Memory and Fiction: Trauma in Contemporary Romanian Literature

The studies of memory (memory studies) have developed a connection to the concept of trauma (trauma studies) and its manifestations. The literary field became a proper medium of evocation and testimony of past traumatic events. Therefore, social manifestations, traumatic measures of political regimes have all been integrated into literary works as a manner of attesting both their physical and psychological implications. Talking about the traumatic events of the Holocaust, James E. Young views such literary works as “documentary narrative” or, more specific, literature of testimony. Literary (and artistic) works related to the Holocaust are also object of Marianne Hirsch’s studies. In her view, evoking and narrating traumatic events implies the usage of postmemory. Past could also be evoked, as Michel Foucault considers, through literature on the basis of counter-memory. Taking into consideration different manifestations of memory in literature, the present study aims to analyse some of the Romanian contemporary works tackling on the remembrance of the traumatic ideological intervention on the female body that the prohibition of abortions represented during the communist regime. Corporal and psychological traumas that the 770 Decree caused are related in Corina Sabău’s novel And the Crickets Were Heard and also in the testimonial collective volumes Comrades of journey. The Feminine Experience in Communism (edited by Radu Pavel Gheo and Dan Lungu) and Mihaela Miroiu’s (ed.) The Birth. Lived Stories. Thus, literary materialisations of memory would be observed, in order for the contemporary reader to understand the severe traumatic implications of an abusive ideological prohibition of abortion.

historical facts and their literary representations is of extreme importance for an objective analysis of the "consequences" of such events (421). Only through a detached view, would the reader be aware of the produced trauma and all its psychological implications.
Moreover, literary representations of memory are seen, in Marianne Hirsch terms, as manifestations of postmemory, a form of memory that is activated when it comes to evoking past traumatic events that seriously affected the course of humanity. "«Second generation» writers and artists have been producing artworks, films, novels, and memoirs, or hybrid «postmemoirs»" (Hirsch 3) claims the author, referring to the position of writers who, through memory, recollect significant events that had a considerable impact on collective memory. The connection to the phenomenon of witnessing mentioned by Young can be also found in Hirsch's The Generation of Postmemory: "These terms reveal a number of controversial assumptions: that descendants of victim survivors as well as of perpetrators and of bystanders who witnessed massive traumatic events connect so deeply to the previous generation's remembrances of the past that they identify that connection as a form of memory, and that, in certain extreme circumstances, memory can be transferred to those who were not actually there to live an event (4)." Thus, the "postgeneration" is perceived as creating on the basis of a link that even in present times connects them to the generation suffering traumatic experiences. By activating mnemonic processes and continuities, their artistic works are meant to express the major psychological impact transmitted across generations. Literary representations of recollected historical events reveal a sort of direct consequences, due to the endless "narrative reconstructions": "To grow up with overwhelming inherited memories, to be dominated by narratives that preceded one's birth or one's consciousness, is to risk having one's own life stories displaced, even evacuated, by our ancestors. It is to be shaped, however indirectly, by traumatic fragments of events that still defy narrative reconstruction and exceed comprehension (5)." Therefore, a postgeneration writer evoking past traumatic events would not simply recall facts and events. The narrative connection to the traumatic experience allows them to form an assemblage involving memories and also some extra "imaginative investment, projection, and creation" (5). In addition to this, Michel Foucault speaks about a form of memory related to the literature "manifesting the history of otherness". Multiple forms of traumatic experiences that are included in works of literature conceive it a character of counter-memory: "literature has been transformed, since the nineteenth century, into a counter-memory; and the subjects that naturally evolve from this language manifest the history of our otherness: violence, transgression, madness, sexuality, death, and finitude" (Foucault 8). In Foucault's view, the writer is not creating a link between past and present, but one between his writing and death: "This conception of a spoken or written narrative as a protection against death has been transformed by our culture. Writing is now linked to «sacrifice and to the sacrifice of life itself»; it is a voluntary obliteration of the self that does not require representation in books because it takes place in the everyday existence of the writer" (117).
