Selma Harrington (Bosnian)

[Selma, who looks to be in her thirties, is tall with short blonde curly hair. An architect by profession, she dresses very stylishly and wears eye-catching ear-rings with cats' faces on them. Her English is excellent with barely a trace of an accent. Her manner is warm and friendly and she laughs a lot. At the same time, she considers her answers thoughtfully and is clearly both intelligent and cultured. We meet a few days before Christmas, in a café in Ranelagh where they serve the good strong espresso that Selma likes to drink. Loud Christmas music cuts across the conversation.]

I'm originally from Sarajevo and have lived in Dublin effectively for about three years. But I visited here several times before that, first in 1991. My husband is Irish. We met in Zimbabwe where we were both working. Before that I hardly knew anything about Ireland, except for the Troubles. I had read Brendan Behan in school: The Borstal Boy was the first Irish book I read. James Joyce was also compulsory school literature: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and a bit of Ulysses, that was the extent of my acquaintance with Dublin. I suppose that's one area where the West is deprived: there's little awareness of for example Slavic literature, Polish, Czech. Being smaller nations, perhaps we had that advantage, that we were striving to know more about the rest of the world. That said, the Irish people I met abroad were open-minded, cosmopolitan. Living here, I am finding other sides to the Irish mentality.

I can't say that Ireland was a cultural shock, but speaking as an architect I suppose what struck me immediately was how the cities were largely untouched by the Second World War. Another difference is that in central European cities you see people out and about in the areas where they live, in the suburbs. My parents, visiting me in Clonskeagh after seven or eight years in the prison that was Sarajevo, asked, "But where are all the people?" Day or night you hardly see anyone out on the streets. And that's typical of any residential area in Dublin. It's to do with planning, I suppose. Here all the people converge on the centre. Even the transport system operates that way.

In Yugoslavia, my work as an architect and in related areas such as furniture design meant that I was travelling a lot abroad to trade fairs. In the late 1980s Zimbabwe was hosting a conference of non-aligned nations and as a result, a group of Yugoslav professionals was invited to go there to work. Programmes on television showed us how beautiful Harare was. The proposition was also attractive financially, so I inquired about job opportunities and was offered some interesting work. This was at a time when the recession was starting to hit Yugoslavia, with resulting political problems and some signs of the future conflict. As it turned out, I left Sarajevo six months before the war broke out - fate, I suppose. I literally arrived with two suitcases and met my future husband within two weeks of my arrival.

That is why I started visiting Ireland, duringour six year stayin Zimbabwe. The First time I arrived on a Yugoslav passport with no visa requirements but then the war started in April and everything changed.

What happened in Yugoslavia is particularly sad because it functioned relatively well as a federation. We had a lot of pride in our country, a great sense of freedom and achievement. There were problems of course but we had our own industry, even our national car. There were no great divisions in society and in fact one of the differences that strikes me here, in this booming economy, are the numbers of people sleeping rough, which tells me that the community has disintegrated in some way.

You were asking about culture shock. One thing is the attitude I often encounter when people here find out I am from Eastern Europe. It seems that the changes that have occurred have swept away any perception of the positive aspects of the countries. For example, although it's accurate to say that I am a Bosnian Muslim, I find it quite offensive to be labelled in this way. Our society was in any case secular, accommodating people from a multitude of religious backgrounds: for example, Jewish settlers from the sixteenth century, expelled by the Spanish Inquisition, were given shelter in the then Turkish Empire. An architect friend of mine of that background was discussing with me the topic of how we are perceived abroad, and said, "Selma, I assume you socialised in Sarajevo with people and not with Muslims or Croats or whatever." He is an atheist but finds himself defined by his Jewishness. It's quite insulting in a way.

My first visit to Ireland was at Christmas and I was struck by the warm atmosphere. Because my country was socialist, our festival officially centred more around New Year. People ask how we celebrated Christmas in Bosnia. We used to go and visit my schoolfriend's grandmother, who was of Czech origin, and baked wonderful Christmas cookies. At that time, we weren't bothered about putting labels on anyone. My own grandmother, who was Muslim, would get gifts from the neighbours and send them baklava cake in return to celebrate the end of Ramadan since these two holidays can coincide within a few days of each other. Now I find that my friends from before are still my friends, whatever their background. But I know that is not the case everywhere.

My parents stayed in Sarajevo throughout the war and luckily weren't directly affected. But my young cousin, the mother of two lovely girls, was walking along the street and a piece of mortar hit her in the back. She's paralysed now. Another cousin, who was a real golden boy, volunteered to defend the city. He'd go up into the mountains to try and break the siege and after one action in June 1995 when they were coming back into the city he was hit by a sniper and killed. What was tragic was that his father was trying to get him out - he even applied to me for help. But my cousin said to his father, "No I don't want to leave. Someone has to fight. Do you want to sit on your couch and wait until they come to your door?"

It was unbelieveable how culturally active people were in Bosnia during the war. My mother saved the clippings to send me because she knew I would be interested. On one occasion a "Bosnian haiku" verse was doing the rounds, which typified what life was like in Sarajevo with no running water, no electricity, having to burn furniture and old shoes for heating. I translated it for a talk I gave in Zimbabwe. As far as I remember, it went as follows: "Spare the underwear/ Humbly eat, thinly shit/ Wash your bottom parts a bit." That was life during the siege, in a nutshell.

During the war it was difficult to communicate with my family. A letter could take six months to get through. Telephones were cut off in July 1992. Sometimes satellite phones were working if you were in Europe. But from Zimbabwe it was impossible. I was worried sick. So eventually I treated it as a sort of project, setting up a network of communication through a chain of people I'd never met. Our little parcels would circle the world to get into Bosnia. It was quite an enterprise to decide what to put in a parcel that would be small enough for people to agree to take. I ended up sending vitamins, pressed herbs, tea, coffee, things like that. Once I got some liquid glycerine from a health shop, thinking it would be great for use as a hand cream or something. It was taken out of the parcel because glycerine, as I realised later, could be used to make explosives! I'd like to write about it all sometime, the parallel life I was leading in a beautiful country, lovely weather, with a fantastic Irish guy: I felt guilt all the time. Then my parents wrote to tell me that at least with me away they had one less worry.

There is a great sense of disappointment now. Even after the Dayton peace accord, tens of thousands of young people were leaving the country. And there was no need for any of it. Under a different leadership, Yugoslavia could have continued to function and might even eventually have joined the EU - if there is any advantage in living in the EU with its polluted environment and its poisoned meat. That's one thing I find highly ironic, that you live in this supposedly developed world and you can't trust your basics: it's disgraceful to have e-coli in your water or salmonella. I have to say, I have strong reservations about the EU bureaucracy. The Irish enthusiastically adopted the benefits without addressing the downside. Maybe now it's time to slow down. What would be wrong with that? I worry about the country