One summer during highschool, I attended a full-immersion school on the coast of Croatia. I slept, studied, did laundry, and lived entirely in Croatian, the second language I had learned from my Bosnian-Croat parents. One evening at dinner, a classmate, clearly confused, told me something I’d never forget: “You speak like a Serb.”
At the time, I understood that there were differences in dialect. I knew that my parents were minorities from Bosnia and that our speech might sound different to someone raised in Dalmatia. But I hadn’t expected the tone of accusation in her voice, as if the way I pronounced something as mundane as “soup” was suspect, or even threatening.
Embarrassed and eager to fit in, I quickly adjusted my speech. I started picking up local idioms, softening consonants, and mimicking the “right” accent. When I returned home to Canada at the end of the summer, my grandmother laughed and told me I sounded posh. I had overcorrected.
This post isn’t a plea for pity. What lingers with me isn’t how that moment made me feel, but how strange it seems in hindsight. We were both children. She may have been confused about why a Canadian student was suddenly in her Croatian class. Maybe she had a Serbian friend whose speech matched mine, or maybe she had seen someone like me on TV. What matters more is what that interaction represents.
Now, as I reflect on that summer through a different lens, I realize that what I experienced was part of something much larger: a glimpse into how language, identity, and memory are entangled with trauma, specifically, cultural trauma.
Cultural Trauma: Beyond the Individual
Jeffrey Alexander in his book defines cultural trauma not as the immediate consequence of a tragic event, but as the way that event is narrated and absorbed into collective memory. Trauma becomes cultural when it alters a group’s sense of identity, when suffering is not only experienced but also publicly acknowledged, symbolized, and shared.
He writes about how suffering only becomes ‘trauma’ when communities assign it meaning, narrate it, and integrate it into identity. This interpretation is what makes trauma collective rather than merely personal. It explains how a single comment about how I “sounded like a Serb” is connected to a much deeper, unresolved post-war narrative. One that continues to mark bodies, borders, and words.
It also helps us understand how victimhood, real or imagined, can fuel nationalism. Narratives of collective pain can be used to justify exclusion, retaliation, or silence. But they can also be mobilized for solidarity and social change. What matters is not whether the trauma is “accurate,” but whether it is believed, and who gets to tell the story.
Pretty Village, Pretty Flame: Memory in Conflict
The film Pretty Village, Pretty Flame (1996) captures this symbolic weight of trauma through the story of Milan and Halil, childhood friends who become wartime enemies. Their shattered friendship is a metaphor for the collapse of Yugoslavia itself. The film shows how war undermined the possibility of the restoration of a multicultural and multi-confessional society.
Like my own memory, the film uses intimate encounters to portray how nationalist ideologies seep into daily life. It’s not just soldiers and slogans —it’s the way people speak, remember, and forget. Milan and Halil’s transformation mirrors how children absorb historical conflict as absolute truths. As Ivo Andrić writes in The Bridge on the Drina, children “did not squabble about this, so convinced were both sides in their own belief” (128).
The Tunnel and the Bridge: Symbolic Spaces
In Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, much of the story unfolds in a tunnel, a modern-day version of the bridge in Andrić’s novel, once a meeting place of debate and now a site of tension. The tunnel becomes a metaphor for ideological entrapment, a place where diverse characters reflect on the fractured nationalism they’ve inherited and enacted. The soldiers in the tunnel are not just fighting a war, they are enacting a cultural narrative that defines who belongs, and who doesn’t.
Fitting In and Standing Out
So, what does all of this have to do with a fourteen-year-old being told she “spoke like a Serb”?
A lot apparently.
Because identity is rarely about facts —it’s about stories. About who tells them, who believes them, and how deeply they’re felt. My classmate may not have understood the weight of her words, but I now understand the social forces that shaped her reaction. It was not about me. It was about the narratives she had inherited, the lines that had already been drawn in her mind long before we ever met.
That’s the danger (and opportunity) of cultural trauma. It can divide us, or it can help us see one another more clearly. It can justify borders, or it can remind us that those borders are imagined.
And sometimes, it shows up in the smallest of places. Like the way someone says soup!
Digital Dugme 