MONTENEGRO IN REBECCA WEST’S BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON: THE LITERATURE OF TRAVELLERS AS A SOURCE FOR POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY

The literature of travellers represents a key foundation upon which geography was built as a social construct. It depicts the territorial reality on a personal level. The literature of travellers has been at the origin of popular geographical knowledge. In 1941 the great British novelist Rebecca West (1892-1983) published a chronicle of her travels through Yugoslavia from 1936 to 1938: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. Her book is a good example and a relevant test of the literature of travellers as a source of political geography. Actually, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is West’s political response to the Balkans rather than an account of her journey through Yugoslavia. Through her writing, West has contributed to the shape of a different public opinion about Yugoslavia and its peoples which continues to live on. Moreover, her book strongly influenced the Anglo-Saxon policy makers on their comprehension of Yugoslavia. West significantly depicted Montenegro in its history, people, traditions and politics by means of pictures regarding Boka Kotorska, Budva, Cetinje, Kolasin, Mount Lovcen, Plav, and Skadar Lake. On the basis of the chapter devoted to Montenegro in West’s book, the paper will focus on its features of political geography through an analysis of significant geosymbols.

Ključne riječi: politička geografija, nacionalni identitet, geografija prikaza, prostorna percepcija, geosimboli, putopisna literatura, Crna Gora, Jugoslavija, Balkan, Rebecca West Travel Literature and Geography: Some Theoretical Issues Halfway between higher culture and talk litterature, the travel book is a literary genre which is considered a popular work today.For centuries it was one of the key bases upon which geography was built as a social construct (Scaramellini, 1996).Discovery travel can be considered a typical experience of modern Europe (Stafford, 1984;Charmasson, 2010).Consequently, the travel book in a way represents the heart of the relationship between the travel experience and the geographical knowledge.Travel literature depicts the territorial reality.Nevertheless, it is done on a personal level which has the effect of distorting the images and selecting the memories.Travel literature is a true archive of cognitive practices.The account of journeys realized in 1936-1937-1938 by Rebecca West through Yugoslavia was titled Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.It is truly an exemplary text.Why?It offers many significant historical data which are accompanied by the author's comments about a not well-known country by the Westerners at that time, and a part of what was still the Ottoman Empire in 1912.From the strict viewpoint of political geography, West's book represents an outstandingly important document insofar as one can consider it an intelligence report which had a role in shaping the perception of Yugoslavia among the political establishment in Great Britain and in the US.
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is a woman's testimony based on personal experience of Yugoslavia, in which one finds specific forms of feminine sensitivity and expression.Consequently, it is not always easy for a masculine observer to decipher the subtlety and sensitivity of West's Yugoslav experiences, notably the significances which are attached to those experiences and the ways in which she articulates them (Berdoulay, 1988).Rebecca West's analysis often follows more from an anthropological commitment than from any sense of adventure.Within such a special context, it is necessary to establish a clear distinction between travel and tourism.West never considered herself a tourist, but a traveller.Historically speaking, tourists were those who followed in travellers' footsteps.The key feature of tourism is the travel realized as leisure.In contrast, the traveller is involved with serious work.The travel is an acceptation, a legitimate purpose in itself.The public travel account takes the exceptional, abstract and generalized feature of an ethnography, while the private travel account takes the shape of a travelogue (Bianchi, 1985;Della Dora, 2009).Black Lamb and Grey Falcon made a contribution in the development of the Anglo-Saxon public opinion about Yugoslavia and its peoples.This process of forming opinion is a complex one, and it acts at different levels.West's book shoulders a very strong political dimension.She even explained that within the travel literature the study of interactions of political and religious ideas was the matter (West, 1958).
One can read Black Lamb and Grey Falcon as a sustained meditation upon the theme of power.This meditation is present throughout the book.The depth of West's political committment underlines the author's bitterness when Yugoslavia became Communist in 1945.Commander of the Order of the British Empire, West (1892West ( -1983) ) was an active feminist who took part in the suffragette movement before WW1.She was a radical socialist at the beginning of her writer's career, but she became a passionate anti-Communist at the end of her life.She wrote papers for The New Yorker, The New Republic, The Sunday Telegraph, and The New York Herald Tribune.She attended the Nuremberg Trial.If Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is a standard of the travel literature, this book, widely favourable to the Serbs, represents a noteworthy review of history and ethnography of the Balkans, but also an advanced and clear thought regarding Nazism.

