Karaoke Culture

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD WOMEN

As an emotional phenomenon, patriotism belongs to the psychopathology of human behavior. Its perversity is shared by only one other phenomenon, namely love of God, because paraphilia, among other things, is defined as “love for a non-human object.” In this case the word love implies the impulsive and obsessive sexual excitement that a given non-human object stimulates in the paraphiliac. Many psychiatrists spent years challenging the negative connotations of the word paraphilia, and so it is that nowadays, the general consensus appears to be that paraphilia should not be treated as a mental disorder unless it causes direct harm to the individual or those around them.

Love for one’s homeland is an emotion an individual feels for a “non-human” object. Until recently at least, love for non-human objects was classified as a mental disorder.

This raises a few questions: How is it that no other psychopathological activity has succeeded in establishing itself as socially normal? How is that no other form of mental disorder has been legalized and institutionalized? How is it that no other disorder wields such enormous social power, or can boast such a long and rich history? How did such a turn of events come about? How did the semantic transition occur? How did something that is fundamentally abnormal somehow morph not only into something that is normal, but into something that is actually desirable? It’s simple. We just put a little effort toward humanizing the non-human object and our love becomes normal and understandable. This is why, among other reasons, believers swallow the host, a floury substitute for Jesus’s abstract body, and drink red wine, a liquid stand-in for Jesus’s abstract blood. Given to us to sniff, nibble, and lick, God’s mysterious spirit will come one step closer.

Right there we have the one and only reason the abstract homeland is most often portrayed as a mother in popular iconography. Hence the multitude of paintings in which the homeland-as-mother suckles her many children at her voluptuous bosom. Hence the gigantic sculptures scattered everywhere that represent the homeland-as-Motherland. In every former Soviet capital, there was at least one gigantic mother: Mother Russia, Mother Armenia, Mother Georgia, and so forth. While the homeland is represented by the figure of the collective mother, the state is most frequently represented by the figure of the Father. The whole thing inevitably ends in a symbolic sex scene: in the tangled embrace of Mother and Father.

I underwent a patriotic initiation when I started primary school. The initiation uniform was a short navy-blue skirt, a white blouse, a little navy-blue Tito-style cap with a red star on the front, and a red Pioneer scarf that I wore around my neck. Believing every word, I repeated the sacred text of the Pioneer’s pledge (Today, as I become a Pioneer, I give my Pioneer’s word of honor that I will work and study hard, and be a good comrade; that I will love my homeland the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, that I will guard its achievements, spread brotherhood and unity. .). The Pioneer’s greeting with which the oath concluded—With Tito for the homeland! Onwards! — was the socialist replacement for the sacred Amen! The truth is that children make the greatest patriots, most devout believers, most diligent conservationists, and most loyal consumers. State ideologues, politicians, priests, and the canny manufacturers of children’s products know this only too well. At the occasional school function, I recited a whole repertoire of patriotic verses, although I don’t remember ever writing a single one down. The phrases promising that I will guard the achievements of my homeland and brotherhood and unity like the apple of my eye have remained forever engraved in my memory. The Yugoslav anthem “Hey, Slavs” makes my skin tingle. I learned the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets; I knew Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, Macedonian, and Montenegrin songs; and I also knew a handful of ethnic jokes about representatives of the Yugoslav nations and nationalities. I learned geography, developed a good ear for all Yugoslav languages and dialects, and made my own the conviction that fascists are bad guys and anti-fascists good guys.

The above could be taken as the abridged contents of my first homeland package. Nevertheless, as a child I still had mixed feelings about my homeland, because my mother had a different homeland to me. My first encounter with her homeland, and another language — I was seven at the time — raised the confusing possibility that there were lots of homelands, and that homelands could also be replaced. My mother had two: the one she was born and grew up in, and the other, which she chose out of love. Out of love for this homeland? No — out of love for my father. Truth be told, a child — the future me — was also on the way.

Yugoslavia helped constitute my Yugoslav identity. Its disintegration, the war, and my new Croatian identity, not to mention the bureaucratic ritual of changing passports — the old Yugoslav one for a new Croatian one — destroyed every shred of belief in the seriousness or genuineness of identities that are tied to homelands. The phrase from the Pioneer’s pledge about guarding brotherhood and unity like the apple of my eye was suddenly turned on its head, becoming a snake devouring its own tail, a hook on which many necks hung, a silver bullet that ripped apart the “vampiric” heart of federal Yugoslavia. Former brothers rushed to gouge each other’s eyes out. Patriotism suddenly appeared as a divine promise; one merely needed to make a choice — and the majority chose correctly. Everyone became patriots. For some, the less agile, patriotism simply meant a guarantee they could stay where they were; for the more agile, it brought pennies from heaven. The homeland was a goldmine — and those who understood the metaphor literally rolled in it. On the back of a verse written to the glory of the homeland, people became ambassadors overnight; on the back of public declarations about the glory of the homeland, others became government ministers. Denouncing a neighbor who didn’t love the homeland could mean an unforeseen extension of one’s apartment — into the neighbor’s of course. Patriotic commitment brought hotels, companies, ministerial chairs, and directorships to the committed. Patriotism was even a currency: entire factories could be bought with a heart-rending patriotic word. It was enough to place one’s hand on one’s heart, turn on the tears, sing the anthem, curse the enemy, and there you go, people became political power-brokers: one a TV bigwig, another a hospital boss, one the ambassador to Malaysia, another to Washington. Overnight, frogs turned into princes. People understood that it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and made their play to woo the homeland. The deposit was peanuts, the profit enormous. Thanks to the magic power of patriotism, people who hadn’t even been to university became university professors, public opinion-makers who held forth on anything and everything, local stars, desirable lovers, owners of villas with swimming pools. Patriotism was hard to resist and had the same effect as Viagra. Patriotism was like a magic shirt, the kind that in Russian fairytales protects the hero against every evil, and helps him vanquish the serpent and win the princess, the kingdom, and the crown. The other truth is that in the race for patriotic gold, in the race to defend the honor of the homeland, some lost their lives. Surviving defenders of the homeland’s honor were generously compensated in their place.

My third initiatory homeland package is almost empty; there’s just a passport and a tax number. My new homeland doesn’t want my love, and neither does it promise to love me. We don’t have any mutual illusions in matters of the heart. I’ve heard it said that new Dutch citizens attend a low-key ceremony, during which they are presented with a Delft-style china potato, as well as a passport. I got a passport, but not a potato. In any case, unlike for the first two, I am bound to my new country by choice. Half-hearted or unequivocal, confused or clear-headed, good or bad, hasty or considered, it doesn’t matter, the choice was mine. Sometimes, when coming in to land at the airport, I look out at the surface of my new homeland, so skinny and pressed up against the sea. And I feel a sympathy I can’t quite articulate. In these moments, in my imagination, I put my finger in the hole of a dike to save it from imaginary floods.

In the forests of the Amazon there are little birds called “architects.” During the mating season, the males, the “architects,” build nests of various shapes with incredible inventiveness, decorating them with forest berries, little feathers, and leaves. Every nest is a miniature architectural masterpiece. Then a female appears, and she carefully inspects each nest before finally settling on a single one. The chosen “architect” wins the right to mate — in another words, to continue the species. In an ideal world, it would be the same with homelands. We should be able to take a quick look at each, check it out, and give it a grade, and then, if we must, choose the best — the best being the one which secures the future of our descendants.

Homelands should promote themselves like tourist destinations, something which many countries actually do. Croats themselves have declared Croatia paradise on earth, and a little country for a big holiday. Tourist agencies, of course, lie. You pay for a hotel with five stars, and you get a wonky bed, a shower that doesn’t work, and a pool that leaves you with a fungal infection as a memento. Many states are cunning; they know that free choice could be damaging, so they come up with laws, visas, passports, an entire system of complications, which prevent open inspection and free choice. In this way, many states turn their citizens into hostages, and so the majority of us — citizens — mate in the nest in which we’re caught. What’s more, this nest is where we find our own greatness, particularity, identity, strength, and glorious history: Hey, it’s the same nest where our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents mated! We derive perverse satisfaction from the thought that our children will also mate in this same nest. We’ll warble away, inventing legends about how our nest is the most beautiful on the planet. We’ll force ourselves and those around us to love our nest. We’ll declare our neighbors’ nests filthy and hostile. We’ll decorate our nest with crests and flags, surround it with wire, see our love for it blossom, force children to love it — we’re ready to defend it to the death.

Asked what communism is, a child replied: “I don’t have communism because I drink my milk regularly.” Asked how I feel about patriotism, as a woman I could cite Virginia Woolf and her famous line: “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman my country is the whole world.”[1] However, as the gossip rags have it, Angelina Jolie has that quote tattooed on her body. As a writer, I unfortunately can’t quote private tattoos. So, all things told — how do I feel about patriotism? I don’t have it: I drink my milk regularly.

February 2010

[1]Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas.

OLD MEN AND THEIR GRANDCHILDREN

One hundred and one old men

Over the weekend of July 19th and 20th, 2008, the town of Key West in Florida played host to 141 Ernest Hemingways. Hemingways from all over America gathered in Key West in a competition for the greatest degree of physical resemblance to the famous writer. This year the winner was Tom Grizzard, in what is said to have been a very stiff competition. The photograph that went round the world shows a collection of merry granddads, looking like Father Christmases who have escaped from their winter duties — in other words, like Ernest Hemingway. The old men, who meet every year in Key West on Hemingway’s birthday, also took part in fishing and short story writing competitions.

Another old man. .

The following day, newspapers in Croatia carried a photograph of an old man who has no connection at all with the 141 old men from the previous article. In Croatia on July 21st, 2008, Dinko akić died, at the age of eighty-six. Who was Dinko akić? akić was the commandant of the Ustasha concentration camp of Jasenovac, where Jews, Serbs, Gyspies, and communist-oriented Croats were efficiently executed. After the war he managed to escape to Argentina, and it was not until 1999 that the Argentinian authorities handed him over to Croatia, where he was sentenced to twenty years in prison. At that “historic” moment, many Croats saw the sentence of Dinko akić as an injustice — for them that same Independent State of Croatia (in which Dinko akić had killed Jews, Gypsies, Serbs, and unsuitable Croats) was “the foundation of our present Croatian homeland,” as the local priest, Vjekoslav Lasić, put it on the occasion of akić’s death. The priest was in fact merely expounding a thesis put forward by Franjo Tuđman, the first President of Croatia (since Ante Pavelić), and the “father of the Croatian nation.” “That is why every decent Croat is proud of the name of Dinko akić,” announced the priest Vjekoslav Lasić, adding that he was “proud that he had seen akić on his bier dressed in an Ustasha uniform.” The funeral of old Dinko akić at Mirogoj cemetery in Zagreb on July 24th, 2008 was attended by some three hundred people. Even aged criminals have friends. Three hundred people is not a bad number.

And yet another old man. .

