(no subject)
I've been reading Erica Johnson Debeljak's Forbidden Bread. Erica is an American who married a Slovenian poet and lives in Slovenia, and the book describes basically the cultural shock she experienced when she settled down with him here.
I've been amazed at a number of things - amazed at how she saw them, amazed at how she somehow found and noticed things that I remember as nearly gone or passe from my childhood at least ten years before she came here. It's like watching a picture of a town, you're all there amid the red roofs, looking up a church spire, but someone elses gaze focuses on a darkness in a bush off to one side, like a camera with a focus locked blurring everything else. I'm not saying that she's painting a wrong picture - I'm just saying I've never seen it the way she did. She noticed, for example, the absence of central heating in many people's houses. And I do know that in my grandmother's house, they've installed central heating maybe ten or fifteen years ago. But I also remember that as an anomaly, as a shock when I realised that something that I thought was the norm wasn't really in my grandmother's apartment.
I wondered whether I had really lived such a sheltered life, been kept so very much out of things to completely overlook the gray reality of socialism the traces of which she saw everywhere.
But perhaps what amazed me most was the sheer amount of yugo-nostalgia that pervaded the book. This was not so much about Slovenia as about Slovenia that was not part of Yugoslavia any more. I know she was here at a terrible time when the war in Croatia and Bosnia was at its worst and bloodiest... But I cannot remember ever feeling the longing, the regret, the loss she describes in some parts about the ending of Yugoslavia. Well - perhaps an inkling, for the music, or the temperament that perhaps compensated for the dull, steady, narrow-minded mindset that is supposedly typically Slovenian. I don't know.
Have I felt sorry for what was happening - and terrified in many respects, and like someone who got off the plane at the last moment before takeoff for some stupid reason only to later hear about its crash? No doubt... and yet there was also the comfortable knowledge that it wasn't happening here, that I will not be harmed by it...
... or maybe it was simply an 18-year old's hubris, the youth's eternal optimism.
Or maybe it was just something simpler, something low like turning one's eyes and thoughts away. At least I knew how lucky we were, how blessed to have escaped this, for some unknown reason.
It is not a flattering mirror she presents... but it's a mirror, I suppose, and it shows a part of the truth, some part perhaps I might not see on my own. Glad I read it.
I've been amazed at a number of things - amazed at how she saw them, amazed at how she somehow found and noticed things that I remember as nearly gone or passe from my childhood at least ten years before she came here. It's like watching a picture of a town, you're all there amid the red roofs, looking up a church spire, but someone elses gaze focuses on a darkness in a bush off to one side, like a camera with a focus locked blurring everything else. I'm not saying that she's painting a wrong picture - I'm just saying I've never seen it the way she did. She noticed, for example, the absence of central heating in many people's houses. And I do know that in my grandmother's house, they've installed central heating maybe ten or fifteen years ago. But I also remember that as an anomaly, as a shock when I realised that something that I thought was the norm wasn't really in my grandmother's apartment.
I wondered whether I had really lived such a sheltered life, been kept so very much out of things to completely overlook the gray reality of socialism the traces of which she saw everywhere.
But perhaps what amazed me most was the sheer amount of yugo-nostalgia that pervaded the book. This was not so much about Slovenia as about Slovenia that was not part of Yugoslavia any more. I know she was here at a terrible time when the war in Croatia and Bosnia was at its worst and bloodiest... But I cannot remember ever feeling the longing, the regret, the loss she describes in some parts about the ending of Yugoslavia. Well - perhaps an inkling, for the music, or the temperament that perhaps compensated for the dull, steady, narrow-minded mindset that is supposedly typically Slovenian. I don't know.
Have I felt sorry for what was happening - and terrified in many respects, and like someone who got off the plane at the last moment before takeoff for some stupid reason only to later hear about its crash? No doubt... and yet there was also the comfortable knowledge that it wasn't happening here, that I will not be harmed by it...
... or maybe it was simply an 18-year old's hubris, the youth's eternal optimism.
Or maybe it was just something simpler, something low like turning one's eyes and thoughts away. At least I knew how lucky we were, how blessed to have escaped this, for some unknown reason.
It is not a flattering mirror she presents... but it's a mirror, I suppose, and it shows a part of the truth, some part perhaps I might not see on my own. Glad I read it.