It is an important moment for any national literature when writers begin to feel free to write about other countries. And not as a veiled way to say something about their own country, mind you, but simply because they feel like it. Spain has now finally entered into the era of global relevance, and Clara Usón’s new novel La hija del Este is part of this welcome phenomenon. (I think this book is highly likely to be translated into English, although it has been published too recently for such a translation to exist just yet. So do stay on the lookout, the book is very good.)
Usón writes about the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and the wars that ensued as a result. The novel is very powerful and beautifully constructed, and the writer never gives in to temptation to use Yugoslavia to say something about Spain.
The novel begins with the protagonist’s short stay in the Moscow of 1994. I happened to be in Moscow exactly at the time the writer is describing and I can say that her descriptions of the city in that exciting and turbulent era are very good and reliable. This is extremely rare because Western writers usually write total crap on the subject. Usón doesn’t manage to transmit the excitement of those times but this is only the result of her need to set a somber tone for the rest of the novel.
La hija del Este was of enormous interest to me because it discusses the events of the Serbo-Bosnian war from the point of view of Serbs as the aggressors and Bosnians as victims. This is not the approach I was exposed to when the war was taking place. (You remember where I lived in the 1990s, right?) The narrative of the war that was known to me was that of our Slav brothers and sisters being attacked and persecuted by the horrible, mean Bosnians who were acting at the behest of the vile, imperialistic Americans. The word “Muslims” was barely ever mentioned in that narrative. I vaguely knew that there were some Muslims somewhere on the margins of this conflict, but I didn’t know they were central to the war. Our journalists and politicians kept referring to the region as Yugoslavia long after there was no more Yugoslavia. It is interesting that I’m now discovering a different perspective of the war from a Spanish writer.
I realize that this blog’s readers have probably been exposed to the version of events that Clara Usón is presenting in this novel and it will not shock them in the way it shocked me. However, the novel is still highly valuable even for those who already know this perspective.
At this point, I’m not ready to draw any conclusions about the Bosnian War but I’m glad I discovered that a different approach exists from this valuable novel.
And what do you know about the wars in former Yugoslavia?
Clarissa's Blog 
To answer your question, I know quite a bit about the Wars of the Yugoslav Succession, partly because they were relevant to my doctoral thesis, which I was working on at the time, and partly because it was exactly the opposite to what whats happening in South Africa at the same time, and with the same excitement. Just as we were getting rid of apartheid, people in Yugoslavia were eagerly adopting it. Just as we were abandoning ethnic cleansing as something evil, they (or at least the power grabbers among them) were embracing it as something good.
You can see my take on it here:
http://www.reocities.com/missionalia/natrec.htm
but, unlike your Spanish author, I couldn’t resist comparisons with my own country.
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Ah, this is great, thank you!
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Where I used to live in the 90-ies there were two competing mutually exclusive narratives. The one you described (actually going even further, and interpreting everything not just as an attack on Slav brothers, but as a part of world-wide anti-Russian conspiracy, part of a civilization war between the immoral West and Russia, the spiritual beacon and hope of all humankind 🙂 ) and equally one-sided “evil murderous Serbs are guilty of everything”. Obviously, if one is exposed to different viewpoints, one may understand that the truth is somewhere in-between. Should not say “obviously”, I guess, because most people chose one or another. I used to enjoy getting on the nerves of local Russian ultra-patriots by noticing that if they want to make parallels between Kosovo and Baltic states, then Russians, and not the Baltic people, are “the Albanians”. And there apparently is nothing worse to a Russian ultra-patriot than being compared to an Albanian… 🙂
In the States I knew a lot of Serbian graduate students. Interestingly, they were not opposed to studying in the States, despite the bombings. They also did not have any visa problems. Apparently the US never considered them likely terrorists. Which kind of tells me that despite all that history the Serbs were considered the “members of the club”. The club of European nations, who sometimes fight each other, but this fighting does not affect the club membership.
Anyway, in the end I developed the perspective similar to that described by Steve.
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“They also did not have any visa problems. Apparently the US never considered them likely terrorists.”
– Because Serbians never engaged in acts of terror. War and terrorism are different things. It is more surprising that nobody wondered about how likely the people with experience in the Serbian army were to engage in sex crimes.
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People I know did not serve in any army. However, I’ve heard that when large number of Bosnian refugees were brought to Des Moines, the gang wars started between them and local African-Americans… And as far as I know, the Bosnians have won… And I’ve heard that not from the Serbs, but from local Americans.
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One of the more perceptive comments comes from Samuel Huntington, in his book The clash of civilizations:
“The breakup of Yugoslavia began in 1991 when Slovenia and Croatia moved toward independence and pleaded with Western European powers for support. The response of the West was defined by Germany, and the response of Germany was in large part defined by the Catholic connection. The Bonn government came under pressure to act from the German Catholic hierarchy, its coalition partner the Christian Social Union Party in Bavaria, and the _Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung_ and other media. The Bavarian media, in particular, played a crucial role in developing German public sentiment for recognition. ‘Bavarian TV’, Flora Lewis noted, ‘much weighed upon by the very conservative Bavarian government and the strong, assertive Bavarian Catholic Church which had close connections with the church in Croatia, provided the television reports for all of Germany when the war began in earnest. The coverage was very one-sided’… Germany pressured the European Union to recognise the independence of Slovenia and Croatia, and then, having secured that, pushed forward on its own to recognize them before the Union did in December 1991.”
As I see it, much of the violent break-up was caused by outside powers deliberately trying to exacerbate the conflicts by taking sides rather than trying to act as mediators. Huntington suggests one possible reason for this.
As a result, both the Russian narrative (as described by Clarissa) and the Western narrative were flawed. They were looking for “black hats” and “white hats” as in the old Western movies, and thus made things much worse.
Also, Croatia and Slo0venia hired a high-profile public relations firm to put their case to the West, and this happened quite a long time before the break-up occurred. I remember reading a syndicated article in a South African newspaper, which must have been republidshed around the world, to the effect that Croats and Slovenes had been part of the Hapsburg Empire, and were therefore “Western” whereas Albanians, Macedonians and especially Serbs had been part of the Ottoman and Byzantine Empitres and were Oriental and therefore nonWestern and uncivilised barbarians.
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This is VERY enlightening, thank you! I find the PR angle especially interesting. We, the Ukrainians, never managed to sell our independence as attractive to anybody. We barely even managed to convince ourselves. On the positive side, however, is that there can be no war. The only Ukrainians interested in fighting a war of independence have gone to fight in Chechnya.
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The Serbs did not hire a Western PR firm, and therefore suffered a cultural disadvantage. As I pointed out in the article linked to in my first comment, Balkan nationalism, and Eastern European nationalism generally, has a different basis from Western nationalism. Thus when they tried to explain their position to Western media and politicians, they faced a huge cultural barrier.
Unreconstructed communist warlords like Milosevic, on the other hand, knew this, and were able to exploit Serbian nationalist sentiment to their own advantage. Tudjman did exactly the same in Croatia, of course, but that was strictly for domestic consumption. The PR firm handled the face they showed to the West. And Izetbegovic in Bosnia was not much different.
I know very little about Ukrainian politics, but I must say that when the Western media label a Ukrainian leader as “pro-Western” my bullshit detectors start twitching.
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