Be Uncomfortable!

Does escaping one’s own country at a young age mean losing part of your identity?

Novelist Elvira Mujčić affirms that identity asks for an artificial stillness. It is a dangerous concept; after all, conflicts based on ethnic identity have been the bloodiest. Yet, for cartoonist Boban Pesov, identity can be positive when not declined into an acritical form of patriotism. Identity can be a conduit to explore one’s roots. Across art, places, and music, Pesov is now trying to learn more about his cultural background. 

Mujčić was born in a small Serbian town in 1980, but soon moved to Srebrenica up until the beginning of the war in 1992. She has now lived in Italy for over twenty years. Pesov was born in Macedonia in 1988, and moved to Italy when he was eight. They're foreign everywhere they go: Balkan in Italy, Italian in the Balkans. 

Their latest works confront the history of their countries of birth and, although significantly different, share some fundamental traits. Mujčić's La stagione che non c’era is a novel centered around a few characters living in an unnamed village just before Yugoslavia's breakup. Change is brewing, and most clearly so in the Drina valley, far from the diverse and lively Sarajevo, as religion and ethnic background gradually gain in salience thanks to propaganda. The novel's reality is "on hold", prompting contemplation. Something is going to happen, it will happen very soon, it could happen anytime; but when?

Pesov’s C’era una volta l’Est is a graphic novel that takes an actual story from his family’s life and fictionalises it. His father escaped Yugoslavia when the author was little. It was the beginning of a war that did not directly involve Macedonia, but its consequences would heavily influence its economy. In the graphic novel we follow a man crossing collapsing Yugoslavia and struggling as an irregular immigrant in Italy. We also follow his son travelling from Italy to Macedonia by car to get to his parents thirty years later. Moving through rich and detailed depictions of the places we are moving through, this return journey becomes a device to interrogate change since the fall of Yugoslavia. 

Both works deal with the theme of belonging. Someone with a mixed identity, says Mujčić, will always be uncomfortable. They’ll never be able to fully declare “This is my place!” because someone will always contest it.

But maybe it’s better to be uncomfortable; a well-defined identity might be rigid. When History comes to pass, Mujčić suggests, it asks for seemingly smallest gestures: refusing to speak in a language different from your own, refusing to speak with people “outside your village”. Alas, what has happened in Yugoslavia remains relevant: ethnic conflicts, racism, the idea of a pure-blooded national race. Quoting Slavoj Žižek, "The Balkans are Europe’s subconscious".