Georeactor Blog

The Ministry of Pain (Dubravka Ugrešić, 2004; 2006 translation)

A novel of a professor who left Yugoslavia and teaches literature of the lost nation in Amsterdam. There are some obvious parallels to the author. Ugrešić was a well-known author and screenwriter in Zagreb, and left for Germany and Amsterdam after being threatened in a 1992 article titled Croatian feminists rape Croatia (known colloquially as the Vještice iz Rija).

The narrator's students are in the newly defined Serbo-Croatian program to get student visas and scholarships while war rages. She decides not to put additional demands on the class, and initially they talk about their childhoods and the common culture. They linger in cafes after class. The Western professors, once the resident experts on their region, avoid them. Eventually the department mandates a more strict curriculum.

There are long lists of regional in-jokes, authors and singers and poets, etc. who I do not know anything about. One reference which I did look up was Desanka Maksimović - her poem about a massacre by Germans in WWII (Kragujevac) became known to every Yugoslav child. Yet Maksimović would appear at Gazimestan, a rally of a million Serbs organized by Slobodan Milosevic in 1989.

Though the book is about Yugo-nostalgia, the students' essays allow for multiple vignettes and journeys into not-so-nostalgic memories.
As a reader I appreciated learning something about refugee life. The narrator returns to Zagreb for a few chapters and manages to get lost in changed bureaucracies and street names. Her mother has unexpectedly tuned out the larger world for TV shows and neighbors. A passenger tells her that refugees/emigres cannot process that the war is ancient history for the people left behind. A friend in Amsterdam expects her to accept bigotry, calling others Turks and Milosevics.
At another point she and a student visit an ICTY trial in The Hague. I did some research but did not match the details to a specific testimony.
In the final pages there's a rebuke to the Yugo-nostalgia themes: someone else leaves a note about people who fought to escape communism, and a student reminds her that he left to avoid military service and death.

Fitting for a literature professor as author-insert, there is always discussion of language - when people refer to it "our language" or "that language", the way people would emphasize 'Yuga' to dissociate from the Serbian-Motenegrin union then named Yugoslavia, unfamiliar "newspeak" and hillbilly words becoming popular to more divide dialects, Cyrillic and Latin letters, the idea of a common language still having borders with Slovenian and Albanian.

In a 2002 interview (predating this book) Ugrešić said:

[at the ICTY in The Hague] those Yugo-killers are extremely sensitive to language nuances; they are offended if a translator translates a prosecutor's question, "How many people did you kill?" into a dialect that is not their own. That hurts, man - hearing the question in a "foreign" language. So the translators, as their internal joke, decided to call that language "BCS," Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian. I agree with them–there is no better coinage.

I also appreciated an explanation for Western inaction and our eventual forgetting of Yugoslavia (summarized by the interviewer):

You say that during the war the media in the former Yugoslavia felt justified telling lies simply because the other side lied more. And you remark that perplexed Westerners gave up on any attempt to find out what was really going on.

The separation of language continues to be a contentious topic, particularly in segregated cities (a recent research paper describes Vukovar, a city in Croatia with a one-third Serb minority). Aid programs in the early 2000s attempted to integrate activities between Croatian and Serb classes which were already held at the same school (at different times of the day). After a recent census, the Serb minority is small enough that the government can remove Cyrillic signs.

Ugrešić later participated in the 2017 "Declaration on the Common Language" which covers several of the language unity themes. She died in 2023.

Updates to Previous Reads / Random Croatia Notes

In Croatian stores there is a new-looking "Jimmy Fantastic" chocolate produced by a Serbian brand (Štark). I interpreted it as a Mr. Beast / Feastables ripoff, but a Tweet from 2021 suggests it has been around longer. And then I Googled, and no one else seems to have thought about any connection or subterfuge.

New to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Excursion removal of Muslims from Bulgaria to Turkey.
Also in Istria (northern coast of Croatia) there are several reminders of when it was controlled by Italy or home to many Italians who fled as it was incorporated into communist Yugoslavia. For example, the tiny island of Susak which has its own diaspora: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susak

Ranked Choice Voting has reached more voters over the past ~5 years, but it may be losing popularity with Alaska recently voting to repeal it, and other states failing to pass it. In 2021, NYC embarrassingly included test ballots in their unofficial counts (I remember another bug, but maybe I'm wrong). RCV in Alaska seemed wounded after Sarah Palin's loss in a three-way race in 2022. In Nevada, where I witnessed a hybrid RCV-caucus election in 2020, voters favored expanding it in 2022 but failed on this second round of voting required for ballot initiatives.

Using Welsh to block immigration into Australia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_exclusion_of_Egon_Kisch_from_Australia