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2009 Myth, Memory, Mother: Negotiating Nation in Marko the Prince Elizabeth B. Harbaugh

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COLLEGE OF VISUAL ARTS, THEATRE AND DANCE

MYTH, MEMORY, MOTHER: NEGOTIATING NATION IN MARKO THE

PRINCE

By

ELIZABETH B. HARBAUGH

A Thesis submitted to the School of Theatre in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2009 The members of the Committee approve the Thesis of Elizabeth B. Harbaugh defended on March 30, 2009.

Natalya Baldyga Professor Directing Thesis

Irma Mayorga Committee Member

Kris Salata Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above named committee members.

ii For Barbara J. Britzke and Joseph D. Harbaugh

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

With great appreciation for: Dr. Gary Gershman, for leading students to war-torn and and laying the path before my feet; Professors Jane and Mark Duncan, for reintroducing me to the theatre and their continuing encouragement; John Stark, for allowing me the opportunity to investigate this dramatic text; Timothy R. Saunders, Aaron C. Thomas, and Jay M. Gipson-King, for their emotional reinforcement and keen editorial eyes; Drs. Irma Mayorga and Kris Salata, for their guidance and support; and, Dr. Natalya Baldyga, for her insight, humor, and inspiration.

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ...... vi

1. Introduction ...... 1

A Balkan Trilogy...... 3 “At world’s end”: A Brief Contemporary History of the ...... 5 “Your mind can only take so much horror”: Theatrical Representations of the Yugoslav Civil War...... 10 An “emotionally plausible” Place: Reading Marko the Prince through Theory ...... 12 “Reinterpreting legends and myths”: The Inheritance of Marko...... 16 “A memory of clay”: Rediscovering Father, Reinventing Self...... 17 “No more dead babies”: Recreating “Mother”...... 17

2. “Reinterpreting legends and myths”: The Inheritance of Marko...... 19

3. “A memory of clay”: Rediscovering Father, Reinventing Self...... 34

4. “No more dead babies”: Recreating “Mother”...... 50

5. Conclusion ...... 65

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 67

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 71

v ABSTRACT

U.S. and Western media depict the Yugoslav Civil War of the 1990s as one of the most horrific ethnic conflicts since the Holocaust. The Yugoslav Civil War developed while Yugoslavia was attempting to adjust to new definitions of state lines after the fall of Communism. The state of Yugoslavia had combined the former Hungarian province - Slavonia, former Austrian territories Slovenia and , former Austro-Hungarian - as well as the independent states of Serbia and , and had enfolded different ethnic populations including , , , and Bosnians. While differences between ethnic communities were suppressed when Yugoslavia was a functioning state, after Communism the assertion of independence by disparate states and the subordination of various ethnic minorities encouraged rising tensions and violence. Presenting the war as the product of solely Serbian aggression, the Western media helped promote the problematic idea of a centuries-long ethnic hatred between Yugoslavia’s uneasily conjoined peoples as the cause for the civil war’s eruption. In this project, I suggest that Jovanka Bach’s unpublished play Marko the Prince (2002), the final installment of her trio of plays about Serbia and its diaspora, entitled A Balkan Trilogy, reframes the conflict for a U.S. readership. My examination explores how various strategies of identity construction in Marko the Prince reflect larger operations of nationalist discourse through which the text reconstructs the nation by means of heroicizing its ideal(ized) representatives. As I argue, Marko the Prince’s heroicization of Serbian nationalism reiterates how the construction of national identity is dependent upon by and for whom it is recreated, suggesting means through which dramatic texts can uncover ideological strategies. To redefine the tenets of Serbian nationalism, my investigation examines the invocation of myth, the creation of sympathetic masculine figures, and explores the conflation of the idealized woman with the Serbian motherland. Homi Bhabha, in his theory of “acts of enunciation,” argues that in the moment when cultures meet, they are simultaneously defined and exposed as constructed. This thesis positions Marko the Prince’s reconstruction of Serbian nationalism as an act of cultural enunciation by and for a U.S. audience in light of Bhabha’s theory. By redefining Serbian nationalism as a “heroic” construction, rather than the “monstrous” entity represented by Western media, I argue that Marko the Prince provides its readers and audience with an alternate encounter with discourses of the Balkan world.

vi INTRODUCTION “The very concepts of homogenous national cultures, the consensual or contiguous transmission of historical traditions, or ‘organic’ ethnic communities – as the grounds of cultural comparativism – are in a profound process of redefinition. The hideous extremity of Serbian nationalism proves that the very idea of a pure, ‘ethnically cleansed’ national identity can only be achieved through the death, literal and figurative, of the complex interweavings of history, and the culturally contingent borderlines of modern nationhood.” – Homi K. Bhabha, 2004 (7)

As Bhabha suggests, contemporary national identity is never static; on the contrary, the new nations of the world unceasingly attempt to define themselves through the negotiation of their historical and cultural inheritance. On February 17th, 2008, the Republic of Kosovo declared its independence from Serbia. Following nearly twenty years of bloody civil conflict, the creation and international recognition of this new nation-state reignited violent, paramilitary demonstrations of national identity in the former Yugoslavia. For the international community, the vehemence of conflicting nationalisms in the Balkans is both tantalizing and troubling. Citizens of Western Europe and the United States tend to have difficulty positioning the Balkans: discourse often constructs the region as a “bridge” between Europe and Asia, a nebulous place that belongs neither to itself nor to either continent. Indeed, the Balkans as a whole are decidedly, simultaneously not European and not “Oriental;” even the loaded Western term “Balkanized” connotes incomprehensible chaos. Because swathes of the Balkans were under the rule of the , and the territories have substantial Muslim populations, some scholars suggest positioning the region as an Oriental territory. Maria Todorova’s Imagining the Balkans (1997) examines the discursive construction of the Balkans both within the region and by outsiders, specifically in Western Europe and America. She rejects an “Oriental” positioning of the Balkans in favor of a unique position indescribable through Said’s terms; ultimately, Todorova argues that Western Europe and the U.S. must construct the idea of the Balkans in order to maintain their own superiority: By being geographically inextricable from Europe, yet culturally constructed as ‘the other’ within, the Balkans have been able to absorb conveniently a number of externalized political, ideological, and cultural frustrations stemming from tensions and contradictions inherent to the regions and societies outside the

1 Balkans. Balkanism became, in time, a convenient substitute for the emotional discharge that orientalism provided, exempting the West from charges of racism, colonialism, eurocentrism, and Christian intolerance against Islam. After all, the Balkans are in Europe; they are white; they are predominantly Christian, and therefore the externalization of frustrations on them can circumvent the usual racial or religious bias allegations. As in the case of the Orient, the Balkans have served as a repository of negative characteristics against which a positive and self- congratulatory image of the ‘European’ and the ‘West’ has been constructed. (188) Todorova suggests that the Balkans are, fundamentally, an ideological creation borne in the “West,” rather than a discrete political or geographic arena. Therefore, discussions of the Balkans are less about geopolitics than they are about U.S. and Western European ideology. The region, however, remains important to the rest of the world, as the international community invades its borders and condemns its conflicts. Therefore, I suggest that projects such as mine, which will attempt to read the way a Montenegrin-American playwright constructs nationalism in the tempestuous former Yugoslavia, contribute to discourse in a global community of scholars, across myriad disciplines, who seek to break open the common, contemporary representations of the region. I wish to contribute to this ongoing conversation because these nationalist discourses remain critical for our global community; a better comprehension of the various ways in which they are enunciated should only lead to a more complicated understanding of how cultural interactions are constructed in accordance with particular matrices of power and dominance. Theatre must be especially scrutinized as a form of cultural exchange that can foster, cement, or explode stereotypes. Homi Bhabha’s decisive text The Location of Culture suggests that the moment in which culture is “enunciated” defines that culture (51). I will explore this concept in greater depth later, but for now I argue that dramatic texts such as Marko the Prince are enunciative acts that both describe and define cultures for their audience. Interestingly, those acts that are created outside of the culture (for this project, primarily published English-language texts) give insight into the culture as it is both produced and perceived by those author/spectators. More simply, the enunciation of Serbian culture in Anglo-American texts opens up a site of exploration in which an elusive national identity can be negotiated by and for Westerners to enable a more complex

2 representation of the nuanced constructions that describe Balkan identities.The problematic Western European positioning of the Balkans can be interrogated through an examination of plays that attempt to portray the region’s cultural issues and conflicts, despite the fact that they have been written by those outside the region. Montenegrin-American playwright Jovanka Bach’s A Balkan Trilogy (1995-2002) provides a dramatic representation both removed from and immersed in the Balkan conflict by virtue of the playwright’s United States upbringing and her Slavic ancestry. Born in 1938 in Chico, CA, to émigrés from Montenegro, Bach has roots in the Balkans, though she was born and educated in the U.S.1 Because of her own unique story (examining a family culture that she may read through her U.S. lens), this dramatic artifact allows a U.S. readership a bridge into the region’s inherited conflict from her own U.S.-influenced perspective, one similar to that audience’s own. I believe that an examination of the final play of the Balkan Trilogy, Marko the Prince, will enable an interrogation concerning nuanced aspects of the text and its constructs as I tease out the representations of ideas pertinent to Serbian culture and nationalism for Western scholarly and artistic communities. Specifically, I seek to illuminate the ways myth, memory, and motherhood interact intratextually in Marko the Prince in order to reveal the strategies by which the text, in its moment of cultural enunciation, repositions Serbian nationalism, not as a destructive or violent identity, but as potentially heroic. A Balkan Trilogy Jovanka Bach’s A Balkan Trilogy is a collection of three plays written during the late 1990s2. The first play, Name Day (1995), reveals the hidden pasts of two Serbian émigré families and their reunion in California. Through the revelation of secret crimes, both families shatter as the crimes of the old world reappear in the new. A Thousand Souls (1999) takes place in Sabor, a fictional village in Yugoslavia, at the start of the Yugoslav Civil War in 1991.3 As a son attempts to interpret his mother’s past, he must confront the rising violence and resurgent myths he discovers. These first two plays are written in a realistic style and closely focus on Mike, a first generation Serbian-American who seeks to accept and understand his parents’ history and his

1 Bach died in 2006, after seeing Marko the Prince staged in New York. 2 Bach’s plays are unpublished and therefore may contain spelling or grammatical errors. I will always replicate the text exactly as it has been given to me without adjusting her language. 3 While Sabor is not given a specific location, the years in the play and the ethnic groups involved suggest that Sabor, though fictional, would logistically need to be set somewhere on the Serbian-Bosnian border.

3 own inheritance. The final installation of the trilogy, Marko the Prince (2002), shifts away from the realistic style of the earlier plays and redirects its focus from the U.S. citizen-subject, Mike, to a Serb and a Muslim, both natives of Sabor. Marko the Prince serves as the specific focus of this project and centers on Chicha, Mike’s cousin, a Serb living in Sabor. The play opens with the introduction of the guslar, a “Homeric type bard, who . . . sings of the Serbs’ history, passed down orally through generations . . . he adds his own poetic embellishment, mixing fact and fiction, until the stories assume mythic dimensions” (1). Bach uses the guslar to invoke Serbia’s mythic past. The guslar invokes and invents an ancient history not required by the conflicts in the preceding plays. A brief summary of the play reveals the way the past inflects the present conflicts in the region. The conflict in Marko the Prince is foreshadowed by the Serbian mother Mila’s dreams of a faceless woman who presages future danger. Chicha and his Muslim best friend Omar, however, focus on the past rather than the future and seek justice for the unsolved murders of their fathers. In the first act, Vuk, the Serbian police chief, confronts Omar with a military medal from Chicha’s family, evidence that Chicha may have been the murderer of Omar’s father; this information sends Omar spiraling into despair, as he questions the foundations of his friendship. Vuk pursues Boyana, Chicha’s fiancé, and attempts to dissuade her in her affections; however, Boyana rejects Vuk, and the guslar invokes the love of the legendary in his description of Chicha and Boyana. Narin, Omar’s sister, returns from study and travel abroad and meets Mike, protagonist of Name Day and A Thousand Souls, who has volunteered with the United States Red Cross to assist in the dispensation of medical supplies and food to the villagers displaced by the growing conflict. While Omar withdraws from Chicha to consider his supposed betrayal, Narin and Mike fall deeper in love and Chicha and Boyana celebrate their engagement; the act ends as Vuk threatens Chicha, “[y]ou never know what tomorrow will bring” (51). The second act opens with the revelation that Narin is pregnant and planning an abortion. When Omar confronts Mike with the information, he intervenes and begs her to keep this child of her former lover, pleading, “[n]o more dead babies. No more blood sacrifices” (56). Vuk again accosts Boyana, using the medal as impetus for her to reject Chicha. When Omar confronts Chicha with Vuk’s evidence of the medal Chicha repudiates Omar and plans to attack Vuk for his slanderous accusations about Boro, Chicha’s father. However, Vuk reveals information about Boro that repositions him, not as a virtuous war hero, but instead as a criminal who stole Vuk’s

4 family home and land. Chicha’s mother Mila shoots Vuk for this revelation, but confirms its veracity to Chicha, thereby shattering his world. A sniper kills Omar, inspiring Chicha to encourage the end of conflict; he uses , a Serbian national holiday, to exhort his fellows to lay down arms. Vuk, injured by Mila’s assault, returns and kills Chicha, who martyrs himself in a hail of bullets. The play has two (alternate) endings, one of which features Chicha reimagined as Marko the Prince while the guslar sings; the second reveals Boyana’s death at Chicha’s graveside and sends Mike and Narin off to safety. Marko the Prince is one of a limited number of plays by Anglo-American authors dealing with conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, making it a rare point of access to dramatized national identity in the Balkans.4 I read the play as a negotiation of the nation that uses various historical and discursive strategies to heroicize contemporary Serbian identity. This process, however, is more slippery than that – not only do the characters within the text construct a national identity, but the text itself is an artifact in a larger discursive conversation that constantly renegotiates national identity. As Bhabha suggests, culture is created and defined in the moment of enunciation; in the very writing of this play, the text becomes a participant in the redefinition of culture. Within the play, the characters’ interactions reveal the heroicization of contemporary Serbian national identity; the text as a whole then participates in a larger body of discourse which constantly negotiates that identity for a Western audience. “At world’s end”: A Brief Contemporary History of Yugoslavia5 “In the Balkans, you don’t need to ask for history lessons, because they come at you all the time, uninvited and long-winded, with the same kind of odd enthusiasm that a stranger in America might tell you about his children, pulling a picture out of his wallet.”6 It is essential to review the pertinent history of the creation of Yugoslavia, its rule under Tito, and the activities of the Yugoslav Civil War in order to gain a better understanding of the specific issues of the region. Aspects of history will also be examined in depth in the following chapters as required. The history of the creation and demise of Yugoslavia has its roots in waves of past conquerors and legendary battles, shaped by religious differences, and surrounds

4 Of those plays, only Sladjana Vujovic’s The Tender Mercies (1993) is also written by an Anglo-American of Balkan descent. 5 In Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, Robert Kaplan suggests that the Balkans are a region “at world’s end” (286). This supposition intrigues me both because it reflects the position of the Balkans as the edge/end of “civilized” Europe and because it seems to suggest an apocalyptic quality. 6 Peter Maas Love Thy Neighbor (24).

5 contemporary discourse and practices of the nation-states in the region. As the quote above indicates, problems of history are inescapable in any discussion of the current conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and have been the subject of myriad books on the topic.7 Of most importance at this juncture is a brief history of the breakup of Yugoslavia, which provides the backdrop for this trilogy of plays. The nation-state of Yugoslavia was created at the end of 1918 as part of the Peace of Paris following the end of the First World War. Parts of the Balkan peninsula combined in the newly-formed state included former Hungarian province Croatia-Slavonia, former Austrian territories Slovenia and Dalmatia, former Austro-Hungarian Bosnia-Herzegovina, as well as the independent states of Serbia and Montenegro. As Balkan historian Stavrianos states: “Given this complex background, it becomes understandable why the leaders of Yugoslavia met with so much difficulty in their attempts to construct a viable state. Their efforts eventually failed” (616). I draw attention to the various territories that make up the state of Yugoslavia for several reasons. Primarily, I wish to reemphasize that it is not simply “age-old ethnic hatreds” that inspire conflict in the former Yugoslavia; rather, it is a situation complected with issues political, religious, and economic. Throughout the twentieth century, Yugoslavia remained a nation, if an uneasy one, mainly by virtue of Communist leader Josep Broz Tito’s stringent policies. With the fall of the U.S.S.R. in 1989, however, ethnic and religious tensions in Yugoslavia rose until violence broke out. Very simply, the Yugoslav Civil War developed while Yugoslavia was attempting to adjust to new definitions of state lines and the construction of their various new and old nations. The former Yugoslavia is constituted of ethnic populations of Serbs, Albanians, Croats, and Bosnians, who may also identify as Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Moslem. While these differences were suppressed (as much as possible) when Yugoslavia was a functioning state, after the fall of Communism the asserted independence of disparate states, and the subsequent conflicts in those places where an ethnic minority was denied political or economic control, encouraged rising tension and violence. When ethnic Serbs attempted to hold Yugoslavia together by denying Albanians, Muslims, and Croats political and economic rights, Bosnia- Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia. What followed was a civil war,

7 Of particular import among these texts are the following: The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers, 1804-1999 (Misha Glenny); The Balkans since 1453 (L.S. Stavrianos); and Yugoslavia as History: Twice There Was a Country (John R. Lampe).

