Seeing the World as a Mosaic

Mosaics in the sanctuary of Arantzazu, Spain (from a book Arantzazu by Javier Garrido, 1987)

“Where are you from?”

“Where are you from?” is a question that most immigrants and expats will need to get used to. The moment they step into a foreign country, the differences in their appearance, language, or accent become clear points of separation. The question will become an everyday presence, for some more of a nuisance. After a while, you have the answer memorized, you respond to it automatically. And you also respond automatically to any following comments and questions, as you have already heard them dozens of times.

I have always felt a certain uneasiness when responding to it. I was born in a country called Slovakia (part of the European Union) and lived there for the first 18 years of my life. However, I moved for my studies once I reached adulthood and haven’t lived there since. I have spent some time in the neighboring Czech Republic, then the Netherlands, and I have been living in the United Kingdom for more than three years now. On the surface, when someone asks “Where are you from?”, I answer with a resolute “Slovakia” (and prepare myself for either slight confusion or genuine disinterest). The purpose of my unequivocal answer is, of course, to simplify the flow of the introduction. Delving into the complexities of my stays in different countries would definitely break the fundamental rules of conversation. But deep down, I know I don’t have a good answer.

“Where are you from?” is a question that tries to gather something definitional about a person. We don’t tend to ask other potential questions like “In which country were you born?”, “In which country did you go to nursery?”, or “What are your native languages?” as starting points of conversations, as these would only gather bare facts. When we ask about the origin of a person, we desire an answer that will enable us to immediately identify and understand them better. “Where are you from?” is actually “Who are you?” in disguise.

Mosaic Identities

One of the core developments associated with the emergence of modernity is the association of identities primarily with ethnic or national backgrounds. However, this hasn’t always been the case. The association of primary identification reference points with national entities is a phenomenon that started with the creation of nation-states. The dissemination of the notion of a nation started in 17th-century Europe and took full force in subsequent centuries. On the cultural front, national identities began to be forged through shared territory, language, and customs. In the economic realm, having a certain overarching identity meant that individual states could rely on the mobilization of their citizens for the purposes of building industrial and military strength. The whole process went hand in hand with urbanization, unification of education systems, and industrialization, where dislocation of population meant the uprooting of more traditional identities.

In Europe during the Middle Ages, the social identification points were entirely different. You first and foremost identified with your local village and/or region. Society was distributed into three orders - the clerical order (the people that prayed), the aristocracy (the people that fought), and the peasants and others (the people that worked). These orders represented another identification point, as people would identify with others of the same order across borders even more than with people of another order within the same kingdom. And on top of that, religion (being Catholic, Protestant, etc.) was another layer of identification. There was no concept of a nation as we understand it now.

Before the Middle Ages and in other regions, the identification points were no less diverse than the ones described above. The Romans used the notion of Romanitas to identify with concepts and practices that defined what it meant to be a Roman. This entailed a set of personal traits and behaviors that were desired in a good Roman citizen, including trustworthiness and honesty. In the Islamic Golden Age (8th-14th century), there was the concept of Ummah, denoting a community of believers that was a fundamental point of reference. Similar religious or local identities were present in most societies of the past in one form or another.

The almost singular association of identity with national or ethnic background that emerged in modernity began to crack in recent decades. Identities of gender and sexuality started to be asserted as part of the attack on the establishment during the cultural revolutions of the 1960s. Being a woman and/or being homosexual (or other identities that now form the LGBTQIA+ movement) became subjectively more important than specific national cultures. The subsequent globalization of world economies with the resultant free flow of human labor engendered a whole new set of identities: people migrating from developing countries for work, or more privileged classes of expats or digital nomads. These people could identify with a myriad of different references, from strong religious affiliations to original regional (or national) cultures, to the customs of their destination countries, or a combination of all of these. These people have been shaped by a very different range of sometimes convergent, but often contradictory influences. It’s no longer a smoother surface of national culture, but rather a mosaic of identity references. For these people, their origin is nothing more than a distant memory.

Slovak Identity

My trajectory has been part of that second wave of denationalization of identities. Thanks to the existence of the European Union, I was able to move freely abroad for my studies and later for work. And as a result of the strong demand for tech workers in the UK, I was able to move here even after the country left the European Union. My identity was already bound to be multifaceted after so many years outside my country of origin. However, I feel there are two other factors that have shaped my personal understanding of identity.

