*Photographer: Michael Mc Causlin*
I am now publishing chapters from my upcoming book "Globalization's Child. Being a global citizen through affections and symbols".
**Täby 2019-04-10**
Today I am trying a “northeno” hat that I got from one colleague who grew up in Mexico as a youngster. The hat I received is common in the region where his family is living. The reason I am trying the hat at home is that the weather today was quite cold. But next week I am going to Cape-Town and will be able to use that hat for when travelling. There is, in my feelings, something magical about cowboy hats. It reminded me about the first movies I saw in my childhood – spaghetti-westerns.
During the war in Bosnia in my hometown Teslic there were often problems with electricity shortages. It means spending days and weeks without continuous access to electricity. One place in Teslic that had electricity all the time was the centre for civil defence service located beneath the local council building. Before the war, my father was working there as a radio-operator. Having daily access to electricity meant having access to a TV. The “Centar”, as we used to call it, became an important place during wartime.
By watching Western movies and being socialised with early heroes like Clint Eastwood, it also gave me a sense of ideals in life. As a person, I highly value personal freedom and adventure in life. Western movies as a genre are often about struggle on the basis individual vs collective, freedom vs unfreedom and local vs central. What inspired me the most was the feeling of individual hero or anti-hero that has to go through a struggle, or an obstacle course, to achieve a better life and progress. The winning moment place is when the main character manages to establish the ranch where he or she settles down, can produce wealth and have a family life.
“Anarchy” in the sense of Western movies is both inspiring and discouraging at the same time. As there is an absence of a central authority, the individual has more or less unlimited freedom. But the individual also faces problems and challenges that occur where other individuals are corrupted or having negative intentions towards one. “Wild West” is wild also because it reminds of the laws of nature – kill or be killed, but also very human norms that one should respect others property and lives.
I also remember one moment of my pacifist father being so angry that he turned off the TV in the middle of a movie. The reason was that I was cheering on a movie scene where civilians were getting killed and massacred. At that moment, I think it was during early 1995, the war was still going on, and we as children were often imitating adults as by playing war or being excited by wartime. Violence and death were in our heads. One of my childhood friends even took a plastic helmet and tried to go to the front while our flats were full of plastic or wooden pistols.
As I was getting older “centar” became a symbol for my struggle against different kinds of collectivism and primitive views on human identification. At the beginning of the war, my father who was against the war and nationalist politics was forced into it through mobilisation. As the Serb nationalists took over the power in Teslic, he lost his job by being told that after the war, he will not be able to return. The reason was that my father refused to support politics and behaviours based on hate, human rights violations, economic crimes and corruption in different forms. For my pacifist, pro-European and cosmopolitan father, the war became a Wild West period filled with struggles and obstacles he had to manage through to help his friends and family.