I do know Žute dunje was considered one of them, however the remainder of the songs have pale from reminiscence leaving solely a sense of heat and melancholy. Nada Ler had a stupendous, soulful voice, excellent for singing the standard Bosnian sevdalinke her fellow feminist drugarice requested that night time in a Budapest restaurant in October 1999. Nada was there as a part of a bunch of feminists from the Yugoslav successor states, lots of whom had been together with her at that pivotal worldwide feminist convention in Belgrade Drug-ca in 1978.
We had gathered for a gathering of the Ladies in Battle Zones Community, which introduced collectively teachers and activists from Sri Lanka and the previous Yugoslavia with teachers from York College, Canada, and different establishments, all within the position of feminists in critiquing and interesting with armed battle and its aftermath. The assembly had been deliberate for the summer time of 1999 in Sarajevo, following a earlier gathering in Sri Lanka, nevertheless it had been moved to Budapest due to the NATO bombing of Serbia that spring. I used to be dwelling in Bosnia on the time, conducting my PhD dissertation analysis on ladies’s activism and nationalism after the warfare. When these from Belgrade, Zagreb and elsewhere in former Yugoslavia joined Nada and Duška Andrić, one other Bosnian feminist with a stupendous voice, in track, the emotional lament took on additional weight – mourning the losses of warfare and the destruction of the state they’d as soon as shared.
Nada’s desirous about the pre-war previous of Bosnia-Herzegovina, or BiH, in feminist phrases was key, even when, as she confused, it didn’t make sense to think about BiH in isolation. It was all one nation. She had moved in intellectually thrilling circles in Yugoslavian cities, Italy and past; Yugoslavia was too restrictive – tijesno – for her nomadic spirit, she’d stated. Early in my analysis, a number of individuals had instructed me that she was the one feminist in Bosnia earlier than the warfare.
After I first met her, she was newly again from educating Gender Research at CEU, Budapest, (my future establishment, unbeknownst to me on the time) and had simply began working for the Soros Basis on their gender programmes. After struggling to elucidate my analysis in ways in which individuals would perceive, speaking to Nada was an enormous reduction. She knew the scholarly critiques I used to be working with and noticed instantly the place my questions in regards to the relationship between gender and nation had been coming from, why they mattered, what the stakes had been. We had many lengthy, animated talks, through which I attempted to understand what it had been like for her to be a feminist educational in Sarajevo earlier than the warfare. She additionally posed me interview-like questions on what the opposite ladies activists I used to be speaking to had been saying, displaying her countless curiosity and vitality.
Having misplaced her place on the college when she fled Sarajevo throughout the warfare, Nada threw herself into varied sorts of NGO advocacy work within the late Nineteen Nineties and 2000s, lastly launching her personal NGO that she named after the Yugoslav period feminist collective Žene i društvo (ladies and society). She addressed many activist gatherings together with her clear and convincing critiques of energy honed over years of writing and educating within the socialist interval however tailored to new circumstances and vocabularies. She preferred to start out from anthropology and the statement that gender had been the primary foundation of division of energy in human society, lengthy earlier than the arrival of capitalism and the existence of the proletariat. Energy was all the time central to her level: she was cautious to emphasise that feminism didn’t advocate ‘power over’ however a diminishing of energy differentials.
Ladies activists made clear that Yugoslav feminism had not been well-known in BiH earlier than the warfare. A number of the older ladies had learn feminist articles within the media, together with Nada’s writings, however activism had occurred distant in Belgrade, Zagreb or Ljubljana. Nada was proud that the scholars she taught had realized to suppose broadly and critically, however she had not been in a position to direct her educating particularly at feminist approaches. It was subsequently vital when in 2006 a bunch of younger feminists concerned within the Pitchwise pageant, devoted a panel to revisiting the well-known 1978 Drug-ca assembly. Nada was after all one of many key authentic individuals on the panel (together with Dunja Blažević and Vesna Pusić). She was noticeably pleased with the black-and-white {photograph} of her from these days that graced the exhibit in regards to the occasion. In it she was after all youthful, however the tilt of her head and the clever smile had been the identical.
Nada Ler Sofronić (1941-2020). Picture by way of Fb
It was her smile she was identified for, and he or she flashed it once more as she instructed me how some Occasion comrades earlier than the warfare had known as her place ‘feminism with a smile’. She associated how she had all the time caught to educational language, critiquing Yugoslav society from inside Marxism and thus in all probability permitting her to proceed her work. Nonetheless, she was suspicious to the authorities. I had the sensation that she had had a cagey and savvy method of coping with fellow Occasion comrades, particularly after an encounter with an older man as soon as once we had been having espresso collectively at Sarajevo’s Skenderija advanced. He handed by our desk to inform Nada she was ‘still beautiful’, calling her his former lover (ljubavnica). Smiling, she corrected him: ‘love’ (ljubav). ‘Yes,’ he stated, ‘it was only in my dreams.’ When he had gone, Nada instructed me with amusement how he had been despatched as soon as by the inner police throughout a tense political time within the early Nineteen Eighties to search out out whether or not this feminism was something harmful. She satisfied him that she was nonetheless a loyal Marxist, however he additionally appeared to have fallen in love together with her and introduced her flowers on a number of events.
Her coy, flirty method of placing this man in his place whereas remaining admired by him match nicely with the image she had painted of how she and the opposite Yugoslav feminists had skilled their encounter with Western feminists throughout Drug-ca. Contemplating me too younger to recollect, she described in vivid element the hippy, pure kinds of the overseas feminists who confirmed up with furry armpits, unbrushed hair and no bras. This was stunning sufficient for the Yugoslav ladies, however essentially the most disconcerting was the foreigners’ insistence on all-female areas. Nada and her comrades didn’t need to exclude males. That they had a number of good allies and had no imaginative and prescient of crafting a feminist society with out males. (She didn’t point out how lesbians or others within the group felt, and I sensed the outlines of some basic divisions amongst feminists, however this was not a part of her narrative.)
Put up-war Sarajevo was in some ways not Nada’s factor. She chafed below the brand new expectations of ethno-national loyalties and id markers, notably as an atheist of Jewish origin who didn’t match into any of the dominant teams. Her Ladies and Society group didn’t survive the donor recreation for lengthy and he or she started to spend extra time on the Croatian coast the place she was to retire. I really feel fortunate to have had the possibility to listen to Nada’s tales and have interaction in discussions together with her throughout a interval of stark distinction to the period through which she had established herself. Her critiques all the time introduced out her educational, feminist and Marxist essential sensibilities, and so they had been all the time accompanied by that huge smile of a heat and sort soul.
