Introduction
Hungarians of Yugoslavia, an ethnic minority along the Hungarian border since the establishment of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, and consequently in its successor states, produced and consumed a minority literature different not only from the belletristic output of the Western Balkans but also from the literatures of Hungary, or the similarly detached, Hungarian literary field of Czechoslovakia or Romania. While avoiding the pitfalls of Yugoslav or Hungarian exceptionalism, it is significant to point out that due to the collective experiences of being an ethnic minority, the development of the literary field evolved in a somewhat dissimilar direction than the majority or other minority canons. Belletristic in the broadest sense of drama, poetry, and prose, these authors created fiction by abstracting and transferring amongst other topics, their memories of Yugoslavia, as well as its disintegration into writing.Footnote 1 Women within these ethnic literary practices, however, perform/ed an even more peripheral and even more silent mnemonic practice, well beneath the official flows of the (post)Yugoslav or Hungarian public arena.Footnote 2 Employing a wide variety of literary genres, female memory of Yugoslav socialism transgressed into literature even later, and in a much subtle way. Remembering the landscape and its society otherwise, creating an archive otherwise, these women from Yugoslavia, however, embody nowadays a distinct voice within contemporary Hungarian literature, as they articulate another perspective on how the state and its violent dismembering is represented.
While previous socio-spatial ruptures, such as the world wars, remained largely unrecorded in Hungarian women’s writing and, aside from a few notable examples (Erzsébet Börcsök, Simin Bosán Magda), stayed mostly ephemeral in non-public memories of Yugoslavia, the 1990s brought a significant change in the relationship toward landscapes and its societies of the recent past. Witnessing the end of Yugoslav socialism and performing its transition into the past, their writing not only documented such shifts but also assessed it by creating a different archive than the dominant public memories of ethnic majority and/or minority and/or male writers. Displaced principally due to the gradual disappearance of the state, but also through emigration in many cases, this mnemonic process proceeds beyond the recalled landscape where these traumas originated.
Constituting itself also as an emancipatory practice of writing amongst the more dominant canons, this archive of Hungarian minority women from post-Yugoslavia is one of the earliest 21st-century examples of its kind.Footnote 3 Although there were other 20th-century archives, at times, when displacement, refuge, and uprootedness of (minority) women becomes an increasingly relevant topic of European drama, poetry, and prose, this specific archive also emerges as an emancipatory and empowering engagement for female writers and readers equally. Often positioned nowadays as a remembrance from “elsewhere,” the archive is designated by a tension where the place of remembering and the landscapes of memory are irreducibly incongruous. Representing this from a non-dominant, female, and minority literary position exposes a perspective, which has been rare before the European and global upheavals of the 21st century; this archive marks one of the earliest examples of such a multifaceted exclusion, which only multiplied since the 1990s. In her poem, Anna Terék, a Hungarian poet from Vojvodina, now living in Budapest, folds her remembering and memories into such an alternate archive of marginality. Thus, representing a subject incapacitated by a crisis of displaced personal development and in-between-ness, the nuances and idiosyncrasies of a different vernacular and different public memories blend into the indifferences of a forever alienating city.
A manifold intersectionality of a displaced and excluded remembering of a time, a space, and a society of the past converge in the text-worlds of Anna Terék. She is constantly reminded that her Yugoslav memories in Budapest do not evoke any response, while she is not and does not feel completely Hungarian either. Her distinctively autobiographical poem is titled külFÖLD, meaning “abroad” but with a typography that emphasizes the compositeness of the word: “föld” meaning “land,” with a prefix to denote “outside” or “beyond” (kül). The dual structure of this prefix lacks the reference, which would define the relation to what one is an outsider or from what one is removed, creating a title void of a origin of identification, and exposing a series of memories from a position caught in-between a disintegrating perception of Yugoslavia and an incomplete understanding of Hungary.
Highly autobiographical, such alternate landscapes of displaced women authors can display nuances of memory and non-belonging well beyond the national paradigm(s). This is important because from a female minority vantage point, uprootedness, belonging, and remembering merge into a different belletristic practice, where writing (and consequently reading) is governed by other patterns, and this is why this case study of the archives of Hungarian minority women emerges as a relevant example. Developing another archive, creating another location and performing the act of remembrance otherwise, constructing text-worlds otherwise, while connecting the spatial, temporal and social otherwise, they expose a gaze alternate to all the available official and public narratives. Learning to read them as such could teach us how to recognize these archives and how to consume a kind of literature, which is currently being created and made public globally by minority women writers in refuge. Although the inability to establish stable categories of remembering emerged in the ethnic Hungarian community of (post)Yugoslavia as a trans-generational problem of writing already in the early 1990s (Roginer Reference Roginer2019, 243), this liminal perspective complements it with the reevaluating aspects of womanhood. The question remains, therefore, how Hungarian women from a disintegrating Yugoslavia memorialized the space, time, and society of their own past and present? Moreover, how is it possible that this archive of displaced memoryscapes developed beyond the dominant literary representations without dominant mnemonic references?
Theoretical and Methodological Framework
In order to interlock (1) memory and remembering, (2) time, space, and society, the (3) concept of the archive, and the (4) gender aspect with the (5) belletristic practice of writing and reading to expose this specific condition of uprootedness, we need to define the approach both theoretically and methodologically. Since the analysis needs to reveal the systematic and regular nature of these memoryscapes as a model, the elements of the framework have to complement each other. Moreover, as they come from various disciplines and academic traditions, they also have to fit together in a rather specific way.
At the beginning of The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard examines the house, where one is born, and where “many of our memories are housed,” later continuing, “In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time. That is what space is for” (Reference Bachelard1994, 8). Contemplating the human experience and its various perceptions in 1977, Yi-Fu Tuan came to a similar conclusion: “Objects anchor time. They need not, of course, be personal possessions. We can try to reconstruct our past with brief visits to our old neighbourhood and the birthplaces of our parents” (Tuan Reference Tuan1977, 187). These temporal aspects of perceiving places of the past have been complemented with the more recent correctives provided by geocriticism, which recognizes space, time, and society as a triple unity of equal factors, while positioning displacement, exile, and non-belonging as one of the most acute contemporary issues of society.Footnote 6 “Certainly the massive movements of populations – exiles, émigrés, refugees, soldiers, administrators, entrepreneurs, and explorers – disclosed a hitherto unthinkable level of mobility in the world, and such movement emphasized geographical difference; that is, one’s place could not simply be taken for granted any longer” (Tally Reference Tally2013, 13).
Interlinking the social, spatial, and historical discontinuities between past and current experiences, memory, and remembering, the aim of the article is to describe how these archives of memoryscapes of Hungarian women from (post)Yugoslavia came about. The goal is to interpret how this change in the representation of landscapes of the past occurred. Further, this analysis will display how these alternate, liminal, non-official but self-referential mnemonic practices, as individual and public remembering, developed as belletristic representations during the past three decades. Arranging time, space and society otherwise, in this sense performing a “thirdspace” perspective and representing memoryscapes otherwise, these specific intersectionalities of Hungarian women authors from Yugoslavia constitute a set of principles that govern the creation of text-worlds otherwise as well.Footnote 7
The term text-world is borrowed from narratology, and it is understood as a spatial totality represented through fiction. Commonly used in the humanities as a possible world in a fictional text, it exists through the author, who creates it, but also from the viewpoint of the consumer, who in turn is able to imagine and interpret it approximately the same way. It stands as the collective name for the temporal, spatial, and social universe represented by the text, regardless whether it is prose, drama, or poetry.Footnote 8 Memoryscapes, which appear through these text-worlds, are in this sense memories of a concrete place, time, and society, which are remembered and represented as complex landscapes of a recalled past. The term also unites poetry, prose, and drama, which abstracts it, thus making it analytically compatible with the concept of the archive, yet it also connects it with the memoryscapes, which appear in all literary genres. Although sharing the historical preconditions with dominant flows of interpretation, it is crucial to neither compare these marginalized text-worlds to the ones of Hungarian or post-Yugoslav (predominantly male) fiction, nor to isolate them as exceptional. Approaching it in itself as one amongst a wide array of other (potential) archives, the relevance of this article lays not in displaying the difference, congruence, or similarity of this archive in relation to other archives but in presenting how these intersectionalities of gender, geography, and politics enabled memoryscapes, which became visible in literature.
Addressing the spatial, temporal, and social aspects of female writing, “thirding” simultaneously facilitates not only a description of minority memoryscapes and a specific act of remembering but also helps us designate the multiple exclusion of the Subject who remembers. Therefore, the “thirding” and “thirdspace” of Edward Soja, or as he also calls it the “trialectics of Historicality, Spatiality, and Sociality” (Reference Soja1996, 71), which by converging become inseparable, facilitate a possibility to access the archives of these Hungarian female memoryscapes of Yugoslavia from a more integrated point of view.Footnote 9 Thirding also interconnects present and past and, in this sense, remembering and memory within the archive. Increasingly important in terms of displacement, where both by the disintegration of the state and emigration, the location of the act of remembering, as well as the memoryscapes themselves often become irreducible to its components. As in the Terék excerpt in the introduction, where the times, places, and societies of socialist Yugoslavia ceased to provide a reference of belonging, while an emigration to Hungary brought only further alienation, a thirdspace perspective enables the analysis to interconnect this collective level with the personal. It does this, however, without losing the historically developmental thread of the archive in general, or the coherence of the concrete text-world.
