No country, no cry: Literature of women’s displacement and the reading of pity

ABSTRACT

This article discusses how works of popular fiction cultivate affective attachments to unstable distinctions between citizens and migrants, “refugees” and “economic migrants”, or “legal” and “irregular” migrants. Focusing on two texts published in the USA between the mid-1990s and 2015 that thematize the fallout from late-20th-century conflicts in former Yugoslavia, the article examines how novels written by women get read as instruments of women’s personal engagement with the politics of nationhood, migration and displacement. The texts encourage sympathetic disidentification from the fictional texts’ female protagonists, and provide formal signals for readers looking to distance themselves from the ambiguities of the protagonists’ status and the gendered violence it entails. The article suggests how such reading, a profitable commodity with middle-class consumers of literary texts, cultivates political imagination that aestheticizes concerns with the violence and uncertainty of all nation-making, and ascribes insecurity to unfamiliar regions and foreign women.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• refugee
• Balkans
• Bosnia
• Yugoslavia
• gender

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Giorgio Agamben (1995) offers a famous discussion of the structural impossibility of this distinction in “We Refugees” (115).

2. The economic and ideological forces are usually impossible to distinguish, and the migrants’ status vis-à-vis a nation state often impossible to ascertain. In the face of such unprecedented intensity of forced migration, Owens (2009) argues, it “no longer makes sense, if it ever did, to represent political subjectivity in terms of state/nation/territory” (568). Howe-Haralambous (2017) explains how the “confusion” in contemporary European migration crisis reflects the attempt on the part of state authorities to differentiate between “refugees” and “economic migrants” in an effort to find those “deserving” of help because imagined helpless enough, and justify juridical and state violence against the rest.

3. Some of their failures are made manifest in their inability to acknowledge that their crossing of borders is an exceptional event, defining of a different economic class, travel not undertaken for business or leisure; in their failure to own and show passports at the crossing; to pay for their journey on the officially sanctioned travel market; and – this most “misguided” of transgressions – to refrain from asking for the privileges of citizenship from a foreign state.

4. For an elaboration on the relationship between “liberal citizenship” and histories of European colonialism, see Bloom (2018). For various critiques mounted from the positions of “postcolonial literature”, “world literature”, “women’s literature”, etc., see, for example, Ahmed (2017); Gikandi (2014); Viswanathan (1989).

5. “The International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former Yugoslavia since 1991” was an ad hoc court established in 1993 by Resolution 827 of the UN Security Council, and dismantled at the end of 2017. Located in The Hague, it was charged with prosecuting grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, violations of the laws or customs of war, genocide, and crimes against humanity.

6. The Court also heard numerous horrific accounts of sexual violence and coercion in which men were the perpetrators and the victims. That none of those was ever deemed potentially interesting and profitable enough to be made into a work of “fiction” or “memoir” is worth some thought, especially in the context of the gendered politics of victimhood and its representation in texts designed to elicit humanitarian interest and feeling.

7. The relationship between state institutions and normative gender and sexuality is reinforced in the recent wave of reformulations of the concept of marriage as a kind of contract reserved for persons invested in perpetuating “family values” and related forms of normative sexuality, but available to same-sex couples and thereby disruptive to hegemonic gender norms.

8. The bombing was the 1999 NATO intervention in Kosovo and Serbia, in response to the state terror against Kosovar Albanians ordered by the Serbian government of Slobodan Milošević, and one of the last acts of open involvement in the politics of former Yugoslavia by the Clinton administration.

9. Inexplicably, “Zóra” is accented, but “Jovo” is not; “Gailé” but not “Dejana”, etc.

10. For an unequivocal celebration of Obreht’s career-making, see The New York Times account by McGrath (2011) of her arrival on the literary scene, in which the “Author Earns her Stripes on First Try”. McGrath reminds readers that “[i]n The Times on Friday, Michiko Kakutani called it ‘hugely ambitious, audaciously written’”.

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Olivera Jokic

Olivera Jokic is associate professor of English and gender studies at John Jay College at the City University of New York. She is a scholar and teacher of 18th- and 19th-century literature, gender, historiography and textual interpretation. Her work has appeared in Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, Essays in Romanticism, Literature Compass, Common-place and elsewhere.