The Ship Yugoslavia

This article first appeared in the Yugobulletin newsletter.

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I’ve been back in the US long enough that the semester in Ljubljana, the first of my doctoral studies, seems like a memory of a different life.

I survived the reverse culture shock—still a thing no matter how many times I return. I submitted my term paper—Pass!—and Semester 2 has begun, remotely this time. And a trip back to ex-Yugoslavia, in late April and early May, is booked and planned.

In Astoria, Oregon, where I live, I’m about as far from the former Yugoslavia in the continental United States as can be. What’s more, ever since the Bosnian restaurant, Drina Daisy, with its displays of Sarajevo paraphernalia, closed two years ago, there’s nothing tangible connecting me to my spiritual homeland.

But Yugoslavia rears its beautiful head in unexpected ways.

One of the best events in town is FisherPoets, a weekend-long festival at end of February that is “a celebration of the commercial fishing industry in poetry, prose, and song.” Fishermen and women from all over—the West Coast, Alaska, Maine—come to town to share their creative works in venues ranging from breweries to theaters.

At one such reading, Megan Emerson, a tugboat operator on the Columbia River, read a long narrative poem titled “The Nest.” I’ll admit, it made my eyes well with tears. The poem about a boat reminded me of the different stories we can and in fact do tell about the lost country that was Yugoslavia, and it hit a nerve.

In the poem, Emerson is walking around an old waterfront neighborhood in Seattle when she comes upon two men cutting up an old hand troller.

“[W]atching that nameless boat die by inches” she felt the way many of us had in 1991 when we watched a country being dismantled.

“I kept on standing there and standing there because I didn’t want it to be true.”

She wondered about the people whose father or grandfather fished on that boat over its 100-year life, and felt sadness about the world they had known dying.

Until she realized she was telling the wrong story.

“It’s not a matter of “whose father’s boat was that” or “whose grandfather’s.
“The question to ask is: whose kid, whose grandkid, was born because they made it home? Whose children were fed because of that boat?”

Like any good plot twist, a pivot to a different point of view turns the entire story around. The boat was dead but what mattered wasn’t that moment, but her life.

“She did her job. She kept them all safe. Brought them all back.”

A common trope about Yugoslavia is that it was a failure: a failed experiment doomed from the start, an artificial creation that could not but fail, a “paradigm lost”.

Of course, all states are artificial, man-made creations. Of course, Yugoslavia was not some kind of trial and people who lived there lab rats testing a hypothesis. Of course, Yugoslavia was rather a solution to a problem and a promise-filled place to be and live. Of course it’s easier to tell the stories of doom and disaster and fall into the trap of hindsight bias.

Nevermind that. Let’s pivot.

Judging an experience by the way it ended is only one way to remember and tell its story.

Another, and one that Emerson chose to tell instead, is remembering a life for its high points, for the good.

“I don’t think that a bird feels grief when the pieces of wood they wove together finally come apart. What’s a few hours of dying at the dock compared to all that living?”

Like judging a long marriage for the fact it ended in divorce (or indeed for the way the divorce occurred), judging Yugoslavia because it ended and how, too, is just one way to tell its story.

Seventy-three years, from 1918 to 1991 is actually pretty impressive for a country: Yugoslavia surpassed the average age of all countries created since 1700, likewise even if you count only the socialist period and the 20th century.

And all those children who were fed and kept safe because of it, remember them. They’re today’s fathers and filmmakers, mothers and other miracle workers, presidents and professors.

The sunken ship Yugoslavia keeps bringing us back home.