The negotiation of national identity — writing a thesis
I keep transcribing the interviews and I can’t stop thinking that the people who left Romania because they had a hard time there are very brave. And I should believe this about myself at one point, too, I imagine. Because this is bravery, new beginnings are super difficult.
This is what I was journaling on 17th of April 2017 while transcribing 14 interviews with Romanians living abroad. What all these people had in common was a two-year long subscription to the narrative magazine DoR. I interviewed them in order to understand why they were still reading magazines from their country of origin. How was this simple act of reading a magazine from ‘back home’ drawing them to imagine connections to their country? The research I dived into for my master thesis turned out to be both an academic endeavor and a personal self-analysis.
The research
The concept of national identity was almost rocket science back in January when I was speed reading five books in parallel to set up a few knowledge pillars for the theoretical framework of my thesis. Based on these books, I decided to focus on a few elements that are often seen as making up a nation, and even more, the ones that are seen as defining the Romanian nation. As extracted from my thesis,
“Being Romanian means speaking the language, being born within the borders of the country, belonging to a more or less active way to the Orthodox religion. Belonging to this nation also means acknowledging your Latinity and Dacian ancestries, and to be aware of all the hardship and the endurance history of Romania.”
This is the ethnic definition of the nation — a definition which leads us to understand ourselves as ‘bound by common blood, culture, and history’. Yet, other definitions of the nation are also possible — for instance, a civic definition where belonging to the nation is conditional upon achieving the right to vote, being politically active, and informed. In practice though, these things are highly intertwined — one nation is not solely civic or ethnic, but one of them outbalances the other.
Further, in my research I chose the definition of nationalism from Benedict Anderson’s perspective, in which nationhoods are ‘imagined communities’ and media plays a key role in this imagining process. In this viewpoint, nationalism is an imagined construct, that started with the print revolution when people were able to share myths and stories, and vernacular languages spread over continents.
So I chose the narrative magazine DoR and its subscribers, to see how much of an ‘imagined community’ was the magazine building out of Romania for the subscribers living abroad. I made a bet assuming that those people that kept their subscription for at least two years developed a relationship with the media outlet, in order to follow the idea of Anderson that media is a string for nations to be ‘imagined communities’.
I was lucky to interview people that opened their hearts to me and honestly shared their stories. I organized these personal stories of national identity negotiations in over 17 pages in my thesis, with a section focused on the struggles of national identity negotiation and another concerned with the role of DoR magazine in those negotiations. And I won my bet — because indeed the subjects developed a relationship with the magazine, which seemed like an entity with a personality. I also learned that some of the people I interviewed felt like belonging to a community by having this subscription, and that the magazine funnelled a civic involvement, and a care to contribute to the positive changes happening in their homeland.
My own national negotiations
I analysed so many stories, but all the time I derived new insights into my own stories. After I finished the master studies, I kept on thinking about nationalities and the people I interviewed. Somehow, I remember all the findings of my thesis when…
… I date other nationalities than my own and it doesn’t work out — I hear that the cultural differences are making a difference in a relationship. For example, how Dutch men are not as romantic as the Romanian ones. But then I remember all the love stories I found out through the interviews, with people falling in love despite having different cultures. Because love is love, and nationality is secondary.
… friends I make here open their houses, hearts, and their minds to my stories, I realize that those who told me — including my family — ‘you are alone among strangers’ were wrong. Helping someone doesn’t require a passport, but compassion. I remember the stories of some subjects that were purposefully looking for Romanian friends because they believed only co-nationals would be able to understand their struggles and stories. But the story changed, and after some years, their circle of friends encompassed varied nationalities.
… I meet new people and they try to guess my nationality — Colombian, Spanish, Italian, Croatian, Portuguese — and I finally tell them I’m Romanian. They don’t know what my language sounds like, but most of them have heard of vampires, Ceaușescu, gypsies. Many of them also know another smart Romanian that they worked or are friends with. I understand it’s an involuntary response to have a narrow understanding of national belonging, but the truth is we always discover a person with a story, not with a national label.
… people find out I can understand Spanish, Italian, French and Portuguese, and I explain to them that Romanian is a cousin language of these, since we share a Latin root. Some of the people I interviewed were proud of this and even employed this ability in their everyday life. This makes me, more and more, want to put to good use my high-school French and the soap-operas learnt Spanish, but I am still hiding this wish in the books I start to read, but hardly finish.
… I searched for a job during the summer and dealt with rejection, and I remembered the people that told me that other nationalities are preferred over East European. I stepped out from the bubble of these voices, and learned that my colleagues from the master programme — more than 10 different nationalities from all over the world — also found it hard to find a job, and not because of their nationality, but because of the job market.
These are some of the recurrent thoughts I keep having after handing in the thesis. Nationality became less of a label for me, and more of a chance for making a new story. It’s fun to let people guess my nationality or to see their surprised faces when I understand their Spanish conversations. To meet people, fall in and out of love, and not for their nationality, but more for their reading habits and musical tastes. Lastly, I understood that finding a job you like is always difficult. Maybe all these challenges are more of a millennials thing — (social) media says millennials are challenging the rules and steps of life as it has been known by their previous generations. Millennials, after all, might leave their mark on the history nowadays more than nationhoods have done it.
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My master thesis can be read here and special thanks go to my brilliant supervisor — Delia Dumitrică — who pushed me to go beyond my limits. I am grateful I had the support of DoR team, and that I was welcomed with trust from their incredible subscribers I had the chance to interview — they are all kind, generous, and amazing people. Lastly, I am lucky I had so much support, in so many forms (proofreading included), from all of my amazing friends back in Romania and all over Europe — including The Netherlands — who cheered me along this tedious process of writing the thesis and believed in me. Thank you ❤.
