ABSTRACT
The presence of ethno-nationalist narratives in published, post-Yugoslavian literature increased dramatically in the 1980s, as did the production of ‘antinarratives’. This chapter will explore how ethno-nationalist narratives have been treated in the literature of the last decades. In contrast to the socialist stateideology of the former Yugoslavia (which promoted the ‘brotherhood and unity’ of all south Slavic people) in the 1970s, and especially in the 1980s after Tito’s death, a politicised literature increasingly precipitated the reinforcement and reconstruction of a specific (ethno-)national collective memory (i.e. Croatian, Slovenian and Serbian instead of a ‘Yugoslav’ collective memory). This development began in the 1960s and continued throughout the 1970s, as the power of the separate republics (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, Montenegro) grew and the federal government slowly lost influence (see Wachtel 1998: 174). After Tito’s death (1980), a ‘phase of implementation of new perceptions’ (Sundhaussen 2007: 385), as historian Holm Sundhaussen calls it, ensued. Extremely patriarchal, clerical and national oriented writers, politicians and journalists made and/or followed this ‘trend’. The ‘dismantling of the Yugoslav culture of memory and historiography’ (Sundhaussen 2007: 420) especially in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia became the main project of this new ‘patriotic’ literature. A sense of belonging to Yugoslavia gave way to the problematic reliance on a very dogmatic concept of ‘ethno-national’ identities, which viewed project Yugoslavia as a threatening construct that endangered the ‘pure’ homogeneity of one’s national identity. This implicitly meant that other ethnic groups, which had co-existed in this multi-ethnic state, now became a threat. In a rising number of novels, interethnic hatred, mostly presented as a ‘natural’ phenomenon, and ‘ancient’ wars and violence between South Slavic ethnic groups became popular topics. Andrew Baruch Wachtel’s Making a Nation, Breaking a Nation: Literature and Cultural Politics in Yugoslavia (1998) provides a detailed analysis of these phenomena, which not only analyses a lot of novels in detail by focusing on the question of political ideas presented in this prose, but also gives an overview of their quite successful reception. According to Wachtel, Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian nationalist novels became the most popular genre in the 1980s, often depicting hate-fuelled violence between Yugoslavia’s different (religious or
ethnic) South Slavic groups. For example, in 1989, shortly before the breakout of the wars, the most extreme nationalist books appeared in Serbia. Slobodan Selenić’s Timor mortis, for example, presents the Croatian massacre of Serbs during the Second World War as the culmination of long-term patterns. The novel’s central features are the retreading of inter-ethnic hatred and the call for revenge. Vojislav Lubarda’s Vaznesenje (The Ascension), published the same year, offers an ideologically-driven and transparent description of violent Serbian-Muslim relations in Bosnia: Bosnian Muslims are shown as a group that has always hated and murdered Serbs; Bosnia is not at all a multicultural microcosm of Yugoslavia, but rather, a site of hatred and disaster (see Wachtel 1998: 197-226). Similar narratives can be found in Croatian nationalist literature. Ivan Aralica, Croatia’s most prominent nationalist writer, a symbol of (ultra-) conservative circles and the Croatian ‘father of the nation’, penned his first, unsuccessful, ‘socialist-realist’ novels in the 1960s. However, he slowly grew in importance during the 1970s. His books at that time, as Andrew Wachtel points out, mostly catalogue the clash between Christianity and Islam, offer contemporary versions of the ‘blood and ground’ narrative, to glorify the patriarchal peasant life and promote the Croatian national idea (see Wachtel 2006: 107). Nationalist intellectuals and authors, almost exclusively men, received prizes and commendations and often became politicians. Franjo Tuđman, president of the newly-independent Croatia, praised Aralica as the greatest living Croatian writer after the election. Aralica subsequently became a member of the Croatian Academy of Arts, senator of the Croatian Parliament and an official member of the Tuđman’s ‘Politburo’ (see Wachtel 2006: 108-110). In 1992 the Serbian nationalist writer Dobrica Ćosić became the president of the ‘rest’ of Yugoslavia (although only until 1993). More importantly, the above-mentioned novels all became popular bestsellers. Conversely, anti-nationalist literature and its authors faced political and cultural opposition and became marginalised. It is in this period that writing about Bosnia became mostly a describing of ethnic/religious hatred in the country. Sundhaussen points out, the role of nationalist art and cultural production for the outbreak of the war has often been overstated, especially in international scientific and journalistic discourse. However, this nationalist literary production provided cultural and historical meanings and patterns of perception that legitimised violence and participated in the construction of the enemy. This includes the creation and promotion of scapegoat theories, conspiracy theories, fantasies of defence and selfvictimisation, clichés of heroes and the mythologising of the nation (see Sundhaussen 2007: 445 and 446). In all republics of the former Yugoslavia, the nationalist literature participated in the construction of ethno-religious identities that supported the production of exclusively nationalist thinking; ‘inter-ethnic hatred’ became a dominant topic, especially in the literature about Bosnia, which had and still has a big heterogeneity of ethnic and religious groups. Conversely, anti-war literature subverted those models of exclusive (ethno-)national identity, which characterised the nationalist literature of the last decades. It is not surprising that the topic of
