orchestra’s director, furthermore, had grown up in the nearby Croatian region of Baranja before being evacuated to the country’s interior during the war. She thus had witnessed firsthand the fact that living within Croatian territory did not guarantee a secure, fearless existence; intermittent ethnic tensions and problems with untripped landmines and buildings weakened by shellfire keep the threat of further destruction alive even today. Under what conditions, then, would this director and the parents travel to foreign territories that presented no such physical threats? Nearly two decades after the war, how did experiences and narratives of daring movement into war-torn territories interact with the affect of a fear that has persisted despite attempts to rationalize it into insignificance?
Such a dissonance between thought and feeling is affective block at its most basic: the ability of feeling to block (in delimitation) a conscious, rationalizing, and contradictory understanding of the world. It does so through an accrual of embodied intensity that in its generation is “disconnected from meaningful sequencing, from narration” (Massumi 1996, 219). Yet this chapter also examines the “interanimation” (Gray 2014, 9) in musical spheres between affective and narrative registers of security and risk. Probing under what wartime and postwar conditions affective attachments, tales, and eventually traveling musicians themselves reached beyond the boundaries of secured Croatian lands, it shows how a nation-state’s core territory emerges physically and discursively through the common site of the body. It argues ultimately for a new way of understanding the emergence of terms of becoming and of Otherness (a national “we,” a racialized distinction of “us” and “them”) through intimate, musical relationships with dangerous areas and presence. It thus demonstrates how this affective block is also an aggregation of feeling, a building of intense intimacy as individuals begin to feel like a “we.”
One of the first dangerous areas abandoned was Baranja, whose refugees saw both themselves and tambura traditions as passive wartime victims and did not immediately hear in this music the potential for responding physically to the realities of warfare. The particular poignancy of this northeast Croatian region’s capture for its residents instead often inspired tambura music composition as a form of communication from afar. Ballads such as “Tell the World the Truth about Baranja” (“Istinu svijetu o Baranji reci”) connected narratives of threat, endangered traditions, and calls to armed engagement. Released in 1992 by Slavonski Bećari, it tells of the peaceful village life of food, wine, family, and tamburaši that the Šokci, one of the easternmost groups of Croats, had enjoyed in Baranja before its occupation by an “evildoer” (the Yugoslav People’s Army).
A resonant song for Croatians during Baranja’s 1991–1998 occupation, it was, however, only partially accurate in its claim that the tambura had fallen silent while the rifle narrated (and caused) the falling of “cold steel” and other wartime dangers. Certainly from the perspective of Croats such as the “Pajo Kolarić” director (then a child), who had fled from Baranja, the rifle and not the tambura was sounding in their home villages. This likely rang true despite the fact that their Serb neighbors or the Yugoslav soldiers positioned there could have been playing instruments at the time. As Kruno Kardov notes, Croats in nonoccupied cities such as Osijek imagined towns and cities in Eastern Slavonia and Baranja not merely cleansed of Croats but altogether devoid of residents, though many Serbs remained throughout the occupation (Kardov 2007, 66). Yet as this song demonstrates, tambura music was also an effective sonic medium by which to “tell the tale” of war to nonoccupied Croatia and the world beyond. In this respect, the tambura remained decidedly outspoken throughout the war.
In 1992, however, tambura performance was also becoming important for reclaiming Croatian territory, establishing postconflict transnational networks, and other material processes that, like the advance of riflemen, have reconfigured musical performance’s human geography in Croatia and beyond. Tambura music’s connection to danger became most concrete during this period as some tamburaši, far from playing it safe, used songs and performances to confront not only discursively but also physically the actions of Yugoslavian forces. Prominent tambura ensembles’ movement during and after the war and the conflicts’ narrativization in publications, song texts, and other media illuminate the resonance and affective capacities of war, danger, and aggression for tambura performance in independent Croatia.
I consider these processes’ material and spatial dimensions by examining diverse divisions and intimacies in relation to national musical belonging, which has intensified since 1991 through tambura networks centered in Croatia. The chapter focuses on the regional and international activities of the STD “Pajo Kolarić” as a primary case study while also examining affiliated or comparable professionals such as Slavonski Bećari and the tambura/rock singer and songwriter Miroslav Škoro. All hail from Osijek, which Yugoslav forces bombarded but never occupied. I consider their performances and discourses on tambura music during and after the war, both in Croatia and abroad. The chapter further elaborates “national intimates” as an approach to transnational nationalism, its tambura narrativization, and the intersections of secession, militarization, diaspora, affective block, and constructions of national music.
In examining the flows and disjunctures in ensembles’ movement across these territories to reconnect to intimates beyond Croatia’s new national borders, I also consider the nature of Yugoslavia’s disintegration, or “balkanization,” as it has of course also been labeled. This term, which emerged from studies of Southeastern Europe, has come to connote rupture and fragmentation in geopolitical entities the world over. Its use reflects the focus of much political discourse, journalism, and scholarship on the creation of separate, often mutually hostile or fearful nation-states out of larger republics such as Yugoslavia, Ethiopia, Micronesia, Indonesia, and Sudan.3 Just as notably, however, national independence has often been cause for intensification of communal ties and intimacy across the very borders it has erected.4 I consider the affective work of making and narrativizing border crossings through musical performance in contexts of wartime danger and fears.
DANGEROUS PERFORMANCE
The most pressing territorial concern for such ensembles throughout the 1990s was the return to lands where tamburas had perceivably fallen silent. Armed conflict and bombing severely limited transport of passengers and mail via car and train, and Croatian media saturated their programs with fear-inspiring reports on the dangers of accessing contested regions (Povrzanović 1993, 140). Even for those in areas not directly affected by the encroaching Yugoslav forces, occupied Slavonian territories and cities in danger of capture and destruction became objects of longing tinged by threat. Several prominent tambura ensembles took advantage of opportunities to fight for, return to, and reclaim these territories. Their efforts to stabilize the state’s outlying lands and borders were important not only for physically and symbolically instituting Croatian sovereignty but also for resurrecting access to communities in neighboring states, Central Europe, and North America.
The act of pushing toward the front lines and borders responded to the perceived and, for many tamburaši, physically experienced dangers of war. Svanibor Pettan notes that the war “brought together musicians and musical genres that would otherwise hardly be considered compatible. The shared necessity to neutralize the threat made folk musicians, opera singers, and rappers perform on the same occasions” (1998, 14). Music fulfilled three functions: encouraging “those fighting on the front lines and those hiding in shelters,” provoking and humiliating “those seen as enemies,” and calling on “those not directly endangered—including fellow citizens [and] the Diaspora” (13).
Often situated or originating in East Croatian regions that felt the war most heavily, tamburaši themselves spanned the spectrum of endangerment. Their responses often extended beyond such discursive functions to include direct physical, musical, and affective engagement with the war’s dangers. Analyzing music’s relationship to territories and deterritorialization, Deleuze and Guattari write that musical expression is “inseparable” from a minoritarian becoming “because of the ‘danger’ inherent in any line that escapes, in any line of flight or creative deterritorialization:
