by Eva Hoffman
Fernando Escalante Gonzalbo is a sociologist and intellectual renowned for his analyses of Mexican politics and culture in books such as Imaginary Citizens and In the Eyes of God. Gonzalbo also appears frequently in print and television shows in Mexico, as well as teaching at El Colegio de México in Mexico City.
9
Surrealism and Survival
in Romania
Carmen Firan
From the perspective of a foreigner, Romania is a little-known country, usually associated with various media clichés that present it as a predictable part of the former Communist block. In fact, it is an unpredictable and contradictory country, even for Romanians. This paradoxical cultural space has absorbed several cultural influences: the French sophistication between the two World Wars along with the avant-garde movement that emerged in Romania before spreading to Europe, the spicy Orient, the rural civilisation of the Balkans and the ethnic diversity of Transylvania under the Austrian-Hungarian empire. A young state with old roots, Romania was always struggling to define and assert itself at the crossroads of powerful interests. Yet this country managed to find a way to survive, despite its historical wounds and the isolation it suffered for decades from international dialogue. Today, Romania needs to solve its paradoxes and to overcome its own clichés – from the corrupt mentalities embedded by decades of Communism, to the lament of a nation that is still too little known and praised for its contribution to the universal choir of cultural values. It also needs to redefine its national identity according to the new era of globalisation.
As a member of the European Union, Romania will find the right way to redeem itself from its past and move forward into the future through a mutual interchange and an open dialogue with the world.
National surrealism and cultural paradoxes
I grew up in Communist Romania, the only country of Latin language origin in Eastern Europe, but the language didn’t help us escape dictatorship. Actually, to quote South America’s experience, all you need is a Latin language and a dictatorship for surrealism to be born. I’m thinking not only about the artistic trend, but also about our everyday life, full of ‘surrealism’ and discrepancies for more than 40 years.
We were not in Latin America though, but in Europe, although during those times a huge gap separated East and West inside the same Europe.
We were completely disconnected from Europe’s soul, from the open dialogue of values, and enclosed in a dark territory of fear and poverty. Europe represented our lost dream of freedom, our natural home, artificially quarantined by the Communist ideology. After the fall of the Communist regime in 1989, reintegration into mother Europe was another painful process for a country isolated for decades, where everything was upside-down, from damaged economy to corrupt mentalities.
There are different perceptions of Romania and several clichés. It depends if you look at the country from the outside or as an insider. For a Westerner, it is hard to define it at first sight, and even harder to understand it due to its peculiarities, paradoxes and controversies. Probably the West never had a full understanding of Communism. The utopian idea of Communism was more resisted in the West, where it remained just an abstract idea, than in Eastern Europe, where the experiment affected generations in a negative way and distorted national and individual destinies.
In reality, we all know that there were always two Europes. Even before the First World War, we could speak about a sort of ‘historical superiority’ of the West, a kind of French, English or German arrogance that Communism only emphasised. During the totalitarian era of the East, these differences were only aggravated.
To rethink and reshape the European consciousness was the main goal of the European Union, which succeeded in creating, through an effective political–cultural dialogue, a common roof, protective and open, for countries from the West and from the East as well. Could the twenty-first century be dominated by a united Europe? It sounds very attractive and challenging.
What brings Romania to this optimistic picture? In order to answer, a brief cultural and historical X-ray could be useful, not only to explain the differences between Romania and other countries, but also to highlight the similarities and the common spiritual ground.
The Romanian cultural matrix resides in the countryside, a rural universe filled with legends and tales, with a rich folklore and pre-Christian traditions. The symbol of Romania is the peasant. Looking old and wise, or just tired, dressed in a long fur coat, a shepherd scrutinizing the horizon, or just searching for his magical ewe or lamb, he represented the essence of this place – agrarian by excellence, resilient over time, the iconic image of stability and persistence. One of the dramatic consequences of the Communist ideology in Romania was the destruction of the villages along with their traditions and customs, and the humiliation of the peasant torn from his natural surroundings, forced to leave his land, his church and his belief and to move to the outskirts of the big cities, in order to work in socialist mammoth factories, where he lost his ancestral identity, where he felt depersonalised and estranged from his native environment.
The genuine peasant changed into a no man’s land inhabitant and the word ‘peasant’ itself was distorted, symbolising a rude, primitive human being. The national Communism dreamt of producing ‘a new man’, a hybrid trying to redefine himself for decades to come, in search of his lost national identity and his belonging to the European spirit.
