
draws to its conclusion, the protagonist contemplates the eerie emptiness
of Pariss Gare dAusterlitz and resolves to continue looking for his father,
whose continued absence and uncertain fate signifies the permanence of
loss in Austerlitzs life.

UNTHINKABLE DEATH, IMPOSSIBLE MOURNING

The protagonists surnamerevealed to him by his master at Stower
Grange private schoolis not accidental. When a character refers to the
small place in Moravia, site of a famous battle [in 1805], Sebald posi-
tions the text in a Europe that is defined by conflict, both literally and
metaphorically, and also positions it at the beginning of a tortured period
of European history that is generally regarded as a complicated and not
entirely safe subject.5 At its core, therefore, Austerlitz sets out to deal
with the anguish of continental trauma and mourning in the modern age.
Invested in the powerful currency of a traumatic experience, which slowly
and repeatedly unfolds before the eyes of its protagonist, the text ties
together the notion of permanent absence, the crippling fear of prospective
loss in what Jacques Derrida calls lavenirthat which is to comeand
our inability to address the systematic extermination of life via conven-
tional forms of textual mourning.6 Sebald couches his attempt at textual
mourning in a series of signifiers tasked with rendering its impossibility.
Not only is the persecution of a whole people treated as a pan-European
scarthe infant Austerlitz on the Kindertransport is indicative of the con-
tinents collective shame literally transferred across national bordersbut
death, desolation and decay are indelibly imprinted in Sebalds depictions
of the crumbling architectural magnificence of Europes civic buildings.7
The Derridean lavenir is reflected in the eeriness of Austerlitzs borrowed
childhood, whilst the turmoil of human displacement resides in the haunt-
ing (and haunted) transitional spaces of Europes central stations. And
death, of course, is everywhere: in the ghostly processions of Welsh fairy-
tales, in the cold, dusty corners of Iver Grove in England, in the myste-
rious curios of Antikos Bazar in the Czech town of Terezn and in the
meticulous archives of Europes libraries and museums designed to house
all manner of conflict, violence and shame (evoked as Europes common
heritage).8 To be sure, the European civilisation recreated by Sebald recalls
Walter Benjamins notion of civilisation as a document of barbarism.9
56 T. KOULOURIS

More specifically, the text functions as a post-1945 European project in

textual mourning on what Habermas calls the supranational level, work-
ing across borders, across cultures, across time, whilst always maintaining
its national and historical specificity.10 Seen from this angle, mourning
becomes Europes lingua franca and Austerlitzthe work of a German
emigrant in Britain at the dawn of the twenty-first centuryprovides a
rich tapestry of insights into the ways we conceptualise Europe as a site
of common aspirations and conflicting national and financial interests. In
Austerlitz and in other works, Sebald seems to suggest that if there is such
a thing as a common European heritage then it is one consummated not
only in actual trauma, of which we can barely think let alone textually rep-
resent, but also in the trauma of impossible mourning.
On the event of Jean-Franois Lyotards death in 1998, Derrida wrote in
Libration: [his] absence will remain [] forever unthinkable.11 I would
like to pursue the adjective unthinkable a little further. To my mind, the
unthinkability of death crystallises how the only ethical way in which the
living can speak or write about the dead is one which acknowledges, firstly,
the alterity of death, secondly, the permanence of absence and thirdly, con-
tra Freud, the impossibility of successful mourning.12 Beyond the episte-
mological problems one faces when writing about the dead, the only kind
of mourning that warrants the name mourning is that which ultimately
fails.13 In writing that the death of a friend is unthinkable, Derrida does
not imply that death is in any way unexpected or unnatural; on the con-
trary, in Politics of Friendship (1994) he argues that death and mourning
structure human relationships from the outset.14 Rather, he implies that to
think about the dead presents an epistemic impasse inherent in the process
of thinking about that of which we know nothing. When it comes to an
event such as the Holocaust, the concept of unthinkability is further exac-
erbated because it reveals not only the aforementioned impasse, but also
the need to employ a reasoning framework capable of comprehending the
systematic extermination of life.15 In this sense, the Holocaust demands as
much as negates the deployment of such a framework, either rational or
irrational.
To overcome the impasse, Dan Diner argues that to historicise the
Holocaust we must first formulate a postulate that goes beyond the binary
opposition of rationality and irrationality; in this respect, he argues, the
Nazi atrocities and the ways in which the Judenrat quite literally negoti-
ated the extermination of themselves and of the thousands of Jewish people
in their care can only be considered as counterrational.16 In other words,
 TRAUMATIC EUROPE 57

the Nazi atrocities were neither rationalfor being consistent with the
monstrous rationality of the Nazi projectnor irrational, for that would
raise important problems in terms of responsibility and culpability. The
difficulty is further complicated when it comes to narrating the Holocaust.
Any literary portrayal of the event unleashes a host of potential problems
pertaining not only to the aesthetic investment(s) made in and by a liter-
ary work, but also to the legitimacy and objectives of writing literature
about the systematic slaughter of a whole people. Although Dominick
LaCapras meticulous work on the historico-theoretical representations of
the Holocaust mobilises the important semasiological and performative
dimensions of acting out and working through past traumas, it comes
to the conclusion that the Holocaust as a reality goes beyond powers
of both imagination and conceptualization.17 I suggest, therefore, that
to narrate the Holocaust we need to invest in a value which transcends
the borders of rational, irrational or, indeed, counterrational thought.
In so far as there can be no thought beyond the parameters delineated
above, Derridas unthinkability constitutes a useful framework of refer-
ence. Situating the Holocaust in the realms of unthinkability need not
constitute a form of betrayal; rather, it may be seen as an ethico-political
stance which suggests that the act of narrating the Holocaust necessitates a
kind of textual mourning which should, first and foremost, consider itself
impossible. As such, a notion of unthinkability which, in tandem, generates
a kind of impossible textual mourning may be said to encapsulate Diners
counterrationality and LaCapras sustained theoretical explorations of
working through trauma, whilst also succeeding in highlighting the speci-
ficity of the Jewish historico-political experience from the 1920s onwards.
What is especially noteworthy about Austerlitz is that Sebald resists nar-
rating the Holocaust itself. Instead, he offers an oblique commentary on
Europes past and present with a view to situating the atrocities of World
War Two within the socio-historical framework that produced them. The
novel starts with a scene in Antwerp Zoo, specifically in the Nocturama,
the zoos enclosure for night animals, which is redolent of the dark eeriness
of what is to come (lavenir) in the dark enclosure of the Terezn ghetto
that will slowly come to blight Austerlitzs memory. The first sixty-odd
pages set out to establish that the industrial carnage of the Second World
War and the Holocaust did not happen in a socio-political vacuum, but
was the upshot of over two hundred years of colonial and military expan-
sion. After the Nocturama scene comes Sebalds first foray into European
imperial history as he describes the building of Antwerps central station.
58 T. KOULOURIS

According to Austerlitz, this was overseen by King Leopold himself and

was built to emulate the Roman Pantheon, albeit with Byzantine and
Moorish features.18 In linking the sinister enclosure of the Nocturama
(captivity) with the central station (travel), whilst also deploying a host of
reminders of European imperialism (Rome, Byzantium, King Leopolds
Belgium), Sebald offers a powerful retrospective of a European civilisation
built on expansionism, exploitation and human pain. Nineteenth-century
European imperialism, as illustrated by its imposing civic architecture, was
pursued not in the name of nature made serviceable to mankind, or even
industrious labour as a social good, but [to symbolise] the principle of
capital accumulation.19
Presiding over all the reminders of European imperialism is, according
to Austerlitz, the notion of time. Rather than being a benign marker of
human progress, this is viewed as a rigid authority whose dual task has
been to ensure, firstly, that Belgian citizens adjust their activities to its
demands and secondly that Belgian trade and commerce could hasten
through the gigantic spaces separating us from each other.20 Austerlitzs
thoughts on the subject are triggered by the imposing clock in Antwerps
central station:

The clock is placed some twenty metres above the only baroque element in
the entire ensemble, the cruciform stairway which leads from the foyer to
the platforms, just where the image of the emperor stood in the Pantheon
[]; as a governor of a new omnipotence it was set even above the royal
coat of arms and the motto Eendracht maakt macht [Union is Power].21

In direct contrast with the intractable, omnipotent authority of reified

time is the fragility and transience of human experience. Here, the role of
photographs in the novel, as in all Sebalds fiction, is crucial. In so far as all
forms of pictorial representation outlive those they represent, photographs
function as one of modernitys most powerful metonymies for mourn-
ing.22 What is more, and given that their role is nothing if not ambiguous,
photographs serve to question the very essence of representational verac-
ity in Sebalds documentarist texts. As Carolin Duttlinger argues, despite
their representational realism and apparent immediacy [photographs] do
not necessarily provide straightforward access to the scenes or experiences
they record.23 Be that as it may, if reflection is a form of (photographic)
representation, the scene in the central stations waiting room is a potent
means of pitting the transience of human life against the permanence and
 TRAUMATIC EUROPE 59

robustness of Europes civic buildings. When Sebald has Austerlitz won-

der, in French, how many workers died from inhaling deadly vapours of
mercury and cyanide whilst manufacturing the tall mirrors of the waiting
room, he reminds the reader that even the most benign of monuments to
European industrial civilisation is, at the same time, a testament to human
suffering, whether of factory workers or of people subjected to colonial
brutality.24
The depiction of human life as decidedly fragile is then juxtaposed
with Austerlitzs extraordinarily detailed foray into the architecture of
European military fortifications. Austerlitz considers a number of such
erections in the first section of the novel, culminating with the fortress of
Breendonk. At this ill-fated complex near Willebroek, a monstrous incar-
nation of ugliness and blind violence, the unnamed narrator, inspired by
Austerlitz, is led to reflect on how little we can hold in mind, how every-
thing is constantly lapsing into oblivion with every extinguished life, how
the world is [] draining itself, in that the history of countless places
and objects which themselves have no power of memory is never heard,
never described.25 Conceived as a fundamental component of modern
European society, militarism pervades the wider culture and conscious-
ness, particularly with regard to its urge towards regulation, distinction
and absolute power.26 For example, to Austerlitzs mind the entire archi-
tecture of the capitalist era is predicated on militarisms compulsive sense
of order and [] tendency toward monumentalism.27 This is evident in
lawcourts and penal institutions, railway stations and stock exchanges,
opera houses and lunatic asylums, and the dwellings built to rectangular
grid patterns for the labour force.28 It is through these general, apparently
tangential details that Sebald presents the socio-historical context of the
Holocaust. The first part of the novel is essentially a history of Europe
underpinned by the vulnerability of human experience and by the tyranny
of European modernity, as defined by its monuments (industrial, imperial,
military and financial). The text then goes through a veritable parade of
pan-European misery and woe, extending from the death of Austerlitzs
childhood friend, Gerald, to the discovery of Austerlitzs real identity and
eventual journey to the Czech Republic, where he comes face to face with
the harrowing anomy perpetrated against his parents and his people.29
It is here that the text reaches a number of important dilemmas. How
does one write the Holocaust? In whose voice and in whose name does
one write and what does one hope to achieve? If, according to Derrida,
death is unthinkable even on a personal level, how can we think of, and
60 T. KOULOURIS

write about, the millions of victims of the Holocaust? The narrative

techniques that Sebald has deployed up to this pointthe multi-layered
reported speech, the photographs, the sub-plots, the long passages of free
indirect discoursecome to a standstill before the enormity of genocide.
That Sebald stops short of narrating the gas chambers, and that he does
not attempt to give a voice to the actual victims, serves my hypothesis on
the essential unthinkability of a scene that would involve describing mass
extermination. This is certainly not to suggest that ghettos like the one in
Terezn are easier to narrate, although, as Dan Diner has shown, no mat-
ter how grotesque the internment and exploitation of millions of people
in ghettos might have been, they nevertheless afforded inmates a sense of
hope that was absent in the extermination camps.30 In referring to these
only as the East, Sebald succeeds in capturing the enormity of the Jewish
torment whilst remaining thoughtfully faithful to the principle that an
aesthetical approximation of the unspeakable woes of people waiting to be
dispatched is not only unethical but also unthinkable.31
Nevertheless, in reaching the point where he has to narrate the Terezn
ghetto, Sebald combines a willingness to speak out for, or on behalf of,
the silenced victims with an affective narrative which respects the mortify-
ing reality of the experience.32 In a long passage that stretches as a single
syntactic section for almost eleven pages, Sebald has Austerlitz narrate the
Terezn ghetto based on the account of the Holocaust survivor H.G.Adler
(19101988).33 The text here succeeds in combining history as chronicle
of verifiable facts with history as narrative, thus complicating not only the
ways in which facts are transmitted, but also our ability to knowthat is
to say, to comprehendthe historical convergence that generated these
facts. In other words, Sebald weaves a narrative which, on the one hand,
captures that which may be knownthe facts of the Terezn ghettoand
on the other justifies what Derrida calls the unthinkable nature of such
loss: that which is ineffable and, therefore, unnarratable.
On a surface level, the documentary evidence provided by Sebald
is compelling. Some sixty thousand souls from all over Europe were
crammed in a bounded ghetto that provided each with two square metres
of space.34 A truly transcontinental community of human pain, the ghetto
housed industrialists and manufacturers, lawyers and doctors, rabbis and
university professors, bank managers, businessmen, shorthand typists,
housewives, farmers, labourers and millionaires, people from Prague and
the rest of the Protectorate, from Slovakia, from Denmark and Holland,
from Vienna and Munich, Cologne and Berlin, from the Palatinate, from
Lower Franconia and Westphalia.35 Sebald describes the extraordinary
 TRAUMATIC EUROPE 61

bureaucracy of the Kommandatur committed to the systematic extinc-

tion of life and lists the everyday torments that the inmates had to deal
with: the disposal of their dead, the disease, the dashed hopes of those
who were fooled into believing that they might be spared, the monstrous
fate of those marked Rkkehr Nicht Erwnscht [Return not Desired], the
propagandist general improvement campaign before the visit of the Red
Cross in the summer of 1944 and the film the Nazis shot for propaganda
purposes or in order to justify their actions and conduct to themselves.36
Importantly, Sebald seeks neither to empathise with the Holocaust vic-
tims nor to provide a philosophico-historical revisionist elaboration of the
legitimacy of writing about the Holocaust as a German, that is to say, as a
socio-historically embedded social actor. (Let us not forget that Austerlitz
was published after Sebalds air-war lectures, which included comments
on the Allied bombing of German cities for which he was criticised.37)
Equally, his insistence on capturing the enduring currency of death, loss
and trauma as a pan-European legacy aims neither at diverting attention
from the Nazis as perpetrators of horrendous crimes, nor at minimis-
ing the enormity and singularity of the Holocaust as a historical reality
that aimed at exterminating a whole race. Rather, he seeks to encode this
unthinkable atrocity precisely within a set of socio-historical and socio-
economic circumstances which have the tendency, if not exactly to repeat
themselves, then at least to (re)open the dreadful possibility of renewed
violence and shame in our time.

AUSTERLITZ INOUR TIME

In reading Austerlitz in relation to the specificity of its subject-matter and
in terms of its historical situatedness at the dawn of the twenty-first century,
I do not suggest that there are identical socio-political parallels between
the Second World War and the present. The Holocaust was certainly the
culmination of Europes century of barbarismthe singular event which
Derrida in Shibboleth (1986) calls the hell of our memory and I
by no means wish to imply a similar collective intentionality in the pres-
ent.38 However, in so far as the Holocaust cannot be dissociated from the
wider trends in the inter-war years, we are justified in reading Austerlitz
from an interpretative angle that should, at the very least, be sensitive
to contemporary socio-historical conjunctures.39 It is perfectly legitimate
to argue that Europes contemporary political, financial and media elites
have facilitated a number of far-right initiatives that have placed conflict
and suffering at the very core of the European project. These range from
62 T. KOULOURIS

the hierarchical structuration of the Eurozonewhat we may call finan-

cial centralismto the appeasement of genocide in Bosnia, where mass
slaughter returned to Europe at the exact moment that President Clinton,
at the opening of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington in
1993, proclaimed never again.40
Despite being a deeply Eurocentric text, Austerlitz brings into sharp
focus the ways in which contemporary Europe as a union of nations and
cultures deals with the challenge of adhering to the foundational tenets of
the Treaty of Rome (1957). Reading through Austerlitz, I detect a pro-
nounced dichotomy between a contemporary Europe which, on a surface
level, seeks to present itself as a collective of nations on a mission to tran-
scend the traumas of the past and, on a deeper level, which embodies a vast
collective of ordinary citizens tormented both by the traumas of the past and
by an EU committed to serving the interests of a select few. It has become
increasingly apparent, especially since 1992, that the grand idealisms of
the original trans-European pactharmonious co-existence, unity, soli-
darity, democracy, isonomyhad no practical existence. On the one hand,
the EUs efforts to forge an ostensibly European identity are continually
thwarted by forces prioritising national sovereignty and the specificity of
national culture; on the other, the Eurozones commitment to a neoliberal-
ist form of austerity politics has stifled both the principle of democracy and
the principle of collective and individual human rights.41 In addition, western
Europes deep-seated ethnocentric (or region-centric) bias has become ever
more apparent. After its indifference to the plight of the Bosnian Muslim
population, it showed an arrogant will-to-power over the eastern European
accession states and the crisis-ridden territories of Africa and the Middle
East, which has resulted both in increased migrant and refugee population
flows to Europe and in increased hostility to such flows.
This state of affairs has been exacerbated by the centralising tendencies
of the EUs socio-economic vision. As Costas Lapavitsas argues, the pro-
cess of Europes financialisation, which accelerated relentlessly after the
Maastricht Treaty (1992), has deep roots that stretch back to the early
1970s.42 However, after the advent of the single European currency at the
beginning of the 2000s, the fifty-year route to unification has come to be
seen by many as nothing more than a process of financial colonialism.43 It
seems that, whilst Project Europe pushes for an ever closer financial(ised)
union controlled by a powerful neoliberalist core, it remains indifferent
to the misery of its own people and to the woes of thousands of war-torn
refugees, who either drown whilst trying to reach its shores or end up
 TRAUMATIC EUROPE 63

in detention camps strewn across the European continent. The wave of

privatisation, deregulation and de-welfarisation forced on former eastern
bloc countries before their accession to the EU has now been extended
to Greece, perhaps the most annoyingly elusive fly in Europes neolib-
eral ointment. Greeces relationship with its EU partnersespecially with
Germanyhas reopened old wounds which, contrary to what the EUs
political elites would have us believe, are decidedly not healed. The aus-
terity measures which have been causing crisis in Greece, unfolding as
this book goes to press, have reactivated fault lines that the continent
was supposed to have moved beyond. Tellingly, the cover of the German
journal Der Spiegel on 21 March 2015 features a photoshopped picture
of Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, on the rock of the Athenian
Acropolis next to a group of Nazi officers, with a caption that reads, How
the Germans look to Europeans: the German superior force.44 We should
also not forget the dehumanising language employed by most European
governments to refer to the refugees fleeing the war-ravaged areas of
the Middle East, language that Zeid Raad Al Hussein, the UN High
Commissioner for Human Rights, explicitly links to the ways in which
Europes elites referred to the plight of the Jews in the 1930s.45 In short,
the current historical conjuncture in Europe is nothing short of alarming.
Amongst the multiple crises of contemporary Europe one thing is certain:
no form of socio-cultural or political (let alone economic) convergence
can take place when the traumas of the past have not even begun to teach
us how to avoid catastrophe in the present.
Read in conjunction with the rest of Sebalds oeuvre, especially Die
Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants, 1993) and Die Ringe des Saturn (The
Rings of Saturn, 1998), and against the larger historical developments
described above, Austerlitz constitutes a complex yet caustic critique of
the ways in which twenty-first-century Europe thinks of itself, of its citi-
zens and of its prospects as a union. This is nowhere more obvious than
in Sebalds descriptions of Austerlitzs meetings with the unnamed narra-
tor in Lige and Brussels. In Lige, Austerlitz launches into a two-hour
discourse on how, in the nineteenth century, the vision of model towns
for workers entertained by philanthropic entrepreneurs had inadvertently
changed into the practice of accommodating them in barracks.46 Just as
European commercial elites are treated with unmistakable sarcasm, so is
the supposed system of justice in Europe. While in Brusselsthe very
heart of the EUAusterlitz describes the Palace of Justice as the larg-
est accumulation of stone blocks anywhere in Europe and as a singular
64 T. KOULOURIS

architectural monstrosity.47 He then goes on to conceptualise the aloof,

undisputed authority vested in Europes self-serving institutions: this
huge pile of over seven hundred thousand cubic metres contains corridors
and stairways leading nowhere, and doorless rooms and halls where no one
would ever set foot, empty spaces surrounded by walls and representing
the innermost secret of sanctioned authority (emphasis added).48 As the
accumulating negatives make clear, at the heart of European authority is an
emptiness, an absolute lack of humanity. Sebald continues in the same vein
towards the end of the text when Austerlitz visits the new Bibliothque
National. This is located on the waste land between the marshalling yard
of the Gare dAusterlitz and the Pont Tolbiac, where there once stood
an extensive warehousing complex to which the Germans brought all the
loot they had taken from the homes of the Jews of Paris.49 Austerlitzs
visit to the Bibliothque National works metonymically to indict the fact
that contemporary Europe, symbolised again by its magnificent if over-
bearing architecture, has been built on layers and layers of human misery
and pain. In the years from 1942 onwards, writes Sebald, everything our
[European] civilisation has produced, whether for the embellishment of
life or merely for everyday use, from Louis XVI chests of drawers, Meissen
porcelain, down to the last salt-cellar and pepper-mill, was stacked there
in the Austerlitz-Tolbiac storage depot.50 With the whereabouts of these
looted items still shrouded in silence, Sebald can only conclude that the
whole affair is buried in the most literal sense beneath the foundations of
[the] pharaonic Presidents Grande Bibliothque.51
It would be a disservice to the torments of the past if Austerlitz were
not read as a novel which warns of the dangers of the present. To my
mind, Sebald is what Hayden White calls a philosopher of history, one
who [s]eeks not only to understand what happened in history but also to
specify the criteria by which he can know when he has successfully grasped
its meaning or significance.52 Sebald, in other words, fulfils his role as a
public intellectual whose job is to intervene in a socio-political reality and
to advance insights into how culture may uphold social justice, freedom,
equality and truth.53 To be sure, Sebalds overall project is preoccupied
not only with the ways in which loss and trauma have come to haunt
Europes collective imagination, but also with the material circumstances
that give rise to dispossession, poverty and war. When read through the
lens of the current historical convergence, the novels concern with impe-
rialism, capitalism and militarism is as relevant now as it ever was, speak-
ing to the catastrophe caused by the ever closer integration between state
 TRAUMATIC EUROPE 65

power, finance and major industrial conglomerates. And let us not forget
that whole peoples are still demonised for either refusing to adhere to,
or keep up with, the socio-economic vision of the EU, or for trying to
flee from the conflicts in Africa and the Middle East, the seeds of which
western Europe itself was instrumental in sowing.54 Austerlitz reminds the
reader that western Europes state-of-the-art central stations and transport
infrastructure, its magnificent architecture and fascination with open bor-
ders, are in place to facilitate flows of financial, industrial and commercial
capital. When it comes to flows of ordinary people, or indeed of peoples
democratic will, insurmountable barriers are routinely raised.55
Our concern with history, argues Sebald in Austerlitz, is a concern
with pre-formed images already imprinted on the brain, images at which
we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, some-
where as yet undiscovered.56 There is no doubt that history and truth in
contemporary Europe are so often left to transnational media networks,
to financial technocrats and to an array of governmental experts. As
such, the principles which have underpinned one of the major strands
of European thought since the Enlightenmentsocial justice, freedom,
respect for the democratic process and for human rightsare treated as
unaffordable frivolities that have no place in the relentlessly financialised
reality of homo economicus.57 That being said, in reading Austerlitz we
realise that beyond the economic reasons for the persecution of the Jews
lay a deep socio-cultural (if not metaphysical) belief in the indescribable
genetic evil that the Jewish people were supposed to contain.58 Far from
considering such matters unthinkable in the twenty-first century, it seems
that contemporary Europe is once again preoccupied with, and seeks to
protect itself from, similar evils, be they cultural, religious, economic or,
indeed, genetic.59 Austerlitz warns us that this is the worst possible sce-
nario for Europe and the wider world.60

NOTES
1. Adorno, Cultural Criticism and Society, in Adorno, Prisms, trans. by
Samuel M.Weber (1955; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), p.34.
2. For a comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon, see Amnesty International,
The Human Cost of Fortress Europe: Human Rights Violations against
Migrants and Refugees at Europes Borders (2014), Amnesty International,
http://www.amnesty.eu/content/assets/Reports/EUR_050012014_
Fortress_Europe_complete_web_EN.pdf (accessed 2 September 2015).
66 T. KOULOURIS

3. For an introduction to financialisation, see Costas Lapavitsas, Profiting with-

out Producing (2013) and Crisis in the Eurozone (2012); Giovanni Arrighi,
The Long Twentieth Century (1994); Bastiaan Apeldoorn and Laura Horn,
The Marketisation of European Corporate Control: A Critical Political
Economy Perspective, New Political Economy, Vol. 12, No. 2 (2007),
pp. 21135; and Dorothee Bohle and Bla Greskovits, Neoliberalism,
Embedded Neolibralism, and Neocorporatism: Towards Transnational
Capitalism in Central-Eastern Europe, West European Politics, Vol. 30, No.
3 (2007), pp.44366.
4. Debates about Holocaust representation are complex and beyond the scope
of my remit here. A meticulous account of these debates may be found in
Brad Pager, The Good German as Narrator: On W.G.Sebald and the Risks
of Holocaust Writing, New German Critique, Vol. 96 (2005), pp.75102.
5. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. by Anthea Bell (2001; London: Penguin, 2002),
pp.96, 97.
6. On trauma and repetition, see Gabrielle Schwabb, Haunting Legacies:
Violent Histories and Transgenerational Trauma (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2010), pp. 235. The future [or more precisely that
which is to come] can only be anticipated, writes Derrida, in the form of
absolute danger (Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak (1967; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p.5).
7. Austerlitz admits to an obsession with Europes railway stations which he
regards as places marked by both blissful happiness and profound misfor-
tune, an admission that underscores the emotional ambivalence of a survi-
vor who owes both his physical life and the death of his former identity to
Europes railway transport (Sebald, Austerlitz, p.45).
8. For example, see ibid., pp.74, 1469, 26676, 27780, 385403.
9. Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Benjamin, Illuminations,
trans. by Harry Zorn (1955; London: Pimlico, 1999), p.248.
10. Habermas, The European Nation-State: On the Past and Future of
Sovereignty and Citizenship, Public Culture, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1998), p.402.
11. Derrida, The Work of Mourning, trans. and edited by Pascale-Anne Brault
and Michael Naas (2001; Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003), p.214.
12. Freud argues that when the work of mourning is completed the ego
becomes free and uninhibited again (Freud, Mourning and Melancholia,
in Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV (19141916): On the History of the Psycho-
Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, trans. and
edited by James Strachey and Anna Freud (London: The Hogarth Press,
1957), p. 245). Impossible mourning should not be confused with the
collective mood of post-1945 Germany, which was marked by what
Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich called its inability to mourn (see
Gerhard Fischer, Writing Ex Patria: W.G.Sebald and the Construction of
 TRAUMATIC EUROPE 67

a Literary Identity, in Dhaen and Goerlandt, eds, Literature for Europe?,

p.273). Whereas Derridas impossible (or resistant) mourning seeks to
conceptualise a systematic ethico-political apparatus to deal with death and
loss, inability to mourn refers to the specific German incapacity to come to
terms with the atrocities of World War Two (see Sebald, Constructs of
Mourning: Gnter Grass and Wolfgang Hildesheimer, in Sebald, Campo
Santo, trans. by Anthea Bell, edited by Sven Meyer (2003; London: Penguin,
2006), pp.1025).
13. See Derrida, Work of Mourning, p.144.
14. See Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. by George Collins (1994; London:
Verso, 2005), pp.125.
15. For my purposes here, I do not distinguish between intentionalist and func-
tionalist approaches to the Holocaust: see Dominick LaCapra, Writing
History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2001), p.11.
16. Diner, Historical Understanding and Counterrationality: The Judenrat as
Epistemological Vantage, in Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, eds, The
Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2003), p.80.
17. LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1994), p.220.
18. See Sebald, Austerlitz, pp.912.
19. Ibid., p.13.
20. Ibid., p.14.
21. Ibid., p.13.
22. See Derrida, Athens, Still Remains, trans. by Pascale-Anne Brault and
Michael Naas (2009; NewYork: Fordham University Press, 2010), pp.23.
23. Duttlinger, Traumatic Photographs: Remembrance and the Technical
Media in W.G.Sebalds Austerlitz, in J.J.Long and Anne Whitehead, eds,
W.G. Sebald: A Critical Companion (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 2004), p.157.
24. See Sebald, Austerlitz, p.15.
25. Ibid., pp.26, 301.
26. Ibid., p.19.
27. Ibid., p.44.
28. Ibid., p.44.
29. See ibid., pp.1645, 203.
30. Diner, Historical Understanding, p.80.
31. Sebald, Austerlitz, p.332. Sebald does describe a scene in which five hun-
dred dead bodies [were] stacked on top of each other in the central
morgue, but this is the only time he does so and its purpose is to showcase
the enormity of Nazi crimes not to second-guess the victims woe (ibid.,
p.337).
68 T. KOULOURIS

32. For an interesting elaboration on this point, see Katja Garloff, The Task of
the Narrator: Moments of Symbolic Investiture in W.G.Sebalds Austerlitz,
in Scott D. Denham and Mark Richard McCulloch, eds, W.G. Sebald:
History, Memory, Trauma (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006), pp.15769.
33. Sebald, Austerlitz, pp.33142.
34. Ibid., p.332.
35. Ibid., p.331.
36. Ibid., pp.337, 338, 3412.
37. See Sebald, Air War and Literature: Zrich Lectures, in Sebald, On the
Natural History of Destruction, trans. by Anthea Bell (1999; London:
Penguin, 2004), pp.3106). Whilst generally well received, especially after
Sebalds untimely death in 2001, a number of commentators criticised
Sebalds tone, in so far as it raised a number of problematic issues pertaining
to collective memory and the task of works of literature vis--vis social issues
of magnitude: specifically, the Holocaust in parallel examination of the suf-
fering of German civilians during the Allied bombings (see, for example,
Andreas Huyssen, Rewritings and new Beginnings: W.G.Sebald and the
Literature on the Air War, in Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests
and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003),
pp. 13857; and Simon Ward, Responsible Ruins? W.G. Sebald and the
Responsibility of the German Writer, Forum for Modern Language Studies,
Vol. 42, No. 2 (2006), pp.18396).
38. Derrida, Shibboleth, in Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, eds, The
Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2003), p.307.
39. See Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century
19141991, new edn (1994; London: Abacus, 1995), pp.369.
40. See Stjepan G.Metrovi, The Balkanization of the West: The Confluence of
Postmodernism and Postcommunism (London and New York: Routledge,
1994), p.32.
41. See Elena Crespi, Matthias Sant-Ana and Sylvain Aubry, Downgrading
Rights: The Cost of Austerity in Greece (Paris: FIDH, 2014), pp.46. A num-
ber of thinkers have written very eloquently about the issue of neoliberal-
isms democratic deficit: see, for example, Wendy Browns Undoing the
Demos: Neoliberalisms Stealth Revolution (2015) and Tariq Alis The
Extreme Centre: A Warning (2015).
42. Lapavitsas, Profiting without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All
(London: Verso, 2013), p.290.
43. In other words, this is a form of financial centralism which favours the EUs
core at the expense of Europes peoples, especially the peoples of the so-
called European periphery. For example, western European countries with
grave financial problems include Portugal, Ireland, Italy and Spain which,
 TRAUMATIC EUROPE 69

along with Greece, have come to be known by the acronym P.I.I.G.S.

Beyond the offensiveness of this acronym, the stand-off between the pru-
dent north and the indolent south bears testament to the ways in which
prejudices of old still play an obstructive role in the formation of a common
European identity.
44. See Manfred Ertel, Katrin Kuntz and Walter Mayr, Study Sheds New Light
on Forced Greek Loans, Der Spiegel, http://www.spiegel.de/interna-
tional/germany/greek-study-provides-evidence-of-forced-loans-to-nazis-
a-1024762.html (accessed 15 August 2015).
45. See Sam Jones, Refugee Rhetoric Echoes 1938 Summit before Holocaust,
UN Official Warns, The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/global-
development/2015/oct/14/refugee-rhetoric-echoes- 1938-summit-
before-holocaust-un-official-warns (accessed 1 November 2016).
46. Sebald, Austerlitz, p.37.
47. Ibid., p.38.
48. Ibid., p.39.
49. Ibid., p.401.
50. Ibid., p.402.
51. Ibid., p. 403. Of course, this practice did not only take place in Paris.
Austerlitz points out the frightening bureaucracy of the Greater German
Reich which created across Central Europe a well-ordered network of con-
trol and expropriation: I studied the maps of the Greater German Reich
and its protectorates [], I traced the railway lines running through them,
felt blinded by the documentation recording the population policy of the
National Socialists, which was put into practice on a vast scale through mea-
sures partly improvised, partly devised with obsessive organizational zeal
(ibid., pp.2789).
52. White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century
Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), p.428.
53. For the role of intellectuals in the contemporary European crisis, see Costas
Douzinas, Philosophy and Resistance in the Crisis (Cambridge: Polity, 2013),
pp.198208.
54. The European Commissions own report on the recent migration crisis
admits that Europes collective response has been insufficient (see
European Commission, A European Agenda on Migration, European
Commission, http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/home-affairs/what-we-do/policies/
european-agenda-migration/background-information/docs/communica-
tion_on_the_european_agenda_on_migration_en.pdf (accessed 15 August
2015). Although the main problem that the report isolates pertains to lack
of adequate co-operation between member-states, this lack of co-operation
in turn points towards Europes reawakened racism and towards its unwill-
ingness to invest adequate funds to counter this urgent humanitarian crisis
70 T. KOULOURIS

(see Ruth Wodak, Anything Goes!The Haiderization of Europe, in Ruth

Wodak, Majid KhosraviNik and Brigitte Mral, eds, Right-Wing Populism in
Europe: Politics and Discourse (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp.2337).
55. As I write these lines, a pan-European network of resistance to the EUs
financial centralism is being organised by solidarity networks in Greece,
Spain, Italy, Ireland, Germany and elsewhere. The spread of these networks,
alongside the rise of radical left parties, such as Greeces SY.RIZ.A and
Spains Podemos, have produced anxiety amongst EU elites. A number of
thinkers, economists and political scientists concur that one of Germanys
underlying aims in penalising Greece so severely was to stifle similar initia-
tives in countries where comparable forms of democratic resistance have
started to gain traction. Perhaps the most vocal of such criticisms has come
from Jrgen Habermas, one of Europes most stalwart integrationists, who
openly accused Chancellor Merkel of having gambled Germanys [post-
war] reputation away (Philip Oltermann, Jrgen Habermass Verdict on
the EU/Greece Debt Deal, The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.
com/commentisfree/2015/jul/16/jurgen-habermas-eu-greece-debt-deal
(accessed 15 August 2015).
56. Sebald, Austerlitz, p.101.
57. See Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalisms Stealth Revolution
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015), pp.79112.
58. See Lon Poliakov, The History of Anti-Semitism, Vol IV: Suicidal Europe,
18701933, trans. by George Klin (1977; Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2003), pp.316.
59. In a recent article published in the German conservative newspaper Die
Welt, Seewald von Berthold suggests that one of the basic problems of hav-
ing Greece in Europe is that, although its elites think that the Greeks are the
descendants of Pericles and Socrates, they are in fact a mixture of Slavs,
Byzantines and Albanians (von Berthold, Griechenland zerstrte schon
einmal Europas Ordnun, Die Welt, http://m.welt.de/geschichte/ arti-
cle142305296/Griechenland-zerstoerte-schon-einmal-Europas-Ordnung.
html (accessed 15 August 2015)).
60. I would like to thank Patricia McManus and Elena Gualtieri for their criti-
cally astute interventions; many thanks also to Andrew Hammond for his
invaluable editorial advice.
 3

gota Kristf s Europe: (Un)Connectedness

and(Non-)Belonging inThe Third Lie

MetkaZupani

After the Second World War, especially between 1948 and 1989, European
social and political life was dominated by the Cold War. In the West, finan-
cial support from the USA aimed at warding off the expansionist tenden-
cies of the Soviet Union, while the Truman Doctrine (1947) reaffirmed
US leadership of the free world. During his March 1946 visit to the
USA, Churchill addressed the problem of divided Europe and used the
term Iron Curtain to describe the increasing separation between East
and West. The appearance of the Cominform (1947), the Prague coup
(1948) and the Soviet blockade of Berlin (1948) encouraged the forma-
tion of the Brussels Pact in April 1948 and the creation of NATO in April
1949. The USSR took control of the countries beyond the Iron Curtain
East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania,
Albania and Yugoslaviaand, with the exception of Yugoslavia, which split
with Moscow in 1948, imposed dictatorial systems maintained through
repression. Soviet rule in the satellite countries went through a number
of stages between the death of Stalin and the revolutions of 1989. The
post-Stalinist era, which began with Khrushchevs speech at the Twentieth
Party Congress in 1956, promised a less repressive society, yet dissent was

M. Zupani ( )
Department of Modern Languages and Classics, University of Alabama, 870246,
Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0246, USA

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 71

A. Hammond (ed.), The Novel and Europe,
DOI10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4_3
72 M. ZUPANI

still crushed. For example, in October 1956, young Hungarians fought

Soviet tanks with their bare hands and many thousands fled, mainly to
Austria, from where they were relocated to various western countries.1
By the late 1960s, the satellite states had entered a period of decline. The
slowly disintegrating system presided over by Brezhnev was dealt a final
blow by Gorbachevs perestroika. In Hungary, foreshadowing other major
events in the eastern bloc, a relatively peaceful transition in October 1989
brought an end to the pro-Soviet system.2
These events had a direct bearing on the Hungarian-born writer gota
Kristf (19352011). With her husband and baby daughter, Kristf
fled her home country during the uprising in 1956 and was relocated
to Neuchtel in Switzerland, where she worked in a watch factory while
painstakingly learning French, the language she mainly used for her fic-
tion.3 This offered a particular view of Europe as she experienced it firstly
in Hungary and later in Switzerland, and as she presented it in her pro-
foundly disturbing trilogy: Le grand cahier (The Notebook, 1986), La
preuve (The Proof, 1988) and Le troisime mensonge (The Third Lie,
1991). As the trilogy illustrates, Kristf occupies a distinct space within
the recent category of translingual or allophone authors born in a tradi-
tionally non-Francophone country who chose to write in French (such as
Milan Kundera, Andre Makine and the 2000 Nobel Prize laureate Gao
Xingjian). While she claims with many contemporary women authors
the right to express herself, her prose is ideologically and philosophically
far from that of the French feminists, who fostered a new awareness of
women in a multicultural and mutually supportive environment. One of
the major influences on Kristfs work is the fact that she had not been
exposed to French until later in life. As she explored the notions of hybrid
identity, multilingualism and transnational conditioning, she wrote in a
non-European Union country, Switzerland, on the periphery of the trends
that were fuelled in France by the interconnectedness and overlapping of
cultures.4
Kristfs The Third Lie focuses more on issues of non-belonging or,
rather, impossible belongings and impossible identities in times of con-
flict. Constant modifications of (fictional) realities, with reversals of for-
tune and conflicting interpretations of characters origins, may serve as an
allegory of Europes changing times after the Second World War, most
obviously those of Hungary (although the country in which the novel
is set is never named). These transformations also serve to point at a
continuous deconstruction of leading ideologies and modes of existence
 GOTA KRISTFS EUROPE 73

in various contexts, including those defined by national borders, with

their shifting nature and unpredictable level of divisiveness and danger
for those who attempt to cross them. The world on the other side may
prove to be deadly for a number of characters or, at least, threatens to
rob them of all sense of belonging. On the other hand, staying within
the framework of a prescribed existence (as we may imagine it in post-
1956 Hungary) is no guarantee of happiness, connectedness, trust or
mutual understanding. The choice of having twin brothers at the core
of the trilogy, symbiotically connected, apparently identical yet unavoid-
ably separate, with little possibility of reconciliation or recognition, is the
foundation on which constant reversals of fortune are built. Stiffened
emotions, distrust, violence, with introvert yet passive-aggressive person-
alities, come to life in a prose that has been polished to the core.5 The
trilogys major strength comes from the apparent detachment of the nar-
ration, behind which one senses a particular form of compassion for the
unbearable suffering caused by forced or self-inflicted exile, involuntary
migration and impassable borders.
In order to better delineate the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of The
Third Lie it is important to gain brief insight into the first two novels of the
trilogy. In her interviews with Erica Durante, Kristf often repeated that
her writing could never render the authenticity of the horrendous events
she attempted to transcribe, although they were clearly related to her own
life.6 The two protagonists were largely inspired by her own childhood
during the Second World War, when she and her brother were sent to live
in a village close to the Hungarian border. The characters disillusionment
with the authoritarian regime installed after the war in all probability stems
from the writers own aversion to the impositions of Marxist dogma she
experienced during her teenage years.7 During the novelistic reworking of
her memories, Kristfs experiences were morphed into the twin brothers
first-person narrative, which initially deploys the plural we rather than the
more conventional I. The aesthetics of this prose, its unusual beauty and
its impact on readers, come from a refined, subtle and precarious balance
between the extremes of human emotion and their deliberate suppression.
In the first volume, The Notebook, the two unnamed boys establish their
own set of ethical principles. Left to ward for themselves in the house of
a vicious grandmother, they secretly confine their tribulations to a note-
book that contains their observations on the (German) invasion, the per-
secution of (Jewish) refugees, the suffering of the wider population, the
conflicts between opposing factions in the village and the death of their
74 M. ZUPANI

mother. By necessity, they learn survival skills while navigating a course

between the oppression of the wartime regime and the tyranny of their
grandmother. At the end of the war, new occupiers coming from the East
violently replace the recent invaders. The Notebook ends with the chapter
The Separation, in which the twin brothers plan the crossing of the bor-
der with their presumed father, who unexpectedly appears in the village
and wants to leave the country. In a clear allusion to the Iron Curtain, the
border is heavily guarded and fortified, with a large mined space between
the two fences. As the twins have anticipated, the father dies in an explo-
sion, which allows one of the boys to cross over, while the other returns to
the grandmothers house.
The Proof, the second novel in the trilogy, shifts from the first-person
we to a third-person narrative. Lucas, the twin brother who remained in
the country, is named for the first time, although nobody in the village or
among the patrolling soldiers who collected the dead mans body seems
to have noticed the disappearance of a sibling. Moreover, when Lucas
mentions to a rare friend that he has placed the notebooks in hiding for
his brother (now named as Claus), the friend expresses surprise: I didnt
know you had a brother. Youve never mentioned him. Nobody has.8
This is how Kristf inverts any preconceived notions about the narrative
and raises the question of whether the two brothers are actually one and
the same person. Lucas continues his rather peculiar life in the village,
keeping his secrets to himself and protecting himself from the brutality
of the regime. The historic background is clearly that of the early 1950s
in Hungary: innocent people are imprisoned and the system eliminates
whoever does not agree with its impositions.9 Peter, Lucass rare friend,
describes the hope for change: Our country is in the throes of an upris-
ing. A counterrevolution. It began with intellectuals writing things they
shouldnt have. [] But it all began to get out of hand when the work-
ers and even a part of the army joined up with the students.10 These
are doubtless the events of the Hungarian Uprising and the consequent
invasion of the Soviet army, called in by the Hungarian government itself,
which asked for the help of our great protectors against the enemies of
the people.11 It is during this divisive period that Lucas yearns for his
absent brother Claus and, amidst the despair felt by many characters for
the future, finally disappears. In the last chapter of The Proof, set some
decades later in a changed political atmosphere that suggests 1989, Lucas
seems to be supplanted by Claus who arrives by train and declares that he
lived in the area during his early years.12 Is the new man really Claus and
 GOTA KRISTFS EUROPE 75

not Lucas, as the towns people tend to believe? Can Claus be entrusted
with the notebooks, a testimony Lucas left of the time he did not share
with his brother? The anagram of the double name, Claus-Lucas, certainly
contributes to the increasing sense that the twin brothers are a single con-
sciousness, one that has been torn in two by Cold War division. Is one to
believe Clauss stories about his 30 years spent on the other side and his
reasons for not wanting to stay there?13 In a statement that again shows
the divide between East and West, as well as the disillusionment of an
expatriate, Claus declares that he has lived in a society based on money.
There is no place for questions about life.14 His acute awareness of the
environmental problems in the western town he lived in undermines any
idyllic perception that people may have of the free world:

At one time, when I first came, it was a charming small town with a lake,
forest, low old houses, and many parks. Now it is cut off from the lake by
a highway, its forest has been decimated, its parks have disappeared, and
tall buildings have made it ugly. [] The old bistros have been replaced by
soulless restaurants and fast-food places where people eat quickly, sometimes
even standing up.15

At the end of The Proof, Claus T., aged fifty, holder of a valid passport and
a thirty-day tourist visa, is being held in the prison of the town of K. and
is about to be repatriated.16 The most incriminating documents are the
notebooks written in the same handwriting as his own, which means that
there is no proof that their real author, Lucas, actually exists.17
In her in-depth analysis of the trilogy, Martha Kuhlman emphasises
the political dimension of the novels and the architecture of a fictional
labyrinth that can be read as a parable for Europe during the Cold War
years.18 In her words, the division between Eastern and Western Europe
appears through the model of an unnamed Central European country
that has endured the three successive shocks of Nazism, Socialism and
Capitalism.19 Kuhlman posits that readers, instead of trying to identify
the countries whose histories may have generated these narratives, should
view the novels in a broader sense, since they hold a wider relevance
to a number of countries on opposite sides of the Iron Curtain.20 The
novels address more than one clear-cut situation, as the reader is left in
the unsettling position of negotiating and deciding between conflicting
versions of the same event.21 Nevertheless, Kuhlman finds a clear focus in
the trilogy on the way that life in Cold War Europe continually inclined
76 M. ZUPANI

towards the frontier that divided it. In The Notebook, the pressures on the
unnamed twins to flee the country produces movement from the East to
the West, whereas in the second novel, The Proof, the energies are directed
from the West to the East, with one of the brothers, Lucas, keeping track
of events in the East while expecting the return of Claus, the twin who
managed to cross the border. In her analysis of The Third Lie, Kuhlman
explores the dramatic tensions in a post-1989 East that is again gravitating
towards the West, but in a different way than apparent during the Cold
War. Claus is on the verge of being expelled from the country as his visa
expires. The situation becomes even more complicated in a final encounter
with his supposed twin, who pretends not to recognize his brother []
and turns him away.22 This is where Kuhlman brings in Freuds notion of
the uncanny, the Unheimlich, to explain that [t]he elements of the scene
are always the same, but their placement and disposition shift: there is one
child or two, a border between East and West, and a man who must cross
a mine field to escape to the other side; all the rest is a matter of inter-
pretation, depending upon which perspective we occupy.23 Kuhlman con-
cludes that she reads the changing and contradicting narrative elements of
the novels as a warning of how malleable the past actually is, especially
in Central European countries who must reconstruct their history after
decades of Communist subterfuge, while also attempting to memorialize
the victims of the Second World War.24
More specifically, the trilogy analyses the atmosphere of violence
and repression that characterised the Cold War. The parabolic nature of
Kristfs prose is particularly effective for capturing the uncertainty of
truth in a period defined by heightened clandestinity, propaganda, sus-
picion and paranoia. In The Third Lie, situations abound where nothing
is stable, everything may be a lie and there is hardly any way to discover
whether there is truth to be found in the complicated relationships. The
novel initially reverts to a first-person narrative by the prisoner, Claus, who
uses his time in confinement to write, although the content of his writing
may be held against him. His hesitations over the true stories he wishes
to relate, as opposed to an imagined reality that may be less painful, are
certainly a mise en abyme for Kristfs own writing dilemmas.25 Reliving
his past through his notes, Claus explains that his childhood was spent in
hospitals and that he was in a coma at the beginning of the war. After the
bombing of a rehabilitation centre in the area, the boy was placed with an
elderly widow whose description was found at the end of The Proof. In The
Third Lie, the official notice, Mrs. V., ne Maria Z., is deceased without
 GOTA KRISTFS EUROPE 77

heirs, is an indication of the old womans demise; at this time the boy is
almost 15 and alone, with no brother by his side (378). The period must
be that of the early 1950s, as references are made to a repressive communal
social system that paradoxically leaves the boy homeless after the authori-
ties reclaim the putative grandmothers house. At this point, he accepts to
guide across the border an unknown man who inevitably perishes in a land-
mine explosion, allowing the boy to cross over safely. The situation from
The Notebook is faithfully repeated here, but the man is not the father and
there is again no mention of a brother. In a flash-forward, after an absence
of nearly forty years, Claus dreams in the prison of a brother whom he
kills, a fratricide that finally makes them inseparable (367). Metaphorically,
this murdera dream, a nightmarerelates to all the killings in this coun-
try and to the harrowing obligation placed on the living to remember
the dead. In Clauss own writing within the novel, the discussions about
the brother suggest that the latter has always been a mental figment that
allows Claus to endure the unbearable solitude (395). If we are to read
the trilogy as a parable for the Cold War, we understand Clauss tribula-
tions as an example of the (inner) conflicts on both sides of the political
divide: the dream of closeness and understanding in opposition to a sys-
tem that continues to insist on continental division. This comes to light
when the authorities do not believe in the authenticity of the notebooks
and see Claus as one of the emigrants who have now returned in search
of belonging (398). The pompous affirmation by the officials that [o]
ur country currently belongs to the free world is a clear reference to the
political changes of 1989 (398). But Claus does not care about this appar-
ent freedom, doubting its reality and claiming that he has returned home
to die.
The events from the past continue to surface as the novel, now in a
third-person discourse, reveals a story that has not yet been told in the
trilogy. On the western side of the border, soldiers once rescued a boy
who crossed no mans land by walking over the corpse of a deceased man.
He pretends to be Claus T.Age eighteen, but since he has no identifica-
tion papers, the truth about him may never come to light (404). As we
are told:

The child signs the statement, in which there are three lies.
The man he crossed the frontier with was not his father.
The child is not eighteen, but fifteen.
His name is not Claus. (405)
78 M. ZUPANI

The third lie on the list offers a key to interpreting the novels title. In order
to survive in a new environment, an emigrant assumes a new identity. A nec-
essary lie may initially facilitate integration, but may also have harsh reper-
cussions when the person returns to the home country, especially to a place
like Hungary, where suspicion was an important part of bureaucratic repres-
sion even after the apparent change of the system. In this context, Clauss
doppelgnger, or possibly his brother (now said to be an important poet
who writes under the penname Klaus Lucas), navigates between his own
lies and the different identities he assumes, often with regard to outer cir-
cumstances, so that he comes to develop a duality within himself. Symbolic
of the larger political dimensions, the situation becomes even more intricate
when the insider (Lucas or Klaus Lucas) is to face the intruder (Claus) and
decides to forge yet another set of lies to preserve his status.
In his life in the West, lies have been a necessary dimension for the
presumed Claus. He wants to use the notebooks he has brought with
him to become a writer in the language of his new country. (Clearly, at
this juncture, we cannot trust any longer the information presented about
the notebooks in The Proof.) By his avowal, in one version of the note-
books Claus has written [s]tories that arent true but might be (410).
His need to sufficiently master the adoptive language, in order to share
his memories, mirrors Kristfs own experience in Neuchtel: while she
never translated her poetry from Hungarian into French, she must have
wondered whether the language community in which she lived after 1956
would accept the realities of her native country as she transformed them
into French in her fiction. From her writing and her interviews, it is obvi-
ous that she followed closely the political events in Hungary, while also
maintaining a detached or rather disenchanted attitude close to that of her
characters, one that bordered on emotional anaesthesia, doubtless a way of
dealing with the consequences of the trauma that we find in her novels.26
After Claus is brought to the embassy of his adopted western country,
the embassy officials pursue the quest for the presumed brother, finally
locating a Klaus T., with a K., the important poet (412). The separate
narratives now seem to be moving closer together, as Claus recognises the
old house in which he lived until he was four years old, and then dreams
of becoming all of the characters we have encountered so far: Claus, Lucas
and Klaus. Part Two of the book then offers a first-person narrative from
Klauss perspective. He admits to having had a twin brother, Lucas, whose
possible return after 50 years of absence could trigger major psychological
reactions in the woman with whom Klaus shares his house, reopening the
terrible wound of her involuntary infanticide (421). The two men will
 GOTA KRISTFS EUROPE 79

meet, but it takes several pages before we discern the truth behind a series
of lies Klaus tells his unwelcome guest. Klaus invents a married life, with
twin grandsons, Klaus and Lucas, living in the same town, K., where the
presumed brother had recently been imprisoned (429). With the emi-
grant brothers manuscripts left behind, the encounter triggers Klauss
desire to write his own testimony of past events.
At this point, we learn a number of things about the familys history.
The father, a journalist recently drafted into the army and already dressed
in a uniform, wanted to abandon his family for another woman pregnant
with his child. The desperate wife grabbed his pistol and killed him, while
inadvertently hurting Lucas, then four years old. For some years, Klaus
lived with Antonia, his fathers lover, and his half-sister Sarah, from whom
he was later separated because of an incestuous episode.27 Towards the
end of the war, an eight-year-old Klaus discovered the grave of his father,
with the name Klaus-Lucas T. inscribed on it. He unsuccessfully searched
for his brother at a bombed rehabilitation centre in a remote country
town where Antonia had taken the children. Nobody saw a connection
between Lucas and a very poor limping boy who played harmonica in bars
and lived with a grandmother. Because Klaus blamed Antonia for all his
misfortunes, no recognition or reconciliation between them was possible.
He then began to take care of his mother, who had been living in the old
house after her release from a psychiatric hospital, all that time valorising
her absent twin son and blaming herself for the accident. To earn a liv-
ing as a young boy, Klaus distributed papers, later becoming a typesetter
and starting to write poems that he would eventually publish. Although
typesetting ultimately brought about saturnism, a disease of printers and
typesetters, he was able to experience at first-hand the gulf between social
reality and the political slogans in the newspapers (474). His critique of
the regimes prosecution and brainwashing of the population includes a
reference to the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary:

What we print in the newspaper completely contradicts reality. A hundred

times a day we print the phrase We are free, but everywhere in the streets
we see the soldiers of a foreign army, everyone knows that there are many
political prisoners, trips abroad are forbidden, and even within the country
we cant go wherever we want. (4689)

Official affirmations of happiness and abundance were contradicted by

Klauss and his mothers misery, although Klaus was advised to continue
doing his job without asking questions (469). When his half-sister Sarah
80 M. ZUPANI

returned to the capital at the age of 18, Klaus made no allowances for
personal fulfilment and rejected all further contact with her. In a situation
that mirrored the impossible brotherly connection between Claus and his
twin, the only way that Klaus could confide in his absent brother Lucas
was through an inner monologue:

I tell him that if hes dead hes lucky and Id like very much to be in his
place. I tell him that he got the better deal, that it is I that is pulling a greater
weight. I tell him that life is totally useless, that its nonsense, an aberration,
infinite suffering, the invention of a non-God whose evil surpasses under-
standing. (471)

After 1989, the horrors of the Cold War cannot easily be overcome or
consigned to the past. In the last chapter, we return to more recent times,
with the final separation between the alleged brothers; in Klauss words,
Lucas came back and left again. I sent him away. He left me his unfin-
ished manuscript. I am trying to complete it (477). The completion of the
alleged manuscript requires the involvement of both brothers, regardless of
all the separations and obstacles caused by the Iron Curtain. Symbolically
speaking, literature is again the bridge between eastern and western Europe
that may bring about some mutual understanding. Tragically, however, we
learn that Claus T. [] committed suicide today [], just as he was being
repatriated (477). Although Klaus has been waiting for Lucas his whole
life, he finally doesnt accept the possible reunion, which remains unreach-
able, unattainable, while still sought after. On the last page of the novel,
in a letter to Klaus that is now signed Lucas, Claus asks to be buried next
to his parents. Klaus does not consider the man to be his real brother, but
is almost ready to replace the name Claus with Lucas and even plots his
own possible suicide in a manner that mirrors the other mans demise. In
short, the (non-)identity of the twin brothers is determined by their dop-
pelgnger. Is Klaus really the one who remains in the country? Has Lucas
become a double of his own brother by choosing the name of Claus, a
perfect anagram of Lucas, as we saw earlier? Or is Claus simply an impos-
ter, now a citizen of a country run by money who returns to his homeland
to die? The thread that connects these complementary yet antagonistic
characters, while also dividing them, are the notebooks that Claus brings
to Klaus, asking him to finish them. The brothers, both on the verge
of death due to self-poisoning through alcohol and cigarettes, may be a
metaphor for the way that Cold War society affected the inner dimensions,
 GOTA KRISTFS EUROPE 81

the ones that are never disclosed. In the home country, the continual
violence of war and dictatorship and the lies disseminated by the regime
have moulded the destructive behaviour of the brothers, who internalise
the political and military brutality of their times. As the only optimistic
feature of the trilogy, writing serves as a modification of reality and as a
challenge to all ideological positions, helping individuals to survive under
dire conditions, regardless of the lies it may also convey.
A recent British reprint of The Notebook contains an afterword by the
Slovene philosopher Slavoj iek, first published in The Guardian in
2013.28 iek sees The Notebook as a novel through which I discovered
what kind of a person I really want to be []: an ethical monster with-
out empathy, doing what is to be done in a weird coincidence of blind
spontaneity and reflexive distance, helping others while avoiding their dis-
gusting proximity.29 To ieks mind, [t]he young twins are thoroughly
immoralthey lie, blackmail, killyet they stand for authentic ethical
naivety at its purest and, in doing so, suggest a preferable world in which
sentimentality would be replaced by a cold and cruel passion.30 ieks
typically ironic, even arrogant, position may not correspond to what
Kristf had in mind when she wrote the trilogy, or any of her other novel-
istic or theatrical works. Yet iek manages to capture the way that, for the
characters in the trilogy, only this detached cruelty allows them to survive
in a fragmented, war-torn Europe, in which the belief in human goodness
is impossible to maintain. In the face of the unbearable human suffering
of twentieth-century Europe, Kristf does not suggest that belonging is
likely or indicate that it is possible to survive either the totalitarianism
of the Cold War or the upheavals that followed it. Despite her distance
from the feminist movements of her times, gota Kristf, with a strong
and independent voice, claimed the right to speak out about her country
while living elsewhere and using a language she had acquired as a grown
woman. But the hiatus, as we have seen, was never mended.

NOTES
1. Davies, Europe, p.1103.
2. See Judt, Postwar, pp.60810.
3. She alludes to the conditions of her Neuchtel life in her novel Hier
(Yesterday, 1997).
4. Many Algerian-born women writers were schooled in French and quite
naturally gravitated towards France to further their education. Such is the
case of Assia Djebar, the first Arab woman to become a member of
82 M. ZUPANI

Acadmie Franaise and the author of Femmes dAlger dans leur apparte-
ment (Women in Algiers in Their Apartment, 1980). Lela Sebbar, born to
an Algerian father and a French mother, often wrote about her heritage, as
seen in Je ne parle pas la langue de mon pre (I Dont Speak My Fathers
Language, 2003). Also relevant here is Julia Kristeva, originally from
Bulgaria, whose novel Les samoura (The Samurai, 1990) describes the life
of an intellectual raised behind the Iron Curtain who arrives in France and
has to adapt to a highly strung avant-garde environment.
5. In one of her interviews with Erica Durante, Kristf states that it took her
three years to write The Notebook, a relatively short novel of about 180
pages, because of the in-depth corrections and continuous fine-tuning
(Durante, Entretien dErica Durante Agota Kristof, Vivre, pome indit
dAgota Kristof: Introduction de Marie-Thrse Lathion, Viceversa: Revue
suisse dchanges littraires, Vol. 2 (2008), p.32).
6. See Durante, Agota Kristof: Du commencement la fin de lcriture,
Recto/Verso, No. 1 (2007), pp.16.
7. See the writers avowals about this period quoted in Manuela Cavicchi,
Il ny a que le prsent: la maledizione dellesilio nelle opera di Agota
Kristof, Altre modernit/Otras Modernidades/Autres Modernits/Other
Modernities, No. 2 (2009), pp.1756.
8. Kristf, The Proof, in Kristf, The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie, trans.
by Alan Sheridan, David Watson and Marc Romano (1986, 1988, 1991;
NewYork: Grove Press, 1997), p.259.
9. Ibid., p.261.
10. Ibid., p.285.
11. Ibid., p.287.
12. Ibid., p.324.
13. Ibid., p.259.
14. Ibid., p.334.
15. Kristf, The Third Lie, in Kristf, The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie,
p.367.
16. Kristf, Proof, p.336.
17. By this stage, the only fact we can be sure of is the former existence of the
deceased grandmother, Maria Z., wife of V., who during the war []
was entrusted with the care of one or more children (ibid., p.338).
18. Kuhlman, The Double Writing of Agota Kristof and the New Europe,
Studies in 20th Century Literature, Vol. 27, No. 1 (2003), p.122. This
article matches quite closely the tenor of the present essay, while future
investigation might make use of volumes such as Marta Di Benedetos La
question de lidentit dans luvre dAgota Kristof (2008) and Tijana
Miletics European Literary Immigration into the French Language:
Readings of Gary, Kristof, Kundera and Semprun (2008).
 GOTA KRISTFS EUROPE 83

19. Kuhlman, Double Writing, pp.126, 122, 122.

20. Ibid., p.126.
21. Ibid., p.126.
22. Ibid., p.129.
23. Ibid., p.129.
24. Ibid., p.133.
25. Kristf, Third Lie, p.345. Further references to this novel will be given in
parentheses in the text.
26. Carine Trevisan attributes emotional anaesthesia to Kristfs characters,
who show all the signs of the psychological conditions related to extreme
suffering (see Trevisan, Les enfants de la guerre: Le Grand Cahier dAgota
Kristof, Amnis: Revue de civilisation contemporaine Europes-Amriques
(2006), http://amnis.revues.org/952 (accessed 16 September 2015).
Within the vastly expanding field of trauma studies, Boris Cyrulnik asserts
that one in two people will encounter trauma in their lives and that one in
ten will be marked forever by traumatic situations (see Cyrulnik, The
Whispering of Ghosts: Trauma and Resilience, trans. by Susan Fairfield
(2003; NewYork: Other Press, 2010), p.168).
27. There is an abundance of problematic relationships between men and
women in the trilogy, the analysis of which is beyond the scope of this
essay. One of the studies on the topic is Simon Cutcans monograph,
Subversion ou conformisme?: la diffrence des sexes dans luvre dAgota
Kristof (2014).
28. This publication may have been triggered by a cinematographic adaptation
of The Notebook in the same year, which marked a continuous interest in
Kristfs disturbing trilogy over the 27 years since it was initially published
in French. The film, in Hungarian, has been circulated both with the origi-
nal French title, Le grand cahier, and with the English title The Notebook.
The director, Jnos Szsz, may have chosen the Hungarian language to
emphasise the strangeness and unhomeliness that is present in the novel.
29. iek, gota Kristf's The Notebook Awoke in Me a Cold and Cruel Passion,
The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/
12/agota-kristof-the-notebook-slavoj-zizek (accessed 30 April 2015).
30. Ibid.
 4

Between Yearning andAversion: Visions

ofEurope inHilde Spiels The Darkened
Room

ChristophParry

With a European parliament, open borders, free movement of capital and

a common currency across much of the continent, European integration
is today an inescapable fact. Yet Europe does not inspire the public imagi-
nation in the same way that the individual European nations did in the
past two centuries. The European integration process, set in motion as a
reaction to World War Two, is not only about economics and politics but
also about redefining the predominant categories of collective identity and
allegiance. The most important institutions are in place, but the corre-
sponding community, to borrow loosely from Benedict Anderson, still has
to be imagined.1 This is not to say that the work of imagining Europe has
not taken place. It has been going on for centuries, especially in literature,
but unlike the imagining of the nation, it has always tended to be out of
step with political, economic and social realities.2 The novel discussed in
this essay is in many respects representative of this process. The Darkened
Room (1961), written in English by the Austrian-Jewish writer Hilde
Spiel, can be classified as European both in terms of the conditions of

C. Parry ( )
Faculty of Philosophy, German Language and Literature,
University of Vaasa, 65200 Vaasa, Finland

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 85

A. Hammond (ed.), The Novel and Europe,
DOI10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4_4
86 C. PARRY

its writing and with respect to its contents. It deals with a heterogeneous
group of exiles and emigrants in NewYork in the late 1940s, all of them
busy imagining their own versions of Europe. But before presenting the
writer, her attitude to Europe and her novel in detail, I shall briefly discuss
some traditions and pitfalls in the business of imagining Europe.
According to Bo Strth, [n]ations and other kinds of belonging are
constructed socially. In the process of social construction the discursive
character takes on essential proportions. In other words essentialization is
the goal of social construction.3 If we accept this proposition then we can
say that, in the case of most modern nations, the goal has to a large extent
been reached.4 The predominance of the nation as an object of allegiance
over the regional, religious and ethnic community is of relatively recent
origin and dependent on certain historical conditions connected with
modernity. It was the development of civil society with a public sphere
not wholly dependent on the institutions of power that fundamentally
promoted the idea of national identity in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Functioning public spheres emerge gradually within society and
their importance lies in the fact that they represent the society as a whole
rather than solely the state, thus helping to forge a sense of community.
As Jrgen Habermas has long emphasised, literary life played a consider-
able part in establishing the public sphere during the evolution of mod-
ern nations in Europe.5 Not only did it provide a forum for debating the
mores and values of society but individual literary works themselves could
be instrumental in imagining national communities.6
One current weakness of the European project, as compared with the
development of nation-states, is the continents comparatively underde-
veloped civil society. In particular there are no genuinely European parties
and no widely visible, politically active transnational European media.7 In
this situation literature might not carry the same weight in the European
project as it did in the national projects of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, but it is certainly present. In fact literature in Europe has always
had a double allegiance. While it has had an indisputable function in
strengthening individual nations, not least through its reinforcement of
national languages, it has also upheld a broader European heritage that is
far older than the nation-state, thus consolidating a continent-wide cul-
tural space.8 And it is a fact of European literary culture that continental
and national identities have coexisted throughout the modern era. Just as
there are national canons so there is an embarrassingly Eurocentric canon
of World Literature which serves as a point of reference for national lit-
 BETWEEN YEARNING ANDAVERSION 87

eratures. In the same way that individual works can partake in imagining
the nation they can contribute to imagining the broader cultural space of
Europe. Obvious examples from the beginning of the twentieth century
are Romain Rollands Jean-Christophe (19041912) and Thomas Manns
great philosophical novel, Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain, 1924).9
How is Europe imagined in such texts? Obviously, by analogy to national
imaginings, reference can be made to foundational myths and to a long
common history which, while seldom peaceful, generally revolved around
the same recurring issues. Indeed, the fact that we recognise Europe at
all as a coherent and identifiable space is the result of its cultural and reli-
gious history.10 Historically and culturally European nations have enough
in common to provide the foundation for a common identity, although
this identity cannot be defined too narrowly. The long-standing and wide-
spread narrative that explains Europe in terms of a synthesis of Judaic,
Greek/Hellenic and Christian influences may be intellectually appealing
for some, but has never been sufficient to prevent bitter strife between
Europes component dynasties, religions, ethnicities and nations and is
also far too remote from contemporary life to command practical alle-
giance.11 Furthermore, this heritage is no longer specific to Europe, but
is shared by many societies across the globe. Features that seem to define
what is European also serve as attributes of such contentious, and often
conflated, categories as Christendom or so-called western civilisation.
Equating European civilisation with Christianity gives a false picture, for it
not only denies the Jewish and Islamic contributions but also ignores the
characteristically European process of secularisation that has been going
on for centuries.
A second way of imagining Europe is to focus on its inclusions and
exclusions: in short, to look at Europe through its others. Since the
Crusades the Islamic world has been a major source of alterity and, despite
the term for the collective self evolving in the late Middle Ages from the
religiously defined Christendom to the more secular and more specifi-
cally geographical Europe, the oriental Other remained a target of the
European imperialist enterprise.12 Colonised regions such as Africa and
Asia were found equally useful for setting off the supposed civilisation of
(western) Europe, although tended to provoke imperial competition rather
than continental unity.13 Ironically, if Europeans had difficulty in seeing
themselves as a coherent entity, they were certainly seen as a single aggres-
sor by the colonised peoples.14 From the perspective of Europes occidental
other (that is, the New World as created by European emigrants), Europe
88 C. PARRY

has also come to be seen in the singular, despite the folkloristic attachment
of many Americans to the respective lands of their ethnic roots.15 It was to
America that the largest group of emigrants and exiles from Europe went
before and during World War Two, and it is America that serves as a setting
for Hilde Spiels European novel.
Neither the recourse to foundational historical narratives nor the delin-
eation of Europe in opposition to its others seems to offer an adequate way
of building up a viable European identity today. Both approaches share
the essentialising properties that marked the nation-building process of
the nineteenth century. But the fact that the nation-state is still the norm
does not mean that it is destined to remain so for all times, especially since
many of the conditions that privileged it have begun to erode since the
middle of the twentieth century. On the one hand economic globalisation
has undermined national sovereignty in Europe and forced governments
into international cooperation in order to maintain at least a modicum of
authority in the face of rival global actors. On the other hand the presence
of sizeable immigrant populations in larger cities severs the traditional tie
between ethnic homogeneity and specific geographical location that had
once driven nationalist projects. In this respect, as Gerard Delanty points
out, [n]ational identity has ceased to fulfil the function of social integra-
tion; the nation no longer fits into the sphere of the state, providing the
latter with an identity and cultural legitimation.16 This being the case, it
is unlikely that the kind of heroic grand narrative that formerly legitimised
the nation can be effective in the case of Europe, especially since neither
the experience of World War Two nor the grudging process of decolonisa-
tion show Europe in a heroic light.
Clearly, different discourses of legitimation are now called for. Recent
writing on European identity has therefore started to focus on cosmo-
politanism as a way of conceptualising what it means to be European. As
commentators have shown, cosmopolitanism is useful for illustrating the
frequent rootlessness of identity in contemporary Europe, as well as for
discussing allegiances to Europe which operate in terms of process rather
than place.17 This view fits in well with the reality of literary production.
The authors most likely to reflect on European and transnational identity
are those who for one reason or another have direct experience of living
in different countries and whose work falls into the category of literatures
without a fixed abode, in Ottmar Ettes phrase.18 The cosmopolitan is
at home everywhere and at the same time is everywhere a foreigner and
as such can meet with the same kind of prejudice that traditionally con-
 BETWEEN YEARNING ANDAVERSION 89

fronted the European Jews.19 Paradoxically the barbaric outburst of racism

and nationalism that led to World War Two generated a new mobility of
refugees, exiles and displaced persons who, as a result, had experience of
life in various European countries and overseas. Cosmopolitans by choice
or necessity, they had to reassess their relationship to their origins and
identities. These experiences are well documented in the autobiographical
writings and novels of such exiles as Lion Feuchtwanger, Anna Gmeyner,
Hans Sahl, Anna Seghers and others.20 Although only a minority of exiles
returned to their home countries directly after the war, exile studies has
tended to view their writings in the context of the literary histories of the
respective countries of origin, thus renationalising the authors and over-
looking the cosmopolitan reality in which they lived and worked.21
A cosmopolitan attitude was already quite prevalent in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries among assimilated Jews, not least
in Habsburg Austria where they tended to be loyal to the imperial status
quo in the face of the centrifugal nationalisms working to tear the empire
apart. This finally resulted in that enormously productive and specifically
Viennese brand of cosmopolitanism famously celebrated by Stefan Zweig
in Die Welt von Gestern (The World of Yesterday, 1952) and which briefly
made Vienna into a vibrant hub of modernity.22 It was in this atmosphere
that Spiel was born into an upper-middle-class assimilated (and converted)
Jewish family just before the collapse of the empire. With Vienna now
the unenthusiastic capital of the rump republic of German Austria, what
remained of the cosmopolitan spirit became directed towards Europe as
a whole. From an early age Spiel was attracted to socialism and to pan-
Europeanism and heard Richard Coudenhouve-Kalergi lecture while still
a schoolgirl.23 As a student of philosophy in the early 1930s she became
greatly troubled by the increasingly open anti-Semitism in the city and,
like many assimilated Jews in Germany and Austria at that time, she expe-
rienced the way Jewishness was forced on the community from the out-
side.24 In 1936 she emigrated from Vienna to London two years before
emigration became a question of life or death. Accustomed to travelling
and linguistically talented, Spiel had little difficulty in acclimatising to dif-
ferent surroundings. She was and remained a great believer in assimilation
both as a Jew in a gentile society and as an Austrian in Britain. Like her
husband, Peter de Mendelssohn, Spiel was prepared to write in English
and her first novel in that language, Flute and Drums, set among inter-
national students in Italy, appeared as early as 1939. After the war she
travelled to Vienna in British army uniform as a correspondent for the
90 C. PARRY

New Statesman, and also spent time with her husband in Berlin. She thus
had first-hand experience of the early Cold War in Europe which forms an
important part of the background of The Darkened Room.
The novel is set in NewYork in the late 1940s when American politics
was increasingly overshadowed by the Cold War and McCarthyism. At
the time of publication, Spiel had little experience of the USA.In 1952
she made a relatively short tour of the country with her husband, spend-
ing some two weeks in NewYork. There, and in Los Angeles where she
visited Thomas Mann, she met a large number of migrs, many of them
troubled by the dilemma of having permanently left the Old World and
of being unable to acclimatise to America.25 This is precisely the dilemma
Spiel deals with in her novel. The darkened room of the title is the home
of the main protagonist, Lisa, who regularly holds a kind of salon for a
mixed collection of European expatriates. Symbolically Lisa usually keeps
the blinds of her room closed, keeping out not only the light but also
any outside influence. Lisa is an extravagant non-practicing Austrian Jew,
whose personal moral code is anything but conventional and who has left
behind her a trail of ex-lovers, some of whom are among her guests.26
Lisa survived Fascism and most of the war by hiding in Italy where she
had dealings with the black market and developed a drug problem before
being brought to America by her future husband Jeff Curtis, an officer
and son of a Protestant pastor from Indiana.
The main plot of the novel tells of Lisas gradual decline and death
from the perspective of the first-person narrator, Lisas maid, the Latvian
Lele, who has lost both parents in the war, one killed by the Nazis, the
other by the Russians. Only one short chapter is devoted to Leles experi-
ences before arriving in America with her young fatherless son. Lele had
worked for the German occupational forces in Latvia and, at the end of the
war, she found employment as a maid in the household of a British officer
in Austria. In America she is briefly employed by an unqualified Jewish
psychiatrist, Kati Langendorf, before joining Lisas household where she
is soon treated more as a friend than as a servant. Lele does not hide her
antipathy towards her first employer or her initial surprise and relief at her
first meeting with the eccentric Lisa in her darkened bedroom.
It is within this broad international framework that Spiel deals with
the question of European identity, and does so in two ways. On the one
hand there is the plot itself, which illustrates the different life choices faced
by the expatriate community, who need to decide whether to return to
Europe, to assimilate into American society or to retain their Europeanness
 BETWEEN YEARNING ANDAVERSION 91

within a tightknit diaspora. On the other hand there are the discussions
among the Central European migrs in Lisas salon which reflect the
nature of Europe on a discursive level. Lisas regular guests are, in Leles
words, relics from the past and the far-away, ciphers for something that
was dead and gone, lemures haunting a graveyard.27 They include Jews
and Gentiles, a number of writers, an industrialist, a psychoanalyst, a soci-
ologist from the New School, an Austrian Socialist (Lisas former lover
Thomas Munk, who has found work with Voice of America) and a pair of
sinister Hungarians who are somehow involved in Munks denunciation
to the FBI as a communist towards the end of the novel.
Not unlike the sanatorium in Manns The Magic Mountain, Lisas
darkened room provides a locus for the meeting of ideas. Several larger
gatherings are described in some detail.28 The first is held in honour of a
young first-generation American pilot on leave from Berlin, where he is
engaged in the 1948 airlift and has personal experience of the situation in
divided Europe. The description of this party provides the opportunity
not only to introduce the members of Lisas circle but also to reveal the
inherent antagonisms within the group. While all are equally curious to
hear what the pilot, Stephen Kline, has to say about Berlin, they argue
vociferously about the causes of the discord between the allies. It is the
second gathering, however, that provides the discursive crux of the novel.
It is here that the contrast between the Old and New Worlds is discussed
most extensively, and it is significant that Spiel herself quotes extensively
from this chapter in her later essay, Das Sternbild Europa (The European
Constellation, 1977).29 The party is held for Paul Bothe, a successful
writer who has already moved from his American exile to the peaceful
enclave of Switzerland and now returns for a visit. It is he who encourages
Lele to write a book and who insists that the other guests, whatever their
opinions about Europe may be, have never really internalised their move
to America.30
By and large Lisas guests constantly think and talk about Europe but
are reluctant to return. It is a love-hate relationship in which hate domi-
nates the discourse and love holds the group together. Bothe introduces a
kind of foundational myth when he claims that [o]ur ethics, our beliefs,
our cosmologyall are derived from a handful of peoples nestling around
the shores of the Mediterranean.31 One voice, that of the respected but
unproductive writer Winterstein, makes a plea for European unity in spite
of the misguided enterprises of Napoleon and Hitler: There is only one
tragic mistaketo make the orchestra play a single monotonous tune
92 C. PARRY

instead of the symphony it could give us to perfection. French horns, Italian

flutes, Austrian violins, even a Russian trombone, the Germans blowing
trumpets or playing celli, according to their mood .32 European unity
in this view does not imply uniformity, but still envisions the continent
as an idealised, even aestheticised, space of harmony and cooperation.
Wintersteins utopian dream is soon punctured, however. The psychiatrist
Kati Langendorf reminds him that Europe is a hierarchical continent gov-
erned by powerful nations that only recently produc[ed] one long chain
of conflagrations that nearly set the world aflame.33 Europe, in other
words, is no melting pot.
The aversion towards Europe is most poignantly expressed by the soci-
ologist Renate Schaefer. Having lost her family in the Holocaust, Schaefer
sees no reason why she should [l]ook back to that cesspool, that slaugh-
terhouse of ideas.34 As she continues:

Every morning when I enter the lovely steel and plate-glass building of the
New School, I go down on my knees and thank Hitler for driving me out
of that smelly old University at Frankfurt on Oder. Back there as a young
graduate I felt ancient, yes, ancient and hoary and positively covered with
fungus! Here, fifteen years older, I seem to be re-born everyday!35

When Kati Langendorf diagnoses a collective mother complex among

the expatriate group, which she believes could be collectively healed,
the publisher Talberg replies that Europe is not a big fat overweening
Momma, but a terrible old decaying body, gangrenous, in an advanced
stage of putrefaction, except that it always recovers sufficiently to go on
dying, decaying, poisoning the terrestrial atmosphere.36 But when Renate
Schaefer says that the poison came exclusively from Germany, her remark
is gently refuted by Talberg who points out that the Germans have no
vested interest in brutality except perhaps in its methodical application.
It s in the European bloodstreamno one knows when and where it will
erupt.37 However negative they may be, Lisas guests are clearly begin-
ning to see Europe in the singular.
Despite their disagreements and their shared disappointment with the
course of events in Europe, the guests continue to congregate in Lisas
stuffy room, because it is the decaying culture of the Old World, fatally
wounded by the events of the war, that they miss. Bothe explains his deci-
sion to return to Europe in banal terms, claiming that, as a writer, he
needs a certain kind of sensual reality: After a lifetime of smelling Italian
 BETWEEN YEARNING ANDAVERSION 93

garlic and incense, or real candle-wax dripping on a German Christmas

treehow can you exist in this alien popcorn-munching, gum-chewing,
baseball-playing world?38 Significantly this miniature collage of impres-
sions is not restricted to one region of Europe, but implies difference and
variety.
Nevertheless, the general tendency in the group is to create Europe
as a single entity and to contrast this entity with its New World other.
Despite the humiliation of war-torn Europe, the attitudes displayed in this
particular chapter of the novel still reveal an implicit belief in European
superiority over the gum-chewing society they find themselves in. Such
attitudes were not unusual in the transatlantic cultural discourse of the
time. Even Theodor Adorno, who returned from American exile in 1953,
makes subtle complaints about chewing gum, and generally privileges
the more reflective culture of Europe over the pragmatic utilitarianism
of the USA.39 The dichotomy did not always work in Europes favour,
however. In The Darkened Room Schaefer and Talberg both claim that,
while America is dynamic but uncultivated, Europe has a long-standing
culture but is moribund.40 The point had already been made in an article
in the Neue Rundschau of 1951, where the author, Eugen Grster, con-
trasts Europes cathedrals and classical music with the science and technol-
ogy of America and admits, like Lisas guests, that European culture has
unfolded as a long series of variations on the theme of death.41
While most of Lisas guests are obviously still obsessed by the Old
Continent, and embittered about the events that forced them to leave,
they make no real attempt to return. It suffices that they regularly congre-
gate in her flat and deliberate about the Europe of their own imagination.
By setting themselves apart from their environment as Europeans they can
come to terms with their relatively marginal position in the USA.The nar-
rator, however, does not share their obsession. Lele has first-hand experi-
ence of war and displacement and has nothing to yearn for in Europe
(a continent of which, she admits on her journey to the States, she has seen
very little).42 Among her friends and acquaintances in America are immi-
grants and their offspring who are happily settled and seem to have no
problem with their hyphenated identities. They remain first and foremost
American, albeit within the framework of cosmopolitan New York City
which, as Bothe points out, is not really America at all.43
At this point a closer and more critical look at the form of Leles nar-
rative is needed. This is perhaps the most interesting feature of the novel,
since the seemingly nave Lele, who has had little previous experience of
94 C. PARRY

high society, relates a story in which her own role is more than a little
ambiguous. Her account seems relatively objective and her mixture of
sympathy for Lisa and astonishment at the latters lifestyle appears con-
vincing. But should this be taken at face value?44 In earlier sections, Lele
shows a general appreciation for an employer who treats her well, takes her
into her confidence and even gives her fine clothes to wear. Lele also seems
unaware of Lisas drug problem and, during the final party described in
the novel, seems to show remorse at not having called a doctor when Lisa
has an emotional breakdown, an event that foreshadows Lisas death from
a morphine overdose. Nevertheless, Leles attitude changes dramatically
during her narrative, in spite of the fact that it is narrated in retrospect.
A hint at what is to come appears at the start of the opening chapter. Set
after the events in NewYork, Lele is here comfortably installed in a house
in California, having put her life with Lisa firmly behind her. This she calls
a bad dream, citing an expression which Lisa herself uses in connection
with Europe.45 The same attitude is clear in the final chapters, when the
earlier hints of admiration for Lisa give way to disgust and Lele is more
than relieved at her employers demise:

Suddenly Lisa [] turned for me into the incarnation of Europe. She was
the woman arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and
precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand full of the
abominations and filthiness of her fornication. She was the great whore of
Babylon. And I did not want to see her face again.46

This emphatic moralising seems strangely out of place in Leles other-

wise restrained narrative. But the end of the novel casts everything into a
new perspective, for only now it is revealed that Lele left for California to
start a new life with none other than Lisas widower Jeff. Unlike Lisa, the
European Jew, Lele is immediately accepted by Jeffs family and she adopts
their rigid Protestantism. In the context of her newly found religion the
crass rhetoric of Leles final depiction of Lisa as the Babylonian whore
falls into place.47 And now the symbolic dichotomies of the narrative
Lisas preference for keeping her room dark, in contrast to the light of
California, the intrigues among the refugees contrasted with the straight-
forward attitudes of Jeff and his Bible-thumping father in Indianaseem
to gain new meaning. The ambiguity of Leles role in Lisas household also
becomes apparent. While Lisa declines, Lele blossoms. At the second big
party Lele is upgraded from simply being the serving girl to sitting at the
table in place of one of the guests. In the course of the novel she inherits
 BETWEEN YEARNING ANDAVERSION 95

not only clothes from her employer but also two lovers and a husband.
One of the lovers is, as mentioned, the socialist Thomas Munk, but this
attachment is discarded at the end along with all other memories of Leles
life in NewYork. In marrying Jeff she puts all else behind her. But Jeff,
too, is less straightforward than at first appears. In one scene his refusal to
spend Christmas with European flops and niggers reveals a fundamen-
tally racist mindset that raises serious questions about the society that Lele
has joined.48 Without going as far as Dagmar Lorenz, who sees Lele as
an unreformed anti-Semite and Jeff, with his Midwestern background, as
representative of the crypto-fascist tendencies of McCarthys America, we
could say that there is an egocentric single-mindedness in Leles actions
which is somewhat at odds with the story she tells.49
The reliability of Leles narrative is finally disqualified by a disparaging
afterword by the writer Bothe who originally encouraged her to write
her story. Bothe now reveals that he himself edited the manuscript, espe-
cially the conversations in Lisas room which, he claims, Lele had neither
the opportunity nor the education to follow properly. This ultimate dis-
claimer with respect to the reliability of Spiels narrator opens the novel
to quite divergent readings. What is certain, however, is that Lele has
totally immersed herself in mainstream American life and that the price of
her assimilation is the loss of her European roots and a total rejection of
any remaining trace of cosmopolitanism. By letting Bothe challenge the
very authorship of Leles book Spiel injects into the narrative the plurality
that is the essence of the European cosmopolitanism which, finally, the
novel champions against more exclusivist forms of continental or national
identity.
For the author, total immersion was not an option. By the time the
novel was completed, Spiel was working on her next major work in
German, Fanny von Arnstein (1962), the historical account of a cosmo-
politan predecessor, and was seriously considering returning to Austria.
Despite her 25 years in Great Britain assimilation was proving more dif-
ficult than expected. After experiencing warmth and solidarity during
the war years, she became increasingly frustrated at her social isolation
and at the lack of attention she received as an intellectual.50 Britain sim-
ply did not feel European in the way that France, Italy and Austria did,
and it is no coincidence that among the guests visiting Lisas darkened
room there are no British. Indeed in Das Sternbild Europa Spiel com-
ments on the English Channel being one of Europes external borders and
says that London and NewYork are closer to each other in atmosphere
than London and Paris.51 But as a setting for her novel London, with its
96 C. PARRY

proximity to mainland Europe, would not have served nearly as well as

NewYork. Although Britain has a tradition of absorbing refugees, it is the
USA which has substantially built its identity on offering them a new life.
Although much of what she puts in the mouths of her European refugees
may have been inspired by her own experience among exiles in London,
the choice of NewYork as a setting strengthens the structure of the novel
by enabling the confrontation of Europe with one of its most significant
others.
For the forlorn coterie at Lisas gatherings in the late 1940s, European
unity is at most a utopian dream blemished by the recent experience of
World War Two and by the beginning of the Cold War. But while Spiel
was writing the novel the institutions of todays Europe were slowly but
surely beginning to take shape. The time gap is significant. The discus-
sions at Lisas gatherings are necessarily inconclusive. Her guests, with all
their different backgrounds, cannot agree on what to think about Europe.
Their attempts to fit it into a master narrative are as unproductive as the
solemn sentiments of European politicians, but insofar as they keep dis-
cussing the matter, they form a discursive community demonstrating the
paradox noted by Gerard Delanty that intractable disunity [might be]
the condition for a European identity.52 At the same time the novel also
supports the more optimistic view that, in default of agreement on what
Europe is or should be, being European can be expressed as a cosmopoli-
tan identity that works against provincialism and division.