Rebecca West and Yugoslavia
It is very clear that the unchanging character of a country's history means that its territory and its people cannot be reinterpreted without the traveller being overwhelmed by the absolute weight of the past legacies (Barnes, Duncan, 1992).Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was published in two volumes in 1941 just when Great Britain fought alone for its survival against the Nazi barbarity.In 1936, 1937and 1938, Rebecca West did not visit a Yugoslavia at war when she and her husband, the banker Henry Maxwell Andrews (married in 1930), ventured into a country which the West did not know well and which took the name of Yugoslavia only in 1929.Of course, there was no civil war in Yugoslavia but one must say that Yugoslavia was an artificial creation of the victorious Allied Powers for the benefit of Serbia which had paid the price of blood at their side between 1914 and 1918.At the moment of Rebecca West's journeys, the country was suffering from Serb centralism.The Ustashe separatism in Croatia was a minor and irrelevant community of several hundred members, most of whom were in Italy.In the 1930s, the most important political party was the conciliatory Croatian Peasant Party led by Vladko Maček.That party frequently won the elections on the present-day Croatia's territory, and it used democratic methods for improving the position of the Croatian people within the Kingdom of Yugoslavia.From 1933, Nazi Germany used ethnic cleansing (Jews and Gypsies), and political murder became common: Stjepan Radić (1871Radić ( -1928)), leader of the Croatian Peasant Party, had been slaughtered on the floor of the National Assembly in Belgrade, whereas King Alexander I had been murdered in Marseilles in 1934.During her Yugoslav tours, West quickly discovered an underlying stream of violence which was trapped in the collective memory and which was linked to the stormy past of that Balkan area.
Rebecca West came to the Balkans for the first time in 1936 when visiting Greece, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia.She did not need much time to fall in love with Yugoslavia and its peoples.At the time of her Yugoslav stays, she experienced an enormous emotional gap, and she had been looking for something to fill that gap.Although she achieved considerable international fame both as a novelist and as a social commentator, frequently agressive, West was not happy in her private life and she suffered from a mass of conflictual frights (Rollyson, 1995).A ten-year love affair with the British novelist Herbert George Orwell (1866-1946) had just ended.He was 26 years older than her.Rebecca West had a son fathered by him.According to her biographer Victoria Glendinning, she had ended all sexual intercourse with her husband (Glendinning, 1987).In 1935 the British Council had sent her to Scandinavia and the Baltic States for dispensing lectures.It was her opportunity to stand up for Finland.The three Yugoslav journeys came and changed her viewpoint.The same love story occurred between her and Yugoslavia as between Ernest Hemingway and Spain (Death in the Afternoon, For Whom the Bell Tolls).

Structurally speaking, Black Lamb and Grey
Falcon is a seamless book even if the writing is supported by the obviousness and experience of three different travels.Actually, West's very strong committment is the key element which confers to the book its full significance and grandeur.She knew her topic and wrote her book when Europe was on the brink of war.Within her book, West emphasized with strenght her hate for Nazism which was present in Germany since 1933.This is also the reason why she has nothing but contempt for the autonomist process which led to the founding of the Ustashe Croatian State (1941State ( -1945)).Let us speak clearly: on one hand, West did not like the Croats very much because she compared them to Irish Catholics, sometimes unfairly.On the other hand, she identified herself very strongly with the Serbs.She took her choice within the context of that time: Yugoslavia was a constitutional monarchy under the regency of Prince Paul.It was not so much a nation as a federation of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, plus Bosnians, Macedonians, Montenegrins and a scatter of diverse minorities.When backing up one of the Yugoslav wings, West did not state only a personal preference because she also placed herself in a particular political and historical context: Yugoslavia had been invaded, within 10 days, in April 1941 by the Wehrmacht when the Regency and the General Simović's pro-Allied Powers government lost with all hands.
Life after death?That is the central theme of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon if we decode its symbolism.The black lamb is offered as a sacrifice by a Gypsy woman on St George's Eve in order to expect a child.According to West, it is the illustration of a contemptible belief: one receives a wealth of life in return for a gift to death.The grey falcon is the epic bird which gives knez (prince) Lazar the choice before the Kosovo Polje Battle (13 June 1389) between the heavenly kingdom and the earthly kingdom.At the Sheep's Field near Skopje, West witnessed the black lamb sacrificial slaughter on the occasion of a repulsive ceremony of fertility for barren women.Life comes after death.The same symbolism applies to the grey falcon.After the Kosovo Polje defeat, Serbian people suffered a fifty-year Ottoman subjection, but it saved their soul.Through this double symbolism, West provides an understanding of the historical strenghts which forged the Balkan lands (Matera, 1996;Nerozzi Bellman, 2001).

