A Prague text: Reconfiguring marginality in and of Europe

ABSTRACT

While postcolonial scholarship has long sought to decentre Europe, the cumulative effects of such work have been to fetishize and homogenize a figure of Europe. Recent scholarship has recognized the value of reading postcolonial narratives alongside the ramifications of the Cold War for enriched understandings of each and both together. This article enters these conversations by developing a “migrational” reading of three texts about the city of Prague: Czech-born Libuše Moníková’s Prager Fenster (1994), South African-born Nadine Gordimer’s A Sport of Nature (1987), and Indian-born Nirmal Verma’s Days of Longing (1964). Proposing the notion of a “Prague text”, this reading performatively decentres Western Europe while maintaining a nuanced grasp on differences within the continent. The juxtaposition enabled by a Prague text puts up for scrutiny various attributions of European centrality, as the article critically engages notions of “Europeanness” and challenges configurations of Europe as a determining point of reference.

KEYWORDS:

• Decentring Europe
• Cold War
• South African literature
• Indian literature
• post-communism
• Prague text

In classically colonial ascriptions, the European colonial metropolis was designated the centre from which a civilization cast as universally desirable radiated, and the colonies were assigned accordingly peripheral positions in the imagined cartography of the world. The centre, here, forms the node according to which peripheries are demarcated and upon which these putatively marginal spaces might look with envy or desire, and understand themselves as in a relationship of inferiority. Postcolonial scholarship has long understood a need to address and redress these demarcations by decentring the entity called Europe. It has become increasingly obvious that traditional colonial arrangements in which the European centre presents itself as self-constituting – the construction of its meaning and role in the world being its internal prerogative – are untenable (Huggan 2011; Bekers, Bowers, and Helff 2015; Groes et al. 2018), as have constructions of Europe as being able to dispense privileged status (Jensen 2020). Self-definition is by no means the (sole) purview of a European centre, as fiction and scholarship increasingly stage the foundational entanglements of “Europe” with colonial histories (Pitts 2019; Bhambra 2016; Hansen and Jonsson 2014; Evaristo 2006).

Simultaneously, however, many formulations of postcolonial scholarship’s decentring of “Europe” have cumulatively had the effect of producing it as a monolithic unit, presumptively homogeneous and evenly privileged within itself (Lazarus 2012, 122) – which, of course, is not actually the case. Though frequently conflated with “the west”, and very often tacitly, or not so tacitly, rhetorically associated with a (Christian) whiteness (see also Blaagaard and Ponzanesi 2013), Europe is a heterogeneous space and experiences of it differ widely. Privilege and the assigned quality of “Europeanness” are distributed across the continent and its inhabitants unevenly. To counter a “reductive idea of Europe as ‘Western’” (Velickovic 2012, 167), it is useful to think more carefully also about divisions within the continent. In this article, I thus seek to challenge the term “Europe” as a reference point and determining node, and complicate its configuration with a particular focus on demarcations of ascribed peripherality. Peripherality is understood here in the double sense of how colonies were relegated to the periphery of the world view propagated by colonialism, as well as in designations of marginality “within” Europe. I propose that looking to East-Central Europe, and specifically to the city of Prague in the context of the Cold War, furnishes a productive means of articulating this challenge.

In bringing together postcolonial studies’ possible intersections and interventions with a nuanced understanding of the Cold War and its post-communist ramifications, this article draws its contextualization from discussions developed in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing’s Special Issues “On Colonialism, Communism and East-Central Europe” (2012) and “Alternative Solidarities” (2014), as well as recent studies that aim to reconfigure the relationship between postcolonial studies and the Cold War (Djagalov 2020; Popescu 2020). The convergence of narratives of the postcolonial with Cold War vectors of influence can work to reconceive reductive narratives of the Cold War by reinscribing the oft-elided presence and agency of the so-called Third World in this global conflict, while heeding Popescu’s (2014) call to “revisit classics of anti-colonial and postcolonial literature by positioning their decolonising ethos against the background of the Cold War” (384).

