Vesna Goldsworthy: Chernobyl Strawberries

The subtitle of Vesna Goldsworthy’s book Chernobyl Strawberries, “A Memoir” signals not only a literary genre, but a promise. Here, as in historiography, it is not truth itself, but a promise of truth which constitutes the genre. If books in any shape or form can offer truth, if this promise is to be fulfilled, then it is in the genre of autobiography, memoir or confession, in which the object of representation is absolutely identical to the subject which it represents. What could possibly escape such a representation, and how could its epistemological authority be compromised, provided the promise was given in good faith?

The claim that I have just made could easily be proved wrong by any reader of Chernobyl Strawberries. “None of the people or places I refer to in this memoir is invented,” reads the first sentence of the author’s afterword, thus reiterating the genre’s promise of truth. However, in the same paragraph the author admits to “have taken the liberty of combining one or two minor personalities, in a way which [she hopes] simplifies things but which is of no consequence to the story of [her] life, such as it is.”¹ (285). The people encountered in the book are not invented, as characters in works of fiction tend to be, but are modified, combined into one, or also possibly split into two, but the truth of the story has not been betrayed. The same seems to apply to places mentioned in Chernobyl Strawberries. The author confesses to her reverence for Danilo Kiš’s work, and says: “I put a pebble on his grave in Montparnasse” (170). Kiš’s grave, however, is not in Paris, but in Belgrade. It was either someone else’s grave in Montparnasse that the author put a pebble on, or she was betrayed by her memory, as we all sometimes are. How can we be sure that the other places visited, or people we are told about in the book, are not similarly transformed, either voluntarily or involuntarily? It is quite possible that on the level of factual truth the book betrays the promise of truthfulness, and that consequently it should be read as a work of fiction. If this is so, what the book can offer is the fiction of truth of someone’s life, and the promise of (autobiographical) truth should be regarded as no more than a generic convention, equal in value and status to Homer’s invocation of Muse.

A reply to this might be that apart from the concept of truth based on correspondence between text and reality, there is also another concept of truth, which cannot be compromised by questions such as that of the exact location of Danilo Kiš’s grave. We might perhaps name it the truth of autobiographical fiction. Continuing with the same example, what matters within that concept of truth is the author’s reverence for Kiš, irrespective of the real or purely symbolic nature of the pebble put on his grave. The truth of autobiographical fiction would thus be equal to the truth of the author’s self-understanding, and need not be guaranteed by the generic convention of the truth-promise. The epistemological authority of this truth’s creator would be guaranteed by something at the same time more and less reliable than the truth-promise.

At the very end of the book one learns of how and when it came into being. The author has a two-year old son and a medical diagnosis which does not promise a long life, and she assumes that she will not be remembered: “Only two at the time of my diagnosis, he would, in all likelihood, have difficulty remembering me in a couple of years’ time,” she says (280). If she departs now, her son would never have a chance to know who she really was. He would only have some photographs, a ring or a necklace, and other paraphernalia which we usually leave behind. The person on the photographs would be a true image of his departed mother, and in that respect it would be a small part of the factual truth about her. If he cared and had enough time, he would be able to reconstruct other facts of his mother’s life with great certainty, from her birth and school certificates, from her passport and Party membership card, from her employment contracts, etc. Reassembling the factual truth of the average person’s life in the twentieth century no longer poses much of a challenge. However, as much as this kind of truth may be needed, it would not suffice. What really mattered in his mother’s life would be missing from such a reconstruction: What did it all mean to her? We are not mere collections of facts about our lives. How we understand ourselves is not recorded in archives. This is a part of our lives to which only we can testify. And since the author of Chernobyl Strawberries, with her medical diagnosis in her hands, has all reasons to believe that by the time her son might wish to learn something about her self-understanding, she will not be around any more, her book is an attempt to communicate with him from beyond the grave: “I was trying to capture my voice for Alexander so that he could hear it if and when he wanted to. […] I put the ‘life manual’ on the side and began to write my life for Alexander” (281).

This first—let us name it “apocalyptic”—framework of Chernobyl Strawberries weaves together death, maternity and writing, and authenticates not only the book, but the writer too. Throughout her life the author had interpreted herself in terms of the possibility of becoming a writer, and her youthful attempts at writing poetry testify to that. However, that possibility became true only when she acquired a different motivation for writing. Sheer ambition and vanity—self-ironically captured in the phrase “Remember me. Remember ME!” (29)—never bring about anything worth mentioning. She becomes a writer only when writing down her self-understanding becomes an ethical imperative and an act of love: to give to her son what he must be given, or to diminish loss if it cannot be avoided. Writing becomes possible for her when leaving a trace is not something she wants to do for herself, but something she must leave for loved ones.

