37

Slavica Srbinovska
Un iversity of Skopje, Ma cedonia

Making the Identity through Memory of the Images and Words

A boundary is not that at which something stops

but as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing. Martin Heideger,Bilding, Dw elling, Thinking (Pointed out by Homi Bhabha/ Border lives: The art of the present)

The photography and a performance of art

I will start my explanation by applying the same narratological model that is my subject of analyzing. That means that I will point out to some specific aspects of my experience and I want to represent them from my point of view. The narrating in the first person and speaking about the individual experience of the reality is the simple cliche of every autobiography, and its transcendence in to the art. An artistic perspective will explain this experience: its tendency is to become universal and additional building of any particular image of the Mediterranean world. Last year I spent my vacation near by Kuadasi, one of the famous tourists places on the Turkeys coast. The name of the city means the Island of birds. Nearby Ku(adasi, the ancient cities Ephesus, Milet, Didyma, (Didim) Pirien that belong to the different periods of the history, such as Antic Greek or Roman period BC, spread out beside the sea. Inside of them, besides the tourist voices, you can

38 listen the sound of time and you may feel such as someone who is out of the objective time, or like someone who is free of the border system of his life. A photography that I made there corresponds with my imaginary picture of freedom and humanity. It is an artificial structure that according to the form which is free of all oscillations actual in national visually. I can say one trans-cultural form of art and communication. On the photography and in the reality (because the reality itself is the referent of the photography, according to Roland Barthes, 1981,33) there is a hill with the buildings/monuments from different periods; they are made from different empires, Greek, Roman Empire and Ottoman Empire. Those buildings are the magnificent results of different cultures, ethnic or folklore groups, different religions and politic systems. Up on the hill you can see the Church of St Johan, in the middle is Isa Bey Mosque and on the bottom the temple devoted to goddess Artemis (Diana)Artemision temple- which is one of the worlds miracles. It isnt an abstract body. It is a real body that insists to ruin the borders and exists for someone who has specific interior sense or an ability to cross the borders of all past and present times and places and to concentrates him to this artistic reality made of time and space. This is a sublime picture of Mediterranean world. I would like to make the comparison between this reality and the performance called Culturalization or ontological missing of the tragedy which was made by Zaneta Vangeli in Skopje. She tries to displace the codes, or better to make the mixture of codes from different cultural systems and refers to the procedure of shifting and the transformation in their meaning. Her sublimation is realized through an imaginary reproduction of the interior of the church of St Sophia/Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. This building was an orthodox temple, a church, but through the period of Ottoman Empire it was transformed in a mosque, and today it is a museum, or a building of a culture. I use this performance to explain the possibility of transformation, or better of shifting the codes and to accord to their projection on the actual and contemporary dialogues and misunderstanding between the people, between I and the Others. My photography and this performance clearly points to the James Donalds thought

39 that a nation doesnt express itself through its culture, it is culture that produces the nation. (James Donald, 1993, 167). He also means about the culturalization of the social by the culture. From this beginning I would like to point out to the whole heterogeneous world of living from which is consists the reach base of European culture, called Mediterranean world of differences.

Narrative structure of an autobiography

Autobiographical discourse is usually designated by some paradigmatically and sintagmatically relations, or by virtual and concrete elements. In the autobiography, there are many elements of the communicative semiosis that are established in one time, society and takes its place in the verbal interaction in that society. Through the autobiography, we can see some kind of relation between the language and the imagination. According to Benveniste the autobiography is in a close relation with the correspondences, memories and other forms of communications. Because of the discursive dimension of the autobiography we always speak about the argumentation in the course of this form of writing. (Philipe Lejeune, 1980,45). Autobiography has a specific strategy of distribution the elements of the structure. The historical narrating is characterized by objective representation or without including the individuality of the narrator in the story. That was a classical definition given by Benveniste in the first phase of his explanation of differences between story and discourse. But we couldnt escape from the fact that autobiography is usually determinate from a pragmatically situation, or the narrator insists on his influences up o n t h e r e ader. We have a specific narratological situation in which autobiographical discourse take care of his reader and it refers to him. This form of meaning and thinking couldnt escape form the general frame of the meaning of every story, or from its constructing. But the most important aspect of the autobiography is the relation between the validity of communal using of the words and meanings, or the statements and individual tendency of every personal point of

