Diasporic Voices or the Aporia of Shifting Identities: The Case of Rumjana Zacharieva BORYANA DOBREVA U NIVERSITY OF P ITTSBURGH Migration is a well-documented phenomenon of our transnational age. Since the 1960s, a great body of literature on migration has emerged in the Germanspeaking world alongside the migratory movements from the East/ Southeast to North and West. The literature of Turkish-German migration has attracted significant scholarly focus, especially within US German Studies. Such attentiveness can be explained by the realization that (1) the Turkish-German immigrant population is the largest minority group in the country and that (2) Turkish immigrants are continuously constructed as the Oriental Other in public discourse. 1 With the exception of Russian-born German author Wladimir Kaminer, Eastern European migrant writers such as Dimitre Dinev, Zsuzsa Bánk, Terézia Mora, and Rumjana Zacharieva have received scant academic attention despite the great media and public popularity of their plays and texts. Nonetheless, German scholars like Hannes Schweiger, Erika Berroth, and Martin Hielscher have drawn attention to the importance of migrant narratives from Southeastern Europe as instances of transnational writing in German. Literary-critical discourse on the whole, however, seems to confirm anthropologist David Kideckel’s observation that «[t]o much Western historical, social scientific, and political authority, East and West remain fundamentally separate categories of thought with gradations unrecognized» (par. 5). This perception holds true especially for Europe’s East within - the Balkans, whose cultural Otherness is almost always taken for granted and is rarely problematized by Western critics. 2 This article grows out of a dissertation that analyzes the role of Balkan migrant writing in articulating a transnational identity in and through literature. The present contribution focuses on the Bulgarian-born author Rumjana Zacharieva, who has lived and published first in West Germany and then in unified Germany since 1970. Her bilingual works have received numerous favorable reviews in German literary magazines and newspapers. Where Wetzlarer Neue Zeitung and Junge Welt praise the sensual and hypnotic power of Zacharieva’s poetic style, General-Anzeiger acclaims the Marquezesque fullness of her prose («Pressestimmen»). Zacharieva is also the recipient of the Förderpreis des Landes NRW in 1979 and the Literaturpreis der Bonner Lese CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 315 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 315 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 316 Boryana Dobreva in 1999, awarded to a nonnative author of German for the first time. However, Zacharieva’s oeuvre remains an appropriate example of the benign neglect towards lesser known transnational literatures, including that of Eastern European intellectual émigrés. Many have been persistently inscribed into a Balkanist discourse, even when these intellectuals are not political dissidents but have migrated West for other reasons, including love, as is the case with Zacharieva. 3 Against this backdrop of Balkanist discourse and issues of alterity, I consider Rumjana Zacharieva’s works as an important contribution to the study of the culture of the Other. Like many intellectuals and writers from Europe’s Balkan margins, Zacharieva, to paraphrase Roumiana Deltcheva’s words, is deeply cognizant of the antagonistic relationship between East and West, New Europe and Old Europe, and her narratives denote the author’s engagement in describing, interrogating, and reconfiguring the space in-between (559). Zacharieva’s literary output not only illuminates the concepts and demarcations that inform European collective imaginations but also introduces a Balkan dimension regarding the formation of modern identity beyond a national focus. In this paper, I proceed as follows. I first define the term «Balkanism» and how it relates to «Orientalism.» I then provide a close reading of Zarachieva’s second novel, Bärenfell (1999), by mapping out the narrative strategies she uses to address problems of identity formation and identification in a transnational context. Central to my discussion are the following questions: (1) How does the novel engage the Balkanist discourse? (2) In what ways does it negotiate cultural difference, shifting identity, and feelings of belonging and displacement through the representation of history and memory? Specifically, I look at how the novel negotiates the experience of migration from East to West in order to articulate a particular kind of personal identity under the auspices of a long tradition of Orientalism and Balkanism. Few scholars have been up to the task of breaking the hermetic logic of the Balkan trope, which has persisted, as Michael Herzfeld writes, even in those «academic circles, in which the condemnation of prejudices has been the loudest» (x). One scholar who has been up to the task is the Bulgarian expatriate and historian Maria Todorova. Todorova established herself in the Englishspeaking world in the mid-1990s with her studies of past and current constructions of the Balkans in popular and scholarly discourse. In other words, she can be called the founder of a critical Balkan Studies that examines in depth the West’s representational, identificational, and power frameworks within which the Balkans have been constituted and further revisits knowledge about the region and its peoples as a generalized and simplified non-West. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 316 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 316 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Diasporic Voices or the Aporia of Shifting Identities 317 Todorova’s most important intellectual achievement is her groundbreaking study Imagining the Balkans (1997) - the first discussion of Balkan imagology from an interdisciplinary standpoint. Meticulously researched and highly informative, Todorova’s book is an exploration of the roots and routes of a three-century-long history of Balkan misrepresentations that has culminated in a set of stigmatizing attributes that maintain the image of the Balkans as the «powder keg» and «residue» of Europe. Todorova’s interdisciplinary, comparative methodology allows her to show lucidly how the Balkan trope was and is still being used by scholars, politicians, and journalists as a powerful rhetorical device that, in a manner similar to that of Orientalism, helped sustain the superiority of a self-essentialized and dominant West. While acknowledging common characteristics with Orientalism, 4 Todorova draws attention to the ambiguity and fragmentation inherent in Balkan identity formation, two aspects that have been conditioned not only by Western Balkanism’s othering practices but also by the region’s semi-colonial history and peripheral geography. In the chapter «‹Balkans› as Self-designation» from Imagining the Balkans, she remarks that self-conceptions of the Balkan nations have one common feature that has been bitterly construed throughout the centuries as «an abnormal condition» or «a stigma» (58). That is, Balkan peoples have persistently looked at themselves and their countries as being in a «state of transition, complexity, mixture, ambiguity» (58). Adrian Otoiu correctly observes that Todorova reads this transition as both a spatial and temporal in-betweenness (92). As a broad geographic area, the Balkans have for centuries been a crossroads of different religions, peoples, cultures, and political systems, a bridge that both connects and divides West and East, Christendom and Islam. Historically, the region has simultaneously partaken of several imperial legacies - the Byzantine, the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian, and the Soviet - of which, as Todorova claims, the Ottoman has had the most lasting effect on the perception and self-perception of the Balkan peoples (Balkan Identities 13). With respect to its temporal dimensions, Todorova conceptualizes the transition as «a bridge between stages of growth,» where Balkan peoples seem to be in a limbo, appearing as «backward, semi-colonial, semi-civilized, semi-oriental» (Imagining the Balkans 16). She masterfully elucidates that while Orientalism is a way of confronting an antagonistic Other, Balkanism engages with being «the incomplete self» of Europe (18) because it is not a discourse of discrete oppositions (i.e., East versus West), but one that «treats […] differences within one type» (19). Thus, the Balkan self is a self that is neither fully Oriental, nor altogether Western, but is instead «erected against an Oriental other»; a self caught in its spas- CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 317 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 317 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 318 Boryana Dobreva modic desire for and in constant frustration and shame over its never fully achieved Europeanness. 5 Rumjana Zacharieva’s second autobiographically inflected novel, Bärenfell, takes its reader into the maze of Balkanism and Balkanite self-definitions via the female protagonist - the Bulgarian-born migrant and writer, Mila. To summarize briefly the novel’s plot: Mila, her German husband, and their daughter travel to Mila’s home country, Bulgaria, during the mid-1990s. A three-day hike in the Central Balkan mountain range, one of the largest protected habitats of Europe with a substantial brown bear population, features centrally and metaphorically in the narration of Mila’s search for a sense of identity that had been shattered through the experience of migration, and of her attempts to reclaim an identity against the persistent inscription of her self as a writer and a woman into ethnic, gender, and national paradigms by both Bulgarians and Germans. 6 At the story’s end, Mila attempts to shed her «Bärenfell,» that is, the physical weight gain that had plagued her body since her arrival in Germany, and the emotional weight or burden of being estranged from both her home and her adopted country. Yet, the novel remains open-ended and does not offer closure, only holding out the possibility of resolution: the successful, however painful, gesture of self-translation, of transcoding the Other (also within): Ein Film aus mehreren Handlungssträngen lief in ihr ab: das Jetzt in Deutschland und in der deutschen Sprache, das Gestern in ihrer Muttersprache, das Land ihrer Kindheit, Achim, das Kind, die Eltern, das Radio, das Literaturbüro, die Kollegen, die Redakteure, die Publikationen, die ganze Palette der Sinneseindrücke, die permanente Gewichtszunahme, die undefinierbare Schuld, die Erinnerung an Freude, der Hunger, das Essen, das Bärenfell. (59) This passage characterizes not only the protagonist but also the polydimensional and dialogical character of the narrative. For Mila, the novel’s main setting in the Balkan mountain range turns into a site of remembrance and recollection. Impelled by memories about past experiences in both East and West, the story evokes a multiplicity of foci, spaces, and times, and a polyphony of voices and narratives, which are all juxtaposed to create an episodic, nonlinear mode of narration. 