Marĳa Mitrović Smuggling as a - Smuggling Anthologies

literary topic

As a kind of entrance into this type of literature on the topic of smugglers that I would like to present here, an introduction could be The Smuggler, A Tale from the Middle East.¹

A clever smuggler came to the border with a donkey. The donkey’s back was heavily laden with straw. The ofﬁcial at the border was suspicious and pulled apart the man’s bundles till there was straw all around, but not a valuable thing in the straw was found. “But I’m certain you’re smuggling something,” the ofﬁcial said, as the man crossed the border.

Now each day for ten years the man came to the border with a donkey. Although the ofﬁcial searched and search-ed the straw bundles on the donkey’s back, he never could ﬁnd anything valuable hidden in them.

Many years later, after the ofﬁcial had retired, he hap-pened to meet that same smuggler in a marketplace and said, “Please tell me, I beg you. Tell me, what were you smuggling? Tell me, if you can.”

“Donkeys,” said the man.

A person who gets involved in illegal trade, in carrying goods from one place to another when these two places are separated by a border, some form of barrier where one is charged for crossing, a place where duties are paid, such a person must certainly be dexterous, quick, courageous, and must count on such a job being risky and on the possibility that the hands of the law might get a hold of him/her at any moment.²Such a person, therefore, inevitably invests his/her internal qualities into some external, risky action. In other words, such a person features the very components that a literary work is built on – a combination of internal and external worlds that come into contact and intermingle.

Although in the type of literary works I like to read the topic of smuggling is not predominant, when I learned about a meeting focused on the concept of smuggling in all forms of art and social sciences, I felt a wish to speak on this topic, but based on so-called classic literature, the most restricted body of literary works that are recommended to young people during their education, the ones that form the so-called literary canon.

In 1906, the writer Rudyard Kipling, recipient of the Nobel Prize (1907) and the author of the Jungle Book (1894–5) still popular among young people, wrote a brilliant poem, The Smuggler’s Song, which you can ﬁnd on the internet in a series of different interpretations, composed as a ballad, recited by excellent actors, interpreted down to every last detail.³

In one of the commentaries on the poem, I read the fol-lowing:

1 Story Library. The Smug-gler: https://www.story arts.org/library/nutshell/

stories/smuggler.html.

2 It should be mentioned that key ﬁgures, the actual protagonists of smuggling of goods are always men, although female persons are also involved in the chain of developments.

3 https://www.youtube.

com/watch?v=

pELNBp6DBh8.

“Smuggling started in England in approximately 1300, when Edward I placed a duty on exporting wool. In the 1670s twenty thousand packs of wool were smuggled to Calais every year. That’s a lot of wool! This went on until the beginning of the 18th century, when the French custo-mers could buy wool from Ireland at about the same price.”⁴ And further on:

“Many regions of England are extremely proud of their smuggling past – including Cornwall, the Cinque Ports, East Yorkshire – in fact, virtually anywhere that has a coast.” (Ibid.)

There are indeed differences when it comes to goods which are smuggled, their quantity and the amounts of money circulat-ing in the process, but certain main principles remain in force:

it is always a business that skirts the law, it is passed over in silence, it is opportune not to ask anything even when you see what is going on and how, to turn towards the wall and refuse to see what everybody else might be aware of, but pretends not to see. Smuggling brings beneﬁt to many, not just those who are directly involved in the business, but also to numerous me-diators, and even those who will camouﬂage and ‘conceal’ the whole operation from the authorities. In Kipling’s Smuggler’s Song, even wives of indirect participants get golden necklaces when the illegal trade chain is successfully completed.

Let me mention another story from the English-speaking world. In 1845, a very proliﬁc English writer, George Payne Rainsford James (1799–1860) published a story with a very simple and direct title: The Smuggler. It is a story about a smug-gler full of typical English humor and with unquestionable afﬁnity for the skill with which the smuggler carries on his business. Some British regions, James warns, practically lived off smuggling.

