Nonaligned Literature (Part 1)

Yugoslavia cultivated extensive literary connections and networks with its nonaligned friends. Most importantly, writers from Yugoslavia (journalists, diplomats, culture workers, artists, scholars) traveled to nonaligned countries and brought back accounts of their observations and experiences. Part 1 of 2.

With Iva Kosmos and Nebojša Djordjević.

Listen: “Nonaligned Literature (Part 1)” (Episode #122)

Bonus Extras: “Nonaligned Literature (Part 1)” (Episode #122)

Extended, ad-free version of “Nonaligned Literature (Part 1)” (Episode #122).

Transcript: “Nonaligned Literature (Part 1)” (Episode #122)

PETER KORCHNAK: This episode of Remembering Yugoslavia is brought to you by Yugoblok, a member-supported global community and resource hub for all who remember Yugoslavia. Through membership contributions, Yugoblok members make this podcast (and a whole lot more) accessible and freely available to all. Members can also listen to the extended episode, as well as all past extended and bonus episodes.

Visit Yugoblok.com to explore and join today. 

[JINGLE]

PETER KORCHNAK: This is Remembering Yugoslavia, a Yugoblok show exploring the memory of a country that no longer exists. I’m your guide, Peter Korchnak.

In the series on the Nonaligned Movement earlier this year I looked at various facets of Yugoslavia’s nonalignment: history, support for liberation movements, economics, arts and culture, student exchanges, as well as the limits of the policy. As extensive as the series was, it left quite a bit on the table. The part about culture specifically focussed on visual arts, which of course was but one part of Yugoslavia’s cultural production. 

Today and in the next episode we’ll talk about literature and literary connections and networks that Yugoslavia cultivated within the Nonaligned Movement.

We’ll start with my favorite literary genre, travelogues. Back in Episode 51, “Balkan Travel Writers,” I looked at authors from the region traveling to the West and the East and writing about it. 

In this episode we’re going to zoom in on the context of nonalignment: writers from Yugoslavia traveling to nonaligned countries and bringing back accounts of their observations and experiences. 

As always, the extended episode, available to Yugoblok members, has extra analysis and stories.

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: In the beginning, there was Tito. 

When talking about Yugoslav travel writing, we must mention the precursors or perhaps a foundational form of the genre. 

Tito traveled to the Global South extensively, beginning with his trip to Burma and India in 1954. In all he made 169 official visits to 92 countries; many of these visits were part of long journeys aboard the ship Galeb (Seagull).

The goal of these extensive trips, writes Nataša Kovačević in Nonaligned Imagination: Yugoslavia, the Global South and Literary Solidarities Beyond the Cold War Blocs, was to “establish or expand diplomatic relations…as well as to gather firsthand information” that was missing from Western sources and that would complement information gathered by Yugoslavia’s lower-level representatives. Travel for Tito was quote “a path both to countercolonial knowledge and to international relations of socialist equality and coexistence.” Importantly, Tito traveled, quote “not for profit but for the sake of posterity.” 

To prepare him for the trips, a research team compiled “travel guides” with information about each country’s internal and external affairs. Of course, these reports pretty much had an audience of one.

When it comes to published sources targeting the reading Yugoslav public, there are two things to know at the outset. As with all travel writing from the former Yugoslavia or perhaps even the entire Central and Eastern Europe, published nonaligned travelogues are generally under-researched, under-anthologized, and under-translated. 

And it’s also important to note that the genre isn’t unique to Yugoslavia; other socialist countries produced similar works.

IVA KOSMOS: It is, of course, part of the wider phenomena of so-called Second World meeting the Third World.

PETER KORCHNAK: Iva Kosmos is a former journalist and current researcher at the Institute of Culture and Memory Studies at the Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences. Her core interest is travel writing; she wrote her dissertation on post-Yugoslav travel writing and is currently working on a research project at the University of Zagreb, funded by the European Union, on socialist Yugoslav travel writing about the Third World.

What was special about Yugoslavs going to the Third World, in various capacities, and writing accounts of their travels, was their approach. 

IVA KOSMOS: Every time when they go there they say, do we have [the] right to go there and write about these countries? What do we know about them? How can form new types of knowledge without reproducing these western stereotypes? On the one hand, we are aware of these western stereotypes. On the other hand, we don’t know how to form a new type of knowledge because we don’t have the background. So what do we do now?

