BLACK AND BALKAN: A COMPARISON OF CARIBBEAN, AFRICAN, AFRICAN-AMERICAN AND BALKAN HISTORY, THEORY AND ART BY ANJA JOVIC B. A. UNIVERSITY OF ZAGREB, 2006 M. A. COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, 2008 M. A. BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2012 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIEREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AT BROWN UNIVERSITY   © Copyright 2015 by Anja Jovic                                             This dissertation by Anja Jovic is accepted in its present form by the Department of Comparative Literature as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date _________________ _____________________________ Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg, Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date _________________ _____________________________ Esther Whitfield, Reader Date _________________ _____________________________ Paget Henry, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date _________________ ______________________________ Peter M. Weber, Dean of the Graduate School   iii   CURRICULUM VITAE Anja Jovic was born in Zagreb, then ex-Yugoslavia, now Croatia, in what is in that region considered a “mixed marriage.” As a child of both Serbs and Croats, during the 1990s ex- Yugoslav war, Anja learned the first valuable lessons about the dangers of nationalism, ethnicism, othering, and discrimination, about which she deeply cares and writes to this day. While still a student of French and English Literature and Linguistics at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, Anja started translating novels. She translated more than ten novels from English and French into Croatian, by authors ranging from Nicole Krauss to Michel Houellebecq. The process of “rewriting” these novels in a different language gave her interesting insights about the nature of narrative, storytelling and differences and similarities between contemporary novels written in different languages and cultures. After she lived in the French-speaking Switzerland, she moved to New York City in 2007, and earned her Master’s Degree in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. During her Ph.D. studies at Brown, she received the Cogut Center for the Humanities’ John Cargill MacMillan Graduate Fellowship, and published the article “Aimé Césaire and Another Face of Europe” in Johns Hopkins University’s journal MLN. In her free time, Anja has performed in plays and at comedy events at many venues in New York City. She writes essays, sketches and scripts pertaining to the issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and immigration.   iv   ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Before writing my dissertation, I used to skip the Acknowledgements section of books. However, since I embarked upon the process of writing, I have read started reading authors’ acknowledgments with care, empathy, and the newfound understanding that most books, dissertations and other creative and intellectual “fruits of labor” would be impossible without the support of family, mentors, colleagues, and friends. In that respect, this dissertation is no exception. Since my first year at Brown, Suzanne Stewart-Steinberg has been my mentor, my inspiration and a continuous source of insightful comments, observations, commentaries and advice. She also knew exactly when I needed more than academic advice, and every time generously offered a warm cup of tea and a compassionate ear. I believe that every PhD candidate, and especially every PhD candidate that pursues their academic goals and dreams far from home, knows how crucial this is. Suzanne inspired me not only to be a rigorous thinker, and a strong woman in academia – she has also shown me what it means to be a mentor that changes a young scholar’s life by helping them develop their abilities to the fullest potential, all while creating a compassionate, human connection that transcends the years spent in the program. I have been extremely lucky to have another great thinker, as well as a dedicated and compassionate advisor on my dissertation committee: Esther Whitfield. Esther’s advice, comments, guidance, warmth, and intellectual rigor have helped me grow from a student into a scholar. Her impressive knowledge, as well as her willingness to respond to all my questions and concerns with immense care and supportiveness, always gave me solutions for both my highly theoretical, as well as completely practical concerns. I am deeply grateful to my third committee member, Paget Henry, not only for sharp insights and inspiring comments and suggestions, but also for the exchange of our immigrational/emigrational stories, which have always been accompanied with peals of laughter and joys of storytelling. I could not ask for a more impressive mentor in teaching and discussing literature and life than Arnold Weinstein. Watching him talk about literature with such wisdom, knowledge and eloquence that an auditorium with more than two hundred students seemed as if was holding its collective breath for two hours - was simply mesmerizing.   v   Teaching courses with Arnold, and having his guidance, has been one of the most fulfilling experiences of my entire life. I will be eternally grateful to the Cogut Center of Humanities, its brilliant fellows, and Professor Michael Steinberg for some of the most stimulating conversations that I have ever witnessed and participated in, as well as to all the faculty and colleagues at Brown that inspired me and helped me become a better scholar throughout the years: Karen Newman, Paul Armstrong, Barbara Herrnstein Smith, and Marc Redfield. I am thankful to the brilliant Charles Altieri of Berkeley for his lectures and works, and for the discussions of art and life that I will never forget. I am grateful to professors who have generously helped me during my Master’s Studies at Columbia University: Marianne Hirsch, to whom I submitted a paper on Eastern European femininity, and whose message “You should write more about this, Anja” I keep to this day. She knew which topics I was passionate about before I did. Bruce Robbins’s guidance during my first year in the United States was compassionate and wise, while his brilliant seminars and advice were truly life-changing. I am leaving Brown richer not only as a scholar, but also as a person, surrounded by a network of friends, who will stay a part of my life forever: thank you to Peter Kim, Swetha Regunathan, Silja Maehl, Katerina Seligmann, Silvia Cernea Clarke, Fannie Bialek, Yana Stainova, and Karida Brown. Bruno Penteado and Sonja Stojanovic, anything that I could say about the extent of your kindness and generosity would be an understatement. I am thankful to Vesna Kuiken for stimulating conversations about everything and anything. Vesna’s brilliance and warmth have been my home away from home for many years. A special thank you to Zrinka Pavlić and Martina Maričić for making me believe that I can survive anything as long as the three of us can talk about it and laugh at it in the kuhinja (the kitchen) back in Zagreb. Thank you to my family. To Milenko Jovic, my incredibly talented father, and Milena Jovic, who taught me to love art. I still miss them every day. Thank you to Vid Jovic, Desanka Jovic and Ivan Pavkovic, my grandparents who fought against fascism and Nazism when they were only sixteen and eighteen years old. I remember growing up proud of my grandfather Vid’s wounds, and I am still proud of the values of equality, acceptance, love and compassion that these courageous people have instilled in me – the   vi   values that are indeed a part of this project. Zvonimir, Josip, Gerda and Teri Gracin, you will always have a special place in my heart. I do not even know how to begin to thank my mother, Alenka Pavkovic, for working two jobs in order to put food on our table in the war-torn Croatia, for teaching me what feminism means not only in books, but in real life, and – more than anything - for agreeing to read Doctor Doolittle to me before bedtime over and over again, until we could both recite the book by heart. Perhaps it was crucial that then, at the age of three, I was never denied my favorite story. Thank you to Randy Humphrey for teaching me that the boundaries of love can reach much farther than I have ever imagined, for deciding to share his life with me, and for making me laugh even when I firmly decide to stay serious. I see all these people as my nomadic travelling little home, and a crucial part of anything and everything good and positive that I can bring into this world.   vii   TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction …………………………………………………………………1 Chapter 1, Aimé Césaire and “Another Face of Europe”…………………. 23 Chapter 2, Slaves and Slavs: The Dispossession of Slava ………………... 48 Chapter 3, Black Skin, White Masks; White Skin, White Masks………… 109 Chapter 4, Ivo Andrić and Toni Morrison………………………………… 149 Chapter 5, Conclusion and “Connective Histories” ..……………………. 188 Bibliography …………………………………………………………….... 200   viii     INTRODUCTION At the beginning of an academic endeavor, there is often a hope that the study or the work in question will speak for and by itself, without the intruding subjectivity of the voice of the author. There is also the hope that the study will seem objectively and rationally chosen, and dissociated from the researcher's private life. There is as well the awareness that this place of objectivity rarely exists and that most studies in the humanities, and even in natural sciences, evolved from a very personal interest, history, passion or intellectual quandary. We could conclude, then, that every study is a combination of objective and subjective forces, a mixture of the impartial and the personal. In that respect, the present study is no different: its main goal is an objective comparison between the histories and the experiences of Eastern Europe, Africa and the Caribbean, and between blackness and balkannes, while its point of origin can probably be located in two very personal anecdotes. The first one took place in Switzerland in 1997, merely two years after the end of the last Balkan war. My three Swiss friends and I were in a car, which was stopped by the police for what seemed to be a random check-up. We were asked to present our identifications: I had a Croatian ID; three other IDs were, of course, Swiss. The driver was asked to pull over by the side of the road, flashlights were directed at my face, shotguns were pointed at me, and I was thoroughly searched by a policewoman. I remember my fear and confusion, but, more than anything, I remember the feeling of utter humiliation and shame. When the police did not find anything, my co-passengers and I were let go. No one from the police apologized nor explained. It was implicit that in   1     those post-Balkan-war times, with a lot of Yugoslav legal and illegal immigrants and refugees in Western Europe, I was by default a suspect. It was many years later that I read the book Ȇtre noir Africain en Suisse (Being Black in Switzerland) by Cikuru Batumike, a journalist who immigrated to Switzerland from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but the state of affairs that he describes in the book was familiar to me even back in 1997, when I was searched by the police as a very young woman. The experiences of black people in Switzerland and my own converged and overlapped in deep and meaningful ways, despite the fact that their foreignness was visible, while mine was relatively hidden – hidden, that is - until the moment when I had to present my papers, reveal my name or utter a word of French. Our overlapping experiences raised many questions: Why these two groups? Was it the poverty? Or the sheer numbers? And was I right: is this attitude truly primarily directed at Africans and Eastern Europeans? Official Swiss reports written in the field of migration studies and quoted by Batumike seem to prove me right, at least in this specific context: a study of the epidemiology of psychological troubles conducted in Bern in 2001 demonstrates that the most psychologically troubled immigrants are, first, Africans, and, right behind them, Eastern Europeans. That means that the main problem in adaptation could not have been caused by cultural differences, since, according to the study, Asians and Latin Americans adapted much more easily to the life in this Western European society than Western Europe's first-door neighbors. This led me to think that my intuition had been right and that the cause of these troubles lay in a particular kind of stigma, which was apparently primarily linked to Africans and Eastern Europeans (who predominantly immigrated from the Balkans). As Batumike asks: "Yesterday, they were pointing the finger at   2     Yugoslavs - the drug traffickers, today, it's black Africans; whose turn is it going to be tomorrow?"1 The second event that lies at the source of this research happened ten years after the first, after I moved to New York to pursue a Master's degree at Columbia University. I was having lunch with a black colleague from the department, and three British women who happened to sit at a table next to ours were commenting on how dissatisfied they were with the food and the service. They concluded that the waitress and the restaurant did not deserve a tip, and then they, indeed, left without leaving it. My colleague and I found ourselves fascinated by this scene, sitting in silence, which he finally breached by saying: "Oh, the freedom that they have! The freedom… " I do not remember responding, but I knew exactly what he meant. If he had decided not to leave the tip, he would have felt that he was reinforcing a negative stereotype: in short, he did not feel that, as a black man, he was free to be an individual who decides to leave a tip or not based upon his (dis)satisfaction with the service. He felt as a representative of an entire race, which would then perhaps be additionally stigmatized because of his action, regardless of the fact that this action would be particular to him. I was not aware whether there were any negative stereotypes related to Eastern Europeans and tipping, but what I did know was that I felt that I also did not have the freedom to deprive the waitress of her tip without feeling that I would somehow create or reinforce some presumed prejudice against people with Slavic accents. His worry was based on his skin color; my worry was based                                                                                                                           1 Cikuru Batumike. Etre noir Africain en Suisse: Intégration, identité, perception et perspectives d'avenir d'une minorité visible. Paris: L'Harmattan, 2006. p. 206.     3     primarily on my speech. As it turns out, the roles of race and language will find themselves intertwined at many points in this study. These two anecdotes are more or less banal, the second by all means more than the first; but, regardless of the fact that its roots reach into more serious histories, the everyday feeling of racial and/or ethnic inferiority is most often experienced as erosive precisely in its banality and everydayness. One of the most powerful insights of Saidiya Hartman's Scenes of Subjection lies precisely in the fact that behind the histories of the spectacular and the shocking, there is a quiet and almost unspeakable - and therefore often unspoken – but very palpable feeling of subjection and shame. Anne Anlin Cheng begins her book The Melancholy of Race by analyzing a passage from Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man in order to describe what she means by her term "racial melancholia."2 In the quoted passage, Invisible accidentally bumps into a white man in the street, who then calls Invisible "an insulting name." Invisible grabs the man, yelling "Apologize! Apologize!", while continuing to beat him: "I kicked him repeatedly, in a frenzy, because he still uttered insults though his lips were frothy with blood" [my emphasis] (Cheng 16). At the moment when he is about to slit the man's throat, Invisible realizes that the man "had not seen me, actually" (16). Cheng therefore asks who the invisible one really is, since it is Invisible himself who bumps into the man in the street, and then immediately assumes that he is being cursed because of his race, and not because of, for example, his clumsiness: "… the narrator demonstrates that he is trapped, not by having been seen as invisible but by suspecting himself to be so. This is                                                                                                                           2 Ann Anlin Cheng. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.   4     racial melancholia for the raced subject: the internalization of discipline and rejection – and the installation of a scripted context of perception," concludes Cheng (16-17). Croatian author Dubravka Ugrešić writes that she can always recognize - as she calls them - "her people": "But I always do recognize my people. I recognize them at international airports, where they are more easily hidden, mixed up with others. I recognize them by a kind of twitch, by their eyes, by the way they glance shyly around them, and the way they try not to, by the way they check in their luggage, I recognize them even when they're travelling in the opposite direction, when they're well disguised in foreign clothes, and pretending, therefore, to be something else." 3 Her people, therefore, are the people living the lives of quiet – and, in this case, ethnic - desperation. Interestingly, an Afro-Caribbean, an African-American, and a Balkan writer – Aimé Césaire, Langston Hughes and Dubravka Ugrešić – all expressed this feeling of shame by evoking the images of faces covered with spit: For my face, I demand the vivid homage of spit! (Césaire 30)4 Look, now I am only a man, no degradation, no spit perturbs him… (Césaire 39) For honest work You proffer me poor pay, for honest dreams Your spit is in my face. (Hughes)5 At our foreign literary meeting I notice also a Serbian colleague in the corner. He has a tic. He keeps wiping invisible spittle from his face. (Ugrešić 178)                                                                                                                           3 Dubravka Ugrešić. The Cultures of Lies: Antipolitical Essays. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998. 4 Aimé Césaire. Trans. Mireille Rosello and Annie Pritchard. Notebook of a Return to My Native Land. Ohio State University Press, 1994. 5 Langston Hughes. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: First Vintage Classics Edition. p. 638.   5     For Chicago-based Bosnian writer Aleksandar Hemon the locus of this shame is language: in his novel Nowhere Man, the protagonist is the author's alter-ego – Jozef Pronek, a Bosnian immigrant to America working at all kinds of jobs, one of which is teaching. In one of his classes, he meets a man whose name indicates that he is also from the Balkans, and Pronek asks him a banal question: "You like Robert Frost?” “I was reading him on faculty,” he said. “I am also studying litrch — litrchoo — I am studying books.” It was as he was fumbling the word literature that I befriended him. It was painful for me too to utter that word, and I grinned in warm understanding, wanting to hug him like a stack of wheat. Even now, when I teach, when I am forced to utter the word “literature,” I have a strange sensation — my nipples tickle, my eyes well up with tears.6 7 Maybe surprisingly - if we consider the book's title - in Franz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks, shame is, as well as in Aleksandar Hemon, primarily related to speech and language: … the more the black Antillean assimilates the French language, the whiter he gets – i. e., the closer he comes to becoming a true human being."8 [my emphasis] Among a group of young Antilleans, he who can express himself, who masters the language, is the one to look out for: be wary of him; he's almost white. [my emphasis 4] Making him [the black man] speak pidgin is tying him to an image, snaring him, imprisoning him as the eternal victim of his own essence. [my emphasis 18] Fanon also acknowledges that this feeling of linguistic (and therefore, cultural and identity-related) inferiority is by no means valid only in the case of blacks: For the time being we would like to demonstrate why the black Antillean, whoever he is, always has to justify his stance in relation to language. Going one                                                                                                                           6 Aleksandar Hemon. Nowhere Man. New York: Vintage International, 2002. p. 82. 7 Equally tormented by the same problems related to the pronunciation of the word literature, when I am asked what I study, I usually resort to saying: Comp Lit. 8 Franz Fanon. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 2008. p. 2.     6     step farther, we shall enlarge the scope of our description to include every colonized subject. All colonized people – in other words, people in whom an inferiority complex has taken root, whose local cultural originality has been committed to the grave – position themselves in relation to the civilizing language: i. e., the metropolitan culture. (2) Fanon also recounts an (apocryphal or not) anecdote from Aimé Césaire's 1945 electoral campaign, during which Césaire gave a speech in Fort-de-France "in front of a packed auditorium" (22). Apparently, a woman in the audience fainted in the middle of the speech. The conclusion of the eyewitnesses was that she fainted because of how excellent Césaire's command of language was: "His French was so dynamite the woman fell to the floor and started ketching malkadi"9 (22). "The power of language" – comments Fanon – reminding the reader once again that, despite the fact that he is writing about the French Antilles, he is "well aware, however, that this same behavior can be found in any race subjected to colonization" (9). We could conclude that the source of, for example, Invisible Man's shame and anger is immediately visible and exposed, while the cause of ethnic shame is more easily hidden. While this is true, it is also true that the source of shame located in language or speech is also hard to hide in almost any human interaction. Moreover, for Pronek, who has trouble pronouncing the word literature and for the Afro-Caribbean who comes to Paris with "an accent," speech - or the human activity par excellence - becomes invested with shame. Precisely that which is often considered as the main differentiator between animals and humans becomes a source of humiliation. Thus, it turns out once again that                                                                                                                           9  Fanon writes that it means she had convulsions.     7     the subaltern cannot speak – but, apparently, for more than one reason. For, even if they do, they will probably be ashamed of their revealing accents.10 These personal anecdotes and writers' accounts raise another set of questions: In which way does Eastern European experience of shame or inferiority overlap with black "racial melancholia" (Cheng) or the “Prospero complex” (Fanon)? And is one pole of comparison Eastern Europe? Or is it the Slavs? Or the Balkans? Or all three of them, in different overlapping layers? And how does this experience correspond to the experiences of Africans, Afro-Caribbeans or African-Americans? To answer these questions, I first had to ask the question of origins, or, namely: If we assume that the black skin became racially stigmatized primarily because of the Atlantic slave trade, what caused the Eastern European, Slavic or Balkan stigma? Was it economic “backwardness”? Or communism? Was this stigma relatively new, or as old as the stigma related to black skin? In order to try to find some answers, I had to search for the "roots," and return to the past. However, my search for the roots began with yet another anecdote, an anecdote about a fruitful friendship between a black poet and a Balkan linguist, which permitted me to enter this wide-ranging history and theory through a specific event. But, before I embark upon the “story,” I should say a few words about my aims and my general methodology.                                                                                                                           10 Of course, this feeling of shame related to speech and language is connected primarily, if not exclusively, to postcolonial subjects. Any shame that a Frenchman could feel because of his bad pronunciation of - for example - English would most probably not lead him to be ashamed of his "Frenchness;" he or she would more likely be ashamed of his or her supposed individual inability to master a foreign language.   8     Aims and Methodology My aims in this study are various: first, to compare historical and material conditions that draw a strong parallel between the two groups that are the main focus of my study (Balkan and black); second, to see how certain philosophers and theorists used these historical conditions and turned them into ethnically and racially marked constructions; third, to examine how these conditions and constructions influenced cultural and literary productions of the peoples involved; and lastly, fourth, to find ways to influence this production in a positive way (in other words, to open a freer space with more “authenticity” – a concept I will discuss more extensively), as well as perhaps to discover methods of reading and writing about these cultural products (whether they are novels, poems, films, autobiographies etc.). I would also like to address my use of the words and concepts that could be seen as problematic and emphasize that I am not, in any occasion, using them without the awareness of their complexity, and even contentiousness. I use the words “black,” “Balkan,” “African,” “Caribbean” etc. without any intention of leveling or homogenizing the terms or the peoples to which they refer. I choose to use these terms with the keen awareness that they do not indicate that there is one concept, or even one set of concepts, that can satisfactorily embrace the heterogeneity of each of these terms. I am also aware that these are high-octane words, since the peoples to which they refer have been systematically politically, societally and socially homogenized at many points in the past and the present. If we call the French, the Germans or the Dutch “Europeans,” the likelihood is that they will not be upset, or protest that we are lumping them all together and disregarding their heterogeneity. However, when we say “African,” “Eastern   9     European,” “black” or “balkan,” we have to be aware of a long history of oppression, essentialization and stereotyping, during which these terms were often misused or abused. When I say “black,” I never intend to erase or level the differences between an African, an African-American, an Afro-Caribbean, or a black French. Nor do I, to go further, want to erase the differences between a Martinican and a Jamaican, or a Congolese and a Rwandan, a Tutsi and a Hutu. Equally, when I say “Balkan,” I do not want to erase differences in the identities of Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Kosovars, Bulgarians etc. However, I nevertheless choose to use these words, first, because, no matter how heterogeneous and pluralistic the people embraced by those terms are, the very existence – or persistence – of those terms, to me, signals that they still carry an important linguistic and semiotic weight. If the concepts “black” or “balkan” were obsolete, or if they become so, the terms will slowly die along with the concepts. Secondly, since these terms and concepts do exist, my aim is then to follow the footsteps of those that explored the ways in which these concepts could be used for solidarity and empowerment. When a sophomore student wrote to the journal The Crisis, of which Du Bois was an editor, complaining about the fact that the journal used the term “negro,” which the black student found offensive, Du Bois clearly explained how futile the change of the term usually is if it is not accompanied by the change in people’s mindset: If a thing is despised, either because of ignorance or because it is despicable, you will not alter matters by changing its name. If men despise Negroes, they will not despise them less if Negroes are called “colored” or “Afro-Americans.”11 Suppose we arose tomorrow morning and lo! instead of being “Negroes,” all the world called us “Cheiropolidi” – do you really think this would make a vast and                                                                                                                           11  W. E. B. DuBois. “The Name ‘Negro.’” The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader. Ed. Eric J. Sundquist. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. p. 70.   10     momentous difference to you and to me? […] The feeling of inferiority is in you, not in my name. The name merely evokes what is already there. (71) As much as it is sometimes important to change the term, the change needs to be coterminous with the change of the mindset. The terms that I am using here might become obsolete - and if they do become obsolete because a new space of acceptance, openness or hybridity has opened up - then I would be delighted to see them in the dustbin of history. However, at this moment, the very need for us to “tiptoe” around the words “balkan” or “black” is the proof that the concepts behind them are extremely politically and socially charged. They are even linguistically charged, as the verbs “balkanize” and “blacken” both carry negative connotations in every present dictionary. I also deem that it is important that I address the question of the method. I began this study interested in certain phenomena, anecdotes, and comparisons. I did not start with a clear “toolbox” or a methodology; however, something that could be called a method revealed itself to me during my research and the process of writing. I did not impose the method on the material – instead, I let the material dictate the form and methodology. It was of the utmost importance that my methodology emerges from the material and the content for several reasons, the most important of which is precisely the fact that my study focuses on two historically ethnically and/or racially marked groups, whose cultural production (of texts, autobiographies, films, novels) has been influenced by their social circumstances. Du Bois famously wrote that an African-American always lives in a double- consciousness and two-ness, with the perpetual awareness that he is both black and American, that he is perceived as black, with all the connotations that accompany that   11     concept, and that he is interpellated to posit himself towards that gaze in one way or another: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unrecorded strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”12 The Martinicans Aimé Césaire and Franz Fanon, the Nigerian Chinua Achebe, all wrote about the double consciousness of a colonized subject that originates from the periphery. Césaire describes a scene from an evening streetcar in Paris, in which “a nigger big as a pongo trying to make himself small on the street-car bench”13 elicits sneers from some women standing behind him – the sneers to which the Martinican narrator of the poem displays “a big complicitous smile” (31). He adds immediately, in a moment of self-defeat: “My cowardice rediscovered!” (31) And the reader understands that the narrator recognizes a part of himself in the poor black man in the streetcar, that he sees his poverty, as well as the gaze and the sneers of the women, and desperately, “cowardly,” wants to distinguish himself from him. In his collections of essays Home and Exile, Chinua Achebe recounts a story about Nigerian social critic Tai Solarin, who went as a student to London in the 1950s and took a parcel to the post office to send it to Nigeria: “A lady at the counter took it from him and weighed it. To do the calculation for the postage she looked again at the                                                                                                                           12 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk. First Library of America, 2009. 13 Aimé Césaire. The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land: Bilingual Edition. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2013. p. 29.   12     address and said: ‘Nigeria…. Nigeria… Is Nigeria ours or French?’ To which Solarian, a very austere man, replied: ‘Nigeria is yours, madam.’ To even inconsequential minions of imperial rule, subject peoples were all ‘invisible,’ along with their sometimes unpronounceable homelands.”14 Achebe concludes that many a traveler from Africa has discovered their superfluousness and invisibility in Western Europe. In her essay “Nice People Don’t Mention Such Things,” Dubravka Ugrešić explains how her identity of the Other is perpetually and inevitably “glued” onto her, even when she – very much like Césaire in the Paris tram - just wants to blend in with other people in West European cities: At airports I stand in the queue for passport control. Signs over the booths behind which uninformed officials sit indicate my place. In some places it says others, in some there is merely an absence of the blue board with the ring of little yellow stars. My queue is long, it drags on slowly. The EU people in the parallel queue enter quickly. I notice that none of them looks in our direction. There is not a single glance expressing sympathy, curiosity or, if nothing else, contempt. They have no time, the queue is moving too quickly. But we, others, have plenty of time to observe them. We are different, our skin is often dark, our eyes dart suspiciously about or stare dully straight ahead, our movements are sluggish and subdued. No one chats or laughs in our queue, we are quiet, there is something surreptitious about us. The tension of our bodies testifies that we have only one thought in our heads: just to get across this frontier. And when I cross it, I shall not say anything about this to my Dutch friends. Nice people don't mention such things. Besides, why should I? Once I have passed through passport control I can go and pray in a little Muslim or who knows which shrine at the airport itself, if I really feel like it. I'm welcome, cultural differences and identities are respected here. However, my problem is of a different nature. My problem consists in the fact that I am not and do not wish to be different. My difference and my identity are doggedly determined by others.15                                                                                                                           14 Chinua Achebe. Home and Exile. New York: Anchor Books, 2001. p. 98-99. 15 Dubravka Ugrešić. The Culture of Lies. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. p. 237.   13     In her book of essays How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, Slavenka Drakulić explained the preoccupation of a community of overdetermined, marked subjects with their self-presentation to the Western gaze. Namely, she wrote how the entire city of Zagreb, Croatia, was completely “refurbished” in 1987, to the point that, after a fairly short absence, she could barely recognize it: “Perhaps for the first time I was able to notice the Art Deco sculptures on the facades, the little towers, incrustations, mermaids holding up a balcony here, braids of flowers, and chubby little stucco cherubs. Then I remembered that there used to be a warning in front of the cathedral, saying ‘Danger, falling rock!’ (pieces falling from its two Gothic towers), and I had thought it was just about time they did something about the city. All the same, I was surprised.”16 But, of course, the surprise was dissipated the moment she realized that the city was renovated because it was hosting the student Olympic Games Universiade, and the government “was worried about the impression Zagreb would leave ‘on the world’” (160). As much as the citizens of Zagreb were glad to finally see their city renewed, they found the communal inferiority complex that prompted the government to make the changes “humiliating” and “offensive”: “What hurt was this distinction between “the world” and us. […] If they [the foreigners] are “the world,” then what are we? What is dividing us; where is that invisible border? In us, in our low self-esteem, in our history and poverty, the system we live in? What makes us feel so different that we have to look up at the world, with a constant feeling that the world is looking down on us? Or is that borderline between us and them, after all, a visible, palpable one?” (160) This was                                                                                                                           16 Slavenka Drakulić. How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. p. 159.   14     written in 1987, but it is - in different forms - still written and expressed in the Balkans today, from the news to social media. However, the fact that the writers and peoples that are the focus of this study have a complicated relationship to the white West is not the only factor I had to take into account. Coterminous to it is the influence that the white West has had on these peoples’ literary and cultural production. As Philip Gould writes in “The rise, development and the circulation of the slave narrative,” the content of slave narratives was contingent upon “the material and economic realities of publication,” and the narratives were shaped to appeal to their evangelical or anti-abolitionist publishers.17 In case we assumed that the circumstances changed after the abolition of slavery, and that the authors of the Harlem Renaissance were not so much affected by the demands of the market, it is enough to quote just a few examples from John K. Young’s book Black Writers, White Publishers: namely, “the publishers of Cane advertised the novel as ‘a book about Negroes by a Negro’” “despite Jean Toomer’s request not to promote the book along such racial lines.” […] “Zora Neale Hurston criticized American racial policy in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on the Road (1942), noting that ‘President Roosevelt could extend his four freedoms to people right here in America.’ But she cut this passage and others like it” because an editor suggested it.18 Here, I am by no means implying that other ethnically, racially or sexually “unmarked” writers are exempt from the demands of the editors                                                                                                                           17  PhilipGould. The Rise, development and the circulation of the slave narrative. Ed. Audrey Fisch. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. p. 14.   18  John K. Young. Black Writers, White Publishers. The University Press of Mississippi, 2006. p. 3.     15     and/or the market, but I am suggesting that this influence is – if not bigger – then, at least of a different nature whenever we have a writer that belongs to a marked minority.19 Moreover, to the effects of double consciousness, two-ness, and the demands of the publishing market, we have to add the phenomenon that James Weldon Johnson so appropriately named “the problem of the double audience.”20 Namely, when an author who is “marked” sits down to write, they usually feel the pressure of choosing their audience. For whom are they writing? For the Nigerians or for Europeans? For the American blacks, or the American whites? For the Bosnians or “the world”? As Weldon Johnson puts it: “The moment a Negro writer takes up his pen or sits down to his typewriter he is immediately called upon to solve, consciously or unconsciously, this problem of the double audience. To whom shall he address himself, to his own black group or to white America? Many a Negro writer has fallen down, as it were, between these two stools” (477). After we take into account all the factors at play when a black or a Balkan author writes a book, it seems to me that reading their works while using the same methods that we use while reading T. S. Eliot or Ernest Hemingway is quite inadequate. We have now a fairly long history of postcolonial criticism, but there is still a lack of a clear methodology through which we could approach the texts of racial, ethnic and colonial authors. It seems that there are as many methodologies as there are different marked subjects – which is perhaps desirable – but which also means that every new study uses the existent postcolonial theory and criticism as a stepping stone, from which it has to                                                                                                                           19 Jewish, Asian, Latino authors have been subjected to the same demands, but in this case I will focus on the two big groups that I am comparing, particularly since the stereotypes attached to their race and ethnicity have many common traits.     20 James Weldon Johnson. The American Mercury, December 1928. pp. 477-481.   16     proceed to find its own methodologies and approaches. We also, on the one hand, seem to have a rich critical and theoretical postcolonial literature that focuses on the criticism of Western, Eurocentric and/or white dominant narratives, as well as on finding the gaps and wounds in these narratives that point to the existence of the mis- or under-represented marked subjects. On the other hand, critical and theoretical literature that would explore the texts authored by these marked subjects, and attempt to find new methods of reading their texts, is a rarer occurrence. It was clear to me from the beginning that my method is interdisciplinary and deeply historicist: in other words, while reading the works, I am always particularly aware of and curious about the conditions in which they were written, including the circumstances surrounding the author herself. As most of us, I was trained to be fairly resistant to any critical implication of the author in the texts, but, while reading these works, all of a sudden I found myself interested in and sensitive to the authors’ commentaries (less so if they pertained to their life, and more so if they pertained to their work). This by no means suggests that these authors’ texts cannot be read – or even close-read - on their own, but, when we read the works written by the former slaves Oluadah Equiano or Bartolomej Georgijević, or by Dubravka Ugrešić, who writes from her more or less forced exile from the war-torn, nationalistically-charged ex-Yugoslavia, or by Zora Neale Hurston, who one day, as she says, “became colored,” close-reading and the avoidance of the biographical and societal contexts seem to impoverish the texts, instead of enriching them. For this reason, I gave myself the permission to listen to the authors’ own commentaries about their texts, which sometimes included even the notion of intention.   17     Literary criticism is still quite indebted to William K. Wimsatt’s and Monroe C. Beardsley’s influential essay “Intentional Fallacy,” in which they successfully demonstrated the inadequacies of critics’ regard for the writers’ intention in critical analyses of the works. This resistance to the “intent(ion)” is so widespread that, in the Balkans, the question What did the writer want to say? is now posed as a commonplace nonchalant joke, even when someone makes a cryptic remark at a bar. However, perhaps the question of intent(ion) is not so futile or naïve in the case of, for example, Toni Morrison, who writes her texts as both a female African-American author and a literary scholar, or in the cases of Equiano or Bartolomej, whose intentions were to gain supporters for the abolition of slavery of their peoples, as it could be when we, for example, interpret William Carlos Williams’s poem The Red Wheelbarrow. “A poem can be only through its meaning – since its medium is words – yet it is, simply is, in the sense that we have no excuse for inquiring what part is intended or meant,” write Wimsatt and Beardsley.21 But is it true that a poem, let alone a novel, or a slave narrative, always just simply is? “The poem belongs to the public,” Wimsatt and Beardsley add. But what if the public is a bad caretaker? What if the public is the voice of the majority, and the author’s voice is “minor,” easily misunderstood, stereotyped, or marked? “We ought to impute the thoughts and attitudes of the poem immediately to the dramatic speaker” (5). This distinction between the author, the narrator, and their different ontological levels, has been introduced and accepted ever since the brilliant structuralist study of narrative by Gérard Genette (Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method). However, now that we understand the difference between authors, narrators and                                                                                                                           21  K. William Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley. The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky. p. 4.   18     characters, should we avoid asking questions even from the ethnically, racially, sexually or religiously marked author (whose death has been so gloriously proclaimed)? As much as we can close-read “just” the text, we are continuously reminded that literary texts have sometimes been written and/or understood in such deeply political ways that close- readings of them fail to recognize an important aspect of their geneses or afterlives. (Consider one of the most publicized cases of such a “reading,” in which Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on Salman Rushdie.) Furthermore, if we deem that a dialogue with other critics and interpreters of texts is useful, why couldn’t we assume the same about the authors? And, if we bear in mind that authors who did say something about their intents or aims probably have a different agenda than the critics, it is logical that we do not have to be naïve listeners of their commentaries, or that their comments necessarily have to skew or pollute our reading of the texts. However, I would argue that, in some cases, they could potentially inform them. Reading and interpreting texts written by marked subjects made me pose the question whether the intent(ion) and the voice of the author (and not just the narrator) should be explicitly restored in our critical language, not as the main interpretative or evaluative keys, but as important factors in the reading of texts by marked subjects. I suppose that my deeply historicist method that includes all kinds of extratextual materials, ranging from the writer’s life and commentary to the material conditions of the publishing, from literary to non-literary sources, makes my method largely overlap with the method used by New Historicists (or Cultural Poeticists), which is not that surprising since in their “manifesto” (Practicing New Historicism), Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt claim that “it is hardly an accident that this broader vision of the field   19     of cultural interpretation, which had been mooted for more than a century, took hold in the United States in the late 1960s and ‘70s. It reflected in its initial period the recent inclusion of groups that in many colleges and universities had hitherto been marginalized, half hidden, or even entirely excluded from the professional study of literature: Jews, African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, and, most significantly from the point of view of the critical ferment, women.”22 If I had to point to a difference between what could be considered a standard new historicist reading23 and my method, it would be a lack of playfulness on my part, as well as my willingness to read the texts not just against, but also “along” the grain. However, another point of overlap between the method that revealed itself to me and the new historicist method is the importance of the anecdote, which I have found useful in its metonymical and exemplary power, and which, as Gallagher and Greenblatt claim, “satisfied the desire for something outside the literary, something indeed that would challenge the boundaries of the literary,” and provide “a way into the ‘contact zone,’ the charmed space where the genius literarius could be conjured into existence” (48). Chinua Achebe, in his lectures at Harvard, published in the collection Home and Exile, said that he could apologize “for the somewhat autobiographical and anecdotal mode of these presentations to which a totally reasonable person might well have come with more severe, more rigorous expectations” (75). But how could we blame Achebe for using anecdotes when some of them inform us about what it was like to be a student at the University College, Ibadan, toward the end of the British colonial rule in West                                                                                                                           22 Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt. Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000. p. 11. 23 I am aware here that there is no official “standard” new historicist method, but there are still certain patterns that are recognizable in new historicist criticism.   