My mother was born in Yugoslavia, in a country that no longer exists. I love my heritage, but how to love that which no longer exists? On the way from Montenegro to Bosnia, as I pass lakes and mountains, I read somewhere that there is no belonging without love. There is no shortage of love among these parts, even if it often takes its opposite form. However, belonging strikes me as a more difficult question. I love this society but question to which part of it I belong. I have been “othered” many times in the post-Yugoslav territories, whether by religious background, language or name. My belonging was conditional, although it was one I insisted on, perhaps out of “inat”. I speak with waiters in their dialect and recite lyrics of ballads and mention names of towns. Against all odds, I belong. Yet, it is a belonging given begrudgingly, when the ties are so strong they cannot be denied.
These ties run deep. My grandfather grew up in Kosovo and my grandmother in Montenegro. My residence is in Belgrade and my passport is Serbian. My uncle lives in Sarajevo and my friends are Sarajevans. I speak Ekavian. I read Cyrillic. I say “bre” and “merak”. I like to “bleji” with my “raja”. I have relatives in Ljubljana and listen to Prljavo Kazalište. Yet, in this wholeness there is fragmentation; each group demands exclusivity, rejecting the others. I cannot find myself in any one of them alone. Where they accept my background, they do not accept my accent. I have tried to change vocabulary and pronunciation but cannot accept one thing without abandoning another. For these reasons, the ethnonationalism which has caused so much Balkan blood to seep into this soil is anathema to me. It is anathema to the love I feel.
I love these lands, and I am reminded of it whenever I visit. During my last trip to Kosovo, my uncle’s best friend walked me across the Bridge on the Ibar and through North Mitrovica. He told me about their adventures in the late evening and early morning hours and how they would laugh with my grandmother. My father’s old colleague took me to dinner with his family in Pristina. He reminisced how they worked together and how they met their spouses and laughed when I asked him “ku po shkon?”. I felt love from one and I felt love from the other. I felt love from my oldest friend, with whom I grew up on the playground and at parties and who has driven me more times than I can count (he cried when he sold his Golf). In many ways, I come from a family history of such love. Several years ago, over lunch, my mother recounted that my great-aunt and her then-future spouse were Yugoslav Partisans. They were comrades and shared political beliefs in the fight against fascism, but in that fight they fell in love. It was fate that they met and fell in love during those war years, even under such difficult circumstances. Just as it was impossible for them to separate their fight from their love, it is impossible for me to separate between my love and my heritage. Their story taught me that love does not have to be opposed to fighting; sometimes it is found in it. I love both Boško and Admira. Agim and Zoran. Vedran and Zlatan. I love the idea of Yugoslavia. Maybe that is why it is so painful.
Every family carries this pain, and it is always born of love. In ours, it is no different. Our family, like all others, lost much during the wars. We have various family members from various background, and I have heard many war stories. Some died. Some lived on. Some did something in between. My grandfather belongs to those who live. Thank God for that, because he raised me and taught me that loss is never the end. I know that he always continues forward. I know that he has friends “from Vardar to Triglav”. I know he has challenges. I know that he is good with his neighbours, and I know that every year he travels far to care for the graves of his loved ones. I know that it is hard for him. I know that it hurts. I know that he is full of love.
It was from my father’s love in this complicated part of the world that I was born. My father hails from Sudan and is likely the first black man some people in ex-Yugoslavia saw. My parents got engaged in Herceg Novi. I was conceived in Pristina. Throughout the mountain ranges and coast of the Adriatic, my father is often seen as a stranger in these parts. He is not at all a stranger when he is at a barbecue and a younger cousin runs to greet him. He is not a stranger when he chats with the shop clerk at the corner store. He is not a stranger when he loves my mother—that is as far from a stranger to these lands as he has ever been. I, too, am often seen as foreign. Sometimes race speaks faster than we can, and though I have gotten embraces, gifts, and smiles, it has always been after I have spoken. Buying smoki at a supermarket in Kotor, I ask the woman behind the counter with the “Cash Only” sign if I can pay with card.
“Absolutely!”, she replied. “I thought you were an African”. “My grandmother is from Berane”.
“That’s why you’re so well-mannered”, she praises.
“That’s the most important thing, ma’am.”
