45 Archival identity.
I return to Carmen Bugan’s words and try to reconcile her sudden shifts between temporal realms. There is the youth in Ceausescu’s Romania, which ends in 1989 with her family’s escape; there is the post-1989 period of living in the US and going to Oxford for graduate school and much of her available writing comes from this period. But there is also 2010, the year when Bugan began trying to reconcile her memories with the documents collected in the secret police (Securitate) surveillance files. The discovery of this “archival identity” serves as a counterpoint and ontological foil in much of her work.
Bugan requested access to her family’s Securitate files while working on the memoir. “Time stops in the archives, a single moment is preserved as a sheet of paper,” Bugan writes, comparing the Securitate files to “a museum where one can see what people were reading and dreaming about in the communist Romania of the 1980’s.” Dread and fear are palpable, amorphous, present as a sort of fact that makes paranoia natural. Romanians were watched constantly. Over 2,000 papers exist devoted to monitoring her family. In the Securitate files, Bugan encounters her “archival identity” amid thousands of transcripts of surveilled conversations. She is surprised by what is lost in transcription, or how the voices of Securitate enter the dialogue. For example, the transcripts have her addressing her parents with the informal tu, which she didn’t. In the archive, Bugan’s language becomes a mixture of “our and theirs.” She writes to rescue her family’s words “from the files.”
Language matters because every genocide depends on it. We are made by language, socialized by language, and refused entry at a border in technical language constructed to rationalize this exclusion. Language matters because Bugan’s father was arrested and convicted on the basis of language, and for his use of language.
Ion Bugan’s archival identity mystifies his daughter.
According to his Securitate file, Ion Bugan was not a poet but a propagandist, a man “condemned for propaganda against the socialist regime” for typing fliers and protesting alone against Ceausescu on March 10, 1983. The official surveillance order claims: “This surveillance is necessary even more because the objective changes his residence and place of work often, and declares openly that he is not afraid of the Securitate, which, he insists, cannot harm him.”