Vesna Maric emigrated to the UK in 1992, a refugee from Bosnia. A township in northern England funded her transportation. Sixteen at the time, having barely recovered from the shock of experiencing the first six months of the war, she enrolled in school where she soon recognized that “Yugoslavia had been a totalitarian state, that we had been indoctrinated, brainwashed, unfree, undemocratic” – unlike her new British neighbors who were “free of indoctrination” and democratic in practice. As she writes in an essay published in Granta, “The Fascist Within,” this information conflicted with the education she had received in Mostar where she had been a Pioneer and had been taught to regard England as a colonizing capitalist empire that teaches its citizens to value property over human life. How then to reconcile the two incompatible doctrines? What impressions of one’s world remain after we accept that the political history of any country, no matter how democratic it thinks of itself, is mainly a self-justifying lie?
Maric began working on this issue in her 2009 memoir Bluebird in which she described the first four years she spent in England, and the culture clash she experienced. Since then, she has studied Czech literature in London, returned to live in Bosnia, wrote Lonely Planet guides, and essays for The Guardian and Granta. She now resides in Madrid and London, and her latest book has turned to fiction. In The President Shop, she gives her English-language readers a chance to feel what it’s like to be indoctrinated in an ideology much different from their own.
Mona, the novel’s central character, learns at school that “the struggle of [her and her classmates’] forebears was what brought them to where they were, and they had to honor that struggle, always. The struggle that had built the Nation. The struggle that meant ethnical, national and religious differences had been overcome in the name of building the Nation. God could be worshipped, if one insisted on it, but it was not acceptable to feel that one’s God was better than someone else’s. Brotherhood and Unity, above all. The Nation was forged out of the anti-fascist struggle, the struggle for equality.”
The narrative voice in this passage is faithful to the point of view of the young child hearing the words. One senses how that child, raised to honor such a doctrine delivered with zeal, would find it beautiful and honest. If “struggle” is the oxygen of the Nation, then “brotherhood,” “unity,” and “equality” are its essential flavors. Young Mona “understood that she was part of these struggles, that she came from the bodies of those who had been on the edge of death in order to provide that freedom for all.” She is ready to give the Nation what is required of her. But the narrative also invites us to connect the dots: a nation, any nation, proselytizing its young people, raised to acknowledge that violence is essential, eventually will consume itself.
Although the Nation is never given a proper name, the historical details are so precise that we can’t miss recognizing Yugoslavia as the source. We know that this Nation is doomed. The context may be all too obvious, but Maric skillfully guides us around the usual question of “Who started the war?” towards reframing the conversation about history itself. As she suggests in the Granta piece, our modes of examining the past are insufficient. She urges us to “look at examples in history where people have come together to help each other, to build for the improvement of all, where we have fought together for the rights of others through love and compassion.” In the novel, she accomplishes this by subverting the typical division between true believers in the Tito regime and its dissenters. The seeming oxygen of Communist Party doctrine, dissipating after the President’s death, is revealed as a sham. Mona’s and her family’s survival becomes detached from party allegiance; instead they form relationships with others and the natural world. The most lasting and nurturing relationship in the novel is that between Mona and her mother, Rosa.
Like Mona’s father Ruben, Rosa was an active partisan during World War II and retained her faithful allegiance to the President. But while Ruben’s service to the country after the war becomes focused on serving the President himself, Rosa’s efforts go further. Together with Ruben, she runs their shop — where they sell portraits and pins with the President’s image — and she also continues to serve her community. Hearing about two girls who have gone missing in her native village, she leaves her shop and her family, and travels to the mountains to search for them.
Throughout Mona’s childhood, Ruben teaches her the tales about the President, trying to foment the girl’s passion for the man and the Nation. Rosa, though sharing her husband’s politics, spurns dogma. She takes care of practical matters and her relationships with neighbors. But the tragedy of Yugoslavia looms. Personal agency versus fate — does the former mean anything in the face of the latter?
In an interview in Full Stop, Maric confronted this question. She said, “The book plays with these two things by portraying a country that is made through the agency of ordinary people, their work and dedication – yet is at the hands of tradition and in some ways, Fate itself. So my interest was in exploring the idea that we are here to learn life’s lessons in different ways, and that these lessons are pre-determined, and it’s up to us to work out what they are and accept them with grace. We live these individual lives, we think, yet we are part of this deeply intricate universe, and it often takes ‘historical events’ to understand how interconnected we all are – perhaps this is Fate, in that our interdependence is inescapable, that we always affect each other.”
Published by Sandorf Passage on March 9, 2021, 212 pages, $18.95 paperback]