Life and Racism

Last week, my Czech friend curled up next to me to watch American History X. After watching 20 minutes of this film I could barely contain my disgust and shame.I turned my head as a black man was forced to bite the curb and I gagged at the sight of the largest swasticka ever, tattooed on his assailant's chest.

The swasticka and it's implications outside of America were only revealed to me personally this summer as I was traveling abroad. In my minimal reservoir of clothing was an army green hoodie on the back of which I had sown a white and black patch with the slogan "BU*H" with a swasticka in place of the 'S'. The patch was given to me by a friend on election day last year. American youth loved this patch and whenever I would wear the sweatshirt out on the streets of my small New England town some young kid would inevitably comment positively. One of my professors suggested that I sew it to the back of my Graduation gown at the end of my University career when I marched to retrieve my diploma although I hesitated to do so simply because it felt too much like a dare.

I wore the sweatshirt for the first month of my post-grad travels and watched for reactions from those around me, in France and Belgium. When  I traveled East, into the Netherlands I was warned to hide the shirt while in Germany. Begrudgingly, I kept the sweatshirt buried deep in my canvas bag. In Austria however, I pulled it out again and wore it in Vienna into an internet cafe. The owner came to me and  asked that I remove it, stating it was illegal to display this symbol. A new piece of information for me. Again, I packed the patch deep into my bag and left it there.

My travels took me to Belgrade, Serbia from there I decided to move East into Romania and was warned by my Serb friends that Romanians were thieves and not to be trusted. On a train heading father East to the Black Sea with two peace corps volunteers, I moved slowly towards the edge of the European Union's territory. One volunteer worked in Sibu with Roma children, bringing education methods and facilities to the population. The other worked in a public school in Timisoara. At that time, I didn't know Romania's history of concentration camps and torture camps. I didn't know how Roma were exported and affected by the Third Reich and I certainly didn't know how they were hated in Europe by so many and considered a worthless less than human group of pests, to put it mildly. Between these two volunteers I sensed the smallest amount of tension as both could make fun of Roma begging and their frequent please for money, but one was devoted to bringing education to the population and the other on the Western border, more removed from the epedemic.

Walking down the street yesterday with an Italian friend of mine, we passed a group of teenage girls. They had the typical tight jeans and gum snapping sways as one of them held a cell phone blasting Euro-pop into the dusky sky. They laughed and swung earrings, looking sideways under lashes at the male clan gathered at the nearby bus stop. 'I hate those motherfuckers'. he said as we passed.

My stomach dropped. 'You don't understand.' he said 'They are everywhere in Italy. Prostitution, racketeering, theiving, stealing...I knew this one Roma girl who would piss in the middle of the courtyard at school..' and the stories began to flow from his lips. Although he insisted that he distinguished between Romanians and Roma I still had a hard time reconciling his stories with the group of girls that I saw. I think racism destroys the eyes when all a person can see when they see anyone from a group, is the worst stereotype. 'I hate Albanians too..' he said and I had a feeling that most Italians would agree with him. 

Part of me feels like I don't know enough about how Europe understands each other. My sister says, 'Racism is racism'. I know that I am racist too, but that my racism is harder for me to see. I know that I am largely a blank slate, having so few interactions with European culture and history. I have not heard relatives talk about one ethnic group or another, I have not seen my community overflow with immigrants.

I watch CNN from my apartment in the middle of the Czech Republic and listen to the debate about building a wall to keep the Mexicans out of our country. This topic immediately fatigues me. I find my country intolerant and ignorant of the rest of the world. Our standards are two faced, simultaneously allowing immigrants to take the lowest paying jobs and the worst living conditions and criminalizing their position in our country. It's the populations that are living on soil that isn't their own that are discriminated against, migrants, immigrants and refugees. 

After Returning Home

Buildings with holes do not repair themselves.

This surprised me the first time I saw it with my own naive eyes, my shock registered not the vast destruction of a 5 story building but the freshness of it. The hole was wide and I imagined paper blowing wind off the desks freshly exposed to the sun, swivel chairs still turning in awe. The Chinese embassy, an 'unintentional' target of the U.S. bombing of Belgrade in 1999 was an intentional route for my tour guides on my evening entry into Belgrade in January 2006. I am thinking about Belgrade because of Kosovo, whose name decorates walls all around the capital in predictable graffiti. 

This summer sitting on the edge of a slow grey fountain staring, slowly melting and staring at ladies shoes while nervously smoking too many cigarettes.  At the conference of students from KIJAC University in Pristina, one woman stood out from the crowd. Slender hands and a small neck, she reminded me of my sister. She was quieter than the rest and spent most of the night talking with V. the long haired alchemist who never changed his black clothes. She was delicate and tiny, her name was Fluterella, butterfly. She made videos. Yestereday I read in the papers that Serbs in Belgrade never did anything for the Kosovar Albanians. I know that this is not true, having attended a conference hosted by the Belgrade Circle this summer. I do know that the Serbs who hosted this conference were unsympathetic to the frightened Albanians, who had been stopped and hassled at the border. I know that the guest speaker didn't appear and most of the students stayed in their groups.  

The students from KJAK offered me a ride back with them to Pristina, but Buddy had given me glib and mud. 'It's nothing but a skeleton, hot and heavy and full of corruption. There are so many girls there...' he laughed and twirled his purple cigarette with the gold trim. His eyes were too large for his misshapen head and he risked his neck to travel into Pristina weekly, to teach and get laid by young Albanian women. 'Pristina is dead' he laughed deeply. I tried to imagine myself traveling to and working in the city. The bus would come to a grinding halt after 14 hours of dirty bumpy travel and I would get out, crawl to the nearest hotel and take a job carrying bags to the top floor. My legs would become strong and I would see the desert wind blow red sand through the city during the day. At night I would write, perhaps I would work for a newspaper and sell the story of the Serbs like Buddy who snuck in, to work, to sex, to snort the air and piss on the hotel bathroom floors. Surely someone would care that Serbs worked in Pristina, no one thought Serbs worked in Kosovo. I would wait in my corner of the hotel, folding grey towels and tapping out stories on the keys, until the day when Kosovo declared independence. Then surely there would be violence and a story, I would be on the ground, maybe I would speak a little of the language. I would be one of the only Westerners there, embedded and learning from the inside out what Kosovo was like, if it was really dead.

Instead of traveling South with KJAK, I sat at the head table, in the corner position, where no woman who wants to get married will sit. I was paraded through the authentic restaurant grounds and laughed with a fat NYU graduate about Craigslist and Maria Todorova and her son with a Odepial complex. The wine went from my head to my heart and the students left to find discos on the Danube. V. urged me to take a picture of him in the middle of the chairs that had been put on top of the table that night. His black clothes and stark appearance standing like a pole in the middle of a thousand colored chair legs.

The former Yugoslavia has split into 5 independent states now. I think it should be so. After seeing the fear and the tears, hearing the stories of how life was ripped from these students, how everything was halted, after the war. After seeing how Serbs consider Kosovo theirs but hate the inhabitants and refuse them access to the rest of the country. Kosovo is the cradle of their civilization but it has been changing for years and these changes can't be ignored. After fighting with my contingency, my position was solidified. Spain, Romania, Russia, Cyprus all disagree.

I know now that all of those: fat NYU, V., my contingency, those in Romania, in the United States, will all be watching the television, as the world does to check, every few hours, to make sure there hasn't been any violence. For Kosovo's sake, I hope that Serbia relaxes it's grip and the tension does not mount. I still feel an absence in my heart when I think about the bus pulling out of the station in Belgrade without me. There was a smile on someone's face that day, but not mine.