Following the Fear
Christina Novakov-Ritchey
Photo: Christina Novakov-Ritchey
“Now you’re scared.” I had these words tattooed on my left rib when I turned eighteen. It’s a recurring line in my favorite Bollywood movie, Fanaa, starring the dreamy Aamir Khan and Kajol. Khan repeats this line to Kajol as she falls in love with him in the first half of the film, and then again in the second half when their paths cross a decade later. I had gotten the line tattooed on my body because I felt it encapsulated my convoluted relationship to fear. I related to fear as both an affliction—a state of perpetual suffering—and an opportunity. Fear seemed to have possessed this alchemical potential to transform into pleasure and joy. This attitude sent me down a path of confronting many of my fears, to the point where I started to use fear as a compass for where my life should go next.
During the sweltering summer of 2016, I was struggling to recover from a recent breakup. Heartbroken and reeling from my first year of graduate school, I took the bus from Belgrade to Skopje to see my friend Filip, who took me to visit Selma, [1] a traditional healer in a village outside Skopje. Selma is a fourth-generation practitioner of bajanje. Known also by other names, bajanje is a healing practice common throughout the Balkans, which combines incantations, plant medicines, and various ritual elements. Selma has practiced bajanje since she was twenty years old, when she moved to North Macedonia from northern Bosnia to marry her husband in the early 1980s. Nowadays, her thriving practice is popular with both locals and people visiting from abroad, and she frequently sees up to two hundred people on weekends. Selma, like most other bajanje practitioners, doesn’t charge a fixed price for treatments. People are expected to leave however much money they wish on the ground at the end of each session.
Selma specializes in salivanje strave, which translates literally to “melting the fear.” This is a lead-melting divination found across the Balkans. Selma works out of a roughly assembled shed in her yard. In the shed there is a sofa, a few chairs, and a wood-burning stove. Each session begins with the client breathing three times onto a piece of lead that Selma holds in her hand. The breath, she tells me, gives her the first insights into the background of the client and their afflictions. She follows up this initial insight by splashing a few embers from the stove into a pot of water by her feet. The rising steam mimics the breath and allows Selma to peer deeper into the nature of the person’s pain. Finally, she begins to melt the piece of lead in the reservoir of a large metal spoon. As the poisonous metal turns to liquid, she stirs it with the tip of an old hand scythe, which she tells me “cuts through anything bad.” She then covers her client’s body in a large piece of red fabric and begins to pour the molten lead into a pot of water. First, she pours by their head, then a second time by their knees. She repeats this process until the lead splits into two pieces in the water. The shapes that appear in the reformed lead are then read—akin to tea leaves or coffee grounds.
When I meet with Selma, we spend a long time outside talking, smoking cigarettes, and drinking coffee before we duck into the shed to begin the treatment. During our reading, Selma tells me that I am afflicted with strah and urok—fear and evil eye. She tells me that I give more than I receive and that this imbalance is producing physical pain in my body. As she speaks to me, I feel my eyes filling up with tears. Her diagnosis is generic, but I feel validated nevertheless. I realize that I have been craving the environment of intimacy that she and other healers foster. Selma understands unrequited generosity to be a site of social pain and recognizes that failed reciprocity contributes to ill health. To heal my social self, she says, I have to prioritize my own needs. I had grown up in a family of obligation, so I never had the opportunity to internalize this basic truth. By placing self-preservation within the paradigm of social reciprocity, Selma enables me and many other people she treats to shift from viewing self-care as selfish to viewing self-care as contributing to personal health, and by extension the health of the community.
Selma names the piece of lead that breaks off in the water my “heart” (srce), and she hands it to me wrapped in a piece of newspaper. She tells me to keep my heart under my pillow for the next several weeks, and she instructs me to wash myself with water from the ritual three times a day. When the water finally runs out, she says, I am to throw my heart into the river.
