«There is a word that I have not yet found in Italian and wish existed: Tuđina. […] It means everything you go through in the integration process: hostility, not being understood, not being considered, being mistreated… this word means ‘tear that never falls’. It is a sad word that never leaves you. It means not being able to sink into nostalgia when you are struggling and in a difficult situation.»
What is the role of nostalgia in the context of a migratory trajectory? When and how does it develop from a sense of loss? Many of the stories that Moj Dom has given voice to are imbued with nostalgic feelings: for the past self, for the broken community, for a shattered ideal, for the home that was and will never be the same again. Nostalgia then appears as the memory of a loss that still bleeds and that feeds on the memories of war and emigration.
«Nostalgia is a very poisonous plant, which can sometimes be used as a herbal tea.»
However, nostalgia also works as a driving force: on the one hand, to identify one’s needs, desires and objectives, to recognize meaningful relationships; on the other, generating experiences of activism and solidarity, humanitarianism and hospitality driven by an ideological-political push. Nostalgia seems essential to strengthen the foundations and rebuild on the rubble. From here, for many people, a reflection on their survival arises: what is left of the “me” of before? How have I become after the war and migration? Talking about oneself, after so many years of silence, also means dusting off and reinforcing those social devices that allow one to address the splits, strengthen the cracks, and, ultimately, face the journey of rediscovery and reaffirmation of personal and collective history: between past and present, towards an interpretation of the concept of home in a relational sense.
Loss and nostalgia
This article and the following one are intended to be consequential and complementary: a path is outlined from the past to the present and the future, from loss to reconquest, from dissolution to reconstitution. We orient ourselves within two semantic planes opposed to each other from the point of view of emotional connotation: melancholy and hope. The pivot of this circular itinerary, starting point and arrival simultaneously, is the sense of home.
This path starts from the stories of people who moved to Italy during the 1990s and the early 2000s and of people who, in that historical-geographical context, organized humanitarian aid and created host communities to support the refugee population. Their experiences are different but often intertwined and, in some respects, overlapping. They have in common the experiences of uprooting and new rooting, losses – substantial or on the level of the collective imagination – and mending.
The reflection in this first contribution starts from the concept of loss and is full of references to the past: breaking, mourning, and missing. They are framed both on an individual level, concerning one’s home, one’s family, one’s relationships, and on a collective level, of one’s land, of the Nation to which they belonged and which no longer exists, of one’s citizenship that changes with the disintegration of the Yugoslavian State. Here, memory’s most desolate, painful, and even traumatic components are explored. In particular, the role of loss in forming nostalgia is explored, inspecting the latter’s etymology and its multiple meanings. Furthermore, nostalgia’s less obvious character to common sense is made explicit, the constructive one, and the generator of change, which is further elaborated in the following study.
Loss and then…
Uprooting oneself involves abandoning, leaving, losing, perhaps abandoning oneself, and losing oneself. By uprooting oneself, many different parts of oneself are lost. One’s name is cut off. There are those who, having arrived in Italy, experience the deformation of their name or surname by someone who does not know their mother tongue: this results in fear of not being recognized or understood. One abandons one’s language and, with it, a bond of visceral belonging, which conveys feeling, living, and being. One loses identity: it is hidden and concealed because it no longer has a caring paddock to express itself. One leaves one’s origins, family, and territory: for a child, it is the premature anticipation of an ordinary, announced, prefigured experience; for an adult, it is the origin of a deep, gripping sense of guilt.
Mending
Certain cuts heal. In this sense, some tools are particularly beneficial. Art, for example, helps heal the cracks in existence: on a collective level, it is a way of testifying that there is the possibility of repairing the course of events; on an individual level, it takes on a therapeutic function to the extent that it represents, in fact, a medicine for the soul. In particular, some of the people interviewed came into contact with theatre in the context of their experience of displacement. This functioned as a rescue device: comedy has the power to scale down the gravity of events to make it possible to survive them.