Reaching beyond the perceptions of space as merely a vessel of time, or space as only a container of places, geocriticism provides more than the previous approaches to space, where “apace only mattered insofar as the ‘homogeneous flow’ of time had to happen somewhere” (Westhpal Reference Westphal2011, 10). Gaining even more relevance in a remembrance through writing, women authors as agents of the archive not only represented these memoryscapes but also performed and satiated the void of the spontaneously forgotten, or quite often the erased episodes of “official” recollections of history. Efforts not to forget are therefore inherently spatial in all its attributes of smell, light, color, texture, sound, and associated emotion. This article thus explores this particular vocabulary and visibility of spatialized memory, which shapes a contemporary mnemonic practice of where and how a society of the past is verbalized and represented – or as Edward Soja writes, “There is no unspationalised social reality. There are no aspatial social processes” (Reference Soja1996, 46). Thirdspace, as a central concept of how past landscapes are embedded into the archive of female memories, is more thoroughly explained below.
The main challenge is to dissociate this female ethnic minority archive from its habitual analytical approaches, underline the particularities, and expose how an otherness of these shared memoryscapes developed in writing. Unlike other scholars such as Miško Šuvaković (Reference Šuvaković2010) or Zsófia Lóránd (Reference Lóránd2018) who focus on a single author (Reference Šuvaković2010) – or Tijana Matijević (Reference Matijević2020) who assess the art of Yugoslav women from a comparative point of view, or Hargita Horváth-Futó (Reference Horváth-Futó2005), Julianna Ispánovics-Csapó (Reference Ispánovics-Csapó2010), and Éva Toldi (Reference Toldi2012) whose methodology focuses on women authors within regional Hungarian Studies in Vojvodina – this article attempts to grasp women’s writing from a more restrictive viewpoint. Accordingly, although I consider such scholarship useful and necessary, in order to enable a focus only on the archive, the methodology of this article chooses to constrain the analysis by “bracketing” everything but the analyzed literary texts themselves. This unburdens them from readings, which would suggest directions leading away from the examination of the archive itself. Since one of the central claims of the analysis is the empowering nature of writing about how landscapes are remembered by minority women, the focus on “change” itself needs to be conducted by employing this prohibitive methodology, as suggested by Foucault (Reference Foucault, Burchell, Gordon and Miller1991, 55). Focusing not on the continuities of representation but on the altered nature of how time, space, and society is remembered and written down, this article “brackets” all other approaches in order to isolate the archive for inspection.
In order to streamline the concept of the archive toward the analysis, amongst its many meanings and connotations, I understand it therefore as follows:
Instead of seeing, on the great mythical book of history, lines of words that translate in visible characters thoughts that were formed in some other time and place, we have in the density of discursive practices, systems that establish statements as events (with their own conditions and domain of appearance) and things (with their own possibility and field of use). They are all these systems of statements (whether events or things) that I propose to call archive. […] The archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events. (Foucault Reference Foucault2002, 145)
This article approaches the archive, therefore, not merely as a repository of representations of the recent and/or biographical past but as embedded into a collectively inhabited landscape. It is also a model of what can be said about these places, which correspond to the possible and imaginable totality within a text-world as in narratology, thus also providing the methodologic criteria of designating the quotes for this article. As memories recorded by literature, they stand for the possibility of a mnemonic practice, the ability to remember a landscape a certain way, and thus a series of choices to interconnect the spatial, historical, and social in a specific way, rather than any other sense.
Unlike the work of Jan Assmann, whose understanding of memory is more applicable to dominant carriers of memory within an extended group, or to hegemonic sets of rites, images, symbols, or objects that monopolize the mnemonic practices of entire societies, the foucauldian archive is suitable for the analysis of the publicly less visible parts of a society, which is crucial for this analysis (Assmann Reference Assmann2011, 34). This also enables us to integrate the approaches of geocriticism even more, interlink temporality, spatiality, and society, thus exposing a level a detail of social trauma-construction, which would be unavailable otherwise. With such complex intersectionalities, where the political and the artistic multiply and hybridize as the archive is constructed, these text-worlds display a specific kind of spatial, temporal, and social fragmentation, where the archive is in its entirety conditioned by a distinct female minority way of representing memoryscapes of Yugoslav (post)socialism.
As these displaced landscapes of the past became part of an archive, transgressed the threshold of fiction and gained publicity through writing, they also managed to perform a spatial, social, and historical contestation of a male post-Yugoslav or Hungarian gaze, thus representing a type of writing beyond all hegemonic and official processes. As Tim Creswell writes about the definition and creation of certain locations, “Place was not simply an outcome of social processes though, it was: once established, a tool in the creation, maintenance and transformation of relations of domination, oppression and exploitation” (Creswell Reference Creswell2004, 29). Creating this archive of memoryscapes became a tool for these minority women to become subversive in their understanding and presentation of themselves. By showing that they could be remembered otherwise, their writing redefines the relationships between various levels of individual, local, regional, and national remembering, while revising the prevailing archives of collective memories in both Hungary and the post-Yugoslav states. This emancipatory element of creating the archive marks the change, which had to be assessed through writing. Although more descriptive and emphatic than critical, this change of how landscapes are remembered is central. It is assessed, therefore, in a mode akin to that of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari who approached the Jewish minority literature of Eastern Europe in a quite similar fashion. “In this sense, Kafka marks the impasse that bars access to writing for the Jews of Prague and turns their literature into something impossible – the impossibility of not writing, the impossibility of writing in German, the impossibility of writing otherwise” (Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze and Guattari2003, 16). Unlike most masculine vernaculars and visibilities of literature, which arrange places and traumas largely congruent with official mnemonic practices, these dense text-worlds unveil an impossibility of the margins and exclusion. Differing in grievances, uncertainties, places, and resolutions, they represent another liminality of these times, as well as another kind of dislocation of the act of remembering. Nevertheless, they expose the im/possibility to represent all this otherwise as well.
Complexities of such text-worlds, burdened by unclear locations and relations, as well as by the ambiguities of past references and present belonging are also addressed by Gillian Rose: “Its multidimensionality refers to a complicated and never self-evident matrix of historical, social, sexual, racial and class positions which women occupy, and its geometry is one strung out between paradoxical sites. These feminist maps are multiple and intersecting, provisional and shifting, and they require ‘ever more intricate skills in cartography’” (Reference Gillian2013, 186). Accordingly, the various im/possibilities of language and memory to represent once inhabited landscapes of the past, the uprootedness in both majority societies, as well as the shortcomings in interpreting the historical, spatial, and social only multiplied through writing. Examining this change in writing and the self-referential questioning of the suitability of one’s own language enabled nevertheless an emergence of a vivid archive of alternate content in a vernacular other than the dominant one. Simultaneously, they created memoryscapes, which were past and historical as much as it were present and autobiographical, while remembering the belonging to a (post)Yugoslav society, which is neither existent nor completely forgotten.
Finally, the article explores how this archive generated change in terms of bodies, both as a repository and a rule of what can be thought and said about them. It is approached in this sense, not as finite and static but as a dynamic, re-interpretative, and self-referential. In this respect, these text-worlds do not simply record or reflect inhabited places of the past but become parts of wider mnemonic practices through writing. This liminal but subversive belletristic agency is therefore not only relevant from a minority female vantage point but carries emancipatory and transformative potential in representing landscapes, events, and bodies as well both male and female. The remembering body of the present, the one, which arranges the invoked memories is in this sense also not conceptualized as a fixed constant in this article but as a dynamic bio-social organism, altering and re-interpreting itself amongst the varying spatial conditions of past and present. It asserts itself “as a physical and biological entity, as lived experience, and as a centre of agency, a location for speaking and acting in the world” (Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga Reference Low, Lawrence-Zúñiga, Low and Lawrence-Zuniga2003, 1). The body within the represented memoryscapes therefore not only “embodies a place” as social evidence but stands for a feminine position of remembering, which becomes spatial and visible through a specific literary agency of an ethnic minority. More precisely and following Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the body represents the locality via remembering in the dual, related, but dissimilar sense of the word: “representation as ‘speaking for,’ as in politics, and representation as ‘re-presentation’ as in art of philosophy” (Spivak Reference Spivak and Chrisman1993, 66). As the conversion of this archive into writing asserts this biological and social dualism of representation even more explicitly, it is even more important how men and women inhabit and multiply these female thirdspaces of the past.
Defined by the silent and marginal position of remembering, which becomes even more destabilized by the fracturing of Yugoslav socialism and emigration to Hungary (or elsewhere), the archive of these ethnic memoryscapes of women bears much conceptual resemblance with the archives of post-colonial communities. Un- or mis-represented by other (majority) societies, as well as by the belletristic practices of male authors, post-colonial thought can complement the analysis in exposing the liminal, suppressed, and disregarded experiences of the past. Although these text-worlds perform a post-Yugoslav female archive in Hungarian from a perspective of an ethnic minority, these fields of references, as well as their vocabulary, is unconventional in contemporary Hungarian or post-Yugoslav fiction, where the representation of this archive often becomes only balkanized, or perceived as a curiosity of the ethnic minorities. Such misjudgments and the difficulties in examining such intersectionalities – applicable to this kind of Hungarian ethnic minority also – are described by a number of authors. Chandra Talpade Mohanty writes, that “these analyses freeze third world women in time, space, and history” (Reference Mohanty, Mohanty, Russo and Torres1991, 6). Emphasizing the difference in language Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin note, that “Post-colonial texts may signify difference in their representations of place, in nomenclature, and through the deployment of themes. But it is in the language that the curious tension of cultural ‘revelation’ and cultural ‘silence’ is most evident” (Reference Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin2002, 58). This article attempts therefore to lead away from such representations “on” minority women in various text-worlds and focus rather on memoryscapes in literature, as text-worlds written “by” Hungarian women from Yugoslavia. Bypassing the pitfalls to perceive these archives in relation to other archives, the article employs a reading of texts beyond the habitually associated archives. Although restrictive, literary representations of these memoryscapes carry values of their own, regardless of the dominant flows and assigned (scholarly) conventions: “Third World women are perceived of and represented as a minority, both authorially and politically, allowed to speak only if within the bounds of First World conventions of the Other, always already reinforcing attitudes of ‘difference’” (Radcliffe Reference Radcliffe1994, 27). Accordingly, incorporating the thirdspace perspective of geocriticism with a post-colonial reading of these representations, as well as the dissociation of the archives from official memory politics and dominant mnemonic agency, the analysis enables a continuous reinterpretation and reestablishment of the archive according to its own internal principles.
