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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
In great contrast to physical violence, where there is an abundance of evidence, students of the region rarely pay any attention to various forms of sexual abuse, such as molestation, violence in the marital relationship, rape within or outside the home, by relations or strangers, Child abuse, sodomy and the like. They either neglect it completely or else they openly claim and praise "the strict morality" of traditional life, which was supposedly corrupted only with the advent of the "modern way of life" and its corrosive influence.(17)
At best, the emerging picture of the marital relationship suggests a life of cold, unemotional bonds, with husbands demanding sex and wives giving in or enduring it. There are also many signs of great brutality, or, to put it differently, signs of sadistic traits on the husband's part and a masochistic attitude on the part of the wife. Men who were expected to beat and mistreat their wives to prove their masculinity were not very much different when sex was concerned. At worst, women were severely abused by other members of the extended family, by outside figures of authority, and tortured in the process. If they somehow found themselves unprotected-pregnant out of wedlock, widowed, already raped, driven out of their families, emotionally disturbed, handicapped or whatever-they were subjected to random violence, often In the form of gang rape.
One of the female teachers contributing to Erlich's survey, described the following case as typical of the Serbian peasants of Bosnia:
Her husband was rough even in his most intimate demands, and for those days rather lascivious. She is of rather a cold temperament, so in intimate matters they did not quite fit each other. For this reason this contact, she says, was revolting and afforded her no great enjoyment. Yet she did not dare avoid a single one of her husband's demands, but humbly suffered them all. Often she would remain awake at night, weeping, while her husband, satisfied, long since snored. This was the general attitude of husband to wife-never to reveal himself anywhere as tender or sensitive, for he would be made mock of.(18)
Some other contributors to the same survey revealed similar traits, that is marriage as a lifelong sequence of forced sex or, simply, rapes. But some went further:
There are numerous cases of the brother-in-law raping the young wife, the father-in-law his daughter-in-law; in short, every man lives with any woman... This village lives a life which is incredible; nobody would imagine it."
In fact it was not only imagined but described as well. Eruch received some reports on places - in Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia - where sexual morals sank catastrophically low, with widespread adultery, prostitution and blackmailed sexual affairs, sometimes, under pressure, with police officers. These keep a log of the number of women they take, and are not choosy, and have reached the record number of 1500, a man of thirty-eight or forty being especially eager to collect affairs during his last years of service. "(20)
Still, what the survey covered was mostly sexual affairs between consenting (or submitting) adults, however violent they were. It was left to writers of fiction to put into words what scholars neglected or tried to deny, giving us the chance to look into the true nature of traditional life.
The story of literature (and art in general) under socialism is a story of major conflicts-socialism or communism being an Ideology which strongly believed in all sorts of repression, including the repression of freedom of emotions, words, thoughts; among the prime targets were feelings of loneliness, anxiety, despair, in fact everything that was labeled pessimism. But Serbocroat literature was very good at rebelling against the authorities. The sixties in particular were a turning-point, with the growing emergence of works trying to translate the silent screams into literature. A powerful stream of pictures of life as bleak as it could be gushed out. Together with a new wave of cinema, aptly called "the black wave," there started an avalanche of literary works - short stories, novels, plays, half-fictional half-journalistic pieces - where the long repressed and denied truth finally came into the open.
Some of them covered the 19th century, some the first half of the 20th, some periods of (one of many) wars, others the post-war, peaceful years, but most of them told horrible stories of bitter hatred and appalling violence. In fact, reading them one cannot escape the impression that the authors were engaged In a virtual competition to shock and out-shock one another. If some older writers only hinted or obeyed standard rules of refined literature,(21) the generation born around 1930 decided to tell It all and to be as blunt and defiant - often vulgar, too - as hell.(22)
Their stories, mostly autobiographical behind the smoke-screen of fiction, revealed a life of extreme physical, verbal and sexual abuse, of systematic and random violence, of incest (13) between all possible pairs of relatives), sexual abuse of boys, girls and animals. They include ordinary rapes, gang rapes, rapes with various instruments and weapons - all of it accompanied with a rich variety of torture, humiliation and mutilation. Some of It happened under the protective cover of home or darkness, some of it in public; in the middle of villages, squares, meadows or crowded cafes, as a public spectacle, with children among the audience.
