Tatjana Đurišić Bečanović
Slavonic Culture, Vol. XVIII, 2022, pp. 53 - 66
https://doi.org/10.4467/25439561KSR.22.004.16356The paper analyses semiotic processes taking place under the institutional pressure and resulting in the fact that a particular social and cultural community remembers and forgets in accordance with the dictates of the current regime, which means that the collective mnemonic is sometimes even brutally governed by political and ideological centres of authority that generally possess the greatest amount of semiotic power. Therefore the Yugoslav state administration used to be oriented towards forgetting Goli otok, where it relied precisely on the system institutions, particularly on the activities of its intelligence service called UDBA, which handled the camp of Goli otok and imposed a ban on its thematisation. The disappearance from the public discourse was supposed to result in the process of forgetting, while institutional violence and developed social phobia were to silence the witnesses forever. Thus the paper searches for the manifestations of the darkest of Yugoslav taboos, which relates to the greatest amount of institutional violence and repression aiming at forgetting of the trauma of Goli otok. Even though literature is the least controlled discourse, this topic started to be depicted in writing years after the termination of the camp, which incarcerated c. 15000 people from 1949 to 1956. Searching for the forbidden themes of Goli otok, the author analyzes the narrative texts of Dragoslav Mihailović (Kad su cvetale tikve 1968 and Goli otok 1990) and Mirko Kovač (Rane Luke Meštrevića 1971).