First Cycle: Establishing an Archive
Leaning on Hungarian folk traditions, Katalin Ladik wrote her poem by integrating ethno-cultural symbolism and the surreal with late-socialist developments in Kosovo and Vukovar. Published in the famous Novi Sad-based Hungarian neo-avant-garde journal Új Symposion, the poem reflects on violence, destruction, and suffering. Thirding the landscape of the present with the abstraction of female bodies, the older daughter KosovoMetohia (written together) and the younger daughter Vukovar expanded the distances of the text-world with a song of Fehérlófia addressed to Europe as a caller in a late-night radio show.Footnote 11 On the one hand, the text is assembled from extensive mythological figures and landscapes, coupled with allegoric allusions to the body of Christ, while at the same time it draws heavily on Hungarian folk tales and their figurative spaces. On the other hand, it intensely meanders within landscapes of an ongoing slaughter and the laborious toils of motherhood in wartime as the people involved became subjects of brutality. Often linked together, this excerpt interconnects the mutilated female bodies and the violence of a disintegrating country in one of the most explicit ways. Devoid of means to interfere, the allegoric memoryscape of a mother’s body is created as the helpless son calls into the radio show, addresses Europe, but is unable to stop the inferno, which only accelerates as the text-world evolves.
Integrating the imaginary with the factual and the mythical with the political enables her not only to create one of the earliest memoryscapes of these specific traumatic experiences and reflect on the epic cruelties in Kosovo and Vukovar but also to dislocate this into a female text-world. While the official archives were created with typically male references, she introduced an alternate understanding of the present and introduce a field of recognizably feminine references on a spurring conflict already in 1992. As one of the first ones to perform and represent this archive in Hungarian, Ladik also managed to transfer this personal traumatic rupture via a mnemonic agency into Hungarian literary and highbrow cultural production, while employing the rhythm and vocabulary of a pagan prayer performed as a cry for help through a telephone call. Published in the last issue of a magazine, which was suspended after this, but for the last time distributed in both Yugoslavia and Hungary, the need to give a visibility to the violent disintegration of the landscape turns this poem into one of the earliest disapprovals of the war. It is also one of the first belletristic texts in Hungarian, which transposed the turmoil in Kosovo and the siege of Vukovar into fiction, thus establishing it as a landscape of memory and representing it in the early developments of the archive as part of a female experience. In this sense, although the archive could had been developed otherwise, or the transfer of memories into fiction could have occurred from other vantage points, such texts set the tone for a displaced, uprooted, but pacifist and nostalgic (female) voice.
Transferring a gradually fragmenting inhabited geography and the current social experiences connected to it into the past “thirds” these memories similarly to the immediate, distorted, and constantly evolving understanding of memories by Pierre Nora, where memory “is rooted in the concrete: in space, gesture, image, and object” (Nora Reference Nora1996, 3). Abstracted, but also interpreted through art, these spaces, gestures, images, and objects were, however, dissimilar to the ones displayed by the official channels of the mass media, as well as any other dominant archival-attempts. The initial creation of this archive during the first cycle rested therefore on a series of texts by women on sounds, smells, colors, and tastes within a distinct (post)Yugoslav landscape, which was gradually pushed into the past via writing as its decomposition also gained visibility through performance and re-production. By publicly representing the archive in a literary magazine distributed in both Hungary and Yugoslavia, transferring an existing but fracturing geography into collective memory, the archive itself gained a quality of an interpretation of the political through the concreteness of the personal. The archive enclosed landscapes of the past, which were defined by a chronologically finite society and an abstracted but autobiographic outlines of a woman who inhabited and identified with it. It also encapsulates, however, a violently mutating society on an incomplete and contemporary terrain, which only multiplied the positions of her remembering. As the archive of these landscapes evolved, gradually encompassing not only Vukovar and Kosovo, thus locating memories of the past within it on the one side, and the positions of present remembering on the other, the tension between these poles grew through time. As an act of remembering and writing, it arranged places, gestures, images, and objects, which not only governed the archive, and regulated the inclusion and exclusion of elements, but also equipped it with a recognizable set of emotions, emanating from a fading minority position, displacement, and inevitable change.
Similar to Katalin Ladik, other women authors, giving increasingly a shape to the archive, attempted likewise to stabilize their contemporary positions of remembering, as well as to define some criteria to establish a relation to these uncertain landscapes. Nevertheless, these relations differed significantly from the official narratives of the time. As the temporal void grew with the impossibility to access these landscapes both spatially and socially, landscapes of a once continuous present gradually developed into an archive alike to other archives of the past. Distant, nostalgic, and serene but ingrained in the concreteness of personal memories, these memoryscapes of mothers, sisters, and wives slowly became a contrast to most experiences of the present. The first cycle of establishing the archive was therefore not only defined by the shifts of (recently inaccessible) places into the past but also by the search for links between currently destabilizing positions of remembering, on the one side, and a duality of memoryscapes already lost to the war or being currently destroyed on the other. The recollection of how remembering and memory was interconnected, how change was assessed, and how the traumatic landscapes were constructed are recorded in a number of narratives.
At night we could still watch Yu-Tel, broadcasted from Sarajevo, devastating images of wheat fields devoured by tanks, black building-stumps staring into the sky, truncated bodies, valleys and mountains echoing cannon fire, places so dear to our hearts, often visited with our children and friends: the hills of Ilok, where we picked the most beautiful, large blossomed white and purple lilies, the marshlands of Kopács, where we paddled, the snowdrop-cowered meadows and slopes of spring pomp on Fruška Gora in February, where our children learned chicory, mullein, grape hyacinth, the peacock and rainbow butterfly, the moths, or places of our more further wanderings, Plitvice, which is ice-cold even in summer, where T. took me in a boat not long after we met, and where he wouldn’t admit, that he never paddled before, and I that I noticed. And Dubrovnik, the Ragusa of Pista N. which we always visited when arriving and leaving from our summer vacations, only to meander between the ever cooling walls of the curious, ancient-scented city. These early morning broadcasts showed rumbling mountains and valleys, drunken, singing soldiers and screaming, tumbling, women, elders and children who losing their minds fled from these soldiers, and collapsing, expiring bodies as well – I saw, but I couldn’t believe it, I would’ve rather accepted even the fact of manipulated images; every atom of my mind protested against its acknowledgment.Footnote 12 (Mirnics Reference Mirnics2000, 21)
Published in 2000, just after the fall of Slobodan Milošević, this excerpt is an example of memoryscapes at the end of the consolidating first cycle. Spread across the country, which is irretrievably gone, but embedded in the vantage point of the present, the remembering narrator unfolds a terrain stretching generations into the past. Thirding the places, people, and the past into a memoryscape, which is no longer there, Mirnics provides the reader with an aspect of the archive, comprised of elements, which she can introduce to future generations only through writing. She implies that personal experience is no longer an option. Moreover, this text-world not only shows a widening gap of broadcasted official truths of the present on the one side, and a thirdspace perspective of alternately linked personal memoryscapes on the other, but also the increasing impossibility to connect the two. A composite of private, individual, generational, and gendered remembering, the narrator performs – what Edward Soja terms – a “thirdspace perception,” not merely by creating a narrative but by transforming the official portrayals of a “secondspace” landscape into a dual geography of collective experiences and individual emotions also. Representing past and present in a single, short fragment, she created alternate meanings, pathways, forms, and functions of places while locating memories of a tranquil time of herself, her children, and others across the state, which exist only via memory. Accordingly, arranging the narrative by leaning on the inherent tension from within the archive, where memories of peaceful pasts of Yugoslav socialism are on one side, while the vantage point of remembering is embedded in violent social and geographic ruptures of the present, equips the text to evoke joy and suffering at the same time.
Appearing in the thirdspace perspective of many (women) authors, this duality of remembering and memory is irreducible to either of its constituents in the development of the archive. Providing far more than only form and content, memoryscapes consist this way of both present and past within the same imaginary while arranging the densely interwoven social, spatial, and historical as well. Creating a thirdspace of fiction during the first cycle, where these memoryscapes act and exist in this intense and compact form breaches nevertheless beyond the intentions and expectations of the official. Following Edward Soja who conceptualizes “firstplace” as an empirical perception of a geographical terrain, while “secondspace” is a description of ideas on space, mostly according to its primary functions, a “thirdspace” perspective focuses on how groups and individuals view places, as their own priorities of spatial, temporal, and social signifiers converge. How they use them, regardless of their primary functions. A thirdspace perspective is therefore, particularly visible when places were purposefully utilized for the creation of official truths, or when they were interpreted via individual nuances of writing. Transposed into fiction and striped of their official functions, these memoryscapes are often transformed into a wide variety of representations, where the archive is employed beyond the officially existing firstspace and secondspace perspectives, thus resulting in landscapes rather dissimilar from – amongst others – dominant groups or individuals. Especially in the case of minority women authors, these processes enable a specific kind of gendered memory, differing in directions, or places of departure and arrival, in their associated networks of historic meaning, in social function, and many other aspects. Moreover, the transition of these references into literary fiction expanded further the rupture between the various first-, second- and thirdspace imaginations of places, which during the decomposition of the state became unapproachable for the author or the protagonist. Accordingly, these landscapes emerged as the manifestations of the archive, where places of memory and the act of remembering were both represented within a self-interpretation of mothers, sisters, daughters, and female professionals from the micro-levels of the home, market, or the street to the macro-levels of political geography.
