RACIN AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF A NATIONAL CULTURE
Key words: Racin, Fanon, national culture, nationalism, national consciousness, decolonization
I received the invitation to take part in this year’s Racin Meetings (2011) on the same day,
when in the offices of MANU (The Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts) we
had just finished with the Macedonian launching of the
book Identity.Text.Nation (in the Croatian original, Identitet. Tekst. Nacija) by His Excellency, Dr. Zlatko
Kramarić, the current ambassador of the Republic of Croatia in Macedonia. Initially, due to personal family reasons, I had to
decline my participation; however, in due time, coming to the profound
realization that this promotional study about the Macedonian identity, language
and culture, was now being honored with the prestigious Racin Award, I became
compelled by a sense of personal responsibility, and a kind of a personal dept,
which indeed served as the additional motivators for my going to Veles, for the
Meetings. Although, as a matter of fact, insofar I have taken part in these traditional
proceedings on three separate occasions (once even as the moderator of the
scientific symposium which is a part of the Meetings’ frameworks, however on an
entirely different topic of discussion), not until now have I publically spoken
or written about the legacy of our very own Kosta Solev Racin (Коста Солев
Рацин). Thus, I decided to accept the invitation; by placing together the two occasions
I would indeed rectify the injustice and make it a point to speak further on
Racin’s publications, namely, his political reflections, which apart from their
notable social dimension also possess an explicitly national and moral
dimension. Along those lines, I’ll see to a contextualization of the same, in
the span of seventy years, as the world order had undergone momentous changes,
not only in terms of political and ideological shifts, but rather through a
change in the class-based and race-bound paradigms. This, in turn, allows me to
draw a parallel between our Kosta Racin, a progressive people’s thinker, a
revolutionary and a socialist, a poet and a journalist stemming from the realm
of the old Yugoslavia, on the one hand, and the Franco-based existential
humanist, the psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, the progenitor of the anti-colonial
movement in the countries of the Third World, on the other. For this, I have ample
support also through Professor Kramarić’s book, whence he says: “...in Croatia,
we (and the following is also true for Macedonia) shy away from describing the
conditions in our society as postcolonial. We act as if the state of
colonization was (and has remained) particular only to the ‘person of color’,
‘the uncivilized’, ‘the marginalized’ of the world..., but the Croatian and the
Macedonian modern histories, to a great extent, correspond to those of the
modern histories of the Third World...Namely, we speak here of ever present
themes that follow every period of transition. That which all transitions find
in common is their sick incompleteness and ambiguity...” (Kramarić, 2009:
72-73; my
italics). Even though the parallel between Racin and Fanon may
seem a bit far-fetched, the fact remains that both were involved with socially-centered,
nationally-bound and revolutionary-focused questions, thus emphasizing, first
and foremost, the significance of a national culture amidst the
conditions of political, economic and spiritual enslavement. Much like Terry
Eagleton, a Marxist literary theorist and cultural critic, who
has examined the significance of this phenomenon with enslaved and colonized
peoples. “Imperialism is not only the exploitation of
cheap labor-power… – Eagleton writes – but the uprooting of
languages and customs – not just the imposition of foreign armies,
but of alien ways of experiencing…In such
situations,…culture is so vitally bound up with one’s common
identity that there is no need to argue for its relation to political
struggle”(Eagleton, 1983, 2008: 187; my italics).
Let us go back to
1959, to The Second Congress of the Black Writers and Artists in
Rome, when Frantz Fanon posed several key questions concerning
the countries of the Third World. One of these opens up the
dilemma about the national struggle and the process of
decolonization as a cultural phenomenon, whereas another one
brings together the political (and armed!) forms of struggle and
the culture of the colonized peoples, thus coming to
the following realization, that colonial domination calls
to a halt the national culture, in all of its fields,
concluding: “because it is total and tends to
over-simplify, very soon manages to disrupt in
spectacular fashion the cultural life of a conquered
people – adding further that every effort is made to bring the
colonized person to admit the inferiority of his culture…, to
recognize the unreality of his “nation”, and, in the last extreme,
the confused and imperfect character of his own biological
structure” (Fanon, 1963: 236; my italics). Henceforth, any
conscious and organized undertaking on the behalf of the
colonized aimed at re-establishing the sovereignty of
his own nation, for Fanon1 becomes “the most complete and obvious cultural
manifestation that exists.” (Fanon, 1963: 245).