7 Thematically, the novel oscillates between the Balkans and Germany, between childhood memories formed in the young repressive communist Bulgarian state and a somber critique of the brutalizing years of Bulgaria’s current neoliberal era. It also includes reflections on European ignorance of lesser known cultures and a palimpsest of literary modes. The narrative constructs the protagonist as a Balkan writer educated in Western traditions but formed intellectually under Bulgarian communism. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 318 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 318 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Diasporic Voices or the Aporia of Shifting Identities 319 Like Zacharieva, Mila is a graduate of an English-speaking high school in the northern Bulgarian city of Rousse and later finishes her college education in English and Russian literature in the West German capitol, Bonn. In West Germany, the twenty-year-old Mila picks up German with relative ease and soon establishes herself as a German-language writer, translator, and poet. Zacharieva’s decision to include an article written by her for the German Westdeutsche Rundfunk ascribes the novel a documentary note, making Mila’s figure more palpable and realistic and further blurring the boundaries between author and main character. As a Bulgarian woman and an intellectual, Mila is confronted with the West’s indifference to her home country as well as with a constant conflation of differences within the East: Die Eigentümer der Fremdsprache Deutsch kannten kein einziges Wort Bulgarisch, von Russisch hatten sie keine Ahnung, und die kyrillische Schrift erschien ihnen rätselhafter als die chinesische. Und sie behaupteten, dass die bulgarische Hauptstadt Sofia in der Türkei liege, und von der 500jährigen Osmanenherrschaft hatten sie noch nie gehört. (48) In the novel, Zacharieva’s protagonist refers to this form of imperial/ colonizing practices as the «Ungerechtigkeit der Geschichte» (13), as a result of which Mila, like many Balkan intellectuals in the West, aware of the invisibility of their small countries, «battle[s] an inferiority complex as a consequence of [her] status as the Other» (Deltcheva 559). 8 Mila reflects on the state of affairs: «Das permanente Gefühl des Andersseins: Strafe und Privileg zugleich. […] War sie nicht in Deutschland eine Barbarin unter den Europäern? War sie nicht zu Hause eine Europäerin unter den Barbaren? » (45). The narrative represents the female protagonist as belonging to what Azade Seyhan has termed «paranational communities and alliances […] that exist within national borders or alongside the citizens of the host country but remain culturally and linguistically distanced from them, and in some instances, are estranged from both the home and the host culture» (8). Mila’s eventual immersion in the host culture as a German writer, yet one who hardly finds reception beyond small academic and literary circles, is thus characterized by estrangement. The novel captures this hard-to-articulate emotional and mental state of separation in the metaphor of the «Bärenfell.» Having first emerged in her adoptive country, the bearskin feeling envelops Mila’s body and soul to form both a suffocating outer skin and a safeguard against the impertinences of the outer world, be these (1) the lack of genuine (cultural) differentiation by her German interlocutors or (2) her family’s nationalistic, fascist, and racist predilections, which she encounters upon her trip back home to Bulgaria. Mila’s misrecognition by and alienation from CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 319 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 319 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 320 Boryana Dobreva both societies thus emerge as the product of an inscription into Orientalist paradigms subsumed under the Balkan umbrella by the German majority culture. 9 Torn between Germany/ the West and Bulgaria/ the Balkans, self and other, civilization and barbarity, the subject thus seeks to resolve the aporia that marks the shifting identities she is attempting to redefine. The protagonist’s attempts at negotiating her unstable but highly self-reflexive position are fashioned as two dynamic forms of self-interrogation that grant Mila a sense of agency. The first form concerns her gesture of attachments to and detachments from the country of birth and that of residence, affiliations, and disaffiliations with national and ethnic origins, 10 a kind of «experience-in-identity,» to use Gayatry Chakravorty Spivak’s words (781). The second form emerges out of the literary self’s attempts to think through what Venkat Mani refers to as the «situationality» of her cultural difference (25). In both instances, the notion of history as one that «slouches» in Mila’s Balkan/ Eastern European origins, as a history that is «ready to comfort and kill» (Spivak 781), plays a crucial role in Mila’s struggle to construct an intellectual identity abroad. As the product of a first-generation migrant, Mila’s relationship to the Balkans has historical depth, and the essentialist notion of being Bulgarian looms large in the protagonist’s quest or rather struggle for a new identity. Bulgaria as the space of her childhood home and «das Land meiner Geburt,» to which the already westernized Mila frequently returns, becomes a determining factor in her search for self-definition (42). As Mila tries to connect with her roots and to fuse the past with