I inherited my fear from my grandmother. She grew up in a village near Gornji Milanovac in central Serbia during World War II. Coming of age during the war, my grandmother experienced intense, lasting trauma. She was the oldest of three and responsible for her two younger brothers. Growing up, my mother told me that when my grandmother was just ten years old, she witnessed her uncle die under the impact of a shell that fell on their home while she was in it. As a child, I could not really wrap my mind around what it meant to experience that type of terror. I imagined my grandmother trying to shield her baby brothers from the horrors of war and also wondered why we rarely saw or heard about her brothers in the present. As the battles of war subsided, their effects were only just beginning to make themselves known. My grandmother’s father was interned for several years in a fascist concentration camp, and his unaddressed trauma transformed into violent alcoholism upon his return. Growing up poor during the war, my grandmother wanted to leave her life behind and to never look back. When she met my grandfather, she saw him as a way out. My grandparents married in their early-twenties and had one daughter, my mother. In the late 1960s, they immigrated to the United States for my grandfather’s job as a climate researcher.
Because my grandparents lived only about five minutes away from the place I grew up in, they played a huge role in raising me. As a child, I spent several nights each week at their house, and went to elementary school down the street from them. I was very close to my grandfather. He enjoyed sitting on the floor with me and playing games, something my grandmother never did. Though I was closer to my grandfather, I have beautiful memories of being in the kitchen with my grandmother. She enjoyed teaching me how to bake and cook. I loved to transform the pogačica dough into animals and to pack meat and rice into peppers for punjene paprike. I also loved to play in her huge garden filled with flowers and fruit trees. I was particularly fond of eating whole raw lemons while I was supposed to be weeding. She regularly gave me baskets full of fresh sweet lemons to pass along to my friends’ parents.
I got to know my grandmother more through observation than through communicating with her. Some days I would come over to the house to find that she had rearranged all the furniture, to the chagrin of my grandfather. The house was exclusively her domain, and she was very particular about us not getting the furniture dirty. The house was beautiful but rarely seen by anyone else. Having company made her extremely anxious, and other people were seldom invited over.
Two days a year, I watched her get dressed up for church. We were not a religious family, but the diaspora centered around St. John the Baptist Serbian Orthodox Church in San Francisco. On those rare visits, she loved to show off expensive clothing made of silk, elaborately decorated hats, and her signature Yves Saint Laurent Opium perfume. Most of what I remember from the actual services is struggling to not pass out after standing up for an hour and a half while smothered in tamjan (frankincense). After the service, I would hang out with whatever kids were there while my grandparents caught up with their friends. Already on the ride home, my grandmother would commence a litany of complaints and criticisms about everyone in attendance. Once I entered adolescence, her criticisms about people who were allegedly our dear friends and “community” members infuriated me.
A few months after I graduated from college, my grandmother’s personality changed dramatically. The most she ever communicated to me about what was going on with her was after dinner one evening when she said that she had to go lie down, because she “didn’t feel well.” That was the last time I ever saw her. For the next two months, she confined herself to her upstairs bedroom. She stopped cooking, cleaning, and eventually eating and bathing. She stayed in bed all day. My mother and grandfather became her caretakers. They tried forcing her to eat and convincing her to get help, but she refused. They tried convincing her to let me see her, but she refused that too. They tried to get doctors to perform a home visit. They refused.
Over time, her condition deteriorated to the point that she developed extreme paranoia and hallucinations. Her bedroom window overlooked the roof of her house, which to her appeared to be overrun with crows and dangerous intruders. Her mind and body were riddled with fear. After a month, my grandfather woke up one morning to find her dead.
It was only after her death that I learned that this had not been the first psychotic episode that my grandmother had gone through. In intervals of about ten years, she fell into a deep depressive state where she refused to leave the bed and to eat. It lasted months at a time. My family had chosen to shield me from these periods in my youth. Her younger body could recover in a way that it was no longer capable of at eighty years of age. I also learned that every time she had returned to Yugoslavia, she had suffered nervous breakdowns while there that required her to be institutionalized in psychiatric hospitals within a few days of her arrival. After the wars of the 1990s, she never went back. Not even for her mother’s or youngest brother’s funerals.
