The Macedonian playwright Goran Stefanovski, working against the background of ex-Yugoslavia, has long used the microcosm of the theatre to address shifting politics, disintegrating identities, and violence in both physical and spiritual levels. His most well-known work, which encapsulates this lifelong address, is perhaps Divo Meso, an intimate family drama that speaks to the overarching condition of the Macedonian nation, as it is subsumed by invasive forces. In this following essay, Sofija Popovska discusses how the play’s oft-overlooked pathogenic themes dialogue with other texts and narratives from across history, and how, seen along these lines, it speaks universally to the private tragedy of loss, as hidden within the greater global narrative of cultural collisions.
The horseman on the white horse was clad in a showy and barbarous attire. . . While his horse continued galloping, he was bending his bow in order to spread pestilence abroad. At his back swung the brass quiver filled with poisoned arrows, containing the germs of all diseases.
—Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
In Scene VIII of Goran Stefanovski’s 1979 theatrical piece, Divo Meso, a destitute Macedonian household is paid a visit by a German investor, who offers to buy their house in order to have it remodeled into a showroom. Upon his arrival, Maria, the mother of the family, plunges into reverie, ruminating about a mythical condition she’s certain she’s plagued by: the eponymous divo meso. It is, we are told, an “old wives’ tale”—flesh which forms around a hair inside the throat, and grows until its victim asphyxiates. Despite its superstitious roots, Maria’s fear sublimates the intuition of a condition more cataclysmic and widespread: the body of Macedonian society, weakened by discord and poverty, being infiltrated by foreign interests as if by a pathogen. Transformed into an eschatological growth, the will of their German visitor continues its indomitable conquest throughout the play, leading the family to a coda marked by desolation, surrender, and powerless rage.
Though indicated by the title, the element of illness in Divo Meso hasn’t been explored much, relegated to the background in favor of discussing the loss of tradition. Regardless, the pathogen metaphor is especially apt at describing imperialist intervention into cultures; rather than cultivating a mutualistic or commensalistic relationship between two consenting cultures, it introduces a drastically one-sided power dynamic, to the profit of one and the undoing of another. However, before we delve further into the specificities of Divo Meso, I would like to invite you to consider two episodes, one historical and one literary, that tell stories of cultural contagion. These will help unravel the pathogen-host relationship in its cultural, imperialist context, and illuminate individual processes that comprise it—such as the transformation of identity into a collision site of imposed, internalized, and inherent traits. Rather than the reductive (albeit also valid) reading of Divo Meso as a tragedy of familial and national scope, a simultaneous reading of the following tragic—and in many ways analogous—texts will allow for a richer understanding of the theatrical piece, one that includes transcultural motifs.
On June 23, 1763, trader and land speculator William Trent recorded in his diary that two Native American diplomats had arrived at Fort Pitt in order to persuade the British to abandon the location. After negotiations failed, the British offered the Delaware emissaries a parting gift. “Out of our regard to them we gave them two Blankets and a Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect,” wrote Trent. It remains unknown whether this instance of biological warfare succeeded, though the Native American population around Fort Pitt was “struck hard” by smallpox in the spring and summer of 1763. This wasn’t the first, nor last tale of contamination to be found in the imperialist trajectories of Western Europeans. Engraved upon traditions, echoing through languages, and rising scar-like from the surface of collective memory, the image of Western Europe as a cataclysmic pathogen becomes a motif, repeated unto the ages of ages.