the present, her diasporic memory inevitably begins to mimic, to quote Andreas Huyssen, «the identity fictions [and inscriptions] that [have] energize[d] nationhood» in the Balkans (152). The heroine stages the «experience of history» in identity and in «origins» (Spivak) by evoking Bulgaria’s 1300-year-old ancient history, and by reenacting major junctures around which Bulgarian identity has been historically and culturally constructed, including Bulgaria’s liberation from 500 years of Ottoman Rule, life in a totalitarian Bulgaria, the collapse of communism, and the ensuing difficult transitional years. In this first instance, this reenactment often takes the form of informance and performance, of ardent retelling and reciting of passages from heroic epics and ballads that glorify the struggle against the Ottoman invaders and self-sacrifice for a centuries-long cherished freedom, all of them literary and oral creations that continue to be powerful shapers of ethnicity and nationhood in Bulgaria and the Balkans. 11 The reader is presented not only with dates and names of military and political figures, revolutionaries, and poets, but also with the heroine’s interpretation of key events such as the Russo-Turkish War’s Battle of Shipka Pass in 1877-78 that ultimately led to CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 320 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 320 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Diasporic Voices or the Aporia of Shifting Identities 321 Bulgaria’s liberation. The following passage illustrates how the historical signifiers of a nation are retrieved and performed in the narrative consciousness of the expatriate. Standing at the foot of Shipka peak in the Central Balkans, Mila envisions herself standing on an epic battlefield, at «the unlocked gates of lost time» (Ruschdie 10): Sie befindet sich in einem Gedicht. In diesem pathetischen, gereimten Gedicht. Sie kennt «Die Landwehrsoldaten am Schipka» auswendig. […] Sich in einem Gedicht befinden ist ein Ereignis, das ihr für einen Moment das Phänomen namens Geschichte offenbart. […] Denn damals ist jetzt. […] Ein Bilck in die Höhe: eine Handvoll Christen. Ein Blick in die Tiefe: Tausende Söhne Mohammeds. […] Die Landwehrsoldaten - «eine Handvoll Spartaner gegenüber dem Pack eines Xerxes.» […] Die Ereignisse am Schipka-Paß - die Antwort Bulgariens auf die Vorwürfe der Welt, sein Volk sei ein Sklavenvolk, das sich niemals gewehrt habe. Das mit den Leichen, die die Bulgaren auf die Türken geschmissen haben, ist keine Legende - es ist einer der vielen authentischen Berichte über die letzten Kämpfe zwischen Osmanen und Russen, denen sich die bulgarische Landwehr angeschlossen hatte und die zur Befreiung vom Osmanischen Joch führten - endgültig 1878, nach 500jähriger Sklaverei. (123-24) These literally and politically formed moments cohere around the partial yet, as Maria Todorova argues, still persistent Ottoman legacy, along whose lines semi-colonial structures of Balkanist self-perceptions have been reproduced. It is noteworthy to mention that Todorova distinguishes between two types of Ottoman legacy: as continuity and as perception. Whereas the former is associated with political, cultural, social or economic dependence, the latter expresses itself as a process of constant reevaluation and reinterpretation of history by each generation. While the Ottoman legacy as continuity now belongs to the past, the Ottoman legacy as perception can still be traced in the discursive construction of the national and cultural identities in most Balkan countries (Balkan Identities 13). As I have shown thus far, Mila inserts into her personal account flashes of Bulgaria’s history and literature. In so doing, she writes her migrant life story as a narrative of identification and disidentification, in which she mimics and recreates current Balkan modes of cultural self-representations, whose present moment is European but whose past is constructed by non-Western, Soviet, and Ottoman experiences, memories, and fictions. While she reconstructs her tale in migration, Mila finds herself, as a woman, an intellectual, and a Balkanite, haunted by multiple pasts. Her desire to account for the differences of Bulgaria’s subordinated pasts from a «subaltern» perspective leads her to the insistence of cultural translation, in Homi Bhabha’s sense, as a »staging of cultural difference» (227). CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 321 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 321 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 322 Boryana Dobreva At the same time, however, Mila’s performance gesture disturbs an easy transcoding of cultural difference, what Spivak calls, in the postcolonial context, «the horror of an absolute act of intercultural performance» (782). Consider the opening pages of chapter 4, where Mila passionately recites an untranslated couplet from the Bulgarian ballad «Chadshi Dimitar,» a song that praises the haiduts, Bulgaria’s adored nineteenth-century resistance fighters: «Nastane wetscher, messetz izgree/ zwezdi obsipjat swoda nebessen/ gora zaschumi, wjatar powee/ Balkanat pee chajduschka pessen» («Evening comes, the moon rises/ Stars flood the vaulted sky/ The woods rustle, the wind blows/ The Balkan sings a haidut song») (69). Mila’s refusal to translate the song into German thus marks a space of cultural untranslatability, of that which remains unshared and contested between cultures. As she remarks, Das Gedicht war schöner als die Sommernacht des Balkan, schöner als die Sterne, als das