Playing It Dangerously. Ian MacMillen

itself was a means of becoming by virtue of setting the minoritarian “WE” onto new lines of flight from the majoritarian Yugoslav collective. This went hand in hand with racializations of Serbian Others, surfacing both in explicit discourse on biological difference and in more broadly interpretable commentaries on belonging based on ethnicity and citizenship (“WE are showing them our Croatian supremacy”).

      This division into a culturally supreme “us” and a musically, militarily, and at times racially inferior “them” paralleled popular songs’ emphasis on religious and ethnic differences (Baker 2010, 25). Following Ceribašić (2000), Baker notes that gender, too, framed important distinctions, though implicitly (within narrative roles rather than within “us” and “them” narratives); women mostly sang emotional and prayerful rather than expository songs, though they “were more likely to be ‘expository’ than men purely ‘emotional’” (2010, 28). Of Meri Cetinić’s famous “Zemlja dide mog” (My granddad’s country), Baker comments: “Cetinić’s narrator remembered her grandfather telling her about ‘people not like us’ and looked to a day when a well-known person (presumably a euphemism for an enemy who did not need naming) would want to take the land. ‘We’ would not let go of it” (28). The juxtaposition of an unnamed, hostile Other with a specified “us” parallels the contrast in detail between an unspecified zlotvor (evildoer) and the concrete agents “we,” “Šokci,” and “peaceful people” in male artists’ recordings such as “Tell the World the Truth about Baranja” (whose call for the Drava and Danube Rivers to address the world draws closely on “Our Beautiful Homeland’s” plea for the Drava, Sava, Danube, and sea to tell the world of the Croat’s love for his people).

      For Arendt, as Kristeva writes, the “essence of narration” is not “coherence intrinsic to the narrative, that is, as the art of storytelling”; what matters instead “is to recognize the moment of the achievement and to identify the agent of the history/story” (Kristeva 2000, 55). The emphasis on “us/we/ours” in narrative songs, festival publications, and government proclamations and agendas recognized and proclaimed the agents of Croatian wartime resilience. History is necessarily idealized as the narrator constructs a narrative out of “true history”; as Kristeva herself argues, the “art of narrative lies in its ability to condense the action down to an exemplary period of time, to take it out of the continuous flux, and to reveal a who” (55). Thus the “who/we,” through this revelation, becomes separated from “them.” Idealized histories of past distinction interject to confirm the truth of racial and religious difference, despite or perhaps in response to the decades-long propagation of alternative truths in Yugoslavia. The created agent’s remainder—the Other—becomes an all-too-familiar, perhaps intimately known, yet ultimately unnamable enemy or barbarian, for to name it would be to create another “who.” At most, such media reduce enemies to the pronoun “they” (oni), which in Croatian and Serbian is also the deictic “those” and thus “function[s] in a heightened indicative way” (Tomlinson 2015, 311n1). Only intimate, wartime knowledge of the Other makes the term sensible. Unlike “we” (mi), oni implies distance, either physical or personal, for to apply this pronoun rather than proper names to those present is considered rude (Đurašković 2007). “We” is the agent of an ever-new narrative and the subject of an intimate becoming that generates closeness with others who are “ours” and distances those who are not, while “they/those” is the term of an intimately distant minor presence.¹³

      Yet an agent—a “who”—does not suffice to generate narrative. As Kristeva writes: “The actor alone, no matter how heroic his exploit, does not constitute the marvelous action. Action is marvelous only if it becomes memorable. […] It is the spectators who bring the story/history to completion, and they do so by virtue of the thought that comes after the act, and this is accomplished via recollection” (2000, 54). The constant acts of spectation, audition, and recollection that contributed to the narratives of independent Croatia involved, first, the narrators themselves: pedagogues and tambura promoters such as the festival’s president, Frano Dragun, and songwriters such as Antun Nikolić “Tuca.” Yet they soon sought ever broader publics: festival participants, local audiences (the public of svoi), the state, its citizens, its intimates (near and far), and finally the “world.” Reaching spectators beyond the local and prompting their thoughts and recollections required further acts: moving into occupied lands and reestablishing physical contact with communities beyond territories under Croatia’s legal or practical sovereignty. These acts in turn warranted further recollection and narration. Thus within narratives of Croatian resilience and territorial reclamation we can recognize deep dependence on physical acts, not just as sources of histories/stories, but also as a means of producing actors and spectators. In this oscillation between discursive and physical endeavors, musicians and audiences heightened and blocked in aggregate one another’s divinely guided affective resilience (spirit) as they reterritorialized themselves on the Croatian state.

       FORMERLY OCCUPIED TERRITORIES AND CROATIA’S INTIMATES AT THE FESTIVAL

      Building a resilient population and state demanded new spectators and agents, and the widening of participation in tambura music within Croatia also extended to involving Croatia’s intimates. Starting in 1993, the CFU provided general sponsorship for the festival. For the 1994 festival, which officially convened “under the auspices of the Republic of Croatia’s president Dr. Franjo Tuđman,” CFU president Bernard Luketich wrote: “We are especially honored that this year’s Festival theme is ‘all for one, one for all’ because it has also been the slogan of our Union for one hundred straight years” (STD “Pajo Kolarić” 1994, 69; my translation). Luketich specifically mentioned Osijek as an important guardian of the Croatian tambura tradition, and he had a close personal connection to its festival; Željko Čiki, assistant to the festival’s president (later its president, and executive director of the HKUD “Osijek 1862”), was also godfather to Luketich’s grandson, Derek Luketich Hohn, who became a well-known semiprofessional tambura musician and instructor in Pittsburgh.

      The war was not over in 1994. The Yugoslavian Army would shell Zagreb in 1995 in retaliation for Croatia’s Operation Flash offensive, which retook lands held by the Republika Srpska Krajina (Republic of Serbian Krajina, or Borderland). Battles were renewed over parts of the Krajina along the Bosnian border, which significant Serbian populations had assisted in temporarily seceding from Croatia; these eventually terminated with the signing of peace agreements in Erdut, Croatia, and Dayton, Ohio. Osijek’s troops participated in these efforts, but the violence was now no longer close to their own homes.

      As Osijek’s own wartime suffering subsided, songwriters and festival publications refocused their attention on nearby territories recently occupied by the Yugoslavian army and subsequently (until 1998) controlled by the United Nations Transitional Authority in Eastern Slavonia, Baranja and Western Sirmium (UNTAES). As Baker notes, during the siege of Vukovar, Zlatni Dukati and its manager/arranger Josip Ivanković began releasing new songs about this severely damaged East Croatian city, which was close to their hometowns. They declared in the magazine Arena: “We will be the first to enter Vukovar with tamburas! We played in that holy Croatian city last and that power does not exist that can impede us in this intention” (Stažić 1995; also cited in Baker 2010, 41; my translation). The description of Vukovar as “holy” is significant, as the reestablishment of religious practice was closely associated with Croatian independence and tambura music and resembles Frano Dragun’s earlier statement about the tambura reentering Osijek’s “sacral building.” Using music to reclaim occupied territories, make these achievements audible on Croatian media, and hail a public of spectators/auditors to validate these feats through their narration became a common and religiously charged endeavor in the mid-1990s.

      The 1996 festival booklet discusses the organizers’ desire to move the festival into occupied territories. Frano Dragun noted that they were holding the festival under

      complicated socio-political and economic conditions. A part of Lijepa naša that is situated immediately alongside us still is not free. Consequently we cannot also present part of our Festival’s program in our Croatian and once beautiful [city of] Vukovar, the picturesque Ilok or the rich Beli Manastir.

      But, we firmly