Five years after the novel Giusto's War, my new fiction/memoir, The Socialist Abyss: Memoirs of a Former Yugoslavian, is being published by Luglio Editore in Trieste. It's the most difficult book, the most painful, the story of a life that defines an entire existence. No, I'm not exaggerating; I know I've touched the most sensitive chords, put my finger on a wound that has never fully healed. The story, spanning the second half of the twentieth century and concluding in the present day, is the story of Tito's Yugoslavia, his parabola as the master god of a nation built with fire and sword on a purely ideological basis. A story of abuse, persecution, violence, indoctrination, submission to dictatorship, and the Italian minority crushed between fear and collaborationism. The eyes are mine, those of a frightened Yugoslavian girl in the 1980s, and the disenchanted ones of an adult who has seen too many shattered dreams, in a present that has lost all memory of the past. The story begins with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the hopes for the future we young people of the East had, hopes that were promptly dashed by those who firmly believed in a utopia: freedom above life itself. From there, we move backward in time, to the beginnings of communist Yugoslavia, between borders and marginalization. The Marxist myth of real socialism, which was supposed to lead to full-blown communism, through forced collectivization, confiscations and expropriations, the demolition of centuries-old traditions, the upheaval of culture, and the imposition of a new social order. All this against the backdrop of personal events and arbitrary and humiliating acts of 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 unhappy for many years, but it also left me with essential memories of people, situations, and a spirituality untainted by the consumerism and utter emptiness of the contemporary West. So I decided to chronicle a nation perpetually developing without ever reaching a goal, a country torn apart by the iniquities of the powerful "communist bourgeoisie," a backward world resigned to the brutality of the political police, the site of Tito's supreme personality cult; a unique experience , even for communist countries.

Marshal, master of Yugoslavia, the military rank indicating the monarchical title of the strongman in a nation always divided, never peacefully united, which, under the hypocritical blanket of the communist ideals of "brotherhood and unity," hatches the worst intentions of revenge. In this reality, opponents are imprisoned, "orthodox" communists and critics locked up in the horrific gulag of Goli Otok , religion is opposed, even with brutal methods, children indoctrinated from the beginning of schooling, and society as a whole is transformed—through the terror first of the OZNA and then of the UDBA—into a world of informers. Yet, the god-man is popular with many, celebrated in the mammoth May jubilees, revered as the inventor of the "third way" of non-aligned countries, a friend of Western governments, and beloved by the Hollywood star system . When Tito died on May 4, 1980, he left behind a fatal economic crisis and a nation in ruins. I grew up amid the rubble of this nation, passing from childhood to adolescence and learning the brutality of life far too early. I deluded myself into thinking I could find happiness in an idolized but unknown nation, Italy, where the climate of perpetual cultural and political civil war seemed to permeate every strata of society. The disillusionment was enormous, as was the disorientation, so I looked back, studied my homeland and interpreted it through its multiple cultures, trying 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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