Context
"Balkans, My Balkans"
Dubravka Ugresic
1. Images 3. 1. Images The
old pop song “Balkan” by the Croatian singer Johnny Stulic popped back
out of oblivion and now circulates among young ex-Yugoslavs. Why have
young people spontaneously resurrected this particular fragment of a
past pop culture? Perhaps the lines Balkan, my Balkan / Be mighty and stand strong and We are Gypsy people, cursed by fate have something to do with this sudden identification. Perhaps these
lines express the complicated ex-Yugoslav, Balkan, collective “psyche”
better than long-winded elaborations. The line Balkan, my Balkan, be mighty and stand strong has different echoes. One is of that “little land on the hilly Balkans”
and the time when Yugoslavs didn’t refuse to be placed in the Balkans.
The other echo is of the communist ideology of heroism, with a hidden
irony in the phrase stand strong. In the local slang the phrase means simply “take care,” but it also implies a potent male sexuality. The term “Balkan”—as a set of popular, mostly negative, and
amazingly stubborn stereotypes assigned to the “Balkan” region, which
includes the countries of the former Yugoslavia, along with Greece,
Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, and the European part of Turkey—has a long
history. For decades the Balkans proved to be the most favorable
Western European spot for exercising Western European colonial
imagination. Ever since Anthony Hope’s popular novel The Prisoner of Zenda,
situated in imaginary Ruritania, the Balkans have served as a
projection screen for Western European romantic fantasies. The Balkans
had everything that Western Europe didn’t have and so was a territory
convenient for lazy colonialism, the kind that didn’t require a long
journey, even if it was imaginary. Many of the characters of these books—whom Vesna Goldsworthy (the author of the book Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination)
so rightly labels “textual colonizers”—visited imaginary lands
somewhere in the Balkans: Carphatia, Ruritania, Kravonia, Silaria,
Moesia, Sel-ovnia, Pottibakia, Evarchia, Erewhon, Slaka. Others visited
nonexistent places with such exotic names as Slavna, Demlin, Mlavia,
Danubia, Djakowar. Along their way, these textual colonizers
encountered brainless regents and arrogant kings, spies, vagabonds,
military idiots, stupid and servile inhabitants of dictatorships,
informers, murderers, bloodthirsty dictators, wild people, Draculas and
Draculaesque mutants. At the same time, characters in our Balkan books rarely
traveled to Western Europe. Aleko Konstantinov’s literary creation, Bay
Ganyo, managed to. But by denouncing Bay Ganyo as a racist (he was more
like a bad collective set of behaviors), Bulgarian postcolonial
thinkers got rid of him. Some of our characters did manage to reach the
west, even New York, but only as Balkan morphs, as in Jacques
Tourneur’s old film Cat People. A good American guy falls in
love with a beautiful Serbian woman who is in the habit of transforming
herself into a panther whenever she gets angry. In a moment of
desperation, the American guy says: “God, what is with me? I was such a
normal, happy guy.” Which means: any involvement with Otherness that
stems from the Balkans will get one into trouble. Then communism came to power, and that added new fuel to the
fire of Western Eu-ropean imagination. Bram Stoker’s Dracula has been
resurrected in the characters of communist dictators many times.