PETER KORCHNAK: Well, we educate ourselves.

IVA KOSMOS: A really nice example for this is this travelogue by Jože Ciuha, Okameneli smehljaj.

PETER KORCHNAK: Ciuha was a Slovenian painter, illustrator, and poet. Okameneli smehljaj, or Petrified Smile, was published in 1963.

IVA KOSMOS: It is his diary, and the diary covers two years. Years that he spends mostly in Burma. He also makes a three-months trip to Indonesia, to Thailand, and Cambodia. 

And he’s able to a certain degree to break these cultural maps that he encounters. He offers this more nuanced, complex approach to the very stereotypical images of Asia, you know, underdevelopment, illiterate people, poverty, dirtiness, smells…

But then he starts traveling. And when he’s travel [to] other states, Indonesia, Thailand, Kambodia, he does not have material conditions to stay and learn. He spent one month or three weeks there, and it is so fascinating to observe how in the same travel writing book, he flips back to these cultural mentalities. So he then encounters people, and just out of the blue, they’re, you know, representative of passive and fatalistic and meditative East, and he’s an active and destructive Westerner and so on. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Nonetheless, according to Kosmos, Ciuha’s 700-page travelogue is considered to be the best work of travel writing to come out of Slovenia. 

Now, Yugoslav nonaligned travelogues, including Ciuha’s, had two things in common, writes Kovačević in Nonaligned Imagination: one, “a commitment to creating a well-informed Yugoslav audience through sympathetic eyewitness accounts” and two, “a progressive socialist perspective.” 

IVA KOSMOS: Whenever [a] socialist travel writer goes anywhere, to a city, to a region, to a land, he will be specifically interested in the life of the so-called ordinary people, especially workers, peasant[s], factory workers. And he will evaluate that country, a life in that country, by the life of that [sic] workers. 

We have a really nice anthology of socialist travel writing in all directions, in US and in Europe and Africa and Asia and Australia, etc, very traditional title, Put oko svjeta. And then you have this strategy, you know, repeated, always. So for example, there is a journalist, Vojin Šantić, he goes to Hong Kong, or he goes to Indonesia. And in Hong Kong, everything is, you know, shiny, and there is commerce and there is richness, but he goes to the slums, where Chinese refugees are, and that’s who he writes about. Or people who go to Indonesia or Southeast Asia, very common, character that we are going to meet in this travel writing is bechak, the person who rides [a] rickshaw.

So this socioeconomic historical analysis is the second thing, I think, is very important. 

PETER KORCHNAK: That goes for Jože Ciuha and his Petrified Smile.

IVA KOSMOS: He’s not your typical socialist travel writer. He is writing very specifically, in much detail about artistic monuments; he is writing about his personal, philosophic questions when he meets Buddhist philosophy and Buddhist religion and culture and so on; he writes about his drinking adventures. You know, there is a lot of stuff there.  

But I find it even more interesting because I think it’s still permeated with what I call socialist ethos, or socialist traveling culture. Although, you know, it’s not top down discourse, you know, just firsthand journalistic reportage, which is expected to be celebratory of the new countries. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Finally—

IVA KOSMOS: And the third thing is this idea of working together to modernize yourself, Yugoslavia and other independent countries, so we can work together on the global scale to change this power relations globally and to impose ourselves as the third party, you know, not having only these two blocks pressing us, but imposing ourselves. So this is also kind of generally speaking about [the] Nonaligned Movement, not about socialist travel writing. 

PETER KORCHNAK: In informing about and celebrating decolonializing or already decolonialized countries, Yugoslav nonaligned travel writers also took a position specific to their country’s nonaligned stance. First, they wrote in opposition to the West and the East, trying to differentiate themselves from their respective narratives. The second narrative strategy followed from this.

IVA KOSMOS: If we were before thinking about how culturally different we are and what is different in this culture, very stereotypical mental maps, like West is active and East is passive. West is modern then East is traditional, and so on, West is materialistic, and East is, you know, brave savage, who is very, you know, noble and spiritual.

But socialist travel writing in Africa and Asia is not so much, it’s actually not at all about looking for differences—it is about looking for similarities. Because we want to perceive these people as our new global partners. 

