er folk by now — give us psychiatrists. Well, our psychiatrist turned out to be one of ‘ours’, a refugee like us. And you know what she told us? ‘Do me a favor, will you, everybody? Find a little crazy streak in you. Think up a trauma or two if need be. I don’t want to lose my job….’”
We all laughed. The ball was rolling.
I was naturally well aware of the absurdity of my situation: I was to teach a subject that officially no longer existed. What we once called jugoslavistika at the university — that is, Slovenian, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, Montenegrin, and Macedonian literature — had disappeared as a discipline together with its country of origin. Besides, the students I was assigned had no particular interest in literature; they were interested in their Dutch papers. I was hired to teach the literature of a country (or the literatures of countries) from which my students had fled or been expelled. The house was in ruins, and it was my job to clear a path through the rubble.
My main tool, I decided, would be language: “our” language, servo-kroatisch. But the language that had been spoken in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, and Montenegro had now, like the country in which it had been spoken, been divided into discrete units; it had become three official languages: Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian. True, Croatian and Serbian had enjoyed a certain official autonomy even in Yugoslav times, but there was something new: the erection of checkpoints to highlight the differences between them. I was not much concerned with the “new” languages and had no interest in dividing them up according to the fifty or so words that distinguished them. What concerned me more was a certain rigidity in the language as such, a rigidity that made my students unwilling and unable to use it: their questionable mother tongue was being taken over by a half-baked English and, more recently, half-baked Dutch.
I told them I firmly believed that Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian were variants of a single language. “A language is a dialect backed by an army. Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian are backed by paramilitary forces. You’re not going to let semiliterate criminals advise you in matters linguistic, are you?” But I was also aware that I belonged to the last generation whose primary and secondary school literature textbooks had been speckled with readings in Slovenian, Macedonian, Serbian, and Croatian, duly printed in the Roman or Cyrillic alphabet, and that the fact of the very existence of such textbooks would soon be forgotten.
But things weren’t quite so simple. My students knew all too well that I wasn’t speaking metaphorically when I brought in the military; they knew that “our” languages were backed by actual troops, the “our” languages were used to curse, humiliate, kill, rape, and expel. They were languages that had gone to war in the belief that they were incompatible, perhaps precisely because they were inseparable.
The papers abounded in language columns. The butcher, the baker, everyone was an instant linguist. The war gave rise to “differential dictionaries.” Serbs, who had for the most part converted to the Roman alphabet, started going back to Cyrillic; Croats, eager to make Croatia as Croatian as possible, introduced a few awkward constructions borrowed from the Russian and a few even more awkward lexical items in circulation during World War II. It was a divorce full of sound and fury. Language was a weapon, after alclass="underline" it branded, it betrayed, it separated and united. Croats would eat their kruh, while Serbs would eat their hleb, Bosnians their hljeb: the word for bread in the three languages was different. Smrt, the word for death, was the same.
Not that the language as it was before the divorce — Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian or Croatian and Serbian — represented a better, more acceptable linguistic construct that the war had then destroyed. No, it, too, had performed a political function; it, too, had been backed by an army; it, too, had been manipulated, polluted by a heavily ideologized Yugospeak. But the history of melding the linguistic variants into a single construct involved a much longer and more meaningful process than the overnight divorce, just as the history of building bridges and roads involved a much longer and more meaningful process than their overnight destruction.
Boban told us of a recurrent dream of his. He was looking for a street in Zagreb, but was afraid to ask for directions, because people would hear that he was from Belgrade.
“And what if they did?” I asked.
“Then they’d know I’m a Serb. They might spit at me or send me away.”
“So what?”
“Then I’d never find the street I was after.”
“Who were you looking for?”
“A girlfriend of mine. Maja was her name.”
Somebody sniggered.
“Where did she live, your Maja?”
“You turn right off Moša Pijade. One of those streets.”
“Mosa Pijade has a new name,” I said.
“What is it?”
“Medveš
ak.”
“Oh, thanks,” he said seriously, as if he would be using the information that night.
“Could Maja’s street possibly have been Novakova?” I asked.
“That’s it!” he cried, his face beaming with relief. “Novakova!”
“Good thing you didn’t dream about Bosnia, man,” said Selim. “If our guys got their hands on you, you’d sweat bullets.”
The room was still. Selim had tossed a mine into it.
“From now on you will keep all such comments to yourself, Selim. I will not have the classroom turned into a battlefield.”
Selim couldn’t stand Boban’s Serbianisms, that was plain: when Boban talked in class, Selim would roll his eyes, take loud breaths, and cough into his hand, and when Selim talked in class he went heavier on the Bosnianisms — I was sure of it — than he did “on the outside.”
Nevena was completely different. Her speech was characterized by a sort of linguistic schizophrenia: she stuttered and used all kinds of regionalisms and accents indiscriminately; she’d start a sentence in a South Serbian dialect, move on to an imitation of Zagreb speech, launch into the Bosnian drawl, and finally make such capricious use of the tonal system that she sounded like an autistic child. She later explained to me that her Serbian father and Croatian mother had constantly been at each other’s throats and separated at long last just before the war broke out. We all had our ethnic burdens to bear. Nevena had moved in with her grandmother in Bosnia and made her way from there to Amsterdam as a refugee.
“I feel more comfortable in Dutch,” she told me, as if Dutch were a sleeping bag.
Uroš mumbled so much of the time we could hardly understand him. His speech was also marked by an inordinate number of diminutives. Like the servants in nineteenth-century Russian novels he seemed to be using them to placate the people around him. It was as if he were afraid the person he was talking to was going to punch him in the nose and the nice little diminutives would shield him. The rest of the class made fun of Uroš’s diminutives as they did of the tendency of the Dutch to use them. Talking in class became such a trial to Uroš that I mostly left him alone.
Igor spoke fluent Dutch. Dutch meant freedom to him; his mother tongue had become a burden.
“When I speak ‘our language,’ I feel like a character in a provincial play, if you know what I mean,” he said. The “if you know what I mean” was in English. He always peppered “our language” with Anglicisms: it made it more tolerable for him.
“All ‘our’ languages are trying to establish their own literary norm, but the only variant that sounds natural is the impure, bastardized variant. Or a dialect. When I hear Dalmatians talk Croatian, I think, ‘Hey, that’s cool.’ When I hear officials talk Croatian, I think airs and graces and rape. There’s something unnatural about the lot of them — Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian…. Look, I’m a rocker, a musician. I’ve got a hell of an ear. I know what I’m talking about.”