We, who are wandering towards the middles of our lives here in Vojvodina said farewell to safety and meaningful life already in the second half of the 1980s. Since then, we often thought, that an economic, social or political event would turn our fate, and maybe the repetitiveness of this belief numbed and challenged our ability to address properly the subsequent alarming developments. The signs of improvement, that we all awaited and desired were not only late, but we had to acknowledge again and again, that it had only gone worse, until a life, which could had been said or described as normal, was liquidated.
[…]
What we feared so much, happened, and with a curious twist of fate firstly and most frequently, in Újvidék.Footnote 13 They started here, and they are continuing it here. Because, already the first bomb and missile, which I and my family confronted in one of the newest, most densely populated quarters of the city, in front of its most frequented supermarket, made me realise, that something had started, that everything is over, while I was holding onto my children, screaming and shouting helplessly in the middle of the street, while devices of modern warfare destroyed targets known only to them, and allotted death from above, not only to the guilty. (Ózer Reference Ózer1999, 151)Footnote 14
Writing these reflections during the 1999 bombardments, Ágnes Ózer, like many others, emphasized her – almost predetermined – generational embeddedness and intense relation to her city and her motherhood. Contributing to the archive by transferring her interpretation of the present into writing, she embeds the abstractness of an existential experience into the destruction of a concrete place, threatening her own life and the life of her children. Present in a series of narratives on air raids, wars or months of refuge, such extensive landscapes became integrated with close friends, family, and children into compositions of intensely described local places of generational remembrance. Employed in the second cycle as memoryscapes of the parents or as a reconstructed lived experience of a protagonist, these places often lost their extensions of geography and urbanism, gaining immediate, individual, generational, and local qualities in turn. The excerpt also reveals how the narrator acknowledged this paradigmatic rupture. While also implying that an anticipation for the return of a better life existed, these memories are always logged into the present of remembering by the constant and gradual reduction of this belief. Although lasting throughout the 1990s, she realized and voiced the end of a certain order only as the bombing started. Doing this by referring to the destruction of urban space, remembering a generational chronology of hope and the deterioration of it, she thirds the space of the past while noticing the gradual slivering of the social fabric. Concentrated within the confined personal space of a mother hugging her children within an architectural de/composition of façades of Yugoslav socialism during an air raid, the “thirding” of this particular place and its embeddedness into personal and collective history and the reflections on society as a whole occurs in an accelerated setting of a single moment of destruction.
Later becoming a characteristic pattern in the “thirding” process of this archive, the interpretative bond between political discontinuities on one side, and its repercussions in family life and the household on the other was established during the first cycle as well. Contributing also to the transfer of tension between acts of remembering and the objects of memory, unlike archives of male memoryscapes of war or the official interpretation of places, which were mostly dislocated from the family setting, the uncertainties of state and home are often complementary within the text-worlds of women. As the most private emerged and expanded, it enabled place-specific remembering in every case, where the immediately personal aspects of the family’s present or past became deeply embedded into, and mutually complementary with, the social landscape of the war. Transferring these experiences into the archive, Éva Harkai Vass also described her ability to travel to Hungary by train as a woman, bringing home things for the men who could not cross the border because of the military draft. Comparing her most personal and private impressions to official and public broadcasts of the bombardments, she also recorded in her published journal entries how she packed the necessities of the whole family into suitcases if all of them should suddenly leave. Parallel to watching televised landscapes of refugees, she described the daily routines of herself, her children, her nuclear family and immediate social surroundings, which – as they become units of a single thirdspace narrative – interprets the official and non-official narratives, present and past, the nearby and the far away together. Finally, the continuous representation of the 1999 NATO bombing is filtered through a thirdspace perspective by reminiscences on places of the past, as well as a nostalgia of friendships and events connected to certain places, which became accessible only via the archive.
I have not seen any of the demolished Danube-bridges of Újvidék, I did not want to see them in person. But the old one, which could have been seen from the windows of my old rented apartment (were they shattered by the explosion?), and on which like this, in springtime we used to cross over to Pétervárad, is quite close to campus. As students, we even heard a myth, that over the steep arches of the other – the Žeželj-bridge – a boy from Bajsa cycled over with his bike. Some of us believed it, some of us did not; but now the myth, together with the bridge fell into the water. My sons loved the newest one, which connected Újvidék with Kamenica, because of the warm, orange lights of the tunnel bored into the other side, glowing in the daytime as well. We used to drive through it, when we celebrated Mayday on the small stream of Testera on Fruška Gora, until – as to the art colony of Topolya, the hotel in Andrevlje and to who knows how many other places – they moved refugees there from the Bosnian war. Various refugees of various wars country- and worldwide. (Harkai Vass Reference Harkai Vass1999, 304)Footnote 15
Thirding these unofficial memories of war had not been a common topic of Hungarian literature from Yugoslavia, and aside from socialist realism with its politically motivated remembrance of the Second World War, which played a cohesive role in identity and memory politics, landscapes of wars were an omitted subject matter in minority literary production since 1918.Footnote 16 Nevertheless, created as a post-modern archive of places, these memoryscapes of the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and the disintegration of a shared geography gained Hungarian belletristic visibility parallel to the experiences. Additionally, thirding these with landscapes of the past within the first cycle expanded narration well beyond the present. Transferring memories of Yugoslavia and its disintegration into fiction, and in this sense, the performance of the archive in writing enabled not only a creation of criteria for the inclusion of further elements but also for an understanding of forced agency, violence, victimhood, and non-belonging on the wider scale of literary consumption as well. The first cycle is designated therefore by establishing representations of chronologically and socially removed landscapes of peace from the perspective of decay and chaos of the present.
Realizing the withering away of Yugoslavia and in this sense the transgression of its landscapes and citizens into the past, the mnemonic practices of fiction were carried out by Hungarian women of Yugoslavia who could no longer inhabit and proactively identify with these places in the present or the future. Being dislocated and uprooted, sometimes even physically through emigration, exposed the impossibilities of this Subject to define its locations of remembering and interpretation, while embedding its gaze into a memoryscape where remembering and writing could begin and end. With an impossibility to identify with either fragments of post-conflict Yugoslavia or (if emigration was part of the text-world) a transitioning post-soviet Hungary, remembrance was carried out by a Subject whose self-perception was defined both unnecessarily Yugoslav, while being insufficiently Hungarian as well. Although a great number of Hungarians from Yugoslavia emigrated to Hungary to evade the wars of the 1990s and a great number of artists and authors found their place in the art-worlds of Budapest, the creation of Hungarian memoryscapes from and about Yugoslavia during the first cycle was to a large degree ignored in Hungary, as it was in the post-Yugoslav states. Along with the persisting problem of a socio-spatially removed female Subject and its void of non-belonging, these memories proved to be paradigmatically incongruent with identity politics of all majority societies. Such a dual exclusion of the archive, and its un-employability in public acts of remembering elevated, however, the element of nostalgia – especially during the second cycle – within these text-worlds onto another level of abstraction. If we conceptualize the mass performing of official archives not merely as oppressive but also as creative, we see that such mnemonic obstacles contributed greatly for this archive of female memoryscapes to take shape, accumulate elements and relations, and establish criteria of expansion and reproduction. The permanent state of in-betweenness, the shifting interpretations of the spatial, social and historical, as well as the reemerging representations of these memoryscapes in fiction enabled the creation of an archive, which stood not only for a specific female experience of places in the past but for an authentic position of remembering as well.
Second Cycle: Memorialization in Retrospect
Writing about Darko – who is not particularly handsome, has a shrapnel-mark on his forehead from 1991, and sells his tomatoes “in the close by, next village” – Orsolya Bencsik creates a landscape of condensed, post-traumatic sexualized memory. While her autobiographic narrator embarks from a simple story of buying tomatoes and flirting with Darko, who came to Vojvodina from Ravenna after living there for eleven years, the text-world gradually expands into the archive of the first cycle, and well beyond. It is not revealed when the narrative takes place, nor does the protagonist remember the exact year. Another memoryscape also emerges, but she does not reveal when – only that it occurred in the springtime after a NATO raid, in a year “when swallows did not return to sit on the power lines.” As levels of the storyline shift repeatedly between “thirdspaces” of the present and memoryscapes of the first cycle, the narrative is nostalgically pushed into the archive of places of bygone conflicts. As her father says “I had enough,” the archive opens and expands into the present. She is suddenly reminded how he has to leave every third day at dawn for Hungary to earn his living – and how Darko is unable to understand this, because he came to Serbia to live and work. She also remembers that the face of Béla, her father’s friend, looks like Darko’s “except for the dent, the shrapnel-mark and the war.” The narrative spreads even further by interconnecting the pain of the shrapnel with thoughts about her grandfather’s gangrenous foot, and how he had thought to have a similar problem already in 1944 “just before the Russians came.”
As other authors of the time, composing this mosaic of memoryscapes embedded in a remembrance from the present while buying tomatoes, the narrator is neither able to cope with the overlapping, coexistence, and incongruences of these separate archives, nor with the inconsistencies of the various interpretations about the disintegration of the state. Exposing the ruptures within the conflicting archives of these post-Yugoslav memoryscapes, the necessity to work in another country since the 1990s in the case of her father differs vastly from the fate of Darko – although Darko himself does not understand why the protagonist’s father has to go to Hungary, while he himself can sell tomatoes in Serbia. Despite the narrator’s efforts to explain why her father leaves, Darko laconically responds that “everywhere is uncertain, not only where he had fled from.” Yet, while the short story easily interconnects actors, agency, and remembering via the narratives on the present, it displays a grave inability of the protagonists to account for the social discontinuities, which are embedded in landscapes of the past or even into the plans for the future. Consequently, leaning on the archive of the first cycle and memoryscapes of Yugoslav socialism, as well as the shared realities of the present, the void between the two thirdspace perspectives in interpreting the tripartite unity of the places, people, and pasts of the 1990s, as well as the disjuncture of their own self-perception relative to this period, differs paradigmatically.
