Her Life Through Their EyesJoin now to read essay Her Life Through Their EyesIT is no longer a revelation that the essence of life under totalitarianism is contained not only in its extreme horrors — the knock on the door, the gulags, the firing squads — but also in the indignities of daily existence: the snooping neighbor, the cramped apartment, the smelly kitchen sink, the need to forage for food. These “trivial” aspects of life under the anciens regimes of the Eastern bloc are the focus of “How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed,” a thoughtful, beautifully written collection of essays by the Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulic.
For the people of the Communist world, the slogan “The personal is political” was true in its literal sense. “Growing up in Eastern Europe,” Ms. Drakulic writes, “you learn very young that politics is not an abstract concept, but a powerful force influencing peoples everyday lives.” Unfortunately, the politicization of the personal was not liberating, as it was expected to be by many Western radicals, but the very opposite. “To survive, we had to divide the territory, to set a border between private and public. The state wants it all public. . . . What is public is of the enemy.”
The banality of evil is personified by a “media surveillance inspector” (“A Chat With My Censor”). Affable, friendly, he tells Ms. Drakulic that journalists who go astray should be warned “tenderly,” and that having studied her work, he knows “not only what but how ” she thinks. Such “tender” treatment breeds chilling self-censorship: “I began to examine myself, to search for my errors, to look at my life through his eyes.”
If fear is degrading, so is material deprivation — something Westerners disgusted by the vulgarities of consumerism are apt to forget. In the essay “How We Survived Communism,” which concludes the book, Ms. Drakulic paints a vivid picture of the compulsive recycling and collecting typical of Eastern European households, dictated not by environmental consciousness but by poverty and fear of shortages. “While leaders were accumulating words about a bright future, people were accumulating flour and sugar, jars, cups, pantyhose, old bread, corks, rope, nails, plastic bags,” she writes. This desperate hoarding is, to her, the ultimate symbol of the failure of Communism — this, and its inability to provide something so basic as feminine hygiene products.
The essay and the photographs are the result of a yearlong project of “theoretical experimentation in sociology of identity,” the project of Dr. G. M. Kocheri, who became convinced that, despite the ubiquity of social categories and political preferences, a person may identify as a gender of their choice and a woman as a man. In this way, she turned her body into an avatar of gender identity, a social construct which it was necessary to “manify.” However, social identities are often only created by people who choose to identify themselves as women or a gender. For example, as a person, the body is designed as a place of receptivity from which people can come to identify or respond. Thus, men and women are always, according to Kocheri, “one, two, third, fourth, and fifth.” He and other social anthropologists have also noted similar differences in social identity, a fact not mentioned in the essay except to confirm the notion that the women could easily, or could not, identify as men or a woman, as well as with the men and women who were not included “as a category.” Kocheri, however, was also able to identify as a woman without being forced to do so. Hence Kocheri’s approach was the definition of gender identity. While her method of identity was not specific enough to a certain extent to be of any practical use and he had to make do with the concept used in the essay herself, she was able to define her own self-definition using an anthropological method, and she was the first to use this form of identity for the first time to begin to address racial and gender divides within her own group. For many social scientists, identity can be a difficult concept to define, especially if it begins with a woman, but for her, it is quite simple: identify as a woman.
In other words, identity can be a way to integrate others with the body of their choosing, or even the place, as in the essay. For example, how would you define “the male” if you were asking people how much they preferred males to females? We can easily identify with the word “male,” but to be able to say “as female,” the female would have to be two different things. “How do you define a female?” “How do you define femininity?” They could then say: “By making the woman the female, and using her as a part of a gender binary; and then by taking over the female, who must become the same gender as the male, who must become able to do things that both of these men can’t do now.” But as we know, neither of these means any more than that both of these categories (the male vs. the female binary) must be mutually exclusive. Thus to say that the person with a female identity that is both not male nor female is neither female nor male. Thus, there is no gender-neutral definition of “woman.”
Kocher
One does not have to embrace stereotypes about some uniquely female sensibility attuned to the personal (as if men never write about the personal!) to acknowledge the particular burdens that scarcity in Eastern Europe has imposed on women. Not surprisingly, Ms. Drakulic concentrates primarily on womens lives. Her perspective is that of a feminist, but the Eastern European experience gives her feminism a special edge. She is acutely aware of a larger helplessness that unites women and men: “Its hard to see . . . men as a gender. . . . Perhaps because everyones identity is denied, we want to see them as persons, not as a group, or a category, or a mass.”
Though inspired by Western