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LEPA MLADJENOVIC
I come from a country where there is a war - in which all the sides speak the same language and war rape means usually raping and killing women from the neighbourhood. One hundred thousand people dead, ten times more injured. Five million people displaced.
In wartime the image of love, apart from being heterosexual, has an additional quest of reproducing the nation. The image of sex, apart from being heterosexual with lots of pornography, violence and Hollywood movies on TV, has an additional fact - war rape. The women I spoke to talk about being raped in private prisons, in soldiers barracks, in soldiers warehouses, in concentration camps. Their homeless souls and courage haunt me in the nights, and in the morning they give political framework to work and strengthen my will.
In wartime, lesbian love has no language. Out lesbians must swallow their own words. Every word about lesbian existence is taken as a desacralization of the pain of war survivors. Therefore where I live there is not such a social phenomenon as an out lesbian.
Where I come from there is a rule of the nation-state.
Where I come from the regime permanently produces a false reality. They say Serbia is not in war, while women's projects deal with women abused by killers who come back from the front. They say all the human rights in the country are being protected while two million Albanians have no right to schooling or the medical system, and live in the state of seige while thousand of Gypsies live in dark cellars and shanty barns for years, while half a million of refugees are second class citizens. There is still Criminal Law 110 that criminalizes sex between adult males. Lesbians and gays do not have the benefits of marriage, are not safe at their workplace, and live in constant fear.
And still, if I want to work with women I need to compromise with state institutions, knowing that in the Serbian parliament and government there are men who are killers, rapists and war criminals. Not in the symbolic sense, but legally so.
When the war
started I came out on the streets to let my body speak that I am against the
government that kills. When the war continued I felt I had to work with women
war survivors. So, some of us feminists from Belgrade, supported by many women
from non-war zones, opened an Autonomous Women's Center and many women fleeing
their families, male partners or the war zones come there.
Working in the wartime for us feminists poses a dilemma to resolve, how to avoid
a role men in war give to women: nursing the wounds of war survivors? How do
we interpret the war torture if for some of us the word is gender divided? Does
compulsive heterosexual construction of roles make one gender produce the conditions
and means of destruction of each other and make the other gender maintain and
feed that same destruction? I know that many women I see on the streets are
in conflict between their maternal roles and the demand for faith in the nation.
But they do not have any social or historical means to articulate their conflict.
Women then plunge into deeper silence - the place they've known for ages.
Probably many feminist lesbians who live in countries of poverty and war share similar experiences with mine. Trying and failing to understand: why this war. Encircled with images of the dead that appear with the sharp blowing of the wind or an unexpected sound, while soldiers, proud of killing, still wear uniforms in buses and on markets, where people are hungry and sick and funerals become events one has to get used to.
Many times I have wondered about women who love women in my town, who are not identified as lesbians, who are not identified with the role of nation or mother, who do not want to think about war nearby. They walk down the same streets and I don't see them. I ask myself what are the words I could say aloud to make their faces and voices rise from their sheltered silent chambers. In the state statistics they are probably counted as something they are not.
Where I come from, a small group of women got together, again supported by many women from different countries, and we formed "Women In Black Against War". We stand on the street every Wednesday, and show that we disagree with the government. Some of us are harassed by police from time to time, just to be reminded that "they are watching us".
There are no more peace demonstrations on the streets of Belgrade, we are the only persistent positive warriors, who believe that small acts of public disobedience are meaningful. We know they don't change any political decision but they change our lives and they matter to other women.
Women in Black have also a men's support group, and it is formed by two gay men.
But I am not a war survivor, I am not a refugee, I am not a Serbian mother. The city I live in was not ruined. I am not identified with the regime, nor with the nation I come from. When the regime's paper names me "a traitor of Serbian nation" it hits the hidden smile in me.
Where I do come from is not the nation I was born in, but the lost lesbian country I never had and somehow still manage to create. So, if they cannot insult me on the national basis they certainly can insult me as a women and lesbian.
And they do. In April 94, about a month and a half after our Lesbian and Gay Group "Arkadia" had shared the flat with a group of psychologists who work with refugees, Arkadia was thrown out. The argument that were spilled out at us and at me relied on the fascist Criminal Law 110. The psychologists ordered us to leave - "we share the same bathroom" they said. They said that their reputation was being ruined by our presence at the same address. The words used were supposed to mean that we are contagious, suspicious characters. The final comment was that lesbians are not supposed to work with minors who are rape survivors.
So I thought, in pain to the bone, when they hate you for who you are, this is the beginning of war against you. When the psychologists wrote a letter to announce their disapproval about Arkadia, they wrote "Immediately stop the activities". I was surprised, my stomach was shuddering, my face was in danger to lose its shape. For a moment I thought, if all pedestrians tomorrow in the streets knew I was a lesbian and they all thought the same as these psychologists, how will I hold my face whole? How will I open my eyes and not be affected by their disgust? How will I not feel disgusted about myself too? Maybe the woman in the post office would want me to leave the post office immediately if she knew I was a lesbian? Maybe the woman on the market, if she only knew, would not sell me her strawberries? I felt so very bad, I was fighting with myself in order to revive my own dignity for my passion and my politics.
Then I remembered th stories of women from the war zones and how they left their homes. Soldiers of different national colors would come to a village to be cleansed and order "immediately get out of your houses". They wouldn't have more than an hour or so, feeling humiliated all of a sudden, not knowing why, they would have to leave their own homes, they would be made to feel awful for who they are and where they are, in all that surprise they would have to pack and run, and maybe remember only to take a few photos or not, to take some coffee or an apple for the road. No warrant. Immediately. I was cleansed in an instant.
After three years, the essence of war I experienced in the act of hatred against gays and lesbians from my colleagues, just around the corner.
But lesbians will remember and I know there were lesbians living in the wartime before me. Most of them did not leave me their guidelines. Women who loved women in my town long time ago did not save any traces of their voices, that I know. So, sometimes, in the moments of weakness I read Audre Lourde in her "Litany for Survival", or I remind myself that "There must be those among whom we can sit down and weep and still be counted as warriors" (Adrienne Rich). Many lesbians, feminists and pacifists from this country and other countries have supported us, sent post cards, and words of love. Then, when it all arrives, we sit in my kitchen, which we call Free Lesbian Republic, we look in awea the beautiful books and papers, we eat macaroni and some of us dance. And we still dream of how to announce the codes of the Kitchen Republic into the streets.
Lepa Mladjenovic, Belgrade, Serbia. Was given the international human rights award "Filipa de Souza" for lesbian rights 1994