Yugonostalgia and the Ministry of Possibilities

By Sanjin Pejković

“Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.”

This is how the Yugoslav-Croatian writer Dubravka Ugrešić opened her lecture at an American university in 2010.* I watched the speech the other day on YouTube on the anniversary of her death. Dualism, the constant presence of irony and change characterized her as an intellectual. 

In many ways, Ugrešić embodied a not-so-small group of anti- and non-nationalist people who, since the disintegration of their country, Yugoslavia, found themselves in a kind of an existential vacuum. Many identified as Yugoslavs and the country’s collapse left them without a compass. They got lost. 

In her writing, Ugrešić was somewhat reluctant to express the strange feeling of nostalgia for Yugoslavia, which she shared with thousands of former Yugoslavs. The past had completely changed into a foreign country, to borrow the words of L. P. Hartley. 

In their intimate and external exiles, people tried in various ways to prove their own existence prior to the country’s dissolution. The photographs and artifacts that comprised the fragments of memories of their former lives were a way for them to revive themselves for a while, to find a way through the labyrinths of memories that could momentarily restore their sense of worth. The nostalgic discourse related to the former Yugoslavia is usually referred to as yugonostalgia.

In Ugrešić’s novel The Ministry of Pain, one of my favorite books, the protagonist, Tanja Lucić, finds herself in Amsterdam after losing both her country and any semblance of a family. She receives an offer to teach at a university in the language that used to be called Serbo-Croatian and that became fragmented and politicized after Yugoslavia’s breakup. In her exile, she teaches “our people,” that is, people with roots in the former Yugoslavia. Lucić’s alienation is multifaceted because she is a complex personality who does not fit into any imagined communities.

A woman, feminist, academic, and anti-nationalist, just like Ugrešić herself, Tanja floats between the desire to belong and the inner instinct to never fully identify with any collective. She finds common ground with her students in an imaginary, blue-white-red refugee canvas bag that resembles the Yugoslav flag, which she and the students fill with their collective memories. 

I recognize myself in such cataloging of memories. It became for me a strategy of resisting the forced amnesia that the new, nationalist states brought with them. Remembering became an act of resistance, just like in Ugrešić’s homeland, Croatia. Like Ugrešić’s characters, I, too, fill my memory containers and strategically distribute them around my apartment. Bags, packages, IKEA boxes. Neatly arranged and containing a disorder and chaos of reminiscences.

Even after the breakup of Yugoslavia, Dubravka Ugrešić identified as a Yugoslav and European writer. A few years after the country was buried, together with thousands of dead, in Culture of Lies she called herself a post-Yugoslav woman. For her, Yugoslav identity was tied to a sense of homelessness. Her Yugoslavia was the same one that Danilo Kiš had belonged to when he declared himself a Yugoslav writer in Anatomy Lesson, adding it meant nothing but homelessness.

In her essays and novels, Ugrešić criticized the rise of nationalism and its impact on culture, politics, and individual identity. She often explored the linkages of nationalism, historical revisionism, and denial of facts, especially in the context of wars and conflicts on the Balkan Peninsula. However, she was a complex analyst who often panned the dissatisfaction and pathetic self-pity of yugonostalgia and questioned everything in her own, semi-ironic way. Although she mourned the country, she feared cheap and shallow sentimentality. Nostalgia clouded memories and was often counterproductive.

Following their exposure to nationalisms, wars, and severe economic crises after the breakup of Yugoslavia, many former Yugoslavs increasingly see the period between World War II and the 1980s as a golden age. The phenomenon of yugonostalgia can, therefore, be seen as part of a wider grouping of post-socialist discourses. The most important difference between Western and post-socialist nostalgia is the radical social changes—political, economic, cultural—that clearly resulted from the systemic breakdown in post-socialist countries. 

Nostalgia as a term may be unchanging, but its meaning changes greatly depending on its causes. The longing for a return to the days of youth is not as ideologically charged in the West as it is in the East. Yugonostalgia can serve as a symptom of resignation, but also as a type of escapist conservatism. Yugonostalgia can also contain a charge of dissent because it offers a form of resistance and can be understood as a survival strategy.

I am re-reading The Ministry of Pain after a chance encounter with Ugrešić’s Croatian publisher a few weeks ago. He was on his way to Amsterdam to spread her ashes on Amsterdam canals. A materiality that goes up smoke—is that nostalgia? An unvarnished insight into physical loss, Ugrešić’s death forms an invisible weight around our ankles, us who are still searching for cultural kinship between and across the post-Yugoslav borders and barriers that nationalist politicians erected in the early 1990s. Her cremation and unwillingness to be buried in the soil whence she came also says something important about the finality of our lives in exile. Somewhat symbolically, Ugrešić has burned and remains in an intermediate state even in the afterlife.

