fleegar

@shoutplenty

one of my fave liminal spaces is this little lawn in front of the blue gate. well, it’s literally a threshold after all. there used to be more trees to the left. i took this photo the night before leaving for maybe the last time in july 2022 [1/16]

10/4/2024, 3:12:26 AM

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fleegar

@shoutplenty

when i was small and autistic, i was comforted by this in-between space, between my grandparents’ house that was so full of visiting family, and the wider village, down the road or beyond the canal i’m standing just behind in the photo. the threshold had ppl’s cars and some peace

10/4/2024, 3:12:27 AM

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fleegar

@shoutplenty

it was nice for a lil daytime kickabout or a vespertine farewell

nowadays, nobody lives there. the village is much emptier and the house weighed down by the past. i and my mum are kind of just cut loose from our family, by ourselves in england

10/4/2024, 3:12:28 AM

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fleegar

@shoutplenty

the village of sutjeska was renamed to that following the battle of sutjeska, a river near gacko in south hercegovina, in 1943. about 9000 of us were hurt or killed fighting the nazis. my mum told me just today that my great grandad miloš was injured as a partizan in ww2

10/4/2024, 3:12:29 AM

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fleegar

@shoutplenty

i went to that river when i was 17 and it was such an empty place. like agata forest. a stone’s throw from the villages where my grandma and grandpa grew up

nothing was left after the war, so both migrated to banat where 100k+ germans (!) had been given estates by the habsburgs

10/4/2024, 3:12:30 AM

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fleegar

@shoutplenty

after ww2, we kicked them out (to germany/gulag/death) and renamed the villages

miloš got a big house in sutjeska for his anti-nazi efforts. i ran around there w/ my great uncle and like 7 cousins. my other great grandad mirko sat out the war so got the modest house in my photo

10/4/2024, 3:12:32 AM

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fleegar

@shoutplenty

i learnt all the street names as a kid. we were on nikole tesle. ivo lole ribara. maršala tita. petra drapšina. borisa kidriča. žarka zrenjanina. JNA. save kovačevića. all but one are partizans. the last one died at sutjeska. their memories a reminder of heroism but also of pain

10/4/2024, 3:12:32 AM

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fleegar

@shoutplenty

i didn’t quite notice these were all genitive case as a 6y/o lol so yeah that is nikola tesla, serbia’s greatest export. he’s the non-partizan, from the 1800s. that is also tito, on whose street miloš’s big house was

these names also haunt bits of belgrade, like areas of zemun

10/4/2024, 3:12:33 AM

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fleegar

@shoutplenty

this half of my family has that communist partizan background whence hails my collectivist spirit. but it is also, well… haunted by the memory of our dead war heroes

and dare i say, haunted by the germans we evicted and their graveyard we turfed over

10/4/2024, 3:12:34 AM

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fleegar

@shoutplenty

the identity of my hercegovinan grandparents is of tall mountain-dwellers who had been occupied by austrians, hungarians and ottomans for half a millenium, and who were forced to move on by ww2, a mountain of death everything harks back to. where there were roots, little is left

10/4/2024, 3:12:36 AM

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fleegar

@shoutplenty

and now in banat, my family has moved on too. we carry with us this need to be right, on the right side as partizans, where the serbian royalists and croatian nationalists were fascists or nazis. and we’re disunited, not like the natives from banat, not like the other yugoslavs

10/4/2024, 3:12:36 AM

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fleegar

@shoutplenty

we cling to the 100k of us whom the croatian nazis (ustaše) killed in concentration camps. we cling to jugoslavija, which was broken up by the usa. we cling to our communism, we support putin. we deny what we did in bosna, and don’t know what happened in kosovo pre-ww1

10/4/2024, 3:12:39 AM

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fleegar

@shoutplenty

my dad’s friend hails from the same village as my grandma and says the same things as my mum. it’s just our identity, the wars, the displacements, what was done to us, and ignoring what we did and pushing ahead into a hopeless future

10/4/2024, 3:12:40 AM

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fleegar

@shoutplenty

i’ve also joked about how ratko mladić comes from a village near gacko, and his family moved to the next village along from sutjeska. how we must be closely related

i saw graffiti in gacko when i visited at age 17 calling him a national hero, and i didn’t get it. was he right?

10/4/2024, 3:12:42 AM

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fleegar

@shoutplenty

suffering into revenge and an endless cycle. yes, i’ve described a generational trauma

the victim mentality and uncompromising desire to be vindicated, what we call “inat”. or just a feeling of doom, more suffering around the corner, well. it’s a lot like what i’m going thru now

10/4/2024, 3:12:43 AM

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