“You don’t ask about the war” — Born with disdain for war in my blood

When my father said he had just watched Quo Vadis, Aida?, I was surprised.

You sat through a movie about the Bosnian War? I wanted to ask. Willingly?

It was a joke I heard every once in a while when I was growing up: you don’t ask about the war. If I think back hard, maybe I remember jolly and lively family visits suddenly falling somber, normal discussions turning quiet. So maybe my family spoke about it amongst each other. But it wasn’t a topic my parents discussed with me.

So I didn’t ask.

Yet, even as I sit here typing these thoughts, I wonder if that was for me too. I certainly don’t want my parents to have suffered. It’s not easy to imagine them surviving the terror of war, as civilians on top of that.

And I never really looked too much into it. I knew what the war was about: land, money, religion. Did I need to know every detail?

Quo Vadis, Aida? was my reckoning with the war too. My father went through his own experience watching it, taken back to the years of chaos and fear. I want to ask him now, Was it a healed wound? Did it make you angry? It made me angry. It opened me up.

I have yet to talk to my family about it so for now, these remain my thoughts, as I quietly consider what this history was to me. I was born during the war, after all. I was there, if barely. We have another joke about it: born in god know’s what kind of building, what kind of “hospital”, with old man blind as a doctor.

It was my fun fact for a while, being born in a war hospital, makeshift, probably questionable. I felt for my poor mother.

And then the war ended, and people returned. The old home pictures don’t feel like I’m staring at a war-torn country, besides the ones of me standing besides the rubble from our shell of a house. I always thought it was an odd thing to document, your toddler playing amongst the rubble of destroyed houses. It felt so morbid to me — why would you want to remember that? And why would you watch a movie about this tragedy?

Why am I considering re-watching it now? I spent most of my life growing up in the United States. I have the English degree and the broken Bosnian to show for it. I wrestled with my own sense of identity here and there. I thought I had gotten comfortable with it. I went through my phase of telling people I was from Europe when they asked, because I was tired of being asked. Then I had my reckoning in college that everybody was from such interesting backgrounds, and what was the shame in making conversation about it, especially if I still told them my American city before Bosnia when they asked where are you from. Then I moved into full-time jobs, working with other people who were used to hearing about different backgrounds, and people stopped asking as often. I settled into my identity more and more.

Then the pandemic hit. I didn’t visit my family more than once in almost a year and a half, out of pure terror at the possibility of spreading anything to my elderly grandparents. They survived a war, survived the ethnic cleansing of their country, after all. They deserved better than a global pandemic.

I found myself homesick. I didn’t realize how much until my partner and I drove through New York City. My sister and I had been in the big apple several times in the previous year or two. And we had searched, last time we were there, for Bosnian food. There had to be some Bosnians up there — it was NYC, after all! And there were. And I kept it in mind, until my partner had to drive by and I convinced him to stop just briefly to pick up food.

I didn’t realize I missed it until I heard the familiar cadence of Bosnian language — the up and down that I associate with my relatives greeting each other exaggeratedly, slightly sarcastically, a little mischievously. The tone, the pitch, the words. I regretted not visiting Bosnia when my family went, maybe two summers before the pandemic.

I didn’t realize I missed it again until I was listening to Quo Vadis, Aida? The familiar faces, the familiar phrases. I kept saying to myself, I would have translated that differently, because the translation didn’t catch the feeling the Bosnian carried. I said, That looks like an uncle of mine.

And I hated it. Because above all else, this was a movie about human cruelty. Beyond the comfort I got from seeing these familiar quirks and quips, this movie burned me from the inside out. It reminded me how cruel people could be. It was loss and fear and injustice. It hit too close to home, right komšija?

It was war, and it reminded me how much I hate it, seemingly instinctively. As I considered the genocide of Srebrenica, I kept wondering why. Why would you do this? For country, for religion, for honor? What honor was there in this?

Perhaps others feel differently. But for me, I loathed considering how much this war had shaped my very existence, born to a shattered country on the verge of pushing the violence finally back, a year before the war officially ended.

Should I take this symbolically? Perhaps. Right now, I don’t know how else to take it. There’s no conclusion right now. There’s no end to this post either, because I’m still considering it. I’m still considering the regret I feel at not learning the language better, at not learning the recipes better. I’m still thinking about the quiet heaviness of Quo Vadis, Aida?, of how this history bled into me and my family. I’m still fathoming the destruction of human cruelty and the curiosity of human strength. How do you reconcile these together? How do I ask my family about this?