The Blue Monkey Review

I am writing this just before my final exam. Students have been taking tests for a couple of weeks already. Even though my students are all in their first year and so part of the new system, many teachers have chosen to stick with a version of the old method. They have separate tests for the first and second half of the course, but these come a week or so apart. Those of my students who either didn’t take or failed my mid-term will take it again tomorrow. Everyone who wants a first or second chance at the final has the opportunity twelve days later. Stan Surbatović tells me that, while cramming is well-known in the U.S., it takes on a life of its own here. The word they use for it is a verb formed from the word for a military campaign.

In my class student attendance fell sharply after my mid-term. This actually made holding class easier since I didn’t have a large pool of socializers in the back. One week soon after the mid-term a small group of young men were apparently trying to improve their chances with some young women near the back of the room. It annoyed me enough that at one point I said, “Gentlemen, please, either be quiet of leave.” They settled down for a while but soon enough they began again. It hadn’t quite reached the point for me to tell them to go when one of my students addressed me. “Can you stop for a minute?” Then she stood up, changed to Serbian, and tore into the monkey-boys. When she was done, they were quiet. They left soon after.

The students who have come most faithfully are obviously the most interested or motivated. But they have also participated very well in class discussions. They’ve learned a lot, most of which I can’t assess on any kind of test. And, of course, I’ve learned as much from them. Maybe more.

Posted by at 1:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Readers should take the time to look at Ruth’s blog. She has a different point of view and she has written about many of our activities that haven’t made it into Blue Monkey.

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“Her face,” wrote Rebecca West in her characterization of young Montenegrin women, “is like a niche designed for a statue it does not hold.” One of my frustrations with West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is the over-elegance of its writing. What is one to make of this line? This is one of those cases where you want an example. And, once you have the example the whole idea makes sense. West makes the point several times that Montenegrin women are beautiful. And, while I can’t claim any expertise in the field of female beauty beyond a lifetime of study of the topic, I’d have to agree. Yet I’ve been struck, again and again, in talking to young women here that their outlook seems markedly less optimistic than that of their male peers.

West’s simile comes alive for me at the Mex “super” market in the person of one of the two checkers. If you saw her in Santa Monica, even in her Mex red apron, you would assume she was an actress. She could easily fill in for a bad blonde in a Mexican telenovela. Yet she shows little animation in her work, and falls short even in the conventional friendliness that I’ve received from checkers at other stores here. Even her colleague at the Mex meat and cheese counter gets a kick out of my fractured attempts at communication (and I’m just going to mention the counter-girls at the bakery who treat my visits like a game). But the check-out movie star offers little more than “izvolite” when she hands over my change.

I had a chance to explore this with several of my students. After my the last lecture of my course, a few of them joined me for drinks at the Atrium. Three of the young women considered my question about the difference in optimism between young men and women.

“I am not a pessimist,” said Tatiana Metikoš.

Ana Ponoš agrees in rejecting pessimism. “I am a realist,” she said.

Both probably have reason to take a pragmatic view of their lives. Both were born in Croatia, but their families had to leave when the war started because they were Serbian—that is, they went to the Orthodox church. Both had to move more than once, living in Serbia and finally in Montenegro.

But I wasn’t willing to abandon this little exploration of gender differences. I asked the women students if they think that boys and girls are treated differently in Montenegrin families. They were unanimous.

“The son is a god,” said Ana. He receives better treatment, bigger portions at meals, nicer things. There is a word in the language for the male child, even one with sisters. “They refer to him as the only child.”

The women told me about families that keep having children until they finally have a son. They told me about another of my students, a young woman who was the third girl born in her family. “Her aunts were crying when she was born” because they had expected a boy baby.

Perhaps the most telling comment came from Neda Kosorić who says, “I would like to have a son because I think he will have better opportunities.... He will suffer less.”

Of course, my male students didn’t let these comments go unchallenged. That was “200 years ago,” Alexander says when the girls talk about the preferences for boys. I asked Ranko Bulajić if his sister receives as much as he does. Yes, he said, “maybe more.” And, it should be added, the young women are spoke generally, not about their own experiences. I ask Tatiana Metikoš if she has a brother. “No. Fortunately.” Still, the male counterattack was blunted a bit when Alexander asked me if a preference for the male child isn’t true even in American society. I’d have to say that for as much of my white, middle-class milieu that I have a sense of, the answer would be no.

In a discussion of an issue about which they have more personal experience, the women also had telling insights. I see very few boy and girl couples, I told them. Lots of girls couples, holding onto one another, and lots of guys hanging out in pairs or in groups. The women had a poor opinion of Montenegrin men as boyfriends.

