"Creative and Critical Studies, Faculty of (Okanagan)"@en . "DSpace"@en . "UBCO"@en . "Gra\u00C5\u00A1i\u00C4\u008D, \u00C5\u00A0pela"@en . "2014-09-05T20:20:29Z"@en . "2014"@en . "Master of Arts - MA"@en . "University of British Columbia"@en . "\u00E2\u0080\u009CIdentity, home, and loss in Goran Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00C4\u008Cefurji raus!\u00E2\u0080\u009D examines how popular Slovene writer Goran Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s 2008 novel \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! (trans. 2012) reconceptualizes the self/other divide between the relatively homogeneous Slovene majority and diasporic Fu\u00C5\u00BEine community, which lives in Slovenia\u00E2\u0080\u0099s capital city Ljubljana and is comprised largely of immigrants from the former republics of the ex-Yugoslavia. More specifically, this work explores how the two communities exist in a continuum of apparatuses, for example discursive, institutional, and state apparatuses, that are themselves encompassed by an overarching trauma apparatus. Here, the paper discusses etymological and discursive references to past traumatic historical events as well as the narrator-protagonist\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Marko \u00C4\u0090or\u00C4\u0091i\u00C4\u0087 direct references to the more recent Yugoslav Wars. The paper then goes on to address common Slovene responses to the novel. The paper concludes by suggesting that the novel is successful in helping individuals and communities work through stereotypes and xenophobia linked to trauma because, as a non-didactic or confrontational tool, the novel can serve to gently invite the reader into an experience of discomfort and uncertainty he or she may be unwilling or unable to engage with directly. In this way, the paper argues, Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s novel plays or can be used to play a key role in helping the Slovene communities work through, or perhaps more accurately, acknowledge and \u00E2\u0080\u009Csit with\u00E2\u0080\u009D their feelings of pain, discomfort, mistrust, and hate. Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s novel produces enough discomfort to cause reflection, but not enough to alienate or directly blame the reader. In doing so, \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! destabilizes the emotional response to the other constructed by our prejudices and ideology."@en . "https://circle.library.ubc.ca/rest/handle/2429/50315?expand=metadata"@en . "IDENTITY, HOME, AND LOSS IN GORAN VOJNOVI\u00C4\u0086\u00E2\u0080\u0099S \u00C4\u008CEFURJI RAUS! (SOUTHERN SCUM GO HOME!) by \u00C5\u00A0pela Gra\u00C5\u00A1i\u00C4\u008D M.A., The University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus 2014 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES (English) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Okanagan) August 2014 \u00C2\u00A9 \u00C5\u00A0pela Gra\u00C5\u00A1i\u00C4\u008D, 2014 ii Abstract \u00E2\u0080\u009CIdentity, home, and loss in Goran Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00C4\u008Cefurji raus!\u00E2\u0080\u009D examines how popular Slovene writer Goran Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s 2008 novel \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! (trans. 2012) reconceptualizes the self/other divide between the relatively homogeneous Slovene majority and diasporic Fu\u00C5\u00BEine community, which lives in Slovenia\u00E2\u0080\u0099s capital city Ljubljana and is comprised largely of immigrants from the former republics of the ex-Yugoslavia. More specifically, this work explores how the two communities exist in a continuum of apparatuses, for example discursive, institutional, and state apparatuses, that are themselves encompassed by an overarching trauma apparatus. Here, the paper discusses etymological and discursive references to past traumatic historical events as well as the narrator-protagonist\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Marko \u00C4\u0090or\u00C4\u0091i\u00C4\u0087 direct references to the more recent Yugoslav Wars. The paper then goes on to adress common Slovene responses to the novel. The paper concludes by suggesting that the novel is successful in helping individuals and communities work through stereotypes and xenophobia linked to trauma because, as a non-didactic or confrontational tool, the novel can serve to gently invite the reader into an experience of discomfort and uncertainty he or she may be unwilling or unable to engage with directly. In this way, the paper argues, Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s novel plays or can be used to play a key role in helping the Slovene communities work through, or perhaps more accurately, acknowledge and \u00E2\u0080\u009Csit with\u00E2\u0080\u009D their feelings of pain, discomfort, mistrust, and hate. Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s novel produces enough discomfort to cause reflection, but not enough to alienate or directly blame the reader. In doing so, \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! destabilizes the emotional response to the other constructed by our prejudices and ideology. iii Preface This dissertation is original, unpublished, independent work by the author, \u00C5\u00A0pela Gra\u00C5\u00A1i\u00C4\u008D. Also worth noting, unless otherwise indicated all translations from Slovene to English are the author\u00E2\u0080\u0099s own. iv Table of Contents Abstract .................................................................................................................................... ii\t \u00C2\u00A0Preface ..................................................................................................................................... iii\t \u00C2\u00A0Table of Contents ................................................................................................................... iv\t \u00C2\u00A0Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................ vi\t \u00C2\u00A0Dedication .............................................................................................................................. vii\t \u00C2\u00A0Chapter 1: Introduction ......................................................................................................... 1\t \u00C2\u00A01.1\t \u00C2\u00A0 \u00C4\u008Cefurs ........................................................................................................................................ 2\t \u00C2\u00A01.2\t \u00C2\u00A0 Tracing the Socio-economic and Historical Subtext ................................................................. 3\t \u00C2\u00A01.3\t \u00C2\u00A0 Xenophobia: Discourse and Trauma in Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! ........................................... 5\t \u00C2\u00A0Chapter 2: Interpellating Identity ....................................................................................... 12\t \u00C2\u00A02.1\t \u00C2\u00A0 The \u00C4\u008Cefur Stereotype .............................................................................................................. 13\t \u00C2\u00A02.2\t \u00C2\u00A0 Defining Methodology ............................................................................................................ 14\t \u00C2\u00A02.3\t \u00C2\u00A0 Looking in the Mirror - \u00E2\u0080\u009CThe Continuum of Apparatuses\u00E2\u0080\u009D .................................................... 17\t \u00C2\u00A02.1\t \u00C2\u00A0 Hailing the Self \u00E2\u0080\u0093 Marko accepts his interpellation? \u00E2\u0080\u0093 and Mimicry ..................................... 30\t \u00C2\u00A02.1.1\t \u00C2\u00A0 Practice and Ritual ........................................................................................................... 32\t \u00C2\u00A02.1.2\t \u00C2\u00A0 Mimicry ........................................................................................................................... 37\t \u00C2\u00A02.2\t \u00C2\u00A0 The Abjection .......................................................................................................................... 40\t \u00C2\u00A0Chapter 3: The Mist of Trauma .......................................................................................... 45\t \u00C2\u00A03.1\t \u00C2\u00A0 Defining Trauma ..................................................................................................................... 45\t \u00C2\u00A03.2\t \u00C2\u00A0 Thinking Trauma \u00E2\u0080\u0093 Trauma as a Tool .................................................................................... 53\t \u00C2\u00A03.3\t \u00C2\u00A0 Training Anxiety \u00E2\u0080\u0093 The Imposition of the Trauma Apparatus ............................................... 55\t \u00C2\u00A03.3.1\t \u00C2\u00A0 Discourse and Terminology ............................................................................................. 55\t \u00C2\u00A03.3.2\t \u00C2\u00A0 Public Names and Figures ............................................................................................... 61\t \u00C2\u00A03.4\t \u00C2\u00A0 The Intimate and Public Components of the Trauma Apparatus \u00E2\u0080\u0093 Diaspora and War ........... 64\t \u00C2\u00A03.4.1\t \u00C2\u00A0 \u00E2\u0080\u009CA Lost Yugoslavia\u00E2\u0080\u009D \u00E2\u0080\u0093 The Smoking Tentacles ............................................................. 69\t \u00C2\u00A03.4.2\t \u00C2\u00A0 Losing Home ................................................................................................................... 70\t \u00C2\u00A03.4.3\t \u00C2\u00A0 Postmemory ..................................................................................................................... 72\t \u00C2\u00A03.4.4\t \u00C2\u00A0 The Erasure ...................................................................................................................... 74\t \u00C2\u00A0 v 4 Chapter: And Your Point is? \u00E2\u0080\u0093 Accepting Discomfort ................................................ 81\t \u00C2\u00A04.1\t \u00C2\u00A0 An Uncomfortable Slovene Response .................................................................................... 82\t \u00C2\u00A04.2\t \u00C2\u00A0 Sara Ahmed\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00E2\u0080\u009CAffective Economies\u00E2\u0080\u009D and The Cultural Politics of Emotion ....................... 87\t \u00C2\u00A04.3\t \u00C2\u00A0 Opening Up \u00E2\u0080\u0093 Spaces of Curiosity and Empathy, Spaces of Difference \u00E2\u0080\u0093 Framing the Narrative ........................................................................................................................................... 88\t \u00C2\u00A04.4\t \u00C2\u00A0 If You Wanted a Solution, I Have One, But You Are Not Going to Like it ........................... 90\t \u00C2\u00A04.5\t \u00C2\u00A0 A Few Final Thoughts ............................................................................................................. 93\t \u00C2\u00A0Works Cited ........................................................................................................................... 97\t \u00C2\u00A0 vi Acknowledgements While projects such as this are usually cited with only one author, they nevertheless require the assistance of multiple individuals. I would like to give a special thanks to my family and other loved ones for supporting me in every which way. I certainly would not have succeeded without your patience, kind words, \u00E2\u0080\u009Ckicks in the butt,\u00E2\u0080\u009D distractions, and your willingness to act as my sounding boards time and time again. Similarly, I would like to thank my supervisor Dr. Janet MacArthur for her dedication and support. Without her helpful feedback, confidence boosts, and pushes in the right direction, this dissertation would not have succeeded. I would also like to thank my defence committee, Dr. Lisa Grekul, Dr. Jelena Jovicic, and Dr. Martin Blum, for their patient and comprehensive suggestions and questions, much would have gone missed without their careful attention. In addition, I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for their generous grants, a $17,500.00 Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship (2012) and a $6,000.00 Canada Graduate Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement (2014), and UBC Okanagan. This project would not have been possible without their generous funding. Lastly, I would like to thank Dr. Alojzia Zupan Sosi\u00C4\u008D for allowing me to take her course on the Contemporary Slovene Novel (Sodobni Slovenski Roman), my friend Katarina Fatur for her patient edits and instruction on my attempts at writing University level papers in Slovene, and Lina \u00C5\u00A0inkovec for helping me with the non-Slovene terminology. Lastly, I would like to thank the author of my primary work Goran Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 for meeting me for coffee. Although I did not use our discussion in this work, it inevitably brought my attention to insights I might not have noticed otherwise. Thank you! Najlep\u00C5\u00A1a hvala! vii Dedication To my family and loved ones for reminding me to trust myself. 1 Chapter 1: Introduction In the early 2000s my family drove through Bosnia-Herzegovina, as we took a detour on our way back home to Slovenia from the Croatian island Hvar. I was told to look out the window. I will probably never forget what I saw \u00E2\u0080\u0093 churches riddled with bullet holes; towns with only one house standing, the rest abandoned and pockmarked with bullets; towns full of lights, except for that one, bullet covered house. Goran Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s 2008 novel \u00C4\u008Cefuji Raus!, [Southern Scum go home! (trans. 2012)] tells the story of seventeen-year-old narrator protagonist Marko \u00C4\u0090or\u00C4\u0091i\u00C4\u0087 (hereinafter Marko) and his three friends, Aco, Dejan, and Adi,i members of the diasporic Fu\u00C5\u00BEine community \u00E2\u0080\u0093 comprised largely of immigrants and refugees (as well as their descendants) from the former republics of ex-Yugoslavia \u00E2\u0080\u0093 in Slovenia\u00E2\u0080\u0099s capital city Ljubljana. Praised by many, the novel is \u00E2\u0080\u009CSlovenia's most read book since independence\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Kmetec). Many have commended it for exposing Slovenia's ongoing and serious xenophobia and stereotyping of the southern Yugoslav minority living within its borders, as well as the minority's \u00E2\u0080\u009Clack of adaptation and . . . impermeability\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Zagoda 548).ii As critics point out the Slovene community\u00E2\u0080\u0099s xenophobia and the minority\u00E2\u0080\u0099s maladaptation is exposed by the author\u00E2\u0080\u0099s use of language and the narrator protagonist\u00E2\u0080\u0099s acceptance of his \u00C4\u008Cefur identity. Moreover, although the novel does not directly engage with the Yugoslav Wars or the Wars\u00E2\u0080\u0099 immediate effects, it nevertheless illustrates the ways in which the relationship between the Slovene community and immigrant communities from the southern republics of ex-Yugoslavia is influenced by a history of trauma. As such, the following study illustrates the subtle echoes of historical and personal trauma in \u00C4\u008Cefuji Raus! and suggests that the novel presents a compassionate and 2 inclusive tool for exploring and working through memories of trauma in the former republics of ex-Yugoslavia. 1.1 \u00C4\u008Cefurs \u00C4\u008Cefur \u00E2\u0080\u0093 \u00C4\u008Cefurji (plural) and \u00C4\u008Cefurka/e (feminine/feminine plural) first appeared in the late 1980s, early 1990s, and referred to a youth subculture \u00E2\u0080\u0093 youth found (usually in groups) on Ljubljana\u00E2\u0080\u0099s city streets dressed in \u00E2\u0080\u009Ctrack suits, bomber jackets, and brand name runners\u00E2\u0080\u009D; their hair was usually styled in a \u00E2\u0080\u009Cmushroom cut\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Zorko, \u00E2\u0080\u009CVodi\u00C4\u008D po vesti\u00E2\u0080\u009D 185-186). However, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthe term revealed itself as universally extendable \u00E2\u0080\u00A6 among some speakers, to easily include all members of the classification \u00E2\u0080\u0098na \u00E2\u0080\u0093i\u00C4\u0087'\u00E2\u0080\u009D (186), that is, those from the southern republics of ex-Yugoslavia. (The letter \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00C4\u0087,\u00E2\u0080\u009D like \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00C4\u0091,\u00E2\u0080\u009D does not exist in the Slovene alphabet, and rarely, if ever, appears in Slovene words, so encountering someone whose last name ends in \u00E2\u0080\u009Ci\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u009D immediately alerts the Slovene reader that this person is an other). Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 uses the term \u00C4\u008Cefur in its widest sense to include all immigrants and their descendants from the southern republics of ex-Yugoslavia (186). The term is presented as derogatory. According to the novel's first epigraph, \u00C4\u008Cefurs are easily identified by their physiognomic characteristics \u00E2\u0080\u0093 their \u00E2\u0080\u009Clow foreheads,\u00E2\u0080\u009D thick eyebrows, and \u00E2\u0080\u009Cprominent cheek bones\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Pe\u00C5\u00A1ut qtd. in Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087, \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! 8). The term characterizes the men in this community group as \u00E2\u0080\u009Cbeastly, \u00E2\u0080\u009D \u00E2\u0080\u009Cvulgar,\u00E2\u0080\u009D and \u00E2\u0080\u009Cmysogynistic\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Pe\u00C5\u00A1ut qtd. in Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087, \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! 8). The term connotes, as the definition in the first epigraph outlines, and as Urban Zorko reminds us in the afterword, immigrants who are usually uneducated with a low standard of living. These immigrants are (according to the stereotype) usually employed in manual or low wage, physical jobs. They often attend trade schools and \u00E2\u0080\u009Clive \u00E2\u0080\u0093 typically and most famously \u00E2\u0080\u0093 in the Fu\u00C5\u00BEine\u00E2\u0080\u009D (\u00E2\u0080\u009CVodi\u00C4\u008D po vesti\u00E2\u0080\u009D 186). These immigrants are stereotyped as \u00E2\u0080\u009Cbadly assimilated in Slovenia\u00E2\u0080\u0099s bureaucratic and national society\u00E2\u0080\u009D (186). 3 1.2 Tracing the Socio-economic and Historical Subtext In fact, given the ethnic nationalist and xenophobic undertones that color the narrative and Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s dialogue \u00E2\u0080\u0093 his references to the 1990s Yugoslav war, nationality, and historical paramilitary groups \u00E2\u0080\u0093 it quickly becomes clear that the novel is predominantly about a minority group\u00E2\u0080\u0099s struggle in the face of the majority\u00E2\u0080\u0099s xenophobia, and, paradoxically, the majority group\u00E2\u0080\u0099s struggle to accept a minority group that seemingly persists in continually reaffirming the derogatory stereotypes ascribed to it. As Lejla \u00C5\u00A0vabi\u00C4\u0087 puts it \u00E2\u0080\u009CMarko is already the second generation in Slovenia, but his parents, who are from Bosnia, never managed to really grasp the Slovenian way of life, [and] the Slovenians were never able to accept the southern way of life.\u00E2\u0080\u009D Thus the importance of the novel\u00E2\u0080\u0099s socio-economic and historical context cannot be understated, especially given the novel\u00E2\u0080\u0099s title \u00E2\u0080\u0093 \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! I am choosing to use the original title for this specific reason. I believe that although the English translation gives a general sense of the phrase, it fails to capture the same socio-historical tensions as \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus!\u00E2\u0080\u009D As has already been mentioned, \u00C4\u008Cefur is a derogatory and slippery term that commonly refers to a specific sub-culture, but may be extended to include all immigrants and their descendants from the former republics of ex-Yugoslavia. The second term in the phrase, \u00E2\u0080\u009CRaus,\u00E2\u0080\u009D is German for \u00E2\u0080\u009Cget out!\u00E2\u0080\u009D The phrase was a popular graffiti slogan (Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087, \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! 8) that appeared on Ljubljana\u00E2\u0080\u0099s streets in the 1990s around the same time as the slogan \u00E2\u0080\u009CSlovenia for Slovenes.\u00E2\u0080\u009D It is significant that this was the current political party\u00E2\u0080\u0099s election campaign slogan (Blati\u00C4\u0087 310). The appearance of the two slogans coincided roughly with the violent break up of the former Yugoslavia that up until the late 1980s/early 1990s consisted of what are now Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia. Although the length of this work as well as the complexities of these wars exclude the possibility of a detailed analysis \u00E2\u0080\u0093 a discussion of the 4 causes alone would exceed the space available \u00E2\u0080\u0093 suffice it to say that the 1990s Yugoslav wars, which played on economic, political and social tensions in (the former) Yugoslavia, as well as memories of historical injustice (on all sides), forced many families and communities to relocate and caused tremendous suffering and death on all sides. In fact, there are many who will never return to their homes and who will never know the fate of their loved ones. To borrow Meg Coulson's phrasing, the wars left behind the echoes of \u00E2\u0080\u009Cdeath and destruction, the vicious process of \u00E2\u0080\u0098ethnic cleansing\u00E2\u0080\u0099 involving bombing, shooting, arson and other forms of intimidation including systematic rape of women and girls\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Coulson 91).iii In comparative terms, Slovenia\u00E2\u0080\u0099s transition was relatively peaceful. This may be in part because the Slovene national identity is younger than that of Yugoslavia\u00E2\u0080\u0099s other former republics. The Slovene national identity did not begin to actively develop until the 1700s and 1800s (Prunk 7, 59). Indeed, it would not be a stretch to suggest that Slovenia has almost always aligned itself more closely with the West than the Balkans or the East. Nevertheless, although Slovenia\u00E2\u0080\u0099s war for independence lasted approximately ten days and cost the lives of forty-five people (127), iv significantly fewer than those lost in the other ex-republics, the Slovene conflict had its own controversies, some of which are referenced in the novel and the novel\u00E2\u0080\u0099s title \u00E2\u0080\u0093 the graffiti slogan \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus!\u00E2\u0080\u009D Following independence in 1991,v Slovenia erased approximately 30 000 permanent residents who were living in Slovenia at the time of independence, but who had the citizenship of one of Yugoslavia\u00E2\u0080\u0099s other republics, each of which is now a separate country (Ramet, \u00E2\u0080\u009CSerbia, Croatia and\u00E2\u0080\u009D 273).vi The group is known as the \u00E2\u0080\u009Cerased.\u00E2\u0080\u009Dvii As Admir Blati\u00C4\u0087 explains in his 2008 study of the presence of multiculturalism and linguistic bricolages in Ljubljana\u00E2\u0080\u0099s rich graffiti culture, the presence of the two graffiti slogans \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus!\u00E2\u0080\u009D and \u00E2\u0080\u009CSlovenia for Slovenes\u00E2\u0080\u009D \u00E2\u0080\u0093 particularly when 5 they appeared together \u00E2\u0080\u0093 sounded threatening to those Slovenes \u00E2\u0080\u009Cwho were here not really as citizens of this country nor really citizens of another\u00E2\u0080\u009D (310). Regardless of whether or not Blati\u00C4\u0087 means to refer to the \u00E2\u0080\u009Cerased,\u00E2\u0080\u009D the large number of refugees Slovenia took in as a result of the war, or both, he is right to remind the reader that the ominous nature of such statements was further intensified because \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthe actual war in Croatia and Bosnia-Hercegovina reminded us how quickly radical nationalism moves from words to horrific actions\u00E2\u0080\u009D (310). Blati\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s observation is particularly uncomfortable since such slogans are also uncannily reminiscent of the anti-Semitic rhetoric associated with Hitler\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Third Reich. I draw our attention to this history because Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 captures this tension when he chooses the slogan \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus!\u00E2\u0080\u009D as the title of the novel with which he takes the reader into the intimate, at times gut-splittingly hilarious, at times tearfully heartbreaking, tale of Marko, his family, his friends (some of whom were \u00E2\u0080\u009Cerased\u00E2\u0080\u009D or who have a parent who was \u00E2\u0080\u009Cerased\u00E2\u0080\u009D) and their community. All of them, Marko tells us, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cwere affected by the war in Bosna\u00E2\u0080\u009D and had family members or friends who stayed with them (Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087, \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! 13). 1.3 Xenophobia: Discourse and Trauma in Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! My own work seeks to explore traumatic traces inscribed in both the narrative and the protagonist-narrator\u00E2\u0080\u0099s (and his community\u00E2\u0080\u0099s) identity. In this sense, my work is interested in the ways in which social processes, memories, and knowledges are embodied in and through the self. While I acknowledge that our identities are socially constructed, I wish to explore how such social constructs play out as \u00E2\u0080\u009Cnatural\u00E2\u0080\u009D \u00E2\u0080\u0093 \u00E2\u0080\u009Cgut\u00E2\u0080\u009D \u00E2\u0080\u0093 \u00E2\u0080\u009Cauthentic\u00E2\u0080\u009D (re)actions and responses in the self and in encounters with the other. Only by recognizing both processes can we begin to recognize and choose our responses to painful (historical) events and memories. As such, my work is founded on that of Foucault, who proposes \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthat the body is neither biologically given, nor outside of culture and history. It is represented and used in 6 specific ways as a result of specific historical power relations\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Trisk 44). More specifically, I am interested in the ways in which the institutions, discourses, and histories that surround Marko and the two communities \u00E2\u0080\u0093 Slovene and diasporic \u00E2\u0080\u0093 that he interacts and engages with, shape Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s stereotyped diasporic identity. In addition, I will explore how the novel may be used to open up spaces that cultivate empathy and encourage compassionate and inclusive dialogue rather than agonistic competitions among societies, groups, and individuals. As such, my exploration of Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s novel will seek to answer three guiding questions: how does Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s novel represent the role of difficult diasporic experience and traumatic memories of historical injustice in identity formation; in what ways does the novel offer a medium for problematizing, subverting, and exposing ethnic stereotypes that are the product of displacement and trauma in Slovenia and ex-Yugoslavia\u00E2\u0080\u0099s other former republics; and, finally, what role might this work play in the process of working through this troubled history? My first section draws and builds upon the Slovene literary critics\u00E2\u0080\u0099 responses to the novel, particularly Urban Zorko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s commentary in the text\u00E2\u0080\u0099s afterword, Louis Althusser\u00E2\u0080\u0099s theory of interpellation, and Michel Foucault\u00E2\u0080\u0099s conception of the apparatus \u00E2\u0080\u0093 \u00E2\u0080\u009Ca thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Foucault, Power/Knowledge 194). This theoretical discussion is then followed by a close reading that focuses on sections of text where Marko performs his \u00C4\u008Cefur identity as well as those sections were Marko \u00E2\u0080\u009Cargumentatively shows us the reasons for the world he is tangled up in\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Zorko, \u00E2\u0080\u009CVodi\u00C4\u008D po vesti\u00E2\u0080\u009D 198). In this way, I illustrate that Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s protagonist not only accepts the stereotype (and is proud of it) (187, 192), but he 7 also continually reaffirms it by mimicking both the characteristics inscribed on the othered \u00C4\u008Cefur identity and the meanings inscribed on the Slovene self \u00E2\u0080\u0093 the (perceived) difference between the two groups as always already negative, undesirable. In other words, Marko is interpellated into a position of negative difference that discourse displaces onto the other. I contend that Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 successfully reconceptualizes the self/other divide between the relatively homogeneous Slovene majority and diasporic Fu\u00C5\u00BEine community because he exposes the apparatuses dictating the invisible ideology of mutual distrust and fear, and, in doing so, he erases the stereotype: The idea \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00C4\u008Defur\u00E2\u0080\u009D disappears [\u00E2\u0080\u00A6] like a dried leaf not because Marko resists the stereotype, but because somewhere in the novel, the stereotype loses its object. And we cannot, for the life of us, find him amongst the Fu\u00C5\u00BEine anymore. (Zorko, \u00E2\u0080\u009CVodi\u00C4\u008D po vesti\u00E2\u0080\u009D 199) Indeed, \u00E2\u0080\u009C[w]hen we step back and examine the ambient of Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s novel in its entirety, we come face to face with the terrifying fresco of broken homes, drugs, mutual ignorance and nearsightedness of a hopeless adolescent\u00E2\u0080\u009D (197). As Zorko so astutely puts it, \u00E2\u0080\u009CVojnovi\u00C4\u0087 uses Marko's narrative to dissegregate a collection of stereotypes, where every \u00E2\u0080\u0098truth\u00E2\u0080\u0099 on the tongue has its obvious reasons in reality\u00E2\u0080\u009D (199). In the next section, I do a close reading of those parts of the narrative that either directly refer to the most recent Yugoslav War or contain terminology that subtly resonates with historical trauma. It is not only Marko but also his communities that are haunted by a traumatic past. To outline how this occurs, I examine the term \u00C4\u008Cefur, focusing particularly on the term\u00E2\u0080\u0099s linguistic and physiognomic relationship with anti-Semitism; terms such as \u00C4\u008Detnik and usta\u00C5\u00A1a, which refer to Serbian and Croatian radical and paramilitary groups that date 8 back to World War One and the interwar period; as well as the term tur\u00C4\u008Dine, which means \u00E2\u0080\u009Chooliganisms\u00E2\u0080\u009D / \u00E2\u0080\u009Cvulgarities\u00E2\u0080\u009D in English, but which can also be translated as \u00E2\u0080\u009CTurkish words\u00E2\u0080\u009D / \u00E2\u0080\u009CTurkishisms.\u00E2\u0080\u009D In addition, I focus on Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s direct references to the most recent war and the areas affected by it, as well as his allusions to the war\u00E2\u0080\u0099s key players. Drawing on discussions by key trauma scholars and theorists, I explore the lingering presence of intergenerational trauma that dates back as far as the Ottoman invasions in the 14th and 15th centuries and includes both World Wars as well as the most recent Yugoslav Wars. More specifically, I build upon Foucault\u00E2\u0080\u0099s notion of the apparatus by examining the ways transgenerational and intergenerational trauma, which Hirsch suggests occur through a process of postmemory, shape and limit the institutions and discourses represented in the novel. I refer to this as the functioning of a \u00E2\u0080\u009Ctrauma apparatus.