Romania has always been a rich country with poor people. A country that has everything: natural resources, the Danube Delta, the Carpathians and the Black Sea, fertile soil. Once Romania was called the ‘granary of Europe’. The Romanian paradox has many layers, extended through its whole history. The state, as it is now, was created only after the Second World War. Romanian principalities, provinces and territories were separated for centuries, but the Romanian language and culture has a surprising unity across all of them. The Romanian people were stronger than borders and the spiritual boundaries overcame imposed territorial fractures or farces of history.
The state is young, but Romanian roots on these territories are old, dating back long before the Roman Empire. And there is yet another paradox: although the Romans ruled for a relatively short time, the Latin language had a huge impact, creating the Romanian language, while later on, other empires, although they dominated for centuries, from Turks to Austrian-Hungarians to Russians, left feeble marks on the language. But they had strong influences, good and bad, on local mentalities. A small country saving its own identity while surrounded by powerful empires is another form of surrealism.
Romania can also be described as a country rich in ethnic diversity striving to preserve its uniqueness at the crossroads between the East and the West, between the Balkans and the Orient, with a people that displays a Mediterranean temper in the South combined with Balkan customs, a Slavic pace in the Northeast, or a rigorous diligence in Transylvania. The characteristics of the Romanian culture can be situated between pan-Slavism and pan-Germanism, according to some philosophers.
The period of glory for Romania is considered by many to be the era between the two World Wars. After the unification of all its territories in 1918, Romania looked like a fairly large and prosperous state, going through a time of important reforms, a time of economic and cultural flourishing, development of its industrial sector, and it became one of the most important exporters of oil and wheat. Bucharest, nicknamed ‘little Paris’, as rumours have it, could stand next to any major European metropolis. A new artistic movement emerged, the Romanian avant-garde, which eventually conquered Europe and contributed to the birth of surrealism in visual art, literature and cinema. Between the two World Wars, Romanian culture was for the first time in sync with the latest Western trends in Paris or London, becoming a strong participant in the international dialogue of values. Remarkable avant-garde and surrealist talents emerged in Romania, featuring a cosmopolitan cultural attitude. In 1916, Tristan Tzara, a Romanian émigré to Zurich, invented Dadaism. There were three distin
ctive groups of artists: modernist – focused on Western, urban and intellectual culture; traditionalist – oriented towards the religious orthodoxy of the rural world; and the third, proclaiming the birth of the national character, situated at the crossroads between tradition and modernity.
But even this time of prosperity had its paradoxes: except for a few big cities and the wealthy elite, the rest of the country was still impoverished and illiterate and there was no time left for profound changes. The rise of fascism began before the First World War and then Communism took over. After the Second War World, the brutal human rights violations dominated the country making way for Soviet propaganda, which for several decades ruled Romanian culture by ideological censorship. At the same time, through purges, Stalin and the local Communist leaders annihilated any trace of intellectual opposition. Between 1948 and 1964, one Romanian out of nine (meaning about two million people) was sent into a Communist concentration camp. The official literature, or so-called socialist realism, glorified Stalin, his politics and the new proletarian class.
Romania thus entered the harshest dictatorship in Europe, weakened and humiliated by the Fascist regime and the Iron Guard that compromised the country’s prestige during the Second World War. Years of terror followed. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Communist gulag continued the Fascist horrors. For almost 50 years, Romania experienced isolation and was cut off from the West.
Despite all the official oppression, intellectuals gathered in informal discussion groups to keep their sanity and, slowly, a counterculture was born. Several groups of artists rejected the aggressive intrusion of the Communist propaganda, bringing along a fresh, nonconformist subversive voice, opposed to the official ideology. Although Romania didn’t have an organised Samizdat, individual voices of courage made themselves heard, like the political dissident Paul Goma in 1977 or, later, the ‘Blue Jeans generation of writers’.
Over the years, Romanians were perceived through various stereotypes, more or less warranted: a people hesitating between excessive praise and self-disparagement, between laments or victimisation and an ostentatious superiority; coming up with dark plots and conspiracies to explain historical events, but also with an interesting, rich culture and a lively artistic life, with sophisticated intellectuals; xenophobic, nationalistic, but still tolerant in many respects; hospitable, enthusiastic, genuine and warm; inclined towards constant ridicule, with a predisposition to mock everything.
After the fall of Communism, other clichés became associated with Romania, describing a country still haunted by the ghosts of the Communist nomenclature which was soon back in power, by stray dogs, orphans, AIDS victims infected by contaminated blood which they had received in hospitals, human traffic, impoverished Roma population, pickpockets and thieves making headlines in the Western media. I’m not fighting against clichés. They are based, after all, on reality, however exaggerated or generalised it might be. But Romania, despite all its problems, continued to produce an intense cultural life. Even during the totalitarian era, culture had symbolised resistance within the Communist censorship, defence from the absurdity of the system and an underground form of freedom. In the late 1980s, a visitor from England remarked in awe: ‘This country looks surreal to me. You have nothing to eat but wait in line for hours to buy theatre tickets and books…’ It was our form of survival, sanity and refusal to submit to alienation.
