The Tiger's Wife and Balkan Zoology
- By Pedja Jurišić
“Violence was, indeed, all I knew of the Balkans: all I knew of the South Slavs.”
Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
Anyone in the US with even a passing interest in contemporary fiction has by now heard the ovations given to Téa Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife. The New Yorker introduced Obreht as the youngest writer in their 20 under 40 feature; The New York Times called The Tiger’s Wife one of the ten best books of the year; it has sold more than 150,000 copies at year’s end, received overwhelmingly positive, even glowing reviews, and won The Orange Prize.
But mention the words “tiger’s wife” to an unsuspecting individual from the former Yugoslavia, and you might receive the response I recently heard from a friend. “Who?” she asked me, “Arkan and Ceca?”
Arkan and Ceca are the Brad and Angelina of Serbian ethno-nationalism. He, the lifelong criminal and folk hero of the 1990s, leader of the notorious Tigers, a paramilitary group linked directly to the Serbian Ministry of the Interior that massacred and terrorized civilians in Croatia and Bosnia, was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, but gunned down before trial. She, his buxom, folk and pop singing widow, is one of the most beloved singers and perhaps the biggest celebrity in contemporary Serbia.
The story is set in the Balkans and narrated by a young doctor, Natalia Stefanovic, who sets out to a small coastal town across the border to deliver inoculations and medicine to orphaned children of the war. She has just learned of the passing of her dear grandfather, who died on a mystifying trip to a village close to her location, arousing the suspicion of her grandmother, who feels Natalia and the old man have been hiding something from her. In fact Natalia has suspected that her grandfather was dying from cancer, but she knows nothing about the trip in question. Their secret concerns the fables he told her—especially the stories of the “deathless man” and the “tiger’s wife,” which provide “everything necessary to understand my grandfather.”
This is a skeletal description of the plot—focusing on the relationship between the young doctor and her grandfather. But The Tiger’s Wife is also a book about the Balkan wars, a book about death and the role of myth in Balkan consciousness. These are its chief thematic concerns, interwoven together. “Pretty early on,” Obreht has said, “I realized that mythmaking and storytelling are a way in which people deal with reality. They’re a coping mechanism.”
On the one hand, praise for the book is richly deserved. Obreht is a wonderful writer, a great talent at any age. Toss in her precocity—twenty-three when the book was written—and one isn’t surprised that she has become the latest literary phenomenon, the greatest sensation since Zadie Smith. Open to any page in Tiger’s Wife and the prose is precise, evocative, unobtrusive.
The brilliance of the writing, however, is dulled by the storyline. The narrative lacks unity, reading more like a collection of short stories than a cohesive whole. For long stretches, the reader is uncertain of the significance of the tale being told. It seems relayed for its own sake, or for the sake of storytelling. Perhaps for this reason, both the narrative and its conclusion are strangely flat and lack emotional punch.
The novel’s representation of the Balkans is much more problematic. Despite the amount of attention and ink given the novel, this subject has remained neglected. The portrayal of the region has been praised but not much discussed. Critics have lauded the book’s mesmerizing magical realism, a stylistic choice that casts the reader deep into the fog of reality and myth that seems to hover permanently over the Balkans. Or so we are led to think. Liesl Schillinger, writing for the New York Times, praised the novel’s use of “fable and allegory to illustrate the complexities of Balkan history, unearthing the region’s patterns of suspicion, superstition and everyday violence.”
Just what kind of story is The Tiger’s Wife? What account of the Balkans does it provide, and what should we make of its narrative?
To begin with, The Tiger’s Wife possesses very little history. “The story of this war—dates, names, who started it, why—that belongs to everyone,” says the grandfather to Natalia before he presents her with the story of the deathless man. “But something like this—this is yours. It belongs only to you. And me. Only to us…You have to think carefully about where you tell it, and to whom.”
In an interview with Jennifer Egan that is included in more recent editions of the book, Obreht says she had an “extreme, compulsive desire to not use any real places or names and to instead capture the war in essence” (my emphasis). The names are fictional, the timeline obscure, the places, as the novel tells us, cannot be found on the map. Nonetheless, a reader familiar with the region will have no trouble identifying Belgrade as The City, Mostar as the fictional Sarobor, and the Croatian coastline that serves as a backdrop for the town of Zdrevkov.
In the New York Review of Books, Charles Simic concedes that the decision to obscure historical detail is likely to be controversial in the Balkans. He speculates that “it most likely struck [Obreht] that this was material that requires a lot of background and explanation, which would clog the narrative and prevent her from writing the kind of novel she wanted.” Perhaps this is the case. Perhaps Obreht was simply more interested in Balkan myth than Balkan reality. Or perhaps she thought Balkan myth is synonymous with and constitutive of Balkan reality. There is no way of knowing from the text.
Instead of a narrative rooted in history and context, The Tiger’s Wife offers a series of fantastic tales passed down from the grandfather to Natalia, tales that mediate between the real and imaginary, between past and present, blurring the lines. The narrative occupies two temporal spaces: present time, and the time of the grandfather’s childhood.
Superstition and violence—these are the two common strands connecting the past to the present in Obreht’s account of the Balkans, and they pervade the narrative to the exclusion of just about anything else. Superstition abounds, emerges from every mouth, while all narrative strands seem to finish in violence. We encounter every conceivable form of brutality—shelling, mass atrocity, rape, domestic violence, poisoning, drowning, hanging, shooting, maiming, dismemberment of dead bodies—and little in the way of more humane actions and qualities. Thus, the deathless man appears and reappears, to remind us of the pattern of death in the Balkans. And the tiger chews his legs, to symbolize the act of self-destruction. Is this a rich imagination, or an impoverished one? It certainly is not an authentic account of the Balkans.
