from “Battle Songs”
Daša Drndić, transl. Celia Hawkesworth | Battle Songs | New Directions | 2023 | 192 Pages
What do (some other) immigrants do in Canada after the breakup of socialist Yugoslavia?
When they arrive, they ask friends to look after the local money they have from the apartments they sold and they register for social security. (Because social security offices have the right to examine bank accounts and so on.)
Every Friday they get together in an Irish pub that has a terrace on its roof with a lot of plants, and they drink Irish beer.
When they have something to celebrate, they invite a lot of people and then they feed them well. They serve all manner of things from former Yugoslavia. When it’s a matter of food, there’s no prejudice, the national question doesn’t arise.
The women wear a lot of pure silk blouses in pastel shades and little suits and slender-heeled shoes, leather of course.
In winter they go skiing, in summer to the Canadian lakes. Canada has a lot of perfectly managed Canadian lakes.
They go home to visit at least once a year and say how great it is here.
They say that they have come (the men that is, of course) to avoid being mobilized, but on the whole they are over forty. (The twenty-year-olds who haven’t come have on the whole been killed).
They say that all sides in this war are equally to blame, and when they are told that yes, they are to blame but absolutely not equally, they stop speaking to you.
They go to hear bands from their homeland when they play in Toronto because that’s a connection with home.
Among themselves they speak Serbian, but when they’re with you they say they speak Serbo-Croatian so as not to offend you. When you say that you speak Croatian or Bosnian, they say those languages don’t exist.
They are thrilled with Peter Handke.
Those who didn’t come sent their children to Canada to study.
When they get Canadian citizenship, they intend to go back
and carry on where they left off.
They are offended if a Bosnian or a Croat tells them that he has left Serbia. They ask, why on earth would they do that?
They are offended if a Bosnian or Croat doesn’t read Slobodan Selenić, doesn’t like Dobrica Ćosić and doesn’t watch the film Pretty Village, Pretty Flame.
They keep wanting to do the traditional Orthodox three-kiss greeting, and when you don’t want to, they say “I don’t give a fuck...”
They appropriate Sarajevo and the Adriatic Sea. They say, we’re at home there, that’s all our country.
They’re glad that Mira Marković has been well received in Ljubljana, although, to be fair, they do always stress that she is ghastly, ghastly.
If you speak the Ijekavian dialect they ask you where you’re from so they know how to place you.
If one of them is putting on a play, and is a former colleague of yours, his wife phones to tell you the number you should call to book tickets.
When you say you’re going home, they ask: To Belgrade?
For them, it’s as though this war hasn’t happened.
And yet,
There are exceptions.
Exceptions
a) These exceptions are very different.
b) They’ve distanced themselves from those exceptions because they don’t fit in.
c) Such an exception, for instance, is my former colleague, a sound engineer, who sells televisions, flashlights, and light bulbs in a department store.
d) Such an exception is also thirty-year-old Dragan who has been trying for five years now to continue his postgraduate studies, but he can’t because he sends everything he earns to his family so that they can buy a boiler or wood for the winter.
e) These exceptions aren’t a focus group.
f) The women among these exceptions travel for an hour or two to work, they get back at eight and then they cook. They don’t baulk at night shifts.
g) The local ethnic newspapers don’t print interviews with these exceptions.
h) David is such an exception even though (some) Croats drove him out of Dubrovnik.
i) When they earn a bit of money, these exceptions celebrate in a small, ordinary Chinese or Lebanese restaurant.
j) These exceptions have friends from Sarajevo and other places.
k) These exceptions, like Marko, sell sausages in the street and then nearly go mad.
l) They are very lovely exceptions.
