The photo above is of International Pacific College (IPC), Palmerston North, New Zealand, where I taught International Relations (IR) for a number of years.

In the early 1990s, before my involvement in IR, and while I still lived in the UK, I did my damnedest to block out news of the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. It was just too horrific, too incomprehensible, too bloody. This was Europe -- and look what was happening. I literally couldn't bear to watch.

By 1999, when Kosovo, Serbia, and the NATO bombing campaigns burst into the news, we were living in New Zealand. I'd started working in the field of IR in 1996, and the unfolding tragedy began to populate some of the larger frameworks I was learning about. But Iran was the focal area of my work at that point, and I was now a really long way away from Europe...

So it wasn't until 2005, when I was teaching an undergraduate course called War and Peace at IPC, that I really started getting to grips with what had happened to the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. That was the year Dubravka Ugresic's The Ministry of Pain came out in English.

If I were still teaching that course, I would certainly include some extracts from this book as prescribed reading, because it is hard to imagine a more powerful and haunting evocation of the dislocation of war and forced exile.

The book opens with lines by Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, which sketches many of the themes the story will explore (there's a different, perhaps better, translation here):

Those pangs of homesickness
That long since detected upheaval!
I am altogether indifferent
As to where to be altogether...

I don't care where not to fit in...

Everyone's the same
To me, it's all the same to me,
And what is all the more the same

And closest of all, perhaps, is the past.
All my features, all traces, all dates
Have vanished into its morass:
I am merely a soul born -- somewhere.



The story's "I" is Tanja Lucic, who first fled Zagreb, Croatia, for Berlin. When her Serbian partner is offered work in Tokyo, they go their separate ways, and Tanja becomes a literature teacher at the University of Amsterdam. The events she narrates take place around 1997.

Tanja doesn't have refugee status, but feels she cannot return to Zagreb: "Maybe like so many others I subconsciously turned the misfortune of others into an excuse not to return. Though weren't the breakup of the country and the ensuing war my misfortune, too, and reason enough to leave? I don't know. All I know is that I'd set off in what seemed the distant past, and hadn't yet reached a destination... We fled from wherever we could to wherever we could... We were everywhere."

Tanja's students also have a variety of different stories, but all have "come with the war". Their country of origin no longer exists. They don't even know what to call it: "They did their best to deal with it by steering clear of the name, shortening it to Yuga... or playfully transforming it into Titoland or the Titanic. As for its inhabitants, they became Yugos or, more often, simply 'our people.'"

Ugresic's narrator is not starry-eyed about her former compatriots:

"'Our people' had an invisible slap on their faces... I soon learned to pick out my fellow countrymen in a crowd... Surrounded by smoke rings, they looked as 'former' as their onetime nationality... The men complained more than anyone; they were eternally complaining: about the weather, about the war, about their fate and the injustices done them... Women were much less visible than men. They remained in the background, but kept life going... Men seemed to have no assignments; for them being a refugee was like being an invalid."

They share a tragedy, though: "Over and over I heard people say, 'It's not my war!' And it wasn't our war. But it was our war, too. Because if it hadn't been our war, too, we wouldn't have been here now. Because if it had been our war, we wouldn't have been here, either."

Tanja is well aware that her teaching job is absurd on at least two counts. On the one hand, "I was hired to teach the literature of a country (or the literatures of countries) from which my students had fled or been expelled." On the other hand, the very language the literature is written in is a political hot potato. The students called it "our language", in order to avoid the term "Serbo-Croatian", now seen as politically incorrect. The tongue once spoken in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, and Montenegro had now become three official languages (Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian), despite the existence of a mere "fifty or so words that distinguished them".

Language underpins the painful detachment that is a central theme of the novel. Tanja admits: "I often perceive my native language as alien." One of the students, Igor, adds: "When I speak 'our language,' I feel like a character in a provincial play." Other students retreat into dialect or argot, forms of language that represent "temporary refuges from the official language that had come with the war, spreading everywhere, polluting everything... Language was our common trauma."

Tanja's dis-ease has multiple manifestations. She tries to make her little flat homely, by buying little decorative items: "But their presence merely pointed up the anxiety of absence. The absence of what? I had no answer." Her observations of her host city, Amsterdam -- "the largest doll's house in the world" -- are penetrating, but reveal distance and estrangement rather than warmth and oneness.

It's Tanja's students who provide her only grounding. But when she embarks on a class project -- "a catalog of everyday life in Yugoslavia" -- she opens up something of a Pandora's box. At a social evening, a student called Uros recites a nationalist poem from the Tito era, which everyone feels is inappropriate; he then engages in an act of self-harm that will turn out to be prophetic. (He later commits suicide, and though this was a very common action among those affected by the war, and his father's indictment at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia might have formed another motivation, it is hinted that Uros may have had more specific and personal reasons for taking his life.)

Speaking of her students, Tanja says: "I could sense their inner fragmentation, their rage, their stifled protest. We had all of us been violated in one way or another. The list of things we had been deprived of was long and gruesome... The breakup of the country, the war, the repression of memory, the 'phantom limb syndrome,' the general schizophrenia, and then exile -- these, I was certain, were the reasons for my students' emotional and linguistic problems. We were all in chaos. None of us was sure who or what we were, to say nothing of who or what we wanted to be."

