Waiting for Macedonia Critique - Essay Example

? Waiting for Macedonia Word Count 617 (6 pages) Introduction Here we will focus on a discussion of the book Waiting For Macedonia: Identity in a Changing World, as well as the film We Are All Neighbors, assessing personal and national identities in Bosnia and Macedonia and analyzing how people see the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Personal Identities Both the book Waiting for Macedonia and the film Neighbors look particularly at various personal identities such as gender and other classifications during the disintegration of Yugoslavia and after its dissolution. Women and men in Macedonia and Bosnia are trying to find out their identities. Macedonian men and women don’t necessarily feel a kinship tie to their land, unlike Bosnians. Changes experienced by the young female engineers in Skopje include the fact that they feel more liberated to do as they please, and less inhibited. Young modern socialist women in Macedonia are classified on the upper level of the social strata in comparison to Albanian women of the village, who are sometimes pillaged by war, adversity, and infirmity. Unlike women in the European Union, those from Macedonia and Albania are generally regarded as lower-class – but that might be because the countries that they are from in Southeastern Europe are less highly-regarded due to their lower socioeconomic status. Another personal identity that is portrayed in the book is religion. Religion is more relegated to a status that is separated from the state in Macedonia, and people learn to get along with each other even though they are from different religious backgrounds. Religion, in the movie, is portrayed as a necessary part of life. In Bosnia, everyone is split up into factions. It might have had a lot to do with the fact that in the early ‘90s everyone in the region had to at least hear about, if not deal with, the Bosnian War. The Bosnian War divided people into three distinct groups: the Bosnian Muslims; the Orthodox Christian Serbians (also known as Serbs); and the Catholic Croatians (also known as Croats). The Croatians were pitted against the Bosnians by the Serbs. But basically, the Serbians were persecuting the Bosnians based on the fact that they were Muslims. President Bill Clinton finally decided to intervene in the Bosnian conflict in order to prevent an even larger genocide from taking place. To be Muslim in Bosnia meant to be the oppressed. To be a Croatian Catholic meant to be caught in the middle between a centuries-old fight between the Orthodox Christian Serbs and the Bosnian Muslims. National Identities Both the book and the film analyze different elements of national identity as well. Classifications of national identity in Yugoslavia during the existence of the country were never completely solidified because everyone came from different ethnic backgrounds. This only made allegiance to a nationality more difficult to believe in. The uncertainties of life after Yugoslavia, however, were somehow easier to deal with than the fact that much national pride was never lost on many Yugoslavians who were able to assimilate by ethnic groups. Religion can sometimes pose as nationality in the sense that, if someone is a Muslim, they might automatically assume that they are Bosnian. Thus, in a sense, in that region of the world one’s religious identity gets fused with a nationality even though that may not reflect the reality of an individual. In a similar manner – to put it in another way – many people also assume that someone whose religion is Judaism is necessarily an Israeli, but that’s not absolutely true. Nor is it true that someone who is an Israeli is necessarily Jewish –actually, it is the converse. Nothing can be assumed or presumed. While someone may be ethnically Jewish, they may not be a Jewish national (from Israel), and nothing guarantees that someone’s religion is Judaism unless proven otherwise. Therefore, nationality, ethnicity, race, and religion, for some Jewish people, are all one and the same. But certain people do differentiate between various facets of their personality, and that includes nationality. Nationality can indeed refer to ethnic character, but that is distinctly different from ethnicity as we know it – and is part and parcel of being part of a nation of people who share a regional geopolitical boundary. Religion, as mentioned before, can look like someone’s nationality, but one can never make assumptions about someone’s nationality based upon his or her religious persuasion. The protagonists of Bringa’s film show how a mixed village starts to see rifts between the various factions of people in the town – ultimately catapulting itself into conflict, as more and more people in the country are torn rife with resentment about the fact that they are different and thus, struggle to become independent. These people work to create a country from the religion of Islam and two disparate branches of Christianity in order to form a fully-functional Bosnia by relying upon the fact that these people share national