A second path, equally healing for open wounds, consisted in some cases of redefining the relationship with the words of one’s mother tongue, renegotiating their uses and reappropriating them. There are those who, faced with the disorientation caused by the distortion of their surname by those who welcome them, came to terms with a new pronunciation and identified with a new dimension, different but equally legitimizing. There are also those who, unable to use their mother tongue to express themselves artistically, become translators from the latter to Italian, generating bridges and broadening their audience, thus bringing it closer to a less fragmented but fuller self.
Bleeding again
Certain cuts, on the other hand, are more profound. There is an element that is common to the losses experienced in the context of the Yugoslav wars: their sudden, unpredictable, and, for this reason, particularly violent nature. The immigration from Yugoslavia to Italy was impossible to prepare in advance. It was expressed in rapid tears, which strained the ability to recover those memories. This, in turn, undermined the ability to rework what happened.
Such a loss, which hinders a part of the self, preventing its expression, is familiar to both the pragmatic dimension of those who were overwhelmed by the need to migrate and to the ideological dimension of activists and volunteers who operated in Italian or Yugoslavian territory, in the name of shared rights and ideals: peace or socialism. They experienced a sudden interruption of their projects and prospects, producing a laceration in the horizon of possibilities that they envisioned and aspired to. Nonetheless, for those who faced displacement, the sudden loss is further burdened by a sense of betrayal, which arises from the self-attribution of guilt for the abandonment of those left behind.
Getting lost
Nevertheless, some losses remain painful even in the long term. At an individual level, for example, a significant loss comes from a change in one’s status. This is common to many migration stories, even diverting from the specific context of Yugoslavia, and undermines a certain sense of personal stability. The transition from a relatively comfortable position to one of restrictions and sacrifices is disorienting, forcing one into a limbo where the supports to hold on to are elusive.
Moving from the private to the public dimension, what dissolves is the reference to a homeland to which one can no longer belong. Some people who left their homeland felt that the concept of ‘being Yugoslav’ had suddenly disappeared. Conversely, some activists still recall today the regret for the broken Yugoslavian dream: what disappeared here were the shared values, which constituted the basis for the communion of intent between individuals, between associations, between institutions, even towards the latter, a motion of distrust arose. In both situations, the aim is to return, whether to the self or the group, as these were prefigured in a more complete past. It is no coincidence that many of the stories collected are studded with nostalgic references.
Finding oneself
Cultural theorist Svetlana Boym (2001) defines nostalgia as the desire for something that is no longer there, or that has never existed. Furthermore, she illustrates two dimensions: the restorative one, directed towards the past and marked by the loss and the desire to rebuild the old, and the reflective one, directed towards the future, which conceives the possibility of transformation, imbued with passion, hope, and critical thinking.
«Nostalgia is the memories of the people with whom I spent my early childhood and shared the foundations of my life. These are the memories of the fundamental bricks of the house.»
«Nostalgia is a cage that holds you back. But sometimes it is useful for self-awareness, for appreciating human relationships; I am talking about nostalgia for that mutual care in difficult moments.»
Nostalgia can entrap: desire constraints when unattainable because it is suffocated in a concluded time. Yet, immobilizing oneself in the past sometimes renders a need for survival, which finds no other expression. In this sense, the anchoring that characterizes restorative nostalgia can be salvific: it is still a drive, an insatiable form of recovery. Faced with loss, we relate to the collective identities from which we flee or seek refuge. Some run away, but attempting to escape is the opposite of surrendering: it is, instead, an attempt to recover the richness of one’s life, untying it from the external connotations that were scratched.
