For my Nani
In memory of Nani and many other Bosnian women who died in ‘exile.’
Below is a read-aloud version of the entire article.
When I think of happy places, only one comes to mind. It’s not the beach, the mountains, my parents’ house, or any other beautiful place I’ve been fortunate enough to visit. When I need to calm down, I imagine my Nani’s house — my grandmother on my mother’s side. Although this house now exists only in my memories, it’s the one place where I can find peace when I’m stressed.
Nani, or Dikica — we used to call her Dika for short — and my grandfather, Rexhep Zaskoku, who we called Baba Rexha, built a one-story house in the early ‘60s in Ferizaj. The house was built in a typical style of the past century: three steps leading to the entrance, a balcony on the left, the front door on the right, and inside, a wide corridor connecting two bedrooms, a living room and a bathroom. Despite having two bedrooms, we always slept in the living room, especially during the cold winters, as it was the only room we could heat. What I loved most, though, was the yard.
My Nani’s yard was filled with trees — walnut, hazelnut, apricot and apple — and an abundance of flowers. My favorite flower grew right in front of the balcony. Each spring, it bloomed with pink, heart-shaped petals, unlike any other flower I’ve seen. Nani had brought it from her birthplace, Čajniče, in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The story of Nani, who brought the pink flower
Dika was born on May 8, 1940, as the first child of the Džambegović family, followed by Šefka, Nura, Sebahata and Kemali. She spent her childhood in a small mountain town, nestled between the surrounding peaks and Sarajevo, the cultural capital known for its many bridges.
In addition to her immediate family, Nani had many cousins who all lived in the same small town about 90 kilometers from Sarajevo. She enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle for the time. Her father, a merchant, ensured that Nani and her sisters had the finest fabrics for their clothes, sourced from Damascus, Syria, which was renowned for its exquisite textiles. Surrounded by beauty and fashion from an early age, Nani developed a lifelong passion for clothes and perfumes. In fact, my last memory of her is tied to this passion — despite barely having the strength to speak, she asked me to put some perfume on her.
Nani was always particular about dressing “her way,” as she used to say. I remember, as a child in the early 2000s, accompanying her to the tailor, where she was never satisfied. “It’s difficult to work with you, Dika. You never like what I sew for you,” a well-known tailor in Ferizaj would often tell her. Even when she found something she liked in a store, which was rare, she made sure to buy two of the same item — whether it was two identical shirts, two pairs of glasses, or two pairs of pants. She had this habit, believing that if one got ruined, she’d always have a backup.
When Nani recalled her childhood, she described herself as a child who always resisted authority and went against the grain. She often told the story of how, after finishing fourth grade, her father insisted she drop out of school, saying, “Only whores go to school.” But Nani firmly stood her ground and he eventually had no choice but to relent. Looking back now, I realize that my grandmother never used or even knew feminist terms or language. She didn’t realize that her actions were feminist but they spoke volumes, proving that no one, not even her father, could dictate her path in life.
Thanks to her insistence on education, her three younger sisters were able to continue their education. But for Nani, life had something else in store.
Marriage in Kosovo
In 1956, when Nani was just 16, she married a man she had only known for a short time and moved to a place with unfamiliar customs and traditions. My grandfather, Baba Rexha, had close ties to Bosnia. His mother, Emina, was from Mostar but sadly died while giving birth to him, and he often visited her family there. Nani said she liked our grandfather, Rexha, right away. “He was tall, with blue eyes and curly hair. He spoke Bosnian as fluently as Albanian,” she recalled.
Unlike Nani, Baba Rexha was much calmer. He spoke little and spent most of his days playing chess. I didn’t have the chance to spend much time with him, as he passed away in 1998, but my memories of him are always tied to chess. When I think of him, the image that comes to mind is of him playing chess with his friends, Sami and Milazim, under the shade of the trees in Ferizaj.
When Baba Rexha and Nani married, she knew almost nothing about Kosovo. Geography had never been her strong suit, she told me that it was the subject she hated most at school. She recalled how, whenever the teacher asked her to point out places on a map, she always struggled to find them. Kosovo was no exception, even though it was part of the same federation.
While Nani struggled with geography, language was a different story. Determined to adapt to her new place as quickly as possible, she learned Albanian within a year. My grandfather, who was a teacher by profession, took it upon himself to teach her and he succeeded. However, Nani had another reason for learning the language.
At first, Baba Rexha sent Nani to his native village of Rubovc in Lipjan, where his stepmother told her she should serve the guests. In those early days, while serving tea, the women in the kitchen played a trick on her. They told her to say “here’s your tea, like excrement,” instead of “enjoy your tea.” Unaware of the language, Nani repeated the phrase each time she served tea. “All the guests laughed at me and I just left the tea and ran away crying,” she told me.
From that day on, Nani was determined to learn Albanian, including how to read and write. And she succeeded. Within a year, she could speak, read and write Albanian fluently, although her accent still revealed that it was not her native language.
With her subtle and distinct Bosnian sense of humor, even though she spoke Albanian constantly, some words still led to funny misunderstandings. For instance, one day a colleague called my grandfather on the home phone and Nani answered. The colleague said, “Please tell Rexhë that I’ll come and pick him up with a cart.” Not knowing the word for cart, she mistook it for an offensive term and complained to her husband, saying, “I don’t want that friend of yours in our home anymore.” Since then, I’ve had a soft spot for all Bosnians who speak Albanian. They remind me of her.
