One Immigrant's Story

You don't hear many immigrant stories these days. Mostly, we hear about policies in regards to illegal immigration. It would seem that if you want to hear any stories about immigrants you have to dig deep into the past of America, a time when people sailed on a ship, came to Ellis Island, somehow changed their names, and then left to fend for themselves.

But this is not true. There are many immigrant stories still – of people who came here, escaping totalitarian regimes or war. My life is one of those stories.

I was born in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and have spent my childhood there. I was caught in the war. War began in April 1992, and I left Sarajevo by the end of November 1992 in a convoy of women and children bound for Croatia and finally for Czech Republic. I have lived in a refugee camp in Czech Republic for almost four years. I desired so much to come to America. And so I applied to enter the United States. I was rejected. I appealed the decision and I was accepted. And so I came to the United on May 15, 1996, just a few months shy of my 17th birthday.

I have repeated these facts so many times when people ask me about my life. Like a tape or a record – it's all there, ready for someone to either hit play or press the stylus against the grooves of my life. But the sound of the record is hollow and repetitive and muffled. The fullness of a 33 cannot be heard.

In between the chronological facts, there are details, nuances, genuine human experiences, which have a face. Tied very closely to the question and experience of memory is also a problem of identity. We are all part of the human family, to be sure. But it is necessary to know one's roots, to be firmly planted in one's tradition.

I was born a Muslim and I remain a Muslim. But what is a Muslim in America? But wait – I am getting ahead of myself! First, let me ask this: what is a Muslim in Bosnia?

During Communism, religion was suppressed in Yugoslavia. Despite many European and American Marxists/Socialists who claim that ours was a “Socialism with a Human Face,' people still went to prisons for not being loyal to Tito. The use of language was also suppressed, in which any reminders of Turkish and Bosniak words (that have been part of the culture and identity for a very long time) were erased. If you were caught using such words, you were reprimanded, as it happened to me many times in school.

War, which as I said began in 1992, has cut me off from my home, from my family, from my language, and the history of the Bosnian people. I feel locked out. My mind too is fragmented – filled with many identities, although sometimes it feels like none at all. Something in my soul calls out and gazes into the direction of Bosnia.

I am between many worlds. Well, at least two. In America, I am faced with the fact that that acts of violence and terrorism (in other words, evil) are perpetrated by Muslims (but what kind are those and how dare they call themselves Muslims?), and in Bosnia I am always reminded of the significance and the inevitability of memory – remembering those who have perished, the victims of genocide.

These are difficult things to talk about, and one has to be entirely honest, without one small hint of cliched expressions and colorful and inauthentic acts of forgiveness. Spiritualism will not heal any wounds and most certainly it is incapable of asking questions such as, “what is the meaning of life after genocide?” or “why did I survive?” or “how do you forgive and still seek justice?”

In a book titled The Sunflower, Simon Wiesenthal writes a story about a young Jew who is taken from a concentration camp into a hospital. Next to him, heavily wounded, is a Nazi soldier, who confesses that he participated in a burning of an entire Jewish village. He asks the young Jew for an absolution. Young Jew is conflicted. What is he to do? He decides to leave the room, silently. Are we to do this? Again, I come back to the tension between forgiveness and justice.

I can hardly answer such a question in a short column such as this. Or ever. I can only try to explore it, and with God, hope that I have enough courage to “insert” the nuances of human condition in between the lines of chronological facts.