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Title: “Children, Heroes, and Foes in a Communist Family Album”

Author: Mihaela Precup

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article: Precup, Mihaela. 2013. “Children, Heroes, and Foes in a Communist Family Album”.

Martor 18: 19‐33.

Published by: Editura MARTOR (MARTOR Publishing House), Muzeul Ță ranului Român (The

Museum of the Romanian Peasant)

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For decades we had to live in a strange mix-ture of reality and fiction, in a world painted indeeply surreal hues, both real and imaginary.

Approaching communism with the limited toolsof rationalistic logic would empty and deformthe understanding of this phenomenon.– Lucian Boia

How can we ever be expected to forgive thecommunists? I don’t know what they are, but they’re not Romanian (…). How can they haveRomanian blood running through their veinsand still show no mercy?

– Elisabeta Rizea1

ost family albums of communist Ro-mania are repositories of a compli-cated cultural memory that, after the

fall of the Iron Curtain, was negotiated and

rewritten by post-communist administrationsand power structures, including the media.One of the effects of this complex process wasthe manner in which the Romanian popula-tion responds to documentary practices thatexamine the communist regime. It is thus thecase that, almost a quarter of a century after

communism,2 the detention memoirs writtenby political prisoners of the regime have a rel-atively low readership, but communist family albums are part of a more popular autobio-graphical register. This may stem partly fromthe widely held belief that they carry little or

no ideological weight and that they can offereasy or unmediated access to the recent past.

It may also be the case that, with the pas-sage of time, family photographs taken duringcommunism have—like most family photo-graphs, for that matter—become anecdotalpretexts for “funny” stories about food short-age and nationalistic fables of Romanian inge-nuity in moments of crisis. Some nostalgia isalso displayed on websites and facebook pages

that feature not only family photographs, butalso photographs of old toys and clothes, none

19

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Mihaela Precup

20

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of which are observably embedded in the po-

litical context that produced them.3 Instead,they seem to have been inscribed in the well-promoted general feeling that there is a certainindecency in dwelling upon a past that is this

tiresome and troubling, when the present it-self is a constant struggle to make up for losttime, and speedily fit into the EU and NATO.

I think it is important to start includingthe study of apparently private systems of rep-

resentation (such as family photographs)within the larger conversation about commu-nism and its public systems of visual construc-tion (including architecture, banners, paradesetc.). One first step is perhaps to learn to re-gard Romanian communist family albums asmuch more than mere pretexts for musing on

the absurd in history or embodiments of Balkan4 exoticism. Thus, in this paper I amreading a set of my family photographs againstthe conceptual frame introduced by Americantheorist of cultural memory and photography Marianne Hirsch (in conversation with SusanSontag and Roland Barthes), as well as theanalysis of counter-hegemonic practices usedby queer theorist Jose Esteban Muňoz inDisidentifications. More specifically, I will belooking at photographs of myself and my par-ents as children, the three of us dressed iden-

tically in pioneer outfits, but also at photo-graphs of my maternal grandfather, who wasrelatively high up in the communist party ranks. My intention is to explore the influencethat the family album has on the formation of

a certain (possibly idealized) view of one’schildhood and family members, who are ofteninterpreted by children as non-political individuals.

I am also performing an extension of thetraditional familial photographic space by de-ciding to include two photographs of non-family members within my family album. Thefirst of these figures is Elisabeta Rizea, a polit-

ical prisoner of the Dej5 regime whose voice

was only publicly heard after 1989, when shewas interviewed on national television, andethnographer Ioana Nicolau had her memoirspublished. The second is a man who died threeyears before I was born, Cornel Chiriac, arock’n’roll and jazz broadcaster for Radio FreeEurope, whose voice I thought I could hear asa child, so vivid were my father’s tales of theman he described as the person who helpedopen his generation’s doors towards freedom.