On the day of Dinko akić’s funeral, another old man rose from the grave in Croatia. Zvonko Bušić Tajko—the Croatian Mandela, or the most renowned Croatian émigré (as some Croatian newspaper headlines put it) — landed at Zagreb airport on July 24th, to an enthusiastic reception by a crowd of some five hundred people. Bušić was returning to Croatia metaphorically from the grave, but in fact out of American prisons where he had spent thirty-two years. Way back in the 1970s, with his American wife, Julienne Eden Bušić, and a few friends, he had hijacked an American airplane on its way to New York, because “he wanted to draw the attention of the world to the unjust position of Croatia in the former Yugoslavia.” This gesture of “political activism” (as the Croatian papers defined Bušić’s terrorist act) ended ingloriously — Bušić’s explosive device led to one American policeman being killed and another losing an eye, and Bušić and his wife ended up in prison. Julienne was released on the eve of Croatian independence; she got a job in the Croatian Embassy in Washington, and later in Croatia, in Franjo Tuđman’s personal security service. The Croatian army built a villa on the Adriatic coast, so that she would be able to dedicate herself fully to writing her autobiographical novel Lovers & Madmen and to her political activities, lobbying for her husband’s release from prison. Among those gathered at Zagreb airport were Croatian politicians, patriots, pop singers (Marko Perković Thompson, for example), priests, children sitting on their fathers’ shoulders and holding their welcome banners up to the cameras, young people shouting Ustasha slogans (“For the homeland ever ready!”) and singing Ustasha songs. “The Croatian Mandela” made a patriotic speech and quoted a verse from Gundulić’s poem Osman, which every Croatian primary school pupil knows by heart:

The wheel of fate spins about

Round and about ceaselessly:

He who was high is cast down

And who was below is now

on high.

Zvonko Bušić added that, thanks to the good Lord and free Croatia (“At last I am in my free homeland!”), he had climbed high, while, according to the logic of the wheel of fortune, his enemies had fallen. The only person to comment briefly the following day on Bušić’s resurrection was the Croatian President Stipe Mesić (his motive could have been patriotic, but the method he applied was the method of terrorism). Zvonko and Julienne Bušić told the newspapers that they wanted a little peace, although Bušić’s lively speech, his evident excitement at finally finding himself “among his own people,” and the five-hundred strong crowd seem to indicate the opposite.

Doctor Velbing and Mr. Hide

On the July 21st, 2008, the day Dinko akić died, all the world’s newspapers carried a photograph of an old man with a long white beard and white hair, coquettishly gathered on the crown of his head like a kind of diminutive Samurai pigtail. This old man had no connection whatever with the Hemingways of Key West, nor with the late Dinko akić, nor with Zvonko Bušić, who was to land at Zagreb airport three days later. This old man looked as though he had fallen out of the file of some Hollywood agent: like a third-rate actor who specialized in playing Merlin and Gandalf in film fairytales. The old man was arrested in Belgrade by the Serbian police just as he was getting into a number 73 bus. It turned out that the old man was called Dragan Dabić, or rather Dragan David Dabić (3D), or rather — Radovan Karadžić. From the moment of the arrest of Radovan Karadžić, the Balkan butcher and European Osama Bin Laden, the media were flooded with numerous farcical details: Karadžić’s unsuccessful attempts to get involved in football and his derisive nickname “Phantom”; his statement that Yasser Arafat was first an international terrorist, then twenty years later he was awarded the Nobel Prize (an echo of Tuđman’s claim that someone who knew about the Nobel Prize had once flattered him: “If you were not a Croat, General, you would certainly have received the Nobel Prize”); Karadžić’s frenetic 1968 student speech from the roof of the university; his activities as a police informer; his financial fraud and embezzlement; his collection of children’s verse, There Are Miracles, There Are No Miracles; his alleged mistress who also has two names; his online shop where you can buy a little “velbing” (from well-being) or a “cross-shaped composition of the smallest velbing for your personal protection to be worn on the chest” or a large “velbing or spacious cross-shaped composition which harmonizes a whole space”; the decoration on his website, a Jewish three-branched (!) menorah, which is in fact the Orthodox three-fingered blessing in disguise; his cheap aphorisms, which seem to have been copied from Paulo Coelho (“Man is the most perfect instrument!”). Commentaries circulated on the Internet and in private emails. They included mention of the film The Hunting Party, set in the forests of Bosnia, through which Richard Gere hunts the notorious Bogdanovich, played in the film by the Croatian actor Ljubomir Kerekeš. . And then a friend of the author of these lines dug up a You Tube video clip from Barbarella in which Dr. Durand Durand (3D!) sets his Excessive machine in motion and performs his Sonata for the Executioner of Various Women. What possible connection can there be between Barbarella and Karadžić? None whatsoever. Apart from the fact that the Irish actor Milo O’Shea, who plays Dr. Durand Durand, is extraordinarily like Ljubomir Kerekeš, that is to say Dr. Bogdanovich, from the film The Hunting Party, in other words like Karadžić before his complete makeover.

Despite everything, this heap of trivial rubbish circulating in the media served Karadžić himself well, it transformed him from a notorious murderer into a clown and placated a potentially hostile crowd. Intrigued by the farce of his disguise, many people forgot that this same Karadžić-Bogdanovich-Dabić is sitting on a pile of anonymous human corpses, and that there is a large, silent, nameless heap of witnesses, including the women of Srebrenica, for whom this whole media circus that surrounds Karadžić is like salt on an open wound.

The truth will out. .

Pawel Pawlikowski’s Serbian Epics—the best and fullest portrait of Karadžić to date — was made as long ago as 1992. Everything in the film is so clear and explicit that this documentary on its own could serve as an indictment against Radovan Karadžić.

In the intervening years, Karadžić’s criminal file has become notoriously public, and the new details which have flooded the media since his arrest have merely confirmed what we all knew: that Karadžić is a murderer, sitting calmly on a pile of the corpses of people whom he himself killed, and the only thought buzzing in his head is — how to survive. An enormous human mechanism has been keeping Karadžić alive, the same mechanism that preserved Milošević for years: servants, like-thinkers, admirers, assistants, petty and large-scale criminals, the police, the state apparatus, politicians, murderers, fighters, patients, women, friends, priests, the church, believers, dealers, people — both sick and quite ordinary.

At this moment, many Serbs are lighting candles and praying for their man in prison in The Hague. Ordinary citizens, aging rockers (Bora Đorđević), members of the ultra-right group “Honor” (Obraz), Serbian radicals, supporters of ešelj, Nikolić, Karadžić, with children at their head — a boy and a girl — they are all marching at this moment through Belgrade, shouting slogans of support for Karadžić, threatening the Serbian government, The Hague Tribunal, the world. Many Serbs — who otherwise have no idea what to do in the face of a sudden “blow” in their household, when, for example, there’s a faulty tap in the bathroom, or if their wife ends up in hospital — suddenly display supreme organizational skills and political agility:

Karadžić has been arrested — a heavy “blow” has been struck against their “Serbdom.” Every blow against Serbdom has the effect of an adrenaline injection.

Following the false news of Karadžić’s arrest in 2001, “defensive” meetings were instantly organized in Karadžić’s native village and some other places in Montenegro.

Supporters from Montenegro and Serbia gathered, Chetnik songs rang out, priests waved censers around. Karadžić was proclaimed a “haiduk,” “poet,” “fighter,” “saint” and “symbol of Serbdom.” People fell into poetic raptures (“We will not hand Karadžić over!” “Wake up Serbian fire! Radovan is a spark in the rock. Whoever betrays the spark be damned!” “And may all belonging to the traitor be damned a thousand times!”) Those present were given masks of Karadžić’s face. The Montenegrin backwoods sent a message to the world: “We are all Radovan Karadžić”; in other words the people behind the masks brazenly admitted their complicity in genocide, both real and mental. The main slogan of the Chetnik organization “Honor” is: “Every Serb is Radovan!”—and it could be seen in recent days again in the streets of Belgrade. Is Karadžić, Radovan, really an exclusively Serbian monster? Let us not forget the fact that Karadžić easily crossed the borders between such “irreconcilably different” peoples as the Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, and Montenegrins; he spent his summer holidays in Croatia (making only a single linguistic error, the experts maintain). In the end, if for no other reason than because of Karadžić’s longevity and his ability to rise up again like a phoenix, one might ask: How many citizens of the former Yugoslavia were Radovan Karadžić!?

Children, grandchildren, mutants

The lack of a symbolic lynching of Karadžić—now that it is possible — demonstrates that the problem is deeper and harder, and that it is not after all confined to “Karadžićes”: swindlers; prophets and profiteers; doctors of the human soul; grudge-bearers who drag their personal affronts out of dusty chests and transform them into ideologies; necrophiliacs; bone-diggers; bullies; exterminators; murderers; drummers-up of collective hysteria; local “butchers” and “vampires” for whom many citizens of the former Yugoslavia have been obediently stretching out their necks for two decades now. The problem is that all these servants of fascism — like Karadžić—do not excel in the quantity of evil they produce, but in an invisible form, in the seed they leave behind them, in their children, and their grandchildren.

And those children, grandchildren, mutants, have sprung up, healthy and handsome, in the course of these last twenty years. These are the children with Chetnik caps on their heads, who demonstrate throughout Serbia against Karadžić’s arrest. Or Marija efarović whose three-fingered sign of the cross spread throughout Europe, although she was unable to explain its purpose (“In the name of mother, father, and you know. .” she tried irritably to explain to a Dutch woman journalist), and who, when she won the Eurovision Song Contest, did so as she put it herself, “for Serbia”. These are the enthusiastic supporters of the “granddads,” of the Serbian radical Tomislav Nikolić (the author of the statement, “God created the world in six days, and it took me two to send it reeling.”); these are the bullies who beat up Gypsies and homosexuals in the streets of Belgrade; the drunken, ecstatic crowd at concerts by Ceca Ražnjatović-Arkan. These young mutants are from Bosnia; they go on the rampage during football championships and wrap themselves in Croatian, Serbian, and Turkish flags as if in a protective placenta. They are secondary-school children from Makarska who recently had themselves photographed for their school almanac with a swastika in the background, “for fun” (“It’s not a swastika but an Indian symbol of love and peace”, a pupil explained meekly) and strutted about wearing T-shirts bearing the slogan Über alles (“We meant that we had matriculated, it was over, we were above all others”, explained another even more meekly). These are the children who appear at concerts by Marko Perković Thompson in Ustasha uniforms and raise their right hands to the level of their noses, while their granddads — Croatian academicians, writers, journalists, doctors, generals, philosophers, and publicists — write open letters of support for Thompson, the illiterate, third-rate turbo-folk singer, defending his right to the expression of uncensored Ustasha ideas in our free Croatian homeland. They are the young members of obscure pro-fascist parties in Serbia; children with tattoos, whose bodies display Pavelić’s face; customers in shops freely selling fascist souvenirs; the “brave” attackers of tourists, foreigners, homosexuals, and Gypsies. These are children who wear crosses round their necks, who regularly attend Catholic and Orthodox churches and Muslim mosques, who hate each other, or some third party, and all join in hating Gypsies, Jews, Blacks, and homosexuals. These are young contributors to chat-sites who, I presume, know of their brothers: the young Hungarian fascists (Magyar garda), who rose up to defend “Magyar values and culture”; the young Bulgarian fascists of Bogdan Rassata, who “defend Bulgarian values and culture” and for ideological reasons beat up Turks and Gypsies; the brutal Russian children, who beat to death anyone whose skin is darker than Putin’s; the eco-fascists of the German radical right. . They are members of “Honor” and similar ultra-rightwing groups who lure children with the cheap glue of love of God and the homeland, Serbian Serbia, gallant armed forces, the crucified fatherland, and the suffering nation (We need new heroes, Obilićes, and new Maids of Kosovo!). These children are young Croats, Serbs, Montenegrins, and Bosnians who use both open and closed web forums to sow and graft their hatred and proclaim that the war is not yet over. . And they are not alone (there are their grandparents, their parents, their families, Serbdom, Croatdom), nor are they original: fascism thrives among servants and in serving. The local press, local authorities, and local politicians do not pay attention to the “children,” “cases,” “hooligans,” “troublemakers,” “unpleasant, but understandable incidents” in what is otherwise the successful daily life of transition.

