Baedeker barbarism: Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts

Baedeker Barbarism: Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts

Cynthia Simmons

At the end of the twentieth century, the economic and technological interconnectedness of the world gave rise to the concept of the "global village." Yet, at the same time, the fall of communism and the growing recogni- tion of the rights of individuals and the smaller spheres with which they identify have resulted in new nations and increasing nationalism. Emerging political entities have recognized the necessity of determining their difference. As has always been the case, they consciously manipulate sign systems to encourage feelings of unity among their constituents--they design flags and insignia to betoken membership. However, it is our most fundamental sign system, language, that carries the greatest power to shape ideas.

Language can be employed, especially through the print media, to unite certain people and alienate others. The resulting new boundaries, real or con- ceptual, can lead to conflict--in the last decade of the twentieth century the world witnessed bloody wars in Chechnya, Rwanda, Somalia, and the former Yugoslavia. The same process of verbal representation operates throughout our "global village," affecting attitudes toward the combatants. While print and visual media can convince us that victims of catastrophes occurring thou- sands of miles away are actually our"neighbors" to whose aid we must come, in the case of foreign wars, where intervention may cost lives as well as dol- lars, representations in the media may emphasize the otherness of these would- be neighbors in distress. The origins and consequence of such representations are, thus, intimately tied to issues of political policy and, by way of that, to issues regarding human rights.

Etymology has a lesson to teach on the danger of being different. As we well know, "barbaric," originally meaning "foreign" or "non-Hellenic," has come in time to connote "uncivilized," "crude," or "brutal." This movement exemplifies the association of negative characteristics with what is foreign or unknown. This seemingly natural tendency to identify, willy-nilly, what is"barbaric-foreign"with what is barbaric/uncivilized/crude is one that all those con- cerned with human rights and the precepts of humanism should struggle against. The process can lead, at the least, to potentially harmful stereotyping.

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At its worst, such prejudice can justify barbaric apathy and have fatal conse- quences in decisions that determine whether nations will or will not attend to the needs of others in times of danger. Such was the history of two books on the former Yugoslavia, which have had immense impact on knowledge and policy in this region. In relatively peaceful times, their generalizations and misrepresentations failed to promote true understanding. In times of war, they affected policies that resulted in human rights disasters.

In 1941, Dame Rebecca West (Cecily Maxwell Andrews, n6e Fairfield), writer, ardent feminist, and social reformer, published a monumental study of Yugo- slavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. West praised the diversity and pondered the animosities within this nation. She also ventured to account for the region's troubled relationship, especially in the aftermath of the First World War, with Western Europe. Though well received by the general reading public, Black Eamb and Grey Falcon fell under criticism by specialists. Even those who praised the skillfully woven observations of a creative writer took issue with West as an analyst of the history and contemporary situation of Yugoslavia.

After two paragraphs of praise for the author's "rich and flexible prose," Philip E. Moseley wrote:

Yet, with all the high quality of its achievement, and despite the ever-recurring pleasures of discovery or rediscovery which it offers in abundance, Miss West's book will remain something of a tour de force, based as it is upon a few weeks of intensive travel, upon an intuitive rather than an effective understanding of the language, and upon a brief familiarization with the cities and towns rather than with the peasantry...

Another weakness of Miss West's approach is her over-reliance on "Constantine'--a very vivid and many-talented companion, well-known to the reviewer also, but far from trustworthy as an objective interpreter of Yugoslav conditions and problems. The result of this dependence on an official"interpreter" is illustrated in Miss West's complete failure to understand the Croats and the Croatian problem, with its specific overtones of both provincialism and universalism...

Under these conditions of work, signs of the author's uneven mastery of her material are bound to crop out occasionally. Thus "~.ive" is used for "iiveo" (I, 224), "brlo" for"vrlo" (II, 869),"Visok" for"Visoka" (I, 305). One is amazed to leam that Ragusa became"Dubrovnik" only underYugoslavia (I, 230), that Kharkov is in Po- land (I, 521), and that the Croats never used terrorist methods in resisting Hungar- ian rule (I, 605)... 1

Another reviewer, John C. Adams, who also hailed West's "magnificent de- scriptions,'made the important observation, which has been echoed in a more recent and more lengthy treatment of West's book, that "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is actually the revelation of a brilliant woman's search for a political and social philosophy. "2 Nonetheless, the book invites the judgment of the spe- cialist, for"it is among other things a narrative of Serbian and Balkan history, supported by a bibliography in the western languages, and equipped with an index. Hence it deserves to be regarded as a work of history and to be re-

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viewed for a scholarly journal on that basis" (264). As a historian, Adams re- sponds:

The defects of this book, in this reviewer's opinion, are primarily the consequence of the author's attempt to grasp, synthesize, and interpret a staggering mass of historical data in a short time. They also result from an overly subjective and creative approach to history. Miss West's habit of treating Balkan history as symbolic and allegoric often loads events with more significance than they can properly carry. In many instances her analyses of character seem to be derived more from her imagination than from source material. Her evaluation of historical figures, west- em as well as Balkan, frequently varies markedly from the usual. She praises Eliza- beth of Austria as having brought about the Compromise of 1867 and asserts that she might have solved the South Slav question had she not been murdered. Conrad von H6tzendorf is dismissed as a "creature without sense or bowels." Peter I of Serbia, on the other hand, is praised as "the finest liberal statesman in Europe,'and as "a magnificent soldier." Elsewhere Miss West calls Martin Luther a hog, attributes to Shakespeare'a nostalgia for infantile nastiness,'and hails BrighamYoung as one of the greatest statemen [sic] of the nineteenth century. (265)