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In order to better read this visual affilia-tion created between different generations, Iwill be using Marianne Hirsch’s definition of the familial gaze as a gesture not of recogni-tion, but of adoption. She defines it as “theconventions and ideologies of family” (1999,1) through which family members see them-selves, and argues that it helps fill in the gapsof a personal narrative and provides the subject with wholeness: “Through this familiallook I define a boundary between inside andoutside, claiming these [people] as part of thestory through which I construct myself. Thisinclusion is an act of adoption and an act of faith determined by an idea, an image of fam-ily: it is not an act of recognition” (1997, 83).

Hirsch thus removes the burden of recogni-

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tion from the mnemonic process, and pro-poses adoption based on faith, a particularly apt suggestion when it comes to family photo-graphs taken at a time when the subject wasnot even born, as is the case with some of the

images included in this paper.Hirsch further argues that family photo-

graphs—private documents that share a pub-lic visual vocabulary—can be read as usefulsources of “minor” (as opposed to official/na-tional) narration about the past. In her morerecent work, Ghosts of Home, an investigationof the life lived in Cernowitz before the Holo-caust by her parents, co-written with LeoSpizer, they propose the introduction of the

syntagm “points of memory” to be used forobjects and other (not exclusively visual) en- vironments that create an opportunity for per-sonal, not national involvement in a past thatgoes beyond one’s personal experience,

«We employ official and private contempo-rary documents, public and family archivalmaterials, letters, memoirs, photographs,newspapers, essays, poetry, fiction, internet

postings, as well as material remnants thatwe think of as testimonial objects. Centralto our approach is the use of oral and videoaccounts from Old Czernowitzers and theiroffspring (…). These materials are more

than evidentiary sources for us. They focusour narrative around individual anecdotes,images, and objects that serve as ‘points ofmemory’ opening small windows to the

past. (Hirsch and Spitzer 2010, xix)Hirsch and Spitzer go on to explain that

they prefer the use of “points of memory” be-cause Nora’s “places of memory,” although valuable, is “more nationally based” (2010,320).

To this framework that relies on identifi-cation (as adoption) with familial figuresthrough the medium of photography, I would

like to add disidentification6 as a usable way of seeing familial episodes where a repressiveregime becomes involved in the (self-)repre-sentation of the family. In his influential work on race and queer performance, Disidentifi-cations, José Esteban Muňoz traces the history

Children, Heroes, and Foes in a Communist Family Album

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Mihaela Precup

22

of the term “disidentification” to the Frenchlinguist Michel Pécheux, who used Althusser’stheory of interpellation to come up with threetypes of reaction to dominant ideologicalpractices: identification, counteridentification,

and disidentification. He points out the dan-gers implicit in the identification-counteriden-tification binary as a mechanism purposefully produced by the state, and suggests disidenti-fication as a desirable counter-hegemonicpractice. Muňoz reads the latter as a way of ac-knowledging the presence of those elementsdictated by official power structures in one’sown life narrative, in an attempt to counterthem not through utopian effacement, but by

producing long-lasting changes in the socialfabric that has already assimilated them:«To disidentify is to read oneself and one’sown life narrative in a moment, object, orsubject that is not culturally coded to “connect” with the disidentifying subject. It isnot to pick and choose what one takes out ofan identification. It is not to willfully evacuate the politically dubious or shameful

components within an identificatory locus.Rather, it is the reworking of those energiesthat do not elide the “harmful” or contradictory components of any identity. It is anacceptance of the necessary interjection that

has occurred in such situations. (1999, 12)I believe disidentification is a particularly

useful tool when the state attempts to overtly control and shape difference into a bland un-threatening uniformity. It is in such cases thatnations and families become specifically proneto atomization, with some members condon-ing and directly sponsoring oppressive prac-tices, while others are painfully affected by them. Disidentification does not promote am-

nesia, but attempts to rework, in this case, the various collaborations with the communistregime visible in many family albums to a cer-tain extent. Seeing the hand of the regime inthe most apparently mundane of photographsimplies an understanding of the ramificationsof living under a dictatorship, and of the way the latter contaminates the alleged innocenceof the by-stander.