Twenty years prior
to this speech (and the publication of Fanon’s now anthological text Les
Damnés de la Terrе (in English: The Wretched of the Earth2, both
published in 1961), in the Balkans, I suppose
against the background of severed relations with the then leadership of the
KPJ (The Communist Party of Yugoslavia) in Macedonia (I am
referring to the events around September 8th, 1940, when during the
Territorial Conference of the KPM (The Communist Party
of Macedonia) Racin was boycotted and unanimously
excommunicated from the Party) the text “The National Question in
Macedonia” comes to light.3 With it, Kosta Solev joins the ranks
of the most esteemed Macedonian intellectuals, right next to Krste
Misirkov (Крсте Мисирков) and his On Macedonian Matters (in the
Macedonian original, За Македонцките работи). Amidst his
other conclusions, in this text Racin claims the following: “The
struggle of the oppressed national and minority groups within
the borders of an imperialist state, the struggle for a
national independence, for national rights and
democratic freedoms without a doubt gains strength when fighting
against the imperialist bourgeoisie which subjugates and
exploits them in a colonial manner, without a doubt stands
against the entire ‘world system of a financial enslavement’ and the colonial looting,
and thus, becomes a part of the main forces which fight for the
change of this system, becomes part of the struggles of the new
socially-progressive class, the proletariat… The real and
rightful solution to the national question can only be
realized through the revolutionary efforts of the masses, the subjugated and
disenfranchised masses at the hands of imperialism.
These revolutionary efforts of theirs are doubtlessly part of the
revolutionary efforts of the world’s proletariat, which in turn
helps create an unified world-based revolutionary front where all the
oppressed and exploited masses fight against the common devil– the world
imperialist order. This is why to the committed
Marxist-Leninists the national question is a
revolution-centered and international question, and as
such, it represents ‘a part of the general questions
that the proletariat revolution concerns itself with, a part of the
question about the dictatorship of the proletariat” (Racin,
1987: 174-176; my italics).
I’d like to remind
us, though we may all be familiar that as a young man (in 1924, at the
age of sixteen), during the colonization of the Macedonian
lands at the hands of the ruling bourgeoisie and the monarchy of the old
Yugoslavia, the son of the potter Apostol Solev (Апостол
Солев), inspired by Garibaldi’s revolutionary ideas, joined the ranks
of SKOJ (The Union of the Communist Youth of Yugoslavia). At
about the same time, in fact, just a year later (in
1925), on the Caribbean island of Martinique (then a French colony)
Frantz Fanon was born, a descendent of former African slaves.
Racin’s and Fanon’s respective life’s journeys did not
come into converge – perhaps only in 1943, when, on his way back
to Skopje, Racin decided to join the Partisan brigade “Korab”, whereas
Fanon joined the Allied powers in their fight against fascism. And
while the former tragically lost his life, the latter gets wounded
and subsequently decorated with a medal for bravery which in turn
grants him a scholarship to the Sorbonne where he is to study
medicine and literature, and philosophy with Maurice
Merleau-Ponty. After graduating in 1952, he publishes the essay
“North African Syndrome”, so that in the same year, his book Peau
noire, masques blancs (in English: Black Skin, White Masks)
is published by Éditions du Seuil (Paris, France), which he bases
on the Hegelian dialectic binary, the master-slave one, and
derives his own binary: white colonizer –black colonized. Unlike him, our very
own selftaught Racin comes into contact with the ideas of
Hegel, Marx and Lenin, during his time spent in prison, in
Sremska Mitrovica, which he uses to further his
studies. Namely, with his political cohorts, Racin translates
The Communist Manifesto, studies the history of the Macedonian people
from a class-centered and nationally bound perspective, attempts to compile a dictionary
of the Macedonian language, publishes a few articles and
studies in the field of literary criticism, philosophy and history, hence
becomes known, in the lands of the old Yugoslavia, as a progressive
thinker amidst the Macedonian intelligentsia. What sort of a political
and social line of thinking and action he may have pursued
had he lived longer, provided that he would withstand the
ideological pressures of the times, we can only speculate over,
similarly to the case of Fanon, who like Racin himself, lost
his life quite early on, at the age of 35, to leukemia.
But one thing remains certain, the fact that as proponents of socialist ideas
and Marxist ideology, as revolutionaries and fighters for
national and human rights who had experienced the turmoil of war,
both men exhibited a higher consciousness when it came to
matters related to the state of the national culture with the
enslaved colonized peoples, with one difference in mind, namely,
that in the case of Racin, the emphasis was placed on the
class-related national aspect, whereas with Fanon, the emphasis
was placed on the racerelated national aspect.
For example, this is
how Frantz Fanon examines the situation in The Wretched of the Earth.