NOTES
1. See Anderson, Imagined Communities, p.6.
2. See, for example, Paul Michael Ltzeler, Die Schriftsteller und Europa: Von
der Romantik bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: Piper, 1992), p.11.
3. Strth, Belonging and European Identity, in Gerard Delanty, Ruth
Wodak and Paul Jones, eds, Identity, Belonging, and Migration (Liverpool:
Liverpool University Press, 2008), p.24.
4. The nation has come to be taken so much for granted that Anthony D.Smith
can claim that of all the identities in which human beings share today,
national identity is perhaps the most fundamental and inclusive (Smith,
National Identity (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1991), p.143).
5. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry
into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989),
pp.3143.
6. See Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp.2636.
 BETWEEN YEARNING ANDAVERSION 97

7. See Ulrich Beck and Edgar Grande, Cosmopolitan Europe, trans. by Ciaran
Cronin (2004; Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p.137.
8. See, for example, Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. by
M.B.Debevois (1999; Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press,
2004), pp.10810.
9. See Christoph Parry, Gibt es eine europische Literatur (auf Deutsch)?, in
Peter Hanenberg and Isabel Gil, eds, Der literarische Europa-Diskurs:
Festschrift fr Paul Michael Ltzeler zum 70. Geburtstag (Wrzburg:
Knigshausen & Neumann, 2013), pp.5062.
10. See Wolfgang Huber, Die jdisch-christliche Tradition, in Hans Joas and
Klaus Wiegandt, eds, Die Kulturellen Werte Europas (Frankfurt am Main:
Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, 2005), p.69.
11. These are the supposed pillars of European culture on which Ernst Robert
Curtius based his seminal study Europische Literatur und lateinisches
Mittelalter (European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, 1948) and
which have recurred more recently in Rmi Bragues Europe, la voie
romaine (Europe, The Roman Road, 1992).
12. On the shift from Christendom to Europe, see Denys Hay, Europe: The
Emergence of an Idea, new edn (1957; Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1968), pp.589, 7396.
13. Gerard Delanty maintains that it was colonialism and conquest that united
Europe and not peace and solidarity (Delanty, Inventing Europe: Idea,
Identity, Reality (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), p.7).
14. See Edgar Morin, Penser lEurope (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), p.56.
15. See Gerard Delanty and Chris Rumfords discussion of hyphenated identi-
ties as a typically American option in Delanty and Rumford, Rethinking
Europe, pp. 712. Europe as Americas other is discussed in Daniel
J. Boorstin, America and the Image of Europe: Reflections on American
Thought (New York: Meridian Books, 1960), pp.1939.
16. Delanty, Is There a European Identity?, Global Dialogue, Vol. 5, Nos 34
(2003), p.80.
17. See, for example, Beck and Grande, Cosmopolitan Europe, p. 137, and
Delanty and Rumford, Rethinking Europe, pp.214.
18. Ette, European Literature(s), p.129.
19. As Julia Kristeva points out, even in the eighteenth century the cosmopoli-
tan could be regarded as a threat to the identity of the community (Kristeva,
Strangers to Ourselves, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (1988; New York:
Columbia University Press, 1991), pp.1403).
20. On Anna Gmeyner and other exiles in Britain, see J.M.Ritchie, German
Exiles, British Perspectives (New York: Peter Lang, 1997), pp.20117.
21. Only recently has more attention been paid to issues of foreignness and
acculturation: see Drte Bischoff and Susanne Komfort-Hein, Introduction
98 C. PARRY

to Bischoff and Komfort-Hein, eds, Literatur und Exil: Neue Perspektiven

(Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013), pp.119.
22. See Zweig, Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europers, new edn
(1942; Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1952), p. 17. The Jewish
contribution was expressly emphasised by Spiel in her English language
cultural history of Vienna, Viennas Golden Autumn, 18661938 (London:
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987), pp.2356.
23. See Spiel, Die hellen und die finsteren Zeiten: Erinnerungen 19111946
(Munich: List, 1989), p.54.
24. A drastic description of this experience of stigmatisation can be found in
Jean Amry, Jenseits von Schuld und Shne: Bewltigungsversuche eines
berwltigten, in Amry, Werke: Bd. 2: Jenseits von Schuld und Shne;
Unmeisterliche Wanderjahre; rtlichkeiten, new edn (1966; Stuttgart:
Klett-Cotta, 2002), pp14977.
25. As Spiel wrote in 1977, [t]o have left the Old World for ever and to need
not just to live in the New World but also to feel at home there, that was
the insoluble problem for these people (Spiel, Das Sternbild Europa, in
Paul Michael Ltzeler, ed., Hoffnung Europa: Deutsche Essays von Novalis
bis Enzensberger (Frankfurt am Main: S.Fischer, 1994), p.441).
26. Spiel reveals in her autobiography that Lisa is loosely based on a friend of
her youth in Vienna, who might be described as a representative of the
jeunesse dore of the 1920s and early 1930s and who, after living in Italy,
spent her last years in New York (Spiel, Welche Welt ist meine Welt?
Erinnerungen 19461989 (Munich: List, 1990), pp.1823).
27. Spiel, The Darkened Room (London: Methuen, 1961), p.44.
28. In Homi Bhabhas view, such gatherings on the edge of foreign cul-
tures belong to the typical experiences of exile (Bhabha, The Location of
Culture (London and NewYork: Routledge, 1994), p.139).
29. See Spiel, Sternbild Europa, pp.4423.
30. See Spiel, Darkened Room, p.83.
31. Ibid., p.82.
32. Ibid., pp.812.
33. Ibid., p.82.
34. Ibid., p.81.
35. Ibid., p.81.
36. Ibid., p.82.
37. Ibid., pp.82, 83.
38. Ibid., p.84.
39. Adorno is perhaps not entirely serious when he discusses the role of chew-
ing gum as a kind of consumerist surrogate metaphysics (Adorno, Aldous
Huxley und die Utopie, in Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften (Darmstadt:
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1998), X, 112).
 BETWEEN YEARNING ANDAVERSION 99

40. See Christoph Parry, Von der Un-Kultur der neuen Welt, Ein Stereotyp,
seine Struktur und sein Vorkommen bei Thomas Mann und Theodor
W.Adorno, in Peter Pabisch, ed., Patentlsung oder Zankapfel? German
Studies fr den internationalen Bereich als Alternative zur Germanistik
Beispiele aus Amerika (Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), pp.91109.
41. Grster, Geistige Aspekte der amerikanischen Zivilisation (Fortsetzung),
Die Neue Rundschau, Vol. 3 (1951), pp. 256. Similar comparisons are
not unknown in the USA, with its consciousness of having evolved as an
alternative to Europe. America holds up a mirror to Europe just as Europe
does to America (see Boorstin, America and the Image of Europe,
pp.1939).
42. See Spiel, Darkened Room, p.18.
43. Ibid., p.83.
44. Some critics have evidently done so: see, for example, Peter Pabisch, Hilde
SpielFemme de Lettres, Modern Austrian Literature, Vol. 12, Nos 34
(1979), pp.339421.
45. Spiel, Darkened Room, p.7.
46. Ibid., p.183.
47. Elisabeth Bronfen sees Leles conversion as a device used by Spiel to intro-
duce the religious dimension of exile as the banishment from paradise (see
Bronfen, Entortung und Identitt: Ein Thema der modernen Exilliteratur,
The Germanic Review, Vol. 69, No. 2 (1994), p.77).
48. Spiel, Darkened Room, p.92.
49. Lorenz considers the conscious negligence of Lele and Jeff to be largely
responsible for Lisas death (see Lorenz, Hilde Spiel: Lisas Zimmer
Frau, Jdin, Verfolgte, Modern Austrian Literature, Vol. 25, No. 2
(1992), pp.7995).
50. Spiel, Welche Welt ist meine Welt?, pp.1867. The difference between the
public role and status of the intellectual in Great Britain and those in main-
land Europe has been noted elsewhere. See, for example, Anna Boschetti,
La recomposition de lespace intellectuel en Europe aprs 1945, in Gisle
Sapiro, ed., Lespace intellectuel en Europe: De la Formation des tats-
nations la mondialisation XIXeXXIe sicle (Paris: La Dcouverte,
2009), p.170. The fact that Spiel devoted much energy to cultivating an
enormous social network in Britain was obliquely but recognisably satirised
by Norbert Gstrein in his novel Die englischen Jahre (The English Years,
1999), with its unflattering reference to the autobiography of die Katz
(Gstrein, Die englischen Jahre, new edn (1999; Munich: DTV, 2008),
pp.1568).
51. Spiel, Sternbild Europa, p.434.
52. Delanty, Inventing Europe, p. viii.
 5

The European Origins ofAlbania inIsmail

Kadares The File onH

PeterMorgan

The tiny western Balkan land of Albania has lain at the crossroads of
European cultures and on the fault lines of civilisational conflict for over
two millennia. Greek, Roman, Byzantine and even Norman influences
penetrated this land before the arrival of the Ottoman Turks in the late
fourteenth century. Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, living and working
under the socialist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha in the late 1970s, drew on
the national history of incursion and occupation and developed the theme
of Albanias European identity in his Aesopian critique of the regime,
Dosja H (The File on H, 1981). The novel provides a valuable insight into
the literary imagining of Europe on the other side of the Iron Curtain
during the Cold War era.
As a young man in the early 1960s, Ismail Kadare had high hopes
for Enver Hoxhas programme of communist modernisation of Albania.
Hoxha, after all, with his French education and admiration for western
European culture, his patriotism and rejection of Yugoslav interference
and Soviet control, was unlike most of the eastern European leaders.
But after the withdrawal from the Soviet alliance under Khrushchev in
1961, the writer began to realise how wrong he was, as Hoxha ruthlessly

P. Morgan ( )
School of Languages and Cultures, University of Sydney, A18 Brennan-
MacCallum Bldg, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 101

A. Hammond (ed.), The Novel and Europe,
DOI10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4_5
102 P. MORGAN

eliminated all opposition to his consolidation of power. By the late 1970s,

the old and ailing dictator was completing his turn inward, swapping the
iconography of Stalin for that of Skanderbeg and abandoning the com-
munist international in favour of proud national self-reliance in a coun-
try that was still economically poor and underdeveloped. While Kadare
shared with Hoxha a powerful sense of patriotism, his notion of what
Albania should be was very different to that of the dictator. Kadare had
long hoped that Hoxha would turn to western Europe via France, had
the West only intimated a willingness for reconciliation.1 At that stage,
Kadares image of Europe was based primarily on French cultural and
literary sources, merging Classical Greek, Roman and Christian eras into
a longue dure from which he understood the democratic civilisation of
western Europe to have developed. However, the West remained intran-
sigent as US President Richard Nixon visited China, opening the way to
the emergence of a new superpower and new global relationships in which
Albania all but disappeared from view.
Kadare set about creating a critical foil to Hoxhas nationalist commu-
nism, generating an Albanian social imaginary in literary texts that coun-
tered the regimes version of the nation while at the same time affirming
the earlier nationalist rejection of Ottoman influence. However, Albanian
history offered little by way of recourse to a recent past that could be uti-
lised in the narrative process of literary opposition and national regenera-
tion. The necessary exclusion of the Ottoman era left the writer with little
more to work with than a speculative history of Greek-Illyrian civilisation
and the fossilised remnants of a prefeudal culture, namely the oral epics
and folk tales that had provided the literary impetus for the Rilindja or
national uprising of the late nineteenth century. The intellectual wing of
the Rilindja began to trace the lineage of Albanian nationhood but strug-
gled to identify what exactly the nation was after centuries of Ottoman
occupation.2 Neither religion nor culture could provide the bases for
communal identity. As a consequence, the Rilindjas literary intellectu-
als made use of the earlier anthropological and philological researches of
western European scholars, such as Austrian Johann Georg von Hahns
Albanesische Studien (Albanian Studies, 1854), as the basis for further
documentation and compilation of Albanian folk material. The tradi-
tion of oral ballads, such as the Mujo and Halil(i) cycle or the Ballad of
Constantine and Doruntine, were used to construct a national literary
tradition and pedigree as a Volk in the Herderian sense.3 By the early twen-
tieth century, the Catholic friar, Gjergj Fishta, had created a national epic
 THE EUROPEAN ORIGINS OFALBANIA 103

in Lahuta e Malcs (The Highland Lute, 1912), a work comparable in ori-

gins and intent to the late nineteenth-century compilation of the medieval
Mabinogion (c.13251425) for Wales or Elias Lnnrots Kalevala (1835)
for the Finns.4 Rather than confront and accept the Ottoman heritage,
Albanian nationalist intellectuals rejected it in favour of a romantic nation-
alism that found its inspiration in ancient songs and ballads.
In his literary works and essays from the late 1970s Ismail Kadare would
develop the literary material of the Rilindja in an attempt to foreground
a new basis for the European identity of the Albanians while mounting an
implicit critique of the dictatorship. To this material he linked a specula-
tive history of the Albanians, in which their Illyrian forebears, as original
inhabitants of the area and participants in an early Greek-Illyrian civili-
sation, could be linked to the mythic origins of Europe. In this specula-
tive reading of Balkan history, Kadare viewed the Albanians as an original
people of the Balkansand hence of Europewhose national develop-
ment was damaged by the 500 years of Ottoman occupation.5 Here, too,
he rehearses his argument regarding the similarities between Albanian
and Greek legends, in particular those of Orestes, Circe and Odysseus,
and refers to an Illyro-Albano-Greek tradition not shared by South Slav
mythology.6 In stressing the ethno-national purity of his people, Kadare
may have appeared to confirm the isolationist doctrine of the Hoxha
regime. Using the Aesopian strategies of literary irony, however, Kadare
implied that communism too was a form of foreign occupation, an eastern
ideology emanating from the Soviet Union, and hence equivalent in its
harmful effects on Albanian identity to the centuries of Ottoman rule.
The latter, as portrayed in a number of his works, can be read as a cipher
for the subsequent history of communism, viewed as another oppressive,
foreign sociopolitical and cultural hegemony. Working under the dictator-
ship, the writer walked a fine line between representing a counterimage
of the national imaginary and reaffirming the prevailing rejection of the
Ottoman Empire as a formative influence on Albanian identity.
The interest in national and European myth became a staple of Kadares
writing. He wrote about Albanian epic song traditions in Autobiografia
e popullit n vargje (Autobiography of the People in Verse, 1971) and
authored a detailed foreword to the collection, Le Chansonnier Epique
Albanais (Songbook of Albanian Epic, 1983). The novel Ura me tri harqe
(The Three-Arched Bridge, 1977) evokes an ideal eternal Albania in the
image of a rainbow linking the Albanians as an integral ethno-cultural
entity. Kush e solli Doruntinn (Doruntine, 1979) foreshadows his interest
104 P. MORGAN

in the question of Kosovar-Albanian identity and locates core aspects of

Albanian identity in or close to Kosovo, the predominantly Albanian-
speaking territory which had been annexed early in the century and became
part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia (later the Socialist Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia).7 Krushqit jan t ngrir (The Wedding Procession Turned
to Ice, 1986) was finished in 1983 and, with its references to the Kosovo
crisis, was banned before publication. The other work from this year, The
File on H, also has associations with northern Albania and Kosovo, where
the traditions of epic poetry had remained strong. It was published in two
editions of the literary journal Nntori in 1982, but was prohibited from
publication in book form until the late 1980s. Kosovar-Albanian ethnic
nationalism had been a source of tension and conflict since the break-up
of the Ottoman Empire and the inclusion of Kosovo in Yugoslavia. For
the Hoxha regime, Kosovo remained a sensitive topic and, for political
reasons, the regime would accept no public discussion of the issue, fearing,
perhaps, an escalation of unrest at home as well as beyond the Accursed
Mountains.8 Nevertheless, The File on H takes the argument regarding
Kosovo and the European roots of Albanian identity a step further than
earlier works. In this novel both Kosovo and Albania emerge from an origi-
nal Illyrian-Greek civilisation that predates the Slav migrations southwards
and that, for Kadare, forms the basis of modern European consciousness.
The linkage of Kosovo with Albania in the novel thus represents an exten-
sion of Kadares argument for the original links between European civili-
sation and Albanian societies throughout the western Balkans. It must be
kept in mind, however, that the implicit political inferences of this novel
had as their context the ongoing existence of the eastern European social-
ist system, including a relatively powerful Yugoslavia in the early 1980s.
Kadares political intent was to reinstate the cultural and national integrity
of the Albanians as a people, not as a nation-state, as well as to provide a
corrective to the image of Albania propagated by the regime.
In 1979 Kadare met American classicist and literary comparatist Albert
B.Lord, who told him about Milman Parrys research into the traditions
of oral poetry in Yugoslavia during the 1930s. Inspired by Parrys work on
the oral epic poetry of southern Yugoslavia and its speculations on the ways
in which Homeric epic might have been composed and remembered over
generations before being committed to writing, Kadare turned his creative
imagination to the role of Albanian verse epic in forging the nation. The File
on H is not tendentious, however; indeed its lightness and humour render
it unique in Kadares oeuvre. It narrates the visit of two Irish-American
 THE EUROPEAN ORIGINS OFALBANIA 105

anthropologists to the north of Albania in search of Homers descendants

to record their epic songs. The timeframe is the latter years of the Zog
monarchy, specifically the period of the Kings brief courtship with impov-
erished Hungarian aristocrat, Graldine Apponyi, whom he married in
early 1938.9 The story opens at the house of the Governor of the northern
town of N, where the governors wife, Daisy, anticipates in salacious
detail how the visit of the two scholars, Bill Norton and Max Ross, will
break the tedium of her provincial life. Daisy is a product of the Zog mon-
archy, superficially western European but inauthentic, even to the point
of having changed her name from the original Arabic-Muslim Mukadez
(sacred) to what she considers the more elegant English Daisy.10 In lan-
guage and imagery that prefigures the Albanian patriot and renegade Kurt
Quprilli in Kadares Npunsi i pallatit t ndrrave (The Palace of Dreams,
1981), Daisy imagines the two anthropologists as virile and dangerous
influences who will bring excitement to her boring, provincial existence.
The two scholars are treated with awe as foreigners, but their attempts to
imprison the free poetry of the land in their tape-recorders arouses intense
suspicions among the highlanders. In particular, the Albanian authorities
are in no doubt that the Irish-Americans are spies and the official agent,
aural specialist Dull Baxhaja, is set on their trail, noting their every word
and movement (hence the file of the title) (13).
Kadares satire on the Zog regimes attempt at surveillance and con-
trol of the scholars is aimed at its triviality and ineffectuality. From the
perspective of Albania as a deeply rooted ethno-cultural entity, the social
and political machinations of any regime are risible: they will not affect the
deep structure of Albanian identity. This is the point of the juxtaposition
of the social comedy of the town society, of the governor, his wife Daisy
and the other town personalities, hangers-on and spies, with the world of
the epics. The figure of Homer, the tradition of Greek and Illyrian oral
epic poetry, its highlands singers and audiences and the Irish-American
scholars, who bridge the gap between past and present, represent a deeper,
more authentic current of Albanian, Balkan, European and ultimately
global (Irish-American) existence. But all is not quite what it seems in
this world either. Not only is the epic a dying genre, but it has also been
invoked to support ethnic and national claims in the political struggle
between Serb and Albanian at a time of change and impending war.
For a while, the work of the anthropologists goes smoothly. They aim
to study the ways in which the living rhapsodes redact the historical and
poetic detail of centuries in their ritualised and repetitive recitals. The local
106 P. MORGAN

factory owner and soap-maker, Mr. Rrok, suggests the scepticism of urban
society when querying the link between the ancient Greek poet Homer
and the scholars research: Please excuse my ignorance, but tell me what
connection can there be between Homer and your esteemed journey to
Albania? If I am not mistaken, Homer lived four or five thousand years ago
and quite a long way away from here, didnt he? (24). The two scholars
are not distracted from their task, however. In the oral epics of the north-
ern Albanians, Bill and Max hope to discover the embalming process
that preserves the pieces of history in formulaic phrases (47). Like their
models, the philologists Lord and Parry, they aim to establish the status
of the Homeric poems as products of an oral tradition, as the accrued
compilations of generations of poets rather than of a single originary fig-
ure. Essential to this conception is a view of oral tradition as the product
of a linguistic consciousness over the longue dure of GreekAlbanian,
Europeanhistory.
The scholars main discovery is that the epic tradition is characterised
by a process of elimination and forgetting as well as of creative addition.
This process of forgetting enables the rhapsode to pass over in silence
those periods in history which are ultimately unimportant in the national
narrative, such as the Ottoman, the Zog and the communist eras; indeed
for Kadare, Albanian modernity has not yet taken place, but has long been
on ice (another of his metaphors for the state of Albania in, for example,
The Wedding Procession Turned to Ice). The tragedy of Albania, as Kadare
describes it in the later literary essay, Eskili, ky humbs i madh (Aeschylus,
This Great Loser, 1985), is that it fell on the wayside of history after the
Roman and Byzantine periods, remaining static and even fossilising as a
culture, as a result of the separation from its cultural and civilisational
roots in Europe. (Kadare has continued to pursue this argument force-
fully in the post-communist period, leading to rancorous polemics with
Kosovar writer and intellectual, Rexhep Qosja, in particular, who takes a
more measured approach to questions of Ottoman influence on the devel-
opment of Albanian cultural identity.)11
Analysing and interpreting the recordings of the oral epics, Bill and
Max hypothesise not only about the processes of transmission over time
but also about the links between Homeric and Albanian legend, between
Ancient Greek and Albanian culture, and hence between European and
Albanian origins. Referring to nineteenth-century German philological
scholarship, Bill and Max speculate, for example, that an ancient Albanian
tale such as that of the treacherous Ajkuna, wife of the valiant Muj, is a
blood-curdling version of Helen of Troy, and that the story of Zuk the
 THE EUROPEAN ORIGINS OFALBANIA 107

Standard-Bearer reiterates the figure of Orestes in a mothers betrayal,

a sister inciting her brother to matricide, and Furies, and retribution
(88). As they note in their journal, [w]e have ended up discovering the
foundations of a common Graeco-Illyrian-Albanian proto-universe (86).
These ancient songs hark back to a time when the clash between Christian
Europe and the world of Islam [] had been more brutal and harsh in
Albania than anywhere else, and when the destruction of the country was
reflected in the fate of its epic poetry: whole sections of it were buried
beneath the rubble, and the tradition of recitation was banned (116). The
rhapsodes, carriers of the national essence in the epic, fled to the moun-
tains, losing contact both with their countryfolk, who converted in large
numbers to Islam under the Ottomans, and with the wider world of which
Albania had been a part, namely Europe about to emerge from the Middle
Ages. The epic form, capable of expressing the essentials of Albanian life
over millennia in the stories of Zuk, Ajkuna, Doruntine and others, could
not contain the Ottoman occupation which threatened the basis on which
the epic rested: that is, the presence of an Albanian people. It continued to
exist only in competing, fragmentary and unstable variants.
This instability of the form, its changeability in terms of time, place and
point of view, renders it problematic as a genre and weakens any schol-
arly claims to authenticity. Indeed the point of Kadares novel is that the
scholars discover a mode of transmission and adaptation rather than an
original text. The Albanian epics are thus generically connected to earlier
iterations, but not to an Urtext. Homer, as anything other than the puta-
tive scribe who first fixed the Greek texts in writing, is a figment of the
philological imagination. Moreover the oral diffusion of the epics evinces
a disquieting complexity. Unlike the Homeric epics, these Balkan works
do not reveal a single national history, but the two competing national
histories of Albania and Serbia. In other words, a single epic can

exist in the language of two nations that are enemies. And both sides, the
Serbs and the Albanians, use the epic in exactly the same way, as a weapon, in
a tragic duel that is quite unique. A ballad in one of the two languages is like
an upside-down version of the same ballad in the other language: a magic
mirror, making the hero of the one the anti-hero of the other []. (1012)

The issue of the dual provenance of the epicsin Albanian and Serbo-
Croatiancomes to a head with the visit of the sinister Serb Orthodox
monk Dushan from the western Kosovar town of Pe (Serb) or Peja/Pej
(Albanian). He questions Max and Bill about their research, asking why
108 P. MORGAN

they only study the Albanian versions and poisonously admiring their
work on behalf of the Albanian epic, and the Albanian people in gen-
eral (113). Dushan later contacts the hermit, Frok, to incite suspicion of
the scholars and their equipment among the singers, provoking them to
destroy the machinery. The assault on the scholars and the destruction
of their equipment and recordings brings the novel to its denouement.
The collection of epic remnants are now scattered again, just as it was
before, and the hope for national regrouping and redemption lost (160).
This latest catastrophe merely reiterates the national syndrome of frag-
mentation (160). As Bill and Max reflect, [t]he age of the epic really was
over in this world, and it was only by the purest chance that they had had
the possibility of glimpsing its last flickering before it went out for good.
They had captured the final glow, and then lost it. The veil of night had
fallen forever over the epic land (162). And yet, at the end of the novel,
the epic does live on, reassembling itself through the foreigners, bring-
ing Bill into its universe, transforming him into a rhapsode as he intones
lines of verse, compressing their adventure into the formulaic language
of the epic:

Bill pulled his right arm from under his cape, raised it to his face, splayed
his fingers, placed his palm against his upper cheek and ear so that his fin-
gers made a kind of ridge visible over the top of his head. Majekrah, Max
thought, but he had no time to ponder on it because his companion had
meanwhile begun to chant, in a flat and expressionless voice, the lines of
verse that he had just heard read to him.12

This theme of Bills transformation into an epic bard runs through

the story from the first intimations of his increasing blindness, merg-
ing comedy with personal misfortune. The scholars worldly ambitions
to unravel the mystery of Homer and thereby vanquish their academic
opponents are certainly satirised, but Bills transformation bestows upon
the Irish-American a quality of tragic dignity, even grandeur (41). Here, as
throughout Kadares works, the process of immolation into the epic flux
of time and narrative heightens everyday experience to a level of greater
significance. Kadares irony lies in his recognition of the untimeliness of
Bills transformation. Kadare both satirises the scholars romantic visions
of Homeric origins and Balkan authenticity and at the same time evokes
a sense of ethno-national identity deeper than the present and broader
than the individual. On the one hand, the historical memory remains of a
 THE EUROPEAN ORIGINS OFALBANIA 109

people united in the transnational experience of an Albanianness which has

changed over the millennia and has always included Kosovo, but which
has never been equivalent to Balkan political realities. On the other hand,
Kadare consigns his bards and their epics to a romantic past. The location
in which Bill and Max meet the singers is characterised by legendary inns
in the highland mist, visions of ancient crimes, voices that seemed to
come from another world and further other-worldly encounters (74, 81).
From the start, the realm of the epics as imagined by the foreign scholars
is an intermediary zone between reality and dream:

It was their first encounter with highlanders from the true epic zone. []
Looking at these highlanders, you were looking at the boundary between
men and gods, the watershed, the point of contact or of separation, how-
ever you wanted to see it. Epic poetry spoke of them, there was even an old
Albanian word to describe them, hyanjeri, or god-man []. (73)

As the language of the passage suggests, the modern writer can only evoke;
he can no longer believe in the single origin or narrative coherence of this
discursive tradition. The time is long past for this type of unitary existen-
tial and discursive experience, and it is one which Kadare, as the voice of
Albanian modernity, will not replicate. His modern epic must embrace
the contradictory realities of his nation, of highland simplicity and urban
sophistication, of north and south, highlander and lowlander, Gheg and
Tosk, Albanian and Kosovar.
There can be little doubt that Ismail Kadare was powerfully influenced
by the qualities of the Albanian epics. At the same time, he had early on
shown himself to be a clear-sighted critic of Albanian traditions in his
short story The Song (1967), for example, in which an ironic ending to a
story of romantic nationalism leaves unresolved the conflict between tradi-
tional and modern consciousness. In The File on H, Max and Bill become
the mouthpieces for the contradictions and complexities of the ancient
epic. They recognise the profundity of the epic processes still at work in
the Albanian rhapsodes, but also stumble onto the political implications of
their studies in the contemporary environment. Particularly in their deal-
ings with the Serb monk, Dushan, they become aware of the instrumen-
talisation of the epic in the territorial claims of the modern Balkan states,
in the competing claims to primacy of Serbs and Albanians alike, and in
the references to Nazi theories of race and belonging in relation to these
claims (76).
110 P. MORGAN

The scholars uncover the processes of memory and forgetting in the

iteration and ongoing construction of the epic and thus can demonstrate
that Homer was not so much an originary voice, as the accrued voice of
generations of poets and singers over centuries. And while their record-
ings are destroyed, Bills transformation into a late, tragi-comic rhapsode
condenses the events of the past months into verse lines that themselves
will modulate in response to coming events. Is this just a comic sequel to
the tragic end of the genre, a parodic afterword sealing its fate, or is there
hope for revival of the epic and its ethno-national mission? Perhaps the
answer is to be found in the narrative processes themselves. The irony of
The File on H lies in the implicit recognition, stated by the Irish-American
researchers themselves, that both Albanians and Serbs have remembered
and forgotten that which suits their national stories, generating narratives
which are dependent on and determined by interest as well as history.
Both these European peoples owe their origins in this sense to Homer,
but each owns a different Homer. It is ultimately immaterial whether the
Albanian epics are adaptations and translations of the Slav (Serb, Bosniak,
Montenegrin) epics or vice versa: the point is that each national tradition
is a selection dependent equally on forgetting as well as remembering in
order to maintain a single line of narrative integrity and coherence. As
these national narratives will necessarily come into conflict, the retelling
and reframing that define the European epic processes render these works
unreliable as the keys to, or frameworks for, the European present.
In The File on H Kadare recognises the obsolescence of the epics as
statements of collective identity in anything other than a cultural-historical
sense. With Albania having entered a period of modernity after national
liberation, recognition of the power and importance of the national philo-
logical tradition and the historical consciousness that it represents must be
brought into balance with the demands of the modern European nation.
The epic is dead, or rather has transformed itself into the modern novel,
equally concerned with the comedy of Daisy and the spies as with the
fate of the ancient heroes and heroines. Unlike his earlier forebears, the
modern rhapsodethe novelistencapsulates these truths in the ironic
epic of modernity. Daisy is reborn as Emma Bovary rather than refigured
as Ajkuna or Doruntine, and Albania rejoins western Europe through the
modern narrative. The process of reconnection affirms the Albanian claim
to share European origins while at the same time recognising the absence
of an originary voice. Modern novelists, by contrast to the epic rhapsodes
of the past, must operate with multiple, ironic and competing versions of
 THE EUROPEAN ORIGINS OFALBANIA 111

reality among, as well as within, nations. They must engage with the exis-
tence of multiple narratives rather than forget them by attempting to cre-
ate a single strand of truth. The future lies with Daisy and her illegitimate
child (conceived under ambiguous circumstances and, presumably, to be
born like Kadare himself in the mid-1930s), not with the rhapsodes whose
lives will be changed forever by the passing of their generation and the
coming of communist modernity, and not with the research of Max and
Bill, which will end up on library shelves or in mechanised reproductions
in the archives of the future. The epics have moved into the realm of world
heritage, rescued in their death throes by a pair of scholars at a time when
they have already been largely forgotten by their own people.
Critical reception of The File on H has fallen into two main camps.
Galia Valtchinova focuses on the national enmities in the novel, censuring
Kadare for placing his literary skills in the service of Albanian chauvinism,
as does the critic Arshi Pipa.13 Anne White and Robert Crawshaw, by con-
trast, note the ironies and narrative complexities of the work. White argues
that Kadares worldview is permeated by a sense of links or border cross-
ings from one identity to another and the potential for dual identities.14
In Crawshaws view, Kadare comments obliquely on the myths of cultural
independence which had long underpinned Albanias claim for national
sovereignty and, in doing so, deconstructs the processes by which his-
torical evidence is made to serve political ends, since there are no real
winners in the novel.15 Each side of this debate is right in its own way and
wrong in its own way, rather like the epics themselves with their represen-
tations of national identities. Kadare does not embody the level of post-
modern narrative consciousness suggested by White and Crawshaw, nor
is he simply the anti-Serb Albanian patriot represented by Valtchinova.16
In The File on H, as in Drago, nj jet e shkurtr, nj emr jetgjat
(The General of the Dead Army, 1962), Dasma (The Wedding, 1968),
Doruntine, The Palace of Dreams and elsewhere in his oeuvre, Kadare
evokes the power and profundity of the Albanian epic tradition while at
the same time recognising that the epic can no longer function in Europe
as anything other than a cultural memory. It is not viable as a basis for
the modern political nation. Like many literary engagements with popular
national myths, Kadares conceptualisation of the Albanians as an indig-
enous Balkan people sharing an ancient culture with the Greeks is a sort
of literary scaffolding. For this writer, who would become wedded to the
vision of a modern, western European future for his country, the founding
myth of commonality with the origins of European civilisation in Greece
112 P. MORGAN

functioned as an Aesopian argument against the Ottoman past and the

communist present of his country. As part of this project, The File on H
reveals Kadare at his best, weaving comedy into the tragic history of the
nation. The implicit message in regard to the epics is that they are the
embers of a dying fire, a moribund European tradition hearkening back to
earlier national histories. Given the fraught relationship with Yugoslavia at
the time of Titos death, as well as the complexities of the political situa-
tion in Albania towards the end of the Hoxha regime, Kadares novel rep-
resents a subtle plea for political pragmatism rather than ethno-nationalist
fundamentalism.17

NOTES
1. See Peter Morgan, Ismail Kadare: The Writer and the Dictatorship
19571990 (London: MHRA/Maney Publishing, 2010), p.54.
2. See Istvn Bib, Die Misere der osteuropischen Kleinstaaterei, trans. by
Bla Rsky (1946; Frankfurt am Main: Verlag neue Kritik, 1992), p.47.
3. See Anon, Legends of Mujo and Halili, trans. by Robert Elsie, Albanian
Literature, http://www.albanianliterature.net/oral_lit3/OL3-05.html
(accessed 31 July 2015), and Anon, The Ballad of Constantine and
Dhoqina, trans. by Robert Elsie, Albanian Literature, http://www.alba-
nianliterature.net/oral_lit2/OL2-04.html (accessed 31 July 2015).
4. The first full edition of The Highland Lute was published in 1912 and was
edited and enlarged over the decades until the definitive edition appeared
in 1937, only three years before Fishtas death.
5. The Albanian epics originated in Illyrian antiquity, he writes, but were sup-
pressed in the long night of the Turko-Islamic occupation and by the
fierce chauvinist passions of neighbouring lands (Kadare, Foreword to
Qemal Haxhihasani, Luka Kol, Alfred Ui and Misto Treska, eds, Le
Chansonnier pique albanais, trans. by Kol Luka (Tirana: Academie des
Sciences de la RPS DAlbanie, Institut de Culture Populaire, 1983),
pp.710). See also Morgan, Ismail Kadare, pp.2415.
6. Kadare, Foreword, p.9.
7. Ethnic unrest began to escalate in Kosovo in the early 1980s, shortly after
the death of Marshall Tito unleashed the forces of destabilisation which
would come to a head at the start of the next decade in the break-up of
Yugoslavia.
8. Kadare considered Hoxhas silence a betrayal of Albanian ethnic identity,
attributing it to the dictators fear of information about his private life held
by the wartime Yugoslav partisan leaders (see Morgan, Ismail Kadare,
p.120).
 THE EUROPEAN ORIGINS OFALBANIA 113

9. The northern Muslim tribal leader, Ahmed Bey Zogu, ruled as King Zog
1 until 1939. Zog stabilised the economy with Italian financial support,
but also opened the way for the Italian fascist regime of Benito Mussolini
to use Albania as a bridgehead for military expansion into the Balkans. On
the night of 67 April 1940 the Italians invaded Albania in preparation for
the October 1940 attack on Greece.
10. See Kadare, The File on H, trans. by David Bellos (1981; London: Harvill
Press, 1997), p.8. Page references are to the English translation of The File
on H and are given in parenthesis after quotations.
11. See, for example, Rexhep Qosja, Realiteti i shprfillur: Vshtrim kritik mbi
pikpamjet e Ismail Kadares pr identitetin shqiptar (2006).
12. Kadare, File on H, p. 169. The term majekrah (wing-tip) refers to the
ritual gesture accompanying the rhapsodes performance (see ibid., p.87).
13. See Valtchinova, Ismail Kadares The H-File and the Making of the
Homeric Verse: Variations on the Works and Lives of Milman Parry and
Albert Lord, in Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers and Bernd J.Fischer, eds,
Albanian Identities: Myths, Narratives and Politics (London: Hurst,
2002), pp.11113; and Pipa, Contemporary Albanian Literature (Boulder:
East European Monographs; New York: Columbia University Press,
1991), p.94.
14. White, Kosovo, Ethnic Identity and Border Crossings in The File on H,
in Peter Wagstaff, ed., Border Crossings: Mapping Identities in Modern
Europe (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004), p.23.
15. Crawshaw, The File on H.: Metahistory, Literature, Ethnography, Cultural
Heritage and the Balkan Borders, in Reginald Byron and Ullrich Kockel,
eds, Negotiating Culture: Moving, Mixing and Memory in Contemporary
Europe (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2006), p.61.
16. Both White and Crawshaw tend to assume that Kadare is being ironic at
those points where the text does not tally with their arguments. Whites
border crossings thesis avoids the questions raised by Kadares deep com-
mitment to the Albanian epic tradition and his inclusion in the novel of
anti-Serb elements. Crawshaw, in a similar vein, notes that Kadare cannot
be seen as wholly neutral, but tends to rely on irony and ambiguity wher-
ever he cannot square his thesis with the text (ibid., p.68).
17. Revision of this chapter has benefited greatly from the constructive critical
input of Andrew Hammond and Danica Jenkins, to both of whom I offer
my thanks.
 6

Images ofConquest: Europe andLatin

American Identity

PeterBeardsell

It is the USA rather than Europe that occupies the attention of post-1945
Latin American writers when they deal with immediate socio-political
realities. When it comes to their identity, however, they focus more on
the persisting effects of European involvement in the continent. This has
taken many forms, among them the study of origins, a search for civilisa-
tion as opposed to native barbarism, the assimilation of European values,
a resentment towards domination by a white elite, a yearning for political
and cultural independence and the affirmation of indigenous nationalism.
But one overall effect commands particular attention in Latin American
literature: the conquest of native peoples by Europeans in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, which has produced profound psychological and
cultural results that persist in the present era. A sense of having been con-
quered is fundamental to the psyche of many nations.
It must be emphasised that these consequences are not uniform
throughout the region. In Argentina, for example, where the vast major-
ity of people descend directly from European immigrants, and where the
views of the minority of indigenous or mestizo people tend to attract rela-
tively little attention, the notion of conquest is essentially alien in purely
nationalas opposed to continentalterms. Modern colonialism certainly

P. Beardsell ( )
Faculty of Arts, University of Hull, Hull, HU6 7RX, UK

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 115

A. Hammond (ed.), The Novel and Europe,
DOI10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4_6
116 P. BEARDSELL

causes concern, but a preoccupation with invasion and the destruction of

a former system has no place in the national psyche. It is in those coun-
tries where there were highly developed civilisations before the arrival of
the Europeans that the Conquest is a constant and fundamental element
in national identity and culture. Even here there is no entirely common
attitude, since the way in which the preoccupation with conquest is trans-
lated into the official culture varies from place to place. At one extreme
there may be little more than a relatively detached acknowledgement of
the historical facts. At the other extreme, there is shared emotion: a uni-
fied feeling of having been conquered. The Mexican historian Jos Luis
Martnez regarded his own country as being identified with the second of
these positions. This was proven, he argued, by a linguistic phenomenon:
a Mexican always says cuando nos conquistaron los espaoles (when the
Spaniards conquered us), while some South Americans tend to say cuando
conquistamos (when we conquered).1 In effect, we may sum this up
as implying that, whatever a Mexicans disposition to the Conquest, he or
she regards the conquerors as other and the conquered as self.
It is fairly common for modern historians to treat the Conquest as
though it were merely the events surrounding the indigenous civilisations
overthrow by the Spaniards, and to focus on the figures involved in those
essentially military exploits. The Conquest sometimes becomes essen-
tially Motecuhzoma (Moctezuma), Cuauhtmoc and Corts in Mexico,
or Atahualpa and Pizarro in Peru. However, one may well argue that the
Conquest began with the discovery (or journeys of discovery) from
1492 onwards, that it involved explorations by Spaniards before and
after the fall of the Aztec and Inca Empires, and that it became a more or
less constant process during the colonial period. Indeed, there are many
who argue that the Conquest continues today. From the point of view of
the indigenous people within a modern Latin American state, particularly
in rural areas, independence from Spain in the early nineteenth century
was incomplete: it was political, but not cultural, and the official culture
remains fundamentally European and alien. As the Ecuadorean writer
Jorge Enrique Adoum has explained, race and skin colour play a part in this
perception.2 The indigenous communities (or nations, as Adoum calls
them) within the modern state regard the official culture as that of white
people, or else of mestizos emblanquecidos (whitened mestizos), and
feel that it is imposed on them in an authoritarian and aggressive way. It
amounts to a form of internal colonialism (una suerte de colonialismo
interno): the white people behave as though they were always right and
act towards indigenous groups as though they were in a conquered land.
 IMAGES OFCONQUEST 117

The notion that the Conquest has not ended is not confined, however, to
the rural indigenous communities. From the point of view of many white,
mestizo and urban indigenous people, the present sense of belonging to a
conquered race derives, not from a view of the divisions within their own
society, but chiefly from something that they would regard as an external
relationship: what Adoum calls the economic and political control and
the cultural influence of the USA.3 In this context, there is room for a
wide variety of attitudes towards the European Conquest. Although there
is a generally negative attitude, Adoum admits that all Latin American
countries have among their population descendants of conquistadores or
encomenderos (colonists granted land and indigenous workers) and that
many of them are proud of the fact, nostalgic for colonialism and capable
of translating these sentiments into political policies when they occupy
positions of power.
One of the factors that have impinged on peoples perception of the
Conquest at all levels of society has been social and political change.
Martnez has shown that in Mexico a movement to rescue and study the
indigenous past as an act of national affirmation began as early as the years
following the Spaniards defeat of the Aztecs.4 Despite all the conflicting
political tendencies, he argues, this current has never been interrupted.
Indeed, during the nineteenth century indigenismo became an integral
part of the main ideological position of the Liberals, while hispanismo
was espoused by the Conservatives.5 Pursuing this line of argument we
may easily see how, during the twentieth century, under the influence of
Marxism and other ideologies of the Left, there was a general elevation
of the status of indigenous culture and a corresponding critique of the
system that had suppressed it. Socio-economic revolution enhanced this
trend. It is in Mexico after the Revolution of 19101920 that the cultural
consequences have been most notable, but the effects in Andean republics
such as Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador are also extensive.
In the middle of the twentieth century the Nobel laureate Octavio
Paz began to publish a series of essays in which he analysed the socio-
psychological reality of Mexico. Although some of his views have caused
offence in some quarters, there is a general acknowledgement that in sig-
nificant respects he was able to express the essence of the Mexican psyche,
and there is no doubt that his thinking has had a profound effect on that
of intellectuals in his country.6 The most influential collection of essays
is El laberinto de la soledad (The Labyrinth of Solitude, 1950) which
includes important material on the impact of the Conquest. An essay enti-
tled Los hijos de la Malinche (The Children of Malinche) takes up the
118 P. BEARDSELL

theme of Mexico as fundamentally a mestizo nation and links it with what

Paz sees as a deeply rooted psychological sense of betrayal and violation.
In this perspective the Conquest amounts to rape. History is simplified
to become myth and some of the principal figures involved in the clash
between the indigenous people and the Europeans become symbols.7 Thus,
Cuauhtmocs tomb is for most Mexicans the cradle of the nation: the last
Aztec leader, heroic in his resistance to the Spaniards, is its young grand-
father, the origin of Mexico.8 The mother of the nation is known symboli-
cally as La Chingada (the raped woman). If Cuauhtmoc represents the
Mexicans wish to remain closed to the outside, La Chingada represents
enforced submission and penetration by the outside.9 However, there is
also a line of thought that does not leave the identity of La Chingada
symbolically anonymous but identifies the figure as La Malinche (Doa
Marina), interpreter and mistress of the conqueror Corts. This inevitably
implies that the symbolic father is Corts and that for many Mexicans the
partnership amounts to a more or less willing collusion and betrayal by
the mother. Those Mexicans who favour the idea of opening the nation
to the outside may therefore be called disparagingly los malinchistas.10
Hence the coexistence of Cuauhtmoc and La Malinche as opposed and
complementary symbols and the persistent presence of Corts and La
Malinche in the imagination and sensibility of modern Mexicans as symbols
of a secret conflict, which Mexicans have still not resolved. This analysis
by Octavio Paz is a symptom of the fact that writers and artists of the pres-
ent day frequently explore and analyse their countrys current psyche by
demonstrating the continuing relevance of the past. The Conquest itself is
the historical event most susceptible to this treatment.
In Mexican literature the event is sufficiently important to suggest
that its psychological effects could almost be calledwere the term not
regarded as pejorativeobsessional.11 There is even a sufficiently large
number of plays on the theme for us to speak of a Theatre of the Conquest
as virtually a genre in its own right. Novelists of the twentieth century,
though predominantly focused on the Mexican revolution, also shared
a preoccupation with the Conquest. A good example is Carlos Fuentess
Terra Nostra (1975) whereamong other thingsthe indigenous peo-
ples struggles against the conquistadores are juxtaposed with the present
era to suggest their lasting effects. While the literature and art of Bolivia,
Ecuador and Peru do not suggest a phenomenon on quite the same scale
as in Mexico, there is certainly evidence in these Andean countrieswhich
once constituted the core of the Inca Empireof an enduring psychological
 IMAGES OFCONQUEST 119

impact of European control. An aspect of the Conquest was taken up in

Ecuador, for example, by Jorge Carrera Andrade, who wrote an angry
extended narrative poem, Crnica de las Indias (Chronicle of the Indies,
1965), dedicated to the condemnation of tyranny as represented by
Gonzalo Pizarro, who had made himself the first dictator of the New World
by assuming control over the land from Quito to the northern borders of
Chile. In Peru a different aspect of European (and, in a more general
sense, western) domination was explored by Jos Mara Arguedas in the
novel Los ros profundos (Deep Rivers, 1958), a subtle exploration of ethnic
and cultural relationships as a young mestizo boy discovers his identity in
Andean Peru. Later, in the same country, Cronwell Jara published a book
of short stories describing imperial victimisation of the indigenous and the
poor, colourfully entitled Bab Osam, cimarrn, ora por la santa muerta
(Bab Osam, Runaway, Pray for his Soul, 1989). At the end of the Cold
War a significant contribution to the field was made by the Bolivian novel-
ist Nstor Taboada Tern. In order to obtain a more rounded impression
of the legacy of the Conquest and European cultural and political domi-
nance I will now consider a novel of his dealing with what is usually called
la conquista del Per (the conquest of Peru), though it could equally
well be known as la cada del Reino del Sol (the fall of the Kingdom
of the Sun).12 The novel is Angelina Yupanki, Marquesa de la conquista
(Angelina Yupanqui, Marquise of the Conquest, 1992).13
Belonging loosely to the genre of the historical novel, Angelina
Yupanki combines two dominant features. It is an account of the mili-
tary and political events of the Conquest, told in (often sordid) detail
by imagined eye-witnesses, and it is an insight into the sexual lives of the
participants and the way in which events affected the widows of the last
sovereign Inca emperor Atahualpa, in particular Cuxirimay Ojllu, whom
the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro renamed Doa Angelina.
The text is replete with strategies, sieges, battles, betrayals, executions,
torture, rebellions, rapes, lasciviousness, passions, secret rendezvous and
love-making. With a complex, variegated narrative technique, the texts
account of historical events may be considered parallel to the versions
that have been published for the past 500 years.
Events are presented chronologically in a tripartite structure. Strikingly,
the arrangement into three phases is made to work as usefully for the
division of military and political events as for the personal fortunes of
Angelina. In Libro Primero (First Book), events in the former territory
of the Kingdom of the Sun are traced from the meeting of Atahualpa
120 P. BEARDSELL

(Atau Huallpa) and Francisco Pizarro (1532) to shortly after the execution
of the Inca, a period in which the teenage beauty Angelina picks her way
through the confusion and decides that her future lies with Pizarro, for
whom she has developed an obsessive passion. Libro Segundo (Second
Book) covers the extension of the foreign occupation, the indigenous
resistance and the consolidation of colonial power, while at the same time
dealing with Angelinas marriage to Pizarro.14 Like the first section, it
ends with Angelina filled with passion for a new man, this time Juan de
Betanzos. Libro Tercero (Third Book) begins with the campaign against
the Inca rebel leader Manco Capac (Manko Cpaj) and ends after the
death of Pizarro with the arrival in 1547 of Pedro de La Gasca, who had
been sent to Peru to arrest the usurper Gonzalo Pizarro. Angelinas for-
tunes also change in this period, as she transfers her affections to Juan de
Betanzos, marries him and has two children. This aspect of the novel is
rounded off in Madrid with the marriage of Doa Francisca (daughter of
Francisco Pizarro by one of Atahualpas widows) to her uncle Hernando
following his release from prison. By developing the military and personal
aspects of the Conquest simultaneously, the text denies predominance to
conventional historical record, introduces an important focus on women
and enables a greater emphasis to be given to the idea of the continuity of
Inca blood in the mestizos of the future.
In keeping with the basic method of the parallel presentation of mili-
tary/political developments and personal lives, the text has two main nar-
rative modes. Most pages are narrated in the third person, but they are
interspersed with pages narrated in the first person by Angelina. Setting
aside for the present the more difficult third-person narrative, let us con-
sider Angelinas passages with a view to determining what image of her
emerges from the novel. Occasional hints allow us to realise that the pas-
sages have been composed a considerable time after the events and that
they are based on her memory of scenes that she witnessed or on intimate
conversations in which she took part. For example, when she narrates
how Pizarro harangued his men about their duty to treat the indigenous
population with consideration and respect, she mentions that she can still
remember the moment (103). And when she narrates Pizarros last night
with Doa Juana Azarpay she affirms, as though Juana or Pizarro had con-
fided in her, that she knows that they made love with the special fervour
of farewells (104). As an eye-witness she can recall Pizarros reactions to
situations, such as one in which Pizarros hunches were something to see
(105). This sense of Angelinas ability to offer a privileged insight into
 IMAGES OFCONQUEST 121

aspects unavailable to historians usefully empowers her narrative with the

capacity to make critical comment on characters and events. It should be
added that her political comments are extremely rare and that she tends to
focus on her own predicament and on the people who influenced her life.
As far as her attitude to Pizarro is concerned, two radical changes
are noted during the course of their relationship. At first her memories
emphasise her physical attraction to the bearded Great Chief and her
pride in occupying a privileged position. She defends his virtues, praises
his greatness in history and denigrates his detractors (167). However, the
reader of her narrative sometimes notes an internal contradiction, which
may be interpreted as the foreshadowing of her next change of attitude
and of her ultimate disposition at the time of narrating. This contradiction
is the cause of a highly significant passage of self-irony when she explains
her role as Pizarros wife. As a privileged woman she had a dual mission:
to serve as well as possible in bed and to give birth to privileged chil-
dren who would be architects of a system of good living (167). From the
standpoint of the moment at which she narrates, her narrative adopts a
critical attitude towards the role she played during the earlier period of her
life. The second change in Angelinas attitude to Pizarro seems, at first, to
stem from the dying of her physical passion for him as he ages and from
the growth of her desire for Juan de Betanzos. But the predominantly
sexual motive becomes abruptly transformed into a more general sense
of hatred and rebellion, with the result that she can wish his death, reject
his religion and think back to her original husband, Atahualpa (194). This
leads eventually to her reversion to indigenous culture, a change cemented
when she moves to Cuzco, explaining that she wants her son to be born
in the former capital of the Inca Empire (231).
Angelinas progression from the Inca camp to the Spanish side, and
then back to the original culture, may create a sympathetic image: that of
the teenager who follows her instincts, adapts in order to survive and even-
tually learns that the false values are found on the side of the European
invaders and the true ones among the invaded. To an extent her narrative
could be considered as her justification in the face of possible criticism.
However, certain ambiguities in her actions and in her own statements
cause a more complex picture to emerge. Brought up as a royal princess,
she has an ingrained haughtiness, which is expressed as snobbish scorn
towards the interpreter Felipillo. Her attitude to others seems often deter-
mined by self-interest. Subtle manoeuvres to bring herself advantage can
lead to the distress even of people close to her. Doa Ins never forgives
122 P. BEARDSELL

Angelina for easing her out of Pizarros household (because she is a beau-
tiful rival), but Angelina demonstrates her hardness when she remembers
the fact with the comment, Im not bothered by that judgement (226).
Though apparently distressed when she learns of Atahualpas death sen-
tence, she adjusts with remarkable ease after the execution, envisaging
a radiant future with Pizarro. Affection does not appear to play a large
part in her relationship with men, although sexual appetite, heightened by
thoughts of danger and transgression, is a continual motivation. What the
text of the novel presents, then, is a portrayalostensibly a self-portrayal
in which Angelina is neither idealised nor condemned. She is a beautiful
woman, proud of her royal descent, who learns to survive in dangerous
circumstances and successfully satisfies her powerful sexual drive. But as
she herself briefly and defiantly acknowledges, her reputation has a nega-
tive side, in which her great beauty is associated with licentiousness.15 On
the basis of both her own text and the few occasions in which she figures
in the third-person narrative, we infer that loyalty is not one of her notable
characteristics and that self-interest is her principal motivation. It is impor-
tant to bear in mind that Angelinas narrative occupies a relatively minor
proportion of the novel as a whole and that, despite the implication of the
title, Angelina is not in herself the main theme. She acts as a focal point in
the story of Atahualpas widows, provides an insight into intimate situa-
tions and serves as one means by which the novel presents a non-Hispanic
view of the Conquest.
Angelinas is the only voice that expresses itself in isolated narrative
units. The remainder of the text consists principally of narrative in the
third person, within which a multiplicity of voices is quoted. On rare
occasions the voices are presented in the form of dialogue, but in general
they are inserted into the narrative sequence without conventional typo-
graphical signals. There are reasons for ascribing some of the third-person
narrative text to Pizarros scribe Juan de Betanzos. Towards the end of
the novel, occasional allusions are made to a text that he is writing under the
title Suma y narracin de los Incas (Synoptic Account of the Incas). At the
point where he enters the novel as a character, unusual attention is given
to his life and career to date, stating his origins in Spains ruined nobility
and explaining his assiduous efforts to learn the Inca language. He is privy
to inside information and is even named as one who remembers words
spoken by the Inquisitor.16 However, he is not the only character who is
shown to be capable of producing the text from his notes. Long before
Betanzos arrives on the scene, the chronicler Pedro de Ciezo de Len is
 IMAGES OFCONQUEST 123

said to have interviewed Manko Cpaj, and he appears to provide the text
with the Incas actual complaints (126). Pedro Pizarro is a further possible
source, among many others. The text abounds, moreover, with interjected
comments, opinions and exclamations from a great variety of sources,
whose identity is sometimes clearly implied, sometimes left obscure. The
best inference, therefore, is that the third-person narrative is a compilation
of texts derived from chronicles, testimonies and memories.17
With its variegated style, which ranges from the prosaic to the poetic,
the third-person narrative is unified by an overarching sense of irony. For
example, when it informs the reader that diseases hit the Indian popu-
lation, it quotes words that ostensibly explain the epidemic: Why fight
against illnesses sent by God to punish the unfaithful? (30). Whether
these are the resigned thoughts of indigenous people who are suffering
or the message conveyed to them by the friars, the idea that this should
be an explanation is so incongruous that the words mock the Christian
Churchs teaching. At the critical moment when the signal is given for
the massacre of Atahualpas warriors, the narrator interjects the words:
Hell, youve got to seize the moment! (17). This seems to explain the
philosophy and tactic of good timing, but the vulgarity of the expression
contradicts the solemnity and epochal importance of the concept, sardoni-
cally reducing it to the level of Pizarros personal adventure. The later
repetitions of the interjection convert it into a kind of leitmotif to ironise
Pizarros justification of violent action; it occurs again, for example, when
Pizarro decides to execute Atahualpa without waiting for confirmation of
a supposed uprising (62). In fact, the narrator/compiler uses irony abun-
dantly. The overview of the Spaniards highly favourable situation when
colonisation has been consolidated is typical: A life of colonial order and
peace prevailed, smiling on all the conquistadors across the wine, the cards
and the grille, endorsed by gold and drugs. And the sexiness of the Indian
women, and the grace of God (116).
The choice of descriptive material often supports the effects of irony
in conveying an attitude sympathetic to the conquered and hostile to
the conquerors. An especially powerful instance is the description of
Atahualpas execution. Garrotted after being persuaded to convert to
Christianity in order to avoid being burned alive, he is burned regard-
less of the agreement. At first the narrator appears to treat this moment
of death with mystery and supernatural feeling, telling of how the earth
shook and the sky darkened as a storm began, but then adds that [t]he
angels in heaven sang in silence (64). It is clear from the contradictory
124 P. BEARDSELL

silence of the angels that any allusion to Christs crucifixion is bitterly

ironical rather than genuine. Condemnation of Pizarros act by his own
men is implied by a mocking echo of St Peters denial of Christ, culminat-
ing in Pedro Pizarros triple rejection of his half-brother: no, I am no
relative of Pizarros, no (64).
All this is evidence of an underlying hostility to specific events, situa-
tions and personalities of the Conquest, even though there is not always
openly adverse comment. At this point I wish to take the analysis to a final
stage. There are several instances in the novel where the text presents a
critical perspective on the Conquest, the Christian religion or the white
people in general, as though from the point of view of the indigenous
people of that time. In this respect the text becomes not merely an affir-
mation of the indigenous version of events, but a reversal of the European
standpoint and, in effect, a return of the European gaze.
In her own narrative, Angelina expresses a particular sense in which the
direction of the Conquest has been reversed: that is, by the womens sex-
ual conquest of the Spanish men. As she puts it, I was now the conqueror,
discovering the golden temple in the body of the foreign male []. My
race too can conquer (73). In her case, the womens relationship with
the Spanish men is treated as a positive gain (the mens body is their gold)
and a victory. When the third-person narrative deals with the same issue it
takes a different approach, though in doing so it again effectively subju-
gates the conquerors. It regards the Spaniards exploitation of indigenous
women as a symptom of moral degeneration and hypocrisy: in Spain there
is an emphasis on the importance of virginity until the harmony of mar-
riage, whereas in the New World the concept of virginity is suppressed
(117). A similar tendency to generalise about the invaders, the world
from which they have come and the values that they represent, is found in
numerous other passages. The Spaniards deceitful, untrustworthy behav-
iouralien to the Inca codeleads Manco Cpaj to draw the conclusion
that the whole of the white race is cut from the same cloth (124). After
the consolidation of Spanish power in the region, the arrival of new immi-
grants from Spain inspires an ironical gaze at the Old World from the
third-person narrator, with a succinctly critical final comment on a suite
of new conquistadores []. Noble by birth but not in virtues (127). But
the novels most damning overall commentary on the world from which
the conquistadores have come is attributed to Atahualpa. Condemned to
death, the Inca meditates upon the nature of the Spaniards, Spain and the
entire Spanish culture, deducing that:
 IMAGES OFCONQUEST 125

They come from a distant country, a fanatical country driven mad by suffer-
ing and hunger, with fields that are a barren wasteland with the odd hillock,
land that is old and worn out, with rash tyrannical kings and a god as bad-
tempered and immoderate as themselves, who dies, is born again, and dies
again in a tale without end, people whose religion is laughable, preaching
the opposite to what it practises. (58)

The effectiveness of this passage lies in the fact that, although its vision
of Europe is recognisably a grotesque distortion of reality, it still retains
a sufficient hint of truth for its conclusions to be eminently justified.
Fanaticism, suffering, hunger, barren soil, tyrants and religious hypoc-
risy were, of course, all found abundantly in Europe. What may rankle is
that the other should deduce these features to be the essence of a land
it does not know at first hand. If Atahualpas picture looks distorted,
either it must be based upon exaggerated behaviour witnessed among
the invaders who hold him captive or else those who find it distorted
are unaware of the reality of the European scene. In both cases the con-
sequence for Eurocentric readers is one of defamiliarisation, andas is
usual when a familiar truth is defamiliariseda new level of awareness
becomes possible.
As I have noted previously, Angelina Yupanki constitutes a narrative
of material that other books present mainly in summary. The effect that
many passages have on the reader is emotional rather than intellectual. For
an example of the more usual method let us consider the moment when
the American historian William Prescott writes of Atahualpas execution.
The account devotes space to the Incas choice of the garrote, his baptism,
his last wishes and the subsequent funeral service, and it pauses to appraise
his treatment at the hands of Pizarro, but passes over the spectacle of the
mans death: Then, recovering his stoical bearing, which for a moment had
been shaken, he submitted himself calmly to his fate: while the Spaniards,
gathering around, muttered their credos for the salvation of his soul! Thus,
by the death of a vile malefactor perished the last of the Incas!18 Only
in a footnote does he give any detail of what it means to be executed by
the garrote. By contrast with this account, Taboadas novel includes the
horrific spectacle leading to the moment when the flames begin to lick
his body: They fitted the iron rung around his neck and a thick dark-
ness spread through all the land. [] Felipillo was surprised to notice that
when they tightened the shackle to break the bones in his neck incoherent
words came from his lips (64). The text gives sufficient detail to arouse
126 P. BEARDSELL

the imagination and introduces an eye-witness to add authenticity and to

channel the reactions. It is one amongst countless brutal scenes. The tor-
ture and execution at the stake of Manco Cpajs chief wife, Cora Ojllu,
in revenge for the Inca rebels refusal to parley, is a particularly harrowing
example of the many atrocities perpetuated against the women (183).
With this kind of material Taboadas text therefore acts as a powerful
alternative view of the Conquest and of the European culture to which
the conquistadores belonged. In its overall view of the Conquest the book
could be described, without exaggeration, as a compendium of some of
the most hideous and brutal atrocities imaginable. (It is surely no coinci-
dence that the publication of the novel coincided with the quincentenary
celebrations of Columbuss landing in the Americas.) Although this essay
has selected a Bolivian novel to demonstrate the continuing manifestations
of the Conquest in peoples psyche, the theme is found in other genres
(dance, theatre, poetry, painting) in countries from all corners of the conti-
nent. An essential feature of this preoccupation with the Conquest in Latin
America is the conscious linking of the past with the present and, more spe-
cifically, the tendency to explore the historical conflict between Europe and
Latin America in order to affirm a sense of present identity. In this process
we find evidence of the kind of strategic reversal that Homi Bhabha dis-
cusses in The Location of Culture (1994). The Latin American perspective
counterbalances European cultural dominance. It allows an alternative cri-
tique and commentary on the native Americans conquest by Europeans.
It also permits the creation of an alternative discourse in which images of
Europewhich may, as it happens, be of interest to Europeansrespond
to the Latin American vision. Europe is converted into an implement in
various peoples search for their origins. In returning Europes gaze, Latin
America adopts the position of subject or self in relation to its European
object or other, thereby achieving a readjustment of what Bhabha calls the
structured gaze of power whose objective is authority.19

NOTES
1. Martnez, Hernn Corts (Mexico: UNAM/FCE, 1990), p.834. In this
essay all translations into English are mine.
2. Adoum, El proceso de emancipacin no ha concluido , in Heinz
Dieterich Steffan, ed., La interminable Conquista: Emancipacin e identi-
dad de Amrica Latina 14921992 (Mexico: Joaqun Mortiz/Planeta,
1990), p.259.
 IMAGES OFCONQUEST 127

3. See ibid., p.258.

4. Martnez, Hernn Corts, p.832.
5. Ibid., p.833.
6. Clearly, the status of his ideas was further enhanced by the award of the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990.
7. Paz, El laberinto de la soledad (Mexico City: Cuadernos Americanos,
1950), pp.768.
8. Ibid., p.76.
9. Ibid., p.78.
10. Ibid., p.78.
11. For studies of the preoccupation with the Conquest in popular culture,
such as indigenous dance, see Nathan Wachtel, The Vision of the Vanquished:
The Spanish Conquest of Peru through Indian Eyes 15301570 (1976) and
William Rowe and Vivian Schelling, Memory and Modernity: Popular
Culture in Latin America (1991).
12. Nstor Taboada Tern, Angelina Yupanki, Marquesa de la conquista
(Barcelona: Apstrofe, 1992), p.154. Hereafter, page references will be
given in parentheses in the text.
13. The key authority on Taboada is Keith Richards. I owe my interest in
Taboada and my awareness of this novel to his critical studies of the work
prior to Angelina (see, for example, Richards, Sexuality and Death: Cultural
Synthesis and the Grotesque in Nstor Taboada de Terns Manchay
Puytu, Journal of Hispanic Research, Vol. 3 (19945), pp.37696).
14. According to sources such as William Prescott, Pizarro was never married
(see Prescott, The Conquest of Peru, new edn (1847; London: Richard
Bentley, 1850), II, 345). Taboadas text insists on the marriage, but
describes it as being performed in private (see Taboada Tern, Angelina
Yupanki, p.154).
15. See, for example, Taboada Tern, Angelina Yupanki, pp.156, 158.
16. See ibid., pp.14550, 241.
17. The blurb on the back cover of the book appears to name Juan de Betanzos
as the narrator, but this notion must be regarded as a simplification.
18. Prescott, Conquest of Peru, II, 131.
19. Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 109. The material in this essay was first
published in a slightly different form in Peter Beardsell, Europe and Latin
America: Returning the Gaze (2000).
 7

Sissies Odyssey: Literary Exorcism inAma

Ata Aidoos Our Sister Killjoy

EstherPujolrs-Noguer

Published in 1977, Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections from a Black-eyed Squint

captures the journey of Sissie, a young Ghanaian woman, to Europe as a
member of the voluntary organisation INVOLOU. The pan-European
essence of Ama Ata Aidoos novel is reflected not only through Sissies
pilgrimage to Germany and Britain but also through Sissies references to
other European nations: France, Italy, Sweden, Russia, Portugal, Spain, the
kind of imperial nations which, as Joseph Conrad comments in Heart of
Darkness (1899), contributed to the making of Kurtz.1 Sissies testimony
is the outcome of reflections modelled around her black-eyed squint, in
other words, of her dissection, as a black woman, of white male Europe.2
Unlike the traditional critical stance that analyses Our Sister Killjoy as a
re-writing of Heart of Darkness, I contend that Aidoos ground-breaking
work sends readers on a literary journey in which the core text being called
forth and exorcised is none other than Homers Odyssey (c. 800 BC), the
cornerstone of the European literary tradition.3
The concept of tradition is, in itself, a controversial term. In his pio-
neering essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919), T.S. Eliot
encircled tradition in an aura of both inevitability and longing. The poet,

E. Pujolrs-Noguer ( )
Department of English and German, Autonomous University of Barcelona,
08193 Bellaterra, Barcelona, Spain

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 129

A. Hammond (ed.), The Novel and Europe,
DOI10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4_7
130 E. PUJOLRS-NOGUER

the individual talent, aspires to belong to a tradition that is not a given

but is something he must toil hard to obtain since, as Eliot resolutely
affirms, it cannot be inherited.4 Moreover, the poets ordeal, according
to Eliot, does not reside in national or linguistic affiliations, but rather
in his capacityor incapacityto place his poetry in the only literary
tradition that counts: that is to say, the whole of the literature of Europe
from Homer.5 Eliots essay is a product of a (western) European-centred
world in which blackness and femaleness remain, at best, appendages
to the master-signifiers, whiteness and maleness. What is more, Eliots
unabashed Eurocentrism is entrenched in the discourse of orientalism
that Edward Said described as an academic and imaginative mechanism
whereby western Europe created the Orientthe non-Westto safe-
guard its hegemony over colonised territories.6 This configuration of the
non-western as the other was construed upon the civilisation/savagery
dichotomy that elevated western European culture to the apex of human
advancement. As Said later develops in Culture and Imperialism (1993),
the perniciously biased view of the non-West sustained the work of reput-
edly liberal nineteenth-century British thinkers like Thomas Carlyle and
John Stuart Mill, whose humanistic ideas sat comfortably with imperial
thought.7 Blindness towards the cultural richness of colonised territories is
exemplified by Thomas Babington Macaulays famous report, Minute on
Indian Education (1835), in which, after admitting his lack of knowledge
of either Sanskrit or Arabic, he asserts that a single shelf of a European
library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.8 At its
core, the European Enlightenment was nurtured by a fundamental racist
principle propagated by the discourses of the late eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries which demonstrated scientifically the superiority of the
white race. And to this white race, a specific literary traditionthe one
Eliot identifies as originating with Homerwas allotted. Imperialism was
consolidated through literature and, as Said remarks, the novel functioned
as an imperial accomplice, indissolubly linked to and fortified by the impe-
rial enterprise.9
For Aidooa Ghanaian woman whose mother tongue is Fanti but who,
nonetheless, chooses to write in English, the colonial languagetradition
is not a longed for ideal of belonging but a site of contention. What Eliot
calls the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer is a tradition that
has consistently represented both blackness and femaleness as negativities,
as inferior rungs on the evolutionary ladder, despite the fact that it is as
intrinsic to Aidoos literary development as her African oral tradition.10
 SISSIES ODYSSEY 131

Our Sister Killjoy is a reflection of her simultaneous acknowledgement

of and resistance to a literary culture that haunts her African voice; hers
is an exorcism that entails a devastating reading of Europe, and yet, as in
all exorcisms, she has to call forth the evil spirit, commune with it, even
nurture it, in order to finally disown it. I argue that Aidoos text should be
understood as an exercise in freeing the genre of the novel from its impe-
rialistic tendencies by destabilising the civilisation/savagery dichotomy,
by exposing the perils of acculturation and, finally, by writing a novel
which, through a combination of poetry and prose, resists western literary
classification.
The complexity and richness of Our Sister Killjoy demands a more
malleable approach than the focus on intertextual relations to Heart of
Darkness which has so far dominated criticism on the text. Echoing the
vernacular act of talking back to someone (that is, of answering imperti-
nently someones unwelcome remark), writing back can be understood as
an answer, impertinent in nature, to a former text. The journey to Europe
that Sissie embarks on certainly induces the reader to draw a parallel to
Marlows journey to Africa. Conrads indictment of empire is echoed by
Aidoos critique of European authoritarianism, pursued through allusions
to the Holocaust, to Chamberlains appeasement of Hitler, to the Franco
dictatorship in Spain, to colonialism in South Africa and Rhodesia and to
the horrors of neo-imperialism. Similitudes with Heart of Darkness not-
withstanding, I contend that a reading of Our Sister Killjoy solely on the
grounds of it being a writing back to Heart of Darkness erases the traces
of the other texts which constitute Aidoos intertextual web. Specifically,
I claim that Sissies odyssey should be read as a journey where Odysseuss
offspringas epitomised by Aim Csaires Cahier dun retour au pays
natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, 1939) as much as by
Conrads Heart of Darknessare hailed, scrutinised and deconstructed
by a black, female impertinent gaze. Taking into account Julia Kristevas
axiom that instead of focusing on the structure of the text, we should
study its structuration, that is to say, how the structure came into being, the
textual space that Aidoo creates connects author and reader horizontally
whereas, vertically, it relates texts with other texts.11 The reader that Aidoo
is calling forth is postcolonial, a term that encompasses the western as well
as the non-western world, and the texts that are interconnected are those
participating in what Derek Walcott has termed the Homeric repetition
of the western European literary canon.12
132 E. PUJOLRS-NOGUER

The exorcism of Europe that Aidoo performs in Our Sister Killjoy

revolves around the tenet that whiteness needs to be made strange, to
borrow Richard Dyers phrase.13 As an attempt to escape its normative
essence, Dyer urges us to question whiteness by viewing it as simply
another race, to recognise white as a colour too.14 And that is what
Aidoo does in the first part of the novel, entitled Into a Bad Dream, in
which Sissie is literally plunged into the heart of white Europe. Standing in
a German train station, her blackness stands out amid the crowds of white
people who view her presence as an intrusion; she even startles a little girl
who unashamedly points at her and calls her das Schwartze Mdchen
(the black girl) (12). Echoing Frantz Fanons dictum that the black man
[] must be black in relation to the white man, the little girls comment
makes Sissie aware of her blackness and yet, far from acknowledging her
blackness as the source of strangeness, she is made to see the strange-
ness of whiteness: all that crowd of people going and coming in all sorts
of directions had the colour of the pickled pig parts that used to come
from foreign places to the markets at home.15 The visibility-invisibility
game that feeds Our Sister Killjoy is clarified by Houston A.Baker Jr. and
Elizabeth Hammondss concept of the black (w)hole.16 In the field of
African-American cultural theory, the transformation from black hole to
black (w)hole describes the process whereby black individuals gain vis-
ibility in white America. As Hammonds details, in the realm of physics,
the presence of a black hole cannot be seen, but only felt by the effects or
distortions it creates in the space surrounding it. The existence of a black
hole is inferred from the fact that the visible star is in orbit and its shape is
distorted in some way or it is detected by the energy emanating from the
region of space around the visible star that could not be produced by the vis-
ible star alone.17 A transposition of this game of visibility-invisibility onto
Our Sister Killjoy turns Sissiedas Schwartze Mdcheninto the visible
star in orbit with another body which is not apprehended optically: the
white hole of Eurocentric discourse. Sissies wanderings, therefore, are to
be envisaged as those of a star in orbit with Europe, a star whose presence
makes another presence felt, that of whiteness. As Hammonds urges us
to consider, the identification of a black hole requires the use of sensitive
detectors of energy and distortion, and it is here that Aidoos squint-
ing mechanism of dissection and distortion comes into play.18 The second
part of Aidoos title, Reflections from a Black-eyed Squint, points towards
the inquisitive nature of Aidoos narrative technique and persuasively col-
locates with Luce Irigarays Speculum de lautre femme (Speculum of the
 SISSIES ODYSSEY 133

Other Woman, 1974).19 Just as Irigaray dismantles patriarchal discourse

through her specular dissection of western philosophy, so Aidoo dissects
Eurocentric discourse through her insidious and persistent squinting at
the deficiencies of supposedly postimperial/postcolonial Europe.20
Sissies orbit is perfectly orchestrated by the four sections which config-
ure the text and which bring the white hole to the foreground. The four
sections are scripted around the relationships Sissie establishes with people
she encounters on her journey, all of whom are marked by the portentous
triad of desire, knowledge and power that informs Aidoos core intertext.
Homers Odyssey recounts the ten-year journey of Odysseus as he returns
home to Ithaca after the fall of Troy. Odysseuss stature as epic hero
loyal, strong, courageous, responsible and intelligentallows him to over-
come the various obstacles set on his journey and to gain the knowledge
that produces his spiritual growth. Aidoos Our Sister Killjoy narrates the
sojourn of Sissie in Europe before returning to Africa in the years following
the independence of a considerable swathe of the African continent. Also
endowed with the epic qualities of loyalty, strength, courage, responsi-
bility and intelligence, Sissie surmounts difficulties and accumulates the
knowledge which will finally take her home. The causes of Odysseuss and
Sissies tribulations are ostensibly fortunate events: the Greek victory in
Troy and Sissies obtainment of work in a camp in Europe. And yet, for
both Odysseus and Sissie, the happy beginning soon turns into a bad
dream, and does so in notably similar ways (1). Sissie finds her Odyssean
Calypso, the nurturer/seducer that bequeaths immortality to Odysseus,
in Marija, the German housewife in The Plums. Homers nave Nausicaa
finds a counterpart in Kunle, the young Nigerian student based in Britain
who in From Our Sister Killjoy tries to captivate Sissie with alluring neo-
colonial fantasies. Finally, in a manner resembling Odysseuss resistance to
the mermaids song, Sissie implacably destroys the self-aggrandising myths
of civilisation in the last section of the novel, A Love Letter.
The train that Sissie was waiting for at the German station takes her to
a small town in Bavaria where she is expected to work in a summer camp
with other international students. The schwartze Mdchen delineates
her orbit as a visible star by distorting the civilising attributes attached
to whiteness and, more specifically, by making visible the invisible dark-
ness and savagery of Europes recent history. It is in the pastoral setting
of Bavaria that she befriends Marija Sommers, a German housewife and
Calypso correlate. The fact that Marija is described as A daughter of man-
kinds / Self-appointed most royal line, / The House of Aryan and that
134 E. PUJOLRS-NOGUER

she is married to a man called Adolf and is mother to a son likewise called
Adolf, is not gratuitous, but indicative of Germanys historical legacy (48).
Similarly, when the students work in the Bavarian fields, planting pine
trees, they worry about the hidden truths lurking in the earth. If they
didnt plant trees, Sissie wonders, would

Something else,
Sown there,
Many many years ago,
In
Those Bavarian woods
SPROUT?21

It is against this background that Marija attempts to seduce Sissie.

Marija showers Sissie with the goods she knows the Ghanaian girl craves,
the plums of the title, opening the way to paradise and accomplishing her
role as both nurturer and seducer. Because of the strangeness and succu-
lence of the fruit, Sissie had good reason to feel fascinated by the char-
acter of Marijas plums (40). However, just as the plums are desirable
and exotic to her African eyes, so is she desirable and exotic to Marijas
German-European eyes, a rare article to be had (40). Marijas seduction
culminates with her inviting Sissie to her home. This is defined by images
of twentieth century modernia and by dcor that is unvaryingly white,
especially in Marijas bedroom, which is dominated by [a] giant white
bed, laid out smooth, waiting to be used (62, 63). Although the bedroom
resembles for Sissie some primeval cave, for Marija It is a holy place /
A sanctuary for shrouded dreams (62, 63). Accordingly, Marija soon lets
loose these shrouded dreams: with one hand she touches the skin of
Sissies breasts while with the other she groped round and round Sissies
midriff, searching for something to hold on to (64). Marijas warm tears
on her neck, together with the feeling of her hot lips, wake Sissie up [a]s
one does from a bad dream and she unintentionally hit[s] Marija on the
right cheek with the back of her right hand (64). Marijas seduction insti-
gates Sissies longing for home by retrieving from her mind the image of
her mother on rainy days pound[ing] fufu in the anteroom (64).
What is Aidoos aim in painting this seduction? Their mutual disbe-
lief at the act is followed by a sense of pain which in the case of Sissie is
repressed, and in the case of Marija takes the shape of an unusual tear
that falls from the left eye while the right eye remains completely dry.
The disbelief they share is linked to a flimsy moment of recognition in
 SISSIES ODYSSEY 135

each others eyes. If seduction is invested with knowledge, if the civilised

European is allegedly pouring knowledge on the seduced African, then
Marijas seduction has not been in vain. Sissie suddenly knew that behind
the tear is not only Marijas loneliness but a historical loneliness that,
down the centuries, has driven all participants in the imperial project:

And so this was it?