As soon as the enigmatic, promethean Mustafa Sa’eed arrives in a small Sudanese village in Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North, the fabric of the small local community begins to come apart. Unprecedented strife overtakes the inhabitants, resulting in alienation, violence, and a grotesque murder-suicide, which takes the lives of a young widow and a village elder. All this was catalyzed when Sa’eed, driven by a vendetta against the colonial West, went to England, seduced numerous English women, and manipulated them to the brink of sanity, becoming contaminated with Western imperialism in the process—contracting the “germ of a deadly disease that assailed them a thousand years ago.” Symptomatic of contagion is Sa’eed’s propensity for collecting artifacts; his conquests, sexual as well as social, are commemorated by a formidable collection of keepsakes—souvenirs, artworks, bits of correspondence—all stored in a secret room available only to him and his closest friend. Sa’eed himself grimly announces his metamorphosis: “I, over and above everything else, am a colonizer.” However, the transformation doesn’t fully alleviate his state of oppression, as he simultaneously undergoes a process of self-objectification. “He wants to be discovered, like some historical object of value,” the narrator concludes, having examined the contents of Sa’eed’s museum of triumphs. Thus, contagion is defined by both violence and self-destruction. This holds true for its effect on the village people, as well; the noxious dichotomy of internal and external annihilation is perfectly encapsulated by the murder-suicide committed by Sa’eed’s young widow, who had become “another person” after their marriage. Ironically, though locked in a battle with the colonial West, Sa’eed’s identity becomes a site dominated by Western cultural archetypes; he enacts qualities assigned to “Oriental” cultures for the sake of seducing English women, and comes to authentically embody the brooding, tortured Romantic hero, akin to Childe Harold or Heathcliff, which still fails him in the end. “Othello was a lie,” announces the disillusioned Sa’eed.
Now, we arrive at the story of Divo Meso. Though written in 1979, the drama is set in pre-WWII Skopje. At the heart of the narrative is the Andreevikj family: Dimitrija, the patriarch, whose masonry job had cost him his legs; Maria, his wife; the three sons—Simon, a jaded waiter; Stefan, an ambitious car dealership employee; Andreja, an idealistic grocery store clerk; and lastly Vera, Simon’s wife. Other significant figures include Herzog, the Jewish owner of the car dealership, his daughter Sara, and the mysterious German stranger Hermann Klaus. The drama opens with the talk of approaching war, and some expository characterization of the three sons. Simon is emasculated and powerless, and his perpetual physical plights reflect his emotional state of anguish and embitterment; moreover, his alienation from his trade and severance from creativity is embodied, in Fisher King fashion, by his inability to produce a son. Andreja, the youngest, is his diametrical opposite—though his line of work is exhausting, he finds purpose in fighting for a revolutionary cause. Finally, Stefan is ambitious and acute, but emotionally unavailable to his family and obsessed with social status. Their parents, meanwhile, struggle to remain in the past at all possible costs: Dimitrija holds on to the house, a building which had cost him his legs, and Maria wades through mythical trances, a volatile semiotic space where external events produce analogues encoded in the language of folklore. As the story progresses, even the flimsy balance the family had been able to maintain until that point begins to dissipate.
When Hermann Klaus, a cryptic businessman allegedly sent by the German branch of the car dealership that Stefan works for, begins to negotiate a purchase of the Andreevikj family home, he is initially met with adamant resistance on Dimitrija’s part and a vague, yet open attitude on Stefan’s. The seemingly unyielding state of affairs does little to deter Klaus, however, nor does it last very long. Soon enough, he removes Herzog from his position as head of the Macedonian branch of the dealership, using his Jewish origin as a rationale. Herzog’s replacement is a scheming and unscrupulous employee, who then allows Klaus to seize the property. Here, it’s important to mention that the house is a twofold symbol; on one hand, it’s a political representation of Macedonia, but on the other, it stands in for its unique cultural makeup. Thus, Klaus’ objective becomes—rather than a desire for profit—the insidious pursuit of cultural dominance, and the fact that he seeks to subjugate beyond the economic level is reinforced towards the end of the play. When Stefan attempts to convince him to let his family keep their home, Klaus makes him a crude sexual offer, verging on assault. The final fallout, while mostly Klaus’ doing, is contributed to by the mounting tensions and frustrations among and within the family members themselves: the family house is lost, Andreja is imprisoned for an attempted revolution, Simon dies of a heart attack for which he blames Stefan, who, in turn, fires a shot meant for Klaus into the air. Dimitrija, who had spent the duration of the play carving a whistle, finds that it makes a barely audible, hollow sound.