Reading The Tiger’s Wife, one recalls Binyavanga Wainaina’s essay, “How to Write About Africa.” With biting observation, Wainaina exposes common misrepresentations of Africa with ironic advice to aspiring writers of the continent:
“In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country … Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions … Broad brushstrokes throughout are good. Avoid having the African characters laugh, or struggle to educate their kids, or just make do in mundane circumstances… Characters should be colourful, exotic, larger than life—but empty inside, with no dialogue, no conflicts or resolutions in their stories, no depth or quirks to confuse the cause … Animals, on the other hand, must be treated as well rounded, complex characters.”
If this sounds much like The Tiger’s Wife, which includes dogs, bears, tigers, elephants and multiple visits to the zoo, it is not by coincidence. Obreht has repeatedly said that, along with the obvious influence of magical realists, National Geographic has helped shape her writing.
“In Balkan culture, there’s almost a knowledge that reality will eventually become myth,” Obreht tells Jennifer Egan. “In ten or twenty years you will be able to recount what happened today with more and more embellishments until you’ve completely altered that reality and funneled it into the world of myth.” This account of “Balkan culture” corresponds closely to a popular misconception of the region. Surely there’s a difference between telling a good story about the time you got your head stuck in the closing doors of a Sarajevo tram while kissing a date goodnight, and recalling the night you took your son, kissed your husband goodbye, and left your hometown—to take the example of my aunt, a master storyteller and embellisher. But there are some things that need no embellishments and, indeed, some that it is a sin to embellish. Instead of making these distinctions or dispelling grave misrepresentations, The Tiger’s Wife is a beautifully written affirmation of their stereotypes.
The most enduring myth of The Tiger’s Wife—the one that is unseen and untold but that pervades the novel and its reception—is at least as pronounced outside the region as within it. Nearly thirty years ago, when the world gathered for the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, no one would have believed it. Today it is presumed as incontrovertible again. This is the notion that the region and its people are engaged in a timeless, endless, and senseless war. The Tiger’s Wife does nothing to dispel this “ancient hatreds” thesis. On the contrary, the blending of time, bloodsheds, and myth that the novel puts forth has always been an essential complement to it.
Of course, this is nonsense. There is a long line of literature puncturing the myth of ancient hatreds, and the Yugoslav break-up is much better explained by close analysis of the political options and choices of various actors than by reductive tropes such as the one above. But none of this is new. The exuberance of the reception that greeted The Tiger’s Wife speaks to two things: the self-evident talent of Téa Obreht on the one hand, and the lingering, unexamined popularity of Balkan stereotypes on the other.
To put it very simply: in the 1990s, the Balkans did not go up in flames because people one day woke up and remembered old resentments. Instead, the great powers had little interest in maintaining Yugoslavia as it was, and helped to pull it in opposite directions. The political leadership in Serbia and later Croatia pursued premeditated murder and the cleansing of thousands. Bosniaks followed suit on a smaller scale. In Croatia, Bosnia, and later Kosovo, people were slaughtered and tortured not for history or ancient beliefs but for very rational and cynical calculations of present political gain.
In one sense, however, Obreht is right. Not yet twenty years after the wars, a young raconteur completely altered the enormity of that injustice, horror and suffering, and funneled it innocently into the world of storytelling myth. Not, of course, for anyone who lived those days, bears their imprint, and lives their stark reality, but for the blithe attention of an audience looking for the hot new thing.
As Roland Barthes recognized, myth does not deny reality. Rather it empties reality, distorts it, and presents it in a timeless and natural guise. Precisely for this reason, so many reviewers could observe that The Tiger’s Wife told tales, and—in the very next breath—accepted and treated these tales as if they spoke to Balkan realities. But if this is not reality, what alternatives exist? The choice is not between Serbian, Croatian, Bosniak or Kosovar versions of events, as ethno-nationalists would have it. The choice is between authentic and misleading narratives, between nuanced and essentializing representations.
All of which brings us back to Arkan and his Tigers. Twenty years ago, on March 31st, 1992, in the first military operation in the war for Bosnia, the paramilitary group entered the strategically located municipality of Bijeljina with the purpose to “cleanse” it. A great massacre ensued. Photographs by Ron Haviv, whom Arkan invited to witness the so-called liberation of the town, were soon published. An unforgettable one shows a uniformed paramilitary soldier—with sunglasses on his head, a cigarette lingering in his left hand, an automatic rifle held in the right—kicking a dying or dead woman in the head as she lies with two others in a pool of blood. Writing for the New York Times, John Kifner asserts that the picture “tells you everything you need to know.”
Susan Sontag replied that, in fact, the photograph tells us very little apart from the accepted notion that war is horrible and that human beings are capable of doing terrible things to one another. “The problem is not that people remember through photographs”, she writes, “but that they remember only the photographs…they are not much help if the task is to understand. Narratives can make us understand.” The Tiger’s Wife paints ghastly and memorable pictures but, sadly, it does not help us understand.
“How do we make comprehensible stories out of incomprehensible atrocities?” asks James Dawes in That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity. What are the ethics of writing about atrocity, and in fiction, what is the relationship between aesthetics and ethics? These questions await any writer who delves into the subject. But the same questions are incumbent on the reader. How to treat a fictional account of a foreign land, a foreign war, a foreign people? How to evaluate authorial representations of circumstances and places that we little understand? One may look for complexity, one may seek nuance but, because of our limited knowledge of the world, we always run the danger of getting the answers wrong. Nonetheless, writers and readers alike must be more conscious of these issues, and more attentive to their implications, lest we perpetuate misleading and treacherous stereotypes. Or even praise them to high heaven.