“I met some boys,” Ana tells me, “and they think that if they go out with girls they will be considered weak.” The ordinary guy on the korzo doesn’t dance because he doesn’t want anyone to think he is gay.

I had to take a moment to review this information. Young men here probably have as much homophobia as the average barfly in Greensburg (maybe more). But they assert their masculinity by spending most of their time with other guys, and in Montenegro, remember, that means more physical closeness than even grade school boys would accept in the U.S. In the U.S., sadly, if a boy beyond the 5th or 6th grade puts his arm around the shoulders of his best friend, he’ll be cruelly ridiculed. Here not only do adult males hang out with one another, they often hang on to one another. And, recall, friends kiss when they meet.

Yet this male bonding apparently exists to keep the females at bay. Even when they go out with girls, “They don’t act like gentlemen.” They enter the cafe first but they assert their pride by insisting on buying drinks.

The women explained this by talking about the traditional needs of Montenegrin society. Men were always at war, so they always needed more men to take up arms against the Turk. In the 1930s Rebecca West characterized the attitude as, “A man should have everything, because he is a hero, because he is half divine in his courage....” Yet even though warrior virtues are highly attractive in war, they don’t leave much room for a work ethic. They certainly don’t include housework. The following Saturday I went to a pic nic with people from the small Protestant church I’ve attended. One of the young women told me that women simply expect to take care of men in the home. “I can’t imagine a man ironing,” she said. “That just seems like a woman’s job.”

Well, let’s keep things in perspective. Ironing probably remains a novel, one-time experience for most of American manhood, or else it is like bungee-jumping, something that they have nothing against but will probably never try. And, it’s certain that the young men I’ve met and talked to will, or already do, take more of a hand than their fathers did in caring for children and keeping the house in order. But I still think the generalization holds true, that in this culture household labor falls primarily on women.

And for many men, even work outside the home might seem dreary and unappealing. My landlord, who works very hard himself both at the steel and in taking care of his apartment, told me that only 20,000 of 600,000 Montenegrins have productive work. I suspected he was exaggerating, especially when he added, “We have many police.” But it’s clear that unemployment, underemployment, and retirement, account for huge portion of adult males.

If boys and young men really are as spoiled as these young women assert (and all of my second-hand information tends to confirm their view rather than that of my male students), then marriage can’t be a very attractive prospect, even for women who want careers. Most women here who have work outside the home also have the second shift, back home, taking care of all the needs of the children and home. Also, as I’ve written before, many young couples need to move in with the husband’s family to make ends meet. So, you move into the home where your new husband was treated “like a god.” If that is the prospect for young women, no wonder that “realism” makes the future look a little unappealing.

I had an unexpected additional piece of evidence fall into my hands. The essay question on my final exam asked students to choose one of the documents from the second half of the course to examine. I didn’t think much about this, but if I had I might have expected the excerpt from Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery to appeal to students because of its accessibility. Or, perhaps, Martin Luther King Letter from Birmingham Jail because of its idealism. Both of those documents proved quite popular. But the most frequently chosen document was the first chapter of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, “The Problem that Has no Name.” Again and again the female students in classes wrote about how much they saw the problems of 1950s housewives persisting in their world, and of how much they identified with the issues in the text.

If the attitudes of my students indicate larger trends in the culture, then a feminist consciousness will make its appearance here sooner rather than later. And I suspect that my female students are probably better prepared for the economic future of this country than most men are. After all, the women expect to work, and to work long hours. In a world of capitalist expansion, even highly attenuated warrior virtues will seem more and more anachronistic if not perverse.

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Anyone who has seen more than an occasional split second of Spanish-language TV knows that many hours on it are given over to relationship dramas that feature many spectacular changes of fortune for the protagonists and also deal with powerful emotions. Telenovelas are often referred to as “soaps,” but unlike American soap operas telenovelas offer complete narratives, with beginnings, character development, and conclusions. The cast members can then migrate to other telenovelas or make movies or otherwise develop their careers. These are spectacularly popular in Latin America. Brazil produces more telenovelas than any other country, and in the past these dramas have taken a role in political change in the country.

Telenovelas are also popular in Montenegro. Excluding satellite offerings, Montenegro supports six channels (remarkable in itself). These stations import a lot of content (making subtitle translation a viable career path for my students). American movies are very popular. Other programs come from Serbia, France, and Italy. But in terms of hours of television time, telenovelas account for more TV time than any other imported programming and probably for more than all other foreign content combined. On weekdays, between 5 and 7 P.M. every channel has at least one telenovela. One channel, Pink (which I think might be a Balkan super-station) has repeats of telenovelas in the morning, at 5, 8, 10, and 11 and then braodcasts the new episodes between 4 and 9 P.M.

