The ghost of “Brotherhood and unity”

One of the great things about the Yugoslavia I remember in the mid 80s is long summers. Over July and August, Skopje, the capital of Macedonia (now North Macedonia), would be no more than a deserted dreamy landscape punctuated by the soundtrack of crickets. My brother and I spent our long breaks from school in Mavrovo, in a house my grandfather built together with a partisan friend of his from the Greek Civil War, my grandfather being of Greek and his friend of Macedonian ethnicity. 

The neighborhood of summer houses seemed to be mostly inhabited by retirees taking care of their grandchildren. While the grandparents played backgammon, tended to their gardens, cooked and baked, sipped rakija and ouzo and snoozed after big meals, the children roamed around the dirt roads, the surrounding forests and thickets, playing hide and seek, and “Partisans and Germans” if they were boys, or make-believe princess tales if they were girls.

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Archipelago Yugoslavia

1. The “Better life” that never was (Kosovo)
2. Life in the crime scene (Serbia)
3. The apocalyptic clock ticking inside me (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
4. In Slovenia, we dreamed of democracy and woke up under capitalism
5. I don’t write about war because I want to, but because I have no choice (Croatia)
6. The ghost of “Brotherhood and unity” (Macedonia)

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I remember one day playing with two little girls and having a minor squabble with one of them. The girl I had had the fight with – Viki was her name – tried to undermine me in front of Beti, the other girl. She turned towards her, with eyes small and narrow, and said “You are playing with a Greek child”. I distinctly remember my surprise as what Viki had said and was quick to take a patronizing, know-it-all stance, blurting out nervously that we lived in a land where “brotherhood and unity” were the rule. 

I went home rather shaken up and reported the altercation to my family. They responded with loud laughter. “Brotherhood and unity!” they repeated, making me feel as if I were ridiculed. I must have protested against their reaction, probably by getting visibly angry at being laughed at. My grandfather flashed me a smile with his gold tooth, telling me that they weren’t really laughing at me, and that in fact, I was right. 

I pondered the slogan etched into my brain from school and the media “brotherhood and unity” (bratstvo i edinstvo). The more I repeated the phrase, the more I imagined there was a hidden meaning behind it I wasn’t getting, a meaning the adults knew very well, but were hiding from me, who knows why.

I wasn’t convinced. I pondered the slogan etched into my brain from school and the media “brotherhood and unity” (bratstvo i jedinstvo). The more I repeated the phrase, the more I imagined there was a hidden meaning behind it I wasn’t getting, a meaning the adults knew very well, but were hiding from me, who knows why. I felt just as confused as when a group of boys led by my 10-year old neighbor smeared cow dung all over another neighboring house’s doorknob, because Albanians lived there. I was even more confused that the boys stopped speaking to me after that, because they learned I had told my parents about the dung and the knob. I wasn’t sure what I had done wrong, nor why the boys had done this to our neighbors. I had never seen the Albanian family staying in the fairytale-like house right next to the woods. They kept out of the way of everyone else, shrouded in obscurity.

Those summers laden with a magical sense of mystery and tension – ringing laughter and hushed conversations – ended when we left the country that disappeared together with my childhood. My parents took us to Arizona where my body started changing, telling me that people were soon no longer going to consider me a child. My body changed within this confusion of being in a foreign land so different from ours, along with my grandfather’s death and the war of the breakup of Yugoslavia.

My mother would stand in front of the TV: war, she would tell me, this is war. There was footage of women in headscarves, dirty children and gaunt old men hobbling in a line of carts. My mother’s eyes were full of tears, her mouth open. I knew this was something terrible, and I realized from the urgent conversations among my parents and their immigrant friends that there was a chance we were never going back. The country I was born in was no more. War, something existing in textbooks, something my grandfather had helped solve, was back, and it was happening at home, the land of brotherhood and unity.

