"We are not your lab rats"

This is how a man in his mid 50ies greeted me as I walked into his Sarajevo apartment to interview him and his wife for "my dissertation on mixed marriages in Bosnia." His blunt greeting of welcome prefaced his long diatribe against those who would label him and his wife as "mixed" all with the purpose of intruding, along with their politics, into the private confines of their bedroom. "We are normal, so I don't understand why people have to come in and observe us as if we are some strange, exotic breed" he said as he tried to explain why he was reluctant to agree to the interview. However, he gave in after their good family friend Svetlana Broz, the granddaugther of Tito, told them about my project and asked them to help me and serve as my informants. "We have a great respect for Svetlana," his wonderful and brilliantly intelligent (but humbly quiet) wife said. I tried to explain that the purpose of my dissertation was not to single them out as "unique" or exotic or use them as lab rats, but rather to complicate the very idea of mixedness that has dominated our discourse and marginalized all non-ethnic or multi-ethnic alternatives. However, as I struggled to explain myself, I was voicing my own concerns over the very core of my project.

I have agonized for months over using "mixed marriage" as the main category of analysis, which drives my archival and oral research. I have felt as if just by singling out the people who are in a mixed marriage, according to the official discourse, I am homogenizing these individuals into neat categories that I am supposedly de-constructing. In other words, I feel like I am buying into the narratives of the three nationalisms that dominate every aspect of life in this country. But then again, this is the methodological agony many historians of nationalism face as they try to explain the apparent success of nationalism in grouping people in accordance with what it proclaims are centuries-old, immutable categories.

Nevertheless, my sources--archival and oral--have proven to be great allies in resisting the overwhelming logic of nationalism. The Islamic court documents from the interwar period (the 1930s in particular) reveal voices of ordinary people throughout Bosnia, many of them illiterate peasants speaking through their lawyers or clerks, trying to navigate their everyday lives through many categories of belonging that officials (religious officials in this case) persistently tried to impose on them. Over and over again, what comes out in these documents is not some ideological or religious fanaticism of the peasant, but his unwavering pragmatism. In one letter a peasant from a remote Bosnian village sends a short, but blunt message to the Sharia judges: "Leave me alone or I will convert to Christianity. Or you may even force me to go on a hunger strike." I have not been able to trace the letter or an incident to which the peasant was responding, but I found it among the cases of Muslims getting married in churches, or going to Christian ceremonies. Local religious leaders implored the High Sharia Court to do something about these "incidents." I assume the irritated peasant was responding to the intrusive attempts of the local imam to regulate his everyday life.

In interviews, my informants express the frustration that is similar to the one expressed by the nameless peasant from the 1930s. They sigh, cry, laugh, or even shout at being called mixed, and being forced to declare themselves as either Serb, Bosnjak, or Croat. They plead for a different category (most often, "Bosanac" which denotes regional rather than national belonging). And inevitably, these frustrations preface their stories from the war, each of the stories remarkably fascinating and unique, but each of them sharing the common thread: the confusion of individuals about their national belonging at the beginning of the war. An explicit example of this happened in the early days of the war in Sarajevo's neighborhood of Grbavica, which was taken over by the Serb forces early in the war and stayed under their control until the end. N. was a Muslim and his wife B. was a Serb. They wanted to stay put in the neighborhood-despite the raids of Serbian forces of Muslim apartments--because they wanted to reach Belgrade where their son had gone just before the war broke out. As they were taken out of their building by a Serb paramilitary unit, the woman ("Serb") said that she doesn't want to stay there anymore, but wans to leave, at which her husband ("Muslim") said: "No,I want to stay." They went back and forth while the confused Serb paramilitary thug watched them. "He looked like he was watching a ping-pong match" B. said to me. Then he shouted at them. "Stop, both of you. I am confused. Who is the Muslim and who is the Serb here?" Confused that the Muslim man wanted to stay and his Serb wife wanted to leave the Serbian neighborhood, the confused Serbian soldier echoed the intrusiveness of the nationalist logic, which claims the right to define the most intimate feelings of individuals on the basis of their supposed nationality. The couple told me their story laughing at the absurdity of the situation.

It is these kinds of stories that give me hope that I may have been right to stick to "mixed marriage" as my category of analysis. The mere mention of my topic provokes smiles, laughs, tsk-tsk sounds (accompanied by the shaking of the head) and almost always provokes long monologues that are often memory trips to the nooks and crannies of people's past that I might not be able to reach any other way but through these interviews. Thus, despite his "we are not your lab rats" greeting, N. and his wife talked for more than three hours that night. As I was leaving, they said they were very happy to be of help and that I should stay in touch. When my research or lack of productivity gets me down, it is these stories that motivate me to keep on going.