Maja Marijana: I Picked Plums, Fled from Spiders
In an interview for "24sedam," the singer looks back on her childhood and the seasonal jobs that earned her first pocket money, long before she sang to sold out halls.
Singer Maja Marijana talked in an interview for the portal “24sedam” about how she earned pocket money in the fields as a girl, long before she became one of the better known names in Serbian pop music. Her account of childhood and growing up was picked up today, September 16, by the portal Informer.
Marijana was born and raised in Belgrade. Still, she spent part of her childhood and summer holidays far from the capital, at her grandmother’s in Srbobran, a town in Vojvodina, and at her late father’s family home in a village near Blace, in Toplica. It was there, she says, that she first took on field work, not as a chore but as a game.
- I’ve known about work since I was little, seasonal jobs felt like an adventure to me as a kid. Whether I was at my grandmother’s in Srbobran or down south, I never shied away from work. In Toplica I picked plums and blackberries, and in Srbobran I stripped the tassels off corn, Maja Marijana said in the interview for “24sedam”.
The two places where she grew up brought her two different jobs. In Vojvodina, that meant stripping the tassels off corn by hand, row by row, while in Toplica the season meant picking fruit, plums and blackberries, at a time when the gardens and orchards were full.
Farm work, the singer adds, was not just about picking fruit. There was fishing too, and swimming in the river, whenever the weather allowed. One job, however, she did not like nearly as much as the others.
There were interesting things to do, from fishing and swimming in the river to picking plums. Although my plum picking career didn’t last long. I’m very afraid of spiders, so I quickly gave up on the plum harvest because of them, Maja Marijana said for “24sedam”.
Her fear of spiders, she says, only got the better of her with plums. She stripped corn tassels in Srbobran and picked blackberries in Toplica without hesitation, summer after summer, during the holidays she spent at her grandmother’s or in her father’s home region. Fishing and swimming in the river, by her account, were part of the same routine, a break between jobs in the fields.
Maja Marijana now has a long career behind her, but in the conversation with “24sedam” she did not hesitate to admit that farm work was never something to be ashamed of, rather a memory of a childhood spent between Belgrade, Vojvodina and the south of Serbia. That combination, she says, shaped her attitude toward work in general, whether it is field work or the stage.
Her words also show a clear difference in how she experienced each job. While she gave up picking plums after her first encounter with spiders, stripping corn tassels, a job that takes far more time spent in the field, she never once mentioned as a problem. The same goes for picking blackberries in Toplica, which, by her account, she did regularly, season after season, while staying with relatives.
In the interview for “24sedam,” Maja Marijana thus rounded out a picture of a childhood that, as she puts it, had none of the glamour of her later career, but was instead marked by work in the fields at her grandmother’s in Srbobran and in her father’s home region in Toplica.