20     Africa? A college at which he and his Nigerian colleagues had English professors who mostly taught them European canonical literature, to which they had no objections, until, one day, they had to read Mister Johnson, a novel by an Anglo-Irishman, Joyce Cary, which was about Nigeria. Achebe and his classmates apparently felt that Nigeria and Nigerians were so grossly misrepresented in Cary’s novel that one of Achebe’s classmates stood up and “told an astounded teacher point-blank that the only moment he had enjoyed in the entire book was when the Nigerian hero, Johnson, was shot to death by his British master, Mr. Rudbeck” (22). With anecdotes that shaped the fabric - not only of his life, but also of his fiction - who could have blamed Achebe for using them generously? If there is a porousness to my method, especially due to the fact that my project has a broad scope, I do not to see it as a drawback. In her book Blackness in Western Europe, Dutch historian Dienke Hondius writes: “Whether and how old patterns of inter- European enslavement and bondage have affected white attitudes to nonwhites could be subject of more research, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe,”24 leaving that space for someone to complement her research. In the same vein, I see the probable points of porousness, elisions, omissions, and silences in my project as invitations for me or other theorists and scholars to fill and complement them, and thus further illuminate those areas that I did not omit. I would find it particularly gratifying if this project and its methods could help us find new ways of reading and writing about literatures written by marked subjects. In my study, I focus on – broadly understood – two groups: black and Balkan. I am also aware that many points in this study could be applied to other historically marked                                                                                                                           24  Dienke Hondius. Blackness in Western Europe. Transaction Publishers, 2014. p. 329.   21     or oppressed groups as well. However, my choice of these two groups is founded upon my conviction that their histories, the stereotypes ascribed to them, and their particular predicaments overlap more with each other than they do with the conditions and predicaments of other racially, ethnically or religiously marked groups. Now that I drew the main contours of the project, addressed the points of possible contention and attempted to explain my methodology, it is time for an anecdote that symbolically, metonymically and politically defines and grounds my entire project   22     CHAPTER 1 Aimé Césaire and “Another Face of Europe”25 In 1934, at a university canteen in Paris, a young black student from Martinique filled his plate with nothing but tomatoes. The server asked: “Why do you never eat meat? Is it because you don’t have enough money?” The student answered that the reason lay not in the lack of money, but in his philosophy: He was a vegetarian. He heard a peal of laughter behind him and turned, coming face to face with a dark-haired young man who said: “I am also a vegetarian, and for the same philosophical reasons as you!” The young Martinican later became one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century: Aimé Césaire. The other “vegetarian” student with “coal-black hair and a swarthy complexion,” as Césaire described him, was a Yugoslav Croat Petar Guberina, who later became an eminent linguist, the developer of the Verbotonal method for the rehabilitation of people with severe auditory and speech impairments (Louis 32, my translation)26. As Césaire said in the interview in which he recounted this story, they became friends—”the best in the world” (“Ma poésie”). This is how Césaire remembered their first meeting; Petar Guberina told the story a slightly different way. He remembered that he did not have enough money to buy a proper breakfast at the canteen, so he wanted to avoid going there altogether: He was annoyed when others would ask why he had not taken a proper meal. Guberina therefore went to the room for table tennis, below the canteen, where he met a young                                                                                                                           25 This is how Petar Guberina was referred to in the three-part documentary Aimé Césaire: Une parole pour le XXIème siècle directed by Euzhan Palcy.     26 All translations from the French and the Croatian that are unavailable in English are mine.       23     student from Martinique, Aimé Césaire, who was avoiding the canteen for the same reasons. Césaire told Guberina about “the misery on Martinique,” Guberina told Césaire about “the misery in Croatia,” and they instantly felt “a mutual understanding and friendship” (Guberina in Palcy). Then a third person appeared in the room for table-tennis—Léopold Sédar Senghor. From then on, the three of them would gather in the evenings, during which Césaire and Guberina learnt about Africa from Senghor. I would like to argue that this life-long friendship between the two students who did not have enough money for a Parisian canteen is not just an anecdote to spice up the preface to Césaire’s Notebook, but a revealing synecdoche related to the deep and meaningful connections between black and Slavic—and especially Balkan Slavic— experiences. The fact that the hymn of négritude was written in the Balkans seems an opportune coincidence, as the Balkan Slav might be seen as Europe’s internal equivalent of the American or the colonized black. Though the three positions differ in many aspects, the similarities are striking and can provide insights into all three of these literatures and cultures. This chapter centers on the comparison of Guberina’s preface to Césaire’s famous poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land to the first two prefaces to the poem, written by Benjamin Péret and André Breton. My argument is that Guberina, in his preface, demonstrated that he knew how to listen to Césaire more carefully than the two French writers, which is perhaps one of the reasons that Césaire asked Guberina to write the preface for the definitive edition of the poem in Présence Africaine. The connection between the Balkan linguist and the poet of négritude constitutes the starting point for my argument that the Balkans can be understood and theorized more   24     adequately through the prism of négritude or, as I call it, balkanitude, than they can be understood through the prism of Orientalism—or Balkanism. The adequacy of the orientalist discourse in the case of the Balkans has already been called into question by one of the most acknowledged theorists of the Balkan region, Maria Todorova, in her book Imagining the Balkans. However, no one has yet suggested which framework, if any, would be more adequate. My contention is that the discourse about blackness— without forcing a perfect overlap—may serve to inform the discourse on the Balkans, as well as that the comparison will necessarily function dialectically and thus illuminate our reading and theory on texts written by African-Americans, Afro-Caribbeans and Africans. In the summer of 1935, Guberina invited both Senghor and Césaire to his hometown of Šibenik, on the coast of Yugoslavia, now Croatia. Senghor could not come, but Césaire accepted the invitation: “I don’t have the money to go to Martinique and this lunatic invites me to Croatia. In short, I take the train. His family gives me an incredible welcome” (“Ma poésie”). This was the first Césaire’s trip outside of Martinique or France, in which he had spent the previous five years, with no money to go back home over the summers. When he arrived in Šibenik, it was already dark, and he could not see the landscape. In the morning, he opened the window, looked out and was greeted by the view of the sea and a little island on the horizon. Breathless, he asked Guberina the name of the island. Guberina told him it was Martinska, a Croatian version of the name Martinique. Césaire described this as a shock: “The scenery, the coast-line, the exile, the sea…everything reminded me of Martinique” (“Ma poésie”). Something in him was “unleashed,” as he said, and he asked Guberina for a piece of   25     paper (Césaire in Palcy). Guberina answered that he did not have paper, but that he did have a notebook, a cahier. “Le cahier will do!” said Césaire, and, there, in a poor Yugoslav coastal town, he began writing the famous Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, a classic of black literature, “a statement of the historical grievance of the black race in relation to the specific circumstances of its encounter with the West” (Irele xlviii). When a “definitive edition” of the poem was published in 1956 by Présence Africaine, Césaire asked Petar Guberina to write the preface. The two men remembered their first encounter differently: Césaire recounted being caught in the lie about his “vegetarianism,” while Guberina described the complete avoidance of the canteen and the meeting in the room for the table tennis. However, they both remembered the mutual understanding and sympathy, which, at least partially, resulted from their penury: “He was poor and I was poor. We lived on bread. And then, I, a field workers’ child, who had nothing, but, at home, had bread and tomatoes, invited him to Šibenik. We connected through poverty” (Guberina in Palcy). Césaire stated in an interview that he and Guberina had “parallel lives” (Guberina in Kiiru). Indeed, the two men were born in 1913, a month apart from each other, one in a poor colonial area, the other in an area that was finally self-governed after centuries of foreign occupation. They both dreamed of escaping to a more prosperous world, armed only with their intellects and their eagerness to learn. They both managed to enter the Parisian École normale supérieure, one of the most prestigious academic institutions in France. In 1935, Césaire visited Guberina in Yugoslavia, where he wrote the first and “the most important pages of his poem,” and in 1939 he attended Guberina’s dissertation defense at the Sorbonne (Césaire in Kiiru). Césaire later described the   26     importance of Guberina’s theory on the crucial role of the extraverbal elements of speech in communication, which would later become more widely known through Kristeva’s notion of the semiotic:27 It was an extremely important and absolutely original thesis. He was the first to show the importance of intonation, the importance of rhythm, the importance of intensity, the importance of the posture, the importance of the body. He showed the relevance of all these elements in human speech and in the understanding of it. It was an absolutely revolutionary thesis. (Césaire in Kiiru) The two men lost contact during the Second World War, only to meet in Paris right after the war ended, realizing that it had pushed them both into politics: Césaire became the mayor of Fort-de-France and deputy to the French National Assembly; Guberina worked for the Yugoslav Resistance Movement and became a diplomat in President’s Tito’s government. After reuniting in Paris, they both attended all the meetings of Présence Africaine, a Pan-African journal that later became the “material” locus of the birth of négritude. Petar Guberina became one of the organizers of the First Congress of Black Writers and Artists in Paris in 1956. Césaire spoke of the occasion with considerable warmth and amusement: You can ask: What the heck is a Yugoslav, a Dalmatian guy, doing at the Congress of Black Writers and Artists? However, the circle received Petar Guberina as a true brother, as one of us, and, what’s more, he accepted to write a preface to my first long poem… That preface [sic; poem] appeared during the war, prefaced by André Breton, and Présence Africaine decided to reprint it with a preface by Petar Guberina. (Césaire in Kiiru)                                                                                                                           27 In 1934, Petar Guberina wrote a study “Written and Spoken Word,” in which he stressed the importance of including “extraverbal elements” of speech—like rhythm, gestures or intensity—into our understanding of communication. He revolutionized the rehabilitation of the speech- and hearing-impaired by reminding therapists that the understanding of speech is located not in the ear, but in the brain. His claim that “listening” could be much improved even if the periphery of the ear stayed the same sounded counterintuitive at the time, but his verbotonal rehabilitation method is now still used worldwide. Julia Kristeva developed her notion of the semiotic, which almost perfectly corresponds to Guberina’s notion of extraverbal speech, in her Séméiôtiké: recherches pour une sémanalyse (Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art) in 1969, or thirty-five years after Guberina’s study.       27     Numerous paratexts to Césaire’s famous poem have received some critical attention, one of the reasons being that Notebook is mostly perceived as a text authored by “the other,” which needs to be introduced to a general audience through the act of “cultural translation”28 (Watts 31). The preface, indeed, serves as an entrance into the interior space of the book, and is, therefore, unquestionably important—if for no other reason— then because it is spatially and temporally situated before the text itself. The critic Richard Watts made a comparative diachronic analysis of different editions of Notebook, giving special attention to the first 1942 book version of the poem, prefaced by the French Surrealist poet Benjamin Péret and destined for a Hispanophone audience, as well as to the 1947 Brentano’s New York and Bordas’s Paris editions prefaced by another French Surrealist, André Breton. Watts’s conclusion is that these three editions, despite their possible faults, can be considered to provide the most successful paratexts, and consequently, cultural translations, of the poem: Both Peret [sic] and Breton introduce the prospective reader to the poem in a non-reductive fashion. In this way, the paratext to the 1942 edition and the two 1947 editions constitute partially successful translations. It will be more difficult to argue for the “accuracy” of the translation in the paratexts from the decades that followed, paratexts whose translational equivalences are so dynamic as to constitute complete cultural and geographical displacements of the Cahier. (37) Watts argues that subsequent editions overemphasized the Africanness of the poem, downplaying its Caribbean context: “Whereas the 1942 edition immediately established Cahier as a text that stands at the crossroads of Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean, the paratexts to the editions from the 1950s through the 1970s make the poem a product                                                                                                                           28 Cultural translation is understood here as an act of making the unfamiliar more familiar by providing the context in which a particular work was written and by suggesting its possible meanings.       28     and a reflection of Africa, which is only a part of the story” (39-40). However, if we indeed consider the introductions as a form of cultural translation, it seems to me that Péret’s and Breton’s prefaces were two different, even diametrically opposite, versions of a mistranslation. First Two Prefaces to Césaire’s Poem: Péret and Breton If Benjamin Péret wrote the preface as a form of “cultural translation” that would familiarize the reader with the poem written in an unfamiliar context, his is a translation that might be best described as source-oriented. In other words, Péret acknowledges the “unfamiliarity” of the text to the point that he, apparently, does not consider it translatable. His preface corresponds to the type of translation in which foreign words, even if they are common and pedestrian in the source-language, are in the target-language left untranslated and put in italics, so that the reader can be fully aware of the original work’s local color. Of course, this local color becomes local color only after it is displaced. In this case, the local color of Martinique, in Martinique, is just everyday life. But it is not so in Paris. Péret’s Martinique and Péret’s Notebook are thus never completely graspable for the white European or even Latin American audience: For the first time, a tropical voice resounds in our language, not to add spice to an exotic poetry, like a kitschy trinket to a mediocre interior, but to illumine an authentic poetry, springing from rotten stems of orchids and from electric butterflies devouring rotting carcasses; a poetry that incorporates a savage scream of an overbearing nature, a sadist that swallows up men and their machines like flowers swallow reckless insects. Aimé Césaire does not owe anything to anybody: his language does not belong to him as much as it belongs to the radiant language of hummingbirds streaking a mercury sky. Rather than an interpreter of the tropical nature of Martinique, he is a part of it; a judge and a part of this nature at once. His poetry has a princely movement of the big   29     breadtrees and an obsessive rhythm of voodoo drums. Black magic, pregnant with poetry, rebels against enslaving religions in which all the magic is transformed; in which all poetry dies forever. (Péret 1) In Benjamin Péret’s very short, one-page “translation,” Césaire’s Martinique and the concept of négritude thus become something with which the Western or white readers can sympathize but not fully comprehend: Exotic totems that they should temporarily bow to, but that will always remain obscured beneath a veil of otherness. Breton’s preface, written for the 1947 New York and Paris editions of Notebook is, on the other hand, a target-oriented translation—a translation that eradicates everything that would seem too “foreign” to the target audience and that performs this eradication by domesticizing the elements perceived as exotic. Here, the Martinican local color becomes a part of Paris. If Péret’s preface is a vestibule in which the Western reader has to take his shoes off in order to respectfully tiptoe into a foreign, exotic structure, Breton turns his preface into an intimate, familiar space that makes the reader feel that he is entering his own home. Breton begins by recounting his own visit to Fort-de-France; the Western reader is here, of course, able to identify with his gaze. After a paragraph of descriptions of the beach, the corals, and the waves, he proceeds to say that he went to search for a ribbon for his daughter, and chanced upon a publication “lying in the haberdashery” (Breton 230, my emphasis). The fact that the poem is found among buttons, ribbons and knitting needles de-estranges it and reassures (a word Breton himself will later use) both Breton and the reader who identifies with him. When Breton opens the journal Tropique, “unpretentious in appearance,” he is in for another surprise:   30     I won’t pretend that my discovery did not at once arouse feelings of pride. What he said was not foreign to me. The names of the poets and the authors cited were, in themselves, sufficiently assuring. (…) In complete contrast with what had been published in France in earlier months, all of which bore the mark of masochism, if not servility, Tropique continued to chart a more exalted course. “We are among those who say no to the shadow,” proclaimed Césaire (...) The land which he and his friends revealed—yes, it was my land, too. It was our land… (230-231) Knowing that Breton was adamantly opposed to colonization, accusing him of an act of appropriation and cultural colonizing in these paragraphs would perhaps be unfair. However, these statements do show the degree to which the discourse was skewed, even in the case of those who were on the side of the colonized. For, as much as exoticization (in Péret’s vein) is not the most desirable approach to the poem, neither is Breton’s announcement that Western readers who are about to set their foot into Césaire’s Notebook can feel “sufficiently assured” that they would not lose their way in the poem’s meanderings, since it is, after all, written by a man whose journal publishes pieces that are “not foreign,” as well as authors with whose names the Western reader is familiar. The only difference seemed to be that the Martinican intellectuals had apparently stayed on the right track, from which Vichy France had swerved, and that they could, therefore, even be a source of consolation or comfort: “The world was not doomed” (Breton 231). After arranging a meeting with Césaire, Breton found himself doubly assured: He met a black man (or, in his words, “a pure black”) who could pump new blood into the “old world,” French poetry and the already half-wilted Surrealist movement: “[A] black man contributes the first new breath, revivifying, capable of restoring all confidence. And he is a black man who handles the French language as no white man can handle it today” (231). These words of admiration for a black man who is so adroit   31     with his native language, French, probably do not necessitate further analysis after Césaire’s most famous pupil, Frantz Fanon, commented on them: “Even if Monsieur Breton were telling the truth, I don’t see where the paradox lies; I don’t see why there should be any emphasis, because, after all, Aimé Césaire is Martinican with a university agrégration” (22). Breton then evokes the evening he spent with Césaire and his wife, which began after Césaire’s class on—as Breton specifies—Rimbaud, the evening during which the merging of the French and the Caribbean became complete and the two men’s wills became one: “That afternoon, before the sumptuous abundance of greenery, I experienced the full reward of feeling myself in such close communion with Césaire, of knowing him to be a man of will beyond all others, and, in essence, of not being able to distinguish his will from mine” (232). Breton thus paid Césaire the compliment of having an exceptional will, but he also had to add that this will was practically identical to his own. This move is characteristic of the entire preface, which somehow repeatedly manages to turn every compliment to the Caribbean and Césaire into a glorification of Breton and France. Even the poem itself, the poem of négritude, apparently gained Breton’s approval because it confirmed and verbalized what Breton had already known: “Its author had wagered on everything that I ever believed to be just, and he had won incontestably. The stake, all account taken of Césaire’s peculiar genius, was our common conception of life” (Breton 232, my emphasis). It is hard to read this without perceiving the inserted phrase about the “account taken of Césaire’s peculiar genius” as a slightly offensive lip-service: As peculiar as Césaire’s genius might be, it was luckily put to beautiful use in verbalizing Breton’s beliefs.   32     Almost all critics, biographers, and prefacers of Césaire29 take notice of the displacement of the originary moments of the poem: The poet found and returned to his native land not by actually returning to Martinique, but by visiting Yugoslavia, as if it were easier for him to approach his homeland through a place that strongly evoked it, but that was not the original place itself. Ignoring all this, Breton locates the poem’s creation entirely in Paris. He proceeds to write an engaged paragraph, in which he stresses the importance of decolonization and black people’s struggle, both in the poem and life, but then fails to widen this message. Whereas the poem expands the struggle of black people into a struggle against “universal hunger” and “universal thirst,” Breton reduces its semiotic scope by equating its aims with those of surrealism (Césaire, Cahier 117): What, in my eyes, renders this protest invaluable is that it continually transcends the anguish which for a black man is inseparable from the lot of blacks in modern society, and unites with the protest of every poet, artist and thinker worthy of the name (contributing to it, however, its own verbal genius) to embrace the entire intolerable though amendable condition created for man by this society. And, here, written in capital letters, is what has always been the first article in the programme of surrealism: the determined will to deliver the fatal blow to so-called “common sense” which has impudently arrogated to itself the title of “reason”; the imperative need to have done with this fatal dissociation of the human mind in which one of the constituent parts has managed to bestow power upon itself to the point of license at the expense of the other, but which can exalt this latter only by dint of desiring to frustrate it. (Breton 235) Breton’s equating of the black man’s struggle with the “protest of every poet, artist and thinker” seeking to give a fatal blow to “common sense” is somewhat embarrassing (235). As much as the surrealists’ aims had political stakes, Breton should have seen                                                                                                                           29 For instance, Robert Bray in his rather comparison of Whitman and Césaire (“Knowing Grasses: Aimé Césaire’s ‘Cahier d’un retour au pays natal’ and Walt Whitman’s ‘Song of Myself’”), or Mireille Rosello and Abiola Irele in their respective introductions to the poem.       33     that this aim could not be equated with the aims of the colonized blacks. Furthermore, his analogy logically leads to the conclusion that the black people’s struggle to decolonize themselves is a blow to “reason” and “common sense” (235). Breton at the end gives his own “fatal blow” by finishing his six-page preface with an invocation of the poet whom both “Césaire and I [Breton] consider the prophet of times to come,” comte de Lautréamont: “Lautréamont was the first to understand that poetry begins with excess, immoderation, the breaking down of taboos, in the great unreasoning tom- tom,30 up to the incomprehensible rain of stars…” (236). Breton therefore ushers his French, British, and American readers into a poem about the colonized bodies and minds through the antechamber of French surrealist tradition, thus converting its possibly unfamiliar or foreign space into a space as domestic as a haberdashery. It is perhaps not so surprising that Présence Africaine “decided to reprint” the poem with a different preface (Césaire in Kiiru). Péret, in his preface, therefore, assumed that Césaire’s poem is culturally untranslatable, while Breton practically transposed the poem onto the Western soil, assuming that empathic readers can easily understand the position from which Césaire is speaking: “One need only put oneself in Césaire’s place to understand the assaults to which this nostalgia can expose one” (234). Richard Watts, in his work on Cahier’s paratexts, acknowledged that both Péret and Breton “at least partially recuperate the Cahier into French Surrealism,” and that “these gestures and others like them seem to draw the Cahier into the surrealist domain in a form of cultural translation that risks                                                                                                                           30 It is interesting that it is unreasonableness that Breton here collocates with a version of an originally Indian and Malay word from a drum: tom-tom.       34     eliding certain aspects of the text—namely, those that do not conform to the dictates of Surrealism as Breton defined them” (36). Watts nevertheless concludes that, in comparison to subsequent prefaces, which supposedly all excessively focus on Africa, as opposed to the Caribbean, Péret and Breton’s prefaces can still be seen as partial successes that introduced the prospective reader to the poem “in a non-reductive fashion” (37). Not only is it difficult to see how Péret’s and Breton’s prefaces could be seen as non-reductive, but it is also unclear why Watts completely glosses over the definitive edition of the poem, which, as Césaire stated, Présence Africaine decided to reprint with Petar Guberina’s preface nine years after the publication of the edition prefaced by André Breton. Third Preface: Guberina’s Prelude One of the reasons for this omission perhaps lies precisely in Guberina’s preface, which is harder to pin down and which reads less as a “cultural translation” of the poem, and more like a poem’s prelude, inseparable from the poem itself. As opposed to Breton, who makes much of his “discovery” of Césaire and the poem, Guberina never mentions anything about the poem’s partially Yugoslav origins or his own relationship to the poet. More than half of Guberina’s preface consists of quotes from the poem itself, which gives the impression that Guberina’s aim is less to talk to the readers and tell them how to think about the poem, and more to suggest to them to actually listen to it. When his preface does not quote Césaire, it seems to mimic or fuse with the poet’s language: Thus everything becomes a whirlwind of hell and fate. But in a space that exists. And in that space, human beings, birds, misery, alcohol and death walk   35     together as friends. In a land of men and misery. Men who cannot tear themselves away from misery no more than misery can tear itself away from men. (…) Men are so miserable that they give rise to pain, while misery is working so hard to torture them perpetually that it inspires a sort of pity. Misery deserves a lyric poem as much as the men to which it is always attached. (Guberina 12-13) If the subaltern can speak, then Guberina, being a different kind of subaltern himself, attempted to listen, while Péret and Breton wanted to speak with or for him. In his preface, Guberina has put a significant emphasis on Césaire’s internal split, on his double exile and his double imprisonment: “Aimé Césaire recounts to us the drama of the Negro, who is a prisoner of both his island and a prisoner of exile” (14). This doubling is more easily understood from the periphery: Liminal peoples are aware of their peripheral position, and many of their inhabitants express the desire to “escape” to the center. However, if and when they reach it, they soon find out that, in this center, they are always perceived as foreigners from the periphery. On his island, Césaire is thus a prisoner of his desire for a voluntary exile, while in France, he discovers that he is also a prisoner of Martinique. It would perhaps be more convenient to omit Césaire’s disturbing need to escape his homeland, but this escape is inevitable for the understanding of the poem, for it was only after a double displacement, first in France, through exile, and then in Yugoslavia, through memory, that Césaire was able to accomplish the return. At the time, in that generation, we had only one thing on our minds: get away, and, in order to get away, study. (Césaire in Louis 18) I left Fort-de-France, thinking: “Phew! Let’s go, let’s get the hell out of here!” That’s it. I didn’t have any nostalgia, which is why I was very open to the new world to which I was going. (Césaire in Louis 25)   36     Guberina’s first step is to acknowledge this rejection, which the poet feels toward both his homeland and toward his fellow blacks. He then traces the poem’s trajectory—from the poet’s initial rejection of Martinique to his acceptance of both the island and everything that it entails; from the shame he feels when he sees a black man in a tram to the acceptance of his entire race; from his alienation from everyone and everything to an empathy, which slowly grows in ever-expanding circles, and ends by encompassing the whole of human suffering: The poet offers the virtues of his race to the service of the liberation of the entire world: “It’s for universal hunger for universal thirst.” (Guberina 20-21) Perhaps because of the similarities between Guberina’s and Césaire’s situations and their double exiles, Guberina, in his preface, manages completely to erase himself, giving us a prelude to the poem that acknowledges both its négritude as well as its universalist humanism. Guberina’s knowledge of the African, Caribbean, and African- American literatures and cultures have only expanded between his student days with Césaire in Paris and the time when he, at Césaire’s request, wrote this preface. Instead of neglecting his interest in black literatures because of his work in the rehabilitation of the hearing- and speech-impaired, Guberina actually used linguistics to enrich his study of these literatures. Upon his return to Yugoslavia, he founded the Institute for African Studies in Zagreb and animated the Yugoslav interest in black languages and cultures. In the 1950s and 1960s, Guberina and Guberina’s students’ and colleagues’ wrote a plethora of articles on African, Caribbean, and African-American literature. The articles   37     were, of course, written in Serbian, Bosnian, or Croatian for the domestic, homogenous, white Yugoslav audience. A large portion of these articles, which seem refreshingly sincere, were published in a journal of the communist youth “Naše teme” (“Our Topics”), which contained more texts on black literatures and cultures than on any other literature or culture in the world, save for that of the domestic, Yugoslav.31 Guberina published numerous articles in which he analyzed African languages, positing that the rhythm that poets writing in Indo-European languages try to capture through short and long syllables, variations of accent and metric combinations, in African languages becomes rendered more directly, through a carrier of “a thought-emotion” (Guberina, “Tracing” 992). He claimed that, as every language incorporates different non-linguistic elements of its culture, African languages tended to have a richer variety of tonalities, “aspectal” forms, forms of negation and word congruence. Through his work in the Institute of African Studies, his classes at the Zagreb University and his articles, Guberina truly managed to promote interest in the study of black literatures, not only in English and French, but also in major African languages: All of us, except Africans, are in a way tongue-tied before African art. The reason is that we do not understand the original language of African artists’ poetry and prose. We are all forced to use translations from African literature, and those translations are often only chosen paragraphs or verses, or chosen chapters out of a plethora of poems and stories that a visitor to Africa has heard. We also have to be aware that this choice is made according to the taste of a non-African, and that everything that is written down or published had to—by certain publishers—be deemed “worthy” of European and American morals and ears. (Guberina, “Tracing” 992)                                                                                                                           31 In the journal “Naše teme” (“Our Topics”), young intellectuals published articles not only on black literature or history, but also detailed descriptions of agreements between Yugoslavia and African countries or thoughtful analyses of the life and education of African students that were given stipends to study in Yugoslavia.       38     Guberina also published a long study, “On Black Poetry,” in which he wrote on black African, Afro-Caribbean, African-American, and black-European poetries. In the era of close reading and structuralism, long before movements like New Historicism, Guberina was highlighting the importance of the context in which each of these black poetries were written and asked the question whether we could consider them as being interconnected “just” because they were all written by blacks. He maintained that only literature written in Africa and in African languages should be called African literature, so that we could differentiate it from literatures written by black people in other languages and parts of the world. Furthermore, all non-African literature written by blacks could not be put under the same umbrella: African-American literature was different than the literature written in the French colonies, in the Caribbean, and so on. He argued that early African-American art was more specifically “American” and more grounded in the realities of life in the United States than the majority of literature written by American whites. The reason for this was twofold—African-American literature was permeated by the musical forms of the Spirituals and Jazz, and African- Americans had very limited access to the education in European classics, to which American literature was still turning for inspiration: The white American turned to Europe, which he found intellectually imposing; the black American was grounded in the reality of his ghetto. The white American poet, therefore, drew from the forms and themes of European poets, while the black American poet searched for the themes, forms and elements of his American reality. (Guberina, “On Black Poetry” 227-228) He argued that black poets in the French-speaking colonies had less opportunity to form a common culture than African-Americans, and that historical conditions in Senegal, Haiti, or Martinique prevented black poets from these countries to form a common   39     literary form. The conclusion was that francophone black poetry (with some exceptions in Haiti) was deeply influenced by French poetry and rhetoric. However, Guberina claimed that francophone black poetry nevertheless differed from French poetry in its themes, as black poets writing in French still shared the awareness of what it meant to be black—the awareness that, among other things, resulted in négritude; they, however, also tended to differ in their use of rhythm, putting a stronger emphasis on repetitions, syncopation, and verbal and morphological breaks. In some of these rhythmic and thematic aspects, francophone black poetry overlapped with that of African America. Therefore, argued Guberina, two poets as different as Aimé Césaire and Langston Hughes still shared a syncopated rhythm and themes of exclusion and alienation. Their common ground was their awareness of “blackness,” regardless of the fact that the racism they encountered was situated in different contexts. It is in one of these studies that Guberina made explicit his dissatisfaction with Breton’s preface to Cahier, and was thus probably the first critic to object to Breton’s incorporation of Césaire’s poem into the Surrealist Movement: Those who have read both Césaire and the Surrealists can very easily observe that there is a big difference between him and them. The Surrealists consider themselves as some sort of automatons, the poets of dreams, of accidental comparisons and themes. Césaire is on the opposite pole. He is emotionally moved by the suffering of blacks, he himself is black and very much aware of that. He knows how people live in Martinique, how people live in Africa, how black people live in the United States and these lives are incised into his mind as an obsession; he is within them, no matter what he does, no matter where he goes. He has never visited Africa, he does not speak any of the African languages; ever since high school he has been reading French literature of the 17th century. (…) But he passionately studies history, philosophy and geography, and listens to everyone who can tell him something about an area where black people live. (…) He is completely aware of his blackness and of his intellectual hybridity. (Guberina, “On Black Poetry” 285)   40     Guberina argued that Césaire’s ostensibly surrealist tropes and the splintered quality of his work did not stem from his immersion in French Surrealism, but were instead the result of his own fragmented history. In other words, Guberina tried to show that Césaire was less motivated to use the surrealist technique in order to discover the more important world of dreams hidden beneath the concrete reality—as the surrealists did— than to use the subconscious in order to reveal the much more important concrete reality through the language of dreams. Césaire could not just be another surrealist because he did not have the luxury to try to escape from the concrete world into his dreams. He desperately needed his dreams to become real. Césaire himself claimed that he had “discovered” that certain techniques in his poetry overlapped with those used by surrealist writers after the fact: I listened to André Breton, thinking: “Who knew, I’m practicing surrealism, without even knowing it, because, at the bottom, the goal of surrealism is to get rid of all conventions.” (…) Let’s get rid of all conventions, the salon French, the Martinican imitations of French literature, that entire embalmed thing… Let’s get rid of all that! Dig into yourself! Dig further and further! And, after you’ve dug well and hard, you’ll find something. You’ll find the fundamental Negro. (Césaire in Louis 41) That’s the reason that, out of all the literary doctrines, I’ve chosen surrealism—I discovered that I was practicing it without even knowing. Reading André Breton, I thought to myself: “That’s what I’m trying to do: I’m trying to find my deep-hidden self, which is beyond my superficial self.” But, don’t make mistakes, for me, a Martinican, to find a deep-hidden self meant discarding the entire Western and French apparel, and go back to Africa. That was, for me, my deep-hidden self. (Césaire in Louis 54) Césaire considered that his overlap with surrealism consisted in his rejection of traditional, ossified forms, and in his search for a deeper, subconscious self. However, while Breton in his novel Nadja, or Dalí in his paintings, seemed to draw from a subconscious that was highly individual, Césaire considered his deep-hidden self to be   41     inextricably linked to his fundamental Negro, and therefore, to all blacks. The claim about the fundamental Negro, perhaps not surprisingly, earned Césaire the charge of essentialism. I would argue, however, that the black essence in Césaire is not a genealogical, innate kernel, which stays unchangeable throughout time, but a sort of historical residue. Historical, because it depends on the historical context, which changes in different places and times; residue, because it does not define or incorporate the entire black person’s sense of self, but is a part of his or her identity according to which he or she is recognized as different.32 In the touching and virtually unknown documentary film Martinska— Martinique by Lawrence Kiiru, a student from Kenya who came to Yugoslavia as an exchange student and became a Kenyan-Croatian film director, Césaire and Guberina are filmed while retracing their steps in the streets of Paris almost sixty years after their first meeting in the table tennis room. Césaire speaks some Croatian, calling Guberina: “Moj drug! Moj brat!” “My comrade! My brother!” He translates Guberina’s first name Petar into the French Pierrot; Guberina calls Césaire Ljubo, which is the Croatian translation of Aimé (The Loved One). They display old photographs of a black man                                                                                                                           32 Essentialism has become a vilified term—and for understandable reasons: it has too often been paired with the idea that someone’s identity, behaviors, and so on are determined by their “genetic” belonging to a certain group, and has been used to justify discrimination. However, this does not mean that, in order to eradicate discrimination, we need to eradicate the notion of essence. Instead of following the Platonic model, we can reformulate the idea of “essence” in a way that is more akin to the method that Martin Heidegger uses to differentiate between a thing, a piece of equipment, and a work of art. Namely, things, equipment and works of art are all objects, and in respect to their object-like quality, they are less different than they are alike. Therefore, the overlap between them is bigger than their differences – but these differences carry semiotic content and enable us to tell them apart. The “essence” of, for example, equipment is thus “located” in a differentiating residue, with which we are left after we eliminate the elements of the description of equipment that overlap with the descriptions of other objects. Furthermore, this residual essence is culturally determined, historical and malleable. This allows us, for example, to take the terms “black,” “Jewish” or “female,” and explore their contemporary historical “essence” in order to question or change them. If we try to completely dismantle “essentialist” concepts, we stay bereft of the ability to fight discriminatory practices that are based upon these concepts, and we deprive ourselves of the possibility to reformulate them in an affirming way.       42     among whites—Césaire in Šibenik, and of a white man among blacks—Guberina at Présence Africaine meetings. Césaire refers to both their societies as “handicapped,” “underdeveloped,” and “colonized,” concluding that neither he nor Guberina would be capable of thinking about their lives without referring to one another: I cannot take the measure of my life without mentioning him. And I see he cannot take the measure of his life without mentioning me. (Césaire in Kiiru) Journalists and critics who took notice of the story about Martinska and Martinique always see it as just another improbable literary anecdote. However, my contention is that this friendship between the two students points to deep and meaningful connections between black and Slavic—and especially Balkan Slavic—experiences, the connections of which both Césaire and Guberina were very much aware and which somehow stayed largely neglected by cultural and literary theorists. A telling instance in which the connection between Slavic and black culture is overlooked by a theorist, but not by the poet himself, can be found in Robin D. G. Kelley’s otherwise wonderfully insightful introduction to Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism. Namely, Césaire wrote that the colonized peoples, in search for possible models of government, should perhaps turn to the Soviet Union: The problem is not to make a utopian and sterile attempt to repeat the past, but to go beyond. It is not a dead society that we want to revive. We leave that to those who go in for exoticism… It is a new society that we must create, with the help of all our brother slaves… For some examples showing that this is possible, we can look to the Soviet Union. (Césaire, Discourse 52) For Kelley, this statement was not problematic primarily or only because of Stalinism, as Césaire was obviously not aware of the perpetrated atrocities. It was problematic because it seemed that Césaire was contradicting himself in regards to one of the main   43     points of the tract: For, after many pages devoted to a complete repudiation of Europe, he suddenly turned back to it in search for a possible societal model. However, I would suggest that Césaire’s text does not contain an internal contradiction. It just contains an implicit assumption: an implied awareness that there exist two Europes. In short, it was not the colonizer’s Europe to which Césaire wanted to turn, and he was aware of the distinction, despite the fact that he did not make it explicit. On the other hand, W. E. B. Du Bois, for instance, clearly separated the two: In addition to the some seven hundred and fifty million of disenfranchised colonial peoples there are more than half-billion persons in nations or groups who are quasi-colonials and in no sense form free and independent states. (Du Bois 58) In the Balkans are 60.000.000 persons in the ‘free’ states of Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania, and Greece. They form in the mass an ignorant, poor, and sick people, over whom already Europe is planning ‘spheres of influence. (Du Bois 67) Both Césaire and Du Bois were aware that Europe has both its Western civilized and cultured part, and its impoverished and barbaric other. And, then, at the bottom of the ladder, there are the Balkans: A regressed Janus’s face of the “real” Europe, a deprived, wretched, infantile part of its self, which Yugoslav author Dubravka Ugrešić memorably characterized as Europe’s “moronic relative” (Todorova 53). In a Croatian interview shortly before his death, Petar Guberina said: “African culture and black poetry are very close to me. (…) Africa is, both culturally and emotionally, a part of my life. When I first set foot on the African soil in 1961, when Senghor invited me to come to the celebration of Senegal’s independence, it was the happiest day of my life” (Guberina, Politika). In 1989, Patrick Chamoiseau, Raphaël Confiant and Jean Barnabé wrote In Praise of Creoleness, in their “desire to move   44     away from some of the tenets of Negritude and embrace a more global and less essentially racial theory of creolité” (Irele 10). When Césaire was asked what he thought of their attempt, he said: “It’s old news. Creolité appears to me, if you will, as a department of negritude” (Irele 11). His comment was generally judged as “a dismissive and violent remark” (Irele 11). However, we could safely assume that Petar Guberina would see Césaire’s comment as honest and true, as he always emphasized that Césaire’s négritude was not based on an unchangeable, ahistorical black essence, but on a brotherhood of suffering. This was the brotherhood to which both men were sensitive. At the end of the Martinska—Martinique documentary, Césaire looked at Guberina and said: “I still stand by those ideas that you and I discussed all those years ago.” Guberina died in 2005, Césaire in 2008. Only one of them was a great poet, capable of pouring their ideas into verses, but both men identified with what the poet had said: Eia for those who have never invented anything For those who have never explored anything For those who have never subdued anything. (Césaire, Notebook 115) Négritude was Césaire’s attempt to counter the alienation of black people from their cultures, and to “show that Africa is also a territory of culture and civilization” (Césaire in Kiiru). The label Balkan is fluid, constructed, heterogeneous, dependent on the eye of the beholder, and overdetermined by evaluative connotations that include barbarity, violence, and hypersexuality, much like the label black often is. The only framework that has been suggested for the study of the Balkans is “Balkanism,” a Balkan version of Said’s Orientalism. However, a parallel between the discourse on the Balkans and the discourse on blackness might be more useful for both   45     fields. One pole of this comparison is thus blackness as a racial, cultural, and societal category; the other pole would consist of, more broadly, Slavic Eastern Europeans, and— more precisely—of Balkan Slavs. The Balkans are a part of Eastern Europe and shared many of its experiences, but they are also its exception. We could say that the stereotypes and negative perceptions of Eastern Europe have become more crystallized, intensified, and broadened in the Balkans, and, consequently, that the Balkans became a subcategory of their own. The interconnectedness of Césaire’s and Guberina’s dreams can perhaps be extrapolated from a sentence written by Césaire’s most famous student —Frantz Fanon. At the end of his powerful essay Black Faces, White Masks, Fanon imagined a monument “with a white man and a black man hand in hand” standing on top (196). In the spring of 2011, a Cultural Society of Croatian Youth Meridijani organized the first yearly Festival called Aimé Césaire on the Shore of Martinska, created to promote knowledge of the Caribbean and African cultures, which was exceptionally well attended. The town of Šibenik, the birthplace of the hymn of négritude, is planning to build a monument to Guberina and Césaire—the two men from Martinska and Martinique, who felt instant connection long before UNESCOs Declarations on Diversity made such connections politically and socially desirable, and long before either of them became eminent or well- known. I like to think that the monument in their honor is the one imagined by Fanon and that the reading and rereading of négritude and other theories on blackness will help the Balkans in defining their own “dream,” which I propose to call “balkanitude.” This comparative study functions dialectically, and the study of the Balkan history and literature can provide insight into the black experience, as much as the black experience   46     can provide insight into the history and culture of the Balkans. Moreover, the exploration of the “community of experience” of the two racially different groups could perhaps fruitfully inform and fine-tune our views of ethnicity and race. Aimé Césaire and Petar Guberina, 1934. Aimé Césaire and Petar Guberina, almost seventy years later. (Palcy)   47     CHAPTER 2 Slaves and Slavs: The Dispossession of Slava Historic Roots of the Comparison: Slaves and Slavs When the numerous parallels between Eastern European Slavs and Africans, balkanness and blackness, revealed themselves to me in the texts of African-American and Caribbean theorists and writers, I knew that my first task was to discover and clearly delineate the roots of this – perhaps somewhat unexpected - comparison. After all, one pole of my comparison are “white” “Europeans” (in the case of Balkan Slavs both of these terms should stand in quotes), and the other pole are Africans, Afro-Caribbeans and African-Americans. At the beginning of my research, while reading Du Bois’s description of double consciousness or Ralph Ellison’s passages about marginalization in Invisible Man, I knew already that their insights are useful and illuminating in the case of the Balkans, but I wondered what the foundations for these similarities are. What exactly happened that two different groups of people ended up with almost identical sets of stereotypes ascribed to them? Why were the wars between Great Britain and Argentina, or the US and Iraq called wars, whereas the wars in Bosnia or Rwanda were so commonly referred to as tribal warfare? Why were black (and especially African) and Balkan Slavic women in media - almost without exceptions - depicted as either “poor wretches”33 or oversexualized objects of desire? Why were, on the other hand, black and Balkan Slavic men so often depicted either as oversexualized symbols of untamed masculinity, or as criminals? (In this aspect, it seems that American media is widening                                                                                                                           33 Valentina Glajar and Domnica Radulescu, eds. Vampirettes, Wretches, and Amazons. New York: Columbia UP, 2004.   