REMEMBERING GOLI OTOK IN DAVID ALBAHARI’S NOVEL DANAS JE SREDA

Апстракт

Since the 2010s, Goli Otok has re-emerged as a focal point of cultural and mnemonic inquiry across the successor states of former Yugoslavia. A growing body of literary and artistic works revisits the former prison island in the Adriatic Sea, where alleged supporters of the Soviet Union were incarcerated following the Tito–Stalin split of 1948. Among these works is David Albahari’s novel Danas je sreda (2017), which offers a layered and introspective engagement with this fraught historical site.

The novel centers on a son who gradually uncovers the suppressed past of his father, a former Goli Otok prisoner now afflicted by Parkinson’s disease and dementia. The father, however, is not constructed solely as a victim of political repression. As a former party commissioner, he was complicit in the regime’s mechanisms of brutality—both within the camp and, metaphorically extended, within the domestic sphere. This ambivalent positioning destabilizes clear-cut moral binaries and complicates the narrative of victimhood.

The first-person narrator did not experience Goli Otok directly; instead, he occupies the position of a secondary witness, inheriting mediated, fragmented memories through his father’s deteriorating recollections. By examining the novel’s narrative strategies—particularly its negotiation of memory, guilt, silence, and intergenerational transmission of trauma—this article seeks to illuminate the evolving literary representations of Goli Otok in contemporary post-Yugoslav writing. Through its introspective and ethically nuanced approach, Danas je sreda contributes to broader regional debates on responsibility, remembrance, and the afterlives of political violence.