SBS 301 Cultural
Diversity/Prof.
Koptiuch
Fall 2014 Personal Memory
Ethnographies
Amela Duric
I-dentity
Here I am,
chasing Boris, hoping to catch him so he can be it. Inhaling the smell of fresh cut
grass, I ran across the cracked
pavement and tagged him; finally, I got him. Deep
down, I knew this was not the
only way I wanted him. Naïve and young, here I was,
a sun kissed eight year old
from Bosnia wasting my summer, hoping a boy would
notice me. The countless
nights I spent chasing fire flies, going to the park
and looking through the
blinds of our one bedroom apartment to see if Boris
was outside so I could join
him seem so innocent now. He was my very first
crush; I adored everything he
did.
Boris was
like me; he spoke the same language as I did, was
from the same area I was
originally from and he loved playing all the same
games as I did. My family
lived in an apartment complex with a group of
refugees from the Balkan area;
this was nothing new. This is where I met Boris, in
the four building red brick
apartment complex made up of red bricks in the heart
of Carol Stream, Illinois.
His family migrated from Germany as well, just as we
did in 1999. Watching
Boris help his parents unload the truck filled with
belongings, I remember
wondering if they were like us, different? Would he
understand me, because no
one else did? None of the other children in the
first grade could make out
Bosnian, they all spoke English. This drew me to
Boris; he was like me. I
looked forward to playing house because it meant
Boris and I would be “married”
and I could pretend he was mine.
The nights
and days spent with Boris caught up to me when my
father pulled me aside one
day and forbid me from ever imagining I could have a
relationship with him,
“you can be friends with him, but nothing more than
that”. He was clearly being
irrational and had no validity behind his reasoning,
I thought, and so I argued
back. “Amela, they are the reason we are here! They
are the reason you do not
have half of your family” my father proclaimed. I
could not comprehend where
any of this was coming from and even after being
told the war was fought to
kill Muslim-Bosnians I thought my dad was being
crazy—Boris had been nothing
but nice to me, he would never hurt me!
My
daughter, at the time was only eight
years old and had made friends with the
neighborhood kids, which included
Serbian children. Amela, my daughter did not
understand nor could she
comprehend the uneasy feelings I had for these
people who had put us in this
one bedroom apartment, halfway across the world
from our original home. My life
had been taken away from me and everything I had
ever worked for was gone in
the matter of days and now these Serbians in
America, their names, their faces
reminded me of nothing but what I had lost.
I had been friends
with Serbian men and women throughout my
life but when the war broke out, my outlook on who
they were completely
changed. They became monsters, monsters that
killed my family and friends for
reasons I still cannot believe; ethnicity. Our
beliefs in a higher fate were
not the same, so that justifies the killing and
displacement from my childhood
home and land? This is something I could never
forget, even if I tried.
As Amela’s father, I
forbid her to ever have any feelings
for a Serbian boy after I noticed she had been
spending a significant amount of
time with Boris, our neighbor. Amela and Boris
would always be next to one
another, whether they were playing catch or
getting on the bus. That is
something I did not want to see because I never
wanted her to accept someone
whose family probably fought in the war to kill
our people. This is something I
could not accept, but something I knew she was too
young to understand. In
time, I knew she would learn about our history of
what Serbians did to our
people and would make her own mind up on what kind
of relationships she will
have with them.
1992 was not
only the year I was born, but also the year that
altered the rest of my life;
Bosnia had declared independence from Yugoslavia,
which then caused the
reaction of Serbians to besiege Sarajevo with the
intention of ethnically
cleansing the country of any Bosnian-Muslims. Within
Yugoslavia, Bosnian,
Serbian and Croatian people lived under the same
nation where the only
distinction laid upon their ethnicity, which is
tightly related to their religious
background. Bosnian-Serbs had historically been
practicing Orthodox while
Bosnian-Muslims related more to Islam. This ethnic
difference caused great
tension when Bosnia declared independence from
former Yugoslavia and wanted its
own identity, which then created a shift in the way
people saw one another.
We
fled from Austria, to Germany to
America and countless cities in between before
ending up in Carol Stream, a
suburb a half hour away from Chicago. Here we were,
a family of four, in a one
bedroom apartment living through organizational hand
outs. I was used to this
life; hand me down clothes, food banks and commuting
through city transit was
the only norm I knew. One thing I did not understand
was why my life was the
way it was; I had assumed everyone’s life was
similar to mine, just in a
different language.
I was eight
when my father told me not to like someone because
of their identity. I had
been exposed to numerous amounts of people and
cultures, so to be told that
someone was wrong for something they believed in
made no sense to me. Trying to
comprehend that how I felt was not right was mind
boggling because I believed
what I had felt to be true. So being told by my
father, someone I absolutely
admired, that I was wrong made me question my own
identity. Of course I was
young and it was merely a crush, but how could
someone I love tell me that a
person was never going to be good for me?
Understanding
now that people can be categorized through their
ethnicity it makes sense that
my father feels the way he feels about Serbians;
people can act on a belief in
such a great manner that others cannot separate the
event from the people, just
as my father could not separate Serbians from the
war.
I came to
the realization that this incident changed the way I
see not only people, but
also life because from that moment on, I questioned
people’s identity. Curious
as to whom we were based on where we came from drove
me to learn about the
history of my family. The horror stories of the war
seem surreal, and the
people who did this are not people to me anymore.
What my father had told me
when I was an innocent eight year old continues to
echo in the back of my mind.
From that moment on and to this day, I have created
an identity for myself
based on the actions of others and what they,
themselves mean to me based on
who they are. Every day I challenge myself to think
outside of those beliefs; to
understand that an action does not define the
person, and this is incident is
the reason for that, and although I believe
someone’s ethnicity determines what
kind of cultural background a person has, does not
mean I relate all of their
principles back to that sole reason.