6 generally designated a war of Serbian aggression, including the use of “ethnic cleansing,” which is defined by James Gow in the following manner: Ethnic cleansing is the strategic use of excessive violence against civilian population centers, demonstrative atrocity and mass murder in order to remove that population. While it involves killing in some cases, in others, the intention is not to murder all members of an ethic group, but to induce all members to leave the territory in question, through the use of demonstrative violence. It is accompanied by the complete destruction of property so as to ensure that return is not possible. The intent of this strategy, which is also conditioned by ethno- national ideology, was to secure the territory in question by removing the prospect for opposition, whether purely political, or violent. (Gow 118-119) The Serbs attempted to cause the ethnic minorities, notably Muslims and Catholics, to leave their homes so that the Serbs could claim the land as their own. In turn, territories where Serbs were the ethnic minority were also overtaken by violence and hostility. The conflict in Yugoslavia earned most of its global attention as stories of atrocities and ethnic cleansing came to light. On June 28, 1989, Slobodan Milošević addressed a crowd of Serbs at Kosovo Polje and suggested that armed conflict could be close at hand. By December 1991, despite U.N. intervention in the region, more than half a million people had been driven from their homes as part of the policy of ethnic cleansing, an attempt to create ethnically pure communities (Ramet 67). The strategic use of ethnic cleansing began in April, 1991, in the Krajina, a Serb-dominated region of Croatia long-disputed by both countries, with the expulsion of the Croatian population (Gow 120). Some of the worst stories of the war came from Srebrenica, where “Bosnian Serb troops entered the city on the late afternoon of Tuesday, 11 July 1995, and began to commit the single biggest crime of the Bosnian war, the murder of some 8,000 unarmed Muslim men” (Glenny 650). Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Roy Gutman covered stories of torture and atrocity as early as 1992, when the Western press was again exposed to stories of death camps and mass rapes, torture and genocide, the likes of which had not been seen in Europe since the Holocaust. Global attention focused on these inhumane atrocities, and these monstrous events became a critical part of cultural discourse. Roy Gutman’s A Witness to Genocide, a collection of his dispatches from the Balkans, documents the infamous brutality of the war and serves to make monstrous the Serbian members

7 of the military. Gutman characterizes one of his first victim’s accounts as “a story of sadist depravity. ‘The victim was beaten over the head, neck, shoulders, back, chest, hips, feet, and arms—that is, over the entire body. [ . . . ] Sometimes he was beaten by one man, sometimes by three, and sometimes even 10 policemen at the same time. They usually beat us during the daytime, sometimes in the room where we were housed and sometimes in the yard. . . .’” (55). The first-person accounts of terror continue, detailing the torture, in the prison camps of Bosanski Samac, of Croats, Muslims, and Albanians by local Serbs, who “’went so far as to make a prisoner eat sand. And they forced one prisoner to swallow his own feces, another to perform sex acts on a fellow prisoner’” (58). The camp of Omarska was particularly notorious; Gutman deemed it: synonymous with massive atrocities. As many as 4,000 Muslim and Croatian men died there of beatings, torture or disease, witnesses say. Several were castrated before fellow detainees, others forced at gunpoint to have oral sex with each other. Women were held at Omarska, too. The 33 female captives at Omarska suffered a horrendous ordeal—rapes, beatings and perhaps even worse . . . (144) The sheer depravity of these activities suggests that the perpetrators have no regard for their victims’ humanity. The accounts of women who survived the Serbian soldiers’ rape camps are the sorts of chilling tales that one wants to be the product of twisted minds. Violence against women is an everyday occurrence, but the stories from survivors in the Yugoslavia seem particularly heinous. This account introduces some of the horrors that female victims suffered at the hands of their tormentors: He then spread my legs and raped me. He was very strong—you cannot defend yourself. When he was done, he inserted his hand inside me and began pinching me with his fingers, as if he wanted to pull everything out. I screamed and he grabbed my right breast and twisted it so hard that I screamed again; long afterwards my entire breast was blackened. He thrust the knife to my throat and said that, if I screamed one more time, he would slaughter me. He inserted his fingers inside me again—it hurt tremendously—and then he thrust his hand at my

8 face and I had to lick his fingers clean, one by one. He repeated the whole thing once more.8 Lisa S. Price compiled other survivors’ accounts that only emphasize the depravity of the Serbs, both military and not, towards the women of other ethnic groups: ‘On that occasion, I was raped with a gun by one of the three men already in the room.’ [ . . . ] If a man couldn’t rape [i.e., if he was physically unable] he would use a bottle or a gun or he would urinate on me.’ [ . . . ] ‘They pushed bottle necks into our sex, they even stuck shattered, broken bottles into some women . . . Guns too. And then you didn’t know if he was going to fire, you’re scared to death, everything else, the rape, becomes less important, even the rape doesn’t seem so terrible to you anymore.’ [ . . . ] ‘They forced the woman and her husband to undress in front of each other in the living room. They bound the woman’s hands behind her and raped her with a wooden baton and a spoon. She was then thrown onto a bed and threatened with further rape. Instead, the men bound her legs, threw her into the bathtub, and one of the perpetrators walked across her chest. She sustained broken ribs, a damaged lung, and other internal injuries.’ [ . . . ] ‘I started to cry, and I told him that I was menstruating. He said he didn’t mind and that he would show me how a Serb does it. He tied my hands and then he raped me on the table.’ [ . . . ] ‘They said they were going to show us what real Serbian men were like. But they weren’t men at all, they were animals, monsters.’ (214- 215) There is little to add in the way of commentary on these first-hand accounts. The final survivor, who calls the Serbs monsters, encapsulates the typical construction of Serbian nationalism in the U.S. and Western European press. Homi Bhabha describes it as “the hideous extremity of Serbian nationalism” (7). Marko the Prince seeks to redefine this monstrous construction of Serbian nationalism; the text asserts that, rather than a nation of monsters, Serbia can be reimagined as a nation of heroes, whose pride in their nation depends, not on destruction and hate, but on a historical, pure, essential Serbian identity.

8 Testimony of K.S., Human Rights Watch, 1993, pp. 174–175. Quoted in Lisa S. Price’s “Finding the Man in the Soldier-Rapist: Some Reflections on Comprehension and Accountability” (213).

9 “Your mind can only take so much horror”9: Theatrical Representations of the Yugoslav Civil War Few published plays in the English-language canon address the Yugoslav Civil War, despite the conflict’s frequent presence in print and visual media and British and U.S. participation in the aftermath of the conflict. Those plays that have been published and produced are: Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1996), David Edgar’s Pentecost (1996), Sladjana Vujovic’s The Tender Mercies (1999), Eve Ensler’s Necessary Targets (2001), Cecilia Parkert’s Witness (2002), Kaite O’Reilly’s Henhouse (2004), Nicholas Kent’s Srebrenica (2005), and Phillip Osment’s Sleeping Dogs (2006). All of these plays treat the conflicts of the former Yugoslavia, in a variety of ways, employing multiple settings, styles, and perspectives. If we begin to consider play-texts as “enunciative acts,” the similarities within the multiplicity suggest that there are specific, but different, cultural sites that require (re)definition. In other words, the commonalities in subject and strategy help establish what cultural areas need definition while simultaneously working to create those definitions. It is helpful to organize these plays into smaller groups, based on their similarities, in order to locate Bach’s A Balkan Trilogy within a larger artistic and cultural context. One assemblage primarily focuses on the violence and inhumanity that arose during the Yugoslav Civil War, which drew the attention of the Western press and humanitarian focus. Blasted, The Tender Mercies, and Henhouse all feature the violent actions and ruptured personal relationships that were so horrifying to the global community. Interestingly, none of the three take place in a Balkan location: both Blasted and Henhouse are set in England, while The Tender Mercies is simply set in a bare room.10 Changing the geographical space of the play is a specific theatrical strategy that has various results. It prevents the violence from being dismissed as that which could only occur in a foreign culture; however, it also erases the specific historical context of the region and represents the violence as potentially universal, without exploring or explicating the particular ethnic, political, and national issues that gave rise to it. On the other hand, the graphic representations of these violent acts translate them into a visceral experience; the audience undergoes them as direct witnesses.

9 Cecilia Parkert, Witness, trans. Kevin Halliwell, p. 33. Though Parkert is a Swede, Halliwell’s translation of her work makes it available to the Anglo-American community. 10 It is the contention of either critics or the playwrights themselves that these plays are meant to represent the conflicts in the Balkans.

10 The next group of plays also utilizes the notion of spectatorship. Necessary Targets, Witness and Srebrenica all showcase outside witnesses as characters within the texts; these spectators, all of whom serve in some “official” capacity, report on specific activities from the region. In these texts, violence is not represented, but it is spoken, written for the audience through words, not action. This primary difference distinguishes these plays from those previously discussed; furthermore, these spectator texts all retain an awareness of the specific location of this conflict in the Balkans. By invoking the Yugoslav Civil War and the performance of spectatorship, these texts function primarily as interrogations of the role of the West as observers of the conflict. They question what it means to be a witness to horror, as the U.S. and Western European populace was, and what the responsibility and role of witness entails. In many ways, these plays do not examine the Yugoslav Civil War so much as they do the implications for the bystanders in Western Europe and the U.S.; rather than engaging the history of the region or the participants in the conflict, these plays’ interest resides in the roles of the outsiders. These two groups of plays do not address the historical, cultural causes of the Yugoslav Civil War. They utilize representations and descriptions of the activities of the war, but by focusing on the atrocities alone rather than the reasons for them, they do not navigate the problematic and multifaceted forces that brought about the conflict I am more interested in examining plays that investigate the convoluted historical, cultural, and nationalist discourses that yielded violence and war in the former Yugoslavia. I believe these plays provide specific contexts that prevent us from either universalizing the violence of the conflicts or reducing them to the barbaric acts of “Others.” I argue that Bach’s Marko the Prince belongs in this final category with Pentecost and Sleeping Dogs. Though these plays are vastly different stylistically, all three specifically invoke Yugoslavia’s past in the midst of representing the contemporary conflict. In this negotiation of past and present, cultural enunciation is most specific and, therefore, most exciting. Both Pentecost and Sleeping Dogs articulate the ethnic, cultural, historical, and religious differences that caused the eruption of the Yugoslav Civil War; these two plays are thoroughly grounded in the region and may therefore be examined as enunciations of cultural discourse. However, both plays are set in nameless villages in nameless nations. While they interrogate the issues of the region, they do not negotiate a particular national or ethnic identity. That which makes Marko the Prince unique is its use of the guslar and of the label “Serb.” These two figures locate the play, temporally and geographically, in a way that

11 differentiates it from other plays. Its specificity allows it to serve as a cultural artifact in which one can read a construction of a specifically reconstructed Serbian national and cultural identity. An “emotionally plausible” Place: Reading Marko the Prince through Theory11 History and literature can be used to contextualize Marko the Prince, but theoretical investigations into nationalism and cultural construction further expand the breadth of inquiry. Benedict Anderson’s pivotal text Imagined Communities (1983) tracks the global rise of contemporary nationalism from its birth in the colonies of the Americas through recent national movements in Southeast Asia. According to Anderson, the rise (and rising power) of the bourgeoisie, particularly in Europe, occurring concurrently with the exponential availability of vernacular print-language writing, allowed nations to begin to imagine themselves as communities: “they [the bourgeoisie] did come to visualize in a general way the existence of thousands and thousands like themselves through print-language” (77). Textual artifacts, therefore, are critical for the propagation of national identities because they both allow for the imagination of those communities and stand as tangible proof of those imagined communities; indeed, because a text requires readers, the evidence of a text reminds a reader of others within her community. While Anderson argues primarily for texts’ importance to the early development of (generally) Western European nations, I reiterate the continued relevance of written texts in the ongoing development and recreation of national identity. Contemporary readers also exist within previously imagined communities, and national identity is always already interdependent upon changing political, economic, social, and cultural discourses.12 Therefore, texts serve not only as both fluid and fixed discursive tools, which respond to shifting conditions during their creation and become fixed in the moment of their iteration, but are also imagined as stable signifiers of a community of readers. Anderson makes the intriguing observation that successful future nation-states must be both “emotionally plausible and politically viable” (51-2). I am intrigued by the notion of emotional plausibility for two reasons. First, emotion signifies the feminine according to the traditional Western discourses that designate the realm of the emotional as a feminine trait and rational as male. Second, plausibility does not require truth, but does inspire belief, which makes

11 Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism Rev. Ed p. 51. 12 Anderson notes: “since the end of the eighteenth century nationalism has undergone a process of modulation and adaptation, according to different eras, political regimes, economies and social structures. The ‘imagined community’ has, as a result, spread out to every conceivable contemporary society” (157).

12 it particularly interesting for the implications of myth so critical to contemporary Serbian nationalism. The first response has shaped my thinking about this project. Emotion is stereotypically delimited as the domain of the woman: the assumed space for feelings is almost always a domestic one, while the political arena is a supposed space of facts, figures, and reason.13 The traditional link between the emotional and domestic in Western thought enables my interpretation of Anderson’s proposition thusly: the creation of the nation requires not only a belief in the (larger) imagined community of the nation, but also the compliance of the emotional (i.e. domestic) spaces of that nation to agree with the larger public terms of the nation’s definition. In The Location of Culture, Homi K. Bhabha suggests, “The recesses of the domestic space become sites for history’s most intricate invasions. In that displacement, the borders between home and world become confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting” (13). The broken border between family and nation creates a space for the investigation of both the nation and the family’s identity. I intend to revisit this notion when I examine figures of “mother” within Bach’s text; for now, I suggest that, as nation and family blur, mothers serve several purposes for the creation of national identity: as gendered subjects who are Other from their male/masculine counterparts; as idea(l) citizens (figures who exist both as an idea in the minds of male defenders and as an ideal of what a national “woman” ought to be) who inspire a call to arms; and, as bringers-up of children who, by utilizing the oral tradition, pass down myths and stories that create normatively-desired citizens of the nation.14 Indeed, nationalist discourse constructs Serbia as a feminine-gendered nation (referred to as the Motherland by Slobodan Milošević and other prominent Serb nationalists), implying a body that must be defended from outside penetration and be a participant in the persistent reproduction of Serbian protectors within those borders. Anderson’s final chapter in the revised edition of his seminal work is titled “Memory and Forgetting.” Within it, he posits the simultaneous need for remembering and amnesia in a way that merits quoting at length:

13 While I do not suggest an essentialist gendered reading of space, I both recognize the historical distinctions discursively delimited by society and culture and distinguish them within the play. 14 As several feminist-nationalist scholars note, women also serve as the literal propagators of a nation’s future through their production of its future citizens.

13 All profound changes in consciousness, by their very nature, bring with them characteristic amnesias. Out of such oblivions, in specific historical circumstances, spring narratives . . . Out of this estrangement [with a specific historical past] comes a conception of . . . identity . . . that, because it can not be “remembered,” must be narrated. . . As with modern persons, so it is with nations. Awareness of being imbedded in secular, serial time, with all its implications of continuity, yet of “forgetting” the experience of this continuity – product of the ruptures of the late eighteenth century – engenders the need for a narrative of “identity.” (204-5) Anderson here suggests that of significant importance to nationalism’s creation is a simultaneous remembering/forgetting of the past accompanied by a re-narration of those forgotten memories. A nation must recognize its past as the requisite foundation for its present; because, however, that past is immemorable for its present citizens, the nation must also narrate that past and disseminate it to both present and future members of the community.15 Additionally, this narration must be recreated with each generation and with each fundamental break from the past that the nation experiences. Therefore, an event such as the Yugoslav Civil War requires rewriting and revision, both during and ex post facto, in order to sustain the imagined community of the nation. Thus, the myths and truths of memory will have lasting impact upon the reimagination of a nation in the midst of trauma. In Marko the Prince, Chicha and Omar’s dead fathers are consistently and continually remembered and constructed via memory. Therefore, one of my chapters will utilize Anderson’s theories on memory as I read the personal and national inheritance that Omar and Chicha must negotiate as they attempt to reimagine their nation and identity. Homi K. Bhabha’s writing on “enunciation” in The Location of Culture has also helped me redirect my focus within this project, both in my analysis of the text and in my positioning of the text as an artifact participating in the construction of national identity. Bhabha begins with “The Commitment to Theory,” a chapter detailing the practical purposes of theory and agreeing to terms that other theorists also use: culture is only a problem when it is read next to other cultures; a culture is not inherently problematic when it is considered alone. However, Bhabha

15 Alongside the required remembering necessary for the construction of community and national identity is a simultaneous forgetting of problematic issues such as internal ruptures and changes in identity and shifting national and ethnic borders. These issues will be addressed in depth throughout my chapters.