Meanwhile Radovan Karadžić can stroll peacefully in his Hugo Boss suits into the Hague courtroom. His work is done.

A procession of collective shame

The job of the Hague judges is to prove individual guilt in the war crimes committed on the territory of the former Yugoslavia, and they, the judges, will be the first, I presume, not to agree with the emotional and hazy thesis of collective guilt. It seems, however, that the mere trial of war criminals does not have the power to bring about a real catharsis or to set in motion real social changes. For without the admission of collective responsibility there can be no successful de-Nazification. For many citizens of the former Yugoslavia, regardless of the actual scale of their responsibility and guilt in the recent war — which, we emphasize, is not equal or the same — those who are to blame for everything are always the others: for the Croats it is the Serbs, for the Serbs the Muslims, the Kosovo Albanians, the Croats, the whole world. . All of them blame the communists, Tito, and the Partisans for everything. And then the “Americans,” the “Russians,” “Jews,” “Europe,” “the world,” unfavorable stars, destiny. All, without distinction, insist on interpreting the events — which they themselves initiated, which they failed to prevent, or in which they themselves took part — as natural catastrophes in which they are exclusively the victims. In that sense Karadžić’s schizophrenic fragmentation — into a gusle-player, a psychiatrist, would-be footballer, ecologist, police informer, Chetnik, murderer, politician, would-be Nobel Prizewinner, thief, poet, tutti-frutti guru, Orthodox mystic, into Radovan Karadžić and Dragan David Dabić—is a typical local sickness, the result of a general social lie, a profound moral and mental disturbance, a madness which their milieu continues persistently to treat as though it were normal.

There is a hope that, with the arrest of Karadžić, by contrast with the messages of the young mutants, the war will finally end. There is a childish hope that we will one day come across the following little newspaper announcement: On the 21st of July 2018—the day of the arrest of the criminal Radovan Karadžić, sentenced to a hundred years in prison for genocide in Bosnia, in the Montenegrin town of Meljina, which is known for its traditional festival of gusle-playing — there took place a “procession of collective shame,” consisting of 141 old men. The old men had false beards and false white hair gathered on the crowns of their heads in pigtails, and they exposed themselves voluntarily to being spat at by the crowd, which this year had gathered in large numbers in order to participate in the ritual of repentance. In this ritual “the old men” (every year there are new volunteers — everyone has the right to participate in the ritual only once, so that all interested volunteers can have their turn) express their awareness of the crimes committed, of the fact that these crimes were committed in their name, with their full knowledge or even their participation, they confess their responsibility for their crimes and apologize wholeheartedly to their victims.

July 2008

A QUESTION OF PERSPECTIVE

1. Without Anesthesia

I met Ryszard Kapuściński in Berlin in 1994; he was there on the same scholarship as me. Kapuściński asked me why I had left Croatia, and to avoid telling my story, I spluttered out. .

“Do you remember the Andrzej Wajda film Without Anesthesia? The one about the journalist, you know, foreign newspapers stop arriving at his office, and then one thing leads to another, and he loses his job, his wife, everything. .?”

The thing was, I could only vaguely remember the film, and I already regretted such a clumsily chosen example.

“I remember,” said Kapuściński. “I was the journalist.”

2. The Professor Thumbs His Ears

It’s an icy January in Amsterdam, unusual for the wet Dutch winters. In the warmth of my writing room, I perform my morning ritual — flicking through the online newspapers, Croatian ones among them. My eye lingers on a particular photograph: an old man with a naughty-little-boy expression on his face, looking straight at the reader, and “thumbing his ears.” To thumb your nose at someone, you put your thumb on the tip of your nose and wiggle your fingers. Thumbing your ears is the same, but you use both hands; thumbs in your ears, you wiggle your fingers like a monkey. Both gestures are infantile and mocking, on a par with poking your tongue out at someone. Both went out of fashion years ago.

I know the smile. The smile signals that the smiler is conscious of having “misbehaved” (maybe he’s lied, stolen, cheated, hit someone, tripped someone up, or even “broken wind” in someone’s presence), but he still tries to mollify the victim. The smiler doesn’t consider his smile an apology, but rather a victory. Hence the cheeky shine in his eyes. It’s not the smile of the culpable, but of the self-assured master of the situation; it’s the smile of the putative servant who is in fact served by others. It’s the smile of the swindler giving you the finger, his hands buried in his pockets.

Many of the men in my former homeland smirk like this. It’s the way the men of the Serbian parliament sniggered at the beginning of the war (I’m sure there’s a video somewhere). Obviously bored, one threw a paper ball at another’s head, and suddenly it was laughs all around. The TV cameras started rolling, the ball was thrown on, and for a brief moment the parliamentary session resembled a rowdy schoolroom, full of little boys. But outside those walls, because of those same little boys, little boys grown fat, old, and gray, a war merrily raged.

The interview with the old man, a university professor, was the five-minute media crown placed on his head by the Croatian weekly Globus. From the interview we learn that the professor is a Pole by birth; that he came to Zagreb with his family in 1931; that his mother was Polish and was forced to convert to the Orthodox church; that he was baptized in an evangelical church in Zagreb (his mother thus making amends); that he had come to love Croatia; that he’d joined the Partisans, capturing two Germans; and that during the war he had a Jewish girlfriend (which wasn’t easy, he says), for whom he acquired papers and helped out of Zagreb to the safety of the Adriatic coast. Last but not least, the respected professor of Russian literature signals his disdain for “demanding” literature (let the super demanding readers read Krleža for the hundredth time, let them read the pick of the foreign writers), explaining that he’d rather read local Croatian “neighborhood” literature, that intended for the mainstream reader, among whom the professor counts himself (we, mainstream readers).

What do these few details tell the hypothetical foreign reader? Nothing in particular. To be fair, the more sensitive foreign reader might find the old professor’s bragging about having saved his Jewish girlfriend a little suspect. After all, it’s what would be expected of any decent person, particularly given the professor’s admission that he was in a position to obtain the necessary documents. It might also occur to our hypothetical foreign reader that the professor was actually signalling to the Croatian public that he himself isn’t a Jew, something the politically correct foreigner, unlike the average Croat, might also think a little tasteless. But what do these few details tell any Croatian reader of middle age or older? A lot.

Self-positioning is one of the most vaunted skills in both Croatian media practice and Croatian everyday life, the expression “he’s done well for himself” a kind of verbal medal bestowed on the best of the best. Politicians, journalists, writers, and other public figures seem most proficient in doing well for themselves. However, this impression of excellence is only created by virtue of them being public people. Other people get by the best they can.

The professor is the son of a factory owner, but the Bolsheviks destroyed the family plant, a fact that automatically elicits compassion in the average Croatian reader (Oh, c’mon: Bolsheviks, Russians, Serbs, they’re all the same communist bandits!). By mentioning his baptism, the professor tips his hat to the masses of Croatian Catholics. And as a Partisan in the Second World War, his capture (just capture, not execution!) of two Germans — a feat he puts down to his fluency in German (a little show of erudition!) — positions the professor as a goodly and Godly humanitarian — among the Partisans.

Why does the professor reveal these details so publicly? The timing is completely understandable — he recently published his autobiography. But the reason? Today, these kinds of details are acceptable. Fifteen years ago they weren’t. Every public mention of Partisans and anti-fascism provoked an outcry, until a newer government, embodied by the recently-retired Croatian president, changed the tune a little. Of course, the professor didn’t mention that he was also a member of the Yugoslav Community Party, as this might still enrage Croatian readers, many of whom were members of the Communist Party themselves, but who, in accord with the times, have diligently deleted this fact from their biographies. Of prime importance is that the professor is a Croatian patriot, and that Croatia is now his true homeland. The professor goes on to boast of a minor, albeit “courageous,” bit of mischief in which he was involved: At a student meeting in 1968, he put together a resolution. But he skips over the long “Yugoslav” years after the Second World War. Everybody knows that as you get older, you increasingly look back and recall the years of your youth, forgetting the more recent ones—he declares. No one would dispute that one. Old people also forget what they’ve read over the course of their lives. It’s a pity the professor didn’t at least remember his countryman, Czesław Miłosz, and his remarkable The Captive Mind, or his other countryman, Miroslav Krleža, and his equally remarkable On the Edge of Reason.

3. What bugged me?

What bugged me about the interview? And why the ill-tempered objections to an old man basking in a deserved flash of media attention? I know the person in the photograph. I understand his language and recognize the nuances and tones. I catch the scent of every word. I know the local Croatian newspeak, which can change in a split-second, depending on the occasion, and which every once in a while undergoes institutional changes. I react like a finely-tuned sensor, I know that every word is there to nuzzle one ear and inflame the other, that every sentence, even the most banal — whose absence of ambiguity the innocent reader doesn’t doubt for a second — is just a new layer of powder on its owner’s face.

Why did I take on the dreary task of “unmasking” a completely inconsequential newspaper story? The text is, in any case, untranslatable, and it’s untranslatable because it is so deeply contextual. In such a case, attempting translation is like going into battle against Hydra — the translator masochistically agrees to losing in advance.

Try to imagine a situation where a woman who has just been raped tries to give an account of her ordeal, but rather than via the usual channels (the police, the courts, the legal system) is forced to tell her story using the only channel remaining — the “broken telephone.”[1] The desperate woman whispers into the ear of one of her neighbors: “They ravished me. .” The whisper is passed from ear to ear, before the last person in the chain boldly declares: “They lavished me!” Everyone bursts out laughing. The woman tries again, and every time new words pop out the other end. Everyone’s having a rollicking time. “You’re monsters!” the distressed woman screams. “You’re bonkers!” yells the last person in the chain, and everyone again roars with laughter.

The metaphor of the “broken telephone” can be used in regard to all countries of the former Yugoslavia. Having entered every sphere of life, the language of the “broken telephone” is omnipresent: in the media, institutional life, politics, the way people think, their interpersonal relations, their everyday lives. As a result, many crimes remain un-investigated, many victims have been rendered silent, many criminals declared heroes, many thieves business people, many idiots intellectuals (and the odd intellectual an idiot), many perpetrators victims, many victims perpetrators, many crazies normal, and many normal people crazy. As we speak, Radovan Karadžić is playing “broken telephone” at the Hague Tribunal. He brushes off words as if they were pesky little thistles. Every word of the indictment that sounds like ravish, he coolly transforms into lavish.