40 view. In the crossroad between these two spheres, communal and individual, we are speaking about the structure of the autobiography as a crossroad of identity. There are many conflicts between the will of the person and the construction of the rules in the community. A difference between the affective and cognitive construction of the consciousness of the reader is usually active aspect in the mind of the narrator of the story of everyday life. It has to be believable for the others, he/she has to thing about many arguments and at the end the story must be rather good organized than to be real. That is a complex construction of the rhetorical tools with the general aim of constructing the identity, not even more in the life, but through the story. Autobiography is analyzing through the discourse of the Others, or rather through the horizon of the community to which it refer to, than by using the exclusive status of the narrator of its story. Autobiography is a discourse about the borders of one I and it is under its direction. It is confronted with the real situation from which I couldnt be able not to give a notice, because the integrity of this I will be destroyed. This game is over, when the integrity of I is leading off to the direction that points out to the other, and trying to speak by using the grammatical form he. Someone is on the window and in the role of the spectator that is a very passive position, but position of narrator that is out of the world of narrating. The narrator of the first, or in the third person Novel, implicitly usually accepts the perception of the other. That is a game of the mirrors or the reflections that people do in their act of communication. (Henry James, 1934/1962, 46). The space and the time of the narrating act assimilate the historical space and time in the autobiography. I would like to say something about the specific way of living in this part of the world: Mediterranean world. The traditional image points out that it is established through the others, it is mottled carpets consists of different colors and different images of the ethnic, national or cultural identities. Paradoxically or not, the main characteristic of the end of the 20th century become the essential examination of the identity, provoke by the others, but also exists the process of deleting the identity of the others, like an act of violent elimination of the and radical

41 insisting of ones identification. That usually leads to the result of violent resolving the life with dead or with war. According to Prof. Rada Ivecovic it is a strong tendency to border the territory and identify yourself by that territory. (Rada Ivekovic, 2001). In that context disappear the reflection of the other and the whole effort is concentrate on the distinguish oneself. By that way we come to the result of pressing out the other, or to the violent that characterized most of the history of existing in the space of the Mediterranean world. If in the center of our thinking we emphasize the idea of establishing the identity, we have to speak about the national, ethnic or cultural identity, but usually about the identity through its reflection in the eyes of the Others. Identity always asks for the territory, it establishes its imaginary borders, but he/she can insist to master the history or the time, and at least the universal, the humanity. All the territories on which insists ones identity dont have to be real, they have to exists as an imaginary land of human living, and after that the real living as it is on the territory of the Mediterranean world of riche and worth. The identity nests through the story and images, but it usually needs the others to listen and accept this images, to react and confirm the existence. But through the story exist the interpretations and borders between the I and the existence of others in its world. I decide to eliminate the established histories and to represent the individual imaginary world of identifying through the story. I choice that way, because all histories in the past in this Mediterranean world insisted on its validity and on its true. I want to represent some sophisticated stories which are not representative for a country, or material world which is straiten in its borders. Narration in my essay is used to express and to revival the individual and imaginary effort to save the past and to integrate the different and not recognized aspects of an individuality which need its identification by the others. That is a narrative as a Utopia in which the time and space are compressing by texturing the story. The Balkans specialties to promote and to accept the history for account of the history of the others will be eliminated.

42 Autobiography as an Utopia of compressing time and space and describing the images of the Other in the Mediterranean world

The border of a lifetime is death. In the various religions of the Mediterran we can find different myths about continuing the life after the dead. But, Im speaking about one specific effort of the writer or a philosopher to discover the borders through we have to go on and continue to live. That means that I try to speak about the difficulties to make the whole story from the immediate experience. It couldnt be represented with out pain, consciousness of many dead times and people in them, or with unhappy feeling that all that life will never be able to return back again. It is impossible to return the time and to go back by using the fictive way of the discourse of the story. (Louis O. Mink, 1987, 89) In the space of a book the writer can unite the parts of his life, which leave only in his memories. Narrative is his instrument to create the imaginary territory of the body of his past and present life. By that way he can preserve and rebuild the past that is sometimes ruin and destroyed. The main antagonists in those efforts of the individuality are the others. In the world of antagonist which strongly order the everydaylife, everybody has to fight with fixed images and myths and his identification on the different plans, and in the different presentation is problematically too. In the Slavic tradition, at the end of the century, I can notice the coming back of the form of autobiography with trying and strong need of explanation the past. That was characteristic for the beginning of the century and for the phase of modernism, but now we are witnesses of the efforts of rebuilding the identity of the writer through his memoir in the phase of postmodernism. Jan Kot called this phase post-mortem, but some writers insist on the sincerely form of novel-autobiography in the sphere of post-modern literature. Why is it so specific for the Slavs? (Jan Kot, 1980//1983, 164) I couldnt escape from the reality, or specifically social reality and its background. The changes are always difficult, they ruin the past life and put the individuality in the position of rethinking who he was and who is he now! Changing the social systems and revolutions always brings difficult and ruining the practice, the