48     the range of the possible roles for African-American men and women, but it seems that this increased broadness does not apply to Africans or Afro-Caribbeans, especially if they have accents.) In order to find the roots of this comparison, I will first return to the past and outline two, or three (if we were to distinguish the slavery on the African West Coast from that on the African East Coast) different histories of enslavement. I will then proceed to analyze the main philosophies and theories in the Western discourse that served to justify or rationalize these histories of enslavement, as well as the racial and ethnic discrimination. I will conclude by sketching out the present consequences of this comparison: namely, the stereotypes and notions that seem to have their foundations in the distant past. British- and American-African and Balkan Slave Narratives Olaudah Equiano was an eighteenth-century Nigerian Igbo, who was captured at the age of eleven, along with his sister, while they were alone, "left to mind the house."34 He was sold several times to different slaveholders, and he travelled extensively as a seaman. He managed to save enough money to purchase his freedom and to write his well-known Interesting Narrative. Bartholomew Georgiewitz, or, more correctly, Bartolomej Georgijević, was a sixteenth-century Croat who was captured and enslaved by the Ottomans in 1526. He was resold seven times and spent thirteen years in slavery before he managed to escape and write the story of his captivity: The ofspring of the house of Ottomanno and officers pertaining to the greate Turkes court. Whereunto is                                                                                                                           34 Olaudah Equiano. The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings: Revised Edition. New York: Penguin, 1995. p. 47.     49     added Bartholomeus Georgieuiz Epitome, of the customes rytes, ceremonies, and religion of the Turkes: with the miserbale affliction of those Christians, whiche liue vnder their captiuitie and bondage. (The last edition of this Slavic slave narrative in English was published in 1569.) While Equiano's narrative is slightly more personal and introspective, and Georgijević's more distant and cold, they both display very similar structures and describe similar phenomena. For example, they both deplore the objectification of the bodies of the enslaved at slave-markets: At the break of day they are brought to market, like droves of sheep, or herds of goats: merchants appear, prizes are set; if the prisoner be liked, his cloaths are stripped off, he is viewed by the buyer, all members surveyed, tryed and throughly searched for faults in joynts or arteries; if he please not, then returned to the owner, and this is done until he finde a purchaser.35 (Georgijević 69-70) I have often seen slaves, particularly those who were meagre, in different islands, put into scales and weighed, and then sold from three-pence to six-pence, or nine- pence a pound. (Equiano 110) They both wrote that many slaves felt desperate enough to risk the escape, despite the fact that, for those who were caught, the punishments were particularly cruel: Some are hanged up by the heels, and most cruelly scourged; and if commit murder, the soles of his feet are all slashed into furrows, and salt stuffed in. Some have great iron chains, fastened on their necks, and forced to wear them day and night, and as long as the master pleaseth. (Georgijević 75) While I was in Montserrat, I knew a negro man, named Emanuel Sankey, who endeavoured to escape from his miserable bondage […] but fate did not favour the poor oppressed man… he was delivered back to his master. This Christian master immediately pinned the wretch down to the ground at each wrist and ankle, and then took some sticks of sealing-wax, and lighted them, and dropped it all over his back. (Equiano 106)                                                                                                                           35 Bartolomej Georgijević. The ofspring of the house of Ottomanno : and officers pertaining to the greate Turkes court. Whereunto is added Bartholomeus Georgieuiz Epitome, of the customes rytes, ceremonies, and religion of the Turkes: with the miserbale affliction of those Christians, whiche liue vnder their captiuitie and bondage. London: Iletestreate, neare vnto saint Dunstones church by Thomas Marshe, [1569?].     50     Georgijević describes how enslaved women are "triaged": those that are found to have beautiful faces and bodies are chosen for concubines; those whose faces are found "ugly" or plain become "matrons" or "hand-maids whose offices some are so filthy, and so loathsome, as were before related. […] It is free for none of them to profess the Christian faith, or hope of liberty during life. There is some content in hope, but these have none" (64). Both Georgijević and Equiano especially deplore omnipresent raping of the enslaved women and girls (and, in Georgijević's narrative, boys), especially when the victims are very young: Where still they are, is ever heard vast and hideous howlings of both sexes, suffering violations from them; neither doth the age of seven or six years, defend them from those vicious actions. (Georgijević 69) … it was almost a constant practice with our clerks, and other whites, to commit violent depredations on the chastity of the female slaves; and these I was, though with reluctance, obliged to submit to at all times, being unable to help them. […] I have even known them gratify their brutal passion with females not ten years old… " (Equiano 104) It is to be expected that their narratives have similar structures, despite the fact that they were written at different places and in different times, because both Equiano and Georgijević had to follow the conventions of slave narratives if they wanted to reach their audience and achieve their primarily - not literary – but political goals. I already gestured towards the fact that marginalized or marked groups have had limited freedom in cultural production - including literature - especially if they were being published by or if they were supplicant to Western white unmarked subjects. Their cultural two-ness and complicated “self-fashioning” is already evident in their double names: Oluadah Equiano is also Gustavus Vassa (and both British and African), and Bartolomej Georgijević is also Bartholomew Georgiewitz (and there was a lot of confusion regarding his origin).   51     “I have been amazed by the Anglo-Saxon’s lack of curiosity about the internal lives and emotions of the Negroes, and for that matter, any non-Anglo-Saxon peoples within our borders, above the class of unskilled labor,” wrote Zora Neale Hurston in 1950, in her brilliantly insightful piece “What White Publishers Won’t Print.” This citation seems pertinent here, regardless of the anachronism, for – if we were to change several words - it accurately describes not just the 1950s, but also the conditions in which marked subjects published their first texts. “Ex-slaves were asked only to state the basic ‘facts’ of their lives; they sometimes bared their backs [while reading their works publicly, or giving speeches] as texts to ‘prove’ their stories” (Gould 20). This emphasis on exteriority and abidance by expectations has been a continuum in literature written by marked subjects from the beginning, while scars on the back or the face - to which I will return repeatedly in this study – were always integral parts of their testimonies. Perfectly in line with the conventions of the slave narrative, both Georgijević and Equiano end their texts with exhortations – the former's is addressed to the Western European Christendom and the Pope: Wherefore (most Christian monarchs) the cruelties of this tyrant, ought with all industry and vigilance be both feared and prevented, lest considering your fair provinces, and viewing them with a fascinating eye, he finde you disagreeing, and thereby infeebled, he assault you on all sides, not onely Candia, Calabria, Malta, and Sicily, but even Italy, France, Spain and Germany; and prove an universal scourge and terror to all Christendom. They are wise, who by other harms prevent their own: you are concerned, your neighbours house is fired. But not to trouble you in this kinde, I recommend to you, most prudent governours, the correction and amendment of this great error, and return to the deplorable calamities and afflictions our brethren suffer under the yoke of tribute in the Turk's dominions, where some with chains around their necks, are dragged through sharp and spiny parts of Thracia and lesser Asia, with naked feet, in thirst and hunger… (Georgijević 101-102) Equiano’s is addressed to the English Queen:   52     I do not solicit your royal pity for my own distress: my sufferings, although numerous, are in a measure forgotten. I supplicate your Majesty's compassion for millions of my African countrymen, who groan under the lash of tyranny in the West Indies. […] I presume, therefore, gracious Queen, to implore your interposition with your royal consort, in favour of the wretched Africans; that, by your Majesty's benevolent influence, a period may now be put to their misery; and that they may be raised from the condition of brutes, to which they are at present degraded, to the rights and situations of men, and be admitted to partake of the blessings of your Majesty's happy government; so shall your Majesty enjoy the heart-felt pleasure of procuring happiness to millions, and be rewarded in the grateful prayers of themselves, and of their posterity. (Equiano 231-232) They are both trying to convince, Georgijević - Western Christian countries; Equiano - the English Queen, that helping the Ottoman subjects or African slaves would help, respectively, the Christian world in general, or England and its manufacturing industry. These are just two examples of the texts whose message is so politically charged that we cannot ignore their intent: “Whether we approach Equiano’s Interesting Narrative as a spiritual autobiography, a history, or an anticipation of later slave narratives, we cannot fail to recognize that the author had designs upon his audience when he wrote it.”36 However, there is a point in which these two narratives do not only run parallel, but in which they actually converge. Namely, Equiano was trained as a seaman and, as such, he also travelled to Turkey, where he felt that he was "treated with civility;" he even writes that he believes how the Ottomans are in general "fond of black people" (167). However, one thing disturbed his otherwise very positive image of the Ottoman Empire (or, "Turkey") – the Ottomans' treatment of the Greeks: "I was surprised to see how the Greeks are, in some measure, kept under by the Turks, as the negroes are in the West Indies by the white people. The less refined Greeks, as I have already hinted, dance                                                                                                                           36 Vincent Carretta. “Oluadah Equiano: African British abolitionist and founder of the African American slave narrative.” New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. p. 49.     53     here in the same manner as we do in our nation" (my emphasis 168). Equiano then travelled to Genoa, whose architecture enchanted him, but where his experience of the city was again spoiled by the wretched spectacle of galley-slaves: "The churches were rich and magnificent, and curiously adorned both in the inside and out. But all this grandeur was, in my eyes, disgraced by the galley-slaves, whose condition, both there and in other parts of Italy, is truly piteous and wretched" (169). The enslaved Greeks that Equiano mentions were, of course, only one of the Balkan peoples that were continuously enslaved by the Ottoman Empire and Western Europe over the period that lasted for a thousand years. "The terms black and slave became increasingly interchangeable in Spain in the fifteenth century," writes Colin A. Palmer in To Make Our World Anew, a History of African Americans. 37 "These two words, Negro and Slave… are by custom grown Homogenous and Convertible," concluded a Christian minister in 1680 (Kelley 68). However, the origins of this word, which became inextricably linked to black race, take us back to the year 937, when, in a document issued to a slave-trader, the Latin term sclavus - deriving from slavus or Slav - is for the first time used instead of the Greek term doulos, or Latin terms servus and mancipium.38 At that point, it was already established that an ethnic name had become a synonym for the unfree, and, to this day, the proper name of a people has been preserved as a generic term for the enslaved in every Western European language: that is how we have the English slave, French esclave, Italian schiavo, German Sklave, Swedish slav, and so on (Skirda 9). French historian of Slavic                                                                                                                              37  Kelley, Robin D. G. and Earl Lewis, ed. To Make Our World Anew, a History of African Americans. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. p. 8.   38 Alexandre Skirda. La traite des Slaves: l'esclavage des Blancs du VIIIe au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Les Éditions de Paris, 2010. p. 5, 7.   54     peoples Francis Conte thus writes: "The name of an ethnic group, therefore, became the generic term for a social category – that of the enslaved - since Slavs, enslaved either by the Arabs or the Germans, were at the time the symbol for the non-free par excellence."39 This acquired meaning is particularly poignant considering that the etymology of the ethnic name Slav in Slavic languages derives either from the word slovo, meaning letter, language (which would have thus indicated a group of people that spoke the same language), or the word slava – a Slavic word for glory (Conte 114-116). The glorious ones were thus both semantically and materially turned into the enslaved. Tellingly, in Arabic, we have a similar philological phenomenon as in Western European languages. After the Arab conquest of Spain in the eighth century, Spain becomes one of the main centers for exportation of slaves, primarily of Slavic origin. Some of these slaves were mercenaries and they were called mamalik, which meant that they were slave soldiers who did not speak the Arabic language. Soon, in Andalusia, they began to be called sakāliba, which is "a term derived from the ethnic name of Slavs – the fact that proves how numerous they were" (Conte 91). In fact, "philologically, the term sakāliba is the Arabic transcription of the word Slav."40 History has already been described as a palimpsest: stories are scraped clean and rewritten, forgotten or changed. Some stories, however, do not need to be erased, as they have never been properly documented in the first place. In a book published in Paris in 2010, historian Alexandre Skirda laments the scarcity of historical research, publications or discussions about the slave trade that, in the case of all Slavs, lasted from the eighth                                                                                                                           39 Francis Conte. Les Slaves: aux origines des civilisations d'Europe centrale et orientale: VIe-XIIIe siècles. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986. p. 113. 40 Charles Verlinden. L'esclavage dans l'Europe médiévale. Brugge: De Tempel, 1955. p. 212.   55     century until the discovery of the New World, and which in the Balkans even continued well into the nineteenth century. Before the discovery of the New World, after which the slave trade began on the West African coast, the trade in Slavs and in Africans from the eastern African coast were simultaneous: in other words, the Ottoman Empire and eastern markets were continuously supplied with slaves from the African east coast and from Slavic lands from the ninth until the end of the nineteenth century. This coterminous enslavement is again mirrored in the vocabulary: in Portugal, a country that was geographically less suitable for an extensive trade in Slavs, the word sclavus or escravo became common only in the fifteenth century, at the same time as the words negro or guineau. This coexistence of different terms, one related to Slavs, the other to blacks, "delayed for some time the complete triumph of the word escravo […] and indicated that in Portugal, in that period, the most common kind of slave was still the African."41 The eastern trade was, however, of a different nature than the Atlantic slave trade. Since their "customers" lived in the Americas and since they catered to plantation owners, who needed workers that could endure tropical climates, Atlantic slave-traders resorted to the West African coast for their human "supply." The demand for this supply was massive, while the slaves that were bought and sold in eastern trade were primarily luxury items: servants, concubines, or eunuchs. Moreover, the East seemed to have taken great care to prevent the slaves from multiplying in their lands: women in harems were often submitted to abortions (unless they could obtain the permission from the sultan or the master to keep the child), while men – if they were not slave-soldiers – were often victims of genital ablation. On the contrary, in the Americas and the Caribbean, it was in                                                                                                                           41 Charles Verlinden. The Beginnings of Modern Colonization; eleven essays with an introduction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970. pp. 38-39.   56     the slaveholder's interest that the slaves procreate and thus create an even larger (and free) workforce. Consequently, the eastern slave trade has left almost no trace: people were captured, sold, lived and died, leaving no visible marks on the lands to which they had been taken. When we consider how comparatively rarely the eastern trade is mentioned in the general discussions of slavery, it seems that this slave trade's place in history has been almost as traceless as its mark on the population. On the one hand, we encounter this puzzling elision or erasure, while, on the other hand, when the eastern trade or colonization do get mentioned, they are often mentioned apologetically, as if those who broach the subject have the need to specify that this particular trade and this particular colonization were not "that bad," as far as the slave- trades and colonizations go.42 Thus, we have, for example, the history of The Ottoman Empire 1700-1922 published by Cambridge University Press in 2005, in which historian Donald Quataert writes that "Belgrade fell just after the 1863," but that "the Ottomans recaptured it."43 It seems hard to imagine someone publishing a book in 2005 in which they deplore the fact that "Saint-Domingue" fell into the hands of Toussaint L'Ouverture, but was recaptured, although in the end Saint-Domingue managed to become the Republic of Haiti. For, from the perspective of the subjugated Serbian population, Belgrade first shook off its shackles, and then fell under the Ottoman rule again. Quataert's descriptions of the movements for independence in the Ottoman provinces                                                                                                                           42 See, for example, the Introduction to Rosa Amelia Plumelle-Uribe's book Traite des blancs, traite des noirs: Aspect méconnus et conséquences actuelles. (Trade in Whites, Trade in Blacks: Unknown Aspects and Present Consequences.) 43 Donald Quataert. The Ottoman Empire, 1700-1922. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. p. 41.   57     clearly demonstrate that his gaze at the Ottoman Balkans is a gaze of the "imperialist eyes": The overwhelming majority of Ottoman subjects were not seeking separation or withdrawal. Rather, they would have remained within an Ottoman state framework had that political entity continued to exist into the 1920s and 1930s. […] … nationalist movements in the Ottoman Empire were minority movements, orchestrated and promoted by a few. In (probably) every case of successor state formation in the Ottoman Empire, state preceded nation and not the other way around. The formation of independent states derived not from groundswell movements but rather from the actions of certain groups in their societies who sought economic and/or political privilege that they believe they could not obtain under Ottoman domination. That is, a relative handful of individuals established a government apparatus, drew boundaries on a map and prepared the national flag and anthem. With these in place, the creation of a national community actually began to be based on a shared feeling of being Bulgarian, Serbian, Greek etc. (190) Quataert fails to take into consideration repeated violent rebellions of the oppressed populations of these fairly contented Ottoman territories - rebellions that were persistently and cruelly stifled in bloody massacres. He fails to stress that, after the 1814 uprising in Serbia, for example, the insurgents "were roasted alive, hanged by their feet over smoking straw until they asphyxiated, castrated, crushed with stones, and bastinadoed. Their women and children were raped and sometimes taken by force to harems… Outside Stambul Gate in Belgrade, there were always on view the corpses of impaled Serbs being gnawed by packs of dogs" (Glenny 19). Quataert even proceeds to analyze the feelings of the Ottoman subjects in the Balkans: "Throbbing in the breast of every Christian in the Balkans was not the idea of breaking away from the Ottomans. The foundation of independent Balkan states in the nineteenth century is no proof of mass                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               58     discontent with Ottoman rule on the part of the Balkan Christian subject populations" (190). If the subaltern cannot speak, there is always someone to speak for them. History is therefore not only written by victors: it is also written by the defeated. The reluctance to write on eastern slavery, Arabic slave-holders or the Ottoman Empire's colonization is perhaps understandable in today's context, in which we know that the Ottoman Empire eventually collapsed, and that the balance of power shifted to the West. The reluctance is also understandable in view of the existent demonization and negative stereotyping of Muslims and the Arab world, which no ethical scholar would wish to exacerbate. It is particularly understandable in view of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which Bosnian Muslims were brutally executed by the Serbian paramilitary forces, who, in their killing spree, called their victims "the Turks." However, erasing the history of the occupation and slavery that did happen in the East and in the Ottoman Empire is not equal to giving voice to Srebrenica victims. If we were to connect the Ottoman colonizer to a Bosnian Muslim victim, we would do exactly what the war criminals did: draw straight, uninterrupted cause-and-effect lines between historical crimes and punishments that make absolutely no sense. The Practice of Devshirme, or the Blood Tax In the context of Eastern, Ottoman slave-trade, no other phenomenon attracts more disparate commentaries from the imperialist perspective as opposed to the perspective of the victim than the practice of devshirme. Devshirme was a tax-collection of Christian children, who were taken to Istanbul, converted to Islam, given new names and used as soldiers of the Ottoman Empire. The earliest record of devshirme dates from   59     1395, a year when the bishop of Thessaloniki published a sermon in which he lamented the Ottoman custom of collecting Christian children as a levy: What am I to say, and how am I to consider the magnitude of the present misfortune? […] What would a man not suffer were he to see a child, whom he had begotten and raised… carried off by the hands of the foreigners, suddenly and by force, and forced to change over to alien customs…? […] Or shall he lament his son because a free child becomes a slave? […] If he were a wild beast, or a stone, or iron, or steel itself, he would have suffered the pains common to mankind."44 In his study "A Contribution to the Problem of Devshirme," Macedonian historian Aleksandar Matkovski explains that the Balkan peoples named this Ottoman levy "blood tax," "soul levy" or "child levy."45 He writes that the devshirme system was established and implemented in Rumelia – or the Balkan lands of the Ottoman Empire. Only Christian children were subjected to the levy: a Muslim child could only have been given voluntarily. The collected boys most often ranged between the ages of ten and twelve, but during the reign of Mahmud I and his son Murat II, even children as young as seven or eight were taken. The "tax collectors" would send a notice to a village, notifying the inhabitants that all fathers have to gather at a certain place at a certain time and bring their sons with them. The handsomest and the healthiest children were chosen for the service; they never took children with physical faults: they avoided children that were "ugly, bald, too tall, too short, children that were subjected to any kind of ridicule, as well as the sons of shepherds or cattle-herders" (Matkovski 279). The population sometimes tried to hide the children, bribe the collectors, or even attempt to prevent the levy by                                                                                                                           44 Speros Vryonis Jr. "Isidore Glabas and the Turkish Devshirme." Speculum, Vol. 31, Jul., 1956. pp. 436- 447. 45 Aleksandar Matkovski. "Prilog pitanju devširme," Prilozi za orijentalnu filologiju XIV-XV/1964-65. 1969. p. 275.   60     armed attacks. Parents who refused to give their children were to be "hanged in front of their own house" (Matkovski 283). In 1582, French traveler Jean Palerne Floresien wrote down a story of a young Greek woman who, when she heard about the arrival of the collectors, tried to hide her eight-year-old child: To force her to reveal where she hid the child, the Ottomans cut off her breast nipples with hot iron. We did not believe her – primarily because that part of the body is so sensitive that death would seem unavoidable – until she revealed her breasts, with their still unhealed wounds. (282) Some Christians in Serbia and Macedonia marked their children's foreheads with a cross, in order to prevent them to be taken away to serve the Ottoman army. This scarring, which is usually inflicted upon the oppressed body by slaveholders, takes yet another layer of meaning when it is inflicted upon the oppressed subject’s kin. On the way to Istanbul, children sometimes attempted escapes, some of which were even successful. Two documents from the sixteenth century tell us that "followed by their cousins all the way to Istanbul and after being converted to Islam, children managed to escape and return to their villages" (285). The documents state that the children are to be collected again and brought to Istanbul in a coffle.46 As I am aware, there are no positive descriptions of devshirme written by the colonized subjects in the Ottoman provinces – and understandably so – but the subjects from the former Ottoman provinces in the Balkans rarely or never have a chance to write the "official" history of the Empire. That is how we end up almost exclusively with apologetic descriptions of this custom, as in the following accounts in Quataert's history:                                                                                                                           46 All this is translated from Matkovski's article "Prilog pitanju devširme" ("Contribution to the Problem of Devshirme"), published in "Prilozi za orijentalnu filologiju XIV-XV/1964-65." 1969.       61     The devşirme system offered extreme social mobility for males, allowing peasant boys to rise to the highest military and administrative positions in the empire, except for the dynasty itself. (31) The devşirme, with its administrator and Janissary graduates, had meant that thousands of Christian peasants' sons rose to high positions of military and political power, enabling the acquisition of wealth and social prestige. (144) The argument that implies that forced enslavement is akin to upward mobility sounds similar to the reasoning of those who claim that African-Americans were "saved" by their enslavers from the poverty and underdevelopment in Africa. Africa and Slavdom: “The Population Reservoirs” The population estimates for the Eastern slave trade, which lasted for a millennium, range from eight to twenty million people.47 This trade also had a shape of a triangle, same as the Atlantic trade. Within the Atlantic triangle, cheap goods and arms were taken to Africa; slaves were transported to the Americas, and tobacco and sugar to Europe. On the eastern side, Western Europe sold Slavic and African slaves, who were transported to eastern markets, wherefrom Western Europe then imported musk, camphor, incense, perfumes, spices, jewelry and silk (Skirda 92). The more direct trade from the east coast of Africa to Asia, on the other hand, was run primarily by Arabs. Arguably the most comprehensive and notable historian of medieval slave trade, Charles Verlinden, concludes that already at the end of the eight century "the slaves were the most prominent export from Western Europe towards the Islamic world," and that the two biggest sources of slaves were Africa and Eastern Europe. Richard Hellie, the author of the book Slavery in Russia, thus asserts: “Comparisons with Africa are fruitful, for                                                                                                                           47  Olivier de Marliave. Le monde des eunuques: la castration à travers les âges. Paris: Editions Imago, 2011. p. 88.   62     Africa and Slavdom have been the two chief sources of slaves for a longer period of time than have any other areas.”48 This parallel prompted Philip Curtin, the author of Slavery and Empire, to describe the Slavic and African areas as “population reservoirs” (Hellie 21). The most luxurious "merchandise" exported towards East were, however, eunuchs, since the complete ablation of genitals was a procedure so dangerous that, depending on how skillful the doctor was, generally only one out of four people subjected to the complete genital ablation survived. That is why eunuchs were also three to four times more expensive than regular slaves. Eunuchs were, once again, primarily from Africa (Abyssinians were particularly appreciated), or the Ottoman territories (usually from Bosnia or Greece, the Caucasus, or from the "Hungarian territories" of Dalmatia and Slavonia) (Marliave 141). In 1976, an Ethiopian born as Gülnata and renamed to Hayretin Effendi, who was one of the last harem eunuchs, told his life story: I was seven or eight years old, I was playing with children my age in the village when horse-riders arrived, they didn't look like our local men, their faces were fairer and they were carrying arms. I found out later that they were speaking in Arabic. Getting of their horses, they took us in their arms. I didn't quite comprehend what was happening to me: putting his hand over my mouth, a man threw me onto his horse, I couldn't cry out and my eyes were popping out of their sockets. […] There were other children like us, we stayed there three days without food or drink and then we were castrated. Throughout many years I've never forgotten the pain and the torture that I endured. (Marliave 87) Fashionable orientalism portrayed harems as romantic and sensual places, while they were in reality the abodes of enslaved concubines and castrated prisoners. Eighteenth- century British physician, William Lemprière, described black slaves at a sultan's harem as "fat and short; if some of them do end up being taller than others, it's always at the                                                                                                                           48 Richard Hellie. Slavery in Russia 1450-1725. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982. p. 22.   63     expense of a good shape, it's rare that they're not deformed and maimed. Their particular voice resembles the voice of a teenager […], [they are] the image of weakness and monstrosity… the amphibian monsters" (Marliave 106). Fanon writes: "The Jew is killed or sterilized. The black man, however, is castrated. The penis, symbol of virility, is eliminated; in other words, it is denied" (140). He was probably referring to castrations in America and consequent displays of African-American men penises as ornaments on mantles in living rooms or similar brutal "customs," but his words could have been applied on the other side of the Atlantic and Indian Ocean as well (140). Therefore, the history of enslavement of the people from Eastern European, Slavic and Balkan territories (these, of course, significantly, overlap) has many common points with the history of the enslavement of Africans: First, the primary excuse used for the enslavement of these populations was that they were heathen. However, most Slavs became Christian by the ninth century, and we know that vast numbers of Africans transported to the Americas and the Caribbean also adopted Christian faith. When the argument about paganism clearly became invalid, philosophers, anthropologists and natural scientists developed a plethora of theories and philosophies about racial and ethnic inferiority. As historian Jacques Heers has put it: "A baptized slave remains a slave" (Skirda 168). Second, the conditions of enslaved women were similar: they were either used as sexual objects, or subjected to coarse household work. Harem concubines who stopped being attractive enough to please the master were often thrown into the Bosphor, sewn in a sack (Skirda 192). The "conflation of rape and concubinage in the sexual economy of   64     slavery" (192) that Saidiya Hartman describes in Scenes of Subjection was so omnipresent in eastern sexual slave-economy that the saying "If you are getting raped, you might as well enjoy it" is known in the Balkans as a local folk piece of wisdom. Both Slavic and black women were perceived as lascivious enough that it was almost impossible to rape them: "The actual or attempted rape of an enslaved woman was an offense neither recognized nor punished by law. Not only was rape simply unimaginable because of purported black lasciviousness, but also its repression was essential to the displacement of white culpability that characterized both the recognition of black humanity in slave law and the designation of the black subject as the originary locus of transgression and offense" (Hartman 79-80). Fichte, on the other side, is one of the many authors who described Slavic women as hypersexual: "so slovenly, so shaped, so inviting, and so dirty," with "a stronger sex drive than German females."49 Third, one of the worst traumas of the enslaved was the moment of the uprooting, of complete confusion and of separation from both the place and the people they have known their entire life. Florent Mouchard thus described the destiny of the enslaved Slavs in his chronicle La Chronique hypatienne: "Frightened, devastated, exhausted, paralyzed by the cold, dying of hunger and thirst, crushed by misery, with hollowed faces, blackened bodies, in an unknown land, with swollen tongues, naked and barefoot in brambles, the prisoners were telling each other: 'I was from this town,' 'I was from that village'… (Conte 422-42350). Equiano as well portrayed the moments of separation – not just from one's hometown – but from friends and family, as one of the cruelest thing in                                                                                                                           49 Larry Wolff. Inventing Eastern Europe. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. p. 335. 50 Conte is here citing from La culture matérielle des Quiptchaq d'après les sources de l'époque. Etudes slaves et est-européennes vol. 18, 1973. p. 93-111.   65     the life of the enslaved: "Are the dearest friends and relations, now rendered more dear by their separation from their kindred, still to be parted from each other, and thus prevented from cheering the gloom of slavery with the small comfort of being together and mingling their sufferings and sorrows? Why are parents to lose their children, brothers their sisters, or husbands their wives? Surely, this is a new refinement in cruelty, which, while it has no advantage to atone for it, thus aggravates distress and adds fresh horrors even to the wretchedness of slavery" (61). Fourth, historians of the Ottoman Empire like to repeat how it was one of the most tolerant colonizing empires in history. Still, in the Ottoman Empire a Christian could not witness against a Muslim in court, as a slave in America could not be a witness against a white person. Murdering the slaves and the subjects was punishable only by fines. Fifth, as “the biggest reservoirs of slaves,” the territories of Slavdom and Africa were left with gaping wounds. History of slavery is perhaps too often discussed only in the context of the captured and uprooted slaves, whereas it seems only logical that the lands that suffered such violent losses of their kin and members of community could not remain unscathed in the process. In the end, it is almost impossible to estimate the exact consequences of the slave trade for these peoples. However, historians seem to agree that it had significantly stifled the progress in Eastern Europe and Africa, while enriching Western Europe. As Basil Davidson writes: "Through these four centuries the balance of gain was all one way. In any effective sense there was no creative marriage of cultures, no passage of ideas, no   66     sharing of wealth and achievement. To Europe the trade with Africa was always an enrichment; and this enrichment could and did help Europe into new and more productive forms of society and government. But to Africans the relationship was incapable of carrying through the social and economic changes that were now required: on the contrary, it steered all those societies that it touched into economic or political frustration."51 On the other side, Skirda writes that, for example, just the numbers for the city of Cordoba are telling: between 912 and 961, the number of primarily Slavic slaves in the city rose from 3750 to 13750. Those ten thousand captured slaves brought the city around five thousand kilograms of gold: gold that the bishop of Prague deploringly called infelix aurum: the gold of misfortune (111). The arguments about Africans selling other Africans or Slavs selling other Slavs are irrelevant, and not only for the obvious reason that Africans or Slavs at the time of the enslavements did not have a sense of common identity. It is irrelevant in a Hegelian way: it does not matter what other nations and peoples would have done if they had had the opportunity to do the same as Western Europeans, or if their cultures had evolved in a way that would have turned them into the oppressors and not the oppressed. To use the term coined by Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel, "moral luck" is, in short, a set of circumstances that makes it easier for a person (or a people) to stay ethically righteous or not. The only reality of the historic, collective "moral luck" is the materialized historic luck. (In other words, the realized moral luck of peoples in the end is equal to their ethics.) It is thus unimportant what others would have done if they had been in Western Europe's shoes; the only thing that can interest us is why the imbalance happened and                                                                                                                           51 Basil Davidson. The African Slave Trade. New York: Back Bay Books, 1961. p. 284.   67     whether there are ways to redress it. However, someone had to rationalize this history of enslavement and explain it, so that the contingent nature of these two histories could be shrouded in a veil of scientific necessity. This was the task of philosophers and racial theorists. Rationalizing the Oppression Early Theories of Race My aim in this section will be to outline briefly the ways in which some of the most well-known theorists and philosophers of race have described Slavs and Africans, the Balkan peoples and blacks. This brief comparison should bring out some of the topics that, again, connect Slavs and Africans and that seem to fall into three categories: claims about inferiority, whether it is inborn or caused by geography or geopolitics; claims about inability of these two groups to govern themselves; claims about their infantile innocence and connectedness to nature. In his Outline of the History of Mankind, eighteenth-century German philosopher Christoph Meiners, popularized the term Caucasian for the white race, claiming that some of the chief characteristics that differentiate different tribes or peoples are beauty and ugliness.52 Ugly races are thus "inferior and animal-like": "The black and ugly people are distinct from the white and beautiful peoples by their sad lack in virtue and their various terrible vices" (Isaac 105). Meiners deemed that only people of the "Caucasian stock" were beautiful. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, he excluded Slavs from this                                                                                                                           52 Benjamin Isaac. The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. p. 105.     68     group (Isaac 105). Fourteenth-century Muslim thinker Ibn Khaldun would have agreed with him: he wrote that black Africans "are closer to dumb animals than to rational beings." Interestingly, but, again, not surprisingly, "he held a similar view of the Slavs" (Isaac 36). Both Slavic and African "race" were related to enslavement, and from "the early fourteenth century in German-dominated regions of eastern Europe, discriminatory urban legislation was enacted against people of Slavic stock" (Isaac 33-34). David Hume's remarks about the "Negro" in his piece Of National Characters (1748) are already notorious: "I am apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites. There scarcely ever was a civilized nation of that complexion, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences." 53 Hume, through a metaphor, interestingly links racial inferiority to speech and language: "In Jamaica, indeed, they talk of one negro as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks words plainly" (my emphasis 11). Hume also expresses some admiration for the Orient, putting it in opposition to the Balkan Greece: "The integrity, gravity, bravery of the Turks, form an exact contrast to the deceit, levity, and cowardice of the modern Greeks" (84). He is also careful to clearly demarcate the contemporary Greece from the ancient Greece: "The ingenuity, industry, and activity of the ancient Greeks have nothing in common with the stupidity and indolence of the present inhabitants of those regions" (84). (This argument about ancient Greece as a Balkan exception is very resonant of the accounts of Africa that isolate ancient Egypt as an African exception, atypical of Africa.) Hume, then, probably unsurprisingly, proclaims                                                                                                                           53 David Hume. Political essays. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.     69     the English as "the most remarkable of any people," but also gives them the aura of universality by saying that they have "the least of a national character," unless their universality can paradoxically pass as a particularity (83). Immanuel Kant, "awakened from his dogmatic slumber by Hume" - apparently not only in relation to the general conditions of knowledge, but also in regards to different "national" and racial characters - in 1764 published a short piece “Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime.” The main premise of the essay is that "different sentiments of gratification or vexation rest not so much on the constitution of the external things that arouse them as on the feeling, intrinsic to every person, of being touched by them with pleasure or displeasure."54 He analyzes the ways in which different types of people (and different sexes) react to the experience of the sublime and of the beautiful (the beautiful here being something that can charm or please, but without the element of dread and awe, which are incorporated in the experience of the sublime). In the fourth section of the essay, “On National Characters in so far as they rest upon the different feeling of the sublime and the beautiful,” Kant dissects the esthetic feelings of different ethnicities and races. Thus, the Italians and the French have the most sophisticated feeling of the beautiful, while the Germans, the English, and the Spaniards have a more acute feeling of the sublime (50). From the respective peoples' acuity in regards to the beautiful and the sublime, Kant extrapolates character generalizations. "The Spaniard" is thus "serious, taciturn and truthful;" the Frenchman "refined, courteous and complaisant" and so on (52). In the east, he finds "the Arab to be the noblest human                                                                                                                           54 Immanuel Kant. 