‘inter-ethnic hatred’ was replaced by ‘inter-ethnic friendship’, or that the idea of replaced ethnic differences had been deconstructed or at least clearly ignored. This specific literature criticised the regimes and subverted the national and religious myths produced all over the former Yugoslavia: It was distributed and read in the various single successor states throughout former Yugoslavia. This production of anti-war and anti-nationalist literature in Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia variously sought to balance between aesthetics and political engagement, as Enver Kazaz points out in his essay on Bosnian prose (see Kazaz 2004: 137-166). By addressing the whole region through their critical texts, these authors differed greatly from the national-conservative ones who exclusively addressed an audience ‘of their own’, describing the ‘others’ so negatively that they can hardly be considered as potential readers. Miranda Jakiša and Sylvia Sasse posit that Yugoslav war literature often closely reflects the ‘contingency’ (as opposed to the commonly postulated ‘naturalness’) of enmity. Furthermore Jakiša and Sasse are asking whether or not post-Yugoslav authors refused to reproduce narratives that legitimate war and violence and thus decided to oppose the fact that art often (re-) produces the ‘great’ (nationalist and religious) narratives (see Jakiša and Sasse 2009: 221-237). Some examples of this literature will be presented to proffer an answer to this question. It will analyse novels from different periods since the 1990s, with a focus on an often neglected segment of the Bosnian war: the conflict between Croats and Bosniaks, a topic that had a great impact on (Bosnian-) Croatian contemporary literature. Apart from the internationally-acclaimed, Croatian-Bosnian writer Miljenko Jergović, who fled from Sarajevo to Zagreb in 1993 and literally ‘imported’ the Bosnian war into Croatian literature (although he never wrote traditional prose about the front or combat, focusing mostly on civic experience of the war), Josip Mlakić is the first Croatian writer who reflected the horror of the Bosnian war in a remarkable political and literary text. His first novel, which won several prizes in Croatia, is one of the first anti-war documents that focused on the Croatian-Bosniak war from 1993 to 1995. In his novel Kad magle stanu (When the fog disappears), published in 2000, Mlakić uses a quite conventional frame in order to stage the war memories of his main protagonist: The soldier Jakov, who fought in the war, is supposed to heal from his depression in a psychiatric clinic. Jakov is given the task to write a therapeutic war diary, which reflects the action at the war front in short ‘images’, as he titles his memories. The treatment fails, in part because his doctor follows a highly questionable therapy that mainly involves showing his patients that they suffer from irrational guilt, because violence is part of war and was completely legitimate and necessary. The fragmentary memories of Jakov re-tell the war experiences of a group of Bosnian-Croat soldiers at the front, fighting against Bosniak units, with occasional Serb attacks. In the novel the Croatian soldier Jakov kills his former Bosniak friend. The group of soldiers is drawn very heterogeneously. Crude humour, vulgar language and male power games keep the group of soldiers together, although only briefly. Similar to the work of Faruk Šehić, one of the most famous Bosniak
war-writers, addressing alcohol and drug abuse, growing brutalisation and psychological or physical violence within the group are shown as consequences of the soldiers’ anxiety and the military’s hierarchical structure. Within this small community, violence is experienced not only from the enemy but also from people of ‘one’s own’. The central murder, which Jakov commits, does not happen during combat. He is in fact tricked by one of ‘his own’. A soldier in his group makes him believe that his friend, a captured Bosniak soldier of the ‘other side’, who happens to be his pre-war best friend, would have slept with his wife, so Jakov kills him. Once he understands he has been the victim of a brutal joke, and being already deeply traumatised and having persistent nightmares connected both to the experience of war and his personal drama, Jakov takes revenge and executes his ‘comrade’ with several shots. Mlakić’s novel, as Davor Beganović points out, transfers the traumas of war to a mental institution; it shows how the description of the experience of war and its traumatic consequences pushes people to the edge. The author uses non-linear and ‘disturbed’ narratives, grotesque elements, intertextuality and (quasi-)documentary material, as well as providing an apocalyptic image