And now how do we find these similarities where we actually know that we don’t know nothing about these parts of the world, and the cultural difference is obvious. So you actually need to work to find similarities, something that unifies you. You can find it in the [sic] socialism, in socialist ideology, in socialist project. 

But I see it more in Yugoslav case, a way to find this similarity is in this awareness of our status as two global peripheries. And then there is this awareness of our history of historical oppression, colonial oppression in Africa and Asia and on the other side of Yugoslavia, being under different empires and so on. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Take Ciuha in Burma.

IVA KOSMOS: He’s focused on trying to de-spectacularize these very typical images. And what I find even more interesting is that although he has this socialist ethos and he is for, you know, nuancing things and offering, you know, this complex background and blah, blah, blah, he is most frustrated with his own impossibility to perceive Buddhist culture. So he’s [a] scholar of Buddhist architecture and his intention is to depict all of this unknown or not known as they should be known Asian monuments. So there are whole chapters of these very detailed depictions of Bagan and Shwedagon in Burma and Angkor in Cambodia, and Borobodur in Java and so on. 

PETER KORCHNAK: According to Kosmos, Ciuha’s travels to Burma were not funded by Yugoslavia but rather by Burma itself, which sponsored him to come to study their art and culture at the University of Rangoon.

IVA KOSMOS: But then he encounters Buddhist culture and religion on all parts of the life that he meets. In architecture, which is hard for him to perceive, he says, I never seen something like this, and I don’t know how to communicate. He’s used to minimalism in Western art, and there is such abundance of detail, and he doesn’t know how to perceive it. Where to start? How to how to communicate with the artworks. 

PETER KORCHNAK: In describing the place, the writer also talks about himself. The Yugoslav travel writers’ nonaligned position and search for similarities in their external journey also informed their own personal or internal journey. Yugoslav writers brought home stories from the Third World with a certain self-image in mind.

IVA KOSMOS: Yugoslavia built its self-image in relations, of course, to all relations where it looked and traveled. And when it traveled to Africa and Asia, it was very important for Yugoslavia to define itself as anticolonial in a terms [sic], also as morally superior to [the] West, to [the] imperial project and so on, and in this way, to define itself as progressive. 

On the other side, it was also progressive in comparison to its African and Asian partners, because it was more modern and it was more developed. So it was quite [a] positive image that was built in these travel writing encounters. 

They don’t go to Africa and Asia as white people, but they come and they realize that the race system is already there, waiting for them just to enter this, the system of meanings. So they realize that they are also fitting in the category of white. But then they say, Okay, we are going to be different whites. We are going to be better whites. 

And I also think there is this difference of them really trying to engage with African thinkers, with Asian thinkers, with Asian writers, with anything they can find, find about Asia and Africa, and that is not produced always by [the] West. Of course, they will always refer to Western authors, but they try to go beyond it.

PETER KORCHNAK: According to Kovačević, quote “In their mission to redress the harmful legacies of earlier travel narratives in non-European spaces—which denigrated, idealized, and exoticized—these authors try to capture the complex material, historical, and localized power relations of the societies they visit as an act of quote “guerrilla resistance to the discourse of colonialism.”” End quotes.

In that vein, one major similarity Yugoslav writers found was between the decolonization movements and liberation struggles in the Third World and their own, Yugoslav People’s Liberation War.

From the mid-1950s to mid-1970s, the genre of travel writing which Kovačević labels “revolutionary travelogue” centered around liberation struggles in the decolonizing nations. Journalists, writers, cultural workers, diplomats, and scholars reported on decolonization or resistance movements in the Third World while at the same time paralleling Yugoslavia’s own earlier People’s Liberation War. Almost all the writers here were men and many, if not most of them, were veterans, that is former Partisans. 

Quote, “Through these accounts Yugoslavs both write and read themselves as cosmopolitan citizens, indirectly contributing to the nonaligned vision of active peaceful coexistence while, paradoxically, “reliving” the wartime struggle against their own enemies that was kept alive in Yugoslav literature, film, and art.” End quote.

One of the most prominent revolutionary travelogue authors was Zdravko Pečar, a former Partisan. He and his wife Veda Zagorac spent some two decades in Africa and eventually founded the Museum of African Culture in Belgrade. 