Still, a m o n g the numerous a t tempts to capture the essence of the region, Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, until very recently, eclipsed all others. It is a literally weighty t o m e - - a t 1,150 pages it d e m a n d s authority. And, even if one knows the area well, it is skillful, and seductive, reading. In a probing, retrospective look at West's work, Brian Hall summarizes its scope:

In Black Lamb and Grey Falcon West all but buries the frail framework of her travel account--her longest visit to Yugoslavia lasted less than two months--under ex- tended meditations on the nature of empire, the value of nationalism, the relationship between the sexes and how it bears on human aggression and survival, the nature of heroism, the nature of Evil, predestination, original sin, Roman Catholi- cism, Orthodoxy, the doctrine of atonement, St. Augustine, Manichaeanism, good art, bad art, the vital importance of art, and, for that matter, the vital importance of all kinds of things that many readers had previously thought were trivial, like em- broidery and well-roasted pig and the fact that the average German of 1937 was pear-shaped and pasty-faced?

Hall makes the point here that in addit ion to the fact that Rebecca West was singularly unqualified to write with any authority on Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is, in any case, more about Rebecca West than it is about that country. Failure to realize this has led those who have agreed with some of West's opinions on Western-European life and history to accept wi thout skep- ticism the analysis of the Balkans that she used to buttress her position. Per- haps her most deadly judgment , in light of recent history, was her revisionist literary interpretation of Prince Lazar's choice in the cycle of epic songs on the subject of the fall of the Serbian empire. On the eve of the fateful Battle of Kosovo, which marks the legendary beginning of five centuries of Turkish rule, the Serbian leader is visited by Elijah in the form of a gray falcon (that of


West's title). Prince Lazar must choose between ephemeral earthly victory and eternal salvation. True to medieval sensibilities, he chooses the kingdom of heaven. Rebecca West, who was finishing Black Lamb and Grey Falcon in Lon- don during the Blitzkrieg of 1940-41, intended to use it to incite the British to action. She later admitted that the Epilogue was written at the request of England's Ministry of Information, thus adding"war propaganda" to any discussion of the book's genre. The error of pacifism in 1940 was illustrated by the fate of the Serbs in what could hardly be called a passive response to Turkish invasion in 1389, and fifty years later this line of so-called"reasoning"was revived to fos- ter political and then ethnic conflicts in the disintegratingYugoslavia.

Hall's reassessment of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon in the popular press has been matched by a scholarly investigation of what we now recognize to be West's orientalist assumptions. Her work has been analyzed along with other accounts, both fictional and "factional," of the ex-Yugoslav territories. In In- venting Ruritania, Vesna Goldsworthy chronicles what she terms the "narrative," "textual," or "imaginative" colonization of the Balkans in British literature. 4 Milica Baki&Hayden describes the shifting boundaries of orientalist West-East/European-Balkan dichotomies in Europe and the former Yugosla- via. ~ Baki&Hayden's delineation of shifting orientalisms serves to explain the seeming contradiction of an earlier analysis by Bakic'-Hayden and Robert M. Hayden of orientalist rhetoric in the Yugoslav press. 6 In that analysis, the Haydens describe an intellectual (not to mention military) imperialism of the North and West over the South and East--a disparity that is emblematized precisely by the geography of ex-Yugoslavia, a country that was formed exactly along an axis north-west to south-east.

The appropriateness of the use of the term orientalism in the analysis of Balkan affairs is called into question in a monograph entitled Critical Theory and the War in Croatia and Bosnia by Thomas Cushman. Cushman identifies a theoretical flaw in employing orientalism to describe the situation within the former Yugoslavia. 7 According to Said's original definition of orientalism, "in- ferior" identities of the dominated are constructed by the dominators. 8 Cushman contends that if in the recent Yugoslav wars, the Bosnian Muslims (or even the Croats) suffered the position of the dominated, their orientalist views cannot be cited to justify the deeds of the dominators, even despite offensive representations of Serbia in the Croatian and Slovenian media. 9 We might also observe that, the question of political domination aside, since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, it is Bosnian Muslims, located to the west of Serbia, who have suffered the kind of imaginative or textual colonization that Goldsworthy describes, thus proving an exception to the general west/east or northwest/southeast dichotomy that figures in orientalism. 1~ Baki~-Hayden's shifting orientalisms work to refine or moderate Said's formulation. It may happen, in fact, that the object of orientalist prejudice can be the perpetrator of orientalist prejudices toward some other object.

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Since Said's groundbreaking work, the rise of post-colonial theory has led to more nuanced investigations of the complex ramifications of Western Euro- pean hegemony. Now "post-colonial" refers to "all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day. "11 Today Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is readily available in most regions of the former Yugoslavia, so that in the future one might also study the effect of that text on conceptions of self and the other among the subjects of West's narrative. Be- fore that significant next step, however, it remains to identify carefully all of its (false) preconceptions. Brian Hall's article is an important addition to the critical analysis of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, for he cites numerous specific examples of West's "Western glance" atYugoslavia. Much still remains to be done with that enormous text, and yet it is not the primary focus of this study. ~me has somewhat softened the affront of West's pronouncements. There is the possibility that she would have seen matters differently from the vantage point of the 1990s. More disturbing and demanding of scholarly analysis are those contemporary works whose authors consider Black Lamb and Grey Falcon their exemplar.

