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  • Letting Us Adults In on a Secret: An Interview with Liliana Corobca and Monica Cure

    Letting Us Adults In on a Secret: An Interview with Liliana Corobca and Monica Cure

    Liliana Corobca and Monica Cure on children, Moldova, and secrets.

    PEN Transmissions is English PEN’s magazine for international and translated voices. PEN’s members are the backbone of our work, helping us to support international literature, campaign for writers at risk, and advocate for the freedom to write and read. If you are able, please consider becoming an English PEN member and joining our community of over 1,000 readers and writers. Join now.

    WILL FORRESTER: Monica, Liliana – thanks so much for speaking to me. Your latest collaboration, Kinderland, is a book about children in the absence of adults – about the social and economic conditions that cause this circumstance, and what this circumstance in turn causes. Could you start talk to me about writing and translating a child’s voice, in particular one which (because of the novel’s circumstances) is beyond its age.

    LILIANA COROBCA: Before this novel, I wrote another – A Year in Paradise – in which Sonia, the main character, has not yet turned 17. She has failed university admission and ends up in the clutches of a trafficker who takes her to a brothel in a war zone on the edge of the world. It explored an aspect of migration in the post-Soviet space, perhaps the most cruel and unfair aspect: human trafficking. In Kinderland, the girl is younger, and it was easy for me to adopt her voice. In fact, the novel was initially an epistolary one, in which the mother’s voice was as strong as the children’s. The kids told their mother what was happening at home and the mother told them what she was doing in Italy. But, as I wrote, the mother drifted away, until I couldn’t feel her anymore. I didn’t feel the need to step into her skin. She became an episodic character; when she appears, it’s through the eyes and voices of the children.

    I was hesitant when I started writing the book (it was published in Romanian 10 years ago), because I felt I couldn’t write about children if I didn’t have them around, couldn’t see them by my side, observe their reactions, understand them by always watching them. Then I said to myself: let’s take a risk. For the elder children, Cristina and Dan, I used my relationship with my brother – who is seven years younger than me, the same age gap as in the book; the third child, who moved me when he appeared between the lines, was my imaginary one, my fictional little boy.

    MONICA CURE: When I began reading Kinderland, Cristina’s voice immediately seemed familiar to me. A similar situation exists in Romania as in Moldova – especially among children in rural areas. Even when parents don’t leave the country to find work, they often have long commutes to the city, and so children spend much of their time in the company of grandparents or other children. I’ve spoken with children who have even picked up certain mannerisms or ways of speaking from elderly people. Having so much freedom – if that’s what we want to call it – makes these children seem to be ‘in the know’ about what is happening around them. But it’s also because they have to be.

    WF: One of Kinderland’s great virtues is its modulation between severity and play (and in finding the playful in the severe, the severe in the playful). Liliana – could you talk a little about that modulation? And Monica – could you talk about severity and play in your act of translation?

    MC: I think that’s a great observation. For me, the scene that best embodies this is when the youngest brother, Marcel, uses his father’s coat to pretend he’s there – even if not in a positive way. The siblings have played dress up in their parents’ clothes before, but this time it’s more poignant. We as readers experience that modulation intensely, but the narrator seems to experience most of it in the same way. That heightens the contrast. In my translation, I wanted to convey that overall consistency of the narrator’s tone.

    LC: To be alone and abandoned in a village is a tragedy. But I tried to accept the children’s perspective: on the one hand, I think that any victim tries to tame reality, to adapt by looking for solutions; on the other, children are always playing – they grow up playing. The tone of the book is a very pure, very innocent one. I remember that I had just finished some projects on censorship – hard and dry – the year I was writing it, and I was seeking to balance my concerns; as dark and hopeless as the anthology of documents on communist censorship was, the story of the abandoned children was bright and tender. I felt that I had to invent some sunny events, so that I could continue the sad story and so that the reader could move forward, too. I wasn’t a detached, cold author: I got involved and looked for a balance and a solution. We can’t survive without a bit of humour, especially in contexts like the novel’s, a borderline situation to which thousands of people – children – are subject today.

    WF: Monica – when your translation of Liliana’s The Censor’s Notebook won the Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize, much was made of it being your debut. Your second book-length translation is of Liliana’s words, too. I’d like to ask about your translatorial voice, and how you think, at the moment, it relates to Liliana’s authorial voice.