During the past four months, I have sampled a wide variety of these televised narratives. Although they look interesting, the Brazilian telenovelas are impenetrable for me. Many of the Spanish language programs have such strange situations that it’s hard to gain a working context for the action in the course of one or two episodes. In one program I had trouble understanding much of the dialogue because of the background noise of rain in the scene, and then the scene switched to two well-cleavaged blondes in halter-tops, outside in the pouring rain and exercising their right to bear assault rifles. I could not understand enough to know what they disagreed about, who they planned to kill, or even why they kept abusing some poor dope who was their flunky.

Over the last month, however, Ruth and I have fallen into a regular telenovela habit in the evenings. We watch the nightly episode of Romantica Obsesión and then quickly change to Pink to catch the last 15 minutes of Apuesta por un Amor. I won’t try to explain the story lines or character development in these narratives. The one is too intricate, the other too subtle, to attempt in a simple blog. Plus, I’m not sure of some of the details. But some things have become clear as we’ve watched, and I want to share some of these lessons.

One benefit, of course, is the one we wanted when we decided to set aside the 8 to 9 P.M. hour. We’ve maintained contact with the Spanish language and have improved our ability to follow spoken Spanish. We’ve also picked up some vocabulary that, while it might have been known to us before, now we can use confidence. Of course, the many phrases expressing adoration don’t seem particularly valuable as far as I am concerned. But there are also many phrases that occur surprisingly frequently that might be considered emergency Spanish: ¡Suélteme! ¡Lárguete! ¡Vete! There also exists lots of phrases that express disapproval of someone, usually someone bad. ¡Maldito! is one we’ve heard a lot lately. And ¡me das asco! You never can tell when you will have to tell someone off. But the larger social lessons of the telenovelas are even more important.

The struggle between good and bad: The Mexico in these telenovelas has escaped from class conflict. Most of the characters are middle or upper-middle or even just upper class. But even people lower in the economic hierarchy seemingly have little resentment or anger toward wealthier people. They might want to acquire wealth by seducing, marrying, or entrapping the envied elite people. But the main conflict is not between those who defend class privilege and those who want to overturn it, but between good (though often badly misguided) people and bad (though often very clever and single-minded) people. And, while there is no one-to-one link between material and moral success, it is clear that those who do good usually do well.

Evil blondes: Blonde women are not necessarily dumb. But they have a very high likelihood of being bad. Both our telenovelas have evil blondes, always women. Of course, there are good blondes, too, even some who are women. And I’ve briefly watched telenovelas in which blondes seemed to be the principal female characters (ergo, good). But if a blonde appears on the screen, you need to give her the benefit of doubting her virtue. Romantica Obsesión, for instance, has a bad blonde and her daughter, who has light brown hair, both angling for the attention, affection, and money of two of the good guys in the show. And one of the above is competing with another blonde for one of the same guys. None of these women seem to have any scruples whatsoever.

Evil mothers: It makes some sense that a typically European appearance would signal compromised virtue to an audience made up mainly of mestizo people. But Latin America, and Mexico in particular, has a cult of motherhood with roots reaching far into pre-Columbian times and nurtured by Catholicism since early colonial times. How, then, do we explain the presence of mothers who cause many of the worst things that take place in the telenovelas? Romantica Obsesión has two wicked mothers, one the blonde woman mentioned above and the other a beautiful morena whose son and husband are the two main good guys in the show. Apuesta had to get by with just one bad mother, but she was the source of almost all the horrible events in the show until she was shot down by a Mexican police sharpshooter. Now, even though she has departed, much of her bad work is being carried on by her daughter, who, by the way, is blonde.

Bad make-up and bad people: If being a blonde or being a mother raises questions about a person’s moral character, pink, mauve, or purple eye shadow pretty much clinches it. This is TV, right? So everyone wears make-up. But if it is noticeable, it signals trouble. Even lower-class women, even women with, uh, questionable pasts, have more restrained lipstick colors than upper class women who mean trouble. And, I have to admit, this is something I’ve always more or less suspected.

Macho is for losers: I’ve said so much about women so far that you might wonder if there are any male characters in these serials. There are and they include the usual range of rich and poor, good and bad, smart and dim. Although poor good guys can be a bit on the dull side, it doesn’t make much sense to have a rich and good guy scripted as stupid. These alpha males, though, are subject to the testosterone-driven emotional storms that result in attitudes and decisions that are inevitably disastrous. Alejandro, for instance, in Romantica Obsesión is madly in love with Mariana but frequently ends up believing some suspicion planted in his mind that she harbors feelings for Oscar, one of the worst people who ever lived. It doesn’t help that Oscar, Alejandro’s mother, Mariana’s stepmother, and Tamara (an evil blonde) all conspire to dupe both Alejandro and Mariana. It also doesn’t help that about half the male characters in Romantica Obsesión are in love with Mariana. [My question is: What is wrong with the other half of those guys?] But, once duped, Alejandro goes into jealous fits and does some really stupid stuff.

