PSYCHOHISTORY
Articles & Texts
[Books texts] [Journal Articles] [Charts] [Prenatal]
[Trauma Model] [Cultic] [Web links] [Cartoons] [Other]
|
Digital
Archive of PSYCHOHISTORY Articles & Texts [Books texts] [Journal Articles] [Charts] [Prenatal] [Trauma Model] [Cultic] [Web links] [Cartoons] [Other] |
Introduction
1.) The Nature Of Simple Life In The Balkans
2.) Battering As A Way Of Life
3.) Sexual Abuse
4.) Traditional Life: Combination Of Channeled Rage And Love
5.) Two Case Studies
6.) Some Current Data On Child Abuse
7.) The Death Of The Patriarch And The Dissolution
Of The Yugoslav Zadruga
8.) Serbia And The Feelings Of Victimization
9.) War Fantasy And Trial Action
~ REFERENCES
Under the title Les Belles Images, a famous French lady whose childhood had been that of "une jeune fille rangee," offered some well-intentioned advice for the sad state of humanity. As a means to over-come alienation she proposed that "people ought to content themselves with a minimum standard of living, as some of the very poor communities still do, in Sardinia and Greece, for instance, where technology has not penetrated nor money corrupted. There people know a harsh happiness, because certain values are preserved, values that are truly human values - - dignity, brotherhood, generosity, which give life a unique flavor. . . when did this decline start? On the day when priority was given to science Instead of wisdom, to utility instead of beauty. With the Renaissance, with rationalism, capitalism, scientism. ... Only a moral revolution, not a social, political, or technical one, can lead man to the truth he has lost."(1)
Far away from Paris, a man born and raised in such a community was appalled by her simplicity and blindness: "I do not know what Madame de Beauvoir's "minimum standard of living" is, but I suspect It is a little more than what she Is idealizing in "some of the very poor communities." Life in Sardinia may look "harshly happy" to Parisian left- and right-wing intellectual cliques, but I know from my own Montenegro, In spite of the "values preserved" there, "values that are truly human," just what life has been like-a life of hunger, hatred, and death."(2)
Milovan DjIlas manifested more than his fair share of devotion to similar values, and he not only made verbal suggestions but was responsible for many violent acts to improve the sad state of humanity and save it from alienation. But, as he grew older, he repented and tried to put on paper "what really happened." Among his many subjects was the story of his people, his family and his own childhood. This is what he remembered:
Everything is at war with everything else: men against men, men against beasts, beasts against beasts. And children against children, always. And parents with children. The guerillas fight the Austrians, and the latter persecute and oppress the people. The spirits strive with humans, and humans with the spirits. The strife is ceaseless, between heaven and earth. And Mother beats us. If she cannot catch us during the day, she beats us when we are asleep. The switch cuts into the flesh, and one sleeps on. And when we awaken, she demands our promise that we will never again do what we did. Or else the beating is continued.
It would be easy to promise that we would not do what we did if only we could feel truly guilty for what we did. But since we do not feel guilty it Is better to lose some sleep and endure the beat-ing to the end.
Certainly strife is one side of life. But there comes a time when only strife is the order of the day, as though there were nothing else in life.(3)
Harsh as this may seem, there was more than constant battering and eternal wan what was even more terrifying was the overwhelming presence of evil forces: "Nevertheless, with us children our greatest fear was not of men, of brigands, or of Austrians. That fear became mixed with another-the fear of nocturnal apparitions, of evil spirits who were everywhere and could appear at any time, "(4) turning life Into hell.