The headline of the interview with the professor also reads like it came out the end of a “broken telephone.” It says: “Dubravka Ugrešić Wasn’t Chased Away.” But what’s my name doing there? And what’s with the verb phrase “chased away”? (My first association: to chase away pigeons. .) While the old man is thumbing his ears at me (shoo, shoo, shoo!), the headline is telling me the exact opposite, that I wasn’t chased away. What kind of nightmare is this?!

I feel as if someone has forcibly catapulted me from my current safe distance in space and time in Amsterdam, January 2010, back into another space and time, to the years 1991, 1992, 1993. .

4. Why I Leave the House without an Umbrella

I don’t know whether everyone has his or her own personal “inadequacy,” but I certainly have mine. I carry it like a birthmark. I’m not even sure that inadequacy is the right word; it’s more a question of perspective, a way of seeing. Perhaps that colleague, a fellow writer, who long ago brought my “optical deformation” to the attention of the Croatian public, was right. We’re inclined to interpret this type of internal failing as the assembly of a conspiracy of details against us; details which over the course of our lives coalesce like little magnetic puzzle pieces, forming our secret parallel biography, an illegible psychogram, an internal map which — in our minds at least — doesn’t bear any resemblance to our actual paths in life. This hidden, parallel biography consists of several ambiguous, yet inevitably similar, frustrations or fascinations — a hard-to-trace unease brought on by the same situation and same people; a glow induced by the same gesture or smile; the same small mistakes, obstinacies, and fears. . As a I child I was always afraid of stairs. Going up wasn’t a problem, but I never knew how to go down. Of course I’ve learned since then, but whenever I look down that childhood fear is always there, lurking somewhere inside me. Little niggling details, nothing too much. Why do I always take the same circuitous route to a particular point in the city? Why is it that this route and not some other remains so stubbornly stuck in my head? Why is it that when I recall certain people I consistently forget their names yet remember details: the way they bow their head, how they worriedly raise their left eyebrow, which gesture follows which particular expression? Why do I persist in going out without an umbrella when it’s perfectly obvious that it’s going to rain?

5. The ABCs of War

At the beginning of September 1991, my neighbors and I would head down to the cellar of our five-story Zagreb building as the air-raid sirens resounded above. Unlike my neighbors, I didn’t take the alarms too seriously. Today I wonder where this “lapse” came from, this arrogance that doesn’t take danger “too seriously”?[2]

At the time I firmly believed that the majority of people wouldn’t follow their caricature-like leaders, wouldn’t destroy everything they’d spent years building together, and wouldn’t cast their childrens’ futures to the wind. Maybe this belief was to blame for my “lapse.” I refused to believe what my impaired vision had witnessed over the preceding few years. And so it was that in September 1991 I refused to believe the evidence that was right in front of me. Maybe it was actually down there in the cellar, with a small human sample for company, that I should have allowed the dirty little thought to sink in: that many people were actually turned on by the war. New, sudden thrills filled the vacuity of their lives; overnight, personal frustrations found an outlet, personal losses could be made good, personal intolerances hung out to air. There, in the cellar, an older neighbor with rat-like features scurried into my “deformed” field of vision. People said he had illegally moved into the five-bedroom apartment of an old woman who died soon afterwards. The square meters of the apartment thus became his. That very first day in the cellar, he appeared wearing a red armband, a pistol buried in his back pocket. Nobody asked him about the armband or what it meant, or where he got the pistol; we listened intently to his garbled instructions. The very next day the neighbor had a deputy, complete with matching red armband and pocket pistol. The young deputy was unemployed and married to a diligent and hard-working neighbor. At some point her biological clock had started ticking, so she found the young man and bore him three children, after which he’d served and exhausted his purpose. The armband and the revolver gave the jerk his dignity back. Until then, he didn’t even know what dignity was.

Switching the volume off, I looked at my neighbors. Then in some small recess of my brain, thanks to my deformed vision, the near future flashed before me: I felt I knew who would be first to sink his teeth into the enemy’s throat, who would spend the war in front of the TV, who would rush to denounce his or her neighbor, who would tend the wounds of the inevitable injured, who would lose themselves to depression, who would rouse the rabble, and who would find their way to the money that was to be made. Maybe it was there, in the cellar, that one should have learned the ABCs of war. I, however, threw my fleeting apparitions to the wind like cancelled banknotes.

6. American Fictionary

At the end of September 1991, I hopped on a train for Amsterdam. There I obtained an American visa and headed off to the States to take up a guest lectureship. Getting the visa in Amsterdam proved fortuitous. In Zagreb the embassies, banks, and airport were closed. In New York the realization that my disintegrating country was at war hit home for the first time. For this new misstep, my “deformed vision” was again to blame: what was at that moment so far away suddenly came unbearably close, and I had trouble making out what was right in front of my nose. I was struck down by “cognitive fever,” and I exorcised my fears (completely inappropriately) by watching hours of horror films on TV in the small New York apartment where an acquaintance had let me stay. Whenever I actually did venture out of my New York “shelter,” I assuaged my fears by meeting up with my fellow countrymen. Most of us were middle-aged, some had come to stay forever, and others, like me, were just passing through. It was a powerful after-life experience: there we were on the other side of the world, as if in some nightmarish Mad Hatter’s tea party. Actually, not one of us knew for sure what we were going to do with ourselves.

American Fictionary,[3] the book that emerged in those few months, was born of my “impaired vision,” a series of columns about the American everyday written for a Dutch newspaper.

I didn’t ask myself too many questions about what a Dutch reader might make of it all. The authorial situation in which I found myself was at any rate doomed to be a fiasco from the outset. The essays were written in a nervous internal double-voice — one contradicted the other, one supplemented the other, and one bled into the other. In any case, it seems that at least for a moment my faulty vision helped me put things in their right place.

I returned to Zagreb in June 1992. My feeling of internal “inadequacy” became acute. I again saw everything in duplicate, triplicate, as a copy and in the original. Nothing fit anymore. Titles didn’t correspond to images, and the sound was out of synch too. It was no different in the surrounding reality. Familiar streets now had unfamiliar names, familiar faces no longer spoke the same language. People who had been friends until recently contorted their mouths into the strange smile of an unknown other.

At the beginning of September I returned to my regular place of work at the Institute for Literary Theory, which was part of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Zagreb. At first, nothing seemed different, but threatening cracks soon appeared in collegial relations. My colleagues seemed like extras to me, as if they were playing returnees from the front in a third-rate theatre show.

“Leave them, it’ll all pass. .” said a female colleague who had been in America at the same time as me. “You know, they’ve suffered, we haven’t.”

I agreed, although the word “suffered” rung a little hollow, like the fall of a plastic coin on a plastic surface. I chalked that hollowness of tone up to my “aural deformation.”

Over the summer I wrote a short essay entitled “Clean Croatian Air.”[4] At the time souvenir tin cans could be bought at Zagreb souvenir stands, and this became the essay’s central metaphor. The cans bore the Croatian coat of arms and the slogan: Clean Croatian Air. I made a tally of what and who in Croatia had been cleaned up by the can’s fastidious spirit — Mr. Clean, or Meister Proper. With the title “Saubere Kroatische Luft,” the essay appeared in the October 23rd edition of the German newspaper Die Zeit, and a short while later as “The Dirty Tyranny of Mr. Clean” in the English Independent on Sunday. It never occurred to me that this short essay, which I thought had about as much explosive force as a New-Year firecracker, would actually explode like a bomb in Croatian public life, or that the tin can metaphor would tighten the noose around my neck.

7. Croatian Fictionary

In front of me sits a bulging file containing a mass of Croatian newspaper cuttings from the early 1990s. The newsprint has yellowed a little, the paper become thin. In one breath, it seems this indifferent heap of newsprint has absolutely nothing to do with me; in the next, the old paper cuts like a razor. For a moment (just a moment), fresh blood runs from the wound. Then I get the feeling that I’m reading the obituaries, seeing the faces of so many who are no longer among the living. I’m amazed that others are still alive; some people are like tinned goods with no expiration dates, I think. I wonder whether I exist myself, and who’s observing whom here: they me or me them. Then, like an uncoiled spring, a detail I’d never noticed before jumps out at me. With a confidence seemingly backed by hard science, some of the stories point the finger at my ethnic background, others hysterically demand that I finally declare it myself. Then my focus switches to dates, and the dates get to me. What at the time seemed like a spontaneous eruption of journalistic vilification of my person now merges into a more consistent story. I bang my head against the paradox as if against a wall: the more consistent the story becomes, the more difficult it is to tell.

My vigilant fellow citizens quickly “cracked” the essay published in Die Zeit. The first to denounce me was a journalist employed in the ruling party’s “deratization” task force (she later spent many years as the chief editor of Croatian national television), who declared me a denouncer of the homeland. A mere two days after my media promotion to “traitor to the homeland” came an attack from the pen of a well-known Croatian writer. My fellow writer not only produced a raft of accusations and general derision aimed in my direction, but also a type of open-ended indictment, suggesting that I was an internal enemy of the young Croatian state. With varying degrees of personal creativity, my future media executors would later duly complete it.

Soon after my fellow writer’s attack, the president of the Croatian PEN association sent an angry fax from Rio de Janeiro, where the World PEN Conference was being held. The president had gone to Rio on a crusade, the aim of which was to convince the International PEN committee to nominate Dubrovnik as the venue for the following year’s conference. I can only assume that someone there pointed out that it might not be the smartest of ideas to hold the congress in a war zone, but for the audience back home the affronted president decided to translate this detail a little more dramatically. An American writer had apparently raised the question of freedom of the press in Croatia and, again apparently, had also expressed concern about the fate of five (female) “journalists.” The very same day, an article entitled “Lobbyists Lose their Voices”[5] appeared (whose author is today the editor of a prominent cultural program on Croatian television), in which five women were accused of conspiracy against Croatia, of attempting to “mine” the future Dubrovnik World PEN Congress, and of deliberately concealing Serbian war crimes, specifically, the rape of Muslim and Croatian women. The World PEN Congress was held in Dubrovnik the following year, and the name of the concerned American writer was never revealed. Why? Because the concerned American writer never existed. He or she was a product of the zealous imagination of the president of the Croatian PEN association and his assistants.

The avalanche was triggered. The “case” was crowned by an article in the influential Globus weekly, the article being attributed to “the Globus investigative team.” Five women — Slavenka Drakulić, Rada Iveković, Vesna Kesić, Jelena Lovrić, and I — were declared “the Witches of Rio.” In addition to the story, a table was published containing our dates and places of birth, our educational backgrounds, our ethnicities, our professions, our marital,[6] familial, and employment statuses, details of the real estate we owned, periods we’d spent abroad during the war, “anti-Croatian” quotes taken from our publications, and evidence (or lack thereof) of our membership in the Yugoslav Communist Party.

Although the Globus media fabrication was an incomparably stupid and amateurish piece of work (real experts would have nailed it!), it nonetheless achieved its goal.

