For readers interested in creative ways of discussing memory, the new English translation of Witold Szablowski’s narrative nonfiction book Dancing Bears: True Stories of People Nostalgic for Life Under Tyranny is not to be missed. It is unusual, first because it approaches the concept of memory politics in various formerly authoritarian states. But it is also unusual because the first half of the book is not about politics or history at all. Instead, Szablowski begins his narrative telling tales of the rehabilitation of dancing bears in Eastern Europe.
The Bulgarian Roma people have long trained bears to dance and perform tricks, forcing wild animals into total submission. After the USSR fell in the early 2000s, this practice was abolished, and animal rights organizations have set up nature reserves to reintroduce the dancing bears to their natural habitats, guiding them to act as bears naturally do rather than as their human counterparts had forced them. And yet, despite the groups’ best efforts, the bears still struggle to find food and hibernate. So ingrained is the bear’s captive past that sometimes they rest back on their hind legs and begin dancing in the forest for no one.
Dancing bears become a striking analogy, framing reported stories on human beings’ imperfect ability to readjust to democracy and the ways in which memories of authoritarian captivity manifest themselves in the present. Essentially, the question Szablowski explores is how people, individually and collectively, often fail to accustom themselves to political and economic freedoms after the fall of Communism, primarily in Eastern Europe.
Szablowski’s literary style of journalism sets the book apart. Rather than express a singular argument about the many political transitions he explores, the reporter ties his stories together far more subtly. He brings readers’ polarized perspectives from each country with a focus on in-depth interviews with fascinating, everyday people in each context. Unafraid to include himself in the narrative, Szablowski invites his readers to accompanying him in thrillingly real journeys, from the front seat of a car-smuggling operation in Ukraine to hitchhiking trips in newly independent Kosovo. The parallels and differences between these contexts are up to readers to define. And as they do, they will grip the cover, unable to put the book down.
The dancing bears also never become a completely explicit metaphor – to the betterment of the text. The connection remains implied: chapters in the second half of the book, each of which focuses on a post-Communist state, simply contain a title and epigraph that refer back to the dancing bear section. The text is not deterministic, but suggestive and meditative. It provokes critical thought rather than a specific argument.
That being said, the wide net Szablowski casts has some holes. While the chapters on Eastern Europe are rich, with in-depth reporting imbued with a sense of cultural understanding, one chapter focuses on Cuba and falls short. The journalist seems to pay little attention to the vast differences between a Latin American and Eastern European contexts, making the inclusion of Cuba feel like a contrived effort to make the book global (and thus prevent it from falling into a more niche, regionalist category with a narrow audience). Or perhaps Cuba’s role in the book belies a different flaw, which is the slippage between economic and political categories. In many instances it remains unclear if the journalist and his subjects discuss the memory of political authoritarianism, the communist economic model, or both at once. Indeed, the reader leaves the text wondering if the author defines the term “freedom” in terms of a democratic voting structure or participation in the free market economy. Of course, as one knows from studying the military regimes of Latin America, the two do not go hand in hand; integration into the neoliberal economics of the west can itself be a motive for authoritarianism. In that context, Szablowski’s unexplained and uneven conflation of economics and politics prevents some of the larger ideas from achieving the crispness or clarity that a reader might desire.
However, the true stories of how Eastern Europeans remember their economic and political pasts remain extremely relevant to the question of public memory. Szablowski gives us a window into controversial issues in memory markets: the question of what to do with the approximately 750,000 mushroom-shaped concrete bunkers set up by Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha; opinions on the 2007 riots in Tallinn, Estonia that took place after the destruction of a memorial honoring the Red Army; the narrative of an “apolitical” tour about the life of Radovan Karadžić, a man charged by the Hague Tribunal for genocide. The guide includes a stop by the pancake shop that makes sweet treats in memory of the Butcher of Bosnia.
The various instances of contested memory provide a new lens for Brazil’s struggles with memory in city space and public discourse. With Dancing Bears in mind, readers can understand the current polarized views on the Brazilian military dictatorship through a more international and comparative perspective.
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