The Blue Monkey Review

I give away more Seton Hill University pens and continue a conversation that had started a few minutes before with a new acquaintance. This is not Jelena, of course, but Momir, the translator. He is a young man, 30 or less, who has lived and worked in London. I’m eager for a coffee, and Momir seems eager to talk. I had told him that I arrived in Nikšić just after the big snow. “So, you saw how well organized everything is?” His sardonic humor and his evident frustration with his homeland continued through our talk. “There is corruption everywhere,” he tells me with some heat after we find an outdoor table at a café across the street from the RTV headquarters. How many politicians in the governing coalition have children in foreign universities? What bribes do you have to pay to have the same services that in England you would receive by filling out a form?

And he also complains about the backward attitudes, as he sees it, of many Montenegrins. “Until a few years ago journalists edited tapes by slicing them with a razor where they wanted to make a splice. The BBC provided some digital editing machines, so now it can be done on a computer. But there are still people who resist learning. I taught my 65 year old father how to work a computer, but we have people at the station who are 45 who won’t learn. Anywhere else in the world, you don’t want to learn a new technology then you can leave because someone younger will come in to do it.”

I ask Momir about the referendum, the topic that frequently makes front page headlines in Montenegrin papers. Should Montenegro separate from Serbia and become fully independent? “I don’t think we should be talking about that,” he says. “The media should not pay attention to that. There are too many economic issues that are far more important.” His father, for instance, worked forty years in a factory and now lives on 150 euros a month. Salaries here are distressingly low.

Yet, people will go without food “so they can have a new cell phone.” Everyone seems to have a cell phone. The desire for consumer goods here seems completely disconnected with the economic level of the country. Most cars here are tiny, Ladas or Skodas or ancient Fiats. But a surprising number of Audis and BMWs show up on the streets of Nikšić and Podgorica. And young women (from teens to young mothers) dress very well. There is no shortage here of footwear that combines the worst features of stiletto heels with cowboys boots. Nina told me that she asked her women students about their fashions. They told her exactly what each item of clothing and accessory cost, totaling for many of them 100 euros or more. This is in a country where teachers earn 200 or 300 euros a month.

Momir sees many good things in Montenegro, in spite of his frustration. He returned here with his Croatian wife because they plan to start a family soon. “I remember when I was young I could just go outside and play, and no one had to watch me. When I got hungry, I could knock on any door and someone would feed me.” I see part of this phenomenon daily—children playing near their apartment blocs with no adults watching, let along supervising. Sometimes there are adults present, going about their own business. Sometimes there are no adults anywhere. And, “If you have to pay for something in London and you lack one penny, then that’s too bad. But here if you don’t have what you need, even if it’s 10 euros, someone lets you have the money.”

Momir is making some investments, and he is also attempting to launch his own business, selling Montenegrin properties over the internet. There are some good ones available, so you should check out.

Srijeda

Last night I watched myself on Montenegrin television. I should mention that production values here are not what they are at, say, NBC. My three minute interview was used as color in a program on business communication, but that program consisted of two women professionals—one a communication consultant at some ministry, another a professor in my Filozofski Fakultet—sitting with an interviewer and answering questions. They could have been used as examples of “low context” culture, the two of them about as animated as distant cousins at a Baptist funeral (and I’m not going to say anything about their make-up choices). My three-minute interview, by contrast, showed a man struggling to make the best of a bad situation. I took some comfort from knowing that no one, certainly no one I know, could possibly have an interest in seeing this program. And, even though it was misspelled once, Seton Hill University appeared on the screen when my face was there.

After the interview I return to reading Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon. My cell phone starts buzzing and making other noises, its non-subtle message alert. “I JUST SAW YOU ON TV,” I read from my friend Goran. Goran is writing a dissertation that compares Serbian and American literature. What, I wonder, could have led a Thomas Pynchon scholar to watch that program?