Such a reframing in terms of the Cold War can not only offer enriched readings of postcolonial literature, but also build a framework from which to remodel calcified relations of centre/periphery, while bypassing the centres of Western Europe and North America. Turning a gaze back on Europe with a recalibrated understanding of the Cold War can help to productively re(con)figure the supposed European centre. The vocabulary of “centre” and “periphery” continues to be useful since, though these ascriptions have been shown as mutable and problematic, “to reject the terminology [of centre-periphery] as outdated does not diminish the degree to which power relations continue to play out across centre-periphery divisions at various levels of everyday life” (Peeren, Stuit, and Weyenberg 2016, 1). As Mary Louise Pratt (2002) puts it, denial of such naming “reauthorizes the centre to function unmarked as centre” (23).¹

In order to work towards decentring Europe while maintaining a differentiated understanding of the continent itself, I thus aim to reshuffle what are construed as its margins. This allows rethinking what is understood as Europe and properly European, as well as enriching the understanding of the constitution of Europe as modulated from outside it, and re-imagining the coordinates used to ascribe centres and peripheries. I illustrate and argue for this by reading together some different writings that share a focus on the city of Prague: Czechoslovakian-born, German-language author Libuše Moníková’s (1994) book of essays, Prager Fenster; South African-born author Nadine Gordimer’s ([1987] 1988) A Sport of Nature, and Indian-born writer Nirmal Verma’s (2013) novel Days of Longing (first published in Hindi in 1964). These writers occupy radically different positionings and create very different imagined worlds. As such, despite seeming incongruent, the selection might also enable reading what Stephen Heath (2004) has called “migrationally and impurely, writings intermingled with one another, against the grain of the ready – legitimate – identities” (174): methodological choices which are potentially productive.

The often-portrayed city of Prague is a prime example of how places can accrue compound meanings via literary representation and emerge in a cultural imaginary. A particularly evocative crystallization of this is found in Vladimir Toporov’s (2003) idea of the “Petersburg Text of Russian Literature”, one that reads the myriad texts occupied with writing St Petersburg as complementary threads constituting one larger text of the city. As Natalia Bratova (2013) puts it, “literary works of different epochs and writers that choose Petersburg as their setting and as their theme can be united into a homogenous and easily discernible concept of the Petersburg text” (5). The Petersburg Text “resembles an echo chamber, in which writers cannot help responding to other voices in the tradition and to their own earlier pronouncements” (Buckler 2005, n.p.). This entails a confluence of literatures concerned with creating a place through language, and together conjuring a transtextual accumulation of representation: Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, and others collaborate in weaving the Petersburg Text. These writings participate in each other’s afterlives.

The Petersburg Text can be taken as a model for configuring a “Prague text”, though the Prague text I propose here differs from the concept developed by Toporov. While Toporov’s notion entails the conscious participation of the authors involved – certainly not the case with the writers discussed here – a Prague text might also be allowed to emerge through reading processes; that is, through reading together the various Pragues of Moníková, Verma, and Gordimer. This invokes and evokes an understanding of a literature that is in some sense essentially collaborative. Yet these texts also have in common that they, collectively, performatively decentre Western Europe, while manifesting how, following Michael Rothberg and Yasemin Yildiz (2011), “a singular site of memory can accommodate a diversity of histories that resonate with each other instead of erasing each other” (33). The texts do this by narrating some lesser-told (hi)stories of Europe, and enabling an elucidation of what understandings of Europeanness can entail. This seems an important point to consider in light of migrations into contemporary Europe, and the ways in which such ideas are sometimes instrumentalized in narratives of belonging, or non-belonging, to Europe. The discussion of Moníková’s Prager Fenster demonstrates how writing conceived as work against forgetting can serve to contest and reconfigure assigned peripherality within Europe and maintain a textured sense of difference within the continent. An engagement with Gordimer’s A Sport of Nature enables a focus on the European “periphery” of its East-Central European setting, relegating Western Europe to the margins, or even to irrelevance. Juxtaposing this with Verma’s Days of Longing serves to show up a myth of European racelessness, while instrumentalizing Europe as romantic setting.