Presumably the telenovelas have an overwhelmingly female audience in Latin America, an audience that might have a deep aversion to the more egregious forms of machista behavior. From our small sample of telenovela episodes, it seems that although these stories don’t challenge male privilege, they portray what we might think of as the Latin male version of “mastery” as admirable but misguided at best, and as completely vicious at its worst. In fact, the most typically macho character we’ve seen is Alvaro, in Apuesta por un Amor. He comes from a rich family, but on top of being unscrupulous and kind of dim, he also treats his wife (one of the rare good blondes) with disdain. He cheats on her and is abusive. Right now he’s hooked up with the serial’s bad blonde, and together they plan to...well, I don’t want to give away too much.

Alvaro’s father, Don Julio, provides the most compelling image of male mastery. In the episodes we have seen, Don Julio has spent a lot of time getting angry and making peremptory demands on his family. Driven by pride, he has made one disastrous decision after another. The current example of bad parenting: His daughter, Soledad, has made a mistake in sleeping with a man she doesn’t love. She is repentant, her fiancé, Leandro, has gone into a macho, and Don Julio has kicked her off the hacienda. But all this mastery and anger comes at a price. Even though we have only watched the program for a few weeks, in 15 minute segments, we’ve seen Don Julio suffer two cardiac episodes. Alvaro and Don Julio together add up to a pretty clear message that the traditional Latin male attitudes are corrupt, sick, and vicious.

Leandro may represent a hopeful trend for Latin males. He’s a regular guy, hardworking, with a generous spirit. He’s also physically courageous if not a little out of control at times—he’s already had a fist fight with his rival for Soledad. But he’s also suffering from impotence, has seen a doctor about it, and is currently in therapy. Now, we suspect that his rival, Samuel, who seduced Soledad, has caused Leandro’s e.d. through witchcraft (the bruja in this story is another mother whom I’d hesitate to describe as good). But the willingness of Leandro to acknowledge his problema and seek therapy probably signals a good trend for the Latin male and for the makers of Viagra (TM).

The telenovelas contain many positive messages, even to my overly intellectualized view of things. Romantic passion is a good thing, but as a passion it can also drive the morally ambivalent toward bad behavior. The Catholic religion also comes off well in the telenovelas, though again the portrait has its ambiguities—the most religious woman in our two serials is also one of the evil mothers. Romantica Obsesión contains an extended discussion of the morality of divorce, something that probably seems anachronistic even to viewers in Latin America. But, if anything could be done to ease the burden of problems faced by these characters, it would be clear, deliberate communication. In Romantica Obsesión every other episode has one of the good guys or girls telling another one of the good people, “You have to talk to her (or him) about this.” Perhaps this reflects some influence of U.S. culture in Latin America. I can’t say. But it is clear that the good people in these stories stumble into the land of harmful beliefs and actions only when confused by the machinations of the bad people. And the longer they refrain from speaking plainly to the ones they love, the longer they stay there.

Posted by at 6:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

If I had time I would go with you and show you the way. --Total stranger

Mobile phone companies here charge real money for air time. If, however, you use SMS, you can make 5 euros last a long time. So, when I use the phone here, it’s usually to send a text message, or to receive one. But what was I to make of the message I received last Friday night? “Going to alb tom. Want to go? Nina.” Alb? Albania? Of course I wanted to go. It took us another hour to work out details, using some actual landline telephone time. The problem with a visit to Albania is that, other than by car, there is no direct transit. It involves taking a cab to the border, then finding a bus, then doing the reverse to leave. In the end, we decided to rent a car.

Twelve hours later Ruth, Nina, and I headed out of Podgorica with the directions that a policeman, a cleaning woman, and a shop girl gave us at different points along the way. I’ve written before that that the use of directional signs here would have to be described as parsimonious. Of course, there aren’t that many major roads, so it’s hard to go too far wrong. But I’ve noticed that signs often don’t tell you how to leave the country, or when you are about to do that. So, as often happens in this part of the world, the border crossing appeared unexpectedly.

Even more unexpected was the experience at the border. First, we paid €2 to drive the car through a shallow puddle to wash off the tires. Then we had to all leave the car and enter the passport control office, something new. It didn’t take long for the official to fill out the appropriate forms and take €10 apiece from us for our “visas.” And then we went into another office where I received my temporary Albanian driver’s license. I’d have to say that even though this all seemed strange, everyone treated us with courtesy. And we had a chance to see a bit of local TV—a Bugs Bunny cartoon broadcast in Italian but with Albanian subtitles.