There are a few stories which were at the time included in all textbooks and school anthologies on the territory of the former Yugoslavia, which have either as their central topic or sub-topic exactly this: illegal transportation of commodities, trading in goods for which no prescribed duties have been paid;

the smugglers are likable and “tame”, physically powerful, skilful, somewhat secretive, and exotic, although it is quite clear that their actions are illegal and punishable by law. If the lit-erary characters of smugglers that I will brieﬂy present here are all from literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this is not just because I am better acquainted with this literature than with that of the present, or because it is still surmountable, not so massive that a reader is easily dis-couraged by its production, but rather it is because in those

4 http://www.funtrivia.

com/en/subtopics/Anatomy -of-a-Poem-A-Smugglers-Song-319582.html.

times writers were interested primarily in the psychology of characters, the nature and character of people who were en-gaged in illegal trade, and less in the speedy, reckless and nerve-racking situations that inevitably characters who devoted their lives to something authorities put outside the law found them-selves in.

I have chosen three stories on our topic, all three of them published in the second half of the 20th century. Their heroes include Martin Krpan, who smuggles “English salt” from Trieste to the interior of Slovenia in the story Martin Krpan s Vrha (Martin Krpan from Vrh, 1858), a Slovenian classic by the au-thor Fran Levstik, Štivrnikov France, the hero of Josip Jurčič’s story Tihotapec (Smuggler, 1865) who illegally trades in to-bacco brought to Slovenia from Croatia; and two characters who also smuggled tobacco in the story Vodene sile (Water Forces, 1897), located in an unnamed small port in the Central Adriatic written by a Serb author born in Šibenik, Simo Mata-vulj.

Since I know that Martin Krpan transports English salt on his mare from Trieste to the interior of Slovenia was already discussed at previous sessions of the gathering on smuggling, I would like to stress only two facts related to this story: it be-came extremely popular at the time of preparation for and the winning of Slovenia’s independence; anthropologist Bojan Baskar pointed out how and why this story turned into a true myth among Slovenians (Baskar, 2008: 75-93). In a series of interpretations of Levstik’s story, commentators asked the fol-lowing question: what was Krpan in fact trading in? What is that English salt? Baskar offers quite a few convincing reasons to believe that it was indeed kitchen salt, but he also stated opinions according to which Krpan was in fact smuggling potassium nitrate that was transported from India and China by English ships where it obtained the epithet ‘English’. This powder is an important component of gunpowder (besides being used in food industry, and as fertiliser in agriculture).

If we look upon Krpan as the smuggler of kitchen salt, we will consider him a man of the people who was helping them get hold of a product monopolised by the Empire until 1818, but if we look upon him a smuggler of an important component of gunpowder, we see him as a predecessor of a currently im-portant ﬁeld of smuggling – we see him as a smuggler of arms, in other words as somebody who is involved in smuggling py-rotechnics, and not in helping the impoverished population get a basic necessary ingredient of their daily diet.

The other two stories about smugglers, although they can be found in numerous anthologies, have not won such a de-gree of popularity, or so many commentaries. Jurčić’s longer story Tihotapec has the features of so-called village stories, but also contains germs of a criminal novel. It follows the destiny

of a young man called France Štivrnik from a poverty-stricken village on the border between Slovenia and Croatia. In order to make a few dinars, Štivrnik approaches tobacco smugglers who are bringing the goods from Croatia. One of the border officials (iblajtarji was the local term for that department of police) falls in love with a smuggler’s sister. Risking his own life, Štivrnik kills the border guard, because he believes that an honourable village girl cannot marry such a broadly reviled man, as customs officials are seen this way in the eyes of the entire region. This story tells us that poor people were engaged in forbidden trade, especially people who had once already broken the law and were then forced to hide; they were double culprits – for smuggling, but also for fights, assaults against border guards, murder... France murders the border guard be-cause the latter tries to become close to his beloved Lojzka. In the eyes of a villager, the greatest enemy is the border guard.