Bullying slavers and slave-traders.
Solitary discoverers.
Swamp-crossers and lion hunters.
Missionaries who risked the cannibals pot to
bring the world to the heathen hordes.
Speculators in gold in diamond uranium and
copper
Oil you do not even mention
Preachers of apartheid and zealous educators.
Keepers of Imperial Peace and homicidal
Plantation owners. (656)

It is the tear Forever falling [] out of a womans eye that unleashes

Sissies anti-colonial tirade, as she recognises the unyielding savagery that
underlies western European modernity (65). It is from her blackness and
femaleness that she looks at Marija and discovers a woman whose Aryan
whiteness does not save her from the loneliness of a desire for conquest
grounded in imperial maleness.
Whereas in The Plums Sissie cast her unrelenting gaze at the cradle
of Europes whiteness, Aryan Germany, in From Our Sister Killjoy her
eyes dissect Britain. The status of Britain as Sissies colonial home further
complicates her squinting intervention (85). As Sissie starts to meet the
many African migrants who live there, strangeness mingles with familiar-
ity, the hidden merges with the visible andin Freudian terminology
the unheimlich becomes the heimlich: She had had no idea of what to
expect of England. But what no one had prepared her for, was finding so
many Black people (85). The familiar sight of black people blends with
the distressing wretchedness in which they live, this white country hav-
ing relegated even African students to the level of scavengers (85). And
to this scavenger category belongs Sissie, one of the many recipients of
the leftovers of imperial handouts, those Third World students who go
to the West to get an education, exchanging their knowledge and talent
For a few pennies now and a / Doctoral degree later (86). If Sissies
orbit unveiled the source of Marijas thwarted seduction, now in Britain it
136 E. PUJOLRS-NOGUER

takes us to Nausicaa/Kunle, a Nigerian student, practically a Londoner,

having lived in that city for seven years, who, from his privileged posi-
tion as recipient of imperial leftovers, articulates the theory of the Heart
Transplant as the solution to racism (95).
The first successful heart transplant was conducted by Dr Christian
Barnard in Cape Town, South Africa, on 2 January 1968. Race clandes-
tinely entered the history of the operation since the donor, Clive Haupt,
was black and his black heart was transplanted into the white body of
Philip Blaiberg. The logic that Kunle uses to formulate his theory of the
heart transplant is seemingly exact: if hearts can be exchanged between
races then what follows is equality. However, Sissies black squint sees how
the experimentation of the Christian Doctor was permeated with racism
since, as she notes, in his glorious country, niggerhearts are so easy to
come by, because of the violence those happy and contented bantus perpe-
trate against one another, in their drunken ecstasies and childlike gambols
(100). As a trope, the heart transplant has the capacity to condense the
whole history of the imperialistic enterprise, not only the dehumanising
strain of colonial desire but also the indefatigable re-emergence of this
desire in postcolonial times. Indeed, the heart transplant represents the
heart of an imperial darkness that continues to utilise the African mind
as much as the African body. As Sissie realises, those who take up Post-
graduate awards to study in the West are involved in Giving away / Not
only themselves, but / All of us, draining Africa of the learning required
to end its perpetual dependence on colonial rulers (86, 87). As Sissie also
details, entire families drown in debts to have their sons educated in the
West in the hope that this education will eventually save them from pov-
erty. Blindness binds Kunles African eyes which, submerged in western
ecstasy, have failed to see what Sissies impatiently and angrily devour. By
using intentionally politically incorrect vocabulary, she questions whether

cleaning the Baass chest of its rotten

heart and plugging in a brand-new, palpitatingly
warm kaffirheart, is the surest way to usher in
the Kaffirmillenium. (101)

Almost deprived of energy after her plunge into Europes white hole,
Sissies Odyssean journey takes her back by aeroplane to her Ithaca-Africa.
This conscious return to Africa is the outcome of an excruciatingly pain-
ful decision, that of leaving her lover, a Ghanaian, in Britain. Like Kunle,
 SISSIES ODYSSEY 137

Sissies unnamed lover has been seduced by the civilisation of Europe,

a seduction Sissie acrimoniously confronts in her love letter, written
while suspended in the air in the plane, her reflections enhanced by this
bird-like, omniscient perspective. The departure is a sacrifice which, like
Odysseus tied to the mast, allows her to avoid the irresistible allure of the
mermaids/Europes song.
A Love Letter opens with a conversation between an African-American
student and a visiting African professor. The student anxiously raises the
question of whether the Egyptians who built the Pyramids, you know, the
Pharaohs and all, were [] African, to which the professor replies:

My dear young man, [] to give you the decent answer your anxiety
demands, I would have to tell you a detailed history of the African conti-
nent. And to do that, I shall have to speak every day, twenty-four hours a
day, for at least three thousand years. And I dont mean to be rude to you
or anything, but who has that kind of time? (111).

The African-American students question is a concealed plea to blacken

Egypt. This is a political move to counter the whitening of Egypt that
underlay the racial discourses of the nineteenth century, and which both
Martin Bernal in Black Athena (1987) and Robert Young in Colonial
Desire (1995) have unmasked as a colonialist gimmick to keep whiteness
at the top of the evolutionary ladder.22 The African professors remark is
impregnated with an irony and ambivalence hurled at a readership post-
colonially contextualised. On the one hand, his answer is elusive, even
dismissive, labelling the task proposed by the student as an impossible
one. On the other hand, his very elusiveness opens up another possibil-
ity: that of questioning the viability of all racial discourses. As the novel
goes on to explore, pan-Africanism is a direct legacy of nineteenth-century
racialism, one that merely replaces white for black: the substitution of the
whitening of Egypt by a blackening of Egypt does not weaken but, on
the contrary, reinforces the omnipresence of race. As a literary affiliate
of pan-Africanism, negritude poetry reveals the same racial foundation, as
illustrated by the celebration of blackness, racially conceived, in Csaires
Notebook of a Return to the Native Land.
Sissies lover, the addressee of the letter, embodies this pan-African-
ist/negritudinist discourse. The racial conception of the world that nur-
tures pan-Africanism is the same that substantiates Eurocentric discourse
and it is not by chance that the introductory scene of A Love Letter is
138 E. PUJOLRS-NOGUER

immediately followed by the protagonists identification of this discourse

as the site of struggle. Eurocentric discourse is grasped by Sissie in its
most verbal manifestation, the English language, a suspicious inheritance
that has enslaved her: I cannot give voice to my soul, she writes: the
messengers of my mind always come shackled (112). It is indeed a back-
breaking job [] to unlearn what the masters have taught, to disclose
the colonising impulse behind the act of naming, which aims to erase all
traces of Africanness: For a child to grow up / To be a / Heaven-worthy
individual, / He had / To have / Above all, a / Christian name (120,
25). The imperialism of language is repeated in the wider cultural sphere.
For example, the universalist claims of the western canon, with its notions
of universal truth, universal art, universal literature, are intended to pre-
serve the whiteness and maleness that nourish Eurocentrism (6). It is the
same canon that claims that the only thing Black people can do is [to]
run, jump and sing, to operate for the entertainment of people from
the western hemisphere (129). The ultimate representation of cultural
supremacism is, for Aidoo, the Christian God, a rather / Nice / Old /
European / Gentleman with a flowing white beard, in contrast to
Lucifer, whose chronic blackness condemns him to remain a poor Black
Devil (27).
In this sense, the metaphor of the heart transplant also expresses a dif-
ferent form of loss: the erasure of the cultural heart of a community. But
the word heart also returns us to the very special artistic space assigned to
love. It was out of love for Mother Africa that negritude poetsand pan-
Africanistssang to their land, and the same sentiment pervades the act
of writing that occurs in A Love Letter, although here, in contrast to the
negritude poets, the writer is a woman. Sissies return to the native land,
the crazy, old continent of Africa, is loaded with the knowledge gained
in Europe, a knowledge that permits her to appreciate Africa outside the
discursive constraints of both Eurocentricism and the celebratory black-
ness found in Csaires Notebook (133).
The issues of space, writing, love and gender take us to Kristevas
beginning of Stabat Mater: Words [] are always too distant, too
abstract for this underground swarming of seconds, folding in unimagi-
nable spaces. Writing them down is an ordeal of discourse, like love.
What is loving, for a woman, the same thing as writing.23 Aidoo, in a
tremendously generous act of love, takes this ordeal of discourse on her
shoulders and writes down, her own hand in Sissies hand, the testimony
of her journey into the heart of darkness, dissected and offered to a
 SISSIES ODYSSEY 139

readership by now, albeit confusedly, re-positioned. Her subjectivity as

an African female is queried: Sometimes when they are hotly debating
the virtues of the African female, I ask myself: But who am I? Where
did I come from? (117). In the end, she decides to leave her lover,
her Lost Heart, in the unhomeliness of (neo-)colonial Europe and to
come to terms with herself, an act that can only be accomplished in
Africa (119). Writing will allow her to recover her heart, her selfhood,
her subjectivity as African female. The conflation of sight and taste that
the image of Africa emanates (it felt like fresh honey on the tongue)
soothes her mind, liberates her enslaved self, for she recognises her true
home in the outline of the African continent glimpsed from the plane;
all signs of the uncanny disappear with the sight of the warm and green
[] land unfolding before her, as if opening its arms in welcome (133).
The whole western discursive tradition of representing Africa as noth-
ingness is turned upside down, and yet this dismantling does not carry
the racialised signs of negritude. Moreover, there is no need to send
the letter; its addressee, Sissies lover, has already perished in the sea of
Eurocentrism, his colonised mind a reminder of the bones of those dead
sailors that succumbed to the mermaids song.
The bleak representation of Europe that Aidoo offers in Our Sister
Killjoy was met with reserved criticism, particularly regarding the experi-
mental quality of the text. Indeed, if we were to apprehend Our Sister
Killjoy generically, we would find ourselves at a loss. Is it a novel or are the
four parts to be viewed as short stories? What about the last section, A
Love Letter, which transports the text into the realm of epistolary fiction?
Should Our Sister Killjoy be classified as a prose text with some poetic
incursions or should we view the prose and poetry sections as equally
important? I believe that the critical tendency to label Our Sister Killjoy
as an entirely experimental creation camouflages a western discomfort
at the Europe that readers are made to witness. However, I claim that
the deconstructive dynamic that propels the writing of Our Sister Killjoy
stems in turn from the authors discomfiture with the European literary
genre par excellence, the novel. As previously mentioned, the novel, as
a cultural artefact of bourgeois society, is unthinkable without imperial-
ism. The novel is, in Saids words, an incorporative, quasi-encyclopaedic
cultural form whose highly regulated plot mechanism and entire sys-
tem of social reference are soundly rooted in the dichotomy of home
and abroad that authenticates Eurocentric discourse.24 Consequently, as
a postcolonial author, for whom the home of Eurocentric discourse is
140 E. PUJOLRS-NOGUER

her abroad, Aidoo must face the aesthetic and cultural limits posed by
a genre articulated within a clearly imperialistic framework. The result is
this narrative expedition, in which omniscient and first-person narrator
fuse with each other and the public realm, as expressed through oratory
and political discourse, blends with the private realm of letter writing. It
may be argued that Aidoos view of Europe, mediated by her determina-
tion to disclose the defects of the continent, deliberately obscures its more
alluring traits. Like all artistic constructs, Our Sister Killjoy is the outcome
of a certain time and place: here, the throes of neo-colonialism and the
disillusionment of independence. Spatial and temporal demarcations not-
withstanding, what Aidoo confronts us with is a view of imperial Europe
from without that postcolonises Eurocentric discourse by making it neces-
sarily strange.
In a manner that resembles Odysseuss instinct for survival, Sissie
resists the tempting mermaids song which extols the beauty and civilisa-
tion of Europe; she listens to the song, digests it, nurtures it and, finally,
discards it. Her mast is her irreverent, implacable and inexorable black-
eyed squint. This literally kills joy, but whose joy is she killing and why?
Her denunciation of Eurocentric discourse is geared both towards the
accomplices of such discourse, the Africans who willingly acquiesce to
European/western assimilation, and towards the Europeans/westerners
whose colour and gender perpetuate a system that empowers maleness and
whiteness. Her gradual acquisition of knowledge is harmonised via the
four sections that configure her Odyssean quest and culminate in her final
spiritual growth: her acknowledgement of whiteness as master signifier
(Into a Bad Dream), her realisation that loneliness resides at the heart of
imperialism (The Plums), her intellectual apprehension of the dangers of
acculturation (From Our Sister Killjoy) and her emotional investment in
the act of decolonisation (A Love Letter). While sailing alongside Sissie,
readers are confronted, often brutally, sometimes tenderly, with a post-
colonial Europe which, far from promising equality and hope, tightens
and reinforces colonial attachments. In Our Sister Killjoy, Eurocentric and
pan-Africanist discourses are dissected and revealed as constraining forces
that stifle Aidoos growth as an African woman writer. This literary sur-
gery expurgates the real heart of darknessEurocentric discourseand
replaces it with her own writing odyssey that achieves two apparently irrec-
oncilable ends: her inscriptionhowever reluctantin the whole of the
literature of Europe from Homer and her Homeric demolition of this
very same tradition.25
 SISSIES ODYSSEY 141

NOTES
1. Conrad, Heart of Darkness, new edn (1899; NewYork: W.W.Norton &
Company, 1988), p.50.
2. Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections from a Black-eyed Squint, new edn
(1977; Harlow: Longman, 1988), p.93. Further references to this book
will be indicated by page numbers inserted in the text.
3. Analyses of Our Sister Killjoy as a re-writing of Heart of Darkness are so
common that enumerating them all is beyond the scope of this article.
However, I would like to highlight Hildegard Hoellers Ama Ata Aidoos
Heart of Darkness (2004) since she provides us with an extremely valuable
insight into how the text encourages readersboth western and non-west-
ernto re-position themselves in a postcolonial world (see Hoeller, Ama
Ata Aidoos Heart of Darkness, Research in African Literatures, Vol. 35,
No. 1 (2004), pp.13047).
4. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent, in David Lodge, ed., 20th
Century Literary Criticism: A Reader (London: Longman, 1972), p.73.
5. Ibid., p.74.
6. See Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, new edn (1978;
London: Penguin, 1995), pp.14.
7. Ibid., pp.967.
8. Macaulay, Minute on Indian Education, The Norton Anthology of English
Literature, http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/victorian/
topic_4/macaulay.htm (accessed 25 July 2015).
9. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p.84.
10. Robert C.Young identifies the connection between race and gender when
he affirms that race was defined through the criterion of civilization, with
the cultivated white Western European male at the top, and everyone else
on a hierarchical scale either in a chain of being, from mollusc to God, or,
in the later model, on an evolutionary scale of development from a femi-
nized state of childhood (savagery) up to full (European) manly adult-
hood (Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race
(London and NewYork: Routledge, 1995), p.94).
11. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtins study of the literary text, Kristeva elaborates
her own theory of intertextuality which she captures in the following sen-
tence: any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the
absorption and transformation of another (Kristeva, Desire in Language,
trans. by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon S. Roudiez (1977;
NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1980), pp.367; see also Bakhtin,
The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. by Caryl Emerson and Michael
Holquist (1938; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp.2705).
12. Walcott, Omeros, new edn (1990; London: Faber and Faber, 2002), Book
Two, Chapter XVII, p.96.
142 E. PUJOLRS-NOGUER

13. Dyer, White (London and NewYork: Routledge, 1997), p.10.

14. Ibid., p.11.
15. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. by Richard Philcox (1952; NewYork:
Grove Press, 2008), p.90; Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy, p.12.
16. Baker was in fact the first to coin the term black (w)hole to describe the
development from invisibility to visibility that characterised the black pro-
tagonists of Richard Wright and Ralph Ellisons novels. Their isolation from
American society, Baker argues, grants them the space and time to think
about their seemingly irreconcilable identity as blacks and Americans. The
knowledge gained in the black hole is what will allow them to emerge from
it as unified, coherent, reconciled selves; hence, the black hole becomes the
black whole. Whereas Baker centres his study entirely on the travails of the
black American male, Hammonds focuses her analysis on the space allotted or
denied to black women in America (see Baker Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-
American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1984), p.144; and Hammonds, Black (W)holes and the Geometry of
Black Female Sexuality, in Elizabeth Weed and Naomi Schor, eds, Feminism
Meets Queer Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997),
pp.13656).
17. Hammonds, Black (W)holes, p.149 (italics mine).
18. Ibid., p.150.
19. See Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. by Gillian C.Gill (1974;
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), pp.243364.
20. For a recent view of the postimperial versus postcolonial debate, see
Paulo de Medeiros, Post-Imperial Europe: First Definitions, in Dirk
Gttsche and Axel Dunker, eds, (Post-)Colonialism across Europe:
Transcultural History and National Memory (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag,
2014), pp.14966.
21. Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy, p.37. Another intertext that comes to the fore is
T.S.Eliots The Wasteland (1922), particularly the lines: That corpse
you planted last year in your garden, / Has it begun to sprout? (Eliot,
The Wasteland, in Eliot, Collected Poems 19091935 (London: Faber and
Faber, 1936), p.63, lines 712).
22. See Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization,
Volume I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 17851985 (London: Free
Association Books, 1987), pp. 5889, 20999; and Young, Colonial
Desire, pp.90117.
23. Kristeva, Stabat Mater, in Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. by Leon S.Roudiez
(1983; NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1987), p.115.
24. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p.84.
25. The research for this article has been funded by the Spanish Ministry of
Economy and Competitiveness (project FFI2012-32626).
 8

European Fiction ontheBorders:

TheCase ofHerta Mller

MarcelCornis-Pope andAndrewHammond

Borders have long been a major feature of European life. Although many
are recent creations, resulting from settlements drawn up after the First
and Second World Wars, there are traces of the ebb and flow of earlier
national and imperial projects, with even the remains of the Roman impe-
rial limites still present in the landscape. Confirming the significance of
continental borders is the fact that, existing alongside national bound-
aries, or statutory lines between contiguous nations, are lines of ideo-
logical division, more abstract in their distinction between spatial entities,
but no less performative. An example is the Iron Curtain which, as Josef
Langer observes, was both an abstract marker of ideological difference
and one of the most hermetical lines of division between people in mod-
ern times.1 These divisions have not only affected the lives of those living
in borderlands but also circumscribed and defined life towards the met-
ropolitan centre. Indeed, so pervasive are Europes geopolitical barriers
that one wonders about the uncertainties and anxieties that lie behind

M. Cornis-Pope ( )
Department of English, Virginia Commonwealth University, 900 Park Avenue,
842005, Richmond, VA 23284-2005, USA
A. Hammond
School of Humanities, University of Brighton, Falmer Campus, Brighton,
BN1 9PH, UK

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 143

A. Hammond (ed.), The Novel and Europe,
DOI10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4_8
144 M. CORNIS-POPE AND A. HAMMOND

them. There may be relevance, for example, in tienne Balibars observa-

tion that there exist no absolute border lines between the historical and
cultural territory of Europe and the [] other histories and cultures of
the world, that the whole of Europe as such is a border line.2 Whether
Europe is seen as a borderless continent or as a veritable palimpsest of bor-
ders, it is no surprise that the topic recurs so often in modern European
fiction. As this essay explores through Herta Mllers Herztier (The Land
of Green Plums, 1994), such fiction dramatises the practices and out-
comes of spatial demarcation that are becoming increasingly important
areas of study in sociology, anthropology and political geography.
As much of this scholarship emphasises, borders have always been
marked by contradiction, paradox and anomaly.3 On the one hand,
national and ideological perimeters are viewed as authoritarian institu-
tions of governance which seek to order national or regional life. William
Walters, taking a lead from Foucault and Deleuze, views the markers of
territorial sovereignty as particular technologies of power and as sys-
tematic instruments of population management.4 In territorialising a
nation-state, hard borders monitor and restrict transnational exchange,
separating populations in a way that reflects the etymological link between
frontier and frontline, a zone of territorial appropriation or defence
resulting from military conflict.5 The control of national limits also estab-
lishes control of what lies within those limits. Once discrete and autono-
mous statehood has been established, a nation-state can standardise law,
custom, political activity and economic behaviour, as well as regulate the
repertoire of possibilities, to use a constructivist term: the range of avail-
able models of action, thought and expression.6 This idea that the periph-
ery defines the core is epitomised by how the disciplinary mechanisms
of border securitydocument checks, surveillance technologies, military
patrolsform a perfect metonym for Foucaults carceral society. Yet here
is where ambiguity begins to emerge. The state boundary is also where
social and political formations interact and where national separation is
replaced by international communication and co-operation. Boundaries
become porous, however vigilantly they are defended. Illustrating the pro-
cess of connectivity are not only the cross-border flows of goods, services
and capital consequent on globalisation but also the intellectual exchange
so essential for national-cultural development. In this sense, borders are
states at the limits of their power in more senses than one: they are where
state power is most keenly marked and felt, but also where power starts
and finishes at once, where power is crudest, most absolute and then
 EUROPEAN FICTION ONTHEBORDERS 145

most abandoned.7 The interplay of multiple and contradictory properties

indicates why borders have been such a popular theme in fiction, as does
the evolving sense that borders crystallise the key geopolitical issues facing
Europe and the wider world. Almost all the hard question of our time,
R.B.J.Walker argues, converge on the status of borders; of boundaries,
distinctions, discriminations, inclusions, exclusions, beginnings, endings,
limitations and exceptions.8
The paradoxes of national and ideological borders are further revealed
in discussions of their impact on identity. For many in Border Studies, the
markers of territorial division create the parameters of identification and
belonging, not least by offering spatial definition for the supposed opposi-
tion between self and other. Commenting on the development of national
communities from the nineteenth century onwards, Thomas Schippers is in
no doubt about the importance [of] spatial limits as essential ingredients
of self identification, arguing that for many Europeans [t]he border con-
tour has become like the shadow of ones second skin.9 The internalisation
of spatial division is just as pronounced at ideological fault lines. During
the Cold War, for example, the Iron Curtain helped to construct the group
identities of both western bloc and eastern bloc: as Halldr Laxness con-
tends, the two halves of Europe were taught to hate one another [] in
the same way European nations used to do before the concept of national-
ism became obsolete and East and West were substituted in its place.10 Yet
the abandonment of state power at the border is also auspicious. Offering
an escape from the rituals and orthodoxies of home, the border crossing
can be considered an existential passage, a journey from one state of social
being to another, in Hastings Donnan and Thomas M.Wilsons phrase,
or a transitional site at which states of being are merged and transformed.11
For Abdul JanMohamed, the border subject is one who is able to combine
elements of two cultures in order to articulate new syncretic forms and
experiences.12 This definition stands both for individual border crossers
and for entire frontier communities which, lying closer to the population
across the border than to the centres of national power, are able to substi-
tute state-sanctioned identities with more hybrid (multiethnic, multidox
and polyglot) formations. In this way, Wilson defines border zones as lim-
inal spaces (i.e. interstitial and transitional conditions of culture and com-
munity) between the ordered, structured, and unpolluted conditions of
nation and state.13 As the term liminal suggests, these are places where
two or more cultures are stretched beyond their normal positions and
forced to experience a state of uncertainty.
146 M. CORNIS-POPE AND A. HAMMOND

These multiple debates are given concrete shape in literary fiction,

which examines a range of lived experiences often understudied in aca-
demic research.14 This has been most evident in eastern Europe during
periods of transition from one ideological definition of national identity
to another. In Remaining Relevant after Communism (2006), Andrew
Baruch Wachtel explores the contradictory trends that have traversed
the regions literature in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centu-
ries, with some writers emerging as national heroes and others finding
themselves caught in the paradoxes of regional transformation, trying
simultaneously to redefine national borders and to transgress them in the
name of a new internationalism.15 Although this conflict goes back to
the nineteenth century, it grew more pronounced during the Cold War,
when an assertive, exclusivist nationalism grew in response to Soviet inter-
nationalism, marginalising the literary expression of ethnic minorities, a
phenomenon which in turn produced a countertrend of cosmopolitanism,
multiculturalism and cross-cultural connectivity. For the writers involved,
borders were understandably negative. As they detailed, the Cold War was
a time when frontiers [were] stitched up more and more closely (Vladimir
Nabokov) and when border regimes were so tense it was as though all the
nerves of Europe were strung out [], waiting to be operated on (Louis
Armand).16 Negative responses were especially marked during encoun-
ters with physical frontiers. The pages of Cold War fiction abound with
characters who are shocked at finding their world being broken in two,
who are awed by the pillboxes, wide ditches and towering walls and who
feel terror and [] alienation in the face of officials that pounce on
you, grab you, and send you to a labor camp.17 Just as despairing were
reflections on the ideological boundaries between western capitalism and
eastern communism. Czesaw Mioszs La Prise du pouvoir (The Seizure
of Power, 1953), Ismail Kadares Dosja H (The File on H, 1981) and
gota Kristfs La Preuve (The Proof, 1988) show that borders are not
just national in orientation, but national, intellectual, and spiritual, in
Nikos Kazantzakiss phrase, with the dividing lines of East-West hostility
creating what Giuliana Morandini called a crossroads of interests, of lan-
guages and of logic.18 The despair reached a peak in fiction that addressed
the psychological effects of living with hard borders. Milan Kunderas
La Valse Aux Adieux (The Farewell Party, 1976), Peter Schneiders Der
Mauerspinger (The Wall Jumper, 1982) and Ivan Klmas ekn na tmu
(Waiting for the Dark, 1993) illustrate the multiple ways in which bor-
ders shape the terms of individual and national life. For example, Klmas
 EUROPEAN FICTION ONTHEBORDERS 147

Czechoslovakia is depicted as a concentrationary barbed-wire country in

which every one of us [was] scarred and as a net [with] all of us trapped
insects inside.19 Although these pessimistic accounts predominated, there
were occasional references to more positive features, most commonly to
the liminality and hybridity of the border subject. Igor Klekh extols those
who, grafted on the boundary between two cultures, are defined by
transmutations of primal matter, which nowhere else can be found, and
Peter Schneider finds hope in the figure of the wall jumper, the one who
has come to distrust the hastily adopted identity that states offer [and]
feels at home only on the border.20
The negative features of border experience are depicted in Mllers The
Land of Green Plums, which draws on the authors life under totalitarian-
ism in Romania and in exile in Germany. An ethnic German from the
Romanian Banat, the borderland with Hungary and Serbia, Mller was
part of a movement of ethnic German (or Swabian) writers termed the
Aktionsgruppe Banat, which included Richard Wagner, William Totok
and Rolf Bossert.21 The group, officially banned in 1975, opposed the
Stalinist rule of Nicolae Ceauescu, which was gradually moving towards
its self-styled Golden Epoch, a period of heightened oppression, austerity,
propaganda and censorship. Illustrating the mood of the times, Mllers
first collection of short fiction, Niederungen (Nadirs, 1982), appeared
only in a severely censored edition and her next collection, Drckender
Tango (Oppressive Tango, 1984), was also regarded as politically subver-
sive. Both works address the troubled history of the Banat Swabians dur-
ing the twentieth century, moving from the support some offered to Nazi
Germany in the 1940s to their fate under Ceauescus increasingly nation-
alistic regime. The Land of Green Plums reworks themes from her earlier
fiction, focusing on the persecution of the Swabians during the late 1970s
and 1980s and on the dangers in the period of minority isolationism. The
unnamed narrator is a young ethnic German woman from the Banat coun-
tryside whose father had volunteered for the SS during the Second World
War. Moving to the south-eastern city of Timioara to pursue her studies,
the narrator befriends two Romanian women, Lola and Tereza, as well
as several young Swabian men (Edgar, Georg and Kurt), with whom she
starts to engage in clandestine literary activities that expose them to the
harassment of the secret police. Of the two female friends, Lola has the
most dramatic fate, committing suicide to escape the responsibilities of
her pregnancy at a time of draconian anti-abortion laws. The other female
friend, Tereza, the daughter of an ethnic Romanian sculptor favoured by
148 M. CORNIS-POPE AND A. HAMMOND

the regime, is viewed with suspicion by her Swabian male friends, who
believe that she is collaborating with the authorities. In depicting the trials
of female characters in particular (anti-abortion laws, sexual abuse, forced
prostitution), Mller offers a stark and shocking portrait of life behind
closed borders.22
Although no literal borderline is ever described in the text, Romanias
militarised frontiers are a constant presence in peoples minds. While many
eastern bloc regimes allowed their citizens to travel to other communist
countries (a key part of their attempt to create a transnational commu-
nist identity), Ceauescu curtailed this relative freedom of movement,
even preventing Romanians from travelling to the neighbouring coun-
tries of Hungary, Poland, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. Nevertheless, with
the regime becoming steadily more oppressive, and its austerity measures
driving the population deeper into poverty and illness, [e]veryone lived
by thinking about flight.23 The desire for escape, for passage from one
state of social being to another, often produces a romanticised vision of
the border crossing, with characters dreaming [o]f running after the corn
until the soil becomes another country, of swimming across the Danube
until the water becomes another country and of climb[ing] onto freight
trains so they can roll away (47, 47, 48). The three images, which recur
through the narrative, signify mobility and freedom, the attainment of
agency through the very act of physical movement. Yet the association of
flight and life is shown to be fantasy.24 Ironically, another association that
borders have for the population is with the dictator, who is rumoured to
take continual trips abroad (to France or China, Belgium or England)
to receive treatment for a fatal illness, rumours that create an ominous
coupling of flight and mortality (61). More directly, the many flights that
punctuate the narrative are mostly cut short by the dogs and the bullets of
the guards, associating the process of escape with subjugation, oppression
and murder (61). As the narrator writes:

The flowing water, the moving freight trains, and the fields full of grain
were all places of death. When the farmers harvested their cornfields, they
found withered or bloated corpses, picked over by crows. The farmers took
the corn and left the corpses, because it was better not to see them. In late
autumn, the tractors ploughed them under. (61)

Inverting natural images of fertility and growth, the passage evokes the
border as a landscape of absolute negation. So persistent are these images
 EUROPEAN FICTION ONTHEBORDERS 149

that characters urge to flee begins to assume darker undertones. For

example, when the narrator hears about the failed escape attempt of a
work colleague, her remark that he is the victim of a common wish that
dragged one person after another toward death implies that flight is more
about ending life in Romania than about achieving life abroad, that flight
is a way of dying, as she puts it, or a bid for death (132, 162, 61). The
suggestion is supported by the number of suicide attempts amongst the
narrators circle of university friends, all of whom spend the timeframe of
the narrative moving closer and closer to an obsession with flight while
simultaneously imagin[ing] how we might desert our friends by commit-
ting suicide (218, 219). Exemplifying the inclusionary function of bor-
ders, territoriality has spread from the physical into the mental landscape,
creating a population that is unable to foresee any temporal or spatial
existence beyond the police state.
The subjugation and death that characterise totalitarian borders also
define the conditions of totalitarian society. As with Klmas portrait of
Czechoslovakia, Mllers Romania has been shaped by its frontiers into
an enclosed, introverted and claustrophobic space, an illustration of what
social scientists term territorial boundedness or of borders functioning
as political-juridical [] containers within which political, economic
and social action, behavior and identity are structured.25 In the novel,
the most marked features of the bounded state are the informers and
secret police, who engage in continual surveillance, interrogation, house
searches and document checks. The mood of stifling oppression is typi-
fied by the narrators university accommodation, described as dormitories
of forty identical little cubes, all with fitted loudspeakers that not only
pipe workers songs at the students but alsoit is suspectedmanage to
see and hear everything (5). The irony here is that the narrator and her
friends, who have migrated from the provinces to seek greater intellectual
freedom in the city, find urban life even more circumscribed than rural
life. As a young undergraduate, the narrator knows that the states intru-
sion into personal space cannot be physically stopped (doors were no
shelter), but still believes in the possibility of mental freedom ([a]ll we
could open or slam or leave ajar were our own foreheads) (46). Again,
the belief is illusionary. In a country in which citizens walk, eat, sleep, and
love in fear and in which [e]veryone could feel the dictators corpse []
creeping through his skull, identity has already been moulded by politi-
cal circumstance, even down to its mental and emotional components (2,
62). In one scene, the process is shown to go further:
150 M. CORNIS-POPE AND A. HAMMOND

We sat together at a table, but our fear stayed locked within each of our
heads []. We laughed a lot, to hide it from each other. But fear always
finds an out. If you control your face, it slips into your voice. If you man-
age to keep a grip on your face and your voice, as if they were dead wood,
it will slip out through your fingers. It will pass through your skin and lie
there. (745)

In short, the regime impacts not only on thoughts and feelings but also
on appearance, comportment and behaviour, wielding authority over the
most intimate aspects of citizens identity. Significantly, such authority is
linked to the disciplinary mechanisms of the border. When the narrator
remarks that no one ever asked me in what house, in what place, at what
table, in which bed and country I would prefer to walk, eat, sleep or love,
she insists that the lack of transnational mobility determines day-to-day
existence as much as political, family or sexual life (34). Just as borders
create the conditions of communist Romania, so they are evoked by those
conditions. The difficulty that citizens have in retaining loyalty to the state
is revealed by the narrators comment that [e]verything around us smelled
of farewell and by an acquaintances candid remark that ciao was the first
syllable of Ceauescu (81, 134). Any sense of agency gained by these
moments of rebellion is undermined by the fact that they perfectly suit
the regime, which is not averse to escape attempts. Aware that ordinary
misdemeanours are insufficient for exposing political unorthodoxy, that
[i]ts not enough to catch people stealing meat or matches, the secret
police aggravate the mood of dissatisfaction in order to drive dissidents
towards the frontiers, the intention being to get people to flee and then
catch them (50). To extend the point, when the narrator refers to the
dictator and his guards hovering over all the escape plans she expresses
a literal and symbolic truth, while also indicating that, in communist
Romania, there is no distinction between the murderousness of the border
regime and that of the country it encompasses (48). In this way, the novel
shows how hard borders define the nation-state or, in Anthony Cohens
words, how the boundary encapsulates the identity of the community.26
Mller not only analyses how a regime obstructs the outward move-
ment of people but also examines its treatment of the inward flow of
foreign influence. The novel is partly an exploration of ideological
boundaries during the Cold War, when anything associated with the rival
bloc threatened to subvert domestic stability. For example, western goods
are a dangerous intrusion into Romanian society, hinting at lands where
 EUROPEAN FICTION ONTHEBORDERS 151

there were bluejeans and oranges [] and whisper-thin nylons and real
mascara (47). Such goods rarely appear, but those which do clearly con-
trast to the shoddy products of local industry, summarised by Mller as
tin sheep and wooden melons (29). The seditious potential of western
consumer items is seen when the narrators friend Tereza regularly turns
up at work in foreign fashions (dresses from Greece and from France.
Sweaters from England and jeans from America), which are viewed by
her colleagues as things [] worth fleeing for (108). For the narrators
circle, however, the most significant import is foreign literature. In partic-
ular, smuggled books from Germany, a country where authors think and
write differently, offer the promise of personal growth and transforma-
tion (118). Indeed, so used are the friends to national-communist culture
forging emotional and physical change that they expect the same from
western books: We sniffed at the pages and caught ourselves sniffing
our own hands out of habit. We were surprised our hands didnt blacken
as we read, the way they did from the ink in the newspapers and books
printed in our country (47). The impression that the friends have allied
themselves to the free world recurs in a scene in which Tereza mocks
the pomposity of a state official by swaggering in front of him as though
she werent walking on the pavement, but on top of the world (118).
The narrator sees in the act the difference between this country and the
world, presuming that in a world without guards people would walk
differently (118). Later, however, she doubts such easy generalisations:
Tereza was not the world, she writes, only what people in this country
thought of as the world when they wanted to flee (118). Although this
indicates a loss of faith in the West, the narrators circle is pushed irre-
vocably towards it. After university, when they begin work as teachers,
translators and engineers, some are dismissed as a result of the authorities
doubts about their ideological allegiance. This is the second-to-last stop,
they realise: the last one is out of the country (185). In despair, Georg
rushes to a passport office and fills out an emigration application, falling
into the trap of exposing his disloyalty to the regime. Although the act
could therefore be interpreted as a bid for death (his one wish, Georg
admits, is never to take another step on this earth), it also frees him from
the crushing humiliation the friends have always felt under Ceauescu
(207). Now I feel better, he tells the others, almost like a human being
(208). As chimerical as it proves to be, the crossing of ideological barri-
ers, of entering a world without guards, is linked to the attainment of
humanity.
152 M. CORNIS-POPE AND A. HAMMOND

The pessimism of the text is repeated in Mllers portrait of the Banat,

the western Romanian frontier zone in which the narrator grew up.
In the view of Klekh and Schneider cited earlier, the border subject is
marked by an adaptability, hybridity and cosmopolitanism which oppose
the homogenising tendencies of the national centre: as commentators
point out, if the principal fiction of the nation-state is ethnic, racial,
linguistic and cultural homogeneity, then borders always give the lie to
this construct.27 Nevertheless, the text is doubtful that the Romanian
borderlands offer any antidote to Ceauescus Golden Epoch. On the
subject of Swabian identity, Mllers interrogative narrative reexamines
the efforts by Banat Germans to resist assimilation, but also acknowl-
edges their ethnocentrism. This had led to a chauvinistic involvement
with the Nazi regime, as illustrated by the former SS activities of the nar-
rators father, who still referred to Germany as the Motherland (228).
The denial of hybridity is also seen when the narrators mother warns
her against Wallachians (inhabitants of southern Romania) and when
a family friend insists on her marriage to a German (God forbid that
you appear on my doorstep with some Romanian) (165). In this sense,
the margins of the communist state are as tyrannical as the centre, with
what Mller terms the silence of the villages, which forbids thought,
being no different to that of the metropolis.28 Indeed, when the narra-
tor escapes to multicultural Timioara, partly to evade ethnic prejudice,
she finds that prejudice now exists with state sanction. At a time when
Ceaueaus national-communism was privileging the Romanian major-
ity, the fears of persecution felt by the narrator and her Swabian friends
are aggravated by their minority status. Just as the regime stamps itself
on ones physique, so does ones ethnic or regional roots. For example,
Lola is not only said to have reeked of poor province during her time at
university but also said to have province in the face, showing up in her
cheekbones, or around the mouth, or smack in the middle of her eyes
(2, 4, 2). At the same time, the Swabians first languagethe German
of the Banat, summarised as the childrens bedtime language of the vil-
lagehas given their speech a distinct Swabian accent; as Tereza says
to the narrator, we know that youre German (47, 68, 209). Marked
out as they are, the students attempt to deny their Romanian-German
identity by severing the ethnic ties that bind them together. During their
daily gatherings, for example, they often lash out at each other with
culturalist clichs:
 EUROPEAN FICTION ONTHEBORDERS 153

You and your Swabian forgetfulness. You and your Swabian impatience,
or your Swabian lolling about. You and your Swabian penny-pinching. You
and your Swabian clumsiness. You and your Swabian hiccups, or sneezing;
you and your Swabian socks, or shirts, we said []. We needed the rage
from all those words to separate us. We invented them like curses to gain
distance from one another. (75)

In one sense, the exchanges are an example of rough love, an attempt to

jolt themselves out of the ethnicity that endangers them by insisting on
its absurdity (75). Yet while this mirrors the official denigration of non-
Romanian minorities, it also works to enhance the groups minority sta-
tus. The continual reiteration of supposed Swabian qualities solidifies the
sense of difference that the borderlanders feel at the metropolitan centre,
an act of resistance that may defy state power, but only at the expense of
making them more vulnerable to it.
The inability to find any solution to political oppression is repeated
when The Land of Green Plums turns its attention to life in exile. Edward
Saids famous adage about how [e]xiles cross borders, break barriers of
thought and experience, is not borne out by Mllers account of Cold
War migration, in which the source culture continues to exert an influ-
ence across state boundaries.29 After Georg gains a passport and leaves
for Germany, he is followed by Edgar and the narrator, the three of them
beneficiaries of a shift in state policy from incarcerating undesirables to
banishing them. Despite arriving on the other side of the Iron Curtain,
they are soon placed under surveillance by the Romanian secret service,
which also sends them death threats by telephone and post. Under intense
pressure, Georg commits suicide by jumping from the fifth floor of a tran-
sit hostel in Frankfurt, an act that mirrors the real-life suicide of writer
Rolf Bossert. In a scene that reflects one of Mllers own experiences,
the narrator gets a visit in Germany from Tereza and discovers that her
friend has copied her apartment key for the Romanian political police, the
Securitate, obliging her to end their friendship.30 The regimes continuing
hold over the group is crystallised in her remark that the Securitate has
made graveyards even in places where [it] had never set foot (238). At
the same time, Germany never erases from the narrators mind memories
of her former country, which she still finds tugging at the back of my
head (234). Again, the experience reflects Mllers own sense of being
unhomed both in her adoptive country and in her country of origin.31
154 M. CORNIS-POPE AND A. HAMMOND

The feeling was repeated in the work of Mllers former husband, Richard
Wagner, another member of the Aktionsgruppe Banat who escaped to
Germany. In Die Muren von Wien (Viena, Banat, 1990), a novel explor-
ing a life fractured by national borders, the protagonist is aware that his
flight has only exchanged marginalisation as an ethnic German in Romania
for marginalisation in Germany, where he is at best a Swabian from the
Banat, a member of a vanishing breed who speaks German like a for-
eigner.32 In short, the crossing of borders does not bring the transforma-
tion, freedom or growth that the would-be escapees in The Land of Green
Plums expect. The point is made formally in the way that the novel ends
with the same sentence as it began: this is the comment by Edgar that
[w]hen we dont speak [], we become unbearable, and when we do,
we make fools of ourselves (1, 242). In formulating the exact same limit
to the opening and ending of the novel, Mller creates a sort of bordered
text, one whose formal qualities of circularity and entrapment denote the
stasis, enclosure and rigidity of a life lived within hard borders.
Despite its pessimism, the experimentalism of The Land of Green Plums
exemplifies how the twentieth-century convulsion in border space, in
Richard Robinsons phrase, has also taken place in the realms of conscious-
ness, identification and the creative imagination.33 In eastern European
fiction, such features as polyphony, dialogised narratives, magic realism
and fantasy dramatise the way that uprooting, border crossing and exile
have problematised any coherent representation of identity. Mllers oeu-
vre also shows how gender has played a significant role in this context,
adding itself to generational, ethnic and political issues. More broadly,
women writers have had an increasingly notable presence in the literature
of borders and emigration from the 1980s onward. The work of Slavenka
Drakuli, Dubravka Ugrei, Kinga Dunin, Tatiana Tolstaya, Liliana Ursu,
Gabriela Melinescu and Carmen-Francesca Banciu, to mention just a few,
all exhibit the formal experimentation that can result from a positioning
at the crossroads of different ethnic traditions. Traces of the historical
shifts in borders, and the corresponding shifts in national and imperial
power, have been especially marked in urban writing: multicultural cit-
ies such as Timioara/Temesvr/Temesburg, Cernui/Czernowitz,
Danzig/Gdask, Lviv/Lww/Lemberg, Sibiu/Szeben/Hermanstadt
and Shkodra/Ikodra/Skadra have inspired a reconstruction of cultural
definitions, a hybridisation of styles and genres and a development of alter-
native social and ethnic rapports. Contrasting to the devastation caused by
closed borders is the release of creative energies at those places where such
 EUROPEAN FICTION ONTHEBORDERS 155

borders meet and intersect. For example, during the late 1970s and 1980s
Timioara became a metaphor of resistance against ideological oppression
and nationalist homogenisation through the experimental poetry of Ion
Monoran and Duan Petrovici, the innovative fiction of Sorin Titel and
Daniel Vighi and the political literature of the Aktionsgruppe Banat. In
the work of these writers, Timioara functions as what Alexander Gelley
has termed a city text, as one of those nodes or points of confluence
where sociocultural and textual identities are continually articulated and
tested.34 By exposing the contradictory impulses of the bordered state,
the Timioara city text as reconstructed by Mller and others challenged
the totalitarian levelling of differences through an attempt to reconcile the
divided geographies of their lives.
There is a danger in assuming that Mllers analysis of hard borders
is irrelevant to todays globalised landscape. In an age commonly defined
by interconnection, transnationality and mobility, it is easy to feel
that we all live in a traversable worlda world not of borders, but a
space of flows.35 Hilary Cunningham, whose words these are, urges us
to remember that borders are still heavily politicised locations where, for
the worlds asylum seekers and economic migrants, you might just be the
wrong sort of flow, where you might be incarcerated and fingerprinted
or apprehended and deported and where you might be denied mobility
to the worlds centres of capital and safety.36 The point is evidenced by
the national and civilisational barriers which persist in Europe. Although
the Single European Act (1986) proclaimed a Europe without Frontiers,
some 8000 miles of new border were erected in the 1990s and the EU
continues to reinforce its 55,000 miles of external land and sea borders
against the rest of the world.37 While boundaries within the Schengen area
were being dismantled, a cordon sanitaire was erected around Fortress
Europe, particularly along maritime borders in Portugal, Spain, Italy and
Greece and along land borders with Turkey, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus,
Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Albania, Russia and the Russian enclave
of Kaliningrad. Revealing its centrality to EU governance, border security
has also been dispersed inwards, with control activities now embedded in
train terminals, road networks, travel agencies, hotels and social services, a
regulatory omnipresence not dissimilar to that seen in Mllers novel. To
return to the idea of paradox, this was a proliferation of borders at exactly
the time that continental division was supposed to be ending.38 Needless
to say, the theme continues to feature in European novels: amongst them,
Gerald Szyszkowitzs Auf der anderen Seite (On the Other Side, 1990),
156 M. CORNIS-POPE AND A. HAMMOND

Tnu nnepalus Piiririik (Border State, 1993), China Mivilles The

City & the City (2009) and the linked stories of Miroslav Penkovs East
of the West (2011). At the European margins, such writing informs us,
residents are beset by borders all the time and on all sides (Anna Kim),
travellers are herded across new borders like cattle (Kapka Kassabova)
and migrants, moving from source to host culture, find the space between
them rife with borders (Aleksandar Hemon).39 As these examples suggest,
Mllers The Land of Green Plums is part of a substantial body of literature
that charts the devastating human cost of Europes territorial boundaries.

NOTES
1. Langer, Towards a Conceptualization of Borders: The Central European
Experience, in Heikki Eskelinen, Ilkka Liikanen and Jukka Oksa, eds,
Curtains of Iron and Gold: Reconstructing Borders and Scales of Interaction
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), p.25.
2. Balibar, We, the People of Europe?, p.219 (Balibars italics).
3. See, for example, Tassilo Herrschel, Borders in Post-Socialist Europe:
Territory, Scale, Society (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), p. 6;
Gallya Lahav, Immigration and Politics in the New Europe: Reinventing
Borders (Cambridge and NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 2004),
p.42; Sandra Lavenex, The Politics of Exclusion and Inclusion in Wider
Europe, in Joan DeBardeleben, ed., Soft and Hard Borders? Managing
the Divide in an Enlarged Europe (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate,
2005), p. 123; and Glynn Custred, The Linguistic Consequences of
Boundaries, Borderlands, and Frontiers, Journal of Borderlands Studies,
Vol. 26, No. 3 (2011), p.272.
4. Walters, Border/Control, European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 9, No.
2 (2006), pp.187, 198.
5. See Michel Foucher, The Geopolitics of European Frontiers, in Malcolm
Anderson and Eberhard Bort, eds, The Frontiers of Europe (London and
Washington: Pinter, 1998), p.235. Another etymological link can be found
between margins and marches: see Noel Parker, Integrated Europe and
Its Margins: Action and Reaction, in Parker and Bill Armstrong, eds,
Margins in European Integration (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan,
2000), p.7.
6. See Roy J. Eidelson and Ian S. Lustick, National Identity Repertoires,
Territory, and Globalization, in Mabel Berezin and Martin Schain, eds,
Europe without Borders: Remapping Territory, Citizenship, and Identity in
a Transnational Age (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2003), pp.8990.
 EUROPEAN FICTION ONTHEBORDERS 157

7. Thomas M.Wilson and Hastings Donnan, Nation, State and Identity at

International Borders, in Wilson and Donnan, eds, Border Identities:
Nation and State at International Frontiers (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 17; David Avalos and John
C.Welchman, Response to the Philosophical Brothel, in Welchman, ed.,
Rethinking Borders (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1996), p.189.
8. Walker, The Double Outside of the Modern International, Ephemera:
Theory and Politics in Organization, Vol. 6, No. 1 (2006), p.57. It has also
been said that much can be learnt about the centres of power by focusing
on their peripheries and that [t]he history of the world can be best observed
from the frontier (Hastings Donnan and Thomas M. Wilson, Borders:
Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State (Oxford and NewYork: Berg, 1999),
p. xiii; Pierre Vilar quoted in Peter Sahlins, State Formation and National
Identity in the Catalan Borderlands during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Centuries, in Wilson and Donnan, eds, Border Identities, p.31).
9. Schippers, The Border as a Cultural Idea in Europe, in Niedermller and
Stoklund, eds, Europe, pp.27, 29.
10. Laxness, The Atom Station, trans. by Magnus Magnusson (1948; London:
Vintage, 2004), p.94.
11. Donnan and Wilson, Borders, p.66.
12. JanMohamed, Worldliness-without-World, Homelessness-as-Home: Toward
a Definition of the Specular Border Intellectual, in Michael Sprinkler, ed.,
Edward Said: A Critical Reader (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992),
p.97.
13. Wilson, Symbolic Dimensions to the Irish Border, in Hastings Donnan
and Wilson, eds, Border Approaches: Anthropological Perspectives on Frontiers
(Lanham and London: University Press of America, 1994), p.104. Similarly,
Rena Potok locates a space between borders which, once inhabited physi-
cally or imaginatively, collapses the poles of linguistic and nationalistic
opposition and produces cultural hybridity (Potok, Borders, Exiles,
Minor Literatures: The Case of Palestinian-Israeli Writing, in Elazar Barkan
and Marie-Denise Shelton, eds, Borders, Exiles, Diasporas (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1998), p.292).
14. Although the focus of the present essay on literary fiction works to the
exclusion of spy fiction, the genre offers ideal research material, with its nar-
ratives typically centred on borders and its charactersdissidents, defectors,
double agents, migrs, spiescommonly defined by border crossings.
15. As Wachtel shows, this new internationalism was promoted especially by
writers who had been shuttling between East and West (see Wachtel,
Remaining Relevant after Communism, pp.11939).
16. Nabokov, Bend Sinister, new edn (1947; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974),
p.83; Armand, Clair Obscur, p.261.
158 M. CORNIS-POPE AND A. HAMMOND

17. Cees Nooteboom, In the Dutch Mountains, trans. by Adrienne Dixon

(1984; Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1987),
p.39; Pires, Ballad of Dogs Beach, p.24; Anita Brookner, Latecomers, new
edn (1988; London: Grafton Books, 1989), p.200; Igor Klekh, The Death
of the Forester, in Klekh, A Land the Size of Binoculars, trans. by Michael
M. Naydan and Slava I. Yastremski (1993; Evanston: Northwestern
University Press, 2004), p.163.
18. Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek, trans. by Carl Wildman (1946; London: Faber
and Faber, 1961), p.146; Morandini, The Caf of Mirrors, trans. by Luisa
Quartermaine (1983; Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997), p.108.
19. Klma, Waiting for the Dark, pp.83, 173; Klma, My Golden Trades, trans.
by Paul Wilson (1990; London: Penguin, 1993), p. 39. One of Eugen
Ruges characters describes a hard border as the defining marker of the
small, narrow world where he would have to live his life and the other big,
wide world where real, true life was lived (Ruge, In Times of Fading Light:
The Story of a Family, trans. by Anthea Bell (2011; London: Faber and
Faber, 2014), p.152).
20. Klekh, Introduction to the Galician Context, in Klekh, Land the Size of
Binoculars, p. 104; Schneider, The Wall Jumper, trans. by Leigh Hafrey
(1982; London: Penguin, 2005), p.23. Positive experiences of border cross-
ing are rare, although Jean Genet writes about the enchantment of another
order and Andre Makine describes the thrilling promise of the lands end
that is so dear to [] souls that detested constraints, limits, frontiers (Genet,
The Thiefs Journal, trans. by Bernard Frechtman (1949; Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1967), p.38; Makine, Once upon the River Love, p.8).
21. Complicating the Romanian borderlands is the fact that the nations fron-
tiers were retraced, broken up and compromised several times during and
after the Second World War, with parts of the Banat area reclaimed by
Serbia and with Bessarabia ceded to Ukraine. At the same time, the power
of the state was often overridden by transnational forces, such as the Nazi
invasion and communist take-over during the 1940s.
22. As Lyn Marven points out, the issue of gender is central to Mllers work,
which portrays an inherently patriarchal society in which gender roles are
fixed and rooted in old-fashioned peasant values (Marven, Body and
Narrative in Contemporary Literatures in German: Herta Mller, Libue
Monkov, and Kerstin Hensel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005),
p.37).
23. Mller, Land of Green Plums, p.47. Subsequent page references appear in
the text.
24. There is a quality of fantasy about many literary reflections on Cold War
border crossings: see Vasilii Aksenov, Residents and Refugees, in
McMillin, ed., Under Eastern Eyes, p.45; Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus
Project, new edn (2008; London: Picador, 2009), pp. 1034; and
 EUROPEAN FICTION ONTHEBORDERS 159

Christoph Hein, Willenbrock, trans. by Philip Boehm (2000; New York:

Picador, 2004), pp.2934.
25. Michael Mann quoted in ODowd and Wilson, Frontiers of Sovereignty,
p. 9; Wendy K. Tam Cho and Erinn P. Nicley, Geographic Proximity
Versus Institutions: Evaluating Borders as Real Political Boundaries,
American Politics Research, Vol. 36, No. 6 (2008), p.804.
26. Cohen, The Symbolic Construction of Community (Chichester: Ellis
Horwood Limited, 1985), p.12.
27. Mathew Horsman and Andrew Marshall, After the Nation-State: Citizens,
Tribalism and the New World Disorder (London: HarperCollins, 1994),
p.45.
28. Mller, Land of Green Plums, p.47. On the parallels between the tyranny
of village life and the tyranny of the communist regime, see Thomas
Cooper, Herta Mller: Between Myths of Belonging, in John Neubauer
and Borbla Zsuzsana Trk, eds, The Exile and Return of Writers from
East-Central Europe: A Compendium (Berlin and New York: Walter de
Greuyter, 2009), pp.4867.
29. Said, Reflections on Exile, Granta, Vol. 13 (1984), p.170.
30. Mller related the story in an interview with the Danish newspaper
Politiken, mentioning that the event happened in the same period that I
was receiving death threats like many others who had fled from Romania,
and I kept far away from Romanians I did not know or could not count on
(quoted in Beverley Driver Eddy, Herta Mller: Arts Transcends
Boundaries, Provincetown Arts, Vol. 13 (19978), pp.456).
31. See Marcel Cornis-Pope and Nikola Petkovi, Mapping the Danubian
Literary Mosaic, in Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, eds, History of the
Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the
19th and 20th Centuries (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins,
2006), II, 219.
32. Wagner, Viena, Banat, trans. by Wolfgang Schaller (1990; Bucharest:
Univers, 1998), pp.19, 34. Both Mller and Wagner focus on what the
former has called the trauma of the adult dissident, characterised by dis-
connection, entrapment, lack of trust and existential and cultural uncer-
tainty (quoted in Eddy, Herta Mller, p.46).
33. Robinson, Narratives of the European Border: A History of Nowhere
(Basingstoke and NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p.1.
34. Gelley, City Texts: Representation, Semiology, Urbanism, in Mark Poster,
ed., Politics, Theory, and Contemporary Culture (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1993), p.240.
35. Hilary Cunningham, Nations Rebound?: Crossing Borders in a Gated
Globe, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, Vol. 11, No. 3
(2004), pp.3301.
160 M. CORNIS-POPE AND A. HAMMOND

36. Ibid., p.346.

37. See Mungiu-Pippidi, Facing the Desert of Tatars, p.52; and Christina
Boswell and Andrew Geddes, Migration and Mobility in the European
Union (Basingstoke and NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p.14.
38. Observing that the EUs external frontier [has] come to resemble a state
border, Peter Andreas argues that wall building in the EU is embedded
within the broader institutional framework of European integration
(Andreas, Introduction: The Wall after the Wall, in Andreas and Timothy
Snyder, eds, The Wall around the West: State Borders and Immigration
Controls in North America and Europe (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield,
2000), p.3).
39. Kim, Frozen Time, trans. by Michael Mitchell (2008; Riverside: Ariadne
Press, 2010), p. 34; Kassabova, Street without a Name: Childhood and
Other Misadventures in Bulgaria, new edn (2008; London: Portobello
Books, 2009), p.257; Hemon, Lazarus Project, p.182. The continuing
European desire to exclude is illustrated by one of Christoph Heins char-
acters: They should build walls. Walls everywhere. Its impossible to stop
all these people. A wall round Germany, around every country (Hein,
Willenbrock, p.157).
 9

Borders, Borderlands andRomani Identity

inColum McCanns Zoli

MihaelaMoscaliuc

In his examination of frontiers, Malcolm Anderson underscores their roles

as basic political institutions and as markers of identity.1 He notes that
while frontiers generally emerge as means of establishing exclusive control
over a particular area and its inhabitants, they also condition and shape
human consciousness and territorial ideologies by aggravating notions
of homelands, historical myths, living spaces, natural frontiers, civilizing
missions, ethnicity, human biology, claims of natural rights, and the opti-
mal use of space.2 Contemporary political scientists, sociologists, cultural
anthropologists and other scholars examining the functions of borders
and borderlands in the development of nations, states and transborder
and transnational communities in Europe often address the ways in which
culture and identity affect and are affected by the process. As discussed
in the latest wave of Border Studies, political changes across the conti-
nent (including the revision of frontiers after the disintegration of Soviet
hegemony in eastern Europe) have resulted in the proliferation of identi-
ties that defy traditional relations to territory and sovereignty.3 Anderson
remarks that since the late twentieth century, frontiers have lost some of
their relevance as instruments of mapping and reifying power, and are

M. Moscaliuc ( )
Department of English, Monmouth University, West Long Beach, NJ 07764,
USA

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 161

A. Hammond (ed.), The Novel and Europe,
DOI10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4_9
162 M. MOSCALIUC

being eclipsed by boundaries that do not necessarily coincide with the

frontiers of modern states.4 This idea of [a] non-state boundary [as] an
enduring basis of identity is exemplified by the Roma, a minority with
no geographically maintained frontier but with strong boundary-
maintaining mechanisms and strong communications networks that
challenge the nation-states objective of creating a homogeneous national
identity.5 Judith Okely has suggested that the Roma are able to sustain
a distinct identity through cultural beliefs and observances which express
and enforce ethnic boundaries and which mark the groups independence
from the dominant culture, a remark echoed in Andersons observations
about the recent reconfiguration of the EUs national and regional fron-
tiers into instruments of cultural defence.6 In the second decade of the
twenty-first century, cultural borders are giving rise to some of the most
divisive discourses and debates about the place of the Roma in a chang-
ing Europe. They remain the one people whom even the more tolerant
find it acceptable to disparage and vilify, often by associating them with
boundary-crossings which are deviant, excessive and threatening to what-
ever sense of cohesiveness Europe might be aspiring to.
Irish-born Colum McCanns novel Zoli (2006) explores with unprec-
edented complexity the role that cultural, physical and psychological
borders have played in creating and maintaining the tension between the
Romas historical and fictitious presence in Europe and the European
imaginary. The novels poignancy derives largely from the craftsmanship
with which McCann deploys the conventions of fiction to explore the
historical realities of the Slovakian Roma from the Second World War to
the years following the collapse of the Iron Curtain. He does so by chroni-
cling the story of one woman, Zoli Novotna, whose fictional biography
is loosely modelled on the iconic Polish-Romani singer-poet Bronisawa
Wajs, known as Papusza. Such a tapered focus acknowledges the power
of individualised experience and works against the habit of treating the
Roma as a homogenous group. At the same time, the singularity of Zolis
story accumulates an ethical and historical dimension in the context of
McCanns larger narratives about European constructions of gypsiness
and about the Romas place in a Cold War Europe whose frontiers func-
tioned not only as markers of two competing world systems but also as
instruments of state-policy and indispensable elements in the construc-
tion of national cultures.7
A brief historical framing of the Romas presence in Europe will help
to illuminate the ways in which Zoli engages with issues of real and imag-
 BORDERS, BORDERLANDS ANDROMANI IDENTITY 163

ined borders and identity formation. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth
century, historical documents and anti-Roma legislations from various
European territories reveal anxieties about the impact that their alleged
lawlessness might have on the communities they come into contact with.
The legislations also record attempts to regulate the Romas border-
crossing and to restrict or force an end to nomadism.8 These measures
correlate with imputations that they are devilish, disloyal, debased, lazy
and criminal.9 In the twentieth century, prejudice not only led to the
extermination of between a quarter of a million to a million Roma (mostly
during the 19331945 Porrajmos, or Gypsy Holocaust, steered by Hitler
and fuelled by nationalistic tendencies already at work within most eastern
European states) but also encouraged the enforced assimilation of Roma
during the Cold War, particularly under communist regimes that fortified
national borders and dismantled internal social, economic and cultural
boundaries in order to unify and control the body politic. The regimes
banned encampments, relegated the Roma to ghettoes, placed their chil-
dren in schools for students with special needs and attempted to reduce
the birth rate by non-consensual sterilisation of women. These measures
were seen as means of addressing the minority question and eradicating
parasitism.10 Though civilian hostilities towards the Roma in the eastern
bloc deepened during this period, the fear of repercussions kept manifesta-
tions of intolerance under relative control. It was following the dissolution
of the communist regimes and the lifting of barriers to freedom of speech
that latent prejudice towards the Roma fully erupted. While the loosen-
ing of border controls within the European Union and the weakening of
national controls over the movement of citizens appear to have rescinded
the ban on their migration and to have reinstated, at least in theory, their
rights as a travelling culture, the Roma remain one of the most vulnerable
and excluded of European minorities, their presence either ignored or per-
ceived as problematic for Europes re-imagining of itself as an integrated
community.
McCanns novel fleshes out these historical contexts through a narra-
tive that engages realistically and metaphorically with the effects of physi-
cal and cultural borders on Romani identity and psychology. After Zolis
family is killed by the Slovak pro-Nazi Hlinkas (the paramilitary created
in 1938 by Catholic priest Andrej Hlinka), the six-year-old girl and her
grandfather join another kumpanija, whose admiration Zoli garners with
her talent for singing. She and the kumpanija survive the war by hiding in
a forest, where she is married off to an older man and starts to compose
164 M. MOSCALIUC

her own songs. In post-war Czechoslovakia, both Zoli and her grandfather
embrace the socialist dream of equality and tolerance. Prodded by the
publisher Martin Strnsk and journalist Stephen Swann, she allows her
songs to be turned into poems and promoted by the communist govern-
ment as the harbinger of a literate proletariat.11 Despite the apparent
egalitarianism of the aim, the government is actually planning to assimilate
the Roma through a campaign known in the novel as the Big Halt, a
fictional version of the Act on Permanent Settlement of Nomadic People
(1958).12 Nomadism is banned, wagon wheels are burned, horses req-
uisitioned or sent to glueyards, musical instruments registered and the
Roma are corralled, inoculated and placed into housing projects. Betrayed
by the Czechoslovakian authorities which had turned her into a poster
girl for communism, and tried and condemned by her own people for
collaborating with those authorities, Zoli journeys on foot across three
countries to Italy, where she eventually settles with a new husband.13 The
end of the novel introduces us to Zolis daughter Francesca, an activist
settled in Paris, whose three-day conference, From Wheel to Parliament:
Romani Memory and Imagination, calls for the end of ethnic hierarchies
in Europe.14 However, the seven dividers that signal the novels peripatetic
geography and chronology (Slovakia 2003; Czechoslovakia 1930s1949;
England-Czechoslovakia 1930s1959; Czechoslovakia-Hungary-Austria
19591960; Slovakia 2003; Italy 2001; Paris 2003) reveal a Europe still
marked by discontinuity, juxtaposition, interruption and shifting borders.
Textual disunity may also be a strategy that McCann employs to work
through the complicated politics of representation. In penning the story
of a Romani artist who is ousted by her people for allowing outsiders
insights into their culture, McCann dramatises his own disputable author-
ity as an outsider attempting to narrativise anothers voice.15
While historical documents place the Roma at the peripheries of
European nation-states through disparagement and censure, fictional
accounts tend to romanticise and eroticise them. Romance novels, pulp
fiction, childrens literature, film scripts and song lyrics have turned the
Roma into hackneyed metaphors for illicit desire or ploys for challenging
forms of normative thinking and behaviour. As critics such as Abby Bardi,
Kirstie Blair, Deborah Nord, David Mayall and Katie Trumpener point
out, the Gypsies/Roma who appear in the pages of nineteenth- and
twentieth-century European fiction correlate with explorations of borders
and boundaries, both national and private.16 When literature wishes to
challenge or question matters of national identity, social and economic
 BORDERS, BORDERLANDS ANDROMANI IDENTITY 165

mobility, gender orientation, ownership, societal convention, modernity

or progress, the Roma have often been appropriated for testing the pos-
sibilities of boundary-crossing and transgression. Those familiar with this
literature will recognise in Zoli not only a critique of such practices but
also reflections on the political and social impact of discursive represen-
tation. As McCann remarks through his character Swann, thered only
ever been a few Gypsy writers scattered across Europe and Russia before,
and never any who were part of the establishment. It was an oral culture,
they had no books or written-down stories to speak of, they distrusted the
unchangeable word.17 The Slovak publisher Strnsk convinces Swann to
turn it around and make Zoli an instrument of change, a voice from the
dust that can claim and use the written word.18 Zolis relationship with
the written word, which develops against her communitys interdictions,
is nurtured by her grandfather, who teaches her in secret how to read and
write.19 From the start, she likes the feel of a pencil between [her] fingers
and later, in a bookstore, she experiences the words running like horses,
a potent simile that yokes the natural world to that of print culture.20
Zolis literary endeavour is the first of two ways that McCanns novel
reflects on borders in modern Europe. The binary oppositions that Zoli
attempts to negotiate (nature-culture, oral-written, minority-majority)
are indicative of the boundaries which have shaped European thought
and demarcated European division. Acutely aware of the insuperable and
mutually enforced divide between her people and the dominant culture,
Zoli attempts to remove some of the discord and act as a mediator. As she
straddles the two cultures, however, she enters a state of liminality which
only manages to isolate her. Her recordings and poetry mean to bridge her
peoples oral culture with the majoritys print culture and offer a correc-
tive ethnographic text to stereotypes of gypsiness. As Mary Louise Pratt
argues, ethnographic texts have the potential to address miscomprehen-
sion and enable transcultural exchange, often constituting a marginalised
groups point of entry into the dominant circuits of print culture.21 Zoli,
however, is ousted by her people precisely for succumbing to the allures
of this culture, which works to reveal Romani secrets to the gade and to
increase the vulnerability of her community. While Strnsks intentions
later become mired in politics, he initially makes an important case for
Romani self-advocacy though the written word, arguing that print cul-
ture will allow the Roma to intervene in the process of representation.
However, when shaped by dominant interests, print culture can easily
become complicit in the reification and exploitation of minor cultures.
166 M. MOSCALIUC

This is what happens when Swann and Strnsk turn Zolis songs into
Gypsy literature.22 The two do not limit themselves to transcribing her
songs phonetically, but manipulate the songs by speaking them to one
another, quoting them back and forth, raking them, bending them, prais-
ing them, making them theirs.23 In other words, they replicate the assimi-
lationist practices that operate on a larger scale in the regimes approach
to the Gypsy problem, which claims, in colonialist fashion, to be liberat-
ing the Roma from the troubles of primitivism.24 In taking possession
of the Romas repertoire of embodied memories and re-branding them,
the dominant culture attempts to neutralise the power of a non-material
culture, intervening in its transmission and preservation of collective iden-
tities. Unwittingly, Zoli has sold [her] voice [] to the arguments of
power.25
Working at the peripheries of two cultures, and hoping to render per-
meable the boundaries that polarise them, Zoli ends up being ousted by
both.26 Benedict Anderson notes that with the possible exception of what
he calls primordial villages, human communities exist as imagined enti-
ties: as he puts it, people will never know most of their fellow-members,
meet them or even hear of them, yet in the mind of each lives the image
of their communion.27 Twenty-nine-year-old Zoli has lost her place in
the collective memory of the village, to which the repertoire she released
into print belongs, and has also been denied membership of the non-
Roma community in whose image of itself she is not included. Alaina
Lemon aptly observes that gypsiness figures in the majoritys national
identity as its wild, imagined other, but the Roma themselves are denied
entrance into the majoritys imagined nation.28 Zolis attempt to undo
this positioning and to align the historical with the fictional fails, and she
is left suspended in empty air like a shirt from a branch.29 An extended
metaphor for suspended, abandoned or yet-to-be inhabited identities, the
image recurs, with variations, at least a dozen times in the novel, connect-
ing vastly different settings (Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, France) and trac-
ing Zolis engagement with physical borders and the human landscapes
they demarcate.
This leads to the second way in which the novel engages with European
borders, which is through reflection on their political and psychological
implications. McCann uses the particulars of Zolis experience at national
frontiers to debunk the persistent myth of Gypsy nomadism as rooted in
the desire to evade accountability and to roam irresponsibly. Traversing
Europe on foot, Zoli slips across national frontiers illegally, using the
 BORDERS, BORDERLANDS ANDROMANI IDENTITY 167

safety of forests and abandoned huts for respite and wondering how many
borders, barbwire fences, troopers and roadblocks lie ahead. The Europe
as she knows it differs from the Europe of national desires, its physical
geography much simpler than its human geography. In the initial journey
westward through Czechoslovakia, her body becomes an extension of the
scorched camps and caravans she passes, with the makeshift bandages
that she wears becoming part of her skin, a metaphor for the borders that
enclose her and for the wounds she acquires in crossing them.30 She walks
to survive, not to escape, although she hopes to gain from her journey a
freedom so complete that nothing can catch her, not even the sound of
[her] voice.31 At times, Zoli is startled by how, despite the clear divisions
that national frontiers create, they may remain elusive and invisible to the
eye.32 On her approach to Hungary, she knows she has to cross a hard
border, but three afternoons later it occurs to her from roadsigns that
she is in the new country: there has been no concertina of barbed wire
and no high concrete watchtower to mark her illegal passage, and the
landscape appears wholly alien and yet so much the same.33 However,
as she approaches the hard border of the West (the other border, as
she calls the Iron Curtain), the army trucks, watchtowers and searchlights
remind her of the brutality of state boundaries: How many dead bodies
lie along these imaginary lines? How many men, women, children shot as
they made the short trip from one place to another?34 Towards the end of
the novel, Zoli reflects again on the metonymic dimension of borders and
their function as ideological processes. It was only a few years ago now,
she muses, that the Wall fell, though perhaps it has never been a wall so
much as an idea grown away from its own simplicity.35
The ways in which Zoli affects those with whom she comes into contact
illustrates how the cultural, ideological and psychological characteristics
of national frontiers can condition identity. Living outside the borders
of her peoples collective identity and on the fringes of others imagined
communities, Zoli has become a de-territorialised, borderland presence, a
shadow sidling along geopolitical lines. Her liminal identity recalls Gloria
Anzaldas conceptualisation of a borderland as a vague and undeter-
mined place created by the emotional residual of an unnatural boundary.
[] The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.36 An embodiment
not only of borders but also of what might lie beyond them, Zoli comes
across as a disruptive marker of foreignness/otherness that produces anxi-
ety, but that also triggers a re-framing of desire and (self-)identification.
Some of the people that Zoli meets along the way respond to her forbid-
168 M. MOSCALIUC

den presence by leering and calling her names, spitting in her face and
pelting her with stones, a response that reveals a mixture of abjection and
desire.37 Some of the gade act on fantasies in which Zoli embodies the
stereotype of the easily available, hypersexualised Gypsy, while others
show her kindness because they like her singing or share an affinity for
travelling. Their own imagined gypsiness seems to free them, if momen-
tarily, from whatever mores throttle their ambitions, exemplifying how, at
times, the impulse of othering derives from the sublimated desire to give
ourselves permission to recognise ourselves in the image of the other.
An example is a woman that Zoli meets near Bratislava. On their first
encounter, the woman acts as an enforcer of official hierarchies by threat-
ening Zoli with her gun, indicating the clear lines of division between
them and of the position of authority she is speaking from: inside the law,
on property she owns. Her attitude slowly begins to change, however.
Seeing that her mute son responds positively to Zoli, the woman starts to
perceive a link between the two of them, understanding Zolis lowly and
lawless state to be as untranscendable and isolating as her own sons condi-
tion. At the same time, Zoli reminds the woman of the sense of betrayal
she feels at the hands of the communist regime. But theres one good
thing I like about your people, the woman says:

You steal a chicken, you steal a chicken. The others, they come in, they
steal all your chickens and dont even call it stealing. I am sure you know
what I mean. Im too old for double-talk. I suppose theyll put me in the
ground for it. You go ahead and eat now. There are no five-year plans on
that bread.38

Her appreciation of the Romas honest thievery is a form of dissent. It

allows her to register a grievance and connect, momentarily, with the cusp
of legitimacy and illegitimacy that Zoli inhabits. Through Zolis presence,
she can experience the illusion of resisting communist regulation and pro-
paganda, as well as the titillating illusion of danger (as she assumes that
she is risking her life with her encoded attack on the regime). Thus, Zoli
becomes an embodiment of an ideological border the woman can safely
cross and cross back. The latter occurs at the end of the scene. Warning
Zoli to never again set foot on her property, the woman asks her to take
away a tea towel she has used, believing that Zolis physical presence,
unlike her metaphorical presence, threatens contamination.
 BORDERS, BORDERLANDS ANDROMANI IDENTITY 169

Another significant encounter takes place near the Hungarian border.

Here, Zoli is seized by what appear to be two woodmen but who, she
figures, may be prisoners of a makeshift labour camp, their liminal identi-
ties perhaps not that dissimilar to her own. At first, the two men threaten
her with intimations of sexual assault and violence, then dismiss her fab-
ricated story by saying that for a Gypsy she cannot even lie well.39 For
the younger man, Zoli remains to the end an expendable body that he is
ready to trade in to the authorities for a reward. However, when his col-
league recognises Zoli as the singer-poet whose photo he once saw in a
newspaper, his attitude temporarily shifts. Using an old map, he instructs
her on how to negotiate the newly drawn frontier and cross into Hungary.
In return for his help, he wants to know if she is really a poet and is slightly
confused by her comment that she is a singer, not a poet. Ironically, to
him the two are interchangeable, while to her the divide has widened into
a chasm. His response recalls that of the party officials who are baffled by
the fact that Zoli was a poet and yet signed her name with XXX, as well as
that of the Romani child intrigued at how Zoli could be inside the radio
and on the road [] at the exact same time.40 When the older man stares
into the distance and asks [h]ow have you come to this?, Zoli realises
that he is speaking to himself, or else addressing some old self standing in
the distance, amid trees.41 Her position as someone fallen from grace and
disenfranchised interests the older man insofar as it provides a moment of
reflective recognition of his own fallen, transgressive status. Zolis pres-
ence clarifies the identities of the two men through radical dissociation
and temporary identification respectively.
Zolis own identity draws on and reflects her relationship to borders
and other markers of division. Unlike the non-Roma Europeans, who are
often nostalgic for the things of the past, Zoli yearns for the kind of noth-
ingness that could place her outside nations and national identities and
override all structures of power and exclusion. Zoli notes that others have
had reasons to cross borders, for land, or nation, or desire, but [that]
she has no reason, she is empty, clean, raw.42 She wants to relinquish
all agency and become nothing at all so that she can escape backwards
to a time when things were half-considered, inconsequential, a time
when it had [all] been one giant country.43 One may argue that Zolis
desire is yet another form of nostalgia and that her movement, guided
by natural signposts (twigs, wishbones), simply iterates old clichs about
travellers and their disregard for law and governance. McCann antici-
pates and addresses this. Without discounting the centrality of travelling
170 M. MOSCALIUC

to Romani culture, he complicates it in a number of ways, including by

offering, through Zolis example, the logic that justifies it. Her dwelling
in/through travelling is an act of necessity, and so is the travelling of her
kumpanija, which is driven either by the need to escape forced assimila-
tion or by migratory patterns correlated with labour needs. Moreover,
Zolis disregard for borders is a conscious critique of the state policies
which lie behind them. Borders, like hatred, she observes, are exagger-
ated precisely because otherwise they would cease to exist altogether.44
Through strict enforcement, she suggests, borders function as both the
producers and products of intolerance.
The human divisions created by national or regional frontiers affect
Zolis sense of identity and deepen her sense of displacement. My peo-
ple had never cared about borders, she tells her doctor-interrogator in
a Displaced Persons camp in Austria, and her words are simultaneously
truthful and deceptive, as is the entire story she constructs for this offi-
cial whose notepad and ink remind her of previous betrayals, by teachers,
nurses and census workers who had earlier gathered the information used
to persecute and decimate Europes Roma population.45 The scene in the
camp provides one of the most textured examples of human divisions and
failed contact zones in the novel. Doctor Marcus, the German-speaking
Canadian in whose charge Zoli finds herself, asks questions that aim to
solve the mystery of her patients elective muteness. After she has failed
to coerce Zoli into identifying her ethnicity, she leans closer to her patient
and says, exasperatedly, that she believes Zoli is actually from outer
space.46 Sensing the futility of attempting to articulate her identity, Zoli
remains silent, but after a few days in quarantine, when silence threatens
to annihilate her, Zoli delivers to Doctor Marcus a strange story that the
latter dutifully records on a white notepad, scribbling everything down
as fast as she could.47 Zolis post-traumatic muteness is not so much tran-
scended as exchanged for another kind of silence. Speaking as Marienka
(her birth name), Zoli pretends she is from Hungary, has abandoned her
husband to join her children in France and has spent time in jail. Then,
for a little gaiety and prodded by the doctors triumphant smiles, she
adorns the story with lies that corroborate gado constructions of gypsy
dishonesty: these include the claims that she had got an accomplished
forger to make her a Party card, had stolen a bicycle with a giant basket
on the front and, of course, [] had borrowed some chickens, tied them
down in the basket, feathers flying, and had lived on them until I made
my break for freedom (emphasis mine).48 Zolis double consciousness is
 BORDERS, BORDERLANDS ANDROMANI IDENTITY 171

at work here, constructing a strategic autoethnographic text that, as theo-

rised by Mary Louise Pratt, undertakes the process of describing herself
in ways that engage with others representations of her.49 The fantasy that
Zoli fabricates, which parodies commonly trafficked narratives of gypsi-
ness, allows the doctor to cast Zoli as the deceitful, immoral, excessive
other, as the thief, liar, Gypsy.50 She gives the official what she wants in
order to protect what remains of who she is. Ironically, Zoli begins to like
the person she has created, drawing some power or enjoyment from step-
ping into the realm of fiction and enacting the enemys fantasy. Moreover,
several scenes in the novel indicate that double consciousness helps to
ensure her survival, not least the practice of thievery, the most common
imputation against Roma. While hitching a ride towards Paris in a truck,
she finds the driver trying to rape her and she stabs his eye-socket with a
knife she has purloined from a jeweller, confident in the knowledge that
what I had stolen was what would save me.51
The end of the novel presents us with a Schengen Europe whose lines
of division are softened but still firmly in place and whose disciplinary
mechanisms are still very much at work, at least with regard to Romani
migrants. While the novel begins in Slovakia in 2003 (the year before the
countrys accession to the European Union) with the story of a journalist
who descends upon a Slovakian-Romani settlement in search of Zolis life
story, it ends in the same year with Francescas academic conference in
Paris. The two communitiesthat of squalid shanties pockmarked with
satellite dishes and a dozen radios blaring all at once, whose inhabitants
lament the loss of the communist economic safety net, and that of the inter-
national writers, scholars and activists congregated to reflect on collective
memory and European integrationcapture the range of positions which
the Roma occupy at the beginning of the twenty-first century.52 However,
in ways that Zoli understands better than anyone, the two realities are not
as radically different as they appear, with both remaining separated from
mainstream Europe. The Slovakian-Romani settlement, for example, is
bordered by a swirling, fast, brown, unexpected river whose streambeds
the journalist sees as a terrible shitscape [that] looms up by increments
and that can only be crossed by a rickety little joke of a bridge.53
For all its cosmopolitanism, Paris also manages to insulate the conferees
within their trans-European imaginary, a fact that recalls Swanns remark,
earlier in the novel, that Gypsies were [] their own small Europe.54
Intellectual calibre and prestige do little toward attenuating entrenched
anti-Gypsy sentiments. In order to book a hotel for the conference, the
172 M. MOSCALIUC

organisers have to drop the word Romani from the title, responding to the
hotel managements insistence that [w]e cant have Gypsies, an attitude
that seems to come right out of Zolis tortuous past in Czechoslovakia.55
The anachronism of the Parisian hotel clerks questionof whether the
conferees will have horsecartsreveals how ossified thinking about the
Roma remains even in the imagination of a transnationalised Europe.
However, since the prospect of economic gain supersedes other concerns,
the hotel agrees to accommodate the Gypsies, but at a cost so extortion-
ate that the organisers almost have to cancel. Only a few miles away lies
a suburban ghetto that confines what Zoli terms our people, a danger-
ous and dilapidated neighbourhood that even the gendarmes sometimes
refuse to enter.56 Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, and especially since the
accession of various former communist countries to the European Union,
thousands of Roma have migrated west, with the largest number settling
in France on the outskirts of cities, often in makeshift camps regarded as
burdens on the economy and as health hazards. Dozens of these illegal
encampments have been razed during the presidencies of Nicolas Sarkozy
and Franois Hollande and thousands of Roma have been sent back to
Bulgaria and Romania. While transnational dialogues on Romani issues
and organised structures of representation can help to articulate their
shared interests, there is a sense that the message of Francescas confer-
ence will fail to reach the audiences that most need them: non-Roma like
the hotel clerk or the tiny Romani girl whom Zoli sees running though the
gloomy ghetto with a folded red paper flower stuck on a coat hanger. Who
will help her disentangle her identity as Gypsy from associations with
warranted poverty and delinquency? What borders confine her to this des-
olate fringe and how will she be able to cross them? To whose Europe does
she belong? The Paris that Zoli once dreamed about in Czechoslovakia is
not a European epicentre of civilisation and tolerance, but a version of a
permanent elsewhere, a place defined by the exclusionary practices and
power structures which have long enforced the East-West divide.
During the expansion of the European Union, debates about what con-
stitutes Europe and Europeanness have been compounded not only by
revisions to physical frontiers but also by ongoing changes in the nature
and roles of frontiers in reconfiguring, dividing or suturing the continent
and its constituents. For instance, Malcolm Anderson and Eberhard Bort
point out that a blurring of the distinction between international and
sub-state boundaries within the EU [has] raised the possibility that, as
international frontiers lose the visible trappings of police, border check
 BORDERS, BORDERLANDS ANDROMANI IDENTITY 173

points and barriers, their power as markers of identity will strengthen.57

Andrew Hammond notes that, while the West appeared sympathetic to
the plight of the oppressed East during the Cold War, after 1989 the
post-communist peoples were quickly re-imagined as an uncontrollable
massof criminal gangs, traffickers, prostitutesthat threatened the
imminent destruction of Western stability, thereby altering the terms of
continental division from a geopolitical to a civilisational fault line.58 The
Roma are often placed, in rhetoric that thinly disguises cultural racism, at
the forefront of debates about the influx of undesirable migrants to the
West. As one of the most disenfranchised ethnic minorities within the
European Union (and so also one of the most inclined to take advantage
of the right to free movement), the Roma may be a litmus test of the
much flaunted ideals of an integrated Europe and the viability of a non-
exclusionary European citizenship.