We lived under one of the toughest dictatorships in Europe, watched by the secret police, and isolated from the rest of the world. We did our best to survive within a closed society. One way was to get together in groups selected on the basis of affinities which had to do with art, literature, philosophy or simply a few common tastes. Our lives were simple. We didn’t care about cholesterol, pollution or the negative effects of smoking; nor did we worry about the dangers of obesity, drug addiction or violence. We didn’t need anti-depressants, although we had good reasons to take Prozac. No one sought psychoanalysis, therapists or shrinks, although we had good reason to be depressed. When you live in a cave, with few choices, all sorts of self-defence mechanisms spring into action. One is interpersonal communication. In a society like ours, communication involved sincerity and spontaneity. People talked loudly, gesticulated profusely and even cursed often; they lived and hated passionately. They used to make grandiose plans in the evening, over many glasses of alcohol, only to discard them as impossible to achieve the next morning. And yet these people were authentic in their despair and passionate in their fantasies. Paradoxically, in such an abnormal and repressive society, they were anything but alienated.
In fact, they practiced a type of group therapy, unorganised and without clear goals. In that Balkan atmosphere, their conversations in the shadow of ruined ‘little Paris’ were delightful, a never-ending chatter, spectacular and useless, over full ashtrays and cheap alcohol, all-night-long discussions and hung-over mornings. They weren’t in a hurry to get anywhere. They had no place to go.
In the opaque world of Communism, time meant nothing. The dictatorship seemed permanent. To keep our sanity, we had only the refuge of books and an inner language of freedom, parallel to the official one. Words had no power to change our destiny, but they could keep us sane. And our soul? Nobody mentioned it, but it was there all along, in the arabesques of our lamentations, in the last cigarette butts crushed at sunrise against the background of a hideous smoking factory at the outskirts of the city.
People learned not to trust the official language in the press, in schools, and at work. Most of them doubted any official political speech and cultivated disbelief and irony as part of their self-defence mechanism. Everybody was aware of living in a ‘make-believe’ world, fully aware of its duplicity.
As writers, the metaphor was our main weapon to evade political censorship. Although biographies and memoirs were almost impossible to squeeze through the tight net of censorship, poetry and prose could be enveloped in a protective shell of metaphor and allegory, esoteric enough to get the forbidden truth out regardless of whether it was about political or social reality. Communism disregarded metaphors. It identified the soul as its main enemy. Demolishing churches and synagogues was not enough. That merely eliminated places of worship, but they also got to destroy the metaphors of spirituality, making them appear weak and misleading.
Another source of refuge was humour, carelessness or frivolity. In spite of our bad times, we managed to maintain our sense of humour. There was no shortage of jokes in those days, which acted like some sort of a safety valve. We seemed to be a surreal people who could not stop laughing, even while we were slowly dying! We were like patients in a militarised hospital, subjected to a utopian treatment for an imaginary disease, feeling both guilt and absolution. Guilt, because of the cowardice each one of us had to practice; absolution, because the collective farce so perfectly played on us.
We invoked many alibis in our defence, from the geo-political conditions to the curse which had supposedly been placed on this part of the world long ago. Barbarian invasions, foreign-born monarchs imposed on us, orthodoxy, our former dependence on Constantinople, and later on Moscow, the cruelty of fate itself and the cunning plotting of our neighbours, the games of the superpowers and so forth – all of these we perceived to be working against us.
Everyone was living at least two parallel lives and, without putting up any opposition, we were more resistant than history itself – ultimately the universally accepted cause of our misery. History was constantly the enigmatic character to whom we could quietly attribute our glory, guilt and dramas. It could justify any aberration.
Some areas of our history were inexcusably expanded upon, while others were glibly glossed over by the official powers. The same history that can only be one and the same was undergoing subtle changes from year to year, with whimsical erasures and additions, with heroes and events disappearing or reappearing as the rulers dictated, victories or defeats being reinvented at will. We were all running rings around history, juggling with time, h
urtling from era to era, either condemning or forgiving it. History was being subjected to all sorts of manipulations by both the mighty and the weak. It was, by turns, our pride and our stigma. It was converted into the ingenious instrument of governing. We were about to be swallowed up by history, fed up with it and yet outside it, our eternal insecurity and our sole certainty.