The local population gets along better with smugglers than border guards and protects the former; after all, villagers buy tobacco from these very smugglers. In their eyes, they are powerful colossuses, very strong, bright and resourceful.

An exceptionally interesting figure of a contrebandier can be found in Simo Matavulj’s Vodene sile (Water Forces). Mata-vulj was born in Šibenik, but spent his working years as an Italian language teacher in Montenegro, and then in Belgra-de. An excellent realist, he always stationed his stories in spe-cific geographic spaces, and built his plots on the very finely drawn psychologies of his characters.

In this story, apart from the narrator, who is at the same time one of the protagonists in the plot which emphasises the credibility of the narration, there is also Sep, a young man who offers to drive a tourist – who becomes the narrator of the story – along the coast and show him the sights. The third character lives in a lonely house on a ledge above the sea, a ridge up which the curious tourist climbs, and Sep follows.

Both the site (the difﬁcult to climb ridge) and the bizarre dialogue that goes on in front of the lonely house between Sep and Lovrić are brimming with certain hints, indications of an unclear relationship and encrypted language between these two who know each other but pretend they don’t; the few words they exchange provoke great curiosity in the tourist and he realises that Lovrić is not just an elderly ﬁsherman who is unable to move about and is mending nets sitting down, but is also something else that the tourist is unable to fathom. The dialogue between Sep and Lovrić proceeds as if Lovrić were some kind of sorcerer, a superior being who not only predicts when a storm will come up at sea, but also advises young Sep how to defend himself against ‘water forces’. The mysterious relationship between the two locals is resolved by the tourist only later that evening at the inn when he begins to ask who

these two men in fact are, who is old Lovrić, and who is Sep.

He learns that Lovrić is “the notorious leader of contrebandiers, possibly pretending that he is mad, and perhaps he is, too”

(Matavulj, 1969: 165, my translation). The relationship be-tween Lovrić and Sep was shady and mysterious because these two men who are in the same chain of illegal trade have certain unsettled business between them, which they did not want to reveal in any way in the presence of a witness who is outside this ‘chain’. Guests at the inn who reveal to the tourist the true identity of the men with whom he spent the day do not express any condemnation of the forbidden business.

Even in the narrator-tourist himself there lingers a predomi-nant veil of secrecy, a miraculous aspect. He even attributes a magician’s skill to old Lovrić: “Lovrić did guess that ‘water forces’ would cause a great ‘gale’. – I don’t know how long the storm lasted because I had gone to bed, but I know that I have never had more terrible dreams” (Ibid.). There is neither con-demnation nor suspicion about the men who are engaged in smuggling. A constant that appears in all three stories is a naïve, attractive presentation of the men who were engaged in activities banned by law, as in a fairy tale.

Geographically speaking, two of these three stories take place in littoral parts of the country, so it can be assumed that in the south of Europe, like in England, smuggling flourished in the vicinity of sea routes. It seems, however, that not only was the openness of sea routes decisive, but also the severity of regulations imposed by a state on its citizens. Very soon after the publication of Levstik’s story about Martin Krpan, experts pointed out the fact that Levstik built the key scene in which Krpan beats up fifteen customs officials on the model of a folk story published by a folklorist Matĳa Valjavec ten years before.

