The Book of My Lives (2 page)

Now it seems to me that when I wasn’t in school or reading books, I was involved in some collective project of my
raja
. Besides protecting the sovereignty of the Park and waging various wars, we spent time at one another’s homes, swapped comic books and football stickers, sneaked together into the nearby movie theater (Kino Arena), searched for evidence of sexual activity in our parents’ closets, and attended one another’s birthday parties. My primary loyalty was to my
raja
and any other collective affiliation was entirely abstract and absurd. Yes, we were all Yugoslavs and Pioneers and we all loved socialism, our country, and its greatest son, our marshal Tito, but never would I have gone to war and taken blows for those. Our other identities—say, the ethnicity of any of us—were wholly irrelevant. To the extent we were aware of ethnic identity in one another, it was related to the old-fashioned customs practiced by our grown-ups, fundamentally unrelated to our daily operations, let alone our struggle against the oppression we suffered from Zeko and his cohorts.

One day I went, with nearly all of my
raja
, to Almir’s birthday party. Almir was somewhat older than me, therefore an authority on many things I knew nothing about, including the explosive properties of asbestos, which we called “glass wool” and to which we somehow had unlimited access. On one occasion I had repeatedly ducked as he threw, like a hand grenade, a handful of “glass wool” wrapped in paper, promising an explosion that never came. Almir was also old enough to be getting into rock music, so at his party he played Bijelo Dugme, the Sarajevan rock band that was at the time scaring the living daylights out of our parents, what with their hairy looks and antisocial, antisocialist, asinine music. Other than that, Almir’s was birthday business as usual: we ate the sandwiches, drank the juices, watched him blow out the candles on the cake, offered him our gifts.

For his birthday party, Almir was neatly dressed, which on that occasion meant a wool sweater with black and orange stripes, somewhat fluffy and comparatively resplendent—our socialist-Yugoslavia clothes were decidedly drab. The sweater visibly belonged to someplace else, so I asked him where it came from. It came from Turkey, he said. Whereupon I quipped: “So you are a Turk!” It was supposed to be a funny joke, but nobody laughed; what’s worse, nobody thought it was a joke. My point was that a foreign sweater made him a kind of foreigner, a teasing possible only because it was manifestly and unquestionably untrue. The failed joke entirely changed the mood of the party: to my utter surprise Almir started inconsolably crying, while everyone looked at me admonishingly. I begged them to explain what it was that I’d said, and when they didn’t, or couldn’t, I tried to outline how the joke was supposed to have worked, digging thereby a deeper hole for myself. Let me not go through all the steps of the descent into a disaster—before long the party was over; everyone went home, and everyone knew that I had ruined it. That is, at least, how I guiltily remember it.

Subsequently, my parents explained to me that
Turk
was (and still is) a derogatory, racist word for a Bosnian Muslim. (Years later, I would recall my inadvertent insult, yet again, while watching the footage of Ratko Mladi
ć
speaking to a Serb camera upon entering Srebrenica, where he was to oversee the murder of eight thousand Bosnian Muslim men—“This is the latest victory in a five-hundred-year-long war against the Turks,” he said.) After Almir’s birthday party, I learned that a word such as
Turk
could hurt people. Moreover, it seemed that everyone knew about it before me. What I said
othered
Almir, it made him feel excluded from the group I was presumably unimpeachably part of, whatever group it was. Yet my joke was supposed to be about the flimsiness of difference—as we belonged to the same
raja
, having fought many a war together, the sweater established a momentary, evanescent difference. Almir was teasable exactly because there was no lasting, essential difference between us. But the moment you point at a difference, you enter, regardless of your age, an already existing system of differences, a network of identities, all of them ultimately arbitrary and unrelated to your intentions, none of them a matter of your choice. The moment you
other
someone, you
other
yourself. When I idiotically pointed at Almir’s nonexistent difference, I expelled myself from my
raja
.

Part of growing up is learning, unfortunately, to develop loyalties to abstractions: the state, the nation, the idea. You pledge allegiance; you love the leader. You have to be taught to recognize and care about differences, you have to be instructed who you
really
are; you have to learn how generations of dead people and their incomprehensible accomplishments made you the way you are; you have to define your loyalty to an abstraction-based herd that transcends your individuality. Hence the
raja
is hard to sustain as a social unit, your loyalty to it—to the “we” so concrete that I could (still) provide a list of names that constituted it—no longer acceptable as a serious commitment.

I cannot honestly claim that my insult was directly related to the fact that our wars and the golden days of our Park sovereignty ended soon thereafter. At some point all the conflicts with other
raja
s were resolved by playing soccer, which we were not all that good at. We still couldn’t beat Zeko and his team, because they had the power to determine when a foul was committed or a goal scored. We did not dare touch them and even when we scored, the goal was always denied.

As for Almir, he didn’t play soccer well enough and he got even more into Bijelo Dugme, a band I would forever hate. Soon he reached a point in his life when girls were accessible to him. He started leading a life different from our boyish lives, becoming someone other than ourselves well before we could. Now I don’t know where he is or what happened to him. We no longer belong to “us.”

3. US VERSUS THEM

In December 1993, my sister and parents arrived as refugees in Hamilton, Ontario. In the first couple of months, my parents attended English-language courses, while Kristina worked at Taco Bell, a purveyor of fast “ethnic” food, which she preferred to refer to as Taco Hell. Things were very complicated for them, what with the language my parents couldn’t speak, the generic shock of displacement, and a cold climate that was extremely unfriendly to randomly warm human interactions. For my parents, finding a job was a frightening operation of major proportions, but Hamilton is a steel-mill town teeming with job-hungry immigrants, where many of the natives are first-generation Canadians and therefore friendly, and supportive of their new compatriots. Soon enough my parents did find work—Father at a steel mill, Mother as a superintendent in a large apartment building, in which many of the tenants were foreign-born.