Unglaubliche, von dem die Rede war, und dieses Unglaubliche war der Tod […] Davon gab es nur schlechte Übersetzungen und eine Menge Sekundärliteratur […] Und das Gefühl der Ohnmacht. Das Unübersetzbare blieb unübersetzt. Und nur diejenigen, die das Original gelesen hatten, wußten wovon sie sprach. (68) Denying an easy translatability in which Mila-as-writer would otherwise sustain the illusion of an institutionalized absolute translation of intercultural performance and fixated identity, the artist casts aside the possibility of agency through self-identification and self-explanation (via language) in favor of linguistic self-representation grounded in «Das Unübersetzbare blieb unübersetzt» (68). She resists «the possibility of assertion of agency by a minority artist» and thus frustrates what would otherwise result in, following Mani’s discussion of Spivak, «the cooptation of the artist by ‹imperial malevolence›» (68). And transcending the author, these differences can be heard only in native tongues, as they constitute the very memory of communities, whose stories are still silenced by the hegemonic West and, as a result, remain in the periphery of knowledge, unnecessary and untranslatable. In their discussion of the future of the postcommunist bloc in a new European order, the editors of Over the Wall/ After the Fall quote Istvan Rév’s words that since «memory constitutes identity, the writing of history […] establishes and reestablishes identity ‹through new narratives,›» which, one could add, cohere as memory unto themselves (qtd. in Forrester et al. 22). In Bärenfell, Mila’s conscious act of remembering and retelling her individual story, juxtaposed with the dominant version of Bulgarian national history, reveals her desire to perform a willed self-creation. In her critical engagement with and retrieval of specific elements of great and small hi/ stories, private accounts, and official narratives, Mila creates a sense of self and homeland by CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 322 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 322 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Diasporic Voices or the Aporia of Shifting Identities 323 charting her individual space and time within and against Bulgaria’s national space and time. The protagonist does not construct a timeless, romantic image of her home country because her image of Bulgaria is mediated through the diasporic experience of someone who shuttles between the home and adoptive country and has maintained strong familial ties. Hence, her attachment to the home country is rather burdened by the recollection of a national framework that is marked by incarceration, hopelessness, and inferiority and temporally centered on her childhood in a totalitarian Bulgaria and her experience of the chaotic years of the Bulgarian transitional postcommunist period. Her particular insider/ outsider position of the expatriate thus affords her privileges otherwise unavailable, as she is able to bring the host and mother culture into one single space of interaction and to gain a more somber insight into the peculiarities of today’s Bulgarian sociopolitical and cultural life. In Mila’s eyes, the living conditions in the 1990s are likened to that of dogs: hungry people roam the streets of Sofia along with famished stray dogs. To escape the long, cold winter days, the impoverished and desperate pensioners of Bulgaria are a constant presence in the heated Sofia buses or the source of quarrels among the residents of Sofia waiting for bread in the long queues in front of empty grocery stores. 12 Disquieting articles in the newspapers about murders in families, injustice, and desolation inform Mila’s perception of her home country as a jungle where animals fight for everyday survival and existence: Auf offener Straße verhungerte streunende Hunde, immer wieder die Hunde. In den Wäldern des Balkan, in der Nähe der Dörfer, wurden immer mehr Wölfe und Bären gesichtet: Die wilden Tiere witterten das Tier im Menschen. […] Der Mensch ist dem Menschen […] ein Wolf, ein Bär, ein Hund, dachte Mila. (101) For Mila, the brutalization of her nation plays itself metaphorically as the bearskin, an «identitarian discomfiture» that is mediated through acts of disidentifications and disaffiliations with ethnicity and the nation (Mani 89). One of the most provoking scenes in the novel consists of Mila exchanging opinions with her parents and friends about nationalistic approaches to preserving the threatened ethnic Bulgarian identity and extricating the country from the suffocating financial and political crisis. Mila rejects her interlocutors’ fascistic approval of past, terribly misguided Nazi attempts to do the same followed by such, to Westerners’ ears, hazardous statements that what Bulgaria needs now is someone with Hitler’s iron hand, someone who would establish discipline and order in this devastated country (120). There is nothing left for Mila but to renounce her compatriots and their attempts at a flawed, simplistic reclaiming of the ethnic as a superlative category: CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 323 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 323 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 324 Boryana Dobreva Du hast kein Land mehr Bärin, kein Geburtsland mehr, geschweige denn ein Vaterland! In deiner Sprache heißt es öfter ‹Land meiner Geburt› als ‹Vaterland.