Self-understanding becomes complete and can be transformed into a book only when supplemented by knowledge of mortality. Before her medical diagnosis the author lives in virtual immortality: there is death, but only others die. One dies, but: “An eternity, uninterrupted, stretches ahead of me” (231). Living in eternity, she toys with possibilities which will never be realised, and waits to see what will happen. “I’ve always had a certain chameleon quality, which came from never really knowing who I was,” she says. “Until I started growing that wild piece of flesh in my breast—my tumorchich—I was always happy to turn into a lizard or a leaf, as the situation required. Then, at forty-one, and perhaps for the first time in my life, I suddenly felt too tired for such games. I no longer really cared whether anybody liked me or not. Then I discovered I was no longer able to change colour at all. I stretched my body on my big green leaf, a bald, wounded caterpillar. I was free” (119–20). This freedom, won through awareness of mortality, is the entry to authenticity. She no longer toys with countless possibilities, but settles for one: to be oneself, to become what one already is. What authenticates the book, had previously authenticated the author, and thus made writing possible.

The basis for any authentic self-understanding is temporality. There is a point in time—the moment of dying—which cuts short “an eternity, uninterrupted, which stretches ahead” of someone and thus constitutes the time of living. However, self-understanding which is based on this apocalyptic framework in Chernobyl Strawberries is not presented as a single continuous narration, but as many overlapping narratives, linked to each other by countless pathways of memory and anticipation. The author looks ahead to her death and back to her birth, but it does not seem to be enough. The motto of Chernobyl Strawberries is taken from Wittgenstein: “It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning and not to try to go further back.” How far back does one need to look in order to understand oneself? The present, in which one tries to understand oneself, depends on one’s own past and at the same time on the past history of one’s culture, family and country. Thus the seemingly chaotic narrative of Chernobyl Strawberries oscillates between the anticipation of death, the present in which writing takes place, and a long gaze into the past, the author’s own, but also a social and collective one.

Whether we like it or not, our existential questions and answers are conditioned by the ways the same questions were answered by those who lived before us, and the author’s confrontations with history and war are compared and interwoven with her grandmother’s and father’s ways of coping with their wars. At times, this likeness, this “how you go about something” which we receive early on and spend the rest of our life trying to shake it off, appears in the book in unexpected and humorous ways. The author recalls the first meeting of her Montenegrin grandmother and her future English husband, in which the grandmother chose as a topic of conversation the best ways to preserve severed human heads. Needless to say, she had never actually seen one, let alone tried to preserve one, and we are led to believe that she was at one and the same time self-exoticizing herself, scaring the young man, and mocking the stereotype about Montenegrins still widespread in the West. An equivalent to the grandmother’s self-exoticising is the photo of the author’s Communist Party membership card reproduced in Chernobyl Strawberries, or the casual remark that her summer language course in Sofia was paid for by “the communist government” of Bulgaria: after the head-chopping granny, here comes the horrible commie, heavily armed with her French classes, her poetry, and her George Brassens records.

Thus, beneath the apocalyptic framework, which fused death, maternity and writing, one more framework appears in Chernobyl Strawberries. We could call it historical, not because it tells a history, but because it focuses on what lasts in time and crumbles in it: the body, language and the homeland.

The author already denies nostalgia at the very beginning of the book: “I am not given to homesickness and nostalgia. I am English now”(2). This is true, for if we understand nostalgia to be a depressive reaction to social maladjustment and as a longing to be in the place one came from, Chernobyl Strawberries does not offer this. That kind of nostalgia is fast disappearing in a world of airlines, internet and satellite television, in which we can live on another continent without feeling that we have moved at all. Yet the country of her birth and the language she spoke have something of a spectral existence in her book of self-understanding. Her gaze rearranges the new states of the South Slavs into the previous shape of Yugoslavia on every map of Europe which she looks at. A nostalgic tone can be heard in Chernobyl Strawberries when the author leaves a voice message for her sister in Toronto in the language of their grandmother, or when she describes how her mother tongue, in which she reads the news on the BBC world news service, becomes contaminated, subverted and suppressed by English. Nostalgia appears in Chernobyl Strawberries whenever the author mentions things which disappear, and thus exemplify temporality and pre-figure one’s own disappearance in time. This is not a longing to be somewhere else, but a longing for things to last forever, or to gather up that which is transient and to make it forever alive and present. That is why the country or the language itself are not the primary objects of this nostalgia: their function is to exemplify that which generates this kind of nostalgia. This author’s nostalgia wants not only time that has passed, but time which never passes, “an eternity, uninterrupted, [which] stretches ahead of [her]”, and this is what she wants from the moment she realizes that time will be no more. The question at the beginning of the book: “How could something that seems so solid perish so easily?” (4) refers to a country which disappeared through war, but it also refers to her body which may disappear through illness. “During the years of the Yugoslav wars, I often saw my native city on the news. As I watched its familiar shapes recorded through the infrared camera lens—the bomber-pilot’s-eye view—I often ached with longing to be there. The outlines of the hills, rising from the murky confluence of the Sava and the Danube, were as well known to me as the curves of my own body. It might not be an accident that the two were wounded and disfigured so soon after each other” (152). Thus these two frames, the one which fused maternity, death and writing, and the other which fused language, body and the homeland, become one: what joins them together is an awareness of temporality. The nostalgia which colors the whole book is the sorrow brought about at one and the same time by the disappearance of things which appear as solid as one’s country, body and language, and by the attempt to give them back their solidity and everlasting presence.