Diaspora Voices 7:
Generations

Diaspora Voices is an occasional series of conversations with ex-Yugoslavs living abroad. This one started with an email.

With Tanya Pikula.

Listen: “Diaspora Voices 7: Generations” (Episode #96)

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Transcript: “Diaspora Voices 7: Generations” (Episode #96)

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[SOUNDBITE]

[JINGLE]

PETER KORCHNAK: This episode of Remembering Yugoslavia is brought to you by Yugoblok. Yugoblok is a global community and social network for all who celebrate Yugoslavia’s legacy, cultivate its memory, and imagine its future possibilities. It’s the new home of this podcast, it’s articles, newsletters, events, and a shop—it’s all Yugoslavia, all the time. Visit Yugoblok.com to explore and join.

[JINGLE] 

PETER KORCHNAK: This is Remembering Yugoslavia, the Yugoblok show exploring the memory of a country that no longer exists. I’m your host Peter Korchnak.

It’s been a while since we’ve heard a diaspora voice on Diaspora Voices, a segment on this show featuring conversations with ex- or post-Yugoslavs living abroad. 

And so I recently spoke with Tanya Pikula, a Sarajevo-born Torontonian. A couple of years ago she had emailed me with my favorite kind of a subject line: “A Thank You and Some Ideas.” 

First she said some nice things about the show, which she had found as she searched for podcasts about her former country and the Balkans: “I discovered your podcast only a few months ago and am really struck by how insightful and interesting it is.” 

TANYA PIKULA: I just wanted to thank you, because it was such a lovely reminder of that culture and that time. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Always good to hear.

After sharing a bit of her story, Pikula finished the message by writing, “thank you for the chance to revisit this one thing I seem to have a lot of feelings about, some of them largely unresolved.” 

It is this piece and the ideas Pikula offered that form the bulk of today’s show.

First, let me give a shoutout to the latest HEROes of Yugoblok who make all this possible. Welcome to the blok, Fabiano, Jennie, Jonathon, Nemanja, Patrick, Sanin, Simon, Stefan, and Tanya. Yugoblok is better with you.

These fine young Yugoblokniks took advantage of the introductory membership price for the first 101 vanguard HERO members. There are still a few spots left, so be a hero, go to Yugoblok.com and sign up to join today.

[SOUNDBITE – “Yugoslav Space Program” by Sticky Keys]

PETER KORCHNAK: By the way, that track, “Yugoslav Space Program,” is a generous contribution to the podcast by Sticky Keys AKA Iva Janković who appeared in the second installment of Diaspora Voices, Episode 26, “Home and Country.”

And now, meet Tanya Pikula.

TANYA PIKULA: I was born and raised in Sarajevo, and I was almost 11 when the war started. All of my family was in Sarajevo, so about four generations of my mum’s family, three generations of my dad’s, very extensive family network. And that splintered, obviously, when the war started. 

My mom, dad, my sister and me and my maternal grandparents escaped, and we went to Serbia for about two years.

And then in 1994 my parents got the papers for us to go to Canada. They had to sort of make that very hard decision, and we came to Canada in August of 1994. It’s been 30 years. We just celebrated that anniversary the other day. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Pikula lives in Toronto, a veritable vortex of ex-Yugoslav diaspora—emigres, exiles, expats, refugees…and their descendants. You’ve heard from some of them on this show.

TANYA PIKULA: I used to when I first came to Canada, definitely hang out a lot with ex-Yugos. I didn’t speak English, so those were the only people I felt I could actually, talk to and interact as myself. 

Over the years I’ve continued to have some friends from former Yugoslavia, especially a lot of Bosnians of various ethnicities. But I would say that now, they are in the minority. 

My life just sort of unfolded that way. You know, my partner is Irish. A lot of my friends are— you know, they come from various parts of the world here. But there are still a few people from the former Yugoslavia that you know I do keep in close contact with. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Pikula and I commiserated on this point a bit. There was a point in my immigrant experience here in the US when I hung out with Slovaks and Czechs (there’s a meetup group in Portland, Oregon). But at some point I realized that back home I probably wouldn’t be friends with any of them. It was only our country of origin that united us, and that wasn’t enough.

Pikula pursued the path of English literature, all the way up to a doctorate.