Perhaps the most influential book on Yugoslavia in the popular American press during the recent wars was Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts. 12 This book is usually not mentioned without reference to the Clintons and their apprecia- tion of Balkan Ghosts as a source that helped them "understand" the 'fflgoslav wars. Although the aide who recommended the book to the President arid The First Lady may have been easily misled, specialists have been much more discerning in their assessments. This has much to do with the difference between Rebecca West and Robert Kaplan. Despite Kaplan's homage to the Brit- ish writer, he claimed the very authority that Rebecca West denied. As West embarked on her literary journey, she disclaimed any foreknowledge:"I could form no opinion, for I knew nothing about South Slavs, nor had I come across anybody who was acquainted with them. "13 This may account for the restraint with which reviewers approached her book. They praised her as a creative writer who was able to sense so much knowing so little. And then they would catch her on the particulars. Specialists appreciated Black Lamb and Grey Fal- con as a curious creative mind's "innocent" venture into social science. Al- though mention was rarely made then of the genre of West's work, it was treated as a travelogue, the term Vesna Goldsworthy, a literary scholar, com- fortably employs when referring to the book. In fact, the insidiousness that some have recognized in Balkan Ghosts may not mainly derive from its orientalism, but from the confusion as to its genre, and therefore, its claim to serious discourse on the tragic events in the formerYugoslavia. Unlike Rebecca West, a creative writer, Robert Kaplan is a serious journalist. And as that kind of journalist, he wrote a travelogue.

It is worth noting that many reviewers of Balkan Ghosts were confident early on in assigning the book to its proper genre. From Library ]ounml: "Though


travelogues from the world's troubled spots are now legion, seldom if ever do they possess the historical insight and literary style [emphasis mine] of Balkan Ghosts. This is one of precious few works that allows a Western reader into the tortured soul of the Balkan peoples. Thoroughly captivating...Kaplan is a mas- ter of the genre." This assessment deserves itself to be analyzed for its orientalist assumption, but important for our purposes are the references to genre. From Publisher's Weekly: "Robert Kaplan is a gifted writer with a marvelous feel for the exotic, woolly, mountainous Balkan peninsula. This vividly impressionistic travelogue splices together a long trip in 1990 with sojourns in the '80s and forays into history, resulting in an unpredictable adventure that illuminates the Balkan nations' ethnic clashes and near-anarchic politics." We might for now disregard the "woolly peninsula" and concentrate on such apt turns of phrase as: "impressionistic travelogue,""splices together...sojourns in the '80s," and "forays into history."And this was understood, and it seems intended, as a positive review.

Finally, Tad Szulc identified in his endorsement the distinction between what Balkan Ghosts is and how it has functioned: "Balkan Ghosts is a marvelous political travel book about one of the world's most dangerous current crisis ar- eas."What is a "political travel book"? Certainly Szulc did not intend this phrase to mean "politicized travelogue," although that is exactly what Balkan Ghosts is, even if not intentionally so. It is more likely that Szulc was searching for a designation of a genre somewhere between serious journalism and travelogue.Yet, no such hybrid can really exist. The impetus to serious journalism is antithetical to that of the travelogue. Journalists are professionally bound to seek the truth. Travelogues are creations of fiction.

The Preamble to The Society of Professional Journalists' current Ethics Code reads:"The duty of the journalist is to further [public enlightenment] by seek- ing truth .... "To best achieve this goal the Code suggests that journalists, tbr example: "Test the accuracy from all sources and exercise care to avoid inad- vertent error," "Examine their own cultural values and avoid imposing those values on others," "Avoid stereotyping by race, gender, age, religion, ethnicity, geography, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance or social status," and "Distinguish news from advertising and shun hybrids that blur the lines between the two. "14 The case of Balkan Ghosts highlights the necessity within journalism to "distinguish news" from other kinds of writing. Within that broad field, "travel writing" and "travel journalism" are employed interchangeably. They connote both the engaging narratives intended for real or would-be trav- elers, and, more recently, writing that is intended to lure the potential traveler to certain locales. Currently being debated in the profession is the need to distinguish between travel joumalism/writing and advertising, and this type of journalist is being encouraged to disclose the financial sponsor of the travel.15 The travel writing of the one sort is an expression of opinion. The other is advertising. Obviously neither holds strictly to the suggestions for ethical jour-

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nalism cited above. Although not stated, it is apparent that within the disci- pline, "travel" journalism is distinguished from "hard-core" journalism. Ac- cordingly, Balkan Ghosts would have caused less damage if the author had revealed that his position was not that of the serious journalist conveying a "news report," but that of the travel journalist, writing to express his opinions, and, perhaps, to entertain.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the travelogue is alive and healthy. Still it does not enjoy the popularity it did previously, when world travel was a possibility for the wealthy alone. In the nineteenth century, the travelogue rivaled the novel. Andreas Sch6nle has studied the academic dialogue concerning the two types of writing as genres, from the rise of the Rus- sian novel through the more contemporary treatments in, for example, Ian WaR's The Rise of the Novel, Georg Lukacs's The Theory of the Novel, Percy G. Adams's Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel and even Bakhtin's major essays on the novel. 16 The two genres, it turns out, are indistinguishable with regard to major features associated with the novel, including fictionality. Sch6nle finds that the distinction lies in the way that these genres organize time. He recalls Peter Brooks's observation in Reading for the Plot that the nov- elistic narrative gives primacy to the ending over the beginning in an expression of the death instinct. 17 Sch6nle states that, in contrast to the novel,"the travelogue fosters novelty and change. Being narrated from the point of view of day-to-day experiences, it gives primacy to beginnings over endings. In fact, it embraces othemess to such an extent that it often fails to integrate new meanings into old structures, new sensations into old attitudes. "18 If it is over- looked in the public consciousness that the travelogue is a fiction, how much more easily is it then lent authenticity when authored by a journalist?