Why mention two cases of contagion, one physical and the other spiritual, in a discussion about a Macedonian play? As mentioned earlier, what I hope to achieve is a thematic precedent to illuminate the motif of a contaminated, oppressed culture, forced to incorporate the “germ” of the invading culture without experiencing either the alleviation of the othering process (often internalized as self-objectification), or the conscious appraisal of its own values. Bringing this process to the surface will help to understand the way Divo Meso deals with Macedonian identity, addressing the failure of tradition to survive foreign interference and the disturbing power imbalance between Western and Eastern European countries, while also allowing space to acknowledge internal and internalized problems that are no less significant factors in the fallout.
After a pathogen enters the body, not even convalescence can offer the possibility of a return to the antecedent state. Antibodies will have formed; the flesh remembers past battles that might otherwise perish with time. Whatever positive change might arise from this immunization, it is still necessarily nonconsensual, and thus carries the implicit danger of spawning traits that are poorly integrated within the recipient’s identity. Divo Meso presents a spiritual counterpart to Mustafa Sa’eed in Stevo, the ambitious, capable second son in the Andreevikj family and an embodiment of Western values such as individualism and enterprise. His tension towards his family—which he considers to be the hierarchical opposite to the “cream of the crop” executives who have access to foreigners—reveals that he has internalized an essentially Western viewpoint towards them, seeing their Macedonian background as a symptom of backwardness and stagnation. Klaus gives voice to this Western perspective, describing the Balkans as being “constantly, eternally falling. Into the same ditches. In the same way. Again and again. Persistently and stubbornly. Never gaining any experience.” Though Stefan’s cultural allegiance to the West is transformed by the end of the play, when Klaus reveals himself to be a scheming coward, the metamorphosis provides no relief: situated between the now-shattered image of the West and a homeland demolished and thus no longer defensible, Stefan fires a bullet into the air. The bullet had been intended for one of two ends: to end his own life or that of Klaus. However, either choice would require an assertion of an identity, now rendered obsolescent in a duel with no survivors, and Stefan’s bullet becomes an absurd full-stop, following a series of nothingnesses.
The theme of wasted potential is echoed thrice more—Dimitrija’s wooden whistle, Andreja’s failed revolutionary attempt, and Simon’s failure to beget a son. While these failures are in many ways personal and national—a theme richly explored throughout Macedonian literary and media criticism—Klaus’ role is nevertheless central in the finality of their tragedy. As mentioned previously, it is upon his arrival that Maria begins to feel ill, and this “infection” then proceeds to thrive off of the structural defects of the family and the society which surrounds it. With Klaus’ intervention, the household, a crucial meeting point for the different, often conflicting perspectives of the family members is irrevocably lost, and with it, the possibility of future change. What remains is existence upon Klaus’ land, which, by his imposed terms, is transformed a state hostile to authenticity, be it peaceful or tumultuous.
A reading of Divo Meso alone does demonstrate the main thematic thread in the play: a Faulknerian battle that cannot be won because, due to an enormous power disparity, it is never fought in the first place. A comparative reading with other texts, however, not only reveals transcultural commonalities, but also sheds light upon the drama’s subtle processes between the arrival of the colonizing force and the final fallout. Namely, it brings to the surface the inner battles of the characters, ultimately amounting to a war decisively lost. On one hand, their relationship to their own culture is tarnished by an internalized view from the imperialist perspective; on the other, they are either unable to fully embody the figure of the colonizer, or disillusionment eventually replaces their high regard for the imperialist force. Both possibilities lead to the same outcome. Being unable to tap into either their own or the invading culture as a means of finding purpose, they are left with nothing at all.
Sofija Popovska is currently studying for a master’s degree in Comparative Literature at the Georg-August University of Göttingen. Her first poetry collection, Faces in the Crowd, was published in 2021 in North Macedonia. Her other work has been featured in online publications such as Circumference Magazine and Litlog, among others.
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