Between Homeland and Hostland: Women Migrants’ Agency in US Post-Yugoslav Novels

Although massive (post)socialist migration from Eastern Europe to the West is becoming increasingly represented in post-Soviet and post-Yugoslav writing, contemporary novels on women’s experiences of immigration have received scant attention, both in their host countries and in their countries of origin. This essay contributes to emerging research on Eastern European women’s migrant writing by juxtaposing two semiautobiographical novels that belong to post-Yugoslav diasporic women’s literature: Nadja Tesich’s Native Land (1998) and Natasha Radojčić’s You Don’t Have to Live Here (2005). The main protagonists of both novels are transnational mediators whose migrant identities are reshaped at the intersection of Yugoslavia and the United States, and they offer provocative perspectives on women’s interlinked lives in homeland and host communities. While Tesich fictionalizes a postsocialist migrant’s uneasy relationship with transnational feminism in ways that anticipate her later entrapment in neotraditional gender roles, Radojčić illustrates patriarchal gendering under socialism to describe her own resistance to the gender confines of capitalism. The article focuses on the novels’ different representations of transnational exchanges, exploring to what extent women migrants achieve agency in the complex world of multicultural transactions.

Migration from the former Eastern Bloc to the West has increased dramatically since the late 1990s. Compared to male-dominated pre-socialist migration, post-1990s immigration has included more women, some of whom lost their employment after the fall of socialism and viewed their movement to Western countries as a survival strategy (Crisan 2012: 172). These “feminized flows of human migration” (Bonifacio 2012: 2) and immense changes in the economic, social, and political landscape of postsocialist nations have also contributed to the surge of cultural productions by post-Soviet and post-Yugoslav women.

This work has remained understudied, both in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc and the nations that received these migrants (Nicolaescu 2014: 9–10), despite the growth in scholarship on literatures of immigration by authors from other parts of the world. This fictional work is often taken as representative of the entire migration experience. US readers tend to perceive the literature of Eastern Europe as “dense, melancholic, and philosophical, probably focusing on the horrors of communism” (Wachtel 2010: 267). To dispel such and similar stereotypes of “depressive” Eastern European and post-Yugoslav heroes enveloped in “heavy doses of alcohol and cigarette smoke,” it is necessary to discuss English-language migrant literature alongside Eastern European writing.¹ While Aleksandar Hemon and Téa Obreht are the most popular US post-Yugoslav literary voices (Božović 2013: 6), a number of predominantly male writers from Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia who reside in Canada or the United States and write in English or in their mother tongue, such as David Albahari, Vladimir Tasić, Dragan Todorović, Josip Novakovich, and Ismet Prcic, have also received some critical attention. In contrast, the work of post-Yugoslav women authors writing in English, such as Nadja Tesich, Natasha Radojčić, Courtney Angela Brkic, and Yelena Franklin, has remained less popular.

This essay contributes to the emerging research on postsocialist women’s migrant writing, particularly post-Yugoslav diasporic women’s literature, by exploring Nadja Tesich’s Native Land (1998) and Natasha Radojčić’s You Don’t Have to Live Here (2005).² Reflecting the general lack of visibility of post-Yugoslav migrant women’s writing, the two novels have not yet received critical attention, even though they offer provocative perspectives on women’s interlinked lives in homeland and host communities, which have much to contribute to studies of US immigrant literature. These two semi-autobiographical novels were written in English by authors who were born in the former Yugoslavia in 1939 and 1966, and have lived and published in the United States since 1954 and 1989, respectively. The two narratives provide valuable insights into women’s lives in the former Yugoslavia and their experiences of migration to the United States, which, like other literature of migration from Yugoslavia, is inflected by a focus on the 1990s wars and the disintegration of the country in 1991.

The novels by Tesich and Radojčić capture their protagonists’ prewar lives and memories, and they also trace their experiences of migration and their persisting relationships to their former home’s collective histories. Reflecting on their own past and that of their native country, the protagonists of Radojčić’s and Tesich’s novels, Sasha and the doubly named Ann/Anna, figure as transnational mediators whose migrant identities are reshaped at the intersection of Yugoslavia and the United States. The two novels are remarkably similar in their focus on their protagonists’ complex positions in networks of transnational mobility between the former Yugoslavia and the West, and on the personal and political forces that transform women’s positions within national and transnational contexts. In Native Land, the protagonist returns from the capitalist United States to the socialist Yugoslavia, which she still sees as her homeland, while in You Don’t Have to Live Here the main character moves from Croatia to Cuba, then to Greece, and eventually to the United States. Both novels highlight their protagonists’ reliance on matrilineal values in the face of patriarchal traditions. Tesich’s migrant finds strength in the antiwar traditions of her female relatives at the onset of military conflicts in Yugoslavia but, because of her ongoing identification with her former home, becomes entrapped in neotraditional gender roles. Radojčić transports her protagonist to multiple locations outside her birth country, where she experiences shifts in her racial and class identity that render her a participant in the complex world of multicultural transactions.

Transnational American Studies

In her presidential address to the American Studies Association in 2003, Amy Kaplan (2004: 8) asked how immigrants and their descendants in the United States identify with “America as their country or home” while also “locat[ing] their homelands elsewhere, as a spiritual, ethnic, or historical point of origin.” This dual affiliation often shapes diasporic narratives, which portray the country of origin as a site of nostalgia for migrants’ roots and the host country as the more stable, newly adopted hostland. The tension between home, conceived as the birth country, and the country of dislocation is particularly discernible in the writings of migrant authors who express dissatisfaction with both environments, opting for portrayals of protagonists’ transnational mobility and their mediations between their homelands and hostlands. According to Shelley Fisher Fishkin (2005: 24), in this transnational work the focus is “not only on the proverbial immigrant who leaves somewhere called ‘home’ to make a new home in the United States, but also on the endless process of comings and goings that create familial, cultural, linguistic, and economic ties across national borders.”