TANYA PIKULA: I feel like that choice was, in part at least informed by my immigrant experience. I came to Canada when I was about 13, a very tender age, and at that time, you know, I didn’t speak English. So English was something that I grappled with in the years after that. I didn’t have as many friends at that time, which was very unusual for me, because I was always a very extroverted child and have grown into a pretty extroverted adult. But because of that language barrier, there was a lot of loneliness and insecurity in those teenage years, and over time, I think I found escape in books. And just reading and watching movies became my sort of comfortable little cocoon that I could escape into, you know, as you kind of dealing with all the angst that comes with being a teenager.

By the time High School finished and I had to make a decision about what to do, I continued to kind of want to just keep escaping to these characters and narratives of other lives. And then I started that path, and then I started liking it, and I continued pursuing it. So in many ways, it was a reaction, maybe a little bit of a defense mechanism in some ways. 

On one hand it’s escaping to a imaginary world. On the other hand, it’s conquering the language that was something that was a barrier for me. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Pikula continues to read but…

TANYA PIKULA: There are big gaps in my knowledge in terms of the literature back home. I have spent a lot of time thinking about Yugoslavia, but it was more kind of thinking about my childhood. For a long time, I’ve sort of resisted really engaging in depth with the literature that grapples with, you know, social issues and political issues of that region, because it was just almost too close to home. It was almost easier to retreat into English literature where, you know, not to say that they that it doesn’t deal with social issues but you know, there was something comforting and kind of escaping into, you know, novels about country houses and people sipping tea and just talking about the weather for a really long time.

PETER KORCHNAK: It’s never too late, as this old-new novel reader can attest. 

Academia being what it is, a wretched hive of students and pedagogy (those are my words), Pikula took the transferable skills she had and applied in them in the world of strategic communications, first in government and now in health care.

One of the topics Pikula suggested for the podcast was generational differences in the experience and perception of Yugoslavia. So I asked her about that within her own family.

TANYA PIKULA: With my grandparents, I was more privy to the reactions of my maternal ones, because they were refugees with us for two years, whereas my paternal one stayed under siege in Sarajevo the entire time. 

What I saw was something unshakable about their commitment to Sarajevo, in terms of, that’s our home and that’s where we stay. When the war’s over, we’re going back and that’s where we’re gonna die. And they did do that. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Pikula’s paternal grandparents died in 1999 within three weeks of each other, and her maternal grandfather died a year later. Her maternal grandmother lived with her family in Canada and then died in 2011. She is buried in Sarajevo.

TANYA PIKULA: With that generation, what I saw first and foremost was just— it was such a sense of tragedy, because right at the time when they were supposed to reap the benefits of all their hard work and be surrounded by their children and grandchildren that they raised, this happened, and there was no starting a new life for them, because they were already in their, you know, late 60s. So in many ways, you know, that story of that generation was a story of just figuring out a way to return to the place that you escaped from, or to stay in the place that was always your home, and to simply last there as long as you can, but without that strong network of friends and family that you previously had. 

For them, it wasn’t about “who do I become next?” because there is no becoming next—I am who I am and I have to return to that place in Sarajevo and continue to live there until I die. 

And that generation already, you know, saw a world war, they lived in a time prior to Tito’s Yugoslavia, so their life covered parts of history that were not Tito’s Yugoslavia, and therefore their entire identity wasn’t completely tied to it in that sense. 

That’s at least my family. None of them were members of the Communist Party, so maybe they weren’t as dedicated to that ideal in the same way. They certainly loved Yugoslavia. But I do think that maybe for them, it was more, I just want to stay in Sarajevo rather than mourning this existence that was the only existence they’ve ever known. 

PETER KORCHNAK: As for Pikula’s parents’ generation…

TANYA PIKULA: On my parents and that generation rested the onus of the big decisions. Do we stay or do we go to diaspora? What do we do in terms of our professions? 

PETER KORCHNAK: Both Pikula’s parents had been physicians with some 15 years of experience by the time the war started. In Canada, they questioned what to do next, whether to undergo the yearslong process of becoming doctors or retrain into something else. They ended up switching to public health, specifically infectious disease control; the COVID 19 pandemic was their last project before retirement.

TANYA PIKULA: So their professional identity, their identity as people who were born and grew up in Yugoslavia, that was the only thing that they knew. I think they experienced a certain level existential angst. I especially saw it in my mom, who I think, really believed in Yugoslavia. And I just saw that over time, this process of existential, you know, struggle, how do you define yourself? And then even a process of disillusionment in this dream, vision, this country, that she really believed in. 

But I think for them, there was so much struggle for survival that you’re so busy struggling that even when you’re in the midst of this existential crisis, you don’t have time to dwell as much, you just have to keep moving forward. 