As we might expect, travelogue accounts of the exotic Balkans have been typically patronizing and dismissive. Take, for example, Harry de Windt's travelogue of a journey through the Balkans to Russia: Through Savage Europe. The subtitle to de Windt's book of 1907 reads: "Being the narrative of a journey (undertaken as special correspondent of the Westminster Gazette) through the Balkan state and European Russia. "19 De Windt expects that the title will give the reader (even in 1907) pause:

"Why 'savage' Europe?" asked a friend who recently witnessed my departure from Chafing Cross for the Near East.

"Because,"I replied,"the term accurately describes the wild and lawless countries between the Adriatic and Black Seas."

For some mystic reason, however, most Englishmen are less familiar with the geography of the Balkan States than with that of Darkest Africa. This was my case, and I had therefore yet to learn that these same Balkans can boast cities which are miniature replicas of London and Paris. But these are civilised centers. The remoter districts are, as of yore, hotbeds of outlawry and brigandage, where you must travel with a revolver in each pocket and your life in your hand, and of this fact, as the


reader will see, we had tangible and unpleasant proof before the end of the joumey. Moreover, do not the now palatial capitals of Servia and Bulgaria occasionally startle the outer world with political crimes of mediaeval barbarity. Witness the assassina- tion of the late King and Queen of Servia and of Monsieur Stambuloff, the Bulgar- ian Premier. Wherefore the term "savage" is perhaps not wholly inapplicable to that portion of Europe which we are about to traverse, to say nothing of our final desti- nat ion- the eastern shores of the Black Sea.

The reader might also wonder about the leap from "the term 'savage' is perhaps not wholly inapplicable" to the author's employment of the adjective as an epithet in the title.Yet, we can presume that Mr. de Windt's account was considered to be more "faithful" due to his status as a journalist. Closer to home (and earlier) we have Mark Twain's hmocents Abroad (1869)--also patronizing and dismissive. Yet, readers are likely to be less bothered, and often greatly amused, when Twain rails against "Turkish" coffee as the worst of "all the unchristian beverages that ever passed my lips"or exclaims:"NewYork has fifty wonders where Constantinople has one. "2~ We know that Twain is a creative writer and humorist, and we accept the world he describes as another of his creations.

In his preface, Robert Kaplan acknowledges his debt of inspiration to Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.Yet he distinguishes himself from Rebecca West on the basis of his experience and expertise in the area--this is all implied in the Acknowledgments, where the author chronicles his numerous reporting trips to the Balkans and thanks his "fact-checkers. 'At one point, Kaplan himself draws attention to Rebecca West's patronizing attitude toward her hosts. He is amused by West's, shall we say "fastidious, 'response to Ivan Mestrovie's statue in Kalimegdan Park of a characteristic (for Mestrovie) robust, "Slavic," figure bathing in the sea. West remarks: "Many people might like it taken away and replaced by a gentler marble. "21 Yet Kaplan still praises West's work as his inspiration. Although Balkan Ghosts still has its supporters (often nationalists who find his characterizations of use), specialists have recognized the limita- tions of Kaplan's knowledge or understanding.

While Balkan Ghosts was generally well-reviewed in library and publishing- industry journals (in addition to those cited above, positive reviews appeared in Booklist and Library Journal 22), more informed reviewers offered quite different opinions. In The New York Times Book Review, Istvan Deak declared:

Mr. Kaplan is often judicious in his assessments, but almost as often he is unable to distinguish among diverse forms of political oppression .... Finally, it is disconcert- ing to see Mr. Kaplan refer to Bosnia as 'a morass of ethnically mixed villages in the mountains.' When Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence a year ago, that 'morass' represented the last hope for ethnic co-existence and coop- eration in a nationalistic area gone raving mad. It is no consolation to know that, because of Serbian mass murder, the 'ethnic morass' of Bosnia now no longer exists, z3

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Concerning Kaplan's chapters on the former Yugoslavia, a reviewer in The Economist was equally discerning:

Little illumination is provided by Balkan Ghosts .... [The author] paints an undiffer- entiated picture of doom and gloom, of villainy, treachery and intolerance .... Mr. Kaplan's best chapters are those on Romania and Greece, which he knows well. But read his encounter, at the Serbian Orthodox monastery of Grachanitsa, with Mother Tatiana, a tough Serbian nun. Having slugged back a glass of plum brandy, she says: 'I'm a good Christian, but I'll not turn the other cheek if some Albanian plucks out the eyes of a fellow Serb, or rapes a little girl, or castrates a 12-year-old Serbian boy...'After this horrifying war, which the Serbs started and in which they committed most of the horrors, people will want to ponder how such things came to be said. 24

Both of these reviewers chose to attack what some have recognized as Kaplan's sympathy toward the Serbian position in the Yugoslav wars. Yet, orientalist assumptions and general misunderstandings are to be found in Kaplan's treatment of this entire region.