› Und du hast immer behauptet, du seiest eine Deutsche ohne Hitler im Kopf. Sieh sie dir an, deine eigenen Leute: lauter kleine Faschisten! Warum bist du nicht schon im Englischen Gymnasium gestorben, Bärin? (42) As this example makes clear, Mila transcends Bulgaria as a history that kills. That is, she disidentifies with the poisonous fabrication of a consolidated ethnic identity in order to embrace the multiplicity of cultures and identities that constitute her own life: «Erst die Konfrontation mit der deutschen Sprache tötete den kleinen Faschisten in ihr» (62). To apply Tzvetan Todorov’s words to Mila’s context, «as someone who has lived within a foreign culture […] I can no longer subscribe to my ‹prejudices› as I did before, even if I do not attempt to rid myself of all ‹prejudice.› My identity is maintained, but it is as if it is neutralized; I read myself in quotation marks» (15). It is for this last reason that this novel succeeds in transcending the formulaic, normative, and all too common representations of «good German, bad Balkanite,» of identities between and beyond ethnic and national stereotypes. In performing a self-proclaimed identity as «deutschsprachige Autorin bulgarischer Herkunft,» Zacharieva, and by extension her alter-ego literary self, transcodes an ethnic and collective history into a defanged individual and paranational memory that allows Mila to claim her personal space in time: «Ich bin eine Deutsche ohne Hitler im Kopf» (131). Venturing through the sands of time, Mila overcomes the fatal twentieth century to weigh the ten previous centuries against the twenty years of communism she experienced: Es gab dieses andere Bulgarien, das noch vor dem 9. September 1944 existierte. Dieses Bulgarien hatte es seit dem 7. Jahrhundert gegeben. Das Bulgarien der Protobulgaren, der Slawen und Thraker. Das Bulgarien vor 1396, das Bulgarien vor 1990, dem Jahr der freien Fassaden. Was waren die zwanzig Jahre sozialistisches Vaterland im Vergleich mit dem der vergangenen Jahrhunderte? (130) Mila claims a home in history, but it is a history the meaning of which she, like many other expatriates estranged from their homes, builds out of, in Salman Rushdie’s words, «scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old films, small victories, people hated, people loved» (12). Like Rushdie’s India, Mila’s version of Bulgaria is a Bulgaria «of the mind,» an imaginary place, a «Traumland» that paradoxically but painfully allows her to remain at home while abroad because, as she states, «Nie würde sie ihr Land verlassen, nie» (130). At the heart of my discussion is my interest in the ways Balkan migrant authors self-interrogate questions of origin and Otherness as they negotiate the meticulous process of identity building. Given the different set of histori- CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 324 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 324 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Diasporic Voices or the Aporia of Shifting Identities 325 cal relations informing the Balkans, an important question arises for me as to how to approach cultural productions within this setting methodologically and theoretically. My particular focus is thus on the possibilities of applying concepts advanced by postcolonial and western scholarship to this kind of diasporic literature, all the while drawing attention to Balkanism as an alternative paradigm to theories of alterity and subjectivity. Focusing on history and memory, I have explored the intricate and oftentimes highly ambivalent ways in which Rumjana Zacharieva’s Bärenfell engages, questions, struggles with, negotiates, and, in short, «take[s] responsibility for and before the Balkan ‹identity›» at home and abroad (Antic´ 162). Her diasporic voice finds linguistic and historical coordinates that cross the spaces of memory and time to connect with the stranger in her self while revealing «more complex and contingent patterns of degrees and shades of otherness» in current identity constructions in the German world and beyond (Kuus 478). As a narrative from the borderlands of cultures and traditions, I see Zacharieva’s transnational writing as one that enables us to look anew at existing constellations of selves and others. To challenge and to rethink such configurations means, in the end, to seek a way out of the daunting definitional bog of alterity and to find a path towards cultural integrity. Notes 1 In the German academic field, the thematically rich and linguistically complex border narratives of Turkish-German writers like Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Aysel Özakin, Feridun Zaimoglu, Aras Ören, Renan Demirkan, and others have challenged German literary critics to unremittingly revisit their reading practices of writings born out of displacement, migrancy, and diaspora. American Germanists such as Azade Seyhan, Leslie Adelson, Petra Fachinger, Hiltrud Arens, and Venkat Mani, to name just a few, have expanded and modified their analytical focus on migrant subjectivities, hyphenated identities, the networking of cultural and diasporic memory and historical dis/ continuities, language, writing, and translatability. These scholars have not only offered new insight into the dynamic nature of emerging transnational literatures, they have also stressed the need for a renewed understanding of the cultural function of minority literary discourses in postwar Germany. For the individual contributions of these authors, see Works Cited. 