43 habit. The only thing what point out to the past is the story. Using the story individuality can remake the whole past life. I will point out to the stories of the women that narrate their memories with efforts to reborn them by using the esthetical way of the art. How the others create the image of individual identification? Kica B. Kolbe in her book Paria narrates about her life in Macedonia, about her childhood and her effort, after so many years of silence, to create a new life in a new country, in Germany. The other writer, Dubravka Ugresic narrates the story of her former life in ex-Yugoslavia. Nowadays she lives in Netherlands. The story narrates by Kica B.Kolbe is the story of the dilemma of a woman who spent her past life in Macedonia, and now she is integrated in the new way of living in Germany. The fragments of her past life are from her living in the Aegean colony. Her parents were refugees from the Civil war, after the Second World War, from Greece, or Aegean Macedonia. Political decisions draw down a new border between the territory of Greece and Yugoslavia/ Republic of Macedonia in exYugoslavia. The specific name of her book means someone who doesnt belong to any territorial frame or someone who hasnt no rights and no responsibilities. She borrows the concept from the Indian casting system and the meaning which point out to the others. In that meaning is established the situation of someone who has to create his identity by crossing the borders in his everydaylife. At the beginning of her book Kica says:

The consciousness that, we, the children born after the escape belong to the laconic signification of special, was built in me lately, through making the differences of the others, from the people who were from here, like it was a grand- father of one my school friend who passing the yard full of the unbridled children in the game, with saluted ton shouted: Hey, Aegeans. (Kica B. Kolbe, 2000, 36)

44 The fragment is paradigm of stigmatization. Besides the experience, the narrator tries to compare the past and the present life, and she makes a relation between one I from the past and the other I from the present. She locates her identity in that colony of the people who are the victims of the reality in which are created the new states, new systems and drawing the imperviousness borders. The narrating is in a function of untying a knot from the past and of illuminating the things which are deeply press back in the mind. Her coming to know that the people from her past life are definitely gone is full of pain. The reality in which she, and her relatives were others between Macedonians last for them until today, that means very long period after the Second World War, and they spent their whole life in their dreams of their villages from which they were uprooted. Their dreams are expressed in a passive and melancholic position of spectator of the life. Kolbe is absolutely conscious that only the discourse can help her to reconstruct the past life in which she lived as an uprooted and displaced, as some one from the other world, although she was Macedonian, too. The people are they that made her strong conscious of her differences from the core. From the other side she is also conscious of passing the time and the life of their relatives in their dreaming of going back. That is not realized dream of her parents and her grandparents. The active and always living part of the life of her relatives is made through their images from their places of living. The whole narration is made as an itinerary with all the details of the villages which she visited as a mature woman and which were forbidden for her relatives. That is the problem of a different I, that from her childhood and the other mature I from the present. With her coming back to the roots and to the villages of her parents, Kolbe insists of the Easter of her childhood and the childhood of her died father. This is a very specific story of the woman, or narration in a close connection with the sphere of Sophia, or philosophy. She tries to pass the whole time of her life and to explain why she and her relatives were differ from the other people in