The first one is connected to the historical development of the Slovak identity. A state encompassing solely Slovak people has existed only since 1993 (with a brief exception during WWII). In all other historical periods, the country was part of different political entities, and people speaking the Slovak language (whose standardization also happened rather recently) almost never belonged to the dominant political class (Hungarian Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire, or to some extent Czechoslovakia). There is a lack of imagined stories that other European nations cherish to sustain their national narratives. The French, Germans, and British have a long history of kingdoms and empires that are imagined to provide continuity for current nation-states. Similar historical justifications are part of the narratives in the neighboring countries. Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland all had kingdoms that can serve as jumping-off points for their national identities. In the case of Slovaks, no such recent entities exist. The last kingdom that could be (with many footnotes though) said to be somehow “Slovak” existed in the 9th century. Overall, you could probably count on your fingers all the events that had a region-wide impact that originated in what is now Slovakia. I couldn’t find any statistical evidence for this, but from my personal impressions, I feel that historical knowledge among people in Slovakia is significantly less developed than in most other European countries. This is understandable - why remember anything about history if there is very little in it that you could claim as yours? This instability of historical grounding of national identity is actually, I would claim, one of the primary features of Slovak identity. That doesn’t mean that people cannot express nationalistic or xenophobic tendencies (which is actually quite the case nowadays), but there is no pervasive feeling of national identity and that identity in itself is incredibly brittle when confronted with externals stimuli. To put in a slighlty exaggerated terms, being Slovak signifies an absence of national identity.

The second point concerns what I would call a “shame” component of national identity. By that I mean all the negative connotations that are associated with these countries by the outside world. This sentiment affects not only Slovakia but many Eastern/Central European countries. The negative connotations span the rudeness of behavior, pervasive alcoholism, high criminality, conservative tendencies of the population, unstable democratic institutions, low PPP compared to other developed countries (exemplified through notoriously cheap beer and spirits), the devastating and everlasting effects of communism, and many more. Of course, this is not to say that most of these presumed characteristics are not accurate. Some of these perceptions do describe real social tendencies on some level. In addition, many of these countries are quite small and insignificant when viewed on a global scale, which explains a genuine lack of knowledge about the region (which I would say is the case for Slovakia). The negative perceptions and potential misunderstandings about the region can make people ashamed to admit, understandably, that they are part of it. It’s an identity they might feel is imposed upon them by the outside world, rather than one they have attained.

I have experienced both of these tendencies myself. The pride in my national identity is mostly relegated to specific cultural artifacts. As the native language gives us potent insight into understanding cultural expressions, I do have positive affiliations with art created by people living in that region. I cherish the lyrical prose of Dominik Tatarka and Rudolf Jasik, the deeply engaged political essays of Ladislav Mnacko, the musical compositions of Marian Varga and Ilja Zeljenka, and the vividly naturalistic ballads of Zuzana Homolova. All of these pieces of art (and I could list many more) have fundamentally shaped my understanding of the world, no doubt. Outside the cultural realm though, I do not see myself vehemently claiming my Slovak identity. As an expat in advanced economies, you come across a diverse range of misconceptions and confusions about the country: from mixing Slovakia with similarly sounding Slovenia, to stereotypical understanding of the region, to an outright lack of knowledge about it. However, as I mentioned above, the negative perceptions are oftentimes true. Many of these societies are extremely conservative, lack a history of democratic institutions, and seem stuck in middle-income status, to name just a few. The negative outside perceptions coupled with the knowledge of the country’s deep-rooted (and seemingly never-ending) problems don’t create potent arguments for being proud of the heritage of these countries of origin. And those arguments are already rather sparse for an identity as historically ungrounded as Slovakian.

So it is not surprising that on a prolonged contact with different cultural environments, an already fragile national identity can gradually completely break up. It is not to say one cannot still appreciate a set of deeply embedded cultural references and potential privileges that are the artifact of certain identites (e.g. social-economical stability, functioning education and health systems, belonging to more supra-national entities, etc.). It’s more that one doesn’t feel defined by those restrictive national identities anymore. It’s only in those moments of direct questioning, of answering “Where are you from?”, when one puts on a mask and reduces the world of their references to a single datapoint, their country of origin.

Becoming Other

The lack of strong feelings toward any national entity, however, is not a downside. I have rather started to see it as a privilege. Instead of looking at a stable universe of references, whenever I am exposed for a longer time to different cultures, I am eager to explore them and claim parts of them as my own. I know there are hard limits to these transformations, set by the lack of intimate understanding of other countries’ languages and the missing web of cultural background. But nothing holds me back from learning about the Other with sincere curiosity and incorporating the differences I admire. It might be hard to convey that to people whose backgrounds are less varied, but there is immense joy in glimpsing the world through someone else’s eyes. It’s the hidden joy of experiencing the world as a mosaic.