Pečar was a journalist who had worked as the editor of Politika newspaper. He participated in the Algerian War of Independence as a correspondent and combatant. He documented his time with the FLN in the 1959 book Alžir (Algeria), and later travels, including as Yugoslavia’s ambassador in various African countries, in the book Afrika, published in 1964. Later he also published history books on Algeria and Egypt.

In addition to Algeria, Yugoslav authors also documented liberation struggles in the Congo, Guinea, Kenya, Mali, Morocco, Rhodesia, and so on.

While revolutionary travelogues documented the liberation struggles and nation building of the decolonizing peoples, other authors explored other themes, like workers movements, history, art, religion… 

IVA KOSMOS: There is definitely a difference if we are talking about this literary reportage, which is happening in the context of independence struggle, it’s a specific time, it’s a specific happening. Yugoslavia is very much supportive of the independence struggle[s]. It’s overly optimistic, you know, the future is bright. Everything [will] be great. It is the matter of the moment, and of proclaiming the solidarity, of really believing in this bright future that is happening. And this is, for example, I don’t know, in the 60s. 

And what happens in the second half of the 70s, or in the 80s, when we have these independent countries, and they are still struggling, and the bright future is not so easy to come. Then, of course, the whole these ideas of this fast modernization and of fast acting together on the global scale and getting this peripheral world to modernize itself, it becomes more complicated.

It is also true that there are these two trends, Afro-pessimism and Afro-optimism. And of course, Afro optimism is during the all these independent struggles, when the future seems so bright, and there is Afro pessimism, when the future doesn’t seem so bright. 

And when we are approaching [the] 80s, there is also the turn again towards this western stereotypical images when we are, you know, the Europeans going there and kind of distancing from them, who are obviously not that close to us, and modernized and so on. 

But this is only one stream on the other side. I was actually very surprised to also learn things that prove that this spirit of nonalignment was where very much alive still in the 80s.

PETER KORCHNAK: For one great example of this, listen to the extended episode, on Remembering Yugoslavia PLUS, available exclusively to Yugoblok members.

Generally speaking, Yugoslav writers traveled the most to the countries with which Yugoslavia had or wanted to have the best relations.

IVA KOSMOS: This type of literature gives us an insight into [the] specific experience of interaction between the Second and Third World, which was happening beyond Western patronage and beyond Western discourse and material practice. And I think this is what is important, because Eastern Europeans, of course, went to Africa and Asia before socialism, but it was always part of some kind of Western mission, was it the research expedition or quote unquote civilization mission, or some kind of imperial colonial project. And this imperial or colonial or Eurocentric discourse was always reproduced. 

And now it’s not only travel writing, it’s the whole travel culture [that] is different. It’s not only the discourse, the practice is happening outside of the Western not only domination, but organization involvement. So this is independent meetings, independent interaction between Yugoslavia, and other socialist countries not only Yugoslavia, and newly independent countries in Africa and Asia. 

And sometimes these travels are also state sponsored. Egypt, when it has big social reforms, Egypt invites writers from the friendly states and guides them around and they report and so on. And a part of this, travel writers are also trying to produce new imaginary, alternative narratives. 

And of course, they cannot break their own legacy, the old legacy of Western discourse. And the general public in Yugoslavia and in socialist Europe, is [sic] also educated in this very Western Eurocentric literary canon. So of course, we carry it with it with us, this discourse and imaginary and we cannot break it in a moment. But the mission is, let’s try to think and interact differently. 

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: One of the major nonaligned countries Yugoslavs traveled to and wrote about was Indonesia. 

NEBOJŠA DJORDJEVIĆ: In the socialist period, what is interesting for me is this change [in] how we approach Indonesia as a subject. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Nebojša Djordjević in the final stages of his doctoral studies at the University of Belgrade, with the focus on contemporary Yugoslav travelogues about Indonesia. 