\u00E2\u0080\u009D In other words, I postulate that Marko is hailed by an ideology and a continuum of ideological apparatuses that are haunted by echoes of historical trauma. I conclude my analysis of Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! by answering the last of my three guiding questions: what role might Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s novel play in the process of working through this troubled history? As many Slovene scholars have noted, \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! presents us with a look into a minority culture that exists on the margins of Slovene society, erases the stereotype, and presents us with an image of life in the Fu\u00C5\u00BEine we cannot ignore (Zorko, \u00E2\u0080\u009CVodi\u00C4\u008D po vesti\u00E2\u0080\u009D 185, 199). Indeed, as Zavodnik and Zorko explain, Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 makes no attempt to find the causes or solutions to the tensions between the Slovene and immigrant communities; rather, he explores \u00E2\u0080\u009Chow we go forward\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Zavodnik). Thus, it becomes the \u00E2\u0080\u009Cindividual\u00E2\u0080\u0099s responsibility\u00E2\u0080\u009D to decide whether he or she \u00E2\u0080\u009Cwill break open the surface of the stereotype and surrender to the human chaos behind it\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Zorko, \u00E2\u0080\u009CVodi\u00C4\u008D po vesti\u00E2\u0080\u009D 199). I also 9 discuss the Slovene communities\u00E2\u0080\u0099 responses to the novel, focusing in particular on blog commentary surrounding language, the police reaction to the novel\u00E2\u0080\u0099s depiction of them, as well as the novel\u00E2\u0080\u0099s subsequent appearance in Slovene schools. I postulate that, although the novel generated considerable negative commentary, overall, the discourse generated around and as a result of the novel has functioned as a catalyst for important discussions surrounding the treatment of minority groups, or at least this minority group, in Slovenia. Given the novel\u00E2\u0080\u0099s overwhelming success in generating dialogue surrounding the treatment of immigrants from the southern republics of ex-Yugoslavia in Slovenia, I suggest the possibility of using the novel as a tool for exploring and working through the subtle echoes of historical trauma that reverberate throughout the narrative. Here my work relies on recent discussions of the presence of personal and historical trauma in a culture. These discussions are indebted to Freud\u00E2\u0080\u0099s distinction between melancholia and mourning. Consequently, I apply Dominick LaCapra\u00E2\u0080\u0099s discussion of trauma, absence, and loss where he states that \u00E2\u0080\u009C[m]ourning brings the possibility of engaging trauma and achieving a reinvestment in, or recathexis of, life that allows one to begin again\u00E2\u0080\u009D (\u00E2\u0080\u009CTrauma,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 713). This can be achieved only if the processes of working through \u00E2\u0080\u009Closs and historical trauma \u00E2\u0080\u00A6 allow for a measure of critical distance, change, resumption of social life, ethical responsibility, and renewal\u00E2\u0080\u009D (713). LaCapra asserts that \u00E2\u0080\u009Ccertain forms of nontotalizing narrative and critical, as well as self-critical, thought and practice\u00E2\u0080\u009D (714) are useful modalities for working through. Here, I also draw on current mindfulness discourse, such as Pema Ch\u00C3\u00B6dr\u00C3\u00B6n\u00E2\u0080\u0099s discussion of \u00E2\u0080\u009Csitting with\u00E2\u0080\u009D and approaching affect \u00E2\u0080\u009Cwith curiosity and humor\u00E2\u0080\u009D (\u00E2\u0080\u009CGetting Unstuck\u00E2\u0080\u009D), to elucidate LaCapra\u00E2\u0080\u0099s discussion of working through as a form of existing with historical trauma, but being neither engulfed by it, nor transcending it 10 completely. I suggest that a more useful way of thinking about \u00E2\u0080\u009Cworking through\u00E2\u0080\u009D is to think of it as \u00E2\u0080\u009Csitting with.\u00E2\u0080\u009D Lastly, by engaging with Sarah Ahmed\u00E2\u0080\u0099s discussion of affectivity and emotion, I assert the efficacy of Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s novel not only as a tool for challenging xenophobia but also as a tool for healing. I do so by demonstrating that the very subtle echoes of trauma and the depiction of pervasive structural traumas, as opposed to graphic depictions of traumatic events, make the novel a compassionate and inclusive space for exploring and sitting with historical traumas. I argue that literature initiates dialogue and provides a medium for reconceptualizing and working through, that is, sitting with, historical rifts within the larger global community. In doing so, I suggest the novel participates in \u00E2\u0080\u009Csocially engaged memory-work\u00E2\u0080\u009D, which LaCapra identifies as the process through which \u00E2\u0080\u009Cone is able to distinguish between past and present and to recognize something as having happened to one (or one\u00E2\u0080\u0099s people) back then that is related to, but not identical with here and now\u00E2\u0080\u009D (713). Endnotes i For similar summaries refer to Slovene scholars Urban Zorko (\u00E2\u0080\u009CVodi\u00C4\u008D po vesti\u00E2\u0080\u009D and \"Zakaj so Vojnov\u00C4\u0087evi \u00E2\u0080\u00A6\u00E2\u0080\u009D), Lejla \u00C5\u00A0vabi\u00C4\u0087, Marko Stabej, \u00C4\u0090ur\u00C4\u0091a Strsoglavec, Jasna Zavodnik, D\u00C5\u00BEenana Kmetec, and Urban Vovk. ii See also Tomislav Zagoda, Jasna Zavodnik, Urban Vovk, Urban Zorko (\u00E2\u0080\u009CVodi\u00C4\u008D po vesti\u00E2\u0080\u009D and \"Zakaj so Vojnov\u00C4\u0087evi\u00E2\u0080\u00A6\u00E2\u0080\u009D), Lejla \u00C5\u00A0vabi\u00C4\u0087 and Marjan Horvat. iii For more specific information about the wars, who belonged to which side (since this shifted over the course of the war), what happened, why, and when refer to the following: Sabrina P. Ramet\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Serbia, Slovenia, and Croatia in Peace and at War; David Storey\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00E2\u0080\u009CTerritory and National Identity: Examples from the Former Yugoslavia;\u00E2\u0080\u009D Meg Coulson\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00E2\u0080\u009CLooking Behind the Violent Break-Up of Yugoslavia;\u00E2\u0080\u009D Dawa Norbu\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00E2\u0080\u009CThe Serbian Hegemony, Ethnic Heterogeneity and Yugoslav Break-Up;\u00E2\u0080\u009D and Aleksander Pakovic\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00E2\u0080\u009CThe Puzzle of Yugoslavia: An introduction.\u00E2\u0080\u009D Also worth examining are Laura Silber and Allan Little\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation and Dusko Doder\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00E2\u0080\u009CYugoslavia: New War, Old Hatreds.\u00E2\u0080\u009D While Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation is designed to hold the reader\u00E2\u0080\u0099s attention, and thus is perhaps a bit sensationalized, it gives a fairly broad overview of the conflict. While Doder\u00E2\u0080\u0099s article is intriguing and makes some interesting points, keep in mind that he tends to rely heavily on the problematic \u00E2\u0080\u009Cancient ethnic hatreds\u00E2\u0080\u009D theory. iv I have seen different numbers. I have chosen to go with ten because my father (o\u00C4\u008Di), who was called up when fighting started, said he \u00E2\u0080\u009Cwas scared for ten days.\u00E2\u0080\u009D 11 v On June 26th 1991, Slovenia announced its succession from Yugoslavia (Prunk 127). On December 28th 1991, Slovenia officially \u00E2\u0080\u009Cbecame a sovereign state\u00E2\u0080\u009D (128). \t \u00C2\u00A0vi Under the new law enacted at the time, these residents were given a set amount of time to apply for citizenships. Of the 173, 000 individuals who applied, \u00E2\u0080\u009C171, 000 were granted Slovenian citizenship\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Ramet 273). It is also worth noting that there were \u00E2\u0080\u009C30, 000 permanent residents [who] were said not to have filled out their application forms\u00E2\u0080\u009D (273). However, as Matev\u00C5\u00BE Krivic, a former constitutional court judge who interviewed many of the erased explains, 80 \u00E2\u0080\u0093 90% of those interviewed indicated that they did in fact fill out application forms (qtd. in Ramet 273). These individuals (and those who applied for, but were not granted citizenship) were subsequently \u00E2\u0080\u009Cerased from the citizenship rolls, with consequent loss of rights to jobs, to pensions, to medical care, to schooling for children, etc.\u00E2\u0080\u009D (273). The law was controversial, particularly because many of those who were erased say \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthat they did in fact file applications in time\u00E2\u0080\u009D (273). As Ramet points out, this \u00E2\u0080\u009Cwould mean that the erasure was premeditated, deliberate, and illegal\u00E2\u0080\u009D (273). vii Mehmedal Ali\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s memoir Nih\u00C4\u008De tells the story of a Bosnian who lived in Slovenia at the start of the wars and who was subsequently erased. This man also had family members and schoolmates killed during the war, and found the remains of a mass grave (from World War Two) in Huda Jama \u00E2\u0080\u0093 a mine, where he worked in Slovenia. I was alerted to the book and this man\u00E2\u0080\u0099s story when I watched a TV interview with him on RTV Slovenia (\u00E2\u0080\u009CIntervju,\u00E2\u0080\u009D RTV SLO). 12 Chapter 2: Interpellating Identity Identity in Ideology: The Boy in an Empty City Square \u00E2\u0080\u0093 Circle? Stereotyping is not the setting up of a false image which becomes the scapegoat of discriminatory practices. It is a much more ambivalent text of projection and introjection, metaphoric and metonymic strategies, displacement, over-determination, guilt aggressivety; the masking of \u00E2\u0080\u0098official\u00E2\u0080\u0099 and phantasmatic knowledges to construct the positionalities and oppositions of racist discourse. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (117) Bhabha\u00E2\u0080\u0099s analysis of the stereotype invites the reader to consider how the interplay of power, knowledge, narrative,i the psyche and the body shapes how individuals and communities make meaning as well as how we experience ourselves and others. The task may at first appear daunting and unnecessary\u00E2\u0080\u0093 almost like following the intricate workings of one\u00E2\u0080\u0099s blood vessels and muscle tissues. After all, on the whole, our daily lives and our bodies, if we belong to (or pass as) the majority in our society function just fine without our thinking, that is, until something goes wrong, until we are wounded, until something \u00E2\u0080\u0093 obvious or subtle \u00E2\u0080\u0093 demands our attention. However, how do we attend to \u00E2\u0080\u009Cpains\u00E2\u0080\u009D and \u00E2\u0080\u009Caches\u00E2\u0080\u009D in the world around us? How do we respond within and to the myriad of systems, institutions, ways of knowing, and ways of being that silently and invisibly frame our identities and our relationships with others as something essential, predetermined, originating from a \u00E2\u0080\u009Ctrue\u00E2\u0080\u009D essence we must constantly strive back to or towards? Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! depicts \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthe interactive processes and power relations that inform [identity and the] interchange between groups of people\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Azoulay 97).ii I postulate that the novel uses its representation of Slovene institutions as well as its characterization of Marko to demonstrate that Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00C4\u008Cefur identity is \u00E2\u0080\u009Cessential\u00E2\u0080\u009D only insofar as Marko exists in an ideology that interpellates him into that image. I also argue that Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 simultaneously exposes Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s 13 identity as a symptom of ideology and something that he, as an active agent who accepts and engages in a series of actions, which entrap him in the negative \u00C4\u008Cefur stereotype, is not a passive victim of. Thus by displaying the complicated interplay that hides behind Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s experienced \u00E2\u0080\u009Cessential\u00E2\u0080\u009D identity, Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 refuses to assign blame. He erases the \u00E2\u0080\u009Cessential\u00E2\u0080\u009D and exclusionary stereotype leaving the reader with a complex but addressable interplay of systems (of knowledge and meaning making, and so on) and institutions that one can choose to become aware of and choose to approach differently. 2.1 The \u00C4\u008Cefur Stereotype It is important to consider the term \u00C4\u008Cefur in greater detail. It refers to immigrants from the former southern republics of ex-Yugoslavia and their descendents (Zorko, \u00E2\u0080\u009CVodi\u00C4\u008D po vesti\u00E2\u0080\u009D 185-186). The novel\u00E2\u0080\u0099s first epigraph sums it up: \u00E2\u0080\u00A6 . \u00C4\u008Cefurs are those individuals who live within the borders of a country but who are not part of that country\u00E2\u0080\u0099s national majority. In our case, they are those individuals who come from areas south east of the Kolpe River. In most cases, the descendants of these immigrants are also recognized and referred to as \u00C4\u008Cefurs. They differ physiologically from the majority population by their low foreheads, uni-brows, and strong cheekbones. Their personality characteristics include: loving the easy life, swearing, love of alcohol, misogynism, and soccer. They are obsessed with kitsch and gold jewelry. They are beastly and are often aggressive without cause. Their assimilation is often long. (Robert Pe\u00C5\u00A1uta Magnifico qtd. in Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! 8, italics in original) This definition actually comes from Robert Pe\u00C5\u00A1uta\u00E2\u0080\u0099s, commonly known as Magnifico, song \u00E2\u0080\u009C[Gdo je]iii \u00C4\u008Cefur\u00E2\u0080\u009D that satirizes the racist undertones of the term. However, for the purpose of this study, I am interested in the assumptions the song reveals about \u00C4\u008Cefurs. These 14 assumptions are that \u00C4\u008Cefurs are \u00E2\u0080\u009Cessentially\u00E2\u0080\u009D different and inferior, evident in both physical and psychological characteristics. They are also seen as dangerous and uncultured, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cbeastly and \u00E2\u0080\u00A6 aggressive without cause,\u00E2\u0080\u009D in love with swearing and alcohol, and misogynistic. According to the song, a \u00C4\u008Cefur will inevitably always already have these characteristics; it is in their \u00E2\u0080\u009Cnature.\u00E2\u0080\u009D The Slovene and \u00C4\u008Cefur identities are \u00E2\u0080\u009Cidentities of difference\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Bhabha 5) \u00E2\u0080\u0093 negative difference. They exist on a binary defined by \u00E2\u0080\u009CCartesian dualism[ that] assumes two mutually exhaustive categories, one of which ( . . . ) is assumed to be inherently superior to the other\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Trisk 41). The problem is not the binary oppositions, per se, but the assumption that one side of the binary is better than the other. Thus, I suggest that a series of apparatuses \u00E2\u0080\u0093 specifically, interpersonal discourses, media discourses and institutions, the school system, the judicial system, and architectural structures \u00E2\u0080\u0093 hail Marko into the \u00C4\u008Cefur identity. Marko is successfully interpellated when he accepts this identity as his own. As Zorko explains, \u00E2\u0080\u009CVojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s hero does not reject the series of associations ascribed to the \u00C4\u008Defur community, he fulfills them, he explains them, and he is proud of them, since they are part of his identity \u00E2\u0080\u0093 an identity he did not have the opportunity to choose himself\u00E2\u0080\u009D (\u00E2\u0080\u009CVodi\u00C4\u008D po vesti\u00E2\u0080\u009D 187). Marko engages in a series of practices and rituals that (re)confirm his \u00C4\u008Cefur identity as his essential nature. Indeed, although Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00C4\u008Cefur identity may not be essential in and of itself, Marko is nevertheless interpellated so that he experiences the negative difference inscribed on his body as inherent. However, in spite of this interpellation, Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 never denies his protagonist agency. It is as much his responsibility to instigate a change of perception as anyone else\u00E2\u0080\u0099s. 2.2 Defining Methodology When I refer to ideology, I am thinking of both Louis Althusser\u00E2\u0080\u0099s notion of ideology and Michel Foucault\u00E2\u0080\u0099s notion of the apparatus. For Althusser, ideology is an 15 \u00E2\u0080\u009Cillusion/allusion\u00E2\u0080\u009D (162), \u00E2\u0080\u009Cnot the system of real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relation of those individuals to the real relations in which they live\u00E2\u0080\u009D (165). Ideology, in other words, is how one imagines and perceives the world and one\u00E2\u0080\u0099s place within it. This imagining and perception is simultaneously shaped by the ways in which one has learned to imagine and perceive through one\u00E2\u0080\u0099s interactions with others. Foucault\u00E2\u0080\u0099s notion of the apparatus, which is defined most clearly by Giorgio Agamben and Stephen Thierman, is similar. For Agamben, the apparatus is \u00E2\u0080\u009Canything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings\u00E2\u0080\u009D (qtd. in Thierman 91). For Thierman, the apparatus \u00E2\u0080\u009Coutlines the field of interactions that enables a particular kind of experience (or perception)\u00E2\u0080\u009D and \u00E2\u0080\u009Ccauses us to \u00E2\u0080\u0098see\u00E2\u0080\u0099 in a particular fashion\u00E2\u0080\u009D (90). The two, ideology and the apparatus, cannot be differentiated. I suppose one way of thinking about it is that the apparatus, or, as Foucault calls it, the \u00E2\u0080\u009Ccontinuum of apparatuses\u00E2\u0080\u009D (The History of 144) functions like a sort of membrane, which attempts to contain and frame how individuals and groups view the world. Ideology is the result of a particular shaping. Ideology, and indeed apparatuses, since one presupposes the other, therefore refer to the hidden interplay of knowledge/power; institutions; systems of knowing, being, (re)acting, and responding, that make our (re)actions, responses, and (pre)conceptions appear natural, or predetermined. The second theory that I rely on is Althusser\u00E2\u0080\u0099s theory of interpellation. For Althusser, ideology functions primarily through the successful interpellation of individuals into subjects (170-171). A subject is interpellated, or, to borrow another of Althusser\u00E2\u0080\u0099s terms, \u00E2\u0080\u009Chailed\u00E2\u0080\u009D into ideology, when he/she and those around him/her accept and then participate in actions that (re)confirm his/her identity, a sort of semi-permeable membrane (172-173). A semi- 16 permeable membrane, in this sense, is most simply the assumption that the individual in question will have an identity, and that there will be a certain number of rituals (for example, birth, attending school, church, sports practices) that are to a large extent dictated by the ideology one finds oneself in. To this end, Althusser draws two important conclusions. First, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cyou and I are always already subjects, and as such constantly practice the rituals of ideological recognition, which guarantee for us that we are indeed concrete, individual distinguishable and (naturally) irreplaceable subjects\u00E2\u0080\u009D (172-173). Second, the subject acts insofar as he is acted by the following system ( . . . ): ideology existing in a material ideological apparatus, prescribing material practices governed by material rituals, which practices exist in the material actions of a subject acting in all consciousness according to his belief. (170) Identity is experienced as true or essential, part of our core self. Althusser asserts that although our identities feel obvious to us, they are in fact mediated by an ideology that \u00E2\u0080\u009Calways exists in an apparatus, and its practice, or practices\u00E2\u0080\u009D (166). These practices involve common rituals \u00E2\u0080\u0093actions that have turned into practices, which have turned into rituals, which are subsequently used to (re)affirm the belief that instigated the chain of actions that began the ritual in the first place (168). Such rituals, for example those around birth and death, hail us into the world in a particular manner \u00E2\u0080\u0093 into a particular identity. The consequent actions \u00C3\u00A0\u00EF\u0083\u00A0 practices \u00C3\u00A0\u00EF\u0083\u00A0 rituals that we and those around us engage in continually (re)affirm the semi-permeable identity that we were hailed into and which we recognize and (re)affirm as our own by engaging in the actions \u00C3\u00A0\u00EF\u0083\u00A0 practices \u00C3\u00A0\u00EF\u0083\u00A0 rituals associated with it (168-171, 173, 176, 181). As Judith Butler puts it in regards to gender identity, \u00E2\u0080\u009C[identity] is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory 17 frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Gender Trouble 33). In other words, according to Althusser\u00E2\u0080\u0099s theory of interpellation, ideology creates a series of identity expectations, semi-permeable identities that make up the structure of and are structured by ideology. The individual becomes a subject \u00E2\u0080\u0093 an individual with an identity, when he or she \u00E2\u0080\u009Ccannot fail to recognize\u00E2\u0080\u009D their membrane and exclaim, \u00E2\u0080\u009CThat\u00E2\u0080\u0099s right! That\u00E2\u0080\u0099s true! \u00E2\u0080\u00A6 It\u00E2\u0080\u0099s me[!]\u00E2\u0080\u009D (172). I suggest that Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s subject position is (re)enforced, (re)affirmed, and indeed legitimized by a continuum of apparatuses which he recognizes, accepts, and (re)confirms. The apparatuses are comprised of interpersonal discourses, media discourses and institutions, the school system, the judicial system, and architectural structures that hail Marko into the derogatory, always already undesirable, lesser \u00C4\u008Cefur identity. 2.3 Looking in the Mirroriv - \u00E2\u0080\u009CThe Continuum of Apparatuses\u00E2\u0080\u009D When the Slovene reader opens \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus!, many know almost immediately that Marko is a \u00C4\u008Cefur. This is in part because Marko, who is complaining that there is no soccer teamv he can cheer for, tells the reader that this predicament is caused by his \u00C4\u008Cefur identity. But I will get to that eventually. This reader also knows that Marko is a \u00C4\u008Cefur because of his name \u00E2\u0080\u0093 Marko \u00C4\u0090or\u00C4\u0091i\u00C4\u0087 \u00E2\u0080\u0093 and his lineage. Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s surname includes the letters \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u009D and \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00C4\u0091,\u00E2\u0080\u009D which exist in the Serbian (Cyrillic) and Croatian (Latin) alphabets, but do not exist in the Slovene alphabet, although the sounds themselves are not completely foreign to Slovenes. Nevertheless, the presence of \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u009D and \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00C4\u0091\u00E2\u0080\u009D in Marko's surname automatically marks him as an other who hails from \u00E2\u0080\u009Csouth of the Kolpa River,\u00E2\u0080\u009D and thus as a \u00C4\u008Cefur. In addition, Marko tells us that his father cheers for \u00E2\u0080\u009CZvezda (\u00E2\u0080\u0098Star\u00E2\u0080\u0099 \u00E2\u0080\u0093 a Serbian soccer team, from Beograd), because although he is Bosnian, he is a Serb\u00E2\u0080\u009D (12). Here we begin to see the complicated relationship between ethnic and national identity in the ex-Yugoslavia. Marko, who was born 18 in Slovenia, is not considered a Slovene. He is a \u00C4\u008Cefur other. His father, who is a Bosnian, presumably born in Bosnia, is a Serb. Marko tells us that he [Marko] would be a Zvezda fan, but \u00E2\u0080\u009C[he] can\u00E2\u0080\u0099t. [He] doesn\u00E2\u0080\u0099t know why\u00E2\u0080\u009D (12). He says, \u00E2\u0080\u009CIt\u00E2\u0080\u0099s all complicated, fuck your mother\u00E2\u0080\u0099s kunt\u00E2\u0080\u009D (12). The implication is that Marko can\u00E2\u0080\u0099t be a Zvezda fan because he is not a Serb, although his mother and father are. The reader immediately knows that Marko is a direct descendant of people from Bosnia-Herzegovina. The \u00C4\u008Cefur identity thus becomes Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s semi-permeable identity membrane. He is hailed into the \u00C4\u008Cefur identity. In the epigraph that introduces this section, Bhabha asks the reader to consider \u00E2\u0080\u009C[s]tereotyping not [as] the setting up of a false image which becomes the scapegoat of discriminatory practices\u00E2\u0080\u009D, but as \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthe masking of \u00E2\u0080\u0098official\u00E2\u0080\u0099 and phantasmatic knowledges to construct the positionalities and oppositions of racist discourse\u00E2\u0080\u009D (117). I am intrigued by Bhabha\u00E2\u0080\u0099s observation and begin my close reading of Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s novel with his thoughts in mind. I also align myself, once again, with Foucault who is interested in the ways in which \u00E2\u0080\u009Ca particular discourse can \u00E2\u0080\u00A6 function as a means of justifying or masking a practice, which itself remains silent, or as a secondary reinterpretation of this practice, opening out for a new field or rationality\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Power/Knowledge 195-196). How does Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s novel expose the play of discourse as part of the \u00E2\u0080\u009Cbackground\u00E2\u0080\u009D and \u00E2\u0080\u009Cstor[ies \u00E2\u0080\u0093 ] the causes and effects[,]\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Zavodnik) of the self/other divide in Slovenia? What is hidden behind a superficial reading of the novel that processes only the derogatory images and presumptions associated with its discourse? In a lecture on January 14th 1976, Foucault sketches out the significance of discourse. He explains that \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthere are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterize and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, 19 consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of discourse\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Power/Knowledge 93). In other words, discourse shapes how one responds and (re)acts to the world; however, how we respond and (re)act to the world also shapes our discourse. Drawing on Slovene scholar and novelist Andrej Skubic,vi \u00C4\u0090ur\u00C4\u0091a Strsoglavec explains that limited knowledge of Slovene or the incorrect usage of Slovene is one of the first indicators of immigrant or other status. These linguistic differences quickly identify individuals as belonging to specific groups, especially when it comes to \u00E2\u0080\u009Cnations, which are connected to economic migrations (which is characteristic of immigrants from the former ex-Yugoslav republics)\u00E2\u0080\u009D (312). For example, near the beginning of the novel, Marko describes how the old \u00C4\u008Cefurs used to bring nets to the football field and play. He states \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthe funniest thing was, of course, listening to those who had learned a little bit of Slovenian and forgotten a little bit of \u00C4\u008Defurian, and now spoke some sort of mixture. Fu\u00C5\u00BEinian\u00E2\u0080\u009D (15). To illustrate his point, Marko provides a few examples \u00E2\u0080\u0093 \u00E2\u0080\u009CZvio sem si gle\u00C5\u00BEanje\u00E2\u0080\u009D and \u00E2\u0080\u009CJebala te Milka Planinc u usta\u00E2\u0080\u009D (15) \u00E2\u0080\u0093 which mean roughly \u00E2\u0080\u009Ctwisted I my ankle\u00E2\u0080\u009D and \u00E2\u0080\u009Cfucked Milka Planinc you in the mouth.\u00E2\u0080\u009D The syntax, as well as the occasional Bosnian term, for example \u00E2\u0080\u009Cu\u00E2\u0080\u009D instead of \u00E2\u0080\u009Cv\u00E2\u0080\u009D (\u00E2\u0080\u009Cin the\u00E2\u0080\u009D in English), identify the wording as other.vii As is perhaps obvious from these examples, particularly the more vulgar second example, Fu\u00C5\u00BEinian is more often than not, likely to be associated with graffiti slogans, usually peered upon with disgust and distaste, associated with hooligans or trouble makers, than with official print materials, such as Marko Snoj\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Slovene Etymological Dictionary, designed to preserve and maintain the Slovene language. In fact, one need only turn to some of the negative commentary surrounding the novel \u00E2\u0080\u0093 for example, a blog post that asserts the novel is \u00E2\u0080\u009Cunreadable\u00E2\u0080\u009D or the Slovene priest who notes, with what comes across a lot like disgust, that one counts thirty 20 swear words in the first three pages (qtd. in Stabej 301) \u00E2\u0080\u0093 to ascertain that the language recorded in \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! exists, at least in Slovenia, as a marker of (negative) difference. Discourse functions here \u00E2\u0080\u0093 in the form of Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s surname and the term \u00C4\u008Cefur \u00E2\u0080\u0093 as an indicator of negative difference, which is always already attached to the two communities\u00E2\u0080\u0099 cultural and national identities. In this example, then, discourse participates to solidify an ideology that privileges the Slovenes. In other words, the difference is not often \u00E2\u0080\u009Cexplicitly examined as the product of structural inequalities and asymmetrical social relations\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Azoulay 91). The letters in Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s surname and the term \u00C4\u008Cefur present the illusion that the negative difference associated with them was always already there, that is, an \u00E2\u0080\u009Cobviousness.\u00E2\u0080\u009D Consequently, the term masks the discursive (and other) structures that present it as such. That said, Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s protagonist is not blind to them. As Zorko puts it in the novel\u00E2\u0080\u0099s afterword, \u00E2\u0080\u009CMarko argumentatively shows us the reasons for the world he is tangled up in\u00E2\u0080\u009D (\u00E2\u0080\u009CVodi\u00C4\u008D po vesti\u00E2\u0080\u009D198). For example, in the chapter titled \u00E2\u0080\u009CWhy Slovenia Pisses Me Off,\u00E2\u0080\u009D Marko outlines the more subtle mechanisms of discourse that serve to position \u00C4\u008Cefurs on the \u00E2\u0080\u0098other\u00E2\u0080\u0099 side of the binary. He begins by comparing life in Bosnia with life in Slovenia. He states, in regards to Slovenia, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cwhat pisses me off the most is that they write Marko Djordji\u00C4\u008D\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Vojnvoi\u00C4\u0087, \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! 67). He goes on, \u00E2\u0080\u009Ctoday I went to the post office for the first time in my life, and there is mail under the name Ranka Djordji\u00C4\u008D\u00E2\u0080\u009D (67). He continues, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthey are always fuckin whinin at me at school, bitching about these agreements and conjugations \u00E2\u0080\u00A6 and so on, but they can\u00E2\u0080\u0099t write a single surname? Is it that hard? Six letters. \u00E2\u0080\u00A6 . You have them on every fuckin key board\u00E2\u0080\u009D (67). Although Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s enunciation may leave something to be desired (although perhaps that is just my own bias surrounding vulgarities), he has a point. 