They really proved that they were survivors, as did many, many people who also came to diaspora. They started from scratch in their early 40s with two small kids, and you know, having to rebuild their entire life while trying to figure out, what am I now? And feeling very guilty about leaving parents back home. 

One thing I remember: the whole time during the war, during the early immigrant years, which were, you know, tough, I was never made to feel that I wasn’t fully supported by my parents, and I never remember really being left wanting. They did a really good job of protecting us throughout that whole very tough period. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Children are much more adaptable, of course. Still it’s not a straightforward process.

TANYA PIKULA: My sister was seven. When you’re seven, you’re very malleable. Still, you’re, you know, you just kind of absorb the environment. 

But when you’re 13, which is what I was when I came, the impact on me, I think, was predominantly social and psychological. I went from this, like, super gregarious, you know, extroverted, confident kid, to somebody who felt like she couldn’t communicate basic things to people, to show them how much she wanted to interact with them. 

Puberty is a funny time. It’s awkward wherever you are, but I think especially if right at that time when it’s starting, you move continents, and you’ve just lost your home, and you’re kind of completely disoriented. 

And kids get a little bit mean and you suddenly start to be defined by gender in a way that you weren’t before. And I think that I really struggled with that, and those were years of real loneliness and erosion of confidence that, you know, had an impact for a long time. 

There’s a book by Tom Wolfe, the American writer, and I think the title of the book is, You Can’t Go Home Again. And that’s really what it is. Childhood is just such a happy time, if you’re lucky enough to have, you know, a stable childhood and parents who love you and are in stable position themselves to take care of you. 

PETER KORCHNAK: In all my Diaspora Voices conversations I was struck by one thing that bubbled up when I spoke with Pikula: all the diasporans I spoke with  went to wealthy countries in the West.

TANYA PIKULA: The process of immigration is hard for anyone, whether they’re going, you know, to rich country or poor country. That’s just a sense of emotional and psychological displacement and having to start from scratch. You’re coming into the country, but you’re not rich you’re you’re struggling very much to make ends meet, if anything you’re much more highly disadvantaged than you were in your country where you had roots and connections and your education was accepted.

Now, obviously, you know, we’re very settled in Canada, and we’ve had a massive advantages because we came here. 

One thing to consider, though, is that there’s a spiritual side, you know, that maybe some people have not been able to replicate, even if they live in a country that has a very high standard of living, and even if they’re doing very well. I’m not saying that’s everyone. I’m saying that there have been a lot of ex-Yugos who’ve communicated that to me, and I’ve certainly felt it at times. 

There is a different mentality. In the Balkans, we are people who are less formal. We’re a lot more spontaneous. There’s a lot more socializing. People are, you know, a little bit more straightforward and blunt, but also probably less reserved.

I think even though people have created homes in richer countries and um, are now able to do a lot of things that they may not have been able to do, you know, had they stayed back home, like, I don’t know, traveling to visit China or Japan, or all these parts of the world. 

There is a certain sense sometimes of spiritual homelessness, and I think that that continues to haunt people in various degrees, depending on their personality and, you know, personal experiences.

PETER KORCHNAK: There comes a point in an immigrant’s life, whether they left forcibly like Pikula’s family or voluntarily like I did, when you realize you’re home neither in your old nor your new country. You live with one foot in both places and never really in either. In America I am American but I’ll always be from elsewhere (as I get constantly reminded because of my accent); and when I go back to Slovakia, I feel like I’m just visiting, even though I refer to it as “home-home.” Some even call me “The American” there. 

Pikula’s experience unfolded along the same lines.

TANYA PIKULA: I described this to my wife recently, as, after the war happened, you felt like you left your home and then you came to this train station, except the train station is now your home. 

So I’ve never quite had that feeling of being settled, which sounds ridiculous, because I’ve been here for 30 years and I am settled, but like, spiritually, there’s a sense of hybridity that never like, means you don’t quite take roots. And, you know, when I go back home—when I say home, I don’t really know what I mean by home. Do you know what I mean? 

PETER KORCHNAK: Earlier this summer Pikula went to the Balkans…for the first time in 15 years, visiting with her wife and parents the places where she had grown up. 

TANYA PIKULA: I’m from Sarajevo. That’s the place I feel most attachment to. 

But then you go to Sarajevo, and the things that really made that place was that vast family network that doesn’t exist there anymore. 