NEBOJŠA DJORDJEVIĆ: First we were writing books about Indonesia as our nonaligned partner, as somehow like [an] equal nation in this struggle against the colonialism. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Tito had a great working relationship with independent Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno. They were both among the founding fathers of the Nonaligned Movement, they visited each other’s country frequently, and a lot of collaboration and cooperation took place between Yugoslavia and Indonesia between the latter’s independence in 1949 and Sukarno’s downfall in a military coup in 1965. In that period, Yugoslav writers were—

NEBOJŠA DJORDJEVIĆ: —talking about Indonesia as a kind of a turbulent zone. Mainly those were like journalists who were writing so, like a lot of them, were writing about conflicts, the combination of travelogs and somehow the war analysis, and they were using, really, like picturesque names to name their books. 

One of the books that I’m analyzing is Zeleno i granate, so like, Green and the Grenades, and it’s written by Alexander Vitorović, and he was a journalist that was really like a well traveled, and that was about not only Indonesia, but as I told you, like the rest of the Southeast Asia.

PETER KORCHNAK: The book came out in 1972.

NEBOJŠA DJORDJEVIĆ: And then another guy, his name is Živko Milić, and his book is called Koraci po vatri, Footsteps on Fire. 

PETER KORCHNAK: From 1956.

NEBOJŠA DJORDJEVIĆ: So these are talking about Indonesia in a mixture of instability, war, conflicts. But on the other hand, it’s [a] depiction of this ethnic diversity, really alive cultures…

PETER KORCHNAK: Indonesia’s second president, Suharto, came to power in a bloody military coup in 1965 and ruled as a dictator until 1998.

NEBOJŠA DJORDJEVIĆ: You would expect that when this happened, somehow Yugoslavia will cancel Indonesia and we will not talk to them, write about them, don’t do anything about them, or we will just, like, somehow trash them. But Yugoslavia in that time really decided to do, like, pragmatic politics. And we were like, Okay, you you have your own mess, but we still have business to do with you, and then we continue [the] relationship. They were not as like close and friendly as they were like during the first Indonesian President, but nevertheless, I’m glad that we somehow like continue this. 

PETER KORCHNAK: An anticommunist, Suharto had different ideas about Indonesia’s path.

NEBOJŠA DJORDJEVIĆ: That second Indonesian President also had an idea to promote Indonesia as a new paradise and a new hot spot, tourist destination. 

We start going away from this combat, let’s say, version of a literature, and we were moving more into this re-creation of exotic paradise that Indonesia is.

A good illustration of Indonesia as a paradise: travel writer, her name is Maria Savin, and the name of the book is U dodiru s nebom, In the Touch with the Sky. And again, like she’s writing not only about Indonesia, but also about some other countries.

PETER KORCHNAK: Indonesia receded from the Yugoslav book market in the 1970s but continued its presence in the press.

NEBOJŠA DJORDJEVIĆ: Travel literature democratized more when it entered the press. And we had a lot of these magazines, we had a lot of, like, people traveling, writing, feeling somehow self-confident that they can comment and write about the country.

The interest on Indonesia was somehow following political interests. So when political interest was really there, then we had not only like travel books, but political analysis, fairy tales, short stories, even we had, like, some modest examples of, like, translating Indonesian literature into Serbian— Serbo-Croatian. This big production was probably made so for every school, every village, small town, can have a copy and learn about this country. 

Maybe the most famous travelogue, I think in the whole Yugoslavia, it’s at the end of the 80s, it’s called Potrazi za staklenim gradom, In Search of the Glass City. And it’s written by two guys, Željko Malnar i Borna Bebek. 

PETER KORCHNAK: That book came out in 1987. 

Another author Djordjević highlights is Tibor Sekelj, a Hungarian globetrotter who was actually born in today’s Poprad, Slovakia and who traveled and wrote about his travels extensively, though not necessarily about Indonesia. He was best known for his advocacy of Esperanto.

NEBOJŠA DJORDJEVIĆ: He really tried to somehow break away from this kind of a colonial system of the knowledges [sic], quit this logic of writing travel books on a certain topic and sell it in the million copies, something super sensational. He really wanted to, like to change the paradigm, but maybe he was just too ahead of his time. 

PETER KORCHNAK: There is of course a difference between supply and demand, the discourse produced versus the demand for it and its impact, particularly in a socialist country that was producing this literature with an ulterior motive. 

NEBOJŠA DJORDJEVIĆ: When it comes to the broader impact, it never really reached too far, because, even today, when Indonesia has promotions, cultural events, I feel that somehow Indonesia is always reintroducing itself to— now I’m talking only about the Serbian audience.