45 Macedonia, although they were the same, Macedonians. Hers narrating in quest of the essence brings her to a permanent question Why she was the other? Autobiography in this case is constructed by using the experience of the life that is became the life of solely about survival. Narration of the past situation in the frame and space of one book is a life story of one family of refugees, and the status of the women in it. In that explanation, in her very specific narration are treated the same elements that are included in our everyday life. She thought about the role of the women as a spectator, passive position of someone who is waiting for his coming back, or at home. Also, Im speaking about the voice of one rare woman that has her own, individual narration about her family, from Skopje and from Germany. From her present perspective and her free decision to live in Germany, she explains the same specific situation of the woman that is outsider like her relatives did in the past. In a new land and in a new life that starts at the moment she doesnt know the language of her new homeland. This time she uses the power that lies in her hands (like Prokna in the very famous Greek myth about the messages of the woman without tang) and her mind, by that way she exposes her creative energy through the paintings. In the autobiographical story of Kica Bardzieva Kolbe the category of time is compresses with the space, because only through the book the dream of her mother and father should be realize as it was in the past. Essential aspect of narrative is time, of itinerary is space and mobility, Kolbe successful make the frame of both, in the space of her book and in the time of her story. (2000,127) The central question of her itinerary is the mobility and the possibilities to cross the border, back to the village of her parents. Because of that I use the terms self-representation and individual history, especially I insist of the genre of autobiography which help to everybody to find the center of his/her individual life. The book is full of photographs of her relatives, which are refugees, widows. She uses the essential characteristic of the photography to deny the death and the time and to sublime the sense of Easter-tide the people from the past. Her aim is to stop the time and death at once, Kolbe tries to

46 reproduce the procedure of Prousts narrative of recherch du temps and his sensitive returns in the presence the past moment as alive as they were in the past. In the book The Museum of Unconditional Surrender (1996), Dubravka Ugresic explains this phenomenon of compilation the autobiography and albums on this way: Both the album and autobiography respect the subject they are concerned with (the subject is so personal, how could it not be respected?). Compiling an album and autobiography are activities guided by the hand of the invisible angel of nostalgia? () Autobiography is a serious and sad genre. It is though somewhere deep within us there was an encoded assumption about genre, and both the author and the reader submit to it: they harmonize the rhythm of their pulse, their heart beat, slow down their beating, together lower their blood pressure (Dubravka Ugresic, 1996, 32) Kica B.Kolbe explains her new situation away from her country. She thought through the life-story of her parents who are the refugees and came in the territory of this part of Macedonia, leaving their villages, their houses and their work, which means everything what they are. I must say, his or her identity becomes everybody or rather nobody, or rather paria. That happened in the time of the beginning of her life and childhood in a new country, in Yugoslavia. Everyone from Europe perhaps knows the official history of the Balkan, but he didnt know different faces of the story made from different points of view. Now Im speaking about the boundaries, which has been drawn between the states and the people, and about the dream to cross the border, and to see the houses, the fields or the room of ones past life. Under another national frame, not as Macedonian woman, Kolbe can visit the villages where her parents spent their childhood. She found the empty house which in the past belonged to the family of her father, the village of her mother doesnt exists any more, only the church was the alone witness of the past, but with the entrance which was wall in, or definitive closed. Kolbe belongs to the community of refugees from the part of territory that today belongs to Greece. Her narration is an essay to remember of her childhood in the refugees camps and her living between the refugee population that is mostly women in black and children.

47 The tragedy is repeated today. This is a story, I thing also of our nowadays life. I must point out the result. By Nira Y.Davis explanations, in the war we are confronted with the fact of killing (the position of men) that is the same as the position of women and children or the position of someone who should be killed. (Nira Yuval Davis, 1997, 82) Nira Yuval Davis explains that the most devastating experience of the war, especially the experience of the women, and the punctual of her pain, wasnt the possibilities of a rape, but the loss of entire basis of her former live. Narration of this woman pointed out to the status of displaced persons. They have to adapt to the conditions of new life, end they are aware of living same material resources that make their lives. They have family elsewhere overseas, and the experience to solve the problem of the space of living, or the problem of degraded status of the refugee who depends of someones will to receive them and sponsor their surviving families. Kolbe wrote this book as an attempt to show the way of rehabilitation in a new life, and the possibilities of all emotional and physical resources spent on the daily struggle for survival between the others. I also remark that the sadness is the specific characteristic of her mental constitution. She feels as her parents the problem of permanent temporaries of their life before the war and the fixed position of spectator after the war. Many years they ware not able to construct their new life, they feel themselves as a permanent outsider and their dilemma is to integrate in the normal life or to stay in a position of passive spectator of the life. That filing of melancholy they transferred to the second generation and their children, like it happened in the family of Kica Bardziova Kolbe, the woman from the Europe, living in an eternal identification with the village from which her parents were exiled. Women who are the representatives from that past and future life are generally the representatives of the community of the people which are rooted from their village and which identity is ruined. The dilemma is always how to help to that people, especially women and children who loose their family. The theory explains this situation of lost identity and normal life. It suggests the transversal politic, or the method of shifting in the