But we did go back. And things had changed. There were no more pictures of Tito looking at us from the center of the classroom. I did not miss that picture, even though it made me feel reassured when I was a child: someone brave and kind was looking at me do good work. But I was turning into a young woman and I didn’t need yet another man’s eye critically monitoring my success. I did not miss the sirens announcing the tragedy of his death, along with the eerie freeze that it breathed. Suddenly, I did not feel so terrible I had been born in the year after Tito’s death. It was no longer such a loss that my life did not overlap with his, and I felt embarrassed every time I remembered standing on my parents bed, looking hard at a portrait of Tito on the cover of an assigned book for school, trying to make myself cry, squeezing out a single tear. 

Things had changed. We were happy we had less school because Serbo-Croatian classes were cancelled. Only one class per generation — in my case, mine, to my peer’s great anger — would be studying an additional language beside English, and that was Russian. There was one thing, however, we felt we were robbed from. When we entered first grade, we were all given red scarves and blue hats and pronounced “Tito’s Pioneers” under a red flag. This made us feel like part of something greater. Then in seventh grade, on 25 May, Tito’s (not real) birthday and the Day of Youth, we were supposed to become “Tito’s Youths”, which was followed by a road trip around Yugoslavia. 

Suddenly, we were no longer going to be youths, somehow never officially growing up. And the road trip news was particularly dreary. We were now to go on a road trip to see places we had already seen, roaming about in a country one can cross in two hours in both directions. I was not going to see the Adriatic. I was not going to see the stalactites, stalagmites and olms of the Postojna Cave. I was not going to see where the Danube and Sava meet. It already felt stifling.

Nostalgia grew and still grows like an ear fungus, taking over any kind of ability to listen to the future and actually take control. It is the unwitting revenge of the generation whose sweet sea youth ended with slaughter, and then, isolation.ull of tears, her mouth open.

In a way, for many years, I never felt a lack of anything Yugoslav except space. 

Macedonia was somehow out of it: too far south, just like Slovenia was too far north. It was never important, with us speaking an exotic version of a Slavic language that is less than half understood, being associated as happy-go-lucky dancing music revelers who love to eat tomatoes and peppers by a pretty lake. It was as if Macedonians felt this reduced version of themselves too, so they desperately hardened their “ch” and “dzh” pronunciation, flaunted their Serbian left and right and made off-hand references to Yugoslav cinema and music from the 80s. For us who were born in the 80s, who lacked relatives from outside Macedonia, who were Albanian — or Greek, as half of my family was — it was always a condescending and surprised look at not knowing Serbian perfectly and not getting Yugoslav references. Saying “I don’t know” is hard enough, but getting “You don’t know that?! Are you serious?!” countless times is even harder.  Not only were we smaller now that we were no longer a part of Yugoslavia, but we were lesser amongst ourselves.

It was these same generations with a Yugoslav inferiority complex who helped us to believe that our country was next to nothing, that we were to amount to nothing and that the past was so much better than the future, prompting us to think we need to get out of here and forget about reevaluating our past that excluded a quarter of our population, the population whose doors we smeared with cow shit. Nostalgia grew and still grows like an ear fungus, taking over any kind of ability to listen to the future and actually take control. It is the unwitting revenge of the generation whose sweet sea youth ended with slaughter, and then, isolation. 

But I do understand the frustration and feeling of helplessness. Crossing several borders in the course of 900 kilometers is ridiculous, as is creating boundaries between common languages and cultures. Being small and bordered is stifling and claustrophobic, hindering development. However, for my generation, it is artists, activists and cultural workers who have managed to overcome those borders by working together in a commonly shared space we now call former Yugoslavia, or “the region”. Paradoxically, to me, it is this “region” and this Yugoslavia that now exists more than it ever did. Strangely, it is through this new connection that I am learning about an old country I had never truly experienced. And even more oddly so, I feel a new identity and fondness for this common space, a space that now includes sisterhood besides brotherhood, being unified on a true level.

 I will admit that I am still an outsider. It is the languages that were non Serbian/Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin whose cultures were never part of the full picture. In order to be part of it, you must know how to speak, and through this language come the references and the history and the local idioms that give us all the beauty of knowledge. So for now, I feel like a fortunate half-foreigner, happy to participate. 

Parts of this text are a paraphrase of the novel A spare life translated into English by Christina E. Kramer, who also contributed to this text.

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This article is part of the Archipelago Yugoslavia project by Traduki. It is published in collaboration with the S. Fischer Stiftung.

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