I do know Yellow quinces was one in every of them, however the remainder of the songs have disappeared from reminiscence, leaving solely a sense of heat and melancholy. Nada Ler had a stupendous, soulful voice, excellent for singing conventional Bosnian sevdalinka her fellow feminist associates requested that night in a Budapest restaurant in October 1999. Nada was there as a part of a gaggle of feminists from the Yugoslav successor states, a lot of whom had been along with her at that essential worldwide feminist convention in Belgrade Comrade in 1978.
We had gathered for a gathering of the Girls in Battle Zones Community, which introduced collectively lecturers and activists from Sri Lanka and the previous Yugoslavia with lecturers from York College, Canada and different establishments, all within the function of feminists in critiquing and involvement with armed conflicts and their aftermath. The assembly had been scheduled for the summer season of 1999 in Sarajevo, after an earlier assembly in Sri Lanka, however had been moved to Budapest due to the NATO bombing of Serbia that spring. I used to be residing in Bosnia on the time and doing my PhD analysis into ladies’s activism and nationalism after the conflict. When individuals from Belgrade, Zagreb and elsewhere within the former Yugoslavia joined the singing of Nada and Duška Andrić, one other Bosnian feminist with a stupendous voice, the emotional lament took on added weight – mourning the losses of the conflict and the destruction of the state they’d as soon as shared.
Nada’s enthusiastic about the pre-war previous of Bosnia and Herzegovina, or Bosnia and Herzegovina, in feminist phrases, was essential, even when, as she emphasised, there was no level in contemplating Bosnia and Herzegovina in isolation. It was all one nation. She had moved in intellectually thrilling circles in Yugoslav cities, Italy and past; Yugoslavia was too restrictive – slender – due to her nomadic spirit, she had stated. Early in my analysis, a number of individuals had instructed me that she was the one feminist in Bosnia earlier than the conflict.
Once I first met her, she had simply returned from educating gender research at CEU in Budapest (my future establishment, unbeknownst to me on the time) and had simply began working for the Soros Basis on their gender applications . After struggling to clarify my analysis in a approach that individuals would perceive, speaking to Nada was an enormous reduction. She knew the scholarly critiques I used to be working with and instantly noticed the place my questions concerning the relationship between gender and nation got here from, why they mattered, what the stakes have been. We had many lengthy, animated conversations, throughout which I attempted to grasp what it had been like for her to be a feminist educational in Sarajevo earlier than the conflict. She additionally requested me interview-style questions on what the opposite feminine activists I spoke to have been saying, demonstrating her limitless curiosity and power.
After dropping her place on the college when she fled Sarajevo throughout the conflict, Nada immersed herself in numerous kinds of NGO advocacy work within the late Nineteen Nineties and 2000s, finally launching her personal NGO which she named after the Yugoslav-era feminist collective . Girls and society (ladies and society). She addressed many activist gatherings along with her clear and convincing critique of energy, honed by 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 was the primary foundation for the distribution 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 “energy over,” however relatively the discount of energy differentials.
Girls activists made it clear that Yugoslav feminism was not well-known in Bosnia and Herzegovina earlier than the conflict. Some older ladies had learn feminist articles within the media, together with Nada’s writings, however activism had taken place 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 capable of focus her educating particularly on feminist approaches. It was due to this fact important when, in 2006, a gaggle of younger feminists concerned within the Pitchwise pageant devoted a panel to revisiting the well-known 1978 movie. Comrade assembly. Nada was in fact one of many foremost unique members of the panel (together with Dunja Blažević and Vesna Pusić). She was remarkably happy with the black and white photograph of her from that point that was within the exhibition concerning the occasion. On this, in fact, she was youthful, however the tilt of her head and the clever smile have been the identical.
Nada Ler Sofronic (1941-2020). Picture through Fb
It was her smile that she was identified for, and he or she confirmed it once more when she instructed me how, earlier than the conflict, some social gathering members had referred to as her place “feminism with a smile.” She talked about how she had all the time caught to educational language, criticizing Yugoslav society from the angle of Marxism, which most likely allowed her to proceed her work. Nonetheless, she was suspicious of the authorities. I felt like she had a reserved and sensible approach of coping with social gathering members, particularly after assembly an older man after we had espresso collectively in Sarajevo. Skenderiya complicated. He got here by our desk to inform Nada she was “nonetheless stunning” and referred to as her his former lover (lover). Smiling, she corrected him: ‘love’ (Love). “Sure,” he stated, “that was solely in my goals.” After he left, Nada instructed me with amusement how, throughout a tense political time within the early Nineteen Eighties, he was as soon as despatched by the home police to seek out out whether or not this feminism was one thing harmful. She satisfied him that she was nonetheless a dedicated Marxist, however he additionally appeared to have fallen in love along with her and introduced her flowers a number of occasions.
Her reserved, flirtatious approach of placing this man in his place and but 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 Comrade. Pondering I used to be too younger to recollect, she described in vivid element the hippie, pure types of the international feminists who confirmed up with bushy armpits, unbrushed hair and no bras. This was surprising sufficient for the Yugoslav ladies, however what was most annoying was the foreigners’ emphasis on women-only areas. Nada and her comrades didn’t wish to exclude males. That they had a number of shut allies and had no imaginative and prescient of making a feminist society with out males. (She did not speak about how lesbians or others within the group felt, and I sensed the outlines of some traditional divisions amongst feminists, however this wasn’t a part of her story.)
Submit-war Sarajevo was in some ways not Nada’s factor. She chafed on the new expectations of ethno-national loyalties and identification markers, particularly as an atheist of Jewish descent who didn’t match into any of the dominant teams. Her group Girls and Society didn’t survive the donor recreation for lengthy and he or she started spending extra time on the Croatian coast, the place she would retire. I really feel lucky to have had the chance to listen to Nada’s tales and have interaction along with her throughout a interval that was in stark distinction to the period by which she had established herself. Her critiques all the time introduced out her educational, feminist and Marxist crucial sensibilities, they usually have been all the time accompanied by that massive smile of a heat and type soul.