'Observations on the feeling of the beautiful and sublime and other writings.' New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. p. 13.   70     being in the Orient": "he is hospitable, generous and truthful," but he also displays an "inflamed power of imagination" (58). Persians he proclaims to be the "Frenchmen of Asia," while the Indians "have a dominant taste for the grotesqueries of the kind that comes down to the adventurous" (58). At the bottom of Kant's ethnic and racial scale notoriously comes the "Negro": The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the ridiculous. Mr. Hume challenges anyone to adduce a single example where a Negro has demonstrated talents, and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who have been transported elsewhere from their countries, although very many of them have been set free, nevertheless not a single one has ever been found who accomplished something great in art or science or shown any praiseworthy quality, while among the whites there are always those who rise up from the lowest rabble and through extraordinary gifts earn respect in the world. (58-59) "Among all the savages," Kant deems that no one demonstrates such a sublime character as the native people of North America. He proceeds to lament the status of women in the east, where they are "always in prison," in harems, as well as to lament their status "in the lands of the blacks," where nothing better can be expected than "the female sex in the deepest slavery" (60). He says that a "Father Labat" reproached a black man for the treatment of his wives, to which the latter replied: "You whites are real fools, for first you concede so much to your wives, and then you complain that they drive you crazy" (61). "There might be something here worth considering, except for the fact that this scoundrel was completely black from head to foot, a distinct proof that what he said was stupid," Kant concluded notoriously (61). It is perhaps unsurprising that it is precisely in the works of "the father of German romanticism" - as Johann Gottfried Herder is considered by many - that the descriptions of both Africans and Slavs are written with a more sympathetic, albeit still   71     condescending, tone. If Meiners, Hume, Kant, and, later Hegel and Engels were the representatives of what we today know is racism, or negrophobia or slavophobia, Herder's theory is stamped on the other side of that coin: in his book On World History, he was perhaps the first author to pave the way to negrophilia and, especially, slavophilia. In consistency with the values of romanticism, Herder generally turned the possible negatives into positives: thus, sensuality, dancing, simplicity of life, pastoralism do not become signs of regression and underdevelopment, but traits of a different kind of moral existence. At the beginning of his chapter 'The Nature of African Peoples,' Herder urges the reader to "lay aside our proud prejudices and consider the nature of this region with as much impartiality as if there were no other in the world" (178). Since "The Negro," whom is by whites considered to be a cursed son of Ham, "has equal right to call his cruel despoilers albinos and white satans who are so degenerated only because of a flaw of nature… " (178): "I," he could say, "I, the black, am the original human being. I, more than any other creature, have been sustained by the source of life, the sun; within me and everywhere around me this source has exerted itself most profoundly and with the greatest vitality." (178) Since Europeans, with their "tyrannical indifference," did not even bother to explore the regions from which they procure their "wretched black slave," Herder considers that they do not even deserve to behold Africans' happiness, "for they have unpardonably sinned and still continue to sin, against this quarter of the globe" (180, 181). From these romanticized images of Africa, Herder easily slipped into climatic explanations of the continent and its peoples, according to which the African land did not   72     make it possible for Africans to pursue or develop "higher gifts," but has instead enabled the African to live in a more primal state, with "ampler measure of sensual enjoyment" (183). He resorts to a similar romanticization in his short chapter on 'Slavic Peoples.' Slavs are described as "charitable, hospitable to excess, lovers of pastoral freedom, but submissive and obedient, foes to plunder and rapine" (300). Precisely all this Herder sees as the cause of their oppression (300). Pertinently, he says that the oppression of Slavs by Western Europeans was motivated by "commercial advantage, although Christianity was their pretext": "it was doubtless convenient for the heroic Franks to treat as vassals an industrious nation devoted to trade and agriculture, instead of mastering and practicing these arts themselves" (300). Similarly to how he ascribed Africans' sensuality and way of life to their geographical circumstances, he ascribed the misfortunes of Slavs to their closeness to the Germans and the Mongols, who subdued and attacked "these peoples with gentle character" (300). He ends both the chapter on Africans and the chapter on Slavs by expressing the hopes that more interest will be taken into exploring these two peoples (especially the interior of Africa, and Slavic "customs, songs and legends"). In the chapter on Slavs, he adds an exhortation, trying to awaken them from their slumber: … so you, once diligent and happy peoples who have sunk so low, will at last awaken from your long and heavy slumber, will be freed from your enslaving chains, will use as your own the beautiful regions from the Adriatic Sea to the Carpathian Mountains, from the Don to the Moldau, and will once again celebrate on them your ancient festivals of peaceful toil and commerce (301). Hegel and Non-Historic Peoples It could arguably be said that the theory of race and ethnicity becomes more complex and interesting precisely with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Up to Hegel,   73     philosophers and theorists seemed to have primarily categorized different groups of peoples and ascribed to them some "general" traits. With Hegel, racial and ethnic theory becomes more intellectually sophisticated and complex. The most often repeated notorious Hegel's claim is that Africa is a continent with no history, and that Africans are therefore, people without a history – a theory that Engels will take from Hegel and apply to Slavs. But, what did Hegel mean in saying that Africa had no history? What was the concept of history with which he was operating? These questions are not meant to negate the racism of Hegel's claim: they should just serve to clarify and qualify it. We are familiar with Hegel's views on history from his notes and the notes of his students, which are published together as Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Before going into the discussion of particular nations and peoples, Hegel first lays out his concept of history and historical nations: nations whose "consciousness is obscure" do not belong to "the philosophical history of the world;" only those nations that have become self-aware, or aware of their "inherent principle" are "its object" (12). It turns out that writing one's history is the first principle of becoming a historical nation: thus, "the real objective history of a nation cannot be said to have begun until it possesses a written historical record" (13). Even what Hegel calls "original history" – which is the writing down of current events that will later become history – does not seem to qualify as truly historical. According to Hegel, the first kind of history that could endow a nation with the epithet "historical" is the writing of reflective history – a history about a past age, which is inevitably enmeshed with the spirit of the present age. I would argue here that Hegel is inexplicitly making a distinction between history and past, according to   74     which only the recorded past can ever become history, and in that way contribute to the development of the spirit in the present: When we study the past and occupy ourselves with a remote world, a present opens up before the mind, a present created out of the mind's own activity and bestowed upon it as a reward for its exertions. The events are various, but their general significance, their inner quality and coherence, are one. This circumstance cancels out the past and raises the event into the present. (20) The highest form of historical existence for Hegel is philosophical history, which not only records the spirit of the past and incorporates it into the present, but in which the spirit of the nation is revealed and made self-aware. The ultimately historical nation is the one that has achieved, or is on the path of achieving, its teleological aim - which is that this nation's spirit can be realized in all the nation's customs, in its culture and its institutions, as well as in every individual who belongs to it. The only teleology in this historical movement is that the spirit has to contingently - but also necessarily - become what it was always supposed to become anyway: "World history begins with its universal end - that the concept of the spirit should be realized" (78). Hegel differentiates three different principles of human history: "the Far Eastern (i. e. Mongolian, Chinese, or Indian) principle, which is also the first to appear in history; the Mohammedan world, in which the principle of the abstract spirit, of monotheism, is already present […], and the Christian, Western European world, in which the highest principle of all, the spirit's recognition of itself and its own profundity, is realized" (128- 129). North America is for Hegel the land of the future, and as such, it does not interest him since "prophecy is not the business of the philosopher" (171). He does mention, however, that the fact that the whole indigenous populations of North and South America were decimated by Europeans "indicates that they do not have the strength to join the   75     independent North American states," adding that "culturally inferior nations such as these are gradually eroded through contact with more advanced nations which have gone through a more intensive cultural development" (163). According to Hegel's theory of the development of the world spirit, the world history began to be shaped in "the Orient," where the individual principle and the universal principle (the spirit) were still completely undivided, and lived as an unaware One. In the Greek and Roman world, the individual principle was awoken, but it lived in a state of tension with the universal principle. Therefore, it was finally in Western Europe that the balance between the universal and the individual has finally been achieved, in such a way that the individual spirit recognizes its difference from, but also its place in the world spirit. Africa, for Hegel, stands completely on its own: untouched by history, undeveloped in spirit. In his theory, both the myth of the noble savage and of the plain, barbarian savage are combined: "In Africa proper, man has not progressed beyond a merely sensuous existence, and has found it absolutely impossible to develop any further. Physically, he exhibits great muscular strength, which enables him to perform arduous labours; and his temperament is characterized by good-naturedness, which is coupled, however, with completely unfeeling cruelty" (172-173). In a moment of some awareness of cultural relativism, Hegel does state that the character of Africa and the African are, for a European, almost impossible to comprehend: "We must forget all the categories which are fundamental to our own spiritual life, i. e. the forms under which we normally subsume the data which confront   76     us; the difficulty here is that our customary preconceptions will still inevitably intrude in all our deliberations" (176). And Hegel's "customary preconceptions" did indeed intrude in his evaluation of Africa. Thus, he writes that solely “Mohammedanism” brought at least some culture to "the negroes," that "Africa has not progressed beyond its immediate existence," that men there have still not distinguished themselves from nature, and that their notion of God is incomplete, "for they believe that they can accomplish their aims by their own efforts" – something for which they would now, ironically, be praised (177, 180). Hegel concludes by saying that Africa is "an unhistorical continent, with no movement or development of its own" (190). Perhaps what is most interesting about Hegel's account is that he devotes more text and space to Africa than to any other part of the world that he discusses: for some reason, he had much more to say about this unhistorical space, trapped in a cultureless pre-spiritual void, than any other place, including Germany and Western Europe. Marx, Engels and “small pig-headed nations” of Slavs Friedrich Engels was grievously disappointed with the failure of the European revolutions of 1848, and it seems that he put a huge burden of blame for this failure on Slavs. Wanting to gain their independence from Austria, Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, Slavs were indeed willing to unite with anyone who promised them nation-states and freedom. Ironically, Engels argued that Slavs had to perish precisely because they had never been independent and because they had no history. On the other hand, as Roman Rosdolsky suggests in his book Engels and the 'Non-Historic' Peoples: the   77     National Question in the Revolution of 1848, Engels refused to even acknowledge that the German revolutionaries of 1848 could have supported the "Austrian" Slavs (Slavs that were under the rule of Austro-Hungary), and thus diminish the chances of their joining the counter-revolutionary forces. In the end, it seems that Engels was perhaps just blinded by his disdain for non-historic "Slav barbarians."55 He was overtly a big opponent of Panslavism, and claimed that - since the Slavic race has been subjugated "by Turks, Germans, Hungarians" for a thousand years – the Slavic liberation movement was not a movement for national independence, but "a movement which aims to undo what a thousand years of history have created."56 In his articles, Engels officially supported only the Poles, as they had not participated in counter-revolution. However, in his letters to Marx he made it clear that he still disdained them: "The more I think about it, the more obvious it becomes to me that the Poles are une nation foutue [a finished nation] who can only continue to serve a purpose until such time as Russia herself becomes caught up into the agrarian revolution. From that moment Poland will have absolutely no raison d'étre any more. The Poles’ sole contribution to history has been to indulge in foolish pranks at once valiant and provocative."57 He not only negated any kind of Slavic history; he also predicted that Slavs had no future: We repeat: apart from the Poles, the Russians, and at most the Turkish Slavs, no Slav people has a future, for the simple reason that all the other Slavs lack the primary historical, geographical, political and industrial conditions for independence and viability. Peoples which have never had a history of their own, which from the time when they achieved the first, most elementary stage of civilization already came under                                                                                                                           55 Friedrich Engels. 'The Magyar Struggle.' http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1849/01/13.htm 56 Friedrich Engels. 'Panslavism and the Crimean War." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1855/04/21.htm 57 Marx – Engels Correspondence. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1851/letters/51_05_23.htm   78     foreign sway, or which were forced to attain the first stage of civilization only by means of a foreign yoke, are not viable and will never be able to achieve any kind of independence. […] The same thing holds for the Southern Slavs proper. Where is the history of the Illyrian Solvenes, the Dalmatians, Croats and Shokazians? Since the eleventh century they have lost the last semblance of political independence and have been partly under German, partly under Venetian, and partly under Magyar rule. And it is desired to put together a vigorous, independent, viable nation out of these tattered remnants?58 Engels was livid at the thought that these uncultured Slavs were now asking for any kind of independence, and "all that by way of thanks for the Germans having given themselves the trouble of civilizing the stubborn Czechs and Slovenes, and introducing among them trade, industry, a tolerable degree of agriculture, and culture!"59 He stated that the Germans and Magyars had to suppress these "small, stunted and impotent little nations," even if it had to be accomplished with "many a tender national blossom being forcibly broken." In fact, he concluded that the crimes of the Germans and Magyars against Slavs "are among the best and most praiseworthy deeds which our and Magyar people can boast in their history."60 One of the reasons for a necessary failure of any kind of Slavic unity or independence was, in Engels's view, the fact that the Slavs were divided by their oppressors, the Germans, the Magyars and the Turks, and that they consequently ended up ranging "from highly developed" – "thanks to the Germans" (he was here referring to Western Slavs, like the Poles) – to completely barbaric, as were, for example, the Balkan                                                                                                                           58 Friedrich Engels. 'Democratic Pan-Slavism.' http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1849/02/15.htm 59  Ibid.   60  Friedrich Engels. 'Democratic Pan-Slavism.' http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1849/02/15.htm   79     Bulgarians and Croats. Engels as well made a connection between ethnic inferiority and language, describing Slavic languages as "a sheer patois," which he saw as a result of "the lack of culture" and inexistence of Slavic languages in writing.61 (Of course, not only that books were being written in Slavic languages, but the use of Slavic languages – instead of the official German or Hungarian - was ironically one of the crucial goals in the Slavic struggle for independence. Moreover, the lack of existence of writing should, of course, not have been a discriminating cultural factor.) Engels evoked Hegel in arguing that the development of the world spirit necessitated the annihilation of some peoples, which would otherwise thwart its progress. Thus, Slavs become expendable "fragments of peoples, the remnant of a population that was suppressed and held in bondage by the nation which later became the main vehicle of historical development."62 Similarly to "a nigger, who is therefore closer to the animal kingdom than the rest of us," as Engels wrote to Marx in one of his letters, Slavs – and particularly Southern Slavs (or Yugoslavs) – were "the human trash of peoples," and Engels therefore urged for the annihilation of "all these small pig-headed nations even to their very names."63 Engels might have been more sympathetic to the struggles of the Slavs for independence if their struggle had not sometimes interfered with the class struggle, which was his priority. This is highly reminiscent of black, and especially African-American, grudges with Communism in the twentieth century. In 1939, American Professor H.                                                                                                                           61  Friedrich Engels. 'The Magyar Struggle.' http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1849/01/13.htm 62  Ibid. 63  http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_Engels_Correspondence.pdf     80     Malcolm Macdonald wrote about Engels’s and Marx’s condemnation of Slavic movements for independence and their general contempt of Slavic peoples. He stressed that all arguments published by Marx-Engels in the New York Daily Tribune were “based on the assumption that the Slavs are a backward and, by nature, a reactionary people, and that they lack the essential ingredients for the development of an independent national life, namely numbers, compactness of territory, and economic advancement.” 64 Despite the fact that his article was focused on the events of 1848-49, Macdonald was writing in 1939, and he could not disregard the fact that this attitude towards Slavs was taken over and continued by the Nationalist Socialist Party and Hitler, who “like Marx and Engels, has an inherent contempt for the Slavic peoples,” “peoples without a history,” which should be “led along the path of German ‘Kultur’” (460). The Third Reich: Racism as Faith In their brilliant, extremely informative and poignant book The Racial State: Germany, 1933-1945, Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wipperman argue that the Third Reich was "the first state in world history whose dogma and practice was racism" (23). And, indeed, it does seem that every racist and ethnicist theory became intensified and crystallized in the Third Reich. What is more, I would argue that it is precisely within the racial state of the Third Reich that science and belief converged, and that racism was turned into a sort of secular faith. The sacred status of German blood and soil, the emblems, the SS rituals and symbols only serve to reinforce the religious aspect of Hitler's Germany's racist policies. The Jew became a satanic, almost supernaturally                                                                                                                           64 H. Malcolm Macdonald. “Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and the South Slavic Problem in 1848-49.” The University of Toronto Quarterly. Vol. VIII, No. 4, July 1939. p. 457.   81     powerful evil figure – or as Burleigh puts it: "The Jew represented evil incarnate, performing for Hitler much the same function as the Devil does for many Christians" (40). In the Third Reich, the capitalist notion of usefulness, the eugenicist idea of the purity of blood, and a blind belief in "progress" transformed science into a new morality: "Contrary to the notion that Nazism somehow corrupted and distorted the temples of learning – which of course it did – one could argue that a corrupt and inherently distorted science lent Nazism a specifically 'academic' and 'scientific' character" (56). In this constellation, in which the Jew is the embodiment of pure evil, and the Germanic race is the only pure race that should not let even "a droplet" of its blood "go under in an alien people," Slavs and blacks again found themselves at the same place on the racial scale: as Untermensch, or subhumans, which were either to be annihilated, or put to work as servants and slaves (71-72). There were a few colonial African troops present in Germany and a myth of these soldiers' abuse of German women soon began to be propagated (propaganda postcards were issued "depicting 'gorillas' savaging German women") (128). In reality, African soldiers often complained about being "pestered by German women," who were probably attracted to their exoticism: "The children of these colonial soldiers and their female German partners were referred to as 'Rhineland Bastards'" (128). This led a certain dr. Rosenberger to ask: "Shall we silently accept that in future instead of the beautiful songs of white, pretty, well-informed, intellectually developed, lively, healthy Germans, we will hear the raucous noise of horrific, broad skulled, flat nosed, ungainly, half-human, syphilitic half-castes on the banks of the Rhine?" (129) The issues of miscegenation with the blacks or the Roma “included policy towards ethnic and national minorities, namely   82     the Sorbs, Kashubians, and Poles” – in other words, "masses from the east" - or Slavs (130). Regarding Slavs, the Germans from the Third Reich believed in their "white man's burden": "the Prussian historian Johann Georg Friedrich Reitemeier claimed that the 'uncleanliness' of the Slavs 'was notorious from the earliest times.' Therefore the Slavs had to be grateful for the culture that the Germans brought them. The notion that the Germans were 'bearers of civilization' to areas once settled by the 'ancient Germans' became interconnected with Hegel’s assertion that the Slavs, with the exception of the Russians, were 'peoples without a history'" (26). The need for labor created the phenomenon of worker-guests, who were mostly Slavs, "although they were increasingly 'guests' who had been abducted from their own countries and imprisoned in special camps" (260). By 1944, Germany had more than seven million “foreign workers” (260). They were treated according to their "racial origins," and Eastern workers were at the bottom of the ladder; they wore a sign OST and were "regarded as expendable" (296). Sexual relations with Germans were punishable by death: "Whereas Polish or Russian men were usually summarily executed for sleeping with German women, Polish or Russian women who became pregnant through German men were taken to special delivery camps for Eastern workers. There, their newborn children were subjected to racial selection. Those babies who failed the test were starved or killed with lethal injections" (298). Heinrich Himmler put his attitude towards Slavs succinctly and clearly in his speech in Posen in 1943. He told the troops that you could not just tell Slavs: "You are   83     Slavs, an inferior mob."65 Same as Engels – paradoxically or not - he also stated that the "Slavic peculiarity" is that they were "unable to establish a nation and govern themselves" (Clark, 60): What happens to the Russians, what happens to the Czechs, is a matter of utter indifference to me... Whether the other peoples live in comfort or perish of hunger interests me only in so far as we need them as slaves for our culture; apart from that it does not interest me. Whether or not 10,000 Russian women collapse from exhaustion while digging a tank ditch interests me only in so far as the tank ditch is completed for Germany... We Germans, who are the only people in the world who have a decent attitude to animals, will also adopt a decent attitude to these human animals, but it is a crime against our own blood to worry about them and to bring them ideals... (Clark 62) The Third Reich, or the racial state par excellence, turned the long-existing racist theories into a “religion.” The Discourse on Eastern Europe and the Balkans not as an Orientalist, but as an Africanist Discourse In this section, I will explain why the discourse on Eastern European Slavs and the balkanness should not be read as another branch of Orientalism. I will also account for the reasons why it would be much more useful and logical to read it through the prism of the discourse on Africa and blackness. In one of her pieces in an essay-collection Culture of Lies, Croatian writer Dubravka Ugrešić tells a story about a palindrome. The story involves a female Croatian poet, who wrote a palindrome-poem that can be read from both left and right, while preserving the same meaning. As the war in the Balkans begins raging, the female poet                                                                                                                           65  Veronica Clark and Wilfried Heink. Hitler and Himmler Uncensored. Vera Icona Publishers, 2009. p. 56.   84     realized how utopian and impossible the palindrome is: you can never read something from two opposite sides and get the same story, because, even if the words are exactly the same, depending on the direction from which you read, their meaning changes inevitably: … the language of the palindrome is a Utopian linguistic game. No one speaks it and no one ever will. It works on the Utopian principle that both sides are the same, that the words can be read equally from the left and from the right, from the east and from the west. In our normal discourse, in our normal orientation in space, in our normal understanding of European civilization it is normal for there to be two sides, right and left, an East and a West, and it doesn't cross anyone's mind to suggest that they are identical. (36) This is why the discourse on the Balkans cannot be subsumed under Orientalism. The Balkans are a space that got caught in the middle of a powerful palindrome: not even in a particular word, but in a pause at the center - the pause which divides the left side of the palindrome from the right, the East from the West. Historian Larry Wolff views the entire Eastern Europe as caught in that mid-space: "The oppositions [between East and West] allowed for an intermediary cultural space, in which the idea of Eastern Europe evolved" (7). However, the problem of being caught in the middle of the palindrome is that the intermediary blank space, silenced between two loud, powerful interpretations, at the same time becomes an inferior space, a half-this-half-that mongrel - an existence in halves that often ends up looking inadequate. When I mention Eastern Europe, Slavs and the Balkans, the question of the exact delineations of my comparison imposes itself: am I comparing the experiences of Afro- Caribbeans, Africans and African-Americans to experiences of all Eastern Europeans? Or of just Slavs? Or of the peoples from the Balkans? It is important to stress here that the boundaries between these areas do not form clear lines; they form fluid concentric circles. The largest circle encompasses the entire   85     Eastern Europe with the Balkans, and includes even Russia, but only to a certain extent - considering Russia's own imperialist policies towards the rest of the Eastern Europe and its consistent status of a major world power. The smaller, more relevant circle would envelop Eastern Europe, but Romania, and especially Hungary, would teeter on this circle's boundaries, since Hungary was a non-Slavic imperial power, and since Romanians are traditionally proud of their Latinate, non-Slavic origins. In the end, the narrowest circle envelops the Balkans - and primarily Slavic Balkans - as the space in which lies the chasm in the middle of the palindrome. Only the Balkans were colonized both by the Ottoman Empire and the Western powers. Only the Balkans were fragmented and caught between two powerful empires. And the epicenter of this political palindrome is the city of Sarajevo. It is no coincidence that some of the bloodiest battles of the twentieth century on the European soil were waged precisely there. Being Slavic already carries a certain stigma, but being Slavic and Balkan problematizes this stigma manifold. Furthermore, Eastern Europe is fairly easy to delineate, as much as it is fairly easy to say what ethnic groups are considered Slavic. The Balkans, however, escape the realm of the concrete: their name itself is already a qualitative evaluation. To be "Balkan," or to call someone "Balkan" can easily slip from a territorial designation into an insult. The Balkans comprise all the stereotypes of other Slavs and Eastern Europeans, but they also carry an excess: every Eastern European stereotype in the Balkans somehow becomes intensified, augmented and transformed. But another question that imposes itself in any discourse on the Balkans is: where exactly are these slippery Balkans?   86     In his book The Balkans, Nationalism, War & the Great Powers, 1804-1999, journalist and historian Misha Glenny says: "Any serious consideration of the Balkan peninsula runs up against the unanswerable question of borders. Which countries belong there? A still more sensitive question is – which peoples does it embrace? Countless scholars, politicians, diplomats and journalists have offered definitions… But a consensus has never been found, not could it be" (xxii). However, he puts together a tentative list: mainland Greece, Serbia, Croatia, Romania, Turkey, Bulgaria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Albania (xxii). The Greeks, however, were never completely "Balkan" because, first, they are not Slavic, and, more importantly, they always enjoyed a special status because of their ancient history. While Churchill was debating with Stalin over the division of Eastern Europe, he made the exception of Greece explicit: "Athens alone – Greece with its immortal glories – is free" (2). Historian of Eastern Europe Larry Wolf writes: "Hellenism… helped to exempt modern Greece from inclusion in the idea of Eastern Europe" (7). As I already mentioned, Romanians are certainly Eastern European, and even Balkan, but they are not Slavic, and they are proud of their Latinate origins. Thus, in his book on Balkan Ghosts, Robert D. Kaplan writes: "Romanians see themselves as a Latin race, speaking a Latinate tongue, cast into a violent sea of Slavs and forgotten by the rest of the Latin world," and "it cannot be denied that Romanians are closer in appearance to other Latins than to the Slavs and Hungarians who surround them" (89, 90). Turkey is an exception not only because it is not Slavic, but because it is in many respects an heir of the Ottoman Empire, the century-long master of the Balkans. That leaves us with non-Slavic Albania and Kosovo, and Slavic Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria,   87     Bosnia, Macedonia and Montenegro. It is interesting that both in Misha Glenny and Robert D. Kaplan, Slovenia “passes” and completely escapes balkan epithet. All this goes to show that, while "Eastern Europe" and "Slavdom" are certainly terms that can be slippery and burdened with some connotative weight, they still relate to factual, observable categories – same as Africa, or the Caribbean. "Balkanness," however, escapes the realm of the concrete and enters into the realms of fantasy – very much like blackness. In the meantime, the Ottoman army had already set out, and truths and untruths were spawned. But there was something that unsettled the people of the peninsula even more than the approaching army: the word "Balkan." Before the Turks even set foot on the peninsula, they baptized it and its people with this name, and this name stuck to them, like new scales on the body of an aged reptile. The people were at their wits' end. They twisted in their sleep as if they were trying to shake off this name, but the result was the opposite – the name clung to them all the more forcefully, as if it wanted to become one with their skin. [my emphasis] (Boyar 72) These words by Albanian poet Ismael Kadare indicate that the word "Balkan" in a particular context and in the minds of the peoples' it represents resembles more the insult "nigger" than the term "black." The images of new scales on the Balkan peoples' bodies and of the name that clings to their skin brings to mind Étienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein's claim related to ex-Yugoslavs in Western Europe: "there are always some who are 'niggers.' If there are no Blacks or too few to play the role, one can invent 'White niggers'" (34). In We, the People of Europe, Balibar made a bold statement that Western Europe’s treatment of the immigrants from the Balkans can be paralleled to the treatment of blacks in “South African Apartheid”66 and “the never forgotten Jim Crow system,” adding: “My German colleague Helmut Dietrich, who has long worked on refugees and                                                                                                                           66 Étienne Balibar. We, the People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship. Princeton University Press, 2004. p. 121.   88     migrants on the ‘Eastern Border’ of Europe, particularly the Balkans, has spoken of the Hinterland of the new European Reich” (123). There have been attempts to read the negative stereotyping of Eastern Europe and the Balkans through the prism of Edward Said's Orientalism, but those attempts always end up seeming – if not completely erroneous - then certainly extremely inadequate. Namely, if the Orient, or even "the Turk," were constituted as the European Other, or even as the enemy, that Otherness implied a certain reciprocity and equality. The Other is necessarily comparable to the Gazer, to the one who is doing the otherizing. That is why neither Africa nor the Balkans could truly be a Western Europe's Other, whereas the Orient absolutely could and was. Even Said writes that the context of orientalism is the context of power: "The relationship between Occident and Orient is a relationship of power, of domination, of varying degrees of complex hegemony… "67 The Oriental Other, thus, "generally acts, speaks, and thinks in a manner exactly opposite to European," and was therefore the Other at which the West was gazing face-to-face, with a mixture of fear and fascination (39). I do not mean to propose here that this makes Orientalism unproblematic - by no means - but this Orientalism/Occidentalism framework excludes those that are less than the Other, and at whom the gaze is generally directed mostly downwards. This difference in the status between the Orient and the Balkans is already obvious if we look at the two most famous renaissance texts that describe the Ottoman Empire. In "Europe in the Turkish Mirror," M. E. Yapp writes that between the fifteenth                                                                                                                           67 Edward W. Said. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1979. p. 5.     89     and the eighteenth centuries Europe created two different images of the "Turk" (or, more correctly, the Ottoman), one of which was good, the other bad. He then states that the bad image was at the time propagated primarily through the memoirs of "a Hungarian pilgrim who was enslaved in the Ottoman empire, Bartolomej Georgijević."68 The image of the good Turk, on the other hand, was most memorably offered by the imperial ambassador Ogier Ghislain de Busbecq, in his Turcicae legations epistolae quatuor (1589), a book which contrived to depict the devshirme as the equivalent of success in the civil-service examination" (Yapp 148). So, on the one hand, we have an account of the enslaved "Hungarian pilgrim" Bartolomej Georgijević, who was actually, as we have seen, a sixteenth-century Croat and one of the numerous Balkan slaves sold to the Ottoman Empire, while Busbecq was a native of Flanders and an ambassador to the Ottoman empire in the service of Ferdinand of Habsburg. Busbecq's gaze at the Ottoman Empire was a gaze of a member of one great power facing an-other. Busbecq therefore had the privilege, for example, to find himself fascinated both by Ottoman horsemen and by the city of Constantinople: They formed a charming spectacle to my unaccustomed eyes, with their brightly painted shields and spears, their jeweled scimitars, their many-coloured plumes, their turbans of the purest white, their garments mostly of purple or bluish green, their splendid horses and fine trappings. Their officers rode up and welcomed me with courtesy and congratulated me on my safe arrival…69 As for the site of the city itself, it seems to have been created by nature for the capital of the world. It stands in Europe but looks over Asia, and has Egypt and                                                                                                                           68  M. E. Yapp. "Europe in the Turkish Mirror." "Past & Present, No. 137, The Cultural and Political Construction of Europe" (Nov.,1992). p. 148.   69 Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq. The Turkish Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq. The Unites States: Louisiana State University, 2005. p. 5.     90     Africa on its right. […] No place could be more beautiful or more conveniently situated. (42) Even if the Turk is an Other and en enemy, it is clear that he is perceived with immense respect. Busbecq thus writes that "the Turks succeed in all they attempt and are a dominating race… " (60). He even goes so far as to say that he trembles with dread when he compares the Turkish system with that of Austro-Hungary: If an ordinary enemy, well known to us, and lacking the prestige of victory, were to attack our territory, and our forces were equal to his, it would, I fear, be imputed to cowardice if we did not face him… (238) Soleiman stands before us with all the terror inspired by his own successes and those of his ancestors; he overruns the plains of Hungary with 200,000 horsemen; he threatens Austria; he menaces the rest of Germany… Like a thunderbolt he smites, shatters, and destroys whatever stands in his way; he is at the head of veteran troops and a highly trained army, which is accustomed to his leadership; he spreads far and wide the terror of his name. He roars like a lion along our frontier, seeking to break through, now here, now there. (239) Busbecq does mention that the slaves are the most common merchandise in Turkey, and that he and his entourage every once in a while "were met by gangs of wretched Christian slaves of every kind who were being led to horrible servitude. Youths and men of advanced years were driven along in herds or else were tied together with chains, as horses with us are taken to market, and trailed along in a long line" (68). As much as he thought that these scenes were terrible, he concluded later that slavery was, in the end, a beneficial thing for a society: "I doubt whether the man who first abolished slavery was really a public benefactor. I am aware that slavery has various drawbacks, but these are outweighed by its advantages… It is not every one that can endure want when he has full freedom of action, nor is every one endowed by nature with self-control and the ability to use his judgment aright; hence the need of the guidance and direction of a superior, without which there will be no end to the crimes which will be committed, just as some   91     animals will always be dangerous unless they are forcibly restrained by chains. In Turkey weak wills are controlled by the authority of a master, who, in return, lives on the labor of his slaves" (101). One of these weak wills who deserved to have a master was Bartolomej Georgijević, who, being enslaved himself, was not so delighted by the societal benefits of slavery. Busbecq's gaze is the gaze of an enemy, but also of an equal. Georgijević, on the other hand, does not even have a gaze, as much as Equiano didn't. His account is written in despair, as a cry for help to other Christian nations, in an attempt to convince them that it is in their best interest to stop the enslavement and colonization of the Balkans. But the Western Powers "committed their governments from interfering 'either collectively or individually in the relations of the Sultan with his subjects or in the internal administration of the Empire’" (Glenny 85).70 Even Quataert, in his Ottoman Empire, writes that European leaders for a long time did not want the Ottoman Empire to collapse because "many European leaders came to understand the grave risks that total Ottoman collapse posed to the general peace… Thus, the European consensus that the empire should be maintained, tottering but intact, helped preserve the Ottoman state" (56). As Francis Conte concluded, there was a complementarity in the needs of the Orient and the European West (412). The fact that Eastern Europe, and especially the Balkans, found themselves in a cultureless non-space, caught in the middle of the palindrome, is also evident in renaissance and eighteenth-century travel accounts. That is why Lady Wortley Montagu,                                                                                                                           70  There were some dissenting voices: "Stratford Canning, the experienced British consul and most powerful foreigner in Istanbul, lamented the latitude that this decision gave the Porte, noting bitterly: 'I would rather have cut off my right hand than have signed that treaty.'" (Glenny 85)   92     who visited Serbian Belgrade in 1717, could report to Alexander Pope that her most interesting acquaintance in Belgrade was Achmet-Beg, who "explain'd to me many peices of Arabian poetry" (Wolff 42). She was so enchanted by the poems that she said she would learn Arabic if she stayed in Belgrade longer. In regard to the local colonized population - the Serbs - she reported to Pope that they were "a race of Creatures, who are very numerous all over Hungary," that they "looked like Vagabong Gypsies," and lived in "extreme Ignorance" (42). In Bulgaria, Montagu commented that the "peasant women" were not ugly, but that they had "tawny complexions" (Wolff 43). Wolff comments that "it was not the oriental Turks whose skin was darker, but rather the subject peoples of Eastern Europe" (43). This indicates that Montagu was applying the same set of prejudices to Balkan Slavs that she would have applied to Africans. Both in Serbia and Bulgaria, she was interested primarily in Arabic or Turkish culture, probably presuming that the local people in any case had no culture at all: "So in Belgrade, Sofia, and Adrianople, without even reaching Constantinople, she appreciated the Orient, while Eastern Europe manifested itself incidentally along the way in dirt huts and tawny complexions" (Wolff 43). The theorists that try to squeeze the Balkans into an orientalist framework – to a certain extent - commit the same fallacy (or even insult) that Lady Mary did: they erase the Balkans as a place that had its own identity, a place that was not completely submerged by the colonizer. Another eighteenth-century traveler, French-Canadian lieutenant Salaberry, in Wallachia ran into a woman, at a cabin in the woods, dressed in tatters: "This woman watched hungrily while Salaberry ate, and so he gave her a chicken wing. She   93     immediately took out from under the blanket 'a little child, completely naked,' and fed the chicken to the child. To Salaberry it appeared remarkable that such a woman, in Wallachia, should turn out to be not only a mother, but even a devoted mother who fed her child before herself. He thought of a funny story he had once read about the Hottentots in Africa, about one who was offered whiskey and insisted that all the members of his family taste it before he did himself. Most travelers located Eastern Europe between Europe and Asia, but the imaginative nature of all but the most strictly geographical associations meant that they could also invoke Africa if they felt they had traveled very far from home" (Wolff 46). Wolff correctly remarks that, while the Balkans find themselves in the midspace between east and west, and can sometimes to the easterners or the westerners look as if they belong "to the other side," the fantasmic core of both the easterner's and the westerner's gaze was actually closest to Africa. As Eastern slavery served partly as a model for the Atlantic slave trade, Eastern Europe "in the eighteenth century provided Western Europe with its first model of underdevelopment, a concept that we now apply all over the globe" (Wolff 9). The gaze from the other, Ottoman side, was no different, if not even more condescending. In her book Ottomans, Turks and the Balkans, Ebru Boyar showed how the Orient, same as Lady Mary Montagu, gazed over the empty, uncultured Balkan space, towards its respectful enemy, the West. The etymology of the name "the Balkans" already tells us a story about the mid-space in which this region has found itself. The Balkans did not name themselves, but were named by others: Western Europe called them the Balkans, which meant "Turkey in Europe," while the Ottoman-centered term was Rumeli, a term that designated the Ottoman territories in the region. Consequently,   94     the Balkans or Rumeli expanded or shrank, fluidly depending on the respective powers of Ottoman Empire or Austro-Hungary. Again, caught in the middle of the palindrome, the Balkans/Rumeli seem like a space that is actually a non-space, whose existence depends on those who master and name it: "According to the centre-periphery paradigm, the province as periphery was a dependent unit on the central government in Istanbul. The periphery could not have an existence or identity independent of the centre" 71 [my emphasis]. And it was clear that the centres were either the Ottoman Empire or Western Europe; that is why Turkish historian Halil Ïnalcik in 1943 wrote that the "Bulgarian uprising for independence" in the nineteenth century failed because "the Bulgarians, like the other Balkan nations, did not have an independent, more civilized state nearby which could come to their aid" (Boyar 59) [my emphasis]. Boyar thus concludes that the "Ottoman historian thus represented the Balkans very much within the centre-periphery paradigm, assigning no concept of 'sentient being' to the areas of the periphery whose very existence depended not on their own aspirations and actions but on a centre, be it Istanbul or elsewhere" (70). Both the Great Powers and the Ottomans might have seen each other as adversaries, enemies, or as each other's Other. But, in that respect, they were equals. And in that equality or reciprocity, there can be hatred, but it also necessitates a dose of respect. In that constellation, the Balkans became a non-space of infantilized peoples, at the hands of which a military defeat is shameful: "Defeat at the hands of 'the little Balkan                                                                                                                           71 Ebru Boyar. Ottomans, Turks, and the Balkans: Empire Lost, Relations Altered. New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007. p. 58.     