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.
2 comments:
"No man is a prophet in his own village". Which means (or doesn't, but I like to quote it), no matter how successful you are, there where you work, nobody will respect you here, where you came from. People in Nazareth have been throwing rocks on Jesus (from Nazareth); Vlade Divac, president Panic, successful industrials, humanitarians, etc here. That does happen probably all arround the world. And you don't need to work in another country, where you are famous, to be hated in yours. You can have it in yours too. I think, the reason behind minds of those people who think so is simply - Jealousy. And the abroad-is-better part - I think it's something to do with Inferiority complex.
If you're talking about Serbs who live abroad and return to Serbia, there's some truth to it. As for foreigners who come to Serbia, I don't think the same applies to them, or at least I haven't observed it before. Serbs do tend to be fascinated by foreigners and even surprised and shocked that somebody would chose to come to Serbia. There's always a lot of curiosity, but it's rarely meant to show disrespect - as in 'you must be nobody if you come here'. Though Serbs can be silly and assume that everybody comes to Serbia for Serbian women and food. Get real, people. Other countries have women and food, too ;)
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