Myths have played a crucial role throughout human history in
making sense of difficult natural concepts such as why it
rains and why a landscape changes. By personifying phenomena
or abstract concepts, myths provide a narrative framework that
can make these concepts more accessible and relatable to human
understanding. Myths are cultural common places that are
perceived as natural in a given culture, but in fact were
naturalized and their historical, political or literary
origins forgotten or disguised.
Roland Barthes mentions that myths are a type of speech, as
myths function as a system of communication that generates
meaning. Myths are simple stories that through the use of
metaphors cut to the core of what it means to be human. While
new myths emerge from the most daily habits of contemporary
life, ancient ones are continuously reinterpreted and
contextualized within the present. Myths allow us to imagine
another present, past and future. Myths create bridges from
the here and now to the there and then.
As any story, myths need a context to become alive. Every
piece of land has its own rules, but what happens when they go
out of the literature margins and become a political tool?
Myths are both embedded in our everyday rituals, our language
and our visual culture. When these become the result of
historical political structures, is it still possible to
reimagine another time free from such frameworks?
Mircea Eliade writes that a traditional society needs myths to
live and to have a sense of belonging, meaning and security.
The myth is regarded as a sacred story and hence a "true
history".
Myths become a “role model” to follow as an “absolute truth”,
in which we believe, when we detach from our personal values
to act and follow such a “role model”. In this way, myths
become a form of excellent cognitive thinking performed in the
form of rituals.
I grew up in Moldova. Moldova has been colonized many times by
the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, and
the Soviet Union. Thus we still carry the “noise” and traces
from such histories and different colonizers in the form of
food, rituals, celebrations, street names, and even speech. In
general terms, noise is considered unwanted or loud sounds,
but in the context of colonization, I’m referring to noise as
a symbol of the cultural and ecological pollution of a
territory.
In the following lines, I’ll try to find answers to these
questions by returning home. Returning to the last era of
colonization, which effects I still hear today. I didn’t grow
up directly in the Soviet Union. I experienced the effects of
it through the subjective perspectives of my family and in the
patterns that Moldova still carries. The story I bring to you
is a subjective one, as I refer to the political ideology as a
myth. One that has become a role model for more than a decade
and has changed the collective identity and memory because of
its dominance.
Let’s begin with the invasion. In 1940 geo-political and
geo-strategic interests from the Soviet Union in the land of
Bessarabia
became more intense. In order to hide their geo-strategic
interests of occupying the territory, a more believable
narrative was needed. According to their narrative, Moldova
was a separate nation with no link to Romania.
Instead Moldova had a closer historical identity and culture
with the Russian, Ukrainian and other Soviet people’s history.
So, the “becoming” of the Moldovan nation went through an
aggressive intervention at many levels. From a political
level, the colonization meant canceling a democratic
institution and the instauration of a new ideology.
As the main intention was to build a strong military and
economic force, the soviet ideology meant a transformation and
redirection of a whole society. From a societal level, it
meant an instauration of a new set of beliefs that would
facilitate the new ideology.
The way of redirecting a whole society was through political
myths. Ionuț Isac writes about political myths and define them
as a subjective belief that provides a common foundational
belief system of one’s origins, identities and goals on both
an individual and collective national level: “Political myth
can be said to fix its 'referent' at a confluence of objective
and subjective, reality and fiction, which makes it no
"weaker" than an elaborate social theory or ideology, but even
more powerful than them, when it comes to impressing and
moving human communities and collectivities.”
Political myths are not directly rooted in present reality,
but instead they construct a future reality to make people act
differently in a present, as if the constructed future already
exists.