95     states' was seen as much more humiliating than defeat by the Great Powers" (Boyar 78). The Ottoman publications expressed this sentiment clearly: After ruling with total power for over the three great continents of the world for 600 years, we were finally expelled from Rumeli (the Balkans). We were driven out by our former shepherds and servants. We must not remove from our hearts until the Day of Judgment the pain of this insulting blow which we have received. (79) When British baroness and author Lady Craven travelled in Eastern Europe at the end of the eighteenth century, she was fascinated by the beauty of the landscape and immediately felt the white (wo)man's burden, or a desire to cultivate and civilize it: "Though I have not been absolutely all over this peninsula, I think I am perfectly acquainted with it, and though it is a new acquaintance to me, I sincerely wish it to be peopled by the industrious… Can any rational being, dear Sir, see nature without the least assistance from art, in all its grace and beauty, stretching out her liberal hand to industry, and not wish to do her justice? Yes, I confess, I wish to see a colony of honest English families here, establishing manufactures, such as England produces, and returning the produce of this country into ours" (126). However, this same territory also inspired the Ottoman man's burden; thus, Turkish novelist and journalist Yakup Kadri asked in the 1940s: "What fool said 'in the place where Turkish armies have passed grass does not grow'? Wherever Turkish armies went they brought order, organization and tranquility. At a stroke, countries which had for centuries been in anarchical turmoil found peace and calm. The Turks took over these foreign nations which were incapable of governing themselves and put them on the road to independence and stability (Boyar 143). He concluded that these lands, which the Turks made more cultured, fell into the hands of mere revolted slaves.   96     As unhistorical non-spaces caught in the middle of the East-West palindrome, Eastern Europe or the Balkans cannot fit into the framework of Orientalism. The discourse on Eastern Europe can be enlightened through the discourse of the Caribbean and, especially, Africa, whereas the discourse on the Balkans can be illuminated through the discourse on blackness. Eastern Europe and Africa, balkanness and blackness Basil Davidson was a British historian who focused his research on and comparatively studied Africa and Eastern Europe. He fought with Tito’s partisans in the Second World War in ex-Yugoslavia, and later he fought against colonialism and apartheid in Africa. Edward Said wrote that Basil Davidson was one of the Western intellectuals who went so far in his empathy for - and knowledge of - foreign cultures that he was in fact “on the other side.” Davidson wrote a book on Yugoslav Partisan Fighters, and, even though he was not a communist himself, he said that his time with the partisans inspired him in his later battles against colonialism and apartheid in Africa. Davidson wanted to write on Eastern Europe, but his cooperation with communists during the Second World War prompted the British Foreign Office to label him as a dangerous “fellow traveler,” so he ended up in Africa – and became fascinated with the continent. When I wanted to learn more about pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial African history, I bought a used copy of his book The Black Man’s Burden, expecting to find information “only” on Africa. However, a few pages into the book, next to Davidson’s paragraph that read “Europeans of the nineteenth century believed that Africans had never built nations but, at best, only tribes. Europeans have often continued to affirm that ‘tribalism’ has been, and is now, Africa's bane. But what was this tribalism? What is it   97     today?” there was a note on the margin (10-11). One need to look at the Balkans to see the European variety of “tribalism,” wrote the previous owner of the book. At the time, I just started my research, and I was still questioning the roots between my comparison of Africa and the Balkans, and this note on the margin revealed to me that an anonymous reader of history, whose book I was holding in my hands, drew some of the same parallels as me. After I traced the roots of some of the clusters of concepts revolving around Slavs and Africans, Balkans and blacks, I overviewed the rationalizations of the histories of enslavement and oppression of these peoples. Now I will briefly look at both the stereotypes to which I already alluded in the introduction, and in my discussion of Kant, Hegel, Engels, etc., as well as examine some of the effects that these concepts have had on the peoples to which they refer. Life on the Border: Homo Sacer Black and Balkan identities are fluid: they change according to the place, time and the border crossing. That is why the contours of my comparison are sometimes unsatisfyingly messy: the lines that envelop the groups that I am comparing are porous; they intertwine, ooze, overlap. If you stay in the Balkans, you are less aware of your balkanness – even though, in the globalized world, you are still not oblivious to it. The same is true for an African or an Afro-Caribbean: "The Negro lives in Africa. Subjectively and intellectually the Antillean behaves like a white man. But in fact he is a black man. He'll realize that once he gets to Europe, and when he hears Europeans mention 'Negroes,' he'll know they're   98     talking about him as well as the Senegalese" (Fanon 126-127). Balkan, African, Caribbean – these identities are, of course, extremely heterogeneous, and comprise different ethnicities, religions, languages and cultures. However, after many a border crossing, they tend to begin to melt into one. African-Americans in this sense form a group apart, but, I would argue, still not completely separate. They do not pose the immigrant threat, but even the term African-American marks the fact that they came (or were forcefully taken) to America from elsewhere – elsewhere than Europe, in fact. (Since we have the terms Native American, Hispanic, African-American, it is interesting to note that there is no term for a "European-American." Similarly, a Norwegian citizen living in France is not included in the discussions about "the immigrant problem.") Étienne Balibar sees the divisions within Europe as a European form of South- African Apartheid, or "the never forgotten Jim Crow system" (123). He claims that his colleague Helmut Dietrich, "who has long worked on refugees and migrants on the ‘Eastern Border’ of Europe, particularly the Balkans, has spoken of the Hinterland of the new European Reich”, but that "a desegregated Europe, that is, a democratic Europe, is far from being on the agenda” (123): An implicit comparison with South-African apartheid is thus not devoid of meaning. Its function is not merely to provoke. Must we go so far to say that, in the same period that this regime disappeared in South Africa, it is being reconstituted in Europe? Comparaison n’est pas raison, and we could think of many other situations of institutional inequality (in particular the system that long survived the official abolition of slavery in the United States and that today persists in discrimination in schools, professions, and the application of justice). What the use of this term suggest is the constitution of a population that is “inferior” in rights and dignity, tends to be subjected to violent forms of security control, and must perpetually live “on the border,” neither absolutely inside nor totally outside. The immigrants from the East and South have in some sense left behind them the equivalents of the former South African homelands… “ (171- 172)   99     Neither absolutely inside nor totally outside: it sounds almost as a definition of Giorgio Agamben's homo sacer. Giorgio Agamben's "bare life" or homo sacer is a being posited on the borderline: it is at once excluded from the political order, but also paradoxically kept part of it. On the other side of the spectrum, Agamben puts the sovereign, who is at the center of the polis or of the political, as he has the right to determine the rules for the polis and proclaim the state of exception. I would argue that precisely by virtue of the fact that bare life is excluded from the polis, it becomes the politicized figure par excellence. Bare life is not what Agamben calls zoé, "the simple fact of living common to all living beings," but is, quite the opposite - the most politicized life, precisely because of its exclusion from the body-politic (1). On the other hand, the sovereign, who has the power to decide on who is to be included or excluded, and who can determine the rules and the fate of the entire body-politic is the sole figure who can actually completely escape the political and exist only as zoē, as just a living being. (In a politically charged context, to be perceived as a mere living being is actually a positive thing: it is enough to recall the dog Bobby that Emmanuel Lévinas described in his essay "The Name of a Dog, or Natural Rights," who, as opposed to the concentration camp guards, came to greet the prisoners, recognizing them as human beings. The dog did not see in them the politicized bare life, but just humans. In this sense, being just human and seeing others as just human actually opens a space – not for bare life – but for humanity and solidarity.) In view of Hemon's shame related to the inability to correctly pronounce the word literature and Fanon's claims about how language can transform an Afro-Caribbean into a white man, it is interesting to note Agamben's insistence on language as a tool that determines one's place inside (or outside of) the polis:   100     It is not by chance, then, that a passage of the Politics situates the proper place of the polis in the transition from voice to language. The link between bare life and politics is the same link that the metaphysical definition of man as "the living being who has language" seeks in the relation between phone and logos: Among living beings, only man has language. (7) The fundamental categorical pair of Western politics is not that of friend/enemy, but that of bare life/political existence, zoē/bios, exclusion/inclusion. There is politics because man is the living being who, in language, separates and opposes himself to his own bare life and, at the same time, maintains himself in relation to that bare life in an inclusive exclusion. [my emphasis, 8] Furthermore, Agamben even quotes an episode from Judges, in which "the Galatians recognize the fleeing Ephramites" because they could not pronounce the word Shibboleth correctly (my emphasis, 23). While Agamben's claim that in contemporary society virtually every citizen is a homo sacer seems exaggerated (or even insulting, in some of its concentration-camp analogies, which dangerously cross borders between historical atrocities and metaphorical conditions of being), the highly politicized place of the excluded immigrant or an undesirable citizen is at the center of our political paradigms. In that sense, the place of a black immigrant in France or an African immigrant in North America, or the place of the Balkans in Europe – in short, the places of those who are devoid of political power and voice – become the political spaces par excellence, which lie at the center of our societal paradigms. Caliban’s and Illyrian’s Problems72 Students at the Faculty of Political Sciences in Zagreb in the 1990s liked sharing a story about one of their professors, who, every time that someone was late to his lecture,                                                                                                                           72 In his book on Caribbean philosophy, Professor Paget Henry explains Caliban’s plight, referring to The Tempest. The Balkans (Illyria) and Bohemia were the Shakespearean lands of the exotic, the bizarre, and the uncanny.   101     stopped talking, looked at the tardy student and silently pointed at the blackboard, indicating that the student should read out loud the word written there. The word was: BALKAN – The Balkans. The message was clear: this type of unruly, “uncivilized” behavior is a confirmation that the Balkans is where they all belonged. In “Enter the New Negro,” Alain Locke writes: “the Old Negro had long become more of a myth than a man. The Old Negro, we must remember, was a creature of moral debate and historical controversy. His has been a stock figure perpetuated as an historical fiction partly in innocent sentimentalism, partly in deliberate reactionism. […] The thinking Negro even has been induced to share the same general attitude, to focus his attention on controversial issues, to see himself in the distorted perspective of a social problem.”73 “We are the people with whom no one knows what to do. So we have become a problem, not only for those who do not know what to do with us, but we’re also becoming a problem for us, who also do not know what to do with ourselves. Thus, we have become a sort of a communal problem,” writes Bora Ćosić, an ex-Yugoslav writer to whom I will later return.74 In Hopes and Impediments, Achebe writes: “If I were God I would regard as the very worst our acceptance – for whatever reason – of racial inferiority” (43). And Du Bois sums up these concerns in the The Souls of Black Folk by asking “How does it feel to be a problem?” (7). This feeling of inferiority is originating from the obsession with the gaze directed from the white, unmarked West, whose economic and cultural dominance is not just palpable at the macroconomic and global level, but also in the small, daily obsessions of                                                                                                                           73 Alain Locke. “Enter the New Negro.” Survey Graphic, March 1925. 74 Bora Ćosić. Izgnanici. Zagreb: Meandar, 2005. p. 7.   102     many racially, ethnically or religiously “marked” peoples that do not belong to this white West. Africa’s Backwardness. The Origins of Backwardness in Eastern Europe. Africa’s Turmoil. Balkan Tragedy. The titles are ubiquitous, and they are written both by the West, as by the books’ subjects themselves. In Home and Exile, Achebe describes how annoying it is when the author painting the image of you and your people (who are a mystery to most of his audience) paints an image that makes the native readers feel as if they found themselves in a bizarre hall of mirrors, staring at the distorted reflections of themselves: Cary has a very strong aversion to the people he is presenting to us. And to the towns and villages where these people live, where the action of his novel takes place: Fada is the ordinary native town of the Western Sudan. It has no beauty, convenience or health. It is a dwelling-place at one stage from the rabbit warren or the badger burrow [love these animal habitation dwelling descriptions]; and not so cleanly kept as the latter. It is a pioneer settlement five or six hundred years old, build on its own rubbish heaps, without charm even of antiquity. Its squalor and its stinks are all new. (25) Achebe claims that literature is never done justice when the author resorts to stereotype and malice and that the whole project is “doubly offensive when such a work is arrogantly proffered to you as your story” (41) While translating a novel by the Goncourt-award winner Michel Houellebecq into Croatian, I had a bizarre experience of finding myself confronted with a passage of the book that presented itself to me as a distorted mirror. Namely, Michel’s French protagonist Daniel goes to a brothel full of Eastern European women, and is disappointed by the lack of enthusiasm of the girls:   103     They turned the television or CD player up too loud, turned the light down to a minimum, in other words they tried to cut themselves off; they hadn't the vocation for it, that was clear. Obviously, you could oblige them to turn the volume down and turn the lights up; after all, they expected a tip, and every little thing counts. There are certainly people who get off on this kind of intercourse, and I could easily imagine the type; but I was quite simply not one of them. What's more, most of the girls were Romanian, Belorussian and Ukrainian, in other words, from one of those absurd countries that emerged from the implosion of the Eastern bloc; and one cannot say that Communism has particularly fostered sentimentality in human relations; it is, on the whole, brutality that is predominant among the ex- Communists – in comparison, Balzacian society, which emerged from the decomposition of royalty, seems a miracle of charity and gentleness.” I, the translator of this novel found myself confronted with the images of “us,” the girls from “one of those absurd” Eastern European countries, “brutal” during and after communism, and with the image of the French Balzacian society whose language I was translating. I was confronted with the narrator’s disappointment in the lack of enthusiasm in these girls, who just simply did not have the right “vocation.” (This also made me wonder how many of “our” books were translated into French, and how many, if any, of those books would reflect on the narrator’s and Houellebecq’s Balzacian society.) Again, in Home and Exile, Achebe quotes a passage in which the British writer Cary describes a “fairly innocent party” in Nigeria: “the demonic appearance of the naked dancers, grinning, shrieking, scowling, or with faces which seemed entirely dislocated, senseless and unhuman, like twisted bags of lard, or burst bladders” (24). “Haven’t I encountered this crowd before?” asks Achebe, confronted with a distorted mirror. “Perhaps, in Heart of Darkness, in the Congo. But Cary is writing about my home, Nigeria, isn’t he?” (24) In discussions of these more or less grotesque descriptions of “the other,” theorists and writers often quote Hegel and Sartre, and the master-slave narrative, as   104     explanations of why Europe, or the West (or, for that matter, any subject) needs the “other” in order to constitute itself. However, I would argue that even this theory is overused and too generalized, and that the self did not necessarily have to constitute itself in an opposition to a completely different or inferior “other.” Hell are other people is a phrase that would not necessarily correspond well with the Caribbean, African or Balkan Slavic cosmologies. It is also worth emphasizing that everyone’s conceptions of themselves constantly clash with other people’s conceptions of them, which the former subjects then have to somehow acknowledge, either by rejecting them, or by adopting them as a part of their self-image. However, in the case when the marked subject is confronted with a mirror, the distortions or generalizations become communal, because the subject somehow becomes a representative, or an exemplar. And one of the most common tropes mentioned by the “marked” subjects is shame. One of the most important books on the Balkans was written by Robert D. Kaplan: Balkan Ghosts, a book written before the ex-Yugoslav war, but rejected for publication until the war broke out, and once again made the Balkans an interesting topic. Kaplan himself just wanted to write a travelogue, and later wrote that he had not expected that this book would become one of the main reasons for Bill Clinton’s decision not to try to curb the war (until much later in the case of Serbia and Kosovo). Allegedly, Clinton read Kaplan’s story about the “Balkan Ghosts,” and concluded that this piece of territory is simply too complicated and wrapped up in incomprehensible ancient ethnic tensions to be helped: “The history of ethnic rivalry I detailed reportedly encouraged the President's pessimism about the region, and – so it is said – was a factor in his decision not to launch   105     an overt military response," wrote Kaplan in New York Times (x). In the capital of Croatia, Zagreb, Kaplan met the Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulić: Wearing designer black glasses and a bright, red headband that perfectly matched her red blouse and lipstick, she – and the other women in the hotel bistro – dressed with a panache that complemented the boldness of the hotel's art. The overall message was unmistakable: despite Communist-inflicted poverty and the damp, badly heated apartments and the sorry displays in the shop windows all around, we Croats are Roman Catholic, and Zagreb is the eastern bastion of the West; you, the visitor, are still in the orbit of Austria-Hungary, of Vienna – where the modern world was practically invented – and don't you forget it! (6) From this description, it is clear that, despite his honest interest in the region, Kaplan, first, assumed that it was odd and somehow “artificial” or pretentious that the women in Zagreb dressed as women in the West would: with designer glasses, a red headband, a red lipstick – and all that in this poverty, dampness, and badly heated apartments (the latter especially being a complete figment of imagination on Kaplan’s part). Second, he also implies that they did it to impress a traveller like him. Drakulić is, ironically the same writer who complained that her city Zagreb was “spruced up” only for the Games of Universiade, or for “the world.” On the other hand, Drakulić's sense of fashion is anything but odd in the city of Zagreb, and the possible drabness of the communist city was always juxtaposed with its well-dressed dandyish inhabitants. In Brussels, Drakulić once reacted to a negative remark made by a Croat about Croatia and its problems with nationalism: "Do not say that in front of them. They think we’re all savages.” She was – metaphorically speaking - too often accused of wearing a red lipstick with a panache of a Western woman, and she succumbed to the feeling of the collective shame. The shame that Césaire was writing about when his narrator saw “an ugly negro” in a Paris tram. The shame according to which Ugrešić at airports recognizes “her people.” The shame that   106     Langston Hughes says he will reject: “Let all who will / Eat quietly the bread of shame. / I cannot.” In his book The Event of Postcolonial Shame, Timothy Bewes sees shame as an inexpugnable element of every postcolonial text. However, the shame that he theorizes is a different kind of shame; it is the shame of writing: "The ability to write – is there any better reason to feel ashamed?" (15); the shame that Sartre mentions "you" will experience while reading Fanon's book (4); the shame in writers like Coetzee, Phillips, Thiong'o... "in the experience of a situation in which the ethical (or aesthetic) obligation to write and the aesthetic (or ethical) impossibility of writing are equally irrefutable" (43). However, I would argue that these particular instances of shame are not actually shame. They are - guilt. "Shame" – Bewes quotes Sartre - "is a unitary apprehension with three dimensions: I am ashamed of myself before the Other" (41). I would add: I am ashamed of myself before the Other as I am not. "Negroes are savages, morons, and illiterates," Fanon says. "But I know that in my case these assertions were wrong" (96). Achebe knows that Cary is not writing about his Nigeria. Drakulić knows that “we” are not all savages, and that many women in Zagreb wear designer glasses or red lipsticks (regardless of whether this even matters at all). The curse is that the shame, or indignation mixed with shame, is still often present. Drakulić's, Césaire’s and Fanon's shame is not a personal shame, but a collective shame, which does not leave much space for their individual actions. It is a shame that is present prior to any action on their part.   107     This collective, historical feeling of inferiority or shame is unlike individual shame, which normally happens sporadically: we do something that is perceived ridiculous – fall, act inappropriately in an important setting, make a Freudian slip… This individual shame, however, has contours and borders: we know where it begins and where it ends. It intersects with a different, collective, existential shame in the feeling that one is not seen correctly - falling is not what we would normally do, acting inappropriately in a formal setting is not typical of us - but it is still individual, related to something we did. The collective shame of the marked subject is, on the other hand, a shame without borders, an existential shame that is at the core of the postcolonial, ethnically, religiously or racially inferiorized identity. And in the case of blackness and Balkans the shame-producing preconceptions revolve around backwardness, poverty, primitivism, tribalism, hypersexuality, and violence. In the following chapter, I will examine the ways in which the interpellation to feel shame, or the confrontation with “distorted mirrors,” has influenced the personal testimonies, and artistic and cultural production of the marked subjects.   108     CHAPTER 3 THE POWER OF UNTRANSLATABILITY, OR: BLACK SKIN, WHITE MASKS; WHITE SKIN, WHITE MASKS   In an essay “Caught in the Dream of Others,” published in the collection Why Bosnia?, Slavoj Žižek recounts this fascinating anecdote: There is a well known story about an anthropological expedition who went to visit a wild tribe in the New Zealand jungle who allegedly danced a terrible war dance in grotesque death-masks. When they reached the tribe in the evening, they asked them to dance for them, and the dance performed the next morning did in fact match the description. Satisfied, the expedition returned to civilization and wrote a much-praised report on the savage rites of the primitives. However, shortly after, when another expedition arrived at the place of this tribe and learned to speak their language properly, it was shown that this terrible dance did not exist at all: in their discussions with the first group of explorers, the aborigines somehow guessed what the strangers wanted and quickly, in the night following their arrival, invented it especially for them, to satisfy their demand. In short, the explorers received back from the aborigines their own message, in its inverted, true form.75 This anecdote is a perfect example of what occurs when something is produced to be translated (if we take the notion of translation more broadly, and consider cultural translation as a part of it as well) precisely because it is culturally untranslatable. In this chapter, I will explore the ways in which this logic of the market has become a common phenomenon in the cultural production by many marked subjects, in this case, of African, Caribbean, Balkan and African-American origin. The economy of this type of translation is fairly complex: first, the market-desire translates itself into the "original" culture (the explorers conveying their desire to the tribe), the "original" culture translates the market- desire into a cultural product (the tribe creating the dance), and gives it a stamp of                                                                                                                           75 Slavoj Žižek, 'Caught in the Dream of Others', Why Bosnia? Connecticut: The Pamphleteer's Press, 1993, p. 237.     109     authenticity by emphasizing its cultural untranslatability (the dance, in order to be marketable, cannot be completely culturally transparent and translatable, or – in other words – the Western anthropologists do not want to bring home an account of the tribe from New Zealand dancing the Viennese waltz). The first condition for this kind of “exotic” – or untranslatable – cultural production aimed for translation is for the marked subject to recognize that he is marked and stereotyped, and to have a keen sense of the already-mentioned Du Boisian double consciousness or two-ness. In “Black Skin, White Masks,” Franz Fanon writes “The black man possesses two dimensions: one with his fellow Blacks, the other with the Whites. A black man behaves differently with a white man than he does with another black man” (1). In his essay “Shadow and Act,” Ralph Ellison writes: “For I found the greatest difficulty for a Negro writer was the problem of revealing what he truly felt, rather than serving up what Negroes were supposed to feel, and were encouraged to feel. And linked to this was the difficulty, based upon our long habit of deception and evasion, of depicting what really happened within our areas of American life, and putting down with honesty and without bowing to ideological expediencies the attitudes and values which give Negro American life its sense of wholeness, and which render it bearable and human, and, when measured by our own terms, desirable” (58). In her 1950 article “What White Publishers Won’t Print,” Zora Neale Hurston explains that the publishers are interested in making money, and that they “will sponsor anything that they believe will sell.” And what sells has commonly been an uncomplicated stereotype: “This curious doctrine [of the folklore of “reversion to type”] has such wide acceptance that it is tragic. One has only to examine the huge literature on it to be convinced. No matter how high   110     we may seem to climb, put us under strain and we revert to type, that is, to the bush. Under a superficial layer of western culture, the jungle drums still throb in our veins.” She adds: “The average, struggling, non-morbid Negro is – whether it is loved or disdained the best-kept secret in America.” It is also important to emphasize that this stereotype is – whether it is loved or disdained – still equally pernicious to the psyches and cultural production of the marked subjects: “In our view, an individual who loves Blacks is as sick as someone who abhors them” (Fanon xiii). This, of course, means loves them not as individuals, but as types, or representatives of – usually – an imagined state of innocence, connectedness to nature that we first saw in Herder’s philosophy, and all the related myths of the noble sauvage. Thus, in The Cambridge History of African and Caribbean Literature, Robert Eric Livingston writes: Africa appears as the quintessential land of adventure, a place for European manhood to display its prowess. This version acquires particular salience with the consolidation of modernity in Euro-America itself; Africa is seen to offer an outlet for actions and ambitions no longer credible in the ‘civilized’ part of the world. (259) African customs and beliefs seemed to offer a vital alternative to the stifling conformity of European civilization, and promised more intense experiences of the torments and ecstasies in life. Nourished by avant-garde interest in occultism, esoteric religion, and extreme psychic states, Leiris was fascinated by ritual practices and ideas of spirit possession; in Abyssinia, he attended a sacrificial ceremony, drinking and having himself anointed with blood. For the Parisian, Africa looked to strip off the mask of civilization to reveal a more authentic being. (278) These descriptions of Africans, African-Americans or Afro-Caribbeans as closer to nature, leading a life that is somehow less advanced, but more real etc., is already common knowledge in postcolonial thought and literature. However, I am repeating the main traits of these clusters of concepts in order to show how we can draw a very clear   111     parallel to the concepts related to Eastern European Slavs, and especially the Balkans (where the stereotype of violence, connected to the state of nature, is commonly evoked). In the imperialist Westerner's mind, Eastern Europe's communist drabness was at the same time interesting and repulsive. The Eastern greyness and the lack of luxury provided the imperialist Westerners with a relief from their everyday life of capitalist competitiveness and materialism; their sojourn in Eastern Europe also enabled them to appreciate the comparative luxury in which they lived after their return home. "I think I preferred Eastern Europe when it was communist and there wasn't so much to eat, not much of anything actually, even if you were a visitor, carrying a hard currency… there was a kind of bracing satisfaction to be got from exposing yourself temporarily to a life of privation," says David Lodge’s British novelistic protagonist, Professor Ralph (217). To the Western mind, Easterner European’s life of poverty ceased to be the other's reality, but became a grey, dismal therapeutic Disneyland, a mental spa, in which the Western traveler briefly visited a Fantasyland of Privation, and returned home psychologically face-lifted: "I remember walking the streets of Lodź one winter afternoon, it must have been in the seventies, in a kind of ecstasy at the total unrelieved miserableness of everything, the grimy dilapidated apartment blocks, the dirty frozen snow heaped in the gutters, the trams packed with grey-faced passengers grinding and groaning round the corners on their metal tracks, the lines of shapeless, expressionless women in boots and topcoats queuing stoically outside food shops with totally empty windows and bare shelves… it made you appreciate the ordinary taken-for-granted luxuries of life back home… it made you profoundly grateful for the British passport and   112     airline ticket tucked safe in your inside pocket… there's not the same exhilarating contract anymore…," writes Lodge’s narrator Ralph (my emphasis 217). The contract to which David Lodge, or his protagonist Ralph Messenger, is alluding is a known (and usually unspoken) contract between Eastern and Western Europeans, according to which Eastern Europe accepts its role of the object of a fantasy in exchange for financial gain and a benevolent gaze of the Powerful. Ralph feels that this exhilarating contract has changed since, after the fall of communism, Eastern Europe has begun resembling more and more to the European West. The gap was dangerously narrowing. As a reaction, the myth of the exotic and attractively barbarous Eastern European other has to be stressed with more emphasis. As is often the case with oppressive structures, stereotyping and societal inequalities, this particular phantasy has proven to be particularly prominent and detrimental in the case of Slavic women. Ludmila: Life in a Room and a Half David Lodge is a well-known British academic, literary critic and the author of “campus novels” about life in academia, and at Balkan universities, they can be found on the obligatory reading lists for the exams in British literary canon. In Professor David Lodge's novel Thinks, the main protagonist Ralph - also a university professor - travels to Prague, where he meets a young Czech student Ludmila. Ralph is in his fifties and married, but Ludmila's belly is almost flat "as a pancake, although she ate one... she ate two, she ate anything that was put in front of her while I was with her... How do these girls do it? Perhaps they only eat socially, when someone else is paying, and starve themselves the rest of the time... or stick their fingers down their throats after a blowout...   113     it's not anorexia, though, or bulimia, there's no lack of self-esteem involved, quite the contrary. It's a shrewd assessment of what will help them to get on in, or out of, the Czech Republic... It's not enough to be smart and speak English, you have to look like Kate Moss too... I imagine these young women all over Prague, living at home in cramped apartments in crummy concrete tower blocks, sharing a bedroom with a younger sister, a bathroom with the whole family, with no privacy, no money, just one really good dress in the wardrobe and a figure which they tend carefully like a princess plant, knowing their prospects depend on not getting to look like their mothers... "76 Because, of course, nothing would be worse for an Eastern European (and let alone a Balkan) woman than to end up looking like her mother. It is already clear even from one passage that Ludmila is just a metonymy for Ludmilas. Her personality is devoid of any idiosyncrasies or particularities, and it is, in any case, completely swallowed up by her wish to escape her Eastern European destiny. As a novelistic character, she is flatter than the pancakes on which she is gorging herself at Professor Ralph's expense. In her presence, the Western man's power and masculinity become palpable: his female Western European compatriots earn as much, or even more, than he does; they are financially and sexually independent; they do not need him. The presence of the poor Eastern European woman transforms the average Western European man into a knight in shining armor. Ludmila is condemned to a life in Brodsky's "room and a half."77 Next to this kind of stereotypical Eastern European character – poor, powerless, and relatively divested of the shroud of exoticism - he can become a rich and                                                                                                                           76 David Lodge. Thinks. New York: Penguin, 2001. p. 215 77 Saying that he, his mother and his father lived in a "room and a half", Brodsky so poignantly added: "if such a space unit makes any sense in English." Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One: Selected Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987.   114     successful savior. Because of this newly found power, the Western man's feelings toward this type of Eastern European woman usually include both tenderness and contempt. Lodge's Professor Ralph Messenger is, for example, under the impression that, when he has sex with Ludmila, he is giving her something: he is over fifty, she barely twenty, but in his mind she is the one who should be grateful for sex because he is a member of a higher caste in the European ethnic aristocracy. The European caste system is perhaps not explicit, but it is still a part of the European collective consciousness, which influences every inter-caste encounter. As a British man faced with an Eastern European woman, Ralph is very aware of his ethnic power: "The rest of my day was slated as 'free time – sightseeing' on my itinerary prepared by the British Council, and Ludmila has been appointed to act as my guide. At that moment what I really wanted to do was bugger off back home on the first available flight… but there was this eager, smiling, not bad- looking and incredibly slim young woman holding out her hand for me to shake… it would have been cruel to refuse her services…” (219). His role of a potential Western savior is additionally emphasized by Ludmila's slim, extended hand, and her powerlessness and fragility are underlined by her physical frailty: “I put my arm around her waist and commented on how slender it was and wondered whether I could make my finger-tips join round it” (220). In an encounter between a young Eastern European woman and a middle-aged Western European man, the expected system of desire is disturbed by the ethnic caste system; during their conversation, Ralph supposes that Ludmila is wondering: "Does he want to sleep with me?” (220). He, on the other hand, wonders: "Does she expect me to sleep with her?” (my emphasis 220). Ralph is aware of differences between their bodies ("my body seemed gross and lined and blemished   115     compared to her lean white torso and limbs," 220-221), but when he muses on the reasons behind his decision to have sex with her, he nevertheless “sentimentally” concludes: “It was partly boredom, partly gallantry...” (216-217). An eminent professor in his fifties, therefore, sleeps with a poor twenty-year old student out of gallantry. Ludmila is not an individual, but a type, like Molière's miser, philanderer or hypochondriac, and her whole personality is defined solely by her wish to emigrate. In order to achieve her aim, she can be sweet and fragile, but also mean and devious: when Ralph refuses to invite her to a conference in Gloucester, saying that they have a strict limit on how many people can attend, she writes him an e-mail, blackmailing him: “I think perhaps you do not wish me coming to Gloucester. Are you afraid that I will tell your colleagues and maybe your wife what a nice time we had together in Prague? I promise you I will not say nothing. But if I cannot come to the conference and I lose my travel scholarship I will be very sad and angry. Perhaps I will write about what we did in Prague together and post it on the internet. Your friend, Ludmila” (287). Her ungrammatical and basic English, which he (who, of course, narrates the story) reproduces very vividly, is an important element of her constructed identity: their languages being "small" and "unimportant" – languages that are spoken only by their nations and that do not belong to the group of widely studied "world languages" – Eastern European women in Western art always speak a non-native language. Their heavy Slavic accents, and grammatical or semantic mistakes, emphasize their otherness, and enhance Westerners' suspicion that they will never be able to understand them fully. Ralph assumes that Ludmila wants to get away from the Czech Republic; he knows that she knows that he is a higher caste in the European ethnic hierarchy; he knows that she   116     probably lives in one of the drab-looking Prague buildings in a room and a half with her family. All in all, everything that Ralph truly knows about Ludmila boils down to her wish to escape; everything else – her relationships with Czech friends or boyfriends, her inner life, her way of thinking, her language and culture – would, for Ralph, always remain a mystery. Ludmila never presents herself to the Western eye in her own words, because, even if she did, nobody would understand her "small" Eastern European language. She remains permanently flat and permanently trapped in the eye of the Western traveler. “National coherence and solidarity is implicit in a thorough understanding of the various groups within a nation, and this lack of knowledge about the internal emotions and behavior of the minorities cannot fail to bar out understanding,” commented Zora Neale Hurston when she insisted that “the white publishers” should - for the betterment of society - become interested in the real, interior lives of non-Anglo- Saxon peoples. If we take Europe as an interethnic political and social entity, Zora’s remark can and should be “translated” and applied to its cultural space as well. Isabelle: White Face, Exotic Mask The main protagonist of Leos Carax's film Pola X78 is Pierre, a young French budding writer from a rich family, engaged to a girl from his milieu, living a “typical” life of the French upper classes. However, his artistic aspirations are somewhat stifled by the “mundane” life upon which he is embarking: the sumptuous country mansion, his fiancée's wedding dress, his privileged acquaintances are all imprisoning his imagination and artistic energies. It is at this point in his life that, in his dream, he has a vision of a strange, dark-haired girl. He reminds his mother how, one night, as they were returning                                                                                                                           78 Leos Carax, Pola X. France,1999. Film.   117     home, they saw a girl digging through their garbage – and, to make the contrast between the two of them and her more blatant - he is playing the piano while telling the story. It seems that hers is the face that is haunting him in dreams. One night, while driving his motorcycle through the woods, Pierre finally comes face to face with the girl: she is distressed, dressed shabbily, and has long, disheveled hair. When she sees him, she starts running, giving the impression that she is half-human, half-animal: she is like Apted's Nell, a human being not quite used to (or, as the director would probably put it, spoiled by) civilization. It turns out that she is from Eastern Europe, more specifically, from somewhere where there was a war. The viewer's guess would have to be that she is from the Balkans; however, she does not speak any of the Yugoslav languages, which is not unusual, since it is not uncommon that in Western art all Eastern European languages – like all Eastern European identities – become, for all intents and purposes, interchangeable. The fact that Pierre meets the Eastern European (Isabelle) in the woods, the place symbolizing nature, enhances the notion that she is somehow more “primal” and “natural” than his civilized French fiancée Lucy. (It is also implied that Balkan refugees who immigrated to France took to the woods, probably out of a desperate need to return back to their own world: the world of nature and unspoiled animality.) Pierre, playing the piano in a castle, Pierre in the woods with the (presumably)   118     while conversing with his mother played Balkan, and war-traumatized refugee Isabelle. by the elegant Catherine Deneuve. (Carax) The girl, conspicuously disheveled and half-articulate, then proceeds to tell Pierre the story of her life, which is a concatenation of one stereotype after another: “Toujours j'étais seule, absolument seule. Je vois vieille maison [sic]; noire et très méchante. Où ça? Dans quel pays? Je ne sais pas. Je ne me souviens plus. Toujours mes mains étaient froides." [“I’ve always been alone, completely alone. I see old house [sic]; black and very evil. Where? In which country? I don’t know. I don’t remember. Always my hands were cold.”] As with Ludmila, Isabelle’s heavy Slavic accent and grammatical and semantic mistakes reinforce the impression that she is only half-civilized, situated in the notorious Hegelian mid-space between an animal and a human, at the stage where she has not still completely mastered language. Isabelle then says that she was visited by a French “monsieur,” who took her to France. The house in France was, as opposed to the Eastern European one, big and bright ("avec beaucoup, beaucoup de lumière"), and it had a big, green garden. When she describes the rare moments in which she felt as "herself," she says "je sens moi pareille comme les arbres, la terre, les animaux," [“I felt similar to the trees, the soil, the animals”], once again reinforcing her connection to nature. After her sojourn in France, she was sent back to Eastern Europe, where she was tending cows and the land. Pierre is mesmerized by this “creature” who - as opposed to her Western "industrialized" counterparts – spent her youth looking at the starry sky and milking cows on a three-legged stool. Isabelle then proceeds to paint yet another stereotypical picture: "mais après tout le monde devenir fou, complètement fou; il y avait le feu partout et les   119     bombes tombaient partout et les homes tuaient les homes, les femmes et les enfants, et tuaient même les cadavres"; "le village a brûlé; nous partir, nous marcher, marcher, partout les cadavres, nous traverser les frontières le nuit…" [“But after, everyone becomes crazy, completely crazy; everywhere was fire, and the bombs fell everywhere, and men killed men, and women, and children, and even killed the corpses. The village has burnt; we leave, we walk, walk, corpses everywhere, we pass borders at night…”]. Her description of the war in her country resembles not to the reality of war, but to the idea that the Western European viewer probably formed about the war. "Tu es qui? Tu es qui?" [“Who are you ? Who are you?”] yells Pierre, puzzled by her unordinary traumas and exoticism. Of course, Isabelle turns out to be exactly what he needed to extricate himself from his haut-bourgeois, mundane life and open his artistic valves. They start living together in Paris; the story proceeds, but Isabelle does not adapt to the French society; she does not become boringly civilized, or more "penetrable." When Pierre asks her what she would like to do in the afternoon (in Paris), she does not wish to visit a museum or go shopping: she wants to go "to the big garden where the animals are" - to the zoo - where she runs from one cage to another and ecstatically looks at the animals, to which she is much closer than Pierre and his French friends could ever be. She also claims that she is Pierre's half-sister, but nevertheless initiates sex with him, revealing once again to what extent she is a creature of nature and passion, completely unconstrained by any societal rules, including those of incest. The war trauma and her sporadic visions of cadavers only enhance her attractiveness: the dark secrets that she hides in her heaving bosom make her all the more mysterious and enticing to the young   120     writer Pierre. The film was, of course, nominated for an award at the Cannes Film Festival, amongst others. What is most troubling is that the artistic (mis- or under-) representation not only mirrors what goes on in a society – it also influences it. The myth about the poor, slightly savage, but sensual Eastern European woman has stirred desires in the Western European man and arguably gave new boosts to the "white-slave traffic." One study performed in the Netherlands shows that as many as 75 percent of the women being trafficked in the sex market in the West come from Central or Eastern Europe. 