After the fall of Communism, the Romanian people had to face a new drama. This time it was the paradoxical drama of freedom. With no tradition in civil society, with no community spirit and no training for the democratic exercise, people discovered themselves unprepared for the great challenge they had longed for for so long. What proved to be the hardest was living in freedom. Suddenly the people found themselves in the spotlight. Alone. With only its limitations, inabilities and failures which were now starkly showing in the unforgiving, glaring light of international public scrutiny. Freedom highlights a person’s individuality, stripping the crust of collective protection through which a dictatorship levels out a society, bringing it to the lowest denominator, an easier way to manipulate and conquer it.
Freedom scared a lot of people, who, for years and years, had been used to acting according to the crowd, hiding behind the excuse that one cannot assert oneself in a repressed society. Now suddenly thrust into freedom, they felt terribly insecure. The old value system had been reversed, forcing everyone to come up with new motivations and methods of survival. Under these circumstances, it became quite fashionable for people to reexamine their past in a ‘new’ light, to reevaluate history and culture from ‘different’ points of view.
The lustration law was not accepted in Romania but a witch hunt started. Hundreds of dissidents, revolutionaries with diplomas, and fighters for democracy appeared overnight. They faked their biographies. Some suddenly lost their memory, conveniently forgetting what they had been, and pretending to be completely clean, uncompromised, hoping the world would thus forget their past and forgive their sins. There was an overabundance of upholders of the law, fine intellectuals preaching about the truth, about the need of a moral cleansing, about regaining the ‘national identity’, about putting Communism on trial and restoring the dignity of the nation on the international arena.
Essentially, everyone tried to save himself, to secure for himself a place as close to the top as possible, whether that meant a seat in parliament, or a profitable business, an apartment, a house from the government, or a scholarship to study abroad, now that freedom caused another reversal of values, based on new but equally deficient criteria.
There was the same old poverty, but with the added ingredient of insecurity, the first signs of the transition to the market economy and the consequences of the attempts to reform the economy, resulting in unemployment, a dramatic rise in prices, housing shortages and a lack of a social net. The political scene was dominated by the same old apparatchiks, in search of a retouched biography, while the former police officers found prosperity in business, buying factories and lands for nothing, and quickly spreading the new slogan: ‘We are not selling our country’. Instead they divided it among themselves. ‘The Revolution was made especially for them, to benefit them. All the shed blood was in vain’ was the refrain heard everywhere. Tens of parties and mediocre leaders were spending their energies in useless infighting. The members of parliament were quite pathetic, the members of the government hesitant, incompetent, still influenced by the old mentalities. They constantly invoked the costly legacy of Communism, and again blamed the state of the country on the cruel and ruthless history.
Disappointment, pessimism and hopelessness set in little by little. Within a short time, a parallel black market economy was created, a banking mafia, against the backdrop of the sudden devaluation of the national currency. Corruption was spreading like a plague.
During those times I had an obsessive question: ‘Was it the same in the other ex-Communist countries?’ Some essayists answered, yes. Others claimed that Ceausescu’s dictatorship was the toughest in Eastern Europe, that it was much worse than in former Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Poland or Hungary, with no liberties at all and a very strong secret police that controlled the country. As a consequence, the poverty was overwhelming; the fall of Communism was the result of a bloody revolution; the corruption was higher. On the other hand, although there were some national problems in multiethnic Transylvania, with its mix of Romanians, Hungarians and Germans, they didn’t escalate into territorial ruptures like in Czechoslovakia, or into tragic conflicts like in the former Yugoslavia. Romania didn’t experience big religious passions either.
The transition to the market economy was slower than in other former Communist countries, but from the political point of view, Romania was stable despite the poor performance of its leaders. It is also a safe country, far from the violence that occurred in Russia, for example, soon after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
Survival
Like other countries in Eastern Europe, Romania today is struggling to find its place in the promised land of capitalism. After the fall of Communism in December 1989, the country experienced a decade of economic instability and decline, caused in part by an obsolete industrial base as well as by the lack of much-needed structural reform. Starting from 2000, however, the economy reached a stage of relative macroeconomic stability. Joining the European Union in January 2007 was nevertheless the most significant event since the fall of Communism.
