Bursting Bubbles

First sentences are always the hardest. Do you go for the friendly ‘hi, I’m Mark, and I’m going to write about puppies…’, and end up sounding like a slightly camp junior school teacher; or do you go for the harsher, yet infinitely more direct, ‘Oy! People! Listen to me! The planet is doomed and we’re all to blame…’, and end up sounding like a bearded, unkempt, over-wound Greenpeace activist.

In this instance, I’ve gone for both first lines, as you can see, and now we can move on.

Through the medium of this B92 blog, I’ll be taking you on a whirlwind tour of the life and times of one seriously displaced Yorkshireman who’s managed to carve out a life in the heart of the Balkans and develop a warped understanding of the people of Belgrade.

But first, let’s share our sympathies for the box dwellers:

Way back when I were a lad, I spent over a year living (surviving) and working (labouring) in and around Tel Aviv. I became extremely familiar with the city; accustomed to its sites, sounds, tastes and even bus routes.

I witnessed the harrowing experiences endured by the people of Israel at that time (1995-’96), which included several ‘donkey-back-launched’ rocket attacks from South Lebanon targeting the kibbutz I spent a short time on; numerous bus bombs in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv; a major suicide bombing at the Dizzengoff Shopping Centre in central Tel Aviv and the tragic assassination of then PM Rabin…

These experiences moved me, shocked me and allowed me to develop a degree of empathy for the ordinary, shell-shocked people of the country. However (and here’s the point), I was unable to become a part of the society, and was unable to grasp the essence of what was going on, simply because I was living in an Anglophone box of fellow foreigners.

In the Tel Aviv youth hostels that this sub-community called home, the language we spoke was English, the bars we frequented were each other’s, and the company we mixed in largely comprised the same 18-30-year-old Commonwealth-native travelling labourers (Brits, Aussies, Kiwis, South Africans and Canadians [there were a few Americans, but they were mostly Jews and mostly didn’t work for a living on the building sites of Tel Aviv and the then occupied territories]).

We were cautious when travelling by bus, apprehensive when crossing the border checkpoints to go paint a Jewish Orthodox family’s bedroom in the West Bank, angry when our lives were knocked for six by a random bomber in the city centre, but, nevertheless, we were largely oblivious to what was really going on.

In short, the language and culture barrier prevented us from following a single news broadcast, reading a single headline or striking up a single conversation with any ordinary, non-Westernised Israeli.

Belgrade is full of similarly lost individuals. People who call Belgrade home, or at least home from home, but have no idea what really makes the people of Belgrade tick. They can’t tell the difference between a Zemunac and a Dorćolac; don’t have a clue why Loki or Duff are the only places to get some grub at 4am, or why someone who’s left-handed can be a ‘levak’, but would rather be a levo-ruk’. These are the box-dwellers, the bubble-inhabitants.

Some of them have lived here for years and are comfortable in their boxes – being brought out of their bubbles occasionally to attend parties or chat with Serbs who’ve lived abroad and come back (a very specific group of largely pessimistic Belgraders), before returning to their boxes and their daily doses of Sky and CNN.

I lived in my own protective box in Belgrade for quite some time, but in the end I just couldn’t take it anymore – I’m far too communicative, inquisitive and paranoid to endure that existence of social oblivion for too long.

I broke free of that box, unshackled myself of my monolingual bonds and embraced all that is beautiful, and all that is not so beautiful, in this fair White city on the Danube. How did I do it? Well, we’ll save that little story for next time.