ABSTRACT
All ethnically-homogenous families are alike, but each mixed family is mixed in its own right. Paraphrased in such a way, Leo Tolstoy, the conscience of late, imperial Russia offers a pithy summary of the main purpose of this chapter: to counter the portrayal of mixed families as either sites of resistance to nationalism or symbols of a failed multiculturalism. Having already been casualties of the wars that tore the former Yugoslavia apart, the mixed marriages of the former country again became victimised in the 1990s, but this time by pundits, historians, sociologists and journalists, who used them as props in their arguments over the reasons for the disastrous failure of the country. Well-intentioned historians and journalists pointed to a high number of urban mixed marriages in Yugoslavia in expressing their puzzlement over the collapse of Tito’s ‘brotherhood and unity’ policy (Donia and Fine 1995; Malcolm 1994; Cohen 1994); indeed some Western journalists emplotted diverse experiences of these families into the story of Romeo and Juliet (Romeo and Juliet 1994); expectedly, nationalist ideologues and religious zealots branded them a fifth column (Spahić 1994); and less expectedly, the demographers who conducted first studies of mixed marriage in socialist Yugoslavia pointed to them as evidence of irreconcilable ethno-cultural differences in the country (Botev 1994). Using autobiography, I aim to problematise the stale portrayal of Yugoslav mixed marriages that is still embedded within the highly polarised ideological space of the 1990s. In compensating for the emplotment that inevitably occurs once one has branded these families ‘mixed’, it is useful to heed the approach of the sociologist Rogers Brubaker, who makes a distinction between nominally and experientially mixed marriages. The former describes periods of time when spouses who belong to different ethnic groups do not feel the relevance of these categories. The latter denotes those moments – however brief or prolonged – when due to a variety of factors their differing ethnicities suddenly become socially relevant, forcing them to react (Brubaker et al. 2006: 301-316). Put more concretely, for the first 17 years of their marriage, and the first 12 years of my life, my parents were only nominally mixed: yes, my father came from a Muslim family; his grandfather, a hodža (Muslim priest) strictly forbade the eating of pork in the house, circumcised his children and raised them Muslim; and yes, my mother came from a Croatian family whose mother came from Zagreb, and my maternal
grandfather even fought for the Second World War-era Independent State of Croatia (NDH). However, as both of my parents grew up in staunchly secular families in socialist-era Mostar, they became intellectually aware in an environment of ‘brotherhood and unity’, which frowned upon nationalism as backward. By the time they met in 1970, they had had their ethnicities completely muted. However, the tattoo on my father’s left knee (Figure 4.1), depicting a Catholic cross interlocked with a Muslim crescent and star, which he got during his military service – and while dating my mother – shows his awareness of their ethnic backgrounds, albeit whilst insisting that they be bound together by a giant padlock. In the summer of 1991 during our last Yugoslav family vacation to the Dalmatian coast my father fearfully covered up the tattoo with a large Band-Aid, an act that essentially uncovered the mixedness of our family, and marked the moment – at least in my memory – when our family became experientially mixed.
