War- (1992-1995)Sarajevo, Bosnia. I was six years old when the war began. My life changed one night when my family and I were in our weekend house a few miles away from the capital, where we resided. We used to spend every weekend there. The war began like this:  My father asked my mother, my two sisters and me to get our belongings and rush into the car. I was excited, scared, and confused. (Our car stops at the signal of a large hand, my father mechanically unrolls his window, sighing heavily, then whispering, “Oh my God. Girls, close your eyes. Go to sleep.”  My mother grabs his shoulder with her left hand from the passenger seat and says, Fari, what’s happening?” He looks at her, “Rat (rah-t)” which translates into “war” in Bosnian. After that, they don’t say anything until the Serbian soldier initiates conversation. The Serbian soldier searches our car, points a flashlight on our faces, asks my father an array of questions like, “Where are you headed” and “To whom do these children belong?”  He lets us continue our ride into Sarajevo. We are the lucky ones.) War is being asked to look asleep.

Sleeping- My mother set up blankets and pillows under the kitchen table, away from the windows. My sisters and I were instructed to sleep there and not go near the windows in the apartment. The table is our apartment. We pretended that we are all older and married, and we have come over to each other’s houses to have coffee. We pretended that this is our private home, away from grownups, away from the whistling and fear. Belma is seven years older than me and my twin sister, Berina. (The whistling begins. It is faint, and it sounds like the birds waking up in the early mornings on my grandmother’s farm. Berina and I draw closer to Belma. Berina is on one side, and I am on the other. Sandwhiching Belma, she presses our heads close to her chest and holds our ears until the whistling is over and the bomb crashes. The louder the whistle, the closer the bomb. We run from under the table and into the bathroom: the only place in the apartment without windows. Located between the kitchen and the living room, it the safest place in our home.)  Sleeping is the illusion of safety.

Deaf- When the whistling scared me, Belma wasn’t the only one who closed my ears for me. She wasn’t the only one giving me the advantage of being deaf for a short period of time. I eventually learned to do it myself. Being deaf became a dream. Closing my eyes shut out the world around me, but no hand on my warm ear truly drowned the noise. The noise formed a permanent symphony inside my head. Even when the streets were silent, I still heard it. (Belma, Berina and I are playing tag. The floors are creaking and we are giggling. Belma is “it.”  She catches us and tickles us until our stomachs and armpits hurt. Until the laughter is the only sound that exists in our world. My mother rushes into the living room with her hand over her chest and stops in front of us breathing heavily. We turn to her. We stop laughing. Tears begin forming in her eyes. “Mama, are you okay?” Belma asks. My mom stays quiet for a while and then says, “I thought…I thought something happened to you.”  And she folds her knees and sits on the floor as we try to calm her down.)  I wished I were deaf so I could never confuse shrieks of laughter for shrieks of pain.

Silence- Synonym: Danger. Silent afternoons give the illusion of peace. The illusion of peace drives people outside of their homes to look for necessities such as food. The city becomes crowded with people hurrying to take advantage of silence before it begins. But they can never predict when that will be. The bombing begins. And…war is war. (My father tells me that when it’s quiet outside, we must draw our blinds and move away from the windows. He tells us to go to the basement and hide with the rest of the residents in the building.) I began to understand silence as anything but calmness.

“My life flashed before my eyes”- One’s life doesn’t really flash before one’s eyes right before one thinks one’s going to die, right before one’s life is threatened by an outside force. Nothing really happens except for paralysis, and for those who know God, prayer. Prayer happens. (I am playing outside with my friends. It is a quiet afternoon. My friends Adina, Jasmina, and I are sheltered by our apartment building, located on a mountain. Sarajevo is a city surrounded by mountains. Height, like silence, is dangerous. We are hiding behind the building and writing on the asphalt with old chalk. Adina draws a heart and writes the initials of some boy she really likes inside of the heart. I don’t like any boy, but I write my sisters’ initials in a heart I draw. I am the youngest one of my friends. We giggle because my sisters are my boyfriends. Then we hear the whistling. It grows louder and louder and louder and louder –I run to a nearby wall, by a small staircase that leads to the garden behind the apartment building, I crouch by the wall signaling for them to crouch with me. Adina looks up and screams. I pray. Allah, help us now. Allah save our lives. Allah be with us now. I say my prayers in Arabic. La ilahe illallah muhammeden resulullah. The bomb crashes in the garden, 20 yards away from us. Dust everywhere. The windows of the building crash and the glass lands on the ground making sweet bell sounds. It is all like a melody: our giggling, the whistling as it approaches, Adina’s screaming, the glass on the asphalt. I feel my heart beat on the little wall I am crouching against. My father runs out and shrieks, “WAIT THERE!!!” speaking to nothing, hoping to be speaking to us. He can’t see us through blankets of dust, but I hear his aggressive and soft voice enter into my ears bringing peace to my pounding heart. Minutes after the bomb crashes, I run to my father. Later, we learn that Adina’s face was cut by glass, and we all thank God that she is okay. We were all okay. Protected, somehow.) No, my life didn’t flash before my eyes. Only prayer appeared. And before I knew it, I was in my father’s warm arms.

