Adoption, Belonging and Identity - why I write about Yugoslavia

 

Me in Belgrade 1985

I’m not English. I am Yugoslav, Irish and German. Let’s get that straight before we begin. Because I was adopted at birth, identity is my issue. This is what this article is about.

According to the zeitgeist, you have a baby because you love them. You’re gay, or trans, or cis, or whatever you are, but love is what matters.

Okay. The zeitgeist is BS. I am 63 and I have struggled with identity my whole life. You need to know where you come from and you need photos. No child should be conceived without access to photos of their relatives. I didn’t see photos of my relatives until I was 50, but they absolutely opened my world. Here was my hair, my height, my eyes, my whole belonging.

So you might say, my child is happy without photos. But life is long. You don’t give birth to a baby, you give birth to a person and it is that person who will ultimately decide the rights or wrongs of the matter, not you. Unfortunately, when I was born in 1960, the government made the choice that you were a new person without access to your old family. No photos. It was a social experiment and it failed.    

I am an example of why.

I was adopted into a colonial Australian family of English origins, although I’m not English. (About three sixteenths and even two sixteenths of that, my aunt told me, considered themselves Irish. So, we’re down to one sixteenth.)

I cannot be what anyone wants me to be. I have to be myself.

When you’re a child, you do as you’re told. I grew up on English literature, English history, English war stories, English politics, English movies. When I was in kindergarten, we celebrated Empire Day. I read the English novels and poems my mother gave me.

When I was 29, my adoptive father died. My adoptive Mum died when I was 42. The day after her funeral, I met my biological sisters, having met my brother earlier that year.

From that day, everything changed.

As the years went on, I discovered that I no longer enjoyed the English authors Mum had enjoyed. I discovered the truth about English history and English war stories, not the sanitised versions. After marriage to my half Italian husband when I was 31, my tastes began to alter radically.

Now, I really loved my Mum. I loved her family history in the Southern Highlands of New South Wales. Once she died and my new family began talking about their European roots (which were my roots because we had the same parents) the tug-of-war between the old and the new nearly tore me apart. With a husband and two small children to look after, daily I had this nasty little voice in my head telling me that Mum’s family, which I had loved, was no longer mine because now I had a Real Family. I was one of the Lucky Adoptees who had actually Found Out Where They’d Come From.

This insidious chatterer tortured me. Without mercy it went on and on, week after week until one night three months after Mum died I was in the kitchen washing up while my husband and daughters were watching TV. Suddenly in the dark, Mum was behind me. Suddenly I started to cry. I said, ‘Hi, Mum.’ And then she was gone.

In an instant I was healed. From that brief encounter I knew that Mum’s family and my new family both belonged to me. The Lord had allowed Mum to come and reassure me of that.

People may think I’m crazy being so interested in Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists, but I look like them. When I got off the train in Belgrade in 1985 and for the first time in my life met people as big as I was, I thought, ‘What is this wonderful place?’ I thought Belgrade was the best city in the whole world. I loved the story of the Yugoslav Partisans in World War 2. When I was only twelve Mum had told me about the women who fought alongside the men.

These Partisans were fighting for the country where I felt I belonged, where half of me had come from. Who I looked like. They impressed the Germans, they impressed the British, they were the only country to stand up to Stalin. I am old enough to remember watching Soviet tanks roll into Prague in 1968 on the TV, merely because Czechoslovakia longed to be free of Moscow. Russia never attempted that stunt in Yugoslavia. Why? One name: Tito. Not a perfect man, but a very interesting one. I loved Yugoslavia because it was wild and mysterious and brave. What did Tito say about it? ‘Yugoslavs are a proud people.’

War is a terrible thing, but I have often wondered, with envy I am ashamed to say, what it would be like to fight passionately for the country where your roots had been for a thousand years or maybe more. How I envy the Australian Aborigines because they belong to the land.

So this is my little piece of history. I like to write about Yugoslavia because I think it’s a great story.

https://www.mwalkeristra.com

https://www.mwalkeristra.com

 

 

  

 

THE ADOPTED PERSON'S GUIDE TO ISTRIA

    I had no interest in modern Italy nor the Italian diaspora that has produced restaurants in almost every city on earth. My adoptive mother and father were proud colonial Australians. They didn't go to restaurants. They went to the cricket. They caught fish, and their parents referred to Yugoslavs as Balts even though Yugoslavia was nowhere near the Baltic.

    Discovering herself overnight the parent of a very large baby, my mother accordingly brought me up on a mixture of Australian oral history and stories of the female Yugoslav Partisans. I thought they were thrilling, and I just knew that my birth mother had hurled grenades at fascists. Yugoslavia seemed a wonderful place to me and, when I spent two weeks there in 1985, I settled as naturally into its lakes and forests as if I had taken root.

    So, when I met my brother in 2002 and his first words were ‘my mother is Italian,’ I was less than impressed. (I recall that my half-Italian husband and I may have differed on this.) My sister’s children also told me, ‘Nonna is Italian.' They retrieved a stack of postcards from a dusty shelf addressed to Silvana Di Micheli Tonon.

​

    ‘Di Micheli is her mother’s name,’ they said.

   Well, I had met my biological mother in 1989 and I knew better.

​​​

   'Silvana told me that her mother's name was Micatovich.'  

   I produced my adoption papers and tapped 'Yugoslavian' prominently.

     ​​​

   ‘Italian,’ they replied.

     

   ‘Yugoslavian,’ I said.

​

​    Welcome to Istria.

​

     Silvana was born in Tar, an Istrian hilltop village, in 1920. She took her holidays in nearby Novigrad. Trieste was her city. Following the war, having been Italian for a brief 25 years and Austrian before that, Tar became part of Yugoslavia. In its park, on the cenotaph beneath the partisan star, is an inscription in Croatian and Italian written in 1952, 'This stone is erected as a sign of gratitude to the Croatian and Italian fighters of this community. Casualties for the liberation of our people.'

  

    But Silvana never went back. She was Australian from the minute she stepped off the ship in 1950 and her family, growing up without oral history, were left to their own devices in deciding where she came from. Then one day, when she was nearly 90, she began to reminisce about her childhood. My sister, scribbling furtively, recorded as much as she could, and this is how I discovered that, when her parents took on Italian identity after the war, Silvana herself decided to become Yugoslavian.

​

    What she ultimately related did not amount to a book, but it was enough to bring the past to life and to create the story world for the novel. When she and I read a book together that my brother had bought her about Novigrad, called ‘Cittanova D’Istria,’ it encouraged further memories.

​

    ‘Mandracchio?? ' she exclaimed, thumping the page. (She was 97.) 'Ha, ha, ha! Mandracio, please, not mandracchio. And see those Venetian walls!’ More thumping. ‘They’re to keep the Turks out. People in Cittanova would say to one another, "I’m not a Turk!"’

    And finally a few quotes to shed light on that troubling Yugoslav/Italian question:

​​​

   ‘I like Italian culture but I don’t like Italians. Italians are distrustful because they have been invaded too many times.'
   ​'My father was very unhappy. The government wanted to move him all over Italy.'

​   ‘I saw Mussolini with Hitler in a car in Florence. I was surprised how small he was.'

​​   ‘I felt displaced in Italy.’

   ‘Micatovich was an important name in our village. It was the name of an island down the far south coast near Albania.'

​   ‘My grandmother came from a village near the Austrian border.' 

   'We were Austrian, then Austria lost the war. Then we were Italian, and Italy lost the war!'

​

    My own feeling is that Silvana thought of herself in regional terms, not national. She was Istrian and the mixture of cultures that that implies. ​I fancy that nationality is a modern invention.