Drakulic Quotes

She wonders what else she will have to give up and what is the minimum of things with which one can survive without losing the feeling that one is human? ~ Slavenka Drakulic

It's hard to recognize discrimination when you live with it ~ Slavenka Drakulic

Growing up in Eastern Europe you learn very youg that politics is not an abstract concept, but a powerful force influencing people's everyday lives. ~ Slavenka Drakulic

Look now,' Vesna's mother continued, 'what do you know, a civil war might break out any minute: Serbs would fight with Croats, Czechs would fight with Slovaks, Hungarians would fight with Jews. how can you be sure of anything?'
'But, Mother, if this happens, then it will such big trouble that nobody would think about a shortage of pantyhose,' protested Vesna.
'You'd be surprised, my dear, to know that people have to live and survive during wars, too. Besides, how do you think we survived communism? ~ Slavenka Drakulic

How is a woman to tell the story of her life and not stumble upon men? ~ Slavenka Drakulic

She was convinced the demonic pain she had suffered in her leg as a child had been in some sort of preparation for the accident. Engraved in her memory was how she had been left speechless by the first attack. She had yet to accept that pain cannot be expressed in words but only in inarticulate screams. It took time before she could put brush to canvas, and still more time before she could paint pictures that screamed. In place of the screams themselves. In place of verbal descriptions. She owed it to her father, she thought, to the frantic look in his eyes which she would never forget, and to his words: 'Tell me, tell me! ~ Slavenka Drakulic

She is awake. Again she thinks about fear. Until then, she had not been aware of fear, she had been convinced that she did not feel fear, not even when they had taken the group of men out from the gym, or when she had heard the burst of gunfire. She listens. She knows now that fear is the absence of all emotion, it is emptiness, it is as if your whole body is drained of blood all at once. ~ Slavenka Drakulic

With a practised hand he pulls out a knife and presses it against her throat. Hurry up, he hisses through clenched teeth, hurry up! At that same instant she is again struck by their inability to express themselves in normal sentences; they use only monosyllabic words, as if they have forgotten how to speak. And perhaps they have. Perhaps that happens to people in wartime, words suddenly become superfluous because they can no longer express reality. Reality escapes the words we know, and we simply lack new words to encapsulate this new experience. ~ Slavenka Drakulic

Every public space is like a billboard, with messages from the collective subconscious of the nation. There one can read passivity, rage indifference, fear, double standards, subversion, bad economy, a twisted definition of 'public' itself, the whole Weltanschauung - an entire range of emotions and attitudes is exposed. ~ Slavenka Drakulic

That evening, in her apartment, still in Warsaw, Ana takes down a book from her shelf – a rather thick, ordinary paperback. It looks old, because it's worn out and somehow shabby. But it's not ordinary. I can tell by the way she handles it so carefully, like something unique. 'This is the book I told you about,' she says, holding out the Anthology of Feminist Texts, a collection of early American feminist essays, 'the only feminist book translated into the Polish language,' the only such book to turn to when you are sick and tired of reading about man-eater/man-killer feminists from the West, I think, looking at it, imagining how many women have read this one copy. 'Sometimes I feel like I live on Jupiter, among Jupiterians, and then one day, quite by chance, I discover that I belong to another species. And I discover it in this book. Isn't that wonderful. ~ Slavenka Drakulic

What do people think of when they talk about their lives? Do they really see them as an integral whole, as a chronological sequence of events; as something logical, purposeful, completed? What moments do they remember, and how do they remember them? As words? As a series of images and sounds? My life crumbles into a series of pictures, unconnected scenes which comes to mind only occassionally and at random. But there are key events, the acts of chance or fate, which later enable me to construct a logical whole of my life. One such moment was meeting Jose. The other was my decision to see our love through to the very end. ~ Slavenka Drakulic

Why communism failed: it failed because of distrust, because of a fear for the future.
Because deep down no body believed in a system that was continuously unable to provide for its life citizen's basic needs for forty years or more. ~ Slavenka Drakulic

And then came the pain. First in her leg, as if something had sunk its teeth into it. A huge beast, a dog, maybe. It locked its jaws onto her limb and tore at the muscles with its teeth. She screamed, that was all she could do, scream. She could not describe the feeling of having her body ripped apart. She remembered her father's despair, his face as he leaned over her bed, and his words: What is it, tell me, what is it? As she writhed in pain, soaked in her own sweat, Don Guillermo, her kind, good father, waited for her to tell him. For an explanation. A meaningful verbalization of this horror, so that he could understand what was happening to his child. Otherwise, how could he help her? Because her frenzied cries were not enough. Pain needs to be articulated, communicated. It needs a kind of dialogue. It needs words. But only screams and shrieks of pain escaped from the child's lips. ~ Slavenka Drakulic

To have a son in wartime is the worst curse that can befall a mother, no matter what anyone says. ~ Slavenka Drakulic

The principal difference between her "seductive" and her other self-portraits was the absence of self-awareness in the former and its strong presence in the latter. With time, she became brutally direct. In her later self-portraits she was no longer beautiful, merely odd-looking. She did not seduce, she simply drew attention to herself. Her face became hard, serious. The pronounced cheekbones and heavy eyebrows looks as if they had been carved out of stone. The stern black eyes looked either straight through or straight past the viewer. She deliberately exaggerated the brutality of her self-portraits. She was saying: Look at me, I'm alive and it hurts. These self-portraits were like attestations to her existence: one, two, three, four...Exhibitionism, they said. But for her, painting self-portraits was a kind of magical rite, a kind of exorcism. ~ Slavenka Drakulic

Her mother, an employee with a state-owned company, is a Serb. Her father, an engineer, is a Muslim, which means that S. is neither one nor the other. That is why S. thinks she is exempt from alignment. This is what she believed until the armed men and soldiers arrived in her mountain village that same day. Now, however, she sees that for her war began the moment others started dividing and labelling her, when nobody asked her anything any more. ~ Slavenka Drakulic

Humor is the only way to overcome depression ~ Slavenka Drakulic

Here, in the camp, she could tell any old story, these people would have no choice but to believe her. That is not to say that refugee women like her lie, merely that they are uprooted. Their stories barely mean anything even to themselves now. No one listens to them, which is almost like not existing at all. ~ Slavenka Drakulic

I realize that I only have words and that, from time to time, as I hold them in my arms I am less lonely. ~ Slavenka Drakulic