NOTES
1. Anderson, Frontiers: Territory and State Formation in the Modern World
(Oxford: Polity, 1996), pp. 12. In his introduction, Anderson outlines
the distinguishing traits of frontier, boundary and border, but thereaf-
ter often uses the terms interchangeably, a practice followed in this essay
(see ibid., pp.910).
2. Ibid., p.189.
3. See Donnan and Wilson, Borders, p.61.
4. Malcolm Anderson and Eberhard Bort, The Frontiers of the European
Union (New York: Palgrave, 2001), p.21.
5. Anderson, Frontiers, p.5. There is a tension between the term Gypsy and
the people known by it. Roma, Rroma and Romani (derived from
Rom, meaning man in Sanskrit) are the endonyms used by academics
and activists, as well as by Roma and non-Roma sensitised to the commu-
nitys political and historical circumstances. The terms stand in stark con-
trast to Gypsy, the exonym which derives from the incorrect hypothesis
that the Roma originated in Egypt and by which many European Roma
continue to refer to themselves. At the same time, both terms are mislead-
ing in suggesting the existence of a cohesive ethnic and cultural identity.
The Roma are probably the largest, most dispersed and most heteroge-
neous minority in Europe and many of its constituents identify themselves
only by their group name (such as Cldrai, Cale, Ludar, Lovari, Romnichel
or Sinti). Currently, there is an estimated population of 12,000,000 people
in Europe who identify as Gypsy/Roma, though national statistics vary
174 M. MOSCALIUC

greatly, especially since many Roma do not register their childrens births,
do not take part in a census and do not retain their official documents in
order to reduce the possibility of deportation.
6. Anderson, The Frontiers of Europe, in Anderson and Eberhard Bort, eds,
Boundaries and Identities: The Eastern Frontier of the European Union
(Edinburgh: International Social Sciences Institute, University of
Edinburgh, 1996), p.21. See also Okely, The Traveller-Gypsies (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 778; and Fredrik Barth,
Introduction to Barth, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social
Organization of Culture Difference, new edn (1969; Long Grave: Waveland
Press, 1998), pp.1037.
7. Donnan and Wilson, Borders, p.5.
8. See, for example, Ian Hancock, We Are the Romani People (Hatfield:
University of Hertfordshire Press, 2002), p. 26; David M. Crowe, A
History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia (New York: St. Martins
Griffin, 1994), p. xii; and Elena Marushiakova and Vesselin Popov,
Historical and Ethnographic Background: Gypsies, Roma, Sinti, in Will
Guy, ed., Between Past and Future: The Roma of Central and Eastern
Europe (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2001), pp.423.
9. For example, Crowes research finds categorisations of Gypsies as lazy,
untrustworthy thieves and outlandish claims of excessive Gypsy criminal-
ity (Crowe, History, pp.236, 238).
10. As Crowe points out, the communist regimes of eastern Europe were par-
ticularly nationalistic in their refusal to grant the Roma minority status and
in their attempt to transform them, through forced integration, into little
Hungarians, Romanians, or Russians (ibid., p.238).
11. McCann, Zoli (New York: Random House, 2006), p.83.
12. Ibid., p. 125. For historical details about the Act, see Crowe, History,
pp. 5561. Despite restrictions followed by a ban on crossing national
borders, the Roma managed to sustain a sense of collective identity as a
trans-border, diasporic, travelling culture. McCann emphasises this
through a reference to the grandfathers five languages, through Zolis
mention of our Czech brothers, our Polish sisters, our Hungarian cousins
and through Zolis comment that what happened [during the Porrajmos]
to the least of us happened to all of us (McCann, Zoli, pp.34, 478, 48).
13. Ibid., p.128.
14. Ibid., p.298.
15. In a conversation with McCann, Frank McCourt remarked that Zoli is in
many ways McCanns most foreign character, a woman, a poet, a Rom,
an exile, an Eastern European, to which the novelist replied that this was
the biggest leap [he] had ever made and that the novel merges memories
of anti-traveller prejudice he observed as a child in Dublin with his interest
 BORDERS, BORDERLANDS ANDROMANI IDENTITY 175

in compassion and clarity and making new worlds available (McCourt

and McCann, A Conversation with Colum McCann and Frank McCourt,
in McCann, Zoli, pp.338, 339, 339).
16. See, for instance, Jane Austens Emma (1816), Victor Hugos Notre-Dame
de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, 1831), Prosper Mrimes
Carmen (Carmen, 1845), Charlotte Bronts Jane Eyre (1847), George
Eliots The Mill on the Floss (1860), Vita Sackville-Wests Heritage (1919)
and Challenge (1923), Virginia Woolfs Orlando (1928), D.H.Lawrences
The Virgin and the Gypsy (1930), Ivo Andris Na Drini uprija (The
Bridge over the Drina, 1945), Stefan Kanfers The Eighth Sin (1978) and
Joanne Harriss Chocolat (1999). As an exception, Romani-Hungarian
Menyhrt Lakatoss Fsts kpek (The Color of Smoke, 1975) presents an
insiders view of Romani experience in Nazi-occupied Europe.
17. McCann, Zoli, p.73.
18. Ibid., p.83.
19. Zolis literacy breaks a significant taboo, as the oldest woman of her kum-
panija, Barleyknife, makes clear when she slaps Zoli nine times and pre-
dicts that the girl will end up marrying the butchers ugliest dogs (ibid.,
pp.367).
20. Ibid., pp.39, 89.
21. Pratt, Arts of the Contact Zone, Profession, Vol. 91 (1991), p.33.
22. McCann, Zoli, p.83.
23. Ibid., p.164.
24. Ibid., p.106.
25. Ibid., p.143.
26. This recalls Donnan and Wilsons remark that boundaries are always neces-
sarily confrontational and that ethnic groups are marked off and mark
themselves off from other collectivities in a process of inclusion and exclu-
sion which differentiates us from them (Donnan and Wilson, Borders,
p.22).
27. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p.6. Communities are distinguished,
he adds, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they
are imagined (ibid., p.6).
28. Lemon, Roma (Gypsies) in the Soviet Union and the Moscow Teatr
Romen, in Diane Tong, ed., Gypsies: An Interdisciplinary Reader (New
York: Garland, 1998), p.155.
29. McCann, Zoli, p.231.
30. Ibid., p.184.
31. Ibid., p.186.
32. Ibid., p.198.
33. Ibid., p.198.
176 M. MOSCALIUC

34. Ibid., p.198, 199. She traverses this unnatural border with the aid of the
natural world, including a deer that distracts the guards, a cypress tree in
which she ducks for shelter and soft earth into which she buries her face.
35. Ibid., p.273.
36. Anzalda, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco:
Aunt Lute Books, 2007), p.7. Akhil Gupta and James Fergusons reading
of a borderland as an interstitial zone of displacement and deterritorializa-
tion speaks to Zolis case as well, though the borderlands she crosses do
not shape her, as the two scholars would argue, into a hybridized subject
(Gupta and Ferguson, Beyond Culture: Space, Identity, and the Politics
of Difference, Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1992), p.18).
37. As Julia Kristeva points out, abjection is a manifestation of our response to
that which disturbs identity, system, and order and that which does not
respect borders, positions, rules (Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on
Abjection, trans. by Leon S.Roudiez (1980; New York: Columbia Universi
ty Press, 1982), p.4).
38. McCann, Zoli, p.154.
39. Ibid., p.193.
40. Ibid., pp.28, 151.
41. Ibid., p.197.
42. Ibid., p.200.
43. Ibid., pp.143, 236.
44. Ibid., p.198.
45. Ibid., p.236.
46. Ibid., p.231.
47. Ibid., pp.236, 237.
48. Ibid., p.237.
49. Pratt, Arts of the Contact Zone, p.34. Pratt defines contact zones as the
social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often
in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power (ibid., p.34).
50. McCann, Zoli, p.317.
51. Ibid., p.261.
52. Ibid., p.4.
53. Ibid., pp.3, 3, 4.
54. Ibid., p.82.
55. Ibid., p.308.
56. Ibid., p.303.
57. Anderson and Bort, Frontiers, pp.12, 21.
58. Hammond, Balkanism in Political Context: From the Ottoman Empire to
the EU, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, Vol. 3, No.
3 (2006), p.13.
 10

A Betrayal ofEnlightenment: EU Expansion

andTnu nnepalus Border State

GordanaP.Crnkovi

The poetic and non-linear prose of Tnu nnepalus Piiririik (Border

State, 1993) intertwines a slowly evolving murder mystery with an East
Europeans fragmentary impressions of the West.1 Presented as a series of
letters from the unnamed East European, a gay Estonian translator, to his
American correspondent and confidant Angelo, the first-person narrative
conveys reflections, memories, fantasies and anecdotes about a year he has
spent in Paris in order to perfect his French translation skills. This work
sees him participate in the multi-faceted process of East European cul-
tural integration as required by his grant from [a]n international foun-
dation: Ive done a little of this work, sat in the library and integrated,
he writes.2 The young man had dreamt about the West in his past life in
Estonia, but is discovering that reality does not live up to his expectations.
In particular, his account of a love affair with successful philosophy profes-
sor Franz, a German-French native of Strasbourg, which is interspersed
with and illuminated by fragments about the narrators Estonian upbring-
ing, crystallises the process of disillusionment.
The focus of this essay is on Border States treatment of the EUs pre-
liminary steps towards integration and expansion in the early 1990s. In

G.P. Crnkovi ( )
Department of Comparative Literature, Cinema and Media, University of
Washington, Seattle, WA 98195, USA

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 177

A. Hammond (ed.), The Novel and Europe,
DOI10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4_10
178 G.P. CRNKOVI

examining the novels engagement with the EU, several questions present
themselves: what Europe should one be looking for exactly and what
traits of EU expansion should one be trying to discern? To begin with,
nnepalus novel was published soon after the dissolution of the commu-
nist bloc and the Baltic republics proclamation of independence, or rather
the re-assertion of the independence of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia
(an independence established in the inter-war period and seized by the
USSR in 1940 and then again in 1944). This is a period in which the EU
was being formed but was not yet existent in its current shape: signed in
February 1992, the Maastricht Treaty will not be effective until the close
of 1993, the year in which nnepalus book appeared. In addition, given
that Estonia became an EU member state only in 2004, all the possibly
EU-related inferences in the novel can only be seen as pre-sentiments of
things to come. Nevertheless, Border State gives a clear sense of several
major issues that would fully emerge in the later 1990s. For example, the
influx of refugees fleeing violence in their home countries is indicated by
the Yugoslav refugees who appear in the pages of the novel. The passing
mention of these barely visible, silent people forces us to recall the wars in
the former Yugoslavia, their mostly marginal importance for the residents
of the western metropolis and the EUs divided and at times detrimental
responses to the violence and the prolonged carnage in the Balkans. At the
same time, the novel hints at growing economic disparities within Europe.
Border States accentuation of the combination of great wealth and con-
siderable poverty in Paris and the West in general may also be seen as a
metonym both for the inequalities between western and eastern Europe
and for the increasing wealth gap in Estonia itself, a country in which the
EUs neoliberal economic reforms went hand-in-hand with one of the
highest levels of inequality in the European Union.3
Another way to approach the relationship between EU expansion and
Border State is to focus on the EU as the self-understood and self-declared
heir to the European Enlightenment project of democracy, liberty, equal-
ity and progress. This approach works especially well in the context of
the Baltic States, whose switch to democracy from Soviet authoritarianism
may suggest parallels to the processes of democratisation that took place
in western Europe from the eighteenth century.4 The connection between
the idea of Europe and the Enlightenment is crucial: it was in the eigh-
teenth century that European identity started to be promoted by the eras
most prominent thinkers, such as Rousseau and Voltaire, and that the idea
of Europe became conflated with the newly embraced ideals of progress,
science and modernity. A distinct European identity was envisioned as
 A BETRAYAL OFENLIGHTENMENT 179

one of rationalism that unapologetically examined all previous ideological

and social tenets in the light of reason. The emancipation of the inquiring
spirit from religious and social dogmas led to increasing secularism and the
separation of state and church, as well as to the conviction that the light
of reason would, if nurtured and supported by education, bring about
liberty, prosperity and self-determination (thus Rousseaus mile, ou De
lducation (mile, or on Education, 1762) and Diderots multi-volume
Encyclopdie (Encyclopedia, 17511772)).5 Although this all seemed very
positive, there were considerable dangers to the institutionalization of
reason, as Russell Berman points out:

Might not the terrorism of reason suppress the imagination, as the German
romantics feared? Had not the Napoleonic campaign of reason led to a new
imperial tyranny? Might not the world structured around scientific princi-
ples become repressive and restrictive, and had not the science, knowledge,
and reason played central roles in modern structures of domination?6

As Margaret Kohn mentions, one of the clearest links between the

Enlightenment and tyranny was its justification of imperial expansion, with
the call for a civilising mission of European empires indicating a belief
that a temporary period of political dependence or tutelage was necessary
in order for uncivilized societies to advance to the point where they were
capable of sustaining liberal institutions and self-government.7 Reason, in
short, had a dual potential. For Berman, summarising the central theme
of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimers Dialectic of Enlightenment
(1944), the project of reason is [] multivocal: potentially a source of
domination, it is simultaneously the source of resistance.8 The aim is not
to dismiss reason as an instrument of empire and all manner of domina-
tion, but to separate the Enlightenments emancipatory potential from
its instrumentalisation within oppressive and imperial structures. Yet
has this been achieved in the so-called new Europe? If the dialectic of
Enlightenment is still to be found in the contemporary eastward expan-
sion of the EU, then the achievement of emancipation may once more be
coupled with destructive potentials. As this essay contends, Border State
focuses on the latter and articulates a critical vision of western Europes
betrayal of the constructive sides of the Enlightenment and its utilisation
of that eras more negative heritage.
The novels vision of western Europes betrayal of the Enlightenment
promise is intimately related to the sensibility and life experiences of its
unnamed first-person narrator. This is a young man who came of age in the
180 G.P. CRNKOVI

1970s and 1980s in Estonia, a distant, tiny borderland of the immense and
stagnating USSR, which was living out its final decades under Comrade
Brezhnev, a leader who, to a child terribly afraid of war, looked like
a big, friendly grandfather with his bushy eyebrows (48). Nevertheless,
Soviet rule was experienced as authoritarian by the narrators grand-
mother, a survivor of Siberian exile, who reads aloud from the Peoples
Voice and pretends to believe its propaganda in the hope that this would
ensure that she wouldnt be deported to Siberia again and that my future
would be more secure as well (48). Sudden shouts and menacing bursts
of abrasive Russian words whose speakers are never seen convey the vul-
nerability of Estonian citizens who are, as it were, surrounded by an invis-
ible, yet omnipresent, Soviet authority. The atmosphere of oppression is
made relevant to the wider communist bloc. Referred to only as a land up
North, Estonia is never actually named in the novel, but described as one
of a series of impoverished, dark countries that helplessly bemoan their
stillborn histories.9 As the narrator writes:

On two sides this country is surrounded by a shallow, rocky sea, which

during winters is covered with a tight lid, just like a keg of fermenting sau-
erkraut. Lighthouses send out warning signals in the fog, but ships still run
aground. They succumb to temptations of death, which are very powerful
here. (5)

Amid these dark, heavy and melancholy realities, the narrator yearned
for sunshine, viewing the act of finding the sun as an imaginary rite of
passage (3). The sun, of course, was to be found away from north-east
Europe, in the south and west, and for the narrator, a professional transla-
tor from French, it was most obviously found in Paris, the city he dreamed
of for much of his childhood and adolescence. Indeed, this was a city
where so much of the worlds beauty and wealth is gathered, so many
gifts of the sun (3). Yet his eventual arrival there proves a painful disap-
pointment. Back home, living in a pre-fabricated apartment building with
his grandmother, the narrator imagined that [he] would flee to Paris one
day, would walk along the boulevards, would sit in cafs, would smile at
people who would smile at [him] (32). He now finds himself in this
unfriendly city, full of tourists, suffering from heat, lying in [his] den until
midday, not knowing what more to dream about (32).
The West, France and Paris are marked by their eerie lack of substance,
proving a chimera of what they were supposed to be. Places and things
 A BETRAYAL OFENLIGHTENMENT 181

crumble and dissolve upon the narrators close inspection. Apples bought
from a street merchant look fresh but actually taste of death, bringing
to mind the [c]old, sensuous-smelling autumn apples collected secre-
tively at night from the ground under an ancient apple tree in Estonia
(53, 55). The Baltic visitors disappointment extends to all material items:
At first I was impressed with everything in store windows here. Now Ive
come to realize that almost all is trash, garbage (27). People, work and
passion also lose their presumed integrity and inner life, and prove to be
disappointing pretenders, empty shells that look authentic from a distance
but finally lack meaning.
The realms of life are deprived of their substance because they are pri-
marily moulded from the outside, by institutions, social hierarchies and,
most of all, by the needs of a pervasive and internalised market. If one uses
Marxs classic distinction between use value and exchange value, Border
State perceives the West as a place where the market system has denied
things their inherent purpose and transformed them largely into commod-
ities, into things that are practised and experienced in terms of their mar-
ket value. In this sense, even the narrators lover Franz becomes a symbol
of the Enlightenments betrayed promise, a thinker who does not think
on account of an unquenchable curiosity and inherent urge to understand
things. Instead, Franz practises philosophy as a job one does for good pay
and a solid social standing. The inherent use value of thought has been
displaced by its exchange value: Franz had worked and sweated all his
life, had read Nietzsche and Kierkegaard and Foucault, only in order to
become a well-paid professor (34).
While conventional religion does not play any part in Franzs secular
life, religious vocabulary appears in the narrators ironic description of
Franzs, or the Wests, reverential attitude towards material possessions.
In his apartment, the kitchen is a hallowed place, with its fridge being
an altar of food and a storage place for the sacred host (8). This reli-
gious imagery also appears in the context of the most pecuniary consider-
ations, those of Franzs potential gains and losses on the stock market. His
one prayer, indeed, is addressed to his stocks: I caught him poring over
stock prices in the business section of the newspaper, his nape bent like
a monks at prayer []. It turned out that his family owned a certain
part of some business that made warplanes, among other things (84).
(The novel, which repeatedly mentions war planes and bombardment,
makes an association here between Franz and the narrators grandmother,
who is the only survivor of a heavy aerial bombardment that destroyed
182 G.P. CRNKOVI

the farm she lived in.) The image of Franz checking stock prices as if at
prayer shows that religious or sacred value, though largely removed from
its links to the church, has not disappeared from western modernity, but
is now attached to property and possessions. In addition, Franzs refusal
to really engage or even acknowledge his own existential paradox, that of
a pacifist who benefits from the arms industry, shows his refusal to think
about uncharted or uncomfortable topics. As the narrator comments,
[o]wning these stocks apparently didnt agree with his otherwise leftist
leanings, but in the end he claimed that it didnt really matter who owned
the stocks, that it would not make any difference (84). Irritating in its
generic nature, such a conventional excuse displays a cowardly betrayal of
the Enlightenments call to subject the world to rigorous thought, as sum-
marised in Kants motto, Sapere aude (Dare to Know).10
The cumulative result of Franzs commitment to exchange value, his
refusal to engage in (self-)critical thought and his fetishisation of material
possessions, is that he appears less than a real person. Where do I even get
the notion that this Franz existed as a person?, the narrator wonders, con-
cluding that his lover is one of those marginally real figures, or a ghost
(25, 26, 26). Franzs loss of substance could also be seen as a certain loss of
aura, to use Walter Benjamins concept.11 Though commonly understood
as describing the work of art in the pre-modern era, the concept of aura
indicating something sacred and non-reproducible, with full being, gravi-
tas or genuine existenceis in this essay employed more broadly to mean
an elusive phenomenal substance, in Miriam Bratu Hansens phrase, or
the impalpable, meaningful side of life that has been lost in the West.12
Harsh though it was, the narrators native country endowed books, poetry
and the world as a whole with an indisputable aura. The narrator describes
himself as a victim of books who swallowed books in the school library
and who has always been overwhelmed by the beauty of the world (83,
49, 64). Given the absence in the Soviet Union of the stronger market sys-
tem and its internalisation, these realms were never seen in terms of their
possible exchange value, but as supremely important in themselves. One
read and translated books and poetry because this was the most beautiful
way of living ones life, indeed the only way to survive for some people.
The narrator experiences poetry as literally lifesaving, as it comforts and
eases that constantly constricting leash around my neck (35).
In Franzs West, however, everything has been discarded long ago
(20). The aura of artistic and intellectual life has been destroyed because
these realms have been hollowed out by ingrained utilitarianism and
 A BETRAYAL OFENLIGHTENMENT 183

turned, to a great extent, into the means for the only real goal left as
worth pursuing: a comfortable life. In France, the narrators own transla-
tion work (of poems from the French into Estonian to create an anthology
of French post-war poetry) becomes senseless in any real terms (34). The
work has a market value (They pay me. Its my work), but bears little
relation to the Enlightenments passion for knowledge of the new, for
understanding for its own sake (34). In the end, senselessness pervades
everything: I live a life that doesnt interest me, say things I dont believe,
spend money that isnt mine. [] I have the feeling that just as Im spend-
ing money that doesnt exist, Im living a life that doesnt exist (567).
There is a strong link here to Heideggers work on the quantification of
the qualitative, particularly his point that thinking in terms of values is
[a] murdering that kills at the roots.13 As Iain Thomson elucidates it,
Heidegger believed that

only the invaluableonly that which we would never exchange for any-
thing else, that is, only nonquantifiable qualitiescan truly matter to us or
give genuine worth to our lives. Heidegger does not deny that values exist
[but] denies that what matters to us can ever be satisfyingly reduced to (or
understood in terms of) the value that a subject determines for an object
(let alone for another human being).14

The narrator of Border State realises that, in a materialist environment of

pervasive quantification, being a nobody becomes good; it is the only
way of escaping a world in which all of the named and living realms have
become tragic and empty parodies of themselves. Indeed, it is only the
nothingness of quiet destruction, of total nihilism, that retains some mea-
sure of authenticity and freedom, allowing one at the last moment to
slip out of their hands! (93). Angelo, the narrators American correspon-
dent, is such a nobody. As the narrator writes in one letter: Yesterday
on the telephone you said, Je suis nul. I answered, Jadore ta nullit,
Angelo []. Angelo, I adore your nothingness. I am sick to death and
tired of all those people who are something (29). Border States narrator
will finally assert himself with his own nihilistic gesture, about which more
in a moment.
Paradoxically, western Europes betrayal of the Enlightenment by the
degradation of the integrity and independence of thought is coupled with
the arrogance of rationality, or with rationalitys overreach. As nnepalu
shows, this is present in the domination of the cognitive subject-object atti-
184 G.P. CRNKOVI

tude at the expense of any other mode of being in the world, dramatising
the exclusiveness of reason that prevailed in some strands of Enlightenment
thought. Visiting the Louvre, the narrator notices a crowd of German
tourists that, to him, seems to know the meaning of art as well as the
meaning of it all, while he does not know the meaning of anything (32).
More accurately, even though the narrator is aware of scholarship on art
and actually know[s] quite a few things, he does not equate this kind of
cognitive knowledge with the authentic and full experience of art and the
world in general, just as he does not equate Franzs graduate research into
the relativity of moral values with true insight into ethical dilemmas (32,
20). The Louvre painting in front of which the tourists pause is Watteaus
Pierrot (c. 1718), the portrait of a doleful clown standing in a moment of
inaction and stasis with arms by his side. A reproduction of the painting
hung in the narrators childhood home as a calendar picture and its com-
manding presence, produced by the figures large size and slightly lower
viewers perspective, so affected the narrator that he even dreamt about
it. Despite the opposition between the knowing German crowd and the
non-knowing Estonian individual, the narrators youthful experience of
this artwork was profound, and the way in which he sympathized with
the clown and felt that the two of them were coconspirators, perhaps on
account of their shared sadness and stillness, is remembered many years
after in the Louvre (31). In other words, the novel articulates the narrators
unknowing not as a surrender to ignorance (as he also knows quite a few
things) or to indifference, the motive suggested by Watteaus LIndiffrent
(c. 1717), another painting he sees in the Louvre, but as another kind of
attitude altogether, one of not approaching the world cognitively.
Again, the meaning of nnepalus scene is elucidated by Heidegger,
for whom the revolutionary value of great art lies in its ability to chal-
lenge inherited ontology. By beginning to open up a new sense of what
is and what matters, Thomson summarises, great art either extends or
transforms the ontotheology through which we make sense of the world
and our place in it.15 Predicated on the division between subject and
object, a cognitive relation to art and the world in general prevents the
recognition of the potential of an artwork such as Watteaus Pierrot to
open up a new sense of what is and what matters. Heidegger sees such
cognitive relation as a secondary relationship that comes only after the
more foundational experience of a persons full entwining with the world,
including the world of art. Such foundational experience can be reclaimed
[i]f, instead of trying to obtain a kind of cognitive mastery over art [],
 A BETRAYAL OFENLIGHTENMENT 185

we simply allow ourselves to encounter what is happening within a great

work of art.16 In other words, we should not apprehend art through phil-
osophical cognitive theory but through phenomenological experience. As
Heidegger writes, the phenomenological approach asks that we restrain
from [] knowing and looking, in order to linger within the truth that is
happening in the work. Only the restraint of this lingering allows what is
created to first be the work that it is.17
Although the deficiency of western European rationalism is the major
theme of Border State, there are two linked shortcomings that the novel
foregrounds. The first of these is the hypocrisy of the Wests denial or
minimisation of its imperial past, including the connections between this
past and the development of the EU. In a postcard from Amsterdam,
the narrator writes: Greetings from a town where Europe bids herself
good-bye to heave anchor and to go west or to East India, to Sumatra, to
Celebes, to Tierra del Fuego, wherever (18). The Great Adventure of
empire-building is not viewed as irrelevant to the present; on the contrary,
the current residents of former imperial centres are perceived to be filled
with bitter regret that they can no longer go native or elephant hunt-
ing, temple raiding, or setting villages ablaze (18, 1819). The sensed
nostalgia for imperial power is symbolically related to a support for the
new world order, in a phrase used by Franz, thus making a connection
between past empires and the present-day EU (84).
The second issue, which follows on from the first, concerns the rela-
tionship between western and eastern Europe, embodied in the relation-
ship between the narrator and his German-French lover. This aspect has
been foregrounded in the novels critical reception in its native Estonia.
Though much of the initial reception focused on nnepalus treatment
of sexuality and psychology, the second reception model was a social and
political one: as Kaido Floren describes it, Franz is Western Europe [and]
the first person narrator is Eastern Europe. And according to the author
or the Eastern European the relationship between those two is not quite
normal.18 The novel constructs this relationship as one of economic and
political inequality and unwanted dependency. As the narrators grant to
work in Paris is about to come to an end, Franz offers to sponsor his
further stay in France but omits to mention that this would mean being
entirely beholden to him (92). Having moved into Franzs apartment
and started to use his money, the narrator has already begun to com-
pare himself to a prostitute: As a true East European I sat bright-eyed
and listened to his outrageous ideas about freedom, about Foucault and
186 G.P. CRNKOVI

Derrida []. I listened as a courtesan listens to her client, as a prostitute!

(201). This fate is shared by the whole of eastern Europe: All Eastern
Europe has become a prostitute. From governments and university pro-
fessors on, to the last paperboy, they are all ready to listen to wonderful
speeches about democracy, equality, whatever you please, whatever the
customer wishes! As long as he pays (21). When the narrator becomes
aware that Franz enjoys the thought of his impoverished Estonian back-
ground, that he was a stinking primitive in his eyes, someone he had
caught in the jungle and tamed, a link is made to western Europes past
imperialism (71). The power dynamics of the two mens relationship are
echoed in the broader political and economic arrangements of the nascent
EU.When the narrator asks himself, Who owns my life? To whom has it
been pawned?, the answer is blunt: To heaven or hell, to the European
Bank for Development and Reconstruction (567). In addition, depen-
dent and sensitised eastern European visitors often find their treatment
by westerners to be patronising (When they hear youre from Eastern
Europe they look on you with pity) or fearful, as when French border
officials hold the narrators passport at a distance as though it were a
monster theyd never seen before, as if it might bite them or spray foul
liquid on their uniforms (45, 15). The consequent sense of powerlessness
and invisibility is pervasive:

I once saw the words border state in a newspaper. That was how they
labeled the country from which I came []. A border state is nonexistent.
There is something on one side and something on the other side of the
border, but there is no border []. Its invisible. And if you should happen
to stand on the border, then you too are invisible, from either side (967).

Although the narrator passively goes along with this state of affairs for
a while, he reacts with a decisive and destructive gesture once he realises
that staying with Franz would oblige him to change himself from within,
as it were, to change his core integrity. Franz, outraged by the narrators
suggestion that he might leave for Estonia, demands that he chooses Paris
rather than return there, unable even to name the narrators country (92).

I didnt want what I was supposed to have wanted []. Maybe Id go back;
how did I know? I must have looked rather listless and passive, because
Franz became angry and started yelling at me []. He shouted: Youre
crazy! No normal person would refuse what Im willing to give you, but
 A BETRAYAL OFENLIGHTENMENT 187

you want to go back there there there! (He never did find the right
word.) (92)

The power relation, grounded in economics, is so strong that Estonia,

and the narrators Estonian heritage, is under erasure, the obliteration of
the name of the country foreshadowing the narrators reduction to just
another of Franzs material possessions, should he accept the latters spon-
sorship. The narrator responds by pacifying Franz, who becomes tender
and calm, thinking that [t]hings were going the way they were supposed
to. The worlds order had slipped but now had been restored (93). He
then proceeds to murder his lover by pouring a whole bottle of untrace-
able heart medicine into Franzs gin and tonic. The murder represents
the narrators bid for independence, as well as his final rejection of his
idealised view of Paris and the West. As Eneken Laanes puts it, [b]y poi-
soning Franz, the narrator actually kills his own idea of Europe and the
wish to identify with this ideal. More broadly, he kills the desire of the
post-Soviet homeland to define its national and cultural identity after the
collapse of the Soviet Union in the framework of the rhetoric of returning
to the trouble-free Europe.19
The sentiment of Border State, embedded in the historical conditions
of the 1990s, had already been expressed in eastern European fiction and
non-fiction of the Cold War period. In Zofia Romanowiczs Przejcie
przez Morze Czerwone (Passage through the Red Sea, 1960), the narrator,
a Polish concentration camp survivor, likens her post-war life in Paris to
her life in the camp: in a different framework of course, but one that is all
the more tragic for being normal and routine, I go on enduring instead
of living, I go on allowing myself to be deported, to be more and more
deeply sunk.20 The characters sense in France that the aura of life has
been lost is repeated in Milan Kunderas Nesnesiteln lehkost byt (The
Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1984). Here, the Swiss philosopher Franz,
perhaps a model for nnepalus Franz, is vaguely dissatisfied with the per-
ceived senselessness of his life. He holds life in the communist bloc to be
grander because of all the real, significant and meaningful, albeit dan-
gerous, things happening there; at hearing about life in Czechoslovakia,
for example, he felt a curious mixture of envy and nostalgia.21 Authors
from the former Yugoslavia are also echoing nnepalus critique of the
EU. For example, Croatian writer Dubravka Ugreis Nobodys Home
(2008) and The Ministry of Pain (2007) are powerful reflections on the
failures of EU multiculturalism and rampant class inequalities.22 As Nataa
188 G.P. CRNKOVI

Kovaevi puts it, post-communist eastern Europe is seen by Ugrei as

occupied by the EU and global capitalism, the two texts trac[ing] the
contours of a truly postnational, global capitalist dynamic that the EU,
with its outmoded language of national and cultural identities traditionally
conceived, both occludes rhetorically and fails to account for politically.23
As articulated by Border State, the western European loss of aura in
the 1990s, stemming from the replacement of use value by exchange
value and from the betrayal of the Enlightenment potential for free and
courageous thought, can be seen as a rejection of the ideal of Europe
itself and as a foretaste of the neoliberal order promoted by the EUs
later eastward expansion. nnepalu reacts to these negative aspects by
making them visible and by articulating different ways of living that arise
from other histories, most prominently those of poetry, art and the nar-
rators own Estonian heritage. These different realms of life are marked
by the novels monumental time, which is largely the time of nature, as
opposed to the historical, linear or productive time oriented towards
some telos (to use Julia Kristevas distinction).24 The abundance of nature
motifs and poetic language devices includes the narrators often imagined
metamorphosis into a figure of a painting or into natural elements such
as a seashores low grass (I would gladly be the grass on that waterside
meadow, low grass, stiff from salt), reflecting his longing to share in the
kingdom of plants and embracing the Estonian tradition of communing
with the natural world.25 In this, the novel raises wider questions about
belonging and identity in the new Europe. Taking Border State as the
representative text of a new generation, Maire Jaanus states that the new
Estonian generation lives on the edge between two attitudesan impetus
toward renewed participation and insertion into European and global his-
tory and ambivalence toward, even radical refusal of the subjective limita-
tions imposed by this history.26
While the official texts of the EU insist on the Estonians renewed
participation and insertion into European and global history, nnepalus
novel gives a glimpse into the other, less commonly seen, side of this
dynamic, the one in which EU expansion falls far short of eastern European
expectation.27 The glossy, superficial attractions of the West are captured
in one of Border States key symbols. The narrator has always dreamed
of glass furniture, but when he actually comes to live with such furniture
in Franzs apartment he discovers that one cant get glass like that clean.
As soon as you touch it or put a plate with food on it, it smears again.28
 A BETRAYAL OFENLIGHTENMENT 189

Things do not turn out the way they were meant to, and the EU may not
be the best place in which to live, given its inequalities of wealth and power
and its failure to provide meaning for its citizens. As the narrator himself
finds out, people simply shouldnt live in houses with glass furniture.29

NOTES
1. As Maire Jaanus writes, Piir means border, boundary, frontier, threshold,
limit, end, terminus, line, borderline. Riik is a state, body politic, nation,
country, community, kingdom, domain, realm, empire, government.
Thus, Piiririik could be translated in so many ways (as Boundary Nation,
Border State, Limit Realm, etc) (Jaanus, Estonias Time and Monumental
Time, in Violeta Kelertas, ed., Baltic Postcolonialism (Amsterdam and
NewYork: Rodopi, 2006), p.227).
2. nnepalu, Border State, trans. by Madli Puhvel (1993; Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 2000), p. 33. Hereafter, citations are
marked by page numbers inserted in the main body of the text.
3. Viljar Veebel and Ramon Loik, Estonia, in Donnacha Beachin, Vera
Sheridan and Sabina Stan, eds, Life in Post-Communist Eastern Europe
after EU Membership: Happy Ever After? (Abingdon and New York:
Routledge, 2012), p.176.
4. In his fascinating novel The Czars Madman (1978), Jaan Kross, arguably
the most well-known Estonian writer internationally, uses the Russian Czar
and the novels hero Timotheus von Bock, a Baltic German nobleman, to
symbolise the opposition between tyranny and Enlightenment (see Maire
Jaanus, Estonia and Pain: Jaan Krosss The Czars Madman, in Kelertas,
ed., Baltic Postcolonialism, pp.30929).
5. See Delanty, Inventing Europe, pp.6574.
6. Berman, Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), pp.212.
7. Kohn, Colonialism, in Edward N.Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/colonial-
ism (accessed 29 July 2015). Kohn also emphasises that some major
Enlightenment thinkers (Kant, Smith, Diderot) criticised colonialism and
the arguments that supported it.
8. Berman, Enlightenment or Empire, p.17.
9. nnepalu, Border State, pp.4, 5. The stillborn history includes Estonias
brief period of inter-war independence that ended with the Molotov-
Ribbentrop Pact and the USSRs annexation of the Baltic countries in the
1940s. The colonisation of Estonia started as early as the thirteenth cen-
tury with the invading German knights and continued with Denmark,
Germany, Sweden and Russia fighting over the territory thereafter.
190 G.P. CRNKOVI

10. Quoted in Daniel Brewer, The Discourse of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-

Century France (Cambridge and NewYork: Cambridge University Press,
1993), p.1.
11. See Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,
in Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zohn (1955; London: Pimlico,
1999), pp.21144.
12. Hansen, Benjamins Aura, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 34 (2008), p.340.
13. Quoted in Iain Thomson, Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), p.60.
14. Ibid., p.60 (italics in the original).
15. Ibid., p.45.
16. Ibid., p.76.
17. Quoted in ibid., p.78.
18. Quoted in Rolf Liiv, Kmme aastat hiljem: kas piiririigis on miskit uut,
Sirp, 6 June 2003, http://www.sirp.ee/archive/2003/06.06.03/Kirjand/
kirjand1-1.html (accessed 17 June 2015 and translated by Liina-Ly Roos).
19. Laanes, Lepitamatud dialoogid: subjekt ja mlu nukogudejrgses eesti
romaanis (Tartu: Tartu likooli kirjastus, 2009), p. 174 (translated by
Liina-Ly Roos). nnepalu himself has commented on the novels perceived
allegory of power relations between western and eastern Europe: With this
book I have indeed noticed that people are kind of choosing a side in it and
that the side depends often on where they themselves are from, East or
West. Sometimes the compulsion to choose sides causes an inner conflict
for them. And usually it remains unspoken, but it comes out in emotional
reactions (quoted in Kaur Kender, Kuulates Piiririiki, Postimees
Kultuur, 22 May 2003, http://kultuur.postimees.ee/2022705/kuulates-
piiririiki (accessed 16 June 2015 and translated by Liina-Ly Roos)).
20. Romanowicz, Passage through the Red Sea, trans. by Virgilia Peterson
(1960; NewYork: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962), p.22.
21. Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. by Michael Henry Heim
(1984; NewYork: Harper Colophon, 1985), p.102. The Franz of Border
State echoes this sentiment when claiming, admiringly, that Estonia is a
country where history was being made on a daily basis (nnepalu, Border
State, p.75).
22. Nataa Kovaevi, Storming the EU Fortress: Communities of
Disagreement in Dubravka Ugrei, Cultural Critique, Vol. 83 (2013),
p.65.
23. Ibid., pp.70, 74.
24. Maire Jaanus employs Kristevas distinction between historical and mon-
umental time: see Jaanus, Estonias Time, pp.21319.
25. nnepalu, Border State, pp. 11, 12. Regarding the Estonian culture of
appreciating nature, and the relation between this culture and the national
 A BETRAYAL OFENLIGHTENMENT 191

issue, see Robert W.Smurr, Perceptions of Nature, Expressions of Nation:

An Environmental History of Estonia (2009).
26. Jaanus, Estonias Time, pp.2212.
27. In a survey of 2014, only 45 per cent of the pooled Estonians had a very
positive image of the EU (European Commission, Standard
Eurobarometer82, Autumn 2014, Public Opinion in the European Union,
First Results, European Commission, http://ec.europa.eu/public_opin-
ion/archives/eb/eb82/eb82_first_en.pdf (accessed 18 May 2015)).
28. nnepalu, Border State, p.61.
29. Ibid., p. 61. My work on this essay has been greatly aided by Liina-Ly
Roos, a doctoral student in the Scandinavian Department of the University
of Washington, who assisted my research and translated pertinent work
from the Estonian. Professor Guntis midchens of the University of
Washington has been very generous with his help with research on Estonia
and the EU, and Professor Sabrina Ramet of Norways NTNU has also
assisted with valuable research materials.
 11

The Dilemmas ofPost-Communism:

Elizabeth Wilsons The Lost Time Caf

AndrewHammond

Since its origins in the 1950s, the European Union has been shadowed
by the left-wing blueprints for continental unity which began to emerge
in the nineteenth century. As far back as 1848, Engels spoke of how the
European brotherhood of peoples will come to pass not through mere
phrases and pious wishes but only as a result of thorough revolutions.1 The
cosmopolitan ideal of pan-European revolution was advanced at the First and
Second Internationals and later informed both Lenins belief that socialism
in a single country is [] impossible and the Cominterns consideration
of a Soviet-led United States of Europe.2 The ideal may have retreated
under Stalin (who saw himself as no European but a Russified Georgian-
Asian), but persisted in Trotskys desire for a radical federation of nations
that would ensure political harmony, establish a single market and recognise
common cultural traditions, with class solidarity erasing differences in eth-
nicity, language and tradition.3 Although similarities exist between left-wing
and liberal-democratic models of European unity, both are relational and
exclusionary. Regarding the notions of Europeanness dominant in the West,
Jeremy MacClancy is insistent that by defining what being European is
they necessarily and simultaneously create, by opposition, a definition of

A. Hammond ( )
School of Humanities, University of Brighton, Falmer Campus, Brighton,
BN1 9PH, UK

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 193

A. Hammond (ed.), The Novel and Europe,
DOI10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4_11
194 A. HAMMOND

[] what is not European, one of the most evident features of which is

left-wingism, either in its reformist or revolutionary mode.4 As this essay will
examine in the British context, however, the Europe initiated by the Treaty
of Rome (1957), which always lacked a collectivist agenda, is for many a less
logical arrangement than the socialist rationale of Europeanism.5
The conflict between capital and labour defined twentieth-century
Europe. While the labour movement has its roots the early nineteenth
century, it fully established itself after the Russian Revolution, which was
followed by a rapid growth of left-wing parties in industrial and industri-
alising societies and by a wave of political unrest in Spain, Hungary and
Germany. Although the 1917 Revolution soon betrayed its libertarian ori-
gins, the success of Soviet participation in World War Two vastly extended
Moscows prestige and influence. Alongside its strengthening grip on
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and the
Caucasus, the installation of Soviet-backed regimes in Czechoslovakia,
Poland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, and the partisan victories in
Yugoslavia and Albania, meant that a line dividing East from West,
Left from Right, was carved deep into European cultural and political
life.6 Despite the strict divisions of the Cold War, the left also advanced
across western Europe. Between 1945 and 1949, social-democratic par-
ties became the major force in many governments and even commu-
nist parties gained a sizable share of the vote, particularly in France and
Italy. Inevitably, the slavish devotion of communist parties to the USSR
led to the loss of popular support, particularly after the Soviet crack-
down in Hungary in 1956, which came in the same year as Khrushchevs
denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress and caused the
so-called membership haemorrhage of 19567.7 Nevertheless, most
western countries, determined to avoid social tensions, retained a mixed
economy, with limited nationalisation, legislation for full employment
and provision for health, old age and education. Although ground was
lost to the right in the 1950s, social democracy revived in the 1960s
and 1970s, as did a reformist Marxism in the shape of the New Left in
Britain and the Eurocommunists in Italy, France and Spain, which now
sought to distance themselves from Moscow. Those who still believed in
the historical inevitability of revolution, however, soon faced the great-
est setback of them all. The collapse of the communist bloc between
1989 and 1991 encouraged a shift to the right across the continent.
With its worst urges unchecked by a powerful left, neoliberalism entered
a new, triumphalist phrase, one exemplified by Franois Furets claim
 THE DILEMMAS OFPOST-COMMUNISM 195

that Communism is completely contained within its past, as though

leftist alternatives to actually existing socialism were neither possible
nor desirable.8 As Alastair Bonnett remarks, [i]t is a savage irony that the
achievements of the democratic left in creating more humane and fair
societies in many different countries should be overshadowed by totali-
tarian communism.9
The ideological conflict of the Cold War had a profound impact on
modern European literature. The labour movement was frequently
addressed both by eastern European authors, whether through support
or dissent, and by western European authors, whose customary backing
of containment harmonised with the cultural battle for hearts and minds
waged against Soviet-led Zhdanovism by the US Congress of Cultural
Freedom. Yet western Europe also produced a steady stream of left-wing
fiction of an aesthetic quality and intellectual range largely ignored in
mainstream criticism.10 If it is the case, as Dubravka Ugrei argues, that
in the course of literary history the European East and European West
have jointly authored a single cultural text, something like an epistolary
novel, then radicalism has been one of the topics of correspondence, as it
has been between Europe and the rest of the world.11 The novels of Victor
Serge, Ji Weil, Alfred Andersch, Leslie Kaplan, Kjartan Flgstad, Romain
Rolland, Doris Lessing, Nanni Balestrini, Emine Sevgi zdamar, Halldr
Laxness and Maj Sjwall offered some of the most incisive commentar-
ies on post-1945 Europe, as did those of Ngg wa Thiongo, Sembne
Ousmane, Peter Abrahams and Alex La Guma in the (former) colonies. In
a celebration of the left-wing contribution, Andy Croft extends the focus
to cultural production as a whole:

Communism may have become a prison for some artists and a barracks
for many more, but it was [] the distant shining city of the future for
many others. Aragon, Anand, Becher, Biermann, Brecht, Breton, Calvino,
Ehrenberg, Eisler, Eluard, Fast, Gorki, Guillen, Guthrie, Hughes, Hikmet,
Kastner, Koestler, Leger, Lukacs, Mayakovsky, Neruda, Picasso, Pritchard,
Reed, Rivera, Robeson, Sartre, Seghers, Shostakovitch, Sholokov, Silone,
Tikhonov, Tzara, Wolf, Wright, Yevtushenkodespite its own instinctive
suspicion of the world of the imagination, the international Communist
movement enjoyed, however briefly, the energy and commitment of most
major European and American twentieth-century writers and artists.12

Adorned by caveats and questionable claims, and concluding with a need-

less generalisation, Crofts survey still yields an important truth: that
196 A. HAMMOND

twentieth-century culture was so suffused with leftist sentiment that no

cultural history of the century can ignore it. In Britain, the lefts impact
on national culture extended from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and
Notting Hill Carnival to film, television, theatre and fiction. In the 1930s,
left-wing novelists included Sylvia Townsend Warner, Lewis Jones, Lewis
Grassic Gibbon, Robert Briffault, Graham Greene and such a host of oth-
ers that George Orwell believed the central stream of English literature
was more or less directly under Communist control.13 During the Cold
War, left-wing fiction continued with Jack Lindsays Rising Tide (1953),
Margot Heinemanns The Adventurers (1959), Raymond Williamss
Border Country (1960), John Bergers G. (1972), William McIlvanneys
Docherty (1975) and Gillian Slovos Morbid Symptoms (1984). Admittedly,
such fiction had lost the revolutionary optimism of the 1930s, a trend
exacerbated by 1989 in leftist literature throughout Europe. The ideo-
logical despair of a character in Simone de Beauvoirs Les mandarins (The
Mandarins, 1954), who wonders whether socialist Europe [] isnt just
a utopian dream, pales in comparison to that of a character in Bahaa
Tahers Al-Hubb fi-l-manfa (Love in Exile, 1995), who assumes that the
left has died in Europe and in the world.14 The apparent victory of global
capital raised an inevitable question about the future course of left-wing
writing. The question has been made more urgent by the outpourings of
a literary right which, as Dubravka Juraga and Keith Booker contend, is
continu[ing] to kick the dead horse of socialism, partly on the off chance
that the horse isnt really dead and partly to provide a demonic alternative
[to] the considerable evils of capitalism.15
The dilemmas of left-wing literature reflect those of the wider socialist
movement, currently facing the so-called ban on Utopia or exhaustion
of utopian energies.16 Not only has the left lost its former influence in
mainstream politics, but it is also struggling to counter the continent-
wide denial of left-wing history, which in its eastern European manifesta-
tion is deemed either a monstrosity (an alien imposition, an ephemeral
excrescence) or a deviation from the proper business of government (a
cul-de-sac, an awful mistake).17 In the 1990s, the incumbent EU states,
released from Cold War fears of a resurgent left, wasted no time in eradi-
cating any residual commitment to full employment and slashing expen-
diture on welfare, education and health care. At the same time, the EU
rushed the former eastern bloc into the global market through enforced
privatisation and deregulation, a form of shock therapy that made mil-
lions of east Europeans lose their jobs and access to welfare, as the GDP of
 THE DILEMMAS OFPOST-COMMUNISM 197

all transition economies sank to below that of the late 1980s.18 Driving the
EUs eastern expansion has been the fear of a relapse into communism,
with Brussels and Washington pumping money into non-socialist parties
in Albania, Bulgaria, Romania and the former Yugoslavia in an effort to
export democracy. As one US advisor admitted, [w]e taught them what
to say, how to say it, and even what to wear when saying it.19 Nevertheless,
the neoliberal United States of Europe dreamt up by financiers and busi-
ness leaders has not entirely shaken off its political adversary, which remains
insistent that [t]he failure of Soviet socialism does not reflect on the pos-
sibility of other kinds of socialism.20 In eastern Europe, the transition has
left many feeling exiled from their own life experiences and regretting the
ban on further political experiment. In 1989, Stefan Heym, Volker Braun
and Christa Wolf were already calling for a rejuvenated socialism, a sort
of third way socialism or revival of Dubeks socialism with a human
face.21 The call was echoed by many in the West, who saw the loss of
the command economies not as a repudiation of progressive politics, but
as a chance to revive the true spirit of collective agency. This may entail
a return to revolutionary Marxism, viewed as the libertarian heritage of
Marx, Trotsky, Luxemburg and Gramsci rather than as the degenerate,
oligarchical centralism of the Soviet Union. Alternatively, it may entail the
social-democratic practice of ameliorating the worst excesses of a market
economy, a practice Adam Michnik termed the market with a human face
and Iris Murdoch termed welfare capitalism.22 Either way, many would
agree with Alex Callinicoss belief that the East European revolutions
should be seen not primarily as a crisis for the left, but as an opportunity
finally to free socialism from the incubus of Stalinism.23
This essay will examine the crisis of the European left through a study
of Elizabeth Wilsons The Lost Time Caf (1993), a British dystopian
thriller set towards the millenniums end. This was published in the same
year as the Treaty of Maastricht which, through its reduction of social
spending and deregulation of the labour market, announced that cradle
to grave security would now be less important for Europe than price sta-
bility. To question the assumptions of Maastricht, the novel reflects on the
little known history of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Founded
in 1920 and dissolved in 1991, the year of the Soviet collapse, the CPGB
had marginal relevance to political life, gaining only a few parliamentary
seats in the 1930s and 1940s, but retained a huge symbolic resonance: in
the words of Beatrix Campbell, a former member, the Party was a con-
densation of all the crises and collisions within the labour movement.24
198 A. HAMMOND

In examining Wilsons treatment of the subject, the essay will draw on

Charity Scribners Requiem for Communism (2005), one of the few criti-
cal studies directed toward the aesthetic response to the socialist cri-
sis.25 Scribner analyses the multiple ways in which the epochal changes of
19891991 are treated in left-wing novels, films, artworks and museum
exhibitions of socialist material culture, finding varying degrees of dis-
avowal, melancholia and mourning for an idealised past, as exemplified
by German Ostalgie, or nostalgia for the East. The response has not
been solely nostalgic, however. Mirroring Walter Benjamins belief that
real historical memory sustains emancipatory potentials, Scribner argues
that left-wing cultural production also captures the vestiges of the social-
ist past which remain in the collective memory and, through them, sug-
gests methods of future resistance: The literature and art that recalls the
socialist collective, she writes, does not simply indulge in melancholia for
an idealized communist or welfare state of the past [but] heightens the
awareness that something is missing from the present.26 Wilsons The Lost
Time Caf, written during the apparent death throes of socialism, exam-
ines this sense of the missing in order to counter the negative capacities
of left-wing melancholy and to insist on the enduring relevance of revo-
lutionary tradition in the new integrationist Europe.27
The novel charts the political progress of the first-person narrator, Justine
Unwin, who is drawn back from an expatriate life in California after the
death of her father, a key figure in the CPGB.For some years, Justine has
enjoyed a hedonistic lifestyle, marrying a man she doesnt love to gain
US citizenship and conducting a series of lesbian affairs, a pursuit of pri-
vate pleasure that is partly a rebellion against the austerity of her left-wing
upbringing. Yet the Britain that she finds upon her return shatters her com-
placency. On the surface of things, the capital city has a futuristic, even
space-age glamour: the corporate architecture of silver towers and black
glass clusters around a building like a flying saucer, the cars resemble
[t]ime capsules driven by robotic traveller[s] and the streets are filled with
parrots and palm trees, a result of global warming.28 Beneath the glittering
surface, however, is evidence of what Paul Gilroy has called turbo capital-
isms merciless destruction of Europes once-proud welfare states.29 With
unemployment aggravated by long-term recession, and publicly subsidised
housing long since scrapped, citizens are forced into derelict squats and multi-
occupation tenancies lacking running water or rubbish collection, competing
against each other for survival, often through crime and prostitution (Youd
have thought theyd help each other, one of Justines friends remarks: But
 THE DILEMMAS OFPOST-COMMUNISM 199

no (50)). So atomised is the community that the National Coalition govern-

ment, a tyrannical, right-wing administration, has scaled down its periodic
bouts of repression, leaving it free to focus on its real interests: privatisation,
financial speculation and real estate deals.30 For Justine, the country is clearly
set on a slow, slithery descent towards a new Dark Ages (15).
Wilsons Britain is stark portrait of the consequences of Thatcherism,
which had decimated the countrys welfare state during the 1980s. Yet
the country also functions as a metonym for a post-welfarist European
Union, with its commitment to marketisation and security, its cutbacks
in public spending and its culturalist plans for ensuring mass loyalty. As
the most overt example, the capital is now called Kakania, a non-English
locution that recalls Robert Musils pejorative for the disintegrating
Austria-Hungary.31 At the same time, the currency is the cu, the main
entertainment complex is the European Institute, the news is dominated
by negotiations in Europe and the politician tipped for future leadership
is a Brussels-nurtured bon vivant (48, 91, 36, 257). Culturally, Kakanian
society is almost entirely defined by generic imports from the EU. The
more fortunate residents live in Spanish or Swedish-style housing, shop in
French-sounding boulevards and plazas and dine out in Polish patisser-
ies or tapas bars, where they consume Italian cheesecake, cappuccinos,
croquettes and ristrettos.32 So ubiquitous are the imports that traditional
Britishness seems reduced to residual racism (in Kakania hatred of Russians
surpassed even hatred of blacks) and restaurant adverts for roast beef and
all the trimmings (a dish no one ate any more) (74, 165, 165). For some
citizens, the erosion of cultural specificity is linked to a surrender of politi-
cal sovereignty. This is the message of the Patriotic Party, a new alliance of
anti-Federal Europeans which is convinced that Europe was destroying
democracy and which soon spawns a terrorist wing, New Albion, whose
nationalist agenda of Home Rule for the Albion Nation is advanced via
a bombing campaign on the capital (76, 76, 128, 77). The attacks help to
justify the National Coalitions increase in policing powers, which in turn
serve to protect its economic plans from left-wing agitation. It is within
this atmosphere of violence and coercion, one that wasnt quite fascism
but had ceased to be democracy, that Justine is forced to take a political
stand (78). The discovery that her fathers lodger, a student called Anna
Musgrove, has been brutally murdered in the family home starts her on
an investigation that leads to the dark heart of post-Maastricht Europe.
The base that Justine chooses for her investigation is The Lost Time
Caf, a favourite haunt before her departure to the USA. Situated on
200 A. HAMMOND

prime real estate near the bay, the caf is a thriving enterprise that typifies
the Europeanisation of British society. Arranged around its salons and
parterres is an eclectic array of Czech mirrors, Italian chairs and Victorian
chaise-longues, where the clientele or habitus enjoy French breakfasts,
Polish pastries and Italian wines, served to them by east Europeans who
are work[ed] like slaves (161, 10, 10, 127, 11). While illustrating the
homogenising effects of EU membership, the caf also symbolises the his-
toric decline of working-class politics. In the days before the waterfront
development, when the city still had a functioning port, the caf was a
public house for dockers, then developed as a meeting place for leftist
radicals seeking to associate with the proletariat, and later still attracted a
young bohemian set, which felt the hint of radicalism was giving the place
tremendous cachet (12). Although some radicals still occupy a table, the
owner, Adam, prefers to cater for wealthy media types and business-
men, or at least for the bohemians, who are mostly small-time entre-
preneurs with disposable incomes (89, 10, 47). To make matters worse,
Adam is an ex-Communist Party member now involved in shady deals
with the government which he hopes will fund a chain of cafs from Tokyo
to Manhattan. As he explains himself to Justine, we were all a bit nave,
werent we? As if our meetings and our marches and our protests could
ever change the world (1415). Justines response illustrates the two sides
of her political nature. Shocked at her friends materialism, she never-
theless admires his success, finding in the caf a sort of golden glow, a
youthful energy and vision that propelled us all forward in time.33
The post-modern vacuity of the caf finds its antithesis in her fathers
house, where the investigation takes Justine on a contrary journey into
the past. Professor Charles Hillyard, an academic and writer born into
the working class, was an important figure on the intellectual wing of the
CPGB, but became an anachronism after 1989, when the bottom []
dropped out of the Marxism market (69). The house is evoked by Justine
as a symbol of this irrelevance, of something old-fashioned, from another
era, but also of enduring values that continue to haunt the present (78).
Just as she finds the dark, dilapidated exterior casting a shadow across the
old university quarter, so the dusty piles of research material cramming the
interior, the out-of-date papers and books overflowing from files, draw-
ers and cupboards, lived on, inert and malignant, as if my fathers ghost
had returned to haunt me (7, 30, 61). Her task of sorting through this
dead matter, all of which is on the CPGB and the wider left-wing move-
ment, sets loose an unwanted trail of memories:
 THE DILEMMAS OFPOST-COMMUNISM 201

I wished it was as in ancient Egypt, where the most cherished belongings of

the deceased [] were placed in the tomb, to comfort the soul and make
it feel at home in death. My task of clearing out would accomplish the very
opposite. As I parcelled up books for the library and folded suits for the
charity shop, as I dismantled the papers and threw them on the bonfire, Id
be destroying the routines of his life and all his projects. This was a non-
ritual signifying unbelief. (61)

Justines sudden protectiveness towards the belongings suggests a devel-

oping respect for her father and for the movement he personified. Indeed,
it is with veneration that she realises the accumulated research embod-
ies a museum of political activism, a monument to the memory of
Communism, which the EU is determined to suppress (62). From this
point on, Justines inquiries take two linked paths. Firstly, the discovery
that the typescript of Professor Hillyards last book, an unfinished semi-
autobiographical history of the CPGB, is missing from the house increases
her sense of governmental involvement. Despite Adams dismissal of the
idea (people like your fathertheyre not relevant any more []. Why
on earth should anyone want to off him?), Justine is intent on finding
out whether her fathers death, supposedly caused by a heart seizure, was
actually a political assassination (18).
The second path is a more dialectical inquiry into the shape of modern
Europe. Through studying her fathers papers, Justine learns to counter
the EUs official account of European history with records of the radical
tradition, or what she terms the unconscious of history (57). Awakened
by her studies are buried memories of the anti-fascist struggle, the Greek
Civil War, the building of the welfare state, the Hungarian Uprising, the
anti-colonial struggle and the peace movement. There are also remind-
ers that radicalism was a cultural, as much as political, formation. As a
Communist Party child, one who until her teenage rebellion had known
that We Were Right, Justine participated with the rest of the Party faithful
in the meetings, peace marches, summer camps and visits to the Moscow
State Circus, the Red Army Band and Eisenstein films (623). The activi-
ties taught her that communisms appeal was to the emotions, to the
longings of the hungry, the exploited, the wrecked, but also to an entirely
logical rejection of the Ruling Class, Big Business or Capitalist Ideology
(64). Although the use of capitals may seem to ironise left-wing discourse,
Justine has seen enough of the new Kakania to know the socialists were
right, so utterly, and sometimes self-righteously right, and to agree with
202 A. HAMMOND

her fathers mantra: Socialism or barbarism; theres no third way (64, 61).
Again, it is her fathers jumble of books and papers that crystallises the
task ahead:

The labyrinth also testified to a great vision, and I knew that at the end of
his life my father in his last work had been excavating [the Partys] history in
order to uncover the reasons for defeat, indeed it had been more than that,
it had been intended as the rediscovery of a lost past, a kind of resurrection,
at least a reassertion of its value. (62)

With Professor Hillyards manuscript remaining lost, the first-person nar-

rative is Justines attempt to complete his work, to preserve the collective
struggle from forgetting. Crucially, there is nothing nostalgic about the
endeavour. To begin with, the narrative admits the deficiencies of the radi-
cal movement: the factionalism, the patriarchal attitudes, the totalitarian-
ism of the eastern bloc and the hypocrisy of western middle-class Marxists
clinging to wealth (such as Justines own parents, whose money she inher-
its). Moreover, the preservation of the past is not the same as an avoidance
of the present. When one of her fathers comrades describes CPGB mem-
bers as displaced persons (So many people [] feel displaced. Since the
Party collapsed), Justine is deeply affected, the remark capturing her own
yearning for a movement that she still associates with home.34 If this could
be considered nostalgia, a term deriving from the Greek nostos (home)
and algos (pain), then the sentiment is not the antithesis of political rad-
icalism, as it is often understood, but rather an instance of Benjamins
emancipatory historical memory, or of what Alastair Bonnett theorises
as radical nostalgia: the notion that nostalgia, particularly in periods of
rapid capitalist transformation, works within and against the present, that
it reconstitutes modernity, that it is not just reactive but reaches out and
down to shape our hopes for the past and the future.35 Indeed, the first-
person narrative that Justine produces is a form of popular history, or
history from below, a scholarly retrieval of the material and ideological
lives of common people for the purpose of accruing knowledge for future
struggles.36 As Justine realises, such retrieval is essential in the 1990s,
when the willed amnesia of a smug and vainglorious capitalism, in David
Marquands phrase, was ensuring that radical history was being swept
away even from the great collective memory.37
The renewal of Justines political allegiance is advanced by her investi-
gation, which unearths a web of governmental corruption and violence.
During the timeframe of the narrative, the corruption revolves around
 THE DILEMMAS OFPOST-COMMUNISM 203

the waterfront development, where a grassroots consortium, led by an ex-

CPGB member, is about to use a stretch of prime land to provide jobs and
housing for the community. Just before the project starts, however, the
major investor is shot and the National Coalition uses the resulting scandal
to pass the site to Forest Brothers Investments, a corporation funded by the
Coalition itself. The main channel for the funds is the enigmatic Minister
of the Interior, Alex Kingdom. Described as arrogant and authoritarian,
Kingdom seems the very image of an upper-class Englishman, although his
official biography locates his origins in an orphanage in the Kakanian slums,
suggesting a self-made man of remarkable drive (76). Yet the truth about
Kingdom is very different, as Justine slowly discovers. During military ser-
vice in Germany in the 1940s, her father and a CPGB comrade came across
a Lithuanian, supposedly a communist, who claimed that his life was being
threatened by fascist compatriots; seeing in him a future Party activist, the
two men smuggled him to Britain, although here he evaded them, changed
his name to Kingdom and started a real estate business, making his wealth
through speculation on bombed-out residential sites.38 Furthermore,
Justine learns that he was not a communist during the war, but a small-
time blackmarketeer who collaborated with both the Soviets and the Nazis
and who only fled to Britain because he had murdered an American sol-
dier. Although Justine is wrong to assume that Kingdom killed Professor
Hillyard (who died in a scuffle with Adam), he is likely to have killed several
CPGB members who found out about his past, and also to have organised
an attempt on Justines life, which occurs just as she is learning about her
fathers time in Germany. It also turns out that Kingdom is the mastermind
behind the right-wing terrorist group, which he invented in order to act as
saviour of the city by opposing it, thereby advancing his bid to be the next
prime minster (220). In short, Justine stumbles upon another suppressed
or unconscious history, that of the horrific course of post-war capitalism.
Spanning the European continent from west to east, this is a byzantine
underworld of intrigue and manipulation [], pulsating in the dark like
some rogue bacterial culture in historys boiler room (123).
Justines increasing insight into this underworld presents her with a
stark political choice. On the one hand, she can withdraw from political
commitment and return to the decadent lifestyle she enjoyed in California.
Throughout the investigation, Justines desires certainly remain those of
a detached bohemian, with her narrative continually interrupted by shop-
ping trips, love affairs and parties. On the other hand, she can assume a
responsibility to the labour movement by joining one of the several leftist
organisations that continue to operate in Britain. Most obviously, there
204 A. HAMMOND

is the grassroots consortium that fights the governments plans for the
waterfront, an example of the attempt by social democracy to ameliorate
the savage exploitation that capitalism brings (67). Alternatively, there
is a band of Russian communists aiming to reinstate the Soviet Union
(the way of totalitarianism that Professor Hillyard turned to before his
death) and a radical youth underground that, with the collapse of actu-
ally existing socialism and the dissolution of the CPGB, aims to rebuild
revolutionary socialism from scratch. In this way, the novel dramatises
the options facing the left after the Cold War. The dilemma of 1989,
Callinicos writes, is simply stated:

Do we let the market rip, with all the disastrous consequences that will
have for the well-being of humankind []? Do we seek to humanize it, as
social democracy has sought ineffectually to do since the beginning of the
[twentieth] century? Or do we struggle to replace the anarchy and injustice
of capitalism with a social system based on the collective and democratic
control of the worlds resources by working people?39

Although Justine gives a sizable portion of her inheritance to the revo-

lutionary underground, choosing the path of collectivist democracy, it
proves as undesirable as Soviet centralism, particularly after its bombing of
Kingdoms headquarters (the eponymous flying saucer building) looks
set to bring the Minister even more popular support (120, 195). It is
partly the failure of the contemporary left, and partly her acculturation in
a capitalist society, that leads Justine back to the bourgeois individualism
represented by The Lost Time Caf. After Adam is killed in the attack on
Kingdoms building, she inherits the caf and takes to the work like a true
entrepreneur, giving no further thought to collectivist action or the citys
dispossessed. After the truth about Kingdom emerges, and the govern-
ment can no longer hold onto the waterfront project, the caf even looks
set to benefit financially from the social housing that the consortium will
bring to the district, a reminder that in a system of welfare capitalism it is
always capitalism that dominates. Despite her temporary drift to the left,
Justines ambitions lie elsewhere: Im really a loner, she admits: I like the
spectacle, the flirting, the dance on the surface (259). The closing scene,
in which she arranges a proper Party funeral for her father, is less a cel-
ebration of the professor than a final rejection, a laying to rest of the ghost
summoned up by his research (71). The sense that the ending is ultimately
pessimistic about political reform is heightened by the fact that it is the
Brussels-nurtured bon vivant who takes over as Prime Minster and that
 THE DILEMMAS OFPOST-COMMUNISM 205

the EU continues its post-Cold War expansion, descending on the former

eastern bloc like vultures on the corpse (68).
The message of the novel, however, does not lie in the ideological vaga-
ries of its narrator. Despite her turn to business, Justines completion of
the left-wing history that her father began offers a clear reassertion of its
value, insisting that the history of socialism is necessary for understand-
ing and solving the crisis of late twentieth-century Europe. In this way,
Wilson departs from the major strand of British speculative writing on
the EU.The dystopian novels of such reluctant Europeans as Andrew
Roberts, Brian Aldiss and Rob Grant have challenged Europeanist fervour
with right-wing calls for a return to isolationism.40 For Wilson, herself a
former member of the CPGB, it was not isolationism that was needed,
nor a further swing to the right, but a socialist basis for continental unity,
however unlikely this may have appeared. In this sense, The Lost Time
Caf is aligned to a number of post-1989 realist novelsJeff Torringtons
Swing Hammer Swing! (1992), James Kelmans How Late It Was, How
Late (1994), Livi Michaels All the Dark Air (1997)which retain social-
ist values in a decade when there was not even a language in which to talk
about socialism, much less something as insane as revolution.41 Indeed,
the ongoing ills of capitalism, which according to one estimate have caused
100 million deaths from war, genocide and imperial exploitation over the
centuries, only serve to emphasise that socialisms underlying value, the
wish to create a system of social justice, [] should be retained.42 In
the mid-1990s, as neoliberalism gathered pace, there was both a rise of
progressive politics in western Europe and a return to power of former
communist parties in most eastern European countries, even if these were
still obliged by the EU to stick to the path of liberalisation. The movement
for political and economic reform needs more authors who are prepared
to say to the EU, in Albert Camuss famous phrase, [y]our Europe is not
ours.43

NOTES
1. Quoted in Case, Being European, p.116.
2. Quoted in Alex Callinicos, The Revenge of History: Marxism and the East
European Revolutions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p.26.
3. Quoted in Erik van Ree, Heroes and Merchants: Joseph Stalin and the
Nations of Europe, in Wintle, ed., Imagining Europe, p.53.
4. MacClancy, The Predictable Failure of a European Identity, in Axford,
Berghahn and Hewlett, eds, Unity and Diversity, p.116.
206 A. HAMMOND

5. Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left
in the Twentieth Century (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1996),
p.230.
6. Judt, Postwar, p.197.
7. Kevin Morgan, Gidon Cohen and Andrew Flinn, Communists and British
Society 19201991 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 2007), p.14.
8. Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth
Century, trans. by Deborah Furet (1995; Chicago and London: University
of Chicago Press, 1999), p. x. As Couze Venn writes, [t]he end of the
Cold War/Third World War has released capitalism from needing to
respond to calls for responsibility []. It has lost the ability to respond to
suffering (quoted in Bauman, Europe, p.24). A similar point is made by
one of Ingo Schulzes characters: We, in the East, had been the guarantors
that capitalism in the West had worn a human face (Schulze, New Lives,
p.194).
9. Bonnett, Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia (New
York and London: Continuum, 2010), p.35.
10. M.Keith Bookers remark in the 1990s that the suppression of British left-
wing culture has been one of the major cultural/political phenomena of
the century is relevant to many other national cultures (Booker, The
Modern British Novel of the Left: A Research Guide (Westport and London:
Greenwood Press, 1998), p.3).
11. Quoted in Williams, Writing Postcommunism, p.24.
12. Croft, Authors Take Sides: Writers and the Communist Party 192056,
in Geoff Andrews, Nina Fishman and Kevin Morgan, eds, Opening the
Books: Essays on the Social and Cultural History of British Communism
(London and Boulder: Pluto Press, 1995), p.83.
13. Quoted in ibid., p.85.
14. de Beauvoir, The Mandarins, trans. by Leonard M. Friedman (1954;
London: Collins, 1957), p. 239; Taher, Love in Exile, trans. by Farouk
Abdel Wahab (1995; Cairo and New York: The American University in
Cairo Press, 2001), p.56. With similar despair, Anita Konkka describes a
character as one of the rare people who still believed in the socialist revolu-
tion and Victor Serge has a Russian character say [n]o one will forgive us
for having begun Socialism with so much senseless barbarity (Konkka,
Fools Paradise, p. 66; Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, trans. by
Willard R. Trask (1948; New York: New York Review of Books, 2004),
p.286).
15. Juraga and Booker, Introduction to Juraga and Booker, eds, Socialist
Cultures, p.3.
16. Christa Wolf quoted in Williams, Writing Postcommunism, p.11; Jrgen
Habermas, The New Obscurity: The Crisis of the Welfare State and the
 THE DILEMMAS OFPOST-COMMUNISM 207

Exhaustion of Utopian Energies, in Habermas, The New Conservatism:

Cultural Criticism and the Historians Debate, trans. by Shierry Weber
Nicholsen (1985; Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), p.51.
17. Davies, Europe East and West, p. xi; David Priestland, The Red Flag: A
History of Communism, new edn (2009; NewYork: Grove Press, 2009), p.
xv.
18. See Kate Hudson, European Communism since 1989: Towards a New
European Left? (Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St. Martins Press,
2000), pp.1456; and Ronald Kowalski, European Communism 18481991
(Basingstoke and NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p.225.
19. Quoted in Adam Burgess, Divided Europe: The New Domination of the East
(London: Pluto Press, 1997), p. 109. The irony of democratisation is
captured by a left-wing character in one of Eugen Ruges novels: now
were not supposed to think about alternatives to capitalism! So thats your
wonderful democracy (Ruge, Times of Fading Light, p.265).
20. Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes, p.498.
21. See Ronald Kowalski, European Communism 18481991 (Basingstoke and
NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p.187; and Gnter Kunert, The
State of Europe, Granta, Vol. 30 (1990), p.161.
22. Quoted in Callinicos, Revenge of History, p.15; Murdoch, Under the Net,
new edn (1954; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960), p.99.
23. Callinicos, Revenge of History, p. 3. See also Douglas Kellner, The
Obsolescence of Marxism?, in Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg,
eds, Whither Marxism?: Global Crises in International Perspective (New
York and London: Routledge, 1995), pp.1415.
24. Quoted in Raphael Samuel, The Lost World of British Communism (London
and NewYork: Verso, 2006), p.19. In a publication of 1998, Croft com-
mented that almost nothing is known about the specific cultural histories
of the British Communist Party (Croft, Introduction to Croft, ed., A
Weapon in the Struggle: The Cultural History of the Communist Party in
Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1998), p.2).
25. Scribner, Requiem for Communism (Cambridge and London: The MIT
Press, 2005), p.9.
26. Ibid., pp.10, 3.
27. See Walter Benjamin, Left-Wing Melancholy, in Anton Kaes, Martin Jay
and Edward Dimendberg, eds, The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994), pp.3046.
28. Wilson, The Lost Time Caf (London: Virago Press, 1993), pp.6, 78, 4, 3,
3. Further page references to the novel will be given in the text.
29. Gilroy, Foreword: Migrancy, Culture, and a New Map of Europe, in
Heike Raphael-Hernandez, ed., Blackening Europe: The African American
Presence (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), p. xx.
208 A. HAMMOND

30. The effects of privatisation are exemplified by the local university, now run
for the benefit of shareholders, which has sacked its porters (permanently
employed men who belonged to trade unions) and hired cheap student
labour (Wilson, Lost Time Caf, p.41).
31. See Lynn Guyver, Post-Cold War Moral Geography: A Critical Analysis of
Representations of Eastern Europe in Post-1989 British Fiction and
Drama (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Warwick, 2001), p.64.
32. Wilson, Lost Time Caf, pp. 75, 227, 86, 224, 47. Although European
culture is the major influence, it is only one feature of the globalisation
reshaping city space, with American and Asian influences also apparent. As
Justine says of the post-modern topography that results, Kakania is many
cities in one, all cities in one (ibid., p.25).
33. Ibid., p.19. Although unconnected to Justines divided selfhood, Wilson
herself admits to being prone to internal divisions, writing about how her
flights into escapist identities have come into conflict with the pragma-
tism of the committed protester, who only live[s] fully in the present on
political demonstrations (Wilson, Mirror Writing: An Autobiography
(London: Virago, 1982), pp.82, 1).
34. Wilson, Lost Time Caf, p.170. One ex-member of the CPGB once termed
the Party a little private world of our own, or [a] large or extended family
(Samuel, Lost World of British Communism, p.13).
35. Bonnett, Left in the Past, p.169. See also Svetlana Boyms notion of coun-
termemory, a clandestine recording of the past that point[s] at seams and
erasures in the official history (Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York:
Basic Books, 2001), p.61).
36. See Frederick Kranz, George Rud and History from Below, in Krantz,
ed., History from Below: Studies in Protest and Popular Ideology, new edn
(1985; Oxford and NewYork: Basil Blackwell, 1988), pp.36.
37. Marquand, After Socialism, Political Studies, Vol. 41 (1993), p. 51;
Wilson, Lost Time Caf, p.134.
38. Kingdoms real background helps to explain the novels reference to the
Forest Brothers, which were a collection of nationalist resistance move-
ments in the Baltic States fighting a guerrilla war against Soviet occupation
in the 1940s and 1950s (see Mart Laar, The Power of Freedom: Central and
Eastern Europe after 1945 (Brussels: Centre for European Studies, 2010),
pp.7783).
39. Callinicos, Revenge of History, p.135.
40. See Robertss The Aachen Memorandum (1995), Aldisss Super-State
(2002) and Grants Incompetence (2003).
41. Wilson, Lost Time Caf, p.64.
42. Peter Rietbergen, Europe: A Cultural History (London and New York:
Routledge, 1998), p.464. For the estimate of capitalisms ruinous impact,
 THE DILEMMAS OFPOST-COMMUNISM 209

see Mark Sandle, Communism (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2012),

p.124. As one of Christian Jungersons characters argues, Socialists arent
responsible for as many people dying as those who support the policies of
the US and Europe, policies that reinforce poverty (Jungerson, The
Exception, trans. by Anna Paterson (2004; London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 2006), p.385).
43. Quoted in Luisa Passerini, Dimensions of the Symbolic in the Construction
of Europeanness, in Passerini, ed., Figures dEurope: Images and Myths of
Europe (Bruxelles: P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2003), p. 28. In 1990, Salman
Rushdie commented that liberal capitalism [] will require novelists
most rigorous attention, will require re-imagining and questioning and
doubting as never before (Rushdie, Is Nothing Sacred, Granta, Vol. 31
(1990), p.109).
 12

Minorities andMigrants: Transforming

theSwedish Literary Field

AnneHeith

Literature played an important role in European nation-building in the

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Socialisation through compul-
sory education taught generations of European school children about
national culture, most obviously through literature and literary canons,
which have long been used to develop and circulate nationalist ideolo-
gies. Nationalism may be defined as a particular form of discourse which
makes three sets of interrelated claims: identity claims, temporal claims
and spatial claims. While identity claims distinguish us from them,
temporal claims aim at establishing a common past through narrations
that legitimise the formation of a nation-state and spatial claims involve a
linkage between the nation and a territory called home.1 This discourse
has been extremely influential for the formation of collective identities in
Europe, and in many countries has contributed to cultural homogenisa-
tion, assimilationist policies and the establishment of the most powerful
group (in the case of Sweden, the ethnic and linguistic majority) as the
we of the nation.

A. Heith ( )
Department of Culture and Media Studies, Ume University, S-901 87 Ume,
Sweden

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 211

A. Hammond (ed.), The Novel and Europe,
DOI10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4_12
212 A. HEITH

BLURRING BORDERS: TRANSFORMING EUROPE

However, new discourses of the nation are emerging. Due to migration
and globalisation the concept of the nation-state is in flux. The former
president of the European Council, Herman van Rompui, has gone so
far as to claim that nation-states in Europe are dead and that the belief
that countries can stand alone is a lie and illusion.2 While processes of
nationalisation based on the paradigm of cultural homogenisation pre-
vailed during the formation of the modern welfare states in Scandinavia,
the situation is different today. Scandinavian literature, as well as wider
European literature, is influenced by transnationalism, migratory flows,
diasporic currents and the mobilisation of minorities, all of which has
meant that imaginary and symbolic borders distinguishing between the
cultures of nation-states, regions and continents are not as distinct and
stable as they once appeared to be.3 Methodological nationalism based
on the idea that a nation-state is a container, the content of which needs
to be protected, has come under critical scrutiny.4 Intersections between
the theoretical perspectives of postcolonial studies and the lived experi-
ence of migration have affected aesthetics, and the recognition of poly-
ethnicity, multilingualism and cultural flux and diversity has influenced
literary writing and reading to the extent that the old model of Europe
and Europeanness is being deconstructed. It is important to remember,
of course, that the process of cultural homogenisation that attended the
building of modern European nation-states does not imply that a country
like Sweden historically lacked ethnic and cultural diversity. For example,
a historical survey of multiculturalism in Sweden points out that the coun-
try has never been as cosmopolitan as it was in the seventeenth century.5
As Satu Grndahl has shown, however, it was not until the 1970s that
Sweden saw a significant increase in the production of literature by writ-
ers with a minority or migrant background.6 In the field of Scandinavian
literary studies the result is an increased interest in postnational and cos-
mopolitan influences on contemporary literature.7 Although the pro-
nouncement of the demise of the nation is somewhat precipitous, there
are cross-cultural, transnational flows in present-day cultural production
which deconstruct the model of the homogeneous nation-state, opening
up space for what Daniela Merolla and Sandra Ponzanesi have termed
new migrant cartographies.8
During the last few decades a number of writers published by major
Swedish publishers have gained much attention in national debates about
 MINORITIES ANDMIGRANTS 213

multiculturalism. Alejandro Leiva Wenger, born in Chile, Jonas Hassen

Khemiri, who has a Tunisian father, and Marjaneh Bakhtiari, born in Iran,
are writers who made successful debuts in the early twenty-first century and
who have introduced fresh perspectives on Swedishness and Europeaneity.
In the writings of African-Swedish authors Johannes Anyuru and Sami
Said, new ways of depicting home and belonging in a Swedish context
are being explored. Anyurus extensive publications include En storm
kom frn paradiset (A Storm Blew in from Paradise, 2012), while Said
is best known for his debut novel, Vldigt sllan fin (Extremely Rarely
Nice, 2012).9 Both Anyuru and Said are writing about experiences of how
being black, Muslim and Swedish intersect with new mental mappings
of identity formation. Their work highlights the porous and changing
nature of the borders used for demarcating Europe by the establishment
of dichotomies between white, western Europe and its African other.
Both writers contribute to undermining Hegels influential ideas on race,
which by positioning the Negro outside the history of intellectual, tech-
nological, moral and cultural progress, a progress supposedly guided by
the Absolute of reason, helped to advance European and global cultural
hierarchies.10

VOICING SUPPRESSED HISTORIES: MINORITIES

SPEAKINGBACK
The construct of the homogeneous nation-state is also being challenged
by the cultural mobilisation of minorities who have been subjected to the
policies of marginalisation and assimilation. Finns, Tornedalians, Jews,
the Roma and the Smi were recognised by the Swedish government as
domestic minorities in the year 2000 and their languages have received the
status of official minority languages. Historically, however, these groups
were not included in the idea of the modern, progressive Swedish nation
that was cherished by the political elite responsible for the building of the
welfare state, the Peoples Home (folkhemmet).11
The cultural mobilisation that has taken place among the Smi and
Swedish Tornedalians during recent decades, and their loss of language,
traditions and self-esteem, are themes explored in imaginative literature,
which is influenced by a critical awareness of the dire consequences of the
history of homogenising modernisation.12 The Smi are the only indig-
enous people of the North Calotte, with a traditional homeland, Sapmi,
214 A. HEITH

that extends from Norway in the west to Russias Kola Peninsula in the
east. One major aim of modern Smi imaginative literature is the decon-
struction of the temporal, spatial and identity claims of the nationalist dis-
courses which have marginalised them. Writers like the Smi national poet
Nils-Aslak Valkeap argue that there is a specific Smi culture, history and
homeland which distinguish them from other peoples.13 In connection
with the anticolonial currents which were developing across the world in
the mid-twentieth century, Smi activists saw the suppression of their cul-
ture and the denial of their land claims as a form of internal colonialism.
Activists such as the artist Sofia Jannock also resist the categorisation of
the Smi as a minority by highlighting that they are an indigenous people
who inhabited the northern part of Scandinavia before the arrival of set-
tlers, tradesmen and missionaries.
Challenges to homogenising nationalism also prevail in the Swedish-
Tornedalian literature which began to emerge in the 1970s. Until then,
Tornedalian culture had been suppressed and the Tornedalian people had
been put under pressure to assimilate. Their status in the northern border-
lands between Sweden and Finland changed dramatically when Sweden
lost Finland in the peace treaty of 1809 that ended the war between
Sweden and Russia. Finland then became a Russian Grand Duchy and
the new border was drawn in a way which divided the Tornedalians, so
that those living to the east became separated from those residing to the
west. As the Tornedalian language is a Finno-Ugric language and the
Tornedalians themselves are a Finno-Ugric people, the division was more
problematic for those positioned on the Swedish side of the border.14
The Swedish security elite, fearing Russian expansionism from the Grand
Duchy of Finland, saw the Tornedalians not only as an alien element in the
Swedish nation but also as a potential threat.15 The nationalising pedago-
gies that resulted worked to marginalise the minority and create negative
self-images, as depicted in contemporary Swedish-Tornedalian literature.
In the poem Jag r fdd utan sprk (I Was Born without Language,
1973), which was widely disseminated among the Tornedalians in the
1970s, Bengt Pohjanen presents a lyrical monologue that expresses the
communitys sense of disempowerment and identity loss:

I was whipped at school

into language, clarity
nationality
I was whipped to contempt
 MINORITIES ANDMIGRANTS 215

for that which was mine

the want of language
and the border.16

The mobilisation of the Swedish Tornedalians can be analysed not only

through postcolonial theories of cultural oppression and resistance but
also within the theoretical framework of complex ruralities: that is, the
understanding of the rural as a multiplicity of social space.17 Madeleine
Eriksson explores the issue in the context of Norrland, a term that com-
monly refers to the five northernmost counties of Sweden, which consist
of approximately 58 per cent of the country but little more than 10 per
cent of the population. This has been constructed as a rural periphery
in literature, politics and science from the colonisation of parts of the
region in the mid-1700s (as captured in Linnaeus writings on Norrland)
to current discussions of regional policies.18 Furthermore, Eriksson sug-
gests that divisions between the urban and rural in a Swedish context may
be described through the concept of internal othering, with Norrland
defined as fundamentally different from and inferior to the urban areas to
the south, which are seen as modern, progressive and democratic.19 She
makes the additional point that, in the popular geographical imagination,
Norrland is a sparsely populated area and has become a negatively charged
category referring to people as reactionary, stagnant and backward. In this
sense, it is also an abstract rural space that is constructed as wild, empty
and underdeveloped.20 The point is relevant to the peripheries of many
other European nations, as well as to Europes peripheral regions, which
are similarly defined against the metropolitan centres of national and con-
tinental power.

