By Corina Tulbure.
Marija Djurdjevich, arrived in Barcelona aged 26 fleeing the war in the Balkans. A Catalunya Ràdio journalist with whom he worked as an interpreter during the war helped him leave the country. He landed in 1995 in a splendid Barcelona, full of life and future. His plan was to continue his studies in Catalonia while the situation in his country stabilized and the political regime changed. “I enrolled in the Doctorate in Humanities, although I didn’t know how I would survive because I neither had a job nor could work legally and, moreover, I didn’t know anyone.”
What are the experiences or people that have marked you?
The first years were hard. My shattered and blood-soaked country was in the headlines, and the television was full of terrible images. In Barcelona, amidst the media bombardment, I was surrounded by even more violence than in my country of origin, Serbia. I just wanted to disappear into the masses and go unnoticed, be another person among people, live quietly and make friends without the obligation to answer so many questions (which I lived like stabbing) and without the terrifying burden of analysis political and geostrategic to clarify the dynamics of the war every time he opened his mouth. People here often identified me with what I had fled and treated me as if I was responsible for the war…. Added to this psychological violence was administrative violence – the non-recognition of the right to reside, work, go to the doctor (recurring untreated ear infections have marked my health forever) – and the very long processes of validation of the studies – it took me ten years to get the validation of the university degree. I don’t know how I could stand all that. Still, I persisted in my vision and dedicated myself to dismantling stereotypes, and eventually won a four-year scholarship for doctoral studies. Along the way, I also met some people with extraordinary sensitivity and knowledge, such as a professor of philosophy at the UAB and his wife. They supported me in the most difficult moments.
You founded Casa de l’Est in 2004. Could you tell us about the experience of the organization and what was done there?
In 2004, the process of European enlargement to the east began with the entry of ten new countries into the EU: Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, etc. and we wanted to organize the talent of these countries in Catalonia to promote educational, commercial and cultural cooperation initiatives. The Generalitat de Catalunya subsidized some projects, and they were very fruitful and beautiful years of mutual knowledge, intercultural dialogue, exchanges of historical memory and debates about the present and future of Europe and European identity/diversity in a lot events we organized together with various Catalan entities: exhibitions, presentations and translations of literary works, round tables, film festivals… We also designed and delivered academic courses on the social challenges of enlargement, as well as training modules for council technicians that contextualized Eastern European immigration. The network created in those years serves today to promote joint participation in European projects.
Then you worked as a researcher in a project on mixed couples…
Yes, at the Rovira i Virgili University (URV) I participated in a series of research projects on marriages and binational couples where one member of the couple is a foreigner (migrant for love). We studied the motivations, reasons, preferences and means used to find a partner and their daily experiences: challenges of transnational families, intercultural conflicts… We discovered that the “geographies of love” are not the same in the case of Catalan women and men. Catalan men prefer women from Latin America and Eastern Europe, while Catalan women prefer men from Africa and India. The case of marriages between Spaniards and women from the east was interesting: they justify their migratory project with the search for a partner “less sexist and more considerate than men from the east”, while they are looking for a woman foreign woman with whom to reproduce the gender relations of the past, “because the women here have emancipated themselves too quickly”. We have also found women from the East initially excited about the ‘stay at home’ role after decades of working very hard in the industry, with no time for family. After the initial enthusiasm, many have returned to seek economic independence and have developed ingenious transnational care strategies using new technologies, such as grandmothers taking care of their grandchildren via Skype.
Do you think Eastern Europe is known here? Although, to a certain extent, it is only a geographical identification because it encompasses a diversity of countries, languages, with different pasts.
Very little is known about Eastern Europe and it is imagined as a homogeneous and underdeveloped space. The only point of reference is communism (and of that, the gulag) as if there was nothing before and then neither. Neolithic Europe of the Danube basin, Greco-Byzantine Europe or modern science coming from the east are almost unknown, although their contribution to the construction of European singularity was substantial. The vision of Eastern Europe is still influenced by the Orientalist discourse, which paints it as a threat to the well-being of Western Europe. However, the image improves when eastern countries are promoted as areas for tourist consumption or places to do business or transfer knowledge. It is when some positive image is invoked, some isolated figure belonging to the world of literature, thought or classical ballet.
Do you think that citizens of Eastern Europe experience discrimination in Europe?
It depends on which part of the EU. There are traditionally multicultural and multilingual areas such as Central Europe (Austria) where people from the East and West have lived together for centuries. Here it is different, we are located in the south-western tip of Europe. Eastern Europeans originating from countries that belong to the EU are guaranteed the same basic rights as other European citizens. They suffer, however, marginalization because we live in a competitive world and there is the economic crisis. And also because with globalization, the imposed cultural homogenization has caused an opposite reaction – the resistance and empowerment of the particular and singular, the national – which often sees immigration as a danger to the local culture and way of life . The immigrant, however, is not to blame or responsible for either globalization or economic crises. Sometimes, it is even a victim of deception due to the construction of the too good image, a too positive stereotype, of the regulated and prosperous life in the West, and the reality is not like that either.
