Somebody who comes here is nobody

Groucho Marx famously said that he wouldn't care to belong to a club that accepted people like him as members. Something that happened recently in Croatia reminded me of this statement. I met a famous Croatian, who works outside of the country. He could, like many others, have decided to stay away, but he actually gave some of his valuable time to founding something in Croatia, with an aim to give something back to his country. Admirable sentiment, to be sure, and to be fair, he gets a lot of points in some sectors of Croatian society. However, there is, he admits, another side to it: namely that there are many at home who question his true worth, to the point of even denying that he really is well known elsewhere. The problem, it seems, is coming home. He said he moves from the 1st league abroad to the fourth league at home, and as he put it "I'm not very good any more at fighting in the fourth league".

I've experienced this before. Several times in Novi Sad, we had arranged for people to visit who were well known or at least highly experienced outside of Serbia, and the simple fact that they turn up leads to people thinking they are nobody. Some fourth rate academic at the University of (say) Minnesota is, on the other hand, somebody important. I mean he has a website, and has published something, and most importantly, didn't deign to visit this place. He is thus somehow preferable to anybody whom I've actually met.

This is an odd, recurrent theme in the the former Yugoslavia, and I wonder where it comes from. Is it a generally poor sense of national self-worth? That is, the sentiment would run: Why would anybody who was anybody ever come here? There must be something wrong with them. The rather dumb thing is that it has a rather negative effect on anybody who decides to do something useful. What is the point of doing any good if you'll be considered a sap if you do it? Is it better to stay abroad and not bother?

I guess by the same logic, bands like the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, who visited Serbia a few years ago, must be second class? Nah. Maybe I'm just an over-sensitive nobody with a chip on his shoulder.

Pretending not to be what you are

I like to ask people about where they come from, particularly when I see or hear a name with an origin that doesn't tally with who they apparently are. As one might imagine, these days I tend to look for the "ić" endings in their various disguises - I even asked my mother recently about the obviously English name Aldrich that is in our family history (I still wonder, frankly). I have a nominally German colleague who's surname has the German ending itsch and he admits, with just a bit of reluctance, that at least part of his family history is from somewhere down in the Balkans (in fact, he shares a name with a famous, heroic Croatian politician who is now on the 200 kuna note).

A few years ago, I met a rather strange Austrian fellow once who's surname was pretty clearly simply the name of an animal in a Slavic language. When I asked him where he was from, he said that he was from the south of Austria, some old family. When I said that it sounded curiously like the animal name in Serbian, a Slovenian, also in attendance, broke in and said that it was in fact exactly the word in Slovenian. Ah, I said, so some of your ancestors must have come from Slovenia, zar ne? No, he said, it was south Austrian. Eventually, I think he conceded that his name was probably Slavic, but there was also this reluctance to do so.

There are other examples that are more poignant somehow, in that they involve people denying their true origin rather than their ancestry. I heard of people in the UK who would say that they were (say) Irish but were actually be Czech, and of course anybody who's lived in both North America and the UK can probably spout off dozens of examples of people feigning Britishness despite being born in (say) Oklahoma. And the fake accents can make your ears bleed, even if people from (say) Oklahoma would probably never notice. Once I met an American living in Paris who, upon hearing that I lived in the UK for a long time, said: "I'm glad you don't have that stupid accent that so many people try to make up".

Not all people deny their ancestry. Certainly in the once highly multi-national Austria, I've met a lot of people who embrace it. But it is just frequent enough to warrant mention. The simple fact of the matter is that some people just seem to be ashamed of who they are, and think that somehow they will do better in this world if they hide it. This seems a stark contrast to the attitudes of people at home, who are almost invariably proud to be who they are. As ever, I don't have a sensible ending to this, but just a thought: take some more of this pride abroad, and remember you don't normally get many points for being a pretender.