Mădălina Nicolaescu (2014: 11) observes that the “‘double reading’ of homeland and host communities” criticizes the realities and “utopian beliefs circulated in the various social, political and cultural spaces,” which are, according to Silvia Schultermandl (2014: 277), “rooted within concrete national and regional histories.” The identities of Radojčić’s and Tesich’s women protagonists are redefined by their mobility between the former Yugoslavia and the United States in ways that challenge overgeneralizations in the scholarship on transnational diasporic identities, which is often based on readings of the most well-known postsocialist works by male authors.

Based on the writers’ diverging migration experiences, the novels’ protagonists represent opposing images of the United States. Nadja Tesich, the author of Native Land and a filmmaker and political activist, has written three other semi-autobiographical novels that explore clashes between socialist and capitalist values—Shadow Partisan (1996), To Die in Chicago (2010), and Far from Vietnam (2012)—but none has received much critical attention either in the United States or in Serbia. Although “[US] America made [her] into an artist,” which she welcomed as a useful survival strategy, Tesich sees herself as a fierce critic of the American way of life (2010: 192). She vigorously condemned the bombing of Yugoslavia by the US-led NATO in the spring of 1999 and blamed “imperialist governments of Western Europe and the United States” for “the imposed disintegration of a once-sovereign socialist country into a half-dozen mini-states” (Tesich quoted in Flounders 2014). She also detected signs of developing capitalism in her native Serbia, to which she was never able to return because she died in 2014.

The author of You Don’t Have to Live Here, novelist and screenwriter Natasha Radojčić, has remained equally understudied although she has written three novels that have been translated from English into several languages, thus garnering her recognition and popularity outside of the United States.³ Her debut novel Homecoming (2002), which won the Italian 2004 Grinzane Cavour prize for foreign fiction, focuses on a wounded soldier from Bosnia who returns to his devastated village after the 1990s war. Although the novel does not emphasize migrant or diasporic experiences, like You Don’t Have to Live Here, it portrays animosities between people of different ethnic and religious backgrounds in Yugoslav successor nations. Radojčić’s refusal to create a protagonist who embodies clear cut distinctions between the East and West in You Don’t Have to Live Here has negatively affected the novel’s popularity, both in the Balkans and in the United States. Radojčić (2005a) calls herself a pacifist and a typical New Yorker who loves her mother tongue but writes in English, partly because the second language offered her emotional detachment from the “dark years” of war in her birth country. She also strongly condemned the bombing of Yugoslavia but is less critical of the United States than Tesich. Stating that she “came to New York because [she] was born for it,” Radojčić (2004) views the United States as her home country and the former Yugoslavia as her country of birth.

The two writers’ protagonists have different relationships with the patriarchal traditions of their native and host countries. While the middle-aged Anna travels from the United States to the land of her birth just before the outbreak of war and hopes to reintegrate into her former home by identifying with its past and present, the adolescent Sasha leaves her native land for the United States a few years earlier in ways that challenge “historical associations between womanhood and nation” (McDowell 2003: 25). The two novels show how patriarchal family and societal structures in the former Yugoslavia marginalized women and also influenced their migration and diasporic experiences. The revival of ethnic nationalisms in the 1990s, which “simultaneously mythologized [women] as the nation’s deepest ‘essence’ and instrumentalized them as its producer” (Papić 1999: 155), deepened the uneasy position of women in post-Yugoslav nations. The work of Tesich and Radojčić shows that even though migration improves the economic positions of their protagonist because of the higher living standards in their hostland, dramatic shifts in their national and racial identities impede the development of their social agency.

Tesich’s Ambivalent (Trans)National Encounters

Nadja Tesich’s Native Land chronicles its protagonist’s visit to Yugoslavia right before the war, after she has lived in the United States for many years. A Serbian American in her early fifties, the doubly named protagonist Ann/Anna embarks on a journey from New York City to Ragusa (Dubrovnik) to participate in an international language and literary conference on feminist theory and practice. At the site of her earliest memories, she reflects on her position in-between US culture and her country of origin.

Feeling uncomfortable in a setting that forces her to reconsider her belonging, for Ann the conference becomes not only an inner battlefield but also a complex platform for her transnational interventions. Together with a US poet and an Indian novelist, Ann is scheduled to present on women’s voices and her own work. While Ann prefers to observe the international presenters and local residents rather than actively engage in mediation between the two cultures, her position as a foreigner in her native land that is on the brink of war is paradoxically reinforced by her own insecurities and her criticism of local and global affairs. Ann hesitates to produce her Yugoslav passport at customs and to make contact with other Yugoslavs. Since she had not spoken Serbo-Croatian in years, Ann feels that when she speaks it in the once familiar surroundings, it isn’t “natural any more” (NL 7). She takes advantage of her outsider position to express her dissatisfaction with her homeland and, through her encounter with her former home, also her hostland.

Even as she notices the onset of war in her country of origin, Ann is bothered by the superficial materialism of her US colleagues, who enjoy the benefits of academic tourism under the pretense of engaging in serious scholarly work. As the conference progresses, Ann’s memories of her homeland also lead her to question concepts that are central to scholarly discourses on writing. Ann and Indira, a participant from India, discuss their utter incomprehension of terms such as “subject position,” “deconstruction,” and “sexual politics,” even though “in New York, [Ann] knew what those words meant” (24).

