Yugoslavia in My life, my life in Yugoslavia
By Lidija Dimkovska
1. My Yugoslav Childhood
I spent my childhood in a small village in Macedonia, called Šlegovo, with my grandparents. My parents had to remain in Skopje, my place of birth, to work, so they left me with my grandparents and visited me every national holiday. Because of this, I loved the Yugoslav holidays of the Army, of the State, and of the first of May, because all these holidays brought my parents to me.
Later those same holidays brought me to my grandparents. My grandparents were simple, hardworking country people, illiterate, but wise and with open hearts and minds.
My grandma liked, but also was afraid of, Milka Planinc, the Prime Minister of Yugoslavia in the nineteen-eighties, the first and only woman to hold such a position. She was often on the news broadcast on the radio. Her voice was deep and loud, and my grandma always set the tone low whenever Milka Planinc was speaking about the prosperity and unity of Yugoslavia.
2. The “Trip Through Yugoslavia”
The trip through Yugoslavia was organized by almost every school in Yugoslavia and consisted of seven to ten days traveling by bus to the country’s most important historical and tourist destinations, “from the Vardar River to the Triglav Mountain” as the Yugoslav popular song had it. The motto of all these trips was: “Get to know your country to love it more.”
On my school trip, as a 13-year-old schoolgirl, I visited beautiful Dubrovnik, where I bought the first lipstick of my life, the marvelous Plitvice Lakes, the house where Tito was born in Kumrovec, the former Jasenovac concentration camp from the Second World War, the Kragujevac monument to the murdered schoolchildren, whom the Serbian poet Desanka Maksimović immortalized in her poem “Bloody Tale,” which we all learned to recite by heart in school, the magnificent Belgrade with its long avenues, the vivid cafés of Sarajevo, but we visited nothing in Slovenia.
There was not enough time to get to Postojna Cave and we didn’t see the Triglav Mountain. Maybe it was the frustration of not visiting the sixth republic of Yugoslavia that led me unconsciously years later to move to Slovenia and become her eternal visitor?
3. Brotherhood and Unity Among the Peoples and Nations of Yugoslavia
I had a personal experience one summer towards the end of the nineteen-eighties in a village in Montenegro, at the home of some relatives whom I had never met before. In the Yugoslav mentality, this was not a problem at all: every relative was a close one, even if they weren’t. It was strange to me that our relatives—the men—used to sleep with pistols beneath their heads, but this was completely normal and understandable to my cousin.
“What? Your father doesn’t have a gun?” he asked me in amazement.
One morning, while I was standing in the yard, I noticed a car parked in front of one of the neighbors’ houses, and a man got out with a girl my age. The man let the girl out, kissed her, and immediately drove off, while she took her suitcase, climbed up the steps to the house, knocked, and went in without anyone opening the door for her.
Grandma crossed herself three times, then turned to me and said, “Don’t let me catch you going out with her; she is not a suitable friend for you.”
I was surprised and kept asking her why I shouldn’t get to know her.
“Did you see her father? He’s not even allowed inside. He’s a Shiptar, that’s why! Her mother went off to study in Prishtina, where she found him, and she got pregnant. For years now her mother and father haven’t talked to her; they disowned her in the paper, and don’t ever want to see him.”
It was all pretty incomprehensible to me, this lack of brotherhood and unity among the peoples and nations of Yugoslavia that I had learnt and repeated almost every day in school.
4.The War in My Life
I was deeply hurt years later when I found out that some of the relatives we had stayed with that summer had gone to Bosnia to fight with the Serbs against the Bosnian civilians. We hadn’t known that and after the war, my mother sent me by bus to Montenegro to bring our relatives flour, oil, sugar. That was the first time I crossed a Macedonian border and not a Yugoslav one. It wasn’t regular border guards who entered the bus, but soldiers with machine guns.
My uncle was waiting for me at the bus station. With a firm masculine handshake, he said right to my face in Serbian, “So, Macedonia, it seems, was separatist? You didn’t want to be with the Serbs, with us? You wanted to be like the Slovenes and Croatians? If so, Macedonia will one day collapse; it will totally collapse!”
All the way from the bus station to their house, in the car, he kept repeating that we were separatists, and that there was no one like Slobodan Milošević in the whole world.
Afterward, my uncle took me to the attic to show me all their reserves. There, covering the floor, stacked on top of each other, were bags of flour and sugar, boxes filled with oil and vinegar, bags of noodles, conserves, and who knows what else.
“We have provisions, we’re not waiting for Macedonians to supply us,” my uncle said and added, “But the time will come for us to provide for you.”