And then we were in Albania. In all my travels, I’ve never seen such a striking change in surroundings upon crossing a border. The physical terrain remained the same flat valley land that skirts Lake Skader on both the Montenegrin and Albanian side. But even the change that you see in going from San Diego to Tijuana doesn’t capture the sharp differences in going from Montenegro to Albania. The country is clearly much poorer. Houses looked smaller, and in town the apartment blocks all seemed dilapidated or incomplete. The roads there were just asphalt tracks, or completely unpaved, even in town. Vendors shared the roads with old Mercedes and horse-drawn carts. And from scarcity of direction signs we went into the land before signs were invented. The only sign we found directed us over a wooden bridge that only accommodated one-way traffic, but was for traffic running both ways. Ruth and I followed the whole length of the southern border between the two countries and had no way of knowing where we were headed into Montenegro until the border crossing appeared—again, quite unexpectedly.

In Shkodra, the only substantial town we visited, Nina left us to take a bus to the capital, Tirana. Ruth and I stayed in town for a while before moving on. I assume it must have been a market day. Ruth compared it to a Roman market with cars. It reminded me of la Fayllucca in Cuernavaca or any substantial mercado in a Latin American city. But this market spread out along both sides of the sidewalk up and down the street, as far as we wanted to walk. Yet any shopper from Nikšić would have scorned the old, used goods for sale in Shkodra. Even the new goods must have come from someplace poorer than China.

Far more fascinating than seeing the invisible hand at work, though, was the diversity of people. In Podgorica or Nikšić the great majority of people dress more or less in the same range of fashions that you would find most places in western Europe. Except for their lack of green-dyed hair, piercings, and body art, my students look about the way my students at Seton Hill look. And the barflies on the korzo could walk into any bar in Greensburg without attracting the slightest attention. But in Shkodra we saw young women wearing message t-shirts and traditional women with scarves and bobby-pinned hair, peasants mixing with urban types who looked just like people in Nikšić, Catholic nuns and Moslem women in long headscarves. I even saw one man carrying what I thought must be a scimitar, then managed to get hold of myself and realized it was a scythe blade he had just purchased or had sharpened.

Albanians have a reputation for friendliness. We were there only a short time, I’m sorry to say, but the dozen or so people with whom we had brief exchanges gave us reason to believe the reputation for friendliness is well-deserved. No one treated us coldly, in spite of a very high language barrier. One man who did speak English gave us very reasonable directions for finding the road to Montenegro: Drive out of town and then ask again. But he added, “If I had time I would go with you and show you the way.”

We drove south and returned by way of Ulcinj. Ruth and I had an early afternoon lunch there, then walked into stari grad. Then, over another mountain and back to Podgorica.

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Much to my surprise, I’ve spent more time thinking about religion lately than I have in many years. Most of my mental map of Christianity has been charted in shades and contrasts between a generalized Protestantism that I have known as an insider, and my sense of Catholicism, something that I have come to know through friends and through working for Catholic institutions most of my adult life. In the U.S., and for most of the places I’ve traveled in Europe and Latin America, the map works pretty well. But Orthodoxy isn’t on my map, and during my first months here I didn’t find much to help me understand it. In the last several weeks, though, that has changed, though I still find myself using a Protestant perspective to find my way.

Last week Ruth and I spent the morning traveling to Ostrog, one of the most revered monasteries in Montenegro. We took a bus to the small town of Ostrog and then rode a cab up a windy road to the lower monastery. From there we spent about 45 minutes walking to the upper monastery. We shared the road with quite a few pilgrims, people walking up the monastery for prayer and devotions. They carried bundles, sometimes very large bundles, filled with food and other items to leave outside the monastery. Some walked without shoes over the asphalt, gravel, and rock on the upward road. Though we didn’t know it at the time, I found out later that the following day was the day for remembrance of Sv. Vasili who established the monastery.

Like the sincerity of the pilgrims, Ostrog itself is impressive and severe. It is built into the cliffs very high on the side of a mountain, and the chapels inside are carved into the rock. We entered quietly and respectfully, and kept back so that those who had come for worship wouldn’t be disturbed. We didn’t stay inside long. The chapels we saw, including the one containing the earthly remains of Sv. Vasili, are quite small and we did not want to preclude anyone else from entering.

I’ve written before about sacred space in Serbian Orthodoxy. Nothing could have made that clearer than the devotion shown toward this site. It seems to me that this sense of sacred space has a quality that I don’t see even in Catholic piety. But, I am only an amateur Catholic and a complete tourist in Orthodoxy.