I propose that disidentification can be amode of bearing witness to and speaking

about crimes perpetrated by—in this case—the communist dictatorship from Romanianot by drawing a clear line of demarcation be-tween perpetrators and victims, but rather by coming to terms with and reworking the long-lasting effects produced by decades of every-day negotiations with the policies of theregime. Here I evidently understand witness-ing as not a matter of presence, but as a ges-ture of responsibility, in the etymological sense

of responding to an event, and acknowledgingsomething of oneself as a product of—in thiscase—practices of intimidation and terror thatmay have taken place before one was evenborn.

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I remember my childhood in black and

white. Color film was very difficult to find,7and so my family album is black and white

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until 1989, when I was 11, and then it burstsinto color. My country had been black and

white, then slowly gained color,8 and today itcan be difficult for the untrained eye to spotthe differences in photographic representation

between Romania and the West. Repositoriesof cultural memory such as household appli-ances, furniture, items of clothing like thecommunist pioneer uniform have been re-placed by new models, whereas family albumswere kept, and sometimes it there that you canstill find an old toy or a very important Phillipsradio-cassette player that you now wish youhad not thrown away.

Adopting my parents when they were chil-

dren as part of my lineage is the easy part, per-haps mostly because we are all part of the samesartorial language of the communist regime:everyday uniforms made up of white-and-bluecheckered shirts, red ties, black apron dressesand preferably white knee-high socks for thegirls (and black trousers for the boys). Add tothis the relatively unchanged conventions of posing for an official school picture you got totake home as a memento, and affiliation is very easy to construct. The more difficult part

is finding a way to disidentify with photo-graphs of my grandfather performing his offi-cial duties as part of a repressive regime. In thispart of my paper, I shall attempt to performboth adoption and disidentification.

In the late fifties, my parents were com-munist pioneers, and my mom had just hadher picture published in a local paper (Fig. 1).She had gone to the library to borrow a book,and a photographer had thought she looked

standard enough for her picture to be taken.He opened a Russian textbook which read “Art

in every home”9 and asked her to pretend shewas reading it, and look thoughtful. To thisday, my mother cannot remember any of theRussian she had to study for eight years. Whatthe photographer failed to see, but my motherwas quick to notice when she showed me thepicture, was that her school uniform waspatched at the elbows, and she had differently colored buttons on her cuffs. Also, it is visiblethat she is wearing at least one sweater under-

neath her school uniform, since classrooms

were poorly heated. Her various discomfortswould later become my own (Fig. 2).

I would also have to wear the uncomfort-able uniform, and be unable to relax for years.It is obvious from the way my hands areclutching at the end of my apron, while I amtrying to stand up straight, with my feet neatly aligned, that I was doing my best to performmy diligent young pupil bit for the camera.Unfortunately, the gauze flowers attached tomy headband, an unnecessary but temporarily fashionable addition that my mother was al-ways plaguing me with, are clearly uneven andclown-like on my tomboy haircut. Like my mother’s, my own school uniform also had tomiraculously expand in winter, and give way to blouses, sweaters, leggings and eventrousers, so that I ended up looking like arefugee, forced to wear everything in my pos-session. I remember being miserable and tenseevery day at school, especially when the com-

pulsory white elastic band gave me headaches


23

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Mihaela Precup

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gether with other party leaders (Fig.6).The anniversary marked 20 years since

August 23, 1944, the date when Romania joined forces with the Soviet Army and thusended its alliance with Nazi Germany. After