Vietnamese (potbellied) and miniature pigs in America
In 1985 the Canadian Keith Connell, otherwise employed at a zoo, imported eighteen potbellied pigs, four boars and fourteen sows, into the United States directly from Vietnam. Compared to the established prejudice about the appearance of pigs, these Vietnamese pigs look exotic with strikingly black hair, saddle-shaped backs and a straight tail. They have a wrinkled face and a large, pendulous belly. According to various estimates, from the original core, in about ten years, the population of these pigs in the United States has now reached between two hundred and five hundred thousand, with the trend now decelerating.
Soon after their arrival on the continent, pigs from Connell’s herd were sold at various auctions of exotic animals, where they were advertised as a new kind of family pet. Breeders and promoters of Vietnamese potbellied pigs flooded the media with stories of the unusual pets, and the wave spread. The pigs were a hit.
Breeders pay up to thirty thousand US dollars for a pair of breeding Vietnamese pigs. Their offspring can barely satisfy demand. New potential buyers put themselves on waiting lists and may have to wait up to a year and a half. To increase the litters, some breeders cross Vietnamese pigs with indigenous breeds, producing mongrels which they then palm off on buyers as purebred, original potbellied porkers.
The market was flooded with new profiteers. Thanks to the pigs, breeders bought houses and cars and went on vacation. One woman, for example, bought a sow for four thousand dollars and with her first litter earned six times that. The highest recorded price paid to date for a pig is thirty-seven thousand dollars.
Then the mood of the market shifted. The pigs had done their job, it was no longer possible to earn much on them, and they became uninteresting as pets largely because it turned out that they weren’t exactly adaptable. Abandoned small and not so small Vietnamese potbellied pigs roamed through the streets of towns. They came to parks, they reached the suburbs, dumpsters, and butchers.
As usually happens, one day the media published the tragic story of little Rufus, and in connection with him an initiative founded on goodwill and general humaneness: REFUGE OPENS FOR ABANDONED AND REJECTED VIETNAMESE PIGS. THE REBIRTH OF LITTLE RUFUS.
Rufus had been the pet of seven male students who after a while concluded that he was in fact more of a burden to them than a source of amusement. He was too loud, too demanding, sometimes even aggressive. They shut him up in a cellar and invited the founders of the first refuge for abandoned pigs, who had been glorified in the media—Jim Brown and David Ronson—to come and get him.
Interest grew in the abandoned pigs. Organized groups of visitors from Japan, Australia, Germany, Britain and Belgium came to see how the Refuge functioned and whether they might found something similar in their own countries. New refuges sprang upall over the United States. Many of the pigs in them were only in transit, because a network was arranged to place abandoned and abused pigs in adoptive families.
In the families, however, the Vietnamese (potbellied) and miniature pigs had problems adapting. There were changes in their behavior, mostly as a result of being isolated from other pigs. The most prominent symptoms of such unacceptable behavior in the pigs were: depression and withdrawal into themselves, insecurity, anger, fear and aggression.
Those with experience in treating trauma in pet pigs say that they come across pigs that are not even aware of the fact that they are pigs; they are antisocial and have trouble accepting the collective (that is the other abandoned pigs which have already made friends—they don’t know how to communicate with them, because their piggy language, as an integral part of their piggy identity, has been disrupted, even destroyed). In summary, their socialization is a slow and difficult process.
Pigs are territorial animals and within their group establish a quite specific hierarchical order, in which every pig knows its place.
With house pigs such an order is upset, because the household threatens it. If the people there cross into his, the pig’s territory (especially the place where he sleeps), the house pig can bark and even bite.
It’s advisable to castrate house pigs, because they reach sexual maturity early and this can create problems. Given that the number of homeless pigs is growing, activists for the protection of unwanted, neglected and ill-treated pigs in America organize lectures and print brochures with instructions about how to ensure the pigs a peaceful and contented life in their new surroundings. With that they stress that importing these animals must stop because the domestic surroundings are not at all appropriate.