Similar preoccupations with language and misconceptions as a result of dislocation are also discernible in the works of other, more well-known Eastern European migrant authors who are often taken as representative of post-Yugoslav writing. Dubravka Ugrešić ’s Have a Nice Day (1995)—a travelogue and a “fictionary” of randomly selected cultural concepts she encounters while residing in the United States as a visiting lecturer—also comments on the exclusivity of the scholarly jargon adopted by her US colleagues. Slavenka Drakulić ’s essay “A Letter from the United States: The Critical Theory Approach” (1993) was written in reaction to an invitation to contribute to a feminist anthology whose concepts she finds inapplicable to the Yugoslav contexts. Although Drakulić (1993: 128) participated in the first feminist meeting in Zagreb in 1978, she suggests that (post-)Yugoslav women are “unprepared” for a feminist movement not only because they are unsure how to go about it, but also because they are “afraid to call [them]selves feminists” (132), which might imply that Eastern European patriarchal and “almost aggressive reaction to the label of feminism” (Šmejaková-Strickland 1995: 1004) stems from misconceptions about feminism as a man-hating and state-threatening ideology imported from the West.

Differently from Ugrešić and Drakulić, who describe their experiences of dislocation to the United States during and after the Yugoslavian wars, Tesich’s Native Land focuses on the protagonist’s travels to a Yugoslavia on the brink of war. Whereas Ugrešić and Drakulić question their migrant positions through encounters with US scholars in the United States and via correspondence, Tesich fictionalizes the visit of US-based scholars to the Balkans. At the international conference in Dubrovnik, Tesich’s protagonist Anna/Ann emphasizes the linguistic and cultural barriers between the two spaces, as well as the incompatibilities between the values of the socialist East and the capitalist West.

Throughout Ann’s stay in Dubrovnik, it becomes clear that her language inadequacies stem from her deeply felt views about differences between the two cultures, which render her an awkward mediator. When she discloses her national origin to her US colleagues, they expect sensational stories and a simplified and dramatic “Hollywood answer” (NL 35) about her birth culture and her emigration experiences. Despite her proficiency in both languages, Ann/Anna finds it difficult to engage in meaningful conversations about her experiences, ascribing her communication problems to the interactional shallowness of those leading a fast-paced US lifestyle, including herself. Ann is also enraged at her feminist colleagues’ one-sided views of her birth country and their judgmental ideas of communism as simultaneously “evil” and “sexy,” as they fail to grasp that communism hardly ever “existed in any country except as an idea” (45).⁴

As the half-forgotten world of her childhood years becomes overdetermined with stereotypical Western meanings, Anna starts questioning the US values to which she had aspired and instead foregrounds forces that destabilize her Westernized identity. She embraces the seemingly idyllic life in her birth country to distance herself from her hostland, thus shattering her US identity.

But her temporary return to the Yugoslavia of her childhood, or her fantasy of return, becomes precariously coupled with her approval of the “native machismo” of the local waiters to whom she suddenly begins to gravitate, despite her former disapproval of their patriarchal gaze. Anna observes her female colleagues through the eyes of sexist local men in ways that indicate her nostalgic wish to belong to the community she left long ago. She also strongly identifies with the political and family values of socialist Yugoslavia that favor collectivity over individuality based on “relational conceptions of the person” (Funk 2004: 701), in which feminist issues are either invisible or shaped by socialist ideas that prioritize class over gender. Kristen Ghodsee (2004: 730) has observed that for women from Central and Eastern European countries “resistance against class oppression” was much more relevant than “agitations based on any specific form of gendered subjugation.”

Tesich’s protagonist comes to participate in the patriarchal disapproval of Western women, whose feminist ideas of personal emancipation were viewed as products of a Western capitalist focus on women’s individualities that threatened the existence of socialist states and families. Such views were also often adopted by socialist feminists because, as Ghodsee notes, “proletarian men were seen as closer allies than bourgeois women, who . . . advocated for a kind of global sisterhood based on women’s supposed biological and psychological similarities.” Anna’s reidentification with the socialist values of brotherhood and unity that perpetuated patriarchal views of women as subservient to men shaped her uncritical adoption of the male gaze. Pretending to be equal with sexist native men and different from “bourgeois women,” she fails to define her own gender position as a socialist woman who lives in the capitalist West and is visiting the then still socialist East. Instead, she seems to be lost in nostalgia for sameness with other Yugoslavs whose patriarchal mindset does not include her. Juxtaposing her initial feeling of disorientation with the disintegration and fall of Yugoslavia, she complains that “everything carefully constructed over the past years [is] crumbling now,” wreaking havoc on her “orderly life” (NL 47).