While my grandmother was alive, she didn’t say much about her inner world—at least not to me. In retrospect, I recognize a few times when I could see through the cracks of her carefully crafted persona. In primary school, I lost things all the time—lunchboxes, sweatshirts, pencil boxes, toys, hats. The school was down the street from my grandparents’, so she walked me to and from school on many occasions. As we were walking home one sunny afternoon, I realized that I no longer had the lunchbox I had started out the day with. My grandmother grew angry with me, and I felt terrible that I had lost something again. Her anger was disproportionate to the situation, but I, not knowing any better, was overflown with guilt. She insisted on walking back to school to look for the lost lunchbox. I remembered leaving it at the very top platform of the playground. I scrambled up the monkey bars onto the platform and—success! The lunchbox was still there. We walked home together in a lighter mood. As we got close to the house, my grandmother told me that we could keep this incident as a secret between us; we didn’t have to tell anyone about it. I was so relieved.
Reflecting on this memory today, after years of therapy, gives me precious information about my grandmother’s emotional landscape. By offering to not tell anyone about the incident, she revealed that she anticipated the wrath and disapproval of some authority figure. She wanted to protect me, seemingly unaware of the irony that she was trying to protect me from herself: she was the authority figure that was initially trying to punish me for losing my lunchbox. I wonder if what I witnessed that day was a moment of unconscious solidarity. Perhaps she was protecting me the way that she wished someone had tried to protect her. Maybe she was protecting me from something—someone—that she had internalized a very long time ago.
My grandmother’s anger that day was not the anger of righteousness but an anger stemming from fear. Because we were never able to speak openly about our emotions while she was alive, I can only hypothesize that the abuse and criticism she suffered from her parents morphed into a lifelong inner critic. We do not simply age out of our childhood fears. If we were raised in reactive, traumatic, and/or abusive environments—as my grandmother was—we become hypervigilant and watch out for anything, however insignificant, that may trigger our caregivers’ anger. What begins as a vigilance towards the self can easily become projected onto others, often transforming into neurotic, controlling behavior. This neurotic and controlling behavior can quickly turn into violence.
While my grandmother’s life experiences radically differ from my own, I find an uneasy resonance between our psychological landscapes. We both spent a lifetime struggling with fear. I have struggled with my emotions since adolescence. At the time, I thought there was something wrong with me—that I was defective. Everyone around me seemed calm and more at home in themselves, while I felt like I was crawling out of my skin. When I was young, things were simpler. My family participated in my imaginary world through play. After puberty, however, they stopped speaking to me in the language of play and started speaking in the language of adults—the language of work. Everything became about school, which became a way of speaking about work and productivity and the future. A childhood eclipsed by work.
For my mother, work was a salvation from her own mother. A place of refuge away from the painful criticisms of a traumatized matriarch. For me, work felt oppressive. Work distracted my mother from me. I began to hate work, despite being taught to excel at it.
I became an excellent worker, but the better I became at working, the more alienated I felt from my family and myself. Eventually, this alienation transformed into a dark, lasting depression that now follows me wherever I go.
In 2019, I asked Selma whether we could think of strah as comparable to depression. She identified depression as a potential outcome of strah, but she didn’t think that they were interchangeable:
“Strah makes you retreat into yourself, to fall in a depression, to retreat into yourself, to not want to communicate, to sit, to listen....you have restlessness, nervousness, insomnia, you have negative thoughts, bad dreams. From strah, the heart breaks and the stomach hurts and everything.”
Depression is related to, but not coextensive with, strah. For strah, she says, “there is neither doctor nor pill” (nema ni doktor ni tableta). Her resistance to treat strah with antidepressants does not result from an anti-science or anti-medicine stance. Selma was trained as a nurse before she ever practiced bajanje. These medical options may not offer the solution, she reminds me, “but bajanje helps.”
Selma identifies stress, not brain chemistry or depression, as the cause of strah in adults: “For every strah, there is a reason. And now, in this time, stress contributes the most. Stress contributes the most to strah. Twenty-five years ago it wasn’t like it is now.” The American Psychological Association defines stress as “the physiological or psychological response to internal or external stressors. Stress involves changes affecting nearly every system of the body, influencing how people feel and behave.” While manifestations of quotidian stress are relatively short lived, chronic stress can cause a number of both physical and psychological effects. Explanations of strah and chronic stress are incredibly similar. Both strah and stress can lead people to develop anxiety disorders, depression, body aches, insomnia, exhaustion, headaches, high blood pressure, muscle tension, digestive issues, difficulty having sex, and a weakened immune system.