Sometimes characters overlap, as in the latest version of the famous
film The Prince and the Showgirl. In the film a simple
hairdresser from Queens manages to melt the iron heart of some Romanian
or Bulgarian communist dictator. Malcolm Bradbury’s novel Rates of Exchange, with its sequel Why Come to Slaka?,
is probably the last in a long series of Cold War products connected
with the Balkans. After the fall of the Wall, post-Cold-War products
appeared, among them films which were (and still are) populated by wild
ex-Yugoslav and Ukrainian uranium dealers. Many great people have left their mark on the imaginary map
of the Balkans. Among them were such writers as Lawrence Durrell,
Malcolm Bradbury, George Bernard Shaw, E. M. Forster, Agatha Christie,
Rebecca West, Saul Bellow, Julian Barnes, and a wide variety of
journalists, actors, film directors, political thinkers, and
politicians. The imaginary Balkans was modeled and remodeled, shaped
and reshaped, constructed and reconstructed. At a time when hundreds of
thousands of refugees from former Yugoslavia were landing on Western
European shores, a new name popped out of the imagination of Goran
Stefanovski. From “Casablanca” and “Balkan” he coined the word
“Casabalkan.” The war in former Yugoslavia put the Balkans on the world map
once more. A mountain of journalistic, autobiographical, film, and
literary products have been produced since then. Thanks to the
contributions of ex-Yugoslavs, the reality of the Balkans matched its
dark image more than ever. Once again the Balkans became Western
Europe’s favorite fictional hunting ground for passionate convictions,
thrilling political speculations, moral recuperation, and real
political engagement. This Balkan stigma circulated within Eastern Europe as well,
and here nobody wanted to admit any connections with it. The Slovenians
saw themselves as a European protection shield against “balkanization”;
the Croats thought the same about themselves, and still do; the Serbs
didn’t mind shopping in Sofia, Istanbul, or Thessalonica, but left “the
Balkans” to Bulgarians. Bulgarians didn’t have a way out. They couldn’t
move their Balkan mountain any further—over the Black Sea, to Russia,
say. After the disappearance of communist leaders with artistic
aspirations such projects were no longer possible. So, who lives in
“the Balkans” now? The Bulgarians do. Stulic’s line Balkan, my Balkan, be mighty and stand strong and
its sudden resurrection could be read as the young’s reconciliation
with Balkan identity; as a postmodern acceptance of the image, which
is, just like any other image, a matter of fashion. It could also be
read as a protest against oppressive nationalistic brainwashing. It was
only a few years ago that, during Tudjman’s regime, a strange paragraph
prohibiting any future associations between Croatia and the Balkan
states was almost added to the Croatian constitution. The line We are Gypsy people, cursed by fate demonstrates (besides self-pity and a hidden racism) an awareness that
Roma people, badly discriminated against by Croats, Serbs, Albanians,
Romanians, Bulgarians, and others, are, in fact, the most stigmatized
ethnic population in Europe. Employing a strategy of
self-stigmatization, combined with unavoidable self-pity, the line is a
quick and sharp response to this image imposed on the Balkan people, as
well as being commercially profitable. Many of the cultural products
coming from the Balkans—films (by Emir Kusturica, Goran Paskaljevic,
and others), plays, and pop music—use this ambivalent strategy. In
other words, if the whole world sees us “Gypsy people” as primitive and
wild people, we’re going to play that part. And the world takes it as
truth. 2. Hard Work A lot of work has to be done in
order to establish “cultural cooperation,” which has become the main
ideological urge in Europe these days. The Balkan people, ex-Yugoslavs
above all, have a tough job ahead of them rethinking, reevaluating, and
articulating their recent past and their involvement in recent events.
In other words, the people of the Balkans have some real “soul
searching” to do. They will have to deconstruct the familiar patterns
of self-stigmatization, self-pity, and discrimination, or denial that
“there is something wrong,” as well as an arrogance that is based on
the shaky foundations of national identity or the “otherness”—pride. Western Europeans are expected to do the same. Over the last
few years Europe has undergone a rapid transition, marked by such
important events as the fall of the Wall, the unification of Germany,
and the introduction of a common currency. Europe is also expanding and
will continue to do so in the future. But above all, Europe is
experiencing a demographic change. Today’s Europe is, more than ever
before (demographers claim that there is no comparison in history),
populated by non-European immigrants. The human landscape of Europe has
changed radically over the last thirty or so years. Therefore Western
Europeans should re-evaluate the ideological set of ideas that has
upheld their Western European pride, such as democracy, human rights,
tolerance, and so forth. One of Europe’s ideological “darlings” is multiculturalism.