21 The letters \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00C4\u0091\u00E2\u0080\u009D and \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u009D are relatively easy to find on the keyboard, and the sounds they make are similar enough to the Slovenian sounds \u00E2\u0080\u009Cdj\u00E2\u0080\u009D (similar to a \u00E2\u0080\u009Cd\u00E2\u0080\u009D and soft \u00E2\u0080\u009Cg\u00E2\u0080\u009D sound) and \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00C4\u008D\u00E2\u0080\u009D (similar to a fast and long \u00E2\u0080\u009Cch\u00E2\u0080\u009D sound), to not be too much of a hindrance. Moreover, considering that Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia, and Croatia (whose languages these letters come from) were once a single country, one would be hard pressed to find a Slovene who does not know the '\u00C4\u0091' and '\u00C4\u0087' letters. However, as Marko explains \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthis is that nationalism\u00E2\u0080\u009D (67). But, what is really going on? Could one not argue that since this group is in Slovenia, they must abide by the Slovene alphabet, even if their letters make sense given Slovenia\u00E2\u0080\u0099s history? Yes, one could argue that. However, doing so ignores the subtle mechanisms of power that manifest themselves in this particular \u00E2\u0080\u009Cdiscursive formation.\u00E2\u0080\u009D For Foucault, \u00E2\u0080\u009Ca discursive formation is defined neither in terms of a particular object, nor a style, nor a play of permanent concepts, nor by the persistence of a thematic, but must be grasped in the form of a system of regular dispersion of statements\u00E2\u0080\u009D (The editors of H\u00C3\u00A9rodote qtd. in Power / Knowledge 63). Foucault\u00E2\u0080\u0099s hypothesis suggests that when examining the interplay of discourse and power, one should pay attention to how discourse works in practice to produce knowledge \u00E2\u0080\u0093 an idea and understanding of the world, which becomes an \u00E2\u0080\u009Cobviousness,\u00E2\u0080\u009D a \u00E2\u0080\u009Ctruth\u00E2\u0080\u009D (63). In this case, the negative difference associated with \u00C4\u008Cefurs is the \u00E2\u0080\u009Cobviousness\u00E2\u0080\u009D under affirmation by discourse. The affirmation occurs paradoxically, at least in the first example. At the post office the \u00C4\u0090or\u00C4\u0091i\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s (negative) \u00E2\u0080\u0098other\u00E2\u0080\u0099 identity is simultaneously hidden (disavowed) and reinforced. On the one hand, the disappearance of the \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00C4\u0091\u00E2\u0080\u009D and \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u009D eliminates the visual indicators of difference. However, substituting in the \u00E2\u0080\u009Cdj\u00E2\u0080\u009D and \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00C4\u008D,\u00E2\u0080\u009D maintains the phonetic difference. The silencing, which is only partial, is significant here. In 22 the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault states: \u00E2\u0080\u009C [a]s if in order to gain mastery over it [sexuality] in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present\u00E2\u0080\u009D (17). By \u00E2\u0080\u009CSlovenianizing\u00E2\u0080\u009D \u00C4\u0090or\u00C4\u0091i\u00C4\u0087, the post office and indeed the general discourse that does so on a regular basis,\u00E2\u0080\u009Csubjugate[s]\u00E2\u0080\u009D the surname \u00E2\u0080\u009Cat the level of language\u00E2\u0080\u009D; it controls it. However, this control is \u00E2\u0080\u009Crendered\u00E2\u0080\u009D invisible. The difference continues to be present \u00E2\u0080\u0093 it is heard; however, it ceases to exist \u00E2\u0080\u0093 it is not seen. The shadow of difference becomes the invisible other one can sense but cannot see. The very attempt to control, that is, eliminate the difference, serves to intensify it. The difference becomes not something that is \u00E2\u0080\u009Cdifferent\u00E2\u0080\u009D but something which is uncanny, and thus frightening. The selective use and elimination of different alphabets becomes part of, to borrow Foucault's terminology, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cnot one but many silences, ... [that] are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses\u00E2\u0080\u009D (27), which in turn shape one's perception of the world and one's subjectivity. Consider Marko's second example, which he provides just after his outburst about the post office. He tells the reader that \u00E2\u0080\u009Cwhen you read the criminal pages [in the newspaper] \u00E2\u0080\u00A6 all of the Had\u00C5\u00BEihafisbegovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s and \u00C4\u0090oki\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s and all of the \u00C4\u008Defurs have nice '\u00C4\u0091s' and '\u00C4\u0087s'\u00E2\u0080\u009D (67). In the sports pages, however, \u00E2\u0080\u009Call of the Nesterovi\u00C4\u0087 have a nice hard \u00C4\u008D. And all of the Be\u00C4\u008Dirovi\u00C4\u0087's and Lakovi\u00C4\u0087's and ...\u00E2\u0080\u009D (67). But you can bet, he concludes, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthat if that Radoslav Nesterovi\u00C4\u0087 robbed an exchange store, he would have soft \u00C4\u0087 across the whole page\u00E2\u0080\u009D (67). The surnames, which identify individuals as immigrants or descendants of immigrants from the southern republics of ex-Yugoslavia because of the letters used, are left intact in news reports that outline criminal behavior. However, surnames belonging to the same community group 23 are Slovenianized when they refer to this community groups\u00E2\u0080\u0099 sporting success. The result is that good deeds are associated with Slovenes and Slovene sounding/looking names. Bad deeds, on the other hand, are associated with the other \u00E2\u0080\u0093 the non-Slovene. Indeed, by outlining the varying representation of \u00C4\u008Cefurs in the newspapers, Marko exposes the ways in which the media, or at least the newspapers, use discourse to (re)affirm and legitimize the self/other divide. The school is another institution that subtly reinforces the binary. Like the discussion of newspapers above, this is in part caused by the power that can be channeled through discourse. To illustrate how this occurs, Marko describes the first day of school, an important scene when it comes to exposing the continuum of apparatuses that interpellate the two communities into a self/other binary as follows: when you come to school on the first day, all of the Slovene moms are banging on the doors and taking pictures with their cameras, and all the Slovene youngsters are ready and smart, and they all know each other, and they all know everything already, and so they are all smart, and they crowd around the first bench, so they will be closer to the teacher and become little keeners. And they are all talking to the teacher and having a great time. But one Ranka and the other \u00C4\u008Defur moms stand all scared shitless with us little \u00C4\u008Defurs in the back, and will only look when someone will ask them something, because they themselves screwed up school, because it never clicked for them, and because they never learnt to speak Slovene great, so then they hope that no one will ask them anything. And then they wait silently while all the Slovenes get set up, and then they secretly push their young into the classroom 24 and hightail it out of there. And the young, scared just as shitless as their mothers, plop themselves down in the back row, as far away from everyone as possible, because they are just as scared as their mothers that someone will ask them something. Then they sit in the back row in total terror until the end of the fifth or sixth year, when they lose it because of all the fear and fucking bullshit, so then they go crazy and start with the bullshit and fucking everyone in a row on the head. (Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 123, italics indicate term was originally in Bosnian) Responding to this scene, Zorko postulates that Marko explains the significance of this first day by suggesting that the students are ashamed, frightened of a new environment, and unable to adapt because their parents do not know how to help them bridge the gap in their new environments (\u00E2\u0080\u009CVodi\u00C4\u008D po vesti\u00E2\u0080\u009D195). Zorko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s point is worth noting. On the first day of school, the most glaring indicator of difference between the two communities appears to be the different treatment the children receive from their mothers. The Slovene mothers are presented as excited and supportive, if somewhat crazed. Their children are presented as excited and prepared, if perhaps a tad obnoxious. The \u00C4\u008Cefur mothers, on the other hand, are presented as unsupportive, though the critique is moderated by the fact that Marko acknowledges their fear. Their children are presented as frightened, unhappy to be there, and unprepared. However, the mother\u00E2\u0080\u0099s lack of support is only the surface problem. The main indicator of difference, and the one that perpetuates the cycle, is actually much more subtle \u00E2\u0080\u0093 discursive, invisible, but always already present. As Marko tells us, the mothers are terrified that someone will ask them something, and that their response \u00E2\u0080\u0093 in badly spoken Slovene \u00E2\u0080\u0093 will identify them as other, but not only 25 other, an undesirable other. The mothers are presented as almost cowering. It seems that they cannot wait to get out of there, not because they don\u00E2\u0080\u0099t love their children, but because they are so terrified of being identified. The implication is that the experience of being othered \u00E2\u0080\u0093 that is, marked as undesirable, by the gaze of the Slovene self, is paralyzing. The mothers\u00E2\u0080\u0099 fear does not allow them to give their children the skills and support they need to succeed in the classroom. As a result, the children do not learn and they act out in the school system. They get sent to the Trades high-school, which Marko asserts the \u00E2\u0080\u009CSlovenes created \u00E2\u0080\u00A6 because they didn\u00E2\u0080\u0099t know what to do with all the \u00C4\u008Defurs\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087, \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! 122). Consequently, the \u00C4\u008Cefur children are less educated than their Slovene peers and thus less likely to receive equal paying occupations. As such, the stereotype that immigrants from the south are only capable of doing low paying, physically demanding jobs is reaffirmed. The stereotype and its reaffirmation suggest that the stereotype merely (re)produces an inherent truth. However, the perpetuation of difference, which in this example begins because of a linguistic difference, is (re)enforced, that is, (re)produced by the school system, which further others the \u00C4\u008Cefur children and does not provide them with the safe and comfortable environment necessary to provide them with the skills they would need to participate in all sectors of Slovenia\u00E2\u0080\u0099s socio-economic sphere. In fact, the school system intensifies perceived negative difference by drawing attention to the differences between the two communities and highlighting the \u00C4\u008Cefur identity, which is indicated by cultural signifiers such as language, as something shameful and undesirable. For example, Marko explains that he hates being asked if his surname is spelled with a soft or hard \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00C4\u008D\u00E2\u0080\u009D or \u00E2\u0080\u009Cwhere his parents [are] from\u00E2\u0080\u009D (97). He also refers to the awful feeling when the grammar teacher handed back his assignment and \u00E2\u0080\u009Cannounce[d] in front of 26 the whole class that he used Croatianisms in his essay\u00E2\u0080\u009D (97). Thus, while Marko admits that he rarely goes to school (122) and admits that the \u00C4\u008Cefur school children eventually begin wreaking havoc (123), I cannot help but feel that there is a relationship between the way he is (or perceives he is) treated in school and the acting out he describes. As such, one can see how the various components of the apparatus, in this case discourses, the educational institutions, and the socio-economic institutions which require an education are all intertwined and mutually reinforcing. If one is limited or positioned as an other by one, then one is continually repositioned in this way. Thus, in this way, Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s characterization of the school system demonstrates the ways in which a series of mutually re-enforcing apparatuses position Marko and the other members of the Fu\u00C5\u00BEine community on the margins of Slovene society. Marko further describes the tension between the two linguistic communities and the lack of recognition given to immigrants from the southern republics of ex-Yugoslavia for their contributions to Slovene society as follows: Slovenians get all fuckin riled up if someone doesn\u00E2\u0080\u0099t know how speak Slovenian, but I don\u00E2\u0080\u0099t know how it would help them if all the Pe\u00C5\u00A1i\u00C4\u0087i [Pe\u00C5\u00A1i\u00C4\u0087s] knew Slovenian. Would they like to talk to us? To me these are completely irrelevant, useless, discussions. I mean that, that these Pe\u00C5\u00A1i\u00C4\u0087i [Pe\u00C5\u00A1i\u00C4\u0087s] should know how to speak Slovenian out of respect to Slovenia and all that. Pe\u00C5\u00A1i\u00C4\u0087i [Pe\u00C5\u00A1i\u00C4\u0087s] work on construction sites, they built all of Slovenia, in their lives they respect only Miroslav Ili\u00C4\u0087 and cold beer. If all the Pe\u00C5\u00A1i\u00C4\u0087i [Pe\u00C5\u00A1i\u00C4\u0087s] spoke Tungastanian, no one would notice. Makes your dick hurt. But the Slovenians suffer because of that and are constantly whining and I don't know what. That 27 is part of their complex, because they never learned to play futball [soccer]. (Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! 136) Although Marko's description is bitter and angry, if humorous, he makes a solid point. Slovenes do tend to be very critical if someone from the south does not speak proper Slovene. They are not so critical if other immigrants struggle with the language. Marko's point is also significant because, as Slovene commentators have suggested, both the Slovenes and the immigrant community are complicit in this relationship, the Slovenes because, as Marko's description of the first day of school shows, they make no (or very few) attempts to provide a comfortable and inclusive enviroment for the immigrant children to learn in, and, the \u00C4\u008Defurs, because they don\u00E2\u0080\u0099t go to school. (For example, Marko once tells us he is going to school for the first time \u00E2\u0080\u009Cafter a hundred years\u00E2\u0080\u009D and that he is just going to sit in the \u00E2\u0080\u009Cback row and nap a little\u00E2\u0080\u009D (122)). Also important is Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s observation that the Slovene community lacks respect (or appears to lack respect) for the work the immigrant community does. Again differences are not valued; they are put on a hierarchical scale, where people are not appreciated for their contribution to the greater whole. Up until this point, I have mainly been concerned with the ways in which Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 uses Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s narrative to expose the subtle functioning of the Ideological State Apparatuses, that is, systems and institutions, which do not overtly function through repression, although their \u00E2\u0080\u009Cactions\u00E2\u0080\u009D may well be experienced as violent by the bodies they are imposed onto. However, Marko also \u00E2\u0080\u009Charshly tackles the Slovene police \u00E2\u0080\u00A6 and their tendency to ignore the law\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Zorko, \u00E2\u0080\u009CVodi\u00C4\u008D po vesti\u00E2\u0080\u009D 195). Marko meets the police on two occasions. The first time, Marko and his friends are drunkenly singing \u00E2\u0080\u009CWe are the Champions\u00E2\u0080\u009D followed by a nationalistic Serbian song into the apartment intercom system. The police, who just returned 28 from delivering a warning to Radovan (Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s father), who was drunkenly celebrating Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s winning three-point buzzer shot in the national basketball tournament, pick them up and throw them into the back of a police van (Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! 20-21). Marko explains that he doesn\u00E2\u0080\u0099t know \u00E2\u0080\u009Chow they flew in there\u00E2\u0080\u009D (21). All \u00E2\u0080\u009C[he] know[s] is that Adi was lying under [him] and Dejan on top of him. And that then they closed the door\u00E2\u0080\u009D (21). The boys are thrown about the back. Marko says that \u00E2\u0080\u009C[he] covered [his] head and waited for this mad house to be over\u00E2\u0080\u009D (22). When they stop, they are thrown out in the middle of some forest and left to make their own way home. They eventually do, but first they ransack an old cottage (23-24). Their second encounter with the police happens right after Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s expulsion from the basketball team Slovan. Marko explains that \u00E2\u0080\u009Cas a reward for punching one of Olympia\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Kangaroos left right on the beard, I was suspended for a week\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 44). When he returns, late for practice, his coach is waiting for him. The coach sees Marko drop his smoke, and tells him to pick it up. Marko refuses. Marko is subsequently told \u00E2\u0080\u009CGood bye. When you want to play basketball, come back\u00E2\u0080\u009D (44-45).viii These are good examples that Marko is not a black and white victim. He often makes choices and acts in ways that do not present him positively. During this second example, Marko is really upset and the boys get very drunk (46, 47-50). They end up \u00E2\u0080\u009Ctearing up\u00E2\u0080\u009D a bus and harassing a girl who is on it (51). The driver calls the police, and Marko and Aco are caught (52). The boys are abused. Aco leaves the police station with cracked ribs (69), in addition to the broken arm, which he broke on the bus (72). Marko is kicked/punched in the kidney and forced to jump up a wall (53-54). He is also forced to sign a document stating that he was not beaten (54). The behavior of both \u00E2\u0080\u0093 the boys and the police \u00E2\u0080\u0093 is, to say the least, problematic. My analysis of how the police institution serves as a Repressive State Apparatus, part of the \u00E2\u0080\u009Ccontinuum of apparatuses,\u00E2\u0080\u009D 29 which intermingle and function covertly to position \u00C4\u008Cefurs as the undesirable other, is not meant to justify or excuse the behavior of either. I am not suggesting the boys should not have been arrested \u00E2\u0080\u0093 that is a question for an entirely different debate. However, I would argue that the punishment far exceeds the crime and that the police actions were not justified. Therefore, I suggest that these scenes, like the previous ones, ask us to pause upon the subtle mechanisms of power that inform the interaction. To explain how this occurs, I turn once again to Foucault. In his discussion of the developing prison system, Foucault suggests that one must not only address \u00E2\u0080\u009Cdiscourses about prisons,\u00E2\u0080\u009D one must also examine the various discourses within the prisons. He also asserts that the prison\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00E2\u0080\u009Ccovert discourses and ruses, ruses which are not ultimately played by any particular person, but which are none the less lived, . . . assure the permanence and functioning of the institution\u00E2\u0080\u009D(Power/ Knowledge 38). In Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s case, he never once says that the police made any overt indications that they were targeting him and his friends specifically because they were \u00C4\u008Cefurs; however, Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s lived experience, given that he makes it clear that the Slovene police did this, is that this is the case. The scenes are also telling because later on, the reader finds out that the newspapers\u00E2\u0080\u0099 representations of \u00C4\u008Cefurs emphasize the association between \u00C4\u008Cefurs and criminals and minimize, that is, hide, the associations between \u00C4\u008Cefurs and sports heroes. It is not much of a stretch to read the events in this scene as predetermined. The police are interpellated into a culture that perceives \u00C4\u008Cefurs as always already criminal \u00E2\u0080\u0093 dangerous, no gooders. Thus the police actions are \u00E2\u0080\u009Cjustified\u00E2\u0080\u009D within a sphere of knowledge that positions the \u00C4\u008Cefurs as always already a hindrance to Slovene society. Ironically enough, or perhaps it is to be expected, the police behavior also reinforces this behavior. After the first time the boys are abused \u00E2\u0080\u0093 arguably 30 sadistically toyed with \u00E2\u0080\u0093 the frightened, sick, and yes, drunk group vandalize a cottage. Although it must be acknowledged that the boys are responsible for their own actions, it is nevertheless clear that their actions were instigated and intensified by the way the police treat them. Similarly, after Marko and Aco are released from prison, Aco decides he must beat up the bus driver who reported them. Again, Aco is responsible for his own actions. The novel makes no attempt to justify or excuse his behavior. However, the police brutality acts as a catalyst here as well. In other words, the actions of the police, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cwhich are not ultimately played by any particular person,\u00E2\u0080\u009D but are a series of events caught in a complicated dance that seemingly cannot be broken, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cserve to assure the permanence and functioning of\u00E2\u0080\u009D in this case, not the institution of the prison, but the ideology that positions the immigrant from the southern republics of ex-Yugoslavia as always already negative \u00E2\u0080\u0093 undesirable and dangerous. 2.1 Hailing the Self \u00E2\u0080\u0093 Marko accepts his interpellation? \u00E2\u0080\u0093 and Mimicry In The Location of Culture, Bhabha makes a similar observation. He states that \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthe question of identification is never the affirmation of a pre-given identity, never a self -fulfilling prophecy \u00E2\u0080\u0093 it is always the production of an image of identity and the transformation of the subject in assuming that image\u00E2\u0080\u009D (64). By exposing the ways in which Marko actively participates in maintaining and performing his interpellated subject position, Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 refuses to allow Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s position to be only that of a passive victim. In fact, in \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus!, Marko is no longer the comical stock character that most often represents the immigrant community from the southern republics of ex-Yugoslavia in Slovenia (Zorko 194; \u00C5\u00A0vabi\u00C4\u0087). Marko becomes a round and dynamic character. By illuminating the ways in which Marko is interpellated and consequently acts out this identity, Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 gives agencyix back to the \u00C4\u008Cefur and illustrates that although both the reader and Marko may experience Marko's 31 identity as essential (unchangeable), such a perception of his identity is merely an illusion of ideology.x However, before outlining how this occurs, it is useful to emphasize the paradox that underlies both ideology and xenophobia. Strsoglavec explains, \u00E2\u0080\u009C[i]n public spaces, immigrant dialects are a source of comedy, which is often belittling, but is at the same time an auto referential source\u00E2\u0080\u009D (312).xi Her point is intriguing because it illustrates the chicken and egg conundrum of interpellation. One is hailed into a particular identity, and the more one accepts and engages in actions, practices, and rituals that (re)affirm this identity as \u00E2\u0080\u009Ctrue,\u00E2\u0080\u009D that is, essential, the more \u00E2\u0080\u009Cobvious\u00E2\u0080\u009D this truth appears. Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s novel illustrates that Marko is not only interpellated into his \u00C4\u008Cefur identity, but he is also interpellated into an ideology that accepts as given that one's identity is inherently based on one's ethno-national origins, both of which appear to be (to a greater extent) understood as biologically or spiritually essential (i.e. unchanging) characteristics. Marko accepts this as his \u00E2\u0080\u009Cessential\u00E2\u0080\u009D (biological) identity. Indeed, although Marko appears convinced throughout the novel that \u00E2\u0080\u009CWe [Slovenians and \u00C4\u008Cefurs] do not have the same things in our blood, and that\u00E2\u0080\u0099s that!\u00E2\u0080\u009D (67, translation mine), that is not that. Marko is not genetically predetermined (or guaranteed) to behave in this way because he belongs to an \u00E2\u0080\u009Cethnic\u00E2\u0080\u009D group or \u00E2\u0080\u009Crace\u00E2\u0080\u009D of people referred to as \u00C4\u008Cefurs. Paradoxically, however, because Marko believes and exists in an ideology that requires him to do so, Marko is right: \u00E2\u0080\u009C[Slovenians and \u00C4\u008Cefurs] do not have the same things in [their] blood, and that\u00E2\u0080\u0099s that!\u00E2\u0080\u009D (67). Indeed, Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s identity is inherent only insofar as it is constructed and interpellated as such. However, what holds more weight: the fact that Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s essential (ethnic, national, \u00C4\u008Cefur) identity lacks solid footing; or, that Marko experiences his interpellated identity as essential? 32 2.1.1 Practice and Ritual Marko begins the novel ranting and raving because there is no football [soccer] team he can call his own. He cannot, he explains, cheer for any of the soccer teams other than Serbian Zvezda. He doesn\u00E2\u0080\u0099t want to cheer for the Slovene team Slovan, because, as he puts it, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthat\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Czech\u00E2\u0080\u009D (11).xii He has a little more trouble explaining why he can\u00E2\u0080\u0099t cheer for the other Slovene soccer team Olympia. First he tells the reader it is because he plays basketball with another Slovene club Slovan. Then he states that he actually does cheer for them, but he just can\u00E2\u0080\u0099t be a fan. He doesn\u00E2\u0080\u0099t know why: \u00E2\u0080\u009CI don\u00E2\u0080\u0099t know why. It\u00E2\u0080\u0099s stupid really. Fuck it. Maybe the problem really is that I\u00E2\u0080\u0099m a \u00C4\u008Cefur. But it is also because I am a \u00C4\u008Cefur that I am so upset I don\u00E2\u0080\u0099t have a club. I have that in my blood\u00E2\u0080\u009D (11, italics mine). In addition to the fact that Marko appears to associate identity with one\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00E2\u0080\u009Cnational\u00E2\u0080\u009D and \u00E2\u0080\u009Cethnic\u00E2\u0080\u009D affiliations, there are two points worth noting. First, by stating \u00E2\u0080\u009CI\u00E2\u0080\u0099m a \u00C4\u008Cefur,\u00E2\u0080\u009D Marko recognizes and accepts the \u00C4\u008Cefur identity as his own. Second, Marko, who is successfully interpellated into the \u00C4\u008Cefur identity immediately also recognizes and begins (re)affirming the characteristics associated with the identity. He swears. He makes it clear that soccer is really important to him, and he asserts that he would not be so upset if he wasn\u00E2\u0080\u0099t a \u00C4\u008Cefur. And, perhaps most importantly, Marko states that his passion is something biologically \u00E2\u0080\u009Cessential\u00E2\u0080\u009D: it is in his blood; it makes up the very foundation of his being. Thus, for Marko, the \u00C4\u008Cefur identity exists as an \u00E2\u0080\u009Cobviousness\u00E2\u0080\u009D \u00E2\u0080\u0093 always already there. Marko continues to (re)produce and in doing so legitimize the negative characteristics assigned to \u00C4\u008Cefurs throughout the narrative. He tells the reader that after his team won the basketball game against Olympia, he ran up and down the gym screaming; all he wanted to do was pull his pants down, show the opponent his penis, and tell him to go \u00E2\u0080\u009Cfuck it\u00E2\u0080\u009D (18). He states that when the ball drops into the basket and the buzzer goes, you lose all of your 33 nervousness, your adrenaline spikes, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cand you become an animal\u00E2\u0080\u009D (18). He describes his actions as the \u00C4\u008Defur primitivism, fucked, vulgar, disgusting, sick, this morbid Balkan narcissism that is for some reason always cool, when this animalistic tendency comes out or when you are drunk as fuck. This is something genetic in us, at least in \u00C4\u008Defurs. And that\u00E2\u0080\u0099s why you scream: \u00E2\u0080\u009CWe are the heroes, we are the heroes! We are the gypsies, we are the gypsies.