This morning I had a meeting with one of students in my American Civilization course. Early in the term I had asked if any students would volunteer to take me to an Orthodox service. Petar Božović was the only one who came forward, but it turns out he is not Orthodox but Jehovah’s Witness. I declined his invitation to the Kingdom Hall in Podgorica, but we agreed to meet later to talk about the Witness movement in Montenegro.

There was no hot water in my apartment this morning, so I didn’t shave and feel a bit more “balkan” than usual when I go out. On my way to the faculty I see the cleaning woman who tidies up in my classroom when my last class leaves. Over the weeks we have become cordial, especially as week by week I can say slightly more and make sense of more of what she says to me. We greet one another and then she tells me, “I saw you on TV last night.” I confess and then go about my business.

Petar and I head into the center of town. Nikšić’s town square has two broad streets leading into it from either side, both of which allow only pedestrian traffic on the long blocks just before the square. On the side nearer the faculty the block is almost solidly lined with cafes and bars, most of them with outdoor seating. A lot of the seating is already taken at 10:30, and just like every other day when I’ve gone there, the pedestrian areas have lots of people, mostly male people, standing or sitting around. I can’t figure this out. They can’t all be Fulbright scholars.

Petar and I have a good talk. He explains his own religious quest, how he began a search for real meaning in his late teens. What impressed him about the Witnesses, he tells me, is that the people who represented them practiced what they preached. Witness families seems to have a higher level of moral behavior than other families. And the kind of love shown for other Witnesses, who come from all over the world, greatly impresses Petar.

Petar, like other serious young people I’ve met here, feels a need to gain some distance from his own culture at the same time that he wants to change it. He knows his Bible very well, and shows me passages in an English translation that I note was published in Pennsylvania. He clearly takes seriously his mission as a Witness. I wonder how this message, one that grew out of the local preoccupations of American Protestants, has managed to find any hold at all here in the Balkans. Perhaps, in spite of its dramatic vision of an apocalyptic future the Jehovah’s Witness movement may contain some form of the optimism of its country of origin. That may explain Petar’s comparative lightness of spirit.

In fact, heaviness of spirit often accompanies the skepticism of many of the people I’ve met here. “How do you find Montenegro?” asks Tanja, another of my students who I happen to meet outside the faculty. In Serbian or English, “Kako je u Crnoj Gori?” is the most common question that I’m asked by Montenegrins. “Everything is very nice,” I told a clerk in a shop earlier this week. “It is very interesting,” I tell Tanja. “Interesting?” she responds, finding even this ambivalent reply unexpectedly positive, then asks “How do you like Nikšić?” Another common question, though the subtext is not always so well hidden. At the airport two weeks ago I happened to see Slavica, who is my contact person at the consulate. The first thing she said to me was, “How much do you hate living in Nikšić?”

“It’s very quiet here,” I tell Tanja. Again, she finds my enthusiasm hard to believe. She obviously feels much less warmly toward Nikšić (she commutes from Podgorica) and even toward her country.

“I feel like a bird with clipped wings,” she tells me. Since the breakup of Yugoslavia and the war in the 1990s, Serbians and Montenegrins cannot travel except to a few Balkan countries without a visa. The economy, of course, is the other pillar of Montenegrin pessimism. When I suggest that political and economic change might occur rather quickly, Tanja responds, “Maybe in a thousand years.”

I suspect the changes will come more quickly than she will be able to believe.
A point that I felt safe to make in my TV interview was that a rapid growth in the economy here in Montenegro could lead to very rapid changes, especially for young people. The desire for consumer goods already has a strong presence here. The opportunity to acquire more of the good things of life (i.e. the things that people on TV have) could transform the way many Montenegrins live. The free enjoyment of leisure might change, for instance, or the extended dependence of children and youth, the tight living spaces, and perhaps even the tightly knit family units. None of my interviewers has asked me about that, so I will probably leave here without acting out the role of Jeremiah.