“Switzerland Has Run Out of Steam on Its Way to Multiculturalism”: An Interview with Dragica Rajčić

Introduction

Switzerland encompasses four distinct languages and cultural regions, which are positioned at the periphery of their respective cultural and linguistic centers in Germany, France, and Italy. It has often been noted that these individual linguistic regions within Switzerland manage to express and sustain their own national identities not as enclaves but as a result of their culturally fluid borders. These regional identities “have a natural extension into neighbouring territory, but without ever becoming assimilated there” (Comment 11). One could thus convincingly argue that the multicultural experience is not only a way of life for most Swiss but also a natural and unavoidable condition, an intrinsic way of life. On paper, Switzerland is in many ways a blueprint for a miniature multicultural and plurilingual Europe.

In stark contrast, a different kind of national image has emerged in the wake of the Swiss People’s Party’s Deportation Initiative in October 2007, and, most recently, in the aftermath of the country’s vote on the so-called anti-minaret initiative on November 29, 2009 (according to the Swiss Federal Statistical Office, 57.5% of voters approved to ban future minarets on Swiss mosques; see “Verbot”). In the latter case, a politically fraught discourse of cultural integration became emblematic of a social reality that largely continues to pitch “foreignness” against the dominant cultural norm with the aim of either bridging the perceived gap or acknowledging that the “foreign” element can never be fully harmonized with the expectations of the host country.

As a result of her own search for belonging in the wake of loss and dislocation, the Swiss-Croatian writer Dragica Rajčić offers a poignant political and social commentary on Switzerland’s struggle with multiculturalism. Her writings question the validity and rationale of any Swiss law legislating acceptable degrees of integration into what seem to be four monolithic views of culture within the one national border. In Rajčić’s poetry, short prose, and plays, immigrants are faced with being integrated but not fully assimilated into their adopted home country. They see themselves simultaneously situated inside and outside a culturally hybrid “third space” (Bhabha, “Third Space” 207), experiencing a tenuous sense of belonging while at the same time feeling culturally estranged. Rajčić’s writing is positioned on the borderland between two cultures where the notion of integration is constantly revisited and negotiated; even as a working definition, it remains perpetually in flux.

Dragica Rajčić was born in Split, in former Yugoslavia, in 1959. After a short stay in Brisbane, Australia, Rajčić relocated with her young family to St. Gallen, Switzerland, in 1978. During the following ten years, she was employed in a series of manual labor and service sector jobs such as cleaning woman, waitress, and home worker. Her first collection of poetry in German, Halbgedichte einer Gastfrau, was widely reviewed and brought her instant recognition as an immigrant writer. A literal translation of the title, “Half-Poems by a Female Guest,” fails to capture the subtle ambivalence and ironic twist of the German original. The term Gastfrau is an elegant play on words exposing the hypocrisy behind the euphemistically termed Gastarbeiterliteratur, “the literature of guest workers.”

In the wake of her first literary success, Rajčić’s work became synonymous with Putzfrauenpoetik (“a cleaning woman’s poetry”), a term that Rajčić, in an act of mimicry and defiance, reclaimed herself with a short and witty self-introduction: “Dragica Rajčić, cleaning lady and poet” (qtd. in “Weekend” 35).

After Rajčić’s return to her Croatian residence in Kaštel Stari in 1988, she founded the journal Glas Kastela and worked as a journalist during the months leading up to the outbreak of the war. In 1991, she escaped the war-torn country and returned to St. Gallen. As she explained during the June 12, 2009, interview with Charlotte Schallié, “After I fled to Switzerland with my children, we rented two rooms and I slept on the floor. During that time, I worked in a coffee shop. It...