The Curious Meeting of the Unofficial Postwoman

"I was thought of as a 'dissident', somebody who had been arrested during the communist regime as a 'spy' and for 'subversion of socialism' while actually, I had only sent abroad manuscripts, papers and commentaries of our writers and 'forbidden' journalists and organized the contact between our people in exile and those who had stayed here. I was nothing more than an unofficial postwoman for them."

Jirina Siklová, Interview with querelles-net (2001)

Jiřina Šiklová, pictured in 2009 (Photo by David Port)

This week we had the extremely privileged opportunity of having a personal visit with the famous Czech dissident Jiřina Šiklová. Among a lifetime of other academic and political accomplishments, Šiklová is most famous for her 1981 arrest for illegal dissemination of samizdat literature. Essentially, Šiklová collborated with folks across the world in order to secure radical (and often times feminist) literature in communist Czechoslovakia. As we heard by first hand accounts, this operation was straight out of spy novels, complete with secret messages, coded nicknames, and clandestine rendezvous. 

The smuggling of literature was not the only time in which Šiklová contributed to radical causes. In 1968, she was removed from her faculty position at Charles University for being a contributer to the famous manifesto "Two Thousand Words" as published by Ludvík Vaculík during the midst of the Prague Spring. Following her removal from her teaching post, Šiklová worked as a custodian in a geiactric center of a hospital. During this time, she continued to publish political literature, though she could not use her own name. After her release from jail in 1981 and the Velvet Revolution in 1989, Šiklová was able to return returned back to her work as a professor. In 1991, she also founded the Gender Studies Centre (the place in which we are participating in lectures) and, in time, built it up to become the largest feminist library in the Czech Republic.

Our classroom for our two weeks in Prague.

Books on books on books. All feminist reads. All amazing.

Our visit with Šiklová occurred in her personal apartment, the original location of the feminist library. She showed us the book she and her fellow smugglers use to decode secret messages, and she talked of the importance of literature in a political movement. The short time spent with this woman was truly inspiring. It made me think of what I would do to contribute to a cause about which I was passionate; would I be willing to face jail and other forms of punishment in order to advance political causes? It also made me stand in awe, once again, at the power of books. In the face of all the oppression and political unrest of the world, are books our saviors?