2 In recent years, a number of Balkan scholars at home and abroad have published numerous articles and books in which they, while drawing on but also parting company with Edward Said’s Orientalism and other postcolonial theorists, have conceptualized the historical, epistemological, and methodological conundrum of Balkan subjectivity as well as the Balkan imaginary as the European «other within» from both a Western and a Balkan perspective. The list of intellectual achievements in Eastern European and Balkan Studies would be unthinkable without Larry Wolff’s wideranging historical study Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlighten- CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 325 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 325 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 326 Boryana Dobreva ment (1994); Maria Todorova’s fundamental work on Balkanism Imagining the Balkans (1997); Vesna Goldsworthy’s critique of Balkanist neocolonialism, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (1998), Milica Baki ć -Hayden’s brilliant contribution to Orientalist variations a la Balkan, „Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia“ (1995), and D.I. Bjeli ć ’s and O. Savi ć ’s erudite essay collection on a Balkan theme Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation (2002). Although these works have found wide resonance in the fields of cultural anthropology, sociology, and ethnography with respect to EU politics, integration, and migration, critical literary studies have remained less attentive to the perspectives that critical research on Balkanism might offer (when applied to Balkan migrant literary works in a transnational context) for uncovering and rethinking, in David Gramling’s words, «the hidden epistemological fissures through which transnational subjects continue to emerge» (389). 3 Viewed within the historical context of immigration to Germany, Zacharieva is representative of what Carmine Gino Chiellino has termed, in his introduction to Interkulturelle Literatur, the seventh voice of immigrant authors (56). That is, although Zacharieva moved to West Germany in 1970, her life story as a migrant and writer is not that of the Turkish, Italian, or the Yugoslav guest worker or of the Ukrainian, Russian, or Romanian quota refugee of the 1980s and 1990s. Zacharieva herself has emphasized that what brought her to Bonn were «personal reasons» and her «love for a German man,» and not the dire political and economic situation in her country or the repressive communist system (Bärenfell 61). Her story «Metamorphose» as well as her novel Bärenfell represent Zacharieva’s literary attempt at critique and confrontation with current attitudes to reduce her profile to the commonly circulating images of a dissident writer and the corresponding Betroffenheitsliteratur from the communist Balkans: Was berechtigt mich andererseits, die Selbstbespiegelung nachzuahmen, die von den anderen Autoren der neuen deutschen Prosa und Lyrik bis zur Selbstvergessenheit betrieben wird? Und wie lange kann ich an deutsche Türen (Verlagstüren u.a.) klopfen, die sich in zwei oder höchstens drei Fällen wohlwollend öffnen: wenn ich mich zu meinem literarischen Gastarbeitertum oder zu meinem Fremdsein hierzulande bekenne, oder aber (unbedingt) bereit bin, die Geige recht betroffen zu stimmen: es muß ja tragisch gewesen sein, eine sozialistische Kindheit gehabt zu haben. («Metamorphose» 45) 4 Like the Orient, the Orthodox Balkans were incorporated in the Europe/ non-Europe opposition as non-Europe, thus always embodying the second element of representational dichotomies: more dark than white, more wild than civilized, more violent than peaceful. 5 For a more detailed discussion of Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans, see Otoiu 92-94. 6 In fact, the novel registers a variety of issues such as gender, writing, and language change, issues that overlap and intersect in the narrative’ negotiation of identity, and need to be accounted for in the broader discussion of identity. However, for this particular paper, I have decided to focus only on the role of history and memory in negotiating subjectivity as the focal point of East/ West clashes. 7 Here I draw upon Hamid Naficy’s discussion on aesthetic and stylistic structural similarities of exilic and diasporic films in his An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (2001). Naficy’s ideas of tactile optics and a memory-driven narrative strike me as relevant in the context of diasporic autobiographical writing with its tendency towards modernist fragmentations and stream of consciousness in the form of a filmic montage-like structure. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 326 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 326 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 Diasporic Voices or the Aporia of Shifting Identities 327 8 In the context of Bulgarian intellectual expatriates abroad, Roumiana Deltcheva remarks that «[t]heir eventual immersion in the culture of the West, rather than integrating them to the center, reinforced their status of in-betweenness. Most became exiles for life: neither part of the firmly established Western identity, nor belonging to the unstable Bulgarian identity which they consciously sought to redefine» (559). 9 For further details about Western Balkanism’s willingness to look at the Balkan region from a macrocolonial perspective, see Alexander Kiossev’s discussion in «The Dark Intimacy» in Balkan as Metaphor (2002) 10 For more on affiliations and disafiliations, see Venkat Mani’s Cosmopolitical Claims (2007). 