Și eu am trăit în comunism by Ioana Pârvulescu

An account of the answers to the question ‘Why are we queuing?’ will be presented at both official and unofficial level. The second part of the article is concerned with perceptions of shortages.

This is of course a reading that emphasizes “the bright side” of queuing a more complex description of the phenomenon will be provided in the body of the article. Officially non-existent, the queue provided an opportunity for Romanian citizens to exercise their organizational and communitarian skills. I count among the reactions to shortages the long debated “solidarity” among citizens of Socialist states I argue that the queue can be described as a form of community activity whose organization was left almost entirely in the hands of the community itself. This article will enquire into the everyday life of the Romanians in the 1980s using the queue (the omnipresent food line) as its starting point of enquiry into reactions and perceptions of shortages. I draw upon the concept of otherness employed in human geography and also try to see to what extent the traces of these relevant Others can be detected today in Timişoara. In order to render a better image of the social and political context in which all this happened, I offer a brief review of Romanian television during that period, which has been characterized as the most absurd media in Europe, and I discuss the practice of watching foreign TV in socialist Europe. I will analyse the way in which the image of the relevant Others, the Yugoslavs, is discursively constructed by the interlocutors who got acquainted with them by watching Yugoslavian television. This chapter is based on a series of interviews with Romanians from Timişoara, who represented a fervent audience of Yugoslav television in the last decades of communist rule. Nevertheless, those living in the close vicinity of state borders had the privilege of watching foreign television, which had a strong signal in these regions, and thus of getting accustomed to the reality of the neighbouring countries, of learning their languages, and of finding out about the Western way of life and values. 1 Romanians were forced to live in the self-sufficiency imposed by a ruler trying to prevent his citizens from any form of contact with the rest of Europe. This period of Romanian history, the last years of the totalitarian communist regime, was characterized by an ever-growing and ubiquitous personality cult of Nicolae Ceauşescu. This chapter offers insight into the way the Others, Yugoslav neighbours, were perceived by the Romanians watching Yugoslavian television in the 1980s in Timişoara, the biggest city of the Romanian Banat.

Și eu am trăit în comunism by Ioana Pârvulescu