The year is 1983, March-April. I'm lying in the intensive care room at the Belgrade Institute for Lung Diseases, across the street from Internal Clinic A, the street was then called Deliblatska... I was operated on, and the recovery is going well, even though I'm haunted by that operation - a hoarse voice. I turned seventeen in that hospital. On the bed next to him lies an old, wealthy Roma, a boss from Eastern Serbia. A very polite and pleasant man. At one point, I heard him say something, and as I felt the best in that room (and was the youngest), I listened to see if others had any problems, if I needed to call my sister. I listen to what he is saying, and I hear: "How nice it is to be a Montenegrin". When I understood what he was saying, I asked him "Why do you say that?". And he will say, as if from a cannon: "You are all literate!" I laughed, knowing how untrue that was, though. Even then, and it seems, especially - today.
It was only a matter of days when local illiteracy would literally take to the streets.
It happened in Pljevlje, the city of tambourines and songs, the town mentioned in Andrićev novel A bridge on the Drina... It is also the city that produced the first female novelist in Montenegro. Milka Bajić Poderegin (by the way - she was also the mother of one of Bond's girls) wrote the novel "Svitanja" in 1938. A novel with a bourgeois atmosphere, and testimony to the subtle spirit of the author. Her daughters - the Bond girl was an actress in America, and the other a publisher in London - published their mother's novel again in the late eighties in Belgrade.
However, the most ridiculous is the defense of the Pljeval authorities - the blame is directed at the company that made the inscriptions. (And the old government, of course.) The definition of dilettantism - nobody does their job properly, but it's always someone else's fault.
The low level of public literacy is one of the key problems of today's Montenegro. It clearly points to a general decline in intellectual standards, which is why such diplomas are possible. And such policemen, judges, politicians...
The results of our students on European tests are always among the worst. It is clear that (il)literacy, like many other things, comes from - family and school. Today, both institutions are on the low branches in Montenegro, not only as generators of literacy, but also of decency, so it is not surprising the names of the streets of Pljeval.
If it is any consolation, it seems that illiteracy in Montenegro does not recognize national and religious divisions. She seems to be the same for everyone.
"When the army returns to Kosovo" - in Cyrillic, of course... but with one Latin letter. It is possible that in this case the illiteracy impulse is connected with the real belief in what is being written. Let's say - if something is yours, what will the army do? You don't go your own way with the army. Only on other people's. The essence is in the ridiculous Balkan imperialisms - mythology instead of history, geography, and even grammar.
But, there is still a tacit idea in a huge part of the local population that literacy is not (that) important, that literacy is a fraud, as soon as someone talks culturedly and nicely, he must be a fraud, clearly. Such a mental attitude is the ideal stage for the flourishing of illiteracy. Which goes with a kind of pride - he has not sold himself, he rejects the dangerous yoke of literacy/grammar/logical-linguistic order.
The relationship to language is inseparable from the relationship to reality. If you don't know your way around the language, reality will remain unfathomable to you. What is clear in the language is also clear in the head. And vice versa.
That sentence of the old Roma from intensive care is a trace of the way in which, in the context of SFRY, the so-called of ordinary people, Montenegro was often idealized. Which is always mostly irritating... Not all Montenegrins, as people like to believe, are tall, nor brave, nor virtuous, and, as we can see, not even literate.
Bonus video:
