Remembering Yugoslavia: exile, nostalgia and trauma in Dubravka Ugrešić’s “The Ministry of Pain”5 min read
“Tell me, has it occurred to you that all that time you may have been torturing us? Has it occurred to you that the students you forced to remember were yearning to forget?” How do we deal with war and trauma, or with the loss of a homeland and national identity? Is it better to dwell in memories of the past, of a time before it all happened, when everything was seemingly peaceful and good? Or should we simply forget the past – forget everything that happened and start from scratch? These are some of the key topics explored by Ugresič in The Ministry of Pain, a novel set in a supposedly neutral post-Yugoslav war era Netherlands.
Set in the mid-nineties, the book tells the story of a young woman named Tanja who flees Yugoslavia due to the succession wars. After a short stint working as a nanny in Berlin, Tanja receives an offer to teach for two semesters at the Department of Slavonic Languages and Literature at the University of Amsterdam. Many of Tanja’s students come from former Yugoslavia, and for them, attending university is a step on the ladder to obtaining residency papers. Tanja’s role sees her embark upon a journey of Yugonostalgia as a self-proclaimed “memory tutor” wherein the collective past offers a safe haven, and contemporary topics of war, guilt, victimhood and responsibility are seen as minefields best avoided – especially with a class of students from diverse ethnic and religious backgrounds.
For Tanja, “confronting the recent past was pure torture, looking into the future – uncomfortable.” That left only the more distant past, that of a united Yugoslavia. Svetlana Boym defines the form of nostalgia that Tanja and her students experience as “reflective nostalgia” – focused on reminiscence and on enjoying memories of the past without aiming at resurrecting it, as opposed to restorative nostalgia. This reflective nostalgia produces feelings of solidarity and unity between Tanja and her students, a stark contrast to the potential for debates of war and nationalism to produce conflict. For Tanja this escape into the past becomes not just a way to deal with the present but becomes something else, with Yugonostalgia, “the remembrance of life in that ex-country, [becoming] another name for political subversion.” The parts of the past we choose to remember – and how we choose to remember them – can have great political significance, especially when such activities are dictated and influenced by the state or by political parties.
What starts out as a seemingly fun bonding experience traveling down memory lane soon darkens, and Tanja’s method of dealing with the situation comes under scrutiny. Reminiscing and nostalgia are finite when war and their consequences are still lurking in the shadows. The bubble had to burst sooner or later. And when it does, it brings into question Tanja’s perception of her students’ experiences. To what degree did Tanja follow the path of Yugonostalgia for the sake of her students’ mental wellbeing – or did she only do it to make herself feel better?
Throughout the course of the book, from the first part dealing with nostalgia as a means to cope with the reality of war and displacement to latter parts covering the darker topics of suicide and trauma, there are some keyunderlying topics. These include a critique of politics and nationalism in the newly formed post-Yugoslavia states and a discussion of language and its political implications. The novel shines a light on the weighty decision of staying or emigrating in times of conflict, on holding perpetrators accountable and on trying to keep a vestige of sanity throughout it all. The book discusses ways to deal with personal losses, including one’s home, identity, mother tongue and, ultimately, an imagined future. It also talks about how sometimes, it is easier to return to what hurt us due to a sense of familiarity and belonging.
August is Women in Translation month, and as such, there is an aspect of the book that deserves more attention – the element of language and its political implications. In the first part of the book in particular, Tanja, the protagonist, muses on the topic of language: “language was a weapon, after all: it branded, it betrayed, it separated and united…” the languages spoken in former Yugoslavia “had gone to war in the belief that they were incompatible”. A language once shared and used to unite her and her students, and the Yugoslav society, has come to be used as a weapon of division. The politics of language remains a pressing topic and point of contention today, with languages being used as both symbols of oppression and of independence. They possess both the ability to unite and to separate and exclude people.
The Ministry of Pain is one of my all-time favourite novels – not just for its ability to touch upon thought-provoking topics, but also because of Ugresič’s ability to write without superfluous paragraphs and sentences. Every part of the book is deep and meaningful, or asks provocative questions. The reader gets drawn ever deeper into the protagonist’s mind and contemplations, following her increasingly fragmented thoughts as she loses her grip on reality.
For those interested in the topics raised in this novel, I recommend Ugresič’s 1998 essay collection The Culture of Lies which offers a deep dive into nationalism and a harsh critique of politics and national identity building in the nations born out of the wars of Yugoslav dissolution.
The Ministry of Pain was first published in 2004 under the title “Ministarstvo boli” by Fabrika Knjiga. The English translation that this article is based on was published in 2008 by Telegram and translated into English by Michael Henry Heim.
