Hating Yourself As a National Sport
A Five Things Essay On Balkan Ethnic (Self)Hatred and Scattered Thoughts on Literature
I.
I’ve been thinking a lot about artists that look down on the communities they come from, as that seems to be a theme of my reading at the beginning of this year, although I guess it only became a theme after I picked up a V.S. Naipaul book while staying at my in-laws.
Another book fitting this theme is “The Return of Filip Latinovicz” by Miroslav Krleza, about a painter coming back to what was then the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, is now Croatia, after several decades abroad. I’m not going to recap the plot since it will be repetitive for Croatian readers who probably read this in school and meaningless to non-Croatian ones, but Filip spends a lot of the novel looking down on almost everyone in the village his mother moved to, from the self-satisfied local elites to the dirt-poor villagers. As a member of my book club pointed out, we spend a lot of time reading about mud.
What is this with working class or marginalized artists sneering at their own backgrounds? Maybe it’s because when you are intimately acquainted with people who struggle daily for their meals, it’s hard to convince yourself art means anything. Thus putting down the others around you is the only way to deal with the guilt.
That might be true of the character of Filip, but based on the little I read of him, gives a bit too much credit to Naipaul.
II.
Malograđanstvo is a BCMS expression that started off as a way Marxist theorists in the region labeled the petty bourgeoisie, people who financially were close to the working class but desperately clung to their slightly superior position and allied themselves with the bourgeoisie and aristocracy. Today, it is used to negatively refer to people who are self-absorbed and preoccupied with their own interests and status.
Peeping through the crack to hear your neighbors arguing is malogradanstvo. Dedicating your life to petty building politics so you can screw over your neighbor is malogradanstvo. In Krleza’s books, he frequently speaks on this term, brutally skewering the members of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie who are obsessed with themselves. In “Povratak Filiipa Latinovicza,” they humiliate a village girl for their amusement while reminiscing about the balls they attended during the Habsburg monarchy.
I’m not sure if I’m using the word right but I’d like to offer a few different examples.
People living in big cities (by Balkan standards) complaining about uncouth people moving to the city from the village, even though they aren’t moving for fun but because the village no longer has work, is malogradanstvo.
Looking down on villagers while eating vegan and organic thanks to the many farmer’s markets in the city is malogradanstvo.
Making fun of regional accents, working class hobbies, and more is malogradanstvo and should be an invitation to getting your ass beat.
III.
Look at Twitter and you’ll find a lot of people moaning about the death of Croatian or Balkan culture. It tends to be music-related a weird amount of times. Recent tweets that irritated me including moans about a high school reunion hiring tamburice instead of something classier, the way we ruined the sound of accordions by making them part of folk music, and the ever present culture wars over kids these days listening to Serbian turbofolk and trap.
I don’t know why people fixate on music so much. Maybe because it’s such a public expression of who you are. You can pretend to be something else for your whole life, but what do you listen to when you’re celebrating births, weddings, and the passage of time? That’s who you really are.
To the person who’s spent their whole life building a facade of civility, the sense of abandon is frightening for what it might reveal. The village is frightening as it is harder to hide there. The rest of the Balkans (associated in the Croatian mind with villages, even though Serbia’s cities are much bigger than Croatian ones) are frightening. All identities are imagined, but imagination is powerful.
IV.
I feel bad for all the Balkan people obsessed with distancing themselves from the village. Who are you trying to impress? Trying to show how Western you are, closer to Austria, Germany, an imagined Mitteleuropa. We were ruled by the Habsburgs, not the Ottomans. Or if we were ruled by the Ottomans, we secretly wanted to be ruled by the Habsburgs. All nationalism is pathetic, but if you’re going to go for it at least go big and dream of independence or world conquests for your imagined community, not groveling to a higher power.
The Balkan seljak who drinks his rakija and plays her folk-pop tune on the accordion and breaks their back to feed the country has more dignity than the person obsessed with proving how “European” we actually are. Even if the European person is educated and rich.
V.
Sometimes, I loathe Zagreb. Sometimes I relish in the role of Zagreb’s sleeper cell seljanka, waiting for people to mock Croatian villages to me before I widen my grin and explain that even though I was born in New York City, my family are villagers and I am proud of my background and actually, to a New Yorker, Zagreb has a lot more in common with a village than a real city.
Most of the time, I love Zagreb. It’s the city that took me in. There’s a reason I moved here and not the village, a reason my grandmother told me never to choose that life.
Sometimes, I pity Zagreb. A city full of people begging to be something they’re not. Although I guess that’s true of all cities, where reinvention is possible. Zagreb is sadder as instead of people striving to be different versions of themselves, it’s a city of people (or at least, people of a certain class) trying to be a copy of someone else. Of Vienna. Of somewhere Western, or at least Central.
That’s sadder than a folk tamburica song at a high school reunion.