14 suggests that the problem with reading cultures against each other comes not from their interaction, but from the challenges raised by the moment when that culture is created and recognized, the moment he calls “enunciation.” Here, it is necessary to quote him at length: [I]t is the very authority of culture as a knowledge of referential truth that is at issue in the concept and moment of enunciation. The enunciative process introduces a split in the performative present of cultural identification; a split between the traditional culturalist demand for a model, a tradition, a community, a stable system of reference, and the necessary negation of the certitude in the articulation of new cultural demands, meanings, strategies in the political present, as a practice of domination, or resistance. . . The enunciation of cultural difference problematizes the binary division of past and present, tradition and modernity, at the level of cultural representation and its authoritative address. It is the problem of how, in signifying the present, something comes to be repeated, relocated and translated in the name of tradition, in the guise of a pastness that is not necessarily a faithful sign of historical memory but a strategy of representing authority in terms of the artifice of the archaic. (51-2) Bhabha’s fundamental question is the locus of culture – from where and how does culture base its authority? Bhabha argues that authority is both created and interrogated in the moment in which it is enunciated; it is the utterance of cultural “truths” that both creates their authority and simultaneously reveals them to be “performative” and unstable. They are performative because they require the moment of enunciation: they do not exist in fact, but only through the means of their creation. At the same time, the stability that cultural identity seems to represent is concurrently mined from past and present needs and is always fluid as it attempts to adapt to the new needs of the culture. Furthermore, the past itself cannot be considered stable, as it is always read through and interpreted by the needs and desires of the present authors. Therefore, any enunciation of culture must be read against itself so that its instabilities become visible. I propose to use Bhabha’s theory of enunciation to interrogate both Bach’s text and customary Western representations of Balkan nationalism. First, treating the speech of the characters as “enunciative acts” requires that they be read for historical subtext. As my interpretation of Anderson suggests, familial relations are tied up with issues of national identity; therefore, the characters’ interactions signify a negotiation of cultural and national ideas within

15 the play. Moreover, the play is a textual artifact in and of itself. Through the creation of the text, Bach herself participates in the active enunciation of a Serbian national identity for a U.S. readership. Thus, the text can be read through the breaking-down of binary relations that Bhabha articulates: it speaks from a specific historical moment while simultaneously required to navigate the past and its uses in the present. I will take this concept from Bhabha and add to it my own thinking about theatre and national identity. I suggest that this play represents Bach’s creation of an idea(l) nation: one that is simultaneously only an idea and yet also an ideal, an embodiment of a particularized conception of the nation and, therefore, nationalism. A written dramatic text (before it is performed, when it also enters another realm of discourse) is, practically speaking, the crystallization of an idea, the translation of imagination into an identifiable discursive tool. At the same time Bach’s text deals with an idea of the nation, this nation is also idealized; the text represents the nation as it exists ideally in Bach’s mind. It need not, and does not, indicate reality. What it does represent is the imagined nation, a nation unrealized, because it is not real, but a nation that, according to the text, ought to exist, that is inherently indicated in the fact of its creation. In that way, we see national discourse at work, both the effects and creation thereof, which is what makes the play text an important artifact of study as a discursive attempt to pursue the recreation of national identity. I will explore the tension embodied within this text, with the theoretical assistance of Bhabha and Anderson, in the following three subsections that will constitute my chapters. The following chapters will focus on three primary areas of interest – myth, memory, and motherhood – in an attempt to break open the cultural ideals being created within the text. Each of these subjects serves an integral role in the ongoing creation and construction of national identity, both inside and outside of Marko the Prince. “reinterpreting legends and myths”: The Inheritance of Marko In my first chapter, I seek to explore the role of myth in Marko the Prince and investigate how its invocation works to justify the actions of the present. Chicha represents a conflation of two important Serbian mythohistorical figures, King Lazar and the titular Prince Marko. Specifically, the guslar and Chicha invoke the , which is often positioned as the mythified locus of contemporary Serbian identity. Furthermore, the title “character,” Marko, though never seen onstage, is invoked throughout the guslar’s tales and the text’s stage directions, and is also embodied by Chicha. By suggesting that his spirit is present within

16 Chicha, Bach uses the mythical Marko to imbue Chicha with heroic/mythic status; however, the text also collapses into Chicha the myth of King Lazar, the martyr whose sacrifice guarantees the future of Heavenly Serbia. The use of these figures is not only critical within the text of the play, but also for its significance within the greater scope of discourse on Serbian national identity. As Anderson writes, “The more the ancient dynastic state is naturalized, the more its antique finery can be wrapped around revolutionary shoulders” (160). Reading Chicha’s mythical constructions opens up a site for investigating the revolutionary and traditional aspects of the heroic Serbian identity constructed in the play. “a memory of clay”: Rediscovering Father, Reinventing Self This chapter will investigate the ways that memory, particularly the memory of the father, influences the construction of Serbian masculine national identity. For both Chicha and Omar, their father’s murder signifies an inheritance of honor that carries with it the burden of conforming to a normative racial/religious/national identity. Mike, the Serbian-American Red Cross volunteer, navigates a different issue when negotiating his inheritance: he must learn to balance his U.S. subject position with his newfound Serbian consciousness. Chicha’s remembering and discarding of his father’s supposedly heroic past allow him to martyr himself as the new generation’s heroicized representative. How does the act of remembering the father impact the behavior of the son? In what ways does this impact the construction and enactment of Serbian national identity as posited by the text? I suggest that textual and historical readings, concurrent with an awareness of Bhabha’s notions of enunciation, will allow us to read the characters’ paternal relationships, and the text as a whole, as a site for the contestation of Serbian national identity. “No more dead babies”: Reinscribing “Mother” Through the course of my first two chapters, I hope to navigate the discursive uses of myth and memory in the construction of national identity. My final chapter will interrogate ideals of motherhood and the state and investigate how maternal relationships work in the creation of national identity. Kesić suggests, “Women’s bodies, individually tortured and in pain, are transformed into national symbols and presented as symbolic battlefields that embody national values” (314). While not all of the pain experienced by the women in Marko the Prince manifests physically, the representation of women as symbolic battlefields invests both their bodies and their activities with a multi-faceted significance within nationalist

17 discourse. Furthermore, their survival of pain and their sacrifices for the nation allow for the persistent creation of male cultural heroes in contemporary Serbia. In what ways are women necessary for the construction of a national identity other than that embraced by men? How do ideas of motherhood and child-rearing (and child-bearing) become wrapped up in the discourse of nationalism? Within this chapter, I hope to use discoveries about myth and memory to locate the Serbian national culture established by the women in the plays, using that to discern both how national identity is created in the larger world of cultural discourse (in which the text participates) and how the characters themselves stand as signifiers for creating national identity. The construction of the Serbian hero, Chicha, and of Serbian nationalism, depends upon the interweaving of myth, memory, and mother. Throughout these three chapters, I will investigate these discursive components and situate them within specific historical and theoretical contexts. Ultimately, I seek a greater understanding of the forces of nationalism and the methods by which Serbian national identity constructs itself in this play text. What interests me about national identity is the process of its creation: just as Bach manipulates myth and legend, fact and fiction, to recover the Serbian identity, so is this identity imagined by a Western audience as embodied in and performed by ethnic Serbs in the Balkans and throughout the world. Interrogating such acts of enunciation allows the U.S. audience to question its own positioning of this region and its people as mysterious and Other, which increases the possibility of meeting those other cultures as equal members of a global community.

18 “REINTERPRETING LEGENDS AND MYTHS”: THE INHERITANCE OF MARKO

“History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.” – E.L. Doctorow

“It is a myth, not a mandate, a fable not a logic, and symbol rather than a reason by which men are moved.” – Irwin Edman

Myth derives much of its power from a common reception as truth. In the imagined community of the nation, belief in and not the fact of history serves as the locus of imaginary identification. As Benedict Anderson notes, myth’s plausibility, not its truth, invests it with power. As a political tool, myth has the ability to alter any relational framework; between peoples, persons, and within the self, myth can become the tenuous foundation on which all assessment of the world depends. It has the ability to dismiss an entire ethnic or religious group as Other, to create a brotherhood out of people in disparate urban and rural communities, and to allow the identification of oneself as an inheritor of a mythic past. The power of myth and the viability of national identity are frequently irrevocably intertwined and give credence to national authority. Part of this construction of national identity involves what Homi Bhabha identifies as enunciative acts. For Bhabha, these are the moments in which culture is both defined and troubled; moments of enunciation require both the authority of the past and the possibility to reinvent the past in order to transfer that authorization to the present moment. Acts of enunciation are, therefore, moments of instability in which the articulated culture attempts to negotiate a historical authority within a contemporary need. As such, it is critical that cultural enunciations contain elements of the past. Myth helps to locate a cultural enunciation within a historical conversation. The power of myth comes from its simultaneous reception as historical fact and its malleability, which allows for its reinvention dependent upon contemporary requirements. While sometimes rooted in history, myths are, in and of themselves, permeable; in other words, they are permitted to evolve

19 throughout their repetition because they are not solely historical accounts.16 They can be, and are, permeated by the constantly shifting needs of cultural enunciation. In her study of eighteenth-century British theatre, Mita S. Choudhury theorizes that “the performance of differences,” when combined with theatrical “appropriation,” yields substantial political import (71). She further argues that the theatrical representations of these appropriated ideas of differences have particular significance: In the theatre, the appropriated objects are neither territories nor artifacts but historical markers and cultural icons—events, characters, situations, and myths— that preexist in a plethora of fluctuating historical, traditional, and custom-bound states in their native environments. Once appropriated by a dominant culture, these objects acquire (new) identities through an intricate process of naturalization. (71) Although Choudhury’s focus is particular to the imperialism of eighteenth-century England, I believe that her analytical model can be more broadly applied to other sites of interaction between myth and national identity. The changing mythos surrounding Serbian national characters can indicate changing needs of a Serbian nationalism attempting to naturalize both its past and present. The differences instantiated in and idealized by myth become a site for the appropriation of heroism and pride. Under disparate historical circumstances, these myths, legends, characters, and events are reimagined in order to support a specific construct of Serbian national identity; the various strategies for doing so are dependent upon their historical and temporal location. It is critical, then, to read the representation of differences and myths in Marko the Prince in order to reveal both their naturalization and the circumstances (receptive, perceptive, and historical) that require them. What this text ultimately provides is the presentation of a sanitized representation of Serbian nationalism and a palatable cultural enunciation that mitigates contemporary U.S. perceptions of Serbian nationalism as violent and extremist, instead rendering it as heroic and intelligible to the U.S. citizen-subjects.17 The representations of the Yugoslav

16 Pål Kolstø provides a critical survey of the variety of methods and modalities by which contemporary scholars analyze the use of myth in his introduction to Myths and Boundaries in South Eastern Europe. Kolstø suggests that the two primary schools of thought, the “enlighteners” (those scholars who argue for examining only objective historical facts) and the “functionalists” (those scholars who argue that myths constitute an essential body for exploration) are best intermingled in any study of Balkan myth and nationalism (31-34). 17 While this text is linguistically available to a world-wide English-speaking audience, it is unpublished and has never been produced outside of the United States. I refer to its reception by a U.S. readership to indicate the

20 Civil War in the Western press generally termed it a war of Serbian aggression caused and characterized by rabid Serbian nationalism. Roy Gutman, the first Western journalist to uncover the truths of the horrific stories from the Yugoslav Civil War, denounced “Serb ‘ethnic cleansing’ [as] the euphemism for murder, rape, and torture” (xvii). The tales of rape camps, castrations, and the outright slaughter of thousands at Srebrenica came together in Western consciousness as the barbaric outpouring of longtime ethnic hatred.18 As such, the rehabilitation of the mythical figures involved in the purported creation of these conflicts, particularly Marko the Prince and King Lazar, is of critical importance to those who would offer an alternative to tropes of rabid Serbian nationalism. By sanitizing the mythical origins of these heroes, Chicha is represented as a new inheritor of Serbian national identity rendered intelligible to a U.S. readership. Ultimately, the new Serbian nationalism is, as Choudhury suggests through her model of early British nationalist discourse, naturalized and represented through its rejection of accusations of cruelty and embracing of heroic sacrifice. The legends and myths utilized by Marko the Prince are essential both to creating historical and cultural authority within the text and to rehabilitating Western reception of Serbian nationalism. The invocation of these particular myths provides the text with the cultural authority to represent Serbian nationalism, which in turn allows the reader to accept it as authentic. Simultaneously, the demonized historical beginnings of the enduring bloodshed in the Balkans can be disavowed through the reinvention of the mythical perpetrators. The invocation of myth through the titular character, who is immediately associated with the protagonist, imbues Chicha with Marko’s heroism and daring. Though Marko is never seen onstage, “his sentient influence is felt through the main character, Chicha” (2). The conflation of the mythical Marko with the contemporary Chicha sets the character up as the cultural and nationalist hero whom the U.S. readership recognizes, giving him the authority to represent and negotiate Serbian identity. Marko’s consciousness is accessible through Chicha’s actions, investing Chicha with the power of the mythical past while simultaneously giving him permission to reinvent the myths in order to appropriate them into contemporary Serbian identity. As stated earlier, Benedict Anderson posits that “The more the ancient dynastic state is naturalized, the more its antique finery can be audience most likely to come into contact with the text 18 Craig R. Whitney claims: “The history of all the southern Slavs in the Balkans is a tangled of mass rape and barbaric slaughter, the product of the kind of ethnic hatred that perhaps only people who are closely related to each other could nurture so well for so long” (1). This account, in 1993, was espoused by most of the Western press and its readers and generally continues.

21 wrapped around revolutionary shoulders” (160). By naturalizing Chicha within the mythic tradition, the text in effect creates a new Serbian identity. Investigating the strategies of mythical construction in the text can reveal the ways in which contemporary Serbian nationalism is reconceived and reconstructed in order to be made less threatening to the readers in the U.S. From the first introduction of Marko in the stage directions, the text heroicizes him for the reader: According to legend, Marko is glorious, electrifying – a prince of high birth, the son of a Royal who fought in the Battle of Kosovo. For whatever reason, Marko, himself, was never at Kosovo. After his people are defeated, he becomes a brigand prince, setting wrongs right in his own way and taking advantage of every opportunity. He’s a mercurial warrior – fierce, fearless, yet capable of being tenderhearted. The only rules he lives by are of his own. He settles justice in his own way, quickly, if not always wisely, taking slight from no man or woman. (2) The text positions Marko as the Serbian combination of Robin Hood, a populist hero whose commitment is to fighting injustice, rather than seeking revenge (the “brigand prince, setting wrongs right”), and John Wayne, a hard-talking, sharp-shooting gunslinger with a heart of gold (“a mercurial warrior – fierce, fearless, yet capable of being tenderhearted”). It is intriguing to note that Marko does not participate in the Battle of Kosovo, the conflict mythologized as the first end of the Serbian nation, and is therefore not indicted by the negative connotation the battle might hold for U.S. readers due to its recent representations in the media. The Western media frequently denotes Slobodan Milošević's 1989 speech at Kosovo Polje as the inciting incident for the Yugoslav Civil War. On the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, Milošević spoke to one million Serbs about the importance of the inheritance of the battle: “By the force of social circumstances this great 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo is taking place in a year in which Serbia, after many years, after many decades, has regained its state, national, and spiritual integrity…Through the play of history and life, it seems as if Serbia has, precisely in this year, in 1989, regained its state and its dignity and thus has celebrated an event of the distant past which has a great historical and symbolic significance for the future” (Milošević). Additionally, through the association of Marko with tropes of heroic heteromasculinity, Chicha also represents an embodiment of the heroic qualities appealing to a U.S. reading population.

22 Perhaps the most important of Chicha’s admirable traits is his unceasing pursuit of justice, rather than revenge. Throughout the play, he reinforces his own construction as a heroic figure who wishes only to set things right; it is not his personal plight that drives him, but a commitment to weighing the scales and correcting the balance. After reclaiming the cemetery for the Serbs (from whom it had been stolen by the Muslims with the help of the double-crossing Mayor, Krsto), Chicha wants to avoid further bloodshed: “As long as the Moslems don’t try for the cemetery, I’m done with that. What’s more important to me is finding father’s killer” (7). It is not the pursuit of property, or even the continuation of ethnic conflict, that drives Chicha; rather, he focuses on discovering the identity of murderers, who will be dealt with as individuals rather than collapsed into a group of a particular ethnicity. Instead of the bloodthirsty Serbs depicted in the U.S. press, who seek to take that which does not belong to them, Chicha is a man interested in peacefully or diplomatically righting the wrongs done to him and those he loves. This motif of Chicha as the bringer of justice persists in his first encounter with Omar, his Muslim . While Omar is trapped inside by the snipers spraying their “existential form of graffiti” on his walls with bullets, Chicha threatens them (10). He objects to their cowardice, yelling “Hyena! Be a man! Show yourself!” (10). Chicha does not fear a violent encounter, but he refuses to engage in bloodshed unless it is a fair fight in which the participants can face each other head-on, which indicates a kind of masculine courage and honor identifiable for a U.S. readership: Chicha is someone who “fights fair” and does not engage in cowardly attacks on the weak. Furthermore, the sniper attacking his friend is a fellow Serb; rather than standing behind and acquiescing to a Serbian solidarity created in opposition to a demonized Muslim Other, Chicha stands firmly on the side of justice and bravery by risking his life for the unarmed Omar. He seems to exist outside of the perceived rabidity of Serbian nationalism, standing in defense of the weaker, the unprotected, rather than engaging in or encouraging monstrous acts of “ethnic cleansing.” Even those character traits of Marko’s gently criticized in the stage directions (most notably his mercurial temper) are borne out as positive and charming in Chicha’s actions. When his fiancé, Boyana, comes to him, shaken from an encounter with an unwelcome suitor, Chicha chides her insecurity and sings her a ballad, “The Wedding of Prince Marko,” at once alleviating her fears and simultaneously reconceiving their love as the inheritance of an epic tradition (28). Rather than taking Boyana’s fears seriously, Chicha trusts in his imagined (and, in the text,

23 reified) position as a powerful epic hero, invested with mythos and charming her fears away. He is similarly endearing at their engagement party. In the space of a few moments, Chicha’s mood vacillates from an enthusiastic desire for the group to “be merry – be joyful,” into curiosity and hurt over Omar’s absence, and directly back into his position as the chief merry-maker: “Musicians – play! Everyone – come, let yourself go – this is a day of celebration!” (49-50). Even Vuk’s interruption cannot dissuade Chicha from his celebrations, though the rest of the group is filled with concern and fear. As the act ends, the reader is left with a buoyant Chicha heroically trying to encourage his family and friends in their happiness. Chicha’s charm and courage in the face of danger and fear reiterate his role as a protagonist to be admired. This sort of heroic audacity is enticing for a reader; Chicha is a new kind of Serb, a likable one with a romantic streak and magnetic sense of humor. He is, at once, a brave soldier fighting for the weak and a lover whose infectious joy enlivens parties. This combination makes Chicha more identifiable to a U.S. reader and naturalizes him as a multi-faceted man who is socially engaging: the sort of hero whom a U.S. reader might not imagine as a Serb nationalist.19 Instantiated as the symbolic vessel of an admirable Serbian national identity and as a heroic figure whom the U.S. reader can identify, Chicha is further distinguished from the other Serbs in the play. Police chief Vuk and his henchman Cerni are thugs of the worst order, the murderers of both Chicha and Omar’s fathers.20 Although Vuk’s primary motivation is, like Chicha’s, the righting of wrongs, Vuk’s methods do not have the same transparency and heroism; indeed, regaining his father’s land is nearly secondary to Vuk’s plans for Chicha: “We must stay detached – objective, then, no one can question our motive. What better person to implicate Chicha then his closest friend – and the son of the victim. I want Chicha completely discredited – his reputation shattered, his closest friend changed to a stranger – then we can do as we want” (22). Vuk wants to set Chicha up for psychological torture, a goal more commonly associated with Serbia in the U.S. imagination.

