21/12/2012 | Writer: Nevin Öztop
Open Letter of Lepa Mladjenovic to Igballe Rogova
Draga Igballa, Dear Igballe,
Kosova 2.0 asked me to write an essay on my lesbian life and I decided to take this opportunity to write an open letter to you. You are my dear lesbian friend and also my first knowledge of Kosova. You are my precious amazon buddy from 1995 when I first ever saw you in black solid shoes. All throughout the years of war we kept close without many words, learning from one of our favorite lesbians, Audre Lorde: It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize and accept those differences.
I wish to remember together with you some of the stories of our dyke lives in the 1990s. You worked with rural women as a feminist activist in Prishtina in the midst of the Serbian occupation, while I worked with women survivors of male violence as a feminist activist and as a Woman in Black against the Serbian regime in Belgrade.
First I must tell you where I am now. O dear Igballica, my dear Igballinka! I can say I am in the Capital of the Lesbian and Gay Mecca in USA -- Provincetown, a small place on the ocean across from Boston where lesbians and gay have concentrated for decades. The nature here is wonderful, but it is something else which is exceptional. For the past 50 years this has been a place where first artists and the gays and lesbians came and visit, and then many moved in to live here, because of freedom and the caring community. I encountered many good people here. I cant believe it! In fact I realized that I have never had enough of a social or political supportive surrounding to be able even to dream that such a place could possibly exist for real. Where many women walk hand in hand, gay men too, lesbian families play with their kids, gay fathers carry babies, while rainbow-peace flags are waving and welcoming us all around town. My friend Michelle, lifetime dyke, who moved here 18 years ago because of the trust in community, says she never locks her door. The town has around 3,000 citizens and in the summer about 30,000 visitors. Same-sex marriage has been legal in this state of USA, Massachusetts, since 2004. Here are some images:
Two lesbians are walking toward me, same height, same haircut, same dark glasses. One pushes a baby carriage with twins. I wave to the kids and all four smile and wave back to me!
By the ocean a wooden veranda with a sound of music... I see one middle aged gay guy, looks almost like Elton John alone there. He’s singing out loud with the music, and then he takes his dog and starts dancing with him and kissing him facing the sunshine! Touched I thought, if men would dance with their dogs with such joy, there would never be any wars again!
I enter a small shop, there is a cashier near the door, and a lovely middle-aged lesbian standing in a beaming smile greets me Hello! I feel like a lightening rod has hit me in the heart! In embarrassment, I look around and go out. What touched me so much? First of all, I felt her self-confidence, the calmness, the warm ease of her lesbian body. I had a feeling of the fullness of her balance with herself and with her surroundings. She also looked like an owner of this shop. Excellent, I thought, she once made a decision to move in this town and work where everyone will be at ease with her as she is. I was thinking further: Not only does she love herself being a lesbian, but her community sees her as a lesbian too. I felt her body energy full not only of the tenderness of her lover’s caresses but also of the care of her supportive neighbors. No wonder I trembled, I think again: I was never before in a place where lesbians can be surrounded by each other and the friendliness of society. Such a liberated power of her body can be experienced by a lesbian who is surrounded by social and political freedom. Then I thought how I feel my body more present and near to me in this town - I’m walking down the streets conscious that I am being seen by lesbians. This pure fact inspires my body with a special erotic energy. Among lesbians is a different form of existing.
II
Here I am, thinking about this letter, dear Igballe. Are you drinking coffee now? I have my green tea and dark chocolate to feast with you. I know you don’t like sweets, but ajvar and cheese.
The first images that came to me were those from the women’s parties that you organized a few times in Prishtina in the middle of the low-intensity war of the Serbian regime against Albanian citizens in Kosova. Was it 1997, or so? Usually the first day would be out in a restaurant whose owner you knew - a safe place therefore - and we would be with women friends and your sisters.
The second night, we’d be in your home. I remember in those days your partner Rachel Wareham, you and me – one day we three got the idea to celebrate C-Day! Yes, if Eve Ensler could invent a V-Vagina Day, we could invent a C- Clitoris Day! And so you organized all-women parties around Christmas. You were dancing hot oriental dances and those that you do with a glass full of wine on your head, which you told me only men do in Kosova! Those were fantastic parties, we would talk lesbian stories, open lesbian gifts gently packed with care to each other, smoke non-stop and drink. I remember I would come back to Belgrade excited and friends would ask me Where have you been? and I would say An all-women party in Prishtina!, and they would say Where? In total surprise, and I would repeat Prishtina! No, they did not understand it. But I was proud. I was proud of you, of our feminist gang, lesbians in revolt from Belgrade, Prishtina, Budapest, New York -- for we knew that women dancing is political.