After the prolonged age of generalised shortages experienced during Communism, when people famously could have money but nothing to buy with it, the consumerist cornucopia blessed Romania with food franchises and supermarkets, fancy restaurants and malls. Romania was just a new market that became more and more interesting as the buying power of its inhabitants increased slowly but steadily. Romanians are big consumers. They will spend the last penny for good food, nice clothes, travelling or to indulge themselves. From this perspective, during the early 1990s, and even more so now, after its admission into the European Union, Romania shows a social energy and vitality that reminds one of the simple, basic dream of being free and enjoying life. Unfortunately, it is not that easy to reach this dream. Over the years many qualified, honest and hard-working young people left Romania in search of opportunities abroad. If you wanted to ‘make it’ in Romania, with some notable exceptions, you had only two options: either have some good connections, or bribe your way into a good position. In other words, one needs to join a complicated social game that involves negotiating moral values. A game that defines the Balkan context, which emerged 500 years ago as the Turkish Empire was requesting tribute from the territories in their possessions. During the early 1990s, the ‘must have-a-connection’ game was played by ex-Communist apparatchiks, who possessed two key elements: the right information and some foreign currency. As a result, a new social class emerged in the mid 1990s: the nouveaux riches. Later on, as six or seven governments rotated, five parliaments changed and three presidents were elected, this social structure changed, embedding more and more social networks.
During the process of integration into the European Union, a great deal of political pressure from international organisations accelerated the process of self-definition of the Romanian social and economic framework into a more functional and less bureaucratic structure at all levels. Ordinary Romanians were more eager than the politicians to join the EU. They were hoping that corruption would slow down, and that the country would be under strict surveillance by the international institutions. The majority of Romanians saw the European Union as a salvation from the self-destructive games played by corrupt politicians or officials. Like many times throughout its history, Romania looked abroad to find salvation.
Despite its economic development, despite having more than 17 million cell phone owners and almost 14 million internet users, poverty is still a big problem, and the effects of modernisation are hardly felt in the rural areas. The differences between the rich and the poor are striking, as the middle class is emerging very slowl
y. Nevertheless, Romanians like to show off. Although the average monthly wage is under 300 euros, there are beauty salons where women pay 100 euros for a hair-styling session. For an ambitious young Romanian girl it is sometimes better to live on an empty stomach than without a fancy dress or a French perfume.
Everybody hopes that accession to the European Union will speed up the country’s development. However, everybody is aware that this process takes time and most young people gradually lost their initial euphoria in the early 1990s, hope in the late 1990s and patience in 2000. The working class left the country for better work opportunities and the most desperate ones abandoned themselves to underground jobs. The ones who leave Romania fall into three main categories: those who decided to leave for good, the students and teachers who left for small babysitting or summer fruit-picking jobs for some pocket money, and those who left in order to continue their education in schools abroad or just for adventure. In a study published by the World Bank called ‘Migration and money transfer: Eastern Europe and the ex-Soviet Union’, it is reported that 38 per cent of the Romanians who live abroad send money home regularly. The massive migration abroad is also causing many problems. Tens of thousands of young families have gone abroad, leaving their children in the care of relatives back home. These children become a social problem, as many of them abandon school, use drugs, practice prostitution or fall prey to shady adults. The elders who have left home do not enjoy a better life; in a country where extended families and care for the elders was a social tradition, one can now see long waiting lists for those who have applied to be admitted into nursing homes, as they no longer have relatives to take care of them.
On the other hand, there is a booming outsourcing market in Romania. According to a global IT IQ report, the world’s most important agency that conducts online research on professional qualifications, Romania already has in Europe more than 16,000 certified specialists. The research has studied the qualifications of the labour force in various fields: software, general knowledge, finances, health, industry, information technology, foreign languages and communication, management and executive positions. The research indicated that Romania ranks second in Europe in professional competence and intellectual training.
During Communist times, there was a split between the real beliefs of the people, shared in the privacy of their homes, and the demagogic declarations of the Communist media. At that time, the biggest problem was the absence of a common social project to which people could adhere, and this resulted in generalised indifference. Nowadays, Romania seems to experience another type of discrepancy between the official reports and the people’s feelings; on one hand, the government agencies report economic growth, yearly increase of personal income, quality of life, increase of life expectancy; on the other, you hear the complaints of ordinary people (especially the elderly) who declare themselves to be unhappy and poorer than ever.
Romania appears thus as a country of controversies and paradoxes, with sophisticated intellectuals, rude people, a promising new generation, kitschy palaces or casinos and beautiful monasteries, upscale resorts, magnificent geography and bad roads. There is as much hope in this country as there is resignation created by tough economic times or national political turmoil. Romania is young and old, joyful and sad, sometimes disappointing, sometimes uplifting. It is always moving forward in quest of its soul and to reassert its new identity. Romania is anything but boring. Its real potential will be seen in the years to come. In the long run, its voice will hopefully add fresh and rich nuances, creative and powerful tonalities, to the chorus of a united Europe.
