Intersekcionalni zakon čitanja ženskog dnevnika: subjektivnost iskaza, moć riječi i topos ratnog užasa
INTERSECTIONAL LAW OF READING WOMEN’S DIARY: SUBJECTIVENESS OF EXPRESSION, POWER OF WORDS, AND TOPOS OF HORRORS OF WAR

Summary/Abstract: The focus of this research paper is on post-Yugoslav women’s prose, or more precisely, the genre of diaries written by women which take the disintegration of Yugoslavia as their topic. This form of writing on the horrors of war distinguishes itself through certain key attributes: female experience in itself needs to be articulated as the subject of the material, bearing witness to the uncertainty of the future or existential threat, and resisting and destabilizing the patriarchal and militaristic mechanism of war. The diary as a genre of writing about life needs to be intersectionally disassembled and studied from the trans-national standpoint, in the context of the topic and the act of writing. The diary is determined not only by the historical context from which it originates, but also by the cultural matrix and opposing stereotypes that find their basis in writing about sex and gender in the text. Although the genre is primarily associated with a woman’s act of writing in the privacy of her home, together with the fact that many more women than men were active in this genre, it is still the case that men tend to take over in the genre-forcing the image of the soldier as a social paradigm. Despite the generally accepted limitations in the study of women authors overall, it is crucial to construct a different theoretical framework based on the consciousness of the gender designation of the author, the study of the dualities of private and public, the personal and the political, the individual and the collective and the social and the cultural; the position that censorship takes and the marginalization of female experience, the analysis of discourse and points where a particular self is imprinted into the body of text. A woman’s self, just like her identity, is a category that not only defines the text of the diary, but the author’s position as well, which adds up to the practice of the destabilization of the traditional norm of the genre and its features. These categories define the role of a woman in literature, her affirmation in the articulation of her creativity and her alternative knowledge, which are a staple for social transformation. The diary genre of writing is most suitable when there is a need to deal with the universal subject of Western metaphysics and including plural (forcibly silenced) female voices and their subjection through the text. With the view that boundaries are negotiated by means of a diary, writing in this form, female authors try their hand at this struggle with forced models and limitations (albeit poetic ones) in general, including tradition, marginalization, and distorted auto perception-they speak up and across the boundaries of the vow of silence. The diary as the most intimate literature genre (a private document) is subjugated to the will and the needs of a woman diarist (the diary keeper) to treat the themes of the rift created by war, the change in and destabilization of identity, from the position of the personal and the bared. The very position from which the diary is created is one that the identify the author as “a woman who tries to write herself”, who is engaged by the nature of activity itself in the re-writing of stories about her that already exist, because in her effort to describe herself, she spoils the important cultural construction of her femininity as passive and hidden (Raoul 57-65). In terms of the culture, which was patriarchal, and which operated in the militaristic realm of the precarious nature of female existence, women who kept diaries in the intimacy of their homes created for themselves some sort of backdrop of security, a witness to their existence, a different attitude compared to the dominant ideology, that was national, warlike and sexist, and at the same time created their own authorial self, writing themselves, engaging themselves in the ethical dimension of anti-war stances; in short, protesting against the horrors of war. With the diary, female authors bear witness, trying to outlive the horrors and offering a different outlook on reality. Thus, women’s diaries destabilize literary and social meanings, ideological and warlike narratives and finally, the patriarchal image of woman, especially in times of war. In spite of the social paradigm stated at the beginning of the paper, female diaries, especially those whose topic is war, inhabit the space of “giving a voice and a word to personal history and the mapping out of the intersection of the meaning of the personal and public sphere“ (Smith and Watson 26); because in its character they are a “makeshift hybrid of a lived-through experience and creative expression” (Schiwy, 234-254). Limited by the evils of war and the lurking danger, the female author masks her attitudes inside the text, trying to preserve the idea of normalcy inside the bestial