Precious cargo: telling other people’s stories
Belgrade, Serbia– written on the way out of the country after six fascinating, exhausting and profoundly humbling days. I’ll post subsequently on different aspects of the trip and my research, but first I want to recognise what this is about: hearing, sharing and learning from other people’s stories.
My trip to Belgrade was wonderful: fascinating for the people I met and the things I saw and did; exhausting for the pace of it all (and the rather less than comfortable bed in my flat). No big surprises there. But as I prepare to settle back into London the best way I can describe my current state of mind is ‘humbled’.
As a journalist – and I came to Serbia as a journalist – you ask a lot of people. In the name of getting the story, you ask people to tell you, a stranger from another place, another generation, often another culture, about their most personal selves. You ask them to share the experiences that shaped them, to name their hopes and to confide their fears and shames. You ask them to lay their most precious cargo on the table so you can question, interpret, and export their lives to the readers back home.
It’s a colossal ask, but if you are lucky, they do. Here in Belgrade, over coffee, tea, wine, beer and rakija, I was very, very lucky.
I met A, who still wears his country’s past heavy on his heart. He described ringing in the new year of 1992 alone, listening to Mozart’s Requiem: “I refused to join the celebration.”
I met L, who could pinpoint the day his childhood ended: when his father was taken to war, and the role of household leader fell to his eight-year-old shoulders.
I met O, whose family left Bosnia as refugees and walked into Serbia: “During Milosevic, I ate only potatoes. Now my fridge is not full-full, but it’s better. I have enough to eat.”
I met J, who told me of her pride and relief when she convinced her father to vote against Milosevic in the nineties, and now, years later, of her fear and sadness when she sees flickers of the same nationalist spirit in her high school students.
I met B, who described being abroad on a business trip when Zoran Djindjich was assassinated: “I was in a shop when I heard, and I cried like a baby.”
I met L, desperate to leave Serbia so he doesn’t waste any more of his life. He described going a rock concert several years ago, too old for the band but determined to have that teenage experience anyway, now that it was finally available in Serbia. Yet it left him feeling sad: “I have this sense of a lost decade… it should have happened earlier.”
I met A, who recalled being heartsick during a recent DJ gig when he was forced to comply with the teenage birthday girl’s demands for nationalist turbo-folk, even though Zoran Djindjic’s son was present at the event, and to play those records was “to spit on everything his father had done”.
I met S, a student as full of hope as any student anywhere, whose voice broke as she tried to defend her country’s future against a past she had nothing to do with: “We have a lot of valuable people here. We have athletes and scientists, young experts and old experts, people who would help you. OK, we have some bad things, but I think you have that in your country, too.”
Hvala, Beograd.