    MC: I feel incredibly fortunate to have got to work on Kinderland after The Censor’s Notebook. Part of what I love about Liliana’s writing is the range, the varied (and important) topics she feels compelled to illuminate in her works. Though the voices of Liliana’s narrators are very different – a 12-year-old girl and a middle-aged communist censor – the sense of humour has something similar in it. I like that Kinderland was a new challenge, but  that it also allowed me to build a kind of continuity of voice for Liliana’s works in English.

    WF: Liliana – many of the Kinderland’s scenes start with words like ‘sometimes’, or ‘one time’, or ‘one summer’. These phrases reveal something about the horizons of time in the book – as though it is progressing, yes, but progressing to nowhere in particular; as though a given scene is repeated and repeatable. The physical plot on which the book takes place is circumscribed, too. This is of course about the bounded space and time of childhood, but it felt to me as though it was also about more than that. Could you talk about these ideas a little? And, perhaps relatedly, about what you think drives this story forward.

    LC: The idea for the novel came from the story of a traumatised boy I met when visiting my home village in Moldova. His parents both worked abroad, returning for only a month in the summer. He had come to our home with his father, who left the child in the guest house. The child was so afraid that his beloved father would forget him at his strange house that he just looked straight at him, staring, hoping that his father would see him and not forget that he exists. The boy didn’t talk, didn’t play. This is where I started – although that little boy isn’t a character in the novel. My parents were teachers and they told me all kinds of stories about such children. The situation – children left at home, alone, without parents – is a real one. I realised it is was a generalised phenomenon and I wondered what our world would be like tomorrow, wondered if the family institution had changed. In my village, every family has a member who has left for money, at least one migrant. I realised that the most important event in the lives of these children is the arrival of their parents.

    ‘Waiting’ is the word around which the entire action of the novel revolves. It is the impulse that drives the scenes in the book forwards. The youngest child puts a chair at the gate and waits. They must do so for more than half a year. Children live with the memory of the moments in which they were normal children with parents. I was interested in how they children survive, and how they become dignified people.

    WF: ‘A village all our own must exist somewhere, one with its own laws, with a way of life that’s inaccessible and hidden to others. Where life carries on beautifully, generously, compassionately, without meanness, longing, and waiting. A village of good children.’ These lines open a passage quite late in the book; when I reached them, they gave shape to a question I’d been dancing around. Secrets are so important to this book – to life, and to a child’s life, and to a community of children in a particular socio-political context. Could you both talk to me about the power – good and bad – of secrets? You’re very welcome to tell me a secret from your childhood, too, if you’d like…

    LC: Maybe it’s not really a secret, because it’s in the book. I describe a scene that seems to belong to the domain of the fantastic – the meeting with the wild boar in the forest – but which is real: in 2010, when I had a scholarship in Stuttgart, I crossed paths with a wild boar in the forest of Akademie Schloss Solitude one evening. I don’t like secrets, really. But mysteries, yes. I believe that children need mysterious, magical experiences; spiritual power, imagination, little ‘secrets’ help these children. And this, although it might not seem like it, is very much related to my very atheistic childhood. We weren’t allowed to go to church, talk about God, read the Bible (a function of a childhood spent in the communist regime), and so we felt the need to invent something unseen, something great. Let’s live in pagan stories, invent our own religion. The power of secrets is a theme as huge as a novel; for the children of Kindereland, it is the power of hope, of patience, of survival.

    MC: Absolutely. Secrets are powerful, especially when shared by a group. In the passage you quote, keeping things secret allows for the protection of a way of life worth protecting. Here, it would be the innocence of childhood. A secret that is hard to keep for long. But there are unintentional secrets as well. Something can become a kind of secret, especially for children, when there’s no one to listen to you. An entire inner world can become a secret, including what is causing you pain.

    I have a very distinct memory from first grade, when it became a fad to look for four-leaf clovers outside during recess. I remember continuing to look for them into the summer when we moved to a new house. My secret search was related to all that I couldn’t yet put into words about cultural and physical displacement, about a sense of aloneness. So much of Kinderland’s power is in speaking this secret, letting us as adults, and now as English-language readers, in on the secret.

    WF: Finally, do you think this is a book of memory or a book of imagination?

    MC: If I had to choose between the two, I would choose imagination. because that is the consummate domain of children, and we see this story through Cristina’s eyes. Imagination is also what makes reality bearable and gives us hope that things will get better. That’s what I want for the children of Kinderland.

