A woman with “deformed vision”;
A woman who has no understanding for a “people celebrating its own state and freedom of speech”;
A woman who has “neither taste nor sense of proportion”;
A woman who has opened her mouth “in the wrong manner, the wrong place, and at the wrong time”;
A woman with a “limited perspective”;
A woman writer with a “specific talent,” whose writing is “scrappy knitting”;
A “murderess of the Croatian nation who kills with her pen”;
A “broad persecuting Croatia”;
A broad who “big mouths, gossips, and denounces”;
A woman worthy of “contempt”;
A woman in need of a Croatian bonfire “to warm her heart”;
A member of “one of the organizational nuclei of international resistance to and defamation of the Croatian Homeland War”;
A member of a crew of “slightly unhappy, and at any rate frustrated women”;
A “dirty liar”;
A “Yugonostalgic”;
A “national Daltonist”;
A “salon internationalist”;
A “spleenful and spiteful surveyor of freedom”;
A “squealer offering recipes for freedom from the long-tainted kitchens of the European pseudo-left and pseudo-right”;
A woman with “mental problems”;
A woman who is “mixed-up”;
A woman who “drops her dress in a storm”;
A woman ready to “sell her homeland for a hundred German marks”;
A woman who for “a little cash, but with obviously great joy, denounces and spits on her homeland”;
A “plume of the failed communist regime”;
An “informer for the European Community”;
A “carefully chosen interlocutor of Brussels and the European Community”;
A woman of “dubious repute”;
A person “not in the least subjected to harassment”;
A “homeless intellectual”;
A “grande dame of Croatian post-communism”;
A self-immolator (who if she returns to Zagreb “needs to be immediately surrounded by a dozen fire engines, have 300 hoses aimed at her, and whose every word needs to be doused in water”);
A “furious woman”;
A “Yugo-nostalgic sicko”;
A woman who was ready for “a better psychiatric clinic”;
A member of a group of “exalted daughters of the revolution”;
A “traitor to the homeland”;
A “lobbyist who has lost her voice”;
A woman “conspiring against Croatia”;
A “feminist”;
A “feminist raping Croatia”;
An “anti-Croatian feminist”;
A member of a group of “self-centered middle-aged women who have serious problems with their own ethnic, ethical, human, intellectual and political identities”;
A “public enemy”;
A woman with a “miserable destiny”;
A woman who has “committed moral and intellectual suicide”;
A “witch”. .
Looking back, many of the accusations seem laughable. They weren’t at the time. The media recruited people for the war effort day and night, every volunteer was welcome. Ducking out to a neighborhood green grocer’s in the summer of 1992, I couldn’t take my eyes of a guy in line in front of me who was anxiously buying bananas. It was hot, and he’d stripped down to a singlet and shorts, with a pistol poking out of one of his pockets. Bananas and revolvers — that was a pretty accurate picture of the Croatian everyday at the time.
It was a time when you could buy weapons through newspaper ads, sellers advertising “mother hens,” “chicks,” and “Kinder Surprises.” Mother hen was a synonym for revolver, chicks for bullets, and Kinder Surprises for grenades. There was no accounting for the direction in which a weapon might go off, something I understood best when I saw a newspaper report about a young guy, a returnee from the front, who let off a “Kinder Surprise” in the yard of his former primary school. The darkness of the time swallowed people in different ways.
8. The Dark Corridors of the Arts Faculty
My job at the Institute for Literary Theory was on a multi-year research project entitled Glossary of the Russian Avant-garde. The project leader was a professor of Russian literature, who, given his scholarly reputation, had managed to assemble an expert team of contributors from several European countries. The proceedings of our annual scholarly conferences were published in a multi-volume series under the project name, co-edited by the professor and me.
When the aforementioned Croatian bard publicly weighed in on my ethnic, ethical, and literary acceptability, my status at work quickly changed. Having read the guild’s evaluation of my case in the news, the very next day my colleagues stopped saying hello or calling in to the Institute’s office. Even the professor stopped coming in. My colleagues started meeting in the office after I’d gone home for the day. At first I didn’t really understand what was going on; then in time we arrived at a form of unspoken agreement: when I left, they’d come in; when I came in, they’d leave. A colleague and friend, one of the few people to stand by me, witnessed this game, which was, by turns, childish, nasty, and exhausting. He’d often wipe an invisible gob of spit from his face, which, although originally intended for me, every now and then caught him.
Sometime in March or April of 1993 I was supposed to go to New York and give a lecture at NYU. For the first time, approval for a few days leave suddenly became a problem, and at the request of the Dean, I had to produce a written synopsis of my intended lecture. There was nothing about this in the Faculty regulations; it was made up on the fly, expressly for me. Despite that, I still refused to believe that my colleagues and friends believed in the “justice” of the media lynching. Somewhere deep inside I was ashamed both for and instead of them.
Those few months I worked on arrangements for our regular annual conference, which that year (1993) was held in May, the theme of which was totalitarianism and art. It seemed deeply ironic to me that my fellow scholars were writing papers about a time in which literature and art were subject to strict ideological diktats — about socialist realism, censorship under Stalin, and the lethal absurdities of totalitarian thinking — when, at the same time, fresh fascist and totalitarian fragments from the Croatian everyday slunk by in front of their noses. It was a time in which a notoriously soc-realist exhibition by the now forgotten sculptor, Kruno Bošnjak, was honored and lauded, when books by “unsuitable” authors (Serbs, communists, non-Croats, Yugoslavs, and so forth) were consigned to the scrap-heap. It was a time when stickers with a traditional three-strand pattern were proudly affixed to books by “ethnically clean” Croatian writers, when media censorship, particularly on radio, television, in schools, and the publishing industry, was the rule, not the exception. At the time, Vinko Nikolić, a returnee from the diaspora, former member of the Ustasha government of the Independent State of Croatia, and architect of the pamphlet On Ustasha Literature, was one of the most prominent figures in Croatian cultural life. Mile Budak, a minor writer, and the architect of the racial laws in Ante Pavelić’s same Nazi state, was the literary discovery of the season. It was a time in which black and white propaganda-like texts were everywhere, and the figure of Ivan Aralica, a Member of Parliament and Croatian President Franjo Tuđman’s favorite writer, established the new Croatian literary canon. It was a time when witches burned on media bonfires, when the Minister of Culture declared that only ethnically pure Croats were eligible to teach Croatian literature and the Croatian language. And it was a time when many street names were changed, and when renaming the street on which the Faculty of Arts was located became the subject of serious debate. Named after an “unworthy” Partisan hero, it was to take the name of the “worthy” Mile Budak.