Montenegro's Geosymbols according to Rebecca West: A Political Geography
Within a bright PhD thesis devoted to Montenegro (the first one published in France till now), Amael Cattaruzza puts forward the notion that symbolic places occupy an important position regarding the acceptance and assimilation of national representation at collective and individual levels (Cattaruzza, 2011).Those places engrave with all individuals some specific mental plans regarding the relationship with the Nation.As he points out very pertinently, the study of symbolic places in Montenegro implies that the significance of these geosymbols be defined not only with regard to their location, but also with their involved communities with times and memories.But, by the way, what is a geosymbol?Bonnemaison proposed the best definition: a place, a route, an area which, for cultural, political or religious reasons, shoulders a symbolic dimension which reinforces some peoples or ethnic groups in their identity (Bonnemaison, 1981).
Rebecca West is not a geographer, but a writer of travel accounts (Saunders, 2010).Consequently, she is aware of the field like the geographer.She speaks through symbols in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.These develop some significant elements of political geography which are amalgamated around some strong key themes:

Montenegro in the heart of Ancient Illyria
West is a woman of the field.She knows how to get the field to speak when she sets her own knowledge in motion.When entering Boka Kotorska's shores, she goes through Risan, a small town located in Boka's background near Perast.There she recognizes one of the oldest towns in the world, but also the capital city of Ancient Illyria and the home of Teuta, the last Illyrian Queen (231-228 BC) before the Roman conquest.With this noticing, West looks at Montenegro in its past political geography.Consequently, she grants an old historical root to the country (p.256) (1).

Centuries-old Venetian influence and the opening to the West
For five centuries  the Balkans' political geography has been suffocated by the Ottoman Empire enslavement.The presence of the Republic of Venice allowed the Eastern Adriatic coastal areas to be secured to Catholicism and the West.West points out this feature in various sections of her book.Along the whole Boka Kotorska shore, she observes that the look is Dalmatian, i. e. the coastline is bordered by Gothic Venetian styled palaces and churches from which Perast is the quintessence (p.256).Perast was Venetian from 1420 to 1797 and it never fell into Ottoman hands.Its container is Venetian (the urban fabric), but its content is Slav (the inhabitants).She also notes that the city of Kotor is nested at the bottom of a kind of Norwegian fjord (actually a huge karstic canyon invaded by the sea).Kotor knew its greater prosperity under the Venetian regime (p.259).Located between Boka Kotorska and Bar, Budva is a small Dalmatian town which appeared not to be of interest to Venice for two reasons, according to West: on the one hand, it was located too southward from Venice; on the other hand, it was too exposed to Ottoman naval attacks (p.1066).

Anti-Ottoman independentism
Without any doubt it is the most powerful integrative principle in Montenegro.Actually, for many centuries, Montenegro was a kind of Asterix Village, as Paul Garde rightly points out.The whole Balkans suffered under the Ottoman yoke, except Montenegro.In the heart of their inaccessible upper valleys, the Montenegrin mountain tribes resisted and defended their villages.They organized punitive expeditions against the occupying forces and they gloried in cutting Ottoman heads (Garde, 1992).It is the first difference with Serbia which was occupied by the Ottoman army rabble.The second difference is the following: Montenegro had no joint border with Serbia until the partition of the Novi Pazar Sandjak in 1912 which was the final retreat of the Ottoman Empire extension in Europe.
In Boka Kotorska, West discovered that Perast is a town which never fell into Ottoman hands.The wonderful small island Gospa od Skrpjela is facing Perast.She lingered to look at a small masterpiece in the church: a bas relief represents the Ottomans who rush down the mountain to attack Perast, but they are forced back by the population (p.258).Between Perast and Kotor, the small city of Dobrota owes its prestige and fame to the exploits of its inhabitants due to the naval war with the Ottomans (p.259).West picked up the same anti-Ottoman independentism in Kotor itself: the city was destroyed by the Ottomans, but it had never surrendered to them.
The British novelist pursues this same analysis through inner Montenegro.When visiting Plav, she worked like a geographer because she explained the settlement distribution: the Montenegrin house is often isolated because, as this land was not occupied by the Ottomans, there was not the same necessity to huddle together for protection from armed raiders (p.1006).A little further on, West stoped at Andrijevica on the road to Kolasin.She pursued her analysis.She contemplated the war memorial to the Vasojević tribe with the names of 700 members who were killed in action during the ultimate war of liberation against the Ottomans.She admired the inhabitants of this area because not only were they engaged in a desperate struggle against the Ottomans, but they also defeated them on several occasions (p.1006).In her view, Andrijevica represents a strong bastion of the anti-Ottoman Montenegrin independentism because in 1702 in that place Prince-Bishop Danilo I Scepcev (1696-1735) killed the inhabitants who have been converted to Islam (p.1007).Then, West visited Kolasin.For her, this small city is also a famous place of the Montenegrin independentism: as a climax in 1858 the members of several tribes in the neighbourhood attacked the town and destroyed all the inhabitants who had kept their Albanian identity or who were Muslim (p.1075).