Lately I’ve had some help in thinking about Orthodoxy through the usual process of contrasting it to something I know better. Last Sunday Ruth and I attended the morning worship service at Nikšić’s only Protestant church. To say Protestantism has a low profile in Montenegro would give me some claim on the Pulitzer prize for understatement. When I first arrived, Janko told me that there were only two Protestant churches in Montenegro. I think he underestimated the missionary activities that are going on here, but it would be hard for anyone to actually find even two. The church we went to was marked only with a sign saying “English Language Center.” The rented rooms once had a sign designating a church, but the landlord would not allow it to remain.

The Rev. Stanisa Surbatovic is an American (a Californian, no less) who has served in the U.S. Navy and in other ministries throughout his adult life. The mission to Montenegro made sense because Stan’s parents were Montenegrin and he grew up with some knowledge of the language. He and his family have been very welcoming and helpful to Ruth and I. The Surbatovic’s have lived in Nikšić for eight years. In that time they have built up a small circle of faithful worshipers and reach a larger group who are interested but not necessarily committed.

Stan (who also teaches at the Philosophical Faculty where I teach) does not see his mission as necessarily antagonistic to the local Orthodoxy. “We would love to see the Orthodox church go through real reform,” Stan wrote to when I sent him some information about this blog. His services emphasize devotional reflection and exposition, and include singing of familiar hymns in both Montenegrin and English. The service here, in fact, apart from the language difference, could have easily taken place at the La Sierra Community Church where I went as a child. Stan revealed that some elements of American Protestantism haven’t made the transition into Montenegrin as easily as the hymns. When they first tried to hold one of the Protestant sacraments, the pot-luck dinner, it led to a bit of cultural discomfort. “Men here aren’t used to serving themselves,” Stan said.

Our translator for the Montenegrin portions of the service was Gordana Djurković, another of my colleagues in the English program and a member of Stan’s church for seven years. She agreed to talk with me, and on the Thursday after the church service she and I had coffee at Cafe Grand on the korzo. Gordana’s good friend (and yet another English teacher), Dragana Dedović also joined us.

As we left the faculty building Goran commented on how lucky I was to be going to coffee with two beautiful women. “It’s a dream come true,” I said. And, in the event, it proved a wonderful opportunity. Gordana talked quite freely about her religious experience, and Dragana also contributed from her Orthodox perspective.

We began with my comments about sacred space, about the importance of special places in Orthodoxy. Dragana didn’t limit her religion to her experience of sacred space—she didn’t feel farther from God when she was out of church. But she agreed with my observation and said that going to a church, or especially to a place like Ostrog, gave her a special feeling, a sense that she found hard to describe.

Gordana, on the other hand, although she grew up in the Orthodox church, now finds that she has little attraction for the observances related to place. She became more interested in religion as she formed what she repeatedly characterized as a relation with God, “as with a person.” Even though she began to go to Stan’s church and attend Bible studies to help with her English, she became more and more interested in what the Bible had to say and in forming a clearer understanding of her faith.

I told them that I had gone to church and that I had found everything unexpectedly unfamiliar. The parts of the liturgy didn’t seem to correspond to the familiar parts of the Catholic mass. “And, of course, I didn’t understand any of the language.”

“Neither do we,” said Gordana, referring to the use of Old Church Slavonic as the language of worship here. Gordana criticized the churches here for not providing instruction in the Bible and explaining Christianity.

“You don’t have to understand all that,” said Dragana. “[Church] is a pleasant place to think about God.”

I asked about religious instruction. The Communist regime may have influenced the Orthodox church’s ability to provide religious formation. But neither woman knew of Orthodox Sunday school or even of confirmation. When I asked if either of them had learned the Apostle’s or Nicene Creed, neither one knew about these. According to Stan, the creed is chanted early in the Orthodox service and only the most faithful at the services would be likely to know what it was.

Although I’m sure she would be uncomfortable with my use of the label, I was struck with Gordana’s Protestant attitude. She emphasized reading the Bible and understanding the scriptures for herself. Several times during our talk she quoted scripture. And, although she didn’t talk about the kind of distinctive conversion experience that evangelical religion generally emphasizes, she did have a sense of really making a change first in her beliefs and then in her entire life. She spoke of having reasons for her actions now that she lacked before, of having a different view for seeking to lead a moral life. And even small enjoyments now have new meaning. She repeatedly emphasized having a relationship with God.