The very title, Balkan Ghosts, establishes the narrator's position from which all will be perceived--that is of the "reasonable," "civilized," "refined" indi- vidual in the face of the primordial and even supernatural forces at work in the Balkans. It carried fatal implications for the'l~2goslav peoples, discouraging the intervention of Western nations into conflicts that"would not die."

Baki~-Hayden calls the title "presumptuous" and then singles out one of Kaplan's most infuriating pronouncements: 25

Nazism, for instance, can claim Balkan origins. Among the flophouses of Vienna, a breeding ground of ethnic resentments close to the Southern Slavic world, Hitler learned how to hate infec t ious ly . 26

Goldsworthy also cites this passage as illustrative of the Western association of the Balkans with violence and the fear of the peninsula as of a contagious disease. She proceeds to make that point that"Kaplan...insures that Central Europe's most monstrous creation of modern times, Hitler, can be unburdened on the Balkans. In contrast, no one would think of blaming the hapless Balkans for the triumphs of Austria's composers. "27

Although perhaps less outrageous, Kaplan's other "odd takes"can be found on almost every other page. In the paragraph preceding Kaplan's implication of West's orientalist attitude toward Mestrovi~'s bather, he writes:"Thus I strolled down Parigka Street to the Kalimegdan Park, near where the Srbski Kralj used to be. By the park I gazed at the Byzantine ramparts, the few remaining Turk- ish buildings, the Orthodox Cathedral, and the reconstructed, neobaroque monuments. From here--that is, from the Srbski Kralj--the city was not only handsome but comprehensible. From the Moskva [Hotel] it was not. "28 This description is only an extension of Kaplan's grand motifs: the Roman Catholic


Cathedral of Zagreb, the Serbian Monastery of Graeanica, the Turkish [emphasis mine] minarets of Skopje, Macedonia. It amounts to an incredible (if seductive) oversimplification of a nation that was predominant ly secular throughout the adult lives of the combatants in the Yugoslav wars.

By the end of the 1980s, after Yugoslavia had been unraveling for nearly a decade (Tito died in 1980), Kaplan sensed an andent impulse to retribution in every Orthodox church and monastery: "The walls of the church [St. Dimitrios] were completely black from candle smoke, like the warm breath of patriots. This was a world inspired by the miraculous darkness of prebirth, a world where the Turks had not yet departed. "29 According to Kaplan, this hatred of the Turks/Bosnian Muslims had been seething since the fourteenth century. Kaplan recounts, as did West, the folk-epic account of Prince Lazar's choice of the heavenly kingdom over victory at Kosovo Polje. He then gives his version of the aftermath:

And as the living death of Ottoman Turkish rule began to seep in, with its physical cruelty, economic exploitation, and barren intellectual life, the Serbs perverted this myth of noble sacrifice. They filled their hearts with vengeful sadness and defeat: feelings whose atmospheric effect bore an uncanny resemblance to those that for centuries propelled Iranian Shiites. ~

This analysis suffers from more than one logical inconsistency. Kaplan cites a folk epic that describes Serbian acceptance of fate and then judges the Serbian impulse to independence as a"perversion"of that myth. In fact, the contradic- tory responses were simultaneous and natural. The folk epic survives to this day and for centuries placated a people who were denied self-rule. The natural desire for independence was no doubt also felt among the Serbs with waxing or waning strength until independence in the late nineteenth century. Fur- thermore, it is absurd to characterize the attitude of Serbs toward Bosnian Muslims inYugoslavia as "vengeful sadness." In their position of political domi- nance over Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbs could hardly have been motivated or greatly bothered by a history they did not live--"One hundred years--all new people." Finally, Kaplan's comparison of the Serbian supposed centuries--old grievance to that of Iranian Shiites goes beyond misrepresentation. After work- ing hard to establish the Bosnian Muslims as the Eastern other, he objectifies the Serbs as equally Eastern, violent, unknowable, and undesirable, associat- ing them with the Western-European and American reader's fear of Muslim terrorism and fanaticism.

The earlier examples continue the grand idea of Kaplan's book, namely, that the inhabitants of the Balkans, unlike reasonable Westerners at the end of second millennium, are haunted and motivated by "Balkan ghosts." When it was published in 1993, scholars were only beginning to chronicle the cynical and systematic machinations of Yugoslav politicians who have sought since "[ito's death to channel the public's discontent toward the issues of identity

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and faith (economic disparity having long been recognized). 31 If Kaplan had spent as much time inYugoslavia in the 1970s as he claims to have during the rise to war in the following decade, he would not have found the impetus in churches and centuries-old battles. As it is, he depicts violent conflict inYugo- slavia as a mythical inevitability. How then could Western Europeans, not to mention the inhabitants of the "New World," feel compelled to understand Yugoslavia, described above as a place of primordial mystery and (Eastern) violence?