He states: “A frequent mistake, and one which is moreover
hardly justifiable, is to try to find cultural expressions for and
to give new values to native culture within the framework of
colonial domination. This is why we arrive at a proposition which
at first sight seems paradoxical: the fact that in a
colonized country the most elementary, most savage, and the most undifferentiated
nationalism is the most fervent and efficient means of defending
national culture” (Fanon, 1963: 244). Although aware that
nationalism and the national consciousness – which as the most
developed form of culture allows for conditions that in turn bring about
also an international consciousness – should not be
equated, Fanon adds: “If man is known by his acts, then we will
say that the most urgent thing today for the intellectual is to
build up his nation… by the discovery and encouragement of
universalizing values. Far from keeping aloof from other
nations, therefore, it is national liberation which leads the nation
to play its part on the stage of history” (Fanon, 1963: 247).
We can encounter a
similar line of thinking with our own Racin. Namely, imbued by the
ideas of the communist Internationale, he claims that the
history of the Macedonian national - liberation
struggles stands in a strange causality with the politics of the
Balkan imperialist forces, thus dependent on “the struggles of
the ripe…imperialist bourgeoisie from the leading European
countries, which since the demise of the Ottoman Empire,
develops an interest in taking over the basis and spheres of
influence in the Balkans” (Racin, 1987: 177), furthering this
claim with an analysis of the territorial aspirations of
Macedonia’s neighboring nations towards Macedonia, for which he writes:
“To this end, the bourgeoisie mobilizes an army of scholars
and charlatans, which then create ‘a theory’ about the national
belonging and the right of their bourgeoisie to annex a piece
of land or an entire county. If the land in question were a
colony, then the annexation came alongside a ‘civilizing’
mission, whereas if the appetites went towards a ‘link’ from the rival’s
chain, then all of the historical remnants would get falsified,
hyperbolized, transformed beyond recognition, all with one single purpose, to
prove the ‘historical’, ‘bloody’, ‘heritage’ right of their
bourgeoisie to rule over those lands...And all of the theories about the ‘blood-line’
belonging of those lands to a certain imperialist state,
about the ‘historical’ mission of that state, and other
fabrications would objectively serve the reactionary goals…Due to these
reasons, Macedonia became ‘the bone of contention’
between the Serbian and the Bulgarian bourgeoisie, to which both
camps directed their predatory eyes and could not come
to any terms. Due to these reasons, came the interfering of
the Serbian and the Bulgarian imperialists in the Macedonian
national-liberation fight, which in turn had a fatal impact on
the Macedonian people and the process of their national
awakening” (Racin, 1987: 174- 175-179; my italics).
It stands as fact
that such progressive and bold statements by Kosta Solev created difficulties for
the hegemonic-holistic structures which held together,
in a colonial dependency, each articulation of spirit and ethnicity, all in the
name of one “unified” national history and culture. The events
in Lopushnik (Лопушник) in 1943 are thus a symptomatic
occurrence which to this day remains as neither fully disclosed nor
openly discussed (or for that matter, problematized) by
our own political public. Certainly, this is not the question to which I could
offer a succinct answer, but what I find intriguing is the knowledge
that comes as a result from these events – namely, that every speech,
every discussion on the topic of cultural diversity in this
space expands the political realm of action. That is to say,
although the discursive constituting of the Macedonian nation
in the works of Racin took place under the veil of the
Communist Party, namely, through the ideological prism of
the Lumpenproletariat that Kosta Solev was a member of, its
emancipating and at the time forbidden ideological
consciousness clearly defied the present,
established, fortified as such, powerful hegemony which
feared Racin’s influence with the people, particularly his ideas regarding the
Macedonian identity, that many others revered and supported.
Similar
observations, but due to a different ideological and
theoretical motivation, are made by the author of the book Text.Nation. Identity:
The Interpretation of the Black Mires of the Macedonian History. He,
among the rest, writes the following: “…I’ll start with the
claim that both Croatian and Macedonian history were in the
position of subjugated subjects. Namely, within the
political borders of the Hapsburg and the Ottoman Empires, there were
a multitude of territorially interlinked cultures without the
necessary political protection. This unfortunate fact asked that the
Croatian, as well as the Macedonian nationalism, carry
out simultaneously two difficult tasks. The first task was the
creation of ‘high culture’ (I’d like to remind us that this could not
have been made possible without an élite…the role of the intelligentsia
was paramount due to the fact that the nation state had not yet
been created)… The second task was to create a sovereign state”
(Kramarić, 2009: 67-68). “In the case of Croatia and
Macedonia – Kramarić adds – since they belonged to
multi-ethnic empires, there were exceptional individuals/engaged
intellectuals, who…practiced nationalism calling upon the
right to adhere to a differentiated cultural identity and a
political autonomy” (Kramarić, 2009: 73; my italics). Kramarić
further develops this observation in one of the many footnotes which
can be found in this important book about Macedonia and
the Macedonian identity, as he references Anthony Smith and Ramachandra Guha
which view identity as more of a cultural form rather than a
political doctrine (Kramarić, 2009: 69). Certainly, here he refers to
the positive nationalist occurrences, namely the classical ethnic
nationalism, which disregarding whether found in the Hapsburg or the Ottoman
or the Romanov or the Karadjordje Empire, came as an
answer to the imperialist nationalism that had instigated the political and
ethnic self awareness of the colonized peoples.