One of the first times we walked down the streets of Prishtina I was glad to be with you and your friends and I said, Let’s sing some of the Albanian songs!! And you told me: To sing in Albanian on the street!! What are you talking about! You must be mad!! I will never forget it. No I was not mad, I was totally ignorant! I did not yet know how deeply and vastly the Serbian regime was contaminating and controlling every segment of your lives in those years. I could not imagine that you could not sing in your language in your own town! And more so I thought – but none of my friends in Belgrade know this! The Serbian regime was controlling media, so, ordinary citizens in Serbia in those days were not supposed to know that Albanian citizens in Kosovo were denied entry to the state (Serbian) institutions, that Albanian children went to private dark cellars meant as schools, that health exams were done often in cellars too, that the majority of your people were expelled from work, that Serbian terror was affecting all dimensions of everyday life, day and night. As Hanna Arendt has said clearly: Totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.
III
I remember once in those years around ’97 you drove to Prishtina and I was sitting on the seat next to you. All of a sudden you were not relaxed any more. You turned off the music. I did not have a clue what had happened. I said What’s going on? You said Silent Please! Your body was trembling. Only a few minutes later would I learn that we were passing the Serbian police checkpoint to enter Kosova. That day I felt the fear in your body to the end of my bones. I froze. I will never forget it. Your fear was deep and cold as iron, re-forming your body into a protective fortress and a mind concentrating on vigilance.
The images of Serbian police threatening Albanian citizens were coming back to my mind. Your story of cruel humiliation when you were asked to come back to the Serbian police station every day at 8 am to pick up your passport, three years afer your request. They would let you wait in an empty old room until 2pm. Then, in threatening voice they would tell you to come back tomorrow. And so on for 22 days, while in reality your passport was in the drawer in the room right next door. In feminist theory we call these ‘acts of nonsense’, and they are known as the pattern of violence in family, as well as in totalitarian regimes and in concentration camps. Making citizens exhausted and humiliated by ‘acts of nonsense’. I remember in the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the nineties many times Serbian soldiers demanded from Bosniak men to eat grass in front of them. In the genocide in Burma women who were imprisoned testified that they were ordered to eat flies.
In your car that day, still silent , I was thinking that in fact I don’t know how many sleepless nights you and your family must have encountered in those years of fear. And this was still before the war of 1999. I could have not imagined, because the fear in your body was a new matter for me, I’ve never felt you this way before. This was a huge difference between me and you. Adrienne Rich once said: The moment when a feeling enters the body / is political. How true this is! Imagine, I always thought this moment of fear in the car separated us. I was uneasy and thinking what is my responsibility in this situation? When there are two who belong to oppressed and oppressor – then one has a task. One way to look at identities is through the history of its pain. I remember now the ‘Massacre Pride Belgrade 2001’. Around 800 neo-fascist men came to beat us up, we were around 40 lesbians and gay men in Belgrade that summer day. We all survived and in our long discussions afterwards we lesbians concluded that it was good to have our hetero friends around as they did not have the same level of the fear of homophobic attacks as many lesbians did. We needed to organize many workshops with some lesbians who were traumatized that day, in order to let this homophobic fear be accepted and worked through.
In another day in those same nineties I was supposed to give something to an Albanian friend of a friend from Prishtina, so I went to a bus station to give it to him, a book I think. We were sitting in a small cafe on the bus station and he was talking in a low voice. I noticed all of a sudden that it was a very skillful low voice. He knew techniques I had never encountered before, many ways to speak in this low voice so that the others nearby would not hear. There is a feminist text that Alice Schwartzer, a feminist writer from Germany wrote many years ago, The little difference and its huge consequences, where she describes gender oppression and names it through the colloquial people’s term: the little difference. That’s this little difference between you and me, dear Igballe, the history of Albanian bodies during the Serbian regime terror. Facts look the same: we live in the same family, the same street, but I have a fear of rape and my hetero brother does not. My fear teaches me to walk the street-lights side of streets at night, while he as a fear-free man in this particular situation can wander any street by night. I am here opening the theme of how different identities – being oppressed as Albanian, as a woman, as a lesbian - imply sets of different emotions that await us in certain historical moments. When I walk through the park in Belgrade where skinheads hang around, my Roma friend tells me No, I’m not going there! Her fear tells her to avoid the place with racists. How do we learn about each other’s feelings? Because if you know that I am aware of how you feel, I’m the witness of your pain, and you have a chance to feel less alone. This encounter of two friends with different imprints of social pain is what inspires me in this letter to you dear Igballe today.
IV
Remember when you all invited me and our dyke feminist friend Bobana Macanovic to come to the First Human Rights Conference in Prishtina in December 1999. It was after the war was stopped by the Kumanovo agreement, and finally Albanians could rest a bit from decades of Serbian rule over Albanian citizens. By that time it was already clear that the Serbian regime during the war of 1999 expelled by force and terror close to 850.000 Albanian citizens from their homes. Also, by that time we already knew that more then 11,000 deaths in Kosova had been reported to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. This is almost twice as many victims for Kosova as the number from the Second World War. On the other side, after the Kumanovo Agreement, thousands of Serb citizens were forced to leave Kosova, thus in Prishtina from the almost 45.000 Serbs and Roma people only about 400 remained.
