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Celia Hawkesworth, Voices in the Shadows: Women and Verbal Art in Serbia and Bosnia, Budapest: Central European University Press, 2000, 281 pp., $49.95 (hb), ISBN 963-9116-62-9
By presenting a historical line of women's writing in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, Voices in the Shadows throws light on a different, suppressed history of literature in the Serbo-Croatian language. It appeared in a very specific historical and political moment, after the collapse of the second Yugoslavia in the 1990s and during an especially traumatic period for the Serbian culture. The book was conceived as a research project for an alternative to mainstream culture, focussing on a long tradition of women writers who had been considered marginal to Serbian cultural traditions. This is why the terms voices and shadows were used in its title, connoting it as finding a way out from the shadow, oblivion or the margin.
The book consists of twelve parts. In addition to the introduction, conclusion, bibliography and index, there are eight central chapters, respectively called: Cultural Baggage, Women's Contribution to the Oral Tradition, Women's Voices in the Middle Ages, The Nineteenth Century, The Turn of the Century: New Opportunities 1990- 1914, Between the Two World Wars: Modernization, The Second Yugoslavia: 1945-1991 and Women's Writing in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The long historical period covered, of over six centuries, as well as the cultural changes which have happened during that period, could be encapsulated only in an informal way. Celia Hawkesworth found such a connecting thread in the poetry collection Trazim pomilovanje (I seek clemency), by the famous Serbian woman poet, Desanka Maksimovic (1898-1993).1 She explains about women's writing that 'in the context of the mainstream tradition of Serbian literature, dominated by the male voice, this work seems to ... have the same startling quality as some of the brief articulations of a female perception that break suddenly into some of the traditional epic songs known to have been sung by women' (15).
This juxtaposition of epic and female is rooted in a dichotomy that has had gendered dimensions for a long time. Namely, in...