Before we get into today’s post, I just want to say a quick thank you to everyone who reads this blog! especially my peers, classmates, and childhood friends who keep me curious and keep the conversations going.
It’s cool that so many of you are also figuring out what it means to grow up between cultures, and that this space has helped us connect just a little bit more.
If you read this entry today and find yourself wanting more (more films, more books, more conversations), please reach out. I’d be so happy to share and chat.
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Confessions of a Teenage Try-Hard
When I was a teenager, I treated preserving my culture like it was my part-time job. Though there was no paycheque, only lace, folk music, and slightly stressed out vibes. I felt as if proving I was “enough” meant knowing the songs, teaching the language, and showing up at every event, even while the rest of my life was very much Canadian. The guilt ran deep. I eventually left the folklore group at eighteen but kept teaching Croatian to younger kids a while longer, partly out of love, but also, if I’m honest, out of obligation. Looking back, I realize I was convinced the entire future of our culture depended on me showing up in a perfectly starched costume, dancing the right steps, and knowing how to tie every decorative knot.
I know for a fact that it gave my parents a sense of home while living in such a foreign place. Seeing their children in ways that felt so familiar to them must have been powerful. I mean, what a concept: your home is taken away from you, and years later, your children become the thing that feels like home. It’s beautiful. But now that I’m an adult, I’ve decided to take a step back.
I was a living example of an imagined community: a nation made not just by borders, but by shared memories.
In another post, I wrote more about how these imagined communities are created, how people who may never meet still feel deeply connected through language, ritual, or even the way we mourn. I link to some readings there that shaped my thinking, especially Benedict Anderson’s work on imagined communities. His work helped me name a feeling I’d carried for a long time: that identity isn’t just inherited, it’s performed, retold, and repeated until it feels like home.
But that’s what I’m trying to say today: for me, it’s not home. Creating some separation from those narratives has been crucial for me. It’s helped me start working through the layers of generational and cultural trauma that so many first-gen Balkan kids (and children of immigrants in general) may inevitably inherit.
When identity becomes too tightly woven into collective memory (especially one shaped by trauma), it can start to feel less like a choice and more like a script. There have been moments where I’ve had to take a step back. To ask myself: Why did loving a culture start to feel like saving it? Why did I feel so responsible for keeping it from slipping away? What am I keeping alive (and who told me it was mine to keep)?
Balkan Math
Reading the book Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity by Jeffrey Alexander gave me something surprisingly concrete: an equation for how national traumas become cultural narratives.
Yes, an actual equation (bear with me).
Alexander’s formula helped me understand that it’s not just what happened that becomes trauma, it’s how it’s told, who tells it, who listens, and who’s blamed.
Cultural Trauma = (Pain + Victim Group + Relation to Audience + Attribution of Responsibility) × Institutional Mediation × Carrier Group Influence
Looking back, I see how the parts of Alexander’s equation (like the relation to audience or attribution of responsibility) had shaped the pressure I felt. It wasn’t just history in textbooks; it was alive in expectations, community conversations, and quiet feelings of loyalty and debt. And that’s when I started to realize: even personal identity can get caught up in cultural trauma narratives, whether we choose it or not.
Solving the Equation (with a fork)
In a university course, I watched two films about the Bosnian war that showed me how nationalism doesn’t just appear in speeches or flags, but hides in everyday things, sometimes in ways that seem almost absurd.
I want to share two examples of nationalism from those films that struck a chord with me in a deeply discomforting way.
One scene I can’t forget shows a soldier wearing a literal fork as a necklace during the war. He explains proudly that his people used forks before the English did. It sounds almost childish, like a playground argument, but it reveals something deeper: a fork to him was symbolic proof of superiority.
In another film, artillery shells (the same ones used to destroy homes and lives) are melted down and used to plate the interior of a church. It’s haunting. The act transforms tools of violence into sacred objects, turning destruction into something holy. It’s not just about remembering the war; it’s about sanctifying it, giving it a kind of divine afterlife.
These examples left me feeling uneasy. They might seem theatrical or absurd, but that’s how nationalism often works: it takes ordinary things and loads them with symbolism until they feel untouchable. Once you start seeing how meaning gets attached to objects and stories, you begin noticing it everywhere.
If you’ve studied nationalism, you might recognize these kinds of examples as forms of symbolic nationalism, where everyday objects or actions become powerful markers of identity, belonging, or superiority. And if you’re familiar with the idea of cultural trauma, you might see how these examples could fit into the equation I mentioned earlier.
You might expect me to break down that equation here, but this is where I choose to step back. My own relation to audience is possibly different from yours as a reader, and my sense of attribution of responsibility is shaped by the fact that I’m writing this blog partly as a way to examine my own internal biases. I’m not part of the generation that lived through the war firsthand, and I’m also shaped by a Canadian education system that didn’t extensively cover it. Trying to fully analyze these symbols myself would come from a personal lens that might not capture the whole picture.
So instead, I’m leaving these examples here for you to consider (and perhaps to fill in the equation for yourself). But if any of this resonates with you the way it did for me, please feel free to reach out. I’d be happy to share the names of the films. Maybe you’ll see the equation come to life for yourself.
Where am I now?
I’ve reflected on which narratives I’d unknowingly absorbed, stories that taught me who the “good guys” were, which pain was legitimate, what kind of pride was pure and what kind was dangerous.
There are narratives that I now gently remove from my understanding of culture. Not because they’re embarrassing, but because they no longer feel helpful to me. I don’t need to inherit someone else’s pain to prove my identity.
What I’ve found is a way to live my culture on my own terms, through joy, art, and curiosity. It’s undeniably woven into my daily life, even though I am very much a Canadian. And it’s what has led me to this blog, where I’ve learned many lessons the hard way (but learned nonetheless). And I’m okay with that.
Digital Dugme 