    LC: I think that if I hadn’t been born in a small village, if I hadn’t gone through many of the small experiences I describe, I wouldn’t have been able to write such a book. How to milk a goat, how to put a plantain leaf on a wound, how to cook, how to take care of animals. The main characters are invented – they have no prototypes in reality – so it is a book of imagination. The main situations – the problem of migration, the state of the village, its life and spirit – are based on real data, so it is a book of memory. I cannot separate these two aspects.

    When I was little, I could see from the stairs of our house three walnuts on the horizon, which, from a distance, looked blue. At one point, I went with my father to the horizon and saw those three walnuts. There, I felt the emotion described in the novel, attributed to the main character Cristina. And now, when I go home, I look at the horizon to see the three walnuts. They are still there, but Kinderland is not an autobiographical novel.

    Liliana Corobca was born in the Republic of Moldova. She made her debut with the novel Negrissimo (2003), winner of the ‘Prometheus’ Prize for a debut awarded by the România literară magazine; the Prize for Prose Debut of the Republic of Moldova Writers’ Union and The Character in Inter war Romanian Novels (2003, translated into Italian and German). Her novels The Censor’s Notebook and most recently Kinderland were both translated into English by Monica Cure and are published by Seven Stories Press.

    Monica Cure is a Romanian-American writer, translator, and dialogue specialist. Her poetry and translations have been published in journals internationally, and she’s the author of the book Picturing the Postcard: A New Media Crisis at the Turn of the Century (University of Minnesota Press). Her translation of Liliana Corobca’s The Censor’s Notebook won the 2023 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize.

    Interview by Will Forrester, Editor.

  • The voice of this body

    Translated from the French by Nick Caistor.

    Ever since my novel appeared, whenever I meet the public I am asked how much of it is true. Did I really correspond with Nadia Comăneci?

    This demand that fiction declare its identity (true or false) is worrying, at a time when the word ‘reality’ is applied to TV programmes in which anonymous people pretend to live their lives in front of the cameras, transforming them into a fiction in which they are the characters.

    The foreword I added to The Little Communist made it plain that: ‘The Little Communist Who Never Smiled does not claim to be a historical reconstruction of Nadia Comăneci’s life. Although I have respected dates, places and public events, beyond this I have chosen to fill in the silences of history and those of the heroine with traces of the many hypotheses and bootleg versions of that vanished world. The dialogue between the narrator of the novel and the gymnast is a dream, a fiction, a way of restoring sound to the almost silent film that constituted Nadia C’s journey between 1969 and 1990.’

    This dialogue between the gymnast and the narrator, a kind of western ‘Candide’ who undertakes a description of Nadia C’s journey because she has valid doubts about the official versions, was not always in the book. The first version of my text circled around the gymnast’s magical body in the same state of amazement as that of thousands of people since her appearance at the Montreal Olympics in 1976. The subject of the novel was herself majestically silent. I then became convinced of the need to create a space for the voice of this body whose opinion was never asked. The character of the gymnast needed to be able to reply to the narrator, to chip away at her omnipotence in the same way one hopes that the voices of all those men and women who lived under communism will one day be heard in all their complexity, so that the west will cease to be the only narrator of history.

    Surrounded by other narrators desperate to limit Comăneci by telling her story on her behalf, the heroine of my novel juggles their diverse rewritings: that of Ceaucescu, of communism in Romania in the 1980s; the frenzied rewriting of the female body by those who never tire of commenting on it and giving it a score – sports, politics and media pundits, from the communist coaches to journalists in the west. And finally, the horizon, which the heroine herself rewrites, scything through space and enlarging it with new expressions: the salto Comăneci, for example.

    With each new book I write, I pose myself this question: at what level of the real do I have to place myself in order to write it? This novel perhaps illustrates the impossible task of writing a ‘true’ biography, when one is caught between personal accounts (who to believe?), the false promise of the trustworthiness of historical documents, and versions of the same event that change as one travels from east to west.

    The fiction I like balks at being restricted to a particular genre. In The Little Communist several forms jostle each other: narrative fiction; a questioning of archives; real political statements, fake correspondences and subjective memories from the communist Romania where I grew up. The career of Nadia Comăneci – one of the last non-sexualised media images of a young girl sanctified by a west in search of a secular angel – inspired the character of Nadia C and this novel, a biography of childhood, or the novel of the writing of a biography.