A POPULAR NOVEL FROMTHESWEDISH-FINNISH

BORDERLANDS
The notion of complex ruralities discussed by Eriksson, as well as wider
studies of popular geographical imaginaries, is relevant to the subject of this
essay: Populrmusik frn Vittula (Popular Music, 2000) by the Swedish-
Tornedalian writer Mikael Niemi. This successful novel, which received
the prestigious August Prize, Swedens equivalent of the Man Booker, and
which has been translated into several languages, exemplifies a new type of
Swedish literature that highlights a domestic minority traditionally mar-
ginalised in literary and cultural production. The setting of the novel is
216 A. HEITH

Vittula, a suburb of Pajala municipality in the county of Norrbotten near

the Swedish-Finnish border in the north. The notion of the backwardness
of Norrland, a rural, thinly populated area, is a central theme of the novel,
as is the historical marginalisation of Norrlands people, critically examined
by Niemi from the vantage point of anticolonial discourse. Although the
authors focus is on the specific conditions of the Tornedalian minority, the
book has appealed to a large number of people, with readers across Europe
and other parts of the world commenting upon connections between
Niemis depiction of place and locations they are themselves familiar with.
An American reader, for example, states that [i]f Vittula were in the US, it
would probably be someplace in Alaska, Arkansas, or Idahosomewhere
very far off the beaten track.21 Similarly, a reviewer has compared Niemis
Pajala, a remote district above the Arctic Circle, near the Finnish border,
where the children of loggers and miners grow up convinced that real life
is elsewhere, to the Appalachians of the USA.22
As the quotations suggest, there are many Vittulas worldwide, places
seen as peripheral in official or mainstream narratives of the nation. There
is a universalism in the themes of Niemis novel which intersects with
present-day concerns in Europe with cultural and linguistic diversity,
region building and popular resistance to the internal colonialism which
has excluded groups of people from national feelings of solidarity due to
ethnicity, language and culture. While locations like Pajala may be seen in
colonising discourses as terra nullius, empty spaces without local history
or culture, such discourses are being challenged in contemporary narra-
tives which foreground the alternative histories of minorities.23 With both
Niemi and his fictional narrator, Matti, being themselves Tornedalians,
the novel provides an insider story, or a narrative from below, modes of
narration which offer a counterdiscourse to the established symbolic bor-
ders which have marginalised ethnic groups and legitimised power asym-
metries. Popular Music aims to find new modes of conceptualising and
expressing identity, belonging and exclusion for a Tornedalian minority
that has been historically disempowered.
The novel consists of a flashback in which the adult Matti returns in his
mind to the suburb of Vittula where he grew up in the 1960s. Although
Matti has now moved south and is working as a teacher in Sundbyberg,
just outside Stockholm, he retains a powerful connection to the region
of his childhood. This connection is made clear in the prologue, which
depicts an incident that takes place while he is climbing in the mountains
of Nepal. After successfully scaling a peak, he bends down to kiss an iron
 MINORITIES ANDMIGRANTS 217

plate on the cold ground, only to find that his lips have frozen onto a
Tibetan prayer plaque. This episode functions as a Proustian madeleine
cake which calls to mind his childhood in Pajala and fills him with what
he later calls a sense of loss, a melancholy.24 In the period which Niemi
depicts, Pajala was seen as a remote district far from the metropolitan
centres of southern Sweden. Matti comments upon this by drawing atten-
tion to connections between distances and exclusion: It was a long way
from Pajala to the rest of the world.25 While the Swedish economy was
growing in the 1960s, modernity came later to Pajala. Indeed, the Pajala
of Niemis novel is not only backward in comparison to the south but is
also a community in decline:

We watched family farms die, and fields give way to undergrowth. We

watched the last logs float down the River Torne when the ice melted,
before it was banned; we saw forty muscular lumberjacks replaced by one
diesel-oozing snow-mobile; we watched our fathers hang up their heavy-
duty gloves and go off to spend their working week in the far-distant Kiruna
mines.26

While the establishment of the modern Swedish state improved living con-
ditions for large segments of the population, modernity also had negative
effects on rural areas, which were depopulated due to the loss of tradi-
tional livelihoods and to the lure of work elsewhere. Niemi describes the
response to this social change as an awareness that moving away was the
only option if you wanted to be something: There was an enormous evac-
uation. A flood of refugees that emptied our village, but strangely enough
it felt voluntary.27 As with many other sections of the text, the passage
describes the arrival of modernity as a rather ambiguous phenomenon.
The choice of the term refugees is significant, indicating that the people
of the Tornedalian villages feel themselves to be victims of a process that
they have no control over. As interesting, however, is the comment that
the process felt voluntary, which may suggest a colonisation of peoples
minds: is Niemi saying that people have been made to believe that they
are living in a remote backwater without any culture or future and that
their only viable option is to look forward to moving, convinced it was
our only chance in life?28 Matti and his Tornedalian friends are fully aware
of the benefits of modern global youth culture, particularly the popu-
lar music of the title, which they view as a liberating force. Yet the full
implications of modernisation are not necessarily as appealing as in the
218 A. HEITH

south. An example is the episode of road paving in Pajala which appears in

the first chapter. When a tipper lorry arrives for the final surfacing of the
roads, Matti finds to his disappointment that the material used is [g]rey,
lumpy, ugly, bloody oil-bound gravel, and not at all the shining asphalt he
expects.29 The episode emphasises a recurrent theme of the novel, namely
the Tornedalians emotional responses to encounters with power asymme-
tries which teach them that they belonged to a bygone age.30
The creation of negative self-images is a characteristic element of inter-
nal colonialism whereby minorities are socialised into cultures of poverty.31
In modern nation-states, institutions like education have played a major
role in the circulation of cultural hierarchies through the implementation
and dissemination of educational material which has been designed to
endorse national elites. The theme is explored in the chapter of Popular
Music which deals with Matti starting school. This describes how the edu-
cation of the Tornedalian children results in a lack of self-esteem, a loss of
cultural identity and a sense that [w]e were different, a bit inferior, a bit
uneducated, a bit simple-minded.32 As Matti recalls:

We gradually caught on to the fact that where we lived wasnt really part of
Sweden. Wed just been sort of tagged on by accident. A northern append-
age, a few barren bogs where a few people happened to live, but could only
partly be Swedes. [] We didnt have any deer or hedgehogs or nightin-
gales. We didnt have any celebrities. We didnt have any theme parks, no
traffic lights, no mansions, no country squires. All we had was masses and
masses of mosquitoes, Tornedalian-Finnish swearwords and Communists.33

The target of Niemis counternarrative here is a national pedagogy which

has excluded the Torne Valley and its inhabitants from the Swedish nation.
This is partly based on the lack of modernity (theme parks) and partly
based on the lack of historical prestige (country squires). But it is also
based on teachings about the Swedish national landscape which, solely
concerned with the flora and fauna of southern Sweden, transmit to
Tornedalian children the message that the Torne Valley is an irrelevance.
Lacking southern attributes, the people themselves are seen as incompati-
ble with the modern Swedish nation, a lesson that has an inevitable impact
on identity. As the passage goes on:

Ours was a childhood of deprivation. Not material deprivationwe had

enough to get by onbut a lack of identity. We were nobody. Our parents
were nobody. Our forefathers had made no mark whatsoever on Swedish
 MINORITIES ANDMIGRANTS 219

history. Our surnames were unspellable, not to mention being unpro-

nounceable for the few supply teachers who found their way up north from
the real Sweden.34

In school, Matti even finds that the landscape of Skne in southern Sweden
came first in the atlas, printed on an extra-large scale, whereas Norrland
came last, printed on an extra-small scale in order to fit onto the page.35
The inevitable outcome is a conviction that, [a]s a citizen of Pajala, you
were inferior.36

POPULAR MUSIC ANDPOSTCOLONIALISM

The young Mattis internalisation of majority discourse is at odds with the
political awareness of the adult narrator. While the novel certainly shows a
population whose specific language, history and culture are suppressed in
Swedish nation-building, the preferential right of interpretation is given
to a member of that population. In this respect the novel demonstrates
the relevance of postcoloniality to such marginalised regions of Europe
as Norrland, especially the postcolonial technique of writing back. An
example is the way in which the insider narrative addresses the issue of
exotification. In colonising narratives such as the genre of western travel
writing, narrated by visitors to what are seen as peripheral parts of the
world, local people and customs are typically depicted as strange, alien or
exotic. For the people living in these so-called peripheral regions, how-
ever, it may very well be that the visitors are strange and exotic. This is the
case in Niemis novel when foreign tourists and teachers from the south
of Sweden are viewed from the perspective of the local Tornedalians, who
are amused at the visitors desire for stor[ies] about their meeting with
the natives.37
This overturning of the self-other binary does not imply that Niemi
depicts the Tornedalians as a homogeneous group. While the Tornedalians
in the novel share a Finno-Ugric ethnicity which is historically intercon-
nected with a specific culture and language, they are often shown to be
marked by differences in ideological and religious preferences. For exam-
ple, the families of Matti and his best friend Niila, also a Tornedalian,
reflect some of the ideological tensions which shaped life in the Torne
Valley. In the 1930s there were strong political movements in the region
social democracy and communismwhich attracted large numbers of
people, as did popular revivalism, in particular the millenarian Korpela
220 A. HEITH

movement and Laestadianism, a faith to which Niilas family adheres.

The attractions of popular revivalism and political radicalism in the 1930s
reflected the poverty of the people, as both movements promised a better
future for the distressed.38 The cultural differences within the community
also exist on a linguistic level. This is most apparent in scenes set in the
local school, described as an arena for encounters between children from
families where only Finnish is used and children from bilingual families.
For example, Mattis fellow-pupil, Holgeri, is depicted as [o]ne of those
quiet lads from the outlying villages who preferred to keep to themselves
[and] would stand around in corners in little groups, mumbling to each
other in Finnish.39 The inflection of the name Holgeri indicates that
the boy has a Finnish background, as the Swedish form Holger has been
complemented with the Finnish ending i. (Finnishness is also conveyed
by the names Matti and Niila.) Holgeris silence, which is related to lack
of proficiency in the Swedish language, contributes to providing differ-
ence and variety in the descriptions of Tornedalians. Similarly, when Matti
visits Niilas house he sees the Laestadian family as strange and remarks
that [i]t was unreal for so many young children to be so quiet.40 The
use of the adjective unreal conveys that Matti sees the silence of Niilas
siblings from the position of someone not immersed in a Laestadian way
of life, despite being aware that silence prevails in all Tornedalian families.
In making such points, it may be said that Niemi recirculates some of the
prevailing stereotypes about people from Norrland (for example, that they
are taciturn). However, the stereotypes take on new inflections by being
connected with other aspects of identity, such as linguistic minority status,
gender, religion, ethnicity and class. For example, one of the local words
Niemi uses in order to convey taciturnity is knapsu, which appears in a
description of a singing lesson: we boys stayed as silent as fish, moving
our lips when the teacher glared at us, but thats all. Singing was unmanly.
Knapsu. And so we kept quiet.41 The way that manliness is connected
with taciturnity means that the novel depicts socialisation not only in rela-
tion to minority status but also in relation to gender.
As such scenes suggest, language is a major theme of Niemis novel,
with Menkieli a particular area of focus. Menkieli, which literally means
Our language, replaced Tornedalian Finnish as the official name of the
Tornedalians language, and is a component of the multilingualism of the
Torne Valley alongside Finnish and Smi. It must be kept in mind that
the novel is written in Swedish and that the original was published by
Norstedts in Stockholm, Swedens oldest publishing house still in opera-
 MINORITIES ANDMIGRANTS 221

tion, despite the fact that there are local publishers in the Torne Valley
which publish in Menkieli. Still, both the original Swedish text and the
English version use phrases in Menkieli which are not rendered in trans-
lation (kotimaassa, kuppari, ummikko, lyly), although not to the extent
that readers unfamiliar with Menkieli or Finnish are excluded. Such usage
of a marginalised language is a common feature of postcolonial literary
resistance to imperial cultures. The Swedish language started gaining
ground when the north was colonised, and, as part of the Swedification
of the region, the languages of the minorities were suppressed, with all
minority languages of the North Calotte today facing extinction.42 But
there are also linguistic revitalisations going on: not only is there a move-
ment for the preservation and development of Menkieli, but Menkieli
is also one of the officially recognised minority languages in Sweden.
This implies that official policies and attitudes have changed considerably
from the period described in Popular Music. Matti is clear about the dif-
ficulties the Tornedalians faced in the 1960s: We spoke with a Finnish
accent without being Finns, and we spoke with a Swedish accent without
being Swedish, a plight that leads him to conclude, [w]e were noth-
ing.43 The experiences of exclusion related to linguistic proficiencyor
lack of proficiency when viewed from the vantage point of homogenising
national pedagogiescorrespond with the theme of Pohjanens poem I
Was Born without Language quoted above.
To extend the link to postcolonial writing, a specific experience explored
in Smi and Tornedalian literature is that of having been subjected to rac-
ism due to ethnicity. As critical whiteness studies have shown, there are
many shades of white in the racist hierarchies which have been established
in order to legitimise ideas of superiority.44 In a British and American con-
text, for example, the Irish have been categorised as not quite white, and
in the regulations of the American Immigration Authorities there have
been categorisations which have placed Italian immigrants on a lower
level than people from northern Europe. In the early twentieth century,
there was a similar prejudice shown towards the Finno-Ugric minorities in
the north on the part of Swedish race biology. After the establishment of
the State Institute for Race Biology in Uppsala in 1922, researchers went
north in order to collect material for use in the mapping of the racial char-
acters of the Swedish nation. Today, the memory of having been subjected
to humiliating physical examinations, as well as the knowledge that there
is material in archives related to the categorisation of family members,
constitute traumas for the Smi and Swedish Tornedalians.45 Although
222 A. HEITH

Niemi does not mention race biology explicitly in Popular Music, he does
depict feelings of lack and of being nothing. At the same time, there are
powerful descriptions of ethnocentric attitudes that are projected onto,
and internalised by, the Tornedalians:

Our home villages were too small to appear on maps. We could barely sup-
port ourselves, but had to depend on state hand-outs. [] Our school exam
results were the worst in the whole country. We had no table manners. We
wore woolly hats indoors. [] We were useless at conversation, reciting
poems, wrapping up presents and giving speeches. We walked with our toes
turned out.46

Although the marketing of Popular Music describes the book as funny and
full of humour, and while most readers probably agree that it is an enter-
taining read, it also relates to a painful history. Finno-Ugric ethnicity and
how it intersects with disempowerment is an important theme for Niemi,
who views the history of recent decades through a filter of humour in
which stoicism and understatement are important elements.
As Eriksson has pointed out, the discourse about Norrland as a periph-
ery has been constructed for some time through representations in politics,
media and art.47 However, Niemis book, as well as other representations by
people who define themselves as members of a minority, contribute some-
thing new by improving our understanding of the many processes which
contribute to marginalisation and othering in Europe. Niemi suggests that
some peripheries are more peripheral than others, and that all the factors
which go to make up the marginalisation of the Tornedalians cannot be
resolved merely by economic redistribution. According to Eriksson the
category of class is suppressed in the discursive construction of Norrland
as a periphery, a process that essentialises difference as a matter of choice
and life style. While this is true in some instances, experiences of belonging
to a cultural minority contribute to differentiations within the category of
Norrlanders. In present-day Smi and Tornedalian cultural mobilisation,
the temporal, spatial and identity claims of nationalist discourse are being
deconstructed, which is not the case with discourses about Norrland as
a whole. In the field of literature, for example, scholarship on working-
class writing makes no suggestion that class per se excludes people from
feelings of national belonging. In fact the working class constitutes the
backbone of the Swedish Social Democratic Peoples Home which domi-
nated nation-building during most of the twentieth century. As commen-
tators have pointed out, [t]he Swedish Peoples Home [] was without
 MINORITIES ANDMIGRANTS 223

doubt meant for ethnic Swedes, although this was never acknowledged
or thought to be necessary to acknowledge.48 In the case of ethnic and
linguistic minorities, on the other hand, there is a long tradition of being
perceived as alien elements in the nation.
In conclusion, Popular Music depicts the emotional responses to
internal colonialism along one of Europes most northern margins. In
Norrland, seen as a multiplicity of rural space, there are binaries not only
between the south and the north, the urban and the rural, the mod-
ern and the backward, the wealthy and the poor, but also between the
Swedish majority and the Tornedalian Finno-Ugric minority.49 Like many
other regions in Europe, Norrland as a whole has been seen simulta-
neously as a provider of raw materials for the nation and as a kind of
peripheral hinterland of the nation, often constructed through the ste-
reotypes of backwardness and stagnancy.50 This discourse of Norrland as
an internal colony tends to disregard the disempowerment of the Smi
and Tornedalian minorities, while also overlooking the complexities of
rurality that are always found in such regions, which are characterised by
complex divisions related to class, ethnicity, language and gender. The
major theme of Niemis novel is the experience of these divisions seen
from the vantage point of a Swedish-Tornedalian protagonist who grew
up in a periphery of a periphery.

NOTES
1. See Umut zkirimli, Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction, new
edn (2000; Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010),
pp.2089.
2. Quoted in Daniel Martin, Nation States are Dead: EU Chief Says the
Belief that Countries Can Stand Alone Is a Lie and an Illusion, Mail
Online, 11 November 2010, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti-
cle-1328568/Nation-states-dead-EU-chief-says-belief-countries-stand-
lie.html (accessed 25 April 2014).
3. See Anne Heith, Europeanization and Regional Particularity: The
Northern Lights Route and the Writings of Bengt Pohjanen, in Dhaen
and Goerlandt, eds, Literature for Europe?, pp.34261.
4. See Anne Heith, Beyond Hegel and Normative Whiteness: Minorities,
Migration and New Swedish Literatures, Multiethnica, Vol. 34 (2012),
pp.1820.
5. See Ingvar Svanberg and Harald Runblom, Det mngkulturella Sverige,
in Svanberg and Runblom, eds, Det mngkulturella Sverige: En handbok
om etniska grupper och minoriteter (Stockholm: Gidlunds, 1989), p.9.
224 A. HEITH

6. See Grndahl, Invandrar och minoritetslitteraturer i Sverige: Frn

frutsttningar till framtidsutsikter, in Grndahl, ed., Litteraturens grn-
sland: Invandrar-och minoritetslitteratur i nordiskt perspektiv (Uppsala:
Centrum fr multietnisk forskning, Uppsala Universitet, 2002), p.36. See
also Lars Wendelius, Den dubbla identiteten: Immigrant-och invandrarlit-
teratur p svenska 19702000 (Uppsala: Centrum fr multietnisk for-
skning, Uppsala Universitet, 2002), pp.917.
7. See Per Thomas Andersen, Hvor burde jeg da vre? Kosmopolitisme og post-
nasjonalisme i nyere litteratur (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2013), pp.1354.
8. Merolla and Ponzanesi, Introduction, p. vii.
9. See Anne Heith, Johannes Anyuru: Literary Explorations of Afro-
Swedishness, Encyclopedia of Afroeuropean Studies, http://www.encyclo-
pediaofafroeuropeanstudies.eu/encyclopedia/johannes-anyuru (accessed
25 September 2015); and Anne Heith, Blackness, Religion, Aesthetics:
Johannes Anyurus Literary Explorations of Migration and Diaspora,
Nordlit, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2014), pp.5970.
10. See Anne Heith, Beyond Hegel, p.18; and Rei Terada, Hegel and the
Prehistory of the Postracial, European Romantic Review, Vol. 26, No. 3
(2015), pp.28999.
11. See Gsta Arvastson, Inledning, in Arvastson, ed., Jrnbur eller frigrelse?
(Lund: Studentlitteratur, 1999), pp.924.
12. See Anne Heith, Aesthetics and Ethnicity: The Role of Boundaries in
Smi and Tornedalian Art, in Lars Jensen and Kristn Loftsdttir, eds,
Whiteness and Postcolonialism in the Nordic Region (Farnham and
Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), pp.15973; and Anne Heith, Challenging
and Negotiating National Borders: Smi and Tornedalian AlterNative
Literary History, in Hein Viljoen, ed., Crossing Borders, Dissolving
Boundaries (Amsterdam and NewYork: Rodopi, 2013), pp.7591.
13. See Anne Heith, Valkeaps Use of Photographs in Beaivi han:
Indigenous Counter-History versus Documentation in the Age of
Photography, Acta Borealia, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2014), pp.4158.
14. See Anne Heith, Nils Holgersson Never Saw Us: A Tornedalian Literary
History, in Heidi Hansson and Cathrine Norberg, eds, Cold Matters:
Cultural Perceptions of Snow, Ice and Cold (Ume: Ume University and
the Royal Skyttean Society, 2009), pp.20921.
15. In a discussion of the Finnish menace in Sweden and Norway, Gunnar
selius makes reference to those who were still prepared to see the Finns
as a threat to national security (selius, The Russian Menace to Sweden:
The Belief System of a Small Power Security lite in the Age of Imperialism
(Stockholm: Akademitryck, 1994), p.156). On the Swedish fear of their
Russian neighbour after 1809, see Magnus Rodell, Fortifications in the
Wilderness: The Making of Swedish-Russian Borderlands around 1900,
Journal of Northern Studies, Vol. 1 (2009), pp.6989.
 MINORITIES ANDMIGRANTS 225

16. Pohjanen, I Was Born without Language, Sirillus, http://www.sirillus.

se/index_bp.htm (accessed 25 September 2015), lines 1218. The poem
was first published in the periodical Vr lsen.
17. Madeleine Eriksson, People in Stockholm Are Smarter Than Countryside
FolksReproducing Urban and Rural Imaginaries in Film and Life,
Journal of Rural Studies, Vol. 26, No. 2 (2010), p.96.
18. See ibid., p.95.
19. Ibid., p.96.
20. Ibid., p.96.
21. Anon, Popular Music from Vittula, Kirkus, 1 September 2003, https://
www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/mikael-niemi/popular- music-
from-vittula (accessed 16 February 2015).
22. Richard McGill Murphy, Lets Rokunroal!, The New York Times Book
Review, 28 March 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/books/
let-s-rokunroal.html (accessed 11 February 2015).
23. On the concept terra nullius, see Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing
Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London and New York:
Zed Books, 2008), p.53.
24. Niemi, Popular Music, trans. by Laurie Thompson (2000; London:
Flamingo, 2003), p.368.
25. Ibid., pp.11617.
26. Ibid., p.71.
27. Ibid., p.72.
28. Ibid., pp.267, 71.
29. Ibid., p.15.
30. Ibid., p.11.
31. See Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British
National Development, 15361966, new edn (1975; Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), p. xv.
32. Niemi, Popular Music, p.70.
33. Ibid., p.70.
34. Ibid., p.70.
35. Ibid., p.67.
36. Ibid., p.67.
37. Ibid., p.95.
38. See Lars Lundmark, Protest och profetia: Korpela-rrelsen och drmmen om
tidens nde (Lund: Arkiv frlag, 1985), pp. 1819; and Anne Heith,
Millenarianism and the Narration of the Nation: Narratives about the
Korpela Movement, Journal of Northern Studies, Vol. 1 (2009), pp.1329.
39. Niemi, Popular Music, p.237.
40. Ibid., p.30.
41. Ibid., p.70.
226 A. HEITH

42. See Sari Pietikinen, Leena Huss, Sirkka Laihiala-Kankainen, Ulla Aikio-
Puoskari and Pia Lane, Regulating Multilingualism in the North Calotte:
The Case of Kven, Menkieli and Smi Languages, Acta Borealia, Vol. 27,
No. 1 (2010), pp.123.
43. Niemi, Popular Music, p.71.
44. See Ulrika Kjellman, A Whiter Shade of Pale: Visuality and Race in the
Work of the Swedish State Institute for Race Biology, Scandinavian
Journal of History, Vol. 38, No. 2 (2013), pp.180201.
45. In Maja Hagermans documentary Hur gr man fr att rdda ett folk?
(What Is There To Do in Order to Save a People?, 2015), which is about
Herman Lundborg, the director of the State Institute for Race Biology in
Uppsala, there are interviews with an old Smi woman who was examined
by race biologists and who describes the shame connected with it. There
are many such testimonies, and some people even wish to forget the expe-
rience in order to leave the pain behind.
46. Niemi, Popular Music, p.71.
47. Eriksson, People in Stockholm, pp.95104.
48. Bjrn Hettne, Sverker Srlin and Uffe stergrd, Den globala nationalis-
men: Nationalstatens historia och framtid (Stockholm: SNS Frlag, 2006),
p.400 (my translation).
49. In one critical analysis of Niemis use of humour in Popular Music it is
claimed, falsely, that Pajala is a region with no identity (Juha Ridanp,
Politics of Literary Humour and Contested Narrative Identity (of a
Region with No Identity), Cultural Geographies, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2014),
p.720).
50. See Madeleine Eriksson, (Re)producing a Periphery: Popular Representations
of the Swedish North (Ume: Department of Social and Economic
Geography, Ume University, 2010), pp.25.
 13

My Dream Can Also Become Your Burden:

Semezdin Mehmedinovis Poetics
ofSelf-Determination

GuidoSnel

INTRODUCTION: ASPACE FORANEXTRATERRITORIAL

LITERATURE
In Autoportret s Torbom (Self-Portrait with a Satchel, 2012), Semezdin
Mehmedinovi, the prominent Bosnian poet and writer who has been liv-
ing in the USA since the end of the Sarajevo siege in 1995, describes an
encounter with a certain Roger. Roger is an American actor who, about to
play an Eastern European refugee in a film, wants to use the encounter
to record Mehmedinovis Slavic accent, which he will imitate for his
role.1 Roger is not interested, however, in what the Bosnian author might
have to say:

What will we talk about? It doesnt even matter. What matters here is not the
meaning but the sound of words []. I ask if it is alright if I make a drawing
of him during our conversation. Yes, yes, of course thats alright! And he
already positions himself in profile, probably the same pose he adopts when

G. Snel ( )
Department of European Studies, University of Amsterdam, 134 Spuistraat,
Amsterdam 1012VB, Netherlands

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 227

A. Hammond (ed.), The Novel and Europe,
DOI10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4_13
228 G. SNEL

he is being photographed. An actor, he is recording my speech, I am draw-

ing him. We sit for one another. This is an unusual morning.2

For all its irony, the above scene can be taken as a pars pro toto of the cur-
rent state of Bosnian literature, a term that first and foremost connotes the
displacement of many of its authors around western Europe and north-
ern America. Moreover, as a phenomenon Bosnian literature is in con-
stant interaction with the western gaze, and never on equal terms. As Alex
Jeffrey argues, Bosnia has mostly acted over the last two decades as a ful-
crum for Balkanist imaginaries: that is, for a set of stereotypes (violence,
savagery, backwardness) which qualify the Bosnian cultural space either as
Balkan or as Eastern European, and always as inferior and marginal with
respect to western Europe or the West at large.3 As in the above example,
such imaginaries reduce voices from the region to sound devoid of mean-
ing. When the image speaks, as in the case of Mehmedinovi, it does so
in a language that speaks to a small, fragmented audience. Within these
constraints, Bosnian literature seeks for ways to write back, in Salman
Rushdies phrase, to reclaim the discourse about its own identity and its
own specificity in the constellation of post-1989 Europe.4 The actuality of
Mehmedinovis work is that it does so in a manner conscious not only of
the marginal role of a linguistic space such as the Bosnian, but also of the
increasingly marginal role of the written word amidst the omnipresence of
visual culture. This, I contend, is how the literature of Bosnia (as an exten-
sion of Mehmedinovis work) has been carving out a space for itself ever
since the beginning of the war in the spring of 1992.
In an odd way, Bosnian literature owes its existence to the break-up of
Yugoslavia and the subsequent wars of independence. The war in Croatia
(19911995) and especially the war in Bosnia (19921995) put two lit-
eratures on the cultural map of a continent that had hitherto been accus-
tomed to Yugoslav literature, albeit as a marginal phenomenon. Specifically,
the writers of Bosnia, most of whom were caught in the 1425-day long
siege of Sarajevo, found themselves part of a global media spectacle. This
is why the work of Mehmedinovi is of significance beyond its obvious
literary merits. Ever since his war classic Sarajevo Blues (1995), his writing
has shown a deep awareness not just of the effects of exile and cultural
marginalisation. It has also sought for ways to reclaim space for the writ-
ten word at a time when it is increasingly challenged by an overpowering
visual culture. As we shall see in Self-Portrait with a Satchel, a book of
semi-autobiographical prose texts and drawings, his work constantly hovers
 MY DREAM CAN ALSO BECOME YOUR BURDEN 229

between the modes and meanings of written discourse and visual repre-
sentation, resulting in what can qualify as a hybrid of various genres and
media, where narrative prose, poetry and visual art intersect.

THE SARAJEVO SIEGE ANDTHEEUROPEAN PUBLIC SPHERE

In Sarajevo Blues, a collection of essays, poetry and stories written while
under siege, Mehmedinovis main preoccupation was to find an expla-
nation for the failure of the outside worldEurope, the Westto truly
identify with the citys plight. His suggestion was that much of this failure
could be attributed to questions about the modes of representation in
various media, as well as to the fact that we only empathize with our own
tragedies.5 He indicates that the Bosnian Serb campaign of ethnic cleans-
ing drew little response from populations across Europe because their own
communities were not vulnerable to the rape, torture and murder which
the campaign entailed. He drew a comparison with the war in Vietnam:
Television sees right through the lack of compassion in human nature,
just as long as tragedy doesnt hit home []. The sense of tragedy arrived
with the body bags wrapped in the American flag, and not before then,
not through TV reports from Vietnam.6
While a wave of public outrage finally led to military intervention in
autumn 1995, Sarajevo did host a considerable number of artists and
intellectuals from Europe and the USA, who visited the besieged city in
person. French philosophers, such as Andr Glucksmann and Bernard-
Henry Lvy, were prominent among them. Perhaps the most famous,
however, was the NewYork-based writer, critic and stage director Susan
Sontag, who went to Sarajevo in 1993 and staged and directed the first act
of Samuel Becketts Waiting for Godot (1953) under dire conditions. Her
stay triggered not just a debate about the borders and content of European
culture, but also an (ongoing) intellectual exchange about the relation
between written and visual representation of war and genocide. Sontag
published an essay upon her return from Bosnia, Waiting for Godot in
Sarajevo (1993), about her second stay in the capital (she had visited the
city both prior to the Beckett project and afterwards, a fact she empha-
sised in the essay as if to anticipate accusations of disaster tourism).7 The
first effect of her intervention can be said to have been the creation of an
instant European public sphere.8 Paradoxically, by deprecating Europes
intellectuals for their passivity over the genocide, she lured them into
debate, with the essay quickly becoming part of a much wider exchange
230 G. SNEL

of opinions about the war, its mediatisation and Sontags own role in this.
Opinions about Sontag ranged from praise and admiration to fierce criti-
cism and outright disgust. Thus Jean Baudrillard spoke of her cultural
soul-boosting and the condescending manner of all those visitors whose
good conscience basks in the sun of so-called solidarity.9 Whatever the
sentiments surrounding her visit (and those of other renowned foreign
artists, intellectuals and politicians), her sojourn can still be said to have
raised serious questions about the EUs politics of non-intervention and
to have revealed a direct link between its failure to act and the tradition in
western European thought of viewing Bosnia as a quasi-oriental Islamic
culture.10 On being confronted with such stereotypes in the questions she
was asked after returning to the States, Sontag wrote: What such ques-
tions show is that the questioner has bought in to the propaganda of the
aggressors: that this war is caused by age-old hatreds [], that the Serbs
are saving Europe from Muslim fundamentalism.11
Sontags view that Sarajevo stood for the secular, anti-tribal ideal was
the central motive, if not the justification, of her prolonged sojourn in the
besieged city.12 She believed that, at least temporarily, the production of
Beckett restored a sense of normalcy to the lives of the actors with whom
she worked, as well as to the lives of the audience. And that normality was
intrinsically related to being European, to being of Europe: What my pro-
duction of Godot signified to them [] is that this is a great European play
and that they are members of European culture.13 On the issue of why
other foreign writers and artists havent gone to Sarajevo, she downplayed
the dangers involved, bringing up the Spanish Civil War and mentioning the
names of George Orwell and Simone Weil to point out that Barcelona in
the 1930s was as dangerous as Sarajevo in the 1990s.14 Instead, she argued
that the ultimate reason that more people dont volunteer to go to Sarajevo
is a failure of identificationenforced by the buzz-word Muslim.15 What is
clear, I think, is not so much that Sontag insisted on Bosnia being the centre
of Europe (in fact, she refers to the sparseness of pre-war cultural life in
Sarajevo), but that such cultural peripheries are inevitably part of Europe,
even if the centre does not wish to acknowledge them.16
The second effect of her stay in Sarajevo was a flurry of debate about the
role of the writer or artist in wartime and about the (non)sense of artistic
representation of military conflict. Despite the abundant media coverage
of the war in Bosnia, it was clear to Sontag that such coverage would
not encourage Europe to intervene and prevent further atrocities from
taking place. The impact of media coverage, and especially of the role of
 MY DREAM CAN ALSO BECOME YOUR BURDEN 231

photography, was pivotal to her argument. This would eventually prompt

her to publish what can be regarded as a sequel to her On Photography
(1977), the book-length essay Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). The
essay not only analyses the tension between visual and written representa-
tions of trauma and war, a theme later taken up in Judith Butlers Frames of
War (2009), but also polemically responds to her critics by insisting on the
necessity of artistic representation of someone elses suffering.17 This was
meant, it seems, as another justification of her visits to Sarajevo, indicating
that the writers and artists who wished to intervene in Bosnia were not the
false apostles and voluntary martyrs that Baudrillard claimed they were.18
Thus, while the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia and the war in Bosnia
in particular have exercised a profound influence on the way European
cultural geography has been reconfigured and reimagined since the early
1990s, a question remains about who gets to speak in the new Europe: that
is, who gets to redraw the map of Europes cultural geography and to decide
upon Bosnias place in it? And what role, if any, does literature, the written
word, have as a medium in a culture dominated by visual representation?

BOSNIA WRITES BACK

At a time when many claimed to speak for Sarajevo, few of those under
actual siege were allowed to participate in the European sphere of intel-
lectual debate. In this respect, Bosnia was culturally and intellectually
outside Europe just as it was politically outside the international com-
munity (which hardly ever includes the country in crisis with which it is
concerned). The irony is that most, if not all, of the participants in this
instantly Europeanised public sphere claimed to know what it was like for
the Bosnians to see and hear their fate commented upon in the interna-
tional media. According to Mehmedinovi, out of all the local writers and
artists involved in the business of representing the siege, the only ones
accepted into the wider public sphere were the photographers. The city
held some excellent photographers, like Milomir Kovaevi and Mladen
Pikuli, and Mehmedinovi is quick to praise their work: The photogra-
phers of Sarajevoas opposed to their colleagues who come from abroad
to collect their fees from dailies, weeklies and art magazines by trading in
deathare the only chroniclers of war in this city.19 The implicit observa-
tion is that writers were no longer the principal chroniclers of major events
in Europe, which begs the question of how literature continued to function
during and after the siege. I would argue that the writers of Sarajevo did
232 G. SNEL

write back, even when their writings failed to circulate in Europe (or cir-
culated after a significant delay). Authors like Miljenko Jergovi, Antonije
alica and Nenad Velikovi wrote extensively about the siege, although
their work only became available in translation after the war, if at all.20
One should also ask: from where did they write back? If there exists such
a thing as Bosnian literature, one has to acknowledge first of all its extra-
territorial nature. Perhaps its most prominent novelist (at least in terms of
his polemic media presence in the republics of the former Yugoslavia) is
Miljenko Jergovi, who has been based in Zagreb since 1993 and is actu-
ally a figure in Croatian literary life, not Bosnian, as is novelist and politi-
cal scientist Igor tiks. Similarly, Antonije alica is living in Amsterdam,
the Netherlands, and Adnan Mahmutovi is living in Sweden. Aleksandar
Hemon and Semezdin Mehmedinovi, arguably the two most innovative
and daring writers who came of age on the eve of the war, are both based in
the USA.Hemon writes his fiction in English and Mehmedinovi, though
writing in Bosnian, has his books published in Zagreb and English transla-
tions published through City Lights in San Francisco. What Hemon wrote
in the year 2000in the Sarajevo weekly BH Dani perhaps still counts today:

Bosnian literature is a phenomenon, because it has no publishers, no crit-

ics, no readers and no books. The majority of Bosnian books are published
abroad (the USA, Germany, Croatia, the UK, etc.), and whatever is pub-
lished at home is published by sheer accident, in spite of the lack of a literary
infrastructure.21

With a literary and cultural infrastructure that leaves much to be desired,

at least as Hemon describes it, it may come as no surprise that the intel-
lectual debate about the war in Bosnia has been predominantly a non-
Bosnian affair. More specifically, the representations of the war which have
circulated internationally in cinema and literature (whether popular or
high-brow) are mostly dominated by productions and publications which
originate in western Europe and the USA.22
As part of their response, writers from Bosnia have criticised western
commentators who feel they have the right to speak for Bosnia, including
Sontag.23 Miljenko Jergovi, in Transatlantic Mail (2009), a published
exchange of letters with Mehmedinovi, expresses a widely shared frustra-
tion with Sontags involvement in the country. As he writes, [i]t always
seemed to me, every time I met her during her visit, that she didnt see
us as human beings similar to herself. As if the same shell couldnt have
killed both her and us.24 The feeling prevents him from rereading her On
 MY DREAM CAN ALSO BECOME YOUR BURDEN 233

Photography and Illness as Metaphor (books which meant a lot to me back

in those days).25 He explains this aversion via an anecdote about a meet-
ing between Sontag and Jergovis mother, which took place in the latters
home. While the mother smoked barberry leaves, because tobacco was in
short supply, Sontag herself kept putting out half-smoked cigarettes that
she had brought from the States:

the ashtray was filling up and my mother was hoping that, when Susan
Sontag left, she could take all those butts from the ashtray, unroll them, and
there would be Marlboros for three days at least. But then, at some point,
Sontag decided to play host, [] so she got up, took the ashtray and emp-
tied it outside in a bin full of snow and rubbish.26

Faced with such ignorance of the needs of local people, Jergovi concludes
that Susan Sontag didnt know certain important things without which
there can be no life and no poetry.27
Mehmedinovi also recalls Sontags visit and introduces his memory of
it with an account of a friends response to her arrival: Has Ms Sontag
brought oranges?28 As Mehmedinovi explains, [w]hen you visit someone
in prison or hospital [] you bring oranges in order to show sympathy
for their suffering, and in the same way his friends reaction to Sontags
visit, like the reactions of all of us at the time, required those who came
to town to define their position toward our pain.29 When Mehmedinovi
comes to speak of Regarding the Pain of Others, he writes that it is almost
like a sublimation of the Sarajevan experience expressed in the question:
What do we feel and how do we feel regarding the pain of others?30 At this
point, he begins to defend Sontag against Jergovis criticisms. Instead of
referring back to her sojourn in the city, he recalls a photograph that Annie
Leibovitz made of Sontag lying on a hospital bed after her death in 2004:
for Mehmedinovi, this decision finally to show herself in that state, to close
the circle, is an expression of the sort of emancipation that is nothing if not
sheer poetry.31 His suggestion is that Sontags posthumous image provides
the ultimate justification both of her visits to Sarajevo and of her intellectual
endeavours to probe the limits of human identification with someone elses
suffering. By exposing her own physical vulnerability, he claims, Sontag
moved beyond the limits of politics and made a genuine statement. As with
his earlier quotation on the war in Vietnam, Mehmedinovis argument cen-
tres on the human body, or rather the vulnerability of it (the precarious-
ness, as Judith Butler would say).32 Equally central to his argument is the
entanglement of language (Sontags essays) and visual image (Sontags final
234 G. SNEL

photograph), and their mutually problematic relation towards the object of

representation that he is interested in: the reality of war.

MEHMEDINOVIS EXILIC WANDERING: WRITING,

DRAWING, PHOTOGRAPHY
Just as Butler is thinking with Sontag in Frames of War, so Mehmedinovis
response to Jergovi is a continuation of Sontags discourse, although
it is also partially an amendment of it. Sarajevo Blues already contained
profound reflections about the role of language and storytelling in a war
context dominated by visual images. While a number of prominent post-
Yugoslav authors insert visual material into their novels, Mehmedinovis
recent work responds to the challenge posed by visual culture in a different
way.33 Self-Portrait with a Satchel is of indeterminate genre, although may
be said to qualify as a novel. While the text describes in a non-fictional, often
essayistic manner scenes from the authors daily life in the USA, some sec-
tions contain what could be called ultrashort stories, which narrate decisive
events from peoples lives, as related by them to the author, and which show
features of semi-autobiographical prose, or autofiction. Ever since Sarajevo
Blues (1995), Mehmedinovis work has been a quest for new literary forms
to express such themes as the passing of time, remembrance and forgetting.
In Self-Portrait with a Satchel, what seem to be disparate prose sketches
in fact mount up to a meticulous fictionalisation of a very real experience,
that of war, persecution and loss. In particular, the tension between centre
(Washington, DC) and periphery (Sarajevo) permeates the entire text. One
of the powerhouses of global politics, the US capital is also the locus of the
authors exile, so while each encounter or experience described in the book
is narrated at the centre, it simultaneously occurs off-centre, on the mar-
gins. One could make a case, in fact, for all of Mehmedinovis recent work
to be an ongoing fictionalisation of the daily life of an exile from a periph-
eralised country, including the more recent Knjiga Prozora (The Window
Book, 2014), an extension of Self-Portrait with a Satchel.
Once again, Mehmedinovis central focus in these writings is frequently
on the human body. When I think of the human body, he writes, I
remember the beginning of the 1990s, and Sarajevo under siege. Back then
the body was the only space that was real. A mortal space.34 As he goes on:

I think more and more often of the human body as a ruin. I am tired, and
so all the others look tired to me. Ever since I started to draw, Ive noticed a
more or less visible asymmetry on peoples faces. [] They have a tired eye;
 MY DREAM CAN ALSO BECOME YOUR BURDEN 235

its where our defeats in life accumulate. Unlike the rested eye, time seems
to pass more rapidly in the tired one.35

Our bodies register as much our future disappearance as our history.

Recording our dissipation, our dissolving, seems to be the new task that
Mehmedinovi sees for his literature. At the same time, he determines
to record the view from that tired eye, a term suggestive of the liminal
perspective of the Bosnian war survivor. Surely the city of Washington, as
a centre of global politics, can do without a Bosnian chronicler marked by
war and exile, whose writings bring about a sense of lasting defeat. And
yet, he is there, observing, writing. For this task, written discourse alone
does not suffice. Mehmedinovi not only writes about the human body,
but also draws (parts of) human bodies, particularly the hands, faces and
eyes of the people he meets. He does so because drawing awakens a
past event which is extremely lively in my memory and because the past
event is difficult to capture in itself (when I try to visualize the people
in that event, their faces dissolve).36 His elaboration of the point makes
reference to the importance both of expressing a distinctly Bosnian per-
spective and of achieving a visual form that evades the shortcomings of
photography:

Why is it that I started drawing, where does it come from? From a concrete
deprivation. I feel the urge to visually represent the world to myself, and a
camera would offer a solution. In the outside world I am fascinated by people,
but people dont like it when you take their picture [] and the majority of
them would say: no! Everybody aggressively protects their privacy.37

Mehmedinovis response to the obsessive media coverage of the suffer-

ing of wartime Sarajevo is not to reject visual representation (linked to
forms of appropriation and power), but to develop a technique that is
shared, humane and respectful. For doing so, drawing as a response to
concrete deprivation is an important supplement to writing. The influ-
ence of Sontag is apparent in the professed limitations of photography, but
while Sontag famously claimed that visual images are in need of a written
narrative in order to achieve a more profound and lasting understanding,
Mehmedinovi believes written text is in need of images.38 Thus, next to
the above passage is a photograph of a black spot on the white wall of his
flat (a spot that is hardly visible but my whole life and [] world fit into
it), which in turn is informed by the written comment that readers risk
seeing some of the images from my consciousness buried in that spot on
236 G. SNEL

the wall. The images that are fragments from my dream can also become
your burden.39 In short, it is through the act of self-representation that
the reality of Sarajevo (the burden) can be communicated, albeit in an
oblique, fragmented manner.
The problematics of representation continue when Mehmedinovi
introduces a drawing he has made of his son (who, incidentally, is a pho-
tographer by profession). He catches H. asleep and decides to make a
drawing, although confesses that there is something disquieting in watch-
ing someone sleeping (What a violation of someones privacy! Because
privacy, if it exists, is most present when someone is asleep).40 Reminded
of the need for a respectful form of visual representation, he finishes
quickly, looks at the drawing and is satisfied:

The portrait is precise, there is something in the way the hands are posi-
tioned, in the overall expression, which makes me think: these lines on paper
are definitely H., much more precise than if I had portrayed him with a
camera: 41
 MY DREAM CAN ALSO BECOME YOUR BURDEN 237

I would argue that there is no primacy of word over image here, even
though the former precedes and frames the latter. The written text explains
how the drawing came about, why it was made and how it polemically
relates to photography. It does not limit the possible impact of the draw-
ing, and the final colon integrates the drawing with the writing. One could
argue that the drawing has the last say, but once the reader comes to it,
the linear logic of reading has been replaced by a more complex shifting
between visual and written text. One senses that only through this merger
can the author achieve the precision that is his ultimate aim.

A POSTCARD FROMTHEPAST: THEBORDERS OFEUROPE

RECONFIGURED
The point of this post-war generic hybrid is to regain the Bosnian gaze in
the face of the more powerful gaze of the centre. For Mehmedinovi, this
discursive upheaval is not an easy achievement, but rather a momentous
effect of aesthetic form in which the reader of these texts, who is also
the observer of the drawings, takes part in an aesthetically sophisticated
re-enactment of the world. In most of the prose passages, this is a small,
private world: of the apartments to and from which the author moves, of
marital life, of occasional passers-by. Gradually, an image of Washington
appears as a nodal point of a vast migration of people from one conti-
nent to another. Within this web, stories and memories from the Old
Continent keep popping up, many of them related to the war in Bosnia
and the siege of Sarajevo. Each anecdote, each image seems affected by
the same poetical ambition to regain the gaze. This relates equally to the
actor using the narrator as a model for an authentic portrayal of an East
European (quoted at the opening of this essay) and to grand political and
historical matters, such as the delineation of Europe and European culture
and of Bosnias position within them. Most of the time, the grand matters
are dealt with jointly with the seemingly minor ones. An example is when
an old friend from Sarajevo pays Mehmedinovi a visit:

Here we are, after so many years, together in a restaurant. He is just opening

his silver cigarette case. Behind him on the wall there is a mirror. He comes
from a country far away, from an ancient past, and he doesnt know that
smoking in public places was prohibited here a long time ago. When he leans
against the wall, the mirror shakes and behind me the windows start to swing,
together with the stone wall of the cathedral and the hat of a passer-by.42
238 G. SNEL

The encounter is between the here and now and a space that is not just
geographically remote but also at a temporal distance from the present.
This is the very configuration by which Bosnia is cut off from Europe and
the West, the space-time anomaly which Sontag so vehemently rejected
by insisting that Bosnia is part of European culture. The traveller from
Bosnia will cross the line once he lights the cigarette, unaware that smok-
ing has been banned in restaurants. His former compatriot, who observes
him from within the West, realises that it is he himself who conceives of
his friend (and perhaps his own past in their former country) as being at
a distance. When the scene then stops, or is frozen, while the mirror is
shaking, we have a symbol of Mehmedinovis inner disturbance at find-
ing, in his own consciousness, one of the imagined civilisational fault
lines of the post-1989 global order. The distancing in space and time
turns out to be a mere matter of perspective, that of the Bosnian author
who, through recognising the conditioning effects of the western gaze,
manages to turn his attention upon them and thereby achieve his own
viewpoint.
If this scene drifts from personal to public history, then the following
passage from The Window Book involves the reader in a more sweeping
reconfiguration of Bosnia in contemporary geopolitics:

On a windy American street, April 2003, Im talking to Etel Adnan,

daughter of an officer in the Ottoman Empire, about what Bosnia was like
before she and I were born: it was like Id gotten a letter with a Turkish
stamp postmarked Istanbul, and in the envelope was a picture of me Id
never seen.
Etel says: Jack Hirschman once told me this story. Someone asked: What
time is it? And Yogi Berra answered: You mean, what time is it now?43

Adnan, a painter and writer with origins in the city of Beirut and the
cosmopolitan commonwealth of the late Ottoman Empire and its post-
imperial afterlife, reminds Mehmedinovi of an alternative layer of history,
with profound consequences for the way he conceives of both his own
biography and the cultural configuration of Bosnia and Europe as a whole.
Her remark frames their identity in a historical experience which is radi-
cally different from the (western) European notion that cultures are to be
defined by their distance from or proximity to the centres of continental
power. The act of recognising that Beirut and Sarajevo are not only post-
Ottoman peripheries, but also two of the worlds war zones, establishes
 MY DREAM CAN ALSO BECOME YOUR BURDEN 239

alternative networks of political and cultural space and alternative ways of

conceiving the writers identity and belonging. In a passage such as this,
the hegemonic view of Bosnia as a periphery on the outskirts of Europe
may not be broken, but the mirror is again shaking, and our understand-
ing of the people Mehmedinovi meets and the encounters he describes,
as well as the borderline he negotiates between the present and the past,
the West and Bosnia, become open to debate. At the very least, space and
geography, time and history, are open questions again.
Writing in the aftermath of war and genocide in Europe has mostly
centred round the issue of how the act of forgetting can be countered.
Mehmedinovi no longer pursues this topic in Self-Portrait with a Satchel
or The Window Book. Although photography haunts him (because it
reminds him of the vast number of people he has forgotten), no artistic
medium can contain a life in its entirety. What then is the alternative?
Announcing that there is a contentment to forgetting, just as theres a
contentment to remembering, Mehmedinovi tells us about a journey to
Sarajevo he took after eight years away, when he discovered the glass still
missing from windows and the walls still pock-marked with bullet holes,
but much of the interior of his family home intact:

Books still on shelves, paintings on walls Everything just like it was. In

the bathroom I found a glass bottle shaped like a pinecone. Pino Silvestre
cheap aftershave. I opened the bottle, it was empty, but the familiar scent
still wafted out. Eight years didnt exist for me: had I not come back, Id
never have thought of the glass pinecone, it would have remained forgot-
ten, even though many events of my youth, because of it, smelled like
needles.44

Remembering and forgetting are not mutually exclusive. Formative ele-

ments of ones memories can be forgotten while their effects remain con-
stituent parts of ones current self. And although Mehmedinovis work,
with its extreme focus on the private sphere, makes a strong case for keep-
ing the political out of the personal, his chronicling of everyday life in exile
does have consequences for the making (and unmaking) of the political
space of Europe and the West. For just as remembering and forgetting
are inextricably linked up, so are centre and periphery. Exilic prose from
the dispersed margins shake the mirror of our self-perception by revealing
alternative framings of the cultural and political geographies in which we
inscribe our present and past.
240 G. SNEL

NOTES
1. Mehmedinovi, Autoportret s Torbom (Zagreb: Fraktura, 2012), p. 160.
All translations from the text are my own.
2. Ibid., p.160.
3. Jeffrey, The Masks of Europe in Contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina,
in Luiza Bialasiewicz, ed., Europe in the World: EU Geopolitics and the
Making of European Space (London: Ashgate, 2011), p.82.
4. See Rushdie, The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance, The Times, 3
July 1982, p.8.
5. Mehmedinovi, Sarajevo Blues, trans. by Ammiel Alcalay (1995; San
Francisco: City Lights, 1998), p.83.
6. Ibid., p.83.
7. This account first appeared in an abridged version in the New York Review
of Books of 21 October 1993. It was printed in full in the Performing Arts
Journal in May 1994 and later reprinted in her collection of essays, Where
the Stress Falls (2001).
8. I am pointing at an instant public sphere which is Europeanising in the
sense that it crosses national borders and language zones and that Europe
is both the issue and the addressee.
9. Baudrillard, No Reprieve for Sarajevo (1994), trans. by Patrice Riemens,
The European Graduate School, http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-bau-
drillard/articles/no-reprieve-for-sarajevo/ (accessed 18 September 2015).
10. For a full discussion of the issue, see David Toole, Waiting for Godot in
Sarajevo: Theological Reflections on Nihilism, Tragedy, and Apocalypse, new
edn (1997; London: SCM Press, 2001), pp.14.
11. Sontag, Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo, Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 16,
No. 2 (1994), p.93.
12. Ibid., p.93.
13. Ibid., p.90.
14. Ibid., p.90.
15. Ibid., p.93.
16. Ibid., p.90. tienne Balibar, in a lecture delivered in Thessaloniki during the
Kosovo War, makes a similar statement when he writes that border areas
zones, countries, and citiesare not marginal to the constitution of a public
sphere but rather are at the center. If Europe is for us first of all the name of
an unresolved political problem, Greece is one of its centers, not because of
the mythical origins of our civilization [] but because of the current prob-
lems concentrated there (Balibar, We, the People of Europe?, p.2).
17. Butler added to Sontags discussion of visual culture a concern about the
widespread use of embedded journalism in the US invasion of Iraq,
although this shifted the focus from Bosnia to the involvement of the West
(the USA and western Europe) with war and trauma elsewhere.
 MY DREAM CAN ALSO BECOME YOUR BURDEN 241

18. Baudrillard, No Reprieve for Sarajevo.

19. Mehmedinovi, Sarajevo Blues, p.57. The two photographers mentioned
eventually left Sarajevo. Milomir Kovaevi is now living and working in
Paris, while Mladen Pikuli is now based in Rotterdam: see Anon, Milomir
Kovacevic, dit Strasni, Milomir Kovaevi, http://www.milomirkova-
cevic.com/auteur.html (accessed 18 September 2015), and Anon, Mladen
Pikuli, Mladen Pikuli, http://www.mladenpikulic.nl/sarajevo-self-por-
trait.html (accessed 18 September 2015).
20. See, for instance, Jergovis Sarajevski Marlboro (Sarajevo Marlboro,
1994), alicas Tragovi Zmajeve ape (Traces of the Dragon Claw, 1995)
and Velikovis avo u Sarajevu (The Devil in Sarajevo, 1996).
21. Hemon, Bosanska Knjievnost i Posljednji Dani, BH Dani, 25 February
2000, https://www.bhdani.ba/portal/ arhiva-67-281/143/hemon143.
htm (accessed 18 September 2015). My translation.
22. Examples in visual culture are countless, from the films The Peacekeeper
(1997) and Welcome to Sarajevo (1997) to the BBC TV series Warriors
(1999) and the Dutch TV series De enclave (2002). Besides countless
examples of crime fiction, some literary novels about the war are Steven
Galloways The Cellist of Sarajevo (2008), Juan Goytisolos El sitio de los
sitios (State of Siege, 1995) and Norbert Gstreins Das Handwerk des
Ttens (The Profession of Killing, 2003).
23. Two short story collections which criticise directly or indirectly the EU policy
of non-intervention are Ozren Kebos Sarajevo za poetnike (Sarajevo for
Beginners, 1996) and Miljenko Jergovis Mama Leone (Mama Leone, 1999).
24. Jergovi and Mehmedinovi, Transatlantic Mail (Zagreb: VBZ, 2009),
p. 2. All translations from the text are by Mirza Puri and are available
online: see Jergovi and Mehmedinovi, Transatlantic Mail, Asymptote,
http://www.asymptotejournal.com/article.php?cat=Nonfiction&id=
73&curr_ index=0 (accessed 19 May 2015).
25. Jergovi and Mehmedinovi, Transatlantic Mail, p.2.
26. Ibid., p.2.
27. Ibid., p.3.
28. Ibid., p.3.
29. Ibid., p.3.
30. Ibid., p.3.
31. Ibid., p.4.
32. Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (London and New York:
Verso Books, 2009), p.77.
33. See, for instance, Dubravka Ugreis Muzej Bezuvjetne Predaje (The
Museum of Unconditional Surrender, 1996), Aleksandar Hemons The
Lazarus Project (2008) and Daa Drndis Sonnenschein (Sunshine, 2007).
34. Mehmedinovi, Autoportret, p.162.
35. Ibid., p.173.
242 G. SNEL

36. Ibid., p.60.

37. Ibid., p.32.
38. See Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2003), pp.1056.
39. Mehmedinovi, Autoportret, p.23.
40. Ibid., p.32.
41. Ibid., p.33.
42. Mehmedinovi, Knjiga Prozora (Zagreb: Fraktura, 2014), p.13. All trans-
lations from the text are my own.
43. Ibid., p.37.
44. Ibid., p.111.
 14

Blowing Hot andCold: Georgia

andtheWest

DonaldRayfield

Despite Greek colonisation of the Black Sea coast from 600 BC, and
intermittent invasions by, and alliance with, the Romans from the time of
Pompey, Georgia remained on the periphery of Classical Greco-Roman
culture. Its inhabitants were even more cut off than their neighbours,
the Armenians, who at least had performances of Euripides until the first
century AD.For the classical world, Georgia did not exist as a concept:
there was the western half, Colchis, important only for its Greek cities,
and Iberia, its eastern half, seen as a Persian or Parthian possession, only
occasionally a battlefield for the Roman legions. Constantine the Great
in the fourth century AD seemed to finally include Georgia in Europes
sphere (once Christianity had brought Georgia literacy, Orthodoxy and
the culture of Byzantium), but the political history of the country was
still a tug-of-war between Byzantium and Persia, interrupted only by
Arab and Turkic invasions. When secular literature was established in the
eleventh century, it was under Persian, not European, influence. Even
for Georgians who travelled there, Europe was only a potential source of
intercession with oriental tyranny and, despite the trickle of Italian and
Polish missionaries, centuries would pass before western European culture

D. Rayfield ( )
Department of Russian, Queen Mary University, Mile End Road, London
EI 4NS, UK

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 243

A. Hammond (ed.), The Novel and Europe,
DOI10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4_14
244 D. RAYFIELD

itself was felt to have any relevance at all. After the fall of Byzantium, the
Georgian clergy forgot their Greek, and the countrys second languages
became Turkish and Farsi until, in the late eighteenth century, Russian
began to supplant them, thus becoming an intermediary for European
cultural forms.
Georgian literature can be dated back to the sixth century AD.From
the sixth to eleventh century it was primarily Orthodox religious, its fin-
est achievements being in hymns, chronicles and lives of the saints and
fathers of the church. Just one work can be classified as a novel, the anony-
mous Balahvariani (Tale of Balahvar and Iodasap, c.1000). Interestingly,
Georgian literature here acted as a vector to Europe; as shown by Elguja
Khintibidze, Balahvariani is a free version of an Arab tale (deriving from
the Buddhist Sanskrit Lalita-vistara, c.250 AD) which, after a Greek ver-
sion was translated from the Georgian, spread throughout Europe, one late
manifestation being in Lev Tolstoys Ispoved (A Confession, 18791882).1
After the eleventh century, Georgian literature made a volte-face and,
while remaining Christian, underwent a secular flowering influenced by
Persian romance. Although Persian-inspired poetry and prose resembled
the courtly literature of western Europe, the development was parallel, as
the non-secular nature of Byzantine culture obstructed any direct liter-
ary influence from the region. This immunity is striking, because Georgia
periodically sought political help from Europe against Persian domination,
the first appeal being a visit by a Georgian king to Rome in 140 AD.There
was a fatal asymmetry in relations between western Europe and Georgia:
while Georgians appealed for attention at some point in almost every cen-
tury in the Christian era, western Europe turned to them only when it, too,
felt threatened by resurgent Islam: in the twelfth century, the Crusaders
had an informal alliance with the Georgian kingdom, and after the fall
of Constantinople Papal envoys and Venetian merchants visited Georgian
rulers in the hope of opening an eastern front against the Ottomans and of
bringing the Georgian church into the fold of the Catholic church. When
Europe responded to a typical Georgian request for 20,000 armed men,
however, it sent only missionaries, merchants and diplomats, and they cer-
tainly had no interest in Georgias secular literature. The Augustinians,
who restored to King Teimuraz I the remains of his martyred mother in
1628, praised his poetry only for its piety in versifying the story of Joseph
and Potiphars wife.
In the eighteenth century, after a hopeless diplomatic mission to seek
help from Louis XIV and the Pope, the King of Kartlis uncle, the writer and
 BLOWING HOT ANDCOLD 245

lexicologist Sulkhan-Saba Orbeliani, described his journey with absolutely

no curiosity about European culture. If his writingfor instance the fables
of Tsigni sibrdzne-sitsruisa (A Book of Wisdom and Lies, 1720)resem-
bles Perrault or even Voltaire, it is not because of European influence, but
because his Persian models were those that also affected French narratives.
Although Russian influence grew rapidly in the eighteenth century, Russia
was not considered Europe, but a less fearsome sovereign than the Ottoman
or the Safavid Muslims. Georgian writers, when they attempted novels,
ignored Russian models and devised their own experiments. Crown Prince
Ioanes Xumarstsavla-kalmasoba (Alms-Gathering, 1862), half fiction, half
encyclopaedia, can be compared to Laurence Sternes The Life and Opinions
of Tristram Shandy (17591767) in its complete unconcern with readers
expectations. Georgian prose fiction, even after its renaissance in the 1860s,
was never concerned with western Europe, and rarely even with Russia.
Any Russian influence came from lesser works by Turgenev and Saltykov-
Shchedrin, found useful for highlighting the miseries of the peasants under
serfdom and Russian bureaucracy. Georgians delighted in historical prose,
inspired by nostalgia for the golden age, the twelfth century, when the coun-
try was a great Christian power. Such historical prose disdained Europe: from
imperial Rome to the Bourbons, Europes rulers had responded to Georgian
kings appeals for armed assistance with nothing but a few missionaries.
Only in the early twentieth century, when Georgians could travel to
western Europe for higher education and when much western European
literature was translated into Georgian, did the region figure in the novel.
The main concern was whether Georgia should consider itself a European
culture, an Asiatic culture or an anomaly (a question also posed about
Russia by Slavophiles, Westerners and Eurasians). World War One prefig-
ured the resurrection of an independent, united Georgia which would have
to make this choice. With the Kaisers Germany aiming to help Georgia
break away from Russia, Georgian novelists, reinforced by the small cir-
cles of Georgian intellectuals in France and Germany, felt that Europe
was supporting them for the first time. In the early 1920s two novel-
ists, Mikheil Javakhishvili (18801937) and Konstantine Gamsakhurdia
(18911975), were the first to set their prose in western Europe, while
Grigol Robakidze (18801968) preferred to imagine western Europeans
coming to the Caucasus to find the hitherto hidden core of its cultural
values. These three novelists offer contrasting reactions to the West,
although in the final analysis all of them evoke a possibly unbridgeable gap,
in attitudes and in historical fate. Javakhishvilis Kvachi Kvachantiradze
246 D. RAYFIELD

(Kvachi, 1925), a rogue novel comparable to Henry Fieldings Jonathan

Wild (1743), Guy de Maupassants Bel-Ami (Bel-Ami, 1885) and Thomas
Manns Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull (Confessions of Felix
Krull, Confidence Man, 1954), is remarkable for its paean of praise for
Paris, which is tempered by the protagonists discomfort with an alien
tempo and morality. The eponymous hero, a rogue without conscience, is
explicitly distinct from Javakhishvili, a social democrat, but the enthusiasm
that western Europe inspires in him is so lyrical that we cannot help ascrib-
ing it to the novelist. Kvachi, enriched in St Petersburg by fraud and by
association with Rasputin, is forced to flee the country in 1913. In Paris
he has an epiphany on the Eiffel Tower, where he experienced a dizzy,
all-enveloping bliss [at] the beauty of a metropolis which had been made,
who knows when, how or by whom, out of all that stone, iron, steam, and
smoke.2 Even when Kvachis gang of faithful Georgians long for home,
Kvachi wonders why he should leave Paris:

Leave Paris and go running back to crappy Georgia! Ive got to leave the
beautiful princesses here and attach myself to some frump in the backwoods!
Ive got to leave a palace and go to live in some chicken shed in Samtredia
or Tbilisi! [] The whole world is my motherland!3

World War One drives Kvachi back to Russia, where a series of treasonable
acts brings him alternately enormous riches and death sentences. As war
descends into revolution, and Georgian independence is achieved, Kvachi
sees his country abandoned by Europe: Up till now we had two paths:
either Russia or Europe. Now were left with one: the Moscow path.4
Revolution (and a recent brush with the OGPUs executioners) convinced
Javakhishvili that contact with western Europe had been a dangerous
flirtation, although in his best-known novel, Arsena marabdeli (Arsena
from Marabda, 1935), he seemed no more complimentary about Russian
attempts at modernisation: Russia is pursuing Europe on horseback, and
dragging us behind by a rope and telling us, dont lag behind. But we
are running, covered in blood, and we think the Russians are doing us a
favour.5 No doubt that remark was one of the many reasons why Lavrenti
Beria had Javakhishvili tortured and executed in 1937.
In 1947, there was a false dawn when Beria repatriated many Georgians
from France, including both revered scholars and those who had fought
alongside the Nazis; these European Georgians were exempted from the
GULag and allowed to walk free. But writers hopes of liberalisation were
 BLOWING HOT ANDCOLD 247

swiftly crushed by Stalins anti-cosmopolitan campaign, which included

commissioning poems to remind Georgians of the disappointing appeals
to Louis XIV in 1714. After Stalins death, some allusions to Georgias
interaction with western Europe could be made, if kept sufficiently alle-
gorical. Otar Chiladzes first novel, Gzaze erti katsi midioda (A Man Was
Going Down the Road, 1973), deals with the legend of Jason and Medea
from the point of view of the Colchis population, and Jason, as the agent
of King Minos, could be read, if not by the censor then by the educated
reader, as not just the Russian or Soviet conqueror, but European influ-
ence in general. When Chiladze attempted the same allegory in a histori-
cal play, Tsates tsiteli tsaghebi (Tsates Red Boots, 1970), about a sixth
century king of western Georgia who decides to accept Byzantine instead
of Persian suzerainty, the censors were more alert and the play was not
performed until 2007. Eduard Shevardnadze, who came to power in 1972
and hovered between brutal repression and cultural liberalism, favoured
cinema over literature, but tacitly encouraged writers to adopt cinematic
techniques of montage, just as he encouraged film directors to use scripts
that were based on literature outside the Soviet canon. His intervention
saw one remarkable novel, Chabua Amirejibis Data Tutaskhia (Data
Tutashkhia, 19721975), through the press, to the dismay of Party hacks
who deplored, firstly, the publication of a novel by an escapee from the
GULag, and secondly a novel where the bandit and the Tsarist gendarme
are treated sympathetically with what seemed like western European amo-
rality. One underestimated factor in Georgian writers failure to take up
the slack in the post-Stalin era was economic. A Georgian writer might
sell up to 10,000 copies in his or her own republic; if the same writer
conformed to the Communist Partys requirements, however, he or she
would be translated into Russian with a print-run ten times larger (and as
censorship was deemed by Russians to be lighter in the other republics,
the demand for Georgian, Estonian or Kyrgyz novels in translation was
high). This factor, and the Soviet principle of paying authors by the line,
prolonged the survival of the saga-like socialist-realist novel. There was
also an element of state planning in determining the direction of Georgian
prose: as the republic was deemed to have had, unlike Muscovy, a glori-
ous mediaeval period, admirably defending Christian (and thus, in Stalins
eyes, progressive) values against pagans, Muslims and Mongols, Georgians
were encouraged to write historical novels, especially ones which showed
ruthless rulers sparing no individual in the drive to strengthen the state.
Only in novels celebrating collectivisation and industrialisation, or the
248 D. RAYFIELD

conversion of former capitalist exploiters into socialist workers, did

Georgian-Soviet prose follow closely the Russian model.
In 1991, the dire economy and political chaos of the second Georgian
republic destroyed the publishing industry. As access to the European
Union grew easier, writers were free, if they could find money, sponsors
and visas, to visit western Europe and then to write about it. But many
intellectuals were, in the first half of the 1990s, either sucked into the vor-
tex of civil war or forced to search for ways of feeding their families, often
trading in scrap metal and cigarettes or seeking self-sufficiency in the family
village. The EU responded with enough diplomatic intercession, advisers,
money and promises to ensure that the government that finally took con-
trol in the mid-1990s declared itself oriented towards the West politically
and ideologically. A new generation, that had grown up more alienated
from its parents than any in Georgias history, deserted Russian literature
for English and American, and in the new economic world, where paper
was expensive, readers poor and sponsors hard to find, they began to write
under the same commercial pressure as many of their western European
contemporaries: they had to shock with novelty. Drugs, sex, violence,
insanity and a rejection of authority invaded the space left by Soviet values.
The Georgian daily and weekly press and, very soon, the internet (even in
Soviet times Georgia stood out for its cybernetics expertise) became the
main outlets. Eventually, by the mid-2000s, Mikheil Saakashvilis govern-
ment and western aid had raised middle-class urban living standards to
the point at which books were being bought, rather than sold off, and
theatres put on plays, rather than political demonstrations. A frenzy of
translation, with copyrights often waived by sympathetic authors, brought
a good deal of European literature into Georgia within a few years. After
2008, however, when Russia was allowed by the West to annex two key
parts of Georgia (Abkhazia and South Ossetia), and when Georgias efforts
to please the international community by sending contingents of troops to
Iraq and Afghanistan were so ill-rewarded, a more sceptical view of western
Europe returned. The post-2010 government, controlled by an oligarch,
has clearly decided to make an accommodation with Russia; the Georgian
church, whose patriarch was appointed by the KGB in the 1970s, openly
fraternises with his Russian equivalent, and nobody believes in eventual
membership of NATO or the EU.The literary switch to western European
models, however, has not been reversed, even though Georgia realises it is
on the margins and that closeness to Europe is, paradoxically, constrictive
(for instance, Iranians can no longer visit Georgia without a visa).
 BLOWING HOT ANDCOLD 249

In the mid-1990s, only one major novelist stood his ground. Otar
Chiladzes fifth and angriest novel, Avelumi (Avelum, 1995), recounts
the life story of the eponymous hero (his name is the Sumerian for free
citizen), a writer who hates the Soviet system, but whose own empire of
love falls apart together with the empire of evil.6 The timeframe of the
novel is Avelums entire adult life, which spans two massacres of unarmed
Georgian protesters by Soviet special forces: the first in March 1956, after
Khrushchevs de-Stalinisation speech aroused the fury of Tbilisis young
people with its contempt for Georgians, and the second in April 1989,
when Gorbachevs forces attacked a crowd demanding independence with
nerve gas and spades. The intervening 33 yearsas Avelum points out,
the span of Christs life on earthare measured by the slow but steady
increase in contact between Georgians and western Europeans (largely
tourists, fellow-travellers or diplomats) and, as a result, an increasingly
evident discrepancy between Georgians illusions about the free world
and the reality of the gullible, inconsiderate visitors to their country, who
are mainly shepherded by Intourist around the antiquities of Tbilisis State
Museum.7 (Ironically, most of the exhibits in the museum were effectively
a gift from France: in 1921 the fleeing Menshevik government had man-
aged to crate up all the treasures of its palaces, churches and museums and
ship them into exile in France; in 1944, as a gesture of post-war solidarity
with Stalin, de Gaulle repatriated the surviving crates and their curator,
Professor Ekvtime Taqaishvili, to Georgia.)
The contrasting psychology and morality of French and Georgian, capi-
talist and Soviet, are the main threads of this tragic novel. In its chapters set
in France, with typical Georgian ambiguity, the hero is both envious and
disapproving of a free-thinking, hedonistic society which makes happiness
and individual decision-making too easy and blinds its inhabitants to the
tragic realities of life, which the hero sees only too clearly. Nevertheless,
Avelum is portrayed, without apology, as a womaniser. His fame as a writer
brings him an entry into Moscow intellectual life and, with it, a Russian
mistress. It also allows him contact with diplomats, and in the early 1970s,
when the restrictions on meeting foreigners are slightly eased, a French
diplomat facilitates the relationships Avelum has with French mistresses.
After an affair with Ccile, a French visitor to Tbilisis museums, the hero
embarks on an enduring love affair with Franoise, a French woman who
finds work as a translator in Moscow and with whom Avelum, thanks in
part to his all-tolerant wife, can maintain contact while the USSR still
exists. Their time together is severely limited, however. Because Avelum,
250 D. RAYFIELD

in traditional Georgian fashion, does everything to fence off his wife and
daughter from his mistress, they meet in Moscow, rather than Tbilisi; at
the same time, even though Franoise is a Russophile with no antagonism
towards the Soviet system, the authorities treat her with suspicion, allow-
ing her to enter the country for brief periods as a tourist and only for one
extended period as a translator for the propaganda media. Nevertheless,
she has a daughter by Avelum and, when perestroika begins, he is finally
allowed to visit France to see them. At first France seems so heavenly that
he has no wish to take Franoise to the USSR.It would be monstrous to
get her from Paris, the velvety banks of the Seine, the blossoming chestnut
trees intoxicating scent, and transport her back to the eternal dankness
and cold of the grim labyrinth and let her inhale its torpid air, void of
function and so hard to breathe.8 Avelum has equally strong reasons not
to make a move in the opposite direction. Asking himself why he didnt
profit from his good fortune in attracting a foreign woman by marrying
her with the hope of being allowed to emigrate to France, as many in his
situation would have done, he reveals a fidelity to the culture he hates that
is as strong as his fidelity to a family he is so constantly unfaithful to. He
senses that the life of a dissident in the Soviet Union, which he is on the
verge of becoming, may be hard, even perilous, but the life of a Soviet
exile in France would be utterly meaningless and devoid of status.
Contact with French visitors to the USSR has already persuaded Avelum
that their values are alien and, to his fastidious mind, even repulsive. The
family of Lon Fouchet, his diplomat friend, keeps a pet white rat called
Friedrich, while Fouchets friend, Rmy-Louis, who takes an interest in
Georgia purely as a surviving part of the ancient Hellenic world, does not
notice a cockroach crawling over his shirt collar. As Avelum wonders, if
the French can keep a pet rat, give it food and water and clean up after it,
whats to stop them training and taming a cockroach []?9 The visit of
Rmy-Louis to Georgia irritates Avelum as much as it flatters him: while
the French academic is thrilled by the survival of Dionysian traditions in
rural life, he is utterly unaware of the countrys tragic subjugation, like
somebody visiting a prison and ignoring the fact that his host is a prisoner
of conscience. Even the beloved Franoise, once she has found a way of
staying in Moscow for months, rather than days, upsets Avelum by her
easy acceptance of the privileged life that she, as a foreigner, and her con-
tacts, as the sons and daughters of the party and intellectual lite, enjoy.
Franoises so-called European fun entails singing mildly dissident songs,
riding at the Hippodrome and sitting with her degenerate fellow guests
 BLOWING HOT ANDCOLD 251

on an embassy floor slurping champagne from someone elses glass.10

Franoise seems to find nothing reprehensible in the fact that, while she
is enjoying herself, her illicit lover has to sit in darkness and total silence,
lest the concierge of the block of flats assigned to foreigners reports the
presence there of a Soviet citizen.
Perhaps, for western readers, the most disturbing impression left by the
novel is the contradiction between Avelums personal expression of his love
of freedom by multiple, synchronous love affairs and his disdain for French
sexual morality. He fears experiencing France in person lest he encounter a
Madame Claude who turns out to be a man, or a Monsieur Auguste who
turns out to be a woman. He also fears going to a nudist island where
Franoise takes holidays and, not sure whether the French are a nation of
satyrs or of impotents, cannot understand how men can be in the presence
of naked women without constant erections. Still, at the point at which
Avelum travels to France, for all his doubts and moments of revulsion, he
is still at heart a Francophile. After all, the first half of the novel constantly
echoes Rabelais: along with its frequent asides and excursions, and its pre-
occupation with bodily functions, Avelum sees Rabelaiss alter ego Matre
Alcofribas Nasier as his spiritual fellow guest and addresses the reader
with the Rabelaisian Dear idle reader.11 But encountered in real space
and time, France makes an impression on Avelum more grotesque than on
any other character in Georgian fiction. He is shocked at seeing condoms
on sale, and any chances of his affair with Franoise being revived are
destroyed when he notices a packet of contraceptive pills on her bedside
table. Unaware of the ironic consistence with his own Don-Juanism, he
believes that the whole nation is sex-obsessed:

In a cosy Paris street, as peaceful as a street in Tbilisi, a modern clochard had

exposed his genitals, like the hero of a porn film, and was quietly expecting
alms, as though you might think that his fellow citizens would have more
pity for him with no trousers on, utterly depraved and no longer bothering
even with a beggars dignity.12

Avelum is embarrassed not just by French attitudes to nudity and sexuality,

or by the vulgarities of capitalist plenty; he also counts up the weekly num-
ber of murders, rapes, brawls and incidents of torture on French television,
and finds them as numerous as those really happening in a working-class
district of Tbilisi. Even the grandeur of France disgusts him. The sight of
the palace of Versailles is ruined for him by his recall of the description
252 D. RAYFIELD

by seventeenth-century travellers of the overwhelming smell of human

faeces that heralded their approach to the palace from afar. Finally, the
reunion with his mistress and daughter brings about total disillusionment.
Speaking only Russian and Georgian, Avelum cannot communicate with
his daughter by Franoise, nor with Franoise herself, alienated as he is
by his own ineradicable puritanism. He renounces all hope of salvation
abroad: in this place of safety he felt somehow like an untended, unpro-
tected refugee.13
Avelums disaffection comes to a head upon his return to Georgia.
With the country plunged into civil war, Chiladzes hero reproaches west-
ern Europe and America for the repeat in 1991 of their inaction of 1919,
when the Versailles conference failed to grant the country independence:

Mitterrand has no more idea than Clemenceau of Georgias history: even

if he had, what difference would it make? None at all. Theres no way, it
seems, we can all emerge from the dark at the same time. No exit, as they
say. Even the earths rotation is against us. When its day in America, its
night here. When its night in America, its even darker here.14

What infuriates Avelum is the Wests ambivalent reaction to the events of

April 1989, when Soviet special forces, with no sane purpose, murdered
with trenching spades and poison gas some twenty unarmed civilians. The
West, reluctant to antagonise Mikhail Gorbachev, made no protest and,
as a result, seemed to be complicit in the massacre. As Childaze writes,
Marlene Dietrichs friend Reagan is, apparently, very uncomfortable in the
White House. I dont know what Ill do to the criminal if hes identified,
he apparently told his hairdresser. But he still refrains from comment.15
Georgia is clearly just an unimportant pawn in whatever game that western
Europe and America are playing with the remains of the Soviet empire. For
Avelum, the massacre of 1989 is the Golgotha coming 33 years after the
baptism of fire by the KGB special forces in 1956. This time, however, the
massacre is followed by a descent into hell: Avelums wife dies of cancer,
his legitimate daughter, maddened by the massacre, goes off to fight in
the civil war that ensued within a year of President Gamsakhurdias elec-
tion, and Avelum dies from a stray bullet as he tries to take his daughters
Kalashnikov off her. At the end of the novel western Europe is another
planet, as it was in reality. All that its politicians did to mitigate Russian
brutality in Tbilisi was to offer a few of the surviving victims hospital treat-
ment in Germany. The political chaos in Georgia, following the installation
 BLOWING HOT ANDCOLD 253

of Zviad Gamsakhurdias government in 1990, was left for the Russian

Federation to manage and manipulate. Otar Chiladze himself, despite his
own visits to western Europe, fell into a state of disillusionment and wrote
nothing for the seven years before his death in 2010. His last novel, Godori
(The Basket, 2003), about the intermarriage of Soviet police killers and
Georgian intellectuals, dismisses western Europe as irrelevant to Georgias
tragic contamination by Soviet morality.
It was not until 2003 that the Rose Revolution, led by the flamboy-
antly pro-EU president Mikheil Saakashvili and the more pragmatically
pro-EU prime minister Zurab Zhvania, oriented Georgian politics and
culture towards western Europe for the first time in its history. Saakashvili
took as his inspiration the greatest of Georgian kings, Davit IV The
Builder, who sent a piece of the True Cross to the Latins in Jerusalem
(it is now in the possession of Notre Dame in Paris). The introduction of
the rule of law, and the impact of an economic growth underpinned by a
grateful EU and USA, had the effect of reviving Georgian theatre, cinema
and, above all, publishing. The burgeoning internet, on-line journals and
electronic publications, which offered instant and uncensored communi-
cation with the entire world, intoxicated the Georgian public, who associ-
ated this cornucopia with the largesse of the West. Now, at last, Georgians
are reading western European literature in direct translation from the
original, not in Russian, and the models for the novel have been updated
from nineteenth-century fiction (Walter Scott or Guy de Maupassant) to
contemporary English, American, French and German.
The influence of British and American contemporaries is particularly
strong on the new generation of Georgian writers, whose major theme is the
chaotic mingling of western and traditional values, as iPhones and contra-
ceptives subvert the old matriarchal and patriarchal order. Aka Morchiladze
(Giorgi Akhvlediani), who lives mainly in London, produced what readers
may feel is his most powerful work in Mogzauroba qarabaghshi (A Journey
to Karabagh, 2004), about drug-taking and gun-running among young,
formerly middle-class youths in a society that has been totally abandoned
to its own devices.16 Like Morchiladze, Zaza Burchuladze made an impact
with a novel of exceptionally original narrative technique, Adibas (Adibas,
2009), set in the 2008 conflict, when Saakashvilis attempt to enforce
Georgian rule in South Ossetia gave the Russians a pretext to mount a
full-scale war, humiliating Georgia by permanently detaching a quarter of
its territory. Burchuladze, benefiting from his familiarity with the Russian
surrealist Daniil Kharms, shows genius in his portrayal of a population
254 D. RAYFIELD

concerned with problems of gratification, even when death is overhead;

the very title, a typical mistake by a fake-goods manufacturer trying to sell
Adidas, is a judgement on a society that is pretending to adopt western
European hedonism when military force is overwhelming the country.
The war is also a theme in Literaturuli ekspresi (The Literature Express,
2009) by the most talented and versatile of the new generation, Lasha
Bughadze. Here, a train-load of European writers, including Georgians,
travels from a congress in Portugal across Europe to Warsaw, with many
erotic and procedural misadventures, although also with a certain bitter-
ness on the part of the Georgian participants, whose war-torn country is
treated with condescension and indifference by their western European
hosts. In 2006, Bughadze published Okros khana (The Golden Times),
a portrayal of listless Georgians stranded in Scarborough, Great Britain,
some legally, some illegally, but all bored, shocked and alienated as they
recuperate from the murderous atmosphere of Georgian political and eco-
nomic life.17 For an older generation of Georgians, the amorality of much
of the new writing has been alarming. For example, overt sexuality still has
the power to shock, all the more when portrayed by women writers, who
were until recently almost entirely excluded from narrative prose and con-
fined to lyrical poetry. Teona Dolenjashvilis Realuri arsebebi (Real Beings,
2009), in a mere 25 pages and with hypnotic assurance, shows two fami-
lies on holiday brought to destruction by the freedoms which unbridled
sexuality, a little prosperity and a Blackberry can confer.
As more and more Georgians choose Britain for permanent or tempo-
rary exile, these tragi-comic expatriate lives will continue to be a dominant
theme in Georgian literature. One Georgian novelist, Zurab Karumidze,
now writes fiction in English, including his Dagny, or a Love Feast (2013),
which addresses one of the few real stories connecting Georgia with
Europe: the death of Dagny Juel, a victim of Strindberg, Przybyszewski
and, finally, of her murderous lover Emeryk in a Tbilisi hotel room. Since
Saakashvilis regime was replaced by a more cautious government, in
which, some say, a puppet president and prime minister are manipulated
by a canny oligarch, the aim of Georgia to be European in every sense has
been replaced by a gradualism, by which as little as possible is said publicly
about integration with the EU or NATO, for fear of jeopardising slightly
better economic relations with Russia. None the less, most Georgians
(with the conspicuous dissent of the Georgian Orthodox Church, which
has wide popular support but almost no influence on the intelligentsia)
 BLOWING HOT ANDCOLD 255

regard themselves as oriented culturally, politically and economically to

western Europe. In Soviet times there was always the suspicion that some
successful Georgian novelists wrote their novels in Russian to bypass the
small local market for the larger imperial one; it will be ironic if western
European influence now induces Georgian writers (who now face the eco-
nomic problems confronting writers in any country with fewer than four
million speakers) to shape their work for the western market, and even to
write in English.