A differentiated Europe: Between east and west

Narratives of the Cold War often cleave a clear line through the European continent, assigning east and west distinct and fixed identities that are embedded in hierarchical constructions. Such hierarchies tend to assume and perpetuate the putative superiority of Western Europe, and a civilizational and/or cultural “backwardness” of Eastern Europe. Scholars who have discussed these histories and constructions also as they predate Cold War formulations include Larry Wolff (1994) and Maria Todorova (2009). These ascribed distinctions within Europe are also filled with normative content, insinuating some groups as the “wrong kind of European”, or somehow less European than others. Some presences within Europe are thus rendered peripheral and constructed as not properly European – not least Europe’s racialized peoples (see El-Tayeb 2011). Many of these narratives also produce East-Central Europeans as Europe’s internal others and render eastern regions of the continent marginal in the dominant western cultural imaginary. Re-imagining Europe also from these margins serves a differentiated understanding of Europe – prompting the critical revaluation of much-used terms such as “Eurocentric” – while decentring traditional colonial centres of Western Europe simultaneously.

The normative geography of Europe, and the assigned peripherality of her home country in it, are concerns that recur throughout Libuše Moníková’s oeuvre. Moníková was born in Prague in 1945 and died in Berlin in 1998. She migrated to West Germany in 1971 for political reasons, though not explicitly exiled by the communist regime of then-Czechoslovakia. Her corpus of published work is German-language, and she has been the recipient of several German literary prizes.² In Prager Fenster, the title of which might be translated into English as “Prague Window”, Moníková overtly decentres Western Europe by reminding readers that

neither Switzerland nor Czechoslovakia, nor even Austria lies at the centre of Europe which, after all, reaches to the Urals. If one wants to be precise, the centre is more likely at Minsk or Witebsk, and the continent’s highest mountain is in no way Montblanc, but the weathered Elbrus in the Caucasus, 800 metres higher. (1994, 23)

More is at stake in this observation than the merely geographical, since what is deemed the centre also comes to work imaginatively, becoming the node according to which (imagined) peripheries are allocated. That many would think of Montblanc as Europe’s highest mountain illuminates the invisibility of the continent’s east, and an implicit reluctance to understand it as properly European. Such reluctance is often interwoven with a particular disinclination to view Russia as (properly) European (see Billington 1966; Zorin, Schönle, and Evstratov 2016).

Moníková recalibrates co-ordinates of and for the European continent. Though she and many of her novels’ characters enact that much-travelled trajectory of “escaping West into a better life” (Judt 2005, 30), her writing demonstrates how performing a duty to “work against forgetting” (Goodchild 2005, 43) can complicate narratives of the Cold War that posit the dissolution of the Soviet Union as evidence of the moral superiority of the western bloc. As such, Moníková is at pains to use her writing to work against forgetting in order to restore justice against historical wrongs. In her imaginative construction of Europe, the willingness to perform duties of remembering, to do work against forgetting, is constitutive of what it means to enact belonging. Citizenship can be asserted and claimed in the willingness to fulfil these responsibilities, although it is unlikely ever to be fully achieved: it remains an ongoing process, and is linked to cultivating a particular relationship to the past in flexible memorializing practices.

For Moníková, this memorializing inheres in various forms of artistic expression, as in her novel Verklärte Nacht (Moníková 1996) where it is embodied in the choreography and dance of her main character, Leonora. In The Façade (Moníková 1992), it is crystallized in the Sysiphean refurbishment of a Renaissance castle’s façade by four artists. This task that she overtly takes on, entails, for instance, an insistence on recalling the Munich Diktat of 1938, in which Chamberlain and Daladier agreed to cede parts of Czechoslovakia to Hitler as an act of appeasement, without consulting the Czechs – regarded as a colossal betrayal of Czechoslovakia by these apparent western allies. Moníková locates in the Munich Agreement the originary point of later events: “Every Stalinist trial outside the Soviet Union has its origin in Munich” (1994, 82); and sees in this moment a watershed for European history in a wider sense:

In Munich, Europe bid farewell to its world-determining role. What came after was war, Yalta, the immense increase in political power of the Soviet Union and the USA, polarisation of the world; cold war, a series of hot wars, destruction of countryside, humans, the future. (81–82)

Important for the narrative of the Second World War – which, in turn, is formative of the Cold War narrative one chooses to tell – is also the Heydrich assassination, indicating as it does the will to resistance against Nazism by the Czechs (Moníková 1994, 118) – resistance which they were denied in 1938, as Moníková tells it.

Moníková further insists on remembering the self-immolation of the 20-year-old Jan Palach in protest at the Soviet suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, even though every means of doing so falls short: “A report of the last moments and thoughts of a 20-year-old who has decided to burn himself is unimaginable; the gaps are the truest part of it” (Moníková 1994, 104). This work of remembering is structured to tell of the Cold War and what led up to it, as an alternative narrative to that in which Czechoslovakia is relegated to at most a supporting role – a marginal character – and more often than not deemed a passive victim to the greater powers situated on its eastern and western borders. Through the imaginative mapping of this no-longer extant country at Europe’s historical centre, Moníková points to the implicit marginalization underwriting its otherwise peripheral positioning. At the same time, her writing works to complicate the westernness of Europe, the normative content this sometimes pretends to, as well as the prescribed distinctions of Cold War spheres of influence. Europe’s self-styling as the civilizational model to be aspired to, what might be termed the “wider conception of Europe and the West as the general birthplace of the so-called ‘rights of man’” (Lentin 2004, 14) is problematized by Moníková’s noting evident ongoing racism on the continent despite the brief euphoria of 1989 and the supposed opening out and up entailed by the fall of the wall. In her account, east and west come together for the anniversary of German Unification in 1991 to celebrate by collectively attacking foreigners (Moníková 1994, 91). Xenophobia and racism come to the fore more insistently:

Polish busses and vans are attacked at the border and on the highway.

Asylum-seekers flee the former GDR for West Germany for safety from the militant attacks of skinheads and Neo-Nazis.

Japanese people are advised not to wear jeans and T-shirts in Germany, lest they be erroneously beaten up instead of Vietnamese guest workers. (95)

“West” is also a relational category, as suggested by Tony Judt’s (2005) delineation of Czechoslovakia as the “most Western of ‘Eastern’ European countries” (138), and Milan Kundera (1984) is perhaps the most well-known voice to have made a plaintive call for recognition of his native country’s essential westernness in his article “The Tragedy of Central Europe”. Rather than arguing for any such westernness – which also in Kundera is heavily invested with normative content and categorized hierarchically – Moníková points to the absurdity of these demarcations; for example, entailed when “someone in Vienna says, ‘You in the East’” (1994, 22) – since Vienna lies east of Prague. Moníková cautions against the “impoverishment of Europe, the flattening reduction of the world to east–west, north–south, and even more fatally the modern countability – the first, the second, the third, the fourth world” (Moníková 1994, 23). I turn now to what these demarcations looked like from the perspective of the so-called Third World, to demonstrate how readings of literature from the Global South can work complementarily, in a different mode, against just such “impoverishment” and “flattening reduction”.

Decentring Europe: The Cold War and the anti-apartheid struggle

Moníková’s imagined cartography of Europe and its internal divisions is implicitly premised on a reconfiguration of how and which histories of the Cold War are told. A complementary remapping of these histories can be drawn forward by investigating the imaginative constitution of East-Central Europe, and here specifically the city of Prague, from the perspective of the Cold War’s Global South participants. Nadine Gordimer’s ([1987] 1988) A Sport of Nature facilitates a shift in point of view that presents both the peripherality of Western Europe, and the reduction of Europe as such to instrumental value. For Hillela, the novel’s protagonist who operates from Prague to serve the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, Europe is valued principally in terms of its usefulness to political resistance at home, and East-Central Europe is the only version of Europe of relevance to the novel’s imaginary.³

Gordimer was born in 1923 in the small mining town of Springs outside Johannesburg, and died, aged 90, in Johannesburg in 2014. Both her parents were Jewish, her mother from England and her father from the then-Russian Empire, what is now Lithuania. She was internationally known for her fervent opposition to apartheid, having been a member of the outlawed African National Congress (ANC), and several of her books were banned by the South African government of the time. She is perhaps best known for her novel The Conservationist (1974), and for winning the Nobel Prize in 1991.