Yet within months, my parents started cataloguing the differences between us and them—
we
being Bosnians or ex-Yugoslavs,
they
being purely Canadian. That list of differences, theoretically endless, included items such as sour cream (our sour cream—
mileram
—was creamier and tastier than theirs); smiles (they smile, but don’t really mean it); babies (they do not bundle up their babies in severe cold); wet hair (they go out with their hair wet, foolishly exposing themselves to the possibility of lethal brain inflammation); clothes (their clothes fall apart after you wash them a few times), et cetera. My parents, of course, were not the only ones obsessing over the differences. Indeed, their social life at the beginning of their Canadian residence largely consisted of meeting people from the old country and exchanging and discussing the perceived dissimilarities. Once I listened to a family friend in what could fairly be called astonishment as he outlined a substratum of differences proceeding from his observation that
we
like to simmer our food for a long time (
sarma
, cabbage rolls, being a perfect example), while
they
just dip it in extremely hot oil and cook it in a blink. Our simmering proclivities were reflective of our love of eating and, by extension and obviously, of our love of life. On the other hand,
they
didn’t really know how to live, which pointed at the ultimate, transcendental difference—
we
had soul, and
they
were soulless. The fact that—even if the food-preparation analysis made any sense—
they
did not love committing atrocities either and that
we
were at the center of a brutal, bloody war, which under no circumstances could be construed as love of life, didn’t at all trouble the good analyst.

Over time, my parents stopped compulsively examining the differences, perhaps because they simply ran out of examples. I’d like to think, however, it was because they were socially integrated, as the family expanded over the years with more immigration and subsequent marriages and procreation, so that we now included a significant number of native Canadians, in addition to all the naturalized ones. It has become harder to talk about
us
and
them
now that we have met and married some of them—the clarity and the significance of differences were always contingent upon the absence of contact and proportional to the mutual distance. You could theoritize Canadians only if you didn’t interact with them, for then the vehicles of comparison were the ideal, abstract Canadians, the exact counterprojection of
us
.
They
were the not-us,
we
were the not-them.

The primary reason for this spontaneous theoretical differentiation was rooted in my parents’ desire to feel at home, where you can be who you are because everyone else is at home, just like you. In a situation in which my parents felt displaced, and inferior to the Canadians, who were always already at home, constant comparison was a way to rhetorically equate ourselves with them. We could be equal because we could compare ourselves with them; we had a home too. Our ways were at least as good as theirs, if not even better—take our sour cream or the philosophical simmering of
sarma
. Not to mention that they could never get our jokes or that their jokes are not funny at all.

But my parents’ instinctive self-legitimization could only be collective, because that was what they carried over from the old country, where the only way to be socially legitimate had been to belong to an identifiable collective—a greater, if more abstract,
raja
. Neither did it help that an alternative—say, defining and identifying yourself as a professor—was no longer available to them, since their distinguished careers disintegrated in the process of displacement.

The funny thing is that the need for collective self-legitimization fits snugly into the neoliberal fantasy of multiculturalism, which is nothing if not a dream of a lot of
others
living together, everybody happy to tolerate and learn. Differences are thus essentially required for the sense of belonging: as long as we know who we are and who we are not,
we
are as good as
they
are. In the multicultural world there are a lot of
them
, which ought not to be a problem as long as they stay within their cultural confines, loyal to their roots. There is no hierarchy of cultures, except as measured by the level of tolerance, which, incidentally, keeps Western democracies high above everyone else. And where the tolerance level is high, diversity can be celebrated and mind-expanding ethnic food can be explored and consumed (Welcome to Taco Hell!), garnished with the exotic purity of otherness. A nice American lady once earnestly told me: “It is
so neat
to be from other cultures,” as though the “other cultures” were an Edenic archipelago in the Pacific, unspoiled by the troubles of advanced civilizations, home to many a soul-soothing spa. I had no heart to tell her that I was often painfully and sometimes happily complicated.

4. THAT’S ME

The situation of immigration leads to a kind of self-othering as well. Displacement results in a tenuous relationship with the past, with the self that used to exist and operate in a different place, where the qualities that constituted us were in no need of negotiation. Immigration is an ontological crisis because you are forced to negotiate the conditions of your selfhood under perpetually changing existential circumstances. The displaced person strives for narrative stability—here is my story!—by way of systematic nostalgia. My parents ceaselessly and favorably compared themselves with Canadians precisely because they felt inferior and ontologically shaky. It was a way for them to tell a true story of themselves, to themselves or anyone willing to listen.

At the same time, there is the inescapable reality of the self transformed by immigration—whoever we used to be, we are now split between
us-here
(say, in Canada) and
us-there
(say, in Bosnia). Because
we-here
still see the present
us
as consistent with the previous
us
, still living in Bosnia, we cannot help but see ourselves from the point of view of
us-there
. As far as their friends in Sarajevo are concerned, my parents, despite their strenuous efforts at differentiation, are at least partly Canadian, which they cannot help but be aware of. They have become Canadian and they can see that because they remained Bosnian all along.

The inescapable pressure of integration goes hand in hand with a vision of a life my parents could live if they
were
what they see as being Canadian. Every day, they see the Canadians living what in the parlance of displacement is called “normal life,” which is fundamentally unavailable to them despite all the integrationist promises. They are much closer to it than any of
us
back home, so they can envision themselves living a normal Canadian life—my parents can experience themselves vicariously as the others, not least because they have spent so much time and mind on comparison with them. Still, they can never be
them
.