COURAGE

connecting collections

“Double speech” (also called “Aesopian language,” “oblique discourse/language,” “ambivalent discourse” etc.) employed in the official media and other domains of cultural life, as well as the related practices of cultural consumption, namely, “reading between the lines,” represent prevailing practices of cultural opposition under political regimes who relied on severe censorship. Roughly defined, the technique implies encoding texts and demanding the public to interpret them, which eventually results in the emergence of an alternative or secondary public sphere.

This topic frequently emerges in the interviews stored at the RIRNM Documentation Centre too. However, the interview with poet Sándor Kányádi (1929–2018) is of special interest here because he nuances interpretations of “double speech” by claiming that alternative interpretations of particular works emerged even in cases when the writer did not intend to encode prohibited content in his/her own work.

Sándor Kányádi  was probably the most popular contemporary Hungarian poet and translator from Romania. He was a major contributor to Hungarian children’s literature, and from 1960 until his retirement in 1990 he was an editor and writer at the children’s journal Napsugár. He was actively involved in the organization of cultural life, and he was a frequent guest of schools, libraries, and culture houses in Romania, and also in regions neighboring Romania and inhabited by Hungarians.  The “homeland” and “mother tongue” represent key pillars of national identity in his work, as well as cornerstones of his professional credo. The public was as aware of his commitments, much as it was aware of the intolerance of the regime concerning issues of national minorities living in Romania. Under these conditions, the public presumed the employment of double speech, and identified encrypted messages concerning the situation of the Hungarian minority in all of Kányádi’s works. In the words of the poet: “ […] once it was attached to someone’s name that, say that we save schools, kindergartens, … than they [the public] searched something hidden all over the spaces in-between the lines” (“[…] ha egyszer valakinek a nevéhez hozzátapad, mondjuk olyasmi is, hogy iskolákat mentünk, óvodákat mentünk, … akkor minden sorában már valamilyen mögöttest keresnek.”) 

Kustić's columns (about one-fifth of the total number) were released in the form of a book in 2009, covering his writings in Glas Koncila over nearly forty years from the 1960s to the beginning of this century. Kustić dealt with various topics in addition to religion and theology, and he often delved into socio-political themes. Kustić's writing and editing in Glas Koncila under constant surveillance by the Commission for Relations with Religious Communities of the Socialist Republic of Croatia.

For example, the communist authorities had banned Glas Koncila no. 21 of 22 October 1972, in which they singled out among other things Kustić's article under the headline “Seventeen Centuries of Sacred Defiance.” In this article, Kustić took the example of St. Pollio, who preferred death because he did not want to forsake Christianity before the Roman prefect Probus. Kustić pointed out in this context the following: "St. Pollio claimed in particular that there are just laws that Christians are obliged to obey, but that the same authority could issues decrees that are not righteous, laws that a believer cannot accept" (Kustić 1972: 1). The communist authorities suggested, although he did not write it literally, that with these allusions Kustić had, in fact, "invited citizens to disobey and disrespect of the Constitution and laws of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and Socialist Republic of Croatia" (Mikić 2016: 445).

The founder and member of one of the most well-known Romanian rock bands, Phoenix, Nicolae (Nicu) Covaci granted a video-recorded interview to the researchers of the Centre of Oral History at the CNSAS (Romanian acronym for the National Council for the Study of the Securitate Archives) on 5 May 2009. The interview was recorded after Covaci read the personal file about him created by the former Romanian secret police, the Securitate, and expressed his discontent regarding its content, which covered only parts of the artistic life of the band. The interview follows a semi-structured format and falls into the category of life-story interviews. Nicu Covaci spoke about his early life in Timișoara, his educational background, his family and friends, how he became interested in music, and the beginnings of his band Sfinții (The Saints), later renamed Phoenix. Special attention was given to his relations with the communist authorities, especially the Securitate and the communist Militia, given his public profile and non-conformist stance as the leader of Phoenix. Consequently, Nicu Covaci spoke about how surveillance by the Securitate and Militia intensified as the band gained popularity among young people and how he and other members of Phoenix felt their presence during concerts, and he underlined the fact that authorities feared that their concerts might trigger young people’s revolt against the communist regime. Regarding this last aspect, he spoke about the influence Phoenix had on Romanian teenagers and how they filled the concert halls and stadiums where the band played. Moreover, Nicu Covaci described how Phoenix concerts were used by the same young Romanians to carve out a space for personal freedom and self-expression through nonconformist dressing style and behaviour, and especially through singing lyrics that contained hidden messages against the communist regime and its restrictive policies regarding the consumption of Western music. Censorship was another subject of the interview and the leader of Phoenix remembered their complicated relations with it. Sometimes they managed to trick the censors by coating the anti-regime messages of their lyrics in figures of speech, but in other instances, some of Phoenix’s songs could not be included on their albums. The non-conformist stances of Nicu Covaci also brought him into direct conflict with the authorities, as he refused publicly to became a member of the Romanian Communist Party and play an obedient role in relation to the communist authorities. The frequent harassment he was subjected to by the Militia and the Securitate influenced his decision to emigrate in 1976. After the earthquake of 4 March 1977, Nicu Covaci returned to Romania to participate in a fundraising concert for the numerous victims of the natural disaster that had devastated the southern part of the country. In fact, he took advantage of his return home to help the other members of the Phoenix to flee the country. In his interview, Covaci recounts in great details the movie-like story of how he helped the rest of the Phoenix band to get out of the country illegally, hidden in huge loudspeakers.