LIZOANCA LA 11 ANI. COPILĂRIE DEVASTATĂ, SEXUALITATE ŞI ABUZ
LIZOANCA LA 11 ANI [LIZOANCA AT THE AGE OF 11].DEVASTATED CHILDHOOD, SEXUALITY, ABUSE

Summary/Abstract: My study consists in an interdisciplinary analysis of one of the most challenging Romanian proses that has seen the light of print in the last decades: Doina Ruști' novel entitled Lizoancala 11 ani/ Lizoanca at the age of 11(2003, 2017, 2023). This contemporary narrativehas as its starting point a shocking news story (”an 11-year-old prostitute filled an entire village with syphilis”), which is transformed by the novelist into an ethno-revelator of a perfectly justified leniency– since in this provocative text, one can identify various references to ankylosed social mechanisms, tarnished pre-conceptions or mutilating customs, such as marriages between children, the sale of babies or their use as a source of income by violent alcoholics in rural Romanian communities, repeated domestic and social violence, child or adolescent mothers, etc. Still, despite of all these, the novel is not configured as an objective account of today's sordid Romanian realities.At a deep analytical level, Lizoanca… is articulated around a complex narrative of childhood and family trauma, whose reading could serve as a pretext for a complex interdisciplinary investigation – more than necessary in the Romanian space –of post-traumatic memory, resilience and the (imp)possible healing of an existential trauma, especially when it is combined with a trauma of loss or attachment (cf. Franz Ruppert's taxonomy). By means of such impactful fiction, the authentic public debate about disturbing collective flaws or shocking and otherwise hard-to-recognize deviations can finally begin.

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