The first ever Kosovar human rights conference was to be held on the 10th of December 1999. Bobana and me decided to go, but we did not really know how to get to the border where our friend waited for us. After the war of 1999 there were no more buses from Belgrade to Prishtina. Not one. So we took a bus to the last village in Serbia, and then we walked. This was the last year of Milosevic’s police. We did not have a clue how to behave on this new border. We waited in front of the police barn, and one of the policeman said : Where are you going? I said To Prishtina, and he said Over there, how come?, he sounded as if he stands on the border to the end of the world saying there is nothing else over there! All people are gone out of Prishtina, and you are going in? This sounded as if there are no more people in Prishtina at all. What are you doing there? I remember I felt a wave of fear come to me, what the hell are we doing in Prishtina? We had planned to not say that we were going to the human rights conference, but on a private visit, just to be sure we got to see you all. So when he asked this question the second time I said, My boyfriend is in Prishtina. All was understood and he said All right, go.
On the other side of the KFOR[1] international border, we had the most elegant activist, our dear friend Nazlie Bala, waiting for us in a black shining car, and an international police jeep following us, just like in the movies. Many different things happened in the next three days. Bobana was afraid to speak Serbian on the streets of Prishtina, so the deal was to speak in English, but she did not really know much of it. In those three days we slept in your flat, and we spoke Serbian only in there, in order to respect the pain of the neighbors. Bobana and I heard appalling stories of women who were expelled from their homes in Kosova, like you and your family, afraid, squeezed into trains that recalled the train deportations to Auschwitz, robbed of ID documents, spit in the face, thrown out on the Macedonian or Albanian border to wait days and nights. We heard also stories of the pain of women who throughout the ‘99 wartime remained at home under the Serbian terror of daily intimidation, sexual violence, death threats. So many details of profound humiliation.
At the conference I was perceived as “a Serbian body’, and this I took as my specific responsibility. I listened as a sister and at the same time I knew this was an encounter of ‘Sisters from Serbia’ and ‘Albanian sisters from Kosova’. The stories I heard moved me to tears, to the edge of disgust and rage. Crimes done in my name, by men from my streets, by men with uniforms with the same national emblem on my passport, played out with my money. Only few years after the genocide in Srebrenica! Again.
After this complex experience in Prishtina, I came back with two crucial issues in my body and on my mind. First, I could not get away from the pain I have felt from the Kosova war, and could not stop thinking what must I do? Is expressing my feeling of deep sorrow enough? What is my responsibility as a feminist activist from Serbia? As a Woman in Black how to act upon the shameful crimes done to the Albanian people? What kind of apologies for the crimes done in my name you can hear with trust? These questions stayed in me and many of us activists for all the years to follow as we carried on in pursuit of a feminist approach to transitional justice.
After I wrote my report from this conference, I realized I had a hurt in my belly from another issue. It came to me suddenly: How could I lie to the fascist policeman on that border about my boyfriend? In order to overcome obstacles I did not follow my lesbian heart, nor my political vision. How many times before have I had to hide myself? Lesbian life in lesbophobic society implies constant lying. To remain merely alive, lesbians in a patriarchal setting have to lie at some point in their lives. We all become liars. I know that. But this time I said OK, I’ve done it, fine, but that’s enough. After this border event I promised myself not to disguise my lesbian self ever again. No fascist border, no war police, no check point will make me do this again. Ah I feel relief writing this for the first time now. Dear Igballe, thank you for listening. I know you will understand me. We are all in this misogynist world, and as activists end up trapped in some places because we fear, but we do the best we can in given circumstances to survive. And then we learn. We say, OK this is it ! And we move on! I love you dearly my buddy, I can only imagine how many times you were torn between your ‘Albanian body’ and your ‘Lesbian body’ in your life. And then we cry sometime, alone or near our lovers, because we know we must compromise, even if we don’t want to. For lesbians in the warzone this is a constant dilemma. Palestinian lesbians told us their dramatic stories on this theme as well. This is an issue for lesbians even without the war: how to synchronize the ethnic family on one side and lesbian lovers moon-sisters on the other. Muslim, Chicana, Afro, Asian... I will never stop talking how much I admire you for that capacity and softness with which you care about your family and your lesbian community at the same time. I can’t wait for the next dance with you. And, just to remind you that you are loved among feminists in the entire region: If Igballe makes the party we’re gonna dance until dawn! May the sunshine kiss your face today dear Igballe.
Letter of Lepa Mladjenovic to Igballe Rogova
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