Moving away from creating remembrance as disintegration happens into a time, when it already happened, within a short story of only a few paragraphs, the storyline unfolds from the ambiguous relations between the competing archives, decades into the past. Representing a female protagonist, who is aware of the often contrary variability of memoryscapes, as well as of their dispersion within the social fabric, the narrator employs the body as the contested medium and terrain of disruption. Consequently, as the slightly impaired face develops a metonymic relation to the memoryscapes, the storyline interconnects the various forms of violence of the Yugoslav wars with troubled sites of present day Serbia, the refuge in Ravenna with locally grown tomatoes, a precarious life on the market with an occasional flirt, an adolescent phantasy with a covert eroticism of the male body, and the traumatic experiences of several generations after a NATO air-raid within a single narrative. Similar to the post-traumatic male presence elsewhere in the second cycle, this male face inextricably draws her attention, evoking her interest toward his hotbed, where he grows his tomatoes.
As the narrative moves further, memoryscapes of Yugoslavia and their decomposition slowly integrate into a separate point of perception. Signifying another generation, another cycle, and another thirding exercise, together with a newly emerging location of remembering, the archive was gradually complemented with new experiences also. The second cycle is therefore, designated by the possibility of a social, historical, and spatial distance from the memoryscapes of the first cycle. This distance occurs on one side, in the text-worlds of a younger generation of women authors who experienced the wars of the 1990s and the disintegration of the landscape only via or along their parents, and in this sense apply it as a mediated archive. On the other side, even the writers of a previous generation employ these memoryscapes in their text-worlds as parts of an enclosed and already established cycle. Therefore, although the thirding of present remembering occurs in a landscape removed from Yugoslav socialism, a nostalgic perception of these memories of an era emerges also. In this sense, although the narrator of the present mentions, that Darko is “not particularly handsome,” she is interested in him precisely because of the archive he performs through his mediated memories and representations of the male body. However, while the female body is often young as it remembers or remains young within the memoryscape, representations of the male body are different. Assigning political, military, or medical aspects to its experiences, and usually conveyed through romantic or festive narratives, the second cycle complemented this sexualized, wounded, slowly aging male body with a rather specific mnemonic, narrative, and enunciative function also. Therefore, while the second cycle of Hungarian women’s memoryscapes of Yugoslavia depends on the first one, it is not merely the repetitive performance of the archive but its reproduction and reinterpretation as well. The transition between the two cycles should not be perceived, therefore, as an interruption or disjuncture but as a gradual process of a mnemonic and belletristic practice. It is a shift in the spatial, social, and temporal location of remembrance, as well as an expansion and diversification of the first cycle by its non-contemporaries.
Remembering Yugoslavia
Although the landscapes of Yugoslavia emerged in literature written in Hungarian in Yugoslavia already during the 1920s and gained even more visibility after 1945, their transition into memoryscapes during the first cycle did not only shift these places and delegated their interpretation into the past but altered the experiencing protagonist of the text-worlds into a remembering protagonist also. Transforming into memoryscapes during the second cycle, Hungarian women’s writing from the post-Yugoslav states gradually balanced and settled spatial recollections of Yugoslavia, as well as its decomposition into a consolidated archive of the past. Nevertheless, transferring and reproducing these memoryscapes in fiction pushed not only the temporal locus of these places from an ongoing, current identification into an enclosed past but defined the spatial and social limits of the archive as well. In this respect, while the social construction of trauma had been a contemporary issue in the first cycle, the second cycle established another position of remembering, where these social and spatial ruptures of displacement are detached from the present. In turn, by the performance of this position, memoryscapes of Yugoslav socialism and their disintegration became a concluded period of the past, a consolidated cycle with a stable form and social function of terrain, largely detached from the progressive and cumulative qualities of time. Representations of these memoryscapes in the text-worlds of subsequent generations, which started to be published in the early 2000s, and is nowadays largely integrated into the art-worlds of Budapest or Szeged, often occurs, however, from a child’s perspective of late-socialism, while adolescence and adulthood is more associated with the late 1990s and 2000s, respectively. Yugoslavia of the middle and late 1980s is thus arranged as a landscape of prosperity within confines of unspoiled family relations. Places such as the house, the yard, the neighboring streets, and periodic family vacations are therefore defined by future-oriented and hopeful parents, a financially stable extended family living nearby, and a wide array of balanced relationships. By contrast, the memoryscapes of the 1990s are always an antipode of this, evoking disarray, fragmentation, existential uncertainty, and violence from the micro-level of the family up until the macro-levels of state and politics.
Illustrative is the play Silence by Anna Terék, cited above, which follows the fate of a boy born in 1980s Yugoslavia. The drama stretches from the material and emotional abundances of a Yugoslav childhood through remembrances of the military draft affecting the father, sanctions, embargos, and wars of the 1990s up until the post-traumatic domestic violence caused by the frontline, and consequently the marital separation and fragmentation of the family. Due to the irreversibility of these processes and the impossibility to remember otherwise, the recollection of these memoryscapes is thus always accompanied by the creation of a text-world of contrasts. A transgression into fiction, where the times, spaces, and societies of memory, on one side, and the thirdspace of remembering, on the other, expose irreparable discontinuities. Accordingly, authors not only acknowledge the end of an era in the present as they recreate these memoryscapes in fiction, but via the critical present perspective of remembrance and the represented landscapes of the past, they also create text-worlds, which are designated by this burdening opposition.
Embedded into a monologue of a twenty-four-year-old adult, Yugoslavia emerges through an archive represented via his parents’ memories, as well as from the memories of his earliest childhood. Proceeding through his life from the childhood of his father, the pregnancy of his mother and his own birth, it preserved a landscape, which is mediatized by movies. Films, such as the Battle of Sutjeska – a showcase of the official archive itself – are watched by the protagonist at the cinema, and later enacted together with his friends. Recreating a childhood in Yugoslav socialism, he drinks Coca-Cola every day, eats ice cream in jeans in the summer, and dreams to become a professional ski jumper on the Jahorina mountain in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He even nostalgically recalls, “In those days,/ every house had at least one picture of/ Tito,” noting that his father received a world atlas from Tito as a gift when he himself was a child, and because of the many books and pictures of him, the boy thought that Josip Broz Tito was a relative of theirs: “My father really believed/in that freedom,/ compiled from the picture of metal turning,/ partisan movies,/ and books.”
As the act of remembering unfolds through writing, the archives of family memory, and the memory of Yugoslavia interconnect via the congruent spatial, social, and historical references. The thirdspace of a childhood and adolescence develops therefore as a boy’s typical memoryscape from Vojvodina in the 1980s. Defined by popular and consumer culture, lifestyle, and iconography of late Yugoslav socialism, these places compress the social, historical, and spatial into a text-world that enables dense descriptions of experiences, where every of the three aspects could be emphasized simultaneously. In a similar play of hers, written in the 2010s but set in the late 1980s, Vojvodinian Wedding, Anna Terék arranges the landscapes of memory into a storyline of a single ceremonial day. Defining its genre in the subtitle as a “tent-revue,” she sets the narrative in a wedding tent. A specific place, common for traditional (Hungarian) weddings in rural socialist Yugoslavia, but a practice rather unusual for an audience in contemporary Hungary, the site itself is the carrier of symbols, actors, and lines of agency, where the archive of thirdspaces can act out and exist in a peculiar way. As the genre grants a grotesque potential to the storyline, the memoryscape is defined by the distinct social, temporal, and spatial composition of these symbolic characters, places, and names from Yugoslavia. A recognizable model of Subject-construction is Sándor, the best man, who is a “gastarbeiter” in Munich. Described as the typical relative living and working in Germany, his character introduces an alternate thirdspace perception, which presents a conflicting archive. Relating to the rural and familiar aspects of the socialist regime, which he had left for Germany many years ago, he articulates his skepticism toward stagnation when Mihály, the groom’s tipsy father and party secretary of the town, boasts about the progress of Yugoslavia and how it will surpass Germany, Europe, even America. Thirding the memoryscape, Terék incorporated other signifiers into her play as well, such as a reference to a shop named November 29, a common company name invoking the Day of the Republic, or the local monument to the Petőfi Brigade, a Hungarian partisan brigade from Yugoslavia during the Second World War. Comparatively, the groom’s plans for the honeymoon are also located in a social geography, which is deeply rooted in the memory of the state.
In a week we leave for Makarska. We will be there for two weeks. We will take tasty little roasted meats with us. But we will eat in the restaurants on the shore as well. On the way back, we will stop in Sarajevo to eat ćevapi. And I will buy you Turkish coffee in Sarajevo. It will be splendid. Dad told me, that he will lend me his Golf. You will sit in the front, have the smell of Turkish coffee and we will be happy. And then, when we return from the seashore, I will find work, dad will find me work. And we will look for an apartment for rent. (Terék Reference Terék2016, 116)
As a frequently represented memoryscape of Hungarian women authors who write post-Yugoslavia, the social topography of marriage, home, and domestic life resurfaces in various forms quite often. Embedded into a critique of rural traditionalism, social isolation, conservative gender roles and their symbolism, marriage is usually represented in domestic spaces from the perspective of mothers, daughters, sisters, or aunts as an event, a process, a problem, or a solution of a life-cycle. Nevertheless, the act of remembering intimate or public places of marriage, family, home, or the wedding ceremony itself as in the excerpt above is frequently intertwined with the nostalgic remembrance of Yugoslavia. Following the internal dualism of these memoryscapes – where the period of late socialism is usually remembered in relation to the subsequent years of decay – domestic life and its dissolution through death, refuge, or emigration often has a homologous narrative pattern. Private lives of the antagonists evolve and diminish in this sense, similar to the state. Beyond the merely physical location or geographical structure, these spaces of marriage, home, and family are therefore irreducibly entwined with parallel memories of Yugoslavia within these representations as highly emotional spaces, associated with nostalgia, and a confluence of longing and belonging. Complementing the first one, the second cycle introduced in this sense, a wider variety of fictionalized memoryscapes of Yugoslavia, diversifying the experiences, and reaching further beyond the autobiographic. Connecting political experience with private life stories, interpretation with nostalgia remained nevertheless, a vital principle of the text-worlds during the second cycle also. Correlating similarly with family history, however, were the taboos of Yugoslavia.