set up and the machinery of death. The diaries of women authors on the war and the disintegration of Yugoslavia are the result of a reflex of perception and the relationship to things they lived through and what happened. In a nutshell, “diaries speak about interaction between war and exile” (Ergas, 85). Since the anti-war diaries written by women represent their identity, they draw attention to the war methods of the annihilating of a woman’s subjectivity and consequently patriarchal militarism, the limits to collective mishap, ideology and nationalism, but also a pacifist and feminist ethics. The field of post-Yugoslav anti-war diary written by women involves the legitimization of the authorial voices of different women which transcend the limitations of national cultures, affirmed through the disintegration of community, as well as the aspiration to impose an aspect of truth heavily burdened by ideology. They are demonised as enemies- others across the border. Ascending to the field of the post-Yugoslav, and not dominantly scattered national (questionable set of values), it is marked by facing down the narratives which produced wars and violence-narratives that women diary keepers strongly oppose. They plunge deeply into their own subject and highlight its conflict with official dogma. In all anti-war women’s diaries, there is a categorical rejection of violence of war and solidarity with others. Post-Yugoslav anti-war diaries written by women do not attempt to create a complete image of the disintegration of war of the homeland, but to warn against the horrors of war from a different standpoint and give a more ethical option from the victorious and victimizing one. They serve to present the female experience of war, and so it opposes the collective, leads to deliberation about purpose of life, highlights the creation of identity and selfness, and appeals to the mission of preservation of life. Diary keeping becomes a mode of survival. At the same time, a post-Yugoslav as well as transnational approach will help in piecing together the mosaic of alternative knowledge across the borders of national and cultural rifts, that is, the anti-Yugoslav anti-war women’s diary was created based on the principle of women’s togetherness in alternative and ethical, humanist views during a complex time when the mutual backbonethe homeland we all shared, is lost. Within these bounds, among the dozen or so diaries, the one from the besieged Sarajevo, named Sarajevski dani, sarajevske noći [Sarajevo days, Sarajevo nights], stands out: Dnevnik i pisma [Diaries and Letters] 1992.-’94. (1994) by Elma Softić, a mixed Jewish-Muslim woman/female author. The transnational study of the diary in question will be based, first and foremost, on transcending both the ethnical and national epithets of literature of undermining discourse of hatred towards the other and the different, through the destruction of the war narrative (between conflicting nations, especially with a view of the element of location- as a place of dissention), the destabilization of ideological collective dogma, as well as disclosing the character of a patriarchal-militaristic and violent culture. This diary came into existence as a response to the horrors of the ordeal of war that the civil population of Sarajevo had to go through. Just like Scheherazade in her toil for survival, E. Softić brings up the issue of her own shock caused by her encounter with the beginning of the war, while finding her safe haven in writing- in the imprinting of fear and other emotions and impressions onto paper. She catalyzes the abnormal into the normal, the incomprehensible into the comprehensible, fluent and utterable. The experience of women regarding war, makes the sensibility towards the presentation of reality even more pronounced, following it and shaping it through language. Writing in the first person, the changes to your own identity subjected to trauma are recorded. Using a number of explosive and broken off sentences, E. Softić articulates psychosomatic sensations, states and emotions such as sorrow, anxiety, resignation, disappointment, humiliation, misery, distress and nervousness. The diary that she writes thus becomes an emphatic listener, and a trusted witness. The power of words yet breaks the limitations of the traumatic, forming the language in a different manner- by writing about trauma in an anti- war text. Finally, trauma is the text, although the process will fail to be determined or defined- they still reach each other, interlocking in cooperation. Actually, it is all about entanglement of traumatic effects with the literary representation of the struck self, as referenced by Leigh Gilmore. Therefore, this pattern is found in the diary by E. Softić, who records her experience of the traumatic effects of war on her being, aiming to make them visible. In that sense, the mapping of a basement wall as a shelter and protective line, a crossroad of insanity and imprisonment as well as expression as the only way towards freedom, is especially important. To honour