Nobody lives in Sarajevo from my family anymore, other than my dad’s one brother, even his kids, you know, live in Sweden. But you go to visit the graves first and foremost, of course, yeah. 

So there’s all these like, super contradictory feelings, and that feeling of defamiliarization. I know Sarajevo, I can find my way around, I don’t need a map. I see all these sites that are infused with memories. You know, my memories are just superimposed on them, but it’s like you’re playing with a doll house that you used to love, but there’s no dolls in it. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Pikula grew up in the part of Sarajevo called Grbavica, right across the road from the Željezničar football stadium. The Siege line ran along the neighborhood’s main thoroughfare. On her trip she first went by her grandparent’s place…

TANYA PIKULA: This sounds bad, but it looked shabbier than I remember it. Buildings are now older. Maybe that’s why. Maybe I’m just used to that standard of living now in Canada. But it also like warmed my heart because, you know, I saw a tree that I used to climb…

And I walked up to Grandma’s apartment, and, you know, it just shows my naivete as well. Like I knocked at the door, and this lady answered, you know, she’s probably about my age, or maybe even a little bit younger, and I was like, Hi, my. Grandma used to live here. Can I peek in? And she was just like, lady, I’m just trying to get my kid to school, you know? And I was going through this major like, Oh, my God, I’m seeing this apartment again. And she’s sort of like, this is my everyday life. 

PETER KORCHNAK: She also visited her family’s apartment building.

TANYA PIKULA: We lived there, four of us, and the day that the shooting started, we packed our bags and went to grandma’s. And I never saw that apartment again. So it was weird to walk there. And it looked small, smaller than I remember, and strange. But you see people just living their lives and going about their business. And, you know, in my head, everything had stopped when we left, obviously.

PETER KORCHNAK: After I moved out of the country, every time I’d visit over the first few years, maybe a decade after, I’d make a trip to the part of my hometown where I grew up. Life moved on indeed while my memory of it was frozen in the time period when I left.

Changes were even more dramatic in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

TANYA PIKULA: Wherever I went in the Balkans, the sense of ethnicity and religion was just so much more prominent than I remember. You know, in Republika Srpska, part of Bosnia, you, you know, have kids learning religion in like elementary school, which blew my mind. And then, you know, in Sarajevo, you know, you’re seeing a lot of women in hijabs. I don’t remember many women hijabs before, so it’s just more marked. It’s just different from what it was, because we were very, very secular place before. It’s changed so much. 

For me personally, I almost felt like a little bit uncomfortable with it, only because I have a little bit of discomfort with religion. And I think part of that discomfort stems from the fact that suddenly people equated ethnicity and religion and used that as an excuse to make war in the 1990s and I have since had an kind of an aversion to this notion of institutionalized religion. I’m not saying aversion to this idea that you believe in something bigger, because I often do. I would call myself somewhere between a spiritualist and agnostic. But you know, whenever I see kind of fervent expressions of, you know, really institution, you know, somebody belonging to an institutional religion or, like, fervent belief, I feel weird about it . And it doesn’t matter what type of religion it is. 

PETER KORCHNAK: Same with ethnicity…

TANYA PIKULA: I had no idea I was a Serb until the war, maybe a couple of months before the war. I remember, my two friends and I were walking home from school, and they were talking about Serbs, and I had no idea what they were talking about. Maybe I just wasn’t a kid who listened to adults, like I was so obsessed with just playing. And I went home and I talked to my mom, and I said, What’s a Serb? And she said, Well, it’s an ethnicity, that’s, that’s part of Bosnia. And we are actually, we happen to be Serb. And suddenly this thing that I had no idea what it was, came to define who I was in that war. Suddenly all that mattered is, were you Serb? Were you Croat? Were you Bosniak Muslim? This thing that I didn’t know existed became the thing that now defined my identity. 

And that was a weird thing, because I like, yeah, I now say I’m Serb, but. Like I wasn’t for the first 11 years of my life that I knew of. And it’s the same way that when, as we grow up, we become like, gendered. As kids, we’re allowed to get past these boundaries. You play with kids, because you just want to play. You know, you’re out there, you’re playing outside, [it] doesn’t matter who’s who. But then the moment you become moving towards adulthood there’s expectations placed on you that define you more about religious lines, ethnic lines, class lines, gender lines. 

And this was just a very dramatic way in which had happened at the beginning of the war.

People are now divided largely along ethnic lines. That was very odd for me too, because the Bosnia I remember, you know, it was so multicultural.