19 Chicha’s construction in the text seems to reflect two tropes of heteromasculinity identifiable in contemporary U.S. popular film: both the heroic warrior and the devoted lover. In this way, Chicha’s appeal is familiar to the U.S. readership, and also distinguished from the perception that Serbian nationalists are inelecutably foreign. By rendering him intelligible through association with U.S. popular cinema, Chicha is heroicized and made recognizable. 20 The traditional association of Vuk’s name helps establish him as Chicha’s antithesis. Vuk Brankovich was the infamous betrayer of King Lazar, whose death ensured the future rebirth of the Kingdom of Heavenly Serbia. Chicha, imbued with Marko’s heroism, is set in opposition to one of the most critical traitors in Serbian national history. This is one more element closely linking Marko the Prince and the importance of Serbian myth.

24 The conflict between Vuk and Chicha is further complicated by their competition for Boyana, who represents the ideal Serbian woman for both men: beautiful, dutiful, and delicate. Although Vuk claims that Boyana is the only woman for him because of her own merits, Boyana believes differently: “If it wasn’t for Chicha, you wouldn’t give me a glance. But you see yourself in some kind of competition, and want to win me from him, like a type of prize – to prove that you’re superior” (24).21 Boyana recognizes what neither Vuk nor Chicha seem to understand: they are, indeed, competitors, though not solely for her hand. The text sets Vuk and Chicha up to vie against each other in order to determine who will be the new kind of Serb; the man who prevails will have gained the right to represent Serbian nationalism. Boyana becomes a symbol of and an excuse for that negotiation. In their penultimate conflict, Vuk and Chicha are again differentiated, this time in their separate strategies for gaining dominance. After learning that Vuk murdered both his father and Omar’s, Chicha is determined to prove Vuk’s guilt, claiming that “truth needs to be put into action” (79). Armed with only his father’s pistol, Chicha is ready to take on Vuk and the entire police force in order to secure justice from a corrupt system.22 His strategy, moreover, is one of immediate truth: Chicha plays no word games and believes that the truth is unshakeable, non- negotiable (much like his self-perceived innate Serbian identity). Vuk, however, plans to bring about Chicha’s destruction through lies and deceit. By framing Chicha for the murder of Omar’s father, Vuk is able both to destroy his nemesis and to promote violence between the two ethnic groups already at war in Sabor, the fictional village in which the play is set.23 Vuk claims that “the wolf has come to Sabor to set wrongs right,” but he is furthering the cycle of lies and violence which led to the conflict in the first place (82). Although Vuk claims that he, like Chicha, is fighting injustice, his battle involves further perpetration and the demise of an entire village, while Chicha wishes to settle things “once and for all – man to man” (81). Chicha’s

21 Vuk complicates even these feelings when he tells Boyana “The sight of you, the smell of you – inflames me. And your voice – lilting, resonant – clear as a beautiful sounding bell – My mother had a voice like that – You’ve charmed me – completely” (25). The conflation of Boyana and Vuk’s mother suggests an idealized (Serbian) womanhood that will be revisited in the third chapter; however, I point it out here to reinforce the ways in which partnering and marriage are tied up with the idea of the two “kinds” of Serbs symbolized by Vuk and Chicha. 22 Although Vuk reveals that Chicha’s father was the problematic perpetrator of the original injustice, the text needs Vuk to continue the cycle and Chicha to repudiate it. Therefore, Boro and Mila’s guilt becomes a tool by which the text can demonstrate injustice and allow Chicha to claim a new national identity. 23 It is interesting to note that, in Serbo-Croatian, “sabor” means “congress,” as in the governmental entity. This mythical place’s name also bears a strong graphic resemblance, for an English-speaking eye, to Serbia, further evidence that this text’s goal is to authorize and negotiate a national identity palatable to U.S. readers.

25 heroic individualism and unwillingness to involve either the games of words and propaganda or the rest of the village creates a persona for the U.S. readership to respect and admire. Rather than the lies and manipulations so associated with the image of Serbian nationalist identity most familiar to U.S. readers, Chicha provides a unique hero who represents truth, dignity, and a palatable Serbian nationalism. By presenting the idea that there are heroic Serbs and villainous Serbs, the text breaks apart the monolithic Serbian nation of monsters imagined by the U.S. readership, furthering its ability to allow a space for reinventing Serbian identity. Once these two conflicting symbols of Serb nationalism have been established, the text endorses the hero, redefining Serbian nationalism for the U.S. reader. By troubling the U.S. readers’ perception of a uniformly monstrous Serbian identity and creating these recognizable opponents, the text is permitted to endorse an ideal and idealized identity that is more appealing to the Western reader. More simply, the construction of a conflict between hero and villain is so clear that it renders unviable the idea of a Serbian monolith; instead, the perception of Serbian identity can be changed by the text’s representation of that identity as familiar to a U.S. audience. Chicha’s most notably admirable character trait, perhaps that which most separates him from Vuk and the other represented Serbs in the text, is his devotion to his conception of an inherently Serbian honor, even at the expense of his father’s memory. When Boro, Chicha’s father, is revealed as a dishonorable thief who schemed and connived to drive Vuk’s family out of their home, Chicha must reimagine his father, not as a hero, but as an actor in the sustained saga of theft and violence that plagues Sabor. Rather than repeat the mistakes of the previous generation, Chicha rejects the actions of his father in order to stop the conflict destroying Sabor. In his impassioned speech at Vidovdan, as he attempts to stir the villagers to repudiate Vuk, Chicha argues that the true inheritance of the Serbs is not in their destruction of others, but in the saving of their village and way of life: Don’t we show great honor when we kill each other, brother against brother? Certainly, we are honorable when we erase those who don’t cross themselves as we do . . . Be on guard against those who speak with tongues of honey . . . Shouldn’t we honor such an honorable man? Yes, we should honor him and all others like him – with silence, with revulsion – with repudiation! Honor them, all, for betraying our spirit and our souls! Brothers – such a man, as this, lives in each

26 of us, as he has lived in our fathers, and our fathers’ fathers – burrowing in him like a viper whose head must be cut out. (points to Vuk again) Once and for all, cut this man out of us – Cast this man from us – return him to the grave! (95-6) There is much to be unpacked in this declaration of Chicha’s; however, what I find most intriguing here is Chicha’s repudiation of the purported traditional Serbian inheritance in favor of the pursuit of peace. Boro represents an idealized honorable inheritance that is upended by Vuk’s revelations about Boro’s actions; rather than sustaining the tradition of theft and murder, as Vuk does, Chicha reconceives Serbian honor. Unlike Vuk, who pursues bloodshed and ethnic conflict, Chicha wants the end of violence and a return to “our spirit,” a Serbian spirit not invested in the destruction of Muslims, but rather in a reconception of Serbian honor as something he believes ought to be innate (not able to be articulated by “those who speak with tongues of honey”) that holds peace above all. Chicha is unwilling to transgress upon this reconceived honor and instead sacrifices himself, dying in a barrage of bullets fired by his fellow Serbs. In this moment, the text has created a martyr who dies in a demonstration of a new Serbian identity.24 Chicha refuses to participate in Vuk’s persistent quest for vengeance and ethnic superiority; he is reimagined, a new kind of Serb nationalist willing to pay a heavy price for peace. Reading for Chicha’s construction as an overwhelmingly positive national figure is a way in which to discover the text’s strategy for renegotiating national identity; however, it is also critical to explore the tactics by which Chicha’s (problematic) mythical origins are sanitized in order to make them more palatable to U.S. readers. Chicha’s heroism is what Choudhury calls “naturalized,” because it is so easily folded into his identity: he wears both his valor and his charm naturally and moves seamlessly between them. However, these heroic qualities are not without their own murky implications. While clearly invoking the mythohistorical figure of Prince Marko, the text also utilizes the myth of King Lazar, another critically important figure in and mythology. Examining the text’s strategies for incorporating these historical figures reveals the ways in which the mythical authority granted to these two heroes helps to rewrite and reconceive Serbian national identity.

24 Chicha’s martyrdom most obviously recalls Christ’s original martyrdom, a sacrifice made so that mankind may have a better world. The Serbs themselves adopt this myth in the construction of King Lazar, whose death made way for a “Heavenly Serbia.” The connections between Chicha and Lazar appear in the following pages.

27 Myth has been an essential rallying point for Serbian ethnic consciousness and national identity since the Battle of Kosovo Polje in 1389.25 Translated in English as the “Field of Blackbirds,” this event has served as the basis of epic poems, songs, and myths handed down to and reinterpreted in contemporary national identity. While Prince Marko did not fight in this epic battle, he gained his legendary status from the deeds he committed after the battle was lost by King Lazar, leader of the Serbian nation. Both of these heroes figure prominently in the mythos surrounding Chicha. Marko the Prince’s stage directions present Prince Marko as a charming, if violent, national figure, but fail to recognize the ways in which he himself is problematic. While Marko’s cunning, quick wit, and bravery are admirable, the mythic prince is not as valorous and unproblematic as the play paints him. Songs and stories of Marko show that he was both a collaborator with the Turks (who had defeated his countrymen) and a slayer of innocents. Branimir Anzulovic’s Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide (1999) uncovers many of Marko’s more chilling deeds, including his reaction to a Serbian maiden’s rejection of his marriage proposal in the following ballad: Marko raged . . . And by the hand he seized the damsel, He drew the sharp dagger from his girdle, And cut off her right arm; He cut off her arm at the shoulder, And gave the right arm into her left hand, And with the dagger he put out her eyes, And wrapped them in a silken kerchief, And thrust them into her bosom. (15) Marko’s violence in the face of this rejection is particularly chilling, the sort of violent activity with which a U.S. citizen-subject would be loathe to identify and which would place Marko solidly within a narrative of Serbian violence in general and violence against women in particular. Indeed, Anzulovic notes that Marko’s noblesse oblige is only ever activated with animals that he saves from tragedy; with people, Anzulovic argues, Marko is generally violent

25 “National identity” is a somewhat problematic phrase here because Serbia was not a recognized political, or even geographic, entity until the late nineteenth century. After their defeat at Kosovo Polje (The Field of Blackbirds), Serbia became part of the Ottoman Empire in 1459 and did not regain political sovereignty until 1878 (Lampe 167).

28 and frightening, rather than an admirable sort of hero (16). Although Marko has been variously interpreted in contemporary criticism, even those scholars who wish to rehabilitate this heroic figure must negotiate the inherently violent nature of his identity. 26 Vojislav Djurić’s article “Prince Marko in Epic Poetry” suggests that Marko’s troubling configuration is borne out of necessity: Some of Marko’s failings, however, are only the natural traits of his heroic figure. He is quick-tempered, a killer, willful, unyielding, and inflexible. But with the role given him in the songs, could he have been otherwise? Could he have been the symbol of a nation’s longing for revenge and freedom, had he been peaceable, quiet, obedient, retiring, and timid? Of course not. (323) For Djurić, Marko’s problematic status is irrevocably linked with his historical and temporal surroundings; he can be nothing but a problematic figure because a pacifist would be unable to save Serbia unless he were willing to commit acts of atrocity.27 What remains clear, however, is that Marko is, inevitably, troubling, given his wide range of violent behavior. Marko the Prince must alter this challenging mythical hero in order to create a cultural authority that does not reinscribe U.S. conceptions of Serbian nationalism as inherently and inescapably violent. One of the strategies it has for doing so is the conflation of Marko with the character of Chicha, which not only heroicizes Chicha but rehabilitates the Serb mythical hero by eliminating or mitigating the violent aspects of the Marko figure through the remapping of the hero onto a peaceful martyr. This rewriting of Serbian heroism is supported by the invocation of a different, less disquieting mythical hero in the form of King Lazar. The guslar, who serves as narrator and commentator in Marko the Prince, invokes King Lazar’s presence as he and Chicha sing together after Chicha learns of Omar’s betrayal. In

26 It is critical to note the other analyses of Marko which historians and folklorists have conducted. While Anzulovic (a Croatian-American) is almost wholly negative on the subject, the Yugoslav scholar Vojislav Djurić suggests that Marko’s problematic construction is entirely natural, given that he was a freedom fighter for his nation. Tatyana Popović’s Prince Marko: The Hero of South Slavic Epics provides perhaps the most objective view, wherein she examines both Marko’s heroic and dastardly character traits, including matricide, fratricide, and religious and civil disobedience. Even the animals Marko saves are troublesome; as Anzulovic notes, the “hawks and eagles” incapacitated in battle are the only creatures with which he interacts generously, and they themselves are constructed as “a predatory animal that consumes human flesh and blood” (16). 27 What Djurić’s explanation elides is precisely the distinction between historical fact and mythological construction. By suggesting that the mythical Marko had no choice in his construction, Djurić confuses the reality of the man with society’s need while simultaneously recognizing that Marko is but a symbol. This is problematic because it disguises the workings of the construction of national identity as a construction, instead naturalizing the process and endowing both Serbia and Marko with a higher purpose, regardless of the material consequences.

29 preparation for Vidovdan, Chicha wants to be made “happy” with the song of Kosovo.28 After describing the Serbian and Turkish forces, lined up to face each other, the guslar sings: Seventy thousand of our best – And one old man – Are put to rest. The heavenly kingdom is their due – their souls fly off on falcon wings – their blood has turned the plain to rue. The guslar here makes reference to the titular inspiration of Anzulovic’s book, the myth of Heavenly Serbia. This myth, involving King Lazar, is of critical importance for locating Marko the Prince within a specific mythohistorical tradition, and one with less violent overtones. According to the epic ballad The Battle of Kosovo, King Lazar was challenged by the Sultan to meet him and decide the fate of their lands: 29 Lazar! ! Lord of all the Serbs, What has never been can never be: One land only but two masters, A single people who are doubly taxed; We cannot both together rule here . . . (29)

28 Vidovdan (June 28) is a crucial date in Serbian history. Originally a celebration in honor of the pre-Christian god of sun and war, Vid, it was named an official national and church holiday “only after the 1913 victory over the Turks in the First Balkan War” (Anzulovic 84). Not only is it the festival day for St. Vitus, it is the date on which the Battle of Kosovo Polje (1389) took place and also marks Franz Ferdinand’s assassination (1914) and the formation of the first Yugoslav nation (1921). Milošević's famous speech also took place on this date. This holiday stands as a critical indication of the performance of celebrated Serbian nationalism. 29 Epic Serbian poetry is written in trochaic meter, which is notoriously difficult for English translators. The most recent translation of these poems, by John Matthias and Vladeta Vučković, structures them with visible breaks in order to retain the original linguistic and poetic strategies of the Serbian. I have reproduced these poems precisely as they are available in the translation. NB The Battle of Kosovo is also often referred to as the Kosovo Cycle; I will use these terms interchangeably.

30 There are two elements of importance even within this small fragment. First, it is critical to note that the Turks are deemed the aggressors; the Serbs are represented as a people attacked without provocation by the land-hungry Muslims, an entirely different situation than represented in the Western media coverage of the Yugoslav Civil War. Second, the land and people are represented singly. There cannot be disparate countries or discrete units of persons within the Sultan’s proposed nation, which must be indivisible. This argument inflects Vuk and Cerni’s understanding of Sabor, a village they would rather not be populated with those perceived as outsiders, such as the Muslims. Historically, in 1389, the Serbs were fighting for their very right to exist as political entity. Marko the Prince positions Sabor in a similar way, as though it its fight against the Muslims will determine its very survival. Note, however, that Vuk and Cerni believe violence is the only method by which they can retain control of the village. Chicha, however, has a different plan, one that reflects Lazar’s decision more closely. After receiving the letter, The Kosovo Cycle describes how King Lazar is visited by Saint , who brings a missive from the Virgin Mary that gives the king two options: he can choose to fight, and win, against the Turks, and therefore retain his earthly kingdom, or he can choose to be defeated, for every one of his men to die, and therefore retain the promise of a heavenly kingdom in the future (30-31). Lazar’s response is as follows: If I choose an earthly kingdom now, Earthly kingdoms Are such passing things— A heavenly kingdom, raging in the dark, endures eternally. (31) Lazar’s choice at the Battle of Kosovo is a critical one. As Anzulovic observes, “Prince Lazar’s choice of the heavenly kingdom was to transform an alleged military defeat into a moral victory. The legend was gradually expanded to portray people who at every decisive turn in their history opt for the heavenly kingdom by taking the moral high ground” (12). In this construction of Serbian ethnic consciousness, the belief that their predecessor sacrificed himself and seventy thousand of his men to die in order that the Serbian identity be forever identified with moral certitude has frequently been pointed to as an essential element critical for reshaping and

31 justifying cultural and political actions that claim to represent a Serbian ethnic consciousness. When Milošević spoke at the Vidovdan celebration commemorating the six hundredth anniversary of the battle, he alluded to the Serbian army as one that “remained undefeated when losing” (Milošević). Milošević’s speech uses the inheritance of Kosovo to help negotiate national identity at a troubled time for Yugoslavia, arguing that defeat is impossible for the inheritors of Lazar’s sacrifice. With this information, we can read Chicha’s speech and self-sacrifice at Vidovdan for a second, simultaneous meaning, in which we see traces of Lazar’s sacrifice at the cost of a new nation in Chicha’s actions. After inciting his fellow villagers to repudiate Vuk, Chicha begs them to “Let the cemetery for which we ‘honorably’ died and fought, remain the graveyard for this destroyer of our soul [Vuk]. Bury him in the past where he belongs, or he will devour us. Let us be courageous. Let us be valorous. Let us no longer be honorable!” (97). Just as Lazar urged his Serbian countrymen on to their deaths, at the price of their inherited kingdom, so does Chicha exhort his village to choose defeat and the end of battle for the sake of “our spirit and our souls” (96). After this outcry, Vuk commands Cerni and his men to gun down an unarmed Chicha in the midst of their celebration. Vuk seizes the microphone and cries “The cemetery is ours – we control the town – and will fight to the last man to keep it. Better the grave than slavery” (97). Just like the betrayer from epic poetry, Vuk chooses to reject the valorous sacrifice in order that a new nation may be born. He symbolizes the furtherance of ethnic conflict and violence, while Chicha begs for an age of understanding and the reinvention of Serbian national identity in order to reflect what he sees as present in the Serbian soul. Chicha’s self-sacrifice is necessary for the creation of this future Serbia, and the text implies that his representative nationalism is the one that will be embraced by these future Serbs, just as Lazar’s sacrifice created a mythic inheritance of Serbian sacrifice. After Chicha’s death, the guslar sings of his demise while his surviving loved ones progress through the scene to say goodbye: There never was a man like Chicha the brave, who fought for motherland He believed in the good, and fought as he should,

32 without revolver at hand. (97) The guslar’s cultural and historical authority is here conflated with Chicha’s sacrifice: as he enters the hallowed ground of mythology, Chicha is reconceived as a national hero without parallel. Just as King Lazar’s death became the stuff of legend, so will Chicha’s actions be handed down to future generations of the village of Sabor, and his death will be a heroic symbol that embodies a heroicized and valorized national identity.30 The collapse of the myths of Marko and Lazar into one singular character serves a critical purpose for the text. Marko’s problematic, violent demonstrations of national identity are sublimated in favor of his heroic pursuit of justice, while Lazar’s sacrifice at the Field of Blackbirds is enhanced to provide the mythical authority by which Chicha can choose to reimagine the destiny of the Serbian nation. Ultimately, the text needs this conflation in order to disguise the problematic identities of both mythohistorical leaders and their impact upon contemporary nationalism. By doing so, the text can represent the Serbian nation as a fundamentally heroic one, prevented from achieving its heavenly destiny by the presence of less- authentic Serbs who are unauthorized by the mythic past and oppositional to the heroic present. Just as the text needs Chicha to stand for its future, it requires the betrayer Vuk in order to give Serbian national consciousness a position from which to evolve. Simultaneously, Chicha becomes a naturalized, idealized U.S.-intelligible hero and a symbolic, sanitized, safe vessel into which is poured mythical authority, allowing him to reinvent Serbian national identity for the U.S. readership that has already identified with him. He is imbued with cultural authority and reconstructed as the author of Serbian nationalism who represents a national future palatable to U.S. citizen-subjects. In the next chapter, I will investigate memory and masculinity in order to further demonstrate how Chicha, as national symbol, is both rendered intelligible for the U.S. reader and authorized to represent a rejection of vilified Serbian national performance in favor of a less violent, more palatable nationalist identity.

