On language, exile, and The Ministry of Pain

A Loss with a Return Ticket

Dubravka Ugrešić

The Ministry of Pain

Translated by Michael Henry Heim

HarperCollins, 2005

First published as Ministarstvo boli, 2004

While I am studying abroad, I learned that a language can loosen its hold without disappearing. I could follow a lecture, write an email, and sit through a meal. What left me was the speech in which pain, grievance, and a confused anger can be said at their real size. Those feelings had to be shortened and made polite before they would leave my mouth. My first language was still mine. For a while it simply stopped being the language of ordinary life. The pain was real, and it had a limit. A holiday was enough to put that language back on and feel whole inside a sentence again.

Intercultural communication has a name for this season. Kalervo Oberg called it culture shock: the strain of living among unfamiliar cues, borne by someone who is away and may, with time, adjust. Eva Hoffman, remembering her own passage into English, describes the inner version of that strain. A word can be correct and still fail to reach the layer in which the self was first made. What I felt was that linguistic dispossession in a small, reversible form. I kept the fact of my return in mind the whole time I was reading The Ministry of Pain, and I was afraid of the comparison. What I lost was a year or two of fluency in being myself. What Ugrešić’s narrator loses is any clean sense of an afterward.

Tanja Lucić has come from Zagreb to Amsterdam. She teaches the literature of a country that no longer exists to students who have fled it as she has. They call her comrade, holding the last vowel of drugarice. The course is listed as a survey. It becomes a collective attempt to keep a stopped heart beating. The safest place to press is childhood: a red, white, and blue plastic bag, a cake, a sentence learned in primary school. Ugrešić is plain about the language spoken in that room. It is already extinct. Outsiders can hear the words. The life those words used to wake stays inside the circle of people who lost it.

Stuart Hall described cultural identity in two movements, and the classroom lives between them. One movement is inheritance: a people drawn back together through common memory. The seminar tries to practice that. The other is rupture: identity as what war and displacement have made of us, unfinished and produced rather than stored. The end of Yugoslavia has already forced the second movement. The language the students still call “ours” has been divided into Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian, each required to stand as a nation. Their shared past survives in the room as something a new political order has broken and renamed.

Naming is where the book becomes hardest to treat as a case study. Mary Jane Collier distinguishes identity we claim for ourselves from identity other people assign. Inside the classroom, “our people” and “comrade” are claims. Outside, assignment arrives first. Because Tanja’s husband, Goran, is a Serb, their flat in Zagreb is requisitioned by the Croatian army, and in that logic she is “that Serbian bitch.” A student from Zagreb will not use comrade. He calls her Mrs., because the old address sounds Yugoslav, Communist, and therefore anti-Croat. Later her Dutch chair drafts a proposal to separate Croatian and Serbian in Dutch universities, and the change is called long overdue. The country that receives her helps to finish the cutting. A great deal of intercultural teaching imagines contact as a meeting between cultures stable enough to be compared, interpreted, and eventually bridged. In this novel the meeting continues the taking apart.

There is a practical side to the injury, and Pierre Bourdieu’s account of the linguistic market names it cleanly. A language is worth what institutions will recognize. In Amsterdam the students’ language buys very little. Early in the term Tanja asks for short autobiographies in English. She means to be kind. In “our language,” she fears, they would slide at once into confession, and she wants to delay that. I recognized the kindness. It is what I did with my own anger abroad: I moved it into a language that could be handed in and kept from becoming a scene. Howard Giles would call the English exercise convergence, a shift toward the university’s legitimate tongue, and the later return to drugarice and shared jokes divergence, the group drawing close against a city that has no use for its words. Both choices make sense. Convergence turns pain into something that can be submitted. Divergence makes the pain intimate, and then the semester ends and the room is gone.

I went home. Tanja’s attempt occupies seven days in Zagreb. The new identity card is not obtained. The lawyer is not seen. When the plane leaves the ground, what she feels is relief. At the airport she has bought Kraš chocolates in a box made to look like the new Croatian passport, stamped with the coat of arms. Home has become an object one can give. Culture-shock theory draws a curve from crisis back toward some workable life, because the traveler’s own culture is still there to integrate with, or to rejoin. Tanja’s curve has nowhere to arrive. The home culture has been abolished in the same years as her departure.

The classroom is the most moving thing in the book, and the part I trust least. Behind indifferent walls the students give artificial respiration to a life that is gone. Some memories are theirs, some come from parents, some are made up. Every detail, the narrator says, still holds a morsel of truth, and the whole cannot be passed to anyone outside. Julia Kristeva’s stranger lives in a similar cutoff: speech separated from the body’s night memory, from the childhood in which words were first fears and tastes. For a few hours a week the class rebuilds a little of that night, and only for itself.

Svetlana Boym’s two nostalgias let me say why the room feels like care and like a risk. Restorative nostalgia wants the lost home rebuilt, the missing past repaired and closed. Reflective nostalgia stays with the longing itself, ironic and unfinished, and refuses the comfort of a completed return. Tanja’s assignments begin in that second mood. She knows the country will not be put back together. The ritual keeps leaning toward the first: press on the chest, bring out the old objects, speak as if the extinct language still had a people. Igor, who later comes to her flat with handcuffs taken from the students’ workplace, says aloud what the method leaves quiet. He calls the Dutch lowlands a blotter that soaks up memory and pain, a country of forgetting in which people learn to fade. Even the title participates in the translation of pain into something almost witty. The Ministry of Pain is the students’ name for a workshop that supplies sex shops, borrowed from an S&M club in The Hague. Catastrophe enters as a joke, a prop, a metaphor. That is already a beautification, and it is done with great skill.

