“Word Made Flesh”: Czech Women’s Writing From Communism to Post-Communism

This article explores the changes in Czech women’s fiction from communism to post- communism, focusing in particular on Czech women writers’ relationship to literary discourse and feminism. It contends that women writers’ rapport to ideological discourse and literary production under communism is a determining factor in women’s relationship to both writing and feminism. It examines this literary legacy in terms of post-communism, surveying the differences between a totalitarian socialist regime and that of a materialist, capitalist economy, as exemplified in Czech women’s literature. The article offers a survey the major post-communist women writers, including Hodrová, Boučková, Kriseová, as well as delving into a comparative close-reading analysis of two representatives of both communist and post-communist women’s writing: Eva Kantůrková’s Přítelkyně z domu smutku (Companions Of The Bleak House) and Iva Pekarková’s Kulatý svet (The World is Round). Both these texts offer a challenging vision of “women’s community” for today’s global order

History, trauma and remembering in Kivu Ruhorahoza’s Grey Matter (2011)

In 1994, the genocide in Rwanda claimed at least 800,000 lives in just 100 days. More than 20 years on, the memory and trauma of the atrocities still permeate the Rwandan society. This article explores how some of these different manifestations of trauma (individual and collective, actual and inherited, real and imagined, that of survivors and perpetrators), and especially their relationship to the genocide as a historical event, shape the internationally recognized Rwandan feature film, Kivu Ruhorahoza’s Grey Matter (2011). Drawing on the scholarship on trauma, the article examines Grey Matter’s uniqueness within feature films on the topic and its ambition to tackle the impossibility of memory and objectivity vis-à-vis varied experiences of the genocide. It traces the connection between trauma and Grey Matter’s structure, which refuses to offer events a firm chronological placement, both within and beyond the narrative

In The Maim of the Father: The Discourse of Disability in French-Maghrebi Immigrant Texts

This paper explores the "enfreakment" of the father in French-Maghrebian immigrant literature. The father, or the first-generation North African immigrant to France, is routinely depicted as disabled in literary texts. I account for various economic, medical, socio-cultural, and literary reasons for the figurative maim of the father and I examine the possibilities and limits of this disabled position. On one hand, disability seemingly enabled some first-generation immigrant workers, granting them voice and agency in the public forum. On other hand, in immigrant literature, this discourse of disability engenders a freakish form of identity politics; certain second-generation immigrant texts reify and re-appropriate the maim of the father, so as to further disable, and thus enable, the immigrant subject

The Czech Émigré Experience of Return after 1989

Here at home, we hold no love towards émigrés. We didn’t like them before, and we don’t like them now. Not that we don’t concern ourseles with them, we just simply really don’t like them. Seemingly it’s some kind of tradition here [...] They can go ahead and complain, but since they have no political rights, let them whine, they pose no threat, as long as at home all is quiet.1 This comment by Jiří Bigas, made in his 1998 opinion column aptly titled ‘The Relationship with One’s Own Émigrés is a Test of National Maturity,’ encapsulates some of the problematic perspectives on the return of Czech émigrés after 1989. Under the Communist regime of 1948 and 1989, an estimated 550,000 people, or 3.5 per cent of the population, emigrated from Czechoslovakia.2 After the Velvet Revolution, thousands of these émigrés returned, with high hopes of returning ‘home’. Now, fifteen years later, relatively few of tehse individuals remain in the Czech Republic; they have left again, disappointed by the disillusionment or discrimination they encountered. The negative attitude towards returning Czechs, ranging from dismissal to latent xenophobia, has been characterized as the ‘anti-émigré trauma of Czech politics’.3 For a long time, Czechs were neither willing nor ready to express themselves on this sensitive issue. For example, Jiří Gruntorád, director of the samizdat archive Libri Prohibiti, saw himself as archiving painful memories which could not be adequately articulated in the contentious political climate of the 1990s: Every generation has its trauma. Your mother remembered February [1948], your grandfather, the battle of Piava, and now we transmit stories of dissidents. I guess it doesn’t interest people now, it irritates people. I have the feeling that it is unfitting, immoral even, to talk about it yet.4 Almost a generation has passed since the fall of Communism. Perhaps it is now time to address some of the contentious issues of recent history and revisit the traumatic subject of returning Czech émigrés. Drawing on Czech opinion of the 1990s and the statements of émigrés, I will briefly sketch out the main issues of the experience of the émigré return. My analysis however, will explore an aspect that has been almost completely overlooked in this debate: literature. I turn to literature in order to better understand the experience of Czech émigrés, before and after 1989, in its complex cultural, psychological and socio-historical dimensions. In particular, I focus on the ‘painless’ representation of the émigré experience by émigrés that largely informed their reception by Czechs in the Czech Republic after 1989. I posit that the suffering of emigration and return has been repressed in Czech exile literature and I examine the effects of this seeming absence of pain. What happens when the suffering of emigration is kept silent? How does one interpret the muted distress in Czech exile literature? When Czech émigrés could safely return home, was the hardship of emigration erased? How did émigré writers return home in their fiction? These are but some of the questions driving this retrospective reflection