Gordimer’s A Sport of Nature tells the story of its white, South African, Jewish protagonist, Hillela, from childhood into adulthood and her development into an operative for anti-apartheid and anti-colonial struggles happening on the African continent. Like Gordimer herself, Hillela is of Eastern European descent. Her sojourn in Prague is one stop on her journey in what Monica Popescu (2010) reads as “a Cold War picaresque novel” (145, emphasis in original), in which the young woman travels far and wide, playing an increasingly political role, predominantly as a result of her sexual desirability, and her romantic attachment to men of increasing political importance.

Hillela comes to a city which is never named – but is nonetheless identifiable as Prague – as a direct result of Cold War politics. After the death of her South African struggle-fighter husband, Whaila Kgomani, she leaves Africa for Europe, in order to organize assistance for (not explicitly stated but implied) uMkhonto we Sizwe, the armed wing of the ANC. Gordimer’s representation draws an alternative imaginative map of Europe, specifically in that its depiction is determined by the question of its instrumental value to Hillela’s aims: an imaginative configuration whose centre is African.

The novel’s Prague is a place of thick history and romantic characters. Hillela meets two men during her time there, Karel and Pavel. Karel is an older man, multiply imprisoned for his political activism during Europe’s consecutive wars, who translated Neruda during his time in prison, while Pavel has “the wild face associated with ballet dancers who defect to the West” (Gordimer [1987] 1988, n.p.). There is certainly a particularly European allure about the versions of “culturedness” they represent, but it is also, finally, a peripheral allure. Prague, in an extension of some of these romantic qualities, with a discernibly tragic undertone, is represented as embedded in long and layered pasts:

Until then, all the city had run together for her in the overlapping stone statements, destruction, reconstruction, of its past; such density impenetrable, not only by reason of the ignorance of the historical significance of architecture in which the advantage of a colonial education had left her, but because she was accustomed to a thin layer of human settlement in countries where cities are a recent form of social focus. (n.p.)

Hillela becomes attuned to the densely accumulated pasts that gather in this city, but always her reference point is the African continent

Gordimer’s fiction indicates perspicaciously the many ways in which alliances beyond South Africa’s borders enabled the freedom struggle within the country, key amongst them being those with the Soviet Union – or, as they are called in her novel July’s People, “the Russias” (Gordimer 1982, 118). The USSR functioned, whether its motives for doing so are understood as sincere or cynical, as a benefactor of sorts to the liberation struggle in South Africa in terms of providing arms, education, and money. As Popescu says: “The AK-47s received from the Soviet Union, the training camps in Moscow and Odessa, and the financial and editorial support for printing journals, pamphlets, and books were taken as palpable proof of brotherly solidarity” (2010, 9). This fostered in many leftist South Africans at the time an understanding of the Soviet Union and of Soviet East-Central Europe as allies in the struggle against racism, which, significantly, the Soviets were believed to have made great strides in overcoming.

Against the grain of this view held by many of her fellow anti-apartheid leftists at the time, Gordimer was critical of the Soviet Union, as she made clear in her famous 1982 speech “Living in the Interregnum”, in which she indicted the USSR for its suppression of dissidence and widespread use of labour camps (Gordimer 2010, 393). She also recognized, though, the difficulty of expressing this criticism at a time when it could be read as an endorsement of its ostensible Cold War opposite: the capitalist west, which, imaginatively, is here also to some extent contiguous with a colonial/apartheid “them” against which the freedom fight in South Africa constructed itself.