I think that to love another you must, in some capacity, see yourself in them. For that reason, I always found it ironic that when one refers to any ex-Yugoslav language or person, they refer to them as “ours” (“naš”). It is a rare example where the semantics of exclusion become inclusive, and can be helpful in many situations. During my masters studies, I befriended a Croatian who one day called me to meet his grandmother from Dalmatia. She was well over 70, and had travelled to the United States and now to Cambridge, Massachusetts to visit him. He had told her he was studying with a Serbian and invited me to meet her. She did not expect me to be able to communicate and was quite surprised when I greeted her in front of our school campus. “You speak such good Croa-”, she started. As she paused, an uncomfortable silence filled the air, followed by my friend telling his grandmother that “He speaks Serb-”. I cut him off. “I speak ours, ma’am”. There is a relieved laugh as if we are only just now seeing each other. “That’s it, it’s all the same”, she responds, and, after a very solemn look, adds: “It’s difficult, you know, I lost my husband in the war”. To this day, I am proud that I said “ours”.
“Ours” is much more natural a concept than “theirs”, and is why ethnonationalism is so unnatural. In the words of Yugoslav Nobel Laureate Ivo Andrić, “in song man remembers only what he loves”. I have never met anyone who, ethnonationalist or not, will not sing out “proljeće na moje rame slijeće” when “Djurdjevan” by Bijelo Dugme starts playing. We love the same songs and our ajvar is the same in all its shades of red. St. Mark’s Church and the Husrev-Beg Mosque and Our Lady of the Rocks are all beautiful and I feel love for all three. I feel love for a married couple from Slovenia. He, whom I consider among my dearest friends and can always count on, also praises a country he never knew. Yet, as two young adults who forty years earlier would have been countrymen, we found ourselves an ocean away from that once-united country, drinking rakija with Marko and eating ćevapi with Džanan and celebrating Easter with Ana and playing tennis with Dario (we even spoke with cigarette-smoking Bajaga). There is a lot of love to be found in these lands.
With all this I want to say that I believe that love for “ours”, not hatred for “theirs”, is a starting point for this region to progress again. Everyone existed in the war, but our existence need not be war. As Zabranjeno Pušenje sings, people must put “love before flags”. It is possible. Recently, I was in a small town in northern Kosovo, and I went with a friend to a čevabdžinica. In small towns everyone knows and greets one another. After we entered and ordered, a man entered and following custom we addressed him: “Hello, how are you?”. “How can I be?”, he replied. “I survived three wars”. Those who have been in a čevabdžinica know that most of them are small spaces, and in that moment the smell of alcohol from this man was stronger than the smell of the barbecue. Then he looked at me. “These foreigners have taken everything for us; they’re always getting involved. Look at how many of them there are”. I tried to respond but he did not hear me, or did not want to, and throughout the meal he continued with his comments. After we finished and paid, we started towards the car and he came after us. While my friend tried to calm the situation, the man got close to me and asked directly: “Who are you? Whose are you?”. I answered with my mother’s maiden name, the same family name of my grandfather and of his brother who a few months earlier had passed. The man looked at me and with a shocked expression pointed in the direction of my great-uncle’s house and simply repeated the name. I nodded my head. “I knew him”, he said, “I was at his funeral”. Then, contrary to all the words he uttered and the attitude he showed, this unknown man hugged me and kissed me three times. He loved his neighbour.
Yet, all this is not easy. I want here to acknowledge the challenges which must be overcome to reach some kind of peace. We must spread love but it is hard to love when you are suffering, when railways stations collapse on your head, when police officers ask you for bribes and you cannot afford bread and organized politics turns into organized crime. One feels pain when they have democracy but nothing in their pockets. It is hard to love in that moment, and, when confronted with everything that was lost, impossible not to cry. I cry at the Children of War Museum in Pristina. I cry for Srebrenica and for Vukovar. I cry for the Storm launched at Krajina and Bihać and for the storm that covers my people’s lands. I cry for Boško and Admira. I cry for the Roma. I cry writing this. I cry out of love and grief and the knowledge that they are the same thing.
Seeking consolation, I turn, as I often do, to Djordje Balašević, one of my favorite artists. Balašević sang of romance and justice and hope and did so in Skoplje, Niš, Beograd, Sarajevo, Zagreb and Split. Yet it seems that even he shed these tears. In a song titled “Just Let There Be No War”, he prays for the same thing that so many have prayed for before him. His words are drenched with the pain of the past. Contrary to his prayer, the seas rose. Thunder raged. Volcanoes awoke. Wars separated. My Đole, there was war. My Yugoslavia, there was war. My people, there was war. Let there be love, too.
All stated names in this article have been changed out of privacy, with the exception of Bajaga and Djordje Balašević. Music cannot be changed.
Author: Anas Adam