Romania became part of the Soviet Bloc, Au-gust 23 was celebrated every year with endlessparades which became even more elaborateafter Ceausescu’s visit to China and NorthKorea in 1971. This picture, also part of my family album, might as well have been a news-paper clipping. At first glance, there is noth-ing familial about it. It is simply a gathering of several powerful comrades about to embark on long tirades in praise of the party. I knew

about it, but I had only seen it once, so when Istarted preparing for this project, I asked my mother to send it to me. It took me quite awhile to identify my grandfather among themen standing at the tribune, one of our coun-try’s leaders in 1964. It was even more difficultfor me to recognize my grandfather as the manspeaking with gusto (or perhaps blasé author-ity) from an outdoor podium (Fig. 7), a hugebanner with the picture of the globe behindhim, on which were painted flowers and a

fragment reading “everywhere” (which musthave been part of the slogan “Workers every-where, unite!”).

As a child, I knew that my grandfatherwas—quite vaguely—a party member, whilemy parents were not. It did not seem to mattermuch, since he retired by the time I was eight,and so I was unable to imagine what his jobmight have been.

At this point, a number of choices present

themselves. I could simply counteridentify with this image as not strictly belonging to thefamily album, as my grandfather is pho-tographed on the job. I could simply choose tofocus on his role as a loving grandfather, whohas always been proud of me, who misses mewhen I am away and whose conversations Ienjoy when they are not political. I can try tothink about the fact that he, like many otheryoung and ignorant country boys, was luredby the promise of a better life, and was grate-ful to the Party because the latter—as he put

it—sent him to college and gave him a solidposition in society. But then, there is the dis-turbing question of how this country boy may have felt when his own parents’ land was con-fiscated during the brutal nationalization

process that cost many Romanian peasantstheir sanity, life or freedom.13 My grandfather,the son of two pious peasants who lost theirland, rose rapidly within the ranks of the party,and would often inspect the state of the agri-culture in the southern district that he was re-

sponsible for (Fig. 8).14

Considering the background of mostprominent party members, one may easily infer that these land inspectors must have all

been former country boys proudly marching

on confiscated lands, some of which may aswell have belonged to their own families. Theirself-satisfied smiles and intent gazes, each andevery one pointed at something else, as if try-ing not to let anything slide by, are those of aproud but somewhat confused conqueringarmy. Their decorations and suits, the identi-

cal shape of their shoes, haircuts, ties andproud stride are all part of the official para-phernalia of party leaders at the time. Nobody seems to notice the little boy curiously peer-ing from behind the fence, and the two womenstaring from the yard, one of them holding ababy. The lack of eye contact between my grandfather and these people is, of course, cir-cumstantial, but I think it can be read as sym-bolic of the amnesia party leaders performed,choosing to remember only that they wereborn poor, of good “healthy” working-class


25

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9/16

Mihaela Precup

26

stock, and forgetting that the grand theft of thecommunist party often left their grieving par-ents and, by extension, themselves, even

poorer.15

They are here proudly assessingproperties that might have belonged to thefamily of the little boy perched on the fence,and they are walking around in an ideologicalbubble that separates them from themselves.Their surveillance of the lands replicates thegaze of the former owners whose offspringthey are, and produces a bizarre re-enactmentof their parents’ real and symbolic losses. Intheory, these losses belong not only to the pre- vious generation but also to these former

country boys through inter-generationaltransmission and, more practically, becausethese lost pieces of land are actually their lost

inheritance.16

I recognize the man from these photo-graphs, although I do not know him very well.The family album comes with various neutralstories, so that his own part in the workings of the system is still blurry to me. He also refusedto discuss politics at home, and as a result my

mother and her sister were bizarrely un-touched by his ideology. His work did notmake him or us rich, interestingly enough,perhaps because—so the story in the family goes—he did not accept bribes, like most of hiscolleagues. But there were perks, which some-times made an important difference. Out of this logical back-and-forth I keep performing,one thing emerges: it is not really importanthow much we profited from his position, but

we did, and this is a good place from whichdisidentification with these photographs of my grandfather can start.