After the other conference participants leave, Ann takes a train to Belgrade, her hometown and the capital of Yugoslavia, instead of flying back to New York. Traveling on this “inland” route signifies a revisiting of her past even as her homeland is vanishing. Ann’s prolonged stay in Dubrovnik and Belgrade is marked by her constant preoccupation with divisions between her Yugoslav and US identities, as manifested in a growing split between the US Ann and the Yugoslav Anna. Ann/Anna’s reflections on women’s displacement and outsider position in national and transnational contexts point to two different types of 1970s feminism in Yugoslavia and the West. Anna is aware of the private and public constraints faced by women in the former Yugoslavia where, as Vlatka Velčić (2005: 53) argues, “the brief decades of socialism changed little in the underlying, millennia-old, patriarchal social structures.” While women’s rights and gender equality were guaranteed in Yugoslavia’s constitution, women remained unequal in the private sphere of the home and family, where men were expected to impose control and authority, as well as in the public sphere, which reflected the power relations of patriarchal families. While in theory women could choose whether or not to work outside of the home and to split their obligations between work and family, in practice men and husbands often determined women’s employment choices. Even when they worked outside the home, their work continued at home and limited their leisure. Women’s double workload meant that “men’s lives were not greatly disturbed by domestic responsibility” (Coulson 1993: 89), while for many women their options for leisure-time activities “outside the home were regularly blocked,” so that many identified with home activities “in spite of the oppression within the home itself” (Funk 1993: 323).

In Anna/Ann, Tesich creates a Yugo-nostalgic character who criticizes Yugoslav women’s passivity, gender unawareness, and their lack of choice and agency. She critiques Yugoslav women for taking their constitutional rights for granted and for not understanding US feminism. Ann recounts how, on an earlier visit to the then thriving Yugoslavia, she had encountered “lazy” and “self-complacent” women who “didn’t have to fight to become doctors” since the Western family-career dilemma was almost nonexistent in the former Yugoslavia, where the state “paid for everything—health, maternity leaves, and every abortion” (NL 152). Unlike US women who were encouraged to accumulate material goods in a never-ending quest for improvement, for Yugoslav women “there was nothing to improve or invent,” and they could only follow rules that had been “handed down for centuries” (110) by institutions and families. Ann sees her female Yugoslavian friends as “ordinary,” “too worried,” and passive. They neither chose their lifestyles nor believed they had choices. The novel here makes a point similar to Žarana Papić’s (1999: 154), who has argued that Yugoslav communism provided women with equal rights but also “strategically prevented [women] from becoming active political subjects of their own destiny.”

In the second part of her novel, Tesich suggests that women’s strengths to cope with double or triple shifts is even more pronounced in the case of Yugoslav women in diaspora who continue to sacrifice for their family while having to survive in a ruthless capitalist economy. Anna’s female relatives in Yugoslavia are compared to US migrant women who struggle to succeed in their new homeland. The novel foregrounds the narrator’s perception of her mother and grandmother as two strong women who, each in their own way, challenged the patriarchal status. Practical, pragmatic, and willing to move to the United States in search of a more fulfilling life, Ann’s mother “had adjusted to America through things” and tangibles, “always crav[ing] more sheets, towels on sale, dishes, a new toaster” (NL 124), but also by working hard as a cleaning lady in order to pay for her husband’s medical bills and for Ann’s education. However, while she assimilated quickly to her new surroundings, Anna was still expected to engage in the obligatory marriage, at least for the sake of procreation, since “to remain an old maid was out of question” (125), unacceptable and humiliating. Ann’s mother holds on to even stricter Yugoslav dogmas and beliefs than she did in her homeland. Even though her mother adapted to her new life in the United States, she remained stuck in old patterns and would tell stories about the time before her migration when her life seemed more authentic. Although Ann dutifully meets some of the social expectations by getting married and giving birth to sons, she maintains her affection for her mother and grandmother, the “type of love” that “isn’t good for the economy” because it “creates attachments to people, places, graves” (279) outside of patriarchal agendas, which focus on overpowering and dominating others.

As she revisits her native land two or three more times, Ann realizes the existence of cultural differences in the construction of motherhood. While US mothers are pictured as proactive women “in Bermuda shorts” who “fix sandwiches,” drive around, and solve their children’s problems, a French maman is seen as artistic and flirtatious. In contrast, the Balkan mother is “a woman who cooks constantly and whose face is sad beyond words” (278). The mother figures of Anna’s childhood were “heavy” as bread, earth, and graves, women who often wear “black because somebody is always dying and [they are] always feeding sons who’ll go off to war and then [they]’ll have to bury them too” (279). The Balkan mother is rooted in the mythical and historical oppression of mothers, and in the stories that the narrator has inherited from her female ancestors. The tragic stories that refer to the loss of brothers, sons, and families during wartime have become part of a collective heritage that both cripples and toughens mothers and daughters. They often see themselves as part of an antiwar tradition that is discouraged and invisible in a patriarchal world where “nationalism constructs women as subordinate to men” (Strehle 2008: 6).

Women’s subversive strength also manifests in their relation to religion. While Anna’s mother has constructed a religion, “or what was left of it,” solely for social consumption, “a veneer,” her grandmother’s version is more intimate. She was “talking to God directly from her kitchen,” making sure that the stories about the wandering souls of her unburied sons as well as “the stories about witchcraft and ghosts” (NL 59) stay with Anna for the rest of her life. Ann acknowledges the healing power of her grandmother’s voice “sliding over [her] past” and “smoothing all the rough edges” (115), and she envisions her grandmother’s face when others mention God, wondering if she “has prayed to her all along” (169).

The mature Ann criticizes Western capitalism for its shallow materialism and obsessive consumerism, while also distrusting Yugoslav socialism because of its inability to succeed. She travels back to the past, where she traces the roots of her outsiderness and her rather instinctual avoidance of imposed ideologies. Her inability to fully identify as a member of the Yugoslav community is exemplified in an incident at her grammar school, where a teacher lectured on socialism and “better tomorrows” (134). Although Anna found the class inspiring and participated in the discussion, she “imagined this future happiness as a movement, with [herself] in a gypsy wagon on the road” (134–35), free to travel anywhere with those who did not have to attend school, thus breaking social expectations of conformity.