Kaplan makes much of his acquaintance with the dissident Milovan Djilas. Yet, Djilas's persecution does not ensure the accuracy of his statements. Kaplan quotes him as saying: "Yugoslavia is the laboratory of all Communism. Its disintegration will foretell the disintegration in the Soviet Union. We are farther along than the Soviets. "32 Djilas was correct about the final outcome, but not about Yugoslavia's relationship to the general fall of communism. Despite the attention Yugoslavia drew in the 1970s, with its promise of the more "mixed" economy of workers' self-management, it was the Chinese, and then the Sovi- ets, who moved ahead in the laboratory of Communism, with their experi- ments in glasnost and/or perestroika. Some analysts have seen the demise of Yugoslavia precisely in the recalcitrance of its hard-line Communists.

Kaplan writes with such authority that the reader may hesitate to question:

The greatest stimulus to anti-Serb feeling in Croatia always came from the Roman Catholic Church, which much preferred the Catholic Croats to be under the rule of their fellow-Catholic Austrians and Hungarians, than to be outnumbered in a state dominated by the Eastern Orthodox Serbs, who for historic-religious reasons, were psychologically aligned with the Bolshevist Russians. 33

"The greatest stimulus...always came ' - - a statement could not be more categorical. Yet, anti-Serb feeling in Croatia, where it existed in the forty-five years following WWII, came from sources that exerted greater influence on the lives of Croatians than did the Catholic Church: from workers' collectives at factories and plants that were functioning poorly and from friends and ac- quaintances who felt they were treated unfairly because of various kinds of actual and perceived inequities in the former Yugoslavia based on ethnicity. One does not have to be a sociologist or political scientist to have come to this understanding. One simply has to have known Yugoslavia before the post- Tito era.

We must also address Kaplan's description of the Serbian affinity for the "Bolshevist" Russians. As any Slavist knows, Serbian affinity for Russians of common faith, and vice versa, has characterized, with a few notable excep- tions, Serbian-Russian relations both before and after the "great socialist ex- periment." Russian literary heroes of the nineteenth century could faithfully choose their Romantic demise in the Serbian wars of independence. ~ And as


any high-ranking military officer of the present peace-enforcers in Bosnia will tell you, the greatest obstructionists in any negotiations between those forces and Republika Srpska are the no-longer-Bolshevist Russians. Kaplan's align- ing of Serbs with "Bolshevist" Russians calls up associations that lead the West- em reader to reductionist assumptions. Serbian ties to Russia have more to do with Byzantium than with Marx.

Kaplan gathered his impressions of Croatia in bistros as well as churches. If not for the context of impending war, his attempt to capture the "Croatian mentality" and"Croatian women" after a few drinks in Zagreb's Hotel Espla- nade with the journalist Slavenka Drakuli4 might elicit a guffaw. He interprets her "designer black glasses" and matching red blouse, headband, and lipstick as a message to the American:

...despite Communist-inflicted poverty and the damp, badly heated apartments and the sorry displays in the shop windows all around, we Croats are Roman Catho- lic, and Zagreb is the eastern bastion of the West; you, the visitor, are still in the orbit of Austria-Hungary, of Vienna--where the modem world was practically in- vented--and don't you forget it! 35

Kaplan obviously had yet to see the dust jacket of Drakuli4's The Balkan Express, published also in 1993. He might then have gotten a sense of her personal style. If he had met other writers in Croatia, or Serbia, or Bosnia- Herzegovina, he might have noticed that some dressed more flamboyantly than others, and that this generally has more to do with personality and profession than with ethnicity. If he had just heeded Drakuli~'s recommendation: "You need a few weeks in Zagreb at least.There are so many people to see .... -36 Kaplan chooses instead to generalize from Drakuli4's attempt to discuss nu- ances that all was simply the conflict of"West against East. "37 At the same time he manages to exclude Croatia from "our" West, pathetic as it is with "badly heated apartments," "sorry displays, 'and the sorry attempt of Croatian women to "mimic ' a Western sense of style.

Kaplan consistently characterizes the Albanians of Kosovo as dirty and wretched, and he interprets an altercation on a bus to Pri~tina, the capital as a sign that the minority is about to revolt:

The Albanian men crowding next to me on the back seat of the bus south from Zagreb had eyes glazed over by trachoma. They wore threadbare pants held up by safety pins in places where zippers should have been. They were Muslims, yet their breath reeked of alcohol; even in the most avowedly secular of Islamic countries, this was rare. As everywhere in Yugoslavia, pornographic magazines were ubiqui- tous, along with loud Western rock-and-roll music blaring from cheap transistors. There was a fight over a seat. Two men began shouting: this I was used to. They began shoving each other and would have come to blows if others had not inter- vened. This I had never seen in the Muslim world, where almost all violence is

Simmons 121

political. Suddenly, I did not feel quite safe. Never have I felt that way among Mus- lims, except in a war zone. 38

Before taking a closer look at this "loaded" passage, we might question from the start the choice of religion as the most salient feature of Kosovo Al- banian identity. Western Europeans from similarly secular, if predominantly Christian, societies would consider odd the evaluation of their behavior with respect to their religious beliefs. Kaplan conflates the economic reality of the region with what he assumes to be a betrayal of Muslim religious practices. Presumptions and misrepresentations abound.

