Museum of Yugoslavia, Belgrade (2023) | kallerna / CC BY-SA 4.0
The Polish poet Czesław Miłosz once wrote, “Language is the only homeland.” I didn’t understand that line until my own country broke apart. Now I see what he meant—when people learn to fear their own words, it is its own form of exile. Two of my uncles learned this early: as young men in the 1960s, they fled Yugoslavia on foot, crossing the border illegally because they knew that a careless remark or a perceived expression of disloyalty could end a career—or a life. Once they escaped, they were barred from returning; setting foot on Yugoslav soil again risked imprisonment. They lived in exile for decades, punished not for crimes, but for ideas the state feared they might speak.
A few years later, after President Josip Broz Tito loosened the borders, my father left to become Gastarbeiter—a guest worker in West Germany. We followed him during the unrest of the early 1970s, when Party membership was the only guarantee of work and the air at home felt tight with fear. I spent my early childhood in Yugoslavia during those years, where authoritarianism was not simply escalating, it was the air we breathed. To question power, even with the perceived misuse of a word, could mean getting sent to Goli Otok, the prison island for dissidents.
On the walk to our village school, we were taught to greet every adult, but the greeting itself could be a test. Two polite phrases lived side by side: “Good day” or “Praised be Jesus and Mary.” The former was favored by Party loyalists, the latter by the religious faithful. We had no way of knowing which greeting a given stranger preferred—only that one might keep you safe, and the other might mark you. Choose wrong, and that stranger might twist your ear until it burns and report you.
My grandmother used to warn me, “Prije ispeci pa onda reci”—bake it before you speak it. At first, I thought it was just a folk saying. But under state communism, it meant: Be careful, someone is always listening.
That’s how children learned to speak under that regime: through fear. We didn’t study syntax; we studied survival. Even our silences carried accents.
In my childhood, the state defined “fear” as loyalty and “silence” as peace. Those who spoke out were labelled “traitors,” “foreign agents,” or “moral deviants.” In Yugoslavia, “verbalni delikt”—the crime of speech—was not metaphor but law. People were imprisoned for a joke or a passing remark. One well-documented case is that of journalist Ženi Lebl, who spent more than two years on Goli Otok for repeating a single joke about Tito: “Yugoslavia won an international flower competition because it grew a white violet weighing 100 kilos,” a play on the propaganda refrain that hailed Tito as the “white violet” beloved by the youth. Lebl was not alone. Students were expelled for joking about Tito in cafeterias; professors such as Mihajlo Mihajlov were imprisoned for essays that deviated from the Party line; even the poet Vlado Gotovac was arrested after delivering a public speech the authorities deemed “linguistically hostile.” Even in English, decades later, I still overthink my sentences before they leave my mouth. The muscle memory of repression. By the time a society reaches a point of normalized self-censorship, it doesn’t need a dictator; it already has an authoritarian grammar.
The rhetoric of President Donald Trump and his acolytes in the US—railing against “enemies within,” and “vermin” in need of “cleansing”—is hardly innovative. The phrases were tested before, on other tongues.
Whenever a politician in any country talks about “cleaning up” culture, speech, or schools, it’s about asserting a hierarchy. This has been a point of regime policy under Trump. In one of Trump’s early edicts in his second term, the president ordered federal agencies to scrub hundreds of words from public-facing websites—terms like transgender, LGBTQ, diversity, equity, bias, immigrants, even women and girls. Some agencies were told to remove these words entirely; others were warned that using them would trigger reviews or penalties. The quiet deletion of whole categories of people through capricious executive order. As one historian told NPR, “If you erase the memory, we really forget the people.” At the memorial service for far-right provocateur Charlie Kirk, Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller vowed that the administration would use federal power to find political opponents, “take away their money, their power, and, if they have broken the law, their freedom.” He warned, “We will not live in fear, but you will live in exile.”
In biblical scripture, “exile” carries two meanings. In the Old Testament, a period of exile entails a process of correction and humility—the people of Israel learning faithfulness while in foreign lands. In the New Testament, exile becomes a metaphor for spiritual sojourners, those who belong to another kingdom but must endure this one. In both, exile is not domination. It is transformation. Miller’s words, taken out of context, could sound like an assurance that the oppressed would endure and the unjust would be humbled.
Miller instead drained the words of liberatory meaning. His threatened exile isn’t only geographical. It’s psychic, social and moral. An injunction to watch our every word.
When Yugoslavia collapsed in the 1990s, the first thing to erupt was speech. We invented new words—wild, vulgar, absurd—reclaiming our tongues from the censors. A helicopter became a zrakomlat, an “air-beater.” A pencil sharpener was a zarezivač drvene misli, a “carver of wooden thoughts.”
But after independence, new governments insisted on their own linguistic “purity.” Words shared for decades among Croats, Serbs, Bosnians, and Montenegrins were suddenly declared foreign, unpatriotic, or “contaminated.” Croatia’s language institute even issued lists of “properly Croatian” words, and teachers corrected children who used the “wrong” variant. Dictionaries were rewritten. In the years after the war, people in Croatia often referred to this as “cleansing the language,” and linguistic policing again became a social convention. Authoritarian habits of language, once learned, are hard to unlearn.
