Transcript
Good evening. I am Meri Ilich. People always talk about the second generation or young people who did not come of their own free will, but we are an exception. My children were twelve and nine years old. I was divorced, I worked in another city, and when I decided to leave — because I worked for the United Nations and had a much broader perspective than other people from my country could have — I thought it was not right to take the children just because I wanted to leave this country.
I had no horizon for myself or for my children at that time in Yugoslavia. I went to visit my ex-husband with my children and I told him: "Look, I am leaving. I cannot take it anymore; I do not feel well, I do not fit in my own country. I want to try to find another country." I decided to go to Barcelona, but I asked my children: "If you stay with dad, mom will send you money when she can and will visit you. You will not lack anything and dad will take care of you. Otherwise, you can come with me, but I do not know what awaits me nor what will await you."
The twelve-year-old said: "For a child with my abilities, there is no life here; I want to go with you." And the nine-year-old said: "I cannot live without my brother." So they both came with me. They spoke English very well and Serbian. They quickly joined school, with Spanish at first; but when Catalan began, for three months, if the teacher refused to speak any word other than Catalan, the little one, nine years old, came home crying. I could not help him, because first they send you to a Spanish course and it was not clear to us that learning Catalan was much more important.
What did he do? Instead of understanding, he began to memorise. He memorised the lessons until, in his brain, a bridge formed between Spanish and Catalan. Now they speak both so well that, a year ago, a client came into the shop and started speaking Catalan. My sons answered him in Catalan and he said: "Oh, sorry, I think I made a mistake, because they told me that there is a company here run by young foreigners who are very good at IT." My sons said: "Yes, but we are Catalans of foreign origin. That is why we speak Catalan so well."
But this journey to speaking Catalan so well and feeling like Catalans of foreign origin has been very long and has gone through many ups and downs. For a single mother with two children it has been a tremendous experience. Now I can write books and I am proud, but while I was going through it there were many nights of tears. One of them went through very intimate encounters with drug addicts, drugs and the squatter community; the other went through a period of shutting himself off, against everyone, because no one understood him: not his own mother, not his own brother, not even himself.
They were two extremes; the two lost each other on this path as brothers and, in the end, they found each other again. From Yugoslavia they carried memories of a country at war and the memory of a family destroyed by alcohol and male chauvinist violence. Here they found that no one understood that they were much more mature than children their age. They did not find funny what children their age did, and to their classmates, what they talked about and did was not understandable.
This child, at twelve years old, started going to an acting school, because in Serbia he also went. We had lived in Malgrat de Mar, in a refugee shelter, for a year, but I knew it was very important that, aside from school, they had extracurricular activities. I could not let them have too much free time without knowing what to do while I looked for work.
So this child went to Barcelona, to an English school of acting and dance. Luckily we got a scholarship, because the director understood that we had arrived there with a wonderful dream, thinking we would find other things and opportunities. The first day he had to go from Malgrat to Barcelona he spent half an hour drawing and explaining that "mom does not have money to pay for two tickets, you have to go alone, the station is four blocks away," etcetera. After a long time he made his confession to me and told me: "Mom, after a thirteen-year-old boy helped me get on this train, I sat under a fifteen-year-old boy."
This shock, this loss of a few years of childhood and youth, they carry with them. Sometimes I notice it with sadness and I feel guilty for bringing them. And sometimes I see it with pride: they are so mature, they are so good, and here they have come to know a culture that is not machista, or at least that recognises machismo exists and fights against it. Now, when they talk to their friends from Serbia who come to visit, they tell them: "This is not how you treat women."
There is a Russian psychologist, I cannot remember his name right now, who says that everything in life goes in a spiral, even the crises. We hope that this crisis will pass with the spiral. When problems come, they come, they come, they come and they pass; and when good times come, so do they. I also noticed in my children spirals related to culture.
When they arrived, they compared everything with what we had left behind: the buildings, the way of being, the way of dressing, even the way of gossiping. When we heard some gossip, they would say: "But Barcelona is not that big; people behave like people from a village in our country." Then they reached another point, when everything Catalan and Spanish was much better than what we had left. This also happens with adults: first we have great excitement for the new country; then, when we focus on the problems, we have no work and we see no respect, we start to love our own country much more, forgetting the bad things that were there. The same happened with my children.
When they entered this phase of being only Catalans of foreign origin, forgetting the customs from there and everything we had left behind, I began to think I had to do something. I know we are not going back, but I do not want them to lose what we have brought, because equal opportunities does not mean forgetting everything you have had. It also means having the opportunity to take care of your own roots, carry them with you and incorporate them in the new country, because the new Catalonia, the Catalonia of today, can progress only if we all unite everything we have: our experiences, our wisdom, knowledge and roots.
I thought: "I have to do something, because my grandchildren cannot grow up without knowing their origins." At the same time, more or less in the same months, my children were thinking about what to do with their lives. One son had just finished a year of training and did not know what he was going to do. The other finished some studies, had some jobs and toyed with the idea of starting a Balkan fast food business: going into debt with a hundred thousand euros and setting it up. I was very scared, because food is never safe and, if you do not know this business, no.
Indirectly, without interfering too much, I gave the younger one a sabbatical year to think, but meanwhile I was looking for what the two had in common and what they liked. They liked computers. So they decided to start an IT and design company. There they found each other, there they also found their middle ground with Casa Eslava and their origins, because they brought the IT and design work and began to proudly talk to their Catalan friends about their Slavic origins.
It took a lot, a lot of patience to reach this point: so that Catalans of foreign origin do not forget their roots and that, with the experience they have from their countries, they can also contribute. Now what remains for me is to wait little by little for my grandchildren and to hope that in the encyclopedia or dictionary of Catalonia the word "nouvinguts" changes to "benvinguts", that we are welcome. Thank you.