In short, the traditional life in Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro, as portrayed in fiction (and on stage and film), can be described as life of enormous hatred, vindictiveness and cruelty, with sexual expressions of aggression a common component. The traditional Balkan man rapes for power, he is extremely insecure and the best way he can find to make himself feel better and in control is to get drunk and violent, to make others feel even worse, to humiliate, to degrade, to inflict as much pain as possible. This makes him gain some self-respect and at the same time makes him respected in the eyes of other; less daring and violent men. As women are treated with a mixture of reverence and resentment, to conquer them is accompanied with an appropriately mixed response: the conqueror is a criminal and a hero at the same time; he Is hated with awesome respect. Sexual triumphs in var-ious forms produce tremendous guilt and pride at the same time.
Thus, one of the heroes of a typical short story "was adored by the workers. They were proud of him although he, apparently, furrowed through their beds, polluting with the stench of his stable-smelling body the guts of their wives and daughters." He was "our man", "healthy and unspoiled," proving it Continuously by taking "just about every one of them, from cleaning women to little girls."(23)
The most Outspoken of these novels was written by Petar Saric under the title The Master is Coming Tomorrow.(24) It Is a portrait of traditional, patriarchal tyranny and submissiveness, a tale of sexual exploitations as exercises of raw power. The clan (or brotherhood) it portrays was born In Incest between a brother and sister; and a few centuries later the incestuous bond between the head of the clan and his sister is still its dominant secret, although the Master is more or less impotent. The novel proceeds through scenes of jealousy, hatred and aggression toward the final murder of the Master. Its women closely eye the young boys and seduce them as soon as they are "ripe" (i.e. In puberty), giving them up only when the boys get married. A man of fifty who has a subnormal son, wants him to marry a girl of fifteen, but their marriage is to be a formality, as he wants her for himself, to bear him a new, healthy son.
In every generation of this clan there is a boy who suffers "the family Sickness", i.e., severe nightmares and a sort of epilepsy. The description of the latest case: It started when the boy was a tiny baby, with convulsions, screams, crying, Vomiting. It was immediately recognized by everyone. The baby started to turn over; on his stomach, burrowing his face into the straw in the cradle. His mother allowed him to do so, but the grandmother was strongly against it: "Turn him back! He must lie on his back, even if he dies!" In short, "they all wanted to help him and it did not occur to them he might be defending himself from them."
As narrated by the boy when he has reached his early teens, the treatment looks like this:
Father pours water on me, he reaches with his wet hand into my armpits and my crotch, where I sweat the most. At the beginning, he had great trouble, he did not know how to wake me up. How did he ever think of reaching between my legs with his wet hand, how did he find out this helps me best?(25)
As with every other kind of violence, sexual aggression greatly increases during times of war; particularly at the beginning and the end of wars - again, as recorded in some memoirs and contemporary Serbocroat fiction (there are no statistical data available). In times of chaos and Insecurity, with no firm authority, the latent frustrations and hatreds explode into a devastating, massive outburst, orgies of plunder; murders and rapes.(26)
For instance, when the Austrian army started to pull out of Montenegro in 1918, "there It was as though some fury, a great fire, suddenly seized an entire region. All rose up - young and old, women and even children - to pillage the Moslems In the Sanzak. Even men who were not ever easily misled, who had lived In righteousness and meekness all their days, now lost their heads ... There was something else in all this, too, something even deeper and more lasting, a kind of perverted vow, some deep inner pleasure." Women who went with foreigners were targets of the worst brutalities.(27)
An excellent example of how people manage to find a tolerable way through such abusive experiences can be found in the culture of the Serbs, meaning the population of Serbia, Montenegro, parts of Croatia and Bosnia. They have organized their lives around a great national trauma, the battle of Kosovo, which took place in 1389, when the Serbs were defeated by the Turks. What followed was a gradual occupation, lasting for several centuries. What followed as well was an elaborate creative process, devoted to the creation of legend and mythology.
After the defeat and occupation, there gradually emerged a flood of epic poetry, born out of despair and frantic need for an appropriate survival strategy which put the blame on fate and treason. The heroes were transformed into martyrs and the defeat mysteriously, was turned into moral victory, thus helping the Serbs to Survive: "Adversity was only to be a trial through which the Serbs had to pass in order to come to better days. Hence the day of the national disaster became, strange as it may seem, the national festival. To avenge Kosovo became the one as-piration of a subdued nation."(28) Thus, a permanent, legitimate and noble target for violence was produced: to fight the Turks became a national obsession, a perfect outlet for pent-up feelings, aggressiveness, rage. The ability to fight became the greatest possible virtue, the standard for any appreciation of man's morality and performance of his sa-cred duty. This spellbinding mythology, which was half chanted half recited by guslari, coupled with centuries of action, provided a perfect combination of rage and love-rage against the enemies, love for the motherland (particularly Kosovo, the cradle of the Serb nation, the most sacred place). Most of their epic poetry celebrated something like an appetite for sacrificial self-immolation In glorious wars.
