Being from the funny zone
Words by Leon Karagic
“Isn’t that the country with all those memes about them?”
familiar tourist staple for the obligatory quarter-life crisis euro-trip.
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 firstdate 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.
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’.
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 Bosnia’s biggest cultural export history knowledge and show solidarity to my parent’s true geopolitical socialist to the terminally online is FatTV, a YouTuber with over 6 million subscribers birthplace. that transcends genre, as he can go “Once upon a time, there was one from cosplaying five superheroes in Answering the question of where country…” they’d tell me. five different colours, to making a I am from as someone with Balkan “hORriBLe” crazy hamburger as the With a low degree of caution heritage and born in Australia has Joker. If Marvel took a few notes from needing to be exercised, questions always perplexed me from the point Mr. FatTV, they could conjure up a multiof my ethnicity never needed to be where I was old enough to answer verse where I actually gave a shit. clear to others and therefore myself. it myself. My lifelong penchant for This wasn’t helped by the fact that I wanting to keep social interactions Google ‘bosnian fish’ and you only half-learned my parents’ mother clear and with minimal discordance will either be unsurprised by the lack tongue and didn’t want to invoke the also doesn’t help. At the onslaught of interesting things to say about the cognitive dissonance felt hearing my of the confused eyebrow raises I’d marine life of a landlocked country or Dad’s wonkily translated jokes and life receive at school after answering with be greeted with a lovely video blaring lessons. Sometimes it was hard to tell a country my classmates never heard out some loud distorted turbo-folk. the difference that way too. But in this of, I began arbitrarily changing it up Nevertheless, you look and the Bosnian stubbornness, all of my family history depending on whether I thought they fish is puffing back a fat dart. Good on would get filtered through a blurry haze you bro. would know about the mere existence of foreign consonants and vowels, of the country. If they did? What I came to realise slowly as grabbing and assembling them slowly “Yeah sure, I am, ‘Bosnian’, nice to while a bunch flew past me, having to these memes began proliferating was meet you.” a slight sense of hollowness, a vague be content with fragments. void of inward reflection. In displaying If they didn’t seem to know what What slowed me down in this that aspect of my identity as a funny Burek or cevapi was? ‘Serbian’. Years continual swirl of identity, was none spectacle, the chuckles I’d hear echoed later, I’d say ‘Croatian’ to spice it up; a other than the proliferation of memes discordantly within it, as I felt like I
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