Digital Dugme

I took a university course called Other Europes, which focused on Southeastern Europe. I enrolled in it, hoping to finally face a piece of history I’ve long avoided. Growing up, I often wondered why my parents immigrated. Why had they never fully explained it to me?

Only now, in my early adulthood, have I started to grasp the complexities of the region my family came from. Through this course, I began to see how history is never neutral. It’s shaped, reshaped, and framed by those who tell it. Stuart Hall’s idea that modernity is not the product of one clear historical path but rather a condensation of many overlapping and competing histories helped me make sense of the conflicting narratives I encountered. This especially resonated when learning about the Yugoslav wars, events with many sides and interpretations. To be clear, this blog post isn’t about choosing one. It’s about confronting a mental block that’s long kept me from even beginning the conversation.

For a long time, I resented my parents for not teaching me about the Yugoslav wars. I’d find myself in conversations with other first-gen Balkan kids, feeling confused by their political references (and worse, ashamed that I had no opinions). I didn’t even know how to explain my own background. With some people, I’d say I was Croatian. With others, Bosnian. The truth is, I didn’t fully know the difference.

Now, I understand my parents were trying to protect me. They wanted to give me a life free from the fears they grew up with. And I’m grateful for that. I truly love living in Canada, I wouldn’t change it for the world.

But this past Christmas, something shifted. I travelled to Bosnia with my dad, a trip I’ve made many times before. But this time, I came with a deeper curiosity. I had started reading ahead in the course syllabus, and I approached the visit with a more introspective perspective, shaped by everything I was beginning to learn.

In Canada, I’ve always identified as bicultural, but I’ve never fully felt like I belonged. In Bosnia, I was technically “home,” but I also realized I was viewed as a visitor, a Western tourist with a decent understanding of the culture, but still an outsider. Maria Todorova’s concept of Balkanism helped me name this feeling. The Balkans are often framed as a space between East and West, and that tension mirrored my Canadian-Bosnian identity perfectly.

The course didn’t just teach me history, it opened up conversations with my dad that we’d never had before. He watched all the assigned films with me and listened patiently as I debriefed my weekly lectures. One of the most powerful moments came after watching the documentary Twice a Stranger, which focuses on the population exchange between Greece and Turkey.

The film was eye-opening. It explored how monocultural identities were forcibly created through the displacement of people, supposedly to avoid conflict. Homogenization was seen as the solution. It reminded me how, after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, many displaced Muslims settled near Christian villages in Bosnia, increasing tensions that had already been simmering. The idea of forcibly redrawing identity lines to create a “modern” European state was haunting.

That film led me into a rabbit hole, a deep dive through archives online and in my local public library. I found CBC coverage from the early 90s showing families being forced from their homes in Bosnia. One of those families was mine. My father remembered those exact scenes. He was safe in Canada when it aired, watching his family on the news, knowing there was nothing he could do.

That moment stayed with me. I realized how much fear my parents had carried (and unknowingly passed down to me). I grew up with the same survival mindset: believing that hobbies were useless if they didn’t make money, that work and education were the only paths to security. I thank my parents for their work ethic, but I also recognize how I burned myself out, over and over again, chasing a safety that was never actually threatened.

This blog doesn’t “fit” into that survival mindset. It isn’t a commodity. It doesn’t lead to a paycheck. But it helps me breathe. And I think my parents would be proud to see me finding peace, not just in surviving but in reflecting.

I’ve been diving deeper into film, music, and memory, and I’m excited to continue that exploration through this blog. I’ll start by linking a book that helped me understand imagined communities and how my parents’ experiences as immigrants fit into a much broader historical and cultural context. This was something I hadn’t fully recognized before.