Closer to exile
Nani was a born storyteller. Her stories were far more interesting to me than fairy tales about kings and queens.
Nani always spoke fondly about Čajniče. I couldn’t understand how a person who had spent 50 years in another place, raised five children and had 13 nieces and nephews could still speak so fondly about her hometown. She shared stories about the rivers, mountains, her childhood and youth. In my naive understanding of the world around me, I thought of Bosnia as part of a different continent. This perspective likely stemmed from Nani’s inability to return there after the 1998-1999 war in Kosovo. In my childlike innocence, I told myself a truth: fewer miles between countries did not necessarily represent proximity.
Nani always talked to me about her three sisters but rarely mentioned her brother Kemal. I often begged her to share more about him, but she always found ways to sidestep the question. She also expressed how much she missed speaking her mother tongue. Although all five of her children spoke Bosnian, they always spoke Albanian with her. Nani would tell me that she missed herself when she spoke her mother tongue. “I think and dream in my language,” she always said.
Nani hadn’t returned to her homeland since shortly before the 1992-1995 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Before that, she and her family made annual visits, spending every summer vacation there. Baba Rexha had a car, and most of the time, they took three of the five children with them. For Nani and my mother, those holidays were some of the most beautiful times in their lives, but everything changed when the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina began.
To escape the war, Nani’s father, brother and sister-in-law Hadija, along with their three daughters — Šefka, Sebahate with her daughter and granddaughter, and Nura with her daughter — stayed in Kosovo. But Nani’s brother Kemal and the other sons and men of the family did not. Just a few weeks after the war started, the Serbian army rounded up all the men from Čajniče and loaded them into a truck one by one. In total, 16 men from Nani’s family were taken, all under the age of 40. Among them was Nura’s son, Sebahudi, who was only 16 years old. Nura ran after the truck, begging them to release her son, but they hit her with the butt of a machine gun and knocked her unconscious. They left immediately afterward.
They stayed in Kosovo until 1995, when the war ended and Nani’s family returned to Bosnia, but not to their homeland. According to the Dayton Agreement, Čajniče and the surrounding region were designated as part of Republika Srpska. None of Nani’s family returned there again. In December 1995, Nani said goodbye to her family, unaware that it would be the last time she would see them. She only saw Sebahate once more in 2008.
‘I will die in exile’
On her good days, Nani hoped we would visit her homeland together. She often said, “I will show all the places where I grew up.” However, during moments of weakness and sadness, she would say, “I will die in exile.” In those moments, I could only hug her in response. In 2008, when Kosovo declared independence, Nani almost went. She quickly packed suitcases and documents after someone told her that she could travel. What stopped her going was that the bus to Sarajevo passed through Serbia, which she associated with Serbian forces. Her fear of them also prevented her from visiting the graves of family members who had been killed by Serbian forces.
I will never forget the moment she realized she would not be able to return to her homeland. That night, she cried a lot, which was unusual for her. She didn’t even cry in 2006 when they found the remains of Kemal, her nephew Sebahudin and 14 other men from her family. It was as if she had convinced herself that their deaths would only become real if she went to their graves and saw with her own eyes that they were truly gone.
For me, seeing Nani cry was a significant turning point. At that moment, the illusion I had created about her a few years earlier shattered.
As a Bosnian woman, Nani did not have an easy life in post-war Kosovo. She often needed to see a doctor due to her high blood pressure and on one occasion, I accompanied her. When a member of the medical staff heard Nani talking and learned her name, they refused to treat her. They said “You’re a shkije, [pejorative term for Serbs] and you’re lying. You are not Albanian at all. You don’t even look Albanian,” as if a person’s appearance could determine their origin
Aggravated by these comments, Nani almost got into a fight with them. Her persistence was unmatched and the doctors had no choice but to attend to her. I must have been eight or nine years old at the time, and from that moment on, Nani became my heroine.
No superhero I had ever seen on TV could match her strength — until the moment in spring 2008 when she finally broke. That night, she cried for her hometown, her childhood, her parents who were no longer alive, her brother, her nephew and 14 other men from her family killed by Serbian forces. She wept for her sisters and Kemal’s three daughters, who would grow up without her seeing them. That night, she cried because she realized she would “die in exile.”
In exile, without seeing the graves of her family members and without hugging her sisters and nieces who were still alive, Nani died on February 7, 2010. None of her sisters could attend her funeral. Her family now lives in Sarajevo and are not able to return to their hometown, Čajniče, as their houses were occupied by Serbs after the war.
I visited Bosnia and Herzegovina four years after Nani’s death to attend a volunteer camp. I remain the only one from my mother’s family who has visited Bosnia. The visa process was one of the most difficult experiences I’ve ever faced. To obtain a Bosnian visa, I had to apply to the Embassy of Bosnia and Herzegovina in Skopje, which required a mountain of documents. They issued the visa in a letter, not in my Kosovo passport.
Since Nani’s death in 2010 and my first visit in 2014, this process has not changed.
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