How a Writer Found their Voice
Herta Müller’s struggle against enforced silence in Communist Romania
“Finding a Form” Redux
In my first article on Medium, I mentioned the writer William Gass, who in his essay “Finding a Form” attributes the genesis of his writer’s journey to his need to escape from a dysfunctional and abusive home.
Gass’ father’s verbal abuse proved the power of language — negative though it might be, while his mother’s slow suicide via alcoholism modeled the powerlessness of those who accept the world’s abuse silently.
These two parental modes: the power of words coupled with the belief one cannot control one’s circumstnaces, landed him in the comfortably distant chair of the narrator.
Put another way, because he believed himself too weak to change the world, Gass changed himself.
…for me, the world became a page; that, I said, with Stoical acceptance, is the way I wanted it; it is what I would have chosen.
How commonplace is such an admission of powerlessness is to the origin story of a writer. Would a macho-man like Ernest Hemingway ever admit he had chosen his trade out of a feeling of personal ineffectuality? It seems unlikely. But the struggle to control one’s reality is very real, and writing is one legitimate and relatively harmless way we can achieve a modicum of power.
A Brief History of Romania
Another example of a writer who sought control over her circumstances through writing is the Romanian writer, Herta Müller. Unlike Gass, her powerlessness did not arise within the atomized patriarchy of the middle-class American home. Rather, her dispossession was a direct result of having been born into the authoritarian regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu.
Romania is an interesting and mysterious country. The photo above shows just how beautiful it can be. Yet its troubled history is full of brutality and silent dispossession.
As its name suggests, Romania is a descendent realm of the Roman Empire. I’ve heard that its language more closely resembles the Latin of the Romans than Italian. Romania is where Transylvania is found, whose most infamous liege, Vlad the Impaler, is believed to be the real-life character from which the gothic vampire is derived.
After WWII, Romania became a part of the the so-called Eastern Bloc, a barrier of communist authoritarian nations that served as a buffer between the USSR and Western Europe at the height of the Cold War. Young people today won’t remember the Soviet Union, but for those of us who grew up during that time, the threat of nuclear war (and other more minor forms of conflict — regime change, the roots of the Afghanistan war, etc.) was constantly in the headlines.
In 1997 I traveled around the world after high school. I met my friend in Greece and we moved up through Eastern Europe, which at that time was transitioning away from Communist dictatorships with various degrees of success. Albania had been open for only six months, so we went inside to take a look. It says a lot that my friend and I, two intrepid teenagers, decided to fly over Romania.
Herta Müller in Romania
This was the country Herta Müller grew up in. She was a member of a German ethnic minority which had been incorporated into Greater Romania at the end of WWI, when the country doubled in size with the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
In 1921, her grandfather was stripped of his ancestral lands by the 1921 Agrarian Law, which put an end to the large estates. Müller grew up tending cattle on the now-collectivized land of her forebears.
Her dispossession was not just physical. She also unknowingly endured the state’s rewriting of her people’s history. Though the German and Hungarian minority had lived in the region for generations, Communist Romania viewed them now as outsiders. It didn’t help that Germany had lost the war, and all ethnic Germans had become stained with the opprobrium of Hitler’s Reich.
The country itself had vacillated in its allegiance during WWII. While the king was initially sympathetic to the Allies, he tried to curry favor with the Germans when he saw how quickly much of mainland Europe fell to their onslaught. After the war, Romania switched allegiances again, and the country came under the influence of Stalin.
In Her Own Words
In an interview with the Paris Review, Müller describes her isolation. On one side was the oppression of the state. On the other was the parochial nastiness of her small ethnic German community. As a child, she was left to her own and grew up almost semi-feral with no knowledge of the outside world or experience of literature.
People often ask me what books I had at home, and I find the question strange. As if you couldn’t write unless you grew up in a home with a library, or parents with some degree of higher education. But really from a certain age on, our upbringing is up to each of us, we do it on our own.
… And at one point I realized that literature was the continuation of what I’d done as a child — using my imagination. I hadn’t realized it at the time, but essentially I had been turning everything into literature, in my head, without knowing what literature was.
Raised in a society of duplicity and betrayal, where even the names for the plants of the land became either tools for the authorities or pockets of resistance, Herta Müller, searched for a way out of her loneliness.
…I wrote because I had to, as a matter of self-assurance, because all doors were closed. I didn’t know where to turn, didn’t know how things would go on, my father had died, I couldn’t go back to the village, I didn’t have any perspectives at all, and there was a lot of fear because the secret police were harassing me daily. It was an absurd situation — they’d kicked me out of my office but I still had to work. I couldn’t leave the factory, couldn’t give them a pretext to dismiss me. And so I started writing, and suddenly there was this rearview mirror, and everything started coming back about my life in the village. It wasn’t trying to write literature, I just put it down on paper to gain a foothold, to get a grip on my life.
Final Thoughts
It takes remarkable courage to try to tell our stories honestly. For many of us the ramifications can be the loss of friends, family, work colleagues, or jobs. For others, those like Müller, in countries that perceive their artists and writers as threats to hegemony, the cost of finding their voice can be their life.
Regardless of the severity of consequence, when we tell our stories, we are doing ourselves and those around us a favor. Freedom begins with personal transformation, and personal transformation begins when we are empowered to think about and tell our truths.
