I know Yellow quince It was one of them, but the rest of the songs faded from memory and only a feeling of warmth and sadness remained. Nada Lir had a beautiful, soulful voice, perfect for singing traditional Bosnian sevdalinka Her fellow feminist friends She ordered that night in a Budapest restaurant in October 1999. Nada was there as part of a group of feminist activists from the successor states of Yugoslavia, many of whom had been with her at that pivotal international feminist conference in Belgrade. Comrade In 1978.
We had gathered at a meeting of the Network of Women in Conflict Zones, which brought together academics and activists from Sri Lanka and the former Yugoslavia with academics from York University in Canada and other institutions, all of whom were interested in the role of feminists in criticism and engagement. With armed conflict and its consequences. The meeting was scheduled to take place in the summer of 1999 in Sarajevo, after a previous meeting in Sri Lanka, but was moved to Budapest due to NATO's bombing of Serbia in the spring of that year. I was living in Bosnia at the time, conducting research for my doctoral thesis on women's activism and post-war nationalism. And when those from Belgrade, Zagreb and elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia joined Nada and Duška Andrić, another Bosnian feminist with a beautiful voice, in the song, the emotional lament took on added weight — a sorrow for the losses of war and the destruction of the country they once had. subscriber.
Nada's thinking about Bosnia and Herzegovina's pre-war past was, in feminist terms, essential, even if, as she emphasized, it did not make sense to view Bosnia and Herzegovina in isolation. It was all one country. She moved in intellectually exciting circles in Yugoslav cities, Italy and beyond. Yugoslavia was very restricted – Carefully “For her Bedouin spirit,” she said. Early in my research, several people told me that she was the only feminist activist in pre-war Bosnia.
When I first met her, she had recently returned from teaching gender studies at Central European University in Budapest (the institution where I would teach in the future, without knowing it at the time) and had just started working at the Soros Foundation on its gender programmes. Having struggled to explain my research in ways people understand, talking to Nada was a huge relief. She knew the scholarly critiques I was working with, and she saw immediately where my questions about the relationship between gender and nation were coming from, why it mattered, and what the stakes were. We had many long and lively conversations, in which I tried to understand what it was like for her to be a feminist academic in Sarajevo before the war. She also asked me interview-like questions about what other women activists I was talking to were saying, which demonstrated her endless curiosity and energy.
Having lost her position at the university when she fled Sarajevo during the war, Neda became involved in various types of NGO advocacy work in the late 1990s and 2000s, eventually launching her own NGO which she called the Feminist Association of the Yugoslav Era . Women and society (Women and Society). She addressed many activist congregations with her clear and compelling critiques of authority, honed over years of writing and teaching in the socialist period but adapted to new circumstances and vocabulary. She liked to start from anthropology and note that sex was the primary basis for the division of power in human society, long before the advent of capitalism and the existence of the proletariat. Power was always central to her view: she was keen to stress that feminism did not call for “power over” but rather for the reduction of power differentials.
Activists explained that Yugoslav feminism was not well known in Bosnia and Herzegovina before the war. Some of the older women read feminist articles in the media, including Nada's writings, but the activism took place as far away as Belgrade, Zagreb or Ljubljana. Nada was proud that the students she taught learned to think broadly and critically, but she was unable to orient her teaching specifically toward a feminist approach. So, it was significant in 2006 when a group of young feminist activists participating in the Pitchwise Festival dedicated a committee to revisit the famous 1978 festival. Comrade interview. Nada was of course one of the main original participants in the committee (along with Dunja Blazevic and Vesna Pusic). She was noticeably proud of the black-and-white photograph she had taken in those days that graced the event's exhibition. She was younger in it, of course, but the tilt of her head and the clever smile were the same.
Nada Ler Sovronich (1941-2020). Image via Facebook
It was her smile for which she was most famous, and she brought it up again when she told me how some pre-war party comrades had called her attitude “smiling feminism.” She recounted how she had always adhered to academic language, criticizing Yugoslav society from within Marxism, and thus perhaps allowed her to continue her work. However, the authorities were skeptical. I had the feeling that she had a careful and intelligent way with her party comrades, especially after meeting an older man once when we were having coffee together in Sarajevo. Alexandria complicated. He stopped by our table to tell Nada that she was “still beautiful,” calling her his ex-girlfriend (Lover). She smiled and corrected him: “Love” (love). He said: Yes, it was only in my dreams. When he left, Nada told me with amusement how he had once been sent by the internal police during a tense political period in the early 1980s to find out if this feminist movement was dangerous. She convinces him that she is still a devout Marxist, but he also seems to have fallen in love with her and brought her flowers on several occasions.
Her shy and flirtatious way of putting this man in his place while maintaining his admiration for him fits well with the picture she paints of how she and other Yugoslav feminists experienced their encounters with Western feminists during his reign. Comrade. Since I am too young to remember, she described in vivid detail the natural hippie styles of foreign feminists who showed up with hairy armpits, uncombed hair and no bras. This was shocking enough for Yugoslav women, but even more disturbing was the foreigners' insistence on designated women-only spaces. Nada and her companions did not want to exclude men. They had many good allies and had no vision of forging a feminist society without men. (She didn't mention how lesbians or others in the group felt, and she sensed the outlines of some classic divisions among feminists, but that wasn't part of her narrative.)
Post-war Sarajevo was in many ways no match. She bristled at new expectations of ethno-national allegiances and identity markers, especially as an atheist of Jewish descent who did not fit into any of the dominant groups. Her organization Women and Society did not survive the donor game for long and she began spending more time on the Croatian coast where she was scheduled to retire. I feel fortunate to have had the opportunity to hear Nada's stories and engage in discussions with her during a period in stark contrast to the era in which she established herself. Her criticisms always highlighted her critical academic, feminist and Marxist sensibility, and were always accompanied by that big smile of a warm and kind soul.