However, this idea of multiculturalism is, in practice, nothing more
than shopping for vegetables at the Turkish shop and having dinner in
an Indonesian restaurant. Ethnic and racial incidents are rife and part
of everyday life in Europe. Using a definition of contemporary society
as a “risk society characterized by global reflexivity,” Slavoj Zizek
concludes that “racism itself is becoming reflexive.” “Today’s
reflexive racism is paradoxically able to articulate itself in terms of
direct respect for the other’s culture,” according to Zizek. European
multiculturalism is, as practiced today, more than ever just a
politically correct disguise for indifference, for lack of contact
between different ethnic groups, for politically acceptable racism. In such a complex context it is not easy to reflect upon
cultural cooperation in Europe. There are many questions to be asked
and answered before we undertake such an ambitious enterprise: for
instance, how we see and define culture. In cultural cooperation—which
is today commonly understood as an exchange of cultural products—I see
three major scenarios bearing major dangers. The first possible scenario is the already existing one, based on the idea of European multiculturalism. It is a Eurovision Song Contest scenario. This major European mass-cultural performance, which
emotionally involves millions of European TV viewers, is the most
explicit and vulgar metaphor of European cultural cooperation. This
year’s winner, a Turkish pop group, is a perfect mass-cultural product
of European multicultural ideology. The judges’ choice reinforces the
stereotype (semi-belly dance, semi-oriental music), breaks with it
(blond Turkish daughters born in Switzerland), simultaneously expresses
and frees itself of “national identity.” With this example in mind, we
can easily imagine a European po-etry, art, or theater festival based
on the same idea of culture and cultural cooperation. The second possible scenario of cultural cooperation in
Europe is one based on defending high European cultural standards,
meant to be a defense against the American mass culture that dominates
the European market. There have been many attempts to protect European
cultural products against American “cultural imperialism.” There is,
however, another imaginary “threat”—one that comes from the inside,
from non-European Europeans. The Western European cultural canon,
having dominated for centuries, no longer plays a major role in today’s
global culture. A cultural policy based on a fear of “Islamization”
from within and “Americanization” from without could produce a scenario
based on exclusion, in which Europe’s culture would define itself as
the “defender” or “museum curator” of the highest “European” cultural
values. The third danger is hidden in the term “advocacy for
culture.” Cultural policy experts, cultural operators, cultural
managers, cultural facility providers might in some near future
outnumber writers, artists, filmmakers, composers. If such a scenario
came about, then cultural cooperation in Europe would simply mean
cultural cooperation between cultural policy makers. The idea of
culture as a service would prevail. Culture would serve the idea of
unification, of a united Europe; it could serve as an ambassador, a
diplomat, an escort service. In that case, culture would falsely
transform itself in order to become a most pleasant representative of
the national state, to keep the status quo, in other words. And then there is the market and overproduction. As Jean
Baudrillard said: “Art died not because there was not any, but because
there was too much.” 3. Test & Toast Cultural
dynamics—constant and lively exchanges—happen on their own, mostly
without much reflection. Ideas, influences, interactions happen
indirectly, incidentally, and often by mistake. It’s difficult to
control these dynamics, to follow their paths, and to understand them
easily. The real “language of culture” today could be called
“smurfentaal.” That’s what young urban people in Netherlands call their
slang, which is peppered with Moroccan, Turkish, Antillean, and English
words and lots of gestures. The name “smurfentaal” derives from popular
culture (Smurfs are little blue cartoon people). In other words, the
language of culture is a mixture of many cultural languages and is
constantly in change. It is a language influenced by global culture and
spoken globally; a language of a constant inclusion and not exclusion. Great works of art also happen on their own. More often than
not their authors are not representatives of national cultures, but the
opposite: outsiders, rebels, exiles, lonely individuals. James Joyce,
an Irish rebel, abandoned Ireland, his home, his church, the existing
values and norms, the norms of language and of literary tradition. He
linked himself to the Homeric story, creating the foremost literary
monument of European modernism, Ulysses. Let us try to imagine Mr. Joyce today. He would need seven years to complete Ulysses and seventeen years not to complete Finnegans Wake.
At the moment, Mr. Joyce is in Trieste, he is poor and unknown, he is
going to teach English in the Croatian town of Pula, just for a few
months. Later he will move to Paris. Imagine Nora telling James: “We are so poor, Jimmy, you
should apply for some grant for some of those projects of yours!” Would
today’s wealth of cultural institutions and cultural facilities be able
to help Mr. Joyce? Would our cultural managers be able to recognize his
genius? Or would they, following the rules, advise Mr. Joyce to seek a
stipend from some Irish cultural institution? Or would they advise him
to try some Greek cultural foundation, concerning that “Greek link” of
his project? Perhaps the answers to these questions will help a bit in
building a vision for a new European cultural policy. My message is simple, as are my fears. “Workers,” “cultural
proletarians” should not serve to facilitate cultural institutions, but
cultural institutions should serve to facilitate “cultural
proletarians.” In closing, let me go back and use a quote from
Malcolm Bradbury. These words in broken English belong to
Comrade-General I. Vulcani, head of the Slakan State: In
Slaka, when we drink, we like to make toast. Our favorite toast is “to
dialogi.” With “dialogi” we mean many things. “Dialogi” is the
friendship of all pease-loving fraternal peoples. “Dialogi” is the
great spirit of amity and concorde. “Dialogi” means desire for true
intercurse—an intercurse where each partner is an equal and no-one is
on top.
