I was 20 days old when my family left my birthplace of Mostar, Bosnia and Hercegovina because tensions had finally led to a devastating blow-out between Croatians, Serbians, and Bosnians. One of the pivotal cities being fought over was my hometown. My mum was a Croatian woman, my father a Serbian man, and because of this, we really didn’t have anywhere to go but out.

My family, to this day, refuses to talk about all of this, so the little information I do know, I have pieced together myself, and because of this, my frame of reference is based around when I learned it. With no one willing to talk, I replaced explanations with personal logic and meaning, and now, my identity is weaved with my 5 year old logic that Bosnians were the bad guys, and my 13 year old shock that I am part Serbian, and my 22 year old dismay that the idea my dad adamantly supports is the same idea that at one point, justified killing hundreds of people in a barn. 

I never knew what I was or where I came from. When I showed up to kindergarten as the new kid, the first question a boy asked me was why my English sucked and where I came from, because it sure wasn’t Canada. I didn’t know how to answer him. It didn’t help that my former country of Yugoslavia, at the time, was being diced and sliced, and that borders, like in so many other cases, are easily drawn on maps, but are detrimental for the ethnic groups that need to reconcile them on the ground. I remember the first time the reality of this sunk in for me. I was in my first year of college and had just read Thomas King’s “Borders”, and the idea that my identity, and everyone else’s identity for that matter, had nothing to do with the lines drawn on a map, hit me like a ton of bricks.

My identity seemed to always be shifting. Growing up, my mother told me I was Croatian. My father, rather than correct her, worked to challenge her through my sister and I. From a young age, instead of using the Serbian/Croatian term for dad, he told me to call him Babo, a term of endearment used by Muslims in Bosnia. In 1995, he took me to a protest at the Vancouver Art Gallery against Western intervention in the Bosnian war. The only thing I knew was that my Babo was always right, and that whatever he was, I was too. I was 12 years old before I finally found out, ethnically speaking, that I was half Serbian. Suddenly, I needed to make room for a new identity, but that was alright, because for once it was supported by real evidence, and not the justification that it was my dad pissing off my mum. I could finally explain to people that I was born in what used to be Yugoslavia, but that the country was divided up, and for now, I’m born in what is Bosnia and Hercegovina. I am not Bosnian, because that is a term used by Muslim’s who are native to the land, but do not identity as either Croatian or Serbian. Is your brain hurting yet? Mine has been for years.

This is who I am by birth. But at a young age, I welcomed the idea of being Canadian with such open arms—partly because everyone around me seemed to be Canadian, and partly because it encompassed such simpler borders, both geographically, and figuratively. The price of giving up my Serbian/Croatian cultural roots seemed fair, for the chance to rid myself of oppression, war, and lies. All I knew was, that watching a Canadian beer commercial, I felt a sense of loyalty, to the simple ideas it presented. It looked so easy to be Canadian. Give us hockey, mountains, and beer, and we don’t have to talk about the oppression, the war, and lies, that seem to make up every country.

I’m coming to terms with the fact that like my Serbian/Croatian identity, my Canadian identity—what I consider to be my home and my values, is constantly changing, and I am constantly learning. Most importantly, there is an underbelly to everything, and I have to acknowledge it if I want to lay any claim to it, because I need to claim it as a whole, faults and all.