Archeology of female cannibalism: Slavenka Drakulić's novel Divine Hunger

Along with other texts like Samuel Beckett's Dante and the Lobster or Tania Blixen's Babette's Feast and films like Marco Ferreri's La grande bouffe or Peter Greenaway's The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover, Slavenka Drakulić's Croatian novel Divine Hunger (Božanska glad, 1995) is a paradigm of how a somatic discourse can unfold on various levels, differing in semantic reach.The theme of “female cannibalism”, developed on the denotative level of a transgressive “amour-fou”-tale and perverting the signs for love and death, is revealed as a code for several subtexts or connotative readings:–for a reading, centring on the concepts of gender and postcolonial history;–for a philosophical and psychological subtext, concerning concepts of identity, dependency and incorporation of the Other (master-slave-relation); and last but not least–for a political subtext, based on the concepts of power, nation, aggression and annexation.