The reverberations of broader Cold War rifts are felt in A Sport of Nature by South Africans in exile in other African countries “separated by the distance of alliances dividing Moscow and Peking, East Germany and the United States” (Gordimer [1987] 1988, n.p.), pointing to nuanced ripple effects as they manifest throughout the African continent. Prague becomes the locus from which Hillela is able to operate politically, gaining support for the struggle at home. Her work entails both covert trips around Europe and the more visible work of attending political gatherings for “cultural solidarity of the Eastern bloc with the Third World” (n.p.), since, as the narrative voice comments wryly, “contacts at all levels had to be kept up” (n.p.). Her political manoeuvrings highlight connections between the so-called Second and Third Worlds which bypass the former colonial centre altogether. There is a certain pragmatism to Gordimer’s representation of these global Cold War currents, and to her characters’ approach to them, pointing to the matter-of-fact ways in which help can be sought and desired ends achieved by the struggle fighters she portrays. As Reuel, Hillela’s second husband who becomes president of an unnamed post-independence African state, puts it: “Of course, we’re allies [ … ]. What could we hope to do, on our own” (n.p.). This is no espousing of high-minded ideals of transnational solidarity, but a practical understanding of what needs to be undertaken in order to get the job done: co-operation is expedient (see also Schulze-Engler 2020). Perhaps even more to the point, Reuel indicates, while letting his pilots undergo training in Bulgaria, that “he had to win his war with arms from the East, and to win his peace with money from the West” (Gordimer [1987] 1988, n.p.). Reuel’s shrewd understanding of the way the (non-African) world works maps money (with terms) onto the west, and (much-needed) weapons onto the east.

This draws forward what might well be self-evident in various iterations in the Global South, but which is often elided in larger narratives of the Cold War, that “Cold War political alliances in Third World countries were conjugated by the local demands of respective decolonisation processes” (Osinubi 2014, 412). A narrative such as this foregrounds the active negotiation of the given geopolitical situations undertaken by Global South agents, as opposed to framing them as peripheral characters who were merely co-opted by and for the determining spheres of influence decided by the superpower blocs. Europe, in the novel’s imaginative mapping, is predominantly socialist East-Central Europe, and the interest in peripheral Western Europe is limited to its usefulness to the struggle in the Global South. The novel finally uses Europe to tell a story in which the African continent is central.

Decentring Europe: Romantic Prague and European racelessness

The designation of instrumental value to East-Central Europe and the romantic allure of a Prague setting are threads that also run through Nirmal Verma’s (2013) Days of Longing in which the city and its romantic European texture are used as the backdrop for the tale of a short lovers’ tryst between the story’s narrator and Raina, a visiting Austrian tourist.

Verma was born in Shimla in India in 1929 and died in New Delhi in 2005. He was a well-known and much-decorated figure of Hindi literature, particularly as a key member of the Nayi Kahaani, “New Story” literary movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s, which is widely regarded as having been pioneered by his short story collection Parinde (Verma 2007). He was politically active as a member of the Communist Party of India, though he resigned when the Soviets repressed the Hungarian uprising in 1956. Fluent in Czech, he spent ten years from 1958 to 1968 at the Oriental Institute in Prague, translating modern Czech writers, including Milan Kundera and Vaclav Havel, into Hindi. Verma’s Days of Longing was published in 1964 – before the Prague Spring – and translated from Hindi to English in 2013 by Krishna Baldev Vaid – this translation is used in this article.

Verma’s narrator has come from India for a research visit to Prague. A struggling student, he is happy to accept the offer of an acquaintance, the director of a local travel agency, to act as tour guide to an Austrian tourist for a few days. The tourist is Raina, travelling with her young son, Meeta, and, as the narrator shows them around the city, she and the narrator have a brief love affair. Prague acts as a romantic setting for this relationship. But Verma also signals the city’s commodity existence: Prague as advertised, so the poster the narrator sees in the director’s office announces “Visit Prague, the City of Your Dreams!” (Verma 2013, n.p.; italics in original).