Although everyone, including my father voted against the spa, they started building it the same summer, erected an enormous concrete museum on the banks of the Danube, and hung pictures of the partisan heroes in it, even though everyone knew they had butchered hundred and twenty men in our village, but we couldn’t talk about this. Mother threw also a tantrum once because of this. Granny’s tongue slipped. “Do you want to get all of us put away?!” Later, the museum was guarded heavily and it wasn’t advised to be there after dark, to sneak or fool around in the shady park, because all lovers were discovered. But there was only a problem if they didn’t have any personal documents on them. (Bence Reference Bence2001, 43)Footnote 18
Altering official memory by “thirding” the perception of commemoration sites of the Second World War, Bence presented a specifically rural, local, female, and minority gaze. Introducing memoryscapes in her collection of interconnected short stories with the absence, beating, torture, and execution of men, misfortunes of deserted women who ran and hid in the fields from soldiers arriving and leaving in short intervals in various uniforms, or the hunger of mothers and children, she complemented the official commemoration sites of the Second World War. In this excerpt, memory of a certain place transgresses into the archive as a terrain other than anything which surrounds it, other than what the local community would have wanted, and other than what for it has been used since. Exposing the grave discontinuities between the official and unofficial mnemonic practices, the museum remains a contrast to the informal archive performed by the women. By describing the alternate side of the monument – both as it was contested as a proposition and as it was misused as a completed commemorative complex – Bence revealed the marginalized registers of the state-imposed mnemonic practices. Displaying a hiatus in the official sites commemorating early Yugoslav socialism, the remembrance interlinked in writing a trans-generational line of narrators embedded in a thirdspace of tabooed places of the municipality. Instead of invoking memoryscapes of the partisans or unabridged progress in the rapidly urbanizing and industrializing countryside, Bence and other authors introduced another set of landscapes into Hungarian fiction. Arranging the remembrance in her short stories from the perspective of agrarian women who perform and preserve a hierarchy of values other than the myth of future-oriented, modernist escalation of Yugoslavia, Bence represents a memoryscape where large parts of the local community construed their worlds other than it was officially expected. Thirding the places of the family, the neighborhood, and the town, she remembers mothers and grandmothers who not only conflicted with the commemorated abstract values of Yugoslav socialism but embodied another set of places also. Remembering hardships during the winter of 1944–1945, writing about dozens of women and children hiding on abandoned farms without food and in dark kitchens to avoid violence, they represented the bearers of blank spots of past atrocities toward Hungarian women in the earliest days of socialist Yugoslavia.
As the excerpt above illustrates, three generations of women interlock into a mundane but quickly escalating family conversation at home. By remembering these shunned scenes from the micro-level of personal spaces with children to the vast landscapes of war in winter, Bence presents amongst others a conversational stigma also. In this sense, up until their transgression into fiction during the 1990s, some memories had to remain unspoken. Conversely, “thirding” the place of official commemoration, thus highlighting the impossibility of a rearranged place to fulfil its collective mnemonic function as well as the impossibility of the inhabitants of the village to identify with the structure, produced not only a historically or ideologically non-relational space. With the inaptness of the commemorative site to emerge even as a place of informal leisure, it also became a blank space, alien to the town in its social, spatial, and historical sense equally. Its transgression into fiction nevertheless converts these impossibilities into an alternate archive of remembering Yugoslavia. It enables text-worlds to reveal the differences between the official and unofficial, as well as to display the thirding process of certain places during the represented mnemonic activities of the characters involved, thus provoking the readership to remember otherwise as well.
David Harvey points out, that “the very act of naming geographical entities implies a power over them, most particularly over the way in which places, their inhabitants and their social functions get represented” (Harvey Reference Harvey1990, 419). Although remembering and recording the gradual decay of the country in the first cycle, many authors were unable to define its name even in the second cycle and, in this sense, struggled to designate their own locus of existence and remembering. Hungarian women from what had been Yugoslavia brought a further quality to this deprivation of naming and agency. Instead of an official vocabulary, memoryscapes were often defined in accordance with inter-personal an inter-generational thirding, employing not only alternate names and places but – as in the excerpts above – also alternate historic connections between society and its individual actors, on one side, and significant sites of the past, on the other. This is even more pronounced through the “othering” mnemonic practices of the Hungarian minority due to its involvement in the Second World War. Although naming and claiming that geography is one of the manifest strategies of both official and unofficial interpretations of memoryscapes, an inability to stabilize the position of remembering in the present, thus to establish criteria of including or excluding places of the past while developing a relationship to them, has been a significant narrative obstacle during the second cycle as well.
Radio Nautik, broadcasted from the island of Vis announced yesterday, that Yugoslavia was disestablished. It does not exist any longer. I was born in Újvidék (today Novi Sad) in 1942. It belonged at that time to Hungary, later to Yugoslavia. Today to Serbia and Montenegro. Yugoslavia was the name of the country, which once bloomed, and I was present, when it was dismembered. I did not wait for its death rattle. Now, I am traveling from one part of its remains to the other. (Ladik Reference Ladik2007, 16)
Narrowing down its genre in the subtitle as a “novelistic life-story,” this part of Ladik’s autobiography is titled Diaries from Hvar, and by 2007, as it was published, she meticulously added a footnote to the fourth sentence: “from 2006 to Serbia.” Following also the homologous narrative pattern and describing her life-cycle analogous to Yugoslavia, she remembers her professional and private life in this country from Hvar, Croatia. As she learns in another fragment of a once collectively inhabited space, even the name of the country where she grew up and was recognized as an artist does not exist anymore, and thus the dislocation of every reference of herself as a Hungarian female poet, actress, performer from Yugoslavia becomes complete. Existing only as an archive of memoryscapes, the experiences transgress into these fractured memoirs as narratives of decay and in-betweenness. Conjuring private and official memories of places from Yugoslavia in a constant shift of her position of remembering between Budapest, Novi Sad, and Hvar, she arranged her autobiography into an alternate Hungarian private map of Yugoslav art-history.
Due to her inability to define belonging between decomposing memoryscapes of the past, as well as the transitioning post-socialisms of the post-Yugoslav states and Hungary of the present, Katalin Ladik wrote her memoirs by creating a dislocated landscape beyond these categories. Representing and performing a privately and professionally self-determining woman, rooted in the archaic imaginary of Hungarian language and folklore, as much as in the institutional landscape of the Yugoslav neo-avant-garde from the 1960s onward, Ladik breaks the narrator of the book into fragments: the editor, the glazer, and the artist. Unusual for Hungarian language where gender is not grammatically signified, all beginning with a capital letter and all in feminine form (Szerkesztőnő, Üvegezőnő, Művésznő), these public roles not only become names but by interconnecting private life cycles with public engagement, they organize the text-worlds as well. They regulate relations of the life cycles to public processes, embed the present of remembering to various pasts while spatializing it, and they mark the transgression from one biographic memoryscape to the other. Shifting between her native city of Novi Sad, chosen Croatian island of Hvar, and involuntary residence of Budapest, these three categorically female Hungarian persons of a Yugoslav past merge into the social functions of a woman, a mother, an actress, a poet, a vocal artist, and many more.
Thirdspaces of the second cycle often occur with landscapes, which are logged between remembering and fiction, thus longing for not only what occurred at a certain past location but also what could have occurred – unless the memoryscape (as in the case of Yugoslavia) disintegrated. As Rubenstein defined it,
The felt absence of a person or place assumes form and occupies imaginative space as a presence that may come to possess an individual. Nostalgia in this sense is a kind of haunted longing: figures of earlier relationships and the places with which they are associated, both remembered and imagined, impinge on a person’s emotional life, affecting her or his behavior toward current experiences and attachments. Implicit in the deeper register of nostalgia is the element of grief for something of profound value that seems irrevocably lost – even if it never actually existed, or never could have existed, in the form in which it is “remembered.” (Rubenstein Reference Rubenstein2001, 5)
Connected to inaccessible and remote landscapes of the past, the archive unfolds in the case of Ladik as a professional biography embedded into Yugoslav socialism and the subsequent disarray. As homologous processes, displayed both as a professional and private crisis, the fragmentation of the state is represented along the fragmentation of the career and the individual and the impossibility to define any of her identities. Nevertheless, with her inability to act and exist in this landscape any longer, and to perform a field of spatial, social and temporal relations, the only remaining possibility of a retrospective memoryscape-construction of a woman in socialist Yugoslavia is nostalgia. Similar to sensations of longing and belonging analyzed in fiction and autobiographical writing by Roberta Rubenstein, Ladik also longed for the places and their social associations, which became permanently absent –not only because she left for Budapest in the early 1990s but also because, in the meantime, Yugoslavia itself was displaced to the past and became a composite of nostalgia.
