| MARTOR
appears now in a new format. The seventh issue of our journal has
taken the shape of a dictionary: key words, arranged in alphabetical
order, and glossed in a less familiar manner. Definitions are rare,
most of the terms are just a pretext for recollecting certain experiences
or ways of life in the Bucharest of the ‘80s. The issue no
longer includes the usual museology section, and the photographic
images, in homeopathic proportion, are only meant to give a taste
of a future, richly illustrated volume of testimonies related to
the same period, which we plan to edit in Romanian.
Such
radical departure from the design of the previous issues is actually
due to the events that happened over the last two years, which have
been heavy and sudden losses for the small world of our museum and
the even smaller team of the MARTOR Journal.
The
first to go away was Horia Bernea, without whom the Museum of the
Romanian Peasant would not have broken new ground in European ethnomuseology.
Before he left us, he was making plans for a journal issue dedicated
to the Mediterranean world, of whose spirit Romania is definitely
a part. And then, after she wrote about the way the museum and its
team grew under Horia Bernea’s inspired guidance, Irina Nicolau
left us, too, in a discreet and equally sudden way. She is the one
who, during the lessons of alternative ethnology she held for the
young, one day proposed the urgent collection of as many testimonies
on the ‘80s as possible. This is how the series of interviews
was initiated, as well as the written confessions of older people
whose lives were insistently marked by that period.
The
materials that are gathered here have proved to be the result of
very different outlooks on that moment in history: nightmarish memories
stand side by side with nostalgic regrets, sparks of black humor
and even some original recipes. It would have been a pity to spoil
this fabulous diversity by selecting the texts according to some
criterion or other. Therefore, we simply decided to arrange the
key words in alphabetical order. The annex at the end of the volume
includes the list of the authors/collectors (referred to by their
initials) and the list of the informants (referred to by numbers).
In this way, we hope to make the reading of such various texts easier,
while those who are interested can easily identify the sources as
well.
Will
we ever be able to exorcise by testimony the direst decade of Ceausescu’s
regime? Will we ever be able to leave behind the irreparable losses
that followed?
I
couldn’t tell how it was that this scrap of paper got on my
desk, this fragment of a list Irina had started: envelopes that
don’t stick, ball-points that don’t write, rubbers that
leave marks, matches that won’t burn…
Ioana Popescu |
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