Verma’s Prague is set in a Cold War East-Central Europe with the typically mentioned shortages and shoddy commodities. This Europe is small, and theoretically traversable despite the divisions between east and west, but only with money and the right passport. This is crystallized in the relationship difficulties of the narrator’s friends Franz and Maria, due to Franz's freedom of movement, granted by his German passport, and Maria’s relative immobility as a mere Czech citizen: as she says only half-jokingly, “They have a rule here that a Czech girl can leave the country only if she is married to a foreigner” (Verma 2013, n.p.). Franz’s mobility prompts one of the friends to say “I think Franz is the luckiest of us all. Because he is a European” (n.p.). Since Maria enjoys no such freedom of movement, the implication is that she is not quite so European – a distinction about which the narrator signals awareness: “There are millions of Europeans and they aren’t all that lucky” (n.p.). The narrator discerns differentiations within Europe: all Europeans are not equal, and some Europeans have more freedoms than others.

The narrator himself is, of course, not entitled to the freedoms of a European. His Otherness to this European space is assumed and remarked upon outright because of his Brown skin. The novel’s awareness of race (that of the narrator, as well as of the Africans and Asians with whom he shares his residence) paints a racially heterogeneous portrait of the city, which counters a great deal of European (hi)storytelling in which Black and Brown presences are erased or invisibilized (El-Tayeb 2011). Responses to the narrator’s own Otherness include typically orientalist and racist assumptions and ascriptions. This is evident in the travel agent’s wife who “has never seen an Indian before and she thinks all Indians wear turbans” (Verma 2013, n.p.), and that “every Indian is either a magician or a maharaja” (n.p.); and the waiters at the Pelican restaurant who “called me Maharajah and often asked me about elephants and forests” (n.p.). His presence elicits responses from strangers, prompted by curiosity and the assumption that he must be from elsewhere, as in his interactions with tram conductors: “‘Where from?’ she [the tram conductor] asked in Czech [ … ]. ‘From India’, I enlightened her. ‘India is so far away!’ she said and heaved a long sigh. I knew that was what she would say. I dozed off” (n.p.). The casualness of his response suggests a quotidian experience. Fatima El-Tayeb (2011) and Sara Ahmed (2017) are among the scholars who have addressed the implicit racial-racist assumptions underpinning the presumptive right to ask this question of People of Colour in European contexts: pointing to a presupposed understanding that they must be from somewhere outside Europe.

Much of such discourse about Europeans of Colour is implicated in narratives (and rationalizations) of non-belonging, and points to a fundamentally racialized understanding of Europeanness. It is important to note the existence of a plurality of experiences of Europe, and as such a plurality of Europes. Hillela, as white, is taken at first glance as belonging to this space: her whiteness passes for Europeanness, and her Jewishness remains uncommented upon during her time in Prague. Verma’s narrator, on the other hand, is addressed by strangers who assume that he must be from elsewhere: “the (visual) markers of Otherness [make of him an] eternal newcomer [ … ], forever suspended in time, forever ‘just arriving’” (El-Tayeb 2011, xxv). Verma’s narrator implicitly contests this by speaking fluent Czech and knowing the city well enough to act as a guide to his lover from neighbouring Austria. In this way, he illustrates a form of belonging that, like those intimated by Moníková’s memory practices, is not beholden to narratives of autochthony.

Mapping from multiple margins: Reconfiguring European peripherality

Moníková’s Prager Fenster, Gordimer’s A Sport of Nature, and Verma’s Days of Longing all take Prague as subject or setting. The Prague text reading of them together allows different iterations of the city to reverberate against and with each other. Moníková’s intimate portrayals are of a city understood as home, whose ascribed marginality she is deeply invested in reconfiguring. She does this by formulating artistic labour as work against forgetting, to do justice to the textured past of the city and of her native Czechoslovakia. The evocations of Gordimer and Verma follow the experiences of outsiders in the city, foreigners from the Global South. Gordimer’s Prague is a strategic operating position for the anti-apartheid activities of her protagonist, as well as the setting for her romantic interludes with cultured Europeans. Not dissimilarly, for Verma, Prague is the location for romance, and also an ironically and earnestly imagined “City of Your Dreams!” (Verma 2013, n.p.).