    Lafon-Lola_c_Lynn SKLola Lafon is a writer and musician. The author of four novels, Lafon was born in France and grew up in Sofia and Bucharest. She lives in Paris. Her latest novel The Little Communist Who Never Smiled has been translated into eleven languages and won ten literary prizes in France, including the Prix Version Femina.

    @LafonLola

  • An 'archival identity'

    This week PEN Atlas hears from Carmen Bugan, daughter of Romanian dissident Ion Bugan,  on the discovery of previously classified files about her family that were kept by secret police during the 1980s in Romania. A fascinating and moving account about dissidence, family and identity.

    Sometime after the Romanian Revolution of 1989 the new government opened the files kept by the secret police (Securitate) and made them available to families who were the subject of such files. What you actually get is the cleaned up – readable, publicly digestible, indeed, publishable – version of the dossiers, not the whole of them. But still this is enough to make you reconsider your personal identity and sense of your own family and friends. I wrote to the Consiliul National Pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securitatii (CNSAS) asking for my own files and instead, thanks to a lot of bureaucratic confusion, in July 2010 I received access to my father’s.  My mother asked for hers and in September 2012 she received them, almost exactly twice as many as my father’s.  At the time of preparing this essay for publication we received news that CNSAS found three more dossiers (eight more volumes) on my father; I have set up an appointment to consult them this autumn.To my surprise, all of the details of my own adolescence, complete with love notes I wrote to boys thinking only they would read them, have been faithfully recorded in my mother’s archives. My yearly letter to my father in prison, his postcards to us, and the conversations my father had with the men in his cell, are all recorded, sometimes paraphrased, as are the transcripts of our dreams that we used to share with each other in the mornings. There are notes with further instructions for monitoring us written on the side of the pages as well as glosses about our state of mind or feelings when we made certain remarks that they interpreted from our tone of voice, as well as transcripts of all of our telephone conversations.  To top it off, there are also records of when we couldn’t be recorded because there were regular power cuts affecting the village.Now, of course, as my father correctly states, I don’t need to read the files of the Securitate to find out who he is, by now I know who he is.  But in light of having begun to read through these documents I am beginning to disagree. I am now developing a notion of his ‘archival identity’ and while this is happening, I am also going through a revolution of my own sense of identity as a member of a family with ‘archival past’.  I am beginning to make space in my own sense of identity for an ‘official’ version of myself, in other words, for a diary of my adolescence written by someone else.For one thing, in these files I meet my young father – some nine years before he married my mother and she gave birth to me. It’s strange to have a ‘documented’ narrative of your young parent, indeed even younger than you are when you are reading about it.  It’s like reading a story about someone else entirely. I meet the man who survived horrendous prison interrogations and torture, even though the torture is not explicitly mentioned in these files: only the periods of solitary confinement are documented with dates and places. You find out about the beatings by reading between the lines. In my own experience my father is the man who told me to eat my tomato salad and dress well to avoid getting a cold.  He taught me to change light bulbs, car tires, build shelves, and made me cry every time he won at chess. In these files he is the man who attempted to hijack an aeroplane to escape from Romania following his public expression of anticommunist sentiments, the man who hiked all the way to cross the Iron Curtain with a backpack filled with lemons, chocolate, cognac and antibiotics, and slept in haystacks and coal piles to hide from armed police, the man who always did everything to ‘take the chain from around my neck’, as he still says. So it’s a bit like having two different men for one father.How did he manage to survive it all? Today he is a man for whom there exists the ‘official narrative’ of his life as a dangerous political ‘criminal’, as well as his own personal identity as someone who sacrificed his best years for the benefit of everyone else. Yet at the same time he is a man who still struggles with his own identity, that of an old immigrant planting his tomatoes in a garden far from his birthplace, forgotten by everyone.burying_the_typrwriter_fc_1 (3)In September 2012 I took my little children, husband, and mother-in-law to the United States for a publicity tour of Burying the Typewriter, my memoir about growing up in Romania, and to see my family in Michigan.  As we walked through the door to my parents’ house one night, my mother was bent over a stack of folders containing no fewer than 3000 pages of informative material on her and on us, then children.  Think of all of the things that we said for the microphones, precisely because we knew they were there! And think of all the things we said because we could no longer hold them inside ourselves however hard we tried. After one of the prison visits at Aiud, we went to visit my mother’s brother at the Black Sea for ten days. The files contain the transcripts of all of the conversations we had at my uncle’s house, including details such as the money he gave to us and the one kilogram of coffee, without the knowledge of his wife, since money was tight for him too!  It turns out that not only our house was bugged, but also his house, all the way across Romania, as were the houses of all of our friends, where we went to talk ‘freely’. We stood around the living-room chair where my mother piled all of those files, facing the hard evidence of what it meant to be the wife and the children of a political dissident in Romania in the 1980s.I am reading strange things about myself in my mother’s secret files.  