\u00E2\u0080\u009D (19). For Marko, his behavior, which he recognizes as inappropriate, is natural \u00E2\u0080\u0093 obvious! His experience, at least in this scene, is that he has no control over it. It \u00E2\u0080\u009Cis something genetic in [him]\u00E2\u0080\u009D (19). In other words, Marko believes (practices) his interpellated \u00C4\u008Cefur identity. Here, I would draw our attention to Althusser\u00E2\u0080\u0099s paraphrase of Pascal: \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00E2\u0080\u0098Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe\u00E2\u0080\u009D (168). Althusser argues that practice equals belief, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthat the \u00E2\u0080\u0098ideas\u00E2\u0080\u0099 of a human subject exist in his actions\u00E2\u0080\u009D (168). In other words, Althusser maintains that if an action is completed often enough, it becomes a practice; once this practice is completed often enough, it becomes a ritual. Eventually, when the ritual is repeated often enough, it becomes a belief, or a \u00E2\u0080\u009Ctenacious obviousness[ ]\u00E2\u0080\u009D (166-169, 128), something that is always already recognized as true. The reader sees this occur throughout the novel. First, as I discuss above, Marko accepts his \u00C4\u008Cefur identity. Then, Marko participates in a series of practices that reaffirm this identity, for example, in the scene at the basketball game discussed above; when Marko and his friends get belligerently drunk (20-21, 48-52); when Marko and his friends run out on the restaurant bill (32-33); as well as when the boys use vulgar and misogynistic language when interacting with girls (41-42, 50-52). Consequently, 34 Marko repeats the actions assigned to the \u00C4\u008Cefur identity he is hailed into, continually presenting them as always already there, obvious and essential. Or does he? In the first example, Marko states that he acts violently after the basketball game because there is something genetic in \u00C4\u008Cefurs, that is, those who hail from the southern republics of ex-Yugoslavia. However, later on, his narrative, while still engaging in a series of practices and rituals that (re)affirm the imposed identity, also challenges it. For example, although Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s narrative critiques the Slovene police who once left the boys in the middle of the forest (20-21) and beat them another time (52-55), Marko acknowledges that he too might have called the police if there were three hooligans ransacking his bus (101). This suggests that he believes he deserved to be punished, if not beaten for his actions. In addition, while Marko acknowledges the ways he and his friends talk to and about girls, he also mentions that he always felt uncomfortable with this sort of language (41).xiii Similarly, when describing the restaurant scene, Marko acknowledges his own problematic behavior (he and his friends do not pay for the bill); however, he also outlines that the waitress looked at them \u00E2\u0080\u009Clike they were the biggest hooligans from the very beginning\u00E2\u0080\u009D (34, 33). Indeed, despite the fact that the novel implicates Marko and his friends as being deserving of, or at least living up to, the derogatory stereotypes that they are hailed into from birth, or to borrow Zorko's terminology, which are \u00E2\u0080\u009Cpredestined\u00E2\u0080\u009D for them (\u00E2\u0080\u009CVodi\u00C4\u008D po vesti\u00E2\u0080\u009D 187), the novel is an open minded but firm critique of the way the Slovene public treats the immigrant community that hails from the former southern republics of ex-Yugoslavia. The strongest reason for the novel\u00E2\u0080\u0099s success is its ability to evoke empathy and restrain from directing blame. Going back to the restaurant scene, as Zorko points out, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cin the same breath that he [Marko] rages because the waitress looks at him like he is criminal, he 35 admits that he ran out and escaped without paying the bill\u00E2\u0080\u009D (196). The scene is perhaps one of the most complicated and thought provoking scenes in the narrative. The boys decide to go to the restaurant because Marko won the basketball match and now he has to treat them. (In Slovenia, the person celebrating an event or success pays for the celebration, not the other way around as it is in Canada). The other reason, of course, is that they do not want to go home. Marko tells us they went to the restaurant Babnik \u00E2\u0080\u009Cbecause they have really reasonable prices, if you are fast and bust it out of there when the waitress isn't looking\u00E2\u0080\u009D (32). He goes on to say that \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthere is only one problem with this restaurant, you can only go once\u00E2\u0080\u009D (32). \u00E2\u0080\u009CI don't know,\u00E2\u0080\u009D he says, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cif there is a \u00C4\u008Cefur anywhere in the world who has been to this restaurant more than once. Every weekend someone comes hightailing it out of Babnik stuffed like a pig\u00E2\u0080\u009D (32). So far, Marko has not challenged any of the stereotypes leveled against \u00C4\u008Cefurs. Instead, he has blatantly confirmed them. Then Marko points to something that should give us pause: But is it my fault, that the Fu\u00C5\u00BEine are so close and that the waitresses don't run after us through the suburbs. Fuck her mother, the waitress kept staring at us from the very beginning like we were the most criminal of them all. Just because we looked like little \u00C4\u008Defurs, or what? I even saw the look in her eyes, as she watched us, and thought that we were gonna piss out of there as soon as we were done. We did piss out of there, but that's not the point. The point is, that she couldn't have known we were gonna piss out of there, but she kept glaring at us and giving us shitty portions. (32) 36 He adds, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cwhat if we had paid? What then? She would have looked at us just the same. And that's just it! Fucking cow!\u00E2\u0080\u009D (33). Leaving Marko's colorful language aside, he has a point. The scene almost seems to convey the chicken and egg dilemma. What came first, the negative perceptions and stereotypes surrounding the \u00C4\u008Cefurs which cause Slovenes to stare and glare at them, like they were really the worst hoodlums and criminals in the world? Or was it the \u00C4\u008Cefurs, who, Marko admits, rather frequently \u00E2\u0080\u009Cpiss off\u00E2\u0080\u009D without paying the bill? As he puts it, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cwhat would have happened if we paid at the end? She would have still looked at us this way. And that\u00E2\u0080\u0099s the ke\u00C4\u008D [catch]!\u00E2\u0080\u009D (33-34). Significantly, in this scene, the reader is invited to empathize with both the waitress and Marko. We can empathize with waitress because she has reason to suspect that she will not get paid for this order. Moreover, the language Marko uses to describe her suggests the boys were not the most pleasant or respectful customers. However, we can also empathize with Marko. Even if we tend to belong to the dominant demographic, we can imagine or at least be open to attempting to imagine what it would feel like to be looked at with disgust and distrust. We can imagine, or at least the novel invites us to imagine, what it would feel like to walk into a room or a restaurant and immediately sense that we are not wanted and that the people around us think we are lesser. Basically, the scene tells us that someone, the narrative does not seem to care who, is going to have to break the circle. Either the waitress will have to step out on a limb and treat the \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00C4\u008Cefurs as she would any other customer, or the \u00C4\u008Cefurs represented by the boys, will have to start paying the bill. Of course, I would not delude myself or the reader of this thesis into thinking that such an approach will change the established pattern. Rather, I would like to emphasize that by indicating both the waitress and Marko and his friends as guilty of wrongdoing, Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 has left both with the responsibility 37 to fix it. Neither is innocent here; however, we also cannot say that either is completely guilty. However, it is only because Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 sets up the scene so that the context as well as the cause and effect of each character\u00E2\u0080\u0099s actions are illustrated that we are able to empathize with both. These scenes are important because they demonstrate that although Marko appears to engage in a series of practices and rituals that (re)confirm and legitimize his \u00C4\u008Cefur identity \u00E2\u0080\u0093 sometimes he is even successfully interpellated into this identity \u00E2\u0080\u0093 his actions suggest that he is not so much interpellated into an ideology that positions him as the undesirable other, as he is partially interpellated and engages in a sort of mimicry of this identity. 2.1.2 Mimicry Bhabha defines mimicry as \u00E2\u0080\u009Ca sign of a double articulation; a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline, which \u00E2\u0080\u0098appropriates\u00E2\u0080\u0099 the other as it visualizes power\u00E2\u0080\u009D (122). I use the term similarly. I understand the term \u00C4\u008Cefur to function as \u00E2\u0080\u009Ca complex strategy\u00E2\u0080\u009D meant to \u00E2\u0080\u009Cregulate and discipline\u00E2\u0080\u009D the other. It is an appropriation of the other, insofar as it dictates the other\u00E2\u0080\u0099s identity. However, I understand Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s mimicry of the \u00C4\u008Cefur identity as a variation on Bhabha\u00E2\u0080\u0099s concept of mimicry. Unlike Bhabha\u00E2\u0080\u0099s definition, in which the other mimics the self and (re)affirms the self\u00E2\u0080\u0099s position by being \u00E2\u0080\u009Calmost the same but not quite\u00E2\u0080\u009D (127), Marko mimics the identity of the other, as it is defined and positioned by the self. Or, as Albert Memmi explains (in relation to the colonizer/colonized binary), \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthe colonized emerges as the image of everything the colonizer is not\u00E2\u0080\u009D (ref. in Hartsock 160). I understand the relationship between Slovenes and \u00C4\u008Cefurs similarly. Slovenes (the novel\u00E2\u0080\u0099s ethnically homogeneous majority) occupy the position of the self, while Marko and the \u00C4\u008Cefurs (the ethnically diverse minority) occupy the position of the other. In this way, the \u00C4\u008Cefurs are positioned to represent everything (bad or negative) that the Slovenes are not. Marko, thus, mimics the stereotype of a \u00C4\u008Cefur in the first epigraph that describes \u00C4\u008Cefurs as 38 using vulgar language and having a visceral, animalistic need for violence. Marko does not try to repeat and (re)present the self; rather, I view him as trying to repeat and (re)present (mimic) the defined and constructed other, which is the necessary opposite in an ideology grounded by an either/or dichotomy. That said, I am perhaps a tad hasty in asserting that Marko mimics only the identity of the other. It is true that Marko does not attempt to mimic the image of the Slovene self. In fact, he considers being called a Slovene an insult (68). Marko always already accepts, acknowledges, and even fulfills his personification of the imagined other. However, Marko is not a passive object in this dichotomy. On the contrary, he actively participates in the very process that others him. One could say that while Marko does not mimic the image (identity) of the Slovene self, he does mimic the actions of the self. For example, some time after Marko and Aco get released from the police station, Marko goes with Aco to stalk Damjanovi\u00C4\u0087, the bus driver, who reported them to the police. They sit in front of his apartment building. Marko is just about to leave because, as he puts it, he does not \u00E2\u0080\u009Chave time for this bullshit\u00E2\u0080\u009D, when Damjanovi\u00C4\u0087 comes out. Marko tells us that Damjanovi\u00C4\u0087 \u00E2\u0080\u009Clooked completely ridiculous, and [that] he had a real \u00C4\u008Defur face\u00E2\u0080\u009D (131). At this point, Marko pauses to explain that he and his friends once got in an argument \u00E2\u0080\u009Cbecause [he] claimed that you can tell a \u00C4\u008Defur apart from a Slovene, by their face\u00E2\u0080\u009D (131). He then tells the reader that \u00E2\u0080\u009CDamjanovi\u00C4\u0087 proved [this] theory\u00E2\u0080\u009D (131). \u00E2\u0080\u009CYou really couldn't screw him up. Harsh facial features, thick whiskers, some blurry look, half crooked teeth, he was just missing a toothpick in his mouth\u00E2\u0080\u009D (131). Here Marko is actively participating in a ritual that positions one group, in this case his own \u00C4\u008Cefur group, as other. If one breaks down Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s description of Damjanovi\u00C4\u0087, it is clear that his description is not so different from the 39 derogatory assertion that \u00C4\u008Cefurs are \u00E2\u0080\u009Care beastly and are often aggressive without cause\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Pe\u00C5\u00A1ut qtd. in Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087, \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! 8). Damjanovi\u00C4\u0087 has \u00E2\u0080\u009Ckostmat[e],\u00E2\u0080\u009D which suggests thick hairy, almost furry, whiskers. In addition, Marko describes Damjanovi\u00C4\u0087's eyes as having a sort of \u00E2\u0080\u009Cblissfully blurry\u00E2\u0080\u009D expression which, given the other descriptors and subsequent analysis of his teeth as \u00E2\u0080\u009Chalf crooked\u00E2\u0080\u009D, is closer to the English colloquial expression \u00E2\u0080\u009Ccreepy\u00E2\u0080\u009D than anything else. One is invited to think of a dangerous male who preys on women and children. The point, of course, is that Marko is actively participating in the \u00E2\u0080\u009Ccomplex strategy\u00E2\u0080\u009D meant to \u00E2\u0080\u009Cregulate and discipline\u00E2\u0080\u009D the other. In fact, Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s hypothesis and his \u00E2\u0080\u009Cexperiment\u00E2\u0080\u009D accept and reproduce the pseudoscientific theory of physiology encapsulated by the first epigraph that maintains that \u00C4\u008Cefurs \u00E2\u0080\u009Cdiffer physiologically from the majority population by their low foreheads, uni-brows, and strong cheekbones\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Pe\u00C5\u00A1ut qtd. in Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087, \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! 8). In Bhabha\u00E2\u0080\u0099s theory, the self appropriates the other\u00E2\u0080\u0099s identity in order to dictate it. Here, Marko appropriates the actions of the self in order to maintain and legitimize his own other identity as real and definable. Since I agree with Zagoda, who argues that the novel functions as a \u00E2\u0080\u009Cform of resistance which Bennet qualifies as \u00E2\u0080\u0098conservative praxis committed to the defence of subordinate culture\u00E2\u0080\u0099\u00E2\u0080\u009D (549), I do not believe we can read this phenomenon as simply an indicator of the dominant culture\u00E2\u0080\u0099s all-pervasive power. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that by practicing the action of differentiating \u00C4\u008Cefurs and Slovenes based on their physiology \u00E2\u0080\u0093 that is, mimicking the actions of the self \u00E2\u0080\u0093 Marko is not only accepting the derogatory characterization of his \u00C4\u008Cefur identity as an \u00E2\u0080\u009Cobviousness\u00E2\u0080\u009D \u00E2\u0080\u0093 a truth \u00E2\u0080\u0093 his ritual actions make it thus, despite the fact that Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s narrative allows the possibility that it may not really be quite so obvious \u00E2\u0080\u0093 always already there. 40 I would like to pause a moment further on the ways in which Marko believes (practices) his interpellated \u00C4\u008Cefur identity. However, I am not thinking about such obvious events; rather, I am intrigued by the moments when Marko not only interpellates his other identity as essential, but where he also actively participates in this othering process. One example is the scene with the bus driver discussed above. Another is the scene that immediately precedes it. Marko is grumpy with Aco, who is \u00E2\u0080\u009Csociolosifizing,\u00E2\u0080\u009D psychologizing, and philosophizing about the differences between \u00C4\u008Cefurs and Slovenes. Marko explains that ever since Aco put the neighbors who were trying to take advantage of his mom Marina straight, Aco thinks \u00E2\u0080\u009Che knows everything about everything\u00E2\u0080\u009D (129). Ironically Marko, given that he was just complaining about Aco\u00E2\u0080\u0099s philosophizing, explains, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthat is a typical \u00C4\u008Defur characteristic. When something goes well for you, you become smart [a smartass], so it hurts your head. Your self-confidence grows by the minute. You puff up to the max. And then you walk around the Fu\u00C5\u00BEine in the biggest peasant-\u00C4\u008Defur way\u00E2\u0080\u009D (129). In this passage, Marko states that Aco is acting in a \u00E2\u0080\u009Ctypical \u00C4\u008Defur\u00E2\u0080\u009D manner. In other words, Aco is acting in a way that is typical of a certain group, the \u00C4\u008Cefur group. Aco is acting unlike another, in this case, Slovene, group. Moreover, Marko describes Aco\u00E2\u0080\u0099s actions (behavior) with if not scorn and disgust, at the very least dislike. Consequently, since Aco is doing something undesirable, and his actions are typical of \u00C4\u008Cefurs, the reader is left with the follow association: \u00C4\u008Cefur equals something negative, something lesser. In fact, Marko accepts the \u00E2\u0080\u009Cessential\u00E2\u0080\u009D \u00C4\u008Cefur difference, and, he engages in a series of actions (practices), which eventually serve to (re)affirm the \u00E2\u0080\u009Cessential difference.\u00E2\u0080\u009D 2.2 The Abjection What is particularly interesting here is that Marko is interpellated into an ideology that always already assumes a binary opposition based on negative difference. In this 41 ideology, Bosnian becomes the signifier for different \u00E2\u0080\u0093 the undesirable different. Zagoda refers to this phenomenon in another Slovene text Pse\u00C4\u0087i tango by Ale\u00C5\u00A1 \u00C4\u008Car. To illustrate how the term \u00E2\u0080\u009CBosnian\u00E2\u0080\u009D functions in the Slovene language, Zagoda describes a scene in the novel where the two main characters wish to rent a flat. Although one of the characters Viktor finds an affordable flat, his partner Anita states that she is \u00E2\u0080\u009Cnot moving to Fu\u00C5\u00BEine\u00E2\u0080\u009D \u00E2\u0080\u009C[b]ecause Bosnians live there\u00E2\u0080\u009D (qtd. in Zagoda 548). As Zagoda explains, \u00E2\u0080\u009C[w]e can say that the word \u00E2\u0080\u0098Bosnian\u00E2\u0080\u0099 has become the . . . signifier for \u00E2\u0080\u0098the Other\u00E2\u0080\u0099 and it can signify a Croat, Serb, Muslim, or even a Jew or Roma \u00E2\u0080\u0093 the ethnicity is not important for the general signifier of \u00E2\u0080\u0098the Other\u00E2\u0080\u0099\u00E2\u0080\u009D (548). Marko uses \u00E2\u0080\u009CBosnian\u00E2\u0080\u009D in a derogatory fashion similar to Anita\u00E2\u0080\u0099s use of the term. For example, in the chapter titled, \u00E2\u0080\u009CWhy I don\u00E2\u0080\u0099t get out of bed on Sundays,\u00E2\u0080\u009D Marko explains that his parents always argue on Sundays. On this particular day, Marko tells the reader that his father is upset because the sarma (cabbage rolls) are on the balcony and not in the fridge. Marko explains, [o]f course, it is pretty fucked up that the sarma is on the balcony, but that you get pissed about that is for the nut house. The thing is that his head hurts and he is hung over, so now he wants to eat sarma for breakfast. Fuck sarma for breakfast. If that isn\u00E2\u0080\u0099t the most Bosnian thing in the world. (Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 25) Bosnian, here, is used to refer to something negative \u00E2\u0080\u0093 undesirable. In this sentence, Bosnian no longer indicates someone of another nationality; rather, Bosnian indicates someone who is inferior, gross, strange. Marko, himself the descendent of two Bosnian-Serbs, who at other points in the novel romanticizes his Bosnian relatives and their way of life (66), uses this term as an insult. Thus, although Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s narrative indicates that he is aware of the continuum of apparatuses that (re)inforce and (re)produce his identity, he is nevertheless 42 fully interpellated into an ideology that positions his assigned identity as always already negative. Indeed, despite the fact that Marko is, as Zorko notes, a proud \u00C4\u008Cefur (\u00E2\u0080\u009CVodi\u00C4\u008D po vesti\u00E2\u0080\u009D 187), Marko simultaneously appears to reject \u00E2\u0080\u0093 expel his \u00E2\u0080\u009Cotherness,\u00E2\u0080\u009D his other-self, so to speak. I am thinking, here of Franz Fanon\u00E2\u0080\u0099s essay \u00E2\u0080\u009CThe Lived Experience of the Black Man\u00E2\u0080\u009D (1952) and Julia Kristeva\u00E2\u0080\u0099s theory of abjection. In Fanon\u00E2\u0080\u0099s essay, Fanon encodes his lived experience in the face of the white man\u00E2\u0080\u0099s stare. When faced with the white man\u00E2\u0080\u0099s stare, the white man\u00E2\u0080\u0099s image of him, Fanon feels \u00E2\u0080\u009CNausea\u00E2\u0080\u009D (423).xiv He exists \u00E2\u0080\u009Cin the triple: I was taking up room. I approached the Other \u00E2\u0080\u00A6 and the Other, evasive, hostile, but not opaque, transparent and absent, vanished. Nausea\u00E2\u0080\u009D (423). Fanon becomes the white man in that he experiences himself as the white man experiences him; he is the other in that he exists in relation to the white man; and, he is the non-existent \u00E2\u0080\u0093 \u00E2\u0080\u009Cnot opaque, transparent and absent, vanished\u00E2\u0080\u009D \u00E2\u0080\u0093 object in his lived experience of himself in the face of the white man\u00E2\u0080\u0099s gaze. In the face of this experience, Fanon explains that he \u00E2\u0080\u009Ctransported [his self] \u00E2\u0080\u00A6 far, very far away from [himself], and gave [himself] up as an action\u00E2\u0080\u009D (423). In the face of the white man\u00E2\u0080\u0099s, the self\u00E2\u0080\u0099s, gaze, Fanon experiences himself as abject \u00E2\u0080\u0093 that undesirable something, which is not recognized as a something, but an uncanny meaninglessness, that which is \u00E2\u0080\u009Copposed to I\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Kristeva 2) \u00E2\u0080\u0093 which he must expel from himself. I think something similar happens to Marko in \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! Marko is interpellated into an ideology that positions the identity he is hailed into as an undesirable other. Most importantly, Marko is interpellated into an image of himself, the \u00C4\u008Cefur self he identifies with, as it is present in the face of the self\u00E2\u0080\u0099s (the Slovene\u00E2\u0080\u0099s) gaze. As such he accepts it as both something associated with him and something negative, and acts accordingly. Thus, when he engages in actions that mimic those 43 of the self \u00E2\u0080\u0093 i.e. using \u00E2\u0080\u009Cstreet\u00E2\u0080\u009D eugenics to differentiate between Slovenes and \u00C4\u008Cefurs and describing things as \u00E2\u0080\u009Ctypically \u00C4\u008Cefur or \u00E2\u0080\u009Cso Bosnian\u00E2\u0080\u009D in a way that indicates their un-desirableness, their negative difference, Marko is effectively expelling the signifiers associated with the identity he has interpellated (internalized) as his essential self. In other words, Marko is expelling himself as abject. To put it simply, Marko is not interpellated into an identity, his identity; Marko is interpellated into an image of himself, as it exists in the fearful and disgusted gaze of the self that shapes his identity. Endnotes i For a discussion of narrative and identity, as well as meta-narratives, refer to Andreea Deciu Ritivoi\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00E2\u0080\u009CExplaining People: Narratives and the Study of Identity.\u00E2\u0080\u009D ii Jasna Zavodnik states that \u00E2\u0080\u009C[a]lthough Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 emphasizes that many different people live in the Fu\u00C5\u00BEine, in his award winning narrative, he was thinking mainly about stereotypes surrounding \u00C4\u008Cefurs which he generally did not break open but showed their background\u00E2\u0080\u009D (italics around \u00C4\u008Cefur mine). She goes on to say that \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthe novel evolved through the exploration and understanding of specific occurrences and events\u00E2\u0080\u009D; and, \u00E2\u0080\u009C[Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087] believes that behind the behavior of certain groups there exists a story, the causes and effects of this behavior.\u00E2\u0080\u009D Similarly, Zorko explains that Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 presents the reader with a group of people in a very tight spot. He gives us a sense of their experiences. However, he does not provide explanations of the causes for and the effects of their actions and attitudes. Nor does he provide us with the cause and effect of the relationship between the Slovenes and \u00C4\u008Cefurs Rather, Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 presents the reader with the humorously sad/catalystic view, almost cinematic, and explains the basic characteristics (Zorko, \u00E2\u0080\u009CVodi\u00C4\u008D po vesti\u00E2\u0080\u009D 194-195, italics around \u00C4\u008Cefur mine). iii The title here is ironic. As is pointed out by commentator \u00E2\u0080\u009CMusica TheMusica\u00E2\u0080\u009D on the YouTube comments section, it should be \u00E2\u0080\u009Ckdo\u00E2\u0080\u009D je \u00C4\u008Cefur.\u00E2\u0080\u009D \u00E2\u0080\u009CGdo\u00E2\u0080\u009D is not correct Slovenian grammar. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSmPkrwGMQI iv The idea for the subsection heading \u00E2\u0080\u009CLooking through the Mirror\u00E2\u0080\u009D comes from the following statement from Urban Zorko: \u00E2\u0080\u009CWe find ourselves in front of a mirror, and in it Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 tackles the whole spectre of \u00C4\u008Defur existence in Slovenia\u00E2\u0080\u009D (\u00E2\u0080\u009CVodi\u00C4\u008D po vesti\u00E2\u0080\u009D 194). v Marko makes reference to a number of soccer teams and sport clubs in Slovenia and Bosnia. His references to Zvezda (star) also called Cervena Zvezda (Red Star) indicate a Serbian soccer team from Beograd. Marko tells the reader that these fans are called Delija (12). Zvezda is technically a sports club, and there are basketball teams e.t.c. that use the name. However, Marko refers only to the soccer team. Olimpija and Slovan are names of sport clubs in Slovenia. Each club includes a soccer and basketball team among others. Marko talks about the soccer teams from the Olimpia and Slovan clubs. He plays on the basketball team for Slovan. Green Dragon refers to a fan of Olimpija. Red Tigers are Slovan fans. 44 vi Skubic is credited with being one of the first, if not the first, writers to use dialogs specific to Ljubljana in his writings, particularly his 2001 novel Fu\u00C5\u00BEinski bluz (Strosoglavec 311-312). The difference between Skubic\u00E2\u0080\u0099s and Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s novels is, among others, that Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 is mostly concerned with immigrants, which also influenced his choice of social dialect, or more correctly, speech\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Strsogalvec 312). vii The actual creation of this language received considerable attention in Slovenia. It is indeed a linguistic feat. The hybrid dialect has \u00E2\u0080\u009Ctwo levels\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Zorko, \u00E2\u0080\u009CVodi\u00C4\u008D po vesti\u00E2\u0080\u009D 188; Strsoglavec 311). The first level uses predominantly Slovene terminology and grammar, while the second level mixes Slovene words with Bosnian syntax, mixes Slovene words with non-Slovene words, and mixes non-Slovene words with Bosnian grammar and syntax (Zorko 188; Strsoglave\u00C4\u0087 311). In general, as Vovk explains by referring to Zorko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s afterword, the Slovene heavy language \u00E2\u0080\u009Cdominates at the level of narrative, while the non-Slovene syntax and wording is central to the narrator\u00E2\u0080\u0099s intimate surroundings\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Vovk). The language can also be used, Strsoglavec explains, to distinguish between first generation immigrants (Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s parents) and second-generation immigrants (Marko and his friends) (311-312). viii\t \u00C2\u00A0Zorko states that the official reason for Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s expulsion is the fact that he hogged the ball during the state championship (\u00E2\u0080\u009CVodi\u00C4\u008D po vesti\u00E2\u0080\u009D 187). Zorko identifies this point as the catalyst that sets off Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s maturation (187). \t \u00C2\u00A0ix Zorko alludes to another way Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 gives Marko back his agency. He explains that Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 manages to record the treasure chest of sayings, wisecracks, and judgments the Slovenian ethos cooks up at the expense of their neighbors from the former Yugoslavia. His hero, Marko \u00C4\u0090or\u00C4\u0091i\u00C4\u0087 does not reject them. He fulfills them, he explains them, and he is proud of them, since they are part of his identity \u00E2\u0080\u0093 an identity he did not have the opportunity to choose himself (187). In other words, Marko appropriates them. x Althusser states that \u00E2\u0080\u009Cideology = illusion/allusion\u00E2\u0080\u009D (162). xi Here Strsoglave\u00C4\u0087 once again draws on one of Skubic\u00E2\u0080\u0099s observations. \t \u00C2\u00A0xii Slovan is actually a Slovene team. Czech here is used in a derogatory fashion. xiii Urban Vovk states that Marko appears sensitive to the plight of \u00E2\u0080\u009Cpassive female characters\u00E2\u0080\u009D in the immigrant community throughout the narrative. Vovk suggests that it is in his interactions with these female characters that Marko most appears as \u00E2\u0080\u009Cdown to earth and sensitive character.\u00E2\u0080\u009D \t \u00C2\u00A0 xiv Thank you to George Grinnell whose classroom discussions helped me to formulate this idea. 45 Chapter 3: The Mist of Trauma The (learned) gut feeling: the imposition of trauma on the self and the body\u00E2\u0080\u00A6. Experiences of unsettlement, loss, and recurring terror produce discrepant temporalities \u00E2\u0080\u0093 broken histories that trouble the linear, progressivist narratives of nation-states and global modernization. (Clifford 317, italics mine) In this section, I postulate that Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! exposes two communities that exist within a continuum of apparatuses framed by a larger trauma apparatus. In other words, I contend that the novel illustrates a series of interactions that appear to stem from, but are not often consciously tied to, a complex interplay of historical and personal traumas that encourage (re)actions and responses that occur in the present but that are learned (re)actions and responses to past traumatic events. I argue that the novel elucidates the ways in which the traumatic past, characterized by pain and mistrust, is imposed \u00E2\u0080\u0093 consciously and unconsciously \u00E2\u0080\u0093 onto the present through the (re)production of knowledge, for example, through discourse, public names and figures, the state apparatus, as well as accounts of personal experiences, behaviors, and memories. \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! depicts the ways in which the trauma apparatus impose a feeling of \u00E2\u0080\u009Cnaturalness\u00E2\u0080\u009D onto the encounter with the other, yet, paradoxically, creates learned \u00E2\u0080\u009Cinstinctive\u00E2\u0080\u009D responses and (re)actions of discomfort, anxiety, and dislike. Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s story reveals how the trauma apparatus limits one\u00E2\u0080\u0099s self-awareness. 