Anna’s fascination with adventurous people on the move is further illustrated when she escapes from her home with a group of Roma at the age of five.⁵ Unlike Radojčić, whose frequent references to Roma are directly related to the protagonist’s ethnic background, Tesich mentions the community only briefly and refers to them as “gypsies.”⁶ In a few scenes that involve Romani, Tesich romanticizes their nomadic lifestyle, while depicting them as unpredictable petty thieves and smugglers of extraordinary physical beauty and strength, who sometimes serve as “intermediaries between the living and the dead” (170).

Similar stereotypical and rather mystical representations of Roma served to exclude them from mainstream culture in the former Yugoslavia, where they were not officially recognized as a distinct ethnic group. While the Yugoslav Anna idealizes Romani mobility and good-heartedness, the US Ann expresses nostalgia for the Roma’s place in her childhood memories without problematizing their marginalized position and the social conditioning of their nomadism in socialist and preconflict Yugoslavia. Similarly, when Anna reunites with one of her more conventional childhood friends who she describes as “a short grandmotherly woman” (258), Anna explains her solitary travels as a “natural” “need to roam,” which separates notions of a nomadic sensibility from the larger social context. However, the friend observes that Anna’s early nomadic dreams only came true because her mother left the country determined to improve their economic situation and secure an alternative homeland for her daughter.

At the time of Anna’s reunion with old friends in Belgrade just before the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Anna’s immediate motherline stretches from her mother, who was buried in Chicago, to her grandmother who was buried in Belgrade. When Ann witnesses unrest in the streets of Belgrade, she wonders what her mother would have thought of the crowds of people who are divided by mutually exclusive nationalistic slogans, flags, and leaders, each proclaiming their own righteousness. Hearing a poet disputing historical facts and issuing a call to arms, she hopes that he is “just carrying on and being dramatic,” even though the men gathered around him look agitated and “open and close their fists” (242). Pretending to be a journalist, Ann also listens to ordinary people’s conversations and tries to make sense of the growing hatred and fear that pervade the city. The influx of refugees and the news about death “sounded like a repeat of old stories mother had told [Anna] when [they] came to the US, but [she] refused to believe her” (294). Tesich here refers to her mother’s stories about her family’s suffering during the Second World War, hinting at the possibility of history repeating itself in a new war that breaks from the socialist motto of “brotherhood and unity,” which kept Yugoslavia together.

The attempt to define the reemergence of nationalism as a replica of historically different circumstances immobilizes the protagonist’s exploration of her identity, thus limiting her agency and challenging her transnational position. Anna avoids direct confrontation with the political turmoil in the former Yugoslavia, instead locking herself in “some old ritual” (320) that makes her feel at home. The ritual of merging with her native land through identification with the Yugoslav people is evoked by an amateur theater play that reminds Anna of a Balkan avant-garde piece “with no central character to root for [and] no motivation” (285). While watching the play, she recognizes that it employs an aesthetic style that she criticized in the United States. The discrepancy between her US and Yugoslav belief systems is also illustrated in her conversation with a US anthropologist, Joan, who participated in the conference in Dubrovnik and whom Anna meets again in the midst of the preconflict commotion in Belgrade. Agitated by the CIA’s prediction of a “full scale civil war” in Yugoslavia (306), the anthropologist worries about her safety, while Anna remains undisturbed. The episode anticipates the dissolution of Ann’s US identity and her final yet confusing identification with Yugoslavia, achieved through a strange romantic encounter with a young Yugoslav actor who chooses Anna over Joan/Ann. The fact that Anna and the actor are cousins, and that the people around them look similar, emphasizes Anna’s sameness with the Yugoslav nation and its people. The novel ends in a surreal ritual of lovemaking and war waging in which sexual passion overlaps with scenes of moving tanks and dead bodies. Caught in the ritual of grieving and celebrating, Anna is unable to define herself. Her stereotypically female passivity in the presence of Balkan men and her lack of political engagement threaten to imprison Anna in patriarchal practices of female self-effacement. While this seems at odds with the novel’s previous chapters, in which Tesich offers deeper insights into Ann/ Anna’s transnational identity based on her growing political awareness and her critique of homeland and hostland spaces, the novel ends with the protagonist’s inability to define her own position in the changing landscape of her native land.

Radojčić’s Shifting Racial Identities

While the narrator of Tesich’s novel left her native land as an underage immigrant accompanied by her mother, the protagonist in Natasha Radojčić’s You Don’t Have to Live Here travels extensively without her mother, a schoolteacher. The fast-paced and at times sarcastic narrative follows Sasha’s teenage journey from Yugoslavia to the United States via Cuba and Greece. Dissatisfied with her life in Yugoslavia, Sasha starts saving money for a ticket to the United States, and her determination to become a US resident is evident from the beginning of the novel. An outsider in her Yugoslav community, Sasha is driven to live her own American dream. After involuntary migrations to Cuba and Greece, she finally realizes her dream of moving to New York, where her expectations are challenged by the harsh living conditions she faces as an immigrant. She is aware that many of her fellow immigrants were compelled to leave Eastern Europe for economic reasons or to escape communism. Although she quickly accommodates to her new multiethnic surroundings, she is initially unprepared for the US labor market, which slows down her reinvention process as well as her achievement of a social agency.