The power of this mythology oscillated through different historical periods, being particularly strong in times of great distress. It helped people to endure and offered a structured way of life, turning it Into a series of continuing battles, struggles, confrontations, rebellions, plundering expeditions and challenges. Heroic life means perpetual war; not only an unconscious but also conscious cult of aggression. "Two or three perfectly definite ideas are instilled into every Serb from the moment of his birth," wrote Jovan Cvijic, one of the best authorities, himself a Serb.(29) "He learns to wish for personal freedom and self-government and for the freedom of all the Serbian lands, which, he knows from ballads and traditions, were once part of his own coun-try... It is his duty to free them with his own blood by perpetual acts of heroism and by ceaseless sacrifices ... The whole Dinaric area has certainly produced some exceptionally heroic men, but It Is the Dinaric Serbs who attain the highest degree of heroism.../They/ are warlike and have been engaged in warfare incessantly ever since Kosovo... Some of them are, as just as God, but others can hate with a consuming pas-sion and a violence that reaches a white heat. It is the latter who are the chief bearers of the Dinaric war-cry of holy vengeance. Some of them put their strength to evil uses; but the chief vent for It up to the present has been the Serbian idea of nationality, and many of them have already given their lives for it without the smallest hesitation."
"If one studies these violent types," Cvijic continued, "one finds in every single one an alteration of a very active period with one In which they are completely passive and exhausted. The latter periods may actually wreck an important undertaking if a great deal depends upon the individual concerned. They seem to sleep like Kraljevic Marko, the national hero, and everything must wait until they wake. After a very progressive period comes a break with the result that the historical development of the inhabitants of this area goes in a zig-zag line... A general lack of sense of proportion in both good and bad circumstances seems to be a feature of the lively temperament. Hope and despair are both excessive... When things are going badly, the Dinaric peoples behave in an even more characteristic way than when they go well. At the first mischance they are assailed with an indefinite hesitation of spirit which gradually becomes 'frenzied; opposers and grumblers come forward, and at this point they may say and do anything. This critical stage steadily develops into panic, with the well-known features of panic that are common to all nations. "(30)
There are numerous accounts of this particular heroic similar defense lines, so that whole districts of Bosnia and Herzegovina constituted military units to ward off the Austrians (or Europeans), while most of Montenegro and Serbia spent centuries in constant rebellions against the Ottomans, with military units following the rules of kinship bonds.
This had a profound impact on the life of these regions. First warfare affects women and men, but in a different way. To begin with, warfare is of course the most obvious human activity where women definitely cannot compete with men. Constant fighting gives men a distinct role and power base, it offers abundant opportunity for heroism. On the other hand, wars severely diminish the opportunity for home-making, agriculture and other more or less feminine activities and centered on home, privacy, prosperity. The result is therefore not only that victors tend to kill the men and enslave women (sexual exploitation being an important element); It means as well that men tend to die glorious deaths and women tend to end degraded and enslaved.
When life means constant warfare, women not only do the usual women's work, they do men's work as well and have to show a man's courage. To make love and not to make war Is considered an outrage. To cultivate the land, to engage In craft, trade or money-making Is looked upon with contempt, It is something the Gypsies, the Jews, the Greeks or other degenerate foreigners do. To improve the home, to make life easier and more comfortable seems equally beside the point and even ridiculous:
Heroism and heroic actions are the main thread of their existence and colour their whole life," Cvijic tried to explain. "The moment a child leaves the cradle he begins to run after glory and fame, and their great desire is to belong to a heroic family. Everything in life is secondary to heroic ambition, and the Montenegrins are as greedy of heroism as a miser is of his money. They are so sensitive about their pride and their honour that they are apt to lose their heads over trifling matters. Life without honour is absolutely worthless to them, because honour is the mainspring of humani-ty. ... Everything Is sacrificed to pride and heroism. They not only die light-heartedly, but laugh while they are dying. Women have strangled their children in order that they may not betray the army by their crying and expose it to shameful destruction.(34)
One of the most notable consequences of major peace, which came to the region with the end of the First World War; with the legitimate outlet for rage gone, and the love for the motherland somehow empty and without gratification, was a great surge of domestic and general violence. Thus the end of the First World War proved disastrous in Montenegro, although the people were finally united with the rest of their South Slav brothers:
Men became bad, rotten, unwilling to give one another air to breathe. Bestiality and scandal at home, In the village, quickly crowded out of the mind the national tragedy. These vices were our own, Montenegrin and domestic... Uncle Lazar was particu-larly tireless In committing every evil thing against his family... He seemed hardly able to wait to take out his wrath on someone. He cursed and beat his wife. Rosa's weeping (his daughter) enraged him even more. He took her black braids, caught them in the door; and then began to trample on her... Uncle Mirko was even worse, though mostly against himself. He beat his daughters, long married, and drove them through the village. One of them, who took after his evil nature the most, taunted him at the edge of the village to come to her; lift his whiskers, and kiss her shameful parts, and she bawled It out without mincing words.(35)
It should therefore come as no surprise that women In labour were seldom allowed to give birth under their home roofs in such a culture or that they could be ridiculed and even stoned while they stumbled through the village, searching for a safe delivering place - by boys practicing their first acts of heroism. (36)
I do not wish to suggest, as these quotes might imply, dealing mostly with Serbs and Montenegrins, that there was no violence in the rest of Yugoslavia, either during wars or in domestic life. Still, there does seem to have been far less. One of the best arguments is provided by Serbs and Montenegrins themselves, as they do not see it as a fault but, on the contrary, as a source of pride. During most of Yugoslav history, the recent collapse included, their fighting ability and heroic history has served as the best proof of their virility and superiority, providing them with the Opportunity to show a certain amount of contempt for the Croats and Moslems, not to mention the Slovenes, who could not compete at all in this regard.
The same attitude can be found in many foreigners as well, as they were often quite fascinated by this heroic race of the Balkans. Rebecca West, for instance, was Overwhelmed by it, devoting hundreds of pages to it, passing in barely hidden scorn over "the sensible and unexcitable people of Slovenia" and in open contempt over the rich and orderly villages of the German settlers. And her husband joined in enthusiastically: "Observe that in Bosnia the Slavs choked the Turk with cream, they glutted him with their wholesale conversions... But the Serbs fought the Turks, and then they fought them, and then they fought them."(37)
This fighting spirit or distinct Inclination toward violent behavior has been observed even in families that emigrated and found themselves far from their usual belligerent culture. To give an example: "This family was as unusual a group of people as this town has ever seen," said a woman from Illinois, USA, of her childhood friend of Serbocroat stock, now a film star. "It was unusual mainly for its fighting.... He and his older brother and three younger sisters terrorized the neighborhood. Their mother did not believe In discipline, so she would just retreat to the kitchen and turn up the radio while they fought. They fought about anything, really... Mealtimes invariably developed into screaming matches escalating to food-fights, then Malkovich and his elder brother Danny would start chasing each other round the house, arming themselves with butchers' knives and pokers, anything we could find. Danny, he claims, was the inspiration for every sociopath he's ever played.... So It was a warring family, but It was also a very dose one. There were no repressed angers or Simmering resentments, because everyone was letting It all hang out at all times." (38)
Finally, at least a few words on the Second World War are due. In great contrast to what happened In occupied Western Europe, the war in Eastern Europe was actually several wars in one, It was in every possible sense of the word a total war; as all sorts of civil or internal wars were waged at the same time. It was particularly vicious in Yugoslavia, most of all in its central parts Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro. Among Its many appalling results was a total devastation of childhood, something like a massive plunge into the middle ages. After two decades of great endeavors to improve the living conditions, medical service and education, everything crumbled down in a new explosion of hatred. In searching for the roots of the present conflict in Yugoslavia and finding them in childhood experiences, we are not dealing with childhood as such, but with wartime childhood. Its far-reaching consequences simply cannot be overestimated. Childhood history in Yugoslavia is a horrible, extremely painful subject, but to understand the present fury we need to complicate our knowledge with additional horrors of the Second World War. All the leaders in the present fighting were deeply affected by massive traumatic experiences of wartime life and death. The more or less conventional devastation that the occupying armies brought was compounded by a sort of dark age horror; with eye-gougings, mutilations, butcherings and rapes. If the Germans mostly used firearms and other high-technology means to conquer the stubborn country, its inhabitants often preferred knives, axes and similar traditional weapons.
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