thorold gives crowns and pounds and guineas in Q1 21

When I was one-and-twenty
           I heard a wise man say,
“Give crowns and pounds and guineas
           But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
           But keep your fancy free.”
But I was one-and-twenty,
           No use to talk to me.

When I was one-and-twenty
           I heard him say again,
“The heart out of the bosom
           Was never given in vain;
’Tis paid with sighs a plenty
           And sold for endless rue.”
And I am two-and-twenty,
           And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.

A E Housman, “When I was one and twenty”

It has become fashionable to hate the late Yugoslavia, or to diagnose it retroactively as a kind of Frankenstein assemblage of mismatched parts whose dissolution was thus inescapable and inevitably bloody. (...)

(That) would be wrong, just as are those who disparage Yugoslavia, for, in both cases, there is a history of conflicting traditions and tendencies, of struggles against the worst of the people’s instincts for a better polity and a kinder country. The bad guys won in Yugoslavia and ruined what they could, as soon as they could; the bad guys are doing pretty well in America, too. But nothing is inevitable until it happens. There is no such thing as historical destiny. Struggle is all. (...)

It’s hard today to comprehend the magnitude of the leap into a better life that someone like my mother made in Tito’s Yugoslavia. Back in 1946, in the wake of a cataclysm, the new regime instituted gender equality and mandatory and free education, so a peasant Bosnian girl, born in a house with a dirt floor, could go to school. Had she been born a generation before, she wouldn’t have gone to school. She would’ve worked the land with her parents until she got married, whereupon she would’ve popped out children into her middle age, unless she died giving birth or from sepsis after a homemade abortion, like one of Mama’s father’s sisters. Mama’s future was entangled with Yugoslavia’s, enabling her to leave behind the poverty that had lasted for centuries.

Yugoslavia provided a framework into which my mother fully grew, having departed, at the age of eleven, from her more or less nineteenth-century childhood. She built the country as she was building herself. (...)

With all that, life in Yugoslavia could never be reduced to its ideological practices and public rituals of indoctrination, even if they were essential to the culture. The progress and optimism that marked the decades after the Second World War were evident in the creation of the middle class, which consisted of the people exactly like my parents who, born in homes with dirt floors, ended up with college degrees and good jobs in big cities. They owned cars and weekend houses, spent summer vacations on the coast, and travelled out of the country without visas. They lived in rent-free apartments provided by state companies that provided employment through retirement. They took care of their elderly parents in the countryside, visiting often (but never enough) and returning home with the supplies of hearty peasant food, which they stored on their balconies and in the freezer chest bought with low-interest loans. Their children lived with them well into their twenties, even beyond, shamelessly. They planned to retire somewhere in nature—that is, to their weekend house. (...)

(Mama) was a citizen of the country that she built with her very hands, her Yugoslav identity a consequence of her life decisions, an outcome of her human, historical agency. Building the “homeland” was a practice, a daily operation, not a nostalgic one. She did not define homeland by the hundreds of years of unalterable history but by the efforts and dreams of people just like her, people whose siblings were wounded in the liberation war, who left home at the age of eleven to go to school, who earned blisters at youth work actions, who in college shared their room and food with four friends from exactly the same background, and who were the first ones in their family since the beginning of time to earn a university diploma and buy a television set on which they could watch themselves. (...)

Mama experienced the breakup of Yugoslavia as a dissolution of her homeland. What was destroyed was the framework within which her life—its very trajectory—had been self-legitimizing, where she never had to explain herself to anybody. But her family homestead had been within the geographical borders of Bosnia since time immemorial; except for the four college years, she never lived outside it until she migrated to Canada. Though Yugoslavia was a practice based on an idea, Bosnia and Sarajevo were the actual space where she lived, with smells and neighbors and a particular language. As long as Yugoslavia lasted, Bosnia fit into the idea and practice—it was the part of the country where the values of brotherhood and unity were practiced most sincerely and crucially. With the demise of Yugoslavia, Bosnia was left unprotected, and the complicated multicultural space was severely damaged. Mama had to leave it, and for good. ...

Though she appreciates Canada and her life there, the loss of Yugoslavia and Bosnia still casts a shadow across the frozen land.

Even without Morrison's deprecatory afterword, I think this is a book you can't read without getting the idea that it is a first novel written in the 1960s. The author is so obviously feeling towards a way of expressing what she feels about race, gender, and the preconceptions people have about them. Different ways of telling the story are being tried out against each other, there are different, almost conflicting, styles and systems of images in play. It's a workshop, but with hindsight, knowing the vast influence Morrison has had since, you feel privileged to be looking over her shoulder as she builds something.

A slightly awkward feature is the way she links every bad action by one of the black characters to some specific injustice committed by a white person, as though the black characters have no free agency or responsibility themselves, but are doomed to go on raping their daughters, massacring their pets, and beating their wives whether they like it or not, until the whites choose to let them stop. I'm sure that wasn't what Morrison intended to convey.

While women weep, as they do now, I’ll fight; while children go hungry, as they do now I’ll fight; while men go to prison, in and out, in and out, as they do now, I’ll fight; while there is a poor lost girl upon the streets, while there remains one dark soul without the light of God, I’ll fight, I’ll fight to the very end!

CC BY-SA 4.0, Länk