Born in the 1960s to a Muslim mother and a Roma Christian father, raised in her mother’s extended communist family, and surrounded by a number of religious neighbors, Sasha early on learns to accommodate to a variety of cultural influences. Her multiethnic family and a community of relatives from Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina believe in the ideology of “brotherhood and unity” among all peoples in socialist Yugoslavia. However, throughout the novel Sasha is othered based on her half-Romani origin, which hints at the treatment of Romani population in the former Yugoslavia.

Julija Sardelić (2013: 5) argues that although Yugoslavia treated the Roma better than other socialist governments, they were not recognized as a distinct nationality or ethnic minority in most of the former Yugoslav republics, which placed them into the position of a “dispersed” minority without a permanent homeland. Even though the socialist Yugoslavia “play[ed] an important role in the construction of the Romani intellectual and political elite,” it failed to ensure basic living conditions for the rest of the Roma, which in turn created immense class discrepancies. While “Romani minorities were left somewhere in-between: not completely included in the working class as well as not completely excluded” (7), they were “the most oppressed group in Yugoslavia” (Silverman 1995: 1). In order to survive, its members “entered the black market trade and/or became professional musicians in the second economy.” The situation of the Roma as an othered and subaltern group among other constitutionally recognized nations and nationalities during socialism worsened after the disintegration of Yugoslavia, which left them “in-between competing narratives of nationalisms” (4).

Radojčić addresses issues of class, nationality, religion, race, and gender in Sasha’s complex coming-of-age story. Even Sasha’s first name points to the multiplicity of her identity; it can be male or female, and tends to be marked as Russian in transnational contexts. While the protagonist’s hybrid identity bridges the economically privileged and underprivileged portions of former Yugoslav society, her emigration raises her awareness of the racialized, gendered, and classed aspects of her identity. The novel abounds in stereotypes of Roma as they appear in parodic scenes that ridicule and criticize traditional patriarchal values. While Romani father figures and other male relatives are abusers who either neglect or regularly torture their children, spouses, and other female relatives, the non-Romani male characters who are violent and domineering are associated with lower-class backgrounds. When Sasha’s father abandons the family immediately after her birth, they become impoverished. Sasha saves money for a ticket to the United States to follow her nomadic sensibility, as well as to escape poverty and the abuse she suffers from her father, uncle, and her uncle’s son. While her father and uncle beat her, her supposedly perfect blonde cousin assaults her sexually, to the extent that she would wish “there was something sharper than a pencil to hurt him with” (Radojčić 2005b: 10).

A victimized but robust girl of fifteen, Sasha becomes an underage outcast, disliked by most of her extended family but unreservedly supported by her mother. When she moves to Cuba after her uncle’s appointment as an ambassador, her relatives expect her to become more “civilized,” while her mother considers the new country a land of great opportunities for her daughter. Although her economic situation improves, Sasha is critical of the excesses of her uncle’s mansion, which once belonged to a capitalist bourgeois, indicating her growing awareness of class and of the ambassador’s hypocrisy about socialist values of class equality. She also disapproves of the uncle’s racism, which is rooted in his belief that “white” Europeans are superior to black Cubans. The ambassador’s discriminatory attitude illustrates his insistence on constructing and preserving whiteness not only as a sign of skin color but also as a cultural marker that ensures his family’s higher economic status in their new surroundings, which indicates how socialist diplomats appropriated bourgeois values that clashed with socialist notions of equality. But Sasha’s complexion and her behavior interfere with her uncle’s notion of whiteness as a racial and moral category. His racist statement that “darkies are obstacles for Cuba” because they are “lazy, useless, promiscuous” (35) fails to influence Sasha as she becomes involved with a young man whose skin is much darker than hers. The affair is seen as scandalous and eventually leads to her and her mother’s expulsion from the uncle’s mansion and their exit from Cuba.

The uncle subscribes to a form of moral whiteness that is defined as civilized and proper behavior, as well as a white Europeanness from which Eastern Europeans are often excluded but for which they sometimes fight hard. As his country’s official representative, the uncle perpetuates the commonly accepted view that Eastern Europe in general, and socialist Yugoslavia in particular, is just as racially white as other parts of (Western) Europe, despite histories of migration, shifting national borders, and colonialism. According to Anikó Imre (2005: 80), many Eastern Europeans insist that “issues of colonization and race are not relevant to the region,” refusing to admit that in their countries the category of “race” has “remained embedded within that of ‘ethnicity’” (83). Imre describes the Balkan Roma as a racial minority who were never categorized in racial terms but whose stereotyped presence marks Eastern European nations as white through opposition. Sasha’s uncle describes the “darkies” in Cuba in the same terms often used to refer to Balkan Roma but which are not seen as a form of racial discrimination. Imre (2015: 105) claims that race “has a hidden trajectory in Eastern Europe because the region’s nations see themselves as outside of colonial processes and thus exempt from postdecolonization struggles with racial mixing and prejudice.”

Even though she is not sufficiently white in her homeland, Sasha’s whiteness becomes more visible in Cuba because of her European origin and her uncle’s economically and politically privileged position, yet it does not guarantee her or her mother a permanent place in the white communist diplomatic circles. When Sasha is accused of disgracing the family and sent back home before “the shame” reaches “Tito’s ears” (40), her mother falls seriously ill, and the grandmother, the “pillar” of the family and the nurturer of nine children, ends up insane in the mountains of Bosnia. Sasha senses that she cannot meet her mother’s expectations and that she is about to lose her to cancer. After Sasha attacks a doctor, she is sent to live with her father. When she sees how her stepbrother enjoys the kind of fatherly love and attention that Sasha never experienced, simply because he is “a boy, which is better no matter what color” (48), Sasha relives her early experiences of abandonment and rejection. She runs away, causing yet another scandal, and is sent to live with her demented grandmother in the mountains of western Bosnia, where generations of women are recalled only in connection to “the lands, the barns, the houses where they bore their sons” (56).