3.1 Defining Trauma Aporia: a perplexing difficulty (The OED, italics mine) The complicated and confusing term \u00E2\u0080\u0093 traumai \u00E2\u0080\u0093 requires further nuancing. In Trauma: A Genealogy Ruth Leys traces the genealogy of trauma from its conception as a \u00E2\u0080\u009Cphysiology of shock\u00E2\u0080\u009D in the late 1800s, a mental reaction caused by extreme physical shock (3); to its re- 46 conception as \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthe wounding of the mind brought about by sudden, unexpected, emotional shock\u00E2\u0080\u009D (3-4), a way of thinking about trauma that is associated with thinkers such as \u00E2\u0080\u009CJ.M Charcot, Pierre Janet, Alfred Binet, \u00E2\u0080\u00A6 Sigmund Freud, and other turn-of-the-century figures\u00E2\u0080\u009D (3-4); to more recent neurobiological as well as literary and philosophical discussions associated with thinkers such as Bessel A. van der Kolk and Cathy Caruth.ii However, when one speaks of trauma today, he or she is most often referring to PTSD \u00E2\u0080\u0093 Posttraumatic Stress Disorder. As a disorder, PTSD, which outlines some of the most common, though certainly not exclusive manifestations of trauma, has only been recognized by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), published by the American Psychiatric Association, since 1980. The most recent publication of this manual \u00E2\u0080\u0093 the DSMV\u00E2\u0080\u0093 defines PTSD as either the direct \u00E2\u0080\u009C[e]xposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence\u00E2\u0080\u009D, witnessing such an event, learning that such an event has occurred to a family member or close loved one, or having been exposed to the immediate effects of such an event. In order for one\u00E2\u0080\u0099s response to such an event to be labeled PTSD, the individual must experience \u00E2\u0080\u009Cone (or more) of the following intrusion symptoms associated with the traumatic event(s)\u00E2\u0080\u009D: intrusive thoughts, images, or flashbacks related to the event in either nightmares or other forms; trouble sleeping, emotional numbing, amnesia, and violent outbursts; avoidance of stimuli associated with the event; depression, difficulty concentrating, and/or hypervigilance; persistent feelings of guilt and shame; the inability or lack of desire to form interpersonal connections, and so on. If such symptoms persist for more than a month and hinder the person\u00E2\u0080\u0099s functioning and ability to pursue fulfilling activities, the individual will be diagnosed with PTSD (American Psychiatric Association).iii As such the DSM gives a relatively useful sense of how trauma manifests. However, as trauma scholars remind us, no two individuals suffering with PSTD exhibit the same symptoms. Moreover, while some individuals experience PTSD, others may experience an extreme event but 47 not have traumatic responses. Thus, defining working through and sitting with trauma require a multidisciplinary approach that includes not only the \u00E2\u0080\u009Csocial\u00E2\u0080\u009D and \u00E2\u0080\u009Chard\u00E2\u0080\u009D \u00E2\u0080\u009Csciences,\u00E2\u0080\u009D but also a myriad of non-academic forms of knowledge. However, I will focus largely on the discussions of trauma from cultural and literary critical studies. Dominick LaCapra, building on Sigmund Freud\u00E2\u0080\u0099s discussions of trauma, defines \u00E2\u0080\u009C[t]rauma as a disruptive experience that disarticulates the self and creates holes in the existence; it has belated effects that are controlled only with difficulty and perhaps never fully mastered\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Writing History, Writing 41). Cathy Caruth describes it as \u00E2\u0080\u009Cwound of the mind\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Unclaimed Experience 4), more specifically, a \u00E2\u0080\u009Ccrying wound\u00E2\u0080\u009D (8), \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthe breach in the mind\u00E2\u0080\u0099s experience of time, self, and the world\u00E2\u0080\u009D (4). Trauma, she states, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cis not, like the wound of the body, a simple and healable event, but rather an event that \u00E2\u0080\u00A6 is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor\u00E2\u0080\u009D (3-4). This point is interesting because trauma, its experience, and its responses, can take many forms. One can be unaware that an experience has been traumatic until one re-experiences it in such things as flashbacks and nightmares and so on. One can have an extreme experience and perceive it without symptoms initially, only to find that it has a large psychosomatic effect later. Similarly, one may experience the event as traumatic initially, but not be able to imagine the long-term effects and affects of the trauma. Moreover, trauma is not always the result of a specific event. Trauma can also be historical or structural. To quote LaCapra, \u00E2\u0080\u009C[h]istorical trauma is specific, and not everyone is subject to it or even entitled to the subject position associated with it\u00E2\u0080\u009D (78). A historical trauma, in other words, refers to a specific event or occurrence, for example, enduring or witnessing torture, loss of a loved one or home. When it comes to structural trauma \u00E2\u0080\u0093 for example poverty, 48 sexism, and/or racism \u00E2\u0080\u0093 however, \u00E2\u0080\u009C[e]veryone is subject to\u00E2\u0080\u009D it (79) where these things exist. The two are also not mutually exclusive, and one may find that his or her experiences move between the two. However, the subtle distinction is worth pointing out, not only because it hints at the ways in which specific historical traumas may slide into and be absorbed by structures of knowledge, but also because of the ways in which structures of knowledge or apparatuses may move between and stick to historical traumas in ineffectual attempts to explain absences with historical losses. LaCapra elucidates that an absence refers to something that is lacking but which never existed in the first place. Here one might look at the events in post-War Germany. In The Inability to Mourn Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich argue that after World War One the Germans were susceptible to Hitler and the Nazi ideology, because \u00E2\u0080\u009C[w]orld-redeeming dreams of ancient greatness arise in peoples in whom the sense of having been left behind by a history evokes feelings of impotence and rage\u00E2\u0080\u009D (12). The absence, here, is the loss of \u00E2\u0080\u009Cancient greatness\u00E2\u0080\u009D that has the power to \u00E2\u0080\u009Credeem\u00E2\u0080\u009D the world to some perfect whole. After World War Two, the Germans never carried out processes of mourning for the loss of lives, land, Hitler, economic and social power, or the identities of a rational self lost as a result of World War Two. The authors suggest that all responsibility for the war was left in the hands of Hitler and a few high-ranking Nazi officials (xvi). As a result the fact that many Germans participated in the euphoria of the Third Reich was neither acknowledged nor explored. Writing in the 1960s, the Mitscherlich\u00E2\u0080\u0099s explain that \u00E2\u0080\u009Calthough, rationally speaking, it should have been the most burning problem in their minds, Germans have shown a minimum of psychological interest in trying to find out why they became followers of a man who led them to the greatest material and moral catastrophe in their history\u00E2\u0080\u009D (9). 49 Instead, they have sought to move forward without ever coming to terms with or even acknowledging their own pain or the pain their regime brought upon others. They avoided acknowledging or addressing the concrete losses associated with the war. This is in part because they did not wish to acknowledge the shame associated with their country\u00E2\u0080\u0099s role in World War Two. The problem is not only that \u00E2\u0080\u009Ca very considerable expenditure of psychic energy is needed to maintain this separation of acceptable [for example the loss of home and loved ones] and unacceptable memories\u00E2\u0080\u009D, but also that \u00E2\u0080\u009Cwhat is consumed in the defence of a self anxious to protect itself against bitter reproaches of conscience and doubts of its own worth is thus unavailable for mastering in the present\u00E2\u0080\u009D (16). There was a sense of absence, but specific losses were not acknowledged. When losses were acknowledged, they were reduced to loss of territory to the Russians without taking into account the complexities of the war and its myriad of losses. In other words, the past was repressed, numbed out, buried, unacknowledged. Remaining trapped in this manner can have serious effects, especially when the memories repressed manifest themselves as guilt and/or shame. Many children of those complicit in Nazism attested the impact of this on social and family life. Sabrina P. Ramet discusses shame in the context of former Yugoslavia, specifically Serbia: [w]hile shame may have multivarious sources, one of them is feeling that one is considered guilty of something terrible in the eyes of others. In other words, there is, in some cases, a strong link between guilt and shame. Shame is a powerful force that tortures those it affects. But shame may be repressed, giving rise to the phenomenon of unacknowledged shame in which a person might seem \u00E2\u0080\u0098\u00E2\u0080\u00A6 not to be in pain, revealing an emotional response only by rapid, obsessional speech on 50 topics that seemed somewhat removed from dialogue.\u00E2\u0080\u0099 (Ramet and Scheff qtd. in Ramet, Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia 137). In Serbia this phenomenon in conjunction with xenophobic nationalism produced \u00E2\u0080\u009Ca powerful concoction in which the society is able to escape to a mythic reality in which a people (in this case the Serbs) are portrayed as simultaneously heroic and victimized\u00E2\u0080\u009D (136). The absence in this sense is the mythic reality to which the people escape. The losses are whatever events initiated the feelings of guilt and shame that have been repressed. In Germany, similarly, the Germans were prepared to grieve for the land they lost to the Russians, but not, for example, the loss of Jewish lives, or their own loss of hope and faith, national power and prosperity offered by Hitler (xvi, 5-6, 22-24). These losses, then, are experienced as an absence of wholeness. Looking forward in this sense is not about acknowledging the past, learning from it, and then making choices in the present based on an awareness of how this past may affect reactions in the present. On the contrary, looking forward, in this respect, means pretending the past did not occur and refusing \u00E2\u0080\u0093 consciously or not \u00E2\u0080\u0093 to become aware of how the past affects reactions in the present. Indeed, [w]hen psychic defence mechanisms such as denial and repression play an excessive role in the solution of conflicts, whether on the individual or the collective level, perception of reality inevitably narrows and stereotyped prejudices spread; in reciprocal reinforcement, the prejudices in turn protect the process of repression or denial from disturbance. (Mitscherlichs 14) To quote LaCapra, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cabsence is not an event and does not imply tenses ( . . . ). By contrast, the historical past is the scene of losses that may be narrated as well as of specific possibilities that may conceivably be reactivated, reconfigured, and transformed in the present or future\u00E2\u0080\u009D (49). In other words, absences, for example \u00E2\u0080\u009Cancient greatness,\u00E2\u0080\u009D control, or \u00E2\u0080\u009Cmythic reality,\u00E2\u0080\u009D were 51 always already absent, whereas losses, for example loss of land and lives, were but are no longer. An absence is more closely linked to a structural trauma, for example the desire for a whole and homogeneous state, while a loss is more closely linked to a specific event. The problem occurs when the two are conflated: losses cannot be adequately addressed when they are enveloped in an overly generalized discourse of absence, including the absence of ultimate metaphysical foundations. Conversely, absence at a \u00E2\u0080\u009Cfoundational\u00E2\u0080\u009D level cannot simply be derived from particular historical losses, however much it may be suggested or its recognition prompted by their magnitude and the intensity of one\u00E2\u0080\u0099s response to them. (46) Nevertheless, the terms are not exclusive: \u00E2\u0080\u009Closses may entail absences, but the converse need not be the case\u00E2\u0080\u009D (48). Part of trauma\u00E2\u0080\u0099s transferability and stickiness, so to speak, is that trauma is not limited to PTSD in an individual. As Luckhurst points out, \u00E2\u0080\u009C[t]rauma \u00E2\u0080\u00A6 leaks between mental and physical symptoms, between patients (\u00E2\u0080\u00A6), between patients and doctors via the mysterious processes of transference or suggestion, and between victims and their listeners or viewers who are commonly moved to forms of overwhelming sympathy, even to the extent of claiming secondary victimhood\u00E2\u0080\u009D (3). Traumatic memory in this sense can be, and often is, passed down and transposed onto others. Marianne Hirsch refers to the development of shared trauma as \u00E2\u0080\u009Cpostmemory.\u00E2\u0080\u009D She states that postmemory is distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection. Postmemory is a powerful and very particular form of memory precisely because its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and 52 creation. This is not to say that memory itself is unmediated, but that it is more directly connected to the past. Postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stores are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can neither be understood nor recreated. (22). Here she suggests that in some cases, children or close acquaintances of trauma survivors will remember or experience the trauma survivor\u00E2\u0080\u0099s memories as viscerally as if these memories were their own, and that these memories can overshadow their own experiences. In this sense, the experience of trauma can be intergenerational. Historical trauma occurs when traumatic memories and/or associations, emotions, and responses are transmitted or passed down to present communities. Nevertheless, regardless of how the effects and affects of trauma come about, and whether or not their intensity is modified and/or manipulated, the resulting experience can have negative effects. Thus, LaCapra is correct in bringing attention to the fact that although certain memories may be factually problematic or not derived from first-hand witnessing, they are certain forms of truth (13). One cannot address trauma and its affects and effects without acknowledging both trauma\u00E2\u0080\u0099s, particularly historical and community trauma\u00E2\u0080\u0099s, fluidity and its undeniable presence, regardless of how this reality is or has been mediated. That said, as LaCapra puts it, \u00E2\u0080\u009Ctrauma brings about a dissociation of affect and representation: one disorientingly feels what one cannot represent; one numbingly represents what one cannot feel\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Writing History, Writing 42). Like any personal and internal experience, one will most likely never be able to fully convey and completely understand it. Indeed, trauma may never be fully transcended. However, one may be able to work through and sit with trauma as opposed to being stuck in it. LaCapra explains that \u00E2\u0080\u009Cworking through trauma involves the effort to articulate or rearticulate affect and representation in a manner that may never transcend, 53 but may to some viable extent counteract, a re-enactment, or acting out, of the disabling dissociation\u00E2\u0080\u009D (42). One must acknowledge and engage with trauma, which may include forms of representation, if one wishes to work through, instead of being merely awash in it. Certain modes of representation, LaCapra seems to suggest, can enable one to begin to work through the trauma, that is \u00E2\u0080\u009Cremember \u00E2\u0080\u0093 perhaps to some extent still compulsively reliving or being possessed by \u00E2\u0080\u0093 what happened then without losing a sense of existing and acting now\u00E2\u0080\u009D (90). Thus, I suggest that one thinks of working through trauma as \u00E2\u0080\u009Csitting with\u00E2\u0080\u009D trauma, becoming aware of the affect, but being able to work independently of trauma, and respond to the here and now from the here and now.iv 3.2 Thinking Trauma \u00E2\u0080\u0093 Trauma as a Tool I argue that Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s novel can show the reader the ways in which past traumatic events seep into relationships in the present. Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s depiction of both structural and event-based trauma functions as a tool to help the reader distinguish between the past and the present \u00E2\u0080\u0093 between the affective response instilled over time by a series of traumatic events, encounters, their transmission, on the one hand, and the processing of that transmission, on the other. I am not necessarily thinking of the transference of memory in the sense that Hirsch proposes, although I do believe such a process plays an influential role in shared trauma. Rather, I am interested in how Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s novel exposes how the trauma functions as an apparatus itself. I call this the trauma apparatus. I suggest that the novel illustrates the ways in which trauma is passed down onto another, through a series of stages, which one can also think of as parts of an apparatus. The first generation to experience trauma may have responses such as those defined by the DSMV. The second generation may experience a form of their parents\u00E2\u0080\u0099 or close associate\u00E2\u0080\u0099s trauma. For example, if the parent fears a certain event or action, the child may also fear it; the child may, or may not, understand the foundation of this fear. Children may also have nightmares 54 based on their parents\u00E2\u0080\u0099 experiences. Here the transference is direct and heavily embodied; the memory and fear responses are visceral and automatic. Thus, the first and second generations provide the basis of a trauma apparatus. Both generations have a series of reactions and responses \u00E2\u0080\u0093 ways of understanding and interacting with the world \u00E2\u0080\u0093 that are informed by their or their parents\u00E2\u0080\u0099 traumatic experiences and subsequent responses to that trauma. These are passed on to subsequent generations through private and public memories, somatic responses, as well as through discourse; it is these that the novel engages with most actively. Over generations the link to a specific event is lost. All that is left of the connection is a structure of knowing and being that I term the trauma apparatus. This trauma apparatus \u00E2\u0080\u009Cimposes, without appearing to do so\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Althusser 172), a series of embodied (re)actions such as hatred, anger, fear, mistrust, and self-preservation that appear authentic and real, that is, linked to some core bodily truth, but are, in fact, learned and passed down, the result of an event or action that happened in the past, but which has seeped into the present. Given this definition, one may be tempted to think of the trauma apparatus as a loop of return and reenactment of the repressed\u00E2\u0080\u0093 a perpetual state of what Freud called melancholia that traps individuals and groups in a state of acting out. However, I propose that we approach the trauma apparatus as something that must be recognized and approached with awareness if we wish to move on from melancholia to mourning, a process of engaged memory work. By gradually becoming aware of the trauma apparatus, one may simultaneously recognize its presence \u00E2\u0080\u0093 that is a series of knowledges and ways of being linked to a past event and trauma response \u00E2\u0080\u0093 and acknowledge one\u00E2\u0080\u0099s embodied (re)action/s and experience/s, which may itself /themselves be mediated by the trauma apparatus. The trauma apparatus stops functioning as a loop or trap. The trick, so to speak, is that by recognizing, acknowledging the trauma apparatus and the loop, one may choose one\u00E2\u0080\u0099s own response to embodied (re)actions, for example to the 55 other, as opposed to allowing the trauma apparatus to frame this (re)action and response as well.v It is here that I see Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s novel playing a central role. \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! crafts a world infused with both historical and personal traumas. By examining the ways in which these traumas appear in the narrative, one can begin to uncover the subtle, but pervasive effects of trauma not only on and in the individual, but also on the communities with which he or she interacts. 3.3 Training Anxiety \u00E2\u0080\u0093 The Imposition of the Trauma Apparatus 3.3.1 Discourse and Terminology Although trauma\u00E2\u0080\u0099s affects and effects most often begin at the level of the individual or the family, I would like to begin by examining the presence of trauma in discourse. While discourse may appear insignificant, to a large extent, it constitutes the very frame of any apparatus, sort of like the skeleton of a car or animal body, which is more or less useless by itself, but essential to the body\u00E2\u0080\u0099s ability to function. As Michel Foucault puts it, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthere are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterize and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Power/Knowledge 93). This is relevant to the term \u00C4\u008Cefur. The term has much greater linguistic and historical significance than previously discussed. According to the Marko Snoj, the author of Slovenia\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Epistemological Dictionary, the term is \u00E2\u0080\u009Cprobably derived from the Croatian and Serbian \u00C4\u008Cift, \u00C4\u008Civut \u00E2\u0080\u0098\u00C5\u00BDid\u00E2\u0080\u0099 [Jew]\u00E2\u0080\u009D (qtd. in Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 9, italics mine). The association of the term \u00C4\u008Cefur with the term Jew is disturbingly uncomfortable, especially when one considers that the first epigraph explains that \u00C4\u008Cefurs can be recognized by their physiognomy, \u00E2\u0080\u009Ctheir low foreheads, unibrows, well defined cheekbones and strong jaw bones\u00E2\u0080\u009D, as well as their way of life, their tendency to laziness, their constant swearing, their abundant use of alcohol, their predisposition to unprovoked violence, and the pursuit of women \u00E2\u0080\u0093 \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthe weaker sex\u00E2\u0080\u009D \u00E2\u0080\u0093 by the men (Pe\u00C5\u00A1ut qtd. in Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 8). In other words, \u00C4\u008Cefurs are physically 56 distinct; they have bad social habits; and are dangers to the body politic, especially to the women. One assumption is that they are morally corrupt. In the past, most famously during Hitler's Third Reich, Jews were similarly portrayed. Among other things, Jews were associated with \u00E2\u0080\u009Cdistinctive noses,\u00E2\u0080\u009D \u00E2\u0080\u009Cheavy body hair,\u00E2\u0080\u009D \u00E2\u0080\u009Clarge, fleshy ears,\u00E2\u0080\u009D and \u00E2\u0080\u009Cconverging eyebrows among men\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Steinweis 28). During the Nazi period, these sorts of physical characteristics were used in anti-Semitic propaganda to distinguish Jews from other members of the non-Jewish population. This propaganda also characterized Jews as a \u00E2\u0080\u009Cdemoralizing, amoral group\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Beller 46), painting them as \u00E2\u0080\u009Cparasitic aliens\u00E2\u0080\u009D (76) or \u00E2\u0080\u009Cparasitical sub-humans\u00E2\u0080\u009D (91).vi One can hardly ignore the similarities, which are important for two reasons: the implication that these groups, especially their male members are dangerous, especially to women and the ways in which such rhetoric has been, and continues to be, used to justify discrimination and genocide. Now, I am not suggesting that the Slovenia in Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s novel is a few years away from the systematic genocide such as that which occurred in other parts of ex-Yugoslavia. Nor am I suggesting that anyone who uses the term is automatically unethical, unkind, or uncompassionate. However, I do think that one needs to be aware of the ideas he/she may be subconsciously and unintentionally (re)affirming when they use the term.vii To borrow Foucault\u00E2\u0080\u0099s terminology, the term \u00C4\u008Cefur is part of the \u00E2\u0080\u009Ccirculation and functioning\u00E2\u0080\u009D of a discourse that produces and accumulates certain forms of knowledge. The term\u00E2\u0080\u0099s etymology can also evoke conscious and unconscious memories and images of systematic deportations and mass killings.viii Such connotations extend beyond social knowledge of the Holocaust and the Slovene communities\u00E2\u0080\u0099 own experiences during World War Two. As has already been mentioned, the novel\u00E2\u0080\u0099s title first appeared in Slovenia as a graffiti slogan \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus!\u00E2\u0080\u009D in the early 1990s and served as a threat to non-Slovenes, who lived or had taken refuge in Slovenia, but were originally from one of Yugoslavia\u00E2\u0080\u0099s warring republics. Similar graffiti slogans, for example \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00E2\u0080\u0098Juden Raus 57 (in German) and \u00E2\u0080\u0098Death to Jews and Gypsies\u00E2\u0080\u0099\u00E2\u0080\u009D, appeared in Serbia following the end of the Yugoslav Wars in the early 2000s (Ramet 144, italics).ix All three slogans are infused with a sense of violence and death. A whisper of the genocides that occurred during WWII and the Yugoslav War always permeates the slogans. Thus, when Marko or his friends emphasize the difference between the Slovenes and \u00C4\u008Cefurs, or when Marko feels the impact of this distinction, for example, his references to the awful feeling when his teacher signals him out as an immigrant from the southern republics of ex-Yugoslavia (97), a \u00C4\u008Cefur, the assertion implies that immigrants from the southern republics of ex-Yugoslavia are not only different in a negative sense, they are also dangerous. In Slovene discourse, the \u00C4\u008Cefur is (re)presented as an unpredictable and volatile disgrace to society, one that may have to be dealt with accordingly if he becomes unbearable. For the \u00C4\u008Cefur, the Slovene represents a constant danger, a threat, which may at any point errupt and take drastic measures to rid the country of the undesired other. As such, the Slovene community and the immigrant community from the southern republics of ex-Yugoslavia exist within a discursive apparatus that continually (re)positions them on the precipice of fight or flight. The etymological link between the term \u00C4\u008Cefur and the term Jew persists as a constant reminder of just how violently and quickly such dangerous and undesirable \u00E2\u0080\u009Cparasites\u00E2\u0080\u009D may be taken care of. The terms \u00E2\u0080\u009Custa\u00C5\u00A1e\u00E2\u0080\u009D (\u00E2\u0080\u009Custashas\u00E2\u0080\u009D) and \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00C4\u008Detniki\u00E2\u0080\u009D (\u00E2\u0080\u009Cchetniks\u00E2\u0080\u009D) are also interesting, if one wishes to examine the way trauma is inscribed in discourse. The usta\u00C5\u00A1as were a radical nationalist group (political party) that first appeared in Croatia during the interwar period. They were in charge of Croatia's independent fascist state during World War Two and were active durng the Yugoslav War. The \u00C4\u008Detniks refer to a radical nationalist (paramilitary) group that first appeared in Serbia during WWI, but was also active during World War Two and the Yugoslav War. Both groups are known for their violent treatment of the other \u00E2\u0080\u0093 who was defined as either the Serb, the Croat, and/or the Muslim. Unlike \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00C4\u008Cefur,\u00E2\u0080\u009D the terms \u00E2\u0080\u009Custa\u00C5\u00A1a\u00E2\u0080\u009D and \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00C4\u008Detnik/i\u00E2\u0080\u009D do 58 not appear intermittently throughout the novel. In fact, each term is used only once or twice. The term \u00E2\u0080\u009Custa\u00C5\u00A1a\u00E2\u0080\u009D appears in a conversation between the boys. Marko tells the reader that his friends call him \u00E2\u0080\u009Can usta\u00C5\u00A1a\u00E2\u0080\u009D, when he, in response to a conversation of who they would \u00E2\u0080\u009Cfuck\u00E2\u0080\u009D, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cusually says Severina\u00E2\u0080\u009D, a well-known Croatian singer (42, italics mine). Marko is referred to as an Usta\u00C5\u00A1a because he likes a Croatian pop singer. The implication is that all Croatians and those who like them are usta\u00C5\u00A1a and are, thus, like the usta\u00C5\u00A1a, responsible for the historical atrocities, such as the deportation and mass killings of Jews and Serbs during World War Two (Schminder 182).x The term \u00C4\u008Detnik appears when Marko tells the reader who cheers for what soccer team. He states that his friends Dejan and Aco cheer for the Serbian soccer team Zvezda. He implies that this is because \u00E2\u0080\u009Ctheir old men are from Serbia. Serbians\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087, \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! 13). He explains, \u00E2\u0080\u009C[w]e Bosnians look at things a little bit differently\u00E2\u0080\u009D (13). He goes on to say that \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthese \u00C4\u008Detniks, and Arkan [a Serbian assassin and war-lord, during the Yugoslav War (Alvarez 8-12)], and Ceca [a popular Serbian turbo-pop folk singer, who is also Arkan's widow], and Gurovi\u00C4\u0087 [a Serbian basketball player], with his tattoo of Dra\u00C5\u00BEe Mihajlovi\u00C4\u0087 [leader of the \u00C4\u008Detniks during World War Two (Banac 195)],.... piss Radovan off\u00E2\u0080\u009D (13, italics mine). In this case, Serbs, specifically Serbs from Serbia, are linked to the \u00C4\u008Detniks, the historical group responsible for atrocities committed against Muslims and Croats during WWI and II (Banac 149-150, 377), and Arkan\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Tigers, the paramilitary Serb militia that \u00E2\u0080\u009Cplayed an active role in ethnic cleansing\u00E2\u0080\u009D during the Yugoslav War (Alvarez 11). Again, the implication is that all Serbian Serbs, regardless of their actual involvement in the historical group, are responsible for and supportive of the \u00C4\u008Detniks and Arkan\u00E2\u0080\u0099s actions. Here, discourse subtly expands and imposes the affective responses associated with a specific group\u00E2\u0080\u0099s actions in the past onto the larger community group that may only be linked to the perpetrators through birth, not necessarily individual beliefs or actions. 59 Here one is invited to consider Freud\u00E2\u0080\u0099s discussion of the latency period and belatedness, where he argues that trauma is not always experienced as such during the actual event, but returns at some later time to haunt the subject (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience 92, 101).xi The experience of latency and belatedness is particularly significant in a discussion such as this that is interested in the ways in which a trauma apparatus frames knowledge and experience. Subsequent generations may not connect their present experience(s) and knowledge(s) with a series of historical events and (mis)perceptions, that is, those \u00E2\u0080\u009C[s]ubjugated knowledges[,] \u00E2\u0080\u00A6 those blocs of historical knowledge, which are present but disguised within the body of functionalist and systematizing theory\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Foucault, Power/Knowledge 82). Although the boys were not present for the traumatic events associated with these terms, and in fact may not have any conscious knowledge of them at all,xii they are being interpellated by a trauma apparatus when they use this discourse. The terms \u00E2\u0080\u009Custa\u00C5\u00A1a\u00E2\u0080\u009D and \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00C4\u008Detnik\u00E2\u0080\u009D are inextricable from their historical connotations. It is difficult to use either term in this region without evoking disgust, fear, anger, hate, and so on. When either term is used, outside of its historical context, the term's associations are imprinted onto whomever is on the recieving end of the term. Responses to the other are mediated by their associations. As a result, both the self and the other remain, to a large extent, controlled by a trauma apparatus that shapes relationships based on the here and now but on a here and now that is unconsciously \u00E2\u0080\u0093 and here I mean without awareness \u00E2\u0080\u0093 permeated by a past that may in fact bear very little relation to the present. The problem, if one can use such a term without assigning blame, is that the terms are being used not to refer to the historical group, but to convey the negative affect associated with these groups and extend it to an entire community or the receiver of the term. As such, the historical group and the historical significance of the terms disappear, or are at the very least rendered obscure, and the negative memories and events associated with the specific group are imposed onto an entire community group. The experienced affects of a series 60 of traumatic events, experienced at the hands of specific historical groups become discourses of truth used to characterize and define an entire nation. In Foucault\u00E2\u0080\u0099s words, \u00E2\u0080\u009C[i]n the end, we are judged, condemned, classified, determined in our undertakings, destined to a certain mode of living or dying as a function of the true discourses, which are the bearers of specific affects of power (Power/Knowledge 94, italics mine). The terms \u00E2\u0080\u009Ctur\u00C4\u008Dine\u00E2\u0080\u009D and \u00E2\u0080\u009Ctur\u00C4\u008Din\u00E2\u0080\u009D work similarly. Tur\u00C4\u008Dine means \u00E2\u0080\u009Cvulgar language\u00E2\u0080\u009D or \u00E2\u0080\u009Csmack,\u00E2\u0080\u009D but can also be translated as \u00E2\u0080\u009CTurkish sayings\u00E2\u0080\u009D or \u00E2\u0080\u009Cbullshitisms.\u00E2\u0080\u009D One of the boys uses the term, or more correctly phrase, when they are exchanging vulgarities with the drug dealer Pe\u00C5\u00A1i. In response to Pe\u00C5\u00A1i\u00E2\u0080\u0099s yell, \u00E2\u0080\u009Caide [ayde \u00E2\u0080\u0093 \u00E2\u0080\u009Clet\u00E2\u0080\u0099s go,\u00E2\u0080\u009D \u00E2\u0080\u009Cpick it up,\u00E2\u0080\u009D \u00E2\u0080\u009Cscat\u00E2\u0080\u009D], get out of here faggot\u00E2\u0080\u009D, one of them responds with \u00E2\u0080\u009CTur\u00C4\u008Dine, suck my dick\u00E2\u0080\u009D (74). Tur\u00C4\u008Din is a bit different. It means a Turkish male. According to my father, who grew up in Slovenia while Slovenia was still part of the former Yugoslavia, \u00E2\u0080\u009Ctur\u00C4\u008Din\u00E2\u0080\u009D functioned much the same as \u00E2\u0080\u009Cnigger.