Kaplan refers to this scene as evidence of "the crime committed by Tito." To a certain extent, one would have to agree. The abject poverty of many in Kosovo is a crime. Yet, no doubt Tito did not create that situation, even if he did not alleviate it. One wonders, how did Kosovo's ethnic Albanians live before l~to, and how much had their situation deteriorated nearly ten years after Tito's death? Kaplan implies here that in suppressing religion, Tito is to blame for the fact that Muslims in the former Yugoslavia drink alcohol. They eat pork, too. And, yes, they have access to pornography. One wonders again about the Muslim practice of faith before Tito. 39 Yet, even if Tito's Yugoslavia were the cause of this divergence from traditional Muslim custom, is that the crime? It is interesting that the Muslims this author questioned over the years about these "liberties" expressed no concern about their "difference"; in fact, they considered it an advantage. And although many might decry the availability of pornography, Yugoslavs took great pride in their"freedom of the press" (as long as the question was not politics). Their access to information, along with a higher standard of living and the ability to travel, were marks of distinction in the communist world. Finally, the scene that Kaplan interprets as prophetic of the violence that has finally reached Kosovo holds no significance outside of a typical Middle-Eastern, even Mediterranean (not necessarily Muslim), ritual of resolving interpersonal conflict. According to custom, men engage in a se- ries of prescribed actions. They shout, push each other, remove their outer garments and perhaps shirts, all in preparation for an exchange of blows. Yet, this drawn-out dramatic behavior gives onlookers the chance to intervene. The seemingly violent behavior of these men served to avoid real physical violence. 4~ Ethnic Albanians are portrayed as unsightly and incomprehensible-- repellent. As Kosovo Albanians were facing the same policy of ethnic cleans- ing that devastated Bosnia, once again the Western reader received the message that the situation was impossible to understand and that the people, the Mus- lim others (and "bad" Muslims at that), deserved no further attention.

Unfortunately, the passages cited previously do not nearly exhaust the mis- conceptions in Balkan Ghosts. Robert Kaplan wrote his book based on limited experience in a country already under the influence of media campaigns to promote ethnic conflict. If he had known the country ten or fifteen years ear-


lier, he would have to have written a different book. What is more, Robert Kaplan, as a serious journalist, misled the public in writing a travelogue--not just because his writing is overblown, but because he, as much as any literary scholar, should understand readers' presumptions concerning genres and pro- fessions. When students read Balkan Ghosts, they often must be dragged to the realization that statements such as those cited earlier, although they may con- tain a kernel of truth, are nonetheless dangerous in their inspired categorical generalization. Most readers find the book interesting and informative, full of background information and summarization that other accounts lack, and which help them to come to a quick"understanding"of theYugoslav wars. This is all the more reason to scrutinize such quick fixes on cultural conflicts, often constructed by journalists who have limited, even if frequent, acquaintance with the subjects of their reports. Their professional activities have often come to replace, with no less damage, the barbarism that was perpetrated by Euro- pean"Grand-Tourers"of the past, who, with their Baedekers in hand, attempted to capture the exotic appeal of the "Barbarians." Most distressing, of course, was the effect of this text on those who were in fact well acquainted with the region and who were willing to overlook the ignorance and, at times, insult of certain constructions in Balkan Ghosts if they could be employed to substanti- ate the perceived abuse suffered by one ethnicity at the hands of another.

Since the writing of this article, Robert Kaplan has himself addressed the question of genre with regard to Balkan Ghosts. In a recent op-ed rebuttal ('It~e New York ~mes, June 13, 1999), he generally disavows any responsibility for what resulted when President Clinton and his advisors supposedly read policy applications into what he now calls his "travel book."As detailed above, Kaplan's own words in Balkan Ghosts belie such an argument--he strove there to assert his authority and to distinguish himself from the travel writer. 41 What was presented as non-fiction became, under criticism of its practical outcomes, a work of fiction. Kaplan generally lays responsibility at the doors of Western leaders, faulting them for ascribing too much importance to just one book. A valid point, though one that skirts the issues of his own powers of seduction and his intellectual responsibility.

In the end, he does admit to one"failure." Kaplan concedes that he should have prefaced his travelogue with a "policy context" against which it could have been read. A strange book that would have been--a work of fiction framed by a survey of foreign policy. His "solution" only emphasizes his conflict of interest (or mission) in writing on the Balkans. He further explains, "I, like other authors, wear several hats--in my case that of a travel writer and a foreign affairs analyst." It should read, of course, "and that of a foreign-affairs analyst"--two hats. A grammatical slip, no doubt, but quite revealing. Kaplan, in writing Balkan Ghosts, did not wear the hat of a travel writer, but some strange hybrid hat, that of travel writer/foreign-affairs analyst. For reasons discussed at length earlier, this particular haberdashery clashes theoretically and

Simmons 123

ethically. Kaplan claims not to have b e e n cognizan t of the possible foreign policy a nd h u m a n rights implicat ions of his work. But regardless of w h e t h e r

he was or not, it is clear that his work, in its p resen ta t ion of a set of simplified cultural r epresen ta t ions to those w h o had the p o w e r to act or not to act, had practical (and negat ive) effects in te rms of the pro tec t ion of h u m a n rights in the Balkans.

Notes

1. Philip E. Moseley, review of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West, Journal of Central European Affairs 2 (1942/43): 217.

2. John C. Adams, review of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West, Slavonic and East European Review 1 (1943): 264.