48 situation of the others that are also uprooted. I can see that the procedure of narration has the function of bringing under control the whole melancholy or to cross the spiritual and traumatic mental border of the past. The second story is also an autobiographical story narrated by Dubravka Ugresic. The book, which was pointed out before, is called The Museum of Unconditional Surrender that means the story of a past ruined life and about a new life. She uses the memories as the last exit. I want to repeat the same thinking of the child as in the previous story narrated by Kica B. Kolbe and to make a comparison. Now this is a narrating made by Dubravka Ugresic, but it has the same sense:

At home the other little girls would often tease me, calling after me Bulgar (Bulgie! Bulgie!) With the same intonation that they would tease Gypsies (Gypsy! Gypsy!) when they went down our street. The words were pronounced in the same way and meant the same thing: some one e lse, someone w ho w asn't the same as them. Before I wa s qu ite seven I met my first Bulgie, a little girl of my one age. It seemed to me that she ha d fallen from s ome other plane t. W ith an im men se rib bon in her hair (pandelka was indeed, the first Bulgarian word I learned), she remanded me more of an unusual bumble -bee than a little girl did . Th en, w ithou t know ing it, I firmly decided that I was not like her, that I was not a Bulgie, and equally firmly that nor was I a little girl from our street. (1996,135)

Her life story is in connection with ex-Yugoslavia, destroyed life in a former country and the system of living there. She became other between the Croats, because she insisted to differ her status and to express her negative though of radical insisting of national identification, because it is too violent for her. In that bordered situation of living, she decided to be identified as the others. The borders of a new life in Croatia after the break of Yugoslavia in which cleansing from the others on the line of homeland, made her belonging to the others, which means to the people who have deleted lives. Dubravka Ugresic points out that autobiography reminds her of her infallibly of school and the genre of a straight A essay.(Dubravka Ugresic, 1996, 33) She

49 uses the photographs and by making her verbal album, she insists on the reintegration of her former life. Because of that the book is full of memories and sincerely open blocs of narrating the story of her own past life. Her definition of autobiography is in a close relation of her understanding the melancholy and nostalgia. She knows very clear that the life is very unpredictable, that the sides could be changed every moment and the loosing side could be transformed in a winning side. About that feelings of that loosing side of the others, she used to write in an A essay form so-called free topic. Her position of outsider and free woman out of any country border, ethnic or national color is also very difficulty, like any freedom can be the desire and the load. The genre of narrating and the feeling of melancholy corresponded in this book. Namely, the free essay entailed surprisingly rigid clichs: first person narration and a stereotypical opening. Thus, for some unknown reason, theA essay always began with rain (Im sitting by the window against which the first drops of autumn rain are beating) and ended, on the whole, with the same kind of percipitation. What is more, autumn rain was at a particular premium. The most artistically effective were verbs teem and trickle. (The rain teems trickles) and elliptical sentences suggesting the rhythm of the heart together with the rhythm of rain drops. In these essays, like tedious toothache, the same contemplative nostalgic tone rang persistently, generated by the precocious meditation on the leaves falling from a nearby tree and profound anxiety over the so-called transience of life. (1996,33) Although Ugresic insists on irony, she implied the sincerely effort of reconstructing the status of the other, of a woman who escaped from the Balkan abyss and continue with asking herself: Now I no longer know who I am, or where I am, or whose I am (1996, 58) In the situation in which she decides to be the others, she has to leave her previous life and to become everybody, or rather somebody. This situation is also corresponded with the beginning of her carrier as a writer outside of her country, like someone who is unknown, who is at the beginning of his carrier of a writer in exile.

