Being from the funny zone
In displaying that aspect of my identity as a funny spectacle, the chuckles I’d hear echoed discordantly within it, as I felt like I genuinely didn’t know enough about what I was talking about.
Images from Know Your Meme. Collage by Rhea Thomas
“Isn’t that the country with all those memes about them?”
I’ve gotten this response while trying to ice-break on a one-off Hinge date, looking around, trying to find a bar in a suburb I’d moved to a week prior. Laughing with the typical first-date nerves, I had a strange feeling that I can still invoke yet find difficult to pinpoint. Some sort of indirect offence, yet with no bitterness whatsoever. Because as this picture of me started forming in her mind at that moment, my own became blurred and foreign.
Answering the question of where I am from as someone with Balkan heritage and born in Australia has always perplexed me from the point where I was old enough to answer it myself. My lifelong penchant for wanting to keep social interactions clear and with minimal discordance also doesn’t help. At the onslaught of the confused eyebrow raises I’d receive at school after answering with a country my classmates never heard of, I began arbitrarily changing it up depending on whether I thought they would know about the mere existence of the country. If they did?
“Yeah sure, I am, ‘Bosnian’, nice to meet you.”
If they didn’t seem to know what Burek or cevapi was? ‘Serbian’. Years later, I’d say ‘Croatian’ to spice it up; a familiar tourist staple for the obligatory quarter-life crisis euro-trip.
As a kid, this held no political or ethnic grounding for me, nor did I have to confront it as a first-generation Australian. The ignorance didn’t come without its shortcomings though. I remember the eyebrow raises the few times I said I was ‘ex-Yugoslavian’ to teachers, just to flex some limited history knowledge and show solidarity to my parent’s true geopolitical socialist birthplace.
“Once upon a time, there was one country…” they’d tell me.
With a low degree of caution needing to be exercised, questions of my ethnicity never needed to be clear to others and therefore myself. This wasn’t helped by the fact that I only half-learned my parents’ mother tongue and didn’t want to invoke the cognitive dissonance felt hearing my Dad’s wonkily translated jokes and life lessons. Sometimes it was hard to tell the difference that way too. But in this stubbornness, all of my family history would get filtered through a blurry haze of foreign consonants and vowels, grabbing and assembling them slowly while a bunch flew past me, having to be content with fragments.
What slowed me down in this continual swirl of identity, was none other than the proliferation of memes that would come to consume a large portion of South-Eastern Europe. With only the generation before, the reputation of the Balkans revolved around ideological collapse, bloodshed, and tragedy through the atrocities occurring in the Balkan wars of the 90’s. But now it seems to have shifted towards the absurd; the war zone has turned into a ‘funny zone’.
Bosnia’s biggest cultural export to the terminally online is FatTV, a YouTuber with over 6 million subscribers that transcends genre, as he can go from cosplaying five superheroes in five different colours, to making a “hORriBLe” crazy hamburger as the Joker. If Marvel took a few notes from Mr. FatTV, they could conjure up a multi-verse where I actually gave a shit.
Google ‘bosnian fish’ and you will either be unsurprised by the lack of interesting things to say about the marine life of a landlocked country or be greeted with a lovely video blaring out some loud distorted turbo-folk. Nevertheless, you look and the Bosnian fish is puffing back a fat dart. Good on you bro.
What I came to realise slowly as these memes began proliferating was a slight sense of hollowness, a vague void of inward reflection. In displaying that aspect of my identity as a funny spectacle, the chuckles I’d hear echoed discordantly within it, as I felt like I genuinely didn’t know enough about what I was talking about. I was eating the crazy hamburger without knowing what was in it.
And that sent me on a journey that I am still embarking on today. One of occasionally picking up a history book here or there, or instead just going into deep Wikipedia rabbit-holes until I’m reading about the Sino-Albanian split or Serbian language reform. One of getting into Yugoslav Black Wave cinema and new wave bands such as Ekatarina Velika during lockdown and bonding over it with my parents as they gleamed with nostalgia. But most importantly, one of gaining more insight into the world they once inhabited that no longer exists.