He then began telling me at length what great warriors the Serbs had been in Bosnia, how each true Serb—even if he were half of Montenegrin and half Macedonian—was more honorable for having fought in Croatia and Bosnia.
I stayed silent, my fingers fumbling in my pockets.
That evening, one of his married daughters invited us to a dinner. On a table stretched across the whole room were roasted lamb and pans of rice and potatoes. My cousin’s husband put on a cassette, and the traditional Serbian dance burst forth, and everyone leaped from their seats, hugged each other, and pulled me along with them. They sang with unwavering voices—both the men and the women—and spun around, spinning me too, singing along, and in the midst of the frenetic dance, the words “Srbo, Srbo, Slobo, Slobo” rang out.
I couldn’t stand it any longer and began to cry: “I want to go home, I want to go home!”
Finally, they got me out-side, stuffed me into a car, and drove me home; the next day, I caught the first bus to Skopje, having waved hastily to my uncle at the station. I never saw them again.
5. A Strange Post-Yugoslav Gathering
A strange gathering took place in Strasbourg in 1995, around the time of the genocide in Srebrenica, when I was invited alongside some other young Yugoslavs, all of us born in the 1970s. We were fragile and embarrassed, and we felt guilty for a war we hadn’t wanted.
The Bosnians were so angry and sad that I felt guilty to be from Macedonia, which was then the so-called oasis of peace. One day one of them said to me, “Imagine that you’re a student, and your student card is burned in the National Library in Sarajevo, alongside all of our national documents and all of our books—your personal and national identity has been taken away. You are nobody and nothing, and around you people are dying.”
She was right. We tried to understand each other—we even sang together a very popular song “My Balkan” by the rock band Azra, which we all loved.
Many times, the professors at the University of Strasbourg, which was hosting us, exclaimed, “But you love each other!” They tried to create a dialogue between us, so that they could understand what exactly happened and why.
But we couldn’t help them—we were all too stressed by what was then happening in Yugoslavia, and anyway we didn’t understand it either. Yes, I am sure that we loved each other, but deep down I could not shake a feeling of guilt for the war, even if none of us was guilty of anything.
6. Yugoslav Writers and Their Relationships
If young writers listen to old writers from ex-Yugoslavia, they will think that the literary life in Yugoslavia was like a fairy tale. Probably it was not like that, but it is true that each national literature was a part of the Yugoslav literature. At the universities in Yugoslavia there was a department of Yugoslav literature, now called Department for South Slavic Literatures.
The most important poetry festival in Yugoslavia, the Struga Poetry Evenings began its existence in my own country, Macedonia, in 1961 and it awarded the Golden Wreath of Poetry to poets such Mahmoud Darwish, W. H. Auden, Joseph Brodsky, Allen Ginsberg, Pablo Neruda, Desanka Maksimović, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Nichita Stănescu, Ted Hughes, Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said Esber), Tomas Tranströmer, and others.
The writers from ex-Yugoslavia took part in many festivals which they organized in their own republics, always inviting their colleagues from the other republics.
At the end of the nineteen-eighties, as a young poet I took part three times in a poetry festival in Kikinda, in the province of Vojvodina, Serbia, where young poets from all across Yugoslavia gathered.
I always stayed at the home of the same girl who became my friend. On my last stay, in May 1991, one month before everything started, her father who worked in the Yugoslav Army, said at the dinner table that he had been called from his unit to prepare to leave Kikinda and go to Croatia because something was being organized there. Her mother begun to cry. He said he had to go; it was his duty. I was so confused. For years after that I called their number in Kikinda to ask if they were ok, but the line was cut-off forever.
7. Post-Yugoslav Writing
Immediately after the wars, post-Yugoslav writing was influenced by everything that had happened. When I first visited Sarajevo after the war, I bought the latest anthology of Bosnian short stories, and almost every piece in it was connected to the war.
Post-Yugoslav literature is burdened with collective memory, but it also has the ability to look in the mirror of history. Of course, not all of us have written directly about war: the works of my generation are varied. Some are about historical events, but many are simply about the experience of being dislocated or are dedicated to the exploration of questions of nation, nationalism, freedom, identity. Still others reach for universal political themes or try to explore ourselves as victims of the system. Many of us have used humor to combat these traumatic events.
Many writers emigrated from ex-Yugoslavia. Sometimes we are invited together to literary events, representing our (new) countries. These meetings are wonderful and full of emotions and humor.
If something good has come from all the terrible events that happened in ex-Yugoslavia and to it, it is that the Yugoslav War and these political crises have provoked an interest in the literature of my region.
It is an irony that the tragedies that informed these works led to the writers born before the ninety-seventies getting translated into many languages and invited to festivals around the world.
Today, this interest has waned, and is not the same anymore. There are new wars, new exiles, new writers’ destinies. And as we know, the literary market lives in the moment.