From the project comes a collection of memories (hugely informative to readers like us). But it seems to open old wounds (as with Uros), and a complaint is registered with the department. The friend who was instrumental in getting Tanja the job in the first place upbraids her for being "so naive, so blind to the way things were, to 'political reality'."

The complaint seems to eviscerate an already demoralized Tanja, turning her into a harridan, a stickler for the rules and her hurriedly devised new curriculum.

She ends up failing Igor, out of a sort of petty vindictiveness (he always seems to hold some sort of power over her). She ends up losing her job, despite the "excellent" reports she has lately received.

Then Igor shows up at her flat, in the role of bully and abuser, intent on exacting a humiliating revenge.

As he torments her, he says: "In some far-off corner of your brain you're sure life will go back to the way it was before... Has it occurred to you that all that time you may have been torturing us? Has it occurred to you that the students you forced to remember were yearning to forget?... Your course was about a culture that had totally compromised itself, and you neglected to mention that fact... Nobody comes out of a war unscathed. Nobody who's sane. And you looked so shiny and bright. Like a porcelain teacup. Of course I wanted to break you..."

In an ongoing cycle of revenge, Tanja not only (justly) reports Igor to the police, but also (fallaciously) accuses him of rape. "There is no such thing as mercy, no such thing as compassion," she tells us, "there is only forgetting; there is only humiliation and the pain of endless memory. That is the lesson we brought with us from the country we came from, and it is a lesson we have not forgotten."

Jobless, Tanja moves into the flat vacated by another of her students, on the outskirts of the city. She scrubs it obsessively, but can find no peace:

"It occurred to me that I hadn't looked out the window even once during the past few days... I had completely lost my bearings. I just sat there holding an invisible low-life visa and peeling inside... We are barbarians. We are the false bottom of the perfect society, we are its thumb-nosing jack-in-the-box, its demimonde, its ugly underside -- its parallel world... Our tribe is cursed. Returning to the lands whence we came spells our death; remaining in the lands whither we have come spells defeat... I was in a flat not my own in a city not my own in a country not my own, surrounded by crumbling walls and the smell of must..."

She envisages a new, energized, cosmopolitan generation of "our people" arising. But their success will leave the "nameless mass of slaves down below" untouched. And in any case, for her and her students, it is too late: "All we can do now is run our legs off to keep in place... So there I sat surrounded by peeling walls with a profession that was likewise untranslatable and a country that had come apart at the seams and a native language that had turned into three languages like a dragon with a forked tongue. I sat there with a feeling of guilt whose source I couldn't put my finger on and a feeling of pain whose source I couldn't put my finger on."

By the Epilogue, Tanja has arrived at a somewhat more peaceful place. She works as a nanny. She feels as though she is learning her native language from scratch. She is also learning Dutch, and adapting to Dutch life.

And, in a psychologically bewildering and disconcerting turn of events, she lives with Igor...

He, too, has had some kind of breakdown. But now he works with some Irish builders: "Maybe he's driven by the insane notion that by the sweat of his brow he is restoring a certain equilibrium, that for every wall he builds here one will rise out of the ruins there, in the villages of Bosnia or Croatia or wherever it might be needed."

Tanja feels that "life has been good" to her. But she still has nightmares, and every now and then, she needs to escape to the beach to holler into the wind a long "Balkan litany" of curses.



Most of the action is set in Amsterdam, but there is an interlude where Tanja visits her mother in Zagreb. Of course, this trip "home" underlines that it is "home" no longer.

Her mother is self-absorbed (this is her way of coping). And Tanja's visit to the parents of her ex-partner (whom she calls Mama and Papa) throws up the complexity of the emotions that surround Yugoslavia's history. Papa, despite his anti-fascist record during World War II, had spent time in a labour camp during Tito's rule. Tanja is surprised, therefore, to find a picture of the former leader in the pantry: "They'd decided to rehabilitate him... Clearly they preferred the Tito years to the current situation." This was "the generation that truly believed it was building a brighter future." Even after the experience of prison camp, Papa goes back to "building a better tomorrow". It is not until later, when he retires, that his illusions evaporate: "Time had regressed. He was back where he had started from. It was wartime again. There were camps and barbed wire." (There is much resonance here with this 2019 account by Aleksandar Hemon of his mother's experience -- except in her case the feelings of regret and nostalgia are sharpened by exile.)

A fellow-passenger on the plane back to Amsterdam jokingly accuses Tanja of thinking "the war took place yesterday". It did, she replies, and it's still going on. "Well, it is for the people who stayed behind!" he argues. "Your 'yesterday' is their ancient history... So the thing to do is forget, forget everything."

This is undeniably a dark novel. And I guess I worry slightly about the essentialization inherent in the narrator's descriptions of "our people" and their plight. No-one, even if she has suffered, can afford to lump too many entities into too small a box.

But the story is hard-hitting and poignant. The language is always memorable (Tanja's students "dragged their former country behind them like a train"; soap operas were "the foam you sprayed on fear to put it out"...).

And back in Palmy, it would have been an awesome discussion-starter...