My name is Milica and I got it in 1960. At first sight, these two trivial facts about the name and the year of birth have no importance, but they are vital for me. Namely, in 1960, I was born in Belgrade, in Yugoslavia, a country which in those years entered the phase of sudden modernization. A trend of giving children the international names such as Lydia, Maya, Selena, that is to say, not traditional Serbian names accompanied this modernization trend.
I was named after my grandmother, my father's mother, who got it in the late 19th century, at the time when Serbia was a small country, actually, a no one s land, between the two empires, the Ottoman, and the Austro-Hungarian one, and when, following a regicide, the Karadjordjevic, dynasty replaced the Obrenovic dynasty. Renewing the Kosovo myth, the Karadjordjevic started to dream the imperial dreams, remembering the Serbian medieval kingdom, whose queen was called Milica. During my whole childhood and youth, my name was out of trend, very old-fashioned.
However, in the early 1980s, I began to meet people who pronounced my name with awe. In the few years of socializing with people who pronounced my name with awe, I suddenly felt pierced by the arrow of necessary equivalent of the following elements:
I = MILICA = SERBIAN = ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN.
That which I considered to be my most intimate identity, the fact that I am an Orthodox Christian Serbian, in the late 1980s began a hypnotic pendulum of the state politics that produced a mass hallucinatory effect of a collective identity, in which there was no place for the ones who did not feel like Serbs or Orthodox Christians. Moreover, ideologists of this politics claimed that the intimacy of the personal identity is biologically determined, written into genes, and that the Serbs who do not feel that are bastards with a genetic mistake, and that they should be destroyed, since they are a wound on the healthy body of the Serb community.
Then I discovered that my own, intimate identity is actually a carefully devised trap that flawlessly traps the prey of the identity, regardless of whether I, Milica, Serbian and Orthodox Christian, are ready to denounce or at least relativize it. Put before the impossible choice: the wound or the healthy body of the nation, I have decided to privately keep the identity of an Orthodox Serbian, while publicly speaking from the position of a wound.
This paradoxical choice to publicly deny my national and religious identity, while privately regarding it to be still a very important part of my personal identity, is reversibly proportional to a very paradox that lies within a national identity: it is produced totally artificially, but on a personal level is still experienced as completely natural and necessary, so, every community is an imagined one, but
only imagined communities are real!
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