Remembering Disintegration
Approaching the past beyond personal nostalgia and fictionalizing the archive in her book titled Dead Women, Anna Terék explored the socio-spatial fates of several female protagonists from their first-person perspective in Yugoslavia (and elsewhere). Violent, tragic, traumatic, and well-integrated into the memoryscapes of the (rupturing) state, the text employed references of the first cycle to create text-worlds of daughters, sisters, wives, and mothers within their shared microcosms of the past. In this sense, unlike the nostalgic thirdings of the first and second cycle, the disintegration of the state breached ever more often into the abstractions of the non-autobiographic. Focusing on the 1990s and incorporating memoryscapes of the war, her characters are spatially and socially confined by the general limits of movement during the armed conflicts, on one side, but also by the traditional restrictions of female enclosure, on the other. Their inability to move freely because of shelling or snipers is therefore complemented by the interpersonal limits of tradition and its spaces, such as the flat, the kitchen, or the yard, and the immediate periphery of the female body during her daily routines or pregnancy.
Extrapolated in this work of Terék by landscapes of men who are not only away but resurface in memory while behaving differently in the same socially defined place, the archive materializes in the text-worlds in a way that verse conveys a specific type of memoryscape from the 1990s. Imagining their violent husbands, fathers, and sons with other women, or their incongruent presence in the streets and homes as they return, the reader is presented with landscapes through the eyes of several women who die while being embedded into the archive. Transferred into fiction as post-mortem recollections of women, the author fades, therefore, as an agent of remembering into the background. In turn, this not only enables the illusion of a more objective, even impartial record of memoryscapes, where the archive acts and exists beyond the autobiographic, but the detachment and multiplied perspective of these deceased women facilitates a dislocation of pain from the society of men and their usual sites and times of the frontline. Such a displacement of the war disseminates the omnipresence of violence even in the thirdspace of remote bedrooms, kitchens, dining rooms, or street corners during the hostilities but also into the post-traumatic years after the armed conflicts. It redistributes the origins of violence in memoryscapes where war officially existed only in the news as an imagination of combat elsewhere.
Present in texts of other authors as well, this representation of men from the perspective of women provides us with a further aspect of memoryscapes of disintegrating Yugoslav socialism, where the main antagonism is provided by the inability of men to sustain their roles in the decomposing social settings of the local community or the household. Unlike the nostalgic relation to Yugoslav socialism where memoryscapes are mainly comprised of peaceful, positive experiences, these text-worlds are created with male protagonists who are incapable to acknowledge the impossibility to reverse the decomposition, as well as to fit into the altered but ongoing domestic narratives, which developed in their absence. Although some of the men stayed home, they appear in these text-worlds as defective and inadequate carriers of agency, who drift aimlessly and are either cholerically aggressive or completely lethargic. As the text-worlds expose places and social situations where this apathy of men occurs, the link between the present of the narrative and the past of their memoryscapes remains categorically negative. The creation of the text-worlds ranges therefore, from traumatizing dreams and the resurfacing of the unconscious to domestic violence centered around the terminally dislocated figure of the husband or father.
In the aforementioned play Silence by Anna Terék, references are comprised of memories of the main character’s father who is taken away to serve in the army, while leaving behind a world of shortages, where stores are empty, where there is neither gas, nor electricity, and where mothers and wives have to organize the household by themselves. This is interspersed with recurring memoryscapes from a carefree Yugoslav childhood in a transcultural setting to adulthood, where his father’s insults to his mother and open aggression toward his Croatian bride at the wedding underline the father’s inability to behave appropriately. In comparison to an extensive remembrance of Yugoslavia, where the whole family was together in all social occasions from family holidays to the mundane harmony of everyday life, the second cycle exposes situations of social, spatial, and temporal dislocation of the male experience, on one side. On the other, an intensified presence of localized memories of the home, where the women have to take charge and become responsible even when the men are present. As depicted in her play Silence, this consists of standing in line in front of empty shops, struggles of moneyless households and hunger, inappropriate offers on the farmers market, the mother struggles to collect water amidst restrictions, and later to heat it without electricity. As the protagonist grows older and is able to perceive society in a more differentiated way, these experiences become located in memory as places of deficits, absence of the tranquility of late Yugoslav socialism, as well as a lack of food and services, while his mother manages life by herself. The absence of the father, who a true Yugoslav until the draft, is unable to live in the new order even when he returns from the front; the memory of a peaceful, caring, and loving figure withers away along with Yugoslavia. Prevalent in other text-worlds as well, he is substituted with a violent, displaced figure without a productive or emotional function in the household.
The inability to imagine the present other than the linear continuation of the Yugoslav past reproduced a specific type of an uprooted male character in Hungarian women’s writing. Representing, performing, and repeating a thirdspace disruption is present in a further play of Anna Terék titled Dinner Guest, where the inaptness of the male character to navigate beyond the past, and experience the present without the landscapes of loss, restricts the war veteran to spend his time in the graveyard. Unlike others who visit only occasionally, he spends most of his days amongst the graves of his comrades. As a thanatological heterotopia, where seventeen of his friends are buried, all fallen near Szentlászló in 1992, this complex place encloses his perpetuation of the past.Footnote 19 Enabling a daily routine, the graveyard becomes not only a reflection of a specific part of the past but an environment beyond the changes of the present, where memoryscapes can be played out, relived, and duplicated day after day without any interruptions. In turn, he can remain in a place, where all thirdspace relations –present and past, near and far, solitude and company – are reversed or contorted. His perspective of the graveyard expands the discontinuity in which space not only reproduces these relationships to the past but where remembrance and memory can merge without interference. As Kata, a young woman living in Budapest, visits her mother in Vojvodina, this obscure balance is disrupted. Attracted to him, she invites him to dinner at her mother’s house, where present – but from his perspective banal – tensions of the household provoke him to violence. While at the dinner table, Kata remembers the 1990s only by the lack of commodities and that she had to give her savings of German Marks to her parents for food instead of buying a camera; his memories erupt in vivid landscapes of blood and aggression. As Kata tells him before this temper tantrum that he should move to Budapest as well, he responds with a grim smile: “It would be strange to leave everything here. And everyone…” (Terék Reference Terék2018).
A further relevant signifier of the second cycle of archive-development is the sense of in-betweenness during and after the dissolution of the state. Emerging from the micro-levels of travel to the macro-levels of personal space and represented as a void in self-perception, text-worlds often reflect an un-connectedness between memoryscapes of the past and experiences of the present. Exposing that the link between remembering and memory does not provide the narrator with experiences that could serve as models to interpret the present. Waiting in line to cross the border in a car or for passport control on the train, loneliness in the immigration office, saying goodbye in a dark train station before the travels at dawn became common tropes, ones that were often followed by torn families and processes of moving abroad. Complemented with an impossibility to identify with the Yugoslav successor states and the war effort, on the one side, and the inability to reconcile with the hardships of emigration to Hungary, on the other, the text interconnects the personal with the collective in an often insular memoryscape of disorientation. With the inadequacy of all other archives to provide a locus for remembering and a model how to arrange memories, text-worlds were often composed to represent the dislocation of the entire community, through the lens of the individual. Due to the centrality of the family, the home, and the household, the manifestation of these ruptures in women’s writing embeds the experience into much more discontinuous landscapes where she is alone. Together with an uprootedness between the official mnemonic practices of both countries, this non-belonging is often reflected as a life-choice of constant solitary commute.
The railbus was full of passengers, even young and middle aged men this time, not only kids, elderly and women in enormous quantities, as in ’91, when my father fled to Szeged from the military draft. My father went up this time earlier as well, and told my mother, who was frozen to her bones in the evening lights “I’ll have everything done, so you can arrive on prepared” […] My mother took the railbus back to Serbia, she could not be with us, because she had to be on duty in the school during the air-raids. Father arranged these preparations only for us, mother returned to comfort, and her heels beat the barren hallways of the gymnasium 70 km away. (Bencsik Reference Bencsik2012, 77)
As the narrator recalls her first period on the railbus during their move to Szeged, when the NATO air raids started, she identifies herself as a woman for the first time on her way to a foreign city, but alone and atomized, without friends with whom she could discuss the event. Exposing again the homologous narrative pattern where the protagonist leaves her childhood and her country of birth behind. Bencsik gave the exact place of the displaced “home away from home” – Lugas Street, Spring 1999 – which, together with the railbus, represents liminality, both symbolically and in terms of objective reality. Surfacing in the archive as a personal “rite de passage” where the biological and social converge, the railbus and the flat in Szeged are constructed as places that gave refuge and provided a site of paradigmatic change and evolvement. Thirding the emphasized biological presence of her solitary body within a memoryscape, the narrative relied on the parallels of state and personal discontinuities. Complemented by remembering her father routinely crossing the border as he did alone during another war, uniting the pasts of 1991 and 1999 into a developmental self-perception of a grownup within a political and individual crisis, the realization of being alone as an adult and being a woman on a railbus and later in a flat in Szeged merged within the memoryscape. Her narrative of displacement, as well as the impossibility to identify with 1990s Hungary, on one side, and the landscapes of a decomposing Yugoslavia, on the other, emerged as a common sensation of liminality for this generation, which often ended up living on both sides of the border. Remembering these early commutes, although not including violence or individual existential threat as represented by the male gaze, nor connected to a sense of redefined belonging, as was the case in the majority societies, these experiences of exclusion are rather focused on memoryscapes of ruptures in the social fabric, and its impact on the individual, the family, or the home. An inability to continue to live “as usual” or “to let go” thirdspaces of these travels bear the signs of forced domestic disunity.