Edward Said wrote that exile is strangely compelling to think about and terrible to experience: an unhealable rift between a person and a native place, between the self and its true home. Literature has often been glad to make the rift look like depth. Ugrešić writes something quieter and, for me, harder to settle. She gives Tanja a fate that is already a mercy, and then she writes the mercy well.

The mercy is real, and it should be said without embarrassment. Tanja gets out alive. For a time she has a classroom. She is spared the deaths, the conscription, and the suffering that never becomes a syllabus. A note at the front of the book adds one more distance: the narrator and her story are fictional, and even Amsterdam is not wholly real. The worst of the war stays mostly behind the scene. Rain, irony, and the classroom stand in front of it. I understand the mercy. I also feel it as a pressure on what I am willing to call an ending.

In the epilogue the pressure becomes explicit. Abroad, Tanja experiences her native language as a stammer, a curse, or as babble that no longer depicts anything. Surrounded by Dutch, getting by in English, she feels she is learning her first language from the beginning. A word arrives and its substance does not. A substance presses at her and the word fails. The condition is the one Jacques Derrida put in a single sentence: I have only one language, and it is not mine. She enrolls in a Dutch course and, like her classmates, overuses ik. Ik ben Tanja. Ik kom uit vormalige Joegoslavië. For the moment, she says, ik commits her to nothing. It is hide-and-seek. She hides in the open, behind a small, hard word.

Young Yun Kim describes adaptation as a movement through stress toward growth: former habits fall away, new ones form, and an intercultural person emerges. “Life has been good to me” is spoken in that key. Tanja has learned to leave the curtains open and is trying to treat the exposure as a virtue. She is paid decently to look after the children of an American couple, four days a week, and she teaches them nursery rhymes in their language, in English, and in what used to be hers. A rhyme still alive in a child’s mouth is a real remnant. It is also what remains of a literature teacher once her language has lost its price.

The same pages unravel the growth they announce. She dreams of words now, houses no longer. The words have a false bottom. Sentences grow over her like vines. She wakes at her own whimper and cannot tell whether the excess of language was punishment or absolution. Then the book says it again: life has been good to me. A person who must announce her good fortune twice is building a sentence she can go on living inside. The sentence holds. The disaster remains in the room with her. Homi Bhabha’s third space, so often offered as the creative yield of cultural encounter, stays shut. The Dutch ik is a place to hide. Hybridity, here, is the shape survival takes after the conditions for a self have been withdrawn.

I can use the sojourner’s ideas for my own year. Oberg gives a name to a pain that ended. Hoffman keeps me from treating a reversible silence as mere awkwardness abroad. What I cannot do is accept Tanja’s fortune as a recovered life. I know how much the author has already lowered her voice. This “I” receives a fate that can still be told: a room, a wage, the power to arrange pain first as a course and then as a novel. Ugrešić has beautified a great deal. I still cannot accept it. Acceptance would mean agreeing that a person whose language, country, and name have been dismantled can be adequately described as someone who adapted. I stood only at the edge of that dismantling, and my edge included a way back. The edge was enough to make the center unbearable. The novel looks at the center anyway, and then wraps it in good fortune. I believe that she was fortunate. I cannot call what remains a life I know how to receive.

Works cited

  1. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.
  2. Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Edited by John B. Thompson, translated by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson, Harvard University Press, 1991.
  3. Boym, Svetlana. The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books, 2001.
  4. Collier, Mary Jane, and Milt Thomas. “Cultural Identity: An Interpretive Perspective.” Theories in Intercultural Communication, edited by Young Yun Kim and William B. Gudykunst, Sage, 1988, pp. 99–120.
  5. Derrida, Jacques. Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin. Translated by Patrick Mensah, Stanford University Press, 1998.
  6. Giles, Howard, Nikolas Coupland, and Justine Coupland. “Accommodation Theory: Communication, Context, and Consequence.” Contexts of Accommodation: Developments in Applied Sociolinguistics, edited by Howard Giles, Justine Coupland, and Nikolas Coupland, Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 1–68.
  7. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, edited by Jonathan Rutherford, Lawrence & Wishart, 1990, pp. 222–237.
  8. Hoffman, Eva. Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language. E. P. Dutton, 1989.
  9. Kim, Young Yun. Becoming Intercultural: An Integrative Theory of Communication and Cross-Cultural Adaptation. Sage, 2001.
  10. Kristeva, Julia. Strangers to Ourselves. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez, Columbia University Press, 1991.
  11. Oberg, Kalervo. “Cultural Shock: Adjustment to New Cultural Environments.” Practical Anthropology, vol. 7, no. 4, 1960, pp. 177–182.
  12. Said, Edward W. “Reflections on Exile.” Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Harvard University Press, 2000, pp. 173–186.
  13. Ugrešić, Dubravka. The Ministry of Pain. Translated by Michael Henry Heim, HarperCollins, 2005.

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