It turns out that I also had a dossier, I was followed and monitored closely. One of the pages in my file says that ‘certain international organisations and radio entities solicit freeing of Ion Bugan from prison’ and that the only people who could give these outsiders information about my father’s situation would be my mother and me.  So I am reading about the food I ate in 1985, the boy I kissed in the park in 1987 and about his parents going to my mother at work to raise hell about me getting their son in trouble by my association with him. There is my letter in which I reproach him for his parents’ harassment of my mother.  I was a feisty teenager and certainly one who was not easily intimidated: how did I manage to put that face on? But the ultimate figure of ‘Carmen’ that emerges from these files is of ‘a woman with troubles’ someone who tries to articulate some kind of personal independence out of the mess created by the Securitate, resulting in a string of fights with everyone about everything.This literature written by the secret police is exacting, detailed, and also, in significant ways, a lie.  What is true is that we were normal people caught in the destiny of my father’s dissent and we were isolated, intimidated, hungry, and ultimately very tired.  It is not true that we constituted a danger for the people of Romania. We behaved the way the secret police dictated to us: my mother was forced to divorce my father, she had to ‘disagree’ with his politics of opposition, and I applied to be a member of the young communists league, only to be publically shamed because I was ‘unfit’ for membership. The language of the files, including notes and instructions for further monitoring of our family, highlighted paragraphs, and paragraphs blotted out in black ink constitute the language of the oppressor. The details that the oppressor selected to report, the particular gaps he selected to keep in our conversations, the specific meaning he wanted to give to what we were saying for their purposes of finding reasons to further intimidate and observe us aggregate into a specialized language that needs to be properly accounted for.And then
    there is the language of the oppressed – of us – oscillating between showing solidarity (in conversations we had when we thought we were out of the range of microphones) and condemnation of my father’s dissidence (in the house) and his heroic act which he committed at our expense.  For me, reading these files and understanding them requires a supreme act of imagination: in one file, just three pages long, they say that the dialogue transcribed is ‘based on listening to ten audio cassettes’. This means that someone more or less wrote the dialogue pretending it was our own words.  No wonder that, in these files, I address my parents with the informal tu and my parents use technical secret police language, words such as filaj (to follow very closely) which they certainly didn’t know!  That is to say, our language is a mixture of ours and theirs so my fight now is to rescue our own words from the files with the help of memory. Even our speech had been stained by the way we were objectified.Some 20 years after our exile, having received ‘official’ evidence that what we experienced as a family was in fact far worse than we ourselves understood at the time, I feel betrayed once again. I am reading a three-line transcript where they recorded: ‘At 1:32am someone is trying to open the door to the room equipped with listening devices.  The door doesn’t open, after which we record footsteps of someone going away and the insistent barking of the dog, as if to a person who is a stranger to the house.’  The transcript refers to the fact that the secret police were coming into our house at night in order to change their audio/video tapes. I wrote about it in my memoir Burying the Typewriter but there is something quite heartbreaking about reading the Securitate’s self-recording, whilst recording us.For some, a sense of personal identity is a matter of evolution: you wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and know who you are.  Experience, family, friends, and the society in which you live shape you but in a manner which is cumulative – you build on who you know you are.  For me, as I read through an ‘official’ version of my parents’ identities, my own sense of self is changed again, into what exactly, it is too early to know. For 23 years now I have been working on overcoming the sense that we were victims of totalitarianism.  I have tried to blend into western society, living a life with all the normal joys and anxieties: I told myself I must start anew and succeed in a free world, am I not so very lucky I can do this? Think of all of those who died next to my father in the forced labour camps and think of all of those who died in the prisons where he sacrificed 12 years of his life. At least we could start all over again, like all the other immigrants; we could buy into the American dream. But now I read about myself as a two-year old child whom, according to an ‘informative note’, my father loves very much. Just what ghosts of beatings in a prison courtyard in the dead of winter were haunting him as he was making the colourful lights to place above my pram so I can enjoy a little bit of beauty? Here is a medical report file that says ‘the x-ray shows a fractured rib’ and below, ‘application of hammer to fingers.’ The past is the same and is not the same after reading this.The Romanian poet Lucian Blaga said that literature is the tears of those who could not cry—and that is what I am after here, an acknowledgment of suffering, of feeling that somehow does not seem to fit into all of this mess. This is the transformative quality that my writing will need to impose upon the reality of these files. That we woke up at 5 every morning, that my mother came from work everyday exactly at 15:40, me at 18:20, and that we went to bed after eating our sour soup and polenta from the day before at 22hrs is a record of our flesh and blood struggle to live.  During the last spring that we lived in Romania, after we had applied for passports, we were recorded turning over the soil of our garden and planting vegetables.  I am moved by how much we still wanted our garden to blossom and bloom back then, to produce a harvest that we didn’t hope to, and did not in the end, eat. For better or for worse, this biography of my family written by the secret police is testimony to the fact that we existed then – we are a record of hope and dissent that was thought not to exist in my native country at that time.