characteristics. It is the lifeblood of their region’s veins that runs through the native peoples and which encapsulates the biggest national treasure of Bosnia: its people. Although the nationality of Muslims in that particular region happens to be Bosnian, Islam, as a religion, has no nationality, per se. Muslims, or followers of Islam, come from all over the world. Islam does not have one established nationality because believers come from all types of geopolitical boundaries around the globe, and even are from some places that don’t have geopolitical boundaries. Life in Bosnia changed after the war, and people united because of the human element that they all shared – receiving medical care from various Christian aid organizations. This was a bit ironic considering the fact that the Orthodox was just one branch of Christianity which was terrorizing the Muslims, and the fact that the Protestants and Catholics were indeed just other branches of Christianity – an irony that does not go unnoticed. The Republic of Macedonia was founded to accommodate people who lived within a certain geopolitical boundary. Therefore, this had little to do with religion, nationality, race, or ethnicity. Macedonia was a common ground where anyone who wanted to go live there could go, without fear of retribution. It was an uncharted territory, so to speak, because this was a new kind of social experiment. Could different people really get along in peace? Macedonia proved this to be true, and Macedonians united under the basic tenet that everyone had a right to be where they were – no matter what religious, ethnic, national, regional, or personal identity people had adopted. The Disintegration of Yugoslavia Of course, no one is immune from feeling alienated. The fear still persists that Macedonia could one day become the next Bosnia. One woman said “she fears the same ethnic violence in Macedonia as in Bosnia: ‘I think we are the only ones in the world that can live with other nationalities and that is how we have survived. We have no outstanding feeling of nationality. That’s just our life.’”1 The historical actualities of the book are that creating a country from scratch was not easy, nor was it necessarily a fun exercise for those people who were looking at exile from their former homes. The film, although it may have portrayed religious differences well, was not able to necessarily show personal identities like ethnicity, because ethnicity is not only difficult to define from group to group. Everyone sees the world differently, everyone labels people differently, and everyone self-identifies differently. In the years following the Bosnian war, people were able to rebuild their sense of self, but the horrible war savaged the country and ravaged the people until they were rife with grief. Looking at the history of Yugoslavia and Tito’s shunning of nationality and at the Western imagery of the war in Yugoslavia being of ancient hatred based on religion and nationality, it is almost certainly true that notions carried over from the Ottoman Empire dominated in terms of mindset, which served as the catalyst for war. Nationalities based on religion are possible but they’re not convenient nor do they necessarily make sense, because they’re separate – Macedonian, Slav, Orthodox, Albanian. For, just because they are convenient assumptions, it does not mean they are allowed to be made. An Albanian might not be Orthodox. A Macedonian might be an atheist instead of ascribing to a particular faith. So, in closing, one can never really judge a book by its cover. Conclusion Personal identity, nationality, and the disintegration of Yugoslavia affected people on individual levels, as portrayed in Waiting and Neighbors. Several accounts are lacking as to how personal identities and nationalities have been able to be reconstructed in light of the difficult events surrounding the dissolution of Yugoslavia. Without a doubt, people are the ones who got caught in all of the problematic geopolitical boundary gerrymandering that went on when Yugoslavia broke up. Indeed, the enigmas that were at the very heart, the very center of all the conflict, were normal people just living their everyday lives – but alas, they could not agree on issues of personal identity and nationality. This was only conflated and made that much worse by political posturing, which ruined peoples’ lives and brought many to ruin. Thankfully, many lessons can be learned from such a disastrous occurrence as the crumbling state of Yugoslavia, but the most important one being that people need to learn how to live with each other, in spite of their differences, whether those be personal identity issues, nationality issues and how people self-identify, or religious differences. As someone famous once said, it’s often easier to be critical than correct. Let’s hope that in the future people will be able to not only just live, but to live in peace with each other. Works Cited Thiessen, Ilka. Waiting For Macedonia: Identity in a Changing World. Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2007. Print. Read More