Thus, deciding to adopt this image intomy own family narrative without consideringthe fact that here, my grandfather was notdoing just any job, but one that was part of anoppressive political system, would contami-

nate adoption with the effacement of the pro-found human tragedy implicitly condoned by my grandfather’s position. It would also en-courage a separation between the public andthe private sphere that is generally simply notthere. It would imply adopting not only amember of the family, but a whole system of values, one that imprisoned more than a mil-lion Romanians, had many “enemies of thestate” deported, executed and tortured, confis-

cated most private property and threw peopleout of their homes, sometimes at gunpoint,changing Romania brutally and inalterably.

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Both my parents were anti-communist(without digging too deeply into the ideologi-cal framework of the left), and would proba-

bly wince at the thought that I am implicitly suggesting that their ethics were in any way compromised because of their connectionwith my grandfather. They were never com-munist party members, and did their best tostay out of contact with the party, which usu-ally offered some advantages to those who joined. As Romanian hippies (a social category so complex that it needs its own monograph),they did not rebel that much against the socialroles inherited from their parents, and so my

mother’s tasks around the house were cookingand cleaning, and my father was in charge of politics and world news. Also, I have hardly

ever seen my mother hold a camera,17 and only once did I see her listening to Radio Free Eu-rope on her own, and then I knew something

had to be seriously wrong.18 It is easy to look with non-political nostalgia at photographs of them (Fig. 9) when they were in their early 20s(this was in the early 70s), my father with his

long hair and slender figure, a large whitelinen shirt embroidered with Romanian folk

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patterns, worn-out jeans and hiking-boots, my mother with long hair parted in the middleand very large bell-bottoms.

My father took on the role of photogra-pher, and would have us all pose for him, and

as a consequence we have very few pictures of all three of us. He would then quite magically,I thought as a child, transform my room intoa dark room, and I would thus temporarily lose access to it, and would only rarely butmemorably be allowed to sneak in and take apeek at the small trays where he was makingimages appear. It was he who took it uponhimself to build the family archive with in-comparable zeal: when I was six, he recorded

his life story on an audio cassette (again, onthe Philips cassette recorder); he put togetherfamily albums and wrote carefully pennedcaptions so that he may not forget faces he hadnever seen outside family albums, like hisgreat-grandparents’. It was also my father whokept a box of my things from when I was ababy and young child and wouldn’t let meopen it for fear that I might damage what wasinside. And it was he who bought and reli-giously read every prison memoir he could get

his hands on after 1989. And if I needed tofind out anything about the shady past of any of our government members or prominentwriters, all I had to do was ask him, and hewould come up with incredibly detailed andfascinating stories about each and every one of them.

But this was not merely the case of my own family. Most of my friends tell similar sto-ries, where the fathers played parts that are not

very different from my father’s, although I findit hard to believe that anyone else was quite asprone to archiving everything as he was. Also,it was some of the fathers who managed toconstruct and retain a rock star aura they hadborrowed from the few foreign magazines thatwere circulating at the time (Fig. 10), pre-served it as we were growing up, in an anti-aging process that itself seemed to promiseescape (Fig.11), and projected the same rogueimage for their children, whereas most moth-ers’ domestic tasks robbed them of their (pre-

marital) rebel status. Stories of how my fatherwas almost arrested twice for voicing “danger-ous” opinions, about how he was chased by thepolice in the streets of Bucharest because hishair was too long, and about how he knew

people from our most famous rock bands, andwhose tales of endless hours of listening tomusic and looking at Billboards would keepme riveted for hours.

With these stories, I also ingested implicitnotions about the importance of arrested de- velopment, since adulthood was the provinceof compromise with the powers that be, andinevitable slippage into the social role that theParty had cast for you. In more practical terms,

for my parents, graduating from university,automatically growing up and getting marriedmeant being unable to stay in the capital,which was then a “closed city,” and having tore-locate to some small provincial town and

lose contact with their friends.19 Co-habitationwas not permitted by the state, abortion wasillegal, and so couples were marrying without

having lived together first. Houses were be-coming scarce in the late seventies, whenCeausescu had already embarked on his mad“reconstruction” binge and whole neighbor-hoods were erased to make room for poorly constructed unsafe and uncomfortable apart-ment buildings. Here, the walls had been builtthin on purpose, and secret police officersstrategically placed, so that privacy was a lux-ury one learned to live without.