Your mother's south slavic tongue

There is a short but fascinating book called Your Mother's Tongue, by Stephen Burgen. I don't remember everything about it - I borrowed a copy and read it about eight years ago - but it was very interesting. This was mostly because he charted the trends in swears, and how the tendency to swear and the nature of them varies geographically around Europe. Norwegians, I recall, are wimpy at it - I think the worst that can be done is to call somebody a Devil; latin people from the south are much more prone to the worst, or at least most insulting & sexual forms of swearing. The British were a strange exception, being north Europeans who swore more than the others of a similar latitude, and English and Spanish speakers in the Americas hardly swear at all compared to their European counterparts. And so on.

In Germany, where I live, the swears are essentially only scatological and any attempt to insult or affectionately cajole somebody about the sexual habits of his mother will either not be understood, or just laughed at (Waaait a minute, you think my mother is a what? What does this have to do with what we are talking about?). I understand this perspective when I think about the Spanish insult cabron (cuckold) which is very complicated , particularly when applied out of context (let's see, I just accidentally spilled your beer, and now you are saying that, though you don't know her, or indeed if she exists at all, that my significant other is having relations with some other man also unknown to you). And of course in English, it is all about the F-word, unless you come from some minority that has imported the concept of insulting another's mother from elsewhere (i.e. MoFo among African Americans).

I should say that I swear - and I swear too much. It's a bad habit, I know, but as with everybody, I try to avoid doing it in polite company. I firmly believe that a well-placed swear is about the most effective literary tool there is. For a great, great example, see the Martin Amis Autobiography Experience where he talks about his father's - Kingsley Amis - best ever instance of the F-word as said by an angry dog. But through my own overuse I think I ruin my chances of any kind of suitable emphasis.

But it's fair to say that my foul-mouthed behavior comes nowhere close to that of the men I know from the former Yugoslavia. Get a couple of men from Serbia going and - whether they are closest friends or casual business colleagues - and the invective invects. And man oh man, are they dirty.

As anybody who isn't a monoglot knows: swearing in another language is a tricky business. Frankly, you should almost never do it unless you are fully, Joseph Conrad-like, fluent. You'll always offend, and never get the use of it right. But undeterred, or just seeking some additional insights into the place/language that I had found myself increasingly associated with, I asked a few years ago how one swore (psovati incidentally) in Serbian or Croatian. G. was no good, wouldn't tell me anything: don't swear, you savage, it's primitive. But every now and then, when something fell on her toe, or she dropped something, very very occasionally an utterance would come: P--- M---! What was that, I would ask, never to be told. Nothing, nothing.

Eventually, I worked out that this was absolutely the darkest of all swears that exist. When I realised, what it was (my mother's WHAT?), I started spotting it all over the place. Two people speaking in a cafe dropping it into an otherwise ordinary conversation. Elsewhere, there is the more standard fornicator type of invective, that I think is more common in Croatia (at least the Croatians I know use it more often). Related to this verb, some of early attempts to conjugate the similar sounding verb to eat (jesti or ja jedem) led, after some forgivable mix-ups with ds and bs to some interesting looks (We f--- dinner now?). Indeed, people sometimes warn you about this mix-up if they have ever previously dealt with anybody learning this martian language.

If I had to draw a parallel it would be to the way that I remember the English speech of working class Quebecois, that I would sometimes encounter during my student days in Ontario. The F-word came typically once or twice a sentence. And I think it is similar in the sense that nobody means anything by it. Obviously no insult is intended: it has just become a useful adjective/adverb/interjection. It might as well be OK or like or more suitably Ovaj or Važi.

I don't have a sensible ending to this, but one word of warning: to the prudish West, swearing is often frowned upon, even by hipocrits who swear constantly, and given the (often unjustified) reputation of people from the former Yugoslavia, perhaps it is wise either to cut down on it, or at the very least, never translate what you are saying about your friend's mother's anatomy to some curious outsider.

And of course, I know, I can go f--- myself. Oh, and f--- you too.