Both Gordimer and Verma cash in on a certain romantic currency that the central European city seemed to enjoy at the time, and arguably still does. As such, there is a certain exoticization in their portrayal of this famously beautiful city, an exoticization that perhaps plays as counterpoint to colonial narratives produced by white men from the Global North in which spaces of the Global South are exoticized and used as material or mere tropical backdrop for stories that centre on white European protagonists. Moreover, these texts imaginatively bypass the erstwhile colonial centre, thus complicating and re-triangulating relations of the empire’s writing back (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 1989) to a presumptive centre.

Gordimer’s novel in particular points to some lesser-told histories of the Cold War by focussing on how these play out specifically for one anti-apartheid activist briefly in Europe. Rather than positing the so-called Third World in this arrangement as a mere spectator to or site for proxy wars between the two superpowers, this points to the agency of the so-called Third World in the global conflict, and renders the concerns of the superpowers, as well as the superpowers themselves, peripheral, as they are granted only instrumental value for anti-apartheid and anti-colonial struggles. In locating the source of desired assistance in East-Central Europe, the novel troubles the texture of a simplistically or hierarchically divided Europe: west is not best, and is in fact of little interest. This view expands Moníková’s dismissal of such an attribution of superiority, and her problematizing of the category of westernness. The impulse to tell alternative narratives of the Cold War, which posit their home countries as more than mere supporting acts, is also shared by the two writers.

Reading Verma’s novel alongside Gordimer’s shows up the implicitly attributed neutrality of whiteness in the European space Hillela visits: it needs never be mentioned, because other characters do not question her being there. This is in contrast to Verma’s narrator, who must account for his presence because it is assumed that he must come from elsewhere. Verma’s descriptions of these interactions with strangers that never present them as actually hostile are to some extent in line with a reputation the Soviet Union and the satellite socialist republics had in many countries of the Global South during the Cold War – of having overcome the problem of racism however much this was not in fact the case) – and which made it an attractive alternative for many activists from the Global South. Moníková, writing after the dissolution of the USSR, by contrast, casts a light on the different iterations of racial and racist logics dividing and shared by the two sides of the Iron Curtain.

Bringing these multiply imagined Europes into conversation with each other performatively and productively decentres Europe, reshuffling its ascribed peripheries, and producing alternative momentary centres. Because Moníková consistently signals awareness of the imputed marginality of her Prague, its centrality is configured as mutable. As Gordimer and Verma instrumentalize their Pragues, and always have a view to alternative reference points, their configurations too do not construct a monolithic new centre, but rather serve to keep designations of peripherality on the move.

These literary cartographies further demonstrate expressions of belonging that can be productive when asking whether Europe is to be framed as “a bulwark, an exclusionary and discriminatory fortress, or the last romantic ideal of a supra-national organisation based on ideas of peace, justice and emancipation” (Blaagaard and Ponzanesi 2013, 1) – while provincializing the determining nature of this question. The juxtaposition and interrelation enabled by a Prague text challenge Europe as a determining node and simultaneously complicate its internal configuration.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) [265331351/RTG 2130].

Notes on contributors

Lucy Gasser

Lucy Gasser is a lecturer in anglophone literary and cultural studies at the University of Potsdam, Germany. She was a doctoral fellow with the Research Training Group minor cosmopolitanisms, a visiting researcher at Delhi University in 2017, and completed her master’s at the University of Cape Town. She is a founding editor of poco.lit., a platform for postcolonial literatures, and has published in fields that include postcolonial studies, world literature studies, and translation.

Notes

1. On the constructed peripherality of East-Central Europe, and the implication of a “peripheral aesthetics” for the poetics of literature about this region, see also Györke (2021).

2. Translations from the original German are my own.

3. An earlier articulation of some of the following readings appears in Gasser (2021).