A researcher from the Institute of the Macedonian Literature told me, “But, it was not our war”, when I was searching for Macedonian literature written about the separation and the wars in ex-Yugoslav republics. Wasn’t it? The first killed solder in the Yugoslav wars of the nineteen-nineties was Sašo Gešovski from Macedonia, who was shot in Split in front of the TV cameras. We were all shocked by that. The war was too close to Macedonia and could easily make itself felt in our skin. Yet, perhaps it is strange to have a book concerning such a topic in literature like Macedonian literature, when Macedonia wasn’t a true witness to the Yugoslav wars and during those wars was even called an oasis of the peace.
Today we, the post-Yugoslav writers, collaborate in many ways, translating each other’s books into our languages, participating at festivals, reading each other. The aim of Sarajevske sveske (Sarajevo Notebooks), the great literary magazine that existed in the post-Yugoslav space, has now been achieved: we are (again) friends. We all have a Common Ground, we all live in the same world.
8. The Geography of My Life
I left Macedonia in 1994 when the wars in Yugoslavia were still going on. In Bucharest, Romania I received a Ph.D. degree in Romanian literature, and I taught Macedonian literature and language at the University of Bucharest. I learned Romanian and I began to dream in both Macedonian and Romanian.
I met my husband, who is from Slovenia, and, in the beginning, we talked in Serbo-Croatian but soon we felt that we needed a third language, a neutral one. Srebrenica happened in the first summer of our love relationship and with the Romanian language as a common one we wanted to escape Yugoslavia in our life, the country we loved so much and that had hurt us so much through everything that happened.
For seven years we talked in Romanian but when we moved to Slovenia, we began to use Slovenian. Yugoslavia was already past, but the consequences of its break-up were so great that in one way or another we feel them still in our present.
9. The Last Yugoslav
There was not a Yugoslavia anymore, but my homeland was still a Yugoslav one—a political farce at a high level. All the republics following the break-up of Yugoslavia became independent countries and retained their names: Republic of Slovenia, Republic of Croatia, etc., but Macedonia, due to Greece’s problem with the use of the name Macedonia, was recognized in the United Nations as the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM). Everybody became something other than Yugoslav, but we were still former Yugoslavs.
In my childhood I had a mantra (or a prayer?) which I repeated every time I coped with a problem, with solitude, or with a challenge: “Madzhari (my neighborhood in Skopje) is in Skopje, Skopje is in Macedonia, Macedonia is in Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia is in Europe, Europe is in the world.” After saying it for several times I always felt better.
I remember that one of my first thoughts after the separation of Yugoslavia in 1991, was that I could no longer say “Macedonia is in Yugoslavia, Yugoslavia is in Europe…” but I had to say directly “Macedonia is in Europe.”
Years later my little daughter asked me if Macedonia was in Europe. I said yes, but she showed me her school list of the countries which are in the European Union, and there was no Macedonia. Today Macedonia is North, and it is still not in the EU, but in Europe there was the Former Yugoslav Republic almost 30 years after Yugoslavia didn’t exist anymore.
10. A Spare Life
I wrote A Spare Life, which received the EU Prize for Literature in 2013 and the Stale Popov Award in Macedonia, with its story of conjoined twins who must be separated, that was analyzed as a kind of metaphor for the separation of the Yugoslav republics through the separation of the twins with their symbolic Macedonian names: Srebra and Zlata.
In a way, they, as representative of my generation, are the real witnesses of the separation of Yugoslavia: the narrator in the novel is Zlata, who spoke also about her and Srebra’s colleagues at the universities, and the young men who deserted the Yugoslav army: “Once, one of them said, ‘Fuck it all. How did I end up in the wrong place at the wrong time?’ And it was true for all of them—a lost generation that found itself in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
While on a literary tour in the USA when my novel was translated in English, I visited ten cities in two weeks, traveling from New York to Los Angeles. In indie bookshops I met readers as I spoke about my literature and my life, I answered many questions about Yugoslavia as well.
In one of the airports, while waiting for my next flight, I saw the call for passengers traveling to Dayton. I was astonished by the concreteness of the city where the Yugoslav wars ended and the future began, never separated by the past.
About Lidija DImkovska
Lidija Dimkovska is a Macedonian poet, novelist, and translator. She lives in Ljubljana, working as a freelance writer and translator of Romanian and Slovenian literature. She is the author of A Spare Life; her latest book is Grandma Non-Oui. Her books have been translated into 15 languages.
Some parts of the essay are paraphrases from the novel A Spare Life, translated into English by Christina E. Kramer who also edited the entire essay. The essay has been reformatted for web.
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