NOTES
1. Khintibidze, Georgian-Byzantine Literary Contacts, trans. by Arrian
Tchanturia (1969; Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1996), pp.192291.
2. Javakhishvili, Kvachi, trans. by Donald Rayfield (1925; Champaign and
London: Dalkey Archive, 2015), p.238.
3. Ibid., p.263. The passage continues: I can live in any developed country.
I love culture, civilization, progress, clean streets, a nice tidy apartment,
really good entertainments; I like a well-starched shirt, a top hat, patent-
leather shoes; I love women of good breeding who are scrubbed and
bathed, wear silk underwear, and change it at least twice a week; I cant
understand how anyone can live in a town where there arent several col-
leges, a dozen theatres, arts and sciences, a town where intellectual life is
extinguished or never existed (ibid., pp.2634).
4. Ibid., p.451.
5. Javakhishvili, Arsena marabdeli (Tbilisi: Pederatsia, 1935), p.571.
6. Chiladze, Avelum, trans. by Donald Rayfield (1995; London: Garnett
Press, 2013), p.59.
7. Ibid., p.68.
8. Ibid., p.90.
9. Ibid., p.122.
10. Ibid., p.272.
11. See ibid., pp.8, 15, 46, 122, 154, 176, 226, 227.
12. Ibid., p.55.
13. Ibid., p.266.
14. Ibid., p.212.
15. Ibid., p.177.
16. This subject matter was soon exhausted, as shown by his monologue
Kagdata in jorjia (Once a Time in Georgia, 2008), which compared 1990s
Georgia to the world of Hollywood westerns and New York gangsters.
Morchiladze has since relied on sci-fi and alternative history for inspiration.
256 D. RAYFIELD

17. Bughadze can be as imaginative as Borges, as illustrated by his story Ertze

meti, orze naklebi (The Round Table, 2011). This is set in a restaurant
where the menu and waitresses offer not food, but conversations (local
news and obituaries, world politics, flirtations, blazing marital rows), after
which the contented diners can satisfy baser appetites at MacDonalds.
Bughadze can also set out to shock: Pirveli rusi (The First Russian,
2003) portrays Prince Iuri Bogoliubsky (the drunken, treacherous, sod-
omitical consort rashly chosen by the court for the young Queen Tamar in
1185) with such contempt that the Georgian parliament and Patriarch felt
constrained to apologise to Russia.
 15

Becoming Black inBelgium: Chika Unigwe

andtheSocial Construction ofBlackness

Sarahde Mul

INTRODUCTION
The Nigerian-Belgian writer Chika Unigwe wrote the satirical article Zwart
worden in zeven lessen (Becoming Black in Seven Lessons, 2010) after
being inspired by the Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainainas piece How to
Write about Africa (2005).1 In the article, Unigwe remarks that before com-
ing to Europe she had no clear idea of what it meant to be black, suggesting
that she did not experience race to be the defining social identity in Nigeria.
She goes on to describe, with great irony, what she has learned about black-
ness since living in Europe: I now learn that being black means that I am
perceived as a charity project. That I must be grateful for the opportunity
granted to me by being in Europe.2 The lessons further include dressing in
an authentically African way, always being prepared for police control and
being able to dance. Stating that blackness has no connotation on its own,
but is assigned meaning from the outside, Unigwes Becoming Black in
Seven Lessons reminds us of the social construction of blackness.
In this essay, I explore the social construction of black identity in relation
to, on the one hand, Unigwes position and authorial self-representation

S. de Mul ( )
Faculty of Humanities, Open Universiteit, 6419 AT Heerlan, Netherlands

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 257

A. Hammond (ed.), The Novel and Europe,
DOI10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4_15
258 S. DE MUL

as an ethnic minority writer in Belgium/Flanders and, on the other hand,

the identity negotiations of the African immigrant women in the Flemish
city of Antwerp in Unigwes second novel, On Black Sisters Street (2009).
Central to this inquiry will be the question of how the author and the
African sex workers in On Black Sisters Street become black in Belgium
and by extension in Europeand how they negotiate a sense of self vis--vis
the already pronounced social order. Deploying Becoming Black in Seven
Lessons as my interpretative lens, I argue, more specifically, that the self-
representations of the author and characters reveal the mediation of domi-
nant historical images and western symbolic meanings and articulate their
attempts to wrest control of the construction of their bodies away from
the distorted visions of dominant culture. Although Unigwes situation
as a black middle-class author in the European literary field should not be
conflated with the position of the four fictional Nigerian women working
in the sex industry, I wish to contend that parallels can be drawn between
them in the ways in which their agency is established in the performance of
certain cultural configurations which have seized hegemonic hold.

BECOMING ABLACK WRITER INFLANDERS

In Becoming Black in Seven Lessons, Unigwe contends that one is not
born black or African, one becomes black or African in Europe. She
urges her readers to get rid of any hang-ups you might have about Africa
being a continent. It is a country, and so when people ask if you speak
African, or eat African, do not get all worked up trying to explain how a
homogenous Africa only exists in a lazy imagination.3 Coming to Europe,
Unigwe implies, means entering a social imaginary, a discursive space
where subjects are already imagined, constructed and treated as African
by hegemonic discourses. The act of being recognised as such becomes
an act of identity formation. Being perceived as black African animates
one into existence, constitutes one within a possible circuit of recogni-
tion, within the terms of language; only here does ones social existence
become possible. Becoming Black in Seven Lessons, then, sees black
identity as a form of discipline, as a set of norms, narratives and everyday
performative roles and acts. It is what you do at particular times rather
than who you are.
Unigwes ideas about blackness as a social construction resonate force-
fully with postcolonial and critical race theories, with which scholars have
not only uncovered the colonial roots of western perceptions of black
 BECOMING BLACK INBELGIUM 259

Africa as Europes ultimate other, but also sought for multiple ways to
resist these perceptions. When Frantz Fanon enters the white world of
Europe and discovers himself as a black man with an inferiority com-
plex, his socio-psychoanalytical commentary concludes that one is black
to the degree to which one is being perceived as wicked, spineless, evil,
and instinctual. Everything that is the opposite of this black behaviour is
white.4 Becoming Black in Seven Lessons transposes Fanons insights to
the twenty-first-century predicament of blackness in the heart of Europe
and, as a consequence, suggests that these insights are still actual.
At the same time, however, Unigwes contemporary focus also involves
a translation to a new European context, specifically to Flanders, the
Dutch speaking region of Belgium. In so doing, she brings to mind Stuart
Halls contention that if blackness is something constructed, told, spo-
ken, not simply [] found, it can be pluck[ed] out of its articulation and
rearticulate[d] in a new way, thereby creating new processes of identifica-
tion.5 Following Hall, we need to consider the particular socio-cultural
context in which constructions of blackness are narrated and by means of
which these stories can subsequently be told anew. The specific context
of Unigwes writings is a Flemish literary culture whose lack of ethnic
minority writers was (and still is) perceived as problematic, as an absence
in need of clarification. In framing the absence of ethnic minority authors
as a problem, interlocutors have projected onto this desired category of
author their own ideas about the nature of Flemish society and about what
Flemish literature should be. Indeed, in a newspaper article entitled Wij
spreken pas als jullie luisteren (We Only Speak when You Listen, 2004),
Moroccan-Flemish writer Jamila Amadou argues that ethnic minority
writers have been absent from the Flemish literary field since they reject
the only position in the field available for an allochtonous writer: namely,
that of spokesperson for his or her ethno-cultural community.6
Published in 2005, Unigwes first novel for adults, De Feniks (The
Phoenix, 2005), was announced as the first book of fiction written by a
Flemish author of African origin.7 The reception of De Fenix indicated
not only that Chika Unigwe was eagerly awaited as a Flemish author of
African origin, but also that a range of expectations was already circulating
among reviewers about the content of such an authors work. For example,
reviewers clearly wanted her fiction to deliver a new Nigerian perspec-
tive. In his review of De Fenix, Flemish literary critic Marc Cloostermans
complained that the Nigerian protagonist Oge did not have a particularly
interesting view of our country []. To draw our attention to these kinds
260 S. DE MUL

of banalities, we really did not need a Nigerian writer.8 Unigwe has not
overtly criticised such culturalist readings of her work, which may seem
surprising in light of her satirical Becoming Black in Seven Lessons. While
the article suggests Unigwes acute awareness of commonplace ideas of
blackness affecting her life and (as we may also assume) her writing in a
European society like Flanders, her modes of self-representation in meta-
literary textssuch as interviews and book blurbsdo not clearly counter
or question these ideas. This distinguishes her from other ethnic minority
writers in Flanders, such as the Moroccan-born Rachida Lamrabet and
Hafid Bouazza, who vehemently refute ethnic or cultural labels and refer-
ences to allochthony that distinguish them and possibly exclude them
from imaginations of what home-grown Flemish literature is and should
be in the future.9
For an understanding of Unigwes authorial self-representation, it
seems useful to build on the notion of strategic exoticism as put forward
in the studies by Graham Huggan and Sarah Brouillette of the intersec-
tions between postcolonialism and the global literary market place.10 In
The Postcolonial Exotic (2001), Huggan defines a global alterity industry
in which cultural difference is processed through exoticism, a mode of
aesthetic perception [that] effectively manufactures otherness even as it
claims to surrender its immanent mystery.11 For Huggan, the most notice-
able feature of writing by authors such as Salman Rushdie and Arundhati
Roy is the way in which they balance their ostensibly anti-colonial politics
with their commercial viability as globally successful postcolonial novelists,
a balance that suggests their work is designed as much as to challenge as
to profit from consumer needs.12 Sarah Brouillette critiques Huggans
notion of strategic exoticism for implicitly distinguishing between those
consumers who seek [] mythic access to exotic experience and those
who actually have access to the reality that the other consumer can only
ever wish to possess.13 Brouillette convincingly argues that it is more
fruitful to understand strategic exoticism, and likewise general postcolo-
nial authorial self-consciousness, as comprised of a set of literary strate-
gies that operate through assumptions shared between the author and
the reader, as both producer and consumer work to negotiate with, if not
absolve themselves of, postcolonialitys touristic guilt.14
Similarly, one may assume that while being confronted with the expec-
tations and limitations of the position of ethnic minority writer in Europe,
Unigwe strategically acts out the exoticism to which she and her work
are relegated. This position allows her to launch her work and partake
 BECOMING BLACK INBELGIUM 261

successfully in a transnational literary system that transcends the local-

ised Flemish literary field. The African suffix to her self-label as a Flemish
author may not make Unigwes entry into the canon of Flemish literature
easier, but there is also no reason to believe that this is something to
which Unigwe aspires, since her English-language writings and transla-
tions transcend the localised book market in Flanders and the Netherlands
and circulate in a transnational field of African diasporic writing. In so
doing, Unigwes fiction illustrates Rebecca Walkowitzs argument that the
literature of migration reflects a shift from nation-based paradigms to
new ways of understanding community and belonging and to transna-
tional models emphasizing a global space of ongoing travel and inter-
connection.15 Unigwe, then, participates as an ethnic minority writer in
the Flemish literary circuit but is also able to move beyond this small
and localised literary market, perhaps more easily than any other Flemish
writer, using this mobility as a springboard into an Anglophone African
diasporic literary field which enjoys a much broader, not to say global,
readership.

BECOMING BLACK INANTWERPS RED-LIGHT DISTRICT

In what follows, I explore how Unigwes On Black Sisters Street desta-
bilises homogenous definitions of African diasporic womanhood. More
specifically, playing with conventions of postcolonial autobiography and
the short story cycle, On Black Sisters Street renders an account of how
four African sex workers in the city of Antwerp strategically relate to exoti-
cist definitions of African womanhood that are central to the sex industry,
while simultaneously conveying the ways in which their personal histories
surmount these definitions.
The novel recounts how four women desperately seek to escape their
miserable living conditions in Africa and respond to the lure of a bet-
ter life in Europe. Sisi is an ambitious university student unable to find
suitable work; Efe is a teenage single mother struggling to raise her son
without support from his father; Ama has escaped an abusive childhood
only to find her dream of escaping Nigeria crushed by a dead-end job; and
Joyce, without family, home or money, is abandoned by her boyfriend.
In a house on Antwerps Zwartezusterstraat (Black Sisters Street), the
women share their lives under the watchful eyes of Madam and her menac-
ing assistant Segun. However, as illegal workers in Belgium, the women
hide their true names and family histories even from each other. It is only
262 S. DE MUL

when Sisi tries to escape the world of prostitution and is murdered that
Ama, Efe and Joyce work through her death by gradually revealing their
painful histories to each other and to the reader.
Composed of fictional autobiographies of the four women, On Black
Sisters Street invites us to consider the continued relevance of autobi-
ography as a central explanatory category in understanding postcolonial-
ism and its relation to subjectivity. The latter exercise has been the focus
of a series of recent studies that examine autobiographys philosophical
resistance to universal concepts and theories and that explore its intersec-
tions with the postcolonial enterprise of rethinking norms of experience
and knowledge.16 On Black Sisters Street firmly situates the life narratives
of the four African women within todays geopolitical power relations.
These narratives include tragic episodes of poverty, war, sexual abuse and
families torn apart in their home countries, which made them vulnerable
to a global womens trafficking network run by Oga Dele. On arrival in
Belgium, however, they soon find out that they have escaped their cir-
cumstances for a mirageor fata morgana, to use the Dutch title of
the noveland their dreams of a better and wealthier life in Europe are
shattered. That the novel draws on life writing to portray the experiences
and memories of the protagonists may not seem entirely unexpected. In
their reinterpretation of Fanons Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin,
White Masks, 1952) as an autobiographical narrative, C.L.Innes and Bart
Moore-Gilbert suggest that, for Fanon, the autobiographical mode has
partly emanated from a colonial oppression that obliges colonised subjects
to ask the question constantly Who am I?.17 From this perspective, it
is not surprising that On Black Sisters Street also deploys the (fictional)
autobiographical mode to recount the four womens deprived circum-
stances. Specifically, the novel offers a dreary portrayal of the submerged
world of illegal prostitution in the red-light district of Antwerp. It suggests
the descent into disorientation and denial of worth that the protagonists
face, a recurring theme in many autobiographical works by postcolonial
women.18 Employed as sex workers, the protagonists must pay back in
monthly instalments to Dele the fee of 30,000 euros, the cost of their
exportation to Belgium. With their fake passports withheld by Madam
and living under her close surveillance, the four women are almost liter-
ally imprisoned in the house in the red-light district and also objectified in
the position of black sex workers satisfying white mens sexual desires. As
Dele tells Efe, black women [are] in great demand by white men, tired
 BECOMING BLACK INBELGIUM 263

of their women and wanting a bit of colour and spice.19 Primarily, the
women are socially constructed through exotic, sexualised codes of black
womanhood.
On Black Sisters Street centres on the experiences and voices of the
women, who are usually observed from the outside, as sexual spectacles
sitting under red spotlights behind the windows of the Schipperskwartier
of Antwerp. At first sight, the novel offers the reader a voyeuristic glance
into these womens lives, and seems to draw from the kind of tragic sen-
sationalism with which recent accounts of victimised Muslim women have
allowed western readers a supposed peek behind the veil.20 Although
lengthy scenes describe how the women are confronted by all sorts of
deprivation, violence and abuse both in Nigeria and in Belgium, the nov-
els aim is not to deplore the miserable fate of black sex workers who are
victims of Deles womens trafficking network and of the male-dominated
western sex industry. Rendering her account of the journey to Belgium,
Ama says: I made this choice, at least, I was given a choice. I came here
with my eyes wide open (114). Indeed, the novel shows how the four
women are not victims but agents in a transnational world, making strate-
gic choices that are restricted by circumstance.
If they want to be successful as sex workers, the women are to abide by
gendered and racialised norms and codes of behaviour. On Black Sisters
Street is not so much an account of four African sex workers than an
exploration of how they become black sex workers. A depiction of Joyces
working costume is indicative of their transformation: Blue bra sprinkled
with glitter and a matching G-string, boots up to her thighs, she stood
behind the glass and prayed that no one would notice her (234). The
novel clearly suggests the constructed nature of black sexualised woman-
hood by describing how the four women dress up and act out the role that
is expected of them. If it is true, as Eva Pendelton argues, that sex work is
drag in that it is a mimetic performance of highly charged feminine gender
codes (to which we may also add racial codes), then the novel portrays
the four protagonists in the process of performing these highly charged
exoticist codes of black femininity.21
It is worth considering at this point whether Brouillettes notion of stra-
tegic exoticism is not only illuminating for Unigwes authorial position in
the Flemish literary field but also for how her novel relates the African
diasporic sex workers position in the Antwerp sex industry. The four pro-
tagonists cannot generally be seen to change or subvert the normative
264 S. DE MUL

scripts they must follow; until Sisis failed attempt to escape at the end of
the novel, the women almost conscientiously behave as Madam and others
tell them to. The disruptive potential, however, resides not in the wom-
ens rewriting of the codes of black sex workers, but in the narration of
how they act out these codes. Unigwe juxtaposes scenes of the womens
performance as black sex workers with self-reflexive passages which, by
explicating their doubts, uncertainty, embarrassment or feelings of free-
dom in the role, show the women to take an emotional and critical dis-
tance from their job. Unigwe describes what goes on in the minds of the
women as they try their best to please the men who approach them. In so
doing, their work is revealed to the reader as a strategic lie. For example,
Joyce piously scrubs the make-up off her face on the request of a regular
customer who calls her Etiennes Nubian princess (234). She is ready
to change the script and to change costume, as it were, whenever this is
desired. Yet her ultimate goal is not to satisfy white mens desire, but to
achieve economic purpose and upward social mobility. In the words of
Ama: the men she slept with were [] just tools she needed to achieve
her dream. And her dream was expansive enough to accommodate all of
them (169).
The constructed, performative dimensions of black female sex workers
identity may suggest an illusion of a behind where the women act out
their real, core selves. However, we are soon made aware that, in their
daily lives, the womens identities also consist of a series of provisional
narratives. More specifically, On Black Sisters Street inherently connects
the issue of storytelling to constructions of black womanhood. Narrating
their histories to each otherlife writing being a formal way to under-
score the narrative dimension of identitythe women change their stories
about themselves in response to their rapidly changing circumstances. For
example, Sisi and Joyce have changed their names from Chrisom and Alek,
Sisi reveals herself to be Sudanese, not Nigerian as she has made everyone
in the house believe, and Joyce refers to the UN refugee camp she lived in
for a while as a collection of sad stories (194). On arrival in Belgium, Sisi
is determined to shed her skin like a snake and emerge completely new
(98). Madam invents the story of an escape from Liberia that Sisi must
tell about herself in the immigration office. Reiterating one of Unigwes
points in Becoming Black in Seven Lessons, Madam adds that [w]hite
people enjoy sob stories. They love to hear about us killing each other,
about us hacking each others heads off in senseless ethnic conflicts. The
more macabre the story the better (121). After Sisi agrees to be Liberian,
 BECOMING BLACK INBELGIUM 265

we are told that in the next months she would be other things. Other
people. A constant yearning to escape herself would take over her life
(121). While the performance of sexualised definitions of black woman-
hood is central to the four womens lives in Europe, their personal and
family histories emphasise their identities as a series of narratives invented
strategically to suit the circumstances.
On Black Sisters Street complicates and refutes unilateral defini-
tions of black womanhood, which in the words of the Nigerian author
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie are vulnerable to the danger of a single
story, suggesting that if we hear only a single account of another person
or country we risk a critical misunderstanding.22 To borrow a phrase from
Paul Gilroy, Unigwes concept of identity also embraces contingency,
indeterminacy and conflict.23 The novel deploys a range of genres and
narrative techniques which refute the static and single-sided ideas about
female blackness with which the four women are confronted during their
work in the red-light district. Not only are elements of the coming-of-
age novel and the Bildungsroman evident in their stories, but aspects of
the detective novel are incorporated in the whodunit surrounding Sisis
death, features of travel writing appear in Sisis jaunts about Antwerp
disguised as a tourist and magical realism characterises Sisis flight from
her body after death to visit her parents and to curse Deles family. On
Black Sisters Street integrates and interweaves these generic traditions in
a composite form, refusing to prioritise a single authorial voice or to pres-
ent a teleological journey of a single protagonist. As suggested above, it
could be seen as a fictional autobiography, or rather as a series of fictional
autobiographies, as it focuses on not one but several interspersed life
narratives. Its form could also be described as a particular type of short
story cycle, a narrative of community, in Sandra A. Zagarells sense
of the term.24 Zagarell advances a theory of a womens genre that, in
its textual ethos and subject matter, privileges community over self and
shows a concern with process rather than with the conflict or progress
found in linear narrative. Though Zagarells focus is on nineteenth-cen-
tury womens short story cycles, her insights are relevant to twentieth-
century narratives of community which may be inspired most strongly
by writers own racial, ethnic, class, and or cultural traditions, and the
changing roles of gender.25 Zagarells view of the short story cycle rever-
berates in unexpected ways with the relationality of subjectivity that
Moore-Gilbert identifies as one of postcolonial autobiographys central
features.26
266 S. DE MUL

Reading On Black Sisters Street as a narrative of community reveals

how the novel structurally resonates with circular movements of migra-
tion rather than with linear-chronological notions of progress and plot
development. The chapters entitled Zwartezusterstraat, which render an
account of events that occur in the present and that are geographically
situated in the city of Antwerp, are interwoven with chapters focusing
on the individual life stories of the women, which bring into view their
separate, idiosyncratic pasts and futures. Eventually, Ama and Joyce return
to Nigeria and Efe stays in Belgian prostitution (although moves up the
social scale by employing African women). Sisis ghost leaves her body and
also travels back to Nigeria. Just as their individual stories follow an ongo-
ing movement back and forth between Nigeria and Belgium, so the basic
storyline prioritises circularity by ending where it began, with an account
of Sisis death.
Additionally, Innes argues that postcolonial autobiographical writing
often plays a significant role in establishing the subjects sense of location
and belonging.27 In the case of On Black Sisters Street, it is through the
structure of the short story cycle that a community of women is instan-
tiated, one which is composed through the focus on individual autobi-
ographical experiences. The fragmented life stories of the four women
are narrated in the first person, which is interspersed by the third-person
narrative of Sisis migration to Europe and the events leading up to her
death. The movement between individual stories, set in divergent geogra-
phies and dissimilar timelines, creates a weaving effect that rejects essen-
tialist notions of black female identity, while simultaneously insisting on a
commonality of experience. As Unigwe writes, [t]heir different thoughts
sometimes converge and meet in the present, causing them to share the
same fear. But when they think about their past, they have different mem-
ories (40). On Black Sisters Street is a polyphonic collage of individual
stories creating a mosaic that reflects the multidimensional mobility of
African migrant women.
Furthermore, the women living together in the African microcosm of
the house on Zwartezusterstraat are supposed to share Nigeria as their
place of origin, but they are not bound by anything except their situation
in the present. As we come to know their individual life stories, we gradu-
ally learn that these women have had very different lives and would not
come into contact in normal circumstances. The women share no sense
of belonging or commonality based on their national or cultural back-
ground. When, at a party, a South African man addresses Ama as his sister,
 BECOMING BLACK INBELGIUM 267

she vehemently replies that she is not his sister and turns her back on him.
The rejection of family ties is suggestive both for Ama and for the mutual
relationships among the four protagonists. Though they share the same
house, their conceptions of home and family are not defined in national or
cultural terms. The house, a spatial metaphor for the four black womens
community in Europe, is a place of conflict that offers no true sense of
belonging: it is a cold place without a heart(h), the conventional symbol
of the beating heart of the home, the fireplace, proving fake (32).
In earlier sections of the novel, the women know little about each other
and feelings of hostility and suspicion prevent them from developing inti-
mate relations. They shroud their histories in ambiguity or keep them
covered: They were strangers without words between them, given to
maintaining the silence which has [] become the community they share
(115, 39). In the course of narrating their histories to each other, how-
ever, they develop a sense of belonging in each others company. Through
the intimacies of storytelling, the women discover their communal bond
and shared predicament, which gradually ignite a sense of home. Indeed,
it is the act of storytelling that constitutes the womens community in the
house, which in the penultimate section is described like a family home:

The communal kitchen and the shared living room bound the women. They
met there when they yearned for company but could always retire to their
rooms for some privacy. It was where they could escape the glare of the
Schipperskwartier, live a life that did not include strange men with some-
times stranger requests. (273)

It is Efe who initiates camaraderie among the women through storytelling

in the wake of Sisis death, because in grief she feels an affinity with these
women in a way she has never done before (41). Her history involves pain-
ful memories of a pregnancy at the age of sixteen, when she was laughed at
by the neighbouring women in Lagos and excluded from the community.
The status of outcast, combined with her mothers premature death and
her fathers aloofness from family intimacy, ruptured the sense of safety
and belonging that are conventionally associated with notions of home.
In a similar vein, Joyce, whose family is brutally murdered and whose
lover severs their relationship to appease his own family, recognises that
the women in the house on Zwartezusterstraat were the only family she
had (235). In the face of the already pronounced social role of the exotic,
sexualised black woman that constitutes their becoming in Belgium, the
268 S. DE MUL

protagonists of On Black Sisters Street negotiate not only a diverse, nar-

rative sense of selfhood but also a black womens community which does
not depend on ethnic origins, cultural descent, gender or geographical or
national affiliations, but rather on an empathy and understanding which
develop through listening to each others distinctive histories and personal
memories.

CONCLUSION
In this essay, I have explored how social constructions of blackness affect
and inform the authorial self-representations and textual thematics of
the Nigerian-Belgian writer Chika Unigwe. It has been shown that insti-
tutionally endorsed ethno-cultural ideas of authorship shape notions of
Unigwes literary identity and affect the ways in which her oeuvre is read.
Although it may be argued that taking up the role of black author in the
heart of Europe is a form of strategic exoticism, the role does not entirely
define or confine Unigwe, considering that she deploys it to launch her
work and participate in a global literary system of African diaspora writ-
ing, while transcending the exoticised position of ethnic minority writer
available to her in the Flemish literary field. Unigwes writings are indeed
written, printed, translated and read not only in Flanders and Europe but
in multiple places throughout the world, indicating our growing need to
adopt a more transnational perspective if we are to accommodate the sev-
eral communities in which cultural products are nowadays produced and
received and in which various authorial positions can be asserted.
In the light of this latter point, On Black Sisters Street is not only a tale
of choices and displacement set against the backdrop of prostitution in
Antwerp, but also reveals itself to be a book that theorises its own cultural
mobility. While the four protagonists enter a social imaginary in which
they perform the already pronounced role of the exotic black woman,
the novel situates their performance in the larger context of their indi-
vidual biographies, suggesting it is but one of many strategic narratives
they choose to narrate about themselves. Similarly, On Black Sisters Street
exposes how black womanhood in Europe is not merely about taking
up the role of the exotic sexualised black woman of popular European
perception, but also, and perhaps more importantly, about how women
across the limits of cultures and social forces of power and domination
improvise and find spaces to re-describe themselves while creating their
transnational worlds anew.28
 BECOMING BLACK INBELGIUM 269

NOTES
1. Unigwes article is also digitally available as How to be an African, albeit
in revised form (see Unigwe, How to be an African, African Writing
Online, http://www.african-writing.com/nine/chikaunigwe.htm (accessed
29 March 2013).
2. Unigwe, Zwart worden in zeven lessen, MO: Mondiaal Nieuws, 11
February 2010, http://www.mo.be/opinie/zwart-worden-zeven-lessen
(accessed 29 March 2013). This and all further translations are my own.
3. Unigwe, How to be an African.
4. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p.169.
5. Hall, Minimal Selves, in Lisa Appignanesi, ed., Identify: The Real Me
(London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1987), p.45.
6. Amadou, Wij spreken pas als jullie luisteren, De Standaard, 13 October
2004, http://www.standaard.be/cnt/g339ete9 (accessed 21 September
2015).
7. This description appears on the back cover of On Black Sisters Street. Before
making her appearance on the Flemish-Belgian literary scene in 2005, Chika
Unigwe had already successfully debuted with English-language publica-
tions in Nigeria and Britain. Her poetry was published in Nigeria in the early
1990s, her short stories won the 2003 BBC Short Story Competition and a
Commonwealth Short Story Award and were published in Wasafiri and a
number of anthologies of contemporary African writing and she wrote the
two childrens books, A Rainbow for Dinner (2003) and Ije at School
(2003). After her debut in Belgium, Unigwe has continued to publish short
stories, essays and translations and editions of her writings in both Dutch
and English.
8. Cloostermans, As en confetti: Grote emoties bij Chika Unigwe, De
Standaard, 22 September 2005, http://www.standaard.be/cnt/gpai4d5b
(accessed 21 September 2015).
9. Lamrabet has elaborated her views in interview: see, for example, Erwin Jans,
Schrijven al seen vorm van archief, De Wereldmorgen, 12 December 2014,
http://www.dewereldmorgen.be/artikel/2014/12/12/schrijven-als-een-
vorm-van-archief (accessed 21 September 2015). For Bouazzas views, see
Bouazza, Een beer in bontjas (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2004), p.19.
10. On strategic exoticism in New African Writing such as Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichies Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Ahmadou Kouroumas Allah nest pas
oblig (Allah Is Not Obliged, 2000), see Akin Adesokan, New African
Writing and the Question of Audience, Research in African Literatures,
Vol. 43, No. 3 (2012), pp.120.
11. Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London:
Routledge, 2001), p.13.
270 S. DE MUL

12. Ibid., p. xi.

13. Brouillette, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (London:
Palgrave, 2007), p.19.
14. Ibid., p.7.
15. Walkowitz, The Location of Literature: The Transnational Book and the
Migrant Writer, Contemporary Literature, Vol. 47, No. 4 (2006), p.533.
16. See, for example, Alfred Hornung and Ernstpeter Ruhe, eds, Postcolonialisme
and Autobiographie (1998), Gillian Whitlock, Soft Weapons: Autobiography
in Transit (2007), C.L.Innes, The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial
Literatures in English (2007), David Huddart, Postcolonial Theory and
Autobiography (2008) and Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Life-Writing
(2009).
17. Innes, The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 58. See also Bart
Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics, and Self-
Representation (London: Routledge, 2009), p. xxiv.
18. See Innes, Cambridge Introduction, p.58.
19. Unigwe, On Black Sisters Street (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009), p. 84.
Further page references will be given in the text.
20. See Gillian Whitlock, The Skin of the Burqa: Recent Life Narratives from
Afghanistan, Biography, Vol. 28, No. 1 (2005), pp.5476.
21. Pendelton, Love for Sale: Queering Heterosexuality, in Jill Nagle, ed.,
Whores and Other Feminists (New York: Routledge, 1997), p.183.
22. Adichie, The Danger of a Single Story (2009), TED, http://www.ted.com/
talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_ danger_of_a_single_story.html (accessed 17
September 2015).
23. Quoted in Linda Anderson, Autobiography (London: Routledge, 2001),
p.108.
24. Zagarell, Narrative of Community: The Identification of a Genre, Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 13, No. 3 (1988), p.499. See
also Roxanne Harde, ed., Narratives of Community: Womens Short Story
Sequences (2007).
25. Zagarell, Narrative of Community, p.527.
26. Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Life-Writing, p. xx.
27. Innes, Cambridge Introduction, p.64.
28. This essay is a shortened version of an earlier publication: Sarah de Mul,
Becoming Black in Belgium: The Social Construction of Blackness in Chika
Unigwes Authorial Self-Representation and On Black Sisters Street, The
Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. 49, No. 1 (2014), pp.1127.
 16

Undivided Waters: Spatial andTranslational

Paradoxes inEmine Sevgi zdamars The
Bridge oftheGolden Horn

GizemArslan

Relations between Turkey and western Europe have long been marked
by mutual wariness, even as western powers sought Turkish allegiance
in periods of war and Turks looked west in their modernisation efforts.
Shortly after the French Revolution, Ottoman rulers like Sultan Selim III
and Mahmut II sought to modernise the empires civil service, military,
education and civic life along western lines. After World War One, these
reforms found their radical potential in the administration of Mustafa
Kemal Atatrk, the founder of modern Turkey. For decades, however, the
fledgling Republic of Turkey remained isolationist. Even today, after the
end of political and economic isolationism and in the wake of long-term
partnerships with the West, Turkey is still considered Europes Muslim,
eastern other. This might explain Brusselss frosty reception of Turkeys
first application to join the European Community, submitted by Prime
Minister Turgut zal in 1987. Despite the Customs Union agreement

G. Arslan ( )
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures (MCM 208), The Catholic
University of America, 620 Michigan Ave., N.E., Washington, DC 20064, USA

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 271

A. Hammond (ed.), The Novel and Europe,
DOI10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4_16
272 G. ARSLAN

(1996) and the official start of European Union accession talks (2005),
both Turkey and Europe remain ambivalent as the longest EU acces-
sion process drags on. The Turkish public and politicians identify, at
least partly, as European and profess a commitment to joining the club
of EU states, but they also bristle at statements by former and present
EU leaders (particularly Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel) and by reli-
gious leaders (notably Pope Benedict) about the irreconcilability of Islam
with European values, about the peripheral or even un-European status of
Turkey and, in recent years, about Turkeys rapprochements with Middle
Eastern states, especially Iran. The question of how European Turkey is
still lacks a satisfactory answer.
On the other hand, post-1945 transnational labour migration from
Turkey constitutes one of the most significant points of intersection
between Turkish and European histories of labour, capital and culture.
Migration has had transformative effects on Germanand by extension
Europeanlife and letters, and could impel us to pose the converse ques-
tion: how Turkish is Europe? Originally, Turkish guest-workers came to
Germany on short-term contracts after the two nations signed a labour
contract in 1961. Since then, labour migration has constituted Germanys
primary route into the more heterogeneous demographic and cultural
landscape we now often describe as New Europe.1 After similar contracts
were signed with the Netherlands, Belgium and Austria in 1964, with
France in 1965 and with Sweden in 1967, labour migration gradually
gave rise to the formation of a new type of membership in European
nation states.2 The German citizenship laws of 2000 granted citizenship
rights to long-term legal residents and to their children born in Germany,
and by 2013 some 20.5 per cent of the German population had a migra-
tion background.3 The fact that France, another key EU state, has an
immigrant population of 5.6 million, a figure that does not include natu-
ralised French citizens, offers some indication of the demographic changes
taking place across Europe as a whole.4
In the literary realm, authors of Turkish heritage have garnered varying
degrees of popularity and acclaim in western European letters with works
that directly or obliquely thematise migration. Important examples from
Belgium, France and the Netherlands are Mustafa Krs De lammeren (The
Lambs, 2007), Keniz Mourads Le jardin de Badalpour (The Garden
of Badalpour, 1998), Sevtap Baycls De nachtmerrie van de allochtoon
(The Nightmares of Immigrants, 1999) and Halil Grs Gekke Mustafa
(Mad Mustafa, 1984).5 The biggest and oldest literary scene, however, is
 UNDIVIDED WATERS 273

enjoyed by Turkish-German authors, who have won increasing national

and international recognition, especially since the 1990s. Gney Dal, Aras
ren, Zafer enocak and many others have demonstrated that Germanys
(and Europes) transformations are not only social-historical.6 These lit-
eratures reveal cultural phenomena that prove even more convoluted than
political relations. To give one example, the title of Zafer enocaks essay
collection, Atlas des tropischen Deutschland (Atlas of a Tropical Germany,
1992), humorously suggests that when something tropical comes to reside
in its borders, Germany itself becomes tropical. In this tropical Germany,
the entrenched categories that define political relations and public dis-
course in Turkey-Europe relationsinside and outside, centre and periph-
ery, self and otherare not as clear as one might think. Instead, enocak
points to shared histories, common literary archives and sites of contact
and encounter between Turks and Germans.7 He shares this focus with
numerous Turkish-German authors, one of the most prominent of which
is Emine Sevgi zdamar.
zdamar, who became a major literary figure in the 1990s, is also
among the most widely acclaimed authors of German letters. Her numer-
ous achievements include the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for emerging
authors (1991), the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize for authors of non-
German-speaking heritage (1999) and the Kleist Prize for lesser known
authors of exceptional promise (2004). She first entered Germany as a
factory worker in the mid-1960s and, after returning to Istanbul for the-
atrical training, came back to Germany in 1976 to gain employment in the
theatre, working extensively in East Berlin and Bochum as a theatre and
film actress, dramaturge, director and playwright. In her fiction and plays,
she has deliberately chosen German as her sole literary language, but her
writing is predominantly multilingual in orientation, featuring surprising
and humorous products of interlingual misunderstanding and literal trans-
lation, mostly between Turkish and German.8
This essay investigates the literary interventions of zdamars Die
Brcke vom Goldenen Horn (The Bridge of the Golden Horn, 1998) in
conceptualising and contextualising translation and fluidity in European
and global contexts. The novel is the second in a semi-autobiographical
three-novel series called Berlin Trilogy (19922003), which treats the
themes of identity, migration and political resistance during a period of
momentous social and political upheaval in Turkey and western Europe
alike.9 This second instalment spans the years 1966 to 1975 and consists
of two parts: Der beleidigte Bahnhof (The Offended Station) and Die
274 G. ARSLAN

Brcke vom Goldenen Horn (The Bridge of the Golden Horn). In the
first section, the unnamed Turkish narrator arrives in West Berlin as a
migrant worker and, while living in a women workers hostel, encounters
the political and cultural upheavals that took place in the Federal Republic
in the 1960s. The second part is set in Istanbul and in Turkeys southeast-
ern provinces. Turning to revolutionary ideology and practice, the narrator
witnesses, reports on and takes part in the student and labour movements
of the 1960s and 1970s, and eventually returns to Berlin to work as an
actress. The transnational dimensions of the novel are political, social, lit-
erary and linguistic. Politically and socially, the novel portrays the Cold
Wars ideological divisions from the narrators and zdamars leftist per-
spectives. For instance, the narrator observes the aftermaths of the deaths
of Vedat Demirciolu (in Istanbul) and Benno Ohnesorg (in Berlin), and
experiences the intellectual atmospheres of the Cinmathque in Istanbul
and of the womens hostel in Berlin under the mentorship of a communist
director.10 In the background are world events, such as the intervention
of the Soviet Army in Prague, the murder of Martin Luther King and the
death of Francisco Franco. On a literary level, the novel continually draws
on an international archive that primarily consists of texts and authors
committed to Marxist, communist and socialist ideals: these include
Friedrich Engelss Der Ursprung der Familie, des Privateigentums und des
Staats (The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1884),
Maxim Gorkis Mat (The Mother, 19067) and Lenins Gosudarstvo i
revoliutsiia (State and Revolution, 1918), as well as the work of Bertolt
Brecht, Federico Garca Lorca and Nzm Hikmet Ran. zdamers inter-
nationalist range of reference is also sustained linguistically. The Bridge of
the Golden Horn engages in multilingual language play, mostly involving
literal translation of proper names into titles or epithets, the elision or
reformation of German words in the everyday speech of migrants and
the narrators reversion to onomatopoeia or borrowed headlines from
German newspapers in everyday conversations in Germany and Turkey.
Existing scholarship on the novel addresses the transnational and mul-
tilingual dimensions of zdamars treatment of language, as well as the
authors concern with transnational histories of migration and political
resistance. Scholarship has also included discussions of zdamars con-
struction of cultural space, her challenges to dominant discourses about
migrant Muslim women, her critical contributions to public discourse
on the 1968 generation and her approaches to cultural translation and
memory work.11 A considerable number of these analyses pivot around
 UNDIVIDED WATERS 275

the concept of hybridity as the structuring principle of the literatures and

cultures of migration. However, as demonstrated by recent scholarship,
the concept of hybridity does not account for the literature of migration
as a historical formation, is a weak antidote to the pathology ascribed to
migrants between two cultures and cannot sufficiently resist the exotici-
sation and eroticisation of hybrid cultural material.12 Indeed, The Bridge
of the Golden Horn resists the trope of betweenness, telling of migrant
experience with liveliness and humour while ascribing pathology to politi-
cal life in nation-states. This is true of zdamars portrait of the continu-
ing ethnocentrism present in German society, as captured in a newspaper
headline: A German cabinet minister has said, if every German worked an
hour longer each week, Germany doesnt need any guest workers.13 The
pathology is also found in the Turkish republic, particularly in its internali-
sation of Eurocentric discourse. The narrator introduces this via the words
of a family friend, who claims that while [t]he Europeans are progressive,
we are dragging our feet and always taking one step forward and two steps
back.14 In certain circles in Istanbul, to have visited western Europe is to
rise in the social hierarchy and to have European knowledge is to achieve
a form of social power. Indeed, as the narrator views it, Europe was a club
with which we smashed each others heads:

European aspirin cured heart disease. With European cloth one could tell
from a distance of forty yards that it was good. European shoes never wore
out. European dogs had all studied at European dog schools. European
women were natural blonds. European cars didnt cause any accidents.15

Rather than fashioning hybrid cultural material, the novel often appears
much more invested in an internationaland apparently universalliter-
ary, philosophical and political archive of socialist and communist writings
that offer alternatives to national and continental parochialisms.
Nevertheless, the specificity of the novels historical, geographic and
literary references contrasts with its insistence on sites of transience as its
loci of action, the topic on which this essay will focus. The novel devel-
ops this tension into a literary project that treats transitional spaces like
bridges and railway stations paradoxically: as multinomial sites of dwelling,
translation and criss-crossing histories on the one hand, and as nameless
sites of deletion on the other. In this way, zdamar develops a literary
language adequate to addressing questions of translation and mobility in
the context of migration, Europeanisation and globalisation. The Bridge of
276 G. ARSLAN

the Golden Horn offers a model of multidirectionality and fluidity (of lan-
guages, spaces, histories, peoples) that does not obliterate human agency
or historical and geographic specificity. Instead, dislocation and translation
games in the novel produce environments in which borders and transi-
tional spaces no longer divide, exclude or exile, but become scenes of
spirited literary play. These spaces invite new critical engagement with sites
of enabling, opening and contact in flexible yet specific ways, while at the
same time destabilising familiar notions of centre and periphery, inside and
outside, self and other.
zdamars recasting of urban locations challenges and subverts influ-
ential conceptual frameworks for understanding spaces of transience. One
such framework is proposed by Marc Aug, whose work theorises two of
the primary realities constituting human space: the ends towards which it
is formed and the relations individuals have with it.16 In particular, Aug is
concerned with non-places, that is, with spaces such as airports, motor-
ways, shopping malls and train, bus and gas stations, which are formed in
relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure) and which
do not create identity or relation, only solitude, and similitude.17 In his
reflections on urbanity and literature, Ottmar Ette engages with much of
Augs thesis while illustrating that the place/non-place distinction may
not hold for zdamars writing. Instead, Ette offers the term transareal
spaces, designating spaces as created by the movements that criss-cross
them.18 Ette sees the transareality of zdamars prose as culturally and
historically specific, composed of [w]ords beneath words, places beneath
places, movements beneath movements, [] cities beneath cities.19 While
Ette astutely observes zdamars challenges to distinctions between place
and non-place, however, he does not sufficiently address two key elements
of her treatment of urban space. Firstly, Ettes critical language does not
capture zdamars own careful distinctions between various locations in
the urban context (streets, apartments, the Bosphorus, the S-Bahn), even
as she challenges those distinctions. Secondly, while Ettes concept of tran-
sareal space addresses the palimpsestic quality of urban portraiture in the
Berlin Trilogy, it fails to acknowledge that zdamars approach to inter-
stitial space is not only accumulative, but also paradoxical: accumulation
and deletion coexist, as when characters walk the same route forwards
and backwards, both retracing their steps and rewinding their movements.
In short, the full complexity of The Bridge of the Golden Horn, with its
manifold tensions between fluid, multidirectional and multilayered spaces
and identities, is not fully elucidated.
 UNDIVIDED WATERS 277

As Ines Theilen astutely observes, the novels very choice of cafes, rail-
way stations and bridges as its loci of action suggest that zdamar resists
fixity in identity and language.20 More specifically, one of the authors pri-
mary modes of literary resistance is to move through languages and mean-
ing by means of translational strategies, drawing on the vocabulary of both
Turkish and German and using translation between them to problematise
linguistic and cultural fixity, as often happens in the novel to place names
and character names. In her incisive examination of literal translation in
zdamar, Yasemin Yildiz identifies her strategy as a mode of translation
that stays (too) close to the wording of the original, privileging individual
words over other aspects of the text, such as overall meaning, function,
or rhythm.21 The Bridge of the Golden Horn contains various instances of
literal translation (particularly of proper nouns) and mispronunciations
of expressions and names, as well as of Turkish onomatopoeia rendered
in German. One example of direct translation of proper nouns involves
the narrators friend Melek, a name that means angel in Turkish. Instead
of referring to her as Melek, the narrator translates the name directly
into its German equivalent, Engel, and refers to her as Engel through-
out. Relatedly, elisions and shifts of German proper nouns constitute one
of the most humorous elements in the novel. The workers pronounce a
factory managers name, Herr Schering, as Sherin or Sher; when they
add the word Herr to Sher, the managers name becomes Herscher,
intimating the German word Herrscher, meaning ruler.22 Onomatopoeia
makes frequent appearances, especially early in the novel. In the narrators
first days in Berlin, she and her fellow workers act out the groceries for
which they do not know the German word:

In order to describe sugar, we mimed coffee-drinking to a sales assistant,

then we said shak shak. In order to describe salt, we spat on [the] floor and
said: Eeeh. In order to describe eggs, we turned our backs to the assis-
tant, wiggled our backsides and said: Clack, clack, clack. [] So my first
German words were shak, shak, eeeh, clack, clack, clack.23

This mockery of normal linguistic process also occurs when the narra-
tor reads and repeats newspaper headlines in everyday conversation. For
example, when someone asks her, [w]hy do you make so much noise
when you walk?, she answers with a German headline, [w]hen household
goods become used goods, thus disrupting the protocols of everyday
communication.24
278 G. ARSLAN

The two prime sites where The Bridge of the Golden Horn introduces
language play, and negotiates the multilayered linguistic and cultural
tensions such play represents, are Anhalter Railway Station and The
Bridge of the Golden Horn, after which the two parts of the novel are
named. Anhalter Railway Station, to begin with, is a dominant feature
of the narrators cityscape. Once Germanys primary gateway to des-
tinations in the south, but heavily damaged during the Second World
War, the station is now no more than a battered wall and a project-
ing front section with three gateways.25 The narrators term for these
broken remains, the offended station, is a selective translation of one
of the meanings of the Turkish word krlm, meaning both broken
and offended. The translation is therefore both literal and figura-
tive. Moreover, this is a move in which names are made to accumulate
but are also simultaneously voided. An influentialalbeit not uncon-
testedtheory of proper nouns is the no-sense theory, according to
which such nouns simply stand for objects, without having any sense or
meaning other than standing for objects.26 That is to say, proper nouns
are void. To give one example of how zdamar draws attention to this,
she refers to the character Yamur (the Turkish for rain) as Regen
(the German for rain), and as a consequence she evacuates the mean-
ing of the proper noun and renders it descriptive.27 Because the noun
now refers to a generalised meaning (not just the person Yamur, but
to rain in a universal sense), its claim to designating a unique person is
undermined.
zdamars approach to proper nouns and transitional locations, how-
ever, not only voids space and expression, but also layers and populates
them. In one scene, for instance, the narrator walks with several of the
hostels youngest female migrant workers through the three entryways of
the Anhalter Railway Station. There on the ground of the offended sta-
tion, the narrator tells us, we lost sense of time. Every morning this dead
station had woken up, people had been walking there who were no longer
there.28 As she continues:

When the three of us walked there, it was as if my life had already been lived.
We went through a hole, walked to the end of the plot of land without
speaking. Then, without saying anything to one another, we walked back-
wards to the hole that once had perhaps been the door of the offended sta-
tion. And as we walked backwards we loudly blew out our breath. [] Then
we went back to the street again, I looked behind me to see the remainder
of our breath still in the air behind the door space.29
 UNDIVIDED WATERS 279

Anhalter Railway Station is a point of continual return and movement

for the narrator and her companions. In addition to being a non-place
by Auges definition, the station signals non-existence and lack via the
absence of its once-expansive structure. In zdamars treatment, however,
the narrators experiences in the station are not marked by absence, loss or
solitude: she is with other companions to whom she has grown close and,
rather than having a contractual relationship to the space, she has one of
personal connection, even intimacy. As an extension of this, when she and
her companions pass by the telephone booths at the front of the station,
they speak loudly as though our parents in Turkey could hear us.30 By
Ettes definition, this is one of zdamars transareal spaces, where people
and personal histories criss-cross one another and gesture towards the
co-presence and co-dependence of multiple geographies. However, the
station is the site not only of accumulative transnational movement, but
also of corporeal and temporal deletion. The narrator advances through
the ruin with her fellow workers, yet also walks backwards, as though
rewinding the film of her movements. It is this double, paradoxical gesture
that captures zdamars spatial and translational poetics in The Bridge of
the Golden Horn. The narrators mobility and translational play in this
scene acknowledge the necessity of traversing multiple worlds (life-death,
Berlin-Istanbul, East-West, Germany-Turkey) in a space defined by the
layers of movement that criss-cross it. Yet, paradoxically, she voids the
space and the movement it contains, and in doing so she resists their sta-
bility, originariness and mutual exclusivity.
Layering, voiding and movement are not limited to Berlin but extended
to Istanbul and to broader transnational contours across Europe. In
another country (Turkey) and in another space (The Bridge of the Golden
Horn), transnational histories of political resistance and their attendant
literary archives are also shown to converge. As part of this, zdamar
again shifts from proper nouns to epithets and ensures that the bridges
name is simultaneously multiple and void, as with that of the offended
station. There are in fact five bridges that connect the two sides of the
Golden Horn in Istanbul and none of these structures is officially called
The Bridge of the Golden Horn. The bridge on which the narrator is
possibly standing in various scenes is the Hali Bridge, the most iconic
of the five, which was itself rebuilt five times. Therefore, the title of the
novel could refer to one bridge, to many or to none at all. Alongside its
loss of literal signification, the bridge also resists instrumentalisation for
passage from one clearly demarcated space to another. The Golden Horn
280 G. ARSLAN

separated the Byzantine Empire and the Ottoman Empire in the early fif-
teenth century, and was one of the most important sites of the siege that
yielded Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453. Although it separated
western and eastern empires, making [t]he Asian side and the European
side in Istanbul [] two different countries, as zdamar writes, the
Golden Horn does not separate Europe and Asia today, but rather the old
city from newer districts, with zdamars bridge being said in the novel
to link the two European parts of Istanbul.31 As Elizabeth Boa observes,
the bridge over the Golden Horn evokes European heterogeneity at the
heart of a city which is now a centre of Islamic culture. The choice of
the bridge rather than the ferry avoids an orientalist binary opposition of
Europe against Asia. Cultures do not provide monolithic, static pillars to
support bridges.32
The text highlights this feature of the bridge by drawing attention to
the arbitrariness and the politics of geographical division, in that it simul-
taneously recalls East-West conflict and foregrounds water and air, two
classical elements particularly unamenable to division in the natural world,
but all too susceptible to it in the political world. Political and historical
heterogeneity manifest themselves on the personal level as well, with the
emphasis placed on the bridge challenging customary conceptions of the
foreign and familiar, for characters as much as for nations and cultures.33
These literary strategies can all be observed in one key scene on the bridge,
in which the narrator replies to a postcard from her Spanish lover Jordi
with lines from a poem by Federico Garca Lorca:

On a card I wrote two lines by LorcaGreen, as I love you, greenly. /

Green the wind, and green the branchesand threw it into the sea
with Jordis address. The sea would take it to him. Jordis card made me
so happy that I got electric shocks when I touched an object. I walked
across the Bridge of the Golden Horn, at that moment it was raining,
and I thought: Jordi, out of the sky, which we sometimes gave our love
to bear, love is raining on the shirts of the poor men on the Golden
Bridge.34

Of particular significance to this love story is the choice of Lorcas liter-

ary language. The Lorca poem cited in the card, Romance sonmbulo
(Sleepwalking Ballad, 1928), is ostensibly about lost love and despera-
tion, but it is also read by some as an expression of frustration at the
events surrounding the Spanish Civil War. Fought between the socialists
loyal to the Spanish Republic and General Francos nationalists, the war
 UNDIVIDED WATERS 281

can be said to have claimed Lorcas life when nationalist soldiers mur-
dered him in August 1936 for his socialist connections. Historically, the
personal and political experiences referenced in Lorcas poem foreshadow
the transnational student movements described in zdamars novel,
while also offering the text a suggestive framing device: the Spanish Civil
War both precedes the events in the novel and concludes them, since the
novel ends with Francos death. The figures of Lorca and Jordi share one
important feature with that of the bridge, which is their disruption of
East-West binaries. By incorporating the Spanish literary and historical
archives of resistance, the novel refuses the reductive binary of Turkey-
Germany by expanding it into a triad that encompasses another section of
Europe. As mentioned, the novel additionally highlights its resistance to
divisions and binaries in its reference to air and water. Like many scenes
in the second part of the novel, this one takes place on or above the bod-
ies of water surrounding Istanbul, with the air that is to carry the narra-
tors and Jordis love and the water that rains and flows under the bridge
being suggestive of the currents that connect the two lovers across the
continent.
zdamars redeployment of transitional spaces has broad implica-
tions for discourses on globalisation and for literatures of migration in
the European context. Her literary work calls for a critical language that
draws more precise contours around two interrelated terms that circu-
late widely in discourses on globalisation: translation and flow. The
latter is arguably one of globalisations prime metaphors and is often
linked to the former, another prominent term that is increasingly meta-
phorised in the study of literature and culture.35 Arjun Appadurai, one
of the leading theorists in the field, coined the term global cultural
flows to address the fluid, irregular shapes of the landscapes associ-
ated with globalisation.36 Although Mary Louise Pratt also observes
that modernity has permuted into globalisation, and the idea of dif-
fusion from a centre has been replaced by the idea of flow, she has
several important objections to the term.37 She observes that flow
does not sufficiently distinguish between different kinds of movement
(for instance, between movements of migrant labourers and tourists),
and also that it bypasses the question of the directionality of the move-
ment of cultural products. Moreover, flow makes it easy to ignore the
state policies, transnational arrangements, and structured institutions
that create these possibilities and impossibilities of movement, while
also obliterating human agency and intentionality, suggesting instead
282 G. ARSLAN

a natural, gravity-driven process.38 Joo Duarte links Appadurais and

Pratts observations about flow to translation and observes that, in
numerous areas of study, the latter term is increasingly employed to
account for all kinds of social and cultural processes involving transfers,
shifts, exchanges, negotiations and dislocations. Translation has indeed
become a kind of catchword.39
In this context, zdamars literary language offers a fluidity that
is not directionless and gravitational, but multidirectional, and that
remains specific about its vectors. In The Bridge of the Golden Horn and
elsewhere, her translational sensibility, drawing very consciously on lit-
erary and historical archives, develops paradoxes that can be used for
negotiating translation and movement in the global context: specifically,
non-places that are in fact places and the co-presence of criss-crossing
and deletion, features seen in her treatment of movement, namelessness
and multinomiality as simultaneous catalysts of translation and mobil-
ity. Moreover, zdamars literary language claims roles for transitional
spaces that subtly challenge the entrenched notions of self and other,
centre and periphery, border and territory which circulate in Europe
and further afield. These challenges are not isolated but are shared with
other works by first-generation Turkish-German authors, such as Gney
Dal and Aras ren, by a newer generation of authors such as Feridun
Zaimolu and Zehra rak, and by Turkish authors that treat transna-
tional themes and have a broad international readership, notably Orhan
Pamuk in such texts as Kar (Snow, 2002) and stanbul: Hatralar ve
ehir (Istanbul: Memories and the City, 2003). The bridges and railway
stations of zdamars novel become sites where the purported unity
of languages and territories (Turkey, Germany, Europe, East, West)
are disarticulated. In her essay Against Between: A Manifesto (2003),
Leslie Adelson calls for critical work, particularly in literary scholar-
ship, that heeds the beckoning of sites of enabling, opening, contact
and encounter. She holds that the trope of betweenness often func-
tions literally like a reservation designed to contain, restrain, and impede
new knowledge, not enable it.40 In zdamars work, transitional spaces
do not mark borders and are not instrumentalised for passage between
disparate worlds, but become sites of productive translation play and
multidirectional movement in the transnational context. As such, they
impel us to linger in and ponder on the hyphen in self-other, East-West,
Turkish-European.
 UNDIVIDED WATERS 283

NOTES
1. Rita Chin, The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), p.6.
2. Ayhan Kaya and Ayegl Kayaolu, Is National Citizenship Withering
Away?: Social Affiliations and Labor Market Integration of Turkish-Origin
Immigrants in Germany and France, German Studies Review, Vol. 35, No.
1 (2012), p.116.
3. Anon, Population, Key Figures, Statistisches Bundesamt, https://www.
destatis.de/EN/FactsFigures/SocietyState/Population/Migration/Tables_/
lrbev07.html?cms_gtp=150354_list%253D2&https=1 (accessed 21 April
2015).
4. Anon, volution de la part des populations trangres et immigres
jusquen 2012, Insee (Institut national de statistique et des tudes
conomiques), http://www.insee.fr/fr/themes/tableau.asp?reg_id=0&ref_
id=NATTEF02131 (accessed 21 July 2015).
5. See Liesbeth Minnaard, Between Exoticism and Silence: A Comparison of
First Generation Migrant Writing in Germany and the Netherlands,
Arcadia: International Journal for Literary Studies, Vol. 46, No. 1 (2011),
pp. 199208; Graeme Dunphy, Migrant, Emigrant, Immigrant: Recent
Developments in Turkish-Dutch Literature, Neophilologus, Vol. 85, No. 1
(2001), pp. 123; and Sarah de Mul, The Netherlands Is Doing Well.
Allochtoon Writing Talent Is Blossoming There: Defining Flemish
Literature, Desiring Allochtoon Writing, in Elleke Boehmer and de Mul,
eds, The Postcolonial Low Countries: Literature, Colonialism, and
Multiculturalism (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012), pp.12346.
6. See Dals Wenn Ali die Glocken luten hrt (When Ali Hears the Bells Toll,
1979), rens Eine versptete Abrechnung (A Belated Settling of Accounts,
1988) and enocaks Gefhrliche Verwandschaft (Perilous Kinship, 1998).
7. See Leslie A. Adelson, Coordinates of Orientation: An Introduction, in
Zafer enocak, Atlas of a Tropical Germany: Essays on Politics and Culture,
19901998, trans. and edited by Leslie A.Adelson (1992; Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2000), pp. xxii-xxvi.
8. The only exception to zdamars preference for German-language publica-
tion is a collection in Turkish consisting of letters exchanged with the
Turkish poet Ece Ayhan and the diary zdamar kept while accompanying
him during his medical treatment in Switzerland: see Ayhan and zdamar,
Kendi Kendinin Terzisi Bir Kambur: Ece Ayhanl Anlar, 1974 Zrih
Gnl, Ece Ayhann Mektuplar (2007).
9. The first novel of the trilogy is Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei, hat zwei
Tren, aus einer kam ich rein, aus der anderen ging ich raus (Life is a
Caravanserai, Has Two Doors, I Came in One, I Went out the Other, 1992).
284 G. ARSLAN

Told from the perspective of a young unnamed Turkish woman, it describes

her life from childhood to early adulthood and culminates in her leaving
Turkey for Germany. The Bridge of the Golden Horn and Seltsame Sterne star-
ren zur Erde (Strange Stars Stare to Earth, 2003) are also told from a first-
person perspective by a narrator that bears striking similarities with zdamar
and who may or may not be the same woman as in Life is a Caravanserai.
The final novel, Strange Stars Stare to Earth tells the story of a young woman
named Sevgi who comes to East Berlin in 1976 to work at the Peoples
Theatre under the director Benno Besson, an estranged proteg of the poet
and playwright Bertolt Brecht.
10. Vedat Demirciolu was a student at Istanbul Technical University who, in
July 1968, fell out of the window of his university dormitory when police
cracked down on anti-American student protests at the university. He soon
died of the injuries sustained in the fall. Benno Ohnesorg was a student in
West Berlin who died of a police gunshot wound during a crackdown on
student protests against the visit of the Shah of Iran in June 1967. Both
deaths set off new waves of protests and contributed to the radicalisation of
the student movements in Turkey and Germany respectively.
11. For an analysis of one or other of these issues, see Karin Lornsen, The City
as Stage of Transgression: Performance, Picaresque Reminiscences, and
Linguistic Incongruity in Emine S. zdamars The Bridge of the Golden
Horn, Amsterdamer Beitrge zur neueren Germanistik, Vol. 70, No. 1
(2009), pp.20117; Anil Kaputanoglu, Hinfahren und Zurckdenken: Zur
Konstruktion kultureller Zwischenrume in der trkisch-deutschen
Gegenwartsliteratur (2010); Beverly M.Weber, Work, Sex, and Socialism:
Reading beyond Cultural Hybridity in Emine Sevgi zdamars Die Brcke
Vom Goldenen Horn, German Life & Letters, Vol. 63, No. 1 (2010),
pp.3753; Susanne Rinner, The German Student Movement and the Literary
Imagination: Transnational Memories of Protest and Dissent (2013); Ernest
Schonfield, 1968 and Transnational History in Emine Sevgi zdamars Die
Brcke Vom Goldenen Horn, German Life & Letters, Vol. 68, No. 1 (2015),
pp.6687; and Monika Shafi, Talkin Bout My Generation: Memories of
1968 in Recent German Novels, German Life & Letters, Vol. 59, No. 2
(2006), 20137.
12. See Leslie A.Adelson, The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature:
Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005), pp. 10, 8890; Claus Leggewie, Hybridkulturen,
Merkur, Vol. 54 (2000), p.882; and Umut Erel, Grenzberschreitungen
und kulturelle Mischformen als antirassistischer Widerstand?, in Cathy
Gelbin, Kader Konuk and Peggy Piesche, eds, AufBrche: Kulturelle
Produktionen von Migrantinnen, schwarzen und jdischen Frauen in
Deutschland (Knigstein: U.Helmer, 1999), pp.17294.
 UNDIVIDED WATERS 285

13. zdamar, The Bridge of the Golden Horn, trans. by Martin Chalmers (1998;
London: Serpents Tail, 2007), p.53.
14. Ibid., p.78.
15. Ibid., p.193.
16. Aug, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans.
by John Howe (1992; NewYork: Verso, 1995), p.94.
17. Ibid., pp.94, 103.
18. Ette, Urbanity and LiteratureCities as Transareal Spaces of Movement in
Assia Djebar, Emine Sevgi zdamar and Ccile Wajsbrot, European Review,
Vol. 19, No. 3 (2011), p.367.
19. Ibid., p.375.
20. Theilen, Von der nationalen zur globalen Literatur: Eine Lese-Bewegung
durch die Romane Die Brcke vom Goldenen Horn von Emine Sevgi
zdamar und Caf Nostalgia von Zo Valds, Arcadia, Vol. 40, No. 2
(2005), p.321.
21. Yildiz, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2012), pp.1434. One example of a literal
translation can be found in the scene when the narrators father asks her,
My child, why are you sitting there as if all your ships have sunk?, which
is an approximate literal translation of the Turkish expression, Karadenizde
gemilerin mi batt? (Have your ships sunk in the Black Sea?), typically used
to ask people if they are upset about something (zdamar, Bridge, p.134).
22. zdamar, Bridge, p.7.
23. Ibid., p.9.
24. Ibid., p.3.
25. Ibid., p.17.
26. Anon, Proper Names and Descriptions, in Paul Edwards, ed., The
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan, 1972), p.487.
27. zdamar, Bridge, p.29.
28. Ibid., p.17.
29. Ibid., p.17.
30. Ibid., p.17.
31. Ibid., pp.171, 142.
32. Boa, zdamars Autobiographical Fictions: Trans-National Identity and
Literary Form, German Life & Letters, Vol. 59, No. 4 (2006), p.534.
33. See Theilen, Von der nationalen zur globalen Literatur, pp.3245; and
Azade Seyhan, From Istanbul to Berlin, German Politics & Society, Vol. 23,
No. 1 (2005), pp.1612.
34. zdamar, Bridge, pp.1767.
35. See Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 367; Doris
Bachmann-Medick, Introduction: The Translational Turn, Translation
286 G. ARSLAN

Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2008), pp.23; and Joo Ferreira Duarte, The Trials of
Translation: From Global Cultural Flow to Domestic Relocation, Journal of
Romance Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2011), pp.516.
36. Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p.33.
37. Pratt, Reflections on Modernity and Globality, in Helena Carvalho
Buescu and Joo Ferreira Duarte, eds, Representaes do real na moderni-
dade (Lisbon: Edies Colibri, 2003), p.70.
38. Ibid., pp.71, 73.
39. Duarte, Trials of Translation, p.52.
40. Adelson, Against Between: A Manifesto, New Perspectives on Turkey, Vol.
29 (2003), p.21.
 17

Amara Lakhouss Divorce Islamic Style:

Muslim Connections inEuropean Culture

DanieleComberiati

INTRODUCTION: OVERLAPPING HISTORIES

When Divorzio allislamica a viale Marconi (Divorce Islamic Style, 2010)
hit the bookstores in Italy, its author, the Algeria-born Italian Amara
Lakhous, was no longer an unknown. He first stepped into the limelight
when he won the Flaiano and Sciascia literary prizes for his previous novel,
Scontro di civilt per un ascensore a Piazza Vittorio (Clash of Civilizations
Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio, 2006). This was the book that intro-
duced Italian-language migrant literature to a wide readership (although it
should be remembered that this genre had existed for more than 15 years
before Lakhous won recognition).1 The earlier novel met with considerable
public success and was translated into several foreign languages, includ-
ing English, French, Spanish and Arabic, a rare achievement for a young
writer in Italy. Enthusiastically mixing high and low culture, Lakhous
succeeded in creating a distinctive voice by blending a popular dialectal
Italian, replete with local idioms and slang expressions, with a host of quo-
tations from the world of cinema, his debt to neorealism and the Italian

D. Comberiati ( )
Department of Italian Studies, University of Montpellier, 34100, Montpellier,
France

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 287

A. Hammond (ed.), The Novel and Europe,
DOI10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4_17
288 D. COMBERIATI

comedic film tradition being evident even in the title of his later book, a
take on Pietro Germis Divorzio allitaliana (1961). This essay will look in
detail at Divorce Islamic Style, particularly at the novels central themes: the
interaction of migrant and non-migrant populations after 9/11 and the
construction of the Muslim community as a threat to Europe. By way of a
general introduction, however, I would like to highlight its keen observa-
tions on the relationship between European culture and Islam.
Operating through the perspective of two first-person narrators, the
novel alludes to the early Islamic presence in Europe and explores the con-
tribution of Arab culture to the formation and development of European
identity. Christian Mazzari, one of the narrators, hails from the town of
Mazara del Vallo, which has a complex history of departures and home-
comings. Founded by the Arabs, the town was the point of origin of the
dominion of Islam over Sicily, which lasted from 827 to the fall of Noto
in 1091, and like nearby Marsala (whose Italian name comes from the
Arab Marsa Allah, or port of Allah) it boasts a perfectly preserved old
medina.2 Its subsequent decline was due to the departure of many Italians
or Arab-Italians for Tunisia as a result of an agricultural crisis at the end of
the nineteenth century. Indeed, Mazzaris parents are Sicilian immigrants
from Trapani who settled in Tunisia and later returned to Mazara del
Vallo, a typical migratory path for Sicilians at that time. By 1900, Tunisia
had one of the largest and most developed Italian emigrant communities,
overshadowing even Libya; while only 300 Italians lived in Tripoli, some
27,000 lived in Tunis, which was developing into a flourishing commerical
port that occupied a strategic position on the Mediterranean. Over the last
30 years, Mazara del Vallo has again become a destination for immigration
from Tunisia as a new Arab fishing community is returning to the land of
its forebears, thus repopulating the medina. As Mazzari recalls of his child-
hood, I grew up with the children of the Tunisian fisherman [and] was
often taken for one of them: I had typically Mediterranean feaures and I
spoke Tunisian Arabic well.3
The town therefore works as a symbol not only of migration, but also
of the variegated ethnic composition that results, crystallising Italys posi-
tion as a crossroads where the major cultures of the Mediterranean have
converged for centuries. It was during the Middle Ages that about half
the population of Mazara del Vallo decided to convert to Islam (mostly
for economic reasons, since the non-Muslim subjects, the dhimmi,
were subjected to a much higher tax) and also that Sicily experienced a
great revival of art and culture. By returning to this historical moment,
 AMARA LAKHOUSS DIVORCE ISLAMIC STYLE 289

Lakhouss explicit intention is to overturn the stereotype of Islam as

closed and inimical to progress and cultural exchange. Indeed, in more
northerly Italian regions, trade with the Islamic world made a significant
contribution to the development of such major urban centres as Venice,
Florence, Lucca, Genoa and Bologna. Moreover, the book reminds us
that in Europe as a whole Muslim communities were fundamental to the
building of a European identity from the Early to Late Middle Ages. For
example, the Balkans contained established Muslim populations (mainly
in Albania, but also in Mostar and Sarajevo, where they coexisted with the
Jewish population), as did Andalusia, which was to become the focal point
of the Spanish reconquista that culminated in 1492, when, among other
things, the community of Sephardic Jews, unhappy at the prospect of liv-
ing in Christianised lands, decided to settle in the Near and Middle East
between Morocco and Syria.4 In works such as Islam in Europe (2003),
Jack Goody has detailed the routes of Islam into the continent, following
the Ottomans through Greece and the Balkans and the Mongols through
southern Russia to Poland and Lithuania. Many of these invaders were
forced to withdraw, Goody concludes, but not before they had contrib-
uted significantly to the revival of Europe through the exchange of goods
and knowledge.5 Since the Age of Crusades, Europe had also benefitted
from the contact with Arabic cultures taking place in the Middle East. As
John M. Hobson remarks, at the very time when the Europeans were
engaged in military confrontation with Islam, they not only continued
trading with the Muslims but were avidly borrowing a wealth of Islamic
ideas, technologies and institutions that propelled Europe forward.6

DECONSTRUCTING THEWAR ONTERROR

Through its historical allusions, Lakhouss novel indirectly invites us to
reflect upon the Islamic contributions of the past, but it does so without
losing sight of its primary theme, namely the relationship between Arabic-
Muslim culture and Italian identity as experienced and understood today.
Divorce Islamic Style is a whimsical and at times heart-breaking look at
the Muslim immigrants who work in pizza kitchens and live in communal
apartments near Viale Marconi, a crowded, commercial part of Rome that
tourists rarely see. The neighbourhood has typified some of the demo-
graphic changes taking place in Italian cities in recent times. During the
1990s, immigrants on the lowest rung of the social ladder took up resi-
dence in outlying urban areas, finding accommodation in council houses
290 D. COMBERIATI

or in abandoned and dilapidated buildings. In northern Italy and then in

the centre-south, the urban landscape underwent a sudden and exten-
sive transformation as many of the original inhabitants responded to the
arrival of the newcomers by transferring to more modern or more cen-
trally located districts. This left room for the new ethnic communities to
expand and create market niches in which they could survive economi-
cally, bringing with them the ways and customs of their countries of ori-
gin, much as happened with the Little Italys and Chinatowns around the
world. Nevertheless, tensions with the majority population remained. As
Manuela Coppola comments, while in other European countries the leg-
acy of colonialism and the recent global migratory flows have contributed
to the redefinition of national subjectivities, only in recent years has Italy
started confronting [] the consequences of global mass migration.7
It is hard to find the lighter side of the marginalisation and ghettoisa-
tion that has resulted but, as its title suggests, Divorce Islamic Style does so
by scaling these themes down to the size of two ordinary people, Mazzari
and Sofia, who cross paths in ways that can verge on the comical. With
their tales told in alternating first-person narratives, the novel unfolds like
a duet, one in which the singers are in different sound booths and are
unaware of when and how their voices overlap. On the one hand, Mazzari
is an Italian citizen fluent in Tunisian Arabic, a knowledge reinforced
by studying Oriental languages at the University of Palermo, where he
defended his thesis on Garibaldis presence in Tunisia. Due to his dual
knowledge of Italian and Tunisian cultures, Mazzari is recruited by the
Italian secret service to infiltrate a suspected Islamic terrorist cell based
in a call centre known as Little Cairo, working undercover as a Tunisian
immigrant named Issa. Although his brief in Operation Little Cairo is
to spy on the Muslim community, he proves better at making friends than
at finding incriminating information, spending much of his time asking
his handlers to help impoverished migrants with their visa troubles. On
the other hand, the Egyptian-born Sofia is a 27-year-old language gradu-
ate married to an Egyptian architect now working in Rome as a pizza
maker. Theirs is an arranged marriage, which Sofia had accepted because
it allowed her to leave Egypt, but with her husband, a devout Muslim,
demanding she wear the veil and refrain from work, life in Italy remains
difficult. Despite the dissimilar social positions of the two narrators, they
are united in their contempt for the notion that the Islamic Diaspora,
apparently beyond other immigrations, [is] challenging the project of cre-
ating a cohesive Europe.8
 AMARA LAKHOUSS DIVORCE ISLAMIC STYLE 291

In the first part of the novel, when the threat of an Islamist attack on
Rome seems urgent, Mazzari is led to suppose that his role in Operation
Little Cairo is essential for averting disaster. As a CIA operative remarks
on the terrorists supposed aim, [a]ttacking the American Embassy in
Rome means humiliating not only the U.S.A. but also Italy, the European
Union, and the Vatican (53). In these early sections, the writer alludes to
all the mediatised images and linguistic constructions of the war on ter-
ror: the discursive overlap between migrants and terrorists, the notion of
Muslims as the radicalised enemy within and the sacred alliance between
Europe and the USA in the name of a hypothetical western world (22).
Nevertheless, two passages raise doubts about Operation Little Cairo by
drawing attention to historical errors made by the Italian and US secret
services. The first, the so-called Abu Omar case, took place in Milan in
2003, when CIA agents seized the eponymous imam, a refugee suspected
of having links to international terrorism (141). After he was interned
and tortured in an American military base in Aviano, an investigation by
Italian judges not only found the imam innocent but also charged the CIA
with violating Italian sovereignty. The second is a cautionary tale told to
Mazzari by one of his handlers, a Captain Judas, who wants to encourage
his unit not to make amateurish mistakes (35). It involves three Egyptian
migrants in Anzio who, in 2002, were suspected of planning attacks on
several locations around Italy. The trial, however, soon turns into farce:

what was the connection of the three accused men with Islamic terror-
ism? Only the testimony of a neighbour, an old man who stated that, while
going up the stairs, he had heard one of them utter the name of bin Laden!
In April, 2004, the Court of Assizes acquitted the three Egyptians of the
charge of international terrorism, because no crime was committed. (36)

The misguided nature of much of the intelligence work, and the media-
tised images it produces, becomes fundamental both to the construction
of the plot and to the poetics of the narration.9 As in Clash of Civilizations,
the author creates and merges two apparently self-contained worlds in his
text: the world of reality and the world of fiction. If film is for Lakhous
a central source of inspiration, in Divorce Islamic Style his references to the
history of cinema (Italian as well as American) also function textually as a
device for highlighting the fictionality of the war on terror. In an early
reflection on his work, Mazzari/Issa uses images drawn from the cinema,
talking about his need to get into character and linking espionage to
292 D. COMBERIATI

a role in a film (while also insisting that I have no intention of playing

James Bond or Donnie BrascoI dont have the physique for it (13, 14,
14)). Operation Little Cairo is in fact a sort of parallel reality where truth
and fiction are superimposed: as we discover at the end of the novel, the
operation has been entirely stage-managed in order to test Mazzaris fidel-
ity and to gauge whether he can be used in future missions. The revelation
extends the realm of the fake to the simulated operation of the Italian
secret service and the simulated rage of Captain Judas each time Mazzari
steps outside the fiction and introduces some element of fact. During a
break from analysing Al Qaedas Web threats against Italy, for example,
Mazzari asks the Captain for a residency permit for a Moroccan friend and
is chastised for losing focus on the job at hand (78). What sort of request
is that, Tunisian? the Captain rages: Have you forgotten the goal of your
mission? [] Instead of uncovering terrorists youre turning into a social
worker. Congratulations! (78).
In the following pages, Lakhous expands on the theme of roleplay by
introducing the self-reflexive technique of mise-en-abyme to elucidate the
plot. This appears when Captain Judas, outlining for Mazzari the cunning
of the terrorists, claims that they follow the practice of taqiyya. As Mazzari
explains in an aside, this is

a doctrine followed by certain Shiite sects that exhorts its adherents to

hide their beliefs in order to avoid being persecuted. Luckily the courses
in Islamic studies I took at the University of Palermo were good for some-
thing. Its a shitty doctrine. Should we be suspicious of everyone? Judge
intention rather than facts? And how the fuck do you know? (139)

In reality the entire plot is a maze of hidden and constructed identities.

None are as they seem: Issa is Mazzari, Captain Judas is Captain Tassarotti,
the Egyptian owner of Little Cairo resemble[s] the legendary John
Belushi and the reputed terrorists are simply immigrant workers whose
most radical act is to discuss whether it [is] right to export democracy to
the Arab world by means of tanks (15, 44). In his narrative, Mazzari is
initially a witness, as he is the only one who knows the background motives
of the other characters, but increasingly becomes a cultural mediator and
commentator, reflecting continuously on the many facets of immigration
which the majority population fails to understand. For example, the cam-
ouflage that many of the immigrant characters have assumed in order to
integrate into the new country has no links to terrorism, and the tragic
potential of the clash of civilisations turns quickly into farce (an oblique
 AMARA LAKHOUSS DIVORCE ISLAMIC STYLE 293

echo of Divorzio allitaliana and its treatment of honour killings, which

were only criminalised in Italy in 1983). On this subject, the final scene
of the book, where Mazzari is asked to decide whether to continue in the
secret service, is illuminating: youd better be quick, Tunisian. Were in
the middle of the War on Terror, a colleague tells him, getting the exas-
perated answer, War on Terror? Dont be ridiculous! (184).

VIALE MARCONI ASHYBRID SPACE

Other writers, such as Monica Ali of Britain, Yad Kara of Germany and
Kader Abdolah of the Netherlands, have dealt with the theme of metro-
politan multi-ethnicity in Europe, a theme also touched upon by Daniel
Pennacs Monsieur Malaussne (1995) in the context of France.10 But one
of the original qualities of Lakhouss book is that it does not limit its
account to a single multicultural district (which, in the form of Piazza
Vittorio, was a feature of his previous novel). Rather, the narrative roams
across the entire city, showing how migrant experience is not confined to
specific ghettos, which may risk stereotype, but has seeped into the very
identity of Rome. Viale Marconi is a major artery connecting more or
less the centre of Rome with its outskirts, stretching from the Egyptian
Pyramid on the edge of the historical part of the city, through a section
of Testaccio to the Church of St Paul outside the walls. Unlike the Brick
Lane of Alis London or the Kreuzberg district of Karas Berlin, the street
name does not immediately cause the reader (even if she or he is from
the capital) to think of a specific neighbourhood. The author, then, is
courageously resisting the stereotype by choosing a less well known and
less commercially successful district. As a consequence, the use of Viale
Marconi is an adroit narrative move that resolves, or reduces, the ten-
sion between the centre and the periphery. Neither at the heart nor at
the edge of the metropolis, it can absorb new immigrants and turn them
into Romans through a re-imagining of their identity and place in the city,
while also forging a link between Romes past and future. The sense of
Viale Marconi as a symbol of spatial and temporal connection is clear on
the walks that Mazzari takes around the area:

I stroll around aimlessly for a good hour and a half, back and forth along
Piazza della Radio and the Marconi Bridge. [] There are all types: young
Africans and Asians selling counterfeit goods on the sidewalks, Arab children
walking with father and veiled mother, Gypsy women in long skirts begging.
In other words, Im in the Italy of the future, as the sociologists say! (14)
294 D. COMBERIATI

In his choice of setting, therefore, Lakhous not only consciously repudi-

ates the ghettoisation of migrant literature but also rejects trite represen-
tations of the Muslim community in Italy. Indeed, the residents of Viale
Marconi demonstrate both a peaceful coexistence that does not threaten
insurgence against the municipal authorities, a trope so often found in
books of this genre, and a commitment to European economic life, their
aim having been to come here to Italy to work, not to rest (51). In short,
to enter the neighbourhood is merely to discover another part of Rome;
the city, as well as the characters of the novel, has multiple identities and
multiple souls.
This hybridity is most obviously found in Mazzari/Issa, an Italian and
European attempting to hide [his] Italianness and to live life as a non-
European (67, 34). His position between cultures is indicated by his two
names, revealing a past in Tunisia and a present in Italy, as well as by
the meaning of the name Issa (Jesus in Arabic). It is also indicated by
his increasing shift in language usage from Italian to the Tunisian Arabic
demanded by his work in Little Cairo.11 In a sense, the hero of Divorce
Islamic Style can be read as a kind of personification of the novels linguis-
tic itinerary. It is not by chance that, in this novel, the author should have
used a linguistic strategy radically different to his previous work: whereas
in Clash of Civilizations Lakhous started out by writing in Arabic before
rewriting and publishing the text in Italian, here he started in Italian and
only afterwards completed the Arabic version. Alongside its merger of the
two languages, the text is also notable for its diverse use of Italian vernacu-
lars. Almost all of the Italian characters demonstrate a linguistic attach-
ment to their regional origins: the manager of a Piazza Vittorio bar, for
example, considers himself more Roman than Italian, while a Neapolitan
concierge is constantly breaking into her local dialect. As this articulates,
Italian identity is far from monolithic but is made up of conflicts and con-
trasts, not only between migrant and non-migrant populations but also
between the speakers of local/dialectal language and the national/offi-
cial one. Although this contributes to a new, broader definition of what
being Italian means, language still marks and channels forms of power.
For example, Mazzari comments on how his landlady tries to intimidate
me linguistically with her Roman dialect, insisting on a historical link with
Rome that the Sicilian Mazzari evidently lacks (47). But the communities
of migrant people also reveal a tendency to construct hierarchies based
on knowledge of the Italian language. For example, while Sofia has been
so proficient in teaching herself Italian that she is often mistaken for an
 AMARA LAKHOUSS DIVORCE ISLAMIC STYLE 295

Italian who has converted to Islam, her husband is a real disaster: like
many Egyptians he cant pronounce p. A b is dragged into his place
(81). In this case, the increasing distance between Sofia and her husband
is partly a linguistic distance, aggravated by the fact that correct Italian
offers an opportunity to integrate more fully into national life.12

THE TREATMENT OFMUSLIM WOMEN

As the two first-person narratives reveal, the textual emphasis on the
hybridity of Italian society is a direct attack on racial and cultural essen-
tialism. Lakhous succeeds in showing how migrant identity, composed
of such features as social class, ethnic origin, profession, gender and
nationality, has a complexity far removed from the stereotypes created in
the West. Exemplifying the cultural hierarchies that persist in the new
Europe is Grandfather Giovanni, a character that represents the typi-
cal Italian racist, enraged about all southern people, including Sicilians,
Africans and Middle Easterners, but also about East Europeans (I hope
I die before Romania enters the European Union, he says at one point)
(87). If Mazzaris undercover work unearths anything it is that whiteness
and migration are cultural and ideological constructions used to main-
tain social privilege. Accordingly, he makes a caustic reference to first-
class non-Europeans (Americans and Canadians), who experience none
of the unemployment, off-the-books employment, high rent, racism, fear
of losing your residency permit, absence of family, etc. etc. that Muslim
migrants have to endure (91, 54). As further examples, he laments the way
that, in sensationalist newspaper headlines, the word Muslims could
be understood as all Muslims, that is, a billion and a half people, and
condemns what he calls these shitty prejudices: the Sicilian Mafioso, the
Neapolitan Camorrist, the Sardinian kidnapper, the Albanian criminal, the
Gypsy thief, the Muslim terrorist (67, 97).
A central feature of Lakhouss thematics is the rehabilitation of the
figure of the Arab woman in the eyes of the western reader. Sofia, the
female narrator, helps us to question some of the received wisdom con-
cerning the status of women in Islam, a subject that often encourages
simplistic generalisation in western minds rather than the deeper consid-
eration it merits. In a discussion of the gendered stereotypes surrounding
migrants and non-migrants in Europe, Helma Lutz has detailed how the
European woman serves as the standard against which to measure women
from elsewhere, with Muslim women often constructed as the prototype
296 D. COMBERIATI

of migrant women, perceived as miserable victims par excellence.13 The

novel teaches us that Islamic culture embraces irony and that some of its
customs open up space for unsuspected freedoms within the Muslim com-
munity in Italy, not least those surrounding divorce, which is a far sim-
pler process under Islamic rites than under the tortuous and bureaucratic
protocols of Italian law. At the same time, Sofia has space to operate as a
political subject, using irony and sarcasm against cultural prejudices in the
same way as Mazzari. She is not only aware of the general discourse on
Muslims (that we are animals, barbarians, inhuman) but also has personal
experience of its consequences, such as an occasion in the street when she
is told to [g]o back to Afghanistan in your burka, leading her to wonder
[w]hat happened to all the fine speeches about democracy, individual free-
dom, and the right to diversity? (82, 105, 105). Such prejudice constantly
shadows her life in Rome. Regarding her walks around Viale Marconi,
she comments on how I was always arm in arm with a crowd of ghost
companions: their names? Jihad, holy war, suicide bomber, September
11th, terrorism, attacks, Iraq, Afghanistan, Twin Towers, bombs, March
11th, Al Qaeda, Taliban. [] In other words, I was a sort of bin Laden
disguised as a woman.14 In this case, the Italian/European perception
of Arab women (covered, isolated, invisible) is merged with the percep-
tion of Muslims as an imminent threat, creating the idea of a kamikaze
woman. Her contempt for these attitudes is clear in a conversation with
Grandfather Giovanni, particularly in her reply to his hypothesis on bin
Ladens hiding place (88). It is Giovannis conviction that, as bin Laden
is Saudi Arabian, he must be hiding in Mecca, in that square mausoleum
you call Ka Ka Kamikaze or Kawasaki, a comment that draws
a withering aside from Sofia: Fantastic! An ingenious hypothesis. The
Kaaba, built by Abraham, has become a motorcycle brand! (88).
As a woman, an Arab, a Muslim, a migrant and an Italian-speaking
mother, Sofia knows that she has too many identities to be understood
by Grandfather Giovanni, who only repeats the stupid things he reads in
the paper (88). Despite this knowledge, however, she realises the power
that hegemonic attitudes can gain over the individual. In her first nar-
rative section, the issue of naming is shown to be a particular concern,
with Sofia asking a number of questions that are pertinent to the text as a
whole: How are we perceived by others? How does our personality change
when that perception differs from our own? As she continues, if you have
a foreign name it immediately creates a barrier, an impassable boundary
between us and you, one especially marked with a Middle Eastern
 AMARA LAKHOUSS DIVORCE ISLAMIC STYLE 297

name, which ensures that in the eyes of others you are not (and never will
be) a purebred Italian (245). It is perhaps a result of these boundaries
that Sofia does not mind the change that Italians have made to her given
name, Safia (not only do Italians find Safia difficult, but they also believe
that without the veil she looks like Sofia Loren) (27). While suggestive
of yet another assumed or constructed identity, the change is considered
by Sofia to be acceptable:

To tell truth, Sofia is a name I really like a lot. Sofia Loren is a very beautiful
woman and Im fascinated by her story. She was a girl who was born into
poverty and became a movie star. Of course, there are always envious people
who say nasty things about her. Like that she married a big producer to help
her career. The truth is that Sophia Loren is a great dreamer, and Im like
her. (278)

This may imply that Sofia is succumbing to western ideals, most obvi-
ously those of individualism and celebrity. Yet the capacity to dream was
already integral to her personality in Egypt. She was named after a famous
Egyptian radical, Safia Zaghloul, who fought for the education of girls,
participated in the revolution against British occupation and is recalled
as the first Arab woman to publicly remove her veil (26). It is no sur-
prise, therefore, to find that Sofia has a fondness for books on feminism
by Nawal Saadawi, an ambition for a career in business and a hatred of
polygamy and female circumcision, often drawing on the Koran to sup-
port her views, although admitting that her opinion is unlikely to carry
weight: a womens interpretation of the Koran still doesnt exist. Not
one. Its a male monopoly (31, 61). A particular anger is reserved for
the veil. Detesting its connotations of mourning and grief, she mounts
a two-fold attack on the veil that her husband forces her to wear: I like to
combine colors: a pink, green, or purple scarf with a white, blue, or gray
outfit. I try always to be smiling. Our Prophet says: A smile is like giving
alms (63). As this indicates, Sofias effort to understand her culture is
not a rejection of it (she remains a Muslim) but an examination of its con-
tradictions, one that signifies intellectual freedom.15 More often than not,
Lakhous seems to say, womens lack of freedom in some Islamic cultures is
not the result of religion but of politics. The fact that Sofia gives the novel
its title, by finally calling for a divorce from her husband, means that she
assumes greater centrality than Mazzari, articulating Lakhouss vision of
an egalitarian Europe even more clearly than the male narrator. This vision
298 D. COMBERIATI

is summed up by Luisa Passerinis point, in Figures dEurope (2003), that

[t]he subject of the new European identity can no longer be white, male
and Christian; it will be plural at the ethnic, religious and cultural levels.16
It is interesting to compare Sofias narrative voice with those of other
female characters in works by Arab authors or by authors of Arab ori-
gin writing in a European language. The novel La civilisation, ma mre!
(Mother Comes of Age, 1972) by Driss Chrabi takes as its subject the
emancipation of Moroccan women, which it approaches via a complex
analysis of secularism in Islamic cultures and the collision between the
West and the Arab-Moroccan system of patriarchy. Meanwhile, Lhomme
assis (The Sitting Man, 1991) by the Lebanese writer Slim Nassib
explores the theme of female identity against the tragic backdrops of
Lebanon and Israel, torn apart by ethnic and religious conflict, terror-
ist attacks and police repression.17 Other influences on Lakhouss work
may include the recent writings of Tariq Ali, especially The Stone Woman
(2001), Leila Aboulelas description in The Translator (1999) of the rela-
tionship between a Sudanese widow and a Scottish academic, and espe-
cially Lela Marouanes analysis of cultural, religious and sexual stereotypes
in La vie sexuelle dun islamiste Paris (The Sexual Life of an Islamist in
Paris, 2007). Indeed, Divorce Islamic Style can trace its forebears back
to the Al-Nahda movement in Arabic culture and society in the second
half of the nineteenth century, which advocated female empowerment and
womens right to education and participation in political debate.