30 Terry Eagleton argues that “[t]he martyr does not want to die but by accepting his or her death manages to socialize it, puts it on public show and converts it to a sign, places it at the emancipatory service of others and thus salvages some value from it” (105). Here, Chicha’s death signifies the sacrifice needed to recreate Serbian nationalism; like Christ, Chicha dies for the sins of Serbia so that she may be reformed.

33 “A MEMORY OF CLAY”: REDISCOVERING FATHER, REINVENTING SELF

“The past is never dead, it is not even past.” – William Faulkner

“What you have inherited from your father, you must earn over again for yourselves, or it will not be yours.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

As Faulkner and Goethe suggest, memories and fathers have something important in common: both are simultaneously forces of the past and participants in the present. What fathers have accomplished must be created again for the present generation; likewise, memories from the past are persistently re-experienced and relived each time they are retrieved. Fundamentally, what both ideas connote is continuity. What has passed is resurrected in the process of remembering, and the inheritance of fathers must be regularly reconstituted in order for it to remain present. What fathers and memory both do is allow for the semblance of an unbroken line of identification and inheritance through which a contemporary subject can define himself. In the final chapter of Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson investigates the way memory works in the configuration of national identity. Anderson argues that both memory and amnesia are essential for the creation of nationalist identity because memory generates the illusion of continuity. Citizens of a nation cannot experience the perpetual existence of the nation because they only live within their historical moment, while the nation purportedly exists both within and through generations. Anderson suggests that certain key events must be forgotten and then remembered/reconstructed by each generation in order to approximate a feeling of continuity and nationalist belonging (204-6). Therefore, the manner in which the processes of memory are shaped is essential to the development of national identity. Anderson notes that the process of nationalist remembering and reconstruction replicates human memory and identity formation. Autobiographies, he observes, often begin with events that happen before the conscious memory of the author, detailing events handed down by parents and other relatives. In order for these events to be incorporated into the identity of the author, they must be retold (remembered again) by the author as though they were the author’s own. Ownership of these events must be (re)claimed in order for them to be instantiated as fact, a process paralleled by the repeated negotiation of national identity (205). The parental figures are

34 the first authors of continuity and are eventually usurped by their offspring, as memory is rewritten for the new generation’s history. Homi Bhabha asserts an additional relationship between the personal and the national in his observations about the family: “The recesses of the domestic space become sites for history’s most intricate invasions. In that displacement, the borders between home and world become confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting” (13). Within enunciative acts that represent the cultural realm, therefore, the family may be read as a symbol for the nation, a signifier of both itself and the nation as a whole. The construction of national identity, like personal identity, is predicated upon the interactions of memory and the reclamation of the past, and can be traced through a study of familial interaction. Gendered interactions within the family are also complex sites for the investigation of symbolic implication. The links between the symbolic family and nation are constituted through gendered characters. Gendered identities, however, do not exist in a vacuum, but are constructed within a greater discourse of personal identity shaped by history and society. As Judith Butler argues in Gender Trouble, biological sex cannot be an all-encompassing definition of a “person” because “gender is not always constituted coherently or consistently in different historical contexts, and because gender intersects with racial, class, ethnic, sexual, and regional modalities of discursively constituted identities” (4). As the discourse of identity creation functions within these larger social groupings, there is also a smaller discrete unit through which a subject may define him/herself: the family. Fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, exist as gendered subjects within the constructs of the family and the nation. Memory and gender have a complex relationship in Marko the Prince. The continuity of the family is enmeshed in the creation of an unbroken gender inheritance that demonstrates how masculinity ought to be performed and is passed down generationally. None of the male characters has a father present within the text; all of the fathers are absent. Therefore, there are no exemplars of masculinity who demonstrate the cohesion of the family or the nation. Without the imagined gendered succession of the symbolic family/nation, the male characters seem to be unable to construct their own identities without first revisiting their fathers’ gendered and national performances. The absence of the fathers as corporeal characters invokes the absence of the durability of the national imaginary. Therefore, these absent fathers must be reconstructed

35 and the memories of them negotiated by the sons in order to rebuild the nation. I read the text’s fixation on the absent father as representative of the need for an uninterrupted national history reinforced by an unbroken inheritance of gender performance. By remembering their fathers, the male characters discover the nationalist gender performance necessary to the construction of both the nation and the family. Therefore, the act of remembering the father is, for each of the male characters, of multiple meanings. First, remembering father allows for the creation of a purportedly stable gendered national identity. Second, through the embracing or rejecting of their fathers’ gender identities, the male characters reinscribe gender traits of the past and redefine their own identities, and therefore the identity of the national imaginary. Third, the overall action of remembering allows for the fundamental historical break that the war represents to be reinserted into the imagined persistence of the nation; because they engage in the remembering of their fathers, the male characters are able to manipulate the problems of the civil war so that those characters are not a break from the past, but part of a cohesive national imaginary identity. By recognizing and then breaking the continuity of identity through his rejection of his father’s memory and gender performance, the character of Chicha in Marko the Prince reinvents the Serbian man and, symbolically, the Serbian nation, rendering it intelligible to a U.S. readership. In Marko the Prince, the importance of remembering fathers is foregrounded almost immediately. Beginning with Chicha, the text constructs each of the childless male characters as fatherless; indeed, dealing with the inheritance of their respective fathers becomes a critical motivator for most of the action of the play. I argue that all of these male characters are childless because they have not yet negotiated the inheritance of their fathers. As childless men, their identities are unfixed until the memories of father (and their performances of national identity) have been embraced or dismissed. These men are, effectively, unauthorized to have children because they have not yet determined their own national identity inside of the continuity of the nation. Because this play stands as an act of enunciation that reconstructs and redefines Serbian identity for U.S. readers, the memory of their fathers is critical for delimiting the stability of their national identity. This is particularly vital in this situation because the Yugoslav Civil War marks an irreparable break in the continuity of the national imaginary. In this historical moment, the negotiation of memory is especially critical because memories must be reinscribed into the enunciation of the “new” culture. Their fathers are participants in Serbia past; negotiating these memories opens up the potential identification of Serbia present and future. By investigating the

36 modes and repercussions of these memories, I will show how this specific instantiation of absent fathers stands as an indication of the need for an unfaltering national identity, which is critically important in the reconstruction of Serbian national identity in the wake of the Yugoslav Civil War. Chicha represents the first of the childless fatherless males of Marko the Prince; his case is the most important because he stands as the author of the new Serbian national identity. At the start of the play, Chicha and his mother Mila discuss his deceased father, Boro, and the meaning of his inheritance. Now that Boro has been murdered, both Chicha and Mila are invested in the importance of the tangible objects that he has left behind: CHICHA. I’ll never forget the words ‘For Highest Valor’, crowning the top of the medal, like a laurel wreath. When I was a boy, I used to hold it, feel its coolness against my palm, and imagine Dad fighting at the Neretva. MILA. Yes – ‘For highest Valor’ – a shame the medal is gone, too. It meant more to Boro than almost anything. [ . . . ] CHICHA. Don’t cry, Mama. I promise you, Dad’s legacy will endure with or without that medal. MILA. I pray that it will, son. CHICHA. Once more, this pistol will find it’s true mark – Dad used it heroically. And so will I. MILA. You have. You have. Your father would be proud of you. (6-7) For Chicha, Boro’s medal represents a historical artifact with the power to symbolize the permanence of Serbian heroism. While holding the medal, Chicha can experience the critical events that his father experienced, which allows him to “remember” those that were of great consequence to both his father and to his nation. The medal also functions as a double signifier because it symbolizes both Boro’s achievements and the displacement of those achievements into the national identity: the award “For Highest Valor” places Boro’s achievements under the banner of the nation by implying that the valor was in the service of the nation. Boro, then, becomes a defender of the nation and that role is inherited by Chicha through the second inherited artifact, the pistol. The pistol itself is a conduit of continuity, as Mila observes: by wielding it as his father did, Chicha participates in the same acts of national creation as Boro. By utilizing his father’s inheritance in the same manner as his father, Chicha represents the

37 persevering presence of a national defender and is inscribed with his father’s attributes. Therefore, the persistence of Chicha’s memory and his use of Boro’s objects allow for the recreation of Serbian national identity. Remembering the father is also critical for Vuk, who represents the unendorsed performer of Serbian nationalism; his memory of his father allows him to participate in an enduring national performance that ultimately leads to the nation’s demise. Vuk, the play’s antagonist, must also negotiate the tension between a physical object and revered memories. As Vuk reveals late in the second act, his family was destroyed by the actions of Boro and Mila, and Chicha’s home originally belonged to Vuk’s parents: Yes, it’s hard to accept the truth about one’s father. And harder still about one’s self. I’m filing proof against Mila and Boro today, which will return this land to me. I’ve found the papers that prove the forgery. One thing you will learn, Chicha, is the man who you revere as a God is no more than a common thief and murderer. The truth cannot be hidden forever, Mila Borova. (83) The piece of land is the critical object for Vuk’s memory. However, this land is not tied into the nation in the same way that Boro’s medal is. Rather than being a part of a larger entity, the land, as a discrete object, is what ties Vuk to his father.31 It is also the memory of his father’s death, rather than his father’s life, which is Vuk’s inciting motivation. Unlike Chicha’s participation in an unbroken identification with a national masculinity, the breaking point between Vuk’s past and his future is his father’s death. Both the object and the man have been denied Vuk, whose sense of identity lacks the stability that Chicha’s embodies. Therefore, Vuk is not permitted the same national identification that Chicha has, though both must simultaneously negotiate their fathers’ pasts and those objects that reify their memories of their fathers in order to construct their own place in an uninterrupted national imaginary. Vuk’s first statement uses the nonspecific pronoun “one,” rather than the personal “your.” It seems, then, that Vuk recognizes the importance of a father’s identity in the creation of one’s own, implying that he, too, must learn the truth about his father and himself. Earlier, Vuk claims that “[l]ife conditions people to their temperment. They are not born to it. A child, formed by the

31 Vuk, rather than believing in the importance of his nation’s wholeness, considers the land his own possession. His authorship of the nation creates a fragmented state that is not unified. For Vuk, the problem of the nation is complicated by his personal desires; rather than striving for the unified Serbia that is reified in Chicha’s vision, Vuk pursues his an individual, rather than national agenda, which denies him authorship over the nation’s identity precisely because it is not of importance to him. Instead of the nation, Vuk cares only about himself.

38 horrors around him, may grow up to be a horrifying man” (68). Recognizing the cultural construction of his own identity, Vuk suggests that it is the horrors that have shaped him, rather than an innate, essentialized evil. Therefore, these memories of horror, perpetrated against his father, are (re)membered in Vuk himself. He is constructed in both his loss of father and his loss of land, but without the touchstone of his father’s physical object, which symbolizes his connection to previous gender performance. Denied both persistent identity and memory, which are instead replaced with his need to reclaim the land for the sake of personal gain, rather than to create and save the nation, Vuk cannot negotiate either a national or a personal identity. National remembering is not only critical for native Serbs, but also for Mike, whose incursion into Sabor forces him to confront his memory of father in order to negotiate his relationships with the Serbian-national members of the Sabor community. However, because Mike’s negotiation of his father’s memory also results, like his father’s, in exile from Sabor, the text does not empower him to authorize a Serbian identity. Mike, the Serbian-American who returns to Sabor as a Red Cross volunteer, is dealing with a different and distinct set of historical and familial negotiations.32 While working in Sabor, he begins a relationship with Narin, the Muslim Omar’s sister, who has returned to Sabor pregnant from a previous relationship and is planning to abort the fetus.33 Mike stops her before she begins the procedure: “My God – I feel like I’m reliving my father’s experience. My mother told him her firstborn, Rado, wasn’t his – later, she had to kill the baby. As a result, we all suffered – our entire family. Believe me, I don’t want the pain of that again” (55). Although less obvious than Boro’s medal or Vuk’s father’s land, the “imperiled fetus” serves nevertheless as a legacy inherited by a son from his father. For Mike, Narin’s pregnancy recreates a situation from his father’s past: in effect, Mike has inherited the same problems his father faced. As he later tells Narin, “I never fully understood how Dad could accept Mom’s first born, unconditionally – and grieve over him, even though he wasn’t his. Now, I know why he did it. You’ve helped me to understand. He loved Mom, like I love

32 Note that this text does not position Mike as the protagonist of this play, though he has served that role in the previous plays in the trilogy. I suggest that this change in focus reinforces the notion that the play is ultimately seeking to reconstruct a palatable Serbian identity for an American readership. Because Marko the Prince is not about Mike, the foreigner, the focus on Chicha and the reader’s empathizing with him allows the text to reconstruct Serbian identity for the Americans, rather than constructing a Serbian-American identity. 33 The next chapter will investigate the ways in which motherhood is positioned in the text, which will include a lengthy analysis of how this situation is problematic for Narin. Here, the focus is Mike and his memory of his father.

39 you. Thank you, darling” (56). Mike’s association of his situation with his father’s before him reiterates the critical importance of negotiating familial and national identification. However, though Mike follows in his father’s footsteps, there is a critical distinction to note: unlike his father and mother, natives of Sabor, Mike is an outsider. Narin, too, stands outside of the perceived monolithic Serbian identity because she is a Muslim. Furthermore, the father of her fetus is also an outsider, one whose ethnicity and history are entirely unknown. What makes this relevant is that it removes the situation from the imaginedly uninterrupted history of the village. Mike and Narin are not able to be authors of a nationalist identity precisely because they are not of this nation, this village. Mike and Narin, like Mike’s parents, flee, rendering them impermanent members of, rather than participants in, the community. It is Mike’s quest to understand his parents that brings him back to Sabor, and the comprehension of their situation that permits him to leave, allowing him an identity based only upon familial, rather than cohesive national, identity. Chicha, therefore, stands as the only Serbian character who negotiates both his familial and national legacy. Vuk and Mike are both unable to unite their national and familial identities and become representative Serbian authors of a new nationalism. The final male character whose recollections of his father must be investigated is the Muslim Omar, whose memories of his father reveal the ways in which masculinity is constructed differently (as inferior) for him as a representative Muslim and is ultimately positioned as outside of the nation because of his ethnic and gendered differences from Chicha. Omar is different from the rest of the previously mentioned male characters in several ways, the first of which is his religious difference. Although religion is never mentioned in regards to the majority of the characters, Omar is frequently and consistently marked as a Muslim.34 This separates him from all the rest of the male characters, who are only identified as Serbs, or, in Mike’s case, Serbian- American, and none of whom are defined according to religion. The village of Sabor is in the hands of the Serbs at the start of Marko the Prince, which positions Omar as an outsider, one who stands outside the national identities being negotiated by the other male characters. This difference also signifies a greater importance to Omar’s national and familial negotiations of memory; unlike the other characters, who are exposed to other members of their national community, Omar stands alone, without other masculine figures to identify himself with or

34 This is also true of Narin, his sister, and Akret, his father. An in-depth study of the tensions embodied in this consistent ethno-religious marking, particularly in the face of claims about “age-old ethnic hatred” would be a rich site of investigation, but is beyond the scope of this project.

