Hundreds of thousands of Bosnians were forced to flee their homes during and after the conflict in the early 1990s. Although most have sought refuge abroad, many internally displaced persons (IDPs) have embarked on an intra-state odyssey for a new place they would call home. However, did they succeed in that quest? This paper endeavors to answer this question (auto)ethnographically by following the story of the construction and reconstruction of the meaning of author’s family ‘home’ from 1987 to the present. Creating a tripartite theoretical basis composed of the concepts of homelessness, homing, and home, this research explores what home was to the author’s family, how the understanding of this concept varied during the war and post-war period, and how the experience of being an IDP redefined the notion of home. By juxtaposing the parents’ experience on one side, and the children’s on the other, this study provides pioneering insight into transgenerational cleavages of understandings of what home is to those who were growing up as IDPs in Bosnia. Deeper analysis and presentation of findings is generated through poetic inquiry and presented in the form of three research-poems: ‘Home Made of People,’ ‘Fragments of Home(s),’ and ‘Home (making) as a Family’. Analysis unravels the robust, multilevel modifications that reconceptualization of home went through. The assemblage of changes, ignited by the loss of Bourdieusian habitus, consists of not just a vital shift in the emotional and cognitive-moral understanding of what home is, but also in the gendered shrinking of the meaning of home coloured by the transgenerational transfer of failed homing(s).
Nikola Lero is a young researcher and a poet from Bosnia and Herzegovina studying migration and intercultural relations. He has worked as an independent researcher at the University of Oldenburg and a research assistant at the Department of Cultural Studies and Languages at the University of Stavanger in Norway. Nikola aims to introduce arts-based methodologies in studies on previous and current Bosnian migration. Besides working in academia, he has collaborated with the European Parliament in Brussels, UNICEF, and OSCE in Bosnia and Herzegovina on the issues of youth and peacebuilding, EU integration, and human rights.
This paper was written by the author during his Summer Fellowship on Internal Displacement at the Internal Displacement Research Programme at the Refugee Law Initiative. The Fellowship was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, on behalf of the UKRI Global Challenge Research Fund, as part of the funded project “Interdisciplinary Network on Internal Displacement, Conflict and Protection” (AH/T005351/1).