Inter-Christian Coexistence
During her visit to Boka Kotorska in 1936-1938, West discovered the historical coexistence between the Catholics and the Orthodox.She admired two small islands facing Perast, Sveti Juraj and Gospa od Skrpjela, which both accomodated a Catholic monastery (pp. 257-258).She was confronted with the same observation in Kotor where several Catholic and Orthodox churches peacefully coexisted within the urban fabric (pp.259-260).She found the explanation both in the long Venetian presence in that area and in the existence of a historical Croatian minority.Besides, Croatia was not very far away and its border was located at Boka Kotorska's northern entrance.West met this Catholic-Orthodox juxtaposition again in inner Montenegro, but upon another basis.It is in Kolasin: during the eighteenth century, the same thing happened there, as in many other parts of Montenegro -Catholic Albanians merged with the Montenegrins, adopting their language and the Orthodox faith (p.1015).

Relations with Russia
From the beginning of its frontal opposition with the Ottoman Empire to be driven out of Europe, Tsarist Russia became the elder protective brother of the South Slavs who were enslaved under the Ottoman yoke.During the different stages of the Orient Question's settlement, Russia was always on the side of the South Slavs.However, this relationship is perhaps more explicit with Montenegro.West brought an expressive light when she entered Cetinje: Peter the Great conceived an admiration for the South Slavs.He treated Montenegro with special favour, proclaiming Prince-Bishop Danilo as his ally "to conquer the Turk and glorify the Slav faith and name", and sending him money and gifts calculated to foster the Orthodox religion (p.1038).By the way, West emphasized that Montenegro lived from Russian grants during the nineteenth century.

Montenegro's strategic location
West was a fine observer of the field and she felt its contours and detours.During her stay in Kotor, she noticed two key elements regarding the political geography of its position.On one hand, Kotor was the necessary intersection and the gateway for Cetinje, the historical capital city which was located higher in the mountain.On the other hand, Kotor's position transformed that small town into a meeting point between the caravan trade from the interior and the seaborne trade with Italy.With the disappearance of the Republic of Venice in 1797 and of the Napoleonic Empire in 1814, Boka Kotorska was assigned to the Habsburg Empire.West mentioned the oppressive Austrian trusteeship which generated the economic decline of the Kotor area (p.259).She stayed in Andrijevica and she brought up a key aspect again: Montenegro was a major strategic place in the Adriatic (p.1009).

Montenegro's original State structure till 1910
In Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, the passages devoted to Montenegro break strongly with those devoted to Serbia.According to West, it is very clear that Montenegro was not Serbia, included in the unified Yugoslavia she visited in 1936-1938.She strongly underlined the central component which forged Montenegro's identity during modern and contemporary times: Church and State were unique and identical from Danilo I Scepcev (1696) to Danilo II (1852).This lineage of prince-bishops succeeding from uncles to nephews ensured a remarkable politico-governmental consistency.She underlined this aspect on the occasion of her stay in Andrijevica (p.1008).She thought about this topic again in Kolasin: Kolasin inhabitants developed a spirit of resistance, of independence which made them bitterly resentful after the war when Montenegro was amalgamated with Yugoslavia (p.1015).During her long visit to Cetinje, the historical capital city, West drew attention to the original political values of an independent Montenegro about which she seemed to think with nostalgia in [1936][1937][1938].The country has always struggled for its survival under difficult conditions.Montenegro was well managed when Prince-Bishop Sava II (1766-1781) died.He had a brilliant successor in the person of his nephew, Prince-Bishop Petar I (1781-1830), who was the ally of Tsar Alexander I. Afterwards, Prince-Bishop Petar II (1830-1851) was an enlightened and modernist ruler.Prince Danilo I (1852-1860) crushed the Ottoman invader at the Grahovo Battle (29 April-1 May 1858).Last, Nicholas I (1860-1918) arrived.Within 20 years, he was capable of definitely pushing the Ottomans away from the country and doubling the size of Montenegro.West conceived of him as a cunning politician able to treat European statemen like Disraeli or Gladstone as equals.King Nicholas I skillfully took advantage of Montenegro's strategic position and he was able to get grants from Turkey, Italy, Austria and Russia.West deplored that Yugoslavia be divided into provinces (banovinas) under the reign of King Alexander I after 1918 when Cetinje was set under the central control of Sarajevo, where the Muslim political party was very influential.For her, a serious political mistake had been made during WW1: the Heir Prince Petar surrendered Mount Lovcen to the Austrians in June 1916.Then, Mount Lovcen was Montenegro's high-rank place since its summit was occupied by the mausoleum of Prince-Bishop Petar II (1813-1851) which had been destroyed by the Austrians in 1916Austrians in (pp. 1036Austrians in -1063)).It was rebuilt and completed in 1974.