CONCLUSION
To conclude, we can say that Divorce Islamic Style succeeds in showing how
migrant identity, far from being flat and monolithic as often depicted by
the mass media, has a complexity and reflective depth, a point that Lakhous
makes by playing with islamophobic stereotypes, which he negates, eludes
or emphasises as best fits his purpose. An evident target of irony is the
so-called clash of civilisations theory (already satirised in his first novel),
but no less a target is the construction of Muslim women either as passive,
unthinking victims of male power or as active components of the enemy
within. Both narrative strands of the novel cast scorn on what Goody
calls the current tendency in European thought [] to consider Europe
in opposition to Islam.18 On this subject, there is relevance in the two
quotations from Italian writers that Lakhous introduces at the beginning
of the book. These are by Niccol Machiavelli, so important for rethink-
 AMARA LAKHOUSS DIVORCE ISLAMIC STYLE 299

ing political power in Europe, and Ennio Flaiano, the author of the (post)
colonial novel Tempo di uccidere (A Time to Kill, 1947). The quotation
from Flaiano is a real poetic declaration:

As for my irony, or, if we prefer, my satire,

I think it frees me from everything that irritates me,
oppresses me, offends me,
makes me feel uneasy in society. (3)

For Lakhous, to use irony (or satire) against racism and culturalist ste-
reotype is the role of the writer, one that he fulfils admirably in Divorce
Islamic Style.

NOTES
1. See Daniele Comberiati, Scrivere nella lingua dellaltro: La letteratura degli
immigrati in Italia (19892007) (Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2010), pp.4554;
and Chiara Mengozzi, Narrazioni contese: ventanni di scritture italiane
della migrazione (Roma: Carocci, 2013), pp.527.
2. See Francesco Gabrieli and Umberto Scerrato, Gli Arabi in Italia (Milan:
Libri Scheiwiller, 1979), pp. 7121; and Alessandro Vanoli, La Sicilia
musulmana (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2012), pp.428.
3. Lakhous, Divorce Islamic Style, trans. by Ann Goldstein (2010; NewYork:
Europa Editions, 2012), p.141. Further page references to the novel are
given in parentheses in the text.
4. See Nagendra Kr. Singh, International Encyclopaedia of Islamic Dynasties:
Vol. 40, Spain and Eastern Europe (Nuova Delhi: Anmol Publications,
2000), pp.3179.
5. Goody, Islam and Europe, in Delanty, ed., Europe and Asia, p.144. As
Goody summarises, Islam has played a significant role in Europe since its
advent in Spain and the Mediterranean in the eighth century, followed by its
advance into Eastern Europe in the fourteenth and its movement into the
northern steppes soon afterwards (Goody, Islam in Europe (Cambridge:
Polity, 2004), p.8).
6. Hobson, Revealing the Cosmopolitan Side of Oriental Europe: The Eastern
Origins of European Civilisation, in Delanty, ed., Europe and Asia, p.108.
7. Coppola, Rented Spaces: Italian Postcolonial Literature, in Ponzanesi
and Blaagaard, eds, Deconstructing Europe, p.121.
8. Bassam Tibi, The Return of Ethnicity to Europe via Islamic Migration?:
The Ethnicization of the Islamic Diaspora, in Hsu, ed., Ethnic Europe,
p.127.
300 D. COMBERIATI

9. Lakhous does not claim that the object of the war on terror is entirely
chimerical. When Mazzari decides to accept the job of undercover agent, he
does so because Islamic terrorists do exist, theyre not an invention of the
media. Theyve already shown the world what theyre capable of (Lakhous,
Divorce Islamic Style, p.33).
10. See Alis Brick Lane (2003), Karas Selam Berlin (Hello Berlin, 2003) and
Abdolahs Spijkerschrift (My Fathers Notebook, 2000).
11. On this issue, I remember one conversation with Lakhous in which he
quoted a possibly apocryphal comment by Vincenzo Consolo, Arabic is one
of the languages of the Italian, remarking that he had kept this in mind
while writing the novel.
12. For Lakhouss discussions of hybridity and language, an important point of
reference is the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih. His well-known novel, Mawsin
al-Hijra il al-Shaml (Season of Migration to the North, 1966), is likewise
a detective story in which the analysis of immigration and the prejudices that
complicate the relationship between Europeans and non-Europeans is more
important than plot resolution.
13. Lutz, Limits of European-Ness, p.96.
14. Lakhous, Divorce Islamic Style, p. 63. With essentialism and exclusion in
Italy being so pronounced, Sofia is led to question the wisdom of her move
there: isnt immigration ultimately a form of gambling? Win everything or
lose everything? (ibid., pp.69, 151).
15. Importantly, Sofia also draws attention to the contradictions in Italian cul-
ture, most obviously the continuation of domestic violence. As she says at
one point, I thought women were victims of violence in war zones, like
Afghanistan or Iraq, or in countries where theres racism []. But not in
Italy! In other words, isnt Italy still a European country, Western, part of
the G-8, and so on, or am I wrong? (ibid., pp.1223).
16. Passerini, Introductory Note to Passerini, ed., Figures dEurope, p.17.
17. Lakhouss treatment of Sofia can also be examined in the light of a number
of great Middle Eastern poets and intellectuals. For example, Jamil Sidqi
al-Zahawi, a poet of Kurdish origin, has devoted considerable attention to
womens role in society, as has the poet Nzik al-Malikah, whose Dwn:
azy wa ram (Sparks and Ashes, 1979) supported the aspirations of
Middle Eastern women to free themselves from prejudice and oppression
(see Isabella Camera DAfflitto, Letteratura araba contemporanea: dalla
nahdah a oggi, new edn (1998; Rome: Carocci, 2002), pp.1334).
18. Goody, Europe and Islam, p.138.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abate, Carmine, Between Two Seas, trans. by Antony Shugaar (2002; NewYork:
Europa Editions, 2008).
Abdolah, Kader, My Fathers Notebook, trans. by Susan Massotty (2000; Edinburgh:
Canongate, 2007).
Aboulela, Leila, The Translator, new edn (1999; Edinburgh: Polygon, 2008).
Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart, new edn (1958; Oxford: Heinemann
Educational Publishers, 1986).
Adamovich, Ales, Khatyn, trans. by Glenys Kozlov, Frances Longman and Sharon
McKee (1972; London: Glagoslav Publications, 2012).
Adelson, Leslie A., Coordinates of Orientation: An Introduction, in Zafer
enocak, Atlas of a Tropical Germany: Essays on Politics and Culture, 19901998,
trans. and edited by Leslie A.Adelson (1992; Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 2000), xixxxvii.
, Against Between: A Manifesto, New Perspectives on Turkey, Vol. 29
(2003), 1936.
, The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New
Critical Grammar of Migration (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
Adesokan, Akin, New African Writing and the Question of Audience, Research in
African Literatures, Vol. 43, No. 3 (2012), 120.
Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi, Purple Hibiscus (New York: Algonquin Books,
2003).
, The Danger of a Single Story (2009), TED, http://www.ted.com/
talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html (accessed 17
September 2015).
Adnan, Etel, Paris, When Its Naked (Sausalito: The Post-Apollo Press, 1993).

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 301

A. Hammond (ed.), The Novel and Europe,
DOI10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4
302 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adorno, Theodor W., Cultural Criticism and Society (1967), in Adorno, Prisms,
trans. by Samuel M.Weber (1955; Cambridge: MIT Press, 1983), 1734.
, Gesammelte Schriften (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft,
1998).
, and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. by John
Cumming (1944; NewYork: Continuum, 1972).
Adoum, Jorge Enrique, El proceso de emancipacin no ha concluido, in
Heinz DieterichSteffan, ed., La interminable Conquista: Emancipacin e
identidad de Amrica Latina 14921992 (Mexico: Joaqun Mortiz/Planeta,
1990), 25761.
Aidoo, Ama Ata, Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint, new
edn (1977; Harlow: Longman, 1988).
Atmatov, Chingiz, Jamilia, trans. by James Riordan (1958; London: Telegram,
2007).
Albahari, David, Globetrotter, trans. by Ellen Elias-Bursa (2001; New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2014).
Aldiss, Brian, Super-State: A Novel of a Future Europe, new edn (2002; London:
Orbit, 2003).
Ali, Monica, Brick Lane (London: Doubleday, 2003).
Ali, Tariq, Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree, new edn (1991; London and
NewYork: Verso, 1993).
, The Stone Woman (London: Verso, 2001).
, The Extreme Centre: A Warning (London: Verso, 2015).
Allende, Isabel, The House of the Spirits, trans. by Magda Bogin (1982; London:
Black Swan, 1986).
Amadou, Jamila, Wij spreken pas als jullie luisteren, De Standaard, 13 October
2004, http://www.standaard.be/cnt/g339ete9 (accessed 21 September 2015).
Ambler, Eric, The Mask of Dimitrios, new edn (1939; London: Pan Books, 1999).
Amry, Jean, Jenseits von Schuld und Shne: Bewltigungsversuche eines berwltigten,
in Amry, Werke: Bd. 2: Jenseits von Schuld und Shne; Unmeisterliche Wanderjahre;
rtlichkeiten, new edn (1966; Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2002).
Amirejibi, Chabua, Data Tutaskhia, new edn (19725; Tbilisi: Neostudia,
2001).
Amis, Martin, Times Arrow: Or The Nature of the Offence, new edn (1991;
London: Penguin, 1992).
Amnesty International, The Human Cost of Fortress Europe: Human Rights Violations
against Migrants and Refugees at Europes Borders (2014), Amnesty International,
http://www.amnesty.eu/content/assets/Reports/EUR_050012014_
Fortress_Europe_ complete_web_EN.pdf (accessed 2 September 2015).
Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread
of Nationalism, new edn (1983; London and NewYork: Verso, 2006).
Anderson, Linda, Autobiography (London: Routledge, 2001).
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 303

Anderson, Malcolm, Frontiers: Territory and State Formation in the Modern World
(Oxford: Polity, 1996).
, and Eberhard Bort, eds, Boundaries and Identities: The Eastern Frontier of
the European Union (Edinburgh: International Social Sciences Institute,
University of Edinbugh, 1996).
, and Eberhard Bort, eds, The Frontiers of Europe (London and Washington:
Pinter, 1998).
, and Eberhard Bort, The Frontiers of the European Union (New York:
Palgrave, 2001).
Andersen, Per Thomas, Hvor burde jeg da vre? Kosmopolitisme og postnasjonal-
isme i nyere litteratur (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2013).
Andrade, Jorge Carrera, Crnica de las Indias (Paris: Centre de Recherches de
lInstitut dEtudes Hispaniques, 1965).
Andreas, Peter, Redrawing the Line: Borders and Security in the Twenty-First
Century, International Security, Vol. 28, No. 2 (2003), 78111.
, and Timothy Snyder, eds, The Wall around the West: State Borders and
Immigration Controls in North America and Europe (Lanham: Rowman &
Littlefield, 2000).
Andrews, Geoff, Nina Fishman and Kevin Morgan, eds, Opening the Books: Essays
on the Social and Cultural History of British Communism (London and Boulder:
Pluto Press, 1995).
Andri, Ivo, Bosnian Chronicle: Or The Days of the Consuls, trans. by Celia
Hawkesworth and Bogdan Raki (1945; London: The Harvill Press, 1996).
Andrzeyevski, George, Ashes and Diamonds, trans. by D.J. Welsh (1957;
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965).
Anon, volution de la part des populations trangres et immigres jusquen
2012, Insee (Institut national de statistique et des tudes conomiques), http://
www.insee.fr/fr/themes/tableau.asp?reg_id=0&ref_id=NATTEF02131
(accessed 21 July 2015).
, Legends of Mujo and Halili, trans. by Robert Elsie, Albanian Literature,
http://www.albanian literature.net/oral_lit3/OL3-05.html (accessed 31 July
2015).
, Milomir Kovacevic, dit Strasni, Milomir Kovaevi, http://www.milo-
mirkovacevic.com/auteur.html (accessed 18 September 2015).
, Mladen Pikuli, Mladen Pikuli, http://www.mladenpikulic.nl/
sarajevo-self-portrait.html (accessed 18 September 2015).
, Popular Music from Vittula, Kirkus, 1 September 2003, https://www.
kirkus reviews.com/book-reviews/mikael-niemi/popular-music-from-vittula
(accessed 16 February 2015).
, Population, Key Figures, Statistisches Bundesamt, https://www.destatis.
de/EN/FactsFigures/SocietyState/Population/Migration/Tables_/lrbev07.
html?cms_gtp=150354_list%253D2&https=1 (accessed 21 April 2015).
304 BIBLIOGRAPHY

, The Balavariani (Barlaam and Josaphat): A Tale from the Christian East,
trans. by David Marshall Lang (c.1000; London: George Allen & Unwin,
1966).
, The Ballad of Constantine and Dhoqina, trans. by Robert Elsie,
Albanian Literature, http://www.albanianliterature.net/oral_lit2/OL2-04.
html (accessed 31 July 2015).
, The Mabinogion, trans. by Gwyn Jones and Thomas Jones (c.1325-1425;
London: J.M.Dent, 1993).
Antohi, Sorin, and Vladimir Tismaneanu, eds, Between Past and Future: The
Revolutions of 1989 and Their Aftermath (Budapest: Central European
University Press, 2000).
Antunes, Antnio Lobo, The Land at the End of the World, trans. by Margaret Jull
Costa (1979; NewYork and London: W.W.Norton & Co., 2011).
Anyuru, Johannes, En storm kom frn paradiset (Stockholm: Norstedts, 2012).
Anzalda, Gloria, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt
Lute Books, 2007).
Apeldoorn, Bastiaan, and Laura Horn, The Marketisation of European Corporate
Control: A Critical Political Economy Perspective, New Political Economy, Vol.
12, No. 2 (2007), 21135.
Appadurai, Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
Arguedas, Jos Mara, Los ros profundos (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1958).
Armand, Louis, Clair Obscur (Vokovice: Equus Press, 2011).
Arrighi, Giovanni, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of
Our Times, new edn (1994; London: Verso, 2002).
Arvastson, Gsta, Inledning, in Arvastson, ed., Jrnbur eller frigrelse? (Lund:
Studentlitteratur, 1999), 924.
selius, Gunnar, The Russian Menace to Sweden: The Belief System of a Small Power
Security lite in the Age of Imperialism (Stockholm: Akademitryck, 1994).
Ash, Timothy Garton, The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe
(New York: Random House, 1989).
, History of the Present: Essays, Sketches and Despatches from Europe in the
1990s (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1999).
Aslam, Nadeem, The Wasted Vigil, new edn (2008; London: Faber and Faber,
2009).
Atxaga, Bernardo, Seven Houses in France, trans. by Margaret Jull Costa (2009;
London: Vintage Books, 2012).
Auezov, Mukhtar, Abai, trans. by L. Navrozov (194256; Moscow: Foreign
Languages Publishing House, c.1957).
Aug, Marc, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans.
by John Howe (1992; NewYork: Verso, 1995).
Austen, Jane, Emma, new edn (1816; NewYork: Bedford/St. Martins, 2002).
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 305

Avdi, Selvedin, Seven Terrors, trans. by Coral Petkovich (2012; London: Istros
Books, 2012).
Axford, Barrie, Daniela Berghahn and Nick Hewlett, eds, Unity and Diversity in
the New Europe (Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 2000).
Ayhan, Ece Emre, and Emine Sevgi zdamar, Kendi Kendinin Terzisi Bir
Kambur: Ece Ayhanl Anlar, 1974 Zrih Gnl, Ece Ayhann Mektuplar
(Istanbul: Yap Kredi Yaynlar, 2007).
Babnik, Gabriela, The Dry Season, trans. by Rawley Grau (2012; London: Istros
Books, 2015).
Bachmann-Medick, Doris, Introduction: The Translational Turn, Translation
Studies, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2008), 216.
Bachole, Michle, Un pass contraignant: double bind et transculturation
(Amsterdam and NewYork: Rodopi, 2000).
Baker Jr., Houston A., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular
Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).
Bakhtin, M.M., The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. by Caryl Emerson
and Michael Holquist (1938; Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981).
Balibar, tienne, We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship,
trans. by James Swenson (2001; Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University
Press, 2004).
Bardi, Abby, The Gypsy as Trope in Victorian and Modern British Literature,
Romani Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1 (2006), 3142.
, In Company of a Gipsy: The Gypsy as Trope in Woolf and Bront,
Critical Survey, Vol. 19, No. 1 (2007), 4050.
Brfuss, Lukas, One Hundred Days, trans. by Tess Lewis (2008; London: Granta,
2012).
Barkan, Elazar, and Marie-Denise Shelton, eds, Borders, Exiles, Diasporas (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1998).
Barth, Fredrik, ed., Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of
Culture Difference, new edn (1969; Long Grave: Waveland Press, 1998).
Bataille, Georges, Blue of Noon, trans. by Harry Mathews (1957; London: Penguin,
2012). Batonishvili, Ioane, Xumarstsavla-kalmasoba, new edn (1862; Tbilisi:
Merani, 1990).
Baudrillard, Jean, No Reprieve for Sarajevo (1994; trans. by Patrice Riemens),
The European Graduate School, http://www.egs.edu/faculty/jean-baudrillard/
articles/no-reprieve-for-sarajevo/(accessed 18 September 2015).
Bauman, Zygmunt, Europe: An Unfinished Adventure (Cambridge and Malden:
Polity Press, 2004).
Baycl, Sevtap, De nachtmerrie van de allochtoon (Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 1999).
Bazorkin, Idris, Evening Prayers (1963; trans. by Rebecca Gould), in Bruce Grant
and Adele Barker, eds, Russia Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2010).
306 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beardsell, Peter, Europe and Latin America: Returning the Gaze (Manchester and
NewYork: Manchester University Press, 2000).
Beck, Ulrich, and Edgar Grande, Cosmopolitan Europe, trans. by Ciaran Cronin
(2004; Cambridge: Polity, 2007).
Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot, new edn (1953; London: Faber and Faber,
1965).
Bd, Jean-Albert, and William Edgerton, eds, Columbia Dictionary of Modern
European Literature, new edn (1947; NewYork: Columbia University Press,
1980).
Bell, Michael, ed., The Cambridge Companion to European Novelists (Cambridge
and NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Bemong, Nele, Mirjam Truwant and Pieter Vermeulen, eds, Re-Thinking Europe:
Literature and (Trans)National Identity (Amsterdam and NewYork: Rodopi,
2008).
Benjamin, Walter, Left-Wing Melancholy (1931), in Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and
Edward Dimendberg, eds, The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1994), 3046.
, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), in
Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. by Harry Zohn (1955; London: Pimlico,
1999), 21144.
, Theses on the Philosophy of History (1947), in Benjamin, Illuminations,
trans. by Harry Zorn (1955; London: Pimlico, 1999), 24555.
Berger, John, G., new edn (1972; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973).
Berman, Russell A., Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German
Culture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998).
Bernal, Martin, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization,
Volume I: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 17851985 (London: Free
Association Books, 1987).
Bernhard, Thomas, Extinction, trans. by David McLintock (1986; London:
Penguin, 1996).
Bezmozgis, David, The Free World, new edn (2011; London: Penguin, 2012).
Bhabha, Homi K., The Location of Culture (London and NewYork: Routledge,
1994).
Bib, Istvn, Die Misere der osteuropischen Kleinstaaterei, trans. by Bla Rsky
(1946; Frankfurt am Main: Verlag neue Kritik, 1992).
Binebine, Mahi, Welcome to Paradise, trans. by Lulu Norman (1999; London and
NewYork: Granta Books, 2003).
Bischoff, Drte, and Susanne Komfort-Hein, eds, Literatur und Exil: Neue
Perspektiven (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013).
Blair, Kirstie, Gypsies and Lesbian Desire: Vita Sackville-West, Violet Trefusis,
and Virginia Woolf, Twentieth-Century Literature, Vol. 50, No. 2 (2004),
14166.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 307

Boa, Elizabeth, zdamars Autobiographical Fictions: Trans-National Identity

and Literary Form, German Life & Letters, Vol. 59, No. 4 (2006), 52639.
Boehmer, Elleke, and Sarah de Mul, eds, The Postcolonial Low Countries: Literature,
Colonialism, and Multiculturalism (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012).
Bohjalian, Chris, The Sandcastle Girls, new edn (2012; Leicester: W.F. Howes,
2013).
Bohle, Dorothee, and Bla Greskovits, Neoliberalism, Embedded Neolibralism,
and Neocorporatism: Towards Transnational Capitalism in Central-Eastern
Europe, West European Politics, Vol. 30, No. 3 (2007), 44366.
Bll, Heinrich, The End of a Mission, trans. by Leila Vennewitz (1966;
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973).
Bonnett, Alastair, Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia (New
York and London: Continuum, 2010).
Booker, M.Keith, The Modern British Novel of the Left: A Research Guide (Westport
and London: Greenwood Press, 1998).
Boorstin, Daniel J., America and the Image of Europe: Reflections on American
Thought (New York: Meridian Books, 1960).
Boschetti, Anna, La recomposition de lespace intellectuel en Europe aprs 1945,
in Gisle Sapiro, ed., Lespace intellectuel en Europe: De la Formation des tats-
nations la mondialisation XIXeXXIe sicle (Paris: La Dcouverte, 2009),
14782.
Boswell, Christina, and Andrew Geddes, Migration and Mobility in the European
Union (Basingstoke and NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Bouazza, Hafid, Een beer in bontjas (Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2004).
Boyle, Nicholas, and Martin Swales, eds, Realism in European Literature
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Boym, Svetlana, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
Bradbury, Malcolm, Doctor Criminale, new edn (1992; London: Quality
Paperbacks Direct, 1992).
Brague, Rmi, Europe, la voie romaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1992).
Brewer, Daniel, The Discourse of Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France
(Cambridge and NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Briffa, Charles, The Essential Oliver Friggieri: National Author of Malta (Msida:
Malta University Publishing, 2012).
Briffault, Robert, Europa, new edn (1935; London: Robert Hale, 1936).
, Europa in Limbo (London: Robert Hale, 1937).
Brinker-Gabler, Gisela, and Sidonie Smith, eds, Writing New Identities: Gender,
Nation, and Immigration in Contemporary Europe (Minneapolis and London:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
Brisku, Adrian, Bittersweet Europe: Albanian and Georgian Discourses on Europe,
18782008 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2013).
Brodsky, Joseph, Democracy, Granta, Vol. 30 (1990), 199233.
308 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bronfen, Elisabeth, Entortung und Identitt: Ein Thema der modernen

Exilliteratur, The Germanic Review, Vol. 69, No. 2 (1994), 708.
Bront, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, new edn (1847; NewYork: Bedford/St. Martins,
1996).
Brookner, Anita, Latecomers, new edn (1988; London: Grafton Books, 1989).
Brouillette, Sarah, Postcolonial Writers in the Global Literary Marketplace (London:
Palgrave, 2007).
Brown, Wendy, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalisms Stealth Revolution (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2015).
Br, Hein, The Old Man and His Sons, trans. by John F.West (1940; London:
Telegram, 2011).
Brussig, Thomas, Heroes Like Us, trans. by John Brownjohn (1995; New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997).
Bruter, Michael, Citizens of Europe? The Emergence of a Mass European Identity
(Basingstoke and NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
Bughadze, Lasha, Mesame sartuli (Tbilisi: Arete, 2003).
, Okros khana (Tbilisi: Bakur salukauri, 2006).
, The Literature Express, trans. by Maya Kiasashvili (2009; Champaign and
London: Dalkey Archive, 2013).
, The Round Table (2011), in Elizabeth Heighway, ed., Contemporary
Fiction from Georgia, trans. by Elizabeth Heighway (Champaign and London:
Dalkey Archive, 2012), 920.
Bunzl, Matti, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Some Thoughts on the New
Europe, American Ethnologist, Vol. 32, No. 4 (2005), 499508.
Burchuladze, Zaza, Adibas, trans. by Guram Sanikidze (2009; Champaign and
London: Dalkey Archive, 2013).
Burgess, Adam, Divided Europe: The New Domination of the East (London: Pluto
Press, 1997).
Burgess, Antony, 1985, new edn (1978; London: Arrow Books, 1980).
Busch, Frederick, War Babies (1988; NewYork: New Directions, 2001).
Butler, Judith, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London and NewYork:
Verso Books, 2009).
Bykov, Dmitry, Living Souls, trans. by Cathy Porter (2006; Richmond: Alma
Books, 2010).
Callinicos, Alex, The Revenge of History: Marxism and the East European Revolutions
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).
Calvino, Italo, If on a Winters Night a Traveller, trans. by William Weaver (1979;
London: Minerva, 1992).
Camera dAfflitto, Isabella, Letteratura araba contemporanea: dalla nahdah a oggi,
new edn (1998; Rome: Carocci, 2002).
Camus, Albert, A Happy Death, trans. by Richard Howard (1971; Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1973).
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 309

, The First Man, trans. by David Hapgood (1994; London: Penguin, 2013).
Canetti, Elias, The Tongue Set Free: Remembrance of a European Childhood, trans.
by Joachim Neugroschel (1977; London: Granta Books, 1999).
Casanova, Pascale, The World Republic of Letters, trans. by M.B.Debevois (1999;
Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2004).
Cavicchi, Manuela, Il ny a que le prsent: la maledizione dellesilio nelle opera
di Agota Kristof, Altre modernit/Otras Modernidades/Autres Modernits/
Other Modernities, No. 2 (2009), 17383.
Celasin, Izzet, Black Sky, Black Sea, trans. by Charlotte Barslund (2007; London:
MacLehose Books, 2013).
Cercas, Javier, Soldiers of Salamis, trans. by Anne McLean (2001; London:
Bloomsbury, 2004).
Csaire, Aim, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, trans. by Clayton Eshleman
and Annette Smith (1939; Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001).
Charef, Mehdi, Tea in the Harem, trans. by Ed Emery (1983; London: Serpents
Tail, 1989).
Chatwin, Bruce, Utz, new edn (1988; London: Picador, 1989).
Checkel, Jeffrey T., and Peter J.Katzenstein, eds, European Identity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Cherchesov, Alan, Requiem for the Living, trans. by Subhi Shervell (1994; Moscow:
Glas, 2005).
Chiladze, Otar, A Man Was Going Down the Road, trans. by Donald Rayfield
(1973; London: Garnett Press, 2012).
, Avelum, trans. by Donald Rayfield (1995; London: Garnett Press, 2013).
, Godori (Tbilisi: Arete, 2003).
, Tsates tsiteli tsagebi (Tbilisi: Pegasi, 2007).
Chin, Rita, The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Chitnis, Rajendra A., Literature in Post-Communist Russia and Eastern Europe:
The Russian, Czech and Slovak Fiction of the Changes, 19881998 (London and
NewYork: RoutledgeCurzon, 2005).
Cho, Wendy K. Tam, and Erinn P. Nicley, Geographic Proximity Versus
Institutions: Evaluating Borders as Real Political Boundaries, American Politics
Research, Vol. 36, No. 6 (2008), 80323.
Chrabi, Driss, La civilisation, ma mre! (Paris: Gallimard, 1972).
Chwin, Stefan, Death in Danzig, trans. by Philip Boehm (1995; London: Vintage,
2006).
Cloostermans, Mark, As en confetti: Grote emoties bij Chika Unigwe, De
Standaard, 22 September 2005, http://www.standaard.be/cnt/gpai4d5b
(accessed 21 September 2015).
Cohen, Anthony P., The Symbolic Construction of Community (Chichester: Ellis
Horwood Limited, 1985).
310 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Collier, Peter, and Judy Davies, eds, Modernism and the European Unconscious
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990).
Comberiati, Daniele, Scrivere nella lingua dellaltro: La letteratura degli immi-
grati in Italia (19892007) (Bruxelles: Peter Lang, 2010).
Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness, new edn (1899; NewYork: W.W.Norton &
Company, 1988).
Cornis-Pope, Marcel, and Nikola Petkovi, Mapping the Danubian Literary
Mosaic, in Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer, eds, History of the Literary
Cultures of East-Central Europe: Junctures and Disjunctures in the 19th and
20th Centuries (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2006), II,
21724.
Cortzar, Julio, Hopscotch, trans. by Gregory Rabassa (1963; NewYork: Pantheon,
1987).
Coss, Laurence, Bitter Almonds, trans. by Alison Anderson (2011; New York:
Europa Editions, 2013).
Couto, Mia, The Last Flight of the Flamingo, trans. by David Brookshaw (2000;
London: Serpents Tail, 2004).
Cox, Michael, Ken Booth and Tim Dunne, eds, The Interregnum: Controversies in
World Politics, 19891999 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Crawshaw, Robert, The File on H.: Metahistory, Literature, Ethnography, Cultural
Heritage and the Balkan Borders, in Reginald Byron and Ullrich Kockel, eds,
Negotiating Culture: Moving, Mixing and Memory in Contemporary Europe
(Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2006), 5475.
Crespi, Elena, Matthias Sant-Ana and Sylvain Aubry, Downgrading Rights: The
Cost of Austerity in Greece (Paris: FIDH, 2014).
Croce, Benedetto, European Literature in the Nineteenth Century, trans. by
Douglas Ainslie (1922; London: Chapman and Hall, 1924).
Croft, Andy, ed., A Weapon in the Struggle: The Cultural History of the Communist
Party in Britain (London: Pluto Press, 1998).
Crowe, David M., A History of the Gypsies of Eastern Europe and Russia (New
York: St. Martins Griffin, 1994).
Cunningham, Hilary, Nations Rebound?: Crossing Borders in a Gated Globe,
Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, Vol. 11, No. 3 (2004), 32951.
Curtius, Ernst Robert, Europische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern:
Francke, 1948).
, Essays on European Literature, trans. by Michael Kowal (1950; Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1973).
Custred, Glynn, The Linguistic Consequences of Boundaries, Borderlands, and
Frontiers, Journal of Borderlands Studies, Vol. 26, No. 3 (2011), 26578.
Cutcan, Simon, Subversion ou conformisme?: la diffrence des sexes dans luvre
dAgota Kristof (Oxford and Bern: P.Lang, 2014).
Cyrulnik, Boris, The Whispering of Ghosts: Trauma and Resilience, trans. by Susan
Fairfield (2003; NewYork: Other Press, 2010).
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 311

Daeninckx, Didier, Murder in Memoriam, trans. by Liz Heron (1984; London:

Serpents Tail, 2005).
Dal, Gney, Wenn Ali die Glocken luten hrt (Berlin: Edition der 2, 1979).
Dalos, Gyrgy, 1985: A Historical Report (Hongkong 2026), trans. by Stuart Hood
and Estella Schmid (1982; London and Sydney: Pluto Press, 1983).
Davies, Norman, Europe: A History, new edn (1996; London: Pimlico, 1997).
, Europe East and West, new edn (2006; London: Pimlico, 2007).
de Beauvoir, Simone, The Mandarins, trans. by Leonard M. Friedman (1954;
London: Collins, 1957).
De Cataldo, Giancarlo, The Father and the Foreigner, trans. by Ann Goldstein
(2004; NewYork: Europa Editions, 2009).
Delanty, Gerard, Inventing Europe: Idea, Identity, Reality (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1995).
, Is There a European Identity?, Global Dialogue, Vol. 5, Nos 34 (2003),
7686.
, ed., Europe and Asia beyond East and West (London and New York:
Routledge, 2006).
, and Chris Rumford, Rethinking Europe: Social Theory and the Implications
of Europeanization (London and NewYork: Routledge, 2005).
Demetz, Hana, The House on Prague Street, trans. by Hana Demetz (1970;
London: Star, 1981).
de Rougemont, Denis, The Meaning of Europe, trans. by Alan Braley (1962;
London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1965).
Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, trans. by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1967;
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
, Shibboleth (1986), in Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, eds, The
Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2003), 30612.
, Politics of Friendship, trans. by George Collins (1994; London: Verso, 2005).
, The Work of Mourning, trans. and edited by Pascale-Anne Brault and
Michael Naas (2001; Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003).
, Athens, Still Remains, trans. by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas
(2009; NewYork: Fordham University Press, 2010).
Dhaen, Theo, and Iannis Goerlandt, eds, Literature for Europe? (Amsterdam and
NewYork: Rodopi, 2009).
Di Benedeto, Marta, La question de lidentit dans luvre dAgota Kristof (Lille:
ANRT, Atelier national de reproduction des thses, 2008).
Diderot, Denis, Encyclopedia: Selections, trans. by Nelly S. Hoyt and Thomas
Cassirer (175172; London: Macmillan, 1976).
Diner, Dan, Historical Understanding and Counterrationality: The Judenrat as
Epistemological Vantage, in Neil Levi and Michael Rothberg, eds, The
Holocaust: Theoretical Readings (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2003), 7581.
312 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Djebar, Assia, Women in Algiers in Their Apartment, trans. by Marjolijn de Jager

(1980; Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992).
Dolenjashvili, Teona, Real Beings (2009), in Elizabeth Heighway, ed.,
Contemporary Fiction from Georgia, trans. by Elizabeth Heighway (Champaign
and London: Dalkey Archive, 2012), 3863.
Donchev, Anton, Time of Parting, trans. by Marguerite Alexieva (1964; London:
Peter Owen, 1967).
Donnan, Hastings, and Thomas M.Wilson, eds, Border Approaches: Anthropological
Perspectives on Frontiers (Lanham and London: University Press of America, 1994).
, Borders: Frontiers of Identity, Nation and State (Oxford and NewYork:
Berg, 1999).
Douzinas, Costas, Philosophy and Resistance in the Crisis (Cambridge: Polity,
2013).
Dovlatov, Sergei, The Compromise, trans. by Anne Frydman (1981; London:
Chatto and Windus, 1983).
Dragomn, Gyrgy, The White King, trans. by Paul Olchvry (2005; London:
Black Swan, 2009).
Drakuli, Slavenka, S.: A Novel about the Balkans, trans. by Marko Ivi (1999;
NewYork: Penguin, 2001).
Drndi, Daa, Sonnenschein (Zagreb: Fraktura, 2007).
Duarte, Joo Ferreira, The Trials of Translation: From Global Cultural Flow to
Domestic Relocation, Journal of Romance Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2011), 4960.
Dundy, Elaine, The Dud Avocado (1958; London: Virago, 1993).
Dunkerley, David, Lesley Hodgson, Stanisaw Konopacki, Tony Spybey and
Andrew Thompson, Changing Europe: Identities, Nations and Citizens
(London and NewYork: Routledge, 2002).
Dunphy, Graeme, Migrant, Emigrant, Immigrant: Recent Developments in
Turkish-Dutch Literature, Neophilologus, Vol. 85, No. 1 (2001), 123.
Durante, Erica, Agota Kristof: Du commencement la fin de lcriture. Rencontre
avec lauteur de La Trilogie des jumeaux: ses repentirs, ses grandes envoles
dans lcriture, son silence aujourdhui, Recto/Verso: Revue de jeunes chercheurs
en critique gntique, No. 1 (2007), 16.
, Entretien dErica Durante Agota Kristof, Vivre, pome indit dAgota
Kristof: Introduction de Marie-Thrse Lathion, Viceversa: Revue suisse
dchanges littraires, Vol. 2 (2008), 2739.
Duras, Marguerite, A Sea of Troubles, trans. by Antonio White (1950;
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969).
Drrenmatt, Friedrich, The Assignment: Or On the Observing of the Observer of the
Observers, trans. by Joel Agee (1986; London: Picador, 1989).
Duttlinger, Carolin, Traumatic Photographs: Remembrance and the Technical
Media in W.G. Sebalds Austerlitz, in J.J. Long and Anne Whitehead, eds,
W.G.Sebald: A Critical Companion (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
2004), 15571.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 313

Dyer, Richard, White (London and NewYork: Routledge, 1997).

Ebejer, Francis, Requiem for a Malta Fascist (or The Interrogation) (Valletta:
A.C.Aquilina and Co., 1980).
Eberstadt, Fernanda, Tales from the Global Sex Trade, The New York Times,
Sunday Book Review, 29 April 2011, http://nytimes.com/2011/05/01/
books/review/book-review-on-black-sisters-street-by-chika-unigwe.html?_
r=0 (accessed 21 September 2015).
Eddy, Beverley Driver, Herta Mller: Arts Transcends Boundaries, Provincetown
Arts, Vol. 13 (19978), 456.
Edwards, Paul, ed., The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan,
1972).
Eidelson, Roy J., and Ian S.Lustick, National Identity Repertoires, Territory, and
Globalization, in Mabel Berezin and Martin Schain, eds, Europe without
Borders: Remapping Territory, Citizenship, and Identity in a Transnational Age
(Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 89117.
Ejersbo, Jakob, Exile, trans. by Mette Petersen (2009; London: MacLehose Press,
2012).
Eliot, George, The Mill on the Floss, new edn (1860; NewYork: Penguin, 2012).
Eliot, T.S., Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919), in David Lodge, ed.,
20th Century Literary Criticism: A Reader (London: Longman, 1972).
, The Wasteland (1922), in Eliot, Collected Poems 19091935 (London:
Faber and Faber, 1936).
Eltayeb, Tarek, Cities without Palms, trans. by Kareem James Palmer Zaid (1992;
London: Arabia Books, 2009).
Endo, Shusaku, Foreign Studies, trans. by Mark Williams (1965; London and
Chester Springs: Peter Owen, 2009).
Engels, Friedrich, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, trans.
by Evelyn Reed (1884; NewYork: Pathfinder Press, 1972).
Enzensberger, Hans Magnus, Europe, Europe: Forays into a Continent, trans. by
Martin Chalmers (1987; NewYork: Pantheon Books, 1989).
Erel, Umut, Grenzberschreitungen und kulturelle Mischformen als antirassist-
ischer Widerstand?, in Cathy Gelbin, Kader Konuk and Peggy Piesche, eds,
AufBrche: Kulturelle Produktionen von Migrantinnen, Schwarzen und
jdischen Frauen in Deutschland (Knigstein: U.Helmer, 1999).
Eri, Vincent, The Crocodile, new edn (1970; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976).
Eriksson, Madeleine, People in Stockholm Are Smarter Than Countryside
Folks Reproducing Urban and Rural Imaginaries in Film and Life, Journal
of Rural Studies, Vol. 26, No. 2 (2010), 95104.
, (Re)producing a Periphery: Popular Representations of the Swedish North
(Ume: Department of Social and Economic Geography, Ume University,
2010).
Erpenbeck, Jenny, The End of Days, trans. by Susan Bernofsky (2012; London:
Portobello Books, 2014).
314 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ertel, Manfred, Katrin Kuntz and Walter Mayr, Study Sheds New Light on Forced
Greek Loans (2015), Der Spiegel, http://www.spiegel.de/international/ger-
many/greek-study-provides-evidence-of-forced-loans-to-nazis-a-1024762.
html (accessed 15 August 2015).
Ette, Ottmar, Urbanity and Literature Cities as Transareal Spaces of Movement
in Assia Djebar, Emine Sevgi zdamar and Ccile Wajsbrot, European Review,
Vol. 19, No. 3 (2011), 36783.
European Commission, A European Agenda on Migration, European Commission,
http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/home-affairs/what-we-do/policies/european-agenda-
migration/backgroundinformation/docs/communication_on_the_european_
agenda _on_migration_en.pdf (accessed 15 August 2015).
, Standard Eurobarometer82, Autumn 2014, Public Opinion in the
European Union, First Results, European Commission, http://ec.europa.eu/
public_opinion/archives/eb/eb82/eb82first_en.pdf (accessed 18 May 2015).
Evaristo, Bernardine, Soul Tourists, new edn (2005; London: Penguin, 2006).
, On Black Sisters Street by Chika Unigwe, The Independent, 3 July 2009,
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/
on-black-sisters-street-by-chika-unigwe-1728899.html (accessed 11 September
2015).
Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. by Richard Philcox (1952;
NewYork: Grove Press, 2008).
Fenoglio, Beppe, A Private Affair, trans. by Howard Curtis (1963; London:
Modern Voices, 2006).
Feraoun, Mouloud, The Poor Mans Son: Menrad, Kabyle Schoolteacher, trans. by
Lucy R. McNair (1950; Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia
Press, 2005).
Ferrari, Jrme, Where I Left My Soul, trans. by Geoffrey Strachan (2010; London:
MacLehose Press, 2013).
Fielding, Henry, Jonathan Wild; The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1743, 1755;
London: J.M.Dent & Sons, 1973).
Fishta, Gjergj, The Highland Lute, trans. by Robert Elsie and Janice Mathie-Heck
(1912; London: I.B.Tauris, The Centre for Albanian Studies, 2005).
Flaiano, Ennio, Tempo di uccidere (Milano: Garzanti, 1947).
Flanagan, Richard, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, new edn (1997; Sydney:
Picador, 1998).
Flgstad, Kjartan, Dollar Road, trans. by Nadia Christensen (1977; Baton Rouge
and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1989).
Fokkema, Douwe, and Elrud Ibsch, Modernist Conjectures: A Mainstream in
European Literature 19101940 (London: C.Hurst and Co., 1987).
Foucault, Michel, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language,
trans. by A.M. Sheridan Smith (1969; New York: Harper Colophon Books,
1971).
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 315

Freud, Sigmund, Mourning and Melancholia (1917), in Freud, The Standard

Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV
(19141916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on
Metapsychology and Other Works, trans. and edited by James Strachey and Anna
Freud (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957), 24358.
Fuentes, Carlos, Terra Nostra (Mexico: Editorial Joaqun Mortiz, 1975).
Furet, Franois, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth
Century, trans. by Deborah Furet (1995; Chicago and London: University of
Chicago Press, 1999).
Gabrieli, Francesco, and Umberto Scerrato, Gli Arabi in Italia (Milan: Libri
Scheiwiller, 1979).
Gallenzi, Alessandro, Interrail (Richmond: Alma Books, 2012).
Galloway, Steven, The Cellist of Sarajevo, new edn (2008; London: Atlantic Books,
2009).
Gamsakhurdia, Konstantine, Tkhzulebani ots tomad: Dionisos ghimili, new edn
(1925; Tbilisi: DidostatI, 1992).
Garloff, Katja, The Task of the Narrator: Moments of Symbolic Investiture in
W.G.Sebalds Austerlitz, in Scott D.Denham and Mark Richard McCulloch,
eds, W.G. Sebald: History, Memory, Trauma (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2006),
15769.
Garros-Evdokimov, Headcrusher, trans. by Andrew Bromfield (2003; London:
Vintage, 2006).
Gaskell, Philip, Landmarks in European Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University
Press, 1999).
Gavelis, Riardas, Vilnius Poker, trans. by Elizabeth Novickas (1989; Rochester:
Open Letter, 2009).
Gbler, Carlo, Life of a Drum, new edn (1991; London: Abacus, 1992).
Gelley, Alexander, City Texts: Representation, Semiology, Urbanism, in Mark
Poster, ed., Politics, Theory, and Contemporary Culture (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1993), 23760.
Genet, Jean, The Thiefs Journal, trans. by Bernard Frechtman (1949;
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967).
Ghali, Waguih, Beer in the Snooker Club, new edn (1964; London: Serpents Tail,
2010).
Gilroy, Beryl, Boy-Sandwich (Oxford: Heinemann Educational Publishers,
1989).
Gilroy, Paul, Foreword: Migrancy, Culture, and a New Map of Europe, in Heike
Raphael-Hernandez, ed., Blackening Europe: The African American Presence
(New York and London: Routledge, 2004), xi-xxii.
Goody, Jack, Islam in Europe (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004).
Gorky, Maxim, The Mother, trans. by Hugh Aplin (19067; London: Alma Classics,
2015).
316 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gttsche, Dirk, and Axel Dunker, eds, (Post-)Colonialism across Europe:

Transcultural History and National Memory (Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2014).
Gowan, Peter, and Perry Anderson, eds, The Question of Europe (London and
NewYork: Verso, 1997).
Goytisolo, Juan, State of Siege, trans. by Helen Lane (1995; London: Serpents
Tail, 2003).
Grant, Rob, Incompetence: A Novel of the Far Too Near Future (London: Gollancz,
2003).
Grass, Gnter, The Tin Drum, trans. by Ralph Manheim (1959; London: Vintage,
1998).
Greene, Graham, The Third Man and The Fallen Idol, new edn (1950, 1935;
London: Penguin, 1981).
Grohmann, Alexis, and Caragh Wells, eds, Digressions in European Literature: From
Cervantes to Sebald (Basingstoke and NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
Grndahl, Jens Christian, Silence in October, trans. by Anne Born (1998;
Edinburgh: Canongate, 2000).
Grndahl, Satu, Invandrar och minoritetslitteraturer i Sverige: Frn frutsttnin-
gar till framtidsutsikter, in Grndahl, ed., Litteraturens grnsland: Invandrar-
och minoritetslitteratur i nordiskt perspektiv (Uppsala: Centrum fr multietnisk
forskning, Uppsala Universitet, 2002), 3570.
Gstrein, Norbert, Die englischen Jahre, new edn (1999; Mnchen: DTV, 2008).
, Das Handwerk des Ttens (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003).
Gune, Faza, Dreams from the Endz, trans. by Sarah Ardizzone (2006; London:
Chatto & Windus, 2008).
Gupta, Akhil, and James Ferguson, Beyond Culture: Space, Identity, and the
Politics of Difference, Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 7, No. 1 (1992), 623.
Gr, Halil, Gekke Mustafa (Breda: De Geus, 1984).
Grster, Eugen, Geistige Aspekte der amerikanischen Zivilisation (Fortsetzung),
Die Neue Rundschau, Vol. 3 (1951), 2474.
Guyver, Lynn, Post-Cold War Moral Geography: A Critical Analysis of
Representations of Eastern Europe in Post-1989 British Fiction and Drama
(unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Warwick, 2001).
Haasse, Hella S., The Black Lake, trans. by Ina Rilke (1948; London: Portobello
Books, 2012).
Habermas, Jrgen, The New Conservatism: Cultural Criticism and the Historians
Debate, trans. by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (1985; Cambridge: Polity Press,
1989).
, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a
Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989).
, The European Nation-State: On the Past and Future of Sovereignty and
Citizenship, Public Culture, Vol. 10, No. 2 (1998), 397416.
Hagerfors, Lennart, The Whales in Lake Tanganyika, trans. by Anselm Hollo
(1985; London: Penguin, 1991).
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 317

Hahn, Johann Georg von, Albanesische Studien (Jena: Verlag Friedrich Mauke,
1854).
Hall, Stuart, Minimal Selves, in Lisa Appignanesi, ed., Identify: The Real Me
(London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1987), 446.
, Dave Morely and Kuan-Hsing Chen, eds, Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues
in Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1996).
Hammond, Andrew, Balkanism in Political Context: From the Ottoman Empire
to the EU, Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture, Vol. 3, No. 3
(2006), 626.
Hammonds, Evelyn, Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,
in Elizabeth Weed and Naomi Schor, eds, Feminism Meets Queer Theory
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).
Hancock, Ian, The Pariah Syndrome (Michigan: Karoma Publishers, 1987).
, We Are the Romani People (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press,
2002).
Hansen, Miriam Bratu, Benjamins Aura, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 34 (2008), 33675.
Hansson, Carola, Steinhof, trans. by Irene Scobbie (1998; London: Arcadia Books,
2002).
Harde, Roxanne, ed., Narratives of Community: Womens Short Story Sequences
(Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007).
Harris, Joanne, Chocolat (New York: Viking Adult, 1999).
Haviaras, Stratis, When the Tree Sings, new edn (1979; London: Picador, 1980).
Hawkesworth, Celia, ed., Literature and Politics in Eastern Europe (Basingstoke
and London: Macmillan, 1992).
Hay, Denys, Europe: The Emergence of an Idea, new edn (1957; Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 1968).
Hechter, Michael, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National
Development, 15361966, new edn (1975; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University
of California Press, 1977).
Heighway, Elizabeth, ed., Contemporary Fiction from Georgia, trans. by Elizabeth
Heighway (Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive, 2012).
Hein, Christoph, Willenbrock, trans. by Philip Boehm (2000; NewYork: Picador,
2004).
Heinemann, Margot, The Adventurers (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1959).
Heith, Anne, Millenarianism and the Narration of the Nation: Narratives about
the Korpela Movement, Journal of Northern Studies, Vol. 1 (2009), 1329.
, Nils Holgersson Never Saw Us: A Tornedalian Literary History, in Heidi
Hansson and Cathrine Norberg, eds, Cold Matters: Cultural Perceptions of
Snow, Ice and Cold (Ume: Ume University and the Royal Skyttean Society,
2009), 20921.
, Aesthetics and Ethnicity: The Role of Boundaries in Smi and Tornedalian
Art, in Lars Jensen and Kristn Loftsdttir, eds, Whiteness and Postcolonialism
in the Nordic Region (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2012), 15973.
318 BIBLIOGRAPHY

, Beyond Hegel and Normative Whiteness: Minorities, Migration and

New Swedish Literatures, Multiethnica, Vol. 34 (2012), 1820.
, Challenging and Negotiating National Borders: Smi and Tornedalian
AlterNative Literary History, in Hein Viljoen, ed., Crossing Borders, Dissolving
Boundaries (Amsterdam and NewYork: Rodopi, 2013), 7591.
, Blackness, Religion, Aesthetics: Johannes Anyurus Literary Explorations
of Migration and Diaspora, Nordlit, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2014), 5970.
, Valkeaps Use of Photographs in Beaivi han: Indigenous Counter-
History versus Documentation in the Age of Photography, Acta Borealia, Vol.
31, No. 1 (2014), 4158.
, Johannes Anyuru: Literary Explorations of Afro-Swedishness,
Encyclopedia of Afroeuropean Studies, http://www.encyclopediaofafroeuro-
peanstudies.eu/encyclopedia/johannes-anyuru/(accessed 25 September
2015).
Hemon, Aleksandar, Bosanska Knjievnost i Posljednji Dani, BH Dani, 25 February
2000, https://www.bhdani.ba/portal/arhiva-67-281/143/hemon143.htm
(accessed 18 September 2015).
, The Lazarus Project, new edn (2008; London: Picador, 2009).
Herrmann, Richard K., Thomas Risse and Marilynn B.Brewer, eds, Transnational
Identities: Becoming European in the EU (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield,
2004).
Herrschel, Tassilo, Borders in Post-Socialist Europe: Territory, Scale, Society
(Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2011).
Hettne, Bjrn, Sverker Srlin and Uffe stergrd, Den globala nationalismen:
Nationalstatens historia och framtid (Stockholm: SNS Frlag, 2006).
Hewitt, Nicholas, ed., The Culture of Reconstruction: European Literature, Thought
and Film, 194550 (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1989).
Hilbig, Wolfgang, Das Provisorium (Frankfurt am Main: S.Fischer, 2000).
Hobsbawm, Eric, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 19141991, new
edn (1994; London: Abacus, 1995).
, The Curious History of Europe (1996), in Hobsbawm, On History, new
edn (1997; London: Abacus, 1998), 287301.
Hodrov, Daniela, Prague, I See a City, trans. by David Short (1991; Praha:
Jantar Publishing, 2011).
Hoeller, Hildegard, Ama Ata Aidoos Heart of Darkness, Research in African
Literatures, Vol. 35, No. 1 (2004), 13047.
Hoffmann, Yoel, Bernhard, trans. by Alan Treister and Eddie Levenston (1989;
NewYork: New Directions, 1998).
Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, Herbert Lindenberger and Egon Schwarz, eds, Essays on
European Literature in Honor of Liselotte Dieckmann (St. Louis: Washington
University Press, 1972).
Holmqvist, Ninni, The Unit, trans. by Marlaine Delargy (2006; Oxford: Oneworld
Publications, 2010).
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 319

Honigmann, Barbara, A Love Made out of Nothing; Zoharas Journey: Two Novels,
trans. by John Barrett (1991, 1996; Boston: Verba Mundi, 2003).
Hornung, Alfred, and Ernstpeter Ruhe, eds, Postcolonialisme and Autobiographie:
Albert Memmi, Assia Djebar, Daniel Maximin (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998).
Horsman, Mathew, and Andrew Marshall, After the Nation-State: Citizens,
Tribalism and the New World Disorder (London: HarperCollins, 1994).
Houellebecq, Michel, Platform, trans. by Frank Wynne (2001; London: William
Heinemann, 2002).
Hrabal, Bohumil, Closely Observed Trains, trans. by Edith Pargeter (1965; London:
Abacus, 1990).
, Cutting It Short and The Little Town Where Time Stood Still, trans. by
James Naughton (1976, 1973; London: Abacus, 1994).
Hsu, Roland, ed., Ethnic Europe: Mobility, Identity, and Conflict in a Globalized
World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010).
Huber, Wolfgang, Die jdisch-christliche Tradition, in Hans Joas and Klaus
Wiegandt, eds, Die Kulturellen Werte Europas (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer
Taschenbuchverlag, 2005), 6992.
Huddart, David, Postcolonial Theory and Autobiography (London: Routledge, 2008).
Hudson, Kate, European Communism since 1989: Towards a New European Left?
(Basingstoke: Macmillan; NewYork: St. Martins Press, 2000).
Huggan, Graham, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London:
Routledge, 2001).
, Perspectives on Postcolonial Europe, Journal of Postcolonial Writing,
Vol. 44, No. 3 (2008), 2419.
Hugo, Victor, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, trans. by Robin Waterfield (1831;
NewYork: Viking Penguin, 1997).
Humbert, Fabrice, Silas Fortune, trans. by Frank Wynne (2010; London: Serpents
Tail, 2013).
Huyssen, Andreas, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
Ibragimbekov, Rustam, Solar Plexus: A Baku Raga in Four Parts, trans. by Andrew
Bromfield (1996; London: Glagoslav Publications, 2014).
Innes, C.L., The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
Irigaray, Luce, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. by Gillian C. Gill (1974;
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
Iskander, Fazil, Sandro of Chegem, trans. by Susan Brownsberger (1979; London
and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1993).
Ismailov, Hamid, The Railway, trans. by Robert Chandler (1997; London: Harvill
Secker, 2006).
Jaanus, Maire, Estonia and Pain: Jaan Krosss The Czars Madman, in Violeta
Kelertas, ed., Baltic Postcolonialism (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi,
2006), 30929.
320 BIBLIOGRAPHY

, Estonias Time and Monumental Time, in Violeta Kelertas, ed., Baltic

Postcolonialism (Amsterdam and NewYork: Rodopi, 2006), 20332.
JanMohamed, Abdul, Worldliness-without-World, Homelessness-as-Home: Toward
a Definition of the Specular Border Intellectual, in Michael Sprinkler, ed.,
Edward Said: A Critical Reader (Oxford and Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992),
96120.
Jans, Erwin, Schrijven al seen vorm van archief, De Wereldmorgen, 12 December
2014, http://www.dewereldmorgen.be/artikel/2014/12/12/schrijven-als-
een-vorm-van-archief (accessed 21 September 2015).
Japin, Arthur, The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi, trans. by Ina Rilke (1997; London:
Vintage, 2001).
Jara, Cronwell, Bab Osam, cimarrn, ora por la santa muerta (Lima: Eco del
Bho, 1989).
Jasper, David, and Colin Crowder, European Literature and Theology in the
Twentieth Century: Ends of Time (New York: St. Martins Press, 1990).
Javakhishvili, Mikheil, Kvachi, trans. by Donald Rayfield (1925; Champaign and
London: Dalkey Archive, 2015).
, Arsena marabdeli (Tbilisi: Pederatsia, 1935).
Jeffrey, Alex, The Masks of Europe in Contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina,
in Luiza Bialasiewicz, ed., Europe in the World: EU Geopolitics and the Making
of European Space (London: Ashgate, 2011), 85105.
Jelinek, Elfriede, Wonderful Wonderful Times, trans. by Michael Hulse (1980;
London: Serpents Tail, 1990).
Jensen, Lars, Deconstructing Europe: Postcolonial Perspectives (Review),
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Vol. 49, No. 4 (2013), 4978.
Jergovi, Miljenko, Sarajevski Marlboro (Zagreb: Durieux, 1994).
, Mama Leone, trans. by David Williams (1999; New York: Archipelago
Books, 2012).
, and Semezdin Mehmedinovi, Transatlantic Mail (Zagreb: VBZ, 2009).
Joll, James, Europe: A Historians View (Leeds: Leeds University Press, 1969).
Jones, Sam, Refugee Rhetoric Echoes 1938 Summit before Holocaust, UN Official
Warns, The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/
2015/oct/14/refugee-rhetoric-echoes-1938-summit-before-holocaust-un-
official-warns (accessed 1 November 2016).
Joyce, Christopher, ed., Questions of Identity: A Selection from the Pages of New
European (London and NewYork: I.B.Tauris, 2002).
Judt, Tony, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, new edn (2005; London:
Pimlico, 2007).
Jungerson, Christian, The Exception, trans. by Anna Paterson (2004; London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2006).
Juraga, Dubravka, and M.Keith Booker, eds, Socialist Cultures East and West: A
Post-Cold War Reassessment (Westport and London: Praeger, 2002).
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 321

Kadare, Ismail, The General of the Dead Army, trans. by Derek Coltman (1962;
London: Harvill, 1998).
, Le Chant (1967), in Kadare, Oeuvres, ed. by Erik Faye (Paris: Fayard,
19932004), IV, 53740.
, The Wedding, trans. by Ali Cungu (1968; Tirana: The Naim Frashri
PublishingHouse, 1968).
, Autobiographie du peuple en vers, trans. by Edmond Tupja and Pashuk
Matia (1971; Tirana: Editions 8 Nntori, 1988).
, The Three-Arched Bridge, trans. by John Hodgson (1977; New York:
Vintage, 1997).
, Doruntine, trans. by Jon Rothschild (1979; Lanham: New Amsterdam
Books, 1988).
, The File on H, trans. by David Bellos (1981; London: Harvill Press, 1997).
, The Palace of Dreams, trans. by Barbara Bray (1981; London: Harvill
Press, 1993).
, Foreword to Qemal Haxhihasani, Luka Kol, Alfred Ui and Misto Treska,
eds, Le Chansonnier pique albanais, trans. by Kol Luka (Tirana: Academie des
Sciences de la RPS DAlbanie, Institut de Culture Populaire, 1983).
, Eschyle ou le grand perdant, trans. by Jusuf Vrioni and Alexandre Zotos
(1985; Paris: Fayard, 1995).
, The Wedding Procession Turned to Ice, in Robert Elsie, ed., Kosovo: In the
Heart of the Powder Keg, trans. by Robert Elsie (1986; Boulder: East European
Monographs, Columbia University Press, 1997), 10592.
, The Successor, trans. by David Bellos (2003; Edinburgh: Canongate,
2007).
Kakmi, Dmetri, Mother Land, new edn (2008; London: Eland, 2015).
Kanfer, Stefan, The Eighth Sin (New York: Berkley Publishing Group, 1978).
Kapitov, Daniela, Samko Tles Cemetery Book, trans. by Julia Sherwood (2000;
London: Garnett Press, 2011).
Kaputanoglu, Anil, Hinfahren Und Zurckdenken: Zur Konstruktion kultureller
Zwischenrume in der trkisch-deutschen Gegenwartsliteratur (Wrzburg:
Knigshausen & Neumann, 2010).
Kara, Yad, Selam Berlin (Zrich: Diogenes, 2003).
Krason, Einar, Devils Island, trans. by David MacDuff and Magnus Magnusson
(1983; Edinburgh: Canongate, 2000).
Karumidze, Zurab, Dagny, or a Love Feast (Champaign and London: Dalkey
Archive, 2013).
Kassabova, Kapka, Street without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in
Bulgaria, new edn (2008; London: Portobello Books, 2009).
Kaya, Ayhan, and Ayegl Kayaolu, Is National Citizenship Withering Away?:
Social Affiliations and Labor Market Integration of Turkish-Origin Immigrants
in Germany and France, German Studies Review, Vol. 35, No. 1 (2012), 11334.
322 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kazantzakis, Nikos, Zorba the Greek, trans. by Carl Wildman (1946; London:
Faber and Faber, 1961).
, Freedom and Death, trans. by Jonathan Griffin (1953; London: Faber and
Faber, 1966).
Kebo, Ozren, Sarajevo za poetnike (Sarajevo: Dani, 1996).
Keilson, Hans, Comedy in a Minor Key, trans. by Damion Searls (1947; London:
Modern Voices, 2011).
Keller, Ursula, and Ilma Rakusa, eds, Writing Europe: What Is European about the
Literature of Europe?, new edn (2003; Budapest and New York: Central
European University Press, 2004).
Kelman, James, How Late It Was, How Late, new edn (1994; London: Minerva,
1995).
Kender, Kaur, Kuulates Piiririiki, Postimees Kultuur, 22 May 2003, http://
kultuur.postimees.ee/2022705/kuulates-piiririiki (accessed 16 June 2015).
Kertsz, Imre, Fateless, trans. by Tim Wilkinson (1975; London: Vintage, 2006).
, Liquidation, trans. by Tim Wilkinson (2003; London: Harvill Secker,
2006).
Keun, Irmgard, Child of All Nations, trans. by Michael Hofmann (1938; London:
Penguin, 2009).
Khasavov, Arslan, Sense, trans. by Arch Tait (2010; Moscow: Glas, 2012).
Khintibidze, Elguja, Georgian-Byzantine Literary Contacts, trans. by Arrian
Tchanturia (1969; Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1996).
Kiernan, V.G., European Empires from Conquest to Collapse, 18151960 (London:
Fontana, 1982).
Kim, Anna, Frozen Time, trans. by Michael Mitchell (2008; Riverside: Ariadne
Press, 2010).
Ki, Danilo, A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, trans. by Duka Miki-Mitchell (1976;
Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2001).
Kjellman, Ulrika, A Whiter Shade of Pale: Visuality and Race in the Work of the
Swedish State Institute for Race Biology, Scandinavian Journal of History,
Vol. 38, No. 2 (2013), 180201.
Klekh, Igor, A Land the Size of Binoculars, trans. by Michael M.Naydan and Slava
I.Yastremski (1993; Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2004).
Klma, Ivan, My Golden Trades, trans. by Paul Wilson (1990; London: Penguin,
1993).
, Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light, trans. by Paul Wilson (1993;
London: Granta Books, 1998).
Koestler, Arthur, The Call-Girls: A Tragi-Comedy with Prologue and Epilogue, new
edn (1972; London and Sydney: Pan Books, 1976).
Kohn, Margaret, Colonialism, in Edward N.Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/colonialism
(accessed 29 July 2015).
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 323

Kongoli, Fatos, The Loser, trans. by Robert Elsie and Janice Mathie-Heck (1992;
Bridgend: Seren, 2007).
Koningsberger, Hans, The Revolutionary, new edn (1968; Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1970).
, Acts of Faith, new edn (1986; London: Alison and Busby, 1990).
Konkka, Anita, A Fools Paradise, trans. by A.D.Haun and Owen Witesman (1988;
Normal and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2006).
Konrd, George, The City Builder, trans. by Ivan Sanders (1977; Champaign and
London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2007).
Kr, Mustafa, De lammeren (Amsterdam: Van Gennep, 2007).
Kourouma, Ahmadou, Allah Is Not Obliged, trans. by Frank Wyne (2000;
Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2006).
Kovaevi, Nataa, Storming the EU Fortress: Communities of Disagreement in
Dubravka Ugrei, Cultural Critique, Vol. 83 (2013), 6386.
Kowalski, Ronald, European Communism 18481991 (Basingstoke and NewYork:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
Kranz, Frederick, ed., History from Below: Studies in Protest and Popular Ideology,
new edn (1985; Oxford and NewYork: Basil Blackwell, 1988).
Krasznahorkai, Lszl, Satantango, trans. by George Szirtes (1985; London:
Atlantic Books, 2013).
Kristeva, Julia, Desire in Language, trans. by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine and Leon
S.Roudiez (1977; NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1980).
, Stabat Mater (1977), in Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. by Leon S.Roudiez
(1983; NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1987).
, PowersofHorror: AnEssayonAbjection, trans. by Leon S.Roudiez (1980;
NewYork: ColumbiaUniversityPress, 1982).
, Strangers to Ourselves, trans. by Leon S. Roudiez (1988; New York:
Columbia University Press, 1991).
, The Samurai, trans. by Barbara Bray (1990: New York: Columbia
University Press, 1992).
Kristf, gota, The Notebook, trans. by Alan Sheridan (1986; London: CB Editions,
2014).
, The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie, trans. by Alan Sheridan, David
Watson and Marc Romano (1986, 1988, 1991; NewYork: Grove Press, 1997).
, Yesterday, trans. by David Watson (1995; London: Secker & Warburg,
1997).
Krlea, Miroslav, The Return of Philip Latinowicz, trans. by Zora Depolo (1932;
London and NewYork: Quartet Books, 1989).
Kross, Jaan, The Czars Madman, trans. by Anselm Hollo (1978; NewYork: The
New Press, 1993).
Kuhlman, Martha, The Double Writing of Agota Kristof and the New Europe,
Studies in 20th Century Literature, Vol. 27, No. 1 (2003), 12139.
324 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kulenovi, Tvrtko, Natural History of a Disease, trans. by Amila Karahasanovi

(1994; Sarajevo: Academy of Sciences and Arts of Bosnia and Herzegovina,
2012).
Kundera, Milan, The Farewell Party, trans. by Peter Kussi (1976; London and
Boston: Faber and Faber, 1993).
, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, trans. by Aaron Asher (1978;
London: Faber and Faber, 2000).
, The Tragedy of Central Europe (1983, trans. by Edmund White), The
NewYork Review of Books, 26 April 1984, 338.
, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, trans. by Michael Henry Heim (1984;
NewYork: Harper Colophon, 1985).
, The Art of the Novel, trans. by Linda Asher (1986; London: Faber and
Faber, 1999).
, Slowness, trans. by Linda Asher (1995; London and Boston: Faber and
Faber, 1996).
Kunert, Gnter, The State of Europe, Granta, Vol. 30 (1990), 1612.
Kureishi, Hanif, The Black Album, new edn (1995; London and Boston: Faber and
Faber, 1996).
Laanes, Eneken, Lepitamatud dialoogid: subjekt ja mlu nukogudejrgses eesti
romaanis (Tartu: Tartu likooli kirjastus, 2009).
Laar, Mart, The Power of Freedom: Central and Eastern Europe after 1945 (Brussels:
Centre for European Studies, 2010).
LaCapra, Dominick, Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1994).
, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2001).
Lahav, Gallya, Immigration and Politics in the New Europe: Reinventing Borders
(Cambridge and NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Lakatos, Menyhrt, The Color of Smoke: An Epic Novel of the Roma, trans. by Ann
Major (1975; Williamstown: New Europe Books, 2015).
Lakhous, Amara, Clash of Civilizations over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio, trans.
by Ann Goldstein (2006; NewYork: Europa Editions, 2008).
, Divorce Islamic Style, trans. by Ann Goldstein (2010; NewYork: Europa
Editions, 2012).
Lamming, George, In the Castle of My Skin, new edn (1953; Harlow: Longman,
1987).
Lamrabet, Rachida, Vrouwland (Antwerpen: Meulenhoff-Manteau, 2007).
Langer, Josef, Towards a Conceptualization of Borders: The Central European
Experience, in Heikki Eskelinen, Ilkka Liikanen and Jukka Oksa, eds, Curtains
of Iron and Gold: Reconstructing Borders and Scales of Interaction (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 1999), 2542.
Lapavitsas, Costas, Crisis in the Eurozone (London: Verso, 2012).
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 325

, Profiting without Producing: How Finance Exploits Us All (London: Verso,

2013).
Lavenex, Sandra, EU External Governance in Wider Europe, Journal of
European Public Policy, Vol. 11, No. 4 (2004), 680700.
, The Politics of Exclusion and Inclusion in Wider Europe, in Joan
DeBardeleben, ed., Soft and Hard Borders? Managing the Divide in an Enlarged
Europe (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2005), 12344.
Lavrin, Janko, Studies in European Literature (London: Constable and Co., 1929).
Lawrence, D.H., The Virgin and the Gipsy, new edn (1930; NewYork: Bantam,
1968).
Laxness, Halldr, The Atom Station, trans. by Magnus Magnusson (1948; London:
Vintage, 2004).
, The Fish Can Sing, trans. by Magnus Magnusson (1957; London: The
Harvill Press, 2001).
Lefteri, Christy, A Watermelon, a Fish and a Bible (London: Quercus, 2010).
Leggewie, Claus, Hybridkulturen, Merkur, Vol. 54 (2000), 87889.
Lemon, Alaina, Roma (Gypsies) in the Soviet Union and the Moscow Teatr
Romen, in Diane Tong, ed., Gypsies: An Interdisciplinary Reader (New
York: Garland, 1998), 14767.
Lenin, V.I., The State and Revolution, trans. by Robert Service (1918; London:
Penguin, 1992).
Levi, Primo, If This Is a Man and The Truce, trans. by Stuart Woolf (1958, 1963;
London: Abacus, 1987).
, The Periodic Table, trans. by Raymond Rosenthal (1975; London: Abacus,
1986).
, The Wrench, trans. by William Weaver (1978; London: Abacus, 1988).
Levy, Daniel, Max Pensky and John Torpey, eds, Old Europe, New Europe, Core
Europe: Transatlantic Relations after the Iraq War (London and New York:
Verso, 2005).
Lewis, Pericles, ed., The Cambridge Companion to European Modernism
(Cambridge and NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
Lewycka, Marina, A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, new edn (2005;
London: Penguin, 2006).
, Two Caravans, new edn (2007; London: Penguin, 2008).
Liiv, Rolf, Kmme aastat hiljem: kas piiririigis on miskit uut, Sirp, 6 June 2003,
http://www.sirp.ee/archive/2003/06.06.03/Kirjand/kirjand1-1.html (accessed
17 June 2015).
Lindsay, Jack, Rising Tide (London: The Bodley Head, 1953).
Longo, Davide, The Last Man Standing, trans. by Silvester Mazzarella (2010;
London: MacLehose Press, 2013).
Lnnrot, Elias, Kalevala: An Epic Poem after Oral Tradition, trans. by Keith
Bosley (1835; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
326 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lorca, Federico Garca, Romance sonmbulo, in Lorca, Gypsy Ballads, trans. by

Jane Duran and Gloria Garca Lorca (1928; London: Enitharmon Press, 2011).
Lorchenkov, Vladimir, The Good Life Elsewhere, trans. by Ross Ufberg (2008;
NewYork: New Vessel Press, 2014).
Lorenz, Dagmar C.G., Hilde Spiel: Lisas Zimmer Frau, Jdin, Verfolgte,
Modern Austrian Literature, Vol. 25, No. 2 (1992), 7995.
Lornsen, Karin, The City as Stage of Transgression: Performance, Picaresque
Reminiscences, and Linguistic Incongruity in Emine S. zdamars The Bridge
of the Golden Horn, Amsterdamer Beitrge zur neueren Germanistik, Vol. 70,
No. 1 (2009), 20117.
Low, Gail, and Marion Wynne-Davies, eds, A Black British Canon? (Basingstoke
and NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
Luik, Viivi, The Beauty of History, trans. by Hildi Hawkins (1991; Norwich:
Norvik Press, 2007).
Lundmark, Lars, Protest och profetia: Korpela-rrelsen och drmmen om tidens nde
(Lund: Arkiv frlag, 1985).
Lutz, Helma, The Limits of European-ness: Immigrant Women in Fortress
Europe, Feminist Review, Vol. 57 (1997), 93111.
Ltzeler, Paul Michael, Die Schriftsteller und Europa: Von der Romantik bis zur
Gegenwart (Mnchen: Piper, 1992).
, Kontinentalisierung: Das Europa der Schriftsteller (Bielefeld: Aisthesis,
2007).
Macaulay, Rose, The World My Wilderness, new edn (1950; London: Virago,
1983).
Macaulay, Thomas Babington, Minute on Indian Education (1835), The Norton
Anthology of English Literature, http://www.wwnorton.com/college/eng-
lish/nael/victorian/topic_4/macaulay.htm (accessed 25 July 2015).
Macfie, A.L., The Eastern Question, 17741923 (London and NewYork: Longman,
1989).
Magnus, Bernd, and Stephen Cullenberg, eds, Whither Marxism?: Global Crises in
International Perspective (New York and London: Routledge, 1995).
Makanin, Vladimir, Escape Hatch and The Long Road Ahead: Two Novellas, trans.
by Mary Ann Szporluk (1990, 1991; Dana Point: Ardis, 1996).
Makine, Andre, Once upon the River Love, trans. by Geoffrey Strachan (1994;
London: Penguin, 1999).
, Le Testament Franais, trans. by Geoffrey Strachan (1995; London:
Sceptre, 2007).
Makis, Eve, The Spice Box Letters (Dingwall: Sandstone Press, 2015).
Malmborg, Mikael af, and Bo Strth, eds, The Meaning of Europe: Variety and
Contention within and among Nations (Oxford and NewYork: Berg, 2002).
Malouf, David, Remembering Babylon, new edn (1993; London: Vintage, 1994).
Manea, Norman, The Black Envelope, trans. by Patrick Camiller (1986; London:
Faber and Faber, 1996).
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 327

Mann, Thomas, The Magic Mountain, trans. by Helen Tracey Lowe-Porter (1924;
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960).
, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, trans. by Denver Lindley
(1954; London: Secker & Warburg, 1955).
Mannin, Mike, ed., Pushing Back the Boundaries: The European Union and Central
and Eastern Europe (Manchester and NewYork: Manchester University Press,
1999).
Marouane, Lela, The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris, trans. by Alison Anderson
(2007; NewYork: Europa Editions, 2010).
Marquand, David, After Socialism, Political Studies, Vol. 41 (1993), 4356.
Martin, Daniel, Nation States are Dead: EU Chief Says the Belief that Countries
Can Stand Alone is a Lie and an Illusion, Mail Online, 11 November 2010,
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1328568/Nation-states-dead-EU-
chief-says-belief-countries-stand-lie.html (accessed 25 April 2014).
Martnez, Jos Luis, Hernn Corts (Mexico: UNAM/FCE, 1990).
Marushiakova, Elena, and Vesselin Popov, Historical and Ethnographic
Background: Gypsies, Roma, Sinti, in Will Guy, ed., Between Past and Future:
The Roma of Central and Eastern Europe (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire
Press, 2001), 3353.
Marven, Lyn, Body and Narrative in Contemporary Literatures in German: Herta
Mller, Libue Monkov, and Kerstin Hensel (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2005).
Maupassant, Guy de, Bel-Ami, trans. by Margaret Mauldon (1885; Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2001).
May, Sarah, The Internationals (London: Chatto & Windus, 2003).
Mayall, David, Gypsy Identities 15002000: From Egipcyans and Moon-Men to the
Ethnic Romany (New York: Routledge, 2004).
Mazzini, Miha, Crumbs, trans. by Maja Visenjak-Limon (1987; Glasgow: Freight
Books, 2014).
McCann, Colum, Zoli (New York: Random House, 2006).
McCourt, Frank, and Colum McCann, A Conversation with Colum McCann and
Frank McCourt, in McCann, Zoli (New York: Random House, 2006), 33743.
McEwan, Ian, The Innocent: Or The Special Relationship, new edn (1990; London:
Picador, 1990).
McGahern, John, Amongst Women (1990; London and Boston: Faber and Faber,
1991).
McIlvanney, William, Docherty, new edn (1975; London: Sceptre, 1987).
McMillin, Arnold, ed., Under Eastern Eyes: The West as Reflected in Recent Russian
migr Writing (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, School of Slavonic and
East European Studies, 1991).
Mehmedinovi, Semezdin, Sarajevo Blues, trans. by Ammiel Alcalay (1995; San
Francisco: City Lights, 1998).
, Autoportret s Torbom (Zagreb: Fraktura, 2012).
328 BIBLIOGRAPHY

, Knjiga Prozora (Zagreb: Fraktura, 2014).

Memmi, Albert, Strangers, trans. by Brian Rhys (1955; NewYork: Orion Press,
1960).
Mengozzi, Chiara, Narrazioni contese: ventanni di scritture italiane della
migrazione (Roma: Carocci, 2013).
Mrime, Prosper, Carmen, trans. by Nicholas Jotcham (1845; NewYork: Oxford
University Press, 1989).
Metrovi, Stjepan G., The Balkanization of the West: The Confluence of
Postmodernism and Postcommunism (London and New York: Routledge,
1994).
Michael, Livi, All the Dark Air (London: Secker and Warburg, 1997).
Miville, China, The City & the City, new edn (2009; London: Pan Books, 2010).
Miletic, Tijana, European Literary Immigration into the French Language:
Readings of Gary, Kristof, Kundera and Semprun (Amsterdam and NewYork:
Rodopi, 2008).
Miosz, Czesaw, The Seizure of Power, trans. by Celina Wieniewska (1953; London:
Abacus, 1985).
Minnaard, Liesbeth, Between Exoticism and Silence: A Comparison of First
Generation Migrant Writing in Germany and the Netherlands, Arcadia:
International Journal for Literary Studies, Vol. 46, No. 1 (2011), 199208.
Modood, Tariq, and Pnina Werbner, eds, The Politics of Multiculturalism in the
New Europe: Racism, Identity and Community (London and NewYork: Zed
Books, 1997).
Moore, Brian, The Colour of Blood, new edn (1988; London: Flamingo, 1994).
Moore, David Chioni, Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet?
Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique, PMLA, Vol. 116, No. 1 (2001),
11128.
Moore-Gilbert, Bart, Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics, and Self-
Representation (London: Routledge, 2009).
Morandini, Giuliana, The Caf of Mirrors, trans. by Luisa Quartermaine (1983;
Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1997).
Morchiladze, Aka, Journey to Karabagh, trans. by Elizabeth Heighway (2004;
Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive, 2013).
, Kagdata in jorjia (Tbilisi: Literasi, 2008).
Moretti, Franco, Atlas of the European Novel 18001900, new edn (1997; London
and NewYork: Verso, 1998).
Morgan, Kevin, Gidon Cohen and Andrew Flinn, Communists and British Society
19201991 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 2007).
Morgan, Peter, Ismail Kadare: The Writer and the Dictatorship 19571990
(London: MHRA/Maney Publishing, 2010).
Morin, Edgar, Penser lEurope (Paris: Gallimard, 1987).
Morokvasic, Mirjana, Fortress Europe and Migrant Women, Feminist Review,
Vol. 39 (1991), 6984.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 329

Morris, Jan, Last Letters from Hav (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1985).