Nevertheless, narratives also preserve how discontinuities, memories of a bygone country, and the subsequent sensation of such a displacement and dual exclusion emerged as a cohesive force abroad. Although traumatic, the in-betweenness of the country of origin and country of choice provided a shared capacity to interpret experiences and produce intrapersonal memoryscapes at the micro-level. Judit Zágorec-Csuka, a Hungarian poet and novelist from Slovenia, emphasized this in her “letter-novel” when remembering the first encounter with her friend:
Maybe you remember it differently, but it started somewhere in the university cafeteria, when you introduced yourself, rather you to me, than I to you, because you were always more open, than I, and told me, that you come from Zenta. That we are connected even here in Budapest, if by nothing else, then by our identity and previous fatherland, Yugoslavia. To survive the subconscious confusion of being abroad easier. Then you moved into the dorm, and we met in the showers, because you also used Fa shower gel. In Hungary one couldn’t get Fa shower gel in those days. That was when I saw you the first time naked as well. Then, there in the showers of the dorm.Footnote 20 (Zágorec-Csuka Reference Zágorec-Csuka2015, 31)
Written by Júlia, who moved back to Lendva, to Anna, who stayed in Budapest, these letters represent more than two decades of memories scattered throughout two lives as they try to integrate into their preferred cities of education and profession.Footnote 21 Employed as a narrative aid and representing the locus of remembrance, the act of writing letters disclosed how a shared archive of memoryscapes shaped their friendship, providing cohesion and a sense of origin abroad, even as the disintegration of Yugoslavia thrusted the state itself into the past. Although separating after their studies in Budapest, the memories of these two young women – who converged memoryscapes of longing and belonging with the hardships of student life in a foreign city – continue to be defined by their gaze on each other as Hungarian women from Yugoslavia. Thirdspaces of Budapest with the underlying archive of shared memoryscapes determined, however, their perception of each other as much as it enabled them to interpret the world around them. Granting intimacy, this archive provided a principle of organizing and reproducing group identity in a foreign city, while a consensual understanding of a shared social geography provided a sense of belonging abroad.
Resurfacing in works of other authors also, this void in the social function of memory, which places the locus of remembering in-between official Hungarian and post-Yugoslav mnemonic practices, facilitated a specific way of non-belonging for representations of womanhood from the 2000s onward. Arranged mostly around places of student lives, such as cafeterias, dorms, cafes, and streets of Budapest and Szeged, landscapes of this social vacuum are tied to a text-world of redundant memories of ex-Yugoslav students who face only ignorance in Hungary, while as minority Hungarians their memories are removed from the post-Yugoslav space also. Nevertheless, they can provide group identity amongst these expats and serve as an emancipatory element of the narrative apparatus. Especially in life stories, where young, rural, and minority women are left to their own devices in a foreign city, memoryscapes of a dissolving homeland are comprised of strategies other than those of their Hungarian, Yugoslav, or male counterparts. Redefining remembrance of Yugoslav decomposition as unifying and complementing it with an autonomous female agency, this element of the second cycle of the archive is comprised of places of realization, achievement, and pride. Ranging from adolescence and becoming a woman to the feminine perspectives of minority and a gradually aging body in various landscapes of liminality, this pride of restarting a life in Hungary within duplicated experiences of rejection is one of the rare constructive and emancipatory social process of Yugoslav disintegration. Placing the expat woman into contemporary Hungary, while remembering socialist Yugoslavia, on the one side, and interspersing the text-world with representations of the parallel presents of post-Yugoslav transition, on the other, provides this part of the second cycle with a specific narrative function. Amplified through the antagonism between places of “home” and “away from home,” or through the tensions evolving from the impossibility to articulate the archive in Hungary, as well as in (post)Yugoslavia, such an uprooted representation is confronted either with misunderstanding and indifference or welcome – but also with a great deal of exoticism and balkanization. Aside from the autonomy of action, these memoryscapes are therefore also remembered as places of loneliness and a longing for social inclusion. Katalin Ladik approaches this loneliness by introducing into the archive the impossibility to perform, both personally and professionally. Symbolizing it with a one-way ticket on a train ride, her dual displacement from Yugoslavia through the disintegration of the state, and her own emigration, remembrance of those years is designated by the lack of air and numbness:
I absolutely reached my nadir. Something similar like in 1991, when Pál Nagy and Tibor Papp called and persuaded me rather suggestively to travel to Szombathely for the meeting of the Parisian art and literary journal Magyar Műhely. I brought myself very hard to embark to this journey.
I did not take an umbrella to Szombathely. I arrived numb, and in a deep depression. I felt already then, that I am completely dispensable in Novi Sad. The air had vanished around me. It felt, that I was dying there. I did not know back then, that I will abandon my native city. But that specific Balkan Express was already prepared somewhere […] It rambles since then with me on board between Belgrade – Novi Sad – Budapest – Zagreb – Split, even if its name is now changed to Maestral. (Ladik Reference Ladik2007, 26)
As the mutually supporting thirdings of the temporal, spatial, and social collapsed into a hollow remembering of a previously inhabited space, a Hungarian ethnic minority identification with a non-existing Yugoslav society became an impossibility for Ladik as well. Synthesizing and compressing memoryscapes of Yugoslavia and its decomposition into a single unit of prose, the narrator transposes the linear progress of memory into a thirdspace of the past, condensing both archives into the same text-world. Reflecting on the peaceful decades of her biography, as well as its crisis during the 1990s, the withering away of a country of origin is equated with reaching her personal limits as a professional. Along with a vivid, nostalgic memory of Yugoslavia, a lost minority position of a Hungarian female performance artist and poet, as well as an end to a globally networked, cosmopolitan lifestyle, Ladik remembered her uprootedness while balancing between an increasingly isolated Novi Sad and the uncertainties of Budapest. On a narrative level of translating experiences into fiction, the autobiography represents these fragmented memoryscapes as disconnected and chaotic, by which the represented characters are also deconstructed, ambiguous, and uprooted. In the case of Ladik, living in-between fading and emerging homes, both the professional and private biography has been ruptured by the crisis. However, her womanhood remained emphasized, consistent and uncontested by these social, spatial, and historical uncertainties. Prevalent in narratives of other woman authors equally, spaces where this specific Hungarian female identity from post-Yugoslavia could be performed only multiplied through remembrance and acts of writing.
Conclusion
Incorporated into the archive by a writing adult but represented through the perspective of a child, the collective vantage point of a village awaiting Josip Broz Tito, the president of socialist Yugoslavia, is approached as a nostalgic social landscape of the past. Embedded into the mythology of longing and belonging – believed both by the narrator and her mother – the individual, the family, the village, and the state are part of a single continuum within a thirdspace of peace and relative prosperity. Complementing and confirming each other, these parallel levels of the memoryscape make up the past, the people and the places of a landscape, which became visible through the displacement of this belonging, and the internally conflicting interpretations of this displacement.
From late Yugoslav socialism to the post-Yugoslav condition and beyond, memoryscapes of Hungarian women comprising the archives of this ethnic minority are defined in the past decades by remembering other places otherwise, constructing text-worlds otherwise while representing space, time, and society otherwise also. Unlike the Hungarian text-worlds of Yugoslav socialism, this archive is comprised by self-reflexive women who remember other than Hungarians, post-Yugoslavs, or men. Writing enables them to pair time, place, and society within a memory far independently than ever before the 1990s. Emerging as a tool of their own visibility, as well as the visibility of the archive, these memoryscapes stand for alternate experiences of the past, different not only from the corresponding male representation of historical realities but also from the domineering, official sets of memory politics. Nevertheless, displaced into the private memoryscapes of Yugoslav socialism, as well as their subsequent dissolution, these archives draw more from the liminal intimacies of the family and the home, while violence is usually represented as a social pattern, brought into these thirdspaces from elsewhere. In turn, however, due to the unwillingness to identify with official places of violence dominated (mostly) by men, the act of remembering focuses on memoryscapes where women took action and responsibility. This fulfils an empowering role of writing, which was also absent before the 1990s, both from Hungarian and Serbo-Croatian literature. By representing another kind of inhabited terrain from the past, late Yugoslav socialism, its disintegration, and the post-conflict decades appear with other nuances. Moreover, by thirding the spatial, social, and historical signifiers of an age, these authors not only transferred these female archives into writing and defined a fictionalized landscape but re-negotiated and emancipated their place of remembrance.
Consequently, as these mnemonic practices crossed the threshold of fiction, thus folding elements of the social, historical, and spatial into a single text-world, representations of liminality, non-belonging, self-reflection, intersectionality, and autobiography produced a wide variety of subject matter from the early 1990s onward. With a transition of this archive into fiction – expanded through translations and public readings – the flows of dominant mnemonic practices became challenged by a subaltern practice of remembering as well. Displaying women not only as victims or subjects of the past but as empowered, proactive agents of an emancipatory process in a search to reestablish a social position within a repeatedly shifting social geography, this canon stands as an example of post-conflict non-dominant memorialization through writing.
Taking the discussion further, these Hungarian archives of women from Yugoslavia are comprised of vocabularies and visibilities that are as concealed by the dominant vantage points of official (state) remembering as any other ethnic minority archive. Nevertheless, emerging through topics beyond the text-worlds of the majority society and the corresponding masculine imaginary, they employ a distinct thirding practice, which is recognizable elsewhere as well. The theoretical approach developed for this article can serve therefore as a starting point for the analysis of a wide variety of post-socialist or post-imperial archives assembled and arranged by displaced women who come from various ethnic minorities and experienced war, mass violence, or mass emigration. Divided into two cycles, the transfer of their inaccessible landscapes into memory provides the reader with distinct social relations to the spatialized experiences from the past. From the perspective of Hungarian literature, such archives are most certainly to be anticipated from Ukraine, where the internal post-soviet conflict could stimulate comparable kinds of remembering, and where the social construction of trauma will ensue in the upcoming decades.
Disclosures
None.
