RAYNA STAMBOLIYSKA - Our otherness: imagining Balkan and Mid-Eastern identities
The original quote by Orwell is “He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past”
In just two sentences, he has embraced our fate.
In just two sentences, he has embraced our fate.
I am Bulgarian. I live in Paris. My third home is in Cairo.
Egyptian taxi drivers flirt with me, attracted by my milk-white skin. Their
Bulgarian counterparts try to guess which western country I may live in as
bizarrely I put on the seat belt when in the car. And, well, Parisian taxi
drivers are too expensive for me to afford.
My heart beats the same way when student protests erupt in
my very first alma mater, Sofia University, and when people march
with flowers on the streets of Cairo in remembrance of the January 25
Revolution. And it beat similarly when I marched in Paris against social
reforms, which would transform us, highly educated youth, into precarious
workers.
Every time I land in Cairo, there is a friend to welcome me
at the airport. There is another friend to offer hospitality. And there is yet
another dear friend to hug me saying, “welcome home”. The same happens in
Bulgaria and Paris, every time I come back from yet another journey. I don’t fit exactly anywhere but I wander the streets in any
of my three home countries like a fish in water.
Around a hundred years ago, the Middle East, North Africa
and the Balkans were part of the same empire – the Ottoman Empire. A notebook
is “tefter” in Bulgarian and “daftar” in
Egyptian Arabic. My beloved granny used to wish me“happy bath” when
I was a kid... just as a former Egyptian boyfriend of mine jokingly
congratulated me with the Arabic equivalent“na3eeman” twenty years
later. Our regions' histories have followed their own dynamics, but we have
remained strangely similar in the quest to redefine our own selves.
I am far from vocal about my identity. I do not mean
nationality, rather the way I see myself – precisely not of a given
nationality. I am what people in both the Balkans and the Middle East hate the
most: a hybrid identity.
It is difficult to frame intuitions and personal
observations into a rational argument. My point is not about religion, but
about memory and ideology, about the otherness we represent and the way it has
been addressed by the west and our own political elites. I am not aiming to pay
lip service to this or that school of thought. Nor am I eager to be the n-th
pedantic writer spitting on the nasty westerners and their neo-colonial
desiderata. The ambition here lies in explaining how orientalism and balkanism
are the same side of one coin. I am no humanities scholar; so forgive me for
not conforming to the comme il faut manner.
Let's be eloquent about the burden of conforming to our own
identities, and the ways culture and architecture shape political ideology in
both the Balkans and the Middle East. This happens quite seamlessly through
shaping the collective memory and mastering doublespeak. Amend language,
semantics and public discourse, destroy buildings and monuments to substitute
them with new ones to a current strongman's glory. This rings a bell on both
sides of the Mediterranean, right?
He who controls the past
The original quote is “He who controls the past
controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past”, by
Orwell. In just two sentences, he has embraced our fate.
There is not one “good” way of remembering. We know that our
memories are temporary and of an uncertain future. Using them to root back
justice and engage in a reconciliation process supposes the exact opposite: it
supposes that it is possible to transform them into rigid facts laying the
groundwork for a reconstruction of the future.
Yet, this is what happens. Playing around with collective
memory is a favourite spare time activity in both the Balkans and the Middle
East. Employing strong words (e.g., “genocide”, “victims
of communism” for Nazi collaborators, etc.) assigns events
beyond intelligible boundaries – to the kingdom of emotions. Language and
semantics thus become a powerful modulator of political will and ideology.
In both the Balkans and the Middle East, to remember means
to recall, to reshape, to rebuild, to hammer certain events thus transforming
them into an essential bit of the construction of a society. The concept
of collective memory embraces socially shared representations of the past;
these then nurture current identities. Thus, collective memory is far from
being the mere sum of individual memories. Instead, it is both a cognitive and
a communicative process: it is the act of remembering together... read more:
