Yugoslavia was made up of six socialist republics: Slovenia,
Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro and Macedonia, within
Serbia there were also two autonomous provinces, Kosovo and Vojvodnia. Our
novel is set in a few places across the former Yugoslavia, with the main action
happening in Ljubljana, where our young protagonist now lives, the Capital of
Slovenia. Author Goran Vojnović, graduated from the Academy of Theatre, Radio,
Film and Television in Ljubljana and he has won all the major Slovene literary
awards with is bestselling debut novel “Southern Scum go Home!”, a film
director as well as a writer for a Slovene daily newspaper, Vojnović is a
celebrated Slovene.
Our novel is narrated in the first person and commences with
recollections of childhood, his time as an eleven year old with an idolisation
of his father, Nedelko Borojević, recalling the day where is dad was ‘seconded’
and took him to the local markets for buy a super-hero toy, at that time an
extravagance. We then jump forward sixteen years and learn that our narrator’s
father is not dead, but is in hiding, slowly the layers are peeled back and we
learn of his father’s connection to wartime atrocities: “I knew even less about
what had happened there, [Višnjići] on the night of 3 November 1991, at a time
when Dusha and I were already living in Ljubljana.” As the picture becomes
clearer we learn of our narrator’s, Vladan, removal from his own family
history. His father is a wanted war criminal; his idol is not an idol at all:
The information on what exactly
had happened at Višnjići was sparse, even online. There was probably a lot more
detail in Croatian newspapers back in the 90’s, and certainly there were people
around who knew a lot about it, but I had no idea who to ask, and how much they
might want to tell. From what I had managed to piece together I knew that on 13
November 1991, the Third Corps of the Yugoslav People’s Army, under the command
of General Borojević, looted and burnt down the village of Višnjići, near
Vukovar. In the process, they had murdered thirty-four unarmed villagers,
including children, women and old men. They had bured the bodies in a mass
grave that had been found in the forest a few kilometres away. I also learned
that the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia had issued
an indictment from The Hague against Nedelko Borojević years ago, but that he
was still at large. The court charged him with a commander’s responsibility for
the war crimes perpetrated in Višnjići. In the course of my search, I also cam
across a number of theories about where the runaway General Borojević might be
hiding in the vast territory of the Serbian Entity, and how he, like may Hague
defendants, was being protected by members of Serbia’s secret intelligence
service. In the comments section below one article, someone claimed that
Borojević had been living in a fortified house in the vicinity of Užice,
southern Servia, for years. Other anonymous commentators upheld this theory,
and added that his protection was by direct order of the political elite of
Serbia, and was well-known among foreign intelligence services, being the
responsibility of the Serbian army.
Our novel shifts in time between Vladan’s youth and his
current day search for his father and the further we progress the more we learn
of a disintegrating family, told the innocent childhood eyes and the eyes of a
bitter young adult. However this is not simply a tale of a single person searching
for his family roots, it is also a struggle with identity, a human who has been
constantly misplaced, uprooted from his lands, a cultural identity that has
been constantly destroyed and reformed, a person where even language and your
name can brand your identity, where your mother tongue isn’t spoken where you
land:
I started looking around and
quickly determined that there were two types of houses in Bosnia: new buildings
that looked as though their owners has ordered them from a catalogue of
discount Chinese building parts, and then the beautiful old Bosnian houses,
with their regular shapes and subtle colors. But those in the last category
were falling apart, their roofs and load-bearing facades barely holding them
together. The Bosnian world was irreversibly divided: the poor in the beautiful
houses, the rich in alien, ugly ones. The sense of Aesthetics of the ruling
elite revealed the direction in which that elite would be taking this
unfortunate country.
“Yugoslavia, My Fatherland” is a subtle view on the
deterioration of a nation, the racial hatred, the division, and the remnants of
a country after the war:
‘After all this, I’m only sorry
about my old man, who built this country with his bare-hands. I’m glad he died
before he could see the scum he’d built all those bridges, schools, and
hospitals for. The scum he left all this to. They lived among us all those
years, smiled at us in our Tito’s Pioneers uniforms, waved flags but, in the
end, they couldn’t wait for it all to end, so they could fight with each other.
Fuck them, motherfucking fuckers...’
This novel alludes to the atrocities of the war but doesn’t
wallow in the details, a story of a nation that has a troubled past, a family
history that is forever changing, rejection, acceptance, ignoring, and at the
same time forgiving. Our story is not only Vladan’s search for his identity,
nor his search for his father, nor a search for truth, it is also a story of a
nation.
‘It’s been fifteen years since
the war. What I was doing then, that’s no one’s business. Even today,
smart-asses have no clue who was the hero and who was a criminal in that war,
and nobody has any business asking me who I know or don’t know. We should
forget everything, especially you youngsters who don’t have a clue what went on
there, to whom and why. It’s been fifteen years, and it should be prohibited to
talk about this, ‘cause people only say nonsense, and only those who weren’t
there and didn’t see anything talk. War was war. That was another planet. Nobody
can understand that. You were there or you weren’t. Nothing else matters. If
you were there, then everything’s clear to you and you don’t ask questions. If
you weren’t there, you dont have the right to ask anything. Get it?’
As per Vladan’s search for his father and the ‘truth’ behind
his war crimes, we have the lingering question of the wars in the former
Yugoslavia, victim or aggressor?
A wonderfully insightful look at that period of history in a
subtle, yet tormenting work, a book that takes the struggle of identity and
truth and aligns a nation to a family history, yet another gem from Istros
Books, an independent publishing house who specialise in works from South East
Europe.
Copy courtesy of Istros Books.
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