When the media lynching had reached its most vicious height, a neighbor stopped me and asked:

“Well then, neighbor, when are you getting out?”

The “out,” I assumed, referred to when I was getting out of Croatia.

“Why should I be getting out?” I asked.

“Well, you keep writing those lies about us.”

“And you’ve read what I write?”

“Why would I? Are you saying that everyone else is lying!?”

And there was nothing you could do about it. Every call to reason led to a more violent madness. In response to the media barrage, I published an essay entitled “Goodnight Croatian Writers,”[7] in Croatian, and in Croatian newspapers. Nobody commented, but two weeks later, like in a game of “broken telephone,” the Globus investigative team sent the collective response. The confederacy of dunces poked out its tongue and thumbed its monkey ears at me.

My sensitive literary nature can’t resist exhibiting a selection of the insults (which refer both to me and the witch’s cell) proffered by Croatian journalists, writers, and critics, the literati among the literate. I recognize that any psychoanalyst could here accuse me of taking exhibitionist pleasure in the repeated — and this time voluntary — exposition of public insults. But you know what? “Victims” also have a right to narrative pleasure — particularly so if narration is their profession. All in all, in my fellow writers’ scribblings I am described as:

A woman with “deformed vision”;

A woman who has no understanding for a “people celebrating its own state and freedom of speech”;

A woman who has “neither taste nor sense of proportion”;

A woman who has opened her mouth “in the wrong manner, the wrong place, and at the wrong time”;

A woman with a “limited perspective”;

A woman writer with a “specific talent,” whose writing is “scrappy knitting”;

A “murderess of the Croatian nation who kills with her pen”;

A “broad persecuting Croatia”;

A broad who “big mouths, gossips, and denounces”;

A woman worthy of “contempt”;

A woman in need of a Croatian bonfire “to warm her heart”;

A member of “one of the organizational nuclei of international resistance to and defamation of the Croatian Homeland War”;

A member of a crew of “slightly unhappy, and at any rate frustrated women”;

A “dirty liar”;

A “Yugonostalgic”;

A “national Daltonist”;

A “salon internationalist”;

A “spleenful and spiteful surveyor of freedom”;

A “squealer offering recipes for freedom from the long-tainted kitchens of the European pseudo-left and pseudo-right”;

A woman with “mental problems”;

A woman who is “mixed-up”;

A woman who “drops her dress in a storm”;

A woman ready to “sell her homeland for a hundred German marks”;

A woman who for “a little cash, but with obviously great joy, denounces and spits on her homeland”;

A “plume of the failed communist regime”;

An “informer for the European Community”;

A “carefully chosen interlocutor of Brussels and the European Community”;

A woman of “dubious repute”;

A person “not in the least subjected to harassment”;

A “homeless intellectual”;

A “grande dame of Croatian post-communism”;

A self-immolator (who if she returns to Zagreb “needs to be immediately surrounded by a dozen fire engines, have 300 hoses aimed at her, and whose every word needs to be doused in water”);

A “furious woman”;

A “Yugo-nostalgic sicko”;

A woman who was ready for “a better psychiatric clinic”;

A member of a group of “exalted daughters of the revolution”;

A “traitor to the homeland”;

A “lobbyist who has lost her voice”;

A woman “conspiring against Croatia”;

A “feminist”;

A “feminist raping Croatia”;

An “anti-Croatian feminist”;

A member of a group of “self-centered middle-aged women who have serious problems with their own ethnic, ethical, human, intellectual and political identities”;

A “public enemy”;

A woman with a “miserable destiny”;

A woman who has “committed moral and intellectual suicide”;

A “witch”. .

Looking back, many of the accusations seem laughable. They weren’t at the time. The media recruited people for the war effort day and night, every volunteer was welcome. Ducking out to a neighborhood green grocer’s in the summer of 1992, I couldn’t take my eyes of a guy in line in front of me who was anxiously buying bananas. It was hot, and he’d stripped down to a singlet and shorts, with a pistol poking out of one of his pockets. Bananas and revolvers — that was a pretty accurate picture of the Croatian everyday at the time.

It was a time when you could buy weapons through newspaper ads, sellers advertising “mother hens,” “chicks,” and “Kinder Surprises.” Mother hen was a synonym for revolver, chicks for bullets, and Kinder Surprises for grenades. There was no accounting for the direction in which a weapon might go off, something I understood best when I saw a newspaper report about a young guy, a returnee from the front, who let off a “Kinder Surprise” in the yard of his former primary school. The darkness of the time swallowed people in different ways.

8. The Dark Corridors of the Arts Faculty

My job at the Institute for Literary Theory was on a multi-year research project entitled Glossary of the Russian Avant-garde. The project leader was a professor of Russian literature, who, given his scholarly reputation, had managed to assemble an expert team of contributors from several European countries. The proceedings of our annual scholarly conferences were published in a multi-volume series under the project name, co-edited by the professor and me.

When the aforementioned Croatian bard publicly weighed in on my ethnic, ethical, and literary acceptability, my status at work quickly changed. Having read the guild’s evaluation of my case in the news, the very next day my colleagues stopped saying hello or calling in to the Institute’s office. Even the professor stopped coming in. My colleagues started meeting in the office after I’d gone home for the day. At first I didn’t really understand what was going on; then in time we arrived at a form of unspoken agreement: when I left, they’d come in; when I came in, they’d leave. A colleague and friend, one of the few people to stand by me, witnessed this game, which was, by turns, childish, nasty, and exhausting. He’d often wipe an invisible gob of spit from his face, which, although originally intended for me, every now and then caught him.

Sometime in March or April of 1993 I was supposed to go to New York and give a lecture at NYU. For the first time, approval for a few days leave suddenly became a problem, and at the request of the Dean, I had to produce a written synopsis of my intended lecture. There was nothing about this in the Faculty regulations; it was made up on the fly, expressly for me. Despite that, I still refused to believe that my colleagues and friends believed in the “justice” of the media lynching. Somewhere deep inside I was ashamed both for and instead of them.

Those few months I worked on arrangements for our regular annual conference, which that year (1993) was held in May, the theme of which was totalitarianism and art. It seemed deeply ironic to me that my fellow scholars were writing papers about a time in which literature and art were subject to strict ideological diktats — about socialist realism, censorship under Stalin, and the lethal absurdities of totalitarian thinking — when, at the same time, fresh fascist and totalitarian fragments from the Croatian everyday slunk by in front of their noses. It was a time in which a notoriously soc-realist exhibition by the now forgotten sculptor, Kruno Bošnjak, was honored and lauded, when books by “unsuitable” authors (Serbs, communists, non-Croats, Yugoslavs, and so forth) were consigned to the scrap-heap. It was a time when stickers with a traditional three-strand pattern were proudly affixed to books by “ethnically clean” Croatian writers, when media censorship, particularly on radio, television, in schools, and the publishing industry, was the rule, not the exception. At the time, Vinko Nikolić, a returnee from the diaspora, former member of the Ustasha government of the Independent State of Croatia, and architect of the pamphlet On Ustasha Literature, was one of the most prominent figures in Croatian cultural life. Mile Budak, a minor writer, and the architect of the racial laws in Ante Pavelić’s same Nazi state, was the literary discovery of the season. It was a time in which black and white propaganda-like texts were everywhere, and the figure of Ivan Aralica, a Member of Parliament and Croatian President Franjo Tuđman’s favorite writer, established the new Croatian literary canon. It was a time when witches burned on media bonfires, when the Minister of Culture declared that only ethnically pure Croats were eligible to teach Croatian literature and the Croatian language. And it was a time when many street names were changed, and when renaming the street on which the Faculty of Arts was located became the subject of serious debate. Named after an “unworthy” Partisan hero, it was to take the name of the “worthy” Mile Budak.

I commented on all of these things, and a few other things too, at our conference on totalitarianism and art. The professor, as if he’d been personally wronged, responded that it was absurd to draw comparisons between Stalinism and “Croatian patriotism brought on by Serbian aggression.” Or words to that effect. A female colleague suggested that the things I was saying in front of the foreign fellows were deeply inappropriate, because at that moment our boys are dying at the front. . That phrase, our boys dying at the front was the moral chewing gum of the time. “While our boys are dying at the front, you were reading your paper on Bulgakov, and now you’re about to head off for dinner with our foreign colleagues,” I replied. Or words to that effect.

I didn’t go to the dinner. In giving my “inappropriate,” “wrong place, wrong time, wrong means” presentation, I also gave myself the sack. It’d been kicking around inside me for months. Actually, when I think about it, I didn’t give myself the sack, but sacked them, my “guild”—intellectuals, humanists, professors of literature. They deserved sacking for any number of reasons, but one was enough. At the time, in accordance with instructions from the Croatian Minister of Culture, libraries were cleansed of ideologically “unsuitable” authors and their books. Here and there bonfires burned, often initiated by local librarians, teachers, and pupils.[8] According to the rare journalistic investigation, the books of Ivo Andrić, the only Yugoslav to win the Nobel Prize, were found in the rubbish, as were the books of Thomas Mann. Cult books from my childhood such as Branko Ćopić’s The Hedgehog’s House joined them, and my books kept them company. My colleagues, professors of literature, didn’t say a word. Not one of them even batted an eyelid.

When I left the university, a long-time co-worker had the following to say:

“The whole time we actually protected you.”

“What do you mean?”

“We could have attacked you, but we didn’t, right?”

My co-worker was telling the truth. Really, at the time they were in a position to do all kinds of things, but there you have it, they didn’t. Nobody put a bullet in my forehead. In other words — they protected me.

Before leaving, I published an article in the local papers that was ironically entitled “The Right to Collective Censorship.”[9] Like my “out-of-control” appearance at the Slavic conference, the article was a final attempt to establish public dialogue. The article was greeted with silence. Playing “broken telephone,” retelling and mangling my essays published in newspapers abroad was sweeter and deadlier than open confrontation. The very act of engaging in dialogue presupposes a modicum of respect for both one’s interlocutor and for dialogue as a form of communication. The refusal of dialogue means ridicule of the other, their irrevocable human and professional disqualification.

When I told the professor, my long-time collaborator, that I was leaving the university, he said:

“That’s the best thing you can do.”

Not a word more, not a word less. And never another word after.

9. A Special Assignment

The Globus magazine’s fabrication about the Croatian witches was not “Croatian journalism’s most shameful moment,” as several journalists (much, much later) labelled it — as it had nothing to do with journalism. It was, rather, a special assignment, and Globus was but an obedient solder in the battle. All Yugoslav media, Serbian, then Croatian, worked tirelessly on fueling hatred, on quickening the ethnic pulse of the slumbering masses, and when the war erupted, they performed “special assignments” with distinction. Openly admitting that they were lying, the media adopted a Croatian journalist’s declaration that where the homeland’s concerned, I’m prepared to lie as their general moral slogan. When Franjo Tuđman came to power in 1990, his party, the Croatian Democratic Union, took control of the majority of media organizations. A number of journalists were fired in the process, while others, the loyal, were rewarded with directorships, editorships, and correspondent postings. Young storm troopers who didn’t have any moral dilemmas about their profession were recruited in place of those who had been let go — for these storm troopers had neither morals nor a profession.