That was a story about a huge man, Štempihar, who was a to-bacco smuggler. Valjavec collected stories in northern Slovenia, the interior areas that are now at the border with Austria, in other words, far away from the sea. Josip Jurčič’s The Smug-gler also takes place in the interior region somewhere towards the south of Zagreb, where the border between Croatia and Slovenia is now located. If we recall that all these regions were parts of the Habsburg monarchy at the time, we cannot help but wonder: which borders were these, and what obstacles did the commodities travelling within the same state come up against? Obviously, the state collected taxes for goods not just at its entry, but also within the country there were regions within which special customs regulations existed. More reg-ulations meant more offences. As James reminds us in the pre-face of his novel: “The nature of both man and woman, from the time of Adam and Eve down to the present day, has always been fond of forbidden fruit; and it mattered not a pin whether the goods were really better or worse, so that they were

pro-hibited, men would risk their necks to get them” (Rainsford James, 2012: 5). Perhaps this can explain the absence of this topic in classic Serbian and Bosnian literature, in the parts of the former Yugoslavia which lived under the domination of the Ottoman Empire: less democratic, but also less organised, this society had different principles of collecting taxes and in-side the whole empire there were no points where a traveller would have to pay dues for entering a new region or area. In this sense, the Ottoman Empire operated like the European Union operates nowadays: within its borders, commodities travelled freely. A vivid illustration of a completely different attitude towards the concept of customs and travellers who carried dubious goods can be found in the ﬁrst story pub-lished in 1920 by Ivo Andrić, Put Alĳe Đerzeleza (Travels of Alĳa Djerzelez). The story is about a hero known from Bosnian Muslim oral tradition who travels all the time. Andrić de-scribes him at the moment when he was forced to stop by the Drina River, at the border between Bos-nia, already ruled by the Habsburgs, and the Ottoman Empire. A torrent had de-stroyed the bridge and in the building of customs authorities, the so-called ‘jumrukana’, all kinds of people gathered: mer-chants and khojas, soldiers, healers, priests, Jews, Muslims.

They are all waiting for some kind of temporary crossing to be erected on the river and to continue their journey. A good opportunity for customs ofﬁcials to check what kind of goods these diverse people carry. But no – there is no trace of cus-toms ofﬁcials, although everything is happening in the build-ing that belongs to the customs authorities. The writer is inter-ested in only one thing: how the myth of the eternal traveller is crumbling, how clumsy Djerzelez Alĳa is in communicating with people, least of all with women, when he is forced to dis-mount from his horse, to abandon his only natural state: eter-nal travel.

And here is another conﬁrmation of the absolute absence of awareness of the concept of smuggling in regions under the jurisdiction of Ottoman authorities. This anecdote was record-ed by Ljubomir Nenadović, Serbian writer from the second half of the 19th century in his documentary essay titled O Crnogorcima. Pisma sa Cetinja iz 1878 (On Montenegins. Letters from Cetinje in 1878). It reads as follows:

“A man called Simo Premović (he is still living), at the time of Prince-Bishop (meaning in the mid-nineteenth century) used to carry a little tobacco from Montenegro across the Emperor’s border and sell it at the seaside. Once, border guards caught him and conﬁscated the entire quantity of tobacco. Simo came to Kotor: ‘Give me back the tobacco!’

– ‘We shall not, and moreover you’ll pay a penalty.’ – He then went to the circulo (region head), but the circulo gave

him the same answer. Simo went to the General, told him everything and said:

‘General, you are a soldier and a hero like we, the Monte-negrins are; that’s why I came to you. For the sake of bread given to you by the Emperor, give me back my tobacco!

Your Empire can live without my meagre means. – The General replies: ‘I’d gladly do it, but I’m here just for war and military matters, and these are ﬁnancial matters – I don’t meddle in them’. – Simo then asked again: ‘Will you give me the tobacco?’ – ‘No, there is no way we can do it’, the General responds. Then Simo stands up, stamps his foot and cries out: ‘War to the Emperor! War to the Empi-re!’ – the General who didn’t understand well, asked his aide: ‘What is he saying? What is he saying?’ – ‘He is de-claring war on Austria’, the aide answered. Puzzled, the General laughs and says to his aid: ‘Go, let them give him back the tobacco. We cannot be engaged in a war for such minor matters’.” (Nenadović, 1929: 38, my translation) In comparison with contemporary literature dealing with the

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