    About the author

    Carmen Bugan was born in Romania in 1970 and emigrated to the US with her family in 1989 as political dissidents.  She has a doctorate in English literature from Balliol College, Oxford. Her publications include two collections of poems, The House of Straw (due out shortly from Shearsman) and Crossing the Carpathians (Oxford Poets/Carcanet), a critical study on Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile (Legenda, Oxford /Maney Publishing), and the internationally acclaimed memoir Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police (Picador, UK; Graywolf, USA, 2012).  The American edition of this book has won the Bread Loaf Conference Bakeless Prize for Nonfiction and the English edition was BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and shortlisted for the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing. Carmen Bugan was a Creative Arts Fellow in Literature at Wolfson College, Oxford and a Fellow at the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers in Scotland.  She is currently researching the secret files that the Romanian Secret Police had kept on her and her family and is writing a book about having lived on both sides of the Iron Curtain.  She is also working with the BBC on a documentary about her family.  Bugan lives in France with her husband and children.

    Additional Information

    Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police Carmen Bugan will be talking during Le livre sur les quais, a literary festival in Morges in Switzerland, on the 7th and 8th of September. 

  • An ‘archival identity’

    This week PEN Atlas hears from Carmen Bugan, daughter of Romanian dissident Ion Bugan,  on the discovery of previously classified files about her family that were kept by secret police during the 1980s in Romania. A fascinating and moving account about dissidence, family and identity.