27

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Mihaela Precup

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203-4).

My parents moved into one such strik-ingly symmetrical building, in a small townwhere my father stuck out like a sore thumb,before I was born, and a secret police officerwas our upstairs neighbor. It was in this envi-

ronment, on days where we only had twohours of electricity per day, hardly ever any hotwater and no central heating from the eter-nally cold radiators, that my father told me hisstories of music and friendship, while my mother was busy keeping the household fromslipping into total chaos. Friendship, solida-

rity 20 and eternal adolescence were thus pro-

posed to me as valuable alternatives to kinshipand conventional adulthood, at a time whensecond-wave feminism was not imported to-gether with the music, when members of thesame family would be encouraged to turn eachother in to the secret police, and when family

members like my grandfather were often al-ready working within the system, unable orunwilling to fight it.

My own stories, to use Hirsch’s terms, havebeen vacated by my father’s, and his stories are

now part of a past that I sometimes confusefor mine. For people of my generation, thecycle was broken. We got to be communist fal-cons and pioneers, but never hippies quite assignificantly subversive as our parents. In away, the stakes of rebellion and protest neverdid seem as high. After all, nobody was chas-ing my friends down the street to shave themiddle of their heads and force them to cut off their hair. And none of my girlfriends had

their dresses cut off as they were walkingdown the street. These are also, unfortunately,events that are easy to depoliticize and sighnoncommittally to.

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Our family album already contains a rift, acertain visual shock one experiences by turn-

ing a page and moving from a long-hairedman to a besuited gentleman. By placing my-self inside my grandfather’s story, I can beginto fill the gutters between him and my parents,but also attempt to place him in dialogue withthose invisible others who entered our homesthrough the carpets they wove and the musicthey played. In this conversation beyond deathand chronology, Elisabeta Rizea (Fig. 12) andCornel Chiriac (Fig. 13) should not be thought

of as mediators whose stories fill the blanks inmy family narrative. Rather, I am hoping toplay the role of mediator between them andmy grandfather, whose official photographs inour family album could not come alone, butbrought along others.

I would like to propose that ElisabetaRizea entered our family album the minute thecountryside photograph of my grandfatherwas taken. She did so alongside many otherless publicized country folk (including my great grandparents) whom she metonymically

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ended up representing. She lost every piece of property she ever had, and when she came outof prison, the secret police officer who signedher release papers advised her to look theother way when she walked past her own

house. After she was first arrested and tor-tured, when she got out of prison, one of thefirst things she did was help the guerilla fight-ers again. The result was another stint inprison, interrupted by the 1964 pardon. Shewould probably have gone on and on if theguerilla fighters’ group had not been annihi-lated. Her husband and daughter were impris-oned as well, and her whole life was lived in acommunity deeply changed by communism.

The widely-circulated photograph repro-duced here shows an Elisabeta Rizea whosehands are crossed as if in prayer, another re-minder of the repressive measures takenagainst members of the clergy and citizenswho attended religious service, but also a chill-ing reminder of the important Christian com-ponent of the Romanian far right. What I findstriking about it is how much she looks like my grandfather’s mother, not necessarily when itcomes to the exact resemblance of physical

features, but in her clothes, countenance andattitude. They were both Christian Orthodoxwomen from the countryside, and they woreclothes which to my untrained eye look quitesimilar.