In the 60s, when we were on the peak of the policy of forming the Nonaligned Movement, we were really the best educated about other countries outside of Europe and that was maybe the best time that people know. But I think already from the mid-60s, 70s, 80s and so on, like somehow people again, forget about it I didn’t find any book or anything coming from Indonesia that really make [sic] a huge impact. 

Even Aleš Bebler, the ambassador, he and his wife were collecting some objects, and they were like displaying them in Ljubljana, and they were also like somehow trying to feed this niche that we also know about the cultures of Southeast Asia, but that also somehow faded away. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Indeed, it is difficult, if at all possible, to quantify just how popular travel writing, of all subgenres was in the former Yugoslavia. We do know that major newspapers and magazines ran such pieces often, several popular books were reprinted in multiple editions, and so on.

What we also know is who all these travel writers were. 

IVA KOSMOS: The travel that we think of now when we think about travel writing is kind of, you know, leisure traveler, traveling and writing in his free time. 

So that was not the case. 

People traveling were mostly, not exclusively, but mostly journalists, of course, employed by newspapers on a specific mission to go somewhere and report about a specific event. It was, it was for a lot of time a political event, I don’t know, independence struggle, political upheaval, but not always, and not necessarily. 

Then we have diplomats traveling, and, you know, this is also the part of the world and specific time when it’s not that easy to travel. A lot of these states are just forming, you know, the infrastructure is not there. There is no tourism, the whole governments are forming. So this is also the reason why we have diplomats writing. 

And then there are also specific not only diplomats, as for example, Aleš Bebler was, he was a high representative of Yugoslav foreign policy. 

Then we have, of course, other cultural workers or writers, which are also part of some specific organization, of cultural organization.

PETER KORCHNAK: In Yugoslavia’s decentralized system, various federal and republican organizations, like the Socialist Alliance of Working People of Yugoslavia, would send their own representatives or correspondents to places. In later decades, journalists, writers, culture workers, and diplomats were joined by employees of Yugoslav companies, adventurers, and artists.

IVA KOSMOS: But of course, when we are approaching 80s, we also have these individual travelers. Of course, there are kind of exceptions.

Definitely no one went there, you know, to find him or herself, or maybe in the 80s. It was, it was really more writing with some kind of collective mission. Okay, let us meet these new international partners. 

But I wouldn’t say that this was only a top-down discourse. This would kind of reduce the whole thing to a very, you know, narrow and rigid discourse. Of course, there were certain ideas that were developed in Yugoslavia and that people really believed in, and they wanted to kind of work on these ideas to meet the Other, right? But then they would come to the totally unknown continent and everything needed to be investigated. 

PETER KORCHNAK: So how big is this genre? How many travelogues, or books of travel writing were published in socialist Yugoslavia? 

Kosmos and her collaborators first started to compile a bibliography of books and other such works from the socialist Yugoslav period, in Serbocroatian and Slovenian languages.

IVA KOSMOS: All of this corpus is kind of forgotten. It became discarded knowledge. Even the libraries are kind of discarding this material. 

In this moment, we have 300 monographs written in this period from 1945 to 1990.

But the field is much, much bigger, because this was a very popular genre, and a lot of it was written not as traditional travel writing, you know, like a novel or monograph or whatever, it was written in the genre of literary journalism, literary reportage, reportaža, and this material is widely scattered around different dailies, weeklies, magazines. 

There are a couple of anthologies of Yugoslav literary reportage. But that’s [a] only small, small, small, tip of the iceberg. So there is really a lot of it. It was popular on the side of the public, and it was also popular on the side, you know, of the funders,  dailies, newspapers, but also, you know, the government looked very favorably, favorably on the genre, because it was forming new partnership in the, you know, newly independent world in Africa and Asia. And it needed this, you know, these new partners. It needed them to be introduced to the wide Yugoslav public.

PETER KORCHNAK: Most if not all books in Kosmos’s bibliography are written by men. Occasionally, as in the case of Aleš Bebler and Zdravko Pečar, the co-traveling wife is sometimes credited in some way; Bebler’s wife is listed as co-author on his second book. But women journalists seem not to have published many standalone books or monographs from their travels. More on this on the next episode of Remembering Yugoslavia.

