to grow into your own skin / my mother’s upbringing under communism and the transition to democracy
By: Sabina Șancu
Tags: Communism, Narrative, Growing Up, Mother

THE OUTSIDER

A vast majority of Nicoleta’s memories focus on one of the four memory “formats”. Cultural memory gains a dimension that is somehow divergent from her individual path. This could stem from the undeniable alienation that Nicoleta had from the socio-political context of the time, not being “part of social groups with shared belief systems”, which led her to describe herself by her own terms: “I wasn’t a rebel, but I didn’t like following the herd”.

From a social standpoint, Nicoleta is most likely to describe herself in opposition or difference to others. A studious child (defining herself with a Romanian word, “tocilar”, similar to nerd, but which puts the focus on hard work rather than intelligence), she was marginalised throughout school and even university. She kept to herself, staying quiet and writing diaries. Friends appear in her narrative as “saviour” figures, integrating her into society. The path to integration is an active effort on her behalf, but is always marked by an extraordinary situation, because “this is how it happens to me… we cannot stand each other and then we love each other”. An example of this is the joke that made a university friend connect with her, of which Nicoleta says “one night, we were sitting in the dark, and I told a joke which I will not tell you, and… that was that”.

Nicoleta felt even more out of place at her first job, speaking of “older ladies and then there was me among them”. There too, she managed to find one person who took her out of her shell, a “funny guy working at the company’s telephone exchange”, whom she later married.

As opposed to people who had experienced rupture in the brusque transition from one regime to the next, Nicoleta had the relative advantage of finding herself at a transitional point in her life during those years, in search of an identity while her country was doing the same. She finished high school a few months before the 1989 Revolution, joined university right after it and therefore benefitted from the relatively sheltered life of a student, and joined the workforce when the country had shaken off its first post-communist struggles. Nicoleta finds no nostalgia, no sentiment of loss, in remembrance of communist times, other than joys of youth that are encompassed within the universal childhood experience.

Nonetheless, it is important to note that narratives are co-constructions that exist on varying levels of subjectivity and there is no objective truth. Narratives are developed from a certain standpoint, reflecting the unique context that shaped them and giving voice to individual experiences within the context of each group and its discourse. “Narratives, along with the subjectivities they present or construct, are not complete or coherent, but multi-faceted”. Nicoleta’s story does not stand isolated, despite the way she portrays herself.

Moreover, the isolation that permeates many aspects of Nicoleta’s story does not infer that her identity is not relational. On the contrary, it places more importance on the few meaningful connections that she highlights with friends and family. Despite the gendered nature of the Gusdorf model and the feminist criticism proposed by Eakin (1999), Nicoleta’s narrative places itself firmly between the two. Her sense of selfhood blends individual and collective, her narrative is mainly chronological but has significant non-linear aspects, and manages to circumvent a full dedication to both autonomy and relationalism. The way in which Nicoleta recounts her narrative, I believe, blends the traditionally gendered extremes of the narrative and is an example of how it is possible to surpass the confines of considering a narrative male or female. Contributing to this is also the fact that Nicoleta does not describe herself in strictly gendered terms, with one notable exception of discussing access to feminine hygiene products.

Nationally, Nicoleta’s family echoed her relative isolation and bestowed upon her undeniable links with their past, despite confessing not having explored her own postmemory. They had mostly endured losses at the hands of the regime ever since it was instated, with Nicoleta’s mother, Maria, having lost her father 16 because he refused register for collectivisation. This created a hatred and resentment within her — “my mother could never stand the communists”. Instead, Maria tried her best to keep the traditions she grew up with after marrying and moving to the city.

When, as a child, he was instructed at school to greet his family with the socialist greeting “Long live the People’s Republic of Romania”, Nicoleta’s father Niculae was forbidden to say such things again, an attitude which was passed down when Niculae established his own family.

Nicoleta never joined the Union of Communist Youth (UTC), and scored low in her university entry exam because she could not learn one of the Communist Party Congresses by heart. The values that were instilled in her through the language of family, “more direct and more ruthless than social and public speech”, especially in a time of censorship and propaganda, were adopted by Nicoleta. The family was the only safe environment for discussing such things: mistrust was the general feeling of the population, because informants to the Secret Police (Securitate) were everywhere. The family allowed my mother the safety to feel that “it wasn’t good, it wasn’t right”.

Romania never wanted Communism, which “in the natural order of things, could not function”. It was isolated both from the West, and the East. The timely process of de-stalinisation and elimination of all Russian cultural influence, culminating even in anti-Soviet sentiment, making of Romania an outsider within the socialist sphere. Within the context of the Cold War, Romania was deemed a “friendly communist country”. Started by Gheorghiu-Dej, the first communist leader, the ambivalent line of resentment towards the Soviets as well as the Westerners effectively drove the country to isolation and created a unique context. Later, Ceaușescu was keen on restricting access to information of other countries to the real situation Romanians were enduring.

Nicoleta thus found herself an outsider on all accounts, in a matrioshka of isolating circumstances keeping Romania at a distance from the world, her family at a distance from Romanian society, and herself at a distance from her family and peers.