that, she writes down the stories of each of these invisible people trying to survive in inhumane circumstances on her paper and rolls them off the basement wall. In another dimension, the basement wall plays both a protective role and becomes the place of remembrance. Though it may sound like a paradox, a special phenomenon is pleasure amidst the horrors of war. It is all about the ability of a work of art to, firstly, express a state, and then to shake up the female reader through the manner of interpretation and/or reading with images of violence. In the diary Sarajevski dani, sarajevske noći, the shock is the encounter with the unexpected, that changes the state of mind (the shock of horror referred to by Rita Fleski). The pleasure that E. Softić talks about is determined by the sense of togetherness in a motive of survival, but at the same time, what Julia Welland (2018) in her novels about the wars views as a practice, maintaining resistance to wars. The motive that confirms this thesis is in the decision of the woman writer to stay in the town despite the chance to leave the besieged Sarajevo by moving to safe territory far from the war. The reason behind that decision is based on the need of E. Softić to provoke and question her own subject and write it down as different. Her quest for identity and her relationship to a woman’s subjectivity are the precondition for the fulfillment of her ethical duty. In keeping with that, the anti-war attitude of E. Softić stems from the discovery of the substance to the social accountability of women and the involvement of the author in resistance. Thus, the auto-validation of the experience can reflect itself in the literary demonstration of I (Me)-which became existentially open to challenge. The question of staying alive which is determined by the impulse for survival, was minutely described in the diary’s notes describing the suffering in Vase Miskina main street-bomb shelling and facing death, lacerated bodies, fear and shock. Followed by every episode of war suffering, that is, surviving, is the writing down of the experience-what you learned about yourself and the relationship with trauma which tends to repeat and stay in the memory. The context of intimate memory should be raised historically to the level of conviction and the understanding of barbarism, together with the national creation of wars, the creating of enemy model and the consequent extermination and ethnic massacre. Therefore, anti-war as a feminist shift away from the national, becomes a prevalent characteristic of women’s writing about the Yugoslav wars. E. Softić sharply articulates that antagonism to war in Sarajevski dani, sarajevske noći. Declaring guilty everyone who fires grenade but also implying the responsibility of government and politics, is just one example to showcase that. In the core of this stance is the willful consent of the individual to commit crimes. On the wings of strong emotions, E. Softić handles the ethical assumption about the choice to commit crimes- generating a feminist ethics that confronts militarism and national order. In this manner, she elevates the ethics that binds her to the universal feelings of humanism and pacifism, and simultaneously confirms the value of collaboration of women that is important for the genres that write about life. In a nutshell, the anti-war expression in post-Yugoslav women diaries, including Sarajevski dani, sarajevske noći, serves to “make a note of her (woman author) growing opposition expressed by words” (Friedrichsmeyer 209). This anti-war woman’s text, invigorated by the power of language, gives an account of the other side of war horror. On the other hand, this diary as a representative of the literary field, counts on female readers (according to Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson) to take it as a challenge and react to alternative knowledge as opposed to official, institutional and authoritative perspectives. When faced with the textualized horrors of war, a woman as a reader should be able to identify and interpret the position, the woman’s subject in the text and the anti-war, ethical discourse. The anti-war women’s diary genre, Sarajevski dani, sarajevske noći included, possesses the potential to unleash power (in) words which will be reproduced in its new engaged readers. “Women’s experience of war widens receptive sensitivity to others and different models of presentation of reality” (Sablić Tomić 152), separately recorded in intimate texts. It is a node of both writing and reading. The author’s diary before a woman/ female reader, according to Cynthia Huff, calls for no mediator- because the author and a reader themselves both have the authority to write and read. The woman/ female reader, since engaged in the manner of J. P. Sartre, relies on the power of language, the articulation of ideas of a diary writer with a crucial task of meta-textual study, imposed as the only law in recognizing the representative power of words in the horrors of war from a female perspective.

• Details
• Contents