50 She has a very strait definition of her new status, she thought of the autobiography and album as an amateur activities, not professional, but in that fact lies the true: Between these two genres, the fa mily album and autobiography, there is undoubtedly a connection: the album is a material autobiography, autobiography is a verbal album. The advantage of amateurism over professionalism (let us call it that for want of better word), or at least the difference between those two, is contained in the point of indistinct pain, pain which an amateur work (like extrasensory perception) can touch and thus provoke the same reaction in the observer/reader. The point of pain is a chance target preserved only for blessed amateurs, a target which only they can touch, without actually knowing what its all about.(1996, 30) Dubravka Ugresic decides to provoke the past by using the name of the biggest museum in Berlin, it was a Museum devoted to the end of the Second World War and to the surrender of the fascist. Her individual surrender and becoming a woman from nowhere is in a connection with the act of ruining her country, Yugoslavia. Her book is a museum-story consists of all experiences in the country that does exist any more. All the fragments on her photographs and in her memories make her identity that disappear and the new identity that begins. Her choice to be on the position of the others is a reaction of deleting the past. Remembering means reducing the world to little rectangles. (1996, 30) With living the memoirs lives the past life and the others in that country. Through remembering, like Kolbe did, Ugresic establish the base of her future life. The measure of her identity in a positive means become the whole world and the others in it. Living in exile, concrete, in Berlin she use the metaphor of the city which points out to the past, communist period and the future, the world of globalization. Ugresic identify herself in her country (Croatia) as the others and announce her capitulation in the reality which is established by her opinion as a culture of lies. In decision to recreate the past Ugresic research through the tings from the past like archaeologist of everyday with effort to save her past life, not to delete it, because it

51 is the way to construct the future: Plavi Radion, Ohrid, Sarajevo, dzezva, Zenica, Beograd (1996,242) In believing that the people from Ex-Yugoslavia are all the museum exhibits, Ugresic has an ambiguity in herself: to forget and to remember. Like a life in schizophrenic Berlin that is consisted of two cities: one, which wants to forget, and the other, which wants to remember. (1996, 241) The end of her story also insists of that painful ambiguity and her needs to start a new life as the other woman. She thought through the image with interesting landscape, it is build as a whole with two par ts i n it , one fr om t he Ba lkan, and black side of his history as a part of Mediterranean world and the other from Germany. I will borrow the paradigmatically and specific Balkan image for the end to represent the continuing of differences between the North and the South/Mediterranean world. This opposition makes the whole from the center and the others, from the past and from the future:

Somewhere far behind me the landscape of my deranged country is ever paler, here, in front of me, are the steps that lead nowhere. If I look up, I shell see the m etal three pronged star, if I look down, I shell se Alaga, the toothless Gypsy from Dubrava district of Zagreb sitting on a folding chair in front of the Europe center awkwardly tinkling on a childs synthesizer.(1996, 248)

Works Cited

Bathes, Ro land. Le Ch ambre claire, Paris, Editions du Seul, 1981.

Donald, James. How English is it? Popular literature and national culture, in Erica Carter, Donald James and Judith Squ ires (eds.), Space and Place Theories, Identity and Location. London: Lawrence and Wishard in association with New Formations, 1993.

Lejeune, Philipp e. Je est un autre, Seu l, Paris, 1980.

Kot, Jan. Kla tka suzu ka ptaka, 198 0, (Trans. Petar Vu jicic, Gradina, Beograd, 1983 ).

52

James, Henry. The Art of th e Novel, New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1934, 1962,

Ivekovic, Rada. Gender and national border and boundaries. European integration and the ethnicisation of the Balkans, Summer School, Florence, 17-22 June 20 01.Mink, L ouis O. Historical Understanding, Ed. By Brian Fay, Eugene O. Golob and Richard T.Vann, Cornell University Press 1987.

Kolbe, Kica B. Egejci, Kultura, Skopje, 2000.

Ugresic, Dubravka. The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, London, 1996.

Yu val D avis, N ira. Ge nd er a nd Na tio n, SAGE Publications, London. Thousand Oaks. New Delhi, 1997.

Please mention the bibliographic information when referring to this book: History in Words and Images. Proceedings of the Conference on Historical Representation held at the University of Turku, Finland, 2628 September 2002. Edited by Hannu Salmi. Turku: University of Turku, Department of History, 2005. (available as an eBook at http://www.hum.utu.fi/historia/2002)