Very soon, the media itself circulated lists of people who were intended for media execution. My name was among them. Often telephone numbers would appear alongside the names, a weapon offered to small, anonymous citizens. My personal statistics suggest that my patriotic countrywomen were the biggest fans of the telephone as weapon, their anonymous messages littered with vulgarities about sex with “Chetniks.” The calls had an “emancipatory” character for my countrywomen, and many distinguished themselves with their verbal creativity, as if their own erotic phantasies on the given political-military theme were in question.

In this special war the media got a dirty job done, and people suffered and died. .

Because they had the wrong ethnicity;

Because of their Serbian ethnicity;

Because of the absence of an ethnicity;

Because of a mixed ethnicity;

Because of their Yugoslav ethnicity;

Because of a grandmother who was a Serb;

Because of a grandfather who was a Serb;

Because of a father who was a Partisan;

Because of a mother who was a Communist;

Because of an aunt who was an Anti-Fascist;

Because of their ideological beliefs;

Because of their lack of ideological beliefs;

Because of the absence of religious beliefs;

Because of the wrong religious beliefs;

Because they’d stepped on somebody’s toes;

Because they owned a villa at the seaside;

Because the villa caught someone’s eye;

Because of a job that caught someone’s eye;

Because they were Albanians;

Or Roma;

Or Yugoslavs;

Or “unadjusted” Croats;

Because they were successful;

Because they lacked the will to take sides. .

These were the sweet strategies of fascism. And from behind the media smokescreen, behind the smoke from the bonfires on which witches burned, the anonymous and unfortunate lost their jobs and homes. Some were beaten black and blue, others killed. Many passed through everyday life as if through a hail of invisible bullets.

The question of media guilt has never been seriously asked. The majority of the journalists from the time — employees of the Croatian media’s hate industry — are still in their jobs today. It’s true, the language has changed a little, and the strategies are less visible. In any case, today one doesn’t need to lie to “defend the bleeding homeland.” These days one defends what was acquired over the previous twenty years: property, jobs, a secure retirement, or more simply — a decent biography.[10]

Sitting pretty with their sinecures, and fêted with local literary prizes, the lions and lionesses of Croatian literature have today expropriated the “witches’ discourse,” retrospectively touching up their images in the process. They know people have short memories, and the truth is, they’re right — they live in an amnesiac society and they know it. These people (the majority of whom are men) held their tongues for twenty years, yet today boldly recycle the “witches’ letter,” nullifying its original authorship, and in doing so, effectively complete the work of the “witch-hunters” of yesterday.

10. The Fairytale of the Small-town Croatian Patriot

The objection of my colleague, the well-known Croatian writer, that I could have shown more understanding for a people celebrating their own state and freedom of speech really doesn’t stack up. At that moment I understood the so-called “people” better than I understood myself. I know the biographies of dozens of “small-town” Croatian patriots; I’m intimately familiar with the psychogram that creates yes-men. I’ve learned when, why, and who will make a grab for the flag, who’ll be first to scramble off in defense of their country, defending it as if their personal dignity were at stake. Because for many people, the homeland is a synonym for personal dignity; particularly for those who have nothing else.

I knew Ivica (let’s give him a common Croatian name) from high school. He was two or three years older than me, and had he not suddenly re-entered my life, I would have completely forgotten him. Who knows, maybe back in high school I accidentally stepped on his toes. Ivica fell into that category of losers who everyone gave a clip around the ears.

Ivica later studied History at the University of Zagreb, eventually finding work as a secondary school teacher. When I happened to run into him many years later, my heart ached. His status obviously hadn’t changed much. Scruffy, with a wispy beard (completely unfashionable at the time), wearing a suit that was several sizes too big, hair thinning despite only being in his thirties, a black public servant’s briefcase in hand, Ivica perfectly fit the stereotype of the teacher whose pupils stick funny notes on his back. At the time he was living in a rented apartment and whined about his measly pay and rowdy pupils.

But then, at an international history seminar, he met the woman of his dreams, the beautiful daughter of a pair of doctors from an Eastern European capital. Blonde, translucent, pale, with dark rings under her big green eyes, she looked like she’d grown up on cocaine, not kefir. Ivica, like a hero from a Russian fairytale, crossed seven state borders and seven bureaucratic valleys, before finally bringing his blonde-haired beauty back to Zagreb. Fortune had smiled on him, his school came to the party and gave him an apartment, a child was on the way, and even the rowdy kids at school learned a few manners. But when the child was born, his wife filed for divorce. Ivica, it seems, was for her but a first step on the stairway of her life’s aspirations. So Ivica exited his recently-acquired familial bliss and returned to the lonely life of a tenant.

And then, like a surprising burst of sunshine after the rain, like hitting the lottery jackpot, She, the Homeland, appeared. And Ivica promptly signed up, stood in the first rows, bowed to the great leader of the Croatian people, and hustled his way into parliament. Along the way he publicly lobbed several gobs of spit at me. Here, with all my heart, I offer him my forgiveness. What’s more, for his personal happiness, I am also ready to turn the other cheek.

The Homeland gave him a new, spacious apartment, and — people say — a personal chauffeur, although it’s possible the chauffeur is simply a product of my empathetic imagination. He had everything now. He just didn’t have a wife, and for a Croatian politican and a Catholic, this was a not insignificant obstacle to a more serious career. So Ivica (I mean, what else could he do?) proposed to his “cocaine blonde” for a second time, and there you go, the smart woman accepted. From then on we saw her on television every time an Eastern European delegation was in town, serving as President Tuđman’s personal translator.

And then Ivica’s numbers again came up in the Homeland lottery, and he was awarded an ambassadorial posting in — oh, what a surprise — his wife’s Eastern European capital. I imagine his first ambassadorial reception: Ivica, the child of a Croatian peasant, being welcomed by his father and mother-in-law, the doctors. I imagine how all those bumps and bruises vanished in the air. I imagine the in-laws, the doctors, diplomatically bowing and curtsying to their son-in-law. Instead of snotty wee Ivica, a weedy Croatian peasant from the backwoods, they were being received by the Croatian ambassador. The pauper, to whom they had so clumsily abandoned the one-and-only apple of their eye, had become a prince!

I don’t know how things ended up, but it seems that Ivica is no longer an ambassador. Maybe he is still warming a chair somewhere, but in any case the TV cameras have moved on. The Croatian state apparatus is slowly ridding itself of its storm troopers. Storm troopers, they say, destroy the image of Croatia as it seeks to enter the European Union. Ivica is an almost textbook case of an ur-fascist psychogram. And people with these kinds of “valuable” psychograms are never put out to pasture; they’re just put on ice.

11. Mom

I resigned from the Faculty of Arts in June 1993 and spent the autumn in southern Germany. The following year I was to take up a scholarship in Berlin, but what I’d do and where I’d go after that, I had no idea. .

Although I had left Croatia, Croatia had difficulty leaving me. It kept boomeranging back, hysterically reminding me of the fact that I belonged to her, meaning that I would always belong to her, and that it was up to her to decide whether she would ravish me or lavish me. All over Europe the tribe shuffled along behind me, sitting in on my literary readings, bickering and squabbling, hurling caustic remarks, crudely interrupting my appearances with the same accusatory repertoire. The tribe would appear in the guise of a grey-haired old man in Vienna, scribbling in a notebook like an old-school police informant; as a highly-strung woman in Copenhagen, who waved an invisible thermometer tkaing the temperature of my patriotic commitment; as a young teacher of Croatian in Bonn, who (having first proudly declared that she hadn’t read a single one of my books) accused me of using too many Serbian words in my writings; as the haughty representative of the Croatian Catholic community in Berlin, who at (my!) literary readings accused me of destroying the Croatian tourism industry. Of course, none of these people ever gave their first or last name. The tribe introduced itself with the pronoun “we.”

Sometimes Croatia would perfidiously follow me around in the form of nasty gossip, as a wave of letters to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung from Swiss Croats, who, encouraged by the slippery Croatian cultural attaché in Zurich, vented their rage every time I published an article. Sometimes Croatia would show its institutional face, such as when the Croatian embassy in Sofia approached my Bulgarian publisher with an offer to buy the entire print run of The Culture of Lies. At the time the Croatian ambassador to Sofia was a fellow writer, a poet; he knew best what my book was about. Sometimes Croatia would appear at a book fair, where they, Croatian writers, would stand on one side and me on the other. My colleagues would perform their complicated pantomime, walking past as if they didn’t see me, while at the same time letting me know that they didn’t see me.

My mom was my biggest supporter. After I’d already left Zagreb, anonymous fellow-citizens would terrorize her on the telephone.

“Is that Mrs. Ugrešić?”

“Yes,” my Mom would reply.

“The mother of the writer Ugrešić?!”

And when my naïve mother would proudly answer that it was indeed “Ugrešić-the-writer’s mom” on the line, they’d launch into the most vile diatribe imaginable. Once, a self-declared representative of the small town where I was born announced to her that they, the townspeople, were disowning me.

“How can they disown you, they’re not your mother!” she joked to me.

Other times she’d grumble. .

“Stop with all that ‘writing,’ they’ll take my pension away because of you,” she’d protest.

“Would you rather they take your pension away or see me at a reception for Tuđman?” I asked, putting her to the test.

“I’d die of shame if I saw you on television with Tuđman, which wouldn’t be a bad thing, because then I wouldn’t need a pension any more,” she’d reply, and we’d both burst into laughter.

Sometimes I’d get down about everything, not knowing how to cope with others’ hatred.

“Imagine how you’d feel if they loved you!” mom would cheerfully console me.

And then sometimes she’d again get down, grumpily asking herself why fate had given her, of all people, such a stubborn daughter.

“Imagine what it was like for Joseph Brodsky’s parents!” I’d blurt out.

“Yes, but you’re not Brodsky!” she’d shoot back.

And we’d both break into mutually reassuring laughter.

Now, from that mess — where on one side “the facts” take the form of a nonsensical heap of newsprint, and on the other sits my “deformed” memory — my mother emerges as the rare face of common sense. And if someone were to push me up against a wall and force me, after so many years, to respond to the nonsensical question of whether I have a Croatian homeland at all, I’d respond that I do, that it is my mother, a Bulgarian. To my deep sadness, mom recently departed the world of the living.

12. Pigeon Chasers

Let’s go back to where we began, to the photograph of the professor thumbing his ears at me, and the headline letting me know that I wasn’t “chased away.” Asked whether he follows what I write these days, he responds, “Since she’s been abroad, no. On the one hand, it’s a question of personal relationships, and on the other, the fact that she willingly left here. She wasn’t expelled, nobody drove her out, she left to take up a scholarship. . I wasn’t prepared to accept her essayistic work. We parted company the very moment she started to think of it as her ‘war’ abroad, and began promoting herself as a dissident, an exile.”[11]

The professor could have responded to the question by simply admitting that he wasn’t familiar with my work since I went abroad. It would have been a less than flattering response for a professor of literature, but an understandable one all the same. Although they didn’t ask him whether I had willingly left Croatia, whether I was expelled or driven out, he felt the need to lie. He qualifies my literary work as essayistic (how would he know if he hasn’t read it?) and says that he parted company with me (falsely implying that there had been a dialogue) the moment I started thinking of my essayistic work (unworthy of intellectual attention) as a war conducted from abroad (I shot from the pen hunkered in a foreign bunker). In the considered opinion of this respected expert in the literature of the Russian avant-garde, I apparently promote myself as a dissident and exile (my position is, therefore, fake, inauthentic).