Rizea gained a lot of public currency after1989, and my parents were eager to adopt heras a hero of the early fight against commu-nism. During the late fifties, she found herself

weaving fashionable Persian rugs in prison,21

after having been almost beaten to death, lostmost of her teeth and hair, by which she hadbeen hung from the ceiling of a cell (cf.Nicolau and Niţu). After 1989, when part of the media was focusing on unearthing andcanonizing anti-communist fighters, Rizea, al-ready in her 80s, became one of the mostprominent public figures that my parents wereexcited to discover. In the early enthusiasm of the first post-communist years, little was saidabout the extreme right leanings of some (butnot all) of the partisans. In my own rush to

fashion heroes and foes, I adopted Rizea, andonly discovered much later that she had alsobeen predictably appropriated by neo-fascist

Romanian organizations drawn to the initially blurry but idealized figures of “the partisans.”It is only reasonable that neo-fascist move-

ments such as the post-1989 Noua Dreaptă(The New Right) find the partisans so appeal-ing, since, on the one hand, some of them hadbeen members of the Romanian Iron Guard.Their anti-communist fight started in 1945and ended in 1962, when the last partisan wasshot in the Banat Mountains (Deletant 2012,103). One cannot refer to the Romanian

guerilla warfare as a movement, particularly because the fighters were scattered and hidingin the mountains, sometimes with the help of the local population who risked their own livesand the safety of their families to help thosewhose protest was an important symbol of thefight against the Dej regime. The partisangroups were small (something between 10 and40 people), and generally made up of farmers,workers, former officers, lawyers, doctors, and

students (Deletant 2012, 104). According to apolice report from 1951, out of 804 people that


29

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ther was 18 years old, and everyone was start-ing to grow their hair long, bell-bottoms werein, and girls’ skirts were shrinking by theminute. His radio shows became increasingly political, and his death was highly suspicious;

there were rumors that it had been orches-trated by the Romanian secret police.28 He wasin many ways responsible for stopping the rav-aging effects of the forced uniformization of the population, for dispelling the very justifiedfeeling that we were invisible to an inaccessiblefree West. Cornel Chiriac was also partly re-sponsible for turning many people of my fa-ther’s age into quasi-mythical figures for my own generation.

Growing up in the shade of these friendly giants was somewhat dwarfing. My generationwas made up of children who remembered just enough of communism to be embarrassedby post-communist brattish behavior. It oftenseemed to me that none of my stories couldcompare to my parents’, and none of the stakesfor my various adolescent rebellions were highenough. What some of us experienced was thework of the postmemory, defined by MarianneHirsch as a process wherein one’s own stories

are vacated by the unwitnessed stories of an-other, stories to which one feels bound by af-fection and family ties: “Postmemory characterizes the experience of those whogrow up dominated by narratives that pre-ceded their birth, whose own belated storiesare evacuated by the stories of the previousgeneration, shaped by traumatic events thatcan be neither fully understood nor re-cre-ated” (Hirsch 1997, 22). It is also in the vac-

uum created by the secondary role played by my own childhood memories, effaced by thoseof my parents’, that I can attempt to place theodd dialogue between my grandfather, Elisa-beta Rizea, and Cornel Chiriac.

C+*(0.&+*.

What Hirsch attempts to do in Family Frames is break the illusion of referentiality (i.e. the illusion that every photograph has areal-life referent to which it is umbilically, un-problematically connected) on which theo-reticians of photography such as RolandBarthes and even Susan Sontag relied up to acertain point. By bringing up the necessity of disrupting the “documentary authority” of

family albums, she posits her conversationwithin the space created between the perfor-mative function of the family photograph, dic-tated by varying family mythologies, and “thelived reality of family life” (Hirsch 1997, 8).However, my own project—while clearly ben-efiting from Hirsch’s terminology and her useof critical, theoretical, and autobiographicalregisters—is addressing an age where family mythology was so different, that a new voca-

bulary needs to be found. What she calls“prose pictures” (1997, 8) are differently coded


31

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15/16

during the totalitarianregime because of the levelof surveillance that thefamilies involved in theproduction of these narra-

tives were subjected to.Both prose and pictureswere dangerous to possess,and not even orality, towhich most of the popula-tion went back in the ab-sence of confessionalscripturality, was withoutits perils.