40 against. The importance of Omar’s act of remembering his father, then, is even more critical because it serves as the only means through which Omar can establish an identity. The familial does not doubly signify the nation here because the two are collapsed into one single entity. There are no other families in Omar’s nation; he is entirely alone with his memories. Like Chicha, Omar’s father has been recently murdered. However, where Chicha is willing to risk everything to find his father’s killer, Omar’s negotiation of his father’s memory is very different: he claims not to “have your [Chicha’s] tenacity or drive” (12). Unlike the other male characters in the play, Omar’s negotiation of his father’s memory does not inspire him to action. Instead, Omar is incapable of dealing with the murder’s consequences, particularly when Vuk confronts him with (falsified) evidence that Chicha may have been the murderer. However, Vuk says, “[a]fter some anguish, his loyalty to his father will win out. Otherwise, he won’t be able to live with himself” (22). Vuk correctly recognizes that the creation of one’s personal identity is dependent upon the inheritance of one’s father’s memory. If Omar is to disavow the memory of his father, it will render him incapable of a stable existence in the constancy of the family. Indeed, until Omar accuses Chicha, he is a man adrift. As he confesses to Narin when he tells her of Chicha’s possible betrayal, “I’m numb, wretched. I wish I were eight again . . .” (41). Omar’s inability to negotiate the memories of his father makes him a man without familial connection, without identity. He wishes to return to his childhood precisely because that time did not require of him the construction of a cohesive identity within an undivided familial/national arena.35 Ultimately, Omar confronts Chicha about the murder and learns that Vuk’s accusation is false, at great cost to their friendship and his own life. In his attempt to regain Chicha’s trust, he takes Boro’s medal from Vuk’s office and is shot by a sniper upon his return. At his death, however, he has not found justice for his father’s murder and his responsibility must pass to Narin. Through this abdication, Omar reiterates his own inability to negotiate his identity within an unbroken tradition, telling Chicha that “[w]e’ll be one again, like we were as boys” (87). Omar’s return to a childlike state positions him as both infantilized, therefore unable to identify

35 It is interesting to note that Lacan’s theories on the mirror stage and the imaginary may have echoes in the idea of memory and forgetting. The child does not know himself (have an ego, or individual identity) until he recognizes his reflection in the mirror and then may “establish a relation between the organism and its reality” (443). Although Lacan goes on to argue that the self becomes fragmented and yields a duality of self-understandings, I argue that the metaphor of the mirror is a useful one. For the male characters in this play, however, the mirror is symbolized by the memory of the father. It is only in the remembering and forgetting of the father that one’s own identity may be constructed.

41 himself, and feminized, in his renunciation of the pursuit of justice in favor of his sister. Chicha, in turn, gives Boro’s medal to Omar, enveloping Omar in Chicha’s own undivided identity and giving Omar the ability to die “free!” (88). Omar’s death, combined with the lack of his own son, marks the end of the line of his familial identity. Unable to successfully negotiate either his father’s memory or his own identity, Omar can neither re-author his national identity nor position himself within his familial continuity. Through Marko the Prince, the memories of fathers are a shaping factor in the construction of male identities. Tied up with the familial repercussions of these identities are issues of nationalism. The text, however, authorizes only Chicha to negotiate both his father’s memory and his nation’s identity, both of which are embodied in him. Vuk, Mike, and Omar are all unable to formulate a stable national and familial identity because the text establishes each as being unable to do so for various reasons, including obsession with personal gain, exile from the state, and religious and gendered preclusion from national norms. This strategy of permitting Chicha alone to establish an uninterrupted identity positions him as the text’s most authorial figure in national and familial terms. Therefore, the text can construct, for its U.S. readership, a Serbian representative imbued with national continuity and the inheritance of a father’s identity. By doing so, the text represents Chicha as the author and embodiment of a new Serbian identity, one that is rendered intelligible as he deals with the memories and objects of his father’s inheritance. It is not only the memory of father that is of critical importance for identificatory strategy, however. As Judith Butler argues, gender performance is tied up in a myriad of social, political, national, ethnic, and materialist discourses; as I argue, the family is, first and foremost, the smallest discrete unit in which those discursive constructions can take place. Therefore, the father may be read as a representative of gender performance as well as the depository of familial/national memory. Because the national and familial subject is also (already) a gendered one, the negotiation of the father’s gender performance, and the reaction to it by the son, can indicate how gender ought to be performed according to the normative national and familial values. An investigation of the workings of masculinity in this text reveals that it is, again, only Chicha who is able both to negotiate the inheritance of his national/familial gender identity and (re)authorize a U.S.-intelligible masculine construction for a new “Serbian” male.36

36 Generally, references to “masculine” and “feminine” will accord with the traditional hegemonic definitions of these two genders. A Handbook of Literary Feminisms summarizes Mary Ellmann’s “11 stereotypes of femininity;

42 Of the male characters, only Mike is not a resident of the region, which makes his masculinity perhaps less interesting to investigate. I do wish to point out, however, that what he embodies is similar to what his father embodies, an idealized peacekeeper. Throughout both Name Day and A Thousand Souls, Mike’s father Velko consistently tries to halt conflicts between the other characters in the play. While this is borne out to be less than ideal from a native of Sabor (as we will see when we come to an investigation of Chicha’s gender performance), in Mike it becomes something different. In Marko the Prince, Mike is marked as an outsider from the beginning. As Narin says, “and you – ‘Mr. Yankee Doodle’ – have you come to save a backward nation?” (33). Omar reiterates this, saying, “he’s a fish out of his element. He’s trying – but he will never learn to swim in our waters” (37). Mike is unable to escape his U.S. national identity and is therefore denoted as the representative of U.S. masculinity. As the peacekeeper, he stands for an idealization of the U.S. presence during the Yugoslav Civil Wars. Unlike the other male characters, who are unwilling or unable to end the conflict, Mike, as volunteer for the American Red Cross, becomes an admirable (though not heroicized) figure in the conflict. He represents, then, a character with whom U.S. readers might wish to identify: an outsider who is devoted to peace and the end of conflict who is foiled, not by his own inability to end the conflict, but instead by the perpetual antagonism represented by the residents of the region. Omar, who struggles with the negotiation of his father’s memory, also fails to embody his father’s masculinity.37 His father, Akret, appears briefly in A Thousand Souls, the second play in women are equated with qualities from passivity and compliance to irrationality and instability” (155). In its traditional binary structure, masculinity is defined through what it is not (i.e. femininity). While I do not suggest that this sort of reductive, essentialist gender construction is either universal or desirable, I do argue that these traditional understandings of sex/gender are still alive, well, and normative in contemporary American culture. Though these constructions are often troubled by cultural representatives, I believe that they are unsettling because traditional gender hegemony is still a large part of our everyday cultural interactions. Simone de Beauvoir’s pivotal The Second Sex posits: “The terms masculine and feminine are used symmetrically only as a matter of form, as on legal papers. In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the positive and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity. [ . . . ] A man is in the right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong” (xxi). 37 In Act Like a Man: Challenging Masculinities in American Drama, Robert Vorlicky investigates male-cast realist drama in the U.S., observing that traditionally “they [male characters] appear to act according to a social prescription that identifies the ways men are supposed to be. Thus, the cultural construction of gender informs, if not outright determines, a play’s discourse coherence: male characters’ dialogue replicates the socially constructed binary of male/female, masculine/feminine, and Self/Other” (14). In Marko the Prince, Chicha stands as the accepted representative masculine figure, while Omar symbolizes the effeminized Other male. This association of Omar with femininity also serves to demonstrate what character traits are acceptable for women (teaching, emotion, pacifism), which will be helpful definitions to recollect in the third chapter.

43 A Balkan Trilogy. Akret is, as Mike calls him, a “responsible businessman” who is unafraid of confrontation or threats; Akret sits down for his first meeting with Mike with a revolver “in easy reach of his hand” (Souls 41; 24). Akret is one of the most successful, wealthy, powerful businessmen in Sabor, either Muslim or Serbian. Omar, however, performs a different sort gender identity.38 The stage directions describe him as “slender, sensitive with a sad face” (9). Omar’s slenderness connotes femininity according to traditional gender tropes, unlike Chicha’s powerful embodied masculinity; also, both sensitivity and sorrow suggest that Omar, rather than hiding his feelings, expresses them. Emotional demonstrations are traditionally associated with femininity (again, according to hegemonic tropes), rather than masculinity. Narin frequently positions her brother as feminized, telling him, “[y]ou sound like mother – and she was pretty bad at times. You’re worst (sic) than an old woman” (37). Note that not only is Omar feminized, but that femininity is bad, even for a woman. The notion that femininity and weakness limit Omar positions him as ineffective and un-masculine, certainly not a hero with whom the reader is encouraged to identify. What I find particularly interesting about this construction is the way it depends upon ethnic lines for the creation of difference. Unlike the popular notion of Muslims as bloodthirsty terrorists so commonly found in today’s post-9/11 press, Marko the Prince positions Omar as opposed to terrorism (in the form of the snipers) and, instead, as weak and ineffective. It also reiterates the idea of Bosnian Muslims as victims, famously publicized by the coverage of Srebrenica, where 8,000 Bosnian men were slaughtered by the Serbs in 1995. In this text, however, Chicha serves as Omar’s protector, rather than his persecutor. Reimagining the relationship between the Serbs and Bosnian Muslims allows the text to break open the binary opposition of these two ethnic populations, although still privileging Serbia within the paternalistic dynamic established by the text. While Omar’s father was able to stand within his own ethnic group and defend himself, Omar requires the protection of a Serbian caretaker. Rather than embracing his father’s performed masculinity, Omar is reconstructed as a feminized sidekick of sorts; unable to inherit his father’s memory or masculinity, Omar is an ineffective representative of an intelligible masculine Bosnian identity, leaving the Muslims in the play without a national agent or identity and in need of a strong Serbian presence to guide them.

38 Note also that Omar is a teacher, whose students are “like my children” (38). As a caretaker of the youth of Sabor, Omar might be seen as a maternal figure, further reiterating his feminine gender construction.

44 It is critical to examine Vuk’s gender performance as well because he represents the only other “pure” ethnic Serb in the text, instantiating him with potential to be an author of Serbian normative masculinity. Unlike Omar, Vuk is a masculine and intimidating man, though his gender performance is also dissimilar to his father’s. The stage directions describe him as “a physically fit man, about 40, with a feral coiled intensity – ready to be unleashed with the right provocation” (13). Vuk’s ferocity is in marked contrast to what the text reveals about his father, who was taken away by Chicha’s father to be shot as a Nazi collaborator. Note that the text does not represent Vuk’s father as being courageous or even an exemplary Serb; association with the Nazis is unlikely to inspire sympathy in a U.S. readership and even his position as a victim of summary execution does not stir admiration, given those politics. Vuk, on the other hand, is perpetually in active pursuit of what he desires, and even his plans demonstrate his accordance with hegemonic masculinity. His assistant, Cerni, observes, “[y]ou enjoy playing with people, Vuk. You never let anyone know what you’re really thinking” (22). Unlike Omar, Vuk keeps his motivations and feelings inside, without expressing them to anyone; Vuk agrees, saying he “must stay detached – objective” (22). Rather than meekly standing by or wearing his heart on his proverbial sleeve, Vuk plots, quietly and deviously, until he can reveal himself with surety. Only with Boyana, Chicha’s fiancé is Vuk emotionally honest, and even that honesty is tinged with ferocity and aggression. His meetings alone with her always happen as he jumps out, startling her; their first encounter suggests, at first, that he may be planning an attack: BOYANA. Vuk! Why are you scaring me like this? You jump out, suddenly, like a rabbit. VUK. A pretty young woman, like you, shouldn’t rush around, and with such determination. It’s not good for you – BOYANA. I – I have a meeting – VUK. Now, what kind of meeting would you be having – and at this hour? BOYANA. I have to talk to some people. After all, I’m looking to teach here. VUK. Why don’t you talk to me any more? You’ve been away – getting a degree. I have to hear from others that you’ve come back. BOYAYA. Why should I call you? For what reason? VUK. You’re playing games with me, Boyana. BOYANA. But I’m not.

45 VUK. Oh, but you are. Since the first day I met you – in the plaza and walked you home – you’ve been on my mind. And you know that. [ . . . ] BOYANA. There can be ordinary, human feeling between a man and a woman, without any passion. VUK. No – never. Not between you and me. (23-4) Here, Vuk is nothing short of menacing; the start of this scene reads remarkably like the precursor to a sexual assault. Notice, also, that Vuk always misconstrues what Boyana is saying. Although emotional communication falls decidedly on the feminine side of the gender spectrum, Vuk’s refusal to acknowledge Boyana’s desires indicates an obsessive nature that is far from valorized in the text. He assaults Boyana at her engagement party with an unwelcomed, passionate kiss, further reifying him as a monster, rather than a man.39 Vuk’s final monstrous act comes at the climax of the play. Miraculously recovered from a life-threatening coma, Vuk appears at the Vidovdan celebration to kill Chicha. However, even in this final showdown, Vuk is conniving and underhanded. Rather than facing Chicha himself (man to man, as it were), Vuk uses his authority as the police chief and commands Cerni to open fire on Chicha, who is unarmed. This gunning-down of an innocent man is far from heroic and, instead, represents the sort of dishonor emblematized by villains in popular U.S. films throughout the twentieth century and today. Vuk, denied his father’s memory, also denies his father’s embodiment of masculinity, instead embracing an infamous gender performance revealed through his assaults of innocent persons. Chicha, unlike any of the other male characters in Marko the Prince, not only successfully negotiates his father’s memory, but also constructs a masculinity that is thoroughly heroicized in the text. Using his father’s pistol as his weapon, Chicha charges forward through the play in pursuit of justice. He is honorable, impulsive, and brash, fighting against a corrupt system in order to put his world back together. Indeed, Chicha bears a striking resemblance to the action heroes of U.S. popular cinema. In his book White Guys: Studies in Postmodern Domination and Difference, Fred Pfeil suggests that movie series such as Die Hard and Lethal Weapon heroicize a particular kind of U.S. tropic masculinity that Chicha also represents. He outlines the films’ similar plots: “a white male protagonist, portrayed by an actor of proven sex appeal, triumphs over an evil conspiracy of monstrous proportions by eschewing the support and

39 As previously noted, Vuk calls himself a “horrifying man,” created by the circumstances of his upbringing (68). His actions do nothing to disprove that self-definition.

46 regulation of inept and/or craven law-enforcement institutions, ignoring established procedure and running ‘wild’ instead, albeit with the aid of a more domesticated semi-bystanding sidekick” (1). While this is not, perhaps, immediately related to the plot of Marko the Prince, I suggest that the similarities are critical. Chicha’s representation of the majority population of Sabor (as portrayed in the text), resembles white representations of masculine heroes in popular film.40 And while Chicha exists only on paper, he is introduced as “handsome, striking and in the hyper-excited state of a 32 y.o. man, who’s just won a significant physical victory. He’s in paramilitary fighting gear” (3). The sexy hero of Marko the Prince also battles an unjust system similar to those represented in U.S. popular films; indeed, Chicha refuses to align with that system (represented by Vuk), even though it is a legitimate authority. And, while Omar might not be considered a terribly effective sidekick, he is indeed domesticated (feminized) and a representative of peace and the home. Chicha’s familiarity to a U.S. readership echoes the popular action tales of the silver screen. Chicha’s intelligibility as a U.S. heteromasculine hero is challenged, however, when he must confront his father’s inheritance. Early in the play, Chicha identifies himself with his father, who he believes to be a heroic crusader. However, Mila reveals that Boro was not the man Chicha imagined him to be: Boro was no hero – You honor a memory of clay. [ . . . ] It is I who have built him up to you. I! I wanted you to have a father to admire – to look up to. The farm – it was stolen – yes – from the widow – as you heard. Boro shot Miro Miratz. He said Miro was against the state – and he had orders, but it, also, gave him a chance to get the farm. Later, he held a gun to the wife’s head – forcing her to sign the deed. [ . . . ] The widow was a kind, sweet woman. After her death, I couldn’t sleep for a year – thinking about what we had done. Boro never lost a wink. Once, I mentioned it. He hit me. Opened a wound – this scar – above my eye. (92-3) Up to this point in the text, Boro’s memory has served as Chicha’s touchstone for his performance of both masculinity and nationalism; it is in Boro’s name that Chicha has pursued

40 Chicha is not “white” in the strictest Aryan (Anglo-Saxon or Nordic) sense, but this distinction may not occur to a U.S. audience. Although the racialization of the South Slavic peoples in the Western media is a rich site of investigation, it is beyond the scope of this project. In drawing this parallel, I mean only to suggest that just as popular male film heroes are perceived to be the embodiment of hegemonic white U.S. masculinity, so too may Chicha be read as the embodiment of the U.S. perception of Serbian masculinity, represented intelligibly and palatably to the U.S. audience.

47 justice for his father (and, therefore, himself), and in Boro’s name that he has pursued justice, fought for, and won back his nation’s land. However, Boro is revealed as the antithesis of what Chicha wishes to be as a man. Unlike the revelations of the other male characters, Chicha’s do not create a monster, a pacifist, or an arbiter; Chicha, instead, internalizes what has happened to his understanding of his father and, through it, creates a new identity for himself: Yes, Dad – this is your legacy. God knows, I have lived up to it – more than most. I have respected you, honored you – worshiped you. I have killed men in the name of your legacy. I have sacrificed a friend to it. Tell me – how have I been repaid? I see no great reward. No laurel wreath. No hero’s trumpets. Goodbye, Dad –. (he kisses the pistol) For all time, lie with your legacy. May you rest in peace. (He hurtles the pistol across the room.) [ . . . ] I will do as I must – not to honor a false creed or false memory. I will go [to speak at Vidovdan] for the sake of my own honor – to speak as my own man – (93) For Chicha, the rejection of his father’s memory comes with a reconstitution and reunderstanding of himself. Rather than reject the principles he has believed to be the legacy of his father, he rejects his father, vocally and symbolically (through the rejection of the pistol), and recreates himself. This fundamental break with the past allows for the reinvention of both Chicha’s masculinity and his national identity; he is, effectively, reauthorized to speak for Sabor and Serbia, and, through his own recognition of his father’s faults, able to reconstruct what Serbian nationalism means. The failed system of his father, the system that created Vuk, is at an end, and a new Serbian masculinity is to be imagined: one without weapons, one that rejects violence. While the status quo of white U.S.-masculinity is upheld by the heroes of Die Hard and Lethal Weapon, the status quo of Sabor is reinvented through Chicha’s martyrdom. Because he is invested with intelligible U.S. heroic masculinity, Chicha is again authorized, by the text, to represent Serbian identity for the U.S. readership. In his sacrifice, Chicha rejects the bloodthirsty, violent Serbian nationalism envisioned by the U.S. public and, instead, is a heroic figure with whom the audience might empathize and identify. It is through the negotiation of his father’s memory and his reconstituted national identity that Chicha upholds U.S. ideas of freedom, even in a land so very far from the audience’s home. This allows the text to reinscribe Serbian nationalism, creating a heroic imaginary meant to replace that which has been so frequently disseminated in Western media.