Selma notes that a large increase in the incidence of strah began after the war in Bosnia because the war “made what it made” (napravio što je napravio). The wars of the 1990s were intensely traumatic for the people living in the former Yugoslavia. War trauma is a well-known source of a wide range of negative health outcomes. These negative health effects of the war were then compounded by the rapid deterioration of the economy. Most countries once belonging to the former Yugoslavia remain in a state of economic insecurity up to the present day, with rural, elderly, and racialized populations affected most deeply.
While folklorists tend to abstract bajanje from its material conditions, material conditions remain at the forefront of Selma’s mind. She explains that while for children, strah arises from fear of things like animals and bugs, “when they grow up, strah comes from stress. And today brings mainly stressful times, difficult life.” Selma challenges ideas about strah being a force outside of time, something eternal or mystical. Rather, in our conversations, Selma connects the increase of strah with the devastating material conditions that have resulted from the Yugoslav Wars, the collapse of Yugoslav socialism, and the imposition of harsh neoliberal reforms on the region.
We all have more strah now, especially adults, because a very difficult life has come. Now we are afraid of life because our existence isn’t secure. Many people are without work—they have no work—no real life, no anything...there are many families in North Macedonia who are so poor they seriously have nothing. They cannot survive, and thus strah is created—restlessness, nervousness, never-ending thoughts. You think about how you will survive, how you will get your family out. [...] you immediately worry about how you’re going to eat, how you’re going to survive, you know? The organism cannot bear it, my dear. And that’s how it is. Because most people’s strah hits their psyche...their psyche is disturbed when someone has a lot of strah.
Selma recognizes that with the loss of the social protection of the state, which formerly provided health care, employment, environmental protections, and controlled prices, postsocialist populations have been transformed into bare life. The insecurity that North Macedonian rural populations have been subjected to is incompatible with life. The living organism cannot bear this much death.
The accuracy of Selma’s words became glaring in April 2020, when images of densely crowded Romanian airports, filled with workers on their way to Germany to harvest asparagus, circulated on social media. Two thousand workers left on chartered flights in a single day from Cluj-Napoca airport; 80,000 were expected to leave for the entire season. Around the same time, another headline circulated: “Austria imports workers from Bulgaria, Romania to plug gaps in COVID-19 care.” Two hundred thirty-one workers were flown out of Timișoara and Sofia to meet Austria’s demand for care workers. In mid-June, we heard of brutal conditions that migrants from the Balkans faced in German slaughterhouses, where one site saw more than 1,500 positive cases of COVID-19. Living in conditions dubbed by news outlets as “modern slavery,” slaughterhouse workers brought from Eastern Europe stayed in crowded dormitories, received low wages, worked long hours, had no health insurance, and then proceed to have money for housing, meals, work equipment, and transportation deducted from their wages. I am struck by how these incidents reveal the significant intersection of agricultural labor and the vulnerable body, which is where the work of bajanje has traditionally been concentrated.
These are the dominant material conditions since the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s and the so-called postsocialist “transition.” Selma thinks that the postsocialist period in North Macedonia has been a “catastrophe”: “The last twenty-five years, a lot of fear appeared. Everywhere difficult life has come. People are afraid of life itself, my dear (narod od samog života se plaši). And that’s why strah is created. Can’t feed your family, that’s it, my dear.[...] In Macedonia especially.” Strah is an outcome of living in a constant survival mode. Not being able to feel secure in knowing that one can reproduce one’s own existence creates strah. One of the poorest countries of the former Yugoslavia, Macedonia has been subject to some of the harshest economic disenfranchisement since the collapse of socialism.
Folk medicine practices like bajanje are not a panacea to our present catastrophe. There is no hallowed place for folklore and folk medicine that will rescue us from the cruelty inflicted upon those who have already survived staggering amounts of harm. There is only the truth that people have already named the abuse that we now consider to be novel or shocking. These practices have survived the impossible and for some they make the difference between life and death—or between a death mourned and a death forgotten. Today, I turn to bajanje to heal not only my own strah, but my grandmother’s too. The tattoo that once announced my attachment to fear to the world has since been reworked into a bundle of thorns. The fear is still there, but it is in a state of transformation. I hope we can meet there.
[1] Personal names have been changed to preserve anonymity.