3. Brian Hall, "Rebecca West's War," The New Yorker, April 15, 1996: 74. 4. Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (Yale University

Press, 1997). In the chapter "Spectres of War: Representations of the 'Real' Balkans," Goldsworthy treats also non-fictional or autobiographical attempts to "capture" the Balkans--Edith Durham's High Albania, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, and Olivia Manning's The Balkan Trilogy. When writing about Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, however, she chooses, oddly, to focus on the significance of the work for West personally or to confirm the identities of the author's thinly veiled traveling companions. She essentially ignores the book with respect to her undertaking of exposing imagined Western literary constructions of the Balkans.

5. Milica Baki~-Hayden, "Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia," Slavic Re- view 54 (1995): 917-931. Perhaps "shifting," rather than "nesting," better describes the phenomenon, since nesting implies a fixed center or perspective. As Baki~-Hayden dem- onstrates, the distinguishing characteristic of orientalist attitudes of and within the Balkans is their ever-changing points of view.

6. Milica Baki4-Hayden and Robert M. Hayden,"OrientalistVariations on theTheme 'Balkans': Symbolic Geography in Recent Yugoslav Cultural Politics," Slavic Review 51 (1992): 1-15.

7. See "Serbs as Victims II: The Orientalist Fallacy in the Balkans" in Thomas Cushman's Critical Theory and the War in Croatia and Bosnia, The Donald W. Treadgold Papers, no. 13 (Seattle: University of Washington), 25-29.

8. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979). In Said's words, Orientalism is "a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient" (3).

9. Because of the weaker political position of the Slovenians and Croatians, Cushman does not see such negative representations as "orientalist,'but as discourse intended to establish separate identities and to defend against Serbian hegemony. They are, in his view, discourses of resistance, which are quite the opposites of orientalist discourses.

10. Of course, in keeping with the geographical schema, Bosnian Muslims have had to en- dure negative orientalist stereotypes projected on them from the north (Slovenia) and north/west (Croatia).

11. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen ~ffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989), 2.

12. Robert Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts (NewYork: St. Martin's Press, 1993). 13. Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia (New York: The

Viking Press, 1943), 19. 14. The Society of Professional Journalists' Ethics Code is available on the society's web page:

<http://www.spj.org/ethics/index/htm>. 15. See "Opinion," Public Relations Journal, May 1990:27 and"Shop Talk at Thirty," Editor and

Publisher Magazine, November 12, 1994: 56. 16. Andreas Sch6nle,"The Travelogue and the Theory of the Novel," (Paper delivered at the

annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies, Se- attle, November 1997).


17. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (NewYork: Vintage, 1984), 94, 109 (cited in Schonle). 18. Brooks, Reading, 15. 19. Harry de Windt, F.R.G.S., Through Savage Europe (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1910). 20. Traveling with the Innocents Abroad: Mark Twain's Original Reports from Europe and the Holy

Land, ed. Daniel Morley McKeithan (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press), 131, 132. 21. West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, 466. 22. Joe Collins, review of Balkan Ghosts by Robert Kaplan, Booklist 89, February 15, 1993: 1028,

and Joseph W. Constance, review of Balkan Ghosts by Robert Kaplan, Library Journal 118, February 15, 1993: 179.

23. Istvan Deak, review of Balkan Ghosts by Robert Kaplan, The New York 71rues Book Review, March 28, 1993: 3.

24. Review of Balkan Ghosts by Robert Kaplan, The Economist 327, May 22, 1993: 96. 25. Bakiff-Hayden, "Nesting Orientalisms," 919. 26. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts, xxiii. 27. Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania, 7. 28. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts, 73."Srbski"here, rather than the standard"srpski,'indicates, at the

least, Kaplan's less-than-thorough knowledge of the language. We would want to assume that he was not aware of the use of the adjectival form that retains the root "srb" (Serb) by neonationalists.

29. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts, 50. 30. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts, 38. 32. I.". the afte_.'zr, at?., the roIe of religion in :heYagosiav wars ~as bee:~ exa.~. :.ned extens!ve~y.

See for example, Michael Anthony Sells, The Bridge Betrayed (Berkeley: University of Cali- fornia Press, 1996) and Sabrina Ramet, Balkan Babel (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996).

32 Kap[an, Balkan Ghosts, 76. 33. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts, 27. 34. The plight of the Serbs is discussed by Levin in Anna Karenina, and Vronsky presumably

perishes fighting with the Serbs against the Ottoman Turks in the final war for independence.

35. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts, 6. 36. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts, 7. 37. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts, 7. 38. Kaplan, Balkan Ghosts, 41. 39. Converts to Islam in the region felt the consequent influence of Western European social

and political practices before the establishment of Yugoslavia or implementation of social- ism. In his historical novel The Bridge on the Drina, Ivo Andri~ chronicled the confrontation of cultures with the Austrian annexation of Bosnia-Hercegovina in 1878. One notable result--the greater access to taboo pleasures like alcohol.

40. For this explanation I wish to thank my (Persian) colleague Marina Banuazizi. 41. Kaplan notes that readers should be aware from his other writing that he was an interven-

tionist in the policy debate over Bosnia. Be that as it may, readers should not be expected to interpret a finite text, especially if it poses as journalism, only within a dialogue with the authors' entire corpus of writing. Furthermore, if Balkan Ghosts is a "narrative" (i.e, literature), as Kaplan proclaims, why would the reader even think to consult the author's jour- nalistic writb~g?

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Baedeker barbarism: Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and Robert Kaplan's Balkan Ghosts

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