Heritage Fantasy
First published by Cream City Review, Summer 2023
In Croatia, if I spot an old woman with a bent back working in the garden or leading a cow, I stop and let my gaze linger. I think about the mljekarice: the milkmaids, the women who woke before dawn every day to walk for miles down a mountain with gallons of milk strapped to their shoulders, enroute to the city of Rijeka–the city outside my family’s village. Over time, their task bends their backs until their gaze stretches only as far as their next step: a treacherous jut of white limestone, or a crevice that could swallow their ankle. The city of Rijeka honors this essential worker with a bronze statue of Antonija Reljac, a mljekarica. In her left hand she holds a lantern for walking in the predawn hour. Her right hand stabilizes the milk on her hunched back. Her face is not so visible, as it is nearly parallel to the ground.
When I visited in 2009, I passed by this statue after a night of drinking Beck's beer with my brother and cousins. I had to get a photo with her. In it, I am wearing a black corset top and pleather leggings. I have large silver hoop earrings and thinly plucked eyebrows. My long hair is swept to the side in a ponytail. I perch on the edge of the statue, legs tightly crossed, and contort my arm to hold the shoulder of the mljekarica. I shrink my lips to a small frown and stare imploringly at the camera. This weary woman with a ruined back called to me, a drunk twenty year old. What else could I do but pose in mock-grief for a Facebook post? When I uploaded the photo, I only had eyes for my bicep. It shocked me with its size; humongous, bulging up from my lacy corset neckline, unfeminine, ugly. I looked like I was grabbing her neck. I thought my glossy pout was cute, but I saw only a sphincter in a round face, topped by the obtuse line of my nose.
#
My mom repeats the question: Who, other than our family, will care to watch this? I have shown them a new snippet of the personal narrative documentary that I am struggling to complete, and they have found a new way of telling me that it is boring. My dad washes away his concentration with laughter. Tears bud from his crow’s feet as he offers to jump off of a cliff’s edge for the camera, to give you a cliffhanger!
They are not wrong; the film is boring, because I am stuck. It has been eight years since the idea germinated to make a documentary about my Yugoslavian grandfather and Croatian heritage. My editor and I circle and search our footage assemblies for its stakes like tired hawks. We have cut dozens of sequences centering the narrative of a poor uneducated immigrant who struggled to hack it and took his frustrations out on his wife and children. In interviewing my parents and relatives, I heard of brothers left behind in the war, brothers that died in coal mines, recollections of squandered dreams and cases for forgiveness. My grandfather was a complex man, but so what? His story feels dusty, redundant, and unnecessary. Knowing this, I question my efforts, and a hand flips the hourglass. As the work drags into its ninth year, my editor tries to tease a new direction: What could it mean that you are so often in front of the camera?
When I started making this film, in 2014, I was a young actor, and I was learning that my looks weren’t right for the commercial jobs I was chasing. I have been told I have a “Mediterranean look,” which is not button-nosed enough to sell pharmaceuticals or cereal. But I blame my hands for my lack of success.
Painting my nails and wearing rings recalls the hands of a scowling old dame, swatting at children or waving impatiently at serving staff. My hands are large, and I do not mean long-fingered and elegant. As I age, my knuckles expand above swelling wrist veins. My knuckles are flat like my dad’s, my fingers long and firm like my mom’s. I have laboring hands, calloused and strong–a memento from my plebeian ancestors. Commercial auditions will ask me to raise my hands in front of my face for a closeup. When this happens, I know I have lost.
It began as a strategy: I would attach my name to my roots–thus branding myself–in the form of a documentary film about my roots. If casting directors could not figure out that I belonged in a commercial for farming tools, or an educational reenactment show about Balkan folklore, then I would show them. I would stamp my name all over my family’s legends of the homeland; I would colonize my own heritage and appropriate a stereotype to my advantage.
To review: I was not booking auditions, and I thought I could circumvent the gatekeepers by spending my savings on a trip to Croatia to interview distant relatives. The interviews are laced with my own desperate grasp for reassurance, the subtext brimming with: Who am I to you? What does life mean? What is a dream? Do you trust me? Do you think I am an artist? Do I belong here? Will I be okay? Questions that I might ask a wise grandparent, had I been able to get close to any of them.
Nine years later, what started as an odd strategy to break into the acting industry has turned into the challenge of grasping an intangible force. In her book The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym writes that “reflective nostalgia cherishes shattered fragments of memory,” implying that the person experiencing reflective nostalgia has experienced what occupies their longing. My grandparents died when I was young, and yet I feel their reflective nostalgia as if I lived with them in the old country.
Similar to the way that my Puerto Rican wife feels only truly at home when she is near a cerulean ocean, I feel an inexplicable ease in Croatia. I cherish the sight of scrabble mountainsides and pebble beaches. Everything makes sense when I am there–the warm bottles of milk, the way their brand of seltzer (Jamnica) fizzes, the motion sensor stair lights leading up to my cousin’s apartment, the piles of fresh figs rotting on the sidewalks in unfettered abundance. I admire the strength of the lavender sprigs, gripping the sea cliffs as they reach for the sun-drenched Adriatic.
Reflective nostalgia feeds me in a plate of pasta with zucchini served on a sun drenched wooden table. It winks at me from the jolly tops of wild asparagus shooting out of the ground, next to a skinny mountain path. I am found in the stories of laboring village women, with hands that were like mine. My editor and I discovered what had been in our faces the whole time: the film did not want to be about my ancestors’ lives, it wanted to be about me, and my fantasy of them.
#
Much of the interview footage that I gathered with my Croatian relatives involves retellings of the same immigration story, colored by each individual’s unique experience of my ancestors. Hardly the supplies needed to depict mysterious longing, or reflective nostalgia. My editor and I will have to deepen our search, retreat to the nest and rewatch everything. One step forward, two steps back, to find the correct materials for painting my heritage fantasy, which I can easily put into words:
I am a mljekarica. I live in a stone house in an old village. My hands are feminine because they are large, and useful. I have gotten out of marriage because I am devoted to my work. I wake in the witching hour, gather my pails of milk on my back, and wait at the top of the trail for the glow of a fellow milkmaid’s lantern. We descend under the light of the moon, and climb home as the afternoon sun sinks to gold. Our feet are calloused, our toes grow long and knobbly together. We wipe each other’s brows in the summer, we share beeswax for chapped cheeks in the winter. In the spring, we pluck wild asparagus.
And now, I will cast Antonija in the role of my grandmother. She wastes milk to splash it on my face until I get over myself. How preposterous, to fantasize about backbreaking labor. She scolds me on my beauty standards–skinny arms, plump lips and soft hands, and reminds me that it is a privilege to be able bodied and strong. Even if you’re a fool for wanting this, she says, gesturing to her pails, you could sell a lot of milk with that back. She drops a plate of fresh pasta with grated zucchini and sliced tomatoes on a sun drenched wooden table, and commands me to eat.