I left our Kaffeeklatsch thinking in visual terms of figure and ground. Orthodoxy here forms everyone’s background, like the mountainous terrain and the weather. For most it is wrapped up with national identity and undoubtedly with self-identity. As ritual and devotion it becomes prominent at sacred places and in special times. when I spoke to Goran the next day, he said that most people make little connection between Orthodoxy and their daily lives. If they become more serious about religion, they feel they need to become a saint, or at least a monk. Since Luther the Protestant movements have generally expected a clear understanding of the basis for faith, but they have also expected believers to base their religion in faith. Gordana referred to faith as something deeper than feeling. Perhaps so, but we only know about it because we have a perception of it, and usually not an intellectual perception. That requires a lot of attention.

Posted by at 2:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In Balkans, everybody hates everybody. –Student paper

I’ve wanted to write about the issue of “national identity” for quite a while, but I kept thinking that I didn’t have a clear enough insight or firm enough grasp of the issues. As I’ve continued living here and talking to both colleagues and students about the self-identity of various groups it becomes increasingly clear that people who live here feel ambivalence about these divisions and also recognize their ambiguity. Even in the Balkans it’s hard to understand balkanization. Still, this issue has pressing relevance for anyone here. At times in the recent past, this has literally become a life or death issue. In spite of its difficulty, national identity is something that that those of us from outside the Balkans need to recognize.

The central theme of Misha Glenny’s history of the region is that the “Great Powers” have generally been the source of conflict in the Balkans, and that national identity has arisen both as a defense against Great Power hegemony and as an instrument of that hegemony. The Austrian emperor claimed a role as “defender” of Slavic Catholics in Croatia and kept taking more territory on the Dalmatian coast; the Russian tsar could establish “special” relationships with Bulgars, Serbs, even Montenegrins, depending on who best served plans for Russia’s growing power. And the Turkish empire? As the “sick man of Europe” declined in health the other empires tried to take as much as they could and the mixture of peasants, merchants, and bandits who actually lived here improvised states and formed alliances with the power that seemed least exploitive. The process continued into the 20th century as Nazi, western, and Soviet claims on the region shifted and hardened.

More recently, however, the loyalties that emerged from almost two centuries of self-formation have become instruments for homegrown elites. In the 1990s Croatian and Serbian leaders wrapped themselves and their expansionist goals in the cloak of national identity. As in the American Civil War, neighbors, even family members, found themselves on opposing sides in a struggle of conflicting ideologies that they. I cannot do justice to the stories from that period, but the hatreds that broke out then still have power to shape lives now. The hardships of war and economic breakdown have left some Serbians and Montenegrins nostalgic for Yugoslavia, for Tito, even for Communism.

Many people here recognize that their leaders have taken advantage of them. My students all take for granted that the government here, at all levels, is corrupt. They vaguely recognize that the identity issue has become a useful symbol for political power. Blue Monkey readers will remember Momir’s comment a few weeks ago, that the referendum on Montenegrin independence only distracted people from economic issues. My own students agreed when I shared that idea with them. Still, for the ordinary unemployed guy taking his morning walk on the corso, the referendum issue probably appeals to pride of place. Ads supporting independence have now begun to appear, claiming that only an independent Montenegro can be Montenegro.

Like many complicated issues, this one lends itself to simple explanations. In discussing conflicting loyalties in the Balkans with my students, many of them quickly agreed that internecine conflict somehow defined this region and their culture. When I gave them the quote that begins this posting, a murmur of agreement ran through the class. The problem is that they don’t hate other Balkan people. I’m sure that resentments run deep in this region, but younger people here don’t take them for granted. National identity has other meanings than simple exclusion.

Yet what does it mean to be Serbian or Croatian, let alone Montenegrin? I’ve tackled that question with my students both directly, in discussing national identity, and indirectly in discussing race. Race makes for an interesting intellectual problem here, since it remains largely theoretical. Every one of my 160 students is white. I’d be surprised if most of them have even seen anyone of African descent. “We learn in school that there are four races,” Alexander told me a few weeks ago. “White, black, red, and yellow.” “What about the Roma?” I ask. “Are they a separate race?” “Of course.” “Well, are they white, black, red, or yellow?” “Well, that is what we learn in school. But in reality....” And so it went. Most took comfort in the notion that color (some kind of color) defined race, but we left unresolved the issue of whether the Roma were Montenegrin.

In fact, the issue of what it means to be Montenegrin proved intractable. Alexander claimed some kind of generalized Slavic kinship. “Can I be Montenegrin?” I asked. “If I live here? Learn the language?” Some said yes, some no. I had students who accepted a liberal definition of national identity as citizenship. “If they are born here and live here, then they are Montenegrin.” Others laid out characteristics that were far more exclusive, including bloodline and religion. The issues of religion and language emerge repeatedly in discussing Montenegrin identity, and these same issues appear throughout the region.