The Ministry of Pain is a perfectly balanced novel about in-betweenness. It talks about “our people,” the post-Yugoslavs who, after the disintegration, are unable to find new identities. In exile, they seek some kind of salvation from the horrors of war and divide their lives into a before and an after. They move cautiously through the world, marked by their traumas, always on edge, in fear of what could happen at any moment. They took refuge in countries that do not accept them, while in their old homelands they are seen as foreigners. They live in an eternally temporary no man’s land.

Although the author’s alter-ego wanders through traces of memory, the writer in The Ministry of Pain illustrates the very sense of duality when she teaches Croatian-Serbian-Bosnian-Slovenian-Macedonian literature and languages ​​during a linguistic divorce marked by tragic fury. At first she manages to create a communal sense of togetherness, attempting to build the Yugoslav past in the dust and ashes that have not yet settled after the last wars. But the further the project progresses, the more we see collective and individual cracks developing in the imagined nation-building.

Language both unites and divides, and it can be used both as a weapon and a bridge. Bread on the table, Croats decided to eat ”kruh,” Serbs “hleb,” and Bosnians “hljeb.” However, the word for death is the same in all three languages, notes Ugrešić. The fragmented languages ​​act as a cultural political dynamite. People were slaughtered, expelled, raped, and killed with the help of these new-born languages.

For more than half of my life I have been trying to understand the wars that displaced us, but also the ontology of my own exile, a double-exile destiny that shaped me. The departure is not tragic in itself, but its consequences are because the questions never go away nor can they be answered. It matters little whether you made it anywhere, whether you are living the American dream or lack the basic necessities.

Over the past three decades, Dubravka Ugrešić constantly tried to penetrate the complex and existential issues of loss: the loss of homeland, home, country, context, place, and ownership, not in the capitalist sense but as unconscious belonging. Ugrešić believed that exile implied a state of exile. To her the phenomenology of internal exile occurred in moments of self-pitying introspection, in the constant relating to the inner experience of loss and exile. Despite her self-awareness and her attempts to never be pathetic, she could never fully escape, that is, completely free herself from the pain of loss.

It was nice to see so many people mourning her. All of us suffering from internal phantom pains that never really let go. We who are here, there, and everywhere, or still nowhere except in words, in the divided and cannibalistic languages ​​that tried to devour each other throughout history. We see each other and reflect in each other. We wince when we notice similar details, we behave similarly, with our mouths half open as we wander around airports. We write one sentence in one language, then think the next one in another. We speak in one language, we count in another. We are in two places at the same time. Our WhatsApp groups are maps of the world. We will never be able to gather our families and friends again. But at the same time we are free. We are the proletarians of flight, we are anti-nationalists. Rusty anchors don’t drag us down to the bottom.

*

The essay was first published in the Bosnian original, “Jugonostalgija i ministarstvo mogućnosti,” along with a Swedish version, “Jugonostalgi och möjligheternas ministerium” on 24 June 2024 in Lyktan magazine. This translation by Peter Korchnak is published here with the author’s permission on the 3rd anniversary of Dubravka Ugrešić’s death.

About Sanjin PejkoviĆ

Sanjin Pejković is a film scholar in Sweden where he has lived since 1994. He teaches film studies at universities and writes about film for various Swedish publications, focusing on memories of the former Yugoslavia mediated in film and television.

He is a two-time guest on the Remembering Yugoslavia podcast (“Celluloid Retro,” and “An Incomplete Guide to (Post)Yugoslav Cinema”).

Dubravka Ugrešić photo (2011) CC-BY-SA David Shankbone (Wikimedia); author photo by Paul Wennerholm (Sveriges Radio).

Notes

• Nostalgia Isn’t What It Used to Be is the title of the 1978 memoir by Simone Signoret. Ugrešić acknowledges that in her talk at Boston College.
• Lyktan is “a multilingual cultural magazine with particular interest in the meeting of languages. Founded on the principle of “art for all”, [it writes] about art, culture, and multilingualism. [It is] politically and religiously unaffiliated and work[s] independently with Konstfrämjandet Västmanland. Lyktan is run with support from Kulturbryggan, Folkrörelsernas Konstfrämjande, Längmanska Kulturfonden, and Region Västra Götaland.”
• Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.