In this heavily patriarchal environment, she is ostracized for her alleged impurity. The villagers, most of whom are communist Muslims who rarely socialize with Roma and “lowly Christians” (68), perceive Sasha as a promiscuous infidel of mixed ethnic background, a threat to their respectable families, dutiful daughters, and even to their “carpets” and “sitting pillows.” They avoid her both because of her skin color that signifies her Roma origin and because of her underage affair with a Cuban man, a foreigner whose skin is so dark that they speak of him as a “burnt man.” Her uncle beats Sasha when she refuses to accept a local policeman’s marriage proposal. Her mother has her return home, thus saving Sasha from having to choose between marriage and juvenile delinquent school. However, members of the community persist in their attempts to separate Sasha from her dying mother, and Sasha is expelled to Greece to live with her father.

In Greece, Sasha’s skin color assumes new meanings, depending on where she lives and the people with whom she socializes. The father sends Sasha to the American Community School in Glyfada, an affluent suburb of Athens “occupied mostly by American soldiers, wealthy Arabs, and a few Greeks” (86). Although she tries to “belong” to her new surroundings, Sasha cannot concentrate on her schoolwork, as she “would see Mother’s face everywhere” (89) telling her to come home. She falls prey to local drug dealers and US airmen. She learns that Greeks are unwelcoming to foreigners, who are generally seen as inferior, with some variation depending on their national, racial, and economic backgrounds. They strongly disapprove of Greeks mixing with Americans, and particularly with the African American soldiers, because they are “darker than the Turks or Gypsies” and “have more money than [Greeks]” (99).

In the popular night club where Sasha engages in underage prostitution, she experiences racial and ethnic segregation and is ideologically othered as a poor girl “from some Red country” (108). The front tables are reserved for white women from England and Scotland, while other girls—the locals, Sri Lankans, Brazilians, and “brown, olive, and black girls . . . have to take the tables in the back” (104). Sasha is constructed as white against the backdrop of the African American soldiers who visit the club, confirming Sasha’s insight that men “no matter what color” determine the positions of women on the basis of their ethnicity, age, and skin color. But Sasha insists on her nonwhiteness in order to distinguish herself from her emotionally detached and uncaring father, who wants to forget “his dark Gypsy ancestors” (95). While her father identifies as newly rich and white, Sasha feels closer to the Greek peasants working in the market and identifies herself as “part Gypsy.” She leaves the prestigious “white” school and starts an affair with a married African American soldier, whose benevolent yet tragic presence she compares to that of her mother. As he faces deportation after a failed drug test, the soldier overdoses, while her mother’s health continues to deteriorate.

Sasha’s experiences in Greece resemble her life in Cuba. Living in a foreign country against her will, she is dominated by powerful male family members like her negligent father and her domineering uncle. Both men invent new identities for themselves; the father detaches from his part-Roma origin and “whitens” himself through his connections with the economically privileged class in Greece, while the uncle takes on the role of a socialist representative in Cuba and insists on his class privileges and the necessity of racial segregation, perceiving his white Europeanness as a moral category.

When the narrator socializes with “nonwhites” in the “Americanized” Greek Glyfada and in socialist Cuba, she strengthens her appreciation of her own multiethnic roots as well as her attempts to subvert the patriarchal confines by connecting with her motherline. Her aunt buys Sasha a ticket to Yugoslavia so she can visit her hospitalized mother. Sasha’s last encounter with her dying mother signifies her temporary regression to her primary dyad with her mother, which has failed to evolve into a mature relationship because of their enforced physical separation. Sasha realizes that her mother fell ill not because of her daughter’s rebellious behavior but because of the actions of her male relatives.

After her mother’s death, Sasha finds a way to enter a US college. She leaves her homeland in order to reinvent herself and to realize her transatlantic dream, despite her community’s initial disapproval and their judgmental views of the United States as “the crazy land of exploitation and religious sects” (134). During her farewell, the family and neighbors sing nationalistic songs, which ironically anticipate the future deterioration of Yugoslavia and the rise of ethnic nationalisms. Sasha’s well-read but physically disabled cousin, whom she visits in a mental hospital, speaks the words of the novel’s title You Don’t Have to Live Here. They denote that “strong” (139) people like Sasha have choices not available to her cousin, whose eventual suicide anticipates the destiny of the other in the constrictive space of social isolation.

While Tesich’s protagonist nostalgically remembers her homeland by desiring to return to the national and collective we, for Sasha her immigration to the United States creates new opportunities. Yet Sasha’s initial stay in New York City is marked by profound feelings of alienation. Even though the city’s vibrancy fascinates her and she quickly finds lodging with a couple of hard-working immigrants from Romania and Yugoslavia, Sasha finds it difficult to reinvent herself. Without financial support to survive, let alone to pursue a college education, she accepts the very first job as a salesperson in a sex shop. Next, she works as a stripper in an expensive bar where dancers are separated on the basis of their skin color and origin. Here she is classified as “an Eastern European peasant” (176), and she uses her real name on the stage because it “sounds Russian” (174). Sasha is allowed to consume drugs, while “the no-drug policy is strict for black girls” (176), whose skin is also regularly inspected for imperfections. Sasha’s whiteness is also rarely questioned against the backdrop of the African American women strippers, and her otherness is based only on her Eastern European communist background. Regarded as dark in Yugoslavia, “colored” in Greece, and as a privileged white European in communist Cuba, in the United States she is a white girl from a poor socialist country who is expected to entertain men by showing her naked body and telling stories of “growing up with Communism” (161). Radojčić examines the possibilities and restraints on migrant women’s agency in a new country, following changes in her protagonist’s racial and ethnic identity that render Sasha more open to personal transformations in the hostland.