79 According to the International Organization for Migration, around 500,000 women were trafficked into the EU from Eastern Europe in the early 1990s. Their stories – the same as the artistic representations of their identity - all melt into one: they get offers to work in the West by acquaintances, agencies and even friends, who often take their meager savings in exchange for the "service" of transporting them to Western Europe and providing them with a job ("Women respond to advertisements in newspapers for offers of work as au pairs, bar attendants, and dancers." In other cases, they are "sold by relatives of male acquaintances into the hands of traffickers." 80 ) When the women arrive to their destination, the traffickers take away their belongings – including passports and documents – usually beat them, and threaten to kill them if they attempt escape. They end up locked in private apartments or houses that serve as brothels, where they are forced to prostitution. They are forbidden to go out and they see only their customers: they often do not speak the language of the host country, and, even when they do, they are usually too                                                                                                                           79 Vampirettes, Wretches, and Amazones, p. 45 80 Jo Goodey, Sex Trafficking in Women from Central and East European Countries: Promoting a 'Victim- Centred' and 'Women-Centred' Approach to Criminal Justice Intervention. Feminist Review, No. 76, Post- Communism: Women's Lives in Transition, 2004. p. 28   121     scared to say anything. When they dare ask for help, their words usually fall on deaf ears, for, in order to save them, the customers would have to reveal that they went to a brothel. Rarely, the police discover the women during a raid, or a customer falls in love with or takes pity on one of them and goes to the police. Moreover, sex trafficking is a "gendered phenomenon," and the authorities in host countries often demonstrate a bias against "transgressive" female behavior: “With trafficked women, until very recently bracketed in the same category as illegal immigrant and 'undesirable other,' their treatment as victims of crime, rather than complicit offenders is a new development. Traditionally, trafficked women have been responded to as illegal immigrants, as being associated with a criminal underworld, and as prostitutes, and, therefore, as women who have fallen outside the range of acceptable female behavior” (32). The stereotype of a poor, sensual and sexually transgressive Eastern European woman like Isabelle is not the cause of the sexual human traffic, but it certainly does not abate the phenomenon. The Problem of the Double Audience, and Dancing of the “Savage Dance” In 1928, James Weldon Johnson, published the essay “The Dilemma of the Negro author,” in which he explains that the African-American author “faces a special problem which the plain American author knows nothing about – the problem of the double audience”: “His audience is always both white and black America. The moment a Negro writer takes up his pen or sits down to his typewriter he is immediately called upon to solve, consciously or unconsciously, this problem of the double audience. To whom shall he address himself, to his own black group or to white America?” (477) For anyone who would answer that the writer should not worry about this clearly does not understand the nature of this predicament. Weldon Johnson explains that the white writer has   122     predominantly the white audience in mind, to which he can add the black and non-white audience, because that won’t change anything about the way they write. However, if the black author writes for the white audience, they are “bound to run up against a many long-standing artistic conceptions about the Negro, (…) against a whole row of hard-set stereotypes which are not easily broken up. White America has some firm opinions as to what the Negro is, and consequently some pretty well fixed ideas as to what should be written about him and how” (478). If the black man is described “positively,” he is “simple, indolent, docile, improvident peasant; a singing, dancing, laughing, weeping child; picturesque beside his log cabin and in the snowy fields of cotton; naively charming with his banjo and his songs in the moonlight… a pathetic and pitiable figure. In a darker light, he is an impulsive, irrational, passionate savage, reluctantly wearing a thin coat of culture…” (478). (If we replace banjo with an accordion, or a mouth harmonica, all this is unmistakably applicable to the contemporary image of the characters from the Balkans.) When we consider that this concern about the black authors’ audience began with slave narratives and Frederick Douglass, who believed that “true art meant accurate and authentic representations of himself and other blacks, rather than caricatures such as blackface minstrelsy,” we can see how persistence and damaging this concern has been for the cultural production (201). Douglass himself was already advised by some of his colleagues to write less eloquently than he did: “People won’t believe you ever were a slave, Frederick, if you keep on this way” (…). “Better have a little of the plantation speech than not,” another abolitionist lecturer, John Collins, advised; “it is not best that you seem too learned” (Life, p. 218). While Douglass chafed at such paternalism and despised these attempts to control what he said and how he said it, he also recognized that “these excellent   123     friends were actuated by the best motives and were not altogether wrong in their advice,” as he noted (Life, p. 218, My Bondage p. 216).81 (Cambridge 203) In her essay from 1950, Zora Neale Hurston warns us about the true, inner lives of black people, which “white publishers won’t print.” “Or they simply love us too much! / Gaily obscene, doudou about jazz because of their excess of boredom,” writes Césaire in his Notes, denouncing both irrational negrophilia and negrophobia. All these concerns revolving around representation and self-representation have been influencing – to a larger or a lesser extent - African, Afro-Caribbean, African-American and Balkan writing, and they should be taken into account in our critical and theoretical examinations of these works. African-American writer Percival Everett's novel Erasure is addressing precisely this problem of doubly-conscious cultural products, and the process of creation during which the writer is aware both of what he would like to write, as well as what the editors would like to publish. The main protagonist of Erasure is Thelonious Ellison, a highly- educated African-American writer working on contemporary versions of Euripides or parodies of French poststructuralism. Thelonious's books chronically suffer from low sales, a situation that is not helped by the fact that bookstores put his novels into the African-American Studies section for the sole reason that he is African-American and despite the fact that he does not write about race at all. In fact he does not even believe in race, nor is he particularly interested in its problematic: The hard, gritty truth of the matter is that I hardly ever think about race. Those times when I did think about it a lot I did so because of my guilt for not thinking about it. I don't believe in race.82                                                                                                                           81  John Stauffer. “Frederick Douglass’s Self-Fashioning and the making of a Representative American Man” p. 203.   124     While Thelonious has very few readers, he witnesses a success of another African- American writer, Juanita Mae Jenkins, who wrote a novel titled We's Lives in Da Ghetto (of course, Everett's irony regarding this title, which is supposed to portray the real ghetto, is palpable). Thelonious reads a review of this novel in the Atlantic Monthly, which claims that Juanita has written "a masterpiece of African-American literature," and that "one can actually hear the voices of her people as they make their way through the experience which is and can only be Black American" (39). Thelonious wonders who those "people" whose authentic voices we hear in Juanita's novel are, since the novel is packed with nothing but walking stereotypes from "da ghetto," which is in its turn a fantasmatic place of poverty, sex and violence. What Theolonious realizes is that the readers of Juanita's novel feel that the life she describes is somehow more "real," more removed and protected from the daily suburban rut. Thinking of this novel, and of Native Son and The Color Purple, of "people in the street shouting dint, ax, fo, screet and fahre," Thelonious starts "screaming inside," complaining that he "doesn't sound like that, that his mother doesn't sound like that, that his father doesn't sound like that" (61-62). Utterly exasperated by his bad sales and by the success of the novels that falsely claim to portray the reality of African-American life, while actually perpetuating and cashing in on stereotypes, Thelonious decides to push the stereotype to the extreme, and he writes a parody of an African-American ghetto novel titled My Pafology. He, therefore, decides to translate his “authentic” language into exaggerated African-American slang and to make the identity of his characters less decodable for an average American reader. We, the readers of Erasure, get Theolonius’s "culturally untranslatable" novel in its entirety within Everett's Erasure. We are, therefore, reading a novel by the African-American                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           82  Percival Everett. Erasure. Hyperion, 2002. p. 2.   125     author Percival Everett, whose main protagonist is the African-American writer Theolonious, who writes a fake "authentic black" novel, imbedded in the middle of the narrative. Everett (or Theolonius), thus, not only tells us about the possible detriments of reading fiction translated into cultural exotic stereotypes, but also draws us directly into it. When a senior editor at Random House reads Thelonious's novel, she calls this exaggerated parody of black life "true," "magnificently raw and honest," "the kind of book that they will be reading in high schools thirty years from now," and offers him a lot of money for the rights (136). The book becomes a hit, while Thelonious is plagued by the feelings of guilt for switching from writing authentic books that were not exotic (but that did not sell either) to the book that exploits racial stereotypes: I didn't write as an act of testimony or social indignation […] and I did not write out of a so-called family tradition of oral storytelling. I never tried to set anybody free, never tried to paint the next real and true picture of the life of my people, never had any people whose picture I knew well enough to paint. […] I was a victim of racism by virtue of my failing to acknowledge racial difference and by failing to have my art be defined as an exercise in racial self-expression. So, I would not be economically oppressed because of writing a book that fell in line with the very books I deemed racist. And I would have to wear the mask of the person I was expected to be. (212) Thelonious's novel even receives a prestigious book award, and his double identity starts collapsing into itself. At the end of the novel, he is not quite sure who he is: the intellectual interested in French poststructuralism that he was before he wrote a fake "authentic African-American novel," or the African-American who wrote his own novel about da ghetto and who everybody thinks he should be? "But there was no such person and yet there was and he was me," he says, implying that we ultimately become what we culturally translated ourselves into (212).   126     Percival Everett's novel Erasure is trying to sensitize its readers (of any race or ethnicity) concerning ethical questions facing those who crave cultural products by the Other, without taking into account everything that this desire entails, and, especially, the writers who consciously cash in on their perceived "exoticism" and "dance the savage dance." Both groups seem to lose: the former ends up reading shallow, fictional accounts, instead of authentic reflections on life within a certain culture; the latter ends up with a split or a metamorphosed identity. Paradoxically, but not surprisingly, Everett - by virtue of ironizing the interpellations directed at him - from a writer who was not much interested in race in the end turned into a “black” writer (or a writer whose subject is race). Percival Everett found himself in the same predicament as the narrator of his novel, Theolonius. The Igbo Nigerian American artist Keith Obadike brilliantly satirized the commodification of racial authenticity (as well as the entire construction of racial thinking) by putting his “blackness” on sale on eBay. This is the description of Mr. Obadike’s “item,” which reached the price of 152 dollars and fifty cents before eBay removed it from sale: “This heirloom has been in the possession of the seller for twenty-eight years. Mr. Obadike's Blackness has been used primarily in the United States and its functionality outside of the US cannot be guaranteed. Buyer will receive a certificate of authenticity. Benefits and Warnings   127     Benefits: 1. This Blackness may be used for creating black art. 2. This Blackness may be used for writing critical essays or scholarship about other blacks. 3. This Blackness may be used for making jokes about black people and/or laughing at black humor comfortably. (Option#3 may overlap with option#2) 4. This Blackness may be used for accessing some affirmative action benefits. (Limited time offer. May already be prohibited in some areas.) 5. This Blackness may be used for dating a black person without fear of public scrutiny. 6. This Blackness may be used for gaining access to exclusive, "high risk" neighborhoods. 7. This Blackness may be used for securing the right to use the terms 'sista', 'brotha', or 'nigga' in reference to black people. (Be sure to have certificate of authenticity on hand when using option 7). 8. This Blackness may be used for instilling fear. 9. This Blackness may be used to augment the blackness of those already black, especially for purposes of playing 'blacker-than-thou'. 10. This Blackness may be used by blacks as a spare (in case your original Blackness is whupped off you.) Warnings: 1. The Seller does not recommend that this Blackness be used during legal proceedings of any sort. 2. The Seller does not recommend that this Blackness be used while seeking employment. 3. The Seller does not recommend that this Blackness be used in the process of making or selling 'serious' art. 4. The Seller does not recommend that this Blackness be used while shopping or writing a personal check. 5. The Seller does not recommend that this Blackness be used while making intellectual claims. 6. The Seller does not recommend that this Blackness be used while voting in the United States or Florida. 7. The Seller does not recommend that this Blackness be used while demanding fairness. 8. The Seller does not recommend that this Blackness be used while demanding. 9. The Seller does not recommend that this Blackness be used in Hollywood. 10. The Seller does not recommend that this Blackness be used by whites looking for a wild weekend.”83 The Balkan Gypsy Music “on Sale” In his essay “The Balkans Are Somewhere Else,” Bosnian writer Igor Štiks [Igor Schticks] tries to make the same warning regarding the Balkans. He recounts an anecdote from his life in Paris, where a group of his Bosnian friends formed a band and performed "Gypsy Music from the Balkans" at clubs around the city. He complained to the band members about the fact that none of them was a Rom and that, while they did learn some authentic gypsy songs, they also often performed "regular" Bosnian music, pretending that it was gypsy. They answered: "We are all Balkans here, pal, and if that means we                                                                                                                           83  Keith Obadike. http://obadike.tripod.com/ebay.html. Web.   128     even have to be Rom in order to get the Western dreams fired up, then it is to everyone’s benefit." 84 Štiks then brought his educated French friend to one of their concerts, attempting to inform her about this “sale” of identity. After listening to a song by the Bosnian composer Goran Bregović, Juliette exclaimed that she loved this gypsy music, and that even if these guys were not real gypsies, it did not matter - they still were from the Balkans. Exasperated by this ultimate interchangeability of Balkan identities, Štiks went into a tirade: "Things Balkan become Balkan only when we’re outside the Balkans. It’s all a matter of perspective. All you have to do is say the word Balkan and all that complexity seems simpler, more attractive even. You put them all under the same exotic umbrella, which you are carrying right now and which can exist only when you set foot outside of the Balkans. […] For you guys, and for you in particular, the Balkans are the exotic enfant terrible of Europe, but, despite this, irresistible as such children always are, at the same time it is a region that is the source of trouble, a region that is eaten up by a mysterious force of endless hatred that spreads its tentacles ever wider. The Balkans are Europe’s subconscious into which you can stuff everything you don’t like about yourselves while taking everything that is good from it. It is a beast that you can easily see near all the main rail stations of the European capitals." Juliette's (and people like Juliette’s) enthusiasm about anything Balkan or anything black (or, as Césaire would put it, negrophiliac) is – certainly better than overt racism or ethnicism – but only to a certain extent. Since, both hatred and undeserved sympathy are forms of denial of individuality for the hated or idealized groups. A powerful buyer of exoticism revels not in real knowledge about the Other, but in a relief                                                                                                                           84  Igor Štiks, “The Balkans are Somewhere Else.” Blesok no. 40, January-February 2005.     129     from their own supposedly non-exotic reality, their own liberalism, "political correctness," and cultural openness. And, in order for that liberalism to be obvious, the Other cannot be too similar to the Gazer – it has to be palpably different from the subject. Therefore, in this post-communist era, when the Balkans are factually becoming more and more similar to the West, they are reassuring Western Europe about their exoticism with more brio than ever. It is not enough for the Balkan people to be from the Balkans anymore – they also have to pretend that they are “Gypsies.” The talented and renowned Balkan composer Goran Bregović translated many of his songs from Bosnian language into Roma, and these songs are now often advertised as the   130     “authentic Gypsy” music, while, in the 1980s, they were actually run-of-the-mill Bosnian pop-rock songs. This particular announcement is one of the most subdued and correct announcements that can be found, as Bregović is not advertised as playing the authentic gypsy music. However, all the usual connotations related to the Balkans that sell are present: “the sublime madness,” dizziness, ecstasy, Gypsy players, intoxication, Sarajevo, and the “escape” to Paris. As in the case of the fantasy about Eastern European women, this schizophrenia in the cultural production has palpable, material consequences in the communities of the marked subjects. There is a small fisherman village Seget Donji on the coast of Dalmatia, in Croatia. In this village, in the 1980s and 1990s, time seemed to have been passing more slowly than in some other parts of the world: as much as people had a VCR or a dishwasher, the local culture in many ways also stayed intact, picturesque and preserved. Part of that local culture was hybridity: people would sit in kale - narrow Dalmatian passages between houses - and play card games, or gather to play bocce. However, they also knew of and fantasized about distant places of which they heard from those who travelled or left, or the places that they saw on TV: the local night club was thus called California, and the local restaurant Frankie, in honor of Frank Sinatra. It has always been a fairly popular destination for tourists, despite the fact that nobody tried to make this village more "marketable" to them: there was the sea, the coast, the palm trees… The locals thought: what else could the tourists want? But when Croatia split from Yugoslavia and went through a painful transition to capitalism, the locals started thinking about attracting more tourists and making the village more enticing to them. One summer, a couple of years ago, they decided: "We will change the names of the club California and the restaurant Frankie. These French, American or German people are not coming here because of California or Frank Sinatra; they are interested only in our local culture - only in the authentic." Thus, the little Dalmatian village was experiencing the paradox in   131     which it was changing itself to become more "authentic" - or of changing in order to conform to someone else's idea of their "authenticity." Because the truth is that California and Frankie were authentic, as much as the kale and the bocce, and wiping them out has put the village into a strange space of inauthenticity for the sake of the authentic. Now, it has been a few years that California and Frankie are gone. This predicament raises many questions: What happens after "authenticity" is fabricated for a period of time? Does this fabrication become a part of the new authenticity, or is the authentic lost forever? Is the small Dalmatian village now authentic as it is – without California and without Frankie – but with proud announcements about the preservation of its local culture and customs (even if these customs were resurrected from the ashes just to make this proclamation possible)? Or is it precisely the cultural hybridity that was their authenticity, which is, in that case, now lost? Testimonies Commodified In Testimony, Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, Shoshana Felman writes that “It has been suggested that testimony is the literary – or discursive – mode par excellence of our times, and that our era can precisely be defined as the age of testimony.”85 She quotes Elie Wiesel saying: “If the Greeks invented tragedy, the Romans the epistle and the Renaissance the sonnet, our generation invented a new literature, that of testimony” (Wiesel in Felman 6). And even if this generation did not invent it, it is clear that Wiesel is correct in perceiving the importance of testimony in cultural and literary life. It seems to me that the hunger for “testimonies” – not in the                                                                                                                           85  Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, M. D. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge, 1992. p. 5.   132     form of documents at a court of law - but in the form of personal renditions of events, especially of the traumatic kind, is related to the contemporary desire for the real, the true, the “authentic.” Two of the most massive influxes of refugees and exiled people in the second half of the Twentieth Century into the Western countries were caused by the war in ex- Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Those are the first two wars for which the UN Security Council established the International Criminal Tribunals: one for the Former Yugoslavia, in 1993, and one for Rwanda, in 1994. In 1994, in Rwanda, approximately 800.000 Tutsis were killed by the Hutu majority in one hundred days. The war in Croatia lasted for four years, from 1991 to 1995, and resulted in around 13.000 deaths and missing persons. From 1992 to 1995, at least 100.000 people were killed in Bosnia, where the atrocities culminated with the Srebrenica Massacre, during which around 7.000 to 8.000 Bosnian Muslims were killed over the span of a couple of days. In political discourse, both Rwandan and ex-Yugoslav wars are often referred to as "tribal warfare," and are unnecessarily mystified or reduced to mythical ethnic tensions that have lasted for centuries, while "rational" economic factors behind these ethnic tensions tend to be downplayed. In both cases, the Western response was to "exoticize" the reasons behind the conflicts, and this exoticization and mystification   probably contributed to the UN's and international response, which was - as former UN’s Secretary-General Kofi Annan admitted - a complete failure. Rwandan conflict resulted in 7.5 million refugees, out of which at least thousands sought asylum in Canada or Europe. The war in ex-Yugoslavia resulted in approximately four million refugees or displaced persons, most of which ended up in   133     Western European countries and, somewhat less frequently, in the United States and Canada. Consequently, in the Western European imaginary, African and Balkan peoples (usually regardless of wherefrom they come) are often related to the figures of the immigrant, the refugee and the asylum-seeker. Mireille Rosello opens her book Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest with the claim that “in Europe in general and in France in particular, the 1990s were marked by a whole series of heated debates about immigration.”86 It is telling that Mireille Rosello chose the term “guest” to describe the immigrants in Western Europe – since a guest is by definition someone whom we expect to leave. What is interesting in the case of this wave of Balkan and African (especially - but not only - Rwandan) refugees and asylum-seekers is that most Western countries – in order to grant them asylum and give them financial aid – in return asked for their testimonies of trauma and war. This somewhat peculiar situation brings up some unusual questions: What happens when psychiatrists and officials listen to confessions about traumas not in order to heal them, but in order to judge them as true or untrue? What happens if the "victim's" reward is not a possible "cure," but an extension of their financial support and their right of residence? In the media and especially in the unrecorded social fabric of the host countries, these refugees are often perceived as parasites, who prostitute their traumas and take advantage of their host country's benevolence. However, considering this animosity and the fact that many refugees' rights are still being extended even twenty years after the conflicts, we are also forced to ask                                                                                                                           86 Mireille Rosello. Postcolonial Hospitality, The Immigrant as Guest. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. p. 1.   134     what the host countries are gaining by providing the welfare, if we cynically (or rationally) conclude that their sole purpose is not just to help. Where is the Misery? The Croatian director Ognjen Sviličić [Ognyen Svilichich] attended the conference on The New Balkan Film at Columbia University in 2009, where he showed his movie Armin, a more or less successful attempt at a comedic drama. The film itself is arguably less interesting than the comment the director spontaneously made during the Q & A with the filmmakers. Namely, he said that the film has been shown at a festival in Germany, and that the exasperated German audience later asked him: “But you’re from the Balkans, so… Where is the misery?” A young Bosnian director, Aida Begić, was also at the conference, where she was showing the film Snow, which was crowned with a plethora of nominations and awards: in Cannes, in San Francisco, Reykjavik. Begić’s film tells a story of a group of women in a Bosnian village who are trying to continue with their lives after their country was ravaged by war. The film is what I would call the poetry of poverty: on the surface, it seems like a realistic portrayal of the post-war life in a Bosnian village, but the imagery that the movie perpetually displays is a highly stylized fantasy about the cultural Other – an Other who suffers, but is also somehow more “real.” The Western Europeans and Americans in the movie are portrayed almost as cartoon-villains: they want to buy the land in the village from the poor women, and thus turn one of the last bastions of authenticity into a space of soulless capitalist exploitation. The foreigners are, therefore, a symbol of the corrupted Western culture, while the poor women are, once again, a   135     version of Rousseau's noble savages, who have to fight to preserve their authentic culture. The paradox is, of course, that their authenticity is far from being authentic, and that both the Bosnian women and foreigners are a mirror-reflection of a highly stylized Western self-flagellating fantasy. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the film was funded by German and French film production companies. A scene from the Bosnian movie Snow: the poetics of poverty In many Western European countries, the rights of abode and sustenance of refugees and asylum seekers depend on the condition that they are still traumatized “enough” not to be able to return to their home countries. Thus, those who survived the war are encouraged to repeatedly relive the trauma. (Whereas those who were either slightly traumatized or not traumatized at all are, in this system, encouraged to exaggerate the traumatic testimony or invent it.) Under these conditions, the narration of trauma does not become a potentially healing experience; rather, testimony – despite the fact that it is heard by psychiatrists – serves as a court document, or it is alternatively given to the public in the form of an autobiography or a film. The figures of the therapist, the reader or the viewer are invited to witness the trauma, about the contours of which they already have certain expectations (Where is the misery?). I do not claim that these witnesses are knowing villains; it just seems to me that the stories of traumatized victims inspire   136     fascination and fulfill some sort of a need in those who are witnessing them retroactively and at a distance. My questions regarding this are similar to the issues Saidiya Hartman asked in Scenes of Subjection: What interests me are the ways in which we are called upon to participate in such scenes [gruesome displays of slaves’ bodies]. Are we witnesses who confirm the truth of what happened in the face of the world-destroying capacities of pain, the distortions of torture, the sheer unrepresentability of terror, and the repression of the dominant accounts? Or are we voyeurs fascinated with and repelled by exhibitions of terror and sufferance?”87 It seems also that this fascination focuses mostly on testimonies that are, if we can put it like that, easy to interpret – perhaps not politically - but in terms of suffering: pictures of massacred bodies in Rwanda, notorious “bread-line” massacre of civilians in Sarajevo, testimonies that reiterate what we already think we know about trauma (insomnias, flash- backs, headaches, depression), black and white accounts in which we can distinguish the villain from the victim (Bosnian village women in Snow confronting the mean Western capitalists), etc. One of the most famous books about the war in ex-Yugoslavia is thus a diary of Zlata Filipović, who was thirteen years old at the time when the war began and who kept a diary during the siege of Sarajevo. Many – including Zlata in the diary itself - have suggested the comparison with Anne Frank. But herein lies Zlata’s diary’s “fault.” I do not want to commit the intentional fallacy and assume that Zlata wrote the diary with the help of her parents or with the idea and hope of its publication in mind. However, I can examine the history of its publication: namely, the diary was noticed by UNICEF and published by a group of French journalists, after which “the family's fortunes                                                                                                                           87 Saidiya Hartman. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.   137     dramatically changed.”88 "I remember when BBC’s Newsround came to Sarajevo to film my story. I remember it all so distinctly – they spent a lot of time with us," says Zlata Filipović in an interview in 2012. She is now, in 2015, thirty-four, and she resides in Dublin. Her diary was “bought by a French publisher, who pulled all possible strings to evacuate the family to France. And so, in December 1993, the family found themselves living in Paris.” “It was bizarre. If you were wounded, or an orphan, or sick, you could never have got out of Sarajevo. But we did," says Zlata in the interview. “Still aged only 13, she was asked to talk in detail about the war and the violent political landscape of her home country, having tea with the prime minister, John Major, and a French defense minister. The book sold 80,000 copies.”89 The book sold 80,000 copies because it gave those who wanted to witness the war at a distance exactly what they wanted: a war story told by a child who survived the trauma bravely. And who was - like many anonymous refugees and asylum seekers - awarded for her story with asylum. When asked if she would be willing to return to Bosnia, Zlata answered: "The majority of my friends are leaving or have already left. There is no work, no hope, and no future there." She corroborated this statement with a story about her Bosnian friend who graduated from Harvard and wanted to use his knowledge to improve the situation in his hometown: "He came back to Sarajevo full of ideas and projects, but no one recognised his qualifications. He couldn't get anything done. In the end he was so demoralised he went back to the US and got a job on Wall Street." Zlata’s diary was a hit only abroad. Domestic, ex-Yugoslav readers, did not                                                                                                                           88 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/bosnia/9192248/Zlata-Filipovic-whose-journal-was- Sarajevos-answer-to-Anne-Franks-diary-tells-of-her-fears-for-Bosnia-today.html 89 Idem.   138     recognize themselves in this little girl’s story about the big war. The diary is perhaps not completely inauthentic, but it is rehearsed, hollywoodized, commodified and verbalized almost too well. It also excludes the humorous or black humorous moments that are typical for any discourse on war in the social fabric of the Balkans.90 Its resilience is not ordinary and everyday, but heroic. In The Culture of Lies, Ugrešić writes: When the war really flared, it [Europe] was suddenly horrified at the bloodthirstiness of tribal account-settling and withdrew into a corner. And it immediately drew a border-line (It’s incomprehensible! Those must be ancient ethno-customs! These people are not like us!). (248) European, (and American) journalists, intellectuals, artists, analysts, thinkers, experts on countries in transition acquired with the war in Yugoslavia an opportunity once again to show off their colonial love, the love felt for a victim. They did not enter into a dialogue with the victim (What dialogue! The victim is by definition dumb!), they confiscated its tongue (The victim’s role is to suffer, and not itself to articulate its misfortune), they become its interpreters (The language of the victim is in any case unusable in the codes of the Western market.) (248) I would add that they confiscated the real victim’s tongue insofar as they expected the traumas to be verbalized, packaged and sold in a particular way. One of the most publicized survivors of the Rwandan genocide is Révérien Rurangwa, who was fifteen years old in 1994, when he witnessed the massacre of forty- three members of his family. His face and body are a testimony in themselves: “There is a scar that starts at his ear, and then another that curls across his forehead – his ‘kiss-                                                                                                                           90  The examples of this ex-Yugoslav version of black humor are so numerous that they could be the subject of a chapter. Black humor is a crucial part of the literary and social fabric of the Balkans – especially in topics related to politics, poverty and wars. While Bill Clinton and NATO were debating whether they should bomb Serbia (then still Yugoslavia) because of the conflicts in Kosovo, big graffiti appeared one morning on a building in Belgrade: “SO, ARE YOU GONNA BOMB - OR SHOULD WE START REPAINTING THE WALLS IN OUR APARTMENT?” (“HOĆETE LI DA BOMBARDUJETE ILI ĆEMO DA KREČIMO?”). Even in Croatia – which was at the time Serbia’s recent enemy in the Balkan wars – most people were delighted by this humorist defiance in the face of a possible tragedy. In the biggest stand-up comedy club in the Balkans, Studio smijeha, the ethnically mixed comedians have one piece of advice for anyone who wants to take the stage: “Anything war-related always gets the biggest laughs.”   139     curl,’ or question mark as he likes to think of it. The scar that asks ‘Why?’”91 In an interview given to The Guardian in 2009, Révérien explained that he still did not have a permanent permit to stay in Switzerland, which was his host country when he got saved from the mass grave: “Now they say, ‘He needs to go back to his country,’” says Révérien. He thus “got” the “job” of the “narrator” (“Now, I must be the narrator”) of the Rwandan trauma and of the potential dangers of his return to the homeland (dangers that are related to the fact that he witnessed the massacre of his family, and that he recognizes the Hutus who perpetrated it), in order to be able to stay in Switzerland. His book Génocidé opens with a quotation by Primo Levi: “It is neither easy nor agreeable to dredge this abyss of viciousness, and yet I think it must be done…” The quotation is followed by the powerful first sentence: “Il m’ont tué, moi et toute ma famille, sur une colline du Rwanda, en avril 1994, mais je ne suis pas mort.” [“They killed me, me and my entire family, on a little hill in Rwanda in April 1994, but I am not dead.”]92 He writes that people often ask him how the three ethnic groups – Hutus, Tutsis and Batwa - could distinguish between each other - which is a question ex-Yugoslavs (Serbs, Croats and Bosnians) often hear as well. The answer that Révérien gave is valid in both cases; he quotes the French journalist Jean Hatzfeld response: “Les tueurs n’avaient pas à reconnaitre les victimes parce qu’ils les connaissaient. Car dans un village tout se sait.” [“The killers did not have to physically distinguish the victims because they knew them. In a village, one knows everything.”] In those civil wars, Rwandans and ex- Yugoslavs could rely on names or simple knowledge about someone’s ethnicity, since                                                                                                                           91    Ross Vinne Jones. Interview with Révérien. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/apr/08/rwanda- experience. Web. 92  Révérien Rurangwa. Génocidé. Presses de la Renaissance, 2006. p. 9.   140     many crimes were committed against one’s “neighbors.” Révérien acknowledges the role of the West in the war, but without absolving the Rwandans from guilt: “To pretend that the Hutus and the Tutsis were getting along splendidly and that the evil colonizer divided them so that he could rule - inflaming the fire of their differences - would be a caricature. But it is also not completely false” (32). Révérien was urged to tell his story, both to heal his psyche, but also because he became “the narrator” for the West: “At first, I refused, being proud and easily offended, but I suffered too much to say no. I was first rebellious toward Ute-Bettina, a therapist who admitted me, a tall brunette with a soft voice. I stayed locked up in my silence, with fleeting eyes and a distant spirit, smoking one cigarette after another. So it was she who spoke” (96). She told him that, if he started talking, things would become easier. His answer was: “If only I could…” (96). Révérien’s musings on whether his story should or can be told resemble Toni Morrison’s musings on the same topic in Beloved. “A conflict of duty between the things that must be forgotten and those that must not. How to decide which is which? The things you want to forget, you can’t. Even if I wanted to (so that I can sleep a bit better), I wouldn’t be capable of it. This memory is written by knife, with a blade, into my flesh, into the deepest parts of my being, like a tattoo that cannot be erased,” writes Révérien (130-131). The fictional protagonist of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the liberated slave Sethe, also carries physical scars representative of her psychological trauma. Similarly to Révérien, the narrator of Beloved wavers between testimony and silence: “This is not a story to pass on,” says the narrator at the novel’s ending, after actually having narrated the story.   141     These are not the stories to pass on, but they are stories that need to be narrated in order to be forgotten. “Despite some excellent works on the genocide of Tutsis, the books can never find correct phrases for such horrifying events. The pain is beyond anything that can be expressed in words,” writes Révérien, while writing another book about the genocide of Tutsis. What needs to be emphasized is that his testimony, like the testimony written by Zlata, is also not addressed to Rwandans: if it is written for anyone, it is written for the West. The silences in his testimony ring truer than Zlata’s more simplified tale, but – despite his intentions, whatever they were – his story has also become another kind of commodity. The main question seems to be not whether we can write poetry after Auschwitz, but whether we can write “poetry” about it. The People With Whom No One Knows What to Do Perhaps there is a certain rule within human race according to which at a given moment we do not know what to do with certain people. Or even entire peoples. It’s just that, at this particular moment, we are the people with whom no one knows what to do. So we have become a problem, not only for those who do not know what to do with us, but we’re also becoming a problem for us, who also do not know what to do with ourselves. Thus, we have become a sort of a communal problem, for ourselves and for those who take care of us.93 This quote that I already mentioned in relation to Du Bois’s question What does it feel like to be a problem? is from a book by Bora Ćosić [Bora Chosich] called The Exiled (Izgnanici), which is translated only into German – since that was the country in which he wrote it – and otherwise mostly ignored by the international literary community. However, I would argue that it is precisely a book like Ćosić’s – subdued, slightly humorous, careful to avoid any kitsch, pathos or graphic portrayal of suffering – that                                                                                                                           93  Bora Ćosić. Izgnanici. Zagreb: Meandar, 2005. p. 7.   142     more successfully captures the experience of those who have lived through the ex- Yugoslav war and decided to tell its tale. Bora Ćosić is a Serb born in Zagreb in 1931. When he was only five, he and his family moved to Belgrade, where he lived until 1992, when, as he put it, he could smell the “smell of fascism” in Milošević’s Serbia and decided to act boldly and move to Croatia, which was at the time in war with Serbia and had big nationalistic problems of its own. This exile was quiet, as are Ćosić’s testimonies about it. His life of a Serb with a Serbian accent in the war-torn Croatia could not have been easy; since he was an anti- nationalist of a mixed ethnic heritage, his books were at the time not welcome in any ex- Yugoslav country, and Ćosić ended up exiled once again – this time in Germany. There, he became - as he says in his book on the Exiled - one of those people “with whom no one knows what to do.” The pathos of his situation is described at a distance, with humorous curiosity, through depictions of the house for exiled writers, in which he resided in Germany. The political events in Europe he conveyed through depictions of a typical central European apartment: “[In this apartment] the traffic is impossible, except between those enormous pieces of furniture – as if our entire life has to take place in the narrow spaces between” (11). In Ćosić’s novel-essay, this apartment belongs to the entire European family, and the only breathing space in it can be found in the hallway: “I thought about this hallway many times, as of a space that comes in between the two major spaces – which are rooms. For, everyone would think that the most important things happen in one of the two rooms, while it could be true that the crucial things are left precisely for the hallway” (13- 14).   143     He also poignantly, but not bathetically, describes the difference between his Balkan exile and the self-imposed exile of writers from Western Europe (or, in Balibar’s terms – the difference between an immigrant and a foreigner): The Swedes came here as a part of some award – because they are Swedes and because they are writing in this language that everyone in Europe holds in high esteem, but no one understands. That’s why they are looking at the rest of us with suspicion. I look at myself with suspicion as well when I realize how much they care here about my destiny, despite the fact that I arrived here from a country for which – in many people’s opinion – no one should show any kind of care. Since that is perhaps a semi-wild country with very mean people, who are capable of doing many bad things. I know a lot about this myself. We waste a lot of words on this, I and my Swedes, who live on the other side of the wall of my room. In the house to which they arrived because of their desire to live in different places in the world, while I live here because I have no other place to go. And, even if I had, I’d choose to live here. Where people are polite to me, take care of me, without even asking what I did to deserve this – which is a question to which I would not have an answer. I do not know how to answer a single question anymore – no matter to what it is related and no matter who asks it. And I especially cannot answer the questions that I pose to myself every single day. (25) Ćosić’s narrative seems like a truer expression of the experience of exile precisely because of its refusal of self-pity or of displays of trauma. He is also aware that, even without a written or spoken testimony, his exiled body in this house on a hill in Germany is already a kind of testimony in itself. He knows that, as an exile from the Balkans, he himself is already a certain kind of commodity that serves a particular purpose in the West. He does not complain about it; he is just aware that it is there and accepts it: We are a sort of provincial exhibition on the theme of exile. Here are displayed our lives and a couple of baubles that our custodians managed to collect. […] Or the thing that we represent on this hill is not really an exhibition, but an ethno- park of our lives. As if they had told us to ‘act normally’ – probably because it’s unimaginable that the exiled could act in any other way except abnormally. […] I am almost certain now that our collective existence, at this moment in time, is a performance for someone else. (103-104)   144     Interestingly and tellingly, Ćosić’s book is read in the Balkans, but is not translated into any other language, except German, and it did not even approach the popularity of Zlata’s Diary, Révérien’s testimony Génocidé, or the Bosnian film Snow. It is ironically almost too authentic, too subdued, too unheroic - to be truly interesting to the majority of Western readers who want to hear about the war. However, Hannah Arendt’s brilliant phrase about “the banality of evil” can in many ways be applied to suffering as well. There are parts of suffering and elements of the memory of trauma that are banal, and when the witnesses and victims are expected to omit them, we are turning them into professional victims, while depriving ourselves of hearing their truths. The therapists who write reports on war traumas, the judges who grant asylums to the sufferers, the publishers who translate thirteen-year-old’s diary and ignore serious contemplation of an old writer in exile, who understands that his exile is a commodity… They all perhaps act with the best intentions, or they are – alternatively - unconscious of what their motives are. In any case, they are encouraging inauthenticity: whether in asylum-seekers, writers or filmmakers. We have the choice of listening to those that are trying to tell us about the nature of testimonies that we are consuming. As Ugrešić writes: Zlata Filipović wrote a diary about everyday life in Sarajevo, knowing that the diary would be published abroad. As was predicted, the book became a best- seller. (195) Nedžad Begović from Sarajevo ended his diary – which encompasses a whole year of war in Sarajevo, and covers just one page – with the sentence: "I shall never be able to tell anyone anything about any of this…" (201) “Steven Spielberg is coming soon as well"… Right now the people of Sarajevo – those same people who have just survived the siege of their city – are earning a few coins as film extras. "They lie covered in red paint, they play shattered corpses in the Sarajevo Markale market," says my acquaintance. Anyone who omitted to cry over the real victims, will cry over the acted ones. (215)   145     The war is commodified. In 2012, the organization MamaHope made a short video of African young men who make sarcastic remarks about their depiction in Western cultures. The video opens with four young men addressing “the West,” and then proceeding to enumerate the most banal portrayals to which they think they are subjected. These young African men are inviting us to try to discern the stereotype from reality (regardless of the fragility of the latter word). A similar video could have been made with the protagonists from the Balkans.   