Everyday life during communism was

openly and violently falsified by the authori-ties, to such an extent that entire generationsgrew up learning to possess the adequate trans-lation tools to convert blatant fabrication intosome semblance of reality. In this country of

Sancho Panzas,29 little one heard or looked atwas solidly connected to what was actually happening in the world. For a while, we lived inan Orwellian 1984, where the world map wasfull of dark spaces we had no access to and forwhom we were ourselves terra incognita, where

history was successfully rewritten, and wherethe present was only accessible through story-telling, snapshots and actual physical presence.All these exercises in awareness and distancia-tion were questionable, because a whole systemof interpretation was there to provide the com-pulsory tools for reading events “the right way.”Under these circumstances, our family photo-graphs were rarely produced with the blissfulillusion that they would be certificates of pres-

ence or “real” renditions of life as we lived it,so the illusion of referentiality was in somesense never there.

This uninterrupted state of disbelief was animportant mechanism for survival, but it alsocontributed to the transformation of painfulfamily photos into strange anecdotal anachro-nisms, indexes of something so steeped in fab-rication that it might as well never have takenplace. In the present-day Romanian publicspace, little has been done to create places of memory for the losses of communism. By

granting kinship to Elisabeta Rizea and CornelChiriac, who are slowly falling into oblivionand back into invisibility, I am hoping to createthe premises for disidentification in the post-communist Romanian state, and give solidarity

back its much-feared subversive potential.At the same time, I cannot help pondering

the way in which the under-researched affec-tion for anti-communist fighters can produceideological confusion and slippage. I can alsonot help noting that there is little inter-gener-ational and/or post-mortem dialogue outsidethe space of this paper, where I am forcing a vi-sual association between my grandfather andtwo public figures he has never had any respect

for. I am thus performing a ritual of remem-brance and mourning that allows me to iden-tify the mechanisms and effects of my communist childhood within myself as the lov-ing grandchild of one of its sponsors. I amstubbornly proposing my genealogy as a site of encounter between the lost voices of struggleand the now fictionalized acts of betrayal thatsilenced them, and offering the blank guttersof my family album as haunting grounds formy father and other friendly ghosts of post-

communism.The presence of the official photographs of

my grandfather in our family album serve thedubious double purpose of taming both theimages and his actions. They normalize hispart of the repressive power structures andrewrite them as “a job” or “any job” you had todo to support your family. Also, through the very fact of my family’s relative advantages(such as getting an appliance faster than oth-

ers), we also became part of the normalizingprocess of the dictatorship. The reading of my family album must thus lie somewhere be-tween adoption and disidentification. Throughadoption, I have to accept them all as my own,even if I cannot know or recognize them fully,and thus become to a certain extent an accom-plice, inserting myself in the intricate network that gave individuals a double consciousnesswhere two ethically opposed systems of valueswere able to co-exist peacefully. Throughdisidentification, I can acknowledge and re-

Mihaela Precup

32

29) H I = @-@> &>

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33

work the effects of my grandfather’s collabo-ration, which would also become in somemanner my own, by placing myself inside anarrative that occurred before my birth andwhich produced me. This interpretation of my

grandfather’s photographs would enable me tosee the workings of dictatorship not as sepa-rate from, but as part of my own story.

Author’s Note: I presented an early versionof this paper at Yale University, in 2007, duringProf. Laura Wexler’s graduate class on visionand violence. I would like to thank her for herincredible support and for encouraging me tofurther work on it. The writing of this paper

was also made possible by UEFISCDI grantPN-II-RU-TE-2011-3-0149, Cross-Cultural Encounters in American Trauma Narratives: AComparative Approach to Personal and Collec-tive Memories; project coordinator: Assoc.Prof. Roxana Elena Oltean.

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