Open Wounds, the Phenomenology of Exile and the Management of Pain: Dubravka Ugresic’s The Ministry of Pain

How do we remember the country, the place we have left, to which it is difficult, or often impossible to return, or which no longer exists? Do we want to remember it at all? Is remembering for some too painful? How do we remember the life, the ‘home’ we have been forced to leave? Such questions of loss, of nostalgia and memory, of alienation and dislocation, have been imaginatively explored within a long tradition of exile literature - a heterogeneous body of work encompassing a multiplicity of horizons and histories. In the East European context, this thematic concern has been resonating in literatures from the totalitarian periods, in the émigré and dissident literature, and most recently, in the literatures of conflict, especially those affected by the war in Former Yugoslavia.