I hope this is the only time in my life where I will promote past blogging through more blogging.
but, if you're already here, reading this--you might be interested in my only other foray into the blogosphere: in the spring of 2011, I kept a blog while participating in a peace and conflict studies program based in Belgrade/Bosnia/Kosovo and run by the School for International Training. re-reading it, I can totally see how I ended up here--back in the Balkans, rehashing questions of identity, place, space, power. if you're interested, it's here, and I don't think it's going anywhere fast anytime soon.
and I would be interested in hearing your thoughts/ideas/feelings/reflections. and reactions. I'm not much for the monologue.
I've had some interesting conversations in the last few days about the Albanian perspective on things--especially the view from Tetovo looking outward. And I do want to just acknowledge that discrimination/prejudice exists--not like that is unique to Macedonia--and there is some justification to a lot of the victimization narratives which have been shared with me (for example people being denied service in restaurants for speaking the "wrong" language.) But I also hear a lot of "us"-"them"-ing in these narratives (for example, we're not the ones who have a problem with them...) and I'm not sure how to move beyond this--but I listen to these framings of the conflict/tension, and I don't know how sustainable, how long-term these narratives are--when there tipping point is, when things will snap.
One of the most important things I learned from Vahidin was that victim narratives are, of course, compelling. But it's also easy to get lost in them, to get consumed by them, to get stuck behind that frame, those lenses, and how damning that gaze can be--and it takes a lot of cottonballs not to hear the song of those sirens. When really, victim narratives (perhaps more accurately suffering-narratives)--especially in a post-conflict/war community--can actually bridge, rather than reify, exclusive ethnic/linguistic/identity boundaries. For example, Vahido talked about wanting to do an oral history project with the families of Serbs in his village in north-west Bosnia who had been killed during the initial invasion/occupation of his village for harboring/sheltering/helping Bosniaks and Croats from the village--in essence for defending an identity rooted in place, in their community, rather than ethnicity. politics. Or another woman who arrived at one of their dialogue/trauma workshops for women impacted by the war (the war in Bosnia). Like many of the other woman there, she also lost a son and husband during the war--also killed by the Serb forces--but she was a Serb, not a Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim). These narratives aren't popular purely because they confound those neat, clean victim/aggressor narratives. and that's exactly why we need to also make space for them in remembering/recovering/reviving communities devastated by war/violence.
But there's also a huge imbalance of power here in Macedonia--and that shapes so much of the inter-ethnic/inter-linguistic relationships here. and it's difficult to see how the situation will change without some fundamental shift in the distribution of power in society.
However, speaking to a Macedonian Turkish colleague, she mentioned how even within the minority communities, there is still a hierarchy, a pecking order--so questions of power extend not only to the level of Macedonian-Albanian, but all the way through the diversity chain. And like Peggy MacIntosh's essay "White Privilege--Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack" says about American society (or more accurately being of a certain race, a certain class... in American society), I presume there is some privilege-blindness all the way through the power hierarchy here. and privilege is hard to see, hard to pin down--especially being here, it's something I try to be constantly mindful of. But it reminds me of my conversations with Colman McCarthy--and how he asks his students to write about the first time they were catcalled at--and all the women immediately start writing, and all the men look at each other. and in that moment, there's a glimmer of the/an imbalance within society. and how it's in those moments where privilege become externalized--rather than this thing within us which shapes the way we see/interpret/understand the world. (We can start talking about male privilege here, but that's a whole other topic. I will only add that there are not (and hasn't really been a history of) waitresses in Tetovo. I've heard of one in the last decade--at least.) I imagine those few silent moments in the classroom can be uncomfortable--but maybe that discomfort is necessary?
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