Unfortunately, neither Racin lived long enough to witness
Macedonia’s sovereignty nor did Fanon live long enough to witness the decolonization
of the countries of the Third World. And here are some of Fanon’s
thoughts on the subject: “The nation is not only the condition of
culture, its fruitfulness, its continuous renewal,
and its deepening. It is also a necessity. It is the fight for
national existence which sets culture moving and opens to it the doors of
creation…The first necessity is the re-establishment of
the nation in order to give life to national culture in
the strictly biological sense of the phrase”(Fanon, 1963: 244-245).
Earlier on in the text I mentioned that the journalistic
work of Racin stands as a specific way of observing and
interpreting history and tradition. His varied essays may not represent a
stirring intellectual challenge as those by Fanon; they are more
akin to a medium which served as a conduit for Racin to transmit his views
on language, nationhood and culture. Through them, Racin
dealt with the significant aspects of society, with the
interpretation of history, with the problems of power, with the hopes
for the future, since there is no letter freed from the
weight of ideology, which we are not always aware of serving or
partaking. Terry Eagleton is right when he says that we always
label as ideological the interests of others, and never our own
ones, underlining that: “I am not going to argue, then, for a ‘political criticism’
which would read literary texts in light of certain values
which are related to political beliefs and actions; all criticism
does this…The difference between a ‘political’ and ‘non-political’ criticism
is just the difference between the prime minister and
the monarch…”(Eagleton, 2008: 182).
This kind of
reasoning finds its place also in the critical work produced by
Racin, which seemingly concerns itself with literary whereas in
fact it deals with significant social and national questions.
Therefore, it comes as no surprise that Gane Todorovski
(Гане Тодоровски) would describe Racin
in the following way: “Racin was a force of time and nature, an affecter of
change. He spoke in the name of the people and the art
and the class, leaving behind him the imprints of Krale Marko’s
spirit in the history of a time. He had the honor to lead a
movement, to outspread his wings, and while still alive, the
foresight to look to the future, a powerful legacy
which lasts forever, so as to transform itself into a lasting drive
towards unification, and as such to become the spiritual ground
for the enlightened spaces of Freedom” (Todorovski, 1985:
242-243). To be “a force of time and nature, and an affecter of
change” is the trademark of public intellectuals, like Kosta Racin
himself, who through words and action had built himself
into the Macedonian national history, literature and culture.
Seventy-plus years after Racin’s and Fanon’s
observations, the author of Text.Nation. Identity, by closing
the chapter on certain key issues regarding the nation and identity, as a
true “post-Marxist” literary critic (with great respect towards this
ideology which proclaims the dialectic materialism), concludes with the following
words which most aptly reflect the thesis of this
study. He states: “In this book we showed that the idea
about a political homeland was developed by the intellectuals:
the politicians, the literati, the writers of history, the
lawyers, the philosophers, “the promoters” of a national
consciousness. It was formed in the speeches, in the theories
about public law and in the theories about the past. In the songs,
the political pamphlets and the national anthems, they had
created the place and the role of the nation, while through the schools, the
media, the newspapers and the books, this line of thinking
become communal and shared by the masses. This, without
question, confirms that the constituting of a nation, on the one
hand, and its radical modernization, on the other, are only a
couple of complementary processes” (Kramarić, 2009:
18-19; my italics).
Guided by his cosmopolitan spirit and by the intellectual observations made about the Macedonian national question, about the Macedonian literature and culture, Kosta Solev Racin builds on what his predecessors had initiated (Misirkov-Мисирков, Chupovski- Чуповски …), leaving a permanent bequest in the national consciousness of the Macedonian intelligentsia, which, even today, fights the same battles in the field of the world’s diplomacy. Each reflection on Racin stands as a humble contribution in that direction.
Literature:
Eagleton, Terry.
“Conclusion: Political Criticism”, in: Literary Theory: An Introduction, 3rd
Edition.
Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2008.
Fanon, Frantz. The
Wretched of the Earth. Trans. into English by Constance Farrington. New York:
Grove Press, 1963.
Kramarić, Zlatko.
Identitet. Tekst. Nacija: interpretacije crnila makedonske Povijesti. Zagreb:
Ljevak,
2009.
Racin, Kosta. Проза
и публицистика (in English: Prose and Journalistic Articles). Skopje: Nasha
Kniga, 1987.
Todorovski, Gane. Со
збор кон зборот (in English: With Words For Words). Skopje: Nasha Kniga,
1985.
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