11 Unlike industrialized and secularized Western Europe, where the epic no longer exists as a living tradition in the imagination of national ideology, in the less developed Balkans, the heroic epic has made its way into national discourses and has become a major ingredient in the constructed corpus of national past and memory (Baki ć -Hayden 33-34). For further details about the historical role of literary cultures and oral narratives in the construction of national and ethnic memory in Eastern Europe, in general, and in Kosovo, in particular, see Milica Baki ć -Hayden’s essay «National Memory as Narrative Memory: The Case of Kosovo» (2004). 12 The novel’s portrayal of the animal-like interpersonal relations the main protagonist encounters in Bulgaria’s capitol in the 1990s and the general decline of moral and political values in the country is an emerging common theme among Bulgarian expatriates in Europe. With certain variations, we encounter the dog-like or wolf-like motif most notably in French theorist Julia Kristeva’s second semi-autobiographical detective novel The Old Man and the Wolves (1994) and Austrian writer and journalist Ilija Trojanow’s reportage novel Hundezeiten. Heimkehr in ein fremdes Land (1999). Both works take a sober but personal stance on posttotalitarian Bulgaria and the dehumanizing standard of living created by the state and its institutions. Works Cited Adelson, Leslie. The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Antić, Marina. «The Balkans and The Other Heading: Identity and Identification on the Margins of Europe.» Spaces of Identity 6 (2006): 151-65. Arens, Hiltrud. Kulturelle Hybridität in der deutschen Minoritätenliteratur der achtziger Jahre. Tübingen: Stauffenburg, 2000. Bakić-Hayden, Milica. «Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia.» Slavic Review 54 (1995): 917-31. -. «National Memory as Narrative Memory: The Case of Kosovo.» Balkan Identities. Ed. Maria Todorova. New York: New York UP, 2004. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Chiellino, Carmine. Interkulturelle Literatur in Deutschland: ein Handbuch. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000. Deltcheva, Roumiana. «The Difficult Topos In-Between: The East Central European Cultural Context as a Post-Coloniality.» The Sarmatian Review 3 (1998): 557-62. Fachinger, Petra. Rewriting Germany from the Margins: «Other» German Literature of the 1980s and 1990s. Quebec: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2001. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 327 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 327 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38 328 Boryana Dobreva Forrester, Sibelan, Magdalena J. Zambrowska, and Elena Gapova, eds. Over the Wall/ After the Fall: Post-Communist Cultures Through an East-West Gaze. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2004. Goldsworthy, Vesna. Inventing Ruritania. The Imperialism of the Imagination. London: St. Edmundsbury P, 1998. Gramling, David. «The Turkish Turn in Contemporary German Literature: Toward a New Critical Grammar of Migration. (Book review)» The Germanic Review 81 (2006): 385-89. Herzfeld, Michael. Foreword. Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation. Ed. Dušan I. Bjeli ć and Obrad Savi ć . Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. ix-xii. Huyssen, Andreas. «Diaspora and Nation: Migration into Other Pasts.» New German Critique 88 (2003): 147-64. Kideckel, David A. «What is in a Name: The Persistence of Eastern Europe as Conceptual Category.» Special Edition of Replika 1996. 28 Jan. 2006. <http: / / www. c3.hu/ scripta/ scripta0/ replika/ honlap/ english/ 01/ 03ckid.htm>. Kiossev, Alexander. «The Dark Intimacy: Maps, Identities, and Acts of Identification.» Balkan as Metaphor: Between Globalization and Fragmentation. Ed. Dušan I. Bjelić and Obrad Savić. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. 165-90. Kristeva, Julia. The Old Man and the Wolves. Trans. Barbara Bray. New York: U of Columbia P, 1994. Kuus, Merje. «Europe’s Eastern Expansion and the Reinscription of Otherness in East-Central Europe.» Progress in Human Geography 28 (2004): 472-89. Mani, Venkat B. Cosmopolitical Claims: Turkish-German Literatures from Nadolny to Pamuk. Iowa City: U Iowa P, 2007. Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. Otoiu, Adrian. «An Exercise in Fictional Liminality: The Postcolonial, the Postcommunist, and Romania’s Threshold Generation.» Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 23 (2003): 87-105. «Pressestimmen.» Rumjana Zacharieva. 2008. 20 Aug. 2008. < http: / / www.zacharieva. de/ Pressestimmen/ pressestimmen.html>. Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands. Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. New York: Viking, 1991. Seyhan, Azade. Writing Outside the Nation. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. «Acting Bits/ Identity Talk.» Critical Inquiry 18 (1992): 770-803. Todorov, Tzvetan. The Morals of History. Trans. Alyson Waters. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1995. Todorova, Maria. Imagining the Balkans. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. -. ed. Balkan Identities: Nation and Memory. New York: New York UP, 2004. Trojanow, Ilija. Hundezeiten. Heimkehr in ein fremdes Land. München: Carl Hanser, 1999. Wolff, Larry. Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1994. Zacharieva, Rumjana. Bärenfell. Bad Honnef: Horlemann, 1999. -. «Metamorphose.» Eine nicht nur deutsche Literatur. Zur Standortbestimmung der «Ausländerliteratur.» Ed. Irmgard Ackermann and Harald Weinrich. München: Piper, 1986. 42-46. CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 328 CG_41_4_s281-368End.indd 328 19.08.11 09: 38 19.08.11 09: 38