On the basis of personal experience, they, those volunteer activists of nongovernmental and not-for-profit organizations, have found what makes a pig happy:
Fresh grass, especially clover
Rooting, especially after rain
Treats such as apples, melon, watermelon, and fresh vegetables
Sunbathing
Being scratched on the stomach and flanks
Scratching themselves on trees, rocks, fences or each other
Associating with other pigs
Being wrapped in blankets or burying themselves in straw or
hay when it’s cold
Rolling in puddles or pools when it’s hot
Exploring neighboring woods
The enthusiasts Brown and Ronson succeeded in providing all of the above for their protégés, and more. On their farm in West Virginia, they offer pigs both professional veterinary care and conditions for healthy socialization. We treat each animal as an individual, as a unique entity, for no two pigs are the same, say Brown and Ronson for the press. Some adapt more easily and quickly to their new surroundings, others need more time. We don’t hurry them. We want our pigs to realize that they are wanted, that they are living in a safe place, where they will not lack for human or animal warmth.
Brown and Ronson also visit universities in America where they give lectures to students and professors of veterinary medicine about the behavior of pigs and the psychological problems in pigs brought up as house pets.
The community of porcine guardians is growing. United around the same goal, members of this community print newspapers, correspond, exchange experience, advise one another, organize porcine events, all for the wellbeing of imported and then neglected Vietnamese potbellied pigs.*
In this whole story, however, the most striking detail is the warning directed through all available media by the Americans Brown and Ronson to their fellow citizens and beyond: The import of house pets is a destructive act. Imported animals are forced to live in what is for them an unnatural environment, which often costs them both their physical and their mental health.†
* So Sandra Parson, in the pig lovers’ weekly Ziggy, no. 5, 1996, writes, among other things: “P. J. is an extremely intelligent and very charming pig. When we took him in, we weren’t aware of how much care he would need. Both my husband and I work, so that P. J. was alone in the house all day. So, with heavy hearts, we decided to place him in a sanctuary, from where, we hoped he would be adopted. In the refuge P. J. was reborn. We visit him almost every weekend and the changes are striking. There he got to know Lucinda, well-known for the acrobatic skills she performs with exceptional ease, as well as Star, who goes on his own to the nearby shop for yogurt. P. J. and Star will take part in this year’s Christmas parade, for which they have been preparing hard for weeks.” There are also heartrending letters composed by the pigs themselves. In the monthly Lucky, of 23 October 1996, a certain Bacon says, among other things: “I was exposed to terrible violence, I was neglected and virtually confined. For three months, my owners kept me in the utility room and fed me exclusively on potatoes. They neither cleaned nor emptied my toilet. If I made a mess on the floor, they would hit me with a broom. They never took me out into the air, I never played with other little pigs. I even got an infection of the urinary tract because, when they ran out of potatoes, they gave me cat food. Now I’ve been saved. I am in absolute piggy heaven. I never dreamed that life could be so good. I have my own little house and a fence for scratching on. I’ve got lots of friends. I go out whenever I want, no one forbids me anything. Sometimes I even go fishing with my owners.”
† The information about Vietnamese potbellied pigs quoted here is easily accessible: in libraries, on the Internet, in kiosks. The information quoted about pigs in the Balkans are on the whole known to us from the Balkans and probably to inhabitants of the former Eastern Bloc. Details about the émigrés from former Yugoslavia are irrelevant to people in the West.
People like to look at events in the round, they like to have a complete picture, to understand certain events better. For instance, a column of 160,000 Rwandan refugees are trying to return to their homeland from Zaire. In Vase Miškina Street in Sarajevo an explosion eliminated a dozen people as they queued for bread. In the Sarajevo market a shell killed or injured eighty. All people without names. But here they remember little Rufus, P. J., Bacon, and O. J. Simpson. People in the West put together details, little scenes from everyday life out of their own events, which are, thank goodness, abundant.
From Battle Songs by Daša Drndić, translated by Celia Hawkesworth.
Copyright © 1998 by Daša Drndić.
Translation copyright © 2023 by Celia Hawkesworth.
Reprinted with permission of New Directions.