Itsembabwoko ‘à la française’? Rwanda, Fiction and the Franco-African Imaginary

This article explores the literary representation of the genocide in Rwanda, and by extension, that of the Franco-African imaginary. Since the horrific events in 1994, “Rwanda” has become a discursive epiphenomenon, be it in global human rights, African or francophone contexts. Literary works about itsembabwoko, mostly published in France, now represent both a varied and a substantial corpus in Francophone literature. Problematically, however, France played a critical, if not insidious, role in the 1994 Tutsi genocide. This paper therefore examines to what extent Francophone literature about Rwanda is shaped by French politics. Specifically, it contrasts Franco-African texts produced as part of the E ´ crire par devoir de me´moire initiative with novels by first-time Rwandan authors Joseph Ndwaniye, Aime´ Yann Mbabazi and Gilbert Gatore´. It investigates how these diverse texts represent Rwanda post-genocide, and in so doing, how they work to reflect or resist circulating cultural discourses about African francophonie

The translation of pain in immigrant texts.

This cross-cultural dissertation examines how the pain of immigration is conveyed in immigrant literature. It compares immigrant texts from the Maghreb, Haiti and Czechoslovakia, written by authors who emigrated to France and North America. Interdisciplinary in scope, this work raises important questions about immigrant psychology, identity politics, minority representation, globalization and multiculturalism. In the traditional immigrant narrative, suffering is marginalized as part of the immigration process and reflects the immigrant's neutralized position in society. My thesis posits that, in order for their sufferings to be heard and heeded by dominant discourse, immigrant writers must engage in a particular rhetoric in which they both reappropriate and resist generic narrative models. My examination of francophone Maghrebi immigrant texts reveals that many Maghrebi immigrants writers (Charef, Mokeddem, Sebbar, Zouari, Zeituni) signify their social dis-ease by explicitly marking wounds or sickness thematically and stylistically into the corpus of the text. I question the limits of such diseased embodiment by alluding to cases of performance or imposture (Smail/Leger). My analysis of Haitian texts considers how different Haitian immigrant authors (Ollivier, Etienne, Pean, Danticat) intimate migrant pain with vodou myths and symbols. Pointing to certain socio-political misappropriations, I investigate the limits of translating immigrant alienation through foreign cultural signifiers. My study of Czech exile literature shows that, in these texts, immigrant pain is suppressed for a number of literary, socio-historical and psychological reasons. I contend that this seeming absence of pain had important consequences in the negative reception of returning emigrants after 1989 in post-communism. I explore how, with the use of allusion, allegory and other indirect means, returning Czech emigrant writers (Kundera, Pekarkova, Formanek, Martinek) tacitly translate their return in their fiction. In all, this work explores how the subject in pain or victimization may gain representation, voice and agency in social discourse. It examines the role of the body, language, culture, gender and race, as well as emotions and empathy. It concludes that a particularly performative rhetoric of pain is necessary to grant the e/immigrant minority subject representation in the public forum.Ph.D.Canadian literatureComparative literatureLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsSlavic literatureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/124429/2/3138174.pd

The Trademark of a Trend Setter: An Interview with Czech Feminist Writer and Environmentalist Eva Hauserová

I had long known of Eva Hauserová – major Czech feminist writer and founding figure of the Gender Studies Center in Prague. I met her personally for the first time at party she gave in Prague in spring 2001, certainly one of the most delightful get-togethers I enjoyed while I was there: it was a “kiddie” party, and we (a number of well-known writers and scholars) were to dress up like kids, eat snacks and play children’s games. I was immediately enchanted by Eva’s wit, her artistic and literary talent, as well as her lucid understanding of Czech politics and society. It was not until this year that I resolved to interview this inspiring figure, first online and then face-to-face in Prague. Again I was charmed by her presence, above all in her modest appraisal of herself and her clever, insightful commentary on contemporary Czech issues. I begin with a brief biography