Why does the professor get off on all of this? How is it that, after a good eighteen years, when the bonfires have already gone out, he suddenly plucks up the courage to publicly strike a match, employing the same rhetoric as his predecessors? Of course, back then he secretly blew the flames, but only now has he decided to break his silence. The professor knows only too well that he lives in a milieu where people have no moral principles, but, that said, they do have the milieu. As Miroslav Krleža put it, it stinks among the people, but at least it’s warm. And the professor prefers the warmth. Fear of exclusion from the group is evidently one of the most powerful human fears, such fears being inculcated when one is first excluded from a children’s game, a children’s birthday party, or left out by one’s classmates. Fear of exclusion from the group is the basis of every fascism. No one is exempt from this fear, and the professor is no exception.

Why did Globus choose the headline “Dubravka Ugrešić Wasn’t Chased Away”? Globus needed the professor’s authority to confirm that eighteen years ago its investigative team really was in the right. But why now? A short time before the interview was published, Globus lost the lawsuit that it had dragged out for a full seventeen years. Apart from having to pay out a small amount in damages for “burns” I received in the media bonfire, the terms of the settlement also obliged Globus to publish the judge’s decision in full. Publishing the ruling would mean a public admission of moral defeat, something Globus has successfully avoided for years. Instead, Globus published the interview with the professor. The headline—“Dubravka Ugrešić Wasn’t Chased Out”—rings out like a definitive verdict, letting everyone know who wears the pants in the Croatian home.

In the very act of expressing public contempt for his former student and long-time collaborator, the elderly professor dispatched a hoary pedagogical message: every individual act of disobedience (she left willingly!), every rebellious voice must be punished. The milieu is good and righteous, and its prodigal daughters and sons (essayists, dissidents, exiles) deserve every reproach. The elderly professor — the editor of an anthology bearing the inspiring title Heretics and Dreamers, a promoter of Russian avant-gardists and the literary term the poetics of dispute—sadly missed his mark. Rather than a moral arbiter, he served as a mere pigeon chaser. A pigeon chaser?!

My Zagreb apartment had a large balcony, which, being constantly overrun by pigeons, wasn’t particularly attractive. My neighbors had the same problem. No one had any idea of how to get rid of the nuisance. One day an injured pigeon appeared on my neighbors’ balcony. The neighbors felt sorry for it and nursed it back to health, and in return, the pigeon, a female, became as loyal as a household pet. Then one day she brought a “boyfriend” home to the balcony. The neighbors also accepted the “boyfriend” and regularly fed the couple. As a sign of his gratitude for the regular crumbs, the “boyfriend” became a “policeman,” diligently expelling other pigeons from the balcony. The elderly professor threateningly gnashed his blunt beak in my direction, feebly flapping his wings. He did so in return for a few empathetic crumbs thrown to him by the hand of the warm Croatian hearth.

There is another interesting pigeon-related coincidence to speak of here. After my willing departure from the university, the Glossary of the Russian Avant-garde changed its name to the Zagreb Glossary of Twentieth Century Culture. Why the change? I’m certain the professor initiated this little repositioning. In the political context of the time, Russian Avant-garde had an irritating ring. For Christ’s sake, somebody might think that an elite group of international Slavic scholars was scheming its way around Croatia, advocating the return of communism, revolution, the avant-garde, lobbying for the Russians and who knows what else. At the time, Croatia was screaming into the ether that it was a European and a Catholic country, that it was the sacrificial shield defending European culture from the hordes of invading Orthodox barbarians. Naturally, the scholarly team and its field of research remained the same, only the name changed. The eventual danger that someone might have lumped the professor in with the “Eastern bandits” because of Bulgakov-the-Orthodox-Christian or Malevic-the-Serb was skillfully averted. There was one other significant innovation. A certain Ivan Golub (which in Croatian means “pigeon” and is a fairly common name), a theologian, lay minister, and poet, was tasked with writing the customary introduction to the Zagreb Glossary of Twentieth Century Culture. How did Ivan Golub manage to join a team of scholars working on the Russian avant-garde? Ivan Golub symbolically performed the same role as the ever diligent Croatian priests of the day (a role they still perform today): he poured holy water over everything — newly purchased hospital equipment, new kindergartens and schools, newly-asphalted roads, new tractors, newborn babies. In his introductions (not lacking in expertise I might add), Ivan Golub blessed and poured holy water over this literary and scholarly anthology, exorcising all manner of impurities, not to mention “witches” of all stripes. All things told, the professor found a priest, the priest found a professor, and together they were stronger.

13. Bizarre News from the Third World

At a September 2009 meeting in Geneva, United Nations officials, individual country representatives, activists, and NGO workers expressed their concern at the increasing prevalence of witch-hunting in poor, mostly rural areas of India, Africa, and Asia. Most of the victims are women and children.

Although experts maintain that reliable statistics are hard to come by, according to Indian sources in Asam and Western Bengal, an estimated 750 women have been killed since 2003. Suspected witches are terrorized by members of their own communities: they have their heads shaved, are stripped naked and forced to walk through the village, are beaten with sticks, branded with hot irons, buried alive, tied to trees, set on fire, and forced to endure deadly tests. One of the tests, a pareksha, involves a woman being forced to pick up a coin from the bottom of a pot of burning oil: if her hand comes out unscathed, it means she’s not a witch, if it burns, she is. As a practice, witch-hunting usually has hidden pragmatic motives. In India the burning of witches is a local form of geronticide, a way for the community to eliminate a mouth that is no longer capable of earning its bread. Studies show that in India witch-hunting increases in years of drought. Accusing the witches of having cursed the crop, the community — the collective executor — rids itself of its “useless” elderly members. In places such as Tanzania and Congo, victims are also most often elderly women from poor rural households.

The practice of witch-hunting has recently experienced exponential growth in Papua New Guinea. The country is home to ninety percent of all AIDS sufferers in the Pacific islands, and recently surpassed Uganda in total numbers of those infected with the virus. The island nation’s inhabitants blame witches (who they refer to as sangume) for the spread of the disease, subjecting them to terror that most often ends in murder.

A particularly worrying trend is the increase in child molestation, where children, irrespective of their gender, are proclaimed witches by their communities. Estimates suggest that tens of thousands of children live on the streets of Kinshasa, the majority of whom have been disowned by their parents on the suspicion that they are witches. The real reason is poverty, and the accusers are parents who are unable to care for their large broods. A leading role in the brutal practice is played by local priests, who conduct hearings (determining who’s a witch, and who’s not) and perform torture in the form of exorcism, which involves forcing children to drink nitric acid. Needless to say, the priests are paid for their services.

African albinos are also an endangered group, as it is believed that certain parts of their bodies serve as antidotes to witches’ spells. Children are particularly vulnerable, and the terrifying practice of live organ harvesting is not uncommon, the organs being ingredients in a purported anti-serum.

In witch practice there is also a phenomenon known as koro or penis snatching. The phenomenon was first documented in China and other Asian countries, but the more recent examples can be found in Africa (Congo, Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana, Gambia). Men occasionally become engulfed in the collective hysteria, believing that their penises have disappeared. Anyone can be accused of penis theft: “witches,” “black men”(!), people wearing a “gold ring,” “the devil’s right-hand,” a mysterious “stranger.” The penises of the affected supposedly disappear after they have shaken hands with any such person. Enraged, the “dismembered” men physically turn on the “thief.” An unfortunate Sudanese accused a “Zionist agent who was sent to Sudan to prevent the procreation and propagation of our people” for the theft of his penis.

Witch-hunts involve two kinds of participant: accusers, or witch-smellers, and executors. Although banned, in some African cultures (the Bantu culture, for example) the practice of witch-hunting is yet to be eradicated. Dressed in ceremonial clothing, the witch-smellers, usually women, perform a ritual designed to flush out the witch or witches. Members of the tribe sit down in a circle and, accompanied by rhythmical handclaps, begin a hypnotic, ritualistic chanting, until at a given moment the witch-smeller goes into a state of trance. Whomever the witch-smeller touches in her trance is deemed to be a witch; it could be one or many people. Their fellow tribesmen drag the accused from the circle, summarily executing them. Sometimes the rituals go on for days, and sometimes they end in a tribal self-slaughter. Animals can also be witches. The accuser, the witch-smeller, eats raw animal flesh in order to enter the animal’s spirit and refine her hunting instincts.

14. Accusers and Executioners

Today, almost twenty years later, I see many similarities between the living tribal practice of witch-hunting and my own “witch” case. In the early nineties, the Croatian tribe fell into a state of collective trance. Shamans, tribal leaders, and the media, beating their drums day and night to the rhythm of “the-nation-endangered,” led them into the trance. The shamans (ritually draped in the Croatian flag) called their fellow tribesmen to the hunt. The people ate raw meat to refine their instincts, their appetites only increasing when they saw they would go unpunished, and that the other side was doing the same. Their snouts now sophisticated, they became either accusers or executioners. The yellow witch fever dimmed the lights in many people’s heads. A handful of disobedient women were the first to be publicly denounced; others had their turn later. The women were accused of colluding with the devil, of casting spells and betraying tribal custom, spoiling the harvest and spreading illness, and were deemed responsible for the tribe’s misfortune. As punishment, the Croatian witches were subject to public humiliation, media terror, intimidation, contempt, verbal attacks, ostracism, slander, and vicious gossip. They were stripped of intellectual employment, the right to dialogue, and as public figures — actresses, professors, journalists, and writers — removed from public life. Their families were subject to harassment and intimidation, and collective and personal letters were sent to foreign universities, journalists, writers, and translators, all with the express purpose of denying the women access to a public platform or any kind of professional opportunity. It’s true, not one of the accused women was beaten or killed. But far from the media storm, other, anonymous people were. The “witches” served as media surrogates, as fairground attractions, as free dartboards erected on town squares, as the cheapest way to homogenize the people against “internal” and “external” enemies.

Having become shamans, arbitrators, and witch-smellers, my fellow writers and scholars bit into my flesh. In their patriotic trance they denounced me, and then it was open season. At the start — when many came running to burn me on the media bonfire; when the telephone rang at all hours of the day, vomiting threatening messages in my ear; when those same writers and scholars performed their pathetic, third-rate pantomime (a head that turns away in disgust, a glance suddenly lowered on meeting mine), demonstrating — less to me, and more to the milieu — that I had been cast from the circle; when everyone sought a way to perform his or her loyal duty to the new regime, and it was easiest to spit on a “witch”—I still interpreted their hatred as an indirect call for dialogue. But pragmatic, powerful, and efficient, the machinery of hate picked me up and launched my broom on a powerful tailwind. And I flew.