48 The articulation of masculine ideals in Chicha has its counterpart on the other side of the gender binary; within Marko the Prince, the female characters also serve as gendered subjects whose symbolic value must be negotiated in order to reconstruct the idealized (heteronormative) Serbian couple. In the following chapter, I investigate how the formation of femininity in the text also recreates Serbian national identity in terms intelligible for a U.S. readership, displacing the violence of maniacal imagined Serbian citizens. This recreation is enacted through the figure of Boyana (the idealized female Serb) and her pairing with the heroic Chicha (her idealized male counterpart).

49 “NO MORE DEAD BABIES”: RECREATING “MOTHER”

“Women’s bodies, individually tortured and in pain, are transformed into national symbols and presented as symbolic battlefields that embody national values.” – Vesna Kesić

“[T]he maternal body is not only the symbol of national territory through the gendered images of fertility or gentle landscapes: the maternal body is the marker, as well as the maker, of national territory.” – Dubravka Žarkov

Contemporary Balkan feminist scholars Vesna Kesić and Dubravka Žarkov observe that the female body is frequently symbolically linked with the construction of national identity in the Balkans. As they have noted, in times of both war and peace, in the Balkans particularly, the emblematic Woman/Mother is critical for the national imaginary; she is represented as mother of the nation, wife of the warrior, site for the establishment of national or ethnic superiority (through rape, torture, and murder), and loving victim to be defended. The idealized figure of woman stands as a multiple signifier in national discourse, including her establishment as the imagined figure who symbolizes the territory upon which national conflicts are carried out. As Homi Bhabha theorizes, the instantiation of “[c]ulture only emerges as a problem, or a problematic, at the point at which there is a loss of meaning in the contestation and articulation of everyday life, between classes, genders, races, nations” (50). The definition of national identity is borne out of conflict, and the negotiation of gendered identity is one of the sites upon which it is founded. In other words, the gendered inhabitants of a nation stand as symbols, sources, and sites of cultural enunciation. Within the enunciative act, gender identity and its relation to national identity must be addressed by feminists seeking to unpack the symbolic battles rooted in the representation of women. Bhabha suggests that “everyday life” is the context in which cultural battles reveal their slippage as different groups of people attempt to define their differences. The negotiations between citizens in the home, the progressions of their daily interactions, and the conflicts between the people and their interactions, become the sites in which the culture of an entire nation can be revisited and recreated, both by citizens creating their own culture, and by outsiders seeking to understand that culture’s construction. A play text that attempts to establish cultural identity may use the relationships of everyday life as a locus for the creation of an identity that reflects the nation. Women who

50 function as symbols in nationalist propaganda retain their symbolic importance within a play text, and the text’s representation of them can illuminate those nationalist discursive strategies. Indeed, as symbolic women within fictional texts, “woman” stands as an idea both troubling and tempting: the idea of “mother,” associated with Serbia through its representation as the “motherland,” is uniquely suited to define or defy the national imaginary, dependent upon that mother’s actions and her interactions with the men around her. Therefore, an enunciative act, such as a play, must negotiate the definition of womanhood in order to shore up her symbolic significance for the cultural imaginary. I argue that Jovanka Bach’s Marko the Prince is a textual enunciation seeking to define Serbian nationalism for a U.S. readership. Within the play, the three female characters serve as what Vesna Kesić calls “symbolic battlefields.” In her article “Muslim Women, Croatian Women, Serbian Women, Albanian Women . . .” Vesna Kesić uses this term in her investigation of rape, gender, and war in the former Yugoslavia. Kesić studies the media’s representations of rape and violence against women, particularly focusing on how ethnicity and gender were frequently interwoven during the conflict. She is most concerned with how the pain inflicted on women’s bodies during wartime is indicative of a larger patriarchal positioning of women. Therefore, the idea of the “symbolic battlefield” connotes both ethnic conflict and patriarchal oppression. In Marko the Prince, Mila, Narin, and Boyana’s status as symbolic battlefields represents them as negotiators (or the negotiated objects) of particular nationalist issues. Serbia is discursively constructed as a “motherland;” the text’s female figures symbolize Serbia as a nation, and their actions in the play help demonstrate the values articulated by the Serbian national imaginary as interpreted through this particular Serbian-American text. Mila symbolizes the mothers of Serbia past, and Narin the mothers of the present who have rejected tradition. Neither of these women is an acceptable figure for the recreation of the imaginary Serbia. Instead, Boyana stands as the idealized (and ideal) figure of woman, the possession of whom (both emotionally and bodily) authorizes the man who can claim her to embody the new Serbian national identity. Chicha and Boyana, together, function within the play as idealized representatives of Serbian national identity for the U.S. reader. However, the creation of the idealized female figure also requires the rejection of the non-traditional women in the text. A definition of national identity through womanhood can leave no room for additional instantiations: the recreation of nationalism ought not be subject to

51 debate, and, indeed, must be upheld as solitary. The imagined community must imagine itself the same and be represented as such in order to create an identity that is definable through its inclusion and exclusion of particular cultural, gender, and political traits that are in keeping with the nation’s idea of itself.41 It is useful, therefore, to interrogate Mila and Narin’s female identities in order to understand why and how they are unacceptable for the represented Serbian national imaginary constructed within Marko the Prince. They also stand as symbolic battlefields, but signify traits to be rejected, rather than the idealized representatives of the nation. Mila, Chicha’s mother, stands for the symbolic battlefield upon which past and present notions of identity must be negotiated because her loss of identity seems to reflect that of the former Yugoslavia in the post-Tito years. The Yugoslav Civil War created the desire for a return to/recreation of nations and nationalisms that had been suppressed under Tito’s rule.42 Evaluating Mila’s gender identity reveals that her performance of gender, rooted in the past, is no longer acceptable to the Serbia created by this particular enunciative act. Marko the Prince opens with Mila and Chicha commiserating over the recent murder of Boro, Mila’s husband. Mila, since her husband died, has been dreaming of a woman with a warning: “’Beware, beware’” (5). Without a husband with whom to identify, Mila is faced with an identity crisis – how, now, will she define herself? A mysterious dream woman “invades my [Mila’s] sleep. I don’t know who she is – her face is always in shadow. Maybe, it’s myself I’m dreaming about” (6). This dreamscape presents a woman undefined, a figure who reflects Mila’s own sense of placelessness, the disconnection between both a temporal and familial identity. As the world around her changes, her familial identity is in question and Mila cannot locate herself or her identity. She is denied the methods

41 An imagined homogeneity is crucial to the project of constructing a national imaginary. Benedict Anderson theorizes the nation as “imagined community:” “It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion. [ . . . ] Finally, it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (6-7). Anderson later argues that the process of creating an imagined community is facilitated by texts, the production of which allow a citizen to imagine a nation of people participating in the same activity, and that act of imagination later translated to a uniform idea of political consciousness (135). I argue that this imagination of sameness in language and activity can also be translated into the realm of cultural performance: the sameness of reading also needs a sameness of dress, of belief, of values. The nation does not imagine itself diversely, but homogeneously. 42 As most scholars agree, the suppression of these nationalisms affected Serbian identity least of all. Many Serbs, however, railed against Tito’s rejection of Serbian identity. Ultimately, the repression of particular identities in favor of a generic Yugoslav nationalism did not erase the tensions between the disparate nations compressed into the greater Yugoslavia.

52 by which she has identified herself in the past and clings to her role as Chicha’s mother, the only touchstone in her changing world. Part of Mila’s problematic lack of identity stems from the way in which Mila and Boro established their household. First revealed in A Thousand Souls, Mila explains how she and Boro manipulated a purportedly traitorous family in order to steal their land. Mila keeps this dishonorable act from Chicha in order to give him “a father to admire – to look up to” (93). This secret also becomes part of her own identification as a wife, and she is willing to go to great lengths to preserve it. When Vuk arrives at Mila’s home to tell Chicha about the betrayal, Mila shoots him after he reveals the truth: “’Consider yourself fortunate’ – Murderer! [She lifts up her skirts, takes out the pistol and SHOOTS him in the back. Vuk falls without a sound.]” (83). This act is multiply significant. First, it is the female (maternal) figure who commits the act of violence to defend the home/nation. As revealed earlier by an examination of the figures of fathers and sons in Marko the Prince, the play establishes the role of “defender of the nation” (hearth, home) as a masculine one. Women are not to be the armed defenders of the land, a fact Chicha recognizes: CHICHA. To shoot an unarmed man. In one’s own house. In the back. They’ll say I did it. That I’m a coward! MILA. ‘Consider yourself fortunate’, said to Boro that night – by him – my husband’s killer – who steals his medal – comes into my home – to tell lies – to steal my farm – to accuse you of murder! And you stand – listening! Boro would never – CHICHA. You’ve humiliated me! MILA. Justice. It was justice! CHICHA. Woman’s bravery! (84) The significance of Mila’s attack is most important in its reflection upon Chicha. Her dishonor is extended to Chicha. The idea that a woman would be the one to pull the trigger does not fall within the normative definition of either female or Serbian identity. “Woman’s bravery!” is fundamentally different from masculine courage. Here, Mila’s actions are part of two different, but linked, battlefields of identity: that of Serbia past and of normative womanhood. As the shooter, she embodies past national performance (reflecting Boro’s treacherous and cowardly actions); as mother, she fails to conform to normative standards of Serbian femininity. However,

53 Chicha rejects Boro’s and Mila’s idea of justice, just as he rejects Mila herself. As the new author of Serbian identity, Chicha must put aside the nationalism Mila represents, an identity that puts the honor of the family above that of the nation. Mila accedes to Chicha’s rejection of her, begging him “[d]on’t forgive me. Kill me if you must. Don’t sacrifice yourself for a lie! You’re worth a thousand of his [Boro’s] kind” (93). At once, Mila discards the national identity of the past and her own place in contemporary Serbia. In her rejection of Boro and his actions, Mila also eliminates herself because he is a fundamental part of her own identification with Serbia. She represents the womanhood and nationalism of Serbia past, a heritage based on lies, theft, and dishonor. Ultimately, Mila is rejected by her son and from the land. Una Chaudhuri argues that the construction of national identity and gendered identity have a critical difference based on the space in which they are constructed: “Unlike gender . . . national and ethnic identities are often derived from or directed toward a geography; there is a location of identity based on race, nation, ethnicity, language—in short, all the elements that together or in part designate the notion of a culture—that is often absent from the discourse of gender” (3). In Marko the Prince, Mila’s gender performance is uniquely enmeshed with her national performance: she is symbolically located as a woman within the home/nation. Her gender transgression is also a national transgression, and her treachery must result in her exile. Displaced from the nation through her own actions, Mila is dislocated from the Serbian land and tradition. In the battle between past and future identity supremacy, Mila, representing the past, is ultimately rejected as a potential repository of positive Serbian nationalism. Narin, the Muslim female in the play, also stands in for a symbolic battle between past and present identification. Narin is also unacceptable as a repository for new (female) Serbian identity, both as a Muslim (eliminating her from the idealized imagined Serbian monolith) and by her performance of femininity, which is too “Westernized” to fall within traditional normative Serbian femininity. Trained as a lawyer, she is masculinized and eschews the emotional thinking associated with her effeminized brother Omar, calling herself instead “the mean, tough one” (89). Narin is “cosmopolitan,” rather than provincial like Mila: she has spent her time in Europe, being educated and living outside of traditional Yugoslav Muslim culture (38).43 Her relationship with Sabor, unlike the rest of the natives in the play, is one of antipathy; as she tells Omar, she “couldn’t wait to get out” of Sabor and live her life differently. Narin recognizes, however, that

43 As the following dialogue demonstrates, Narin purposefully rebels against the restricting traditions of her cultural heritage. She refuses “to keep to the old ways.”

54 her cultural identification is complex; despite her hostility towards Sabor and her Muslim heritage, her cultural inheritance is inescapable: NARIN. I haven’t done anything special. MIKE. Yes, you have. Here you are – a woman from a Moslem family – you you’ve been able to break away – to get educated to become your own person. NARIN. I just did what I had to do – that’s all. [ . . . ] Father and I though – we were two tough guys, a lot like each other – we fought all the time. He wanted me to keep to the old ways – stay at home, keep his books and wait until a man asked for my hand. No. No way. I would have died first. MIKE. That takes a lot of courage – to go against the old traditions. NARIN. Mother and grandmother were full of superstitions and ancient rules. My one aim was to run away as far as I could – be as different from them, all, as I could. MIKE. I think you succeeded. You make your own rules, and take life as it comes. I like that about you, among other things. NARIN. It’s partly an illusion, Mike. It’s hard to cut away from oneself totally. Life can’t always go the way we plan it. [ . . . ] Actually, you don’t know that much about me. Moslem women, especially us independent ones, can be more complicated than you think. (44-5) Therefore, Narin represents a reimagined Muslim woman, one who has escaped the “limiting” tradition of the village and the conservative practice of religion. However, the power of tradition is not so easily swept aside, as Narin recognizes. Though she removes herself from what Chaudhuri calls the geographical foundation for her national identity, her gender performance, transgressive though it may be, is still bound up with her ethnic/cultural identity. Narin may also represent what a U.S. readership wishes to believe about feminine gender performance in Muslim culture. Because she chafes under the strictures of her Muslim inheritance, Narin is more intelligible to U.S. subject-citizens than a traditional Muslim woman, who might be more at home with behaviors that U.S. readers might view as repressed. In this representation of femininity, Narin’s recognizability for the U.S. readers further removes her from a position as an author of Serbian nationalism. Narin’s ideological and geographical distancing from Sabor displaces her from a traditional understanding of Serbian nationalism, which therefore renders

55 her unsuitable as a model of reconstructed Serbian nationalism for the U.S. readers precisely because she is too familiar to them. Part of this separation from normative Serbian femininity is evidenced by Narin’s sexuality. While traditional U.S. understanding of Muslim women suggests that they are sexually repressed, positioning them under the literal and metaphorical veil of Muslim patriarchal control, Narin’s mutually satisfying sexual relationship with Mike represents her differently. The text hints at this intimacy as Mike begins to kiss Narin: NARIN. (weakly protesting) Mike – I shouldn’t be doing this. MIKE. I thought you liked me. NARIN. I do – more than you know. It’s just – well, this is not right – not now. Not toni- It’s – Oh! I’m being such a liar. I want you Mike – very much. MIKE. Then forget everything else. You’re all that counts. NARIN. Mike – darling – Oh, yes. (They kiss. Lights dim.) (45-46) Narin’s non-traditional gender performance includes her active, apparent sexuality. Her desires are physical and sensual; more importantly, they are represented onstage. Narin’s invocation of her sexual desires falls outside of the definition of traditional femininity, emphasizing the “promiscuity” her brother and father have already attempted to regulate.44 Narin’s unruly, sexual(ized) female body becomes a symbolic battlefield upon which female sexuality and European identity is negotiated. In her intelligibility to a U.S. readership, Narin seemingly stands outside of traditional Muslim femininity as it is understood by U.S. subject-citizens, thus subverting her potential position as an ideal(ized) Serbian woman.45 Narin’s problematic promiscuity (as her brother deems her sexual activity) also positions her as a symbolic battlefield in a second way, one more intimately linked with Western perceptions of the conflict in Yugoslavia through her pregnancy and attempted abortion. One of the most publicized issues of the war was the establishment of rape camps by the Serbian army,

44 Omar censures Narin for what he sees as her promiscuous behavior: “You always get blinded when you meet a man. If only you weren’t so hungry – and driven – when it comes to that. [ . . . ] At the least, you should show respect. Where were you when I wired you about father’s death? In Spain – with one of your latest” (37). Omar implies that Narin’s sexual activity is at best problematic and, at worst, dishonors their father’s memory. 45 Although Narin defeats tradition, it is not without relapse. After Omar’s death, Narin returns to the practices of her ancestors, performing traditional Muslim keening and wailing. Mike, however, stops her from continuing, reminding her “[y]ou’re a modern, bright woman – you’re not your mother or grandmother.” Narin replies, “Modern? An act! My soul twists with ancient rites – I will rub my face with ashes and mourn at his grave for eternity” (89-90). Despite her attempt to connect with the “ancient rites,” Narin is ultimately unable to access her traditional gender performance, instead defaulting to her reconstructed, contemporarily-based identification.

