Do You Really Want to Know, or How (Not) to Talk to an Academician?

The question of my life and my past comes up quite often, especially at parties.  Wherever there is a larger gathering and a need to be introduced for the first time, or even elaborate on the previous introduction—my past comes up.

Of course, I am not surprised.  Someone asks you “where are you from?” and what am I going to say: Japan?  After I utter those inevitable words like “Bosnia” and “Muslim,” the reaction can take different forms.  Either a person will have no clue whatsoever where Bosnia is, and the worst is, they will pretend that they do (“maybe it’s Boston, or Bulgaria, or Bolivia. It starts with a B.”).  Another option is that people will know vaguely where Bosnia is, and there was this “weird” war going on sometime in the 90s, but the knowledge stops there.  Or I meet people who have a more extended knowledge than just a vague recollection of news events from the 90s, and as a result feel like they are your brother in arms.

Too often, I have given away too much information about the war and everything that I have endured during the war and after.  People that know me also know that I usually have no problem speaking about my life.  That is not the issue here.

And actually, the fact that people do not know that much about Bosnia and the war does not bother me either.  I don’t have a “you should know this” complex.  The way I feel is if you don’t want to know, fine.  My life will still go on—no worries there.

The problem is different. 

Once, I was at a party, and I have encountered a woman, who was interested in Bosnia, who read some things about it, and has traveled in Europe.  In other words, she did know that there are other countries beside America.  And yet, perhaps people like this—those who know a little bit more, but still possess a surface knowledge of the history—are worse than those who have never left their backyard.

The woman wanted to know more.  I thought to myself, should I?  Should I speak?  I did.  And just as I suspected, facts about my past were treated as part of the small chit chat.  From “Bosnia’s Mass Graves” to “So, have you seen the new Woody Allen movie?”  All in one go.  I still blame myself for mentioning the biggest pain and a hole in my heart—my father’s death.

Asking questions like “how was the war?” is bad enough.  “Oh, it was maaaahrvelous, daaahrling!  On the way through Sniper Alley, I lost my most prized Louis Vuitton bag because I was running so fast.” 

What is worse is when people give me a list of recommended readings about the war—whether fictionalized accounts or some skewed history books.  This is exactly what happened at this party.

I said nothing.  Or rather, I said, “I will check it out.”  “I will check it out?!  I will check it out?!  What the hell is going through your mind, Emina?”  The party ended, I came back home, and that is when I started to get angry.  Not because of one woman’s ignorance, but because of an accumulated effect of many such conversations.  Of course, the question, which has always come up after the fact is why have I done such a thing?  Why have I given away yet another piece of myself?  Every fact about the war is a wound.  It isn’t just history.  It is personal pain that is with you every waking moment of your life, as well as through the moments of sleep.

Every time I speak about the deaths of family members (Ha! Even saying family “members” sounds more like a sociological observation), and every time it is treated like another conversation at a party, I have tarnished their memory.  This is not how they should be remembered.  Through such dialectic encounters, I have become an object, a souvenir for the pseudo-intellectual elite of America. 

I go back to that question of “why do I do such a thing?”  The truth is that I don’t want to make people feel uncomfortable.  So, I decrease myself in order for them to increase.  I do not want to deal with either inane questions or responses, or worse, the silence (elite, star professors at the University of Chicago remained quiet after asking me “where are you from?” and I won’t name names).  It makes me even more alienated than I already am.  And so, I downplay my past, and in effect, and in its truest meaning, I marginalize it. 

In order to alleviate someone else’s “pain” of listening about things like evil, war, rape, concentrations camps, I reduce my country’s history to a mere footnote in history books.  But this alleviation of someone else’s pain has a tremendous price—my suffering increases precisely because I have betrayed myself, my wounds, my family, my country, my people.

I am worried about making the “academic, open-minded elite” feel uncomfortable?  No, no, this nonsense must stop.  So, next time an “intellectual” asks me “so, how was the war?,” the answer they’re going to get is “do you really want to know?”