\u00E2\u0080\u009Dxiii It is used when Radovan tells Marko about a \u00E2\u0080\u009Ctur\u00C4\u008Din\u00E2\u0080\u009D who stole his wallet on the train (170). In and of themselves, the terms, while clearly part of a vulgar discourse, are not particularly concerning. However, if one considers the terms within a historical context of trauma, one cannot cast the terms aside as mere vulgarities, words to be avoided in respectable Slovene conversation. xiv Historically, the Turks are associated with invaders. As Slovene historian Janko Prunk outlines, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cin the middle of the 15th century, Turkish raids into Slovene lands intensified and had dire consequences in the lives of the population who were pillaged, murdered, and taken into slavery by these \u00E2\u0080\u0098Turkish\u00E2\u0080\u0099 (in fact, Southern Slav-Balkan) raiders\u00E2\u0080\u009D (32).xv In the examples from the novel above, no mention is made of these historical connotations, nor does there appear to be any awareness that the terms could also indirectly refer to Slovenes and immigrants from the southern republics of ex-Yugoslavia, since, at least according to Prunk, Southern Slavs comprised large numbers of these \u00E2\u0080\u009CTurkish\u00E2\u0080\u009D invaders.xvi Again, it would seem that the terms have lost their 61 historical significance, and thus, one is merely nit picking to point them out at all. True enough. Nevertheless, the terms are both historically and linguistically linked to a traumatic historical event. The fact that the terms are now used to delineate a sense of worthlessness and disgust, and that their historical and linguistic origins are largely erased, points to both LaCapra\u00E2\u0080\u0099s assertion that \u00E2\u0080\u009C[s]omething of the past always remains if only as a haunting presence, or symptomatic revenant\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Writing History, Writing 42) and the implication of Foucault\u00E2\u0080\u0099s argument that \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthings work at the level of subjugation, at the level of these continuous processes, which subjugate our bodies, govern our gestures, [and] dictate our behaviors, etc.\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Power/Knowledge 97). History may disappear as such; however, the affects of historical relationships remain encoded in the language, the discourse used in everyday relationships. The reason behind the dislike disappears. However, the strong aversion and disgust, as well as mistrust remain. If one remains unaware of this linguistic relationship, or chooses not to acknowledge it, one runs the risk of allowing the trauma of the past, which remains present, if only in the negative associations with the term, to dictate encounters and relationships in the present. 3.3.2 Public Names and Figures When Marko gets off the train in Bosnia and sits looking at what he describes as desolate surroundings, he states \u00E2\u0080\u009Cif this folk once believed, that Slobo, Franjo and Alija would improve their lives, then that, that they believe in pyramids, is small potatoes\u00E2\u0080\u009D (179). In this passage, Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s reference is to the former Yugoslav presidents Slobodan Milo\u00C5\u00A1evi\u00C4\u0087 (Slobo), Franjo Trudman (Franjo), and, Alija Izetbegovi\u00C4\u0087 (Alija). His reference to pyramids is to the so-called-pyramid found in Bosnia by \u00E2\u0080\u009CBosnian-American businessman\u00E2\u0080\u009D \u00E2\u0080\u009CSemir \u00E2\u0080\u0098Sam\u00E2\u0080\u0099 Osmanagic\u00E2\u0080\u009D but denounced by \u00E2\u0080\u009Ca pantheon of archeologists\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Markey). The pyramid \u00E2\u0080\u009Cfound\u00E2\u0080\u009D in the early 2000s was in fact just a hill.xvii Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s comment is first and foremost a critique of the Bosnians\u00E2\u0080\u0099 62 gullibility and naivet\u00C3\u00A9. However it also points to the ways in which the Repressive and Ideological State Apparatuses are encompassed by a larger trauma apparatus. If one is interested in how the trauma apparatus functions, public names, used in the narrative as nicknames, insults, or to imply betrayal, are also significant. Here one might examine Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s references to the Yugoslav political police and intelligence service, the Orwellian big-brother type of institution OZNA; and the first female president of Yugoslavia, Milka Planinc (Klenke 1; Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087, \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! 15).xviii One might also wish to examine Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s references to key players in the war, former Serbian president Slobodan Milo\u00C5\u00A1evi\u00C4\u0087, Croatian president Franjo Trudman, former Bosnian president Alija Izetbegovi\u00C4\u0087, Slovene president Milan Ku\u00C4\u008Dan, and the war-lord Arkan. In addition, one could examine Marko's references to later Slovene president Janez Jan\u00C5\u00A1a,xix as well as his references to pop icon Ceca, the basketball player Gurovi\u00C4\u0087, and Mitar Miri\u00C4\u0087, the Serbian singer, who sings what Marko calls \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthe unofficial anthem of the Serbian nation\u00E2\u0080\u009D (21). These figures and the institutions they are associated with are part of what Althusser terms the Repressive and Ideological State Apparatuses (RSAs and ISAs).xx Together, they are part of the apparatuses that create and maintain the official ideology or knowledge of the world. The presence of these public figures and institutions, as well as the historical, political, and nationalist meanings and memories associated with them in everyday discourse and conversation work to produce a certain form of knowledge and sense of the world. For example, Marko references OZNA in the chapter headed \u00E2\u0080\u009CZakaj je OZNA sve dozna\u00E2\u0080\u009D \u00E2\u0080\u009CWhy is OZNA all knowing\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087, \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! 165). In this chapter, Marko and his father are waiting for the train to Bosnia. Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s father is sending him back to Bosnia. Right before Marko gets on the train, Radovan asks him if he knows what happened to the bus driver Damjanovi\u00C4\u0087 (166). Marko tells the reader, in Bosnian, that \u00E2\u0080\u009Chis legs shook,\u00E2\u0080\u009D almost like they gave out. He states that \u00E2\u0080\u009Che started to shake and [that he] wanted to close his mouth but it didn\u00E2\u0080\u0099t 63 work\u00E2\u0080\u009D (167). Marko tells Radovan that he did not do it. He tells the reader that Radovan believed him, but that \u00E2\u0080\u009Chis look was so sad, it looked like he was going to burst into tears\u00E2\u0080\u009D (167). Radovan tells Marko that Damjanovi\u00C4\u0087 is in a coma (167). Marko then says that he doesn\u00E2\u0080\u0099t know if Radovan is sending him to Bosnia to protect him or not (168). What is interesting to me here is that Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 heads the chapter that describes Radovan\u00E2\u0080\u0099s knowledge of the crime and Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s confession to his father with the title of Yugoslavia\u00E2\u0080\u0099s former secret police. While the two events are unrelated, and distanced by time and place, they nevertheless appear to convey the same affect \u00E2\u0080\u0093 fear. As part of the discursive apparatus, the term OZNA is still infused with trauma of an institution that no longer exists. Moreover, the fact that Marko considers that his father may be sending him off to protect him also indicates that the fear of authority and the police, regardless of one\u00E2\u0080\u0099s actual guilt \u00E2\u0080\u0093 Marko pulled Aco off of Damjanovi\u00C4\u0087 and did not participate in the beating \u00E2\u0080\u0093 remains. Similarly, references to Milka Planinc connote financial ruin and struggle, and, if the Wikipedia page on her is accurate, the reference extends beyond the financial trauma of the Yugoslav break-up to include the lingering memories of WWII. References to the wartime leaders, Jan\u00C5\u00A1a, OZNA, and Ceca's husband Arkan evoke memories of repression, war, and terror. As such, the discursive presence of these names and figures serves as a constant reminder of fear, mistrust, and loss. These references, in other words, frame each community\u00E2\u0080\u0099s everyday experience that is, on the one hand, to be expected, given the region\u00E2\u0080\u0099s recent history, but which may also prove dangerous when the framed communities exist unaware of the pervasive framing. The frame is in and of itself not dangerous; the frame only becomes dangerous when we exist within it and assume our (re)actions are always already natural and in no way framed by our or our community\u00E2\u0080\u0099s previous experiences. 64 3.4 The Intimate and Public Components of the Trauma Apparatus \u00E2\u0080\u0093 Diaspora and War These strangers really bear no resemblance at all to us as we hold sway \u00E2\u0080\u0093 remote control in hand \u00E2\u0080\u0093 over the last refuge of our privacy. They\u00E2\u0080\u0099re different from us, these refugees and nomads, migrant workers and displaced persons. As they flee repression and poverty, they pay the high price of diversity at every Western border they try to cross. Ale\u00C5\u00A1 Debeljak, Twilight of the Idols: Recollections of a Lost Yugoslavia (13-14, italics mine) In the above passage, Ale\u00C5\u00A1 Debeljak commenting on the collapse of Yugoslavia, describes the feelings of a western viewer watching refugees on a TV screen. He suggests that the self attempts to remove him or herself from an association with the other's pain and suffering \u00E2\u0080\u0093 the other's experience of expulsion. The self does not wish his or her \u00E2\u0080\u009Csafe haven\u00E2\u0080\u009D for example, his/her diverse spaces, to be tainted by those who flee oppression. The presence of trauma in Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s novel is not limited to the structural and public traumas that reverberate through discourses, public figures, and institutions. Building on Zorko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s assertion that in \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthe author sculpts characters, that did not prepare themselves for emigration to a new setting, and who are just as unprepared for it now, after thirty years of life in Slovenia\u00E2\u0080\u009D (\u00E2\u0080\u009CVodi\u00C4\u008D po vesit\u00E2\u0080\u009D 198), I argue that the novel also fashions a world fissured by the traumas of a forced diaspora \u00E2\u0080\u0093 a community group that lives outside its country of origin, but which is still intimately linked to that country.xxi Although one often thinks of diaspora as community groups that were forced from their homes, there are less physically violent reasons for mass exoduses. In the case of Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s family who came to Slovenia before the start of the Yugoslav War, the push was economic, but still largely choiceless. Marko explains that Radovan came to Slovenia because his own father forced him to: 65 Do you know how I came to Slovenia? Do you know, eh? You don\u00E2\u0080\u0099t know anything. That Sunday we had a game, and the coach of [the] \u00C5\u00BDelja [soccer team] was watching. Everyone was saying that I had a chance to play for \u00C5\u00BDelja. The premier League. Do you know what that is, the premier [soccer] league. On Saturday, listen, on Saturday, my old man says to me, \u00E2\u0080\u009Ctomorrow you go to Slovenia.\u00E2\u0080\u009D I said to him, \u00E2\u0080\u009COld man, I have a game, what Slovenia!\u00E2\u0080\u009D, but he goes \u00E2\u0080\u009CPack, you got a job in Slovenia.\u00E2\u0080\u009D And in the morning, off I went nicely on the train and to Ljubljana. What game, what \u00C5\u00BDelja, what career (58, original in Bosnian).xxii Radovan\u00E2\u0080\u0099s words ring with the pain and anger of dreams given up and hope lost. Radovan did not want to come to Slovenia. His father forced him to come, believing, it seems, that there would be greater job opportunities there. Radovan was forced to give up his dreams of being a star soccer player in Sarajevo\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Premier League team for the chance of greater economic opportunity. The experience is one that James Clifford suggests is characteristic of many diaspora: \u00E2\u0080\u009CDiaspora consciousness lives loss and hope as a defining tension\u00E2\u0080\u009D (312). In this example, the trauma is not the result of a violent death or similarly violent experience. Traumatic loss is the result of forced exodus, and the subsequent inability to make connections, grow and develop, or find purpose in life in Slovenia. True, Marko, his family, and his community are not completely blameless for their situation. The problem, as has already been outlined, is multisided. As Zorko points out, Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 is careful to underscore that neither the Slovene nor the diasporic community is free of responsibility in this respect (\u00E2\u0080\u009CVodi\u00C4\u008D po vesti\u00E2\u0080\u009D 198). Nevertheless, regardless of who is responsible, or where one might lay this responsibility, the experience is traumatic in the sense that Robert Jay Lifton defines the term. 66 In \u00E2\u0080\u009CEncounters with Death: The Thought of Robert Jay Lifton,\u00E2\u0080\u009D August G. Lageman elucidates Lifton\u00E2\u0080\u0099s understanding of trauma: trauma may be defined as a break in one\u00E2\u0080\u0099s experience of the self and the world around one, an encounter with an absurd death, and the inability to achieve and maintain vitality. According to Lageman, Lifton identifies three components that are necessary for the self to experience itself as alive and not dead. These are, the ability to move forward, grow, and develop; the ability to make connections; and, the ability to make sense of life, that is, the ability to attach meaning to events and find a purpose in one\u00E2\u0080\u0099s (re)actions (302). For Lifton, trauma occurs when these components are cut short or abruptly paused, for example, when one witnesses an absurd death one cannot make sense of. He identifies five responses to such an experience, three of which are applicable here \u00E2\u0080\u0093 \u00E2\u0080\u009Cpsychic numbing, that is, a diminished capacity to feel\u00E2\u0080\u009D (303); \u00E2\u0080\u009Ccounterfeit nurturance,\u00E2\u0080\u009D which can either take the form of aggressive outbursts or claustrophobic caring (304), and which are also outlined by the DSM V as symptoms of PTSD; and a difficulty finding meaning in experience and life.xxiii For Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s family and his community, these processes are halted. As Marko puts it, looking out over the Fu\u00C5\u00BEine, the day he tells his mother he is no longer playing basketball, I sat looking at the Fu\u00C5\u00BEine and I thought this is the most depressing place ever. Only here can this kind of shit happen. All of these folk, that live one on top of the other, all this crowding and nerves. And all of these folk work from dawn till dusk, half are retired, half don\u00E2\u0080\u0099t have jobs \u00E2\u0080\u00A6 . (86, words in italics written as they were in Slovene version) The Fu\u00C5\u00BEine are [sic] (re)presented as, to borrow Zorko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s phrase, a sort of circular trap (\u00E2\u0080\u009CVodi\u00C4\u008D po vesti\u00E2\u0080\u009D 196), an enclosed area in which no one is happy. Moreover, the imagery of people stacked one on top of another brings to mind the image of a slaughterhouse \u00E2\u0080\u0093 animals stacked one on top of the other, waiting to be used. This is perhaps an oversimplification. However, there is 67 something to be said for the mutually (re)inforcing apparatuses at work here. The implication is that despite working hard, the Fu\u00C5\u00BEine community is stuck, either because they do not make enough money, or because they have people they have to support. There is a sense that the work done by immigrants from the southern republics of ex-Yugoslavia is not acknowledged or respected. It is, in this sense, meaningless. It does not provide the community the space to develop. This is not because the work is not important, but because it is not acknowledged as such. Thus, the work is not acknowledged, perceived, or experienced as meaningful. In fact, in some scenes Marko alludes to the sense that the entire \u00C4\u008Cefur experience is static, undesirable, and worthless, that is, utterly meaningless: In any one of these million flats, something could explode at any moment and that\u00E2\u0080\u0099s it. Everyone is fucked, nervous, unhappy, and badly paid \u00E2\u0080\u00A6 . There are no happy and fulfilled Fu\u00C5\u00BEinians, because if they were happy and fullfilled, they wouldn\u00E2\u0080\u0099t live in the Fu\u00C5\u00BEine. That\u00E2\u0080\u0099s a fact. No dete [child] ever dreamed that they would live in the suburbs of Ljubljana, on the twelfth floor, in a two and a half bedroom apartment, with a five-member family, and a view into the next apartment building. No dete [child] ever dreamed that they would spend their life in front of the apartment on a bench, or in the Kubana [name of a bar], or that the best part of their life would be a meeting of tenants. No dete [child] ever dreamed that they would have a fifty-euro pay and that they would save all year so they could spend three weeks in Bosnia or Serbia. No dete [child] ever dreamed that people would look at it sidewise for thirty years, because they don\u00E2\u0080\u0099t know how to properly pronounce these fucking Slovene words. (144-145, italics indicate original in Bosnian) 68 The community\u00E2\u0080\u0099s experience in Slovenia is presented as a halted process of growing and developing, making connections, and finding meaning in one\u00E2\u0080\u0099s actions \u00E2\u0080\u0093 traumatic. This is not to say that the community would have had more success doing so in their home country, nor is it to say that they are not implicated in their own fate \u00E2\u0080\u0093 Marko, for one, is very open about his less than admirable behavior. However, the intensity of the static and demoralizing experience Marko describes is intensified by the feeling of shame, suffered by Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s community in the gaze of the self \u00E2\u0080\u0093 the constant sideways looks one receives when he or she is unable to speak Slovene, or \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthose shitty feelings, [you have] \u00E2\u0080\u00A6 when they ask if \u00C4\u0090or\u00C4\u0091i\u00C4\u0087 is with a soft or hard \u00C4\u008D, and where are your parents are from\u00E2\u0080\u009D (97). Consequently, there is a pervasive sense of halted development, lack of meaning and purpose, a sense of trauma, so to speak, which is continually (re)enforced by the structural make up of the Fu\u00C5\u00BEine, lack of economic opportunities, and the school system \u00E2\u0080\u0093 the trauma apparatus. \u00C4\u008Cefurs feel that their contributions to Slovenia are not acknowledged, and that they themselves are not respected. They in turn do not respect the Slovenes. They also do not learn Slovene, because they do not see the point, and the people they spend time with speak their language. In addition the Slovenes don\u00E2\u0080\u0099t want to talk to them. Again, the problem appears to be multisided. As such, immigrants from the southern republics of ex-Yugoslavia are unable to make connections outside of their communities. Nor are they able to do so at times in their own families: Marko and his father do not speak for a majority of the novel; Adi\u00E2\u0080\u0099s father, described as a womanizer, used to beat Adi, his brother, and his mom (30-31, 41, 94-95); Dejan\u00E2\u0080\u0099s father is an alcoholic, an event Marko connects to his erasure in the early 1990s (48, 78); Dejan\u00E2\u0080\u0099s mother is divorcing him (140-142). It is clear that the community exists in a sort of trauma apparatus. As such, the experiences of trauma, which play out within the family and intimate community, as well as between the larger communities; the lack of communication; the mistrust of the other; and the violent outbursts 69 associated with this community group which is known for being \u00E2\u0080\u009Caggressive without cause\u00E2\u0080\u009D merely serve to reinforce the binary that itself perpetuates the trauma experienced by the diasporic group. 3.4.1 \u00E2\u0080\u009CA Lost Yugoslavia\u00E2\u0080\u009D xxiv \u00E2\u0080\u0093 The Smoking Tentacles The trauma apparatus is also evident in Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s subtle and direct references to the Yugoslav War and its aftermath which illustrate the ways in which the collapse of Yugoslavia intensified the historical trauma, which is already present in the discursive, public, and intimate apparatuses, and which maintains and (re)affirms a sense of fear and mistrust. In regards to the war, Marko states, We were all hit by the war in Bosna. At Adi\u00E2\u0080\u0099s they had seven relatives in their apartment. We had my cousin Zorka. It\u00E2\u0080\u0099s just that I don\u00E2\u0080\u0099t remember anything, because I was just a little guy. And then in grade three or something, we had this phase, where we argued all the time because of the war in Bosna. Totally fucked, but we were constantly debating and hassling each other on a nationalist level, and repeating what we heard our old men pametovalixxv at home, and because our old men were spewing bullshit, we were also spewing bullshit. (50) Here, Marko reminds the reader that he and his friends were secondary witnesses to the war and the displacement of those directly affected. They housed family members escaping from the war-torn southern republics of ex-Yugoslavia. In elementary school, Marko tells the reader, he and his friends engaged in a political and social argument they did not understand, an argument Marko suggests, their parents did not understand either. The point is that the war had a direct impact on their everyday lives, and affected their everyday actions. And it continues to do so. Marko also occasionally evokes wartime imagery. For example, Marko, commenting on his and his father\u00E2\u0080\u0099s lack of communication, states, \u00E2\u0080\u009C[t]he silence will drive me mad. It\u00E2\u0080\u0099s like we 70 are in a bomb shelter, and the fighter planes are above us, and we have to be quiet, because, if they hear us, they will bomb us\u00E2\u0080\u009D (62). Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s phrasing suggests that he occasionally experiences a pervasive death image, another of Lifton\u00E2\u0080\u0099s five responses to trauma (303). While it is true that this sort of imagery is not pervasive throughout the narrative or particularly intrusive, it nevertheless illustrates that the war haunts Marko in subtle ways. Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s use of war as a metaphor suggests that he experiences his everyday life as a sort of mirror image to the war that took place in Yugoslavia just a few years before. The haunting becomes more clear when Marko describes family trips back to Bosnia: \u00E2\u0080\u009CRadovan was always all nervous, when it was time to go. These are also these \u00C4\u008Defur ways. Fuck it, but you don\u00E2\u0080\u0099t know what sort of moron you will land on, when you are fucking around Bosna, and who will want to fuck your mother in Croatia, because your name is Radovan \u00C4\u0090or\u00C4\u0091i\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u009D (160). The war may be over, but the communities are still positioned in a state of tension between fight and flight. One never knows, as Marko puts it, who they might meet, and how this individual might react. The war in Bosnia [and Croatia], the pervading sense of trauma, which I term the trauma apparatus, continues to haunt, that is, frame, both Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s everyday experiences, and his and his family\u00E2\u0080\u0099s ability to prepare for what lies ahead, and even what they might realistically expect in their encounters with the other. 3.4.2 Losing Home A collective retreat into the past that is used to justify a bloody present makes others liable for the cost of its chauvinism, placing debt on the shoulders of those who do not share in the collective memory of the \u00E2\u0080\u009Cethnically pure\u00E2\u0080\u009D nation and are doomed to be its victims. Ale\u00C5\u00A1 Debeljak Twilight of the Idols: Recollections of a Lost Yugoslavia (19, italics mine) 71 The political and structural effects of the war and dissolution of Yugoslavia have additional traumatic effects on the diasporic population. As a result of the war, the diaspora feel they are homeless, with no home to return to. For Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s father, the trauma results from this sense of loss. Although Radovan has only been to Serbia three times in his entire life, and \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthe last time was more than twenty years ago\u00E2\u0080\u009D, he feels like \u00E2\u0080\u009Cit is his country or something\u00E2\u0080\u009D (102). Marko tells the reader that he knows what the problem is: \u00E2\u0080\u009CRadovan doesn\u00E2\u0080\u0099t have his own country and that\u00E2\u0080\u0099s what irks him\u00E2\u0080\u009D (102). Marko then elucidates the point by explaining that this irks all Bosnians[, since] they like crossed out Bosna, and started gunning for Serbia, now they watch all these [politicians] and they wonder if maybe the Muslims and Croats aren\u00E2\u0080\u0099t better than these morons. That\u00E2\u0080\u0099s why Radovan looks to this Serbia and hopes that it will become a normal country, so that he can say this is his country. Because, right now, he is ashamed to say it is his country. (102) According to Marko, Bosnian Serbs sided with the Serbs during the Yugoslav War, and in doing so betrayed Bosnia. Now that the war is over, they are unhappy with the situation in Serbia and are \u00E2\u0080\u009Cashamed\u00E2\u0080\u009D of what goes on there. However, they cannot return to Bosnia, the country they betrayed. Consequently, Radovan, typical of many diasporic subjects, seems to feel that he has no home to return to and most likely never will, at least according to Marko, who states, that \u00E2\u0080\u009CSerbia will never be a normal country. We all know that\u00E2\u0080\u009D (102). Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s description of Radovan\u00E2\u0080\u0099s inability to come to terms with his nostalgia for home and country reminds one of Freud\u00E2\u0080\u0099s discussion of the accident: \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthe confrontation with death [in this case the death of a country or home] takes place too soon, too suddenly, too unexpectedly, to be fully grasped by consciousness\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Caruth, Unclaimed Experience 101). As Marko puts it, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthey,\u00E2\u0080\u009D by which the reader may assume he means either all Bosnian Serbs, or Radovan and his friends, abandoned Bosnia \u00E2\u0080\u0093 \u00E2\u0080\u009Ccrossed [the country] out\u00E2\u0080\u009D and now, suddenly, they do not belong there or anywhere. 72 The collapse, Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s observation suggests, happened \u00E2\u0080\u009Ctoo soon, too suddenly, too unexpectedly, to be fully grasped.\u00E2\u0080\u009D Moreover, even if the loss is grasped, it remains with the self, a haunting presence of both the pain of the present \u00E2\u0080\u0093 the present loss \u00E2\u0080\u0093 and, I would argue, the pain of a nostalgic past, which is an example not of loss, but of absence. Radovan\u00E2\u0080\u0099s experience elucidates the distinction between absence and loss. His erasure of Bosnia, as Marko describes it, is emblematic of a sense of absence \u00E2\u0080\u0093 a desire to achieve a non-existent wholeness and purity [of state or nation] (La Capra, Writing History, Writing 50-51). Here, there are a few points worth reminding the reader about. Although there were many different reasons for the Yugoslav War, and despite the fact that ethnicity was a minor factor to begin with, and was only over the course of the war made central, there were attempts on all sides to carve out or \u00E2\u0080\u009Creturn to\u00E2\u0080\u009D previously \u00E2\u0080\u009Cpure\u00E2\u0080\u009D and \u00E2\u0080\u009Cwhole\u00E2\u0080\u009D spaces (50-51), which, I might add, it is highly doubtful ever existed in the first place. Radovan\u00E2\u0080\u0099s loss, on the other hand, is more concrete. As LaCapra puts it \u00E2\u0080\u009Closses are specific and involve particular events\u00E2\u0080\u009D (49). Radovan has lost a country, a home, and a sense of connection. Unlike the sense of absence, which LaCapra suggests is associated with absolutes that were never there to begin with (50), Radovan\u00E2\u0080\u0099s loss is a loss of belonging, home, a loss which is linked to a specific event \u00E2\u0080\u0093 the violent collapse of Yugoslavia. In other words, the loss of a country evokes the pain of the present, the recent past, the pains evoked by the war itself (memories of trauma attached to WWI and WWII, and, in the case of this war, also as far back as the middle ages). Radovan\u00E2\u0080\u0099s loss is also an absence \u00E2\u0080\u0093 nostalgic memories of the lost country itself, which while truly lost, was never as whole as memories may wish to make it. 3.4.3 Postmemory And nobody ever whines, and they had a war, and they were all fucked to the core Marko \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! (66, italics) 73 This trauma, this lingering sense of something lost, a loss that is at once silent and deafening. This absence is passed down to Marko. As trauma scholar Marianne Hirsch suggests, \u00E2\u0080\u009C[t]he children of exiled survivors, although they have not themselves lived through the trauma of banishment and forcible separation from home and the destruction of that home, remain marked by their parents\u00E2\u0080\u0099 experiences: always marginal or exiled, always in the diaspora\u00E2\u0080\u009D (242). In this passage, Hirsch refers to children of Holocaust survivors. Although Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s parents did not leave their homes under the same circumstances as Holocaust survivors or Yugoslav refugees, the transmission of trauma and forced exile, first by economic necessity then by actual war, nevertheless remains. For Marko, Bosnia functions as a sort of pastoral ultra reality. In Bosnia, he emphasizes, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthey never give each other the silent treatment. It\u00E2\u0080\u0099s not that they don\u00E2\u0080\u0099t argue, but it\u00E2\u0080\u0099s not the same. At the end, they kiss each other, and they are still a family, they still love each other\u00E2\u0080\u009D (66). He goes on to explain that in Slovenia \u00E2\u0080\u009Cpeople only look out for themselves, \u00E2\u0080\u00A6 . Folks aren\u00E2\u0080\u0099t open. That\u00E2\u0080\u0099s why they aren\u00E2\u0080\u0099t happy\u00E2\u0080\u009D (66). In Bosnia, however, he asserts, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cif someone doesn\u00E2\u0080\u0099t have money, someone who does, gives it to him. Not lends. Gives\u00E2\u0080\u009D (66). His \u00E2\u0080\u009Cgrandmother would give you everything she has\u00E2\u0080\u009D, despite the fact that she only gets fifty euros a month (66). For Marko, at least in this scene, Bosnia is a wonderful and safe place where everyone loves everyone else. Not only can they survive a war, and live off nothing, they can do all that and still love each other. Such a feat is commendable. However, in this scene, Marko aches for an always already absent Bosnian setting. It may be rife with hardship, but this hardship is glossed over by the sense of family and belonging. It appears that Marko has, at least to some degree, romanticized the perseverance and durability of his Bosnian relatives. That said, Marko, like the reader, is aware of the chasm between his nostalgic desire for Bosnia and Bosnia\u00E2\u0080\u0099s actual reality: \u00E2\u0080\u009CBosna is a country where everyone laughs and jokes around, because if they got serious, they would die from the misery in which they live[;] Bosna is the country from which all the 74 Bosnians escaped, only the Serbs, Croats, and Muslims stayed\u00E2\u0080\u009D (172), he says. xxvi The juxtaposition of family and belonging with war, destruction, and ethnic cleansing leaves a sense of uncanniness. As Zala Volcic so astutely puts it, Yugoslav identity is remembered as an uncanny feeling of belonging, whereby that which has been familiar becomes suddenly and inexplicably strange and alien, but this is then the strangeness of that which is most familiar. Yugoslavia is remembered as something terrifying which is at the same time strange and familiar. (76-77) Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s description suggests that one is left with an irreconcilable reality, a sense of something violently lost and destroyed, which nevertheless remains as a haunting presence in Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s and his communities\u00E2\u0080\u0099 intimate narratives. 