56 in which Muslim girls and women were sexually and physically assaulted, and impregnated as a type of biological colonialism that would lead to the biological death of the Muslim “race” through the forced impregnation of ethnic Others by Serbian paramilitary troops. These camps were notorious in the Western media and inspired Eve Ensler’s play Necessary Targets (2003), the only other play about the conflict written by a U.S. female citizen. Despite investigations by various international and governmental agencies, the exact number of rapes is still undetermined. According to Jerome Socolovsky’s article covering the Hague war tribunal: In 1993, a European Community commission estimated 20,000 rape victims in the conflict. The Bosnian government put the figure at 50,000 . . . But what distinguished the Bosnian war was that women were prime targets in ‘ethnic cleansing’ campaigns because of their role in propagating identity. ‘What is new, and extraordinarily horrifying, is that many of the rapes committed in the territory of the former Yugoslavia (were) . . . committed with the intent to impregnate, in an effort to destroy a particular ethnicity,’ Askin [a feminist scholar] wrote. Such attacks – a soldier of one ethnicity raping a woman of another – reportedly led to thousands of forced pregnancies and children. (B8) Women’s bodies in the war were not “symbolic” battlefields, but instead corporeal sites of conflict. Julie Mostov argues that this has not only material, but also ideological purposes: “As mothers, women are reproducers of the nation. In this role, women are heroines and symbols of virtue, fertility, strength and continuity. Conversely, women who refuse to have children or who have children with members of other nations become potential enemies of the nation, traitors to it, collaborators in its death” (91). Narin, like the victims of wartime assault, has been impregnated by an outsider and must manage the repercussions of her undesired pregnancy. However, she has not been impregnated by a Serbian soldier, but instead by an outsider of unknown European national identity. In this way, Narin represents a sanitized version of the familiar (to U.S. readers) plight of the Muslim woman who has been assaulted. Rather than indicting a Serbian male for her predicament, this text recreates her pregnancy in a way that removes the Serbian nation from blame. While the audience is still able, and encouraged, to sympathize with Narin, she is also simultaneously censured for being pregnant (because of the promiscuity demonized by her brother) and victimized as a woman in a problematic situation. This also allows Mike, the heroic U.S. man, to swoop in and save her from making the

57 “unethical” decision to abort her fetus.46 This situation constructs a complex symbolic battlefield. Narin’s body has been victimized in a sanitized way, one that indicts Europe, rather than the U.S. or Serbia, for her problems. Serbian men, and the nation itself, are exculpated from blame, while the U.S., reified in Mike, is presented as the savior; this frees Serbia from accusations of violence, as well as repositioning the U.S presence in the Balkans as effective, rather than unproductive. Furthermore, by choosing to have the foreign child, Narin is again removed from her ability to author the nation. As Mostov suggests, a child born of parents not thoroughly acceptable to the nation is an enemy and traitor to the state. Mike and Narin’s child will not be of Serbia, which means that it will not be embraced by Serbia. Rather than an idealized Serbian woman, Narin is a traitor, raising a foreign child with a foreign man. Her rejection of tradition, her blatant sexuality, and her treacherous motherhood combine to make her a battlefield Serbia must reject, according to Marko the Prince’s construction of Serbian national identity. As Chaudhuri argues, geography plays a critical part in the creation of national identity; therefore, removal from the land itself into a state of exile is a critical site of exploration in the text. Both Narin and Mila are, by the end of the play, relegated to an exilic state because their national and gender identity cannot be incorporated into the monolithic Serbian imaginary represented in Marko the Prince. Both women defy the normative gendered and cultural expectations instantiated in the text: Mila, through her violence towards Vuk (a Serbian man) and promulgation of the family over the nation; and, Narin, through her sexuality and traitorous maternity, need to be exiled from the state in order for it to construct itself as through a single female/national identity performance. The only female left in the text able to epitomize a traditional Serbian identity also acceptable to U.S. readers is Boyana, whose significance has a multiplicity of meanings essential for the construction of that national identity. Boyana’s identity is both linked to and separated from Narin and Mila’s, with critical distinctions. Like Mila, she is a Serbian woman who is deeply connected to her family; like Narin, she is a young, vibrant woman who left Sabor to be educated. The differences between Boyana and Narin are particularly significant precisely because both are young women of child- bearing age who stand apart from the narrow confines of U.S.-imagined traditional Balkan identity. Thus, the younger women are in the position to establish a new national and familial identity for the Serbian imaginary. Narin, as I have discussed, is a female figure too problematic

46 The ongoing debate about a woman’s right to choose in the United States suggests that the ethics of abortion are still an issue for the U.S. public.

58 to be invested with representative national authority; Boyana’s differences from Narin are important for establishing Boyana’s position as the idealized, national Serbian female. Jill Dolan’s The Feminist Spectator as Critic describes the effects of normative gendering on theatre: Since it directs its address to a gender-specific spectator, most performance employs culturally determined gender codes that reinforce cultural conditioning. The representations tend to objectify women performers and female spectators as passive, invisible, unspoken subjects. [ . . . ] She [the feminist spectator] sees attractive women performers made-up and dressed to seduce or be seduced by the male lead. While the men are generally active and involved, the women seem marginal and curiously irrelevant, except as a tacit support system or as decoration that enhances and directs the pleasure of the male spectator’s gaze. (2) Boyana’s docility and beauty are indicative of her passive position within the play, as only an object of male desire and not a subject able to define herself. Boyana is described in the stage directions as “somewhat delicate and frail,” in contrast with the outspoken Narin (23). Although both have gone away to school, Boyana trained to be a teacher, a more stereotypically feminine career than a lawyer. Boyana’s femininity is more traditionally identifiable than Narin’s, and, in the text, more desirable. Both intelligibly and palatably feminine to U.S. readers, Boyana is reified as the symbolic battlefield through which Chicha and Vuk must compete for mastery in order to (re)author Serbian national identity. Sue-Ellen Case’s Feminism and Theatre argues that “[t]here are two basic types of image [of woman]: positive roles, which depict women as independent, intelligent and even heroic; and a surplus of misogynistic roles commonly identified as the Bitch, the Witch, the Vamp and the Virgin/Goddess” (6). In combination with Jill Dolan’s contention that the spectators is assumed to be a white heterosexual male, I argue that Boyana is positioned as the Virgin who represents an idealized female character for the imaginary male audience. Boyana’s fragility is also analogous to the fragility of Sabor itself. In the midst of war, identity politics are tenuous at best. As Bhabha suggests, the meeting of cultures (here Serbian and U.S.) creates a conflict that the text, as an enunciative act, negotiates in order to bridge the fissures between cultural identities. Within the act of enunciation, authority is both created and troubled. I suggest that this text uses Boyana as a double signifier of both a Serbian national feminine ideal and a stand-in for Serbia itself, in order to mitigate the problematic construction

59 of Serbia imagined by the U.S. readership. National discourse, in the region and within the play positions Serbia as a motherland. These multiple meanings allow for the reimagination of the conflict between Vuk and Chicha. Possession of Boyana (both physical and emotional) creates a union dually significant: of the idealized national couple and of the nation (herself) with her chosen representative warrior. Reexamining Vuk’s pursuit and Chicha’s possession of Boyana reinscribes Chicha and Boyana’s position as the endorsed, representative authors of the new Serbian nationalism. Vuk’s first encounter with Boyana exposes both his idealization of her and his conflation of the acquisition of her with the possession of a grounded identity: VUK. For me the moment was like being home at last. [ . . . ] BOYANA. There can be ordinary, human feeling between a man and a woman, without any passion. VUK. No – never. Not between you and me. BOYANA. Vuk – please. If it wasn’t for Chicha, you wouldn’t give me a glance. But you see yourself in some kind of competition, and want to win me from him, like a type of prize – to prove that you’re superior. VUK. Gullible – guileless, Boyana. You pick a man who will betray you at the first opportunity. [ . . . ] Why should I play by any rules? We should get what we can out of life. It’s you that I want – more than anything else. Just say the same, and my life would be full and happy. [ . . . ] Chicha is full of caprice and instability. I would be loyal, faithful. I can give you a home, security. In the short time, I’ve been in Sabor, I’ve accomplished a great deal. Chicha has lived here all his life, and what can he offer? BOYANA. I love him – as he is – for what he is. [ . . . ] VUK. The sight of you, the smell of you – inflames me. And your voice – lilting, resonant – clear as a beautiful sounding bell – My mother had a voice like that – You’ve charmed me – completely. (24-25) There is much to unpack in Vuk’s first interaction with Boyana. Boyana recognizes that Vuk’s interest in her is not entirely based in his affection for her; what Boyana provides Vuk is a sense of “home,” indicated by both his offering of a home and his conflation of her with his deceased mother, who last gave him a home in which to fix his identity. The notion that Vuk and Chicha

60 are in a competition for Boyana further suggests that Boyana, as an individual personality, is not necessarily the only attraction. If the possession of Boyana is linked, in Vuk’s understanding, with the possession of home, then Boyana also symbolizes the land upon which the home is built. Therefore, Boyana also invokes the property stolen from Vuk’s parents by Chicha’s: Boyana thus becomes linked with the land of Serbia itself.47 It is not the land itself that holds value for Vuk, but rather the possession thereof. What I mean to suggest here is that the worth of the land for Vuk is only in the recognized ownership of it, instead of the land being significant for its own sake. Chaudhuri’s theorization of the importance of geography is critical here. The land does not create identity for Vuk; more precisely, his valuation of the land is based on himself and his possession of the land, here embodied by Boyana. Vuk also conflates Boyana with his lost mother. Like Mila, Vuk’s mother is a creature of the past, one unauthorized to construct a contemporary national identity. This collapse suggests that Boyana is idealized in Vuk’s mind; what she can give Vuk is what was taken away by the death of his mother. A “home, security” with a man who is “loyal, faithful” is what Vuk imagines his family was, before Mila and Boro’s intrusion. Therefore, the text positions Vuk’s choice to focus on the past as embodying an identity that must be relinquished by the Serbs in order for the text to construct a positive, forward-looking Serbian identity. Rather than reconstructing an identifiable, contemporary national identity, Vuk’s dreams set him squarely in a past that has rendered Sabor a place fraught with violence, ethnic tension, and dishonor. Were Boyana to choose Vuk, she and Sabor (and, by extension, Serbia) would no longer represent an unambiguous or visionary Serbian identity for the U.S. audience; instead, Serbian nationalism would maintain its perception as violent and brutal. Chicha’s feelings for Boyana, however, are used to invoke a Serbia that is both ancient and forward-looking. Instead of recent history, Chicha reaches back to ancient history in order to find his ideal woman, which reiterates his position as heroic inheritor/author of Serbian continuity and denies the violence associated with Vuk’s contemporary politics. Chicha, in his seduction of Boyana, compares her to an “angel” and invokes the mythic marriage of Prince Marko:

47 For Vuk, the land is a personal possession available for individual ownership, as I have previously argued; however, Boyana’s link with the land here reiterates Chicha and Vuk’s disparate beliefs about the land. For Chicha, land is linked with a larger idea of national identity, while Vuk maintains it a personal possession. Therefore, though Vuk links Boyana with his personal land, it is the ideal of a greater Serbian “(Mother)Land” that is endorsed in Boyana’s union with Chicha.

61 I have not found a girl who suited me, all except one girl, old mother. Under the palace of Redsky, the King, in the land of Forever, mother. [ . . . ] When she came in my sight, the blue sky did swell. Beneath my feet, the rye grass turned sweet as around and around me it went. (28) The differences in Chicha’s and Vuk’s positioning of Boyana center around similar issues. For Chicha, geography is still present, but the effects are different: here, the woman affects the land, causing it to “swell” and “turn sweet.” Rather than conflating Boyana with something able to be possessed, Chicha positions her as an actor whose presence improves the land. It is not ownership that Chicha wants, but union with Boyana and, through her, the land of Sabor/Serbia itself. Also, the evocation of mother returns, but without the conflation to which Vuk falls victim. Here, the maternal figure is separate from the pursued virgin, but implicitly being asked for approval; if the maternal figure is reimagined as the Serbian “motherland,” Chicha is asking the land itself to bless his union with Boyana. What I find most provocative about Chicha’s ballad, however, is the idea that he finds his maiden in the “land of Forever.” This suggests a timelessness to their romance, and themselves, that invokes the essential spirit of the Serbian national imaginary. In this cultural articulation, Boyana and Chicha are positioned as eternal lovers who have the power to reunite Serbia’s glorious past with an equally glorious future. Their strength to do so comes from their relationship with each other. Chicha consistently invokes their union and what they give to each other, telling Boyana he will “give you [Boyana] all the confidence you need,” “I’ll hold you. I’ll give you strength – we will fly with the speed of falcon wings – my beautiful Princess” (28; 29). It is not in the possession of Boyana that Chicha will be empowered; instead, the bond of the Serbian man with the Serbian woman yields the power to live with and for the intrinsic value of the Motherland herself. This new ancient yet progressive union between Serbian man and symbolic Motherland occurs at a significant juncture in the play. The joining of Boyana and Chicha is fully realized just before Chicha’s speech at Vidovdan; in that moment, Chicha wins the battle for Boyana:

62 BOYANA. Darling – listen to me. We grew up together – you were always my protector. The first boy to touch me – to hold my hand. I gave you my first kiss. Long ago I gave you my heart. Now, I give you my soul. CHICHA. Boyana – I am a happy man. Never, have I been so happy. BOYANA. Chicha – love. Stay with me. We can be happy forever. CHICHA. Dearest – If it should be – death is not the end. My dear Boyana – we will meet again. You and I are not done – ever. (94) Chicha has achieved a union not only with the body of the Serbian woman, but with her soul. In her role as double signifier, Boyana has also granted Chicha the possession of the soul of Serbia; not a Serbia scarred by recent violence, but a Serbian imaginary essence, handed down from the mythical time of heroes past. Their union embodies an essentialized Serbian identity that reflects the idea of the durability of the nation through the placement of ancient mythical lovers onto contemporary Serbian figures. Chicha and Boyana are invested with timeless mythical love that authorizes them to rewrite the nation itself. Even in their deaths, this union will survive. After Chicha’s martyrdom, the guslar sings of Boyana’s death: Boyana, his true love called his name kissed his lips – blue, like ice. Then her poor weak heart broke in twain. Boyana, his dear and faithful love was buried with Chicha, our hero, the Brave. Their limbs entwined like branches of early spring that flowered once, but bore no fruit. (98-99) The spiritual union of Serbia with her defender will exist beyond death, as Chicha has promised Boyana. They are also returned to the land, buried together and entwined like trees. The Serbian geography, the land itself, becomes the recipient of their essential Serbian-ness. Symbolically, their deaths provide Serbia with both the example and root of a new national identity. Having joined together as the epitome of the Serbian warrior and maiden, invoked the myths of old to reconstitute their own union as inheritors of that mythic tradition, and sacrificed themselves to the land, Chicha and Boyana have laid the ground for the creation of a new Serbian identity.

63 Marko the Prince, in its enunciation of culture, must negotiate the gendered and national identities of its female characters. As the text struggles to recreate an intelligible Serbian identity, it must, through Mila and Narin, address the problems of Serbia past and present. For the U.S. readership, the idea of Serbian woman is wrapped up in those problematic identifications that Narin and Mila symbolize. In order to create a solitary, intelligible feminine identity, the text must send Mila and Narin into exile. It is only through Boyana’s union with Chicha that a symbol of the motherland is able both to reach into the past and endow the future with essentialized positive Serbian identity. The land, like Boyana’s body, is created in the cultural imaginary as a symbol endowed with a mythic past. The sacrificial body becomes the emblematic mother of the new heroic Serbian feminine identity. Through Boyana’s return to the land, the U.S. readership is able to reimagine Serbia nationalism as heroic, continuous, and poised on the brink of a redefinition that renounces the violent and destructive nature formerly perceived by that audience.

64 CONCLUSION

On my only trip to Belgrade, in 2006, I was sitting in a coffee shop with my mentor and we ordered Turkish coffee, a delight I had only recently discovered. The young man tending the bar looked up at us, very seriously, and explained that it was not Turkish coffee, but Serbian coffee, and that the Turks had stolen it, just as they had stolen the Serbian land. I remember the moment vividly: it marked the beginning of the path that has led me to this project. From Belgrade, we drove to Kosovo, on a road bordered by landmines and guarded by U.N. forces, and saw the devastation resulting from the persistent violence done in the name of national identity. It was on that journey that I decided the investigation of nationalism in Serbia would be a focus of mine in graduate school. Reading plays from and about the region further stimulated my curiosity and I wanted more scholarship, more inquiry into the power of nationalist discourse in contemporary representations of Serbia. For this project, I have endeavored to uncover the way in which nationalist discourse is constructed through the diversity of strategies that serve to combine and create a heroic, monolithic Serbian national identity intelligible to a U.S. readership. Marko the Prince, as an act of cultural enunciation, simultaneously creates a comprehensible Serbian identity for a U.S. readership while calling into question that audience’s previous beliefs about Serbian nationalist culture. By redefining Serbian nationalism heroically, the text gives its readers and audience members a new way to read the discourse of the Balkan world. Essentially, this text combats the demonization of Serbian culture in the Western media through the invocation of myth, the creation of sympathetic masculine figures, and the conflation of the idealized woman with the Serbian motherland. What I have examined are the ways in which the various strategies of identity construction in the text reflect larger operations of nationalist discourse through which the text reconstructs the nation by means of heroicizing its ideal(ized) representatives. I have argued, throughout this document, that this text exemplifies Homi Bhabha’s concept of an “act of enunciation.” In its own representation, the text is authorized to recreate the world of Serbia for a U.S. readership both tantalized by and terrified of the Serbian national imaginary. The question I ask myself, in this conclusion, is how does my document contribute to a more complicated understanding of the region? How can readers of this text approach the text

65 of Marko the Prince, and others that represent the conflicts in Yugoslavia differently because of the insights they have gained here? Homi Bhabha argues that “our political referents and priorities . . . are always in historical and philosophical tension, or cross-reference with other objectives” (38). Therefore, the particular goal of this project, to illuminate the heroicization of Serbian nationalism for a U.S. audience, is also bound up in the projects of other scholars who may be investigating the complex nationalism of the Balkans, the representations of disparate cultures to a U.S. audience, or the uses of myth, memory, and gender construction in the construction of nationalism. I believe that my close reading of this text helps demonstrate how the representation of an “Other” can be constructed via the interactions of multiple sources of authority. These separate yet connected issues may provide ways into other texts representing the region, revealing similar or contradictory strategies. This text’s heroicization of Serbian nationalism reiterates how the construction of national identity is dependent upon by and for whom it is recreated, suggesting another means through which dramatic texts can uncover ideological strategies. Also, reading for U.S./Western intelligibility may offer new insight into the process through which national identity is constructed for particular audiences according to distinct ideological needs, as well as revealing what those audience needs say about the audience’s own national identity. These multiple possibilities for future exploration suggest strategies of reading other cultures that may allow for a less imperialist investigation of those other cultures when it comes to reading dramatic works and other enunciative acts.

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70 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Elizabeth B. Harbaugh was born in Baltimore, MD, and received her bachelor’s degree in Theatre and English from Nova Southeastern University in Davie, FL in 2007. She plans to pursue a Doctor of Philosophy degree at Florida State University’s School of Theatre, where she hopes to focus her scholarship on contemporary constructions of femininity and womanhood in theatre and performance.

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