Dubravka Ugresic, clanek
"Stereotypes are everywhere, and they cover almost everything. We all
create stereotypes. Even the God is a stereotype. Our first ideas
about the world are stereotypes. We learn about the world through the
sets of opposed stereotypes, no-yes, yummy-yuck, good-bad. We adopt
the world around us and adapt to it through stereotypes. Stereotypes
are formulas, structures of primary knowledge, organizing principle of
that knowledge. Stereotypes are also a way of individualization: there
is myself and there are no others. Our mental home is furnished with
stereotypes. Stereotypes form a signal system: with their aid we
travel through the world. Left and right, devil is black, the angel is
white. Even the facts are adopted as stereotypes: the earth is round.
...
I grew up in the environment populated with interesting stereotypes:
Bulgarians were "black" (Crni bulgari), Gypsies were stealing small
children, Serbs were primitive barbarians, Gypries in a word, Croats
were all "faggots", Muslims had six toes-fingers and were all dummies,
Italians ate live cats, Montenegrins were not people but turtles,
that's how lazy they were, male Slovenians were all suckers, joddlers,
while female Slovenians were "girls with round heels", "slots". I had
an exciting "multi-culti" childhood.
Adopting stereotypes and breaking them is a constant process of
learning. Furnishing our mental home and refurnishing it. We finally
learn that the sentence "Turks are dirty" does not contain any message
but: "We are clean".
...
The question is how to communicate, really, in the world jammed by
stereotypes, images, and labels, how to communicate if, as it seems,
every word needs an explanatory footnote, how to deal with the
identity problem imposed by others, how to be heard first and than
understood properly?
Living abroad, to my big surprize, I did not achieve freedom to not be
labelled. Abroad I am regularly adressed as a Croatian writer. I
became a representative of a country which I left and in which I do
not exist anymore. I would not mind it so much but my texts, even if I
would write a recipee for goulash, are very often read through the set
of stereotypes the reader has about the part of the world I am coming
from. Book reviewers often find in my texts meanings which are not
produced by text itself. Or, they rather choose not to review my
books: We can't, we don't know anything about Croatia.
...
The problem of artistic, cultural, intellectual communication in the
world of stereotypes, images, global market, global culture and
domination of American mass-culture is a problem of our time. .... And
to go back to stereotypes: however we try to fight them, we will find
them everywhere, today they are softer, more attractive and more
resistant, because they learned how to mutate. A Bosnian Muslim kid
recently asked its mother: Mom, is it true that all the Muslims are
lesbians?
