Five years after the novel The War of Justus my new fiction/memoir book is out The Socialist Abyss. Memoirs of a Former Yugoslav for Luglio Editore of Trieste. The most difficult book, the most painful, the story of a life that defines an entire existence. No, I'm not exaggerating, I'm aware of having touched the most delicate chords, of having put my finger in a wound that has never completely healed. The story that spans the second half of the twentieth century and ends in the present day, is the story of Tito's Yugoslavia, of his parable as god-master of a nation built with iron and fire on a purely ideological basis. A story that speaks of abuse, of persecution, of violence, of indoctrination, of submission to dictatorship and of the Italian minority crushed between fear and collaborationism. The eyes are mine, those of a frightened Yugoslavian girl in the Eighties, and the disenchanted ones of an adult who has seen too many broken dreams, in a present that has lost all memory of the past. The story begins with the fall of the Berlin Wall and with those hopes for the future that we young people of the East had, hopes that were promptly disillusioned by those who firmly believed in a utopia: freedom above life itself. From here, back in time, to the beginnings of communist Yugoslavia, between borders and marginalization. The Marxist myth of real socialism that should have led to full-blown communism, through forced collectivization, confiscations and expropriations, the demolition of centuries-old traditions, the distortion of culture and the imposition of a new social order. All of this as a backdrop to personal events and arbitrary and humiliating violence.

The idea of ​​writing this book came to me some time ago, but finding the strength and energy to put everything down “in black and white” required a truly remarkable mental effort. It is not easy to lay bare the thorniest aspects of one's life, to tell oneself as a pawn in a story that devours and swallows everything, to tell the truth in a country like Italy, where we talk about “fascism” as if it were 1945 and we “forget” to deal with the communism that has permeated culture in the last seventy years.

Yugoslavia made me an unhappy person for many years, but it also left me essential memories of people, situations and spirituality not tainted by consumerism and the absolute emptiness of the contemporary West. So I decided to tell the story of a nation in perpetual development without ever reaching an end, a country torn apart by the iniquities of the powerful "communist bourgeoisie", a backward world resigned to the brutality of the political police, the place of the supreme cult of Tito's personality; a unicum, this, even for communist countries.

Il Marshal master of Yugoslavia, the military rank indicating the monarchical title of the strong man in a nation that is always divided, never peacefully composed, that under the hypocritical blanket of the communist ideals of "brotherhood and unity" hatches the worst intentions of revenge. In this reality the opponents are imprisoned, the "orthodox" communists and the critics locked up in the horrible gulag of Goli Otok, religion opposed even with brutal methods, children indoctrinated from the beginning of schooling and the entire society transformed - through the terror first of the OZNA and then of the UDBA - into a world of informers. And yet, the god-man is liked by many, he is celebrated in the mammoth jubilees of May, venerated as the inventor of the "third way" of the non-aligned countries, a friend of Western governments and loved by the star system Hollywood. When Tito dies, on May 4, 1980, he leaves behind a fatal economic crisis and a nation in ruins. I grow up in the rubble of this nation, I pass from childhood to adolescence and I learn the brutality of life too soon. I delude myself into thinking I can find happiness in an idolized but unknown nation, Italy, where the climate of perpetual cultural and political civil war seems to permeate every stratum of society. The disillusionment is enormous, the disorientation too, so I look back, I study my country and interpret it through its multiple cultures, I try to find meaning in the lives of border people.

In this book I have chosen a narrative that is at times crude and brutal but always pervaded by a subtle irony, because I find it to be the right way to overcome every abyss of life. The result is a merciless and ironic fresco of a nation that no longer exists, of a piece of life gone by and of the current oblivion of Western society, characterized by deep abysses of historical ignorance and exasperated superficiality.

I consider myself a woman from the East, I am proud of my history, I am pervaded by a deep sense of fatalism and shaped by an ancient spirituality; I do not believe in any homeland, I do not identify with anything other than the glorious past of eighteenth-century Istria. That world in which I grasp the essence of myself and the roots that bind me to the land, that identification with the granite and centuries-old culture that has amalgamated ethnic groups and languages ​​into something unrepeatable. The socialist abyss – as a political commissar defined Yugoslavia when speaking to my father, more than forty years ago – is now far away, as are the aftermath of pain and discomfort from so many years of my life. Yet, when you are born in the East, you carry the deep and terrible abyss within you and you have to learn to live with it.

Gabriella Chmet
Source: Gabriella Chmet Blog – 13/05/2021

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