3.4.4 The Erasure Yugoslavia\u00E2\u0080\u0099s collapse has an even greater effect on Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s friend Dejan and Dejan\u00E2\u0080\u0099s family. Marko tells the reader that Dejan\u00E2\u0080\u0099s father Du\u00C5\u00A1an (Du\u00C5\u00A1ko or Dule) Mirti\u00C4\u0087 came to Slovenia in order to go to school (47). Dule finished the first three years of school at the architexture/building faculty (47-48). Then he met Slovene Sonja and had Dejan and his sister Nata\u00C5\u00A1a. The three \u00E2\u0080\u0093 Dule, Dejan, and Nata\u00C5\u00A1a \u00E2\u0080\u0093 were erased after Yugoslavia's collapse. Sonja was not erased, because of her Slovene nationality (48). Dejan and Nata\u00C5\u00A1a eventually got their citizenships returned. Dule, however, did not. As such, he would have suffered the \u00E2\u0080\u009Closs of rights to jobs, to pensions, to medical care, to schooling for children, etc.\u00E2\u0080\u009D, which Ramet explains is what happened to the approximately 30 000 individuals \u00E2\u0080\u009Cerased\u00E2\u0080\u009D from the citizenship and residency books in the early 1990s (Serbia, Croatia and 273). Regardless of how one views the actions of the Slovene government, which are generally understood as dubious on both legal and 75 ethical grounds, Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s narrative elucidates the negative effects the government\u00E2\u0080\u0099s actions had on his friend\u00E2\u0080\u0099s family and their community. After he was erased, Dule, who Marko admits was a heavy drinker to begin with, falls into alcoholism. He drinks, Marko explains, \u00E2\u0080\u009Clike a freakin idiot\u00E2\u0080\u009D (48). It is often left to Dejan, sometimes with the help of Marko, to get him home from Kubana, the bar he drinks at. Marko describes one such scene for the reader: And then you have to deal with these alcoholics and I look at jadnega [one] Dejan, as he pulls Dule by the hand, so he gets up, i tako sto puta [and like that over and over], and then I always remember myself, when I, as a little guy went with Radovan on his recreation, and then I went with him and his friends for a beer afterwards and I, after the first round, after I had finished my Coca-Cola and I had gotten bored, started to tug on his sleeve, begging, \u00E2\u0080\u0098Idemo ku\u00C4\u0087i, tata, molim te, ho\u00C4\u0087u ko\u00C4\u0087i' [basically, 'can we go home dad, please, I want to go home'], and all night he kept repeating, \u00E2\u0080\u0098Evo sad \u00C4\u0087emo, samo da popijem do kraja\u00E2\u0080\u0099 [essentially, \u00E2\u0080\u0098yes, we will go, just let me finish drinking\u00E2\u0080\u0099] (76, words in italics are the original Bosnian, the rest of this passage is in Slovene). The scene is painfully sad. Dejan, the grown child, who is now responsible for getting his father \u00E2\u0080\u0093 a seemingly broken man \u00E2\u0080\u0093 home from the bar, is juxtaposed with the young Marko, begging his father, who is also drinking, to be allowed to go home. In both cases the two boys are helpless in the face of their fathers\u00E2\u0080\u0099 drinking. In Dejan\u00E2\u0080\u0099s case, his father\u00E2\u0080\u0099s drinking habits are connected to, though Marko acknowledges not wholly caused by, his erasure in the early 1990s. In fact, one might suggest, as I propose to do, that Dule\u00E2\u0080\u0099s drinking is a form of psychic numbing \u00E2\u0080\u0093 a desire to block the erasure\u00E2\u0080\u0099s unpleasant, emasculating, and painful affects. 76 Here, the reader is once again faced with a sort of trauma apparatus. The RSA (the government and army) participated in both the violent collapse of Yugoslavia and the questionable erasure of a significant portion of Slovenia\u00E2\u0080\u0099s diaspora from the southern republics of ex-Yugoslavia. In both cases, the systems that enabled such actions were based on fear and mistrust and, I would add, desire for power. The actions \u00E2\u0080\u0093 the war and erasure \u00E2\u0080\u0093 in turn (re)produce these feelings, and continually (re)impose themselves in the (re)actions and perceptions of the general public. For example, Dule drinks as a response to the erasure, which in turn confirms the stereotype that \u00C4\u008Cefurs love alcohol, which in turn promotes the idea that \u00C4\u008Cefurs are lazy and that they love alcohol. Dejan, at a loss about what to do because his parents are splitting up, ends up kicking and screaming at Adi, who, likewise, is at a loss of how to help Dejan, and ends up rolling on the ground laughing when Dejan tries to talk to him (140-141). As Marko puts it \u00E2\u0080\u009CAdi understood that Dejan was fucked. But Adi never learned how to talk seriously. He just got nervous\u00E2\u0080\u009D (142). Here, Marko links the fact that Adi has probably never had a serious conversation at home (143) to his inability to communicate with Dejan.xxvii The result, which is caused by both the larger governmental, military, and social apparatuses, as well as the more intimate family apparatus, is the (re)affirmation of at least two, if not more, \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00C4\u008Cefur\u00E2\u0080\u009D stereotypes \u00E2\u0080\u0093 \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00C4\u008Cefurs\u00E2\u0080\u009D love alcohol and are \u00E2\u0080\u009Coften aggressive without cause.\u00E2\u0080\u009D As such, the after effects of the war and erasure serve to reinforce negative stereotypes, which themselves reinforce xenophobia \u00E2\u0080\u0093 fear and mistrust of the other. This process is captured in Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s thinking when he and his friends are driving around Ljubljana, honking and yelling, and he addresses the bystanders: All of you, who watch us like we just escaped from the zoo, and think to yourselves, why didn\u00E2\u0080\u0099t we erase all of them, not just eighteen thousand. (97, italics mine). 77 Endnotes i My understanding of trauma and the related concept Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is heavily indebted to Cathy Caruth\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History and Trauma in the Ashes of History and Dominick LaCapra\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Writing History, Writing Trauma. I have also been influenced by Roger Luckhurst\u00E2\u0080\u0099s The Trauma Question; Ruth Leys\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Trauma: A Genealogy; August G. Lageman\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00E2\u0080\u009CEncounter with Death: The Thought of Robert Jay Lifton\u00E2\u0080\u009D (1987); M.J. Larabee, S Weine, and P. Woollcott\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00E2\u0080\u0098The Wordless Nothing\u00E2\u0080\u0099: Narratives of Trauma and Extremity\u00E2\u0080\u009D (2003); Karein Goertz\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00E2\u0080\u009CTransgenerational Representations of the Holocaust: From Memory to \u00E2\u0080\u0098Post-Memory\u00E2\u0080\u0099\u00E2\u0080\u009D(1998); Eduardo Duran, Patricia Grant Long, Barbara Ellen Smith, and Talmage Stanley\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00E2\u0080\u009CFrom Historical Trauma to Hope and Healing: 2004 Appalachian Studies Association Conference\u00E2\u0080\u009D (2005); Bina Toledo Friewald\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00E2\u0080\u009CSocial Trauma and Serial Autobiography: Healing and Beyond\u00E2\u0080\u009D (2007); Susannah Radstone\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00E2\u0080\u009CTrauma Theory: Contexts, Politics, Ethics\u00E2\u0080\u009D (2007); Sigmund Freud\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00E2\u0080\u009CMourning and Melancholia\u00E2\u0080\u009D (1917); and Eduard Klain\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00E2\u0080\u009CIntergenerational Aspects of the Conflict in the Former Yugoslavia\u00E2\u0080\u009D (1998). This last source could benefit from some further research and nuancing. At times it seems to rely too heavily on theories of ancient ethnic hatred and biological determinacy. That said, it nevertheless provides an interesting take on the role of traumatic memory in the dissolution of Yugoslavia. ii Leys is critical of Caruth and van der Kolk accusing the latter of \u00E2\u0080\u009Cslippages and inconsistencies\u00E2\u0080\u009D (305) in his argument, which the former builds on. iii For the full entry, please refer to the DSM http://dsm.psychiatryonline.org/content.aspx?bookid=556§ionid=41101771&resultclick=1#103438457. The section on PTSD and other related stress disorders also defines other Traumatic Stress Disorders, which are similar to, but are not defined under PTSD. iv Here I am thinking of Pema Ch\u00C3\u00B6dr\u00C3\u00B6n\u00E2\u0080\u0099s discussion of meditation and the Buddhist understanding of \u00E2\u0080\u009Cshen pa\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Getting Unstuck). v My conception of the trauma apparatus is heavily indebted to the works of both Foucault and Althusser. My thinking and argument around the idea of using the novel as a tool for becoming aware of the trauma apparatus is similarly heavily indebted and informed by recent work on mindfulness, for example the courses on mindfulness offered at UCLA; Russell Harris\u00E2\u0080\u0099 work in the Happiness Trap and \u00E2\u0080\u009CEmbracing your Demons: an Overview of Acceptance and Commitment Theory\u00E2\u0080\u009D as well as the conversations I have had with Stacey Kuhl Wochner, LCSW, regarding my own OCD. vi Beller points to these examples in his monograph, A Very Short Introduction to Antisemitism. However, one can also see the manifestation of similar conceptions of the propaganda images of Jews from the third Reich era displayed on http://www.calvin.edu/academic/cas/gpa/images/sturmer/ds34-40.jpg. In \u00E2\u0080\u009CAryan and Jew,\u00E2\u0080\u009D Hitler writes \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthe black-haired Jewish youth lurks in wait for the unsuspecting girl who he defiles with his blood\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Rabinbach 191). vii In fact, many may not even be aware of or consider the link at all. 78 viii Memories of mass killings and deportations could include the mass killing and deportation of Jews as well as the mass killing and deportation of Serbs by the Usta\u00C5\u00A1a governments during World War Two (Schminder 182, see also Ben Shepherd's \u00E2\u0080\u009CBloodier than Boehem: The 342nd Infantry Division in Serbia, 1941\u00E2\u0080\u009D and Alexander Korb's \u00E2\u0080\u009CIntegrated Warfare? The Germans and the Usta\u00C5\u00A1a Massacres: Syrmia 1942\u00E2\u0080\u009D); the mass killings and deportations that occured in Slovenia (see Joseph Kranjc's \u00E2\u0080\u009CPropaganda and the Partisan War\u00E2\u0080\u009D in Ljubljana 1943\u00E2\u0080\u009345, especially pages 233-234; and Janko Prunk\u00E2\u0080\u0099s A Brief History of Slovenia: Historical Background of Slovenia); and the mass killing of Domobranci in Slovenia after the WWII. Also see John Corsellis and Marcus Ferrar\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Slovenia 1945: Memories of Death and Survival after World War II, and Sabrina P. Ramet\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00E2\u0080\u009CConfronting the Past: The Slovenes as Subjects and as Objects of History,\u00E2\u0080\u009D (his source is largely interested in different Slovene narratives about the Yugoslav break up); as well as the \u00C4\u008Detnik treament of Muslims during WWII (Banac 377). ix The Yugoslav Wars had ended at this time. However, the Kosovo War continued into 2008. For more information on the Kosovo War refer to James Ker-Lindsay\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Kosovo: The Path to Contested Statehood in the Balkans. x See also Ben Shepherd's \u00E2\u0080\u009CBloodier than Boehem: The 342nd Infantry Division in Serbia, 1941\u00E2\u0080\u009D and Alexander Korb's \u00E2\u0080\u009CIntegrated Warfare? The Germans and the Usta\u00C5\u00A1a Massacres: Syrmia 1942\u00E2\u0080\u009D; Sabrina P. Ramet\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia at Peace and at War (38) and Laura Silber and Allan Little\u00E2\u0080\u0099s Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (85). xi Caruth states that \u00E2\u0080\u009C[i]n its general definition, trauma is described as the response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Unclaimed Experience 91). She goes on to explain that in her view, \u00E2\u0080\u009C[t]raumatic experience, beyond the psychological dimension of suffering it involves, suggests a certain paradox: that the most direct seeing of a violent event may occur as an absolute inability to know it; that immediacy, paradoxically may take the form of belatedness. The repetitions of the traumatic event \u00E2\u0080\u0093 which remain unavailable to consciousness but intrude repeatedly on sight \u00E2\u0080\u0093 thus suggest a larger relation to the event that extends beyond what can simply be seen or what can be known, and is inextricably tied up with the belatedness and incomprehensibility that remain at the heart of this repetitive seeing\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Unclaimed Experience 91-92). While I do not necessarily agree that one is not fully conscious of the trauma, during the event of trauma, as Caruth drawing on Freud suggests (though I would be cautious of excluding the possibility), the idea that one may be unaware of the long term affects of a traumatic experience is important. xii That said, it is worth noting that during World War Two Slovene communities were deported or relocated. Similarly, in the fascist Croatian government actively participated in the genocide of both Jews and Serbs. See notes viii and x. xiii The correct term for a Turkish male is \u00E2\u0080\u009CTurk.\u00E2\u0080\u009D Tur\u00C4\u008Din effectively objectifies the male in question. xiv This sort of language belongs with, as commentator Jo\u00C5\u00BEe Bartolj writes in the Catholic newspaper Dru\u00C5\u00BEina, the more than thirty words found \u00E2\u0080\u009Con the first three pages \u00E2\u0080\u00A6 which we would avoid in any sort of respectable Slovene conversation\u00E2\u0080\u009D (qtd. in Stabej 301) \u00E2\u0080\u0093 assuming, of course, that one could agree on an unproblematic \u00E2\u0080\u0098respectable\u00E2\u0080\u0099 use of Slovene. xv Even today, social memory maintains these associations. My grandfathers were always found of pointing out that the churches built on hills with rock walls around them, which Prunk refers to as \u00E2\u0080\u009Ctabors\u00E2\u0080\u009D (33), were used as protection against the Janissary invasions long ago. And, just a few months ago, I heard an older Slovene lady proclaim that her daughter-in-law used to smoke like a Turk. While the second example seems like a relatively harmless stereotype, though I am sure it warrants closer analysis, the first example points to a more traumatic shared social memory. xvi It would be worth noting here, that the Janissaries kidnapped boys from across all the former republics of Ex-Yugoslavia, so these Southern Slav invaders would have included the Slovenes \u00E2\u0080\u0093 a point Prunk neglects to acknowledge, and which may be worth addressing elsewhere. 79 xvii For more information refer to the National Geographic story: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/05/pyramid-bosnia-1.html xviii Milka Planinc is associated with Yugoslavia's economic collapse (Chossudovsky 2). She is also, according to the Wikipedia page on her, associated with the killing of Domobranci, \u00C4\u008Cetniks, and Usta\u00C5\u00A1as after World War Two. I was unable to confirm the Wikipedia citation, because the original source was in Serbian, a language and alphabet I cannot read. xix During the 1980s, the question of language played a central role in the controversial military trial that occurred in Ljubljana (June 1988). In this controversial trial, the military court put \u00E2\u0080\u009Cfour young Slovenes (journalists Janez Jan\u00C5\u00A1a, David Tasi\u00C4\u0087, and Franci Zavrl, and army Staff Sergeant Ivan Bo\u00C5\u00A1tner) on trial. The charge was betrayal of a military secret. \u00E2\u0080\u00A6 Earlier in May, Maldina had published in its pages documented evidence of Army preparations to arrest large numbers of Slovenian liberals and thereby put a lid on Slovenian democratization\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Ramet, Serbia, Croatia, and 228). The trial was conducted in Serbo-Croat. Technically, because the army was a federal institution, the use of Serbo-Croat was in line with the consitutuion (Bertsch 89, 92; Coulson 88). It was a federal army trial. However, the constitution also allowed the republics to conduct affairs in their republics according to their own laws, using their own languages (Ramet, Serbia, Croatia, and 228 -229). The problem, consequently, was that although the army could \u00E2\u0080\u009Clegally\u00E2\u0080\u009D use Serbo-Croat, the use of a language other than the Slovene mother tongue, effectively \u00E2\u0080\u009Cothered\u00E2\u0080\u009D the Slovene community on their own land. As such, Serbo-Croat became the language of agency, thus, the language of power, and, by implication, the language of supremacy. The trial, therefore, is of interest for two reasons. First, the late 1980s trial of four in Slovenia demonstrates that while the republics were equal on paper, tools such as language could be used to render this equality void. Second, the trial demonstrates how language is, paradoxically, not only a key component in constructing national identity, language plays a role in legitimizing or at least enforcing one nation's power. Indeed, in the areas that comprised the former Yugoslavia, as elsewhere in the world, language has been used as a form (or weapon) of control. The point is worth pausing upon because we see this occur in Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s novel in two glaring ways. Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 exposes the ways in which language positions Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s diasporic community on the margins of Slovene society. In the novel, this occurs because the community\u00E2\u0080\u0099s inability to communicate in Slovene limits their access to education and income, and moreover, it limits their ability to be accepted. On a structural plane, this occurs because, as mentioned elsewhere, Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 creates a literary record of the \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00C4\u008Cefur\u00E2\u0080\u009D language (Zorko 189-192), a feat that must not be understated as it brings what is most commonly associated with \u00E2\u0080\u009Clow culture\u00E2\u0080\u009D on par with \u00E2\u0080\u009Chigh culture,\u00E2\u0080\u009D a point that I believe has been recognized in Slovenia as well. Therefore, in \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus!, Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 uses both the content of the novel, that is, Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s story, and the structure of the language, that is, the use of that demographic\u00E2\u0080\u0099s discourse, to challenge tensions between the homogeneous Slovene community and the diasporic \u00C4\u008Cefur community. These observations have also been engaged with, if not necessarily explicitly stated in this manner, by Slovene intellectuals and the Slovene media. xx The RSAs include \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthe Government, the Administration, the Army, the Police, the Courts, [and] the Prisons\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Althusser 142-143). The ISAs include the \u00E2\u0080\u009Creligious ISAs \u00E2\u0080\u00A6, educational ISAs \u00E2\u0080\u00A6, the family ISA, the political ISA (the political system, including the different parties), the trade Union ISAs, the communication ISA (press, radio, television, etc.), [and] the Cultural ISA (Literature, the Arts, sports, etc.)\u00E2\u0080\u009D (143). xxiIn a footnote on the first page of her article, \u00E2\u0080\u009CCultural Identity and Diaspora\u00E2\u0080\u009D (2013), Cristina-Georgiana Voicu defines diaspora as follows: \u00E2\u0080\u009CDiaspora (namely a collective memory and myth about the homeland) refers to those social groups who share a common ethnic and national origin, but live outside the territory of origin. These groups have a strong feeling of attachment to their \u00E2\u0080\u0098homeland\u00E2\u0080\u0099, making no specific reference to ethnicity, or to a particular place of settlement. \u00E2\u0080\u00A6 \u00E2\u0080\u009C (VOICU, footnote, 161). In \u00E2\u0080\u009CDiasporas,\u00E2\u0080\u009D James Clifford, by drawing on William Safran\u00E2\u0080\u0099s essay \u00E2\u0080\u009CDiasporas in Modern Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return\u00E2\u0080\u009D (1991), explains that \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthe main features of diaspora[ ] [are] a history of dispersal, myths/memories of the homeland, alienation in the host (\u00E2\u0080\u00A6) country, desire for return, ongoing support of the homeland, and a collective identity importantly defined by this relationship\u00E2\u0080\u009D (305). Diaspora, importantly, are a forced exodus. As was concluded in one of my second year English classes with Dr. Lisa Grekul, regardless of whether the \u00E2\u0080\u009Cpush\u00E2\u0080\u009D factor is violent or aggressive, or the effect of economic and environmental change, one could argue that people rarely leave their homes by choice; they are \u00E2\u0080\u009Cpushed\u00E2\u0080\u009D out (Grekul). In James Clifford\u00E2\u0080\u0099s words, \u00E2\u0080\u009CDiasporas usually presuppose \u00E2\u0080\u00A6 a separation more like exile\u00E2\u0080\u009D (304). 80 xxii Jel ti zna\u00C5\u00A1, kako sem ja do\u00C5\u00A1o u Sloveniju? Jeli zna\u00C5\u00A1, a? Ni\u00C5\u00A1ta ti ne zna\u00C5\u00A1. Te nedelje smo imali utakamico i trebo je do\u00C4\u0087 trener \u00C5\u00BDelje, da je gledal. Ve\u00C4\u0087 se govorilo, da \u00C4\u0087u ja i\u00C4\u0087 igrat za \u00C5\u00BDelju. U prvu ligu. Zna\u00C5\u00A1 ti, \u00C5\u00A1ta je prva liga? U suboto, pazi, u suboto meni stari ka\u00C5\u00BEe\u00E2\u0080\u009D \u00E2\u0080\u0098Sutra ide\u00C5\u00A1 o Slovniji.\u00E2\u0080\u0099 Ja mu reko: \u00E2\u0080\u0098Stari, imam utakvicu, kakva Slovenija!\u00E2\u0080\u0099, a on: \u00E2\u0080\u0098Zaboravi, dobio si poso u Sloveniji.\u00E2\u0080\u0099 I ja jutro fina na voz i u Ljjubljanu. Kakva utakmica, kakav \u00C5\u00BDeljo, kakva kariera. (58, original in Bosnian, italics mine) xxiii The other two are the death image and a pervasive sense of guilt (Lageman 303). xxiv The idea for this subtitle is taken from Ale\u00C5\u00A1 Debeljak's monolith Twilight of the Idols: Recollections of a Lost Yugoslavia. xxv No direct English translation exists. The term is similar to philosophizing, \u00E2\u0080\u009Ctalking shit,\u00E2\u0080\u009D \u00E2\u0080\u009Cbullshitting,\u00E2\u0080\u009D acting like they have it all figured out, are all-smart, playing cool. \t \u00C2\u00A0xxvi Zorko is correct to point out that in Marko\u00E2\u0080\u0099s description of Bosnia at the end of the novel \u00E2\u0080\u009Cwe once again discover the land through stereotypes, born with reasons\u00E2\u0080\u009D (\u00E2\u0080\u009CVodi\u00C4\u008D po vesti\u00E2\u0080\u009D 199). xxvii Zorko makes more or less the same observation when he states \u00E2\u0080\u009CAdi does not know what to say to Dejan, who is struggling with family problems\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Vodi\u00C4\u008D po vesti 198).\t \u00C2\u00A0 81 4 Chapter: And Your Point is? \u00E2\u0080\u0093 Accepting Discomfort Critical thinking is not the same as self awareness . . . Let\u00E2\u0080\u0099s face it: in times of crisis we\u00E2\u0080\u0099re all at least a little inclined to take atavistic refuge in proven survival strategies of the sort that helped our ancestors weather the changing of idols without actually having to change themselves. Isn\u00E2\u0080\u0099t the power of collective memory chaining us to inherited formulas, as it\u00E2\u0080\u0099s strongest precisely when we face the challenge of new cultural horizons, the collapse of old regimes, the royal road to a more promising future? Ale\u00C5\u00A1 Debeljak, Twilight of the Idols (18, italics mine) In order to elucidate the importance of acknowledging how the (trauma) apparatus mediates our affective responses, I would like to share a very uncomfortable personal experience. Waiting to board an airplane, I noticed that there were a number of dark skinned men, some with turbans. I felt anxious and uncomfortable. I was scared and nervous; I felt relieved when the security guards spent just a moment longer on these individuals. I was disgusted with myself. I, the humanities student, the student trained in recognizing racism and xenophobia, was having a \u00E2\u0080\u009Cgut\u00E2\u0080\u009D reaction that I can only explain as racism and xenophobia. I was appalled with myself. I tried rationalizing it. The guards are only trying to keep me safe. There are more Muslim fanatics than white or Christian fanatics. Muslims do tend to be darker. I grew continually more horrified, but I was horrified with myself. My ex-boyfriend could pass as Arab. I have Muslim friends. I have friends from Middle Eastern countries. I have never had any reason to fear them, or be anything but curious about our difference. In fact, I probably know more dangerous white people than black or brown people. Yet, there I was, terribly uncomfortable, which my supervisor tells me is symptom of my \u00E2\u0080\u009Cwhiteness.\u00E2\u0080\u009D Of course, there was nothing to fear. My \u00E2\u0080\u009Cgut\u00E2\u0080\u009D feeling was the only monster present. However, the experience taught me something important, and brought 82 my attention to the phenomenon I have attempted to elucidate in regards to the relationship between \u00C4\u008Cefurs and Slovenes in Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s novel. Instincts and gut feelings are not necessarily natural, that is, based on some inherent truth; rather they are things we learn to know and feel. I refer to this anecdote because it illustrates the ways in which affect and justification twist and turn into each other. It is important to be aware of both our affective and critical responses in any encounter with the other \u00E2\u0080\u0093 regardless of whether or not this other is an individual or an idea. Although our fearful and racist (re)actions may be justifiable, this does not make them unproblematically true. The same, of course, can be said of our compassionate and inclusive (re)actions, for example, when we engage with another whose views we respond to as problematic. The tendency in my experience is that we try to find the answer \u00E2\u0080\u0093 the right answer, the truth. What I forget is that life, like any other experience, is not black and white. So no, there is no perfect/happy future, no solution \u00E2\u0080\u0093 as if we could ever agree on one anyways. The way forward, the solution, so to speak, is filled with contradictions, paradoxes, and discomfort. The solution will ask each of us, every side, to sit with aporia. However, this is not necessarily as discouraging, as may at first appear. I argue that novels such as Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! open up a space that both instills a sense of discomfort and, at the same time, paradoxically, invites moments of curiosity and empathy. In this way, the socio-historical frame enters the reader\u00E2\u0080\u0099s awareness, but does not dictate the reader\u00E2\u0080\u0099s (re)actions and responses. The novel asks the self and the other to be aware of and acknowledge the past as well as the socio-economic contexts or apparatuses, but to respond in the present. 