Gendered Agency in (Trans)National Spaces

As portrayed in the two novels, US migrant women from (the former) Yugoslavia are exposed to multiple conceptualizations of gender—in socialist Yugoslavia, during the 1990s war, and in postsocialist successor states that are undergoing radical social transformations. Although socialism allowed for diverse “gender arrangements,” one of the common features of socialist countries was the “attempt to erase gender differences (along with ethnic and class differences)” in order to “create socially atomized persons directly dependent on a paternalist state” (Gal and Kligman 2000: 5). Under the pretense of social sameness, equality, and emancipation, women were objectified by the state on the basis of their supposedly “natural” differences from men and expected to assume the “proper” roles of devoted mothers and obedient workers. But the supposedly “natural” differences did not affect expectations that women and men perform equal work, which additionally supports Janet Johnson and Jean Robinson’s (2007: 7) argument that “communist regimes did not understand gender as distinctive from sex.” Moreover, women’s full inclusion in the labor force in addition to their unpaid workload at home meant that women were deprived of choices and that socialist “ideological claims about equality were never realized” (11).

The fall of communism did not bring much progress. Many women remain disadvantaged as the new regimes “perpetuate inequality and disparity in almost all aspects of economic, social, and political life” (4). Women are systematically excluded from power, and women’s issues have become even more peripheral. The new systems of inequality target women’s bodies with even greater intensity through overt sexualization and the punishment of maternal bodies. As images of pornography dominate postsocialist cultures and reduce potential gender negotiations to sexual essentialism, women are not only defined as national icons that are in charge of reproducing society but are increasingly rendered redundant in the labor force. In such a self-destructive society with “neotraditional gender ideologies” (5) of re-feminization and re-masculinization, communist, nationalist, and capitalist values overlap so as to constrain women’s choices. “Different ways of gendering” (12), ranging from neotraditional to feminist, are constructed within the local, global, national, and transnational contexts of the postsocialist experience that reflect past and present tensions between the East and the West.

The two (semi-)autobiographical novels by Tesich and Radojčić depict migrant women’s negotiations with gender in-between US and (post-)Yugoslav spaces. Whereas Tesich fictionalizes a Yugoslav migrant’s uneasy relationship with transnational feminism that anticipates her later entrapment in neotraditional gender roles, Radojčić’s main character illustrates the patriarchal gendering under communism, as well as resistance to the gender confines of capitalism. The novels do not represent the 1990s war, but they anticipate the revival and mobilization of ethnic nationalisms, offering clues for understanding the personal and political forces that transformed women’s positions within national and transnational contexts.

At the end of her novel, Radojčić’s protagonist quits her job as a sex worker in the United States and moves in with a migrant mother and her daughter who try to preserve their Western European origins by sporadically speaking French. The shift from exposing herself routinely to the patriarchal gaze to living in a women-only household that mirrors her relationship with her mother offers a fresh start for Sasha’s reinvention in the United States. Defining herself as “part Gypsy,” Sasha emphasizes her nomadic sensibility and Romani origin, refusing to be rooted in the seeming stability of the nation. Her newfound attitude is reminiscent of Imre’s (2005: 95) statement that transnational “Gypsies are not obsessed with national mythologies” or “absolute collective roots.” The other half of Sasha’s identity is made up of different ethnic identities, a fact that also distances her from fixed concepts of identity.

While the narrator’s Romani identity is contextualized within the ethnic policies of the former Yugoslavia, it is also presented as shifting and changeable in transnational exchanges that range from Yugoslavia to the United States via Cuba and Greece. As a migrant woman, she is othered, racialized, and sexualized, and her body is treated as a commodity. Unlike Tesich’s protagonist, who only fantasizes about running away with “gypsies” and is continually split between homeland and hostland yet deeply anchored in the nation that supports her identification with the collective we, Sasha embraces all aspects of her transnational migrant identity. Although the newly achieved freedom of choice is never consistent, as illustrated by Sasha’s limited options for work after her arrival in the United States, it grants her agency in a transnational context.

The two novels offer different representations of transnational exchanges. Native Land reflects on its protagonist’s outsider position in the United States and alludes to the possibility of impending US political interventions in socialist Yugoslavia. The transnational encounters between homeland and hostland at the beginning of the novel dissipate once the narrator symbolically merges with her native land. The narrator’s eventual refusal to identify as an active political subject of her own life reproduces patriarchal power relations, challenging her transnational position and further limiting her agency. In contrast, Radojčić transports her protagonist into multiple locations outside her birth country, where she experiences shifts in her racial and class identity. While Sasha is exploited in transnational encounters following her various forced and voluntary migrations, she eventually gains more options, even though many are typical scenarios of female migrant exploitation. Through their mobility, both migrants achieve limited agency. While Anna remains locked in her homeland utopia, Sasha becomes a participant in the complex world of multicultural transactions. The two protagonists’ ambivalent and complex positions in the networks of transnational mobility reflect the status of the contemporary Eastern European migrant who is not only “proverbial” and male.

Notes

Works Cited