“We had a religious war in an atheist country,” said Jasmine, an artist in Belgrade. During the 1990s Serbian Orthodox soldiers shelled Catholic Dubrovnik. Catholic Croatian soldiers shelled the Moslem section of Mostar, in Bosnia. When Yugoslavia fell apart, the pieces it fell into generally had distinct religious majorities. Religion came up repeatedly in my classroom discussions as a marker of national identity or even of race.

It came up most recently in an informal discussion that I had with two of my students, Dragan and Neda. I had explained some elements of American youth culture in the 1920s, and talked about dating in general terms. I asked something rather general about dating in Montenegro today, and Neda unexpectedly said, “Sometimes there are national issues.” That surprised me, though she quickly made me understand that dating across the ethnic barrier is difficult or worse. She had a relationship with “a Croatian boy” that her parents found unsuitable. .She had to give it up. “They say they only want what is best for us, but I wonder.”

“But if he lives in your town and he speaks your language, what makes him Croatian?”

“His parents are Croatian. And they are Catholic while we are Orthodox.” Just that simple.

Dragan had a similar experience which was an even clearer example of the religious divide. He had become acquainted with a girl who was beautiful, he said. “I fell in love with her.” And he believed that she liked him, too. But when they talked and he told her his name, “I could see how she reacted because it was not a Moslem name.” And her parents would not allow her to spend time with boys who are not Moslem. [Dragan and Neda both live on the coast, an area with a much larger share of Croatian and Moselm Montenegrins than other areas.]

Boundaries marked by place of worship can hardly surprise us. Even in the U.S. inter-faith marriage faces some problems, though a religious identity would be distinct from national identity for us. Language, though, is a different story. We have our own problems with that in the U.S. But the issue is whether we admit that we are a bilingual national state or continue to irrationally deny it. We don’t argue over whether English is really the language we speak. (Oops—forgot the whole Ebonics controversy. But I think everyone else forgot that, too.)

When Yugoslavia existed, the official language was Serbo-Croatian. This made the claim that the regional dialects could all be grouped under a single term. In fact, the languages of the region, from Bulgaria to Slovenia all share many features, and linguistically are grouped under the rubric of “South Slavic.”

The real issue, though, is the language(s) spoken in Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia, and Serbia. In my Blue Monkey postings I have consistently referred to Serbian as the language that I was trying to learn and the one I have used to ask for directions, buy cappuccino, and reveal points of my personal biography to strangers. And I’ve used that same language in all of the countries mentioned above. Yet, at the moment, all of those places claim to have their own language. “Govorite li hrvatski? (“Do you speak Croatian?”) the woman asked who helped me find my hotel in Dubrovnik. I made the same wild claim that I would have made if the question had referred to Serbian: “Malo,” I said. (“A little.”)

“Every country has the right to its own language,” one of my students told me. So, the United States, the most powerful nation (at the moment) on Earth, how does it get left out? He saw my point but it didn’t seem to undermine his position. Other of my students, though, just as freely asserted that Serbian, Croatian, Montenegrin were all “the same language.”

I’d agree with the second viewpoint. The differences between Croatian and Serbian, for instance, are so few and non-dramatic that you would need to know one of the languages very well to quickly spot the differences. I bought a local teen magazine in preparation for my talk on youth culture, and managed to understand the gist of several of the articles. It finally occurred to me to note that it was printed in Croatia. It suddenly made sense why the magazine had used the unfamiliar term spoj for date rather than sastanak, the usual term here.

So, some vocabulary changes from one region to the next. Also, there are differences in pronunciation that have now been turned into differences of spelling. Mainly, Montenegrins and Croatians add a lot of “y” sounds that Serbians don’t use. [The alphabet here is completely phonetic, with the Latin symbol “j” representing the “y” sound.] Wednesday in Belgrade is Sreda but Srijeda in Nikšić.

Language distinctions also crop up here in choice of alphabet. In Croatia they only use the Latin alphabet. In the Republika Srbska section of Bosnia, only the Cyrillic shows up on road signs. But once you cross into Bosnian Bosnia, the Latin alphabet completely replaces the Cyrillic. In Montenegro and Serbia, both alphabets are used, though much more Cyrillic in Belgrade than in Montenegro. All these differences, though, don’t amount to a different language. Taken together, they are far less than the difference between the language spoken in Pittsburgh and the one spoken in Charleston.

Right now commonalities and relationships don’t seem to count for as much as distinction and exclusion. Montenegrins are eager to join the E.U. because of the expected economic benefits. They want to belong in Europe. So do Croatians and Serbians. But they don’t want to belong to one another.

Posted by at 6:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (9)