There is a rich choice of testimonies one could use to discredit Simone de Beauvoir's or anyone else's belief that simple life equals harsh happiness and true human values. One of them was written by a miserable young man who wanted to become a hero and chose the most prominent target, Franz Ferdinand, the Archduke of Austria, thus triggering the First World War Gavrilo Princip, who was born In Bosnia (in 1894), remembered his home as a place of constant terror and anxiety: "The wet logs on the open fire gave the only light to the closely packed peasants and their wives, wrapped in thick smoke. If I tried to penetrate the curtain of smoke, the most I could see were the eyes of the human beings, numerous) sad and glaring with some kind of fluid light coming from nowhere. Some kind of reproach, even threat, radiated from them, and many times since then they have awakened me from my dreams. "(5)
Or another example, involving an encounter of an old man and a young woman, running away from home: "Come and sit down! Move closer! Don't be scared! You must have been raised by a stepmother-you seem to be frightened of everything." Her unspoken answer: "It was not a stepmother, but her own mother, but she is frightened nevertheless. There is always some trick hidden underneath everything, however safe it may seem."(6)
What these cases have in common is the type of childhood they assume. As I have shown in my earlier articles(7), the writers were born into a culture of common or joint families, known as zadrugas, as the basic family unit. These communal families, characteristic throughout all of former Yugoslavia, except Slovenia, differ significantly from the conjugal families which we are familiar with In most of Europe; they Involved several biological families living and working together, with men never leaving their native homes and with the eldest man functioning as the leading authority. Predominant features of this type of family life were therefore enormous resistance to change and fear of innovation. With no private property and no emancipation as we know it - the original meaning of emancipare being the freeing from parental authority - that is a child's gain-ing maturity, adult status and Independence through acquiring property, a home of his or her own, the choice of job and life style, all this was quite different from the state of things In Western nations. In the zadruga culture people could be extravagantly generous and kind, sharing everything with a perfect stranger, but, on the other hand, extremely harsh, brutal and aggressive. In short, as portrayed in the works of many foreign travelers, they offered the bewildering contrast of vast loneliness, of cruelty and indifference to human life, but of indifference to possessions, too, with gusts of personal warmth, generosity and outstanding dignity unlike anything one could experience In Western Europe.(8)
In view of the present war (and many previous ones) It seems Im-portant to stress the harshness not "a harsh happiness," but the harsh cruelty, ruthlessness and brutality of this life. It meant a life of constant warfare, was often described as l'heroic" by most of the scholars, and has only recently been far more accurately defined as a life that produced "delegate killers.'(19) Its women were expected to bear In silence extreme oppression, humiliation and violence.
Children born In these families were subjected to harsh treatment even before they were born, as pregnancy was not treated as a partic-ularly sensitive period In women's lives, and they therefore tended to conceal It pretending they were as strong as ever. It meant a very hard, hazardous childbirth, as women often gave birth alone, without assistance, professional or unprofessional, mostly outside their homes. Their babies were ritually and repeatedly cleansed In cold water, again mostly outside, swaddled, subjected to various protective treatments against evil spirits, mostly harmful, and severely punished throughout babyhood and childhood. In short, it was a crowded life of neglect, battering, tenor and the absence of almost all signs of affection. it was also a life of widespread and routine sexual abuse. Psychohistorically speaking, it was a combination of Infanticidal and ambivalent modes of childrearing. if at the turn of the century In most parts of Europe parents insisted on discipline, order, cleanliness, ambition (and achieved these with Increasingly less severe methods), the opposite was true for the simple life in the so-called zadrugas of the Balkans.
But maybe a simple description of a house can serve as the best way of illustrating the nature of this simple life. I have chosen an account provided by a historian who was raised in a zadruga in Bosnia-Herzegovina In the period after the First World War.
"The middle room had a small hearth with an outlet for smoke. The fire was built rarely. Most of the family slept In this room. Sleeping space was reserved for the senior members of the family, married couples, and their small children. The rest of the floor space was not assigned, each person trying to occupy the most desirable spot for the night's rest. To sleep with as many as a dozen persons of different age and sex on the floor in a small, crowded room Is quite an experience. The guest room had a small heating stove, but the fire was made rarely, usually on festive occasions when guests stayed over night. Uncle Rade, the head of the house, his wife, my Aunt Pava, slept in the room, which was the only part of the house that was finished.
The house was poorly furnished. The room had a small wooden table with two benches, two or three stools, and a single Iron bed, the only bed in the house, which Uncle Rade had commandeered for himself. Someone liberated the bed from the military barracks in Bileca after the collapse of Austria-Hungary In 1918. Elsewhere in the house were a few simple stools, two foot-high circular tables (sinija), one or two wooden boxes, and for storage purposes two large elliptical wicker baskets plastered with cow dung. There were no curtains, draperies
or rugs. The bedding was simple and consisted of heavy goat-hair blankets called guber. There were no bedsheets and only a couple of crude pillows in the house. One slept on a guber. covered himself with another guber; and improvised a pillow from his own clothing.
When we were all together, food was generally eaten off the sinija in shifts. The spoons were wooden but there were not enough of them, and at mealtime after each swallow one was obliged to pass the spoon to his neighbor. The house had fewer than half a dozen simple metallic forks, and no table knives at all. We ate from a single large wooden or metallic bowl. This shortage of eating implements and dishes reflects a curious self-effacing attitude. It was certainly no major task to carve additional spoons. Materials were plentiful, and the peasant was skilled in wood-carving. Peasants In Bileca Rudine are talented masons and stonecutters and built beautiful public buildings for wages, but never built comfortable and finished homes for themselves ... Not until the late thirties did the family at long last obtain a sufficient number of wooden and metallic eating implements, a concession to urban influence.
Our zadruga home was disorderly and crowded. The sanitary conditions were appalling. We had no toilets and no washing and bathing facilities. The water In the cistern was polluted, and the dishes were never thoroughly washed. The animals moved in and out of the house, leaving their droppings. Swarms of flies were everywhere. The house was Infested with fleas, bedbugs, and lice."(10)
But this article will mostly concentrate on battering and sexual abuse before moving on to the Issue of the present war in the former Yugoslavia. what I Intend or hope to show is the most striking connection between traumatic childhood and war, or, to put It differently, how some childrearing practices directly produce "heroes," not only delegate killers, but delegate tormentors, avengers and rapists.
Students of traditional family life often overlook some important features of child-rearing practices, considered vital by the historians of childhood, but beating is not one of them. This is more than true of scholarly work on the South Slav type of common family or zadruga. On the whole It makes no attempt to hide the fact that punishment was very often used in child-rearing, mostly In the form of beating. The survey of 300 Yugoslav villages and their domestic lives, carried out SO to 60 years ago by Vera Stein Erlich showed that "in none of the Yugoslav regions Is there a negative attitude toward the use of a stick, and nowhere can one find consistent unity of theory and practice in favor of upbringing without punishment."(11) Some of the answers the author received:
"Girls are struck even up to their twentieth year, and boys up to fifteen, for from that age one has to reckon with the dignity of a youth. In olden days there were soldiers of sixteen, and to strike a soldier would have been the greatest of insults."
"They say: 'We beat small boys most' and: 'A girl feels shame, a boy fear' Children are as a rule beaten up to puberty. It Is rarely anybody brings up a child without punishment. Of certain children people think It born kindly so It must be treated kindly. A child defends itself from its mother, less from its father. Then the mother says: My switch broke. It is rare for a child to attack its parents. Where the switch of parent or teacher strikes, they say that dzehemen (hell) will not catch fire."
"As a rule children are kept severely. There are cases of children not even daring to utter a word In the father's presence,. Regarding punishment, they mostly stick to corporal punishment. The peasants do not like gentle upbringing. They want obedience without a word."
"Swish away, sir, if the bones are mine, the flesh is yours. That is Invariably what I have been told throughout my career as a teacher here. They are critical of my gentle methods, and any failure In school is ascribed to this."
"They beat girls longer, that Is, keep an eye on them, parents beating them them till they are married, when the husbands takes over. Boys are beaten till their fifteenth year. Boys knock their mothers about as soon as they are over IS That Is common, In self-defense. There Is no toleration whatsoever for gentle up-bringing, everything being brought back to the justifying phrase:
The stick came out of Paradise. "(12)
The same was true of the husband-wife relationship, leading Erlich to the conclusion there was "a great deal of cruelty to all the weaker members of the family." Wives were regularly beaten by their husbands and their fathers-in-law, as well as other members of the zadruga, verbally abused-the range of curses and obscenities in the Serbocroat language is quite awesome and severely punished for any signs of dis-obedience, often with serious consequences.
The brutality of the domestic atmosphere can be seen in numerous Serbocroat folk sayings and proverbs, with hatred and fear the dominant words or underlying emotions, for instance: "Trust neither dog, horse or woman," "Boast about the quality of the wheat when it's in your barn and your wife when she's in her grave" or "Fear tends the goats," which was explained by Vuk Karadzic (in 1836) as: "He who fears the master does the work, for there is nothing without fear "(13) One could add an interesting result of a recent survey of Serb fiddles on children and childhood: the most frequent definition for a child is slave. (14)
To make a long and ugly story short: In the traditional life of the zadruga, a man was simply not considered a true man if he refrained from violent behavior and a strict regime was followed to make men of boys. To show affection and gentleness was to be soft-something no man could afford to be. The past tense can easily be replaced for the present perfect tense, as this attitude seems to be as true as ever.
There are different opinions as to how this violent way of life changed over time, with some scholars claiming that things gradually improved and others suggesting that the settled patriarchal way of life was more peaceful and that aggressiveness intensified only during the dissolution and decay of the zadruga style of life. Erlich found out that the degree of violence slowly increased going from northwest to the southeast, being by far the greatest In the families of Serbs and Montenegrins.(15) Anyway, the firm, unchanged basis seems to be strong pressure to avoid expressing feelings, particularly on the part of men, of affection, vulnerability or dependency; coupled with strong pressure to express feelings of force, rage and dominance against commonly understood legitimate targets.
What seems beyond doubt is that on the eve of the Second World War domestic life was extremely harsh and brutal in most of Yugoslavia (with the exception of Slovenia). while In most of Europe children were taught that violence was bad unless it was officially licensed - as in war - this was not so in the Balkans. And the war itself made the situation far worse. The same male Ideal - a real man as a fighter, strong, merciless etc. - is openly cherished in most of contemporary ex-Yugoslavia.(16)
|
Digital
Archive of PSYCHOHISTORY Articles & Texts [Books texts] [Journal Articles] [Charts] [Prenatal] [Trauma Model] [Cultic] [Web links] [Cartoons] [Other] |
To report
errors in this electronic
transcription please contact:
[email protected]