146     The words “reality” or “authenticity” are perhaps very slippery, and – while they are not scientifically provable or quantifiable – they still carry a certain weight, even in fiction. Achebe wisely warned us about the myth of innocence of stories: “What his book [Joyce Cary’s] Mister Johnson did for me though was to call into question my childhood assumption of the innocence of stories. It began to dawn on me that although fiction was undoubtedly fictitious it could also be true or false, not with the truth of falsehood of a news item but as to its disinterestedness, its intention, its integrity” [my emphasis] (Home p. 33-34). In conclusion, both those who write or create as ethnically or racially marked subjects, as well as those who write or create as racially or ethnically marked subjects who are also survivors of traumas, should be able to write their stories without purposefully commodifying them. Identity has become a commodity, and racially and ethnically marked cultural products, produced for “cultural translation” are rarely authentic reflections of social reality; they are often direct responses to the Western market's idea of what this reality is or should be. However, this self-exoticization and the commodification of traumas are certainly not solely West’s fault. The West is just an accomplice – often, in this case, even a more innocent one – for, like the Aboriginal tribe from Žižek's story, many African-Americans, African or Balkan people have caught upon the dream of others, and their cultural products have become the tribal dances with the biggest potential of becoming lucrative. We – the readers, viewers, academics and publishers – should all try to learn the lesson of the second anthropological expedition to New Zealand and be curious about the cultural “language” of “Others,” in order to find   147     out whether the dance that we are applauding so enthusiastically is the dance choreographed by no one other than ourselves.   148     CHAPTER 4 Ivo Andrić and Toni Morrison: A Poetics of a Communal, Aural Voice “Many people who are trying to show certain kinds of connections between myself and Zora Neale Hurston are always dismayed and disappointed in me because I hadn’t read Zora Neale Hurston except for one little short story before I began to write. I hadn’t read her until after I had written,” said Toni Morrison in an interview with Gloria Naylor, published in 1985.94 In his essay “Oral Poetry and Political Dissent in Somali Society,” published in the collection of essays on oral poetry, Said S. Samatar states that the oral poets in Somalia sing what the Somalis feel, and adds: “It is for this reason that Somali poetry may in a small way, be of some value in casting light on the South-East European experience.” 95 The phrase “may in a small way” alludes to a certain anxiety of comparison, which seems to plague comparative studies. Comparatists are often prone to wonder: “Am I just mapping something onto something else because it is convenient?” “Do I see connections even where they do not exist?” “Am I comparing for the comparison’s sake?” Arguably, even a comparison between fairly disparate things can be very illuminating. But, more importantly, the comparatist’s anxiety should be avoided when the only reason for anxiety is that there is no “material,” “physical” evidence that                                                                                                                           94 Ed. Danille Taylor-Guthrie, Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. p. 214. 95  Ed. Michael Branch and Celia Hawkesworth. The Uses of Tradition: A Comparative Inquiry into the Nature, Uses and Functions of Oral Poetry in the Balkans, the Baltic and Africa. London: School of Slavonic and East European Studies, 1994. p. 282.   149     would “corroborate” the comparison. In other words, the fact that many readers and critics find parallels between the novels of Toni Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston regardless of the fact that Morrison had not read Hurston’s work before she wrote most of her novels is, I would argue, perhaps even more interesting and useful than if the opposite was true. Namely, if the parallels between their works are visible, even though the two authors have not read each other’s work, we can assume that the two women lived through some similar experiences, and that assumption can point us to a whole different set of interesting theories and conclusions. In a 1961 issue of the Yugoslav journal “Naše teme” [“Our Topics”], which is entirely devoted to “Contemporary Africa,” Petar Guberina, an ex-Yugoslav linguist and scholar of African languages, black history and poetry, writes: “Black poets, even though they belong to diverse races and areas, have one thing in common: the awareness that in the world, which still has not cured itself of racism, there is suffering that is the result of having black skin. [...] Into the world literature and culture they introduced a new space in which they express themselves, and in which some non-black people find their reflection” 96 [my emphasis]. Guberina himself felt a very strong connection to his lifelong friends Aimé Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor. In his essay “Notes for Writers,” the Bosnian author Ivo Andrić says that the discovery of unforseen and unexpected parallels is one of the biggest pleasures in the life of the writer: “One of the rare pleasures that the writer has from his work is finding analogies in other writers, the                                                                                                                           96 Petar Guberina, ‘Tracing African and Black Culture.’ Centralni komitet narodne omladine Hrvatske. Zagreb, 1961. p. 1006. [all translations from Croatian unavailable in English are mine]     150     random encounters of similar thoughts and solutions. […] Only the writer knows that it’s not plagiarism, but deep and unforeseen similarities and connections.”97 This passage by Ivo Andrić about the delights of unforeseen encounters that a writer can experience in another writer’s work calls attention to an important point about comparisons: they can be real even if the writers have never read each other, and even if they cannot be connected in any traceable, “material” way. Furthermore, a physical encounter, or the fact that one writer read another writer’s work, can mean less than a deep parallel that runs between their creations, and of which neither of them is aware. Many historians of literature are familiar with the anecdotes about Marcel Proust’s and James Joyce’s encounter, during which both writers expressed complete indifference to each other’s works and personalities, and after which they even shared a taxi ride home without exchanging a single word. However, regardless of the probable truthfulness of that anecdote, the conclusion we can or should draw is not that the literature written by Proust and Joyce could not be fruitfully – and even extremely fruitfully – compared. Sometimes the connection is not material, exact, provable, but that does not mean that it is any less real. In fact, the two writers whose work I will examine and compare in this chapter - Ivo Andrić and Toni Morrison – both believed that the world of words produces a sort of reality in its own right. Ivo Andrić was a male Croat born in Bosnia in 1892, who lived and died in Serbia, Belgrade. Toni Morrison is an African-American woman, born in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, who works and lives in the Unites States. At first glance, their stories seem difficult                                                                                                                           97 Ivo Andrić. Historija i legenda. Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1986. p. 58.   151     to connect; however, the famous bridge in Bosnia that Ivo Andrić described in his novel The Bridge on the Drina extends into the experiences that Morrison wanted to portray, while the branches of the scar-tree on the body of the liberated slave Sethe from Morrison's Beloved reach out to the wounded and scarred bodies in Andrić's Bosnia. Both Andrić and Morrison were awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature largely, if not even primarily, for their contribution to our understanding of the histories of their respective countries and peoples: "Dr. Andrić, as a chronicler and a novelist, you have told us about your countrymen, their life and toil, their misfortunes and endurance, in peace as well as in war. […] Just as the bridge on the Drina brought East and West together, so your work has acted as a link, combining the culture of your country with that of other parts of our planet… " – this is how a member of the Nobel Prize Committee addressed the laureate in 196198. "In her depictions of the world of the black people, in life as in legend, Toni Morrison has given the Afro-American people their history back, piece by piece. […] The most enduring impression they [the readers] leave is of empathy, compassion with one's fellow human beings" – this is how Morrison's award was announced by the Academy in 199399. Their prizes are always mentioned in the same breath as their ethnic and racial origins: he is introduced as the first writer from "that region" to win the Nobel Prize, and she as the first African-American woman who received it. Their literature and its value are apparently perceived not primarily as works written by individuals, but as works that are first and foremost saying something relevant about the collective histories of their peoples.                                                                                                                           98 http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1961/Andrić-speech-e.html. Web. 99 http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1993/presentation-speech.html. Web.   152     Andrić was an academic, same as Morrison, and they both consciously struggled to find ways and narrative techniques that would translate their respective peoples’ oral art and history into the written form. For both of them, these histories' ghosts cannot be silenced: if you try to suppress them, they emerge out of water, break into your house, and sit at your table, or they confront you with all the solidity and concreteness of a bridge that you have to cross if you want to move ahead. In both Andrić and Morrison, there is no conflict between politics and art: wounds and beauty are as interconnected as they are on Sethe's body and in the stones of the Bosnian bridge. In this chapter, I will explore the ways in which Andrić and Morrison tried to capture in writing the oral histories of their peoples; their almost identical philosophies of narrative and of the role of the author; the parallels between their respective "postmemories" - to use Marianne Hirsch’s term - and the ways in which through their folk, "village" literature they tried to heal both the present and the past. How Can I Say Things That Are Pictures?100 In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a novel about the somatic, visceral, intimate experience and memory of slavery in America, a “fully dressed woman” walks out of the water (60). Her name is Beloved, and, in the course of this chapter, we will return to her and her meaning(s) in Morrison’s narrative. But, for now, let us just remember that one of the most poignant questions in the novel is uttered by her; namely: “How can I say things that are pictures?” (248). For, this question leads to other questions: How large is the part of our thought and memory – and especially early memory – that consists mostly of “thoughts that are pictures”? And how do we translate these pictures into words? Or –                                                                                                                           100 Toni Morrison. Beloved. London: Vintage Books, 1995. p. 248.   153     this is even a harder question - how do we translate the abstract emotions connected to these pictures into language? Morrison begins her novel Beloved with the image of a house: “124 was spiteful. Full of baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children” (3). Ivo Andrić begins his novel about the Bosnian town Višegrad and the centuries of its occupation - first by the Ottoman Empire, and then by Austro-Hungary - with a description of the Višegrad’s stone bridge over the river Drina: “Here, where the Drina flows with the whole force of its green and foaming waters from the apparently closed mass of the dark steep mountains, stands a great clean-cut stone bridge with eleven wide sweeping arches.”101 So, we begin with a house. And a bridge.   The now-liberated former slave Sethe in Beloved talks to her daughter Denver about the persistence of thought-pictures, not just in our minds, but in the world: “I was talking about time. It’s so hard for me to believe in it. Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think that it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place - the picture of it - stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. […] Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on. So clear. And you think it’s you thinking it up. A thought picture. But no. It’s when you bump into a rememory that belongs to somebody else” (43). Then, what kind of memories and rememories are we, the readers, encountering right on the first page, when we bump into Andrić’s stone bridge and                                                                                                                           101 Ivo Andrić. The Bridge on the Drina. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1959. p. 13.   154     Morrison’s house, “full of baby venom”? What kind of memory – and narrative - are we invited to share? In her book The Generation of Postmemory, Marianne Hirsch describes postmemory as “the relationship that the ‘generation after’ bears to the personal, collective and cultural trauma of those who came before – to experiences that they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviors among which they grew up.”102 In yet another meaningful coincidence or connection, Hirsch says that Morrison’s reading of the first chapter of Beloved at Dartmouth was one of the transformative experiences that made her think about some of the key themes of her book: “Generations after slavery, Morrison was able to convey its impacts and effects more powerfully than contemporary accounts. How is trauma transmitted across generations, I began to wonder? How is it remembered by those who did not live it or know it in their own bodies?” (11) (Tellingly, in her work on postmemory, Hirsch also mentions both Bosnia and Rwanda.) Thus, the events of postmemory happened in the past, but they still shape the present. The stones of the bridge in Višegrad on which Andrić played as a small boy were imbued with centuries of history, oppression and memory, and he grew up listening to the stories about the bridge. The house in which Morrison grew up - with her relentlessly optimistic grandmother and her disillusioned grandfather (as she described them in her autobiographical essay “A Slow Walk of Trees”) - was always bursting with African- American culture, folktales and oral literature. In this chapter, I will explore how Andrić’s and Morrison’s personal memories, as well as the collective memories of their                                                                                                                           102 Marianne Hirsch. The Generation of Postmemory. New York: Columbia University Press. 2012. p. 5.   155     communities, shape and influence the ways in which the two writers tell their stories, creating their own philosophy of narrative, and verbalizing for us, their readers, the emotions and “things that are pictures.” Only That Which Is Written Stays103 Both Andrić and Morrison grew up in a sort of biculture. They both read and loved writers from the Western canon: Andrić expressed his admiration for writers like Goethe, while among Morrison’s favorites were Tolstoy, Woolf and Flaubert. However, along with canonical writers, they grew up immersed in two communities well-known for their rich and long tradition of oral poetry and literature. They read Goethe and Flaubert. But they listened to the townsfolk weave stories about their town, its history and people. They both delved into the history of slavery and oppression experienced by their ancestors. Andrić wrote his doctoral dissertation on “The Development of Spiritual Life in Bosnia under the Influence of the Turkish Rule,” in which he gave a historical description of practices like devshirme, or the so-called blood-levy (described in the first chapter), during which the Ottoman Empire would send their commissioners to the Ottoman provinces, like Bosnia, in order to collect the strongest, brightest boys as a form of tax, taking them from their families forever: “Parents who could not bribe their way to their goal because they were too poor would attempt to hide their child. And all too often they resorted to crippling it or otherwise so disfiguring the child that they could be quite sure of keeping it in their own custody.”104 After Andrić received his doctorate in Graz, he wrote to a friend: “I put a lot of time and energy into this work. Now I should think of                                                                                                                           103 Ivo Andrić. Umetnik i njegovo delo. Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1986. p. 302. 104 _________ The Development of Spiritual Life in Bosnia under the Influence of the Turkish Rule. Duke University Press, 1995. p. 22.   156     doing something more sensible” (Development, xviii). He learnt everything he could about the oppression and colonization of his native Bosnia; he also remembered the oral stories from his native Bosnian village of Višegrad. The goal was to take the facts – or, the history – and add to them the rich treasury of oral poems and stories – or, the people’s memory - and find a way to turn them into a narrative form that would encompass and surpass them both: “Whereas the Bosnia of his dissertation is a land of dry statistics, factual historic events, and countless names and personalities, in his fiction that same Bosnia becomes imbued with life, a sort of writer’s experimental laboratory for observing human behavior and the bewildering turns and twists of history and for reflecting on life in general” (Development, xix). “I am not like James Joyce; I am not like Thomas Hardy; I am not like Faulkner. I am not like in that sense. I do not have objections to being compared to such extraordinarily gifted and facile writers, but it does leave me sort of hanging there when I know that my effort is to be like something that has probably only been fully expressed perhaps in music, or in some other culture-gen that survives almost in isolation because the community manages to hold on to it,” says Morrison in an interview with Nellie McKay (Conversations 152). Morrison’s inspiration for Beloved was the real story about Margaret Garner, the slave who killed her child in order to save her from – not only experiencing the trauma – but being born into it, but Morrison added that “recording her [Garner’s] life as lived would not interest me” (248). Morrison, like Andrić, feels that the historical accounts are useful, but insufficient, and that the only way to capture the everyday, sensory, somatic reality of a trauma is perhaps the narrative art: “I refuse to believe that that period, or that thing [slavery] is beyond art. Because the consequences of   157     practically everything we do, art alone can stand up to it. It’s not the historians’ job to do that – you know what I’m saying? You will get some truth out of it that is not just the province of the natural or social sciences” (244). Or, as Arnold Weinstein phrased Morrison’s project in Beloved: “Morrison is translating the discourse of slavery out of its familiar ideological form into a shocking somatic code, so that we see its true horrors.”105 But, what is the adequate way to narrativize any trauma, let alone traumas of such large proportions? Both Andrić and Morrison knew that this is not a viable task for an individual, so they both turned their gaze away from history books, and towards those who for centuries maintained the collective memory of their peoples: the oral bards. Morrison’s and Andrić’s Predecessors: African Griots and Balkan Guslars For a book in which so many events are “unspeakable,” and in which no one wants to hear too much about the past, Beloved is full of people telling each other stories: Baby Suggs tells stories to Sethe and Denver, Denver to Beloved, Sethe to Denver, Paul D to Sethe, and Sethe to Paul D. Sitting on the porch steps, Sethe complains about her brain that – contrary to all reason – hungrily devours every story, with “no misery, no regret, no hateful picture too rotten to accept,” never saying “No thank you. I don’t want to know or have to remember that” (83). But even with such competitors, no one in this book is more eager to hear stories than Beloved: “Sethe learned the profound satisfaction Beloved got from storytelling. It amazed Sethe (as much as it pleased Beloved) because every mention of her past life hurt. Everything in it was painful or lost. She and Baby Suggs had agreed without saying so that it was unspeakable. […] But, as she began                                                                                                                           105 Arnold Weinstein. Recovering Your Story: Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Morrison. Random House, 2006. p. 411.   158     telling about the earrings, she found herself wanting to, liking it. Perhaps it was Beloved’s distance from the events itself, or her thirst for hearing it – in any case, it was an unexpected pleasure” (69). Perhaps the pleasure in storytelling comes from the fact that Sethe, without even fully knowing it, is a part of collective oral memory, which she, even when it is painful, feels happy to pass on, to relate – not unlike Toni Morrison herself. This tradition of storytelling, and of passing memories to the next generation, has been a long and important tradition in African and African-American communities, and Morrison attested to its crucial role in her writing: “Black people have a story, and that story has to be heard. There was an articulate literature before there was print. There were griots. They memorized it. People heard it. It is important that there is sound in my books – that you can hear it, that I can hear it. So I am inclined not to use adverbs, not because I am trying to write a play, but because I want to try to give the dialogue a certain sound” (Conversations 152). In The Bridge on the Drina, the construction of the bridge entails insurgencies stifled in blood, acts of sabotage that end in public impalements, as well as anecdotes and gossip. However, it is only after the construction is completed that the people of Višegrad have their first oral poem about the bridge, since oral poetry is largely the project of collective memory, and the object of memory can only be located in the past. The present is not interpretable; it is always caught in the midspace between remembering (of the past) and expecting, guessing, fearing (of the future): “The common people remember and tell of what they are able to grasp and what they are able to transform into legend. Anything else passes them by without deeper trace, with the dumb indifference of nameless natural phenomena, which do not touch the imagination or remain in the   159     memory. […] Only when the great bridge arose, men began to remember details and embroider the creation of a real, skillfully built and lasting bridge with fabulous tales which they well knew how to weave and to remember” (27). Among the people forced to construct the bridge, writes Andrić, is a Montenegrin guslar, an oral poet that no one in the village really knew. Once the bridge is finished, the townspeople find a place to hide from the Ottomans, the Montenegrin draws out his instrument gusle, and everyone gathers around him: “They all looked at him without a movement. At last the first notes wailed out, sharp and uneven. The excitement rose. The Montenegrin found the key and began to sing through his nose and accompany himself with the gusle. Everyone was intent, awaiting the wonderful tale” (33-34). Andrić describes to which extent the pleasure that the villagers take in the tale is visceral and somatic: “The peasants pressed closer and closer around the singer but without making the slightest noise; their very breathing could be heard. They half closed their eyes, carried away with wonder. Thrills ran up and down their spines, their backs straightened up, their breasts expanded, their eyes shone, their fingers opened and shut and their jaw muscles tightened. The Montenegrin developed his melody more and more rapidly, even more beautiful and bolder, while the wet and sleepless workmen, carried away and insensible to all else, followed the tale as if it were their own more beautiful and more glorious destiny” (34). This as if is not even quite suitable here, as the listeners of these oral tales do consider the oral stories of guslars as their own destiny. Guslar, the oral poet from the Balkans is the ex-Yugoslav version of the West African griot. Both guslars and griots make their own instruments that accompany their songs; both the African xalam and the Balkan gusla are string instruments with a wooden   160     body, and are still present in the Balkans and Africa. There are a few reasons that probably made the presence of oral literature longer and more important in these parts of the world: a rich oral culture, in which the highest prestige was not always given to the written word; languages that easily lend themselves to vivid imagery and that put a lot of emphasis on the sound; a communitarian spirit, in which private property – and, consequently, individual authorship – for a long time were not held in as high of a regard as the voice of the community, and – lastly – a long history of colonization or enslavement that made it impossible for these communities to write their histories, even if they felt the desire to do so. In her talk/essay “The Site of Memory,” Toni Morrison writes about African and African-American slaves, who were not allowed to learn how to read or write, and about their awareness of the fact that – regardless of their own traditions – when they find themselves faced with the West, “literacy was power.”106 Ivo Andrić, on the other hand, spent three years in prison in his early twenties because of his participation in the underground South-Slav movement “Mlada Bosna” (“Young Bosnia”), the aim of which was the liberation of South Slavs from foreign rule and their unification, as well as the free usage of their language(s) in public life. For both Morrison and Andrić, the legacy of guslars and griots is, thus, a legacy that permeated not just their memory, but also their present, and – of course, consequently, their narrative techniques. It is in the oral poetry of Balkan guslars and African griots that we can find some of the key elements that differentiate the literary style ascribed to Morrison and Andrić from the style of the Western canonical writers that they both admired and read.                                                                                                                           106 Toni Morrison. “Site of Memory.” Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, 2d ed., ed. William Zinsser. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995. 83-102. p. 98.     161     Yugoslav guslars filmed in the 1980s, who carve their own instruments out of wood. Bara Sambarou, a Peul griot, and his hoddou or xalax, the wooden string instrument.107 The village community listening to a guslar.                                                                                                                           107 Sandrine Chevassu. Bara Sambarou, Le Griot Peul. 2008. Film.   162     A very interesting example of the female oral poet in former Yugoslavia. As the images show, she does not have the instrument gusle, since both guslars and griots have traditionally been male. However, this woman learnt how to sing oral epic songs, and is one of the rare women who can fulfill the role of the village oral epic poet. Since she does not have the gusle, she accompanies her chant with rhythmic “drumming” of her cane against the floor. The Spirit Reveals Itself in Oral Epic When Andrić and Morrison were awarded Nobel Prizes in Literature, they were both seen not primarily (or not only) as individual genius creators, but also as voices of their peoples. And they both accepted their awards as representatives of their peoples or communities. We could say that they perhaps tolerated such a lack of individuation (which would most likely not have happened with a white Western male author) out of courtesy or humbleness. However, I would argue that their acknowledgments (in banquet speeches) that they were receiving the award not just as individuals, but also (if not primarily) as members of the ethnically, racially and sexually “marked” groups, were honest, considering the poeticist and historicist intentions in their works, as well as their narrative techniques. In her acceptance speech, Morrison conveyed that a good friend had left her a message about the award on the answering machine, saying “My dear sister, the   163     prize that is yours is also ours and could not have been placed in better hands.”108 Andrić accepted the award, saying: My country is indeed a “small country between the worlds,” as it has aptly been characterized by one of our writers, a country which, at break-neck speed and at the cost of great sacrifices and prodigious efforts, is trying in all fields, including the field of culture, to make up for those things of which it has been deprived by a singularly turbulent and hostile past. In choosing the recipient of this award you have cast a shining light upon the literary activity of that country, at the very moment when, thanks to a number of new names and original works, that country's literature is beginning to gain recognition through an honest endeavour to make its contribution to world literature. There is no doubt that your distinction of a writer of this country is an encouragement which calls for our gratitude.109 Andrić also later adds that the task of the writer who recounts the past is “perhaps to speak in the name of all of those who were unable to express themselves, or prevented from doing so because they were struck down before their time…? (Banquet). In both Beloved and in The Bridge on the Drina, we have the same kind of narrative “voice.” When this voice is not (to use Virginia Woolf’s term) tunneling into and out of free indirect speech of the characters, it never sounds like a subjective, individual voice of a single narrator. However, it is also not omniscient. The closest we can come to describing the voice in Beloved and The Bridge is perhaps to say that it is actually a written manifestation of the voice of the community, a sort of African- American or Balkan modern version of the ancient Greek chorus. It is the spirit of the African-American community about which Morrison talks with so much attention and love. It is the voice of the Bosnian kasaba, or the town [the Turkish word kasaba comes from Arabic Kasbah, which means small town], which Andrić mentions on every page of                                                                                                                           108 Tony Morrison. Banquet Speech. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1993/morrison-speech.html 109 Ivo Andrić. Banquet Speech. http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1961/andric- speech.html   164     his novel. It is the voice of guslars and griots. For, guslars and griots are not seen as creators in the romanticist sense of the word, but as conduits through which collective spirit and memories of the entire communities are voiced, preserved, interpreted and reinterpreted. “Morrison’s achievement has been to illuminate the values of an ancient form within the modern novel. By using this highly literate and literary genre, she privileges oral memory and the oral culture of the African-American community and dramatizes the cultural conflicts between oral and literate traditions,” writes Joyce Irene Middleton in her essay “Orality, Literacy, and Memory in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.”110 I would just add that Morrison’s narrative perhaps does not “dramatize,” as much as it unifies oral and literate traditions. In “The Site of Memory,” Toni Morrison explains her philosophy of narrative: “As for the point of view, there should be the illusion that it’s the characters’ point of view, when in fact it isn’t; it’s really the narrator who is there but who doesn’t make herself (in my case) known in that role. I like the feeling of a told story, where you hear a voice but you can’t identify it, and you think it’s your own voice. It’s a comfortable voice, and it’s a guiding voice, and it’s alarmed by the same things that the reader is alarmed by, and it doesn’t know what’s going to happen next either. So you have this sort of guide. But that guide can’t have a personality; it can only have a sound, and you have to feel comfortable with this voice, and then this voice can easily abandon itself and reveal the interior dialogue of a character. So it’s a combination of using the point of view of various characters but still retaining the power to slide in and out” (100). Notice Morrison’s insistence on and the repetition of the words voice and sound in this                                                                                                                           110  Joyce Irene Middleton.“Orality, Literacy, and Memory in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon.” College English, Vol. 55. No. 1 (Jan., 1993). pp. 64-75. p. 64.     165     description, to which she adds: “What I really want is that intimacy in which the reader is under the impression that he isn’t really reading this; that he is participating in it as he goes along” (100). Exactly as the oral poet wants and expects his listeners to participate in every particular rendition of an oral poem. Ivo Andrić delineated his narrative philosophy by acknowledging himself as a “follower” of Vuk Karadžić, a Serbian scholar who was the first to collect the oral poetry and folk stories of South Slavs, and to research and write down their language: “Cleverly using the wave of Romanticism and the rise of the European interest into the nations of the Turkish Empire, which emerged on the horizon of time, he presented to the scientific and literary world our rich folk literature, our folklore, our new history, the full potential of the hidden opulent and singular spiritual life of his people” (Umetnik 102). Andrić says that Vuk was in this manner trying to redeem in language what was “lost on the battlefield and in politics and give a boost to new efforts towards independence.” Interestingly, Andrić also mentions that, when Vuk’s translator, Tereza Von Jakobi, who was married to an American, wrote to Vuk from America about the big success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher-Stowe, Vuk answered that the book had already been translated into Serbian, and that it was successful, without failing to compare the destiny of African-Americans to his own people: “The subdued people in Turkey [the Ottoman Empire] – namely, the poor masses in Bosnia and Herzegovina - are not in a much better position than the black people in North America” (108). Thus, the narrator in Andrić and Morrison is neither a modernist unreliable narrator, nor is it a realist omniscient narrator: it is what we could call a communal narrative voice, which is both as omniscient and unreliable as the village or kasaba itself.   166     "There was this life-giving very, very strong sustenance that people got from their neighborhood. […] If they were sick, other people took care of them; if they needed something to eat, other people took care of them; if they were old, other people took care of them; if they were mad, other people provided a small space for them,” said Morrison in one of her interviews (Conversations 11). “Each individual took care of the whole, and the whole of each individual. Each house observed the next house, each street oversaw the next, for everyone was responsible for everyone else, and all were responsible for everything. Each person was closely linked with the fate not only of his relations and those in his household, but also of his neighbors, fellow-believers and fellow-citizens,” wrote Ivo Andrić in his novel Bosnian Chronicle. And it is this communal spirit, previously expressed through oral poetry, which is guiding the narrative in their novels. Corn on the Cob and the Paths of Višegrad We saw that Morrison and Andrić from the very beginning of their stories confront us, the readers, with very concrete images: the image of a house, and of a bridge. Their stories abound in people, objects, trees, houses, rivers – even when those concrete things carry metaphorical meanings – since the oral tradition from which they are drawing does not easily assimilate the abstract: “Epic memory functions only with concrete things, it knows only of events and personages. Abstract ideas may be preserved only if they are amalgamated with specific ones, if they are translated into concrete happenings” (The Uses 94). In “The Site of Memory,” Morrison says that she began writing Beloved with one particular image in mind: “I see corn on the cob” (97). Then she asks herself what else this image brings to mind, and says: “I see the house where I grew up in Lorain, Ohio” (97). She calls this process of starting with concrete details and   167     developing stories from them – a technique that is also used in oral poetry - a kind of “literary archeology”: “On the basis of some information and a little bit of guesswork you journey to a site to see what remains were left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply. What makes it fiction is the nature of the imaginative act: my reliance on the image – on the remains – to yield up a kind of truth. By “image,” of course, I don’t mean “symbol”; I simply mean “picture” and the feelings that accompany the picture” (92). In this description of her imaginative process, we also see how much Morrison shirks away from abstractions: even the word “symbol” seems too esoteric for her work. Andrić demonstrates the same love for the concrete and the particular: “The writer’s destiny is to always dwell upon details, upon small things with the narrowest possible horizon. No matter how vast and rich and various the work that the writer does is, no matter how broad and how high his aims reach, his work stays anchored in one detail, one scene, one personality, one word. As soon as the writer begins to try to reach ‘wide,’ thinking about the big picture, with an open, free view - everything blurs - and then, suddenly, both the details and the big picture disappear. As soon as he returns to one scene, a specific word or sentence, as soon as he starts to polish and perfect them, he senses that the unity and the comprehensiveness of his work imperceptibly, but palpably overlap, grow and perfect themselves with each movement of the pen” (Historija 50). Both Morrison and Andrić left their native villages, but they kept “bumping into” the memories and rememories of the corn on the cob and the Višegrad bridge. Morrison once stated in an interview that peasants do not write novels because they do not need them (Conversations 121). Both writers seem to be aware that, in order to write about the   168     collective memory of their communities, they themselves had to start writing from the place of loss – from the place where the corn on the cobb and the childhood bridge belong to the realm of memory. In his autobiographical essay “Paths,” Andrić situated the beginning of all his real and novelistic paths in life on the first path that he had ever undertaken in his native village of Višegrad: At the beginning of all roads and paths, at the basis of the very thought of them, lies sharply and indelibly carved the path on which I made my first free steps. It was in Višegrad, on those hard, irregular, like gnawed away roads, where all is dry and grievous, without beauty, without joy, without the hope of joy, without the right to hope, where a bitter morsel, which has never been eaten, quivers in the throat with every step, where heat and wind and snow and rain eat the ground and the seed in it, and everything that still sprouts and is born, gets stigmatized and bent and bowed so much that, only if it was possible, its other end would be stuck back into the ground, only to push it back into the shapelesness and darkness from which it broke away and sprouted. On those paths, that are swept by wind and soiled and cleansed by rain, where one meets only tormented cattle and silent, grim faced people, that is where I conceived my idea of the richness and beauty of the world. That is where I, ignorant and weak and empty-handed, discovered the fragrant, swooning happiness, happy for everything that wasn't there, cannot be there and never will be. And on all the roads and ways that I passed later in my life, I lived only on that poor happiness, on my Višegrad idea of the richness and beauty of the created world. Because, under all the worldly roads, there has always flowed, visible and palpable only to me, the sharp Višegrad path, from the day I left it, up to this day. Actually, I've used it to measure my step and adjust my walk. And all my life it has never left me. In the moments when I felt tired and poisoned by the world in which, by a bad coincidence, I lived and only miraculously stayed alive, when the sight grew dim and the direction turned uncertain, I would spread before me, like a prayer mat, the hard, poor, divine Višegrad path which cures every pain and nullifies every suffering, because it contains them all and surpasses them all. That way, a couple of times a day, using every calm in the life around me, every pause in a conversation, I would travel a part of that road which should never have been left in the first place. And that is how I will, till the end of my days, invisibly and   169     secretly, still manage to walk the destined length of the Višegrad path. And then, with the end of my life, it will also end. (Staze 15-16)111 In both writers, particular images from their childhoods led them to walk along the paths of their own memory, which were at the same time part of their communities’ collective memories, and which, in turn, through the writers’ oral-written literature, become our memories as well. The details – the bridge, the corn, the solitary youth on the Višegrad path – in their narrative become imbued with an epic power in which the particular becomes the universal. Ripping the Veil Morrison expressed how much reading slave narratives meant to her, but she added how she was always aware that they had been written with a purpose: to demonstrate to white people, and to all possible abolitionists, that black people should not be enslaved. As an academic, she knew that the slave’s interior life had been omitted from these narratives for the purposes of decorum. The slaves also abstained from describing the experiences that would be too shocking or too unpleasant to their readers: “Popular taste discouraged the writers from dwelling too long or too carefully on the more sordid details of the experience. Whenever there was an unusually violent incident, or a scatological one, or something ‘excessive,’ one finds the writer taking refuge in the literary conventions of the day,” using the phrases as ‘I am not about to harrow the feelings of my readers by a terrific representation of the untold horrors of that fearful system of oppression… It is not my purpose to descend deeply into the dark and noisome caverns of the hell of slavery’” (Site of Memory 90). Morrison thus concludes that it became her job to “rip that veil drawn over ‘proceedings too terrible to relate,’ adding                                                                                                                           111 Translated by Lazar Pascanovic.   