This blog post is a little late but life has certainly been hectic lately, especially with the four audiobooks that were waiting for me to come back from vacation. (This part was especially funny. I had gone through the whole spring waiting for a new project and living in audiobook narrator purgatory, and then the second I went on vacation – boom! – two authors reached out to me the week of my vacation starting, and two more projects locked me down during this vacation.) It’s safe to say I’ve had my plate a little too full recently. But, have no fear, I’m here to write yet another blog post of my life that only two people will read ;)

First things first: I call my trip “vacation” and, in part, it kind of was. However, there were two very important components to it that were very much all-business. The first was my continued research into the book I’m writing about my mom’s town in Bosnia, and the second was the Sarajevo Film Festival.

The impetus to go to Bosnia this year was more than just to see family or to conduct my business, it was to attend my cousin’s wedding and meet his new bride and her family.

I was more than happy to attend my cousin’s wedding. Unfortunately, due to the Bosnian Genocide in the 90s, my family is scattered around the world. Of course, my immediate family and I are in the USA, but the rest of my cousins grew up and live in Germany and Austria respectively. And, in recent years, I haven’t been able to make it over to Europe due to career responsibilities (and also severe financial complications). Prior to this wedding, I hadn’t seen some of them for close to 10 years. When you grow up far apart, its easy to forget that you matter to them and that they matter to you. Being part of the dijaspora sometimes means that your own family is a bit of a stranger to you; you don’t have weekend trips to their houses, you don’t have holidays with them, you don’t have that petty minute drama that happens and can sometimes lead to families becoming even closer – if you’re lucky, you have a couple of summers with them at best. This means that, by nature you’re not super close with them and you don’t know how much it matters that you attend. But it’s family, and you value family, so you go.

It heartened me to see my cousins again. We are no longer children. Most of them have started families of their own, careers of their own, and have trekked out on their own unique paths. While of course I was happy for their successes, in a way it broke my heart to feel that passage of time. We’ve all gotten so far in life with so little presence from each other. We’ve missed a lot of moments that cousins should have had together, we’ve missed the closeness. Unfortunately, we can never go back in time. However, now that we’re adults, I see very clearly how we’re starting to navigate the long distance for ourselves. No longer are we relying on our parents to keep the connections alive, we’re doing it ourselves.

One moment especially touched my heart: I had gone up to congratulate my cousin (the groom) on his wedding and to wish him well. He looked me in the eyes, and with true sincerity told me how happy he was that I was able to make it to Bosnia for his wedding. To be honest, I never thought that it might matter to him that I was there – this is what I mean that you forget that you matter to one another. After some time of being distant, you only see what’s missing, you stop seeing the weight of presence, or you feel awkward in it. Maybe it’s just me, but I think I often underestimate how much my presence impacts others. I often find myself amazed when friends think of me outside of when we’re in each other’s presence so I fully recognize that this could just be a me thing – but I was happy to be there, and happy to hear that it matters to them that I’m there just as much as it matters to me that they’re there.

Unfortunately, while I did try to keep a positive disposition throughout the nuptials and preparations, a lot of that was overshadowed by my work in regard to my mom’s town.

In 1992, a genocide was committed in my mom’s town in Bosnia where 258 men, women, and children were murdered for their ethnicity. My mom and my aunts lost a brother in that evil event, along with several cousins and extended family members. Something that had always bothered me growing up was that I could never quite get a full story of that day. The events of that day were always told in bits and pieces because everyone was always telling their own story or the stories of the people they knew, but there was no proper account tying all those stories together. That’s why I set out to write this book project. I’m passionate about this, but I’m also woefully underinformed about the actual political events that lead to that day. Because of this, I’ve had to do an insane amount of research. Part of that research includes interviewing survivors and the family members of victims, and I completely underestimated how much this would effect me.

In these interviews, I would listen to these people talk about their own experiences and the experiences of their loved ones. Things that are unimaginable. Things that I can’t comprehend a human being doing to another human being. Through these interviews, it really hit me how these people had lived through some of the worst things that a human being could suffer through, and that they were expected to continue to live their life with absolutely no justice. No wonder that, after these interviews, I stopped eating. My appetite was just gone. I couldn’t sleep. I would lie awake in my bed for hours and sometimes never get a blink of sleep before the sun came up and I decided to leave my room. None of that was bettered by the extreme heat of the summer, and I began to feel incredibly nauseous all the time. Lack of sleep + Lack of food + Extreme heat = one really sick-feeling Selma.

So, yes, I did everything I could to enjoy myself at this wedding, but my heart was incredibly heavy and I didn’t really know how to unload it. My mom told me to take a break – that this was a marathon and not a sprint. But, to be honest, I do think it is a sprint. It’s been 34 years since the event and the older generation – the one that remembers the day the most – is slowing dying from old age. What’s worse, the perpetrators are slowly dying of old age, too. If they’re never held accountable in one form or another, how does one believe in justice? In balance? In the world at large?

What compounds the stress is that this book must be accurate. It must be fact-checked and cross-referenced a million times, and it must present well-researched evidence for what happened that day. In my opinion, people talking about their own lived experience should be enough but, unfortunately, we have too many genocide deniers in Bosnia (and around the world), thus this book must be solid in its recounting of events. This creates a high bar. Now, add a “time limit”? Yeah, I’m buckling from the stress a bit. I’m tired. And I can only work on this project in spurts before I slowly start getting sucked in the muck of despair and hopelessness. I’ve always said this and will continue to say it: The residents of my mom’s town are better people than I am. They are stronger, more resilient. I’m buckling under the weight of truth, I can’t imagine how they continue on with their lives without buckling to the weight of their own memories.

That’s how I rounded out the “vacation” portion of my trip. The rest of my family only had about two weeks in Bosnia, but I stayed on until the Sarajevo Film Festival. Between the time where my family when back to the US and the start of the film festival, I did take a short 6-day trip to England. I’ll detail this trip in more detail in a later blog post but suffice it to say that that trip really helped me. I went to visit a friend of mine and got to stay with her. It was still very hot, but I was able to just enjoy a few days without grueling over documents, notes, and interview files. I think being able to just explore a new city (London, with a day-trip to Manchester) really helped me to find some peace again, some breathing room. Thankfully toward the end of the trip, I finally seemed to get my appetite back.

After that, I returned to Sarajevo to attend the film festival. You can read more about it in my previous blog post here. But I won’t lie to say that I’ve had better times. The festival itself was awesome, but I was still feeling very sick and nauseous the whole time, so I stayed home a lot and didn’t get to be as social and as “out there” as I would have liked. Maybe I’ll go again next year but, if I do, I will definitely have to prep for it like I’m prepping for battle. Electrolytes, supplements, ice packs, and a HUGE water bottle that will surely announce to anyone that looks at me that I am an American. Maybe with all that, I’ll be able to combat the heat and enjoy my time.

Ultimately, I do think I came back from the trip changed. However, I still don’t know if it was for the better or for the worse. I do think that I have a lot of people counting on me, and I do know that letting them down is the very last thing I ever want to do. But, I don’t know what the future will bring. I hope this project, in it’s ability to bring me despair, once complete, has the equal ability to bring the victims and their family members some peace. At the very least, to let them know that they will not be forgotten.

xx

Selma

Internal Turmoil: Bosnia Summer 2026

Powered by Squarespace