Jelena Markovic writes:

I keep religious icons in my house, the Orthodox ones where Christ has dark, pensive eyes. When my friends come over, they sometimes ask why. It doesn’t seem to fit with the rest of my personality. ‘My parents are religious,’ I say. This makes no sense, because I put the icons up myself. My friend Daniel keeps icons up as well. ‘I’m not sure if I’m a believer, but if there was one true faith, it would be ours,’ he says.

Daniel and I both came to Canada as children, fleeing the Yugoslav war as Serbian refugees. The grief I carry about this – about our displacement, about the war, about an older history of turmoil and conflict and capture through empire – is unwieldy, inarticulate. It’s lodged within me like some half-completed archaeological dig. My icons are a marker of it, while family stories serve as its entryways. My aunt, struck by a stray piece of shrapnel in the neck as she made coffee in the kitchen. My grandmother, peering out from behind her white curtains, the pressure of constant vigilance eventually causing multiple strokes. My father, refusing to be separated from my mother and me, when soldiers ordered all the men off the bus as we made our way out of Bosnia.

These events don’t strike me as separate losses. They are more like perturbations on the membrane of a loss, itself so singular and strange that I don’t know how to behold it. Grief is a human universal, yet in the contemporary literature on grief, cultural bereavement is neglected. I find it difficult to describe the losses involved in being uprooted, in losing access to a culture that I’ve never fully known.

One reason may be that the feelings of losing one’s home country are poorly captured by most philosophical and psychological models. For instance, many philosophers claim that emotions must have intentional content, in that they must be about something. When I’m angry that the car alarm outside won’t stop ringing, I’m angry about the racket, or the fact that my neighbours aren’t doing anything about it. My own cultural grief is about something as well, but it’s blurrier, more amorphous. The object of my grief isn’t a single event or state of affairs; nor does it present itself clearly to me. Rather, grief and its object seem to have a tenuous association, almost as if my grief creates the atmosphere in which my thoughts and emotions drift and spiral. [Continue reading…]