ABSTRACT
The cities of Mostar and Derry/Londonderry have come to represent divided and (re)united communities, providing high-profile, well-documented theatres of national, ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic conflicts. Located in divided societies, the people of those cities have been forced to deal with internal and external affiliation or labels, and to constantly and consistently negotiate and redefine their identities. Since the emergence of postcolonial theory, literature studies have dealt with Homi Bhabha’s ‘in-between’-identities (Bhabha 1994: 2) and the concept of hybridity (ibid.: 4, 38) generated after the downfall of various colonial empires. Although the literary treatment of war and conflict resolution, as well as their topography, has become a key subject of literary studies, there has been no attempt to sketch a comparative context for the literatures of the two post-colonial post-conflict regions of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Ireland, especially Northern Ireland. Whereas there has been a well-developed and widespread theoretical spectrum of postcolonial approaches to Ireland and Northern Ireland and a veritable feast of literature on the partition of Ireland and the Irish ‘Troubles’, scholars have been reticent in deploying a postcolonial approach for the description of Bosnian-Herzegovinian society. Only a few studies, such as Johannes Feichtinger’s Habsburg postcolonial (2003), Vesna Goldsworthy’s ‘Imperialism of imagination’ (author’s transl., 2003) and Alexander Kratochvil’s 2013 volume on cultural boundaries in post-imperial spaces, deal with BosniaHerzegovina as a postcolonial body/society and compare it to Habsburg Galicia, today’s Western Ukraine. In her study on the literature of Ivo Andrić, Meša Selimović and Dževad Karahasan, Miranda Jakiša discusses a possible postcolonial approach to the literature of the region (Jakiša 2009: 147), whereas the author (Vojvoda 2014) analyses Dževad Karahasan’s oeuvre within the context of Homi Bhabha’s theory of Third space as a postcolonial ‘heritage’ of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires and as a space for the negotiation of cultural identities, including their common ground and the differences. The topography of Derry/Londonderry and Mostar mirrors the conflicts in history and the heterotopoi of city space. ‘Postcolonial Narratology’, as Birk and Neumann (2002) and Nünning and Nünning (2002) point out, emphasising the historical and cultural context of narration (Birk and Neumann 2002: 116), as well as current border studies dealing with several forms of boundaries and division
(Wilson and Donnan 1998; Donnan and Wilson 2001; Wastl-Walter 2011), are essential for the analysis of cultural identity conflicts. This chapter will compare two (auto-) fictional, post-conflict diaries, Veselin Gatalo’s Siesta Fiesta Orgasmo Riposo – SFOR (2004), dealing with the meaning of space, borders and the sense of displacement in post-Dayton (1995) Mostar, and Garbhan Downey’s Private Diary of a Suspended MLA (2004), which engages with post-Good Friday Agreement (1998) politics and, more broadly, conflict resolution and cross-community peace building in Derry/Londonderry and Northern Ireland. By means of literary orchestration of ‘space’, ‘place’ and ‘border’ and the protagonists acting as media for different identities, the analysis will trace the societies’ sensitivities and conflicting identities beyond their respective political peace agreements. This chapter argues that both authors (in an ironical way) unmask their cultural communities as being entangled in their histories and collective memories by locating spaces and places and revealing their metaphorical meaning. Playing with national, ethnic, religious, cultural and political stereotypes, they emphasise Stainer’s ‘spatiality of narratives’ (Stainer 2006: 105) by making their protagonists mark their territories, and thus, their (prescribed) identities. Whereas Gatalo deals with stereotypes and identification in post-Dayton Mostar’s everyday life immediately after the war in 1996 and 1997, Downey outlines the ‘conflation of ethno-cultural identity and political organization’ (Stainer 2006: 104), i.e. the ethno-nationalist identities – Britishness vs. Irishness respectively unionist vs. nationalist – which ‘characterize the political discourse of Northern Ireland’ (ibid.: 109) in 2004.
