Slavenka Drakulic, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed (New York, Harper Perennial, 1991)
Introduction The Trivial is Political
While in
the West of the early 1990s after the disintegration of both the eastern
European Communist Soviet regimes, the focus was on dramatic events such as the
dismantling of the wall and cheering people in the streets at the news that
long-abhorred leaders had been arrested, in the towns and cities of Eastern
Europe, memories persisted of shortages, unkempt urban centers, and
bureaucracies abusive and unresponsive to citizen needs, along with suspicion
that lives were not really going to of a sudden be all that different.
Chapter I You Can’t Drink You Coffee Alone
Drakulic
describes the suicide of journalist friend Tanja, who during the late years of
the Yugoslav regime lost her job as a journalist for offending the government,
remembering how abandoned Tanja had felt and the summative sentence that she
had uttered: “You can’t drink your
coffee alone.
Chapter
II Pizza in Warsaw, Torte in Prague
The
author remembers her chagrin when once she landed in Warsaw during the late
1980s and exclaimed to friend, “Let’s go have a pizza”; and another time how guilty she felt for a
similar comment she made to a friend in Prague that she was craving a
torte; thereby remembering that spending
in time in New York had made her insensitive to the shortages in the eastern
European countries.
Chapter
III Make-Up and Other Critical
Questions
Drakulic
describes the home material goods and chemical solutions that women used during
the days of the East European regimes, not (mercifully for GMD) just pertinent
to make-up but to matters also of personal hygiene and grooming.
Chapter
IV I Think of Ulrike This Night in
November
In this
chapter we are taken to Iowa City (familiar turf for Barbara and me) in autumn
1988, where a young woman from East Berlin seems lost, not at home in the
American Midwest but also not pining for return to her homeland any time soon.
Chapter V On Doing Laundry
Drakulic
describes the lengths her grandmother went to during the days of Yugoslav
communism to get clothes bright-white---
boiling, scraping, starching---
never trusting washing machines (water not hot enough) or dryers (lack
of fresh air) in the aftermath of the death of Tito.
Chapter
VI A Doll That Grew Old
The
author describes getting a factory-made doll after having to make do with rag
and paper dolls, but then growing disenchanted with the technically advanced
(simulating bodily functions, displaying emotional expressions) by comparison
to the dolls that she herself made of whatever materials were available.
Chapter
VII Forward to the Past
In this
chapter we are given a history of the rough toilet paper known as Golub produced
by the Yugoslave communist regime, including the days when lapses in production
would necessitate innovating with newspaper and rags, and those immediately
post-Tito days when imported toilet paper was expensive and the
government-produced product not all that much better than Golub.
Chapter
VIII A Chat with My Censor
The
author describes with touches of both humor and irritation the unsubtle ways in
which Yugoslav journalist’s meetings with (often politico-emotionally pathetic)
censors--- the case of focus being her
own--- communicated that articles were crossing the
line of political acceptability.
Chapter
IX The Strange Ability of
Apartments to Divide and Multiply
Drakulic
describes efforts to create private spaces by partitioning; or to gain a little bigger apartment by
illegal trading of residences; produced
abodes that seemed ever shrinking or expanding slightly as if following
arithmetic processes of continual division and multiplication.
Chapter X Our Little Stasi
Stasi is
the post office in Croatia, which served all manner of purposes (banking, telecommunications)
in addition to mailing but where clerks, even in the immediately post-Communist
years, manifested a surly in attitude and served as spies for the government.
Chapter
XI The Language of Soup
Drakulic
describes the extraordinary efforts people in Prague would expend in attempts
to make whatever ingredients were available in economies of shortage tasty in
assemblage into soup.
Chapter
XII The Communist Eye, or What did
I See in New York?
The
author relates how she and another friend who grew up in Eastern Europe reacted
to poverty and particularly beggars on the streets of New York City, in a fascinating
account of how communist values that they imbibed have had some positive effect
on how they perceive inequality in both impoverished and affluent nations.
Chapter
XIII A Letter from the United
States--- The Critical Theory Approach
In this
chapter, the matter of feminism as Western academic ideology is contrasted with
the issues (securing means of dealing with menstrual flow, maneuvering to
achieve the best circumstances for themselves as women and for their families
in a societies that demonstrate little respect for either, overcoming the
attitudes of men whom they love to obtain a more equitable division of
household labor) that actually matter to women, including feminists in eastern
European societies.
Chapter XIV Some
Doubts About Fur Coats
This is a
riveting chapter in which Drakula and another friend from eastern Europe just
cannot act upon their environmentalist and ecological principals, succumbing to
the purchase of cheap fur coats in western street markets, remembering the
shabby coats that were winter gear in the communist societies.
Chapter
XV The Sun, Like an Empty Red Ball
Drakulic
records the curious lack of joy among the people and evident on the streets of
European cities when first given the opportunity to vote in free
elections--- dutifully doing so, but
with long-internalized doubts that voting makes much of difference.
Chapter
XVI My First Midnight Mass
The
author describes growing up in Yugoslavia under Tito’s version of anti-church
communist rhetoric, observing her bureaucratic functionary father enforce the
prohibitions despite the Orthodox inclinations of her mother (who dutifully followed
her husband’s house rules); but then in
the post communist era Drakulic (now moved to Croatia, where similar strictures
had prevailed) only went to church with her grandmother out of interest and
familial sensibility, not herself believing but existing somewhere in the midst
of opposition to freedom of religion and nonbelief on her own part.
Chapter
XVII On the Quality of Wall Paint in
Eastern Europe
Drakulic
reviews the terrible quality of paint on the buildings whether in Zagreb,
Prague, or East Berlin during communist rule and the noble efforts of the populaces
to enhance the appeal of such with surreptitious, dark-of-night ad hoc painting
and graffiti.
Chapter
XVIII The Day When They Say War Will
Begin
In this
chapter we get another examination of the muted joy, despite the elation of the
Western world at communism’s demise, in eastern European people, understanding
correctly that war among the Croatian, Bosnian, and Serbian populations almost
certainly loomed.
Chapter
XIX How We Survived Communism
Despite
the title of the book, the author recalls how she regreted that title even as
the work went to press, actually feeling that survival entailed constant fear
and inconvenience and that laughs were all too few.
Chapter
XX Epilogue
Similarly,
sending the paperback version of the book into print in 1993, Drakulic can
muster little sentiment of joy for the fall of the communist states when the
aftermath presents new challenges and ongoing reminders of the price paid for
the suppressions of the communist era, including those nationalistic impulses that
now made violence and death matters of overt rather than covert fear.
