Stitching Memories

The Ministry of Pain is a meditation on getting lost in the streets of what once used to be your own hometown; on self-invention; on cutting and pasting a collage of memories that we eventually call a narrative of the past; on trying to find a home in language...but what if that language no longer exists?

The narrator, a Croatian literature teacher, Tanja Lucić left Yugoslavia during the war in the 1990s, and after some time in Germany she wound up alone in Amsterdam, where friends had arranged a job for her at the university for two semesters. She finds herself living in a subterranean flat on the edge of the red-light district and teaching the languages and literature of her "former Yugoslavia." There she teaches students who, like her, are trying to adapt, to survive and to rebuild their identities after they have been violently torn to pieces.

"I was, naturally, well aware of the absurdity of my situation: I was to teach a subject that no longer officially existed. What we called jugoslavistika at the university - that is, Slovene, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, Montenegrin and Macedonian literature - had disappeared as a discipline together with its country of origin."

During this time, Tanja undergoes some shocking experiences and provides incredible reflections on exile, modern life, and Europe that would come to be. She warns against the ambitious people from the broken nations, rootless technocrats, "net and web people" whose loyalties and assumptions will have to be tracked very carefully. She reflects on lack of shame and guilt, on the inability to ever return home after leaving, and the life in the no-space between there and here and then and now.

"Surrounded by smoke rings, they looked as 'former' as their one-time nationality; they looked like corpses that had risen from the grave for a bottle of beer and a round of cards but had ended up in the wrong place."

As any new immigrant, Tanja attempts to find her fellow “Yugos” in cafes, bars and classrooms. Those "formers" she describes reminded me of my old self. I too remember the fear and the emptiness that come with displacement. I too was clutching the bottles of beer to ease the pain of endless walks through the maze of memories I called home. But with time you realize, the sooner you abandon the stitching project the better. That blanket made of past stitches itself eventually anyway! (Just make sure you don't sleep in it. And keep weaving the vision of the future!)

Tanja too realized that after getting lost in her own dark corners of empty recollections. After returning “home” she finds the “former” people there too. Those who "stayed behind" are also living in the broken past, except their clocks do not move. When her professorship is terminated, she loses the ability to place herself in the world and spirals down into a depression - here starts her striking meditation on the nature of war, language and displacement, the task of accepting one's new country and one's new self:

"The past is our 'installation', amateur stuff but with artistic pretensions. With a touch-up here and a touch-up there, here a touch, there a touch, everywhere a touch-touch."

Touch ups of the past are inevitable, the book tells us. They are natural. The need for them becomes ever more intense when identities are violently torn apart and destroyed. But with time, obsession with touching up the past becomes overshadowed with the future that the new self starts creating.

Eventually, Tanja too enrolls in a Dutch language school.

The Ministry of Pain is genre-bending, time-bending, identity changing. It is a cross between a novel, a short story, linguistic theory, and memoir. It is a representation of stitching pieces together in every way - stitching memories, stories, genres, languages, homes, geographies, identities.

If you want to read a book that reflects on love, language, mythology, and arbitrary impositions of borders and identities then this is your book.

Ah yes, and so much Yugonostalgia.