Escape- Escape is the condition of being torn away from home. It implies the search for safety, not the desire for departure. (My family learns that there are ways that people have been escaping Sarajevo; a city well under siege. We give all the money we have to a woman who promises to set up our escape. She says a bus will be waiting. She says everything will be okay. She says she’ll have passports for us. On the given date, I am awoken by my father’s hand on my face. He kisses my nose and asks me to wake up. He whispers softly, “Anida, we have to go. Mama has prepared whatever you need.” I ask if she has my dolls. “Wherever we go,” he says, “I’ll buy you whatever doll you want.” My sisters are woken up the same way, with our father’s warm kiss and embrace. We arrive at the bus stop at 6am, but there is nobody there. There is no woman. There is no bus. There is only the hope to escape. There is only the anger of betrayal and the relief of not leaving my grandparents in a war torn city. My mother shakes her head and clasps my fathers hand so tightly that at my eye level, I see their tight hands colored with redness. We return to our apartment. Days later my parents devise a new plan. They say, “Money saves nobody. Not during war.” They forgive the woman who was as desperate as we are. As everybody is. I don’t want to escape. I want the war to end. I want to go to school every day. I don’t want to run through streets hunched over to look smaller while holding my mother’s hand, to go into a basement classroom that she runs.) I understood what it means to be torn: I wanted to stay in Sarajevo but escape the war.

“There is no place like home”- The truth. My home is my Sarajevo. There is no place like home. Even when home is war torn. Even when home is a bloody, frightening, and unpredictable place. Home is grandpa and grandma. Home is a place whose walls do not cry. Whose buildings do not bleed even after being hit by shells. Home is a place whose ground always shakes with rhythm, with life, no matter how many dead bodies lie on top of it. (We set up another deal. My grandfather escorts us to the bus. We say goodbye to our city. The day we leave, it is raining. It almost doesn’t seem like there is a war going on. It is early in the morning again, and we are at the bus station watching people cry and pile into the bus hesitantly. There are hands reaching for nothing and waving out from the bus window. I hug my grandfather. I am crying, but I don’t know why yet. I don’t understand that I may not see him for years. Or that I may not see my home for years. Twenty-four hours later, we are in Split, Croatia at the mercy of strangers. The night is long because we are tired and hungry. We are approached by one gentleman who offers us a place to stay. His apartment is infested with roaches. We are afraid of strangers. I am afraid of him, but he gives me chocolate and bananas, and I am excited to eat something I haven’t had in months. We are grateful to him. Days later, we find a small house to live in for a short time. The house is covered with wisteria vines. After two months of the beautiful sea, and watching my mother cry every day, we finally receive tickets for an airplane to take us to Italy, then to New York, where my father’s sister lives. Croatia is a blur. Time stands still until I arrive to New York.)  I slowly realized what that means—that truth. There is no place like home.

Refugee- A shameful title for those who escaped their homeland. (We arrive in New York City on September 14, 1994. As refugees, we are asked to form a separate line at the airport. Everything and everyone is gray and lifeless. The walls have no color. Even the rope that separates the refugees from the normal people is gray. All of the refugees look the same to me. Everyone looks tired and sad.) “Refugee” became a threat to my name. For a long time, it seemed that everywhere I went, I was referred to as a “refugee,” but I was not born with that name.

Home- Fourteen years later, home is the dream that the war never happened. Home is welcoming and peaceful. Home is where we go on vacation. (I battle with this question a lot. I’ve lived in New York longer than I have in Sarajevo, but Sarajevo smells like home. Like warm freshly baked bread and the steaming asphalt after a summer’s rain. New York smells like my education, my friends, and my house.) Home is where the soul gets left behind.

Forgiveness- The struggle to move past the war. The struggle to erase what happened because there is no such thing as finding justice. (Mrs. Alper, my third grade teacher, wants to take a Polaroid of me and one of Berina. She wants to put our pictures next to the month of our birth, so that, like all of the other kids, we have a place on the birthday wall. I don’t understand what she’s saying. She makes a phone call, and soon there is a taller, older boy standing in front of us. He starts speaking Bosnian in a different accent. I ask for his name, Danijel, and I instantly know that he’s Serbian. Berina and I don’t know whether we could trust him so we begin to cry.) The challenge of forgiveness began when I met Danijel.

Immigrant- Immigrant is what distinguishes and separates me from other people. It is the motivational force behind the desire to succeed and overcome. (It is my senior year of college and the Director of Student Diversity on campus asks me what identity describes me best. She says we have multiple identities. I am a female. I am a Muslim. I am Bosnian. I am straight. I tell her that the only way I could identify myself now is if I think of who I am by birth (Bosnian) in relation to who I am in America. Immigrant. I am an immigrant.) Whatever challenges lie ahead, that is the first one I tasted. I am an immigrant, and that will never change.

Dreaming- The ability to redefine “Sleeping.” The kind of dreaming I want is not produced by the illusion of safety, but by safety itself. Until Sleeping can be safety, I will dream of safety. (I am awake now. I am awake to what happened and why it happened. I struggle mostly with these faint memories. I cannot recall anything before the age of six aside from two or three moments that I may have made up because of photographs I look at now. And what I can recount from the war is exactly what I’ve defined here. Words, although they have set definitions, mean different things to everyone. This is my dictionary and it’s constantly changing.)