    Sometime after the Romanian Revolution of 1989 the new government opened the files kept by the secret police (Securitate) and made them available to families who were the subject of such files. What you actually get is the cleaned up – readable, publicly digestible, indeed, publishable – version of the dossiers, not the whole of them. But still this is enough to make you reconsider your personal identity and sense of your own family and friends. I wrote to the Consiliul National Pentru Studierea Arhivelor Securitatii (CNSAS) asking for my own files and instead, thanks to a lot of bureaucratic confusion, in July 2010 I received access to my father’s.  My mother asked for hers and in September 2012 she received them, almost exactly twice as many as my father’s.  At the time of preparing this essay for publication we received news that CNSAS found three more dossiers (eight more volumes) on my father; I have set up an appointment to consult them this autumn.To my surprise, all of the details of my own adolescence, complete with love notes I wrote to boys thinking only they would read them, have been faithfully recorded in my mother’s archives. My yearly letter to my father in prison, his postcards to us, and the conversations my father had with the men in his cell, are all recorded, sometimes paraphrased, as are the transcripts of our dreams that we used to share with each other in the mornings. There are notes with further instructions for monitoring us written on the side of the pages as well as glosses about our state of mind or feelings when we made certain remarks that they interpreted from our tone of voice, as well as transcripts of all of our telephone conversations.  To top it off, there are also records of when we couldn’t be recorded because there were regular power cuts affecting the village.Now, of course, as my father correctly states, I don’t need to read the files of the Securitate to find out who he is, by now I know who he is.  But in light of having begun to read through these documents I am beginning to disagree. I am now developing a notion of his ‘archival identity’ and while this is happening, I am also going through a revolution of my own sense of identity as a member of a family with ‘archival past’.  I am beginning to make space in my own sense of identity for an ‘official’ version of myself, in other words, for a diary of my adolescence written by someone else.For one thing, in these files I meet my young father – some nine years before he married my mother and she gave birth to me. It’s strange to have a ‘documented’ narrative of your young parent, indeed even younger than you are when you are reading about it.  It’s like reading a story about someone else entirely. I meet the man who survived horrendous prison interrogations and torture, even though the torture is not explicitly mentioned in these files: only the periods of solitary confinement are documented with dates and places. You find out about the beatings by reading between the lines. In my own experience my father is the man who told me to eat my tomato salad and dress well to avoid getting a cold.  He taught me to change light bulbs, car tires, build shelves, and made me cry every time he won at chess. In these files he is the man who attempted to hijack an aeroplane to escape from Romania following his public expression of anticommunist sentiments, the man who hiked all the way to cross the Iron Curtain with a backpack filled with lemons, chocolate, cognac and antibiotics, and slept in haystacks and coal piles to hide from armed police, the man who always did everything to ‘take the chain from around my neck’, as he still says. So it’s a bit like having two different men for one father.How did he manage to survive it all? Today he is a man for whom there exists the ‘official narrative’ of his life as a dangerous political ‘criminal’, as well as his own personal identity as someone who sacrificed his best years for the benefit of everyone else. Yet at the same time he is a man who still struggles with his own identity, that of an old immigrant planting his tomatoes in a garden far from his birthplace, forgotten by everyone.burying_the_typrwriter_fc_1 (3)In September 2012 I took my little children, husband, and mother-in-law to the United States for a publicity tour of Burying the Typewriter, my memoir about growing up in Romania, and to see my family in Michigan.  As we walked through the door to my parents’ house one night, my mother was bent over a stack of folders containing no fewer than 3000 pages of informative material on her and on us, then children.  Think of all of the things that we said for the microphones, precisely because we knew they were there! And think of all the things we said because we could no longer hold them inside ourselves however hard we tried. After one of the prison visits at Aiud, we went to visit my mother’s brother at the Black Sea for ten days. The files contain the transcripts of all of the conversations we had at my uncle’s house, including details such as the money he gave to us and the one kilogram of coffee, without the knowledge of his wife, since money was tight for him too!  It turns out that not only our house was bugged, but also his house, all the way across Romania, as were the houses of all of our friends, where we went to talk ‘freely’. We stood around the living-room chair where my mother piled all of those files, facing the hard evidence of what it meant to be the wife and the children of a political dissident in Romania in the 1980s.I am reading strange things about myself in my mother’s secret files.  It turns out that I also had a dossier, I was followed and monitored closely. One of the pages in my file says that ‘certain international organisations and radio entities solicit freeing of Ion Bugan from prison’ and that the only people who could give these outsiders information about my father’s situation would be my mother and me.  So I am reading about the food I ate in 1985, the boy I kissed in the park in 1987 and about his parents going to my mother at work to raise hell about me getting their son in trouble by my association with him. There is my letter in which I reproach him for his parents’ harassment of my mother.  I was a feisty teenager and certainly one who was not easily intimidated: how did I manage to put that face on? But the ultimate figure of ‘Carmen’ that emerges from these files is of ‘a woman with troubles’ someone who tries to articulate some kind of personal independence out of the mess created by the Securitate, resulting in a string of fights with everyone about everything.This literature written by the secret police is exacting, detailed, and also, in significant ways, a lie.  What is true is that we were normal people caught in the destiny of my father’s dissent and we were isolated, intimidated, hungry, and ultimately very tired.  It is not true that we constituted a danger for the people of Romania. We behaved the way the secret police dictated to us: my mother was forced to divorce my father, she had to ‘disagree’ with his politics of opposition, and I applied to be a member of the young communists league, only to be publically shamed because I was ‘unfit’ for membership. The language of the files, including notes and instructions for further monitoring of our family, highlighted paragraphs, and paragraphs blotted out in black ink constitute the language of the oppressor. The details that the oppressor selected to report, the particular gaps he selected to keep in our conversations, the specific meaning he wanted to give to what we were saying for their purposes of finding reasons to further intimidate and observe us aggregate into a specialized language that needs to be properly accounted for.And then
    there is the language of the oppressed – of us – oscillating between showing solidarity (in conversations we had when we thought we were out of the range of microphones) and condemnation of my father’s dissidence (in the house) and his heroic act which he committed at our expense.  For me, reading these files and understanding them requires a supreme act of imagination: in one file, just three pages long, they say that the dialogue transcribed is ‘based on listening to ten audio cassettes’. This means that someone more or less wrote the dialogue pretending it was our own words.  No wonder that, in these files, I address my parents with the informal tu and my parents use technical secret police language, words such as filaj (to follow very closely) which they certainly didn’t know!  That is to say, our language is a mixture of ours and theirs so my fight now is to rescue our own words from the files with the help of memory. Even our speech had been stained by the way we were objectified.Some 20 years after our exile, having received ‘official’ evidence that what we experienced as a family was in fact far worse than we ourselves understood at the time, I feel betrayed once again. I am reading a three-line transcript where they recorded: ‘At 1:32am someone is trying to open the door to the room equipped with listening devices.  The door doesn’t open, after which we record footsteps of someone going away and the insistent barking of the dog, as if to a person who is a stranger to the house.’  The transcript refers to the fact that the secret police were coming into our house at night in order to change their audio/video tapes. I wrote about it in my memoir Burying the Typewriter but there is something quite heartbreaking about reading the Securitate’s self-recording, whilst recording us.For some, a sense of personal identity is a matter of evolution: you wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and know who you are.  Experience, family, friends, and the society in which you live shape you but in a manner which is cumulative – you build on who you know you are.  For me, as I read through an ‘official’ version of my parents’ identities, my own sense of self is changed again, into what exactly, it is too early to know. For 23 years now I have been working on overcoming the sense that we were victims of totalitarianism.  I have tried to blend into western society, living a life with all the normal joys and anxieties: I told myself I must start anew and succeed in a free world, am I not so very lucky I can do this? Think of all of those who died next to my father in the forced labour camps and think of all of those who died in the prisons where he sacrificed 12 years of his life. At least we could start all over again, like all the other immigrants; we could buy into the American dream. But now I read about myself as a two-year old child whom, according to an ‘informative note’, my father loves very much. Just what ghosts of beatings in a prison courtyard in the dead of winter were haunting him as he was making the colourful lights to place above my pram so I can enjoy a little bit of beauty? Here is a medical report file that says ‘the x-ray shows a fractured rib’ and below, ‘application of hammer to fingers.’ The past is the same and is not the same after reading this.The Romanian poet Lucian Blaga said that literature is the tears of those who could not cry—and that is what I am after here, an acknowledgment of suffering, of feeling that somehow does not seem to fit into all of this mess. This is the transformative quality that my writing will need to impose upon the reality of these files. That we woke up at 5 every morning, that my mother came from work everyday exactly at 15:40, me at 18:20, and that we went to bed after eating our sour soup and polenta from the day before at 22hrs is a record of our flesh and blood struggle to live.  During the last spring that we lived in Romania, after we had applied for passports, we were recorded turning over the soil of our garden and planting vegetables.  I am moved by how much we still wanted our garden to blossom and bloom back then, to produce a harvest that we didn’t hope to, and did not in the end, eat. For better or for worse, this biography of my family written by the secret police is testimony to the fact that we existed then – we are a record of hope and dissent that was thought not to exist in my native country at that time.