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: Travel writing from the region today is radically different from the socialist period.

IVA KOSMOS: I think that one of the main differences when we speak about these regions of the world, now we tend to speak from the position of pity and mercy. 

Back then, even if there was an author coming and saying, “Oh my God, there is such a radical poverty here, and there are still not modernized and everything,” there was this feeling of looking at them as our possible partners, okay, there are so many problems, you need to modernize, you will modernize, we will help, and then we will act together. And they were looking at them as active partners. And some people are very critical to this notion of help, like okay, Yugoslavia is now helping, look at them, they are the same as the, you know, Western people helping

PETER KORCHNAK: So it’s colonialism in disguise kind of thing, yeah.

IVA KOSMOS: Yes, but I think, of course, there was also a reproduction of some colonial imagery, and there was obviously development imbalance, power imbalance. But I really don’t see these relationships of having pity for them. I’m quite sure that there was a difference in seeing these nations, collectives, groups, region, as our active partners, or as our future active partners or possible active partners.

PETER KORCHNAK: The post-Yugoslav travel writing on Indonesia, specifically in Serbia, can serve as an example of the path travel writing took in general.

The last summit of the Nonaligned Movement during Yugoslavia’s existence took place in Belgrade in 1989. The first one after Yugoslavia’s dissolution took place in 1992 in Jakarta.

NEBOJŠA DJORDJEVIĆ: After 1995, we start translating some of the most famous Indonesian writers. We publish one political commentary on Indonesia. 

So until the conflict in Kosovo and the NATO operation here, war in 1999 we were really trying somehow to catch up with them and with, I don’t know, like, maybe even this, like a legacy of Yugoslavia, but that didn’t really again, played well with Indonesians, because they totally ignored that, and then only after like 2000s we officially, somehow re-establish[ed the] relationship. And then, like, this book production start emerging, and now somehow, like, the relationships are again, like, really close again. 

PETER KORCHNAK: In this century, Djordjević highlights four travelogues published in Serbia. 

One, U srcu Sumatre (In the Heart of Sumatra), by Viktor Lazić, in 2011. Lazić later founded the Museum of Books and Travel, a private museum exhibiting books about the world.

Two, Reborneo, whose title is of course a play on words, “reborn” and “Borneo,” Indonesia’s biggest island, by Danijel Apro from 2015. 

NEBOJŠA DJORDJEVIĆ: Every time when we talk about other country, we are always othering. This book is really like a remarkable exception to this orientalistic rule. 

it’s really like experimental literature, but somehow based on Indonesian soil or inspired by it. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Serbian travel writing about Indonesia features female authors quite prominently. There’s Mlečni put okeana – Jedinstvo u različitosti, Milky May of the Ocean – Unity in Diversity by Sonja Lapatanov from 2014, and finally Jefimija, žena koja čeka, The Woman who Waits by Minja Marđonović, publishing under her Instagram handle 100glava Aždaja, from 2020.

NEBOJŠA DJORDJEVIĆ: So those are two female writers who are writing about this region, and they are also interesting because they are somehow giving a new perspective. Because unfortunately, female perspective is still [a] new perspective on things. But they are also, I would say, problematic, because they’re just using Indonesia as a setting for their love dramas.

PETER KORCHNAK: The story of nonaligned literature continues next time on Remembering Yugoslavia. 

[SOUNDBITE]

PETER KORCHNAK: That’s all for this episode of Remembering Yugoslavia, thank you for listening, traveling, and reading with us. 

All guests’ opinions expressed are solely their own; unless otherwise noted they do not express, reflect, or represent the views or opinions of any third party, including myself. 

Find additional information, sources, embeds, links, photos, and the transcript of this episode at Yugoblok.com/RememberingYugoslavia. Also at Yugoblok, listen to the extended, ad-free version of this and every other episode. Become a member today. 

Outro music courtesy of Robert Petrić. Interludes courtesy of Sticky Keys.

I am Peter Korchňak. 

Ćao!

Additional Sources

• Kovačević, Nataša. Nonaligned Imagination: Yugoslavia, the Global South, and LIterary Solidarities beyond the Cold War Blocs. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2025