I don´t know about other academics, but every time I am connecting intellectually with books on topics I experienced myself, although indirectly - through stories, remnants of daily lives, memories of other people - my head is almost boiling of thoughts about theories and possible direction of thought. I am rarely interested those days in issues regarding communism and post-communism - there are way too many horrors to think and write about currently - but no matter how far I am traveling myself from those times, every time I am back, I may realize that this will be the only domain will ever fully understand in all those details.
How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed by Slavenka Drakulić was one of those books, I just finished few days ago. The mention of the time I finished the book is important as it indicates that the memories of the ideas shared are still fresh in my mind.
Start with the title: What is actually to laugh about communism? What is satirical about a regime that killed and traumatised more than one generation, with food shortages, propaganda and everyday corruption, that affects the countries that experienced it until the very day. But if one lived in those times and countries, may know that everywhere, from the USSR until Albania, there was a rich repertoire of underground jokes about the regimes and their clownish representatives, growing exponentially.
Some people went to prison for telling jokes about various dictators and their families. Thus, jokes were a form of resistance at the time. In current dictatorships, young people create memes to display the cowardice and corruption of their abusive rulers.
The heroes of Drakulić´s book are women. Women who relied on natural cosmetics to keep themselves beautiful. Women making delicious dishes out of nothing. Women waiting in line for brownish toilet paper. This communist system awarding women who were bringing babies, many of them, to a dark world without current water and power shortages failed women. Everywhere.
The book does not go too far in trying to explain if this betrayal leaded to any kind of resistance against the system, but this is not relevant. In a journalistic, fact-focused way, seasoned with personal stories,
How We Survived Communism is a written documentary of times long gone, still present in the everyday mentality of people who survived. Survived through laughs and by taking it easy. It was not necessarily a life in the proper sense of the word, but they were able go live. Books like this one, open up new and different lines of thought facilitating a better understanding of current societies and trends.
Rating: 4 stars