Mosteghanemi, Ahlam, Memory in the Flesh, trans. by Baria Ahmar Sreih (1985;
London: Arabia Books, 2008).
Mourad, Keniz, Le jardin de Badalpour: Roman (Paris: Fayard, 1998).
Mller, Herta, Traveling on One Leg, trans. by Valentina Glajar and Andr Lefevere
(1992; Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998).
, The Land of Green Plums, trans. by Michael Hofmann (1994; London:
Granta Books, 1998).
Muller, Karis, Shadows of Empire in the European Union, The European Legacy,
Vol. 6, No. 4 (2001), 43951.
Murdoch, Iris, Under the Net, new edn (1954; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960).
Murphy, Richard McGill, Lets Rokunroal!, The NewYork Times Book Review, 28
March 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/books/let-s-rokunroal.
html (accessed 11 February 2015).
Musil, Robert, The Man without Qualities, trans. by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst
Kaiser, 4 vols (193043; London: Picador, 1979).
Nabokov, Vladimir, Bend Sinister, new edn (1947; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974).
, Pnin, new edn (1957; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960).
Ndas, Pter, The End of a Family Story, trans. by Imre Goldstein (1977; London:
Vintage, 2000).
Nassib, Slim, Lhomme assis (Paris: Balland, 1991).
NDiaye, Marie, Three Strong Women, trans. by John Fletcher (2009; London:
MacLehose Press, 2012).
Nesaule, Agate, In Love with Jerzy Kosinski (Madison: Terrace Books, 2009).
Neubauer, John, and Borbla Zsuzsana Trk, eds, The Exile and Return of
Writers from East-Central Europe: A Compendium (Berlin and New York:
Walter de Greuyter, 2009).
Neumann, Iver B., Russia and the Idea of Europe: A Study in Identity and
International Relations (London and NewYork: Routledge, 1996).
Newman, David, On Borders and Power: A Theoretical Framework, Journal of
Borderlands Studies, Vol. 18, No. 1 (2003), 1325.
Neziraj, Jeton, The Demolition of the Eiffel Tower (Tragicomedy of the Absurd for
Four Actors) (2011), trans. by Robert Elsie and Janice Mathie-Heck, Albanian
Literature, http://www.albanianliterature.net/authors_modern2/neziraj_drama.
html (accessed 24 July 2015).
Ngg wa Thiongo, A Grain of Wheat, new edn (1967; London: Penguin,
2002).
Niedermller, Peter, and Bjarne Stoklund, eds, Europe: Cultural Construction and
Reality (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2001).
Niemi, Mikael, Popular Music, trans. by Laurie Thompson (2000; London:
Flamingo, 2003).
Nikitin, Alexei, Istemi, trans. by Anne Marie Jackson (2011; London and Chicago:
Peter Owen, 2013).
330 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Nikolaidis, Andrej, The Son, trans. by Will Firth (2006; London: Istros Books,
2013).
Nooteboom, Cees, In the Dutch Mountains, trans. by Adrienne Dixon (1984;
Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1987).
, The Following Story, trans. by Ina Rilke (1991; London: Harvill, 1993).
Nord, Deborah Epstein, Gypsies and the British Imagination, 18071930 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2008).
Nothomb, Amlie, Fear and Trembling, trans. by Adriana Hunter (1999; London:
Faber and Faber, 2004).
ODowd, Liam, and Thomas M.Wilson, eds, Borders, Nations and States: Frontiers
of Sovereignty in the New Europe (Aldershot: Avebury, 1996).
Odrach, Theodore, Wave of Terror, trans. by Erma Odrach (1972; Chicago:
Academy Chicago Publishers, 2008).
Okely, Judith, The Traveller-Gypsies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Oksanen, Sofi, Purge, trans. by Lola Rogers (2008; London: Atlantic Books,
2010).
Ollikainen, Aki, White Hunger, trans. by Emily Jeremiah and Fleur Jeremiah
(2012; London: Peirene Press, 2015).
Oltermann, Philip, Jrgen Habermass Verdict on the EU/Greece Debt Deal
(2015), The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/
jul/16/jurgen-habermas-eu-greece-debt-deal (accessed 15 August 2015).
Ondaatje, Michael, In the Skin of a Lion, new edn (1987; London: Picador, 1988).
nnepalu, Tnu, Border State, trans. by Madli Puhvel (1993; Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 2000).
Orbeliani, Sulkhan-Saba, A Book of Wisdom and Lies, trans. by Katharine Vivian
(1720; London: Octagon, 1982).
ren, Aras, Eine versptete Abrechnung (Frankfurt: Dagyeli, 1988).
Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four, new edn (1949; Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1983).
Ouednk, Patrik, Europeana: A Brief History of the Twentieth Century, trans. by
Gerald Turner (2001; Normal and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2005).
Ousmane, Sembne, Gods Bits of Wood, trans by Francis Price (1960; London:
Heinemann, 1986).
Oz, Amos, A Tale of Love and Darkness, trans. by Nicholas de Lange (2002;
London: Vintage, 2005).
zdamar, Emine Sevgi, Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei, hat zwei Tren, aus einer
kam ich rein, aus der anderen ging ich raus (Kln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch,
1992).
, The Bridge of the Golden Horn, trans. by Martin Chalmers (1998; London:
Serpents Tail, 2007).
, Seltsame Sterne starren zur Erde: Wedding-Pankow 1976/77 (Kln:
Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2003).
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 331

zkirimli, Umut, Theories of Nationalism: A Critical Introduction, new edn

(2000; Basingstoke and NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
Pabisch, Peter, Hilde Spiel Femme de Lettres, Modern Austrian Literature,
Vol. 12, Nos 34 (1979), 393421.
Pagden, Anthony, ed., Facing Each Other: The Worlds Perception of Europe and
Europes Perception of the World (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2000).
Pager, Brad, The Good German as Narrator: On W.G.Sebald and the Risks of
Holocaust Writing, New German Critique, Vol. 96 (2005), 75102.
Pamuk, Orhan, Snow, trans. by Maureen Freely (2002; London: Faber and Faber,
2004).
Parker, Noel, Integrated Europe and Its Margins: Action and Reaction, in
Parker and Bill Armstrong, eds, Margins in European Integration (Basingstoke
and London: Macmillan, 2000), 327.
Parker, W.H., Europe: How Far?, The Geographical Journal, Vol. 126, No. 3
(1960), 27897.
Parks, Tim, Europa, new edn (1997; London: Vintage, 1998).
Parry, Christoph, Von der Un-Kultur der neuen Welt, Ein Stereotyp, seine
Struktur und sein Vorkommen bei Thomas Mann und Theodor W.Adorno, in
Peter Pabisch, ed., Patentlsung oder Zankapfel? German Studies fr den
internationalen Bereich als Alternative zur Germanistik Beispiele aus Amerika
(Bern: Peter Lang, 2005), 91109.
, Gibt es eine europische Literatur (auf Deutsch)?, in Peter Hanenberg
and Isabel Gil, eds, Der literarische Europa-Diskurs: Festschrift fr Paul Michael
Ltzeler zum 70. Geburtstag (Wrzburg: Knigshausen & Neumann, 2013),
5062.
Passerini, Luisa, ed., Figures dEurope: Images and Myths of Europe (Bruxelles:
P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2003).
Paulgaard, Gry, Re-Centering Periphery: Negotiating Identities in Time and
Space, in Brynhild Grans and Jrgen Brenholdt, eds, Mobility and Place:
Enacting Northern European Peripheries (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate,
2008), 4959.
Paz, Octavio, El laberinto de la soledad (Mexico City: Cuadernos Americanos,
1950).
Pelevin, Victor, The Life of Insects, trans. by Andrew Bromfield (1995; London:
Harbord Publishing, 1996).
Pendelton, Eva, Love for Sale: Queering Heterosexuality, in Jill Nagle, ed.,
Whores and Other Feminists (New York: Routledge, 1997).
Penkov, Miroslav, East of the West, new edn (2011; London: Sceptre, 2011).
Pennac, Daniel, Monsieur Malaussne, trans. by Ian Monk (1995; London: Harvill,
2003).
Perii, Robert, Our Man in Iraq, trans. by Will Firth (2007; London: Istros
Books, 2012).
332 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Petterson, Per, I Curse the River of Time, trans. by Charlotte Barslund and Per
Petterson (2008; London: Vintage Books, 2011).
Phillips, Caryl, The European Tribe, new edn (1987; London and Boston: Faber
and Faber, 1988).
Pieterse, Jan Nederveen, Fictions of Europe, Race & Class, Vol. 32, No. 3
(1991), 310.
Pietikinen, Sari, Leena Huss, Sirkka Laihiala-Kankainen, Ulla Aikio-Puoskari and
Pia Lane, Regulating Multilingualism in the North Calotte: The Case of Kven,
Menkieli and Smi Languages, Acta Borealia, Vol. 27, No. 1 (2010), 123.
Pipa, Arshi, Contemporary Albanian Literature (Boulder: East European
Monographs; NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1991).
Pires, Jos Cardoso, Ballad of Dogs Beach: Dossier of a Crime, trans. by Mary
Fitton (1982; London and Melbourne: J.M.Dent and Sons, 1986).
Pitanek, Peter, Rivers of Babylon, trans. by Peter Petro (1991; London: Garnett
Press, 2007).
Platonov, Andrey, Soul and Other Stories, trans. by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler
(2007; London: Vintage, 2013).
Plebanek, Grayna, Illegal Liaisons, trans. by Danusia Stok (2010; London: Stork
Press, 2012).
Pohjanen, Bengt, I Was Born without Language (1973), Sirillus, http://www.
sirillus.se/index_bp.htm (accessed 25 September 2015).
Poliakov, Lon, The History of Anti-Semitism, Vol IV: Suicidal Europe, 18701933,
trans. by George Klin (1977; Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2003).
Ponzanesi, Sandra, and Daniela Merolla, eds, Migrant Cartographies: New
Cultural and Literary Spaces in Post-Colonial Europe (Lanham: Lexington
Books, 2005).
, and Bolette B.Blaagaard, eds, Deconstructing Europe: Postcolonial Perspectives
(London and NewYork: Routledge, 2012).
Poole, Peter A., Europe Unites: The EUs Eastern Enlargement (Westport: Praeger,
2003). Pratt, Mary Louise, Arts of the Contact Zone, Profession, Vol. 91
(1991), 3340.
, Reflections on Modernity and Globality, in Helena Carvalho Buescu
and Joo Ferreira Duarte, eds, Representaes do real na modernidade (Lisbon:
Edies Colibri, 2003), 6176.
Prescott, William H., The Conquest of Peru, new edn (1847; London: Richard
Bentley, 1850).
Priestland, David, The Red Flag: A History of Communism, new edn (2009;
NewYork: Grove Press, 2009).
Qosja, Rexhep, Realiteti i shprfillur: Vshtrim kritik mbi pikpamjet e Ismail
Kadares pr identitetin shqiptar (Tirana: Botimet Toena, 2006).
Rabinowich, Julya, Splithead, trans. by Tess Lewis (2009; London: Portobello
Books, 2011).
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 333

Rhys, Jean, Wide Sargasso Sea, new edn (1966; London: Penguin, 1997).
Riboni-Edme, Marie-Nolle, La trilogie dAgota Kristof: crire la division (Paris:
LHarmattan, 2007).
Richards, Keith, Sexuality and Death: Cultural Synthesis and the Grotesque in
Nstor Taboada de Terns Manchay Puytu, Journal of Hispanic Research, Vol.
3 (19945), 37696.
Ridanp, Juha, Politics of Literary Humour and Contested Narrative Identity (of
a Region with No Identity), Cultural Geographies, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2014),
71126.
Rietbergen, Peter, Europe: A Cultural History (London and NewYork: Routledge,
1998).
Rinner, Susanne, The German Student Movement and the Literary Imagination:
Transnational Memories of Protest and Dissent (New York: Berghahn Books,
2013).
Ritchie, J.M., German Exiles, British Perspectives (New York: Peter Lang, 1997).
Robakidze, Grigol, Gvelis perangi, palestra, new edn (1926, 1928; Tbilisi: Merani,
1988).
Roberts, Andrew, The Aachen Memorandum (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1995).
Robinson, Richard, Narratives of the European Border: A History of Nowhere
(Basingstoke and NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Rodell, Magnus, Fortifications in the Wilderness: The Making of Swedish-
Russian Borderlands around 1900, Journal of Northern Studies, Vol. 1 (2009),
6989.
Rolland, Romain, Jean-Christophe, new edn (190412; Paris: Ollendorff, 1921).
Romanowicz, Zofia, Passage through the Red Sea, trans. by Virgilia Peterson (1960;
NewYork: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1962).
Rose, Richard, What Is Europe? A Dynamic Perspective (New York: HarperCollins,
1996).
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, mile, or on Education, trans. by Allan Bloom (1762;
NewYork: Basic Books, 1979).
Rowe, William, and Vivian Schelling, Memory and Modernity: Popular Culture in
Latin America (London and NewYork: Verso, 1991).
Ruge, Eugen, In Times of Fading Light: The Story of a Family, trans. by Anthea Bell
(2011; London: Faber and Faber, 2014).
Rushdie, Salman, The Empire Writes Back with a Vengeance, The Times, 3 July
1982, 8.
, The Satanic Verses, new edn (1988; London: Vintage, 2006).
, Is Nothing Sacred, Granta, Vol. 31 (1990), 99111.
Rusinko, Elaine, Straddling Borders: Literature and Identity in Subcarpathian
Rus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003).
Sackville-West, Vita, Heritage (New York: George H.Doran, 1919).
, Challenge (New York: George H.Doran, 1923).
334 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sadulaev, German, I Am a Chechan!, trans. by Anna Gunin (2006; London:

Harvill Secker, 2010).
Sahgal, Nayantara, Rich Like Us (London: Heinemann, 1985).
, The Schizophrenic Imagination, in Anna Rutherford, ed., From
Commonwealth to Post-colonial (Sydney: Dangaroo Press, 1992), 306.
Said, Edward W., Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient, new edn (1978;
London: Penguin, 1995).
, Reflections on Exile, Granta, Vol. 13 (1984), 15972.
, Culture and Imperialism, new edn (1993; London: Vintage, 1994).
Said, Kurban, Ali and Nino, trans. by Jenia Graman (1937; London: Vintage, 2000).
Said, Sami, Vldigt sllan fin (Stockholm: Natur and Kultur, 2012).
Salih, Tayeb, Season of Migration to the North, trans. by Denys Johnson-Davies
(1966; London: Penguin, 2003).
Samuel, Raphael, The Lost World of British Communism (London and NewYork:
Verso, 2006).
Sandle, Mark, Communism (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2012).
Saramago, Jos, Seeing, trans. by Margaret Jull Costa (2004; London: Vintage,
2007).
, Death at Intervals, trans. by Margaret Jull Costa (2005; London: Vintage,
2008).
Sartre, Jean-Paul, The Age of Reason, trans. by Eric Sutton (1945; Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1961).
, The Reprieve, trans. by Eric Sutton (1945; Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1963).
, Iron in the Soul, trans. by Gerard Hopkins (1949; Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1963).
Sassoon, Donald, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the
Twentieth Century (London and NewYork: I.B.Tauris, 1996).
Schimanski, Johan, and Stephen Wolfe, eds, Border Poetics De-Limited (Hannover:
Wehrhahn Verlag, 2007).
Schneider, Peter, The Wall Jumper, trans. by Leigh Hafrey (1982; London:
Penguin, 2005).
Schofield, Robert, The Fig Tree and the Mulberry (Luxembourg: ditions Saint
Paul, 2011).
Schonfield, Ernest, 1968 and Transnational History in Emine Sevgi zdamars Die
Brcke vom Goldenen Horn, German Life & Letters, Vol. 68, No. 1 (2015), 6687.
Schulze, Ingo, Simple Stories, trans. by John E.Woods (1998; London: Picador,
2000).
, New Lives: The Youth of Enrico Trmer in Letters and Prose Edited and
with Commentary and Foreword, trans. by John E.Woods (2005; NewYork:
Alfred A.Knopf, 2008).
Schwabb, Gabrielle, Haunting Legacies: Violent Histories and Transgenerational
Trauma (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 335

Schwarz-Bart, Andr, The Last of the Just, trans. by Stephen Becker (1959;
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).
Scribner, Charity, Requiem for Communism (Cambridge and London: The MIT
Press, 2005).
Sebald, W.G., The Emigrants, trans. by Michale Hulse (1993; London: The Harvill
Press, 1996).
, The Rings of Saturn, trans. by Michael Hulse (1995; London: Vintage
Books, 2002).
, On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. by Anthea Bell (1999;
London: Penguin, 2004).
, Austerlitz, trans. by Anthea Bell (2001; London: Penguin, 2002).
, Campo Santo, trans. by Anthea Bell, edited by Sven Meyer (2003; London:
Penguin, 2006).
Sebbar, Lela, Sherazade, trans. by Dorothy S. Blair (1982; London: Quartet
Books, 1999).
, Je ne parle pas la langue de mon pre (Paris: Julliard, 2003).
Selimovi, Mea, Death and the Dervish, trans. by Bogdan Raki and Stephen
M.Dickey (1966; Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996).
Semprun, Jorge, The Cattle Truck, trans. by Richard Seaver (1963; London: Serif,
2005).
Senchin, Roman, Minus, trans. by Arch Tait (2002; Moscow: Glas, 2008).
enocak, Zafer, Atlas des tropischen Deutschland: Essays (Berlin: Babel, 1992).
, Gefhrliche Verwandschaft (Mnchen: Babel, 1998).
Serge, Victor, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, trans. by Willard R. Trask (1948;
NewYork: NewYork Review of Books, 2004).
Seyhan, Azade, Writing Outside the Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2001).
, From Istanbul to Berlin, German Politics & Society, Vol. 23, No. 1
(2005), 15270.
Shafak, Elif, The Bastard of Istanbul, new edn (2007; London: Penguin, 2008).
Shafi, Monika, Talkin Bout My Generation: Memories of 1968 in Recent
German Novels, German Life & Letters, Vol. 59, No. 2 (2006), 20116.
Shamsie, Kamila, Burnt Shadows, new edn (2009; London: Bloomsbury, 2009).
Shore, Cris, Building Europe: The Cultural Politics of European Integration
(London and NewYork: Routledge, 2000).
Shteyngart, Gary, The Russian Debutantes Handbook, new edn (2002; London:
Bloomsbury, 2004).
Singh, Nagendra Kr., International Encyclopaedia of Islamic Dynasties: Vol. 40,
Spain and Eastern Europe (Nuova Delhi: Anmol Publications, 2000).
kvoreck, Josef, The Bass Saxophone, trans. by Kaca Polackova-Henley (1963,
1967; London: Picador, 1980).
Slovo, Gillian, Morbid Symptoms (London: Pluto Press, 1984).
Smith, Anthony D., National Identity (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1991).
336 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Smith, Horatio, A Dictionary of Modern European Literature, new edn (1947;

London: Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press, 1947).
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples
(London and NewYork: Zed Books, 2008).
Smurr, Robert W., Perceptions of Nature, Expressions of Nation: An Environmental
History of Estonia (Saarbrcken: Lambert Academic Press, 2009).
Sol, Robert, Birds of Passage, trans. by John Brownjohn (1992; London: The
Harvill Press, 2001).
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, trans. by Max
Hayward and Ronald Hingley (1962; NewYork: Praeger Publishers, 1963).
Sontag, Susan, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977).
, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978).
, Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo, Performing Arts Journal, Vol. 16, No. 2
(1994), 87106.
, Where the Stress Falls (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).
, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2003).
Soueif, Ahdaf, The Map of Love, new edn (1999; London: Bloomsbury, 2000).
Spahi, Ognjen, Hansens Children, trans. by Will Firth (2004; Bristol: Istros
Books, 2011).
Spiel, Hilde, Kati auf der Brcke (Berlin and Wien: Zsolnay, 1933).
, Flute and Drums (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1939).
, The Darkened Room (London: Methuen, 1961).
, Fanny von Arnstein oder die Emanzipation: Ein Frauenleben an dr
Zeitenwende 17581818 (Frankfurt am Main: S.Fischer, 1962).
, Das Sternbild Europa (1977), in Paul Michael Ltzeler, ed., Hoffnung
Europa: Deutsche Essays von Novalis bis Enzensberger (Frankfurt am Main:
S.Fischer, 1994), 42844.
, Viennas Golden Autumn, 18661938 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1987).
, Die hellen und die finsteren Zeiten: Erinnerungen 19111946 (Mnchen:
List, 1989).
, Welche Welt ist meine Welt? Erinnerungen 19461989 (Mnchen: List,
1990).
Stanii, Saa, How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone, trans. by Anthea Bell
(2006; London: Phoenix, 2009).
Starck, Kathleen, ed., When the World Turned Upside Down: Cultural Representations
of Post-1989 Eastern Europe (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2009).
Starova, Luan, The Time of the Goats, trans. by Christina E.Kramer (1993; Skopje:
St. Clement of Ohrid National and University Library, 2011).
Stasiuk, Andrzej, White Raven, trans. by Wiesiek Powaga (1995; London:
Serpents Tail, 2000).
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 337

Stern, Richard, Europe: Or Up and Down with Schreiber and Baggish, new edn
(1961; Evanston: TriQuarterly Books, 2007).
Sterne, Laurence, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (175967;
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Strth, Bo, ed., Europe and the Other and Europe as the Other (Brussels: P.I.E.-
Peter Lang, 2000).
, Belonging and European Identity, in Gerard Delanty, Ruth Wodak and
Paul Jones, eds, Identity, Belonging, and Migration (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2008), 2137.
Strickhausen, Waltraud, Die Erzhlerin Hilde Spiel oder Der weite Wurf in die
Finsternis (New York: Peter Lang, 1996).
Suceav, Bogdan, Miruna, A Tale, trans. by Alistair Ian Blyth (2007; Prague:
Twisted Spoon Press, 2014).
Svanberg, Ingvar, and Harald Runblom, Multicultural Sweden, in Svanberg and
Runblom, eds, Multicultural Sweden (Stockholm: Gidlunds, 1989), 911.
Szyszkowitz, Gerald, On the Other Side, trans. by Todd C.Hanlin (1990; Riverside:
Ariadne Press, 1991).
Taboada Tern, Nstor, Angelina Yupanki, Marquesa de la conquista (Barcelona:
Apstrofe, 1992).
Taher, Bahaa, Love in Exile, trans. by Farouk Abdel Wahab (1995; Cairo and
NewYork: The American University in Cairo Press, 2001).
, Sunset Oasis, trans. by Humphrey Davies (2007; London: Sceptre, 2010).
Taylor, Charles, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, edited by
Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
Terada, Rei, Hegel and the Prehistory of the Postracial, European Romantic
Review, Vol. 26, No. 3 (2015), 28999.
Terrin, Peter, The Guard, trans. by David Colmer (2009; London: MacLehose
Press, 2013).
Theilen, Ines, Von der nationalen zur globalen Literatur: Eine Lese-Bewegung
durch die Romane Die Brcke vom Goldenen Horn von Emine Sevgi zdamar
und Caf Nostalgia von Zo Valds, Arcadia, Vol. 40, No. 2 (2005), 31837.
Thomas, D.M., Swallow, new edn (1984; London: Abacus, 1985).
Thomson, Iain D., Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2011).
Tiffin, Chris, and Alan Lawson, eds, De-Scribing Empire: Post-Colonialism and
Textuality (London: Routledge, 1994).
Timms, Edward, and David Kelley, eds, Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern
European Literature and Art (New York: St. Martins Press, 1985).
Todorovi, Dragan, Diary of Interrupted Days (Toronto: Random House, 2009).
Tolstoy, Leo, A Confession, trans. by Aylmer Maude (187982; NewYork: Dover
Publications, 2005).
Toole, David, Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo: Theological Reflections on Nihilism,
Tragedy, and Apocalypse, new edn (1997; London: SCM Press, 2001).
338 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Topol, Jchym, City Sister Silver, trans. by Alex Zucker (1994; North Haven:
Catbird Press, 2000).
Torrington, Jeff, Swing Hammer Swing!, new edn (1992; London: Minerva,
1993).
Travers, Martin, An Introduction to Modern European Literature: From
Romanticism to Postmodernism (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1998).
, ed., European Literature from Romanticism to Postmodernism: A Reader
in Aesthetic Practice (London and NewYork: Continuum, 2001).
Trevisan, Carine, Les enfants de la guerre: Le Grand Cahier dAgota Kristof,
Amnis: Revue de civilisation contemporaine Europes-Amriques (2006), http://
amnis.revues.org/952 (accessed 16 September 2015).
Troyanov, Iliya, The Collector of Worlds, trans. by William Hobson (2006; London:
Faber and Faber, 2008).
Trumpener, Katie, The Time of the Gypsies: A People without History in the
Narratives of the West, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 18, No. 4 (1992), 84384.
Tsiolkas, Christos, Dead Europe, new edn (2005; London: Atlantic Books, 2011).
Ugrei, Dubravka, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, trans. by Celia
Hawkesworth (1996; NewYork: New Directions, 1999).
, The Ministry of Pain, trans. by Michael Henry Heim (2004; London:
Saqi, 2005).
Ulitskaya, Ludmila, The Funeral Party, trans. by Cathy Porter (1998; London:
Indigo, 2000).
Unigwe, Chika, Tear Drops (Enugu: Richardson Publishers, 1993).
, Born in Nigeria (Enugu: Onyx Publishers, 1995).
, A Rainbow for Dinner (London: Macmillan, 2003).
, Ije at School (London: Macmillan, 2003).
, De feniks (Antwerpen and Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Meulenhof-Manteau,
2005).
, On Black Sisters Street (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009).
, How to be an African, African Writing Online, http://www.african-
writing.com/nine/chikaunigwe.htm (accessed 29 March 2013).
, Zwart worden in zeven lessen, MO: Mondiaal Nieuws, 11 February
2010, http://www.mo.be/opinie/zwart-worden-zeven-lessen (accessed 29
March 2013).
Unt, Mati, Brecht at Night, trans. by Eric Dickens (1997; Champaign and London:
Dalkey Archive Press, 2009).
Uzuner, Buket, The Sounds of Fishsteps, trans. by Pelin Arner (1993; Istanbul:
Everest Publications, 2009).
Vachedin, Dmitry, Snow Germans, trans. by Arch Tait (2010; Moscow: Glas,
2013).
Valtchinova, Galia, Ismail Kadares The H-File and the Making of the Homeric
Verse: Variations on the Works and Lives of Milman Parry and Albert Lord,
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 339

in Stephanie Schwandner-Sievers and Bernd J.Fischer, eds, Albanian Identities:

Myths, Narratives and Politics (London: Hurst, 2002), 10414.
van Cauwelaert, Didier, One-Way, trans. by Mark Polizzotti (1994; New York:
Other Press, 2005).
Vanoli, Alessandro, La Sicilia musulmana (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2012).
Veebel, Viljar, and Ramon Loik, Estonia, in Donnacha Beachin, Vera Sheridan
and Sabina Stan, eds, Life in Post-Communist Eastern Europe after EU
Membership: Happy Ever After? (Abingdon and NewYork: Routledge, 2012),
16384.
Velikovi, Nenad, Lodgers, trans. by Celia Hawkesworth (1995; Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 2005).
, avo u Sarajevu (Sarajevo: Dani, 1996).
Verhulst, Dimitri, Problemski Hotel, trans. by David Colmer (2003; London and
NewYork: Marion Boyars, 2005).
Veteranyi, Aglaja, Why the Child Is Cooking in the Polenta, trans. by Vincent Kling
(1999; Champaign: Dalkey Archive Press, 2012).
Voinovich, Vladimir, The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan
Chonkin, trans. by Richard Lourie (1969; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978).
Volos, Andrei, Hurramabad, trans. by Arch Tait (2000; Moscow: Glas, 2001).
von Berthold, Seewald, Griechenland zerstrte schon einmal Europas Ordnun, Die
Welt (2015), http://m.welt.de/geschichte/article142305296/Griechenland-
zerstoerte-schon-einmal-Europas-Ordnung.html (accessed 15 August 2015).
von Rezzori, Gregor, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, trans. by Joachim Neugroschel
and Gregor von Rezzori (1979; London: Picador, 2002).
Voznesenskaya, Julia, The Star Chernobyl, trans. by Alan Myers (1986; London:
Quartet Books, 1987).
Wachtel, Andrew Baruch, Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the
Writer in Eastern Europe (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press,
2006).
Wachtel, Nathan, The Vision of the Vanquished: The Spanish Conquest of Peru
through Indian Eyes 15301570, trans. by Ben and Sin Reynolds (1976;
Hassocks: The Harvester Press, 1977).
Wagner, Richard, Viena, Banat, trans. by Wolfgang Schaller (1990; Bucharest:
Univers, 1998).
Wainaina, Binyavanga, How to Write about Africa: Instructions for Beginners,
Granta, Vol. 92 (2005), 925.
Walcott, Derek, Omeros, new edn (1990; London: Faber and Faber, 2002).
Walker, R.B.J., The Double Outside of the Modern International, Ephemera:
Theory and Politics in Organization, Vol. 6, No. 1 (2006), 5669.
Walkowitz, Rebecca L., The Location of Literature: The Transnational Book
and the Migrant Writer, Contemporary Literature, Vol. 47, No. 4 (2006),
52745.
340 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Walters, William, Border/Control, European Journal of Social Theory, Vol. 9,

No. 2 (2006), 187203.
Ward, Simon, Responsible Ruins? W.G.Sebald and the Responsibility of the German
Writer, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Vol. 42, No. 2 (2006), 18396.
Weber, Beverly M., Work, Sex, and Socialism: Reading beyond Cultural Hybridity
in Emine Sevgi zdamars Die Brcke vom Goldenen Horn, German Life &
Letters, Vol. 63, No. 1 (2010), 3753.
Weigand, Herman J., Critical Probings: Essays in European Literature from
Wolfram von Eschenbach to Thomas Mann, edited by Ulrich K. Goldsmith
(Berne and Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1982).
Weil, Ji, Life with a Star, trans. by Rita Klimova and Roslyn Schloss (1949;
London: Penguin, 2002).
Welchman, John C., ed., Rethinking Borders (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan,
1996).
Weldon, Fay, Darcys Utopia, new edn (1990; London: Flamingo, 1991).
Wendelius, Lars, Den dubbla identiteten: Immigrant-och invandrarlitteratur p
svenska 19702000 (Uppsala: Centrum fr multietnisk forskning, Uppsala
Universitet, 2002).
White, Anne, Kosovo, Ethnic Identity and Border Crossings in The File on H,
in Peter Wagstaff, ed., Border Crossings: Mapping Identities in Modern Europe
(Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004), 2353.
White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century
Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975).
Whitlock, Gillian, The Skin of the Burqa: Recent Life Narratives from Afghanistan,
Biography, Vol. 28, No. 1 (2005), 5476.
, Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2007).
Wieringa, Tommy, Caesarion, trans. by Sam Garrett (2007; London: Portobello
Books, 2012).
Wiesel, Elie, The Gates of the Forest, trans. by Frances Frenaye (1964; London:
Heinemann, 1967).
Williams, David, Writing Postcommunism: Towards a Literature of the East
European Ruins (Basingstoke and NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
Williams, Raymond, Border Country, new edn (1960; Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1964).
Wilson, Elizabeth, Mirror Writing: An Autobiography (London: Virago, 1982).
, The Lost Time Caf (London: Virago Press, 1993).
Wilson, Kevin, and Jan van der Dussen, The History of the Idea of Europe, new edn
(1993; Milton Keynes: The Open University; London and New York:
Routledge, 1995).
Wilson, Thomas M., and Hastings Donnan, eds, Border Identities: Nation and
State at International Frontiers (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1998).
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 341

Wintle, Michael, ed., Culture and Identity in Europe: Perceptions of Divergence and
Unity in Past and Present Times (Aldershot and Brookfield: Avebury, 1996).
, ed., Imagining Europe: Europe and European Civilisation as Seen from Its
Margins and by the Rest of the World, in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
(Brussels: P.I.E.Peter Lang, 2008).
Wodak, Ruth, Anything Goes! The Haiderization of Europe, in Wodak, Majid
KhosraviNik and Brigitte Mral, eds, Right-Wing Populism in Europe: Politics
and Discourse (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 2337.
Wolf, Christa, Divided Heaven, trans. by Joan Becker (1963; Berlin: Seven Seas,
1965).
, Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays, trans. by Jan van Heurck (1983;
NewYork: The Noonday Press, 1988).
, Accident/A Days News, trans. by Heike Schwarzbauer and Rick Takvorian
(1987; London: Virago, 1989).
Woolf, Virginia, Orlando: A Biography, new edn (1928; New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1956).
Wu Ming, 54 (2002; London: Arrow Books, 2006).
Yildiz, Yasemin, Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition (New
York: Fordham University Press, 2012).
Young, Robert, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London
and NewYork: Routledge, 1995).
Zabuzhko, Oksana, The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, trans. by Nina Shevchuk-
Murray (2009; Las Vegas: AmazonCrossing, 2012).
Zagarell, Sandra A., Narrative of Community: The Identification of a Genre,
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 13, No. 3 (1988),
498527.
alica, Antonije, Tragovi Zmajeve ape (Belgrade: Apatridi, 1995).
Zeller, Florian, The Fascination of Evil, trans. by Sue Dyson (2004; London:
Pushkin Press, 2008).
Zielonka, Jan, ed., Europe Unbound: Enlarging and Reshaping the Boundaries of
the European Union (London and NewYork: Routledge, 2002).
iek, Slavoj, gota Kristfs The Notebook Awoke in Me a Cold and Cruel
Passion (12 August 2013), The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/
commentisfree/2013/aug/12/agota-kristof-the-notebook-slavoj-zizek
(accessed 30 April 2015).
Zobel, Joseph, Black Shack Alley, trans. by Keith Q.Warner (1950; Boulder and
London: Lynne Rienner Publisher, 1997).
Zweig, Stefan, Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europers, new edn
(1942; Frankfurt am Main: S.Fischer Verlag, 1952).
 INDEX

A 213, 2579, 2613, 266, 268,

Abate, Carmine, 13 292, 295. See also individual
Abdolah, Kader, 5, 293 nations
Abkhazia, 248 Africanism, 19
Abkhazian literature, 24 Aidoo, A.A., 6, 28, 12940
Aboulela, Leila, 298 Atmatov, Chingiz, 24
Abrahams, Peter, 195 Akono, Susan, 5
Abu Omar. See Nasr, H.M.O. Aktionsgruppe Banat, 147, 154, 155
Achebe, Chinua, 16 Albahari, David, 32
acquis communautaire, 11 Albania, 3, 15, 18, 20, 27, 71,
Act on Permanent Settlement of 10112, 155, 194, 197,
Nomadic People, 164 289, 295
Adamovich, Ales, 25 Albanian literature, 3, 27, 30,
Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, 273 10112, 146
Adelson, Leslie, 282 Aldiss, Brian, 205
Adichie, C.N., 265 Algerian literature, 5, 25, 27, 324,
Adler, H.G., 60 28799
Adnan, Etel, 6, 10, 238 Al Hussein, Zeid Raad, 63
Adorno, Theodor, 53, 54, 93, 179 Ali, Monica, 5, 293
Adoum, J.E., 116, 117 Ali, Tariq, 34, 298
Aeschylus, 106 Allende, Isabel, 27
Aesop, 101, 103, 111 al-Mozany, Hussain, 5
Afghanistan, 248, 296 Al-Nahda, 298
Africa, 9, 1618, 20, 33, 34, 53, 62, Al Qaeda, 291, 296
65, 87, 130, 131, 133, 1359, Amadou, Jamila, 259

The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 343

A. Hammond (ed.), The Novel and Europe,
DOI10.1057/978-1-137-52627-4
344 INDEX
American literature, 6, 10, 257, 31,
32, 129, 130, 146, 195, 238,
248, 253
Americas, 9, 16
Amirejibi, Chabua, 247
Amsterdam, 5, 33, 185, 232
Anand, M.R., 195
Andersch, Alfred, 195
Anderson, Benedict, 2, 85, 166
Anderson, Malcolm, 161, 162, 172
Andorra, 35
Andri, Ivo, 18
Andrzeyevski, George, 25
Anhalter Railway Station, 278, 279
Ankara, 33
Antunes, A.L., 28
Antwerp, 57, 58, 258, 2616, 268
Anyuru, Johannes, 213
Anzalda, Gloria, 167
Appadurai, Arjun, 281, 282
Apponyi, Graldine, 105
Aragon, Louis, 195
Arctic Circle, 216
Argentina, 6, 115
Argentinian literature, 6
Arguedas, J.M., 119
Armand, Louis, 146
Armenia, 18, 32, 35, 243
Ash, T.G., 7, 21, 22
Asia, 7, 9, 1619, 87, 193, 280, 293.
See also individual nations
Atahualpa, 116, 11925
Atatrk, M.K., 271
Athens, 33, 63
Atlantic Europe, 10
Atlantic Ocean, 13
Atxaga, Bernardo, 28
Auezov, Mukhtar, 24
Aug, Marc, 276, 279
Augustinians, 244
August Prize, 215
Auschwitz, 15, 23, 53
Australian literature, 31, 146
Austria, 6, 13, 15, 18, 29, 72, 89, 95,
164, 166, 170, 272
Austrian literature, 4, 5, 13, 15, 256,
32, 33, 8596, 155, 156, 199
Austro-Hungarian Empire, 18, 199
Avars, 17
Avdi, Selvedin, 31
Aviano, 291
Azerbaijan, 18, 32, 53
Azerbaijani literature, 30
Aztec Empire, 11618
B
Babnik, Gabriela, 28
Baker, H.A.Jr., 132
Bakhtiari, Marjaneh, 213
Balahvariani, 244
Balestrini, Nanni, 195
Balibar, tienne, 1, 17, 29, 143
Balkanism, 20, 22830
Balkans, 11, 13, 20, 22, 101, 1035,
1079, 178, 289. See also
individual nations
Baltic States, 13, 18, 178, 181. See also
individual nations
Banciu, Carmen-Francesca, 154
Barbadian literature, 16
Barcelona, 33, 230
Bardi, Abby, 164
Brfuss, Lukas, 28
Barnard, Christian, 136
Baudrillard, Jean, 230, 231
Bauman, Zygmunt, 1
Baycl, Sevtap, 272
Bazorkin, Idris, 24
Becher, J.R., 195
Beckett, Samuel, 229, 230
Bd, Jean-Albert, 3
Beirut, 238
Belarus, 15, 18, 21, 155
 INDEX 345

Belarusian literature, 25, 30 Bordeaux, 23

Belgian literature, 3, 26, 33, border fiction, 28, 29, 14356, 16173
25768, 272 Border Poetics, 28
Belgium, 3, 6, 16, 33, 58, 148, borders, 1, 2, 7, 20, 21, 23, 25, 26,
25768, 272 2830, 32, 55, 56, 72, 74, 76,
Belushi, John, 292 77, 85, 95, 111, 14356,
Benali, Abdelkader, 5 16173, 186, 238, 276, 282
Benedict, Pope, 272 Border Studies, 20, 145, 161
Benjamin, Walter, 55, 182, 198, 202 Bort, Eberhard, 172
Berger, John, 30, 196 Bosnia, 18, 20, 31, 32, 53, 62, 110,
Bergroth, Kersti, 24 22739
Beria, Lavrenti, 246 Bosnian literature, 7, 14, 18, 24, 28,
Berlin, 5, 24, 33, 60, 71, 89, 91, 273, 29, 31, 32, 156, 22739
274, 279, 293 Bosphorus, 276
Berlin Wall, 21 Bossert, Rolf, 147, 153
Berman, Russell, 179 Bouazza, Hafid, 260
Bernal, Martin, 137 Boyle, Nicholas, 3
Bernhard, Thomas, 13 Bradbury, Malcolm, 30
Berra, (Lawrence Peter) Yogi, 238 Bratislava, 168
Bezmozgis, David, 25 Braun, Volker, 197
Bhabha, Homi, 126 Brecht, Bertolt, 3, 24, 195, 274
BH Dani, 232 Breendonk, 59
Biaystok, 23 Breton, Andr, 195
Biermann, Wolf, 195 Brezhnev, Leonid, 72, 180
Bildungsroman, 265 Briand, Aristide, 9
Binebine, Mahi, 33 Briffault, Robert, 196
bin Laden, Osama, 2916 Brinker-Gabler, Gisela, 6
Blaagaard, Bolette, 18 Britain. See United Kingdom (UK)
Black Sea, 13, 243 British literature, 46, 10, 12, 21,
Blaiberg, Philip, 136 246, 2830, 32, 34, 129, 156,
Blair, Kirstie, 164 193205, 228, 230, 2456, 248,
Boa, Elizabeth, 280 253, 260, 293, 298
Bochum, 273 Broch, Hermann, 4, 5
Bohjalian, Chris, 32 Brouillette, Sarah, 260, 263
Bolivia, 117, 118 Brussels, 63
Bolivian literature, 27, 11926 Brussels Pact, 71
Bll, Heinrich, 4 Brussig, Thomas, 30
Bologna, 289 Buchan, John, 24
Bolshevik Revolution, 15, 194 Bchner, K.G., 4
Bonnett, Alastair, 195, 202 Bughadze, Lasha, 24, 254
Booker, M.K., 196 Bulgaria, 11, 15, 18, 71, 148, 172,
Borchert, Wolfgang, 4 194, 197
346 INDEX

Bulgarian literature, 11, 21, 24, 28, censorship, 147

33, 156 Central Asia, 8, 18
Bulgars, 17 Central Europe, 14, 18, 21, 75
Burchuladze, Zaza, 253, 254 Cercas, Javier, 32
Burgess, Anthony, 34 Csaire, Aim, 131, 137
Busch, Frederick, 26 Chamberlain, Neville, 131
Butler, Judith, 231, 234 Charef, Mehdi, 32, 33
Bykov, Dmitry, 26 Charlemagne, 9, 14
Byzantium, 9, 58, 101, 106, 243, 244, Chatwin, Bruce, 25
247, 280 Chechen literature, 32
Chechnya, 32
Cherchesov, Alan, 31
C Chernivtsi, 154
Callinicos, Alex, 197, 204 Chiladze, Otar, 32, 24755
Calvino, Italo, 24, 195 Chile, 213
Cameroonian literature, 5 Chilean literature, 27, 195, 213
Campbell, Beatrix, 197 China, 8, 148
Camus, Albert, 5, 205 Chinese literature, 72
Canada, 295 Chitnis, R.A., 23
Canadian literature, 25, 30, 32 Chrabi, Driss, 298
Canetti, Elias, 24 Christendom, 9, 87
Cape Town, 136 Christianity, 9, 10, 13, 14, 19, 20, 87,
capitalism, 10, 11, 14, 29, 59, 614, 102, 107, 123, 124, 136, 138,
75, 187, 199, 201, 202, 248, 219, 220, 2435, 247, 289, 298
249, 251 Churchill, Winston, 71
Carlyle, Thomas, 130 Chwin, Stefan, 25
Caribbean, 11, 17. See also individual CIA, 291
nations rak, Zehra, 282
Carrera Andrade, Jorge, 119 City Lights, 232
Crtrescu, Mircea, 13 Clinton, Bill, 62
cartography, 7, 8, 24, 29, 169, 212, Clemenceau, Georges, 252
219, 222 Cloostermans, Marc, 259
Casablanca, 20 Cohen, Anthony, 150
Casanova, Pascale, 2, 22 Colchis, 243, 247
Castle, Stephen, 17 Cold War, 2, 3, 8, 10, 13, 14, 16, 17,
Catherine the Great, 9 20, 247, 29, 30, 34, 53, 71,
Catholicism, 9, 244 757, 80, 81, 89, 90, 96, 101,
Caucasus, 11, 13, 18, 32, 194, 245 1456, 150, 153, 162, 163, 173,
Ceauescu, Nicolae, 147, 148, 1502 1946, 204, 205, 274
Celasin, Izzet, 25 Cologne, 23, 60
Celebes, 185 Columbus, 126
Celts, 13 Cominform, 71

Comintern, 102, 193
communism, 10, 15, 27, 2931, 76,
91, 101, 103, 106, 150, 152,
163, 164, 168, 171, 172, 178,
180, 187, 193205, 21820,
247, 274, 275
Communist Party of Great Britain
(CPGB), 197, 198, 2004
Concert of Powers, 9
conflict, 2, 7, 14, 17, 23, 25, 26, 32,
5365, 7181, 181, 22739,
248, 249, 2524, 262, 264,
280, 298
Congress for Cultural Freedom, 195
Conrad, Joseph, 4, 129, 131
Constantine the Great, 243
Constantinople, 244, 280
containment, 25, 29
Copenhagen, 33
Coppola, Manuela, 290
Cornis-Pope, Marcel, 23
Cortzar, Julio, 6
Corts, Hernn, 116, 118
Coudenhove-Kalergi, Richard, 9, 89
Couperus, Louis, 5
Couto, Mia, 28
Crawshaw, Robert, 111
Crimea, 19
Croatia, 18, 228, 232
Croatian literature, 5, 11, 24, 31, 154,
187, 232
Croce, Benedetto, 3
Croft, Andy, 195
Crusades, 87, 244, 289
Cuauhtmoc, 11618
Cuban literature, 195
Cunningham, Hilary, 155
Curtius, E.R., 3
Customs Union Agreement, 271, 272
Cyprus, 18, 32
Czech literature, 2, 4, 5, 14, 25, 30,
146, 147, 149, 187, 198
INDEX 347
Czechoslovakia, 14, 15, 71, 147, 149,
163, 164, 166, 172, 187, 194
Czech Republic, 18, 54, 55, 59
D
Daeninckx, Didier, 28
Dagestan, 18
Dal, Gney, 273, 282
Dalos, Gyrgy, 34
Danish literature, 3, 8, 16, 24, 28
Dante, 3
Davit IV, King, 253
de Balzac, Honor, 3
de Beauvoir, Simone, 196
De Cataldo, Giancarlo, 34
de Cervantes, Miguel, 3
decolonisation, 16, 88, 140
Defoe, Danile, 4
de Gaulle, Charles, 249
de la Gasca, Pedro, 120
Delanty, Gerard, 1, 34, 88, 96
Deleuze, Gilles 143
Delft, 5
de Maupassant, Guy, 246, 253
de Mendelssohn, Peter, 89
Demirciolu, Vedat, 274
de Montaigne, Michel, 3
Denmark, 3, 11, 16, 18, 60
de Ronsard, Pierre, 3
de Rougemont, Denis, 16
Derrida, Jacques, 22, 547,
5961, 185
Der Spiegel, 63
de Stal, Germaine, 13
Dhaen, Theo, 4, 34
diasporic literature, 5, 6, 25, 26, 32,
33, 8596, 213, 261
Diderot, Denis, 5, 179
Dietrich, Marlene, 252
Dimitrova, Blaga, 21
Diner, Dan, 56, 57, 60
348 INDEX
Dolenjashvili, Teona, 254
Donchev, Anton, 28
Donnan, Hastings, 145
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 4
Dovlatov, Sergei, 25
Drakuli, Slavenka, 31, 154
Drancy, 15, 23
Duarte, Joo, 282
Dub ek, Alexander, 197
Dundy, Elaine, 26
Dunin, Kinga, 154
Durante, Erica, 73
Duras, Marguerite, 28
Drrenmatt, Friedrich, 25, 34
Dutch literature, 3, 5, 6, 21, 25, 26,
28, 272, 293
Duttlinger, Carolin, 58
Dyer, Richard, 132
dystopianism, 14, 26, 31, 197, 205
E Eurocommunism, 194
eastern Europe, 3, 5, 6, 811, 14, 15,
18, 19, 21, 22, 26, 27, 30, 31,
71, 72, 75, 76, 80, 104, 145,
146, 154, 161, 163, 172, 178,
180, 1858, 1957, 202, 205,
227, 228, 237, 295
Eastern Question, 22
East Germany, 23, 33, 71
Ebejer, Francis, 25
Ecuador, 11619
Ecuadorian literature, 11619
Edgerton, William, 3
Edinburgh Fringe Festival, 196
Egypt, 27, 137, 201, 2902,
295, 297
Egyptian literature, 16, 27, 196
Ehrenberg, Ilya, 195
Eisenstein, Sergei, 201
Ejersbo, Jakob, 28
Eliot, T.S., 129, 130
luard, Paul, 195
empire, 6, 7, 9, 16, 17, 23, 27, 28,
11526, 12940, 179, 271
Endo, Shusaku, 6
Engels, Friedrich, 193, 274
Enlightenment, 9, 10, 14, 65, 130,
17788
Enzensberger, H.M., 19
Equatorial Guinean literature, 5
Eriksson, Madeleine, 215, 222
espionage, 25, 291, 292
Esterhzy, Pter, 22
Estonia, 15, 18, 30, 17781,
1848, 247
Estonian literature, 11, 24, 30, 155,
156, 17788, 247
Ette, Ottmar, 6, 32, 88, 276, 279
Eurasia, 8, 20
Eurimage, 12
Euripides, 243
Eurocentrism, 6, 7, 18, 62, 86, 125,
130, 132, 133, 13740, 275
Europa, 17
European Bank for Development and
Reconstruction, 186
European citizenship, 12, 18, 173
European Coal and Steel
Community, 26
European Commission, 12
European Council, 10, 212
European Court of Justice, 10, 12
European Economic Community, 10,
15, 20, 26, 271
Europeaneity. See Europeanness
European Film Academy Award, 12
European identity. See Europeanness
Europeanisation, 8, 13, 17, 21,
200, 275
Europeanism, 1113, 22, 35, 205
European literature, 26, 18, 19, 22,
24, 278, 32, 34, 86, 12931,
13840, 164, 211, 248, 25861,
268, 272

European Monetary System, 10
European Neighbourhood Policy, 11
Europeanness, 1, 4, 5, 7, 9, 10,
1214, 18, 26, 27, 33, 34, 62,
8596, 10112, 162, 172, 178,
193, 194, 212, 213, 230, 272,
289, 298
European Parliament, 10, 12, 85
European unification, 4, 7, 915, 23,
25, 26, 2931, 85, 91, 92,
17788, 193205
European Union, 2, 4, 1017, 1922,
2931, 33, 35, 53, 54, 62, 63,
65, 72, 155, 162, 163, 1713,
1779, 1858, 193, 194, 196,
197, 199, 204, 229, 248, 253,
254, 271, 272, 291, 295
European Union Prize for Literature, 12
Europe, divisions in, 2, 3, 9, 13, 14,
21, 26, 29, 30, 33, 63, 71, 75,
77, 80, 87, 91, 96, 101, 143,
144, 164, 165, 169, 1713, 194,
274, 280
Europe, idea of, 1, 2, 414, 19, 20,
23, 26, 27, 8596, 10112
Europism. See Europeanism
Euroscepticism, 13
Eurozone, 62
Evdokimov, Aleksei, 11
exophone literature, 6
F Friggieri, Oliver, 20
Fadeyev, Alexander, 24
Fanon, Frantz, 132, 259, 262
Farah, Nuruddin, 17
fascism, 90, 95, 199, 203
Fast, Howard, 195
Fatah, Sherko, 5
Favell, Adrian, 17
Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI), 91
Fenoglio, Beppe, 25
INDEX 349
Feraoun, Mouloud, 25
Feuchtwanger, Lion, 24, 88
Fielding, Henry, 246
Finland, 18, 214, 216
Finnish literature, 24, 28, 33
First International, 193
First World War, 143, 245, 246, 271
Fishta, Gjergj, 102, 103
Flaiano, Ennio, 299
Flaiano Prize, 287
Flaubert, Gustave, 3, 4, 110
Flgstad, Kjartan, 195
Floren, Kaido, 185
Florence, 5, 33, 289
Fortress Europe, 21, 28, 53, 155.
See also borders
Foucault, Michel, 144, 181, 185
France, 6, 9, 11, 13, 15, 16, 22, 29,
32, 33, 72, 95, 101, 102, 129,
148, 151, 166, 170, 180, 183,
1857, 194, 2456, 24951, 272
Franco, General Francisco, 131, 274,
280, 281
Frankfurt, 92, 153
Franks, 9
French literature, 26, 9, 10, 13,
235, 27, 28, 30, 324, 72, 87,
110, 183, 195, 196, 205, 217,
229, 230, 246, 251, 253, 272,
293, 298
French Revolution, 13, 271
Freud, Sigmund, 56, 76, 135
Frykman, Jonas, 12
Fuentes, Carlos, 118
Fuhrmann, Manfred, 7
Furet, Franois, 194
G
Gamsakhurdia, Konstantine, 245
Gamsakhurdia, Zviad, 252, 253
Gao Xingjian, 72
350 INDEX
Garibaldi, Giuseppe, 290
Garros, Alexander, 11
Gaskell, Philip, 3
Gavelis, Ri ardas, 30
Gdask, 154
Gelley, Alexander, 155
Genet, Jean, 23
Genoa, 289
genocide, 14, 31, 32, 60, 205,
229, 238
Georgia, 18, 32, 53, 193, 24355
Georgian literature, 24, 32, 24355
German literature, 25, 13, 24, 25,
2831, 33, 5365, 879, 14356, Gupta, Sunetra, 5
195, 197, 246, 253, 27182, 293
Germany, 6, 9, 1416, 18, 19, 22, 23,
28, 33, 5365, 73, 89, 90, 92,
106, 129, 1324, 147, 1514,
179, 184, 194, 203, 232, 245,
252, 272, 273
Germi, Pietro, 288
Ghali, Waguih, 27
Ghana, 28, 129, 130
Ghanaian literature, 6, 28, 12940
Gibbon, L.G., 196
Gibraltar, 18
Gide, Andr, 5
Gilroy, Paul, 198, 265
globalisation, 1, 21, 30, 88, 155,
187, 212, 235, 238, 260, 275,
281, 282
Glucksmann, Andr, 229
Gmeyner, Anna, 89
Goerlandt, Iannis, 4
Gogol, Nikolai, 13
Golden Horn, 27981
Goody, Jack, 289, 298
Gorbachev, Mikhail, 13, 72, 249, 252
Gorki, Maxim, 195, 274
Goytisolo, Juan, 31
Gramsci, Antonio, 197
Grant, Rob, 205
Grass, Gnter, 25
Greater Europe project. See European
unification
Greece, 710, 14, 15, 18, 19, 29, 53,
63, 87, 1017, 111, 133, 151,
155, 201, 243, 250, 289
Greek literature, 5, 25, 28, 146
Greene, Graham, 29, 196
Grndahl, J.C., 8, 16
Grndahl, Satu, 212
Guardian, 81
Gune, Faza, 33
Guilln, Nicols, 195
GULag, 15, 2467
Gr, Halil, 272
Gurs, 55
Grster, Eugen, 93
Guthrie, Woody, 195
H
Haasse, Hella, 28
Habermas, Jrgen, 22, 56, 86
Habsburg Monarchy, 18, 28, 89
Hagerfors, Lennart, 28
Hali Bridge, 279
Hall, Stuart, 259
Hammond, Andrew, 172, 173
Hammonds, Elizabeth, 132
Hamsun, Knut, 3
Hansen, M.B., 182
Hansson, Carola, 32
Haupt, Clive, 136
Hauptmann, Gerhart, 24
Havel, Vclav, 14
Haviaras, Stratis, 25
Hegel, G.W.F., 213
Heidegger, Martin, 1835
Heinemann, Margot, 196
Helsinki Summit, 14
Hemon, Aleksandar, 29, 156, 232
Herder, J.G., 102
Hesse, Hermann, 5

Hewitt, Nicholas, 3
Heym, Stefan, 197
Hikmet, Nzm, 195
Hilbig, Wolfgang, 30
Hirschman, Jack, 238
Hitler, Adolf, 91, 92, 131, 134, 163
Hlinka, Andrej, 163
Hlinkas, 163
Hobsbawm, Eric, 7
Hobson, J.M., 289
Hlderlin, Friedrich, 4
Hollande, Franois, 172
Holmqvist, Ninni, 26
Holocaust, 14, 15, 23, 25, 5365,
91, 131
Holocaust Memorial Museum, 62
Holy Roman Empire, 9
Homer, 27, 28, 10410, 12931,
133, 140
Honigmann, Barbara, 33
Horia, Vintil, 6
Horkheimer, Max, 179
Hosain, Attia, 5
Houellebecq, Michel, 34
Hoxha, Enver, 101, 102, 112
Huggan, Graham, 260
Hughes, Langston, 195
Hugo, Victor, 9
Humbert, Fabrice, 30
Hungarian literature, 4, 14, 22, 25,
26, 30, 34, 7181, 146, 195
Hungary, 14, 15, 18, 29, 32, 714,
78, 79, 105, 147, 148, 164,
16670, 194, 201
Huns, 17
Huntington, Samuel, 14
Hussein, Aamer, 5
I 30, 34, 146, 195, 28799
Iberia, 243
Ibragimbekov, Rustam, 30
Ibsen, Henrik, 3, 24
INDEX 351
Iceland, 18
Icelandic literature, 8, 26, 145, 195
Illyria, 27, 1025, 107
imperialism, 18, 19, 27, 28, 32, 35,
57, 58, 87, 101, 103, 107,
11526, 12940, 143, 166, 179,
185, 205, 21419, 221, 223,
258, 259, 262, 290, 297
Inca Empire, 116, 11826
India, 6, 17, 130, 185
Indian literature, 5, 16, 28, 195,
228, 260
Ingeborg Bachmann Prize, 273
Ingushetia, 18
Ingush literature, 24
Innes, C.L., 262, 266
integration. See European unification
Ioane, Crown-Prince, 245
Iran, 213, 248, 272
Iranian literature, 5, 213, 293
Iraq, 22, 248
Iraqi literature, 5
Ireland, 19
Irigaray, Luce, 132, 133
Irish literature, 4, 5, 8, 24, 29, 30,
16173, 229, 230
Irish War of Independence, 32
Iron Curtain, 20, 25, 28, 30, 71, 74,
75, 80, 101, 143, 145, 153, 162,
167, 172
Iskander, Fazil, 24
Islam, 9, 14, 20, 33, 34, 87, 107, 213,
230, 244, 245, 247, 263, 271,
272, 274, 280, 28899
Islamophobia, 20, 34, 28899
Ismailov, Hamid, 24
Israel, 298
Istanbul, 4, 238, 2735, 27982
Italian literature, 35, 13, 24, 25, 29,
Italy, 6, 9, 15, 16, 18, 19, 22, 29, 34,
53, 89, 90, 95, 129, 155, 164,
194, 243, 28799
352 INDEX
J Kazantzakis, Nikos, 28, 146
Jaanus, Maire, 188
Jakobson, August, 24
JanMohammed, Abdul, 145
Jannock, Sofia, 214
Japanese literature, 28
Japin, Arthur, 28
Jara, Cronwell, 119
Jasenovac, 15
Javakhishvili, Mikheil, 245, 246
Jeffrey, Alex, 228
Jelinek, Elfriede, 25
Jensen, Lars, 35
Jergovi, Miljenko, 2324
Jerusalem, 253
Jewish populations, 19, 5465, 73,
8791, 94, 213, 289
Jhabvala, R.P., 6
John Paul III, Pope, 20
Joll, James, 7
Jones, Lewis, 196
Joyce, James, 45
Judaea, 9, 13, 87
Juel, Dagny, 254
Juraga, Dubravka, 196
K Kr, Mustafa, 272
Kadare, Ismail, 27, 101112, 146
Kafka, Franz, 24
Kakmi, Dmetri, 31
Kaliningrad, 155
Kant, Immanuel, 182
Kapitov, Daniela, 30
Kaplan, Leslie, 195
Kara, Yad, 293
Karahasan, Devad, 14
Krason, Einar, 26
Karlsrhr, 23
Karumidze, Zurab, 254
Kassabova, Kapka, 156
Kazakh literature, 24
Kazakhstan, 18, 194
Keller, Ursula, 4
Kelman, James, 205
Kenya, 257
Kenyan literature, 5, 25, 195, 257
Kertsz, Imre, 30
Keyman, Fuat, 3
KGB, 248, 252
Kharms, Daniil, 253
Khasavov, Arslan, 31
Khemiri, J.H., 213
Khintibidze, Elguja, 244
Khrushchev, Nikita, 71, 101,
194, 249
Kierkegaard, Sren, 181
Kiernan, V.G., 16
Kim, Anna, 32, 156
Ki, Danilo, 4, 14, 23
Klein, Naomi, 21
Kleist Prize, 273
Klekh, Igor, 31, 152
Klma, Ivan, 30, 146, 147, 149
Koestler, Arthur, 25, 195
Kohn, Margaret, 179
Kongoli, Fatos, 30
Koningsberger, Hans, 25, 26
Konrd, Gyrgy, 14
Koran, 297
Korpela movement, 219, 220
Kosovan literature, 20
Kosovo, 18, 32, 53, 104, 107, 109
Kova evi, Milomir, 231
Kova evi, Nataa, 23, 187
Krasznahorkai, Lszl, 26
Kristeva, Julia, 33, 131, 138, 188
Kristf, gota, 25, 26, 7181, 146
Kuhlman, Martha, 75, 76
Kulenovi, Tvrtko, 7, 24
Kundera, Milan, 3, 5, 14, 18, 21, 27,
72, 146, 187
Kyrgyz literature, 24, 247
Kyrgyzstan, 18, 194, 247
 INDEX 353

L Lnnrot, Elias, 103

Laanes, Eneken, 187 Lorca, F.G., 274, 280, 281
LaCapra, Dominick, 56 Lorchenkov, Vladimir, 29
Laestadianism, 220 Lord, A.B., 104
Lagos, 267 Loren, Sofia, 297
La Guma, Alex, 195 Los Angeles, 90
Lake Ladoga, 8 Louis XIV, King, 244, 247
Lakhous, Amara, 34, 28799 Lubonja, Fatos, 3
Lalita-vistara, 244 Lucca, 289
Lamming, George, 16 Luther King, Martin, 274
Lamrabet, Rachida, 260 Luik, Viivi, 30
Langer, Josef, 143 Lukcs, Gyrgy, 195
Lapavitsas, Costas, 62 Lutz, Helma, 295, 296
Latin America, 27, 11526. See also Luxembourg, 3, 197
individual nations Luxembourgish literature, 3
Latvia, 15, 18, 90, 178 Lviv, 154
Latvian literature, 11, 25 Lyotard, Jean-Franois, 56
Lavrin, Janko, 2
Laxness, Halldr, 8, 145, 195
Lebanese literature, 6, 10, 238, 298 M
Lebanon, 17, 298 Maastricht Treaty, 10, 12, 20, 54, 62,
Leeds, 5 178, 197, 199
Lefteri, Christy, 32 Mabinogion, 103
Leibovitz, Annie, 233 Macaulay, Rose, 25
Lemon, Alaina, 166 Macaulay, T.B., 130
Lenin, V.I., 193, 274 MacClancy, Jeremy, 193
Leopold II, King, 58 Macedonia, 18, 155
Lessing, Doris, 195 Macedonian literature, 30
Levy, Andrea, 25 Madrid, 33, 120
Lvy, Bernard-Henry, 229 Magyars, 17
Lewycka, Marina, 21 Mahgreb, 11
Libration, 56 Mahjoub, Jamal, 5
Liberia, 264, 265 Mahloujian, Azar, 5
Libya, 288 Mahmut II, Sultan, 271
Lichtenstein, 35 Mahmutovi, Adnan, 232
Lige, 63 Majdanek, 15
Lindsay, Jack, 196 Makine, Andre, 10, 72
Linnaeus, Carl, 215 Makis, Eve, 32
Lithuania, 15, 18, 178, 203, 289 Malmborg, Mikael af, 13
Lithuanian literature, 30 Malraux, Andr, 24
London, 5, 54, 89, 95, 96, 136, Malta, 18
253, 293 Maltese literature, 20, 25
Longo, Davide, 30 Man Booker Prize, 215
354 INDEX
Manea, Norman, 30
Mann, Klaus, 5
Mann, Thomas, 3, 6, 87, 90, 91, 246
Mantua, 23
Marechera, Dambudzo, 5
marginalisation, 4, 7, 15, 1923,
313, 163, 21123, 22739,
24355
Marouane, Lela, 34, 298
Marquand, David, 202
Marsala, 288
Marshall Plan, 26
Martnez, J.L., 116, 117
Martinican literature, 27
Marxism, 10, 73, 117, 194, 197, 200,
202, 274
Marxism-Leninism, 3
Marx, Karl, 181, 197
May, Sarah, 28
Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 195
Mayall, David, 164
Mazara de Vallo, 288
Mazzini, Miha, 30
McCann, Colum, 29, 16273
McCarthyism, 90, 95
McEwan, Ian, 26
McGahern, John, 32
McIlvanney, William, 196
McLeod, John, 32
Mecca, 296
Mediterranean Sea, 8, 13, 91, 288
Mehmedinovi, Semezdin, 31, 32,
22739
Melinescu, Gabriela, 154
Memmi, Albert, 27
Mensheviks, 249
Merkel, Angela, 63, 272
Merolla, Daniela, 212
Mexican literature, 117, 118
Mexico, 6, 11618
Michael, Livi, 205
Michnik, Adam, 14, 197
Middle East, 9, 16, 17, 20, 53, 62, 63,
65, 130, 272, 289, 2957
Miville, China, 156
migrant literature, 5, 6, 26, 27, 314,
7181, 8596, 17788, 213,
25768, 27182, 28799
migration, 5, 7, 17, 18, 20, 21, 23,
26, 32, 33, 62, 73, 8892, 95,
149, 1535, 163, 166, 167, 172,
212, 228, 237, 239, 254,
25768, 27182, 28799
Milan, 291
Mill, J.S., 130
Miosz, Czesaw, 25, 146
modernism, 4
modernity, 1, 58, 59, 86, 101, 106,
109, 110, 134, 135, 164, 178,
182, 217, 218, 271, 281
Moldova, 11, 18, 155
Moldovan literature, 29
Molire, 3
Monaco, 35
Mongols, 17, 247, 289
Monoran, Ion, 155
Montenegrin literature, 11, 24
Montenegro, 18, 110, 155
Moore, Brian, 30
Moore, D.C., 18
Moore-Gilbert, Bart, 262, 265
Moors, 9, 17, 58
Morandini, Giuliana, 29, 146
Morchiladze, Aka, 253
Moretti, Franco, 3
Moroccan literature, 5, 33, 259,
260, 298
Morocco, 5, 259, 260, 289, 291, 298
Morris, Jan, 24
Moscow, 5, 23, 201, 249, 250
Moscow State Circus, 201
Mostar, 289
Mosteghanemi, Ahlam, 27
Motecuhzoma, 116
 INDEX 355

Mourad, Keniz, 272 Newman, David, 20

Mozambican literature, 28 New Statesman, 89
Muhammad, 9 New York, 26, 86, 90, 936, 200, 229
Mller, Herta, 29, 14356 Nex, M.A., 24
Munich, 33, 60 Neziraj, Jeton, 20
Murdoch, Iris, 197 Ngg wa Thiongo, 5, 25, 195
Murmansk, 21 Niemi, Mikael, 31, 21123
Musil, Robert, 199 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 181
Muzot, 5 Nigeria, 133, 136, 257, 259, 261,
263, 264, 266, 268
Nigerian literature, 16, 33, 25768
N Nikolaidis, Andrej, 11
Nabokov, Vladimir, 26, 146 Nikolova, E.A., 23
Naples, 294, 295 Nixon, Richard, 102
Napoleon, 91, 179 Nooteboom, Cees, 3, 5
Nasr, H.M.O, 291 Nord, Deborah, 164
Nassib, Slim, 298 Normans, 101
nationalism, 2, 12, 13, 20, 27, 86, 88, Norstedts, 220, 221
89, 1024, 108, 109, 111, 112, Norway, 3, 13, 18, 214
115, 1457, 152, 163, 211, 212, Norwegian literature, 3, 13, 24, 25,
214, 218, 222 30, 195, 254
NATO, 9, 20, 71, 248, 254 Noto, 288
Natzweiler, 15 Notting Hill Carnival, 196
Nazism, 5461, 90, 109, 147, 152, nuclearism, 25
203, 246
NDiaye, Marie, 33
Ndongo, Donato, 5 O
negritude, 1379 ODowd, Liam, 29
Nntori, 104 Odrach, Theodore, 30
neoimperialism, 16, 17, 28, 131, OGPU, 246
133, 140 Ohnesorg, Benno, 274
neoliberalism, 31, 54, 62, 63, 194, Okely, Judith, 162
197, 205 Oksanen, Sofi, 33
Nepal, 216 Ollikainen, Aki, 28
Neruda, Pablo, 195 nnepalu, Tnu, 11, 30, 155, 156,
Netherlands, 3, 6, 11, 15, 16, 60, 232, 17788
261, 272 Orbeliani, Sulkhan-Saba, 244
Neubauer, John, 23 ren, Aras, 273, 282
Neuchtel, 72, 78 orientalism, 19, 130, 263, 280
Neuengamme, 15 Ortega y Gasset, Jos, 5
Neue Rundschau, 93 Orthodox Christianity, 9, 14, 107,
New Left, 194 243, 244, 248, 254
356 INDEX

Orwell, George, 5, 26, 196, 230 Peru, 27, 11626

Ossetia, 18. See also South Ossetia Peruvian literature, 118, 119
Ossetian literature, 31 Petrarch, 3
Ostalgie, 198 Petrovici, Duan, 155
Ottoman Empire, 8, 9, 18, 28, 1014, Petterson, Per, 30
106, 107, 111, 238, 245, 271, Phoenicia, 17
280, 289 Picasso, Pablo, 195
Ousmane, Sembne, 5, 195 Pieterse, J.N., 21
Oxford, 54 Pikuli, Mladen, 231
zal, Turgut, 271 Pipa, Arshi, 111
zdamar, E.S., 4, 33, 195, 27182 Pirandello, Luigi, 3
Pirenne, Henri, 9
Pitanek, Peter, 30
P Pizarro, Francisco, 116, 11925
Pacific Ocean, 11 Pizarro, Gonzalo, 120
Pajala, 21618 Pizarro, Pedro, 123, 124
Pakistani literature, 5 Plebanek, Grayna, 33
Palavestra, Pedrag, 22 Pohjanen, Bengt, 214, 221
Palermo, 290, 292 Poland, 6, 1315, 18, 71, 148, 187,
Pamuk, Orhan, 10, 34, 282 194, 243, 254, 289
pan-Africanism, 137, 138, 140 Polish literature, 4, 25, 29, 30, 33,
Pannonia, 4 154, 162, 187
Papusza, 29, 162 Pollen, Geir, 13
Paris, 3, 5, 7, 30, 33, 54, 55, 95, 164, Pomaks, 18
171, 172, 177, 178, 180, 1857, Pompey, 243
246, 250, 251, 253 Ponzanesi, Sandra, 6, 18, 212
Parks, Tim, 10 Porrajmos, 29, 163
Parry, Milman, 104 Portugal, 8, 9, 11, 15, 16, 129,
Parthian Empire, 243 155, 254
Passerini, Luisa, 1, 298 Portuguese literature, 26, 28
Paz, Octavio, 117, 118 postcolonialism, 2, 5, 1619, 27, 28,
pBitek, Okot, 5 31, 35, 131, 13340, 212, 216,
Peja, 107 21923, 25862, 265
Pelevin, Victor, 30 postmodernism, 4, 24, 200
Pendelton, Eva, 263 Poznan, 5
Penkov, Miroslav, 11, 156 Prague, 60, 71, 274
Pennac, Daniel, 293 Pratt, M.L., 165, 170, 281, 282
perestroika, 250 Prescott, William, 125
Perii, Robert, 11 Project Europe, 26, 29. See also
Perrault, Charles, 245 European unification
Persia, 8, 2435, 247 propaganda, 25, 76, 147, 180, 250
Persian literature, 245 Protestantism, 9, 90, 94
 INDEX 357

Proust, Marcel, 3, 5, 6, 217 Rotterdam, 5

Prussia, 18 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 178, 179
Przybyszewski, Stanisaw, 254 Roy, Arundhati, 260
Rushdie, Salman, 228, 260
Russia, 3, 6, 8, 11, 13, 15, 16, 18, 21,
Q 22, 28, 32, 90, 129, 155, 165,
Qosja, Rexhep, 106 193, 195, 204, 214, 2448,
2524, 274, 289. See also Soviet
Union
R Russian literature, 3, 4, 6, 13, 246,
Rabelais, Franois, 251 30, 146, 154, 195, 244, 245,
Rabinowich, Julya, 33 247, 248, 253
racism, 17, 20, 21, 88, 89, 95, 109,
132, 136, 137, 173, 213, 221,
222, 257, 263, 295, 299 S
Rakusa, Ilma, 4, 14 Saadawi, Nawal, 297
Ran, N.H., 274 Saakashvili, Mikheil, 248, 253, 254
Rasputin, 246 Sadulaev, German, 32
Reagan, Ronald, 252 Sahgal, Nayantara, 16, 28
reconquista, 289 Sahl, Hans, 89
Red Army Band, 201 Said, Edward, 16, 130, 139, 153
Reed, John, 195 Said, Sami, 213
Rhodesia, 131 Saint Lucian literature 131
Rhys, Jean, 28 St Petersburg, 246
Rilindja, 102, 103 Salih, Tayeb, 5, 16
Rilke, R.M., 5 Saloniki, 15
Rivera, Diego, 195 Saltykov-Shchedrin, Mikhail, 245
Robakidze, Grigol, 245 Smi, 19, 213, 214, 2213
Roberts, Andrew, 205 Samtredia, 246
Robeson, Paul, 195 San Francisco, 232
Robinson, Richard, 154 San Marino, 35
Rolland, Romain, 87, 195 Sarajevo, 22739, 289
Roma, 19, 29, 16273, 213, 293 Saramago, Jos, 26
Roman Empire, 810, 14, 58, 87, Sardinia, 295
101, 102, 106, 143, 2435 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 172, 272
Romania, 15, 18, 29, 71, 14755, Sartre, Jean-Paul, 25, 195
194, 197, 295 Saudi Arabia, 296
Romanian literature, 4, 6, 13, 2931, Scandinavia, 13, 19, 212, 214. See also
33, 14356, 195 individual nations
Romanowicz, Zofia, 187 Scandinavian literature, 2
romanticism, 4, 179 Scarborough, 254
Rome, 5, 34, 28994, 296 Schengen Agreement, 30
358 INDEX
Schengen zone, 21, 28, 155, 171
Schindel, Robert, 15, 25
Schippers, Thomas, 145
Schneider, Peter, 29, 1467, 152
Schofield, Robert, 25
Schulze, Ingo, 30
Schutzstaffel, 147, 152
Schwarz-Bart, Andr, 23
Sciascia Prize, 287
Scott, Walter, 253
Scribner, Charity, 197, 198
Scythia, 8
Sebald, W.G., 25, 26, 5365
Sebbar, Lela, 5, 32
Second International, 193
Second World War, 1, 15, 25, 57, 61,
713, 85, 88, 89, 96, 143, 147,
162, 194, 203, 278
Securitate, 153
Seferis, Giorgos, 5
Seghers, Anna, 89, 195
Selim III, Sultan, 271
Selimovi, Mea, 28
Selvon, Sam, 5
Senchin, Roman, 30
Senegalese literature, 5, 195
enocak, Zafer, 274
Serbia, 18, 21, 32, 105, 107, 10911,
147, 155
Serbian literature, 4, 14, 23, 32
Serge, Victor, 6, 195
Seville, 23
Shaw, G.B., 24
Shevardnadze, Eduard, 247
Shkodra, 154
Sholokov, Mikhail, 195
Shostakovitch, Dmitri, 195
Shteyngart, Gary, 25
Sibiu, 154
Sicily, 288, 294, 295
Silone, Ignazio, 195
Single European Act, 155
Single Market Programme, 10
Sjwall, Maj, 195
Skanderbeg, 102
kvoreck, Josef, 25
Slavs, 17, 103, 104
Slovakia, 18, 29, 60, 162, 164,
166, 171
Slovakian literature, 25, 30
Slovenia, 18, 81
Slovenian literature, 28, 30
Slovo, Gillian, 196
Smith, Horatio, 3
Smith, Sidonie, 6
socialism, 3, 11, 15, 24, 30, 31, 75,
89, 91, 95, 101, 193205, 248,
274, 275, 280, 281
socialist realism, 3, 247
Sol, Robert, 27
Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, 13
Somali literature, 17
Sontag, Susan, 229, 230, 2324,
236, 237
Soueif, Ahdaf, 16
South Africa, 131, 136, 266
South African literature, 195
South Korean literature, 32, 156
South Ossetia, 248, 253
Soviet Union, 8, 9, 14, 15, 1821, 28,
53, 71, 72, 74, 79, 101, 103,
161, 178, 180, 182, 187, 1935,
197, 203, 204, 24753, 255, 274
Spahi, Ognjen, 24
Spain, 6, 9, 11, 15, 16, 22, 27,
11626, 129, 131, 155, 194,
280, 289
Spanish Civil War, 32, 230, 280, 281
Spanish literature, 3, 5, 28, 31, 32,
274, 280, 281
Spiel, Hilde, 26, 8596
Stability and Growth Pact, 10
Stalin, Joseph, 71, 102, 147, 193,
194, 247, 249
 INDEX 359

Starck, Kathleen, 23 Taliban, 296

Starova, Luan, 30 Taqaishvili, Ekvtime, 249
Stasiuk, Andrzej, 30 taqiyya, 291
State Institute for Race Biology, 221 Tashkent, 5
Stendhal, 5 Tatars, 8, 9, 17, 19
Stern, Richard, 26 Tbilisi, 246, 24952, 254
Sterne, Lawrence, 245 Teimuraz 1, King, 244
tiks, Igor, 232 Terezn, 54, 57, 60, 61
Stockholm, 216, 220 Terrin, Peter, 26
Strasbourg, 177 terrorism, 17, 291, 292, 296
Strth, Bo, 1, 13, 86 Thatcherism, 199
Strindberg, August, 5, 254 Theilen, Ines, 277
trpka, Ivan, 25 Thomas, D.M., 24
Strutthof, 15 Thomson, Iain, 183, 184
Stutthof, 15 Tibet, 217
Suceav, Bogdan, 31 Tierra del Fuego, 185
Sudan, 264, 298 Tikhonov, Nikolai, 195
Sudanese literature, 5, 16, 298 Timioara, 147, 152, 154, 155
Sumatra, 185 Tirana, 5
Sundbyberg, 216 Titel, Sorin, 155
Svevo, Italo, 4 Tito, J.B., 112
Swales, Martin, 3 Todorovi, Dragan, 32
Sweden, 13, 18, 31, 129, 21123, Tobin, Colm, 8
232, 272 Tokyo, 200
Swedish literature, 5, 26, 28, 31, Tolstaya, Tatiana, 154
21123, 254 Tolstoy, Lev, 6, 13, 244
Swedish Social Democratic Peoples Topol, Jchym, 14, 30
Home, 213, 222, 223 Tornedalian populations, 31, 21323
Swedish-Tornedalian literature, Torrington, Jeff, 205
21323 totalitarianism, 15, 19, 26, 5365,
Swiss literature, 3, 25, 28, 3234, 71, 7181, 103, 14756, 178, 195,
81, 146, 195 199, 202, 204, 247
Switzerland, 3, 72, 91 Totok, William, 147
Syria, 289 Toynbee, Arnold, 7
Szyszkowitz, Gerald, 25, 155 transatlantic narrative, 26
Transcarpathia, 13
Transcaucasia. See Caucasus
T transcontinental narrative, 23, 25
Taboada Tern, Nstor, 27, 11926 Transnistria, 15
Taher, Bahaa, 16, 196 Trapani, 288
Tajikistan, 18, 32, 53, 194 trauma, 25, 32, 547, 624, 78, 170
Tajik literature, 32 Travers, Martin, 4
360 INDEX

Treaty of Rome, 62, 194 Unt, Mati, 24

Trieste 5
Trinidadian literature, 5
Tripoli, 288
Trotsky, Leon, 193, 197
Troyanov, Iliya, 28
Truman Doctrine, 71
Trumpener, Katie, 164
Tunis, 288
Tunisia, 213, 288, 290, 294
Tunisian literature, 27
Turgenev, Ivan, 13, 245
Turkey, 15, 20, 22, 33, 155, 238,
27182
Turkish literature, 4, 10, 25, 26, 31,
33, 34, 195, 27182, 293
Turkmenistan, 18, 194
Turkmen literature, 31
Tzara, Tristan, 195
U Veteranyi, Aglaja, 33
Ugandan literature, 5
Ugrei, Dubravka, 5, 6, 24, 154, 187,
195
Ukraine, 11, 18, 21, 22, 53, 155
Ukrainian literature, 13, 21, 28,
31, 152
Ulitskaya, Ludmila, 26
Unigwe, Chika, 33, 25768
United Kingdom (UN), 6, 8, 11, 13,
16, 18, 22, 28, 31, 546, 95, 96,
129, 133, 135, 136, 148, 151,
164, 194, 196, 203, 232, 254,
293, 297
United Nations, 63, 264
United States of America (USA), 6, 9,
16, 19, 22, 26, 33, 71, 8796,
115, 117, 132, 151, 177, 195,
1979, 203, 216, 2279, 232,
234, 237, 238, 252, 253, 291,
295
Uppsala, 221
Ural Mountains, 8
Ursu, Liliana, 154
utopianism, 9, 92, 196
Uzbekistan, 18, 194
Uzbek literature, 24
Uzuner, Buket, 26
V
Vachedin, Dmitry, 31
Valkeap, Nils-Aslak, 214
Valtchinova, Galia, 111
van Rompui, Herman, 212
Vatican, 291
Veli kovi, Nenad, 31, 232
Veliki, Dragan, 4
Venice, 5, 33, 244, 289
Verhulst, Dimitri, 21
Versailles Conference, 252
Vienna, 33, 60, 89
Vietnam, 229, 234
Vighi, Daniel, 155
Vilnius, 23
Visegrd nations, 13
Vittula, 216
Voinovich, Vladimir, 30
Volos, Andrei, 32
Voltaire, 3, 178, 245
von Goethe, J.W., 3, 13
von Hahn, J.G., 102
Voznesenskaya, Julia, 25
W
Wachtel, A.B., 23, 146
Wadia, Laila, 5
Wagner, Richard, 147, 154
Wainaina, Binyavanga, 257
Wajs, Bronisawa. See Papusza
 INDEX 361

Walcott, Derek, 131 Wright, Richard, 195

Wales, 18, 54, 103 Wu Ming, 25
Walker, R.B.J., 145 Wuolijoki, Hella, 24
Walkowitz, Rebecca, 261
Wallace, William, 13
Walters, William, 144 Y
Warner, S.T., 196 Yamsk, 5
war on terror, 33, 34, 28899 Yevtushenko, Yevgeny, 195
Warsaw, 23, 254 Yiddish literature, 2
Warsaw Pact, 26 Yildiz, Yesemin, 277
Washington, DC, 62, 234, 235, 237 York, 23
Watteau, Jean-Antoine, 184 Young, Robert, 137
Weigand, H.J., 3 Yugoslavia, 53, 71, 101, 104, 112,
Weil, Ji , 195 148, 178, 187, 194, 197, 228,
Weil, Simone, 230 231, 232, 234. See also secession
Weldon, Fay, 12 nations
Wenderoman, 30 Yugoslav literature, 4, 5, 14, 15, 23,
Wenger, A.L., 213 187, 234
Westerbork, 15
western Europe, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 11, 14,
16, 17, 19, 21, 22, 268, 32, 65, Z
72, 75, 76, 78, 80, 101, 102, 105, Zabuzhko, Oksana, 28
111, 145, 151, 167, 17883, Zagarell, S.A., 265
1858, 194, 195, 205, 213, 228, Zaghloul, Safia, 297
229, 232, 238, 2449, 2524, 271 Zagreb, 232
West Germany, 23, 274 Zaimolu, Feridun, 282
White, Anne, 111 alica, Antonije, 232
White, Hayden, 16, 64 Zeller, Florian, 34
White Sea, 8 Zhdanovism, 195
Willebroek, 59 Zhvania, Zurab, 253
Williams, David, 23, 30 Zinovev, Aleksandr, 13
Williams, Raymond, 196 iek, Slavoj, 81
Wilson, Elizabeth, 31, 197205 Zobel, Joseph, 27
Wilson, T.M., 29, 145 Zog, King, 105, 106
Wintle, Michael, 14 Zola, mile, 3
Wolf, Christa, 23, 28, 195, 197 Zweig, Stefan, 5, 89