    About the author

    Carmen Bugan was born in Romania in 1970 and emigrated to the US with her family in 1989 as political dissidents.  She has a doctorate in English literature from Balliol College, Oxford. Her publications include two collections of poems, The House of Straw (due out shortly from Shearsman) and Crossing the Carpathians (Oxford Poets/Carcanet), a critical study on Seamus Heaney and East European Poetry in Translation: Poetics of Exile (Legenda, Oxford /Maney Publishing), and the internationally acclaimed memoir Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police (Picador, UK; Graywolf, USA, 2012).  The American edition of this book has won the Bread Loaf Conference Bakeless Prize for Nonfiction and the English edition was BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week and shortlisted for the George Orwell Prize for Political Writing. Carmen Bugan was a Creative Arts Fellow in Literature at Wolfson College, Oxford and a Fellow at the Hawthornden International Retreat for Writers in Scotland.  She is currently researching the secret files that the Romanian Secret Police had kept on her and her family and is writing a book about having lived on both sides of the Iron Curtain.  She is also working with the BBC on a documentary about her family.  Bugan lives in France with her husband and children.

    Additional Information

    Burying the Typewriter: Childhood Under the Eye of the Secret Police Carmen Bugan will be talking during Le livre sur les quais, a literary festival in Morges in Switzerland, on the 7th and 8th of September.