On the other hand, reflective nostalgia can become a resource for constructing a new community of a collective identity. We can then speak of an ‘active’ nostalgia, which in different ways would unite activists/volunteers and migrants: both, moved by a nostalgic feeling, have become active for the reconstruction of identity networks and, therefore, of an idea or a place, that can be home, concretely or metaphorically. Without a sense of belonging, individual identity would remain frayed. Feeling at home, then, puts one’s pieces back together. In particular, certain specific belongings are strengthened and renewed, while others that were more encompassing have lost their original consistency. For example, the revival of a singular national identity, where the Yugoslavian one is no longer applicable, heals a certain sense of fragmentation.
Rebuilding
As mentioned, the nostalgia experienced and narrated by Italian volunteers and activists towards the former Yugoslavia can also be considered from two points of observation, which differ from a temporal perspective. First, the interviewees’ experience speaks to nostalgia for a past not experienced firsthand but which, before disappearing, represented an ideal. This is nostalgia for real socialism, the political and economic system that existed in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The nostalgic feeling then turns to Yugoslavia because it embodied, in History, not only the possibility of existence but also an example considered virtuous – at least in the ‘alternative’ narratives promoted by volunteers and activists. The doors open here to a traumatic dimension of the awareness of the end of a shared dream. It is not just a generational bond. Even in younger volunteers – who identify with the same political values - the memory is similar: less tied to a reality that was experienced “live” from the point of view of temporal placement, albeit at a distance, but more associated with knowledge acquired through study, information and exchange.
Nostalgia for Yugoslavia takes on, in particular for those who identified with the values of the political left, an identity dimension to the extent that it is ideological. Regret for the socialist ideal then becomes the driving force of action: one becomes active for the former Yugoslavia to try to save what had been a possible world, to safeguard the hope that that reality was not destined to disappear, but that it could be reconstituted.
«In the 90s, I worked at the Belgrade Cultural Institute, where I found a type of socialism that made me think of Europe as I pictured it: free, educated, fair, with an excellent social and health system and an egalitarian housing allocation system. When the Italian government bombed Yugoslavia, I resigned and remained close to my Yugoslav friends and colleagues: it was better to stay with my back straight.»
Secondly, a nostalgic feeling is produced in volunteers and activists in conjunction with the lack of a place that, by living there, had become familiar. It coincides with an experience that came when the experiences of mobilization ended, and the protagonists returned to their previous lives, irremediably marked by the experiences lived in the field. This nostalgia is freed from ideological elements but is emotionally rich and primarily linked to the relationships that volunteers and activists had woven during their travels in Yugoslavia, which became an acquired homeland for these people. In this case, too, nostalgia is crucial for their life trajectories, to the extent that – referring, among other things, to experiences lived in particularly delicate years from a formative point of view – it pushed them to work in areas that allowed them to have still something to do with it, or even to live there for more or less long periods.
«[…] I continued to keep in touch with the former Yugoslavia because it had become a full-blown illness for me. There is a lot of talk about the longing for Africa, but there is also the longing for the Balkans […] Now… I want to go and eat ćevapčići in Croatia… well, if I think about it, I feel nostalgic…»
We understand, then, that even those of activists and volunteers are cuts that, to heal, have—or would have had—needed the encounter with other cuts of similar origins and forms to be put in communication and narrated, a space that would restore the value due to such a personal and collective experience.
Conclusion
Nostalgia is, at the same time, a symptom and an antidote to loss. It is water that revives an open wound, but it is also a stitch that prepares the skin for a new race, perhaps for new falls. Keeping alive the memory of that race—and of those falls—and caring for it together with those of the races and falls of others is what produces the healing process and cultivates the reconstruction process, individually and collectively.
Rebuilding the self in individuality and group identity, rebuilding the ideal or real community, passes through memory, but only if put into dialogue, in a protected, comprehensive, welcoming, relational space, where the sense of home, uprooted and re-rooted, can reproduce itself.
Giulia Loda is an aspiring social researcher, collaborating with Codici and exploring topics such as migration, memory, activism, and community storytelling.
Lorenzo Scalchi is a social researcher at Codici who studies various topics, including international migrations, memories, and social inequalities.
