Over a year ago, I drove to a school gymnasium with my brother and crashed an event I wasn’t invited to.
It was a cultural gathering hosted by a Bosnian community, technically public, but not something I would have felt entitled to join. As a Croat from Bosnia, I’ve always moved through a strange in-between: connected to Bosnia, but never quite belonging to all the ways “Bosnian” is lived. My family isn’t Muslim, and I’d grown up with a quiet awareness of the lines that separated us. Not hostile, but undeniably there.
Still, I couldn’t shake the curiosity. I didn’t go to make a statement. I didn’t speak to anyone. I didn’t plan to. I simply stood at the back of a modest school gym.
Then, something happened.
Toward the end of the performances, the MC invited everyone to join in. My brother and I stepped forward. And in that circle of linked hands, I felt something I didn’t expect: belonging. No one asked who I was. No one needed to. We danced together, carried by the rhythm and the steps I had known all my life, and for a few minutes, the cultural divide I had grown up learning about slightly faded.
I didn’t speak to anyone that night. But I danced with them. And that was enough to unravel something inside me. I went home and spent hours searching for the songs I’d heard, the costumes I’d seen, the regions they came from. I still check that dance group’s website now and then, quietly hoping they’re doing well. They don’t know it, but they’ve shaped how I’ve spent my downtime this past year (turning spare moments into deep dives, and ordinary evenings into something worth remembering).
Months later, I found myself at a very different kind of gathering. I attended a Bosnian themed night hosted by Croatians, many of whom I had danced with for years in our local folklore group. Unlike the Bosnian event I had quietly observed from the back of a gym, this one felt familiar. It reflected the version of the Croat-Bosnian identity I had been raised in.
And then something unexpected happened.
A familiar melody began to play, the same music I had heard over a year ago at the school gymnasium. Without a word, my dad and I made our way to the dance floor.
The rhythm leaves no space for hesitation: sharp footwork, bursts of pivots and precision. The dance demands total presence, a physical fluency.
I held my dad’s hand and fell into step, the same way we’ve danced together for as long as I can remember. But then I looked up.
And I realized the entire hall was staring at him and I.
It wasn’t hostile. Just… quiet. Still. Eyes fixed.
It was a new feeling. One I hadn’t experienced at the Bosnian event, where I stood quietly at the back of the gym, clearly an outsider. And yet, no one stared. No one questioned my presence. I felt strangely at ease. The movement, the rhythm, the music, they came more naturally to me than they ever did in the Croatian folklore group I grew up in.
Looking back, I see now what those nights stirred in me. Something happens when you dance in both rooms. You begin to feel the weight of what divides them and the quiet pull of what still connects them. And somewhere between those steps, something begins to take shape.
I found myself thinking back to a memoir by an Albanian author, Gazmend Kapllani. His memoir offers a deeply human view of migration and identity in Southeastern Europe. His voice is humorous and sharp, especially when describing moments of unexpected connection across ethnic boundaries. One scene lingers in my mind: in a Greek coffee house, he thanks a waiter with a traditional gesture *hand over heart*. The waiter returns the smile and the gesture, saying, “We and the Greeks belong to the same tribe” (p.88). It’s a quiet moment, but one that dismantles rigid ideas of difference. Like Kapllani, I’ve seen how identity isn’t fixed or neatly divided. It’s relational, shaped by small encounters and shared recognition.
The Bosnian themed event was more than just music and dancing. It was a living example of an imagined community: a nation made not just by borders, but by shared memory.
The event made me think about how culture is carried forward, not just through tradition, but through feeling. The imagery and music draw from a romanticized past, but they also create continuity, a way of holding onto culture without freezing it. My dad and I found ourselves analyzing lyrics to songs from that night.
The music teaches. It resists. It remembers. Like the secret schools in Ottoman-era Greece where children learned their language and history in quiet defiance, both Bosnian events became their own kind of classroom. A place where trauma is not just inherited, but reshaped. A place where secondhand grief becomes collective memory.
And that, I think, is what Kapllani’s memoir (and events like these) remind us: ethnic identity isn’t something you inherit fully formed. It’s something you gather.
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If you’ve ever wondered how shared memory shapes identity across borders, I’d strongly recommend reading about Benedict Anderson’s theory of imagined communities. It offers a fascinating lens on how people form collective belonging. In addition to Kapllani’s book, which explores these ideas with humour and heart, Anderson’s work helped me name a feeling I’ve carried for a long time.
Digital Dugme 