PETER KORCHNAK: Pikula’s family used to spend summers in Slano, a village about a half hour’s drive up the Adriatic Coast from Dubrovnik.

TANYA PIKULA: Slano is as I remembered it. So that was the strange part. I mean, sure, things have changed, but the sea looks like the sea, and it’s the most beautiful sea, I think in the world.

And after all of these impressions we’ve had, you know, that I definitely had of, you know, man, the places that I grew up like, they look the same, but they don’t feel the same anymore, We went to Slano, and where we used to stay was this camp, we had a trailer that we would leave there for the whole year, and then we would come during the summer months and stay in the trailer, prikolica. 

And there was this gentleman that I remember from my childhood in the 80s called Baldo, and that was his camp, and he was this kind of, like, stricter gentleman in his 60s. So mom, dad, and I decided to take a walk to this little camp where we used to say where we hadn’t been since, you know, the war started. And we get there, and we’re wondering, who owns this place now? And just as we’re about to walk into the camp, there is this gentleman sitting there, and we walk up to him, and we’re like, who owns this camp? He’s like, I do. Turns out Baldo is alive and well in 97 and still owns the camp. And I’m just like, nothing’s changed here. This is, like the creepiest thing. It was just, like, it was just preserved in time. And he looks like he’s 70 years old, it was just insane. 

And then Mom and I said, “Are you okay with us just entering the camp to, you know, take a look?” And the first thing we saw was our old prikolica. So we’re just staring at this thing, and it’s like, that’s our trailer. It’s crazy. It’s all shut up. And I was just like, oh my god, can we get in? And my mom’s like, don’t. I don’t even know how to break into it. The key is lost to time. You know, it was probably somewhere my grandparents apartment 30 years ago. And we spoke to these Germans who were just next to this, the place where the trailer was. And we asked them, “Do you know, does anybody ever use this?” And they said, “No, we’ve been camping here for 20 years. Nobody has ever entered it. And we heard that these people are in Canada.”

PETER KORCHNAK: Like many Bosnians, there’s a clear division in Pikula’s life. And with it, as well as the generational piece, comes a certain view point.

TANYA PIKULA: I look back on Yugoslavia with rose-tinted glasses. It’s not that I look back on the political entity itself. I, in principle, disagree with autocratic rulers, however benevolent they are, and I certainly don’t believe in a one-party system. But I fondly remember Yugoslavia, because Yugoslavia, to me, means A, my childhood, which was, you know, sun drenched and lovely and surrounded by so many caring adults and amazing friends and and, you know, cousins and so on. 

And B, what Yugoslavia also means to me is really like certain ideals of tolerance and trying to reach across the boundaries of ethnicity, of religion. 

What came after, which was so the opposite of all of that created such a sharp contrast that, you know, I feel like I’ve sort of divided my life in the before and after: after the war, after immigration, before the war, before immigration.

I’m always encouraged by people expressing interest or nostalgia or some level of fondness for former Yugoslavia, because to me  it represented a vision of trying to reach across the boundaries that separate us. I don’t necessarily agree with the fact that it was a one party system, but I agree with the ideals that it try to aspire to. 

I’m always, always going to feel a sense of warmth towards people from countries that used to be part of former Yugoslavia that I just don’t have towards anybody else, regardless of what happened. And maybe we can no longer call it brotherhood, but there’s a certain cousinship there that, you know, is, I think important, because there’s so much shared history, good and bad.

And it’s kind of how I feel about, you know, a long term relationship that I had in my 20s, for example. We had wonderful times, and then we broke up, and we still talk, and I feel towards, you know, that person as though they’re my family still, in a way, I feel a certain fondness that only comes from having been intimately involved with someone and having been part of their family and them been part of yours for a long time. 

So we’re all children of that divorce, aren’t we? 

[OUTRO MUSIC – “Jugoslavijo / Od Vardara pa do Triglava” by Horn Orchestra]

PETER KORCHNAK: That’s all for this episode of Remembering Yugoslavia, thank you for listening. 

All guests’ opinions expressed are solely their own; unless otherwise noted they do not express, reflect, or represent the views or opinions of any third party, including myself. 

Find additional information, sources, embeds, links, photos, and the transcript of this episode at Yugoblok.com/Podcasts. And while you’re there, join Yugoblok as a member and take part in a growing community of yugodiasporans and others.  

Outro music courtesy of Robert Petrić. Additional music courtesy of Sticky Keys, check them out and inquire about commissions on Soundcloud. 

I am Peter Korchňak. 

Ćao!