'Somehow We Are [from the Balkans]': Embracing Stigmata in Melinda Nadj Abonji’s Prose

• In Event: Post-Yugoslav Literature(s) in Transnational Perspective

Abstract

When Melinda Nadj Abonji’s 2010 novel, Tauben fliegen auf (Fly Away, Pigeon) received the German and the Swiss Book Prizes, it was primarily praised for its innovative and inspired language. While those laudations focused on the novel’s interventions into the Swiss German idiom, my paper examines how Nadj Abonji’s language of writing intervenes into the ideological and historical “baggage” carried by the cultural and linguistic code system of her ethnic Hungarian upbringing in Yugoslavia. The hypothesis of the paper is that writing in a third language enabled the critical re-examination and re-evaluation of ideologically stigmatized characteristics, words, and worldviews in home and host context alike.

Author

• Petra Bakos, Central European U (Hungary)