Conclusion: Montenegro and the Construction of Images
If West's glance on Montenegro is that of a traveller-writer, it is not one of a hurried tourist because it demonstrates a sense of the field, i. e. ability for spatial analysis with typical connotations of the Anglo-Saxon humanistic geography fin de siècle.For instance, this piece about Skadar Lake: "… the long high vista of Lake Scutari, with its grey pyramids of rock mounting towards the noon of the sky through ooze-bound in the adhesiveness of green jelly, was earth's self-drawn ideogram, expressing its own monstruosity" (p.1035).And West's other impression upon discovering Cetinje: "We climbed the sheer mountainside and dropped over the crest, and found Tsetinye.It lies in a stony crater like a town set inside the brainpan of an enormous skull.Its square stone houses, laid out in broad streets, are typically Montenegrin in a Puritanism that suffers no decoration save an occasional great tree; and all its horizons are edged with a breaking wave of rock, which at this hour was the colour of chill itself" (p.1038).
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon represents a particular image of the Balkan region which has come to be largely accepted in the English-speaking world.Maybe because she was a woman and a feminist, West brought a particular lighting about knowledge as a social construct (Allcock, Young, 2000).When observing the interwar Montenegro, she turned her attention to people, families, women, churches.According to a kind of non-Orientalist vision, she was inclined to downplay the Ottoman Empire and the Turks and to oversize Serbia.She also made both good and bad marks.Did she allow the natives to speak for themselves?Did she internalize the Western definition of the Orient in spite of her own background?The theme of Ottoman decadence is nowhere conveyed with more force or more vividness than in West's work.Her visits to Yugoslavia took place nearly a quarter of a century after the effective ejection of the Ottoman Empire from the area; thus the completeness of her condemnation is the more remarkable.This is Rebecca West's notion that Montenegro and its people are the heirs of the Classical World and that Montenegrin land is the home of great civilizations: Illyria, Roman Empire, Venice etc.
The key quality of the life in the Balkan peninsula is its proximity to Nature.This aspect is thoroughly developed in West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.The key point of the whole book is the account of her visit to the Macedonian area of the Sheep's Field.In that area West witnessed several folk rituals which were traditionally performed on St George's Eve.Two of these events moved her profoundly.The first rite involved Muslim women who were experiencing difficulty in conceiving, and embraced a large black stone in order to promote their fertility.The second rite was the black lamb sacrificial slaughter by a group of Gypsy women, in thanksgiving for the birth of a child (Allcock, Young, 2000).
When completing Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, Rebecca West delivered a lesson on political geography: "In contemplating Yugoslavia the disadvantages of Empire are manifest.I can think of no more striking relic of a crime than the despoilment of Macedonia and Kosovo, where the Turks for five hundred and fifty years robbed the native population till they got them down to a point beyond which the process could not be carried any further without danger of leaving no victims to be robbed in the future.The poverty of all Bosnians and Herzegovinians, except the Moslems and the Jews, is as ghastly an indictment of both the Turks and their successors, the Austrians.Dalmatia was picked up clean by Venice.Croatia has been held back from prosperity by Hungarian control in countless ways that have left it half an age behind its Western neighbours in material prosperity.Never in the Balkans has Empire meant trusteeship.At least, there are such trustees, but they end in jail.The South Slavs have also suffered extremely from the inability of Empires to produce men who are able both to conquer territory and to administer it.This does not apply to the portions that belonged to Austria and Venice, for these powers never conquested them and acquired them by the easier method of huckstering diplomacy; but it is the keynote of the Turkish symphony" (p.1092).
Through a referendum held on 21 May 2006, 55.5% of Montenegrins voted for the independence of their country.For a long time, Montenegro forced upon the representations of its populations as a national territory (Cattaruzza, 2011).There is an intimate relation between nationalism, political space and territorial representations.In 1936In -1938 West had felt that bottom-up nationalism in Montenegro which was based on intimate and individual representations of the nation and its territory (Dijkink, 1996).Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is still the book to read on the Balkans.It renders vividly the tensions between Croats, Serbs, and Muslims, and the inability of the great powers to understand and promote a unified Yugoslavia (Rollyson, 1995).Literature of travellers is truly a source of political geography.