4.1 An Uncomfortable Slovene Response Before continuing, it is worth pausing a moment further on the ways in which knowledge is formed and experienced. In The Inability to Mourn social sociologists Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich state that \u00E2\u0080\u009C[o]ur conscience is formed as an internal censoring agency in 83 which external experience is stored and which directs our behavior\u00E2\u0080\u009D (79). They go on to quote Nietzsche who contends that \u00E2\u0080\u009C[t]he source of conscience is faith in authorities; thus it is not the voice of God in man\u00E2\u0080\u0099s breast, but the voice of some men in man\u00E2\u0080\u009D (80-81). Not everyone believes in authority or God, or another spiritual power or series of powers. However, Nietzsche\u00E2\u0080\u0099s point is nevertheless worth reiterating. Conscience is not formed by some innate internal belief or guiding compass; rather it is created by a series of external factors, largely dependent on the individual and society, and then internalized as a morality. Often, this internal guide leads us well. Socially constructed or not, killing is most often not a viable solution. However, as my own airport experience shows, our \u00E2\u0080\u009Cgut\u00E2\u0080\u009D reactions, a form of knowledge, can also lead us astray. Take for example, one mother\u00E2\u0080\u0099s response to \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! Upon learning that the school required her daughter to read Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s novel, the mother, whose screen name is \u00E2\u0080\u009Cobogatitveno branje\u00E2\u0080\u009D [assigned reading], asks why. Reading the post, I sensed concern and disbelief. The mother states that the text illustrates a group of frightened, less fortunate individuals who do not wish to participate in Slovene society, but who, at the same time, blame Slovenes for anything/everything bad that has ever happened to them. She also contends that the text presents the characters as brave because they get drunk. She goes on to ask how a novel that is full of Serbian, half of it profanities and depictions of hooliganism can be considered \u00E2\u0080\u009Cart\u00E2\u0080\u009D (obogatitveno branje, ponovi).i While I empathize with the mother\u00E2\u0080\u0099s concern, it appears that she read the novel literally, paying attention only to that which would have been most immediately accessed by her frame of reference, most likely prominent stereotypes, and has missed the (more subtle) potential work done by the novel.ii The mother is suggesting that the novel does not meet the requirements for the quality of literature students should be required to read. The difference, which it must be noted is on a continuum and always subjective, is summed up in Slovene scholar Alojzia Zupan Sosi\u00C4\u008D\u00E2\u0080\u0099s book On the Quay of Contemporaaneity: Literature and the Novel 84 [Na pomolu sodobnosti ali o knji\u00C5\u00BEevnosti in romanu]. Zupan Sosi\u00C4\u008D suggests that the difference between literary (\u00E2\u0080\u009Cquality\u00E2\u0080\u009D), which she considers Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087s novel to be, and nonliterary or, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cfun\u00E2\u0080\u009D fiction,iii is that while both types use common literary devices, clich\u00C3\u00A9s, symbolism, suspense, and so on, literary works actively pay attention to the use of language, characterization, and other literary devices to defamiliarize the familiar and suggest something more that what is at first apparent in the plot and literary devices (17-43, 44-74).iv The \u00E2\u0080\u009Ccatch,\u00E2\u0080\u009D of course, is that while a novel can be considered to be of greater or lesser quality, one can also read more or less actively, paying attention or not paying attention to the subtle shifts and narrative moves. Perhaps more importantly, although the mother\u00E2\u0080\u0099s critique \u00E2\u0080\u009Cmisses\u00E2\u0080\u009D some aspects of the novel, her concern, given her frame of reference, is understandable. In fact, I think her concern, that is, discomfort, and her willingness to share it is part of the reason the novel is so successful. Here I am thinking of the conversation, which reflects the overall conversation in Slovenia following the novel\u00E2\u0080\u0099s release that ensued after the mother posted her comment. Two of the parents (with the screen names kgf\u00C5\u00A1 and ponovi vajo) who respond to her suggest that she is focusing too much on the dialogue and reading with preconceived notions (obogatitveno branje, ponovi). Similarly, responder beda suggests not saying anything to her daughter and letting her (the daughter) make up her own mind (obogatitveno branje, ponovi). In both cases, the mother is essentially being asked, to borrow a term from current mindfulness and psycho-therapy discourse, to \u00E2\u0080\u009Csit with her discomfort,\u00E2\u0080\u009D to not respond to the immediate thoughts and emotions evoked by the novel\u00E2\u0080\u0099s language and the characters\u00E2\u0080\u0099 actions. In other words, she is being asked to open up, to allow different insights and experiences, experiences that she does not understand, and which she can not incorporate into her own experience. The novel requires the mother to respond with empathy. Empathy, here, means, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cattending to, even trying, in limited ways, to recapture the possibly split off, affective dimension of the experience of others\u00E2\u0080\u009D (LaCapra, 85 Writing History, Writing 40). LaCapra notes that \u00E2\u0080\u009C[e]mpathy in this sense is a form of virtual not vicarious experience \u00E2\u0080\u00A6, in which emotional response comes with respect for the other and the realization that the experience of the other is not one\u00E2\u0080\u0099s own\u00E2\u0080\u009D (40).v This can lead to a sort of \u00E2\u0080\u009Cempathic unsettlement\u00E2\u0080\u009D(41). That is, the mother is not being asked to identify with or even understand the experiences presented in the novel; however, she is being asked to remain open to and compassionate toward the experiences of others that she can never fully fit into her own experiences. As the other parents remind her, this process may not be easy and it may require her to pause in her response and approach her discomfort and the novel with wonder. Wonder in this sense is defined as an encounter with an object that one does not recognize; or wonder works to transform the ordinary, which is already recognized, into the extraordinary. As such, wonder expands our field of vision and touch. Wonder is the precondition of the exposure of the subject to the world: we wonder when we are moved by what we feel. (Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of 179) While the experience may not be easy, it is one that allows the possibility of something new; it allows the possibility of expanding one\u00E2\u0080\u0099s ability for empathy and awareness. Indeed, through what Sara Ahmed calls wonder, [t]he body opens as the world opens up before it; the body unfolds into the unfolding of a world that becomes approached as another body. This opening is not without risks: wonder can be closed down if what we approach is unwelcome, or undoes the promise of that opening up. But wonder is a passion that motivates the desire to keep looking; it keeps alive the possibility of freshness, and vitality of a living that can live as if for the first time. (The Cultural Politics of 180) 86 This process, that is, this willingness to experience the uncomfortable, this unsettlement, so to speak, seems to me a crucial component of approaching the novel as a tool for working through difficult and traumatic past and present experiences. When engaging with \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus!, I find it difficult to overcome the belief that language and stereotypes play a key role in, as Judith Butler reminds us in Frames of War, that \u00E2\u0080\u009Ccertain framing of reality, both its constriction and its interpretation\u00E2\u0080\u009D that makes some lives grievable and others not (xii, xviii-xix).vi I find myself turning again and again to Marko Stabej\u00E2\u0080\u0099s discussion of the novel in \u00E2\u0080\u009CPri\u00C5\u00A1leki in \u00C4\u008Cefurji\u00E2\u0080\u009D [\u00E2\u0080\u009CPri\u00C5\u00A1leks and \u00C4\u008Cefurs\u00E2\u0080\u009D]. Stabej explains that \u00E2\u0080\u009C[t]he public\u00E2\u0080\u0099s response to that linguistic difference [the lack of formal diction / academic Slovene] are symptomatic of the Slovene language community, where top literature is still conceptually tied to standard Slovene\u00E2\u0080\u009D (297). As Stabej points out, this position is not always limited to the general public. In a footnote, he quotes Slovene scholar Tina Vr\u00C5\u00A1\u00C4\u008Daj who states that \u00E2\u0080\u009Cgood grammar should go without saying when it comes to Kresnik finalists, but it surprisingly doesn\u00E2\u0080\u0099t\u00E2\u0080\u009D (qtd. in Stabej 300). However, Stabej makes an important point when he states that \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthe stereotypical understanding, that the only possible carrier of quality Slovene literature are those with untainted book Slovene \u00E2\u0080\u00A6 most likely limits the general public\u00E2\u0080\u0099s preparedness to understand and accept literary worlds mediated through different forms of language\u00E2\u0080\u009D (303). Importantly, he adds \u00E2\u0080\u009Cwe cannot get rid of the suspicion, that such a stereotypical perception [of what can be considered quality literature worthy of reflection] does not stop merely at the rejection of literary works, but that it is also tied to the lack of desire to accept others and different speakers, different language groups and speakers in the Slovene space in general\u00E2\u0080\u009D (303). One need only consider the Slovene police response to the novel, or the words of one internet commentator \u00E2\u0080\u009Csladoled\u00C4\u008Debula\u00E2\u0080\u009D [icecreamonion] \u00E2\u0080\u0093 \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthis southerner in the novel really insults Slovenes\u00E2\u0080\u009D and \u00E2\u0080\u009C[S]ick nation, this Slovenia\u00E2\u0080\u009D (24.ur) \u00E2\u0080\u0093 to ascertain that the two are related. 87 To this I would add a surprising piece of wisdom I encountered while taking a break from my research: \u00E2\u0080\u009Cbe wary of holding onto any belief too tightly. We all have beliefs, but the more tightly we hold on to them, the more inflexible we become in our attitudes and behaviors\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Harris, The Happiness Trap 47-48). The value, and I use this term loosely, of literature or any form of expression and communication is its ability to open up spaces of empathy, that is, our willingness to engage with contradictions, emotions, beliefs, and experiences that we do not and cannot have full access to. As a non-didactic or confrontational tool, narrative can serve to gently invite the reader into an experience of discomfort and uncertainty he or she may be unwilling or unable to engage with directly. In fact, I argue that Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s novel plays or can be used to play a key role in helping the Slovene communities work through, or perhaps more accurately, acknowledge and \u00E2\u0080\u009Csit with\u00E2\u0080\u009D their feelings of pain, discomfort, mistrust, and hate. This occurs because \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! destabilizes the emotional response to the other constructed by one\u00E2\u0080\u0099s prejudices and ideology. Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s novel produces enough discomfort to cause reflection, but not enough to alienate or directly blame the reader. However, I would not delude myself or the reader of this thesis into thinking that the novel encourages each and every one of its readers to approach the other with empathy and curiosity. As I imagine is clear from the blog examples listed above, not everyone experiences the novel in this way. Nevertheless, the novel allows this possibility, and thus, it is worth examining how it does so. 4.2 Sara Ahmed\u00E2\u0080\u0099s \u00E2\u0080\u009CAffective Economies\u00E2\u0080\u009D and The Cultural Politics of Emotion In thinking through these uncomfortable conundra and how one might exist within them, I find it helpful to draw on Sara Ahmed\u00E2\u0080\u0099s discussions of affect and embodiment. In her work, Ahmed suggests that rather than existing inside us or the objects and individuals we interact with, emotions circulate in between (\u00E2\u0080\u009CAffective Economies\u00E2\u0080\u009D 117). Emotions, she explains, \u00E2\u0080\u009Ccirculate between bodies, \u00E2\u0080\u00A6 [and] \u00E2\u0080\u0098stick\u00E2\u0080\u0099 as well as move\u00E2\u0080\u009D (The Cultural Politics 4). Ahmed goes on to 88 explain that \u00E2\u0080\u009Cemotions work as a form of capital: affect does not reside positively in the sign or commodity, but is produced as an effect of its circulation\u00E2\u0080\u009D (45). She then clarifies this point: \u00E2\u0080\u009C[s]igns increase in affective value as an affect of the movement between signs: the more signs circulate, the more affective they become\u00E2\u0080\u009D (45). Here, one is invited to think back to Foucault\u00E2\u0080\u0099s discussion of power, which circulates between and through bodies, but does not exist within them. It is in this in between space, in the site of circulation, that I see the novel playing a key role. However, I think one should be wary of making the assumption that a narrative will bring complete, unproblematic, or transcendent closure. As LaCapra so eloquently puts it, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cworking through\u00E2\u0080\u009D or as I, drawing on mindfulness discourse, prefer to call it, \u00E2\u0080\u009Csitting with\u00E2\u0080\u009D is not the same as transcendence: The processes of working through, including mourning and modes of critical thought and practice, involve the possibility of making distinctions or developing articulations that are recognized as problematic but still function as limits and as possibly desirable resistances to undecidability, particularly when the latter is tantamount to confusion and the obliteration or blurring of all distinctions (states that may indeed occur in trauma or in acting out post-traumatic conditions). (Writing History, Writing 22) 4.3 Opening Up \u00E2\u0080\u0093 Spaces of Curiosity and Empathy, Spaces of Difference \u00E2\u0080\u0093 Framing the Narrative In Taking Back Our Spirits: Indigenous Literature, Public Policy, and Healing, Jo-Ann Episkenew argues that the \u00E2\u0080\u009Cfirst step towards healing is creating awareness and understanding\u00E2\u0080\u009D (155). Although complete awareness and understanding may prove impossible, beginning the healing process by expanding one\u00E2\u0080\u0099s awareness and understanding seems like a good starting point. This may be particularly true for the oppressor, or the self, who is (I would suspect) more 89 likely to be unaware, or unwilling, to accept and acknowledge his or her role in someone else\u00E2\u0080\u0099s struggle.vii \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! asks the reader to do this. Summarizing a discussion with the author, Kmetec states that \u00E2\u0080\u009CVojnovi\u00C4\u0087\u00E2\u0080\u0099s intention is to encourage critical thinking and deeper reflection into things that deserve our attention.\u00E2\u0080\u009D Indeed, although Kmetec\u00E2\u0080\u0099s observation comes from a discussion with Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 about his second book Jugoslavia moja de\u00C5\u00BEela [Yugoslavia my world] (2012), \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! also encourages the reader to think more deeply and critically about immigrants from the southern republics of ex-Yugoslavia in Slovenia. The book begins by providing the reader with a series of epigraphs that alert the reader to the novel\u00E2\u0080\u0099s seriousness. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, the epigraphs remind the reader to pause before making judgments. The first epigraph is taken from the Serbian-Slovene singer-songwriter Robert Pe\u00C5\u00A1ut\u00E2\u0080\u0099s (commonly known as Magnifico) song \u00C4\u008Cefur. Given that the song is written and performed by a Serbian-Slovene singer-songwriter,viii who could be identified as a \u00C4\u008Cefur because of his parentage, and who in his other works challenges sexual identity stereotypes (Matos), I suspect the song is meant to be ironic, a reappropriation of the term. In fact, the YouTube video of the song, which is titled \u00E2\u0080\u009CGdo je \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00C4\u008Cefur\u00E2\u0080\u009D confirms my reading (Zi Ga). First, the title is ironic. The \u00E2\u0080\u009Cproper\u00E2\u0080\u009D Slovene phrasing would be, as one YouTube commentator pointed out, \u00E2\u0080\u009CKdo\u00E2\u0080\u009D not \u00E2\u0080\u009CGdo\u00E2\u0080\u009D \u00E2\u0080\u009Cje \u00C4\u008Cefur.\u00E2\u0080\u009D Similarly, the song rings with satire. The song begins with the artist reading the definition. This is followed by the phrase \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00C4\u008Cefur raus!\u00E2\u0080\u009D and then with phrases such \u00E2\u0080\u009Clook there is a \u00C4\u008Cefur,\u00E2\u0080\u009D \u00E2\u0080\u009Clook at the \u00C4\u008Cefur.\u00E2\u0080\u009D The song continues with lines such as \u00E2\u0080\u009Cah! fuck it if I'm a \u00C4\u008Cefur,\u00E2\u0080\u009D \u00E2\u0080\u009Cwho is a \u00C4\u008Cefur,\u00E2\u0080\u009D \u00E2\u0080\u009CI am a \u00C4\u008Cefur,\u00E2\u0080\u009D \u00E2\u0080\u009Cyou're a \u00C4\u008Cefur,\u00E2\u0080\u009D and \u00E2\u0080\u009Cwe are all \u00C4\u008Cefurs\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Zi Ga). The song refuses to be ashamed of its \u00C4\u008Cefur identity. The song challenges, to use Homi Bhabha\u00E2\u0080\u0099s terminology, the enunciation of the stereotype. It asserts, look, this is the definition of a \u00C4\u008Cefur, and clearly it is derogatory. By saying \u00E2\u0080\u009Cwe are all \u00C4\u008Cefurs,\u00E2\u0080\u009D the song reminds me that we all sometimes display the negative characteristics discourse displaces onto the other.ix The irony here 90 serves to remind the reader that stereotypes are, most simply, simplifications that function as a form of structural violence. Such a reminder, then, warns the reader against processing the characterizations provided by the epigraphs, particularly the first epigraph as fact. In other words, the song that frames the narrative asks the reader to consider what sorts of emotions and beliefs circulate through and between objects and their signs. Readers are asked, that is, to pause and consider how this sticking of emotions works on them and their (re)actions and responses. 4.4 If You Wanted a Solution, I Have One, But You Are Not Going to Like it As Slovene scholars have noted, \u00E2\u0080\u009C\u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus!\u00E2\u0080\u009D shows awareness of the problems. It doesn\u00E2\u0080\u0099t necessarily say people need to change things. It simply says they need to be aware of what is happening, and how it affects their perception of the other. In other words, the novel asks the reader to become aware. What does one miss when an apparatus one is not conscious of frames one\u00E2\u0080\u0099s experience of the other? In order to make change, to act, if one wishes to, one must be aware of the frames that frame his or her experience, and he or she must make room for a series of uncomfortable feelings. It is only by becoming aware and opening up to all sorts of feelings that one can begin to exist in the present. One must first feel and acknowledge his or her feelings and responses; however, before one (re)acts, he or she must pause, to consider the frame. This, however, does not mean only the state apparatus. The novel asks the reader to consider how his or her own actions, his or her own (pre)conceptions, and his or her everyday encounters with institutions, others from his or her own groups, and others, shape and are shaped by the sticky seepage of emotions and beliefs that he or she is not aware of. How does one\u00E2\u0080\u0099s everyday (re)actions and discourses \u00E2\u0080\u009Cevoke[ ] a history [a belief, a sense] that is not declared\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Ahmed, The Cultural Politics 47)? For, as Foucault once said, one of the first things that has to be understood is that power isn\u00E2\u0080\u0099t localized in the State apparatus and that nothing in society will be changed if the mechanisms of 91 power that function outside, below and alongside the State apparatuses on a much more minute and everyday level are not also changed (Power/Knowledge 60). At this point, I wish I could provide a clear answer \u00E2\u0080\u0093 a solution with steps that need to be implemented. I do not have such clear answers and/or steps. However, I can propose a way in which novels, as well as other forms of expressions, can be used as tools for working through, that is, sitting with, experiences of trauma. The novel offers the reader a place where the reader can, to once again borrow mindfulness discourse, sit with and approach his or her anxiety with curiosity. Anxiety is an important emotion and response. However, it is an emotion that both alerts one to a moment that may necessitate further reflection, and which may often delude one into (re)acting in very unhealthy ways. LaCapra explains that [a] crucial way of attempting to allay anxiety is to locate a particular or specific thing that could be feared and thus enable one to find ways of eliminating or mastering of fear. The convergence of absence into loss gives anxiety an identifiable object \u00E2\u0080\u0093 the lost object \u00E2\u0080\u0093 and generates the hope that anxiety may be eliminated or overcome. (Writing History, Writing 57) As he notes elsewhere, absence cannot be overcome, because while what is missing is absent, it is not lost; it never existed in the first place (48-49). As such, an anxiety based around absence \u00E2\u0080\u009Cmay never be entirely eliminated or overcome but must be lived with. It allows for only limited control that is never absolutely assured; any cure would be deceptive\u00E2\u0080\u009D (57). In fact, LaCapra cautions the reader that attempting to come to terms with or find a solution for this anxiety may prove dangerous: Avoidance of this anxiety is one basis for the typical projection of blame for a putative loss onto identifiable others, thereby inviting the generation of scapegoating or sacrificial scenarios. In converting absence into loss, one assumes 92 that there was (or at least could be) some original unity, wholeness, security or identity that others have ruined, polluted, or contaminated and thus made \u00E2\u0080\u009Cus\u00E2\u0080\u009D lose. Therefore, to regain it one must somehow get rid of or eliminate those others \u00E2\u0080\u0093 or perhaps that sinful other in oneself. (57-58) That is, one might wish to eliminate the dangerous, vulgar, and lazy other \u00E2\u0080\u0093 the \u00C4\u008Cefur encapsulated in the epigraphs at the start of the novel. One might also, ironically, in the same manner, wish to eliminate the filthy member of one\u00E2\u0080\u0099s own community who continues to use such demeaning and clearly derogatory language when referencing the other \u00E2\u0080\u0093 the one in a position of privilege who uses terms such as \u00C4\u008Cefur. In both cases, one individual or group is attempting to alleviate its anxiety about the absence of the world they wish to exist in by locating the fault in the presence or actions of the other. Is one position better than another? Maybe. I certainly have my preferences. However, I cannot ask nor accept someone else\u00E2\u0080\u0099s empathy, that is, I cannot ask someone else to sit with their discomfort and their inability to understand, if I am unwilling to do the same. As such, I propose that Vojnovi\u00C4\u0087 novel functions as a tool for working through both trauma and xenophobia because it asks both groups to pause for a moment and consider the other and the other\u00E2\u0080\u0099s experience. The fact that one cannot ever really know the other only serves to intensify the discomfort people feel when they are asked to suspend their beliefs and open themselves to the unknown of the other. This process is further intensified when people know or sense that they may be implicated, either directly or indirectly, in the other\u00E2\u0080\u0099s struggle. Yet, despite the discomfort and resistance such an openness may evoke, I wish to suggest, by aligning myself with Ahmed, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cthat an ethics of responding to pain involves being open to being affected by that which one cannot know or feel\u00E2\u0080\u009D (The Cultural Politics 30, italics mine). \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! invites the reader to do just that. 93 4.5 A Few Final Thoughts [A] book (or other artifact such as a film) cannot be adequately defended on the basis of the mere fact that it keeps an issue alive in the public sphere and somehow forces people to confront its past. A great deal depends on precisely how a book (or any other artifact) accomplishes this feat and what it contributes to public discussion of sensitive, indeed volatile, issues \u00E2\u0080\u0093 issues that bear forcefully on contemporary politics and self-understanding Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (121) Thus, I would leave the reader with a few final disclosures and thoughts. I have often commented in frustration on Slovene memory and Slovene politics. For example, I often groaned in response to references in news discussions to what was Slovene or Croat land/sea, or my grandfathers reminding me that this used to be Slovene land not Italian or Austrian land before WWI and II. Can\u00E2\u0080\u0099t they just get over it already, I grumbled to whomever would listen. It\u00E2\u0080\u0099s over; we have to look forward I raged. Ironically, this is very similar to my grandfather\u00E2\u0080\u0099s statements that all this talk about WWII and the Partisans after the collapse of Yugoslavia is just stirring up trouble. To paraphrase, he suggests that Tito and his communists did a good job of eliminating discussions of the wars and the hashing up of blame. In part, I agree with my grandfather, and I still feel that hashing up things that occurred almost a hundred years ago is utterly pointless. However, I only feel this way when memories of the past are acted out as if they are still present. For example, I think that reducing current political battles to who fought on what side of the war and which side is more guilty of atrocities is an utterly useless exercise when, that is, it used as an attempt to ascertain which side suffered more or which side was right and which side was wrong. At the end of the day, I imagine all sides participated in ways they wish they could forget, and made choices they wish they had not had to make at all. However, I do think that hashing up old memories and suffering, regardless of whose hands the suffering was caused by, is useful when this hashing up initiates a form of working through, a way of acknowledging the other\u00E2\u0080\u0099s pain, which can never be taken back or be wholly justified or compensated. Should there be talk about 94 who did what, to whom? Of course. Should it be used to assign blame, or to create a calculus of pain? Perhaps. There might even be a \u00E2\u0080\u009Ctruthful\u00E2\u0080\u009D conclusion. But nothing useful can come from this. It is true that my na\u00C3\u00AFve and radical, paradoxically childish self, wants to change the world. I want people to rethink their relationships. I want to help communities engage with each other in ways that open up inclusive and empathetic dialogue that encourages alterity but does not reduce it to oppositionly based binaries, predetermined by the presence of an always already negative difference. However, I am not so na\u00C3\u00AFve, nor so radical. While I dream of grand gestures and sudden wholistic changes, in my experience, the changes that stick are those silent subtle tweaks that make one pause for just a moment. Thus, my goal is not radical change, a new world order, or even a new sort of relationship between groups and communities. I do not aim to heal trauma or even, necessarily, to help communities work through it. I wish all these things but I do not strive to achieve them. That would be like striving to swim a mile in a choppy sea without first learning to cross the calm swimming pool. Rather, the individual succeeds if he or she can encourage just one person, to just one time, rethink his/her automatic (re)action to the other \u00E2\u0080\u00A6 to consider how his/her perception in this particular instance is filtered through a series of apparatuses, not the least of which is a trauma apparatus. Thus, I partially agree with Episkenew, who contends that \u00E2\u0080\u009C[c]onverting the residual pain of traumatic events first into language and subsequently into text enables us to distance ourselves from trauma. We can than examine the text of traumatic events to understand the emotions it triggers, a process that allows us to diminish its negative effects\u00E2\u0080\u009D (70). While I believe that trauma and pain may need to be converted into text or another medium before they can be examined, or for that matter engaged with at all, I am not sure the negative effects and affects of 95 trauma can be totally eradicated. In fact, I am not sure they should be. To once again borrow Ahmed\u00E2\u0080\u0099s words, A good scar is one that sticks out, a lumpy sign on the skin. It\u00E2\u0080\u0099s not that the wound is exposed or that the skin is bleeding. But the scar is a sign of injury: a good scar involves healing, it even covers over, but the covering always exposes the injury, reminding us of how it shapes the body. Our bodies have been shaped by their injuries that persist in the healing or stitching of the present. This kind of good scar reminds us that recovering from injustice cannot be about covering over the injuries, which are effects of injustice; signs of an unjust contact between our bodies and others. So \u00E2\u0080\u009Cjust emotions\u00E2\u0080\u009D might just be the ones that work with and on rather than over the wounds that surface as traces of past injuries in the present (The Cultural Politics 201-202). Scars make us who we are. Some scars we learn from; others we live with. Our own scars remind us of what we have done to ourselves and what others and morality have done to us. The scars of others remind us of what they went through, and sometimes, what we forced them to go through. While picking at scars often makes them worse, and hiding scars only serves to obscure a part of ourselves, a past that made us who we are, living with and learning from our scars reduces the possibility that we will receive or inflict the same wounds and scars, on ourselves or on others, again. \u00E2\u0080\u009CAnd Your Point is? / Moving Beyond Trauma in Trauma \u00E2\u0080\u0093 Accepting Discomfort\u00E2\u0080\u009D i It would be prudent to note two considerations here. First, the mother is mistaken in assuming the \u00E2\u0080\u009Cforeign\u00E2\u0080\u009D text in the novel is Serbian. While some sections are Bosnian, the parts of the novel not written in Slovenian are predominantly in a specific Fu\u00C5\u00BEin dialect. (You cannot translate them by looking up individual words in a Serbian-English or Serbian-Slovenian dictionary, or on Google translate. I tried.) http://med.over.net/forum5/read.php?151,8177814 96 ii Here, my work draws upon Zupan Sosi\u00C4\u008D\u00E2\u0080\u0099s discussion of what makes a literary text and what makes a nonliterary text, and when this occurs, as well as what determines a literary text (so called \u00E2\u0080\u009Cquality\u00E2\u0080\u009D work) and a trivial or non-literary, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cfun\u00E2\u0080\u009D text (so called \u00E2\u0080\u0098non-quality\u00E2\u0080\u0099 work), which was useful in working through some of my thoughts on why and how this novel works. I have noted that Zupan Sosi\u00C4\u008D considers \u00C4\u008Cefurji Raus! a literary text because she listed it as one in one of her class lectures. iii I make this distinction because, as Zupan-Sosi\u00C4\u008D notes, \u00E2\u0080\u009Cnonliterary\u00E2\u0080\u009D can also refer to other sorts of writing (textbooks, reports, some essays, official documents) (18). iv Zupan Sosi\u00C4\u008D also postulates that how a text is classified (and valued) depends not only on how the reader him or herself reads, but also on the reader\u00E2\u0080\u0099s context (17, 39-42). v LaCapra states that \u00E2\u0080\u009C[a]s a counterforce to numbing, empathy may be understood in terms of attending to, even trying, in limited ways, to recapture the possibly split off, affective dimension of the experience of others. Empathy may also be seen as counteracting victimization, including self-victimization. It involves affectivity as a crucial aspect of understanding in the historian or other observer or analyst. As in trauma, numbing (objectification and splitting of object from subject, including self-as-subject from self-as-object) may function for the historian as a protective shield or preservative against unproblematic identification with the experience of others and the possibility of being traumatized by it. But objectivity should not be identified with objectivism or exclusive objectification that denies or forecloses empathy, just as empathy should not be conflated with unchecked identification, vicarious experience, and surrogate victimage. Objectivity requires checks and resistances to full identification and this is one important function of meticulous research, conceptuality and the attempt to be as attentive as possible to the voices of others whose alterity is recognized. Empathy in this sense is a form of virtual, not vicarious, experience related to what Kaja Silverman has termed heteropathic identification, in which emotional response comes with respect for the other and the realization that the experience of the other is not one\u00E2\u0080\u0099s own\u00E2\u0080\u009D (Writing History, Writing 40). vi Of course, I am also implicated in this frame, and it would be foolhardy and irresponsible of me to suggest that my feelings, senses, and beliefs are somehow outside of these frames. Thus, I can only attempt to proceed aware of my own prejudices, feelings, senses, and beliefs, recognizing that mine are just as real and just as experiential as the mother\u00E2\u0080\u0099s, quoted above, regardless of whether or not I agree with her, or experience the same events and experiences in the same ways vii It would be equally ineffective, I believe, for a member of the dominant culture, to identify too closely with members of a minority, that is, take on their struggles as their own. See LaCapra\u00E2\u0080\u0099s discussion of empathy in Writing History, Writing Trauma. viii For more information (in English) on (the eccentric) Robert Pe\u00C5\u00A1ut refer to http://www.last.fm/music/Magnifico and http://www.mladina.si/91512/robert-pesut-magnifico/?cookieu=ok (in Slovenian). ix My reading here is informed by Bahbha\u00E2\u0080\u0099s discussion of the \u00E2\u0080\u0098Self,\u00E2\u0080\u0099 \u00E2\u0080\u0098Other,\u00E2\u0080\u0099 and colonial discourse in The Location of Culture. 97 Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. \"Affective Economies.\" Social Text 22.2 (2004): 117-39. Web. ---. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Print. Ali\u00C4\u0087, Mehmedalija. Nih\u00C4\u008De. Tran. Sanela Ali\u00C4\u0087. Ljubljana: Cankarjeva Zalo\u00C5\u00BEba, 2013. Print. Althusser, Louis. \"Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation).\" Lenin and Philosophy, and Other Essays. Tran. Ben Brewster. 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