If James Young and Marianne Hirsch inspire their theories from the traumatic events of the Holocaust, the same theoretical concepts could be applied to Romanian literary works evoking the period and the consequences of the 770 Decree. 1966 represented the year in the Romanian history when restrictions regarding pregnancy interruption intensified. The communist regime led by Nicolae Ceaușescu established radical measures for increasing the number of the population, in order to raise the economic power of the socialist state. Among these restrictions, the interdiction of abortions was imposed through the normative act. Medical cases allowing a miscarriage were extremely rare, and therefore an increasing number of women were forced to resort to clandestine pregnancy interruptions. Because legislative penalties imposed by the Decree were extremely severe, women in those years could not benefit from specialized medical assistance. As a consequence, having the (social and personal) pressure of an unplanned and undesired pregnancy and also the terror of not being convicted, women applied themselves all sort of clandestine measures that could provoke an illegal miscarriage: consumption of prohibited substances, extremely hot baths, jumps from heights and other strategies that could affect their bodies in such a manner as to cause severe haemorrhages leading to abortion. Unfortunately, consequences of this kind of methods were deadly most of the times. An impressive number of women lost their lives in those ages or, at the very least, they suffered hysterectomies that implicitly caused severe psychological traumas.
Thus, in the last decade, there were written different Romanian literary works tackling on the subject. Examples of such tragic individual stories were presented through the lens of the narrative fiction and, what is more, there were also writers who recollected their own personal experiences in autobiographical volumes. All narrated events are evoked through memory and, in this way, such literary works become a form of documentary realism, a counter-memory created through multiple postmemorial processes. To begin with, such a novel that presents the tragic destiny of a mother who dies trying to abort her second child is Corina Sabău's And the Crickets Were Heard [Și se auzeau greierii]. In Mihai Iovănel's terms, the book represents "a sophisticated mechanism of producing empathy" 1 , due to the fact that it depicts the life of a woman living and experiencing the dictatorship of the regime and the injustices of the Decree. Sabău thus becomes a postgeneration writer who tells the story of a feminine entity perceived as symbol, as it depicts different traumatic events that women generally lived in Ceaușescu's years of domination.
And the Crickets Were Heard is a short novel written from the internalized perspective of Ecaterina, the main character that is also conceived the role of the subjective narrator. The subjective narrative voice retrospectively exposes both her personal and professional course as a feminine entity. Ecaterina, supervisor in charge at the "Adjusting" department of the garment factory "People's Folk" 2 , in Bucharest, presents details of the anti-abortion propaganda of the Decree. In a series of long continuous phrases that do not have a concrete syntactical finality, there are evoked the very common controls that were made in public institutions in those years. The main character had not only the requirement to supervise the ongoing process of the controls, but the undesirable obligation of being subject to such abusive investigations: "Once a month they were putting us on the table and controlled us, Gubalitu was expecting that I would have already understood which my duties were, without permissions, without sick leaves, with more concern for the country's birth rate, talking to them like this, from woman to woman, the Party made you people, you have to give something in return" 3 (Sabău 19-20).
The supreme desire for a significant raise in the country's demography leads to breaking female's intimacy. Such corporal controls represented a form of coercion to reproduction. The drama of the character does not only come from an emotional dissatisfaction regarding the strict physical supervision, but mostly from a sense of injustice that the regime made women subject to. The same injustice and even a sort of disillusionment Ecaterina experiences also because of her unhappy marriage with an abusive husband. Having a careless dominating partner, she feels an amplified fear when she discovers her second pregnancy. Being afraid of the man's rejection to the newness of having another child, the woman has mixed feelings when coming to revealing it: "If only I had the courage of waking him up and telling him just that, do you know that a child is growing in me, but how could I ever tell him such a thing, there are days when I almost stake out at him to say a few words" 4 (41).
The story is created through an uninterrupted inner monologue, like a diary, a posthumous one, due to the fact that the narrative voice exposes retroactively, through involuntary memory, the course of events from the perspective of an after-death analysis. When Ecaterina eventually decides to announce her husband, his selfish request was to stop the evolution of the fetus. And the terrifying experience of the miscarriage ended up with the mother's death. In this point intervenes Foucault's reference to the experience of death. The demise of Ecaterina as well as all those of the women who died after having an illegal pregnancy interruption become the source of the collective trauma.