of the male body (see Beganović 2009: 201-205). One of the politically most relevant issues discussed in the book is the concept of an ‘enemy’ based on national or religious affiliation. Repeatedly, the deep aversion of enmity based on nationalist or ethnic ‘hatred’ is staged in the book and becomes a key element that contradicts nationalistic justification of violence and heroic tales of war. Significantly, scapegoating and conspiracy theories are ignored in this narration; self-victimisation is contrasted with the resolution to simplify dichotomous victim-perpetrator constellations; the defence fantasies and stereotypical tales of war heroes are replaced by male characters (soldiers) who repeatedly re-live panic attacks, but also experience ‘interethnical’ friendship. The novel’s first person narrator is a marginalised protagonist, an anti-hero who experiences manipulations through a collective identity. He replaces the binary opposition us/them (friend/enemy) by denying any collective and especially exclusive ethno-national identity. Killing his prewar (Bosniak) friend is not linked to a heroic tale of the great warrior dispatching a dangerous enemy for his country, but rather, leads to the complete psychic destruction and traumatisation of the protagonist. The lack of an explicit presentation of ethnic conflicts in Mlakić’s novel, their replacement with the presentation of psycho-social conflicts, and the replacement of the heroic war by an anti-hero who refuses to be manipulated for ‘national needs’, are crucial moments for Bosnian anti-war literature in general. This important ‘anti-narrative’ therefore is the link that connects this novel with the next example. In 2005, Boris Dežulović, a Croatian author, published the novel Jebo sad hiljadu dinara (Fuck a thousand dinars), a black-humoured, anti-war satire in which two groups of six soldiers from Croatian and Bosniak forces fight against each other in the Herzegovinian part of Bosnia. The action centres on one single
day and, following the rules of a comedy of errors, both the Bosniak and Croat leaders get the idea for their group to slip into the uniforms of the enemy to fulfil their secret, spying mission. When the two groups meet, great confusion ensues. As the Croatian critic Jagna Pogačnik puts it, in that moment the most important question in any war is who is enemy and who is friend? Here, the question is even harder to resolve because the soldiers grew up in neighbouring towns, so they are quite similar in their look, accents and habits. The novel then catalogues many stories about the private lives of the soldiers, which all refer to a ‘golden period’ of the 1980s and are connected to each other somehow, mostly in a humorous way. Consequently, the dichotomous division into us/them or enemy/ friend is satirically unmasked as ridiculous (see Pogačnik 2006: 75-96), a crucial moment in the deconstruction of traditional concepts of exclusive national identity, which already pervades Mlakić’s novel. The soldiers in Jebo sad hiljadu dinara share anecdotes, memories, jokes and mini-stories about famous or at least popular people from the region: the nymphomaniac ‘bitch’ who deflowered most young men of the town, the folk singer, the local hooligan, the small-town gangster, the football referee who becomes a judge during the war, the fraudulent Chinese shopkeeper who claims to sell the ears and fingers of all war enemies to all parties (in fact they are only tails of pigs). The satirical stories about these protagonists are reminiscences of the life that the soldiers shared before the war, clearly revealing the absurdity of the sudden ‘enmity’ with former neighbours. The naive and simple soldiers and their heroic stories are constantly exposed as lies, heroic tales are mocked, and thus, the mythologising of one great nation and its armed defenders are implicitly presented as ridiculous. The absurdity of an enormous cultural and ethnic distinction between different religious or ethnic groups in Bosnia is laid bare by the genre of comedy of errors. A core scene in the novel is the first meeting of the two troops, both groups wearing the uniforms of the enemy soldiers, yet believing that the others are part of their own troops. A long scene follows, consisting mainly of dialogues among the protagonists, speaking of course the same language. While they are wearing the wrong uniforms, any cultural, religious, political or ethnic ‘otherness’ becomes invisible. Dežulović’s satire therefore shows the contradictory construction of cultural ‘otherness’, which in Bosnia and in the Yugoslav wars became one of the dominant narratives propagated by the political elites and used to legitimise violence. Economic and political (territorial) interests could easily be hidden behind more ‘sublime’ considerations such as cultural, religious or ethnic differences. A comedy of errors typically culminates in a happy resolution of the ‘dramatic’ conflict. In this novel, corresponding with the brutal reality of the civil war, all the protagonists are dead in the end. They die because of an error one of them makes. Again, as in Mlakić’s story, it is not heroic death in combat, but a non-heroic, farcical ‘unhappy coincidence’. So in the end, the use of violence in the novel is dissolved from the question of belonging to a specific ethnic or religious group and is instead shown as a psychosocial problem.