Today, like a dreary re-run twenty years later, everything has been reduced to a photograph of an old man monkeying around and thumbing his ears at me. Now I finally understand: my “deformed perspective” was to blame. I overestimated my “milieu.” Its volume is much smaller and its substance less distinctive than I thought. I underestimated its resistance: it’s much stiffer and stronger than I thought.

So, what really happened? I abandoned my milieu, I left willingly, and it poked its tongue out at me, the only thing it knew how to do. It didn’t bother reading my books — that would have meant dialogue, and I might have believed that, in spite of everything, I’d actually managed to “knit” something its size. But it had always valued its own “mainstream,” oral literature, and that’s why it believed the rumors produced in its own factory. So, really, nothing happened. And not a damn thing is happening — even that telephone is always broken. .

So, my fellow tribesmen, let’s give it one more try, loud and clear this time: Yes, I left willingly. No, you didn’t chase me away, I abandoned you. No, you didn’t part company with me, I did with you. You didn’t disqualify me, you disqualified yourselves. You didn’t fire me, I fired you, yes, you. And Professor, as far as you’re concerned, I have no qualms in saying what you somewhere already know yourself: No, I didn’t fail the exam; you did.

In the twenty intervening years many people have disappeared, many have had their biographies burned, many live elsewhere, many lives have been stolen, many lie under the earth, many live buried alive, many of the guilty still walk free, but the majority of my fellow citizens are still around. My fellow citizens still pick their noses and “break wind,” still sit around in cafés, slag off and suck up to one another, drink their coffee, spend their Saturdays loafing about the town square, which has of course changed its name, but even that doesn’t really change anything. They scuttle to the market, bargain and barter, buy fresh cottage cheese and cream, read the papers, blink in the sun, mix and mingle, flip each other the bird, nod their heads, exchange air kisses, and good-naturedly feed the pigeons that are strutting around the square. For a few crumbs both people and pigeons are ready to get off their backsides, flap their wings and flash their beaks, all for a crumb more. But that’s nothing new; life continues on much the same as it always has.

15. Penis-Snatching

Sometimes I have a laugh imagining how I’d respond if my former immolators — professors who thumb their ears, colleagues, merry rodent exterminators, jokesters, intellectuals, rabble-rousers, witch-smellers, armchair critics, informers, ridiculers, smart-asses, amnesiacs, patriots and patriotesses — would just ask. .

“Why did we singe you a little back then?”

And I think about how to respond; I’m a writer, I should know what might inflame the ears of my pyromaniac people.

“You’d fallen into a national collective trance. Koro. .” I whisper into the ear beside me.

“Koro!?” the person frowns.

“In some parts of Africa men succumb to a collective hysteria. They’re convinced that their penises have disappeared, that someone stole them. And so the angry mob of supposedly dismembered men sets off to hunt down those who are suspected of mutilating them.”

“I don’t understand a word you’re saying. What have Africans got to do with you? Or with us?!”

“I’m speaking in metaphors. Back then, twenty years ago, you accused me of making off with your collective, national thing. Your symbolic thing, naturally. .” I whisper to the person beside me.

“But it can’t have been just about men? What about the women?”

“As protectors of the national virtue, the women were also involved in stringing up the suspected thieves.”

The people in the chain start to grumble.

“C’mon, get it together! We haven’t got all day!” they yell impatiently.

“Well, what shall I tell the person beside me?” he asks, genuinely confused.

“Now I don’t even know anymore. .”

“Why did you end up on the bonfire? Tell me, just make it quick,” he said.

“Because I stole your penis,” I whisper.

The owner of the ear nods his head, he understands, and he tells the person next to him, and the words are whispered from ear to ear. It’s a long chain.

“Because I stole your pride!” yells the last person finally.

It seems that the only remaining channel of communication — the broken telephone — actually still works.

“Yes, because I stole your pride,” I confirm.

My pyromaniacs almost laugh their heads off.

The wind gently licking my face, I take my broom and silently steal away. I look down and my countrymen wave happily, their smiling leaf-like faces turned skywards. From this height they look like cabbages left to grow in an abandoned field. Beneath them, in the dirt, human corpses are rotting. They help the cabbages grow bigger and shinier. Or is that just how things appear to me? I admit, it’s all a question of perspective, and we’re all responsible for our own. And, light as a feather, I ride the wind.

April 2010

[1]A game also known as Telephone, Chinese Whispers, Grapevine, Whisper Down the Lane, Gossip, Le téléphone arabe, Stille Post, and Gioco del Telefono.

[2]Sometime later, the mayor of Zagreb from the time confirmed that the alarms were just a sort of drill to mobilize the people against the enemy. The mayor’s casual revelation never reached the collective ear, and to this day, like many other such revelations, it remains forgotten. Why? Because in other places, the alarms were for real. People in Zagreb obviously didn’t want to hear that the “threat” they took to be real was in fact a simulation game. The warnings in the daily papers that people be on the lookout for Serbian snipers were a part of this same game. The snipers would apparently ring the doorbell disguised as postmen, or peer from the roofs of Zagreb, disguised as chimney-sweeps. Not a single one was ever caught, neither did any evidence (even false!) of their existence ever materialize. This is but one example of the sea of lies that swamped us. But by the time the lies were finally exposed, no one was prepared to believe the truth anymore.

[3]Original published as Američki fikcionar and published in English as Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream, translated by Celia Hawkesworth (London: Jonathan Cape, 1994; New York: Viking Penguin, 1995).

[4]The essay was published in my book The Culture of Lies (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson; Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 1998) the first edition of which appeared in Dutch as De cultuur van leugens (Amsterdam: Nijgh & Van Ditmar, 1995), which was followed a year later by the first Croatian edition, Kultura laži (Zagreb: Arkzin, 1996).

[5]At the time, the Croatian media had individually attacked the journalists Vesna Kesić and Jelena Lovrić, the journalist and writer Slavenka Drakulić, and a professor of philosophy, Rada Iveković. Apparently wanting to conserve energy, they soon came up with a joint indictment for the “five Croatian witches” (me being the fifth). The media haranguing was aimed at convincing the Croatian public that a dangerous feminist-terrorist “cell” was at work, and of the need for unity in the struggle against the internal enemy. We, however, weren’t a “cell.” Each of us coped with our professional lives and the consequences of our intellectual and moral choices as best we could. In this essay I mention my colleagues only sparingly for two reasons: first and foremost, each of them has the right to tell her own story; secondly, mentioning them would force me to use the pronoun “we,” and doing so would mean (inadvertently) contesting their version of events in advance, not to mention dissipating the individual character of these events. This was itself the very aim of the media haranguing — to reduce us all to “broads persecuting Croatia.” My reluctance to use the pronoun “we” in no way signals any lack of solidarity with my colleagues, nor, as is my deep conviction, their lack of solidarity with me.

[6]One of the most amusing accusations of the “investigative team” was that we “witches” had generally chosen Serbs as our partners. As they write: “It would be immoral to mention had it not now become clear that what we are dealing with is systematic political choice, not chance coincidence in matters of the heart.” (“Hrvatske feministice siluju Hrvatsku” [Croatian Feminists Rape Croatia], Globus, December 11, 1992).

[7]Dubravka Ugrešić, “Laku noć hrvatski pisci” [Goodnight Croatian Writers], Nedjeljna Dalmacija, February 25, 1992.

[8]The November 2003 edition of the Prosvjeta journal entitled “Bibliocide-Culturcide” was dedicated to the bibliocide that occurred in Croatia in 1991 and 1992, the title a clear allusion to Heinich Heine’s famous line, “Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen.” (That was only a prelude; where they burn books, they ultimately burn people.)

[9]Dubravka Ugrešić, “Pravo na kolektivnu cenzuru” [The Right to Collective Censorship], Nedjeljna Dalmacija, June 16, 1993.

[10]Celebrating the 500th episode of the program Pola ure kulture [Half an Hour of Culture], in the April 2, 2010 issue of the Globus weekly (that magazine again!) an interview appeared with the show’s host, Branka Kamenski. In the interview, Kamenski speaks of Hloverka Novak-Srzić as her best friend and ersatz sister. Novak-Srzić helped Kamenski move from journalist on the Večernji list daily to host and editor of what is arguably the only cultural program on Croatian television. Kamenski also recalls her intimate relationship with the Croatian writer Antun oljan (who was one of the most important people in my life; I feel privileged to have known him, says Kamenski). She also recalls her most important interviews, such as that with the aforementioned Vinko Nikolić, in the course of which she came face to face not only with Croatian history. . but also with Nikolić’s piercing and incredibly blue eyes.

Branka Kamenski’s “sister” Hloverka Novak-Srzić was the first to denounce me (“Denunciranje domovine” [Denouncing the Homeland], Glasnik, November 9, 1992). Two days after Novak-Srzić declared me a “denouncer of the homeland,” and a person of suspicious ethnic background (which meant a Serbian background), an article appeared by the previously-mentioned Croatian bard, Antun oljan (“Dubravka Cvek u raljama rata” [Dubravka Cvek in the Jaws of War], Večernji list, November 11, 1992). (Translator’s Note: the title of oljan’s article is a play on the title of Ugrešić’s highly-popular short novel tefica Cvek u raljama života [“ tefica Cvek in the Jaws of Life,” 1981], the metafictional chronicle of a klutzy and lovelorn typist’s quest to find Mr. Right — and thereby “get a life.” The implications of oljan’s wordplay would have been crystal clear to his Croatian audience.) oljan, let’s not forget, was one of the most important people in Branka Kamenski’s life. Three weeks later, two articles by Kamenski herself appeared (“Lobistice promukla glas” [Lobbyists Lost their Voice], and “Ćorak u Riju” [Dud Bullet in Rio], Večernji list, December 5, 1992), which officially opened the media pack hunt on the five Croatian witches. In her Globus interview, Kamenski also talks about tennis, her favorite hobby, and there is a photo featuring her favorite tennis partners. In addition to her ersatz sister, a man called Slaven Letica is in the line-up. Slaven Letica really has done it all, from being a personal advisor to Franjo Tuđman to himself standing for President as an independent. Among other things, he was also the initiator and author of the Globus fabrication, Globus, December 11, 1992), published only six days after Kamenski’s early efforts.

Today, eighteen years later, Branka Kamenski claims that: On television we were the first to address the question of dissidents in the new Croatian state, Dubravka Ugrešić, Slavenka Drakulić, Slobodan najder. It was 1996. . Referring to me she adds: I particularly admire Dubravka Ugrešić, I think she’s one of our best writers and it’s regrettable that during the war she wrote essays like “Clean Croatian Air.” I like books that I remember, and hers are such.

The contents of this footnote could create the false impression that the “Witches of Rio” affair was simply the concoction of a homespun “cottage industry,” of a group of people who enjoyed media power at the time (which they still enjoy today). The witch-hunt, however, was but one example of a strategy designed to silently and systematically cleanse Croatia of all manner of “internal enemies.” The refusal to acknowledge this fact is still in force today.

[11]“Dubravka Ugrešić nije otjerana” [Dubravka Ugrešić Wasn’t Chased Away], Globus, January 22, 2010.