When Sabău's character decides to give up on her pregnancy, she prefers to resort to clandestine methods of causing a haemorrhage. In order to provoke it, Ecaterina plans in detail every single one of the procedures, without anyone knowing. All these experiences, having a significant emotional and psychological impact on her, cause another sequence of memories and recollections from Ecaterina's extremely abused childhood. The entity of the husband could be, thus, easily associated with the one of the violent father: "As a man you can feel any pain, but as a woman a simple pain means that you didn't behave and since childhood everyone lurks in order to get you, and the father is the one who gets you first and tells you'll end up like your mum (…) the first that you're going to embarrass is him, the father, and you believe him, his yellow teeth lend his words credibility and until you get to sober up you justify his beat (…) after he left the belt he stroll his shoe along the crouching body and gave her a few more shots (…) I got close and lied down over her and them started to hit me too" 5 (66-68).
According to the traditional model of the patriarchal family, the woman is imposed a constant duty towards the country, towards the society, and the main example of behaviour is represented by the paternal figure. Having an abusive violent father causes a severe emotional impact that can be seen not only in the faulty relationship with her husband, but mostly in such a crucial moment as an abortion.
"I'd better do it by myself" 6 (73), claims the subjective narrative voice, thinking of a possible medical and legislative security she might conceive for herself. Ecaterina constantly remembers in her testimony different tragic cases of women who got mutilated or even deceased because of the malpractice of clandestine doctors or nurses. For fear of severe complications, she resorts to a hot bath that might cause the much desired haemorrhage announcing the pregnancy interruption. Waiting for the hot water to produce its effects over the pregnant body, Ecaterina constantly evokes through memory her husband's words and complaints pushing her towards abortion: "after I wrote to him I realised that I wrote to a man who doesn't care, to a man who told me but how can the other women get by" 7 (75). Despite her worries, the bath has such an impact on her body that an extremely painful bleeding is caused: "I thought that I'll calm down after the first clots, but no, my body has gone mad (…) what can I do to quench all this blood, I make sounds that I cannot control" 8 (80).
Unfortunately, her condition worsens in such a way that she is needed to ask for medical help. In spite of the tremendous legal penalties famous in those years for women who tried a pregnancy interruption, Ecaterina decides to go to the hospital in the wish to save her life. Once in the medical institution, her expectations to recovery gradually disappear. Everybody sees her as simply "the woman from whom it constantly leaks" (84) 9 . Her entire professional status and recognition fade when it comes to such cases ("only women of the lowest leave traces of this kind" 10 (84)). The material result of Ecaterina's act, the abortion left in a bucket, does not represent a choice, an exerted right on the female's own body, but a crime towards the socialist state's population number.
The novel ends up with a shift in the narrative voice.
Ecaterina's process of remembrance is interrupted once with her death. Medical care was not permitted to her and therefore, in the end, her daughter Sofia is the one who subjectively observes and analyses the world around her. The trauma suffered by the mother is transmitted to the daughter as an identity label: "From now on I'm the girl whose mother has died" 11 (98). More precisely, that moment would forever mark her as being the daughter of a woman who died because of an abortion. The girl attentively analyses gestures and words of those present at her mother's funeral: "Gubalitu sighs deeply and knits his hands onto his pointy belly, such a good element, if only she knew to listen the voice of the Party too" 12 (104). Sofia is aware of the fact that things would not be the same without her mother, she would not be read stories before bedtime anymore simply because she was a "good element" who disappointed by not obeying to the communist state's requirements. In sign of a supreme justice for the system and a punishment to her, the mother committing pregnancy interruption deserved to be left to die. Thus, And the Crickets Were Heard is, overall, a literary product of postmemory, a literary testimony written through multiple processes of memory and remembrance. Corina Sabău recreates through fiction a collective traumatic history of women in Ceaușescu's era. The story of Ecaterina comes as an example of what an undesired pregnancy represented in those years. Abuses coming from the ideological propaganda were so severe that consequences as those suffered by the main character actually happened to a large number of women in the history. The story in itself is reconstructed through a subjective memory, and the theme of the narrative also confers it the character of counter-memory.
