Going Places: Slovenian Women's Stories on Migration

Conclusion

235 Conclusion Jernej Mlekuž The concept of this book, which focuses on the subjective, experiential , and lived-through dimension of events and occurrences, provides stories of people who are not favorites of political, national, and other important histories. As indicated by the heroines of these chapters, the stories, memories, and records tell us more about the sense and experience of events and phenomena than about the very events and phenomena themselves. Moreover, those senses and experiences create a bond across the continents—the points of departure and arrival—creating intricate emotional landscapes and weaving feelings of transnational proportions, which overcome and contextualize political boundaries and systems, economic and social differences , cultural traits, values, creeds, and beliefs. As Paul Thompson thoroughly demonstrated, this is a project of the democratization of history and knowledge in general as we finally give voice to those who were silenced, who often had neither the opportunity nor the right to speak out.1 Hence, such a project should not be deprived of researchers’ self-reflection—those who discover the stories, select them, record, process, and place them within a theoretical or conceptual frame and, last but not least, nest them through interpretation within their own concepts. In other words, such a project is by no means free of political, social, and other researchers’ viewpoints. 236 going places What counts is not merely the storytellers’ contexts but also the contexts of those who produce knowledge and power on the basis of those stories.2 The biographical method thus raises the issue of knowledge itself. Instead of great events and great political and military actors, biographical methods place in the limelight the ostensible everywoman and everyman and what she or he can tell about the events, that is, what they mean to her or him. Thus, it is not hard to understand why biographical methodology has become important for the development of women’s studies: it was with its help that “half of humankind,” by and large utterly ignored by academic studies, has begun to speak out. Who speaks in this book? That “half of humankind” without which, as Gisela Bock says, there is “less than half of history.”3 Women, especially women from the professed yet highly inaudible category of little people, were hushed in the field of social-historical memory and knowledge. They were not given a voice, as it was considered insignificant . Their stories usually didn’t reach farther than the kitchen, although in most cases they were seemingly of existential significance for male family members, too. Women didn’t leave the kitchen because they were not important enough, they couldn’t match the fascists, the El Alamein battle, and other so-called great and loud male stories. Why, then, tell the stories of slamnikarice, aleksandrinke, dikle, contemporary Eurocrats, Pepice, Francke, and all other various ordinary and allegedly plain women? Stories, experiences, and testimonies of women carry an important message, mission, and plan. In this book, in this site of knowledge, this workshop and storage of social and historical memory, women have been given a voice: they have not only been allowed to speak but have also been called upon to speak out, thus becoming historical and social subjects. It is through this act that they have inscribed themselves in the field of historical and social memory and knowledge. Women, who have long been denied any significance in the field of knowledge and historical and social memory, have been (re)invigorated—they have become important.4 237 Conclusion What else is important about those stories, experiences, and testimonies ? First, they are brought to us as a version different from those the variants that are considered to be real, true, eternal, or official. The personal stories, memories, experiences, and testimonies collected in this book dare to question the official, dominant, compulsory knowledge. And even when these narratives doubt, they often do so unconsciously. We might say that they always carry within them a torch of resistance that may easily trigger fires of larger proportions, and the flames of these fires may terminally devour stereotypical notions, humiliating images, and fallacious scientific arguments on poor, ignorant, exploited, and misfortunate women who set off to seek their fortune. Yet this book is not merely about looking for the torch of resistance or hot stories that spark fires and stand loud and clear against this or that kind of obduracy. The concept of the stories collected in the...