170     that this is a task of every person belonging to any “marginalized category” that did not historically have a voice, for “we were seldom invited to participate in the discourse even when we were its topic” (91). Perhaps even more importantly, Morrison was aware of Weldon Johnson’s dilemma concerning the “double audience,” and she decided that, regardless of the fact that black people are a minority in her country, she would not write novels that would explain black people to white people (or portray them in an exclusively positive light, in view of the fact that they are still marked subjects).112 Morrison takes the “freedom” (which should not even be questionable) to think “black people” whenever she says “people”: “From my perspective, there are only black people. When I say “people,” that’s what I mean” (Conversations 124). By doing this, Morrison rejects others’ perceptions of black people, and turns them into unmarked, free subjects, at least within her narrative space (and regardless of their status in the story itself). In the Bridge on the Drina, the nineteenth-century Bosnia is passing from the Ottoman into the Austro-Hungarian hands, and the people of Višegrad discover this through a proclamation of the new government: “The freedom of the individual and the good of the community will be the guiding star of Our Government…” (219). Alihodja, an old man and the last member of an old Muslim family, listens to the proclamations, understanding everything and nothing: “the words could have been in a different language, he did not understand them, yet he understood them perfectly” (219). He knew what every other villager (and citizen of the Balkans) knew before having to hear or understand the words: that “somewhere far away in the world the dice had been thrown, the battles fought, and it was there that the fate of each one of the townsfolk was decided”                                                                                                                           112 “From my perspective, there are only black people. When I say ‘people,’ that’s what I mean.” Toni Morrison. Conversations. (124)   171     (227), and that the new governments came and left, speaking of “seed… stars… cares of the throne, lest they call things by their real name and speak what was the fact; that lands and provinces and, with them, living men and their habitations passed from one hand to another like small change; that a well-intentioned true-believing man could no longer find peace on this earth, no more than he could find the little he needed for this short life…” (220). Both the Balkan writer of a slave narrative Bartolomej Georgijević, as well as the African Oluadah Equiano, tried to make their narratives as objective and reserved as possible, in order to further their causes. But Morrison and Andrić ripped the veil, without sparing their readers of the descriptions of atrocities in all their somatic and psychological horror. In “Marked by Memory,” Marianne Hirsch notices that “strangely, however, much of the work on trauma and memory has been resistant to gender differentiation and has not been overtly informed by feminist thinking,” emphasizing how this elision is especially palpable in the case of mothers and daughters, with their traditionally caregiving roles (77). However, in Morrison and Andrić, that elision does not exist, as their novels and stories are replete with meaningful explorations of the role of women in communities that are already oppressed from the outside, as well as with somatic descriptions of female bodily trauma, so vivid that they are almost impossible to read without feeling one’s body tighten and cringe. “I had milk,” said Sethe to Paul D in Beloved, while rolling the dough with a wooden pin: “Anybody could smell me long before they saw me. And when he saw me he’d see the drops of it on the front of my dress” (19). “Men don’t know nothing much,” answered Paul D, adding that they still do know that a suckling cannot be away from its   172     mother for long (19). “Them they know what it’s like to send your children off when your breasts are full,” answers Sethe, and describes how “the boys took her milk”: “After I left you, those boys came in there and took my milk. That’s what they came in there for. Held me down and took it. I told Mrs. Garner on em. She had that lump and couldn’t speak but her eyes rolled out tears. Them boys found out I told on em. Schoolteacher made one open my back, and when it closed it made a tree. It grows there still.” “They used cowhide on you?” “And they took my milk.” “They beat you and you was pregnant?” “And they took my milk!” (19-20) We see here that Paul D is trying to divert the focus of the trauma from milk-taking to the flagellation. After all, one hurts more than the other – that is, it hurts more physically. However, Sethe’s incessant repetition of the phrase “they took my milk” points to a violation that is more than physical: by taking her milk, “the boys” ruptured the connection between the mother and the child - both psychologically and physically. In Bridge on the Drina, during the construction of the bridge, a story spreads that a fairy hinders the building, “destroying by night what had been built by day, until ‘something’ had whispered from the waters and counseled Rade the Mason to find two infant children, twins, brother and sister, named Stoja and Ostoja, and wall them into the central pier of he bridge” (16). Vezir’s men found such twins at a distant village, “still at breast,” and “took them away by force; but when they were taking them away, their mother would not be parted from them and, weeping and wailing, insensible to blows and to curses, stumbled after them as far as Višegrad itself, where she succeeded in forcing her way to Rade the Mason. The children were walled into the pier, for it could not be   173     otherwise, but Rade, they say, had pity on them and left openings in the pier through which the unhappy mother could feed her sacrificed children” (16). The event, of course, alludes to the blood levy, in which children were taken from their mothers, who would then follow those who took them by foot, and for miles on end. It also alludes to all the sacrifices made by the town’s women, and all the losses that they experienced, often in a much quieter, much less noticeable way. The legend of the bridge thus says that “the mother’s milk has flowed from those walls for hundreds of years. That is the thin white stream which, at certain times of year, flows from that faultless masonry and leaves an indelible mark on the stone. […] Men scrape those milky traces off the piers and sell them as medicinal powder to women who have no milk after giving birth” (16). In Andrić, therefore, it is men who take the children, men who wall the children into the bridge, and men who sell mothers’ nurturing milk back to women. In Andrić, the stones of the bridge are maybe imbued with the blood and sweat of men, but what holds the stones together is the milk of the mothers. The Višegrad Bridge with its beautiful eleven arches and the white “milk” stains of all the mothers who lost their children during its construction and the occupation of the city.   174     When Life is Dead When Sethe finds out that her husband witnessed the scene of the white boys taking her milk, “one sucking on my breast the other holding me down,” she feels that she cannot “add” her husband to the scene, but her brain “would go right ahead and take it and never say, No thank you. I don’t want to know or have to remember that” (83). When we meet the inhabitants of the house 124, “full of baby venom,” they are all “formally” free. Formally, for, everyone in that house - except for, perhaps, Denver - endured, witnessed, and lived through too much to be ever completely free. 124 is full of baby venom, and its inhabitants are imprisoned by the walls of their unbearable memories. “Anybody Baby Suggs knew, let alone loved, who hadn’t run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized” (28). Paul D has to keep all his memories and feelings enclosed in a tobacco tin on his chest. At one point, Denver realizes that Sethe’s greatest fear is that Beloved will realize that there is something worse even than “what it took to drag the teeth of that saw under the little chin,” “far worse” - the thing that Baby Suggs died of: “That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t think it up” (295). There is a commonplace notion that the body can be enslaved or tortured, but that the person being tortured can still find some solace and freedom in their thoughts. In Andrić and Morrison, such a duality of the body and mind is inexistent. Quite the contrary, it seems that the characters in their narratives are imprisoned by their thoughts and memories even when they are physically free. The common phrase “it’s just in your   175     head” would be meaningless in their worlds, for: isn’t there anything more important than what is “in our heads”? As in African and Slavic cosmologies, in Andrić and Morrison, the boundaries between the body and the mind are blurred. When the community and the individuals in it are torn apart, enslaved, and robbed of everything – there is no more freedom in language, or in thought. Nothing is abstract. Not even memory, which walks out of the water as a fully-dressed woman. Andrić’s Slave Girl walks out of the water as well: the narrator begins by telling the reader that this was a tale told to him by the waves, the sound of which reached him in Sarajevo: “The story was told to me not by the slave girl herself, but by the heavy and monotonous thudding of the southern sea waves, which break against the foundations of the ancient and dark citadel of Novi Grad. The sound reached me one night in my Sarajevo solitude; it woke me up from my first sleep and forced me to listen to its tale.”113 “The Slave Girl” is a story about the girl sold into slavery with other peasants, and taken into foreign lands, which she cannot recognize nor identify: “In a large cage were crammed five male slaves – all peasants, all past their prime – in another cage, smaller in size, was a beautiful, strong, well-built young girl” (212). The girl’s name is Jagoda [Strawberry], she is nineteen, and she is from the Bosnian village of Pribilivići. When one of the buyers comes to inspect her, the guards order her to spread her arms, show her teeth, after which the seller says: “Whoever buys this, mark my words, will never sell it again. And if he really wanted to sell, he could always get his money back with an additional ducat or two to boot. And as far as escaping is concerned, any slave                                                                                                                           113 Ivo Andrić. The Slave Girl and Other Stories About Women. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2009. p. 211.   176     can escape. But what’s the point of talking about it! Merchandise speaks for itself! It’s a real find!” (214) The Slave Girl remembers that there was a time in which her circumstances allowed her to divert her train of thought from the negative to the positive. But Andrić here shows us that there exists a kind of deprivation, uprooting, and disorientation in which there is no escape in thought: “She tried to think and with her thought to encompass her situation, to find a way out of it or, at least, to gauge the degree of its hopelessness. She tried, but in vain. She remembered that there had been a time when she could think about everything that was happening around her, not only about pleasant things, but also about such things as a lost kid, or some other damage done, about sickness or discord in the house or in the extended family. Even then she had not always been able to complete her thought or find a way out. Nevertheless she could think and seek a way out in her thoughts. But that was before that black day, before the disappearance of her village and of her family in it. And now she could not even think” (217). Morrison, in an interview, once said that, even before the liberation, slaves could not live without value: “They had prices, but no value in the white world, so they made their own, and they decided what was valuable. It was usually eleemosynary (charitable) [sic], usually something they were doing for somebody else. Nobody in the novel, no adult Black person, survives by self-regard, narcissism, selfishness. They took the sense of community for granted” (235). The only way to survive the enslavement was to find a new sense of community, which we witness throughout the narrative of Beloved - and especially at its end - when Denver manages to shake off the prison walls of memory and   177     starts rebuilding her life. However, Denver is a child of “postmemory,” and she has the privilege that Baby Suggs or Sethe do not have. Some of those before her could find the escape only in death or in insanity. In Andrić, there is nothing around the Slave Girl that could give her a redeeming gaze, nothing that would enable her to keep at least a fragment of her former self: Her village, the village of Pribilovići was no more. As soon as some thirty houses which constituted the village were burnt to the ground, at that very instant there arose in her soul of its own accord a new village of Pribilovići – black, heavy and dead. And now it lay in her chest and prevented her from taking a deep breath, and the people of Pribilovići, her people, those of them who had not been killed, became slaves and were dispersed all over the world. She herself was a slave, and nothing but a slave. This was the way of her life now. This was the only way she could see the world and people around her, because the image of the world within her had gone dark and become distorted. Every man was a slave. Slaves were women and children because from birth to death they lived enslaved by something or someone. Every tree was a slave, every stone, and the sky with its clouds, its sun and its stars were slaves. Water, forest and wheat, which somewhere – somewhere where it had not been burned or trampled into the ground – must be forming ears now, were slaves. […] The speech with which people around her communicated was the speech of slaves, regardless of in which language they spoke, and all of it could be reduced to five letters: slave. Every life was slavery, the one which was eking out of its duration and the one which, invisible and inaudible, was just beginning to germinate. Man’s dreams were slaves, so were his sighs, the mouthfuls he ate, the tears he shed, the thoughts he thought were slaves. Men were born in order to be enslaved by a life of slavery and they died as slaves to sickness and death. There was nothing but slaves slaving away in service to other slaves. Because slave was not only he who was sold, all trussed up, in the marketplace; slave was also he who sold and he who bought a slave. Yes, everyone who did not live and breathe in Pribilovići was a slave. And Pribilovići had ceased to exist a long time ago. (217-218) Here, Andrić is not trying to level all suffering, or say that the enslavers are also enslaved by their own vicious acts. He is simply showing that the girl’s trauma is so profound, and that nothing of her former life is left, to the point that everything seems swallowed up, encompassed by this new condition in which she finds herself. There is nothing around her or within her. Only the cage. Here, we see that there are circumstances in which there   178     exists no comfort in thought, and in which the body and the mind are broken to the point where even resilience is gone, and the only exit is found in insanity or death: “Well then, let her not exist either! That was the only remedy, the shortest way to salvation: to renounce life for the sake of life” (218). To renounce life for the sake of life: is there a better way to describe what Sethe did when she killed her child? Her Beloved? In Sethe’s case, even Paul D could not understand: “You got two feet, Sethe, not four” (194). But, no animal would be pushed to a place in which life is not recognizable as life anymore, and where they have to destroy what they love the most “for the sake of life.” In the world in which every moral compass is gone, Sethe’s murder of her child is paradoxically not a beastly, but a human (if not humane) act. The Slave Girl tries to think, but “she realized that her weak and erratic thought could do nothing. It could not break the lock on her cage, much less destroy the sight, the blood, the hot breath within her…” (219). There is no escape. And her entire world, everyone and everything she knew and loved is gone: “One should not look. One should not breathe. To breathe would be the same as to remember, and that would mean that one was seeing not what one was looking at, but what one had seen in the light of the conflagration, in the whirlwind of the massacre. It would mean to know one thing: that none of one’s kith and kin was living; that one’s life was something monstrous, a curse, a disgrace. That was what breathing would mean” (220). The captivity of her thought is stronger than her senses: “mind over body” - the state that is so often seen as positive - here becomes a negative thing, a thing unbearable, a state in which the girl’s eyes are seeing the inside of her mind, and not what is in front of them. The Slave Girl cannot escape the involuntary, oppressive thoughts of the enslaved body, and presses her head   179     between the bars of the cage in order to die, to free her mind, when she cannot free the body: “The beautiful slave girl was hanging low, with her head clamped between the bars” (223). And it is precisely Paul D from Beloved who should understand Sethe, who murdered her child, and the Slave Girl, who committed suicide, as well as Baby Suggs, who permanently suffered from the lack of color, or - the lack of nuances of life, the lack of a range of human experiences - which would not be limited only to black and white. For, it is precisely Paul D who gives the most eloquent and concise description of what it means to exist in that colorless world, in which even love becomes too dangerous, and in which everything that was once human has to be locked up in a tin box on one’s chest: “Life was dead” (129) “The Language Must not Sweat” Is Beloved Sethe’s dead baby? Or a ghost of the 60 million slaves who died while crossing the Atlantic? Or is she the embodied memory? What is the mark on Sethe’s back? Is it “a chokecherry tree,” as described by the white girl, Amy? “See, here’s the trunk – it’s red and split wide open, full of sap, and this here’s the parting for the branches. You got a mighty lot of branches. Leaves, too, look like, and dern if these ain’t blossoms. Tiny little cherry blossoms, just as white. Your back got a whole tree on it” (93). Or is Paul D right, when he thinks that it is just a “revolting clump of scars,” “nothing like any tree he knew because trees were inviting; things you could trust and be near…” (25)? And how much do the answers to those questions change the meaning(s) of the story?   180     In The Bridge on the Drina, mothers’ milk flows from the crevices between the stones of the bridge. Overnight, fairies destroy what is built during the day. In Beloved, a fully dressed woman walks out of the water. In Andrić’s story Jelena, the Woman That is Not, the narrator tells us that this inexistent woman, whom he calls “an illusion” only for our sake, is actually “his biggest reality”: “Her existence: I call it an illusion for the sake of you to whom I am telling this, for me it would be both ridiculous and insulting to call my greatest reality by that name, which in fact means nothing” (506). The word illusion means nothing, because for Andrić, and for Morrison, illusions are real. Both Andrić and Morrison proclaimed themselves as realists, and rejected any label that would qualify the realism of their writing. “The thing about surrealism that I don’t like is the sur,” writes Andrić in his notebook (Sveske 84). When Christina Davis asks Morrison why she dislikes it when her books are categorized as “magic realism,” Morrison answers that she sees magic realism, especially the magic realism wrote by Latin American men, as a way “of not talking about the politics. It was a way of not talking about what was in the books. If you could apply the word ‘magical’ then that dilutes the realism but it seemed legitimate because there were these supernatural and unrealistic things, surreal things, going on in the text” (226).114 I would argue that Morrison feels uncomfortable with the term “magic(al) realism,” because of the implication that a magic realist narrative carries two different narrative planes, or two different sets of concepts: one magic, less real, illusory, and another real, believable, true. As Morrison says: “I grew up in a house in which people talked about their dreams with                                                                                                                           114  This is a controversial statement, and I do not quite agree with Morrison concerning the lack of politics in Latin-American magic realism; however, I understand her stance, as her poetics departs from the poetics of magic realism.     181     the same authority that they talked about what ‘really’ happened. They had visitations and did not find that fact shocking and they had some sweet, intimate connection with things that were not empirically verifiable” (226). Thus, the “magic” in Morrison’s books exists on the same plane as reality – it is reality – and there is no need to distinguish it from “pure realism.” If ghosts and dreams are everyday occurrences, there is no need to label them as “magic.” Applying the term “magical” to them amounts to forcing a different worldview on the writer’s work (and the community about which they are writing). And who could claim that this worldview is in any way more fantastic, or less rational, than the worldview held by the slaveholders in Beloved? As Andrić puts it in his notebooks: “All beliefs, all outlooks on life and all ideologies that expand widely and quickly create a sort of reality, which exists side by side with the material reality…” (Sveske 91). This conception is not only African-American and Balkan; it is also widespread in the Caribbean and Africa. Thus, Solomon O. Iyasere writes that there is a fundamental difference between the Western and African concept about death and “magic”: “in the African conception, the “dead” still return to interact with the living and make themselves symbolically visible. Thus, the dead are often referred to as ‘living.’”115 (This conception of the dead who are not really dead because the memory of them makes them materially present around the living is also omnipresent in the Slavic world and well depicted in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Solaris, inspired by the Polish writer’s Stanislaw Lem’s story, in which peoples’ memories materialize, and the dead “return” to live amongst the alive.)                                                                                                                           115 Solomon O. Iyasere. “Oral Tradition in the Criticism of African Literature.” The Journal of Modern African Studies. Vol. 13, No. 1. Mar., 1975. p. 117.   182     This idea of “truth,” and especially of the monolithic, rational truth, often complicated Western scholars’ research of African and South Slavic oral poetries. In the essay “The Impact of Vuk Karadžić on the tradition: the importance of Homer,” Albert B. Lord clarifies that the basic distinction between traditional oral narrative poetry in the South Slav tradition (often researched primarily for the clarification of Homer) and written narrative is that - in oral narrative - what is reproduced is the story, while the ways in which the story is told, as well as its interpretations and reinterpretations, are (re)created in every performance (The Uses 13-14). Both the stories of griots and of guslari do not have the structure of a novelistic story, in which the reader is surprised by the turns of the plot, but are a part of the collective history, familiar to all the listeners. The joy that the listeners of epic oral poems experience is the pleasure of hearing in which way, and with which details, a particular oral poet will render the story that they already know. The pleasure of oral poetry is of a different quality; it is more “aural,” more sensitive to sound, because it relies not on surprises and events in the plot, but on the enjoyment in the poet’s language. When LeClair asked Morrison what she thinks is special about her fiction, Morrison answered: “The language, only the language. The language must be careful and must appear effortless. It must not sweat. It must suggest and be provocative at the same time. It is the thing that black people love so much – the saying of words, holding them on the tongue, experimenting with them, playing with them. It’s a love, a passion” (123). “Language is the life of the people, conscious and subconscious, visible and hidden. Beyond life, there exists only a dead silence. There is no word that is not connected to life, as there is no plant without the soil that’s feeding it. That means that one needs to be   183     close to people, listen to their speech, immerse oneself into it, reflect on it, live with it as with a brother. And only then can we achieve what we should; that is, to tell our new artistic truth to the people in their own familiar language,” writes Andrić (64). In both Beloved and The Bridge, different interpretations of the same story coexist in peace. Andrić’s and Morrison’s narratives are generally defiant in the face of any strict dualities: the body is not separable from the mind, the magic is as real as reality, and language is the locus of both politics and beauty. Rivers and Bridges: Stories to Pass On It is not a story to pass on. This sentence, heavy in meaning, is repeated over and over on the last two pages of Beloved. However, it is clear that it is meaningful, but less clear what its meaning is. It is not a story to pass on: it is not a story that we should ever omit or forget. It is not a story to pass on: it is not a story that we should repeat and retell. It is not a story to pass on, the narrator says after she told us the story, defying her own message, or telling us that this is the story that should never happen again. In “The Uses of Tradition,” Svetozar Koljević writes that “the formulas [of the oral epic singing] are only the standard inflections of the poetic voice of a conquered and unconquerable people who dream in slavery of their lost greatness and sense the dawn of approaching freedom” (27). He wrote this about South Slavs, but he could have easily applied it to the poetic voice of African griots as well. “The word bridge is crucial to Morrison’s world view,” writes Claudine Raynaud in “Beloved or the shifting shapes of memory” (Cambridge 56). “The gap between Africa and Afro-America and the gap between the past and the present does not exist. It’s   184     bridged for us by our assuming responsibility for people no one’s ever assumed responsibility for,” said Morrison (Conversations 247). “Of all the things created and built by humankind as a part of life’s effort, nothing in my mind is better or worthier than bridges. They are more important than houses, more sacred, and more universal than temples. […] They are all essentially one; they are equally worthy of our attention, because they show the place where humankind encountered an obstacle and did not stop before it, but overcame it and bridged it the way humankind could, according to its understanding, taste, and circumstances. Thus, everywhere in the world, wherever my thoughts wander or stop, they encounter faithful and silent bridges like an eternal and ever insatiable human desire, to connect, to reconcile, and to join everything that challenges our spirit, eyes and feet, to stop division, contradiction, or parting,” writes Andrić (Staze 12-13). In an interview, Christina Davis asks Toni Morrison how she perceives the connection between black people living in different countries, on different continents, and in different linguistic spaces. Morrison first acknowledges the big differences between them, which, she says, she finds even “more interesting than the similarities” (228). However, she adds: “The major thing that binds us – there may be others because I don’t dwell on it that much – is the clear identification of what the enemy forces are, not this person or that person and so on, but the acknowledgment of a way of life dreamed up for us by some other people who are at the moment in power, and knowing the ways in which it can be subverted. That is a connection” (229). In a private notebook, Andrić wrote: “The West. When you say for us that we are cultured people, you want to say that we are acquainted with your art, and that we   185     comprehend all its depths and details. But what does that concretely mean for us? It means that we should live in your dreams - because of any others you are ignorant, nor do you acknowledge them - but stay in our lives, because they are the only lives we have; or to express this better and more clearly: it means that we are searching for a refuge in other people's dreams, where we could hide from our piteous, harsh and often inhumane life, instead of battling with it and changing it through work and strife” (64). The acknowledgment of a way of life dreamed up for us by some other people who are at the moment in power, and knowing the ways in which it can be subverted. We should live in your dreams - because of any others you are ignorant, nor do you acknowledge them - but stay in our lives, because they are the only lives we have. On some deeper level, the communal narrative voices that have sprung from collective oral poetry, written by a Balkan male from Bosnia and by an African-American woman from Ohio, blend and merge in their messages, defying yet another duality. Andrić's and Morrison’s poetics is aural; it evolved from the oral poetry of their peoples, and retains its characteristics: the attention to detail, the predilection for the concrete, the realism that includes “magic,” the favoring of memory (the meaning of the past as it is remembered by the community) over historicity (the accuracy of historical facts), the “conflicting” interpretations that coexist with no conflict, the erasure of dualities (as the duality of body and mind), the communal narrative voice that is neither omniscient nor subjective, and the special attention to language - particularly in its everyday form. “You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. ‘Floods’ is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it   186     used to be,” says Morrison (99). “All the rivers of this world are skewed; they will never be straightened, but we should never stop trying to straighten them,” wrote Andrić in his notebooks. It is not a story to pass on. And, again, this sentence as well erases the duality of either/or. It is both a story/memory that should be forgotten - in the version in which it happened, and in which it was told – and a story/memory that should be passed on to someone else, who will tell it differently. So that each generation of storytellers and guardians of collective memory can straighten out some part of the river, without ever preventing it to remember its former flow.   187     CHAPTER 5 Conclusion and “Connective Histories”116 People are always shouting that they want to create a better future. It’s not true. The future is an apathetic void of no interest to anyone. The past is full of life, eager to irritate us, provoke and insult us, tempt us to destroy or repaint it. The only reason people want to be masters of the future is to change the past.117 Chronologically, the study of Andrić and Morrison should have preceded the study of the contemporary works of Balkan and black fiction that ironize or suffer from the problems of double consciousness and/or double audience. However, I wanted to end with two writers that, I would argue, paved the way for many others that have taken their paths (more so in the Caribbean, Africa and America, and less so in the Balkans, which have not yet fully recovered from the most recent 1991-1995 war and an economically and socially devastating transition). For, whether the Swedish Academy for the Nobel Prize, its committee, and readers of The Bridge and Beloved truly understand more about Morrison’s and Andrić's peoples after reading their works – as they claim they do - matters, but it is by no means crucial. What is crucial is that both Morrison and Andrić were not writing to be linguistically or culturally “translated,” as they are both widely read and beloved by readers whose communities (or those communities’ pasts) are described in these writers’ novels. Importantly, they also did not shy away from confronting what is perceived as the “hybrid” nature of their communities and, consequently, narratives. Hybrid, because Andrić’s works are described as “rooted in                                                                                                                           116  A phrase coined by Marianne Hirsch in her book on Postmemory. 117 Milan Kundera. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. New York: Harper Perennial, 1999. p. 30.   188     Bosnia, in this otherwise obscure corner of Europe, meeting place of East and West, where for so long the Ottoman Empire confronted the Habsburg monarchy.”118 Andrić's novels, thus, are perceived as a “positive fusion” (Hawkesworth 1). Morrison’s work is both African and American: in its orality, in its acceptance of magic and of the dead as parts of the material world, as well as in its communal voice. The recovery of all the roots of their peoples’ identities is a crucial foundation for the building of integral identities, which are not just hybrid forces – not just a mixture of Oriental and Austrian, or of African and American. Due to their histories, Balkan, African-American, African and Caribbean identities carry a duality (or a plurality), but once the work of recovery of the parts that might have been buried takes place, those identities should not be read as “hybrid,” if hybridity in any sense implies a split, a rupture, or an irreconcilability. Balkan, African-American, African and Caribbean identities are complex, because their histories are complex (and their histories did involve ruptures), but all those complexities and ruptures are now parts of the autonomous identities, which, despite those complexities, have to be seen - not as half-this and half-that - but as wholes. Andrić and Morrison write about slavery from Balkan and African-American perspectives. We could ask how those experiences differ from the Caribbean and African perspective, and in which ways they can even be compared. The story of the slaves in the Caribbean could be compared to the story of the slaves in Beloved, but we would have to add a strong influence of European colonization as a factor. The effects of slavery in the Balkans are more similar to the effects of slavery in Africa (especially East Africa).                                                                                                                           118  Celia Hawkesworth: Ivo Andrić: Bridge Between East and West. London: The Athlone Press, 1984. p. 1.   189     In her important book Metaphor and the Slave Trade in West African Literature, Laura T. Murphy writes about the less discussed effects of slavery on Africa. She quotes the historian Patrick Manning, who notes that “the tragic experience of slavery in the modern world left Africans depleted in population, divided irremediably amongst themselves, retarded economically, and despised as an inferior race in a world which had built a vision of racial hierarchy based on the inspiration of their enslavement” (2). The same is true for the Balkans. During my research, I found it striking that the effects of slavery on the territories wherefrom the slaves were taken are so rarely discussed. For, we simply cannot assume that millions of people could have been taken from their homelands, hometowns and families, and that this absence would not have left scars and wounds in the psychological, emotional, political and economic life of the populations that experienced this loss. Thus, Murphy quotes the poet and scholar Kwadwo Opoku- Agyemang saying: “What of the land and the survivors [of the slave trade who were] left behind, the places and people so savaged? […] Tragic as the fate of all these victims is, perhaps the most horrendous experience of the victim society belonged to a group hardly mentioned in the literature: the damned who survived, those deprived relatives of the captured African” (170). These comparisons, of course, are not “competitions in suffering;” they are “connective histories,” which is a phrase Marianne Hirsch coined in order to avoid, as she says, “putting traumas into competition” (21). However, it is important to acknowledge that the first-generation slaves in Beloved were beloved on the other side of the ocean as well. To acknowledge that there were millions on the African East shore and in the Balkans who did not leave a trace, as the nature of slavery in the East prompted the slave owners to prevent slaves from reproducing. Andrić had to invent   190     the Slave Girl, because she does not have a descendant who would do the crucial work of imagining her past: I say crucial, because the story needs to be passed on, so that it would never happen again. Murphy claims that West African literature has metaphors that are “evidence of the way people remember things they would rather forget” (7). People in Africa living with the memories that they would rather forget, but are unable to do so. Exactly like Paul D. Like Sethe. Like the townspeople around the bridge in Višegrad. In the Caribbean and in America, it is impossible to forget. In the Balkans and Africa, one can try, but those attempts prove to be only detrimental. The wounds left by those that are absent are real; it is no wonder that in African and Balkan poetics and cosmogonies, the dead and the missing walk on the same existential plane as the living. They are not even ghosts as much as they are eternally absent. Criticism and Theory for and by the Marked Subjects: New Connections In his article written in 1975, the scholar Solomon Iyasere emphasizes how important it is to develop the skills to read, in this case, African literature not just through the Western Eurocentric lens: “any criticism of the literature must be significantly responsive to the unique methods the writers use to give form and patterns to their experiences” (108). He particularly stresses the inadequacy of “the disinterested contemplation of the aesthetic features of a work,” considering it “too limited and restrictive when applied to the evaluation of African fiction” (108). He mentions the importance of understanding the features of African art (which also, I would argue, “bleed” into African-American and Afro-Caribbean art): the conception of time, the orality, the everyday “magic.” “For the traditional African, events define time rather than time define events. In the western tradition 8 a. m. signals morning or breakfast, so that   191     the time establishes the occurrence of the event. In Africa, the reverse is the case – events determine time, and without them there is no time. No traditional African would say, ‘It is eight o’clock and nothing happened,’” writes Iyasere (116). On the other hand, Hawkesworth writes that, in Andrić’s Bridge on the Drina, “life in the community, as in the life of the individual, the passing of time cannot be measured strictly chronologically. Some periods of time pass more slowly or more rapidly than others; some appear longer because they are more filled with important events or changes; others count as nothing, for they contain no events by which to measure their passing” (my emphasis 125). It should come as no surprise that Petar Guberina knew how to read Aimé Césaire’s poem. In 1981, one of Petar Guberina’s students, to whom he imparted his love of black literature, languages and cultures, Biserka Cvjetičanin, wrote a book (in Croatian) titled African Reality and the Novel. In this book, she gave a critical and theoretical overview of the African novel with a lot of sensitivity towards the African style, as well as towards the (post)colonial worlds in which these novels were written. Her reading of the novels is not evaluative, but descriptive. This is especially conspicuous in the passages in which she, for example, discusses Senghor’s controversial essay “What the Black Man Contributes.” Namely, in this essay, Senghor describes the “black man” in a “Herderian,” romanticist manner, and connects him to the emotion and mysticism. Cvjetičanin acknowledges that this essay is controversial, but she by no means sees these claims as negative (or, for that matter, positive). This openness to see Senghor’s statements as just another description of cultural characteristics made me ask the following questions: If we were to understand Senghor’s claims as belonging to the historicist and constructivist traditions (and not to the theories of essentialist cores of blackness), why would we be   192     upset over his claims about emotions? Why would we accept a hierarchical structure in which emotion is inferior to ratio? As Paget Henry writes in Caliban’s Reason, slavery “produced the discursive transformation of the African into the absolute antithesis of the European. […] Whatever Africans were before, they could no longer be the same after their insertion into this particular historical conjuncture. Whatever black meant before, Africans were now black ‘in relation to the white man.’”119 Without going so far as to claim that there was no dualism in Africa and in the Balkans before the colonization, I would say that there are elements of African and Balkan cosmogonies and philosophies that point to the possibility that their identities (and worldviews) were not built on dualist, structuralist foundations. And, if that is the case, the remnants of that worldview are still present in their literatures and cultures. To return to Guberina’s student’s book on the African novel, the most interesting part of it is arguably the appendix, in which she says: Culture is the locus where a differentia specifica of the people is manifested most clearly, but it is also the bridge that connects people and ethnicities. Today, all cultures are encouraged towards mutual exchange, and we can get connected to Africa precisely through communication, through that «power of the Word» that artistically expresses contemporary African world and traditions. (147) However, she deplores the fact that the liminality of the Balkans, and its precarious position in relation to Western Europe, “has always forced us – or at least we believed so – to gravitate towards European centers of culture, to get inspired by and ‘aim’ towards the Francophone and Anglophone cultures.” She then adds: “Even if that is not surprising, we cannot forget that we very well know what the desire for authenticity is, and that our peoples have been making big efforts for a long time to be given the right to their cultural identity. Africa – which we met through Europe – was ‘an abstraction,                                                                                                                           119  Paget Henry. Caliban’s Reason. New York: Routledge, 2000. p. 55.   193     exoticism and the unknown,’ but it is precisely our position and our cultural tradition that have given us a strong enticement for the unmitigated discovery of the new and unknown civilizations” (my emphasis 147). She, thus, calls for an approach to African literature that would be more direct, less “mediated” by Western Europe: It seems that we are not approaching African literature in complete freedom: it is almost as if we were searching for something exotic, or some unusual mythologies, instead of just showing our openness to the creativity itself and building our own views on African literature and culture. Because therein lies the question of the new cultural consciousness formed around others and us. To which extent the translated novels will present an encouragement for this kind of a dialogue of our culture and literature with those of Africa, and how much enrichment it will bring to us all - only the future can tell. (153) By no means would I ever wish to claim that only critics from the territories with the similar histories, similar sets of stereotypes ascribed to them, or similar poetics, are capable of reading or theorizing black and Balkan poems and novels. The vilification of the Western white “unmarked” (Christian, male, heterosexual, normative) subject has become somewhat of a tired trope in postcolonial theory and criticism. In this study, I have been “guilty” of using those kinds of postcolonial methods myself, but only because I deemed it was crucial to establish the links and similarities between balkanness and blackness, Africans, Afro- Caribbeans, African-Americans and the Balkan peoples, since the four (or two) groups have never before been systematically compared. But the aim of a project of this kind should never be limited to the chastising of the colonizer, as well as the ignorant Western writer, or the ignorant Western critic, who do not understand the postcolonial subjects and worlds. For, that is also an oversimplification, and, moreover, it does not serve much purpose. What I do wish to call for are more readings of “world” literature – in this case black and Balkan – that do not necessarily first “pass through” the Western filter, or Western and Eurocentric readings of this literature’s content (and   194     form). For example, there seems to be one moment in Morrison’s Beloved that creates an interpretative obstacle for Western critics: namely, the moments of sexual intimacy (or perhaps even love-making) between Paul D and Beloved. That love-making seems so incongruous, bizarre, and completely out of place in the novel about the horrors of slavery that critics do not know what to make of it. However, I would say that a Balkan reader - if I can imagine such a generalized entity - would be less inclined to be so puzzled by it, because a part of this reader’s culture is the knowledge that even in the midst of wars and public disasters, everyday intimacies and pleasures of private life still continue (both those that are morally reprehensible, as those that are perfectly acceptable). Without the love-making in the cornfield during slavery, and without the sexual encounters between Paul D and Beloved, Morrison’s novel would perhaps be a less “human” or true portrayal of slavery and its aftermath, than it is with those “incongruous” moments. The “banality of evil,” as I said, is accompanied by moments of the banality of suffering. In Home and Exile, Achebe says: “The last time around W. E. B. Du Bois had held high hopes for the twentieth century on the matter of race. Mindful of that, alas, unfinished business, my hope for the twenty-first is that it will see the first fruits of the balance of stories among the world’s peoples. The twentieth century for all its many faults did witness a significant beginning, in Africa and elsewhere in the so-called Third World, of the process of ‘re-storying’ peoples who had been knocked silent by the trauma of all kinds of dispossession. I was lucky to be present at one theater of that reclamation. And I know that such a tremendously potent and complex reinvention of self-calling, as it must do, on every faculty of mind and soul and spirit; drawing as it must, from every   195     resource of memory and imagination and from a familiarity with our history, our arts and our culture; but also from an unflinching consciousness of the flaws that blemished our inheritance – such an enterprise could not be expected to be easy. And it has not been” (80). In the same text, Achebe also says that he has a message for any writer who is working “in the remote provinces of the world,” while contemplating moving to London or New York: “Don’t trouble to bring your message in person. Write it where you are, take it down that little dusty road to the village post office and send it!” (my emphasis 97) I will glance over the scene of “the little dusty road” that Achebe imagines - the scene that points to the uncomfortable truth that global “places of fantasy” are still predominantly London or New York, and not Nigeria or Sarajevo. I will just add that it would be preferable if those writers could also send their works from Nigeria to Sarajevo, or from Sarajevo to Nigeria. This idea is less utopian and idealistic than it probably seems. Petar Guberina and Aimé Césaire met in a Western “place of fantasy,” Paris, but Guberina was then able to found the Institute of African Studies in his homeland, where ex-Yugoslavs could learn about Africa through their own lens. “Perhaps what I write is applied art as distinct from pure. But who cares? Art is important, but so is education of the kind I have in mind. And I don’t see that the two need to be mutually exclusive,” writes Achebe in Hopes and Impediments (45). He calls his art “applied,” pointing to the fact that its political or social message matters to him as much as its aesthetic beauty. There is no duality here, no either/or; Achebe accepts his African form of hybridity or creoleness (if we here take creoleness not as a fragmented, but as a full, whole identity created out of the elements that were at some point considered disparate or incongruous): “I can see no situation in which I will be presented   196     with a Draconic choice between reading books and watching movies; or between English and Igbo. For me, no either/or; I insist on both. Which, you might say, makes my life rather difficult and even a little untidy. But I prefer it that way” (61). Fran Mažuranić was a Croat, born in 1859, who left Croatia (then a part of Austro-Hungary) because he could not bear the colonizers’ oppression. At some point in his life he found himself fighting against the colonizers in Africa. As Guberina’s predecessor, he left observations on his life in Africa, and a story from the Balkan oral tradition, which centers on the acceptance of a pluralistic world, in which dualities melt, and present us with a refusal of an either/or. I find the story particularly interesting, as it arguably reflects an earlier Slavic (pagan) cosmogony and view of the world, and since it lovingly presents coexistence of more than one monotheistic religion as part of one person’s religious views: My late father used to tell this Bosnian story: An old woman arrived to the village. No one knew what her religion was. She went both to the church and the mosque, she listened both to priests and imams, and equally helped Christians and Muslims. When she was on her deathbed, her neighbors asked: “Granny, tell us in which religion you believe, so that we know where to bury you.” “Oh, my sisters and brothers, find the spot that’s midway between the Christian and the Muslim cemetery, and bury me right in the center. Who knows what’s better in the other world...”120 The possibility of having a Mažuranić or a Guberina read an Achebe or a Césaire can perhaps lead us to new methodologies of reading “Third World,” or racially and ethnically marked texts. As I indicated in the introduction, it seems to me that history and poetics would intertwine in these readings in ways that will surpass all binaries or dualities, and perhaps even lead to new, innovative elements of textual and literary interpretation.                                                                                                                           120 Fran Mažuranić. Lišće i druga prozna djela. Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska, 1966. p. 184.   197     In her book of literary criticism Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison writes: “My work requires me to think about how free I can be as an African-American woman writer in my genderized, sexualized, wholly racialized world.”121 And she carved that space of freedom in her novels. She also writes: “Certainly no American text of the sort I am discussing [that does have African characters] was ever written for black people – no more than Uncle Tom’s Cabin was written for Uncle Tom to read and be persuaded by. As a writer reading, I came to realize the obvious: the subject of the dream is the dreamer” (16-17). But, now, the dreamees have also been the dreamers, and the Balkans need to learn that from African-Americans, the Caribbeans and Africans. (Contemporary texts from the Balkans show that they are, unfortunately, in a phase of extreme interiorized inferiority. This is perhaps a consequence of the fairly recent wars, and of the corrupted economic and political life, which plagues many post-transitional countries.) In In the Name of Identity, Amin Maalouf writes that “it is often the way we look at other people that imprisons them within their own narrowest allegiances. And it is also the way we look at them that may set them free.”122 However, it is not always necessary to wait for others to free you. You can help them by partially freeing yourself. As Barnabé, Chamoiseau and Confiant write in In Praise of Creoleness: “Creoleness is our primitive soup and our continuation, our primeval chaos and our mangrove swamp of virtualities. We bend toward it, enriched by all kinds of mistakes and confident of the necessity of accepting ourselves as complex: For complexity is the very principle of our                                                                                                                           121 Toni Morrison. Playing in the Dark. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992. p. 5. 122 Amin Maalouf. In the Name of Identity. New York: Penguin, 2000. p. 22.   198     identity.” [my emphasis]123 As Césaire said it before them: “I accept, I accept it all” (Notebook 125). As Langston Hughes wrote - “Bring me all of your dreams. You dreamers” - in his Weary Blues (76). But, no one has perhaps subverted the dreams that others might have of her, as well as imposed her own dream upon the rest of the dreamers, as Zora Neale Hurston in her famous essay “How it Feels to be Colored Me”: I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. 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