"Literature of testimony", using Young's terms, could also be represented by collective volumes of autobiographical confessions that contain testimonies of contemporary writers regarding their own experiences or memories about the traumatic events that the 770 Decree produced. If Corina Sabău creates a mnemonic fiction of the traumas caused by the prohibition of abortions, a similar perspective can be also seen in the autobiographical volumes Comrades of journey. The Feminine Experience in Communism [Tovarășe de drum. Experiența feminină în comunism], coordinated by Radu Pavel Gheo and Dan Lungu, and The Birth. Lived Histories [Nașterea.
Istorii trăite], volume coordinated by Mihaela Miroiu and Otilia Dragomir. The two works belong, in Hirsch's view, to the postgeneration, being at the same time self-reflective writings created through a sum of collective postmemories. The forewords of both collective volumes present the coordinators' reasons in choosing the prohibition of abortions as the main topic. Their intrinsic motivation was to somehow stimulate collective memory that remained "insensitive to gender experience" 13 (Gheo,Lungu 9) in the last years. All these self-reflective writings do not tackle only on the specific corporal consequences that controlled abortion had, but also on what the entire feminine experience meant during Romanian communism, taking into consideration multiple physical and psychological implications. The ideological interference in matters of motherhood is perceived by women writers as a personal or a collective experience. Moreover, they see themselves and their social status as "lab rats of a demographic experiment" 14 (12,13).
A presented testimony is that of Anamaria Beligan who recounts, in Comrades…, the controversial situation of the contraceptives. Condoms for instance were extremely hard to find on the market and, moreover, their quality was generally questionable. Their supposed protection regarding contraception was only an apparent one, as they were intended to fail, in order for the number of pregnancies to increase. Known as "little sachets with a butterfly" 15 (Beligan 50), due to the drawings on the packaging, the popular name of condoms could originate from the traditional perception towards the unaccept(ed)able love affairs. What is more, the author ironically presents the famous strategies of "do it yourself". In the top of practices of miscarriage, it was wellknown "the application of a pillow on the abdomen, followed by a cascade of punches that, by doing so, they were not leaving marks" 16 (50, 51). Once again, the terror established through legislative speech is more than obvious. In order not to suffer any possible incrimination, women were capable of applying themselves all sort of barbarous methods that might harm the fetus, and Anamaria Beligan is just one of the contemporary writers that reconstruct this traumatic reality through memory. Regarding the efficiency of contraceptive methods in those years, Claudia Miroiu tells in The Birth… the story of an illegal abortion, her own, caused mainly because of the lack of appropriate protection: "With the help of the boy's mother, I made a curettage at Giulești Hospital, and the doctor, terrified of the high number of curettages girls were subject to in the spring of 1990, counseled me to have a IUD" 17 (Miroiu 213). Unfortunately, this contraceptive method phisiologically affects her when she actually decides to become a mother. Rodica Binder, another self-reflective voice, talks about a "womb" of a "collective disaster" 18 (83) that were gradually formed once with some individual cases. In her affective memory, Binder describes the case of a newly married young girl who interrupts her pregnancy and -similar to Corina Sabău's character -dies as a consequence of the unsanitary intervention: "The singular, individual and scandalous […] tragedy evoked only in whispers, with fear and tears" 19 (83). Once with this event, there is not mentioned solely the tragic story of Brigitta, but mostly the censorship of speech existing in the years of communism. The interventionist politics of the socialist state was inclusively dominating the intimate individual space of population. Therefore, from a collective point of view, people did not even have the freedom to mention such tragic cases in their daily talks. Fear of a coercive legislative intervention prevailed tragedies that humans lived because of the abusive political regime and such events remain in the postgenerations's memory.
Furthermore, Sanda Cordoș represents another literary figure taking part into the testimonial project of Radu Pavel Gheo and Dan Lungu. The feminine author evokes her direct recollections regarding "a whole network" of clamour that was produced when an undesired pregnancy was discovered. At that moment, all kind of clandestine possible solutions were offered by those who knew the subject: "mulled wine and other stews, jumps (preferably from the wardrobe), pills, spindles, procuring miscarriages (some of the girls from Philology weren't afraid), midwives, doctors, aunts, infections, ambulances, sepsis, prosecutors" 20 (Cordoș 137). Such methods of illegal pregnancy interruptions were extremely popular among commoners. In addition to this, the autobiographical narrative voices included in Miroiu's volume mention a sort of fault, a guilt that an undesired and inappropriate pregnancy might cause for those involved, especially for the mother. Showing off one's womb carrying a baby represented a shame, a disgrace for the feminine entity, as society stigmatized such behaviour: "At that time pregnancy represented a kind of «embarrassment», a taboo that was talked about more discreetly and with precaution. When I see that young women nowadays are flaunting their bellies with pride and without any restraint I am reminded the way it was unacceptable in my time" 21 (Bârsan 28,29).
Regarding political strategies of control and supervision, the feminine writers also invoke the very common gynaecological examinations periodically organised in public institutions such as schools, factories, hospitals etc. Otilia Vieru-Baraboi associates this type of interventionist practices with a supreme desire of demographic and birth control that otherwise could have become "chaotic", "generally consummated outside the basic cell of society" 22 (301), namely traditional marriage. However, the main purpose of those checks remains unclear among female population: there were obviously monitored potential pregnancies or, in a worse scenario, even deflorations of unmarried women ("a sort of pop-quiz of good conduct" 23 (301)). If such gynaecological examinations were mandatory, visiting a gynaecologist's office was prohibited because there was the chance of committing abortions without any representative of justice to be present, fact that contravened the Decree. Thus, Ana Maria Sandi recounts her emotional and psychological implications of an examination made on the dining room table: "We couldn't even think about visiting him at the doctor's office. Gynaecologists were strictly supervised and the consultation of an «outside» person could have seemed suspicious.
[…] I went with a heavy heart to my brothersin-law, I was given space for undressing in the dining room, there has been placed a blanket on the big table and then I was told to go up. I still cannot forget the sensation of embarrassment and humiliation" 24 (Sandi 50).
Trauma comes precisely from such dramatic episodes being extremely humiliating for the feminine entity. The impossibility to appeal to specialised medical service brought into women's lives dramatic experiences that affected not only those directly concerned, but also the collective unconscious.
Eventually, feminine authors claim that all those attempts of having a pregnancy interruption despite the severe legislative consequences that the Decree imposed were also a form of exercising the freedom of their own bodies. Unconsciously perceived as a modality of denial and protest against enforced restrictions regarding human reproduction, illegal abortion became a sort of strategy of affirmation of female authority in matters of corporal processes and evolutions. The communist ideal of an extended economical force achieved through a constant demographic improvement could be sabotaged solely through women's refusal of following rigours of the law. Unfortunately, instead of being seen as attempts of keeping their own corporal and psychological integrity, miscarriages nearly became a form of suicidal acts. Underground abortion, states Vieru-Baraboi, was basically the rebound of a subdued freedom conceived "with their flesh and blood" 25 (301).
The two confessional collective volumes, on short, gather together voices of Romanian feminine authors belonging to the postgeneration of writers who expose their most intimate memories regarding the traumatic period and experiences caused by the strictness of the socialist legislative system. Both works become collections of autobiographies offering a realistic and truthful insight of those extremely traumatic years for the feminine collective memory. Together with Corina Sabău's "postmemorial" novel, all literary works bring into present impressive individual experiences using different mnemonic strategies. They are not only created through memory, as a general confession of the authors, but they actually contain multiple events narrated and evoked through memory. Thus, memory stands as a basis when it comes to the connection between past traumatic events and the somehow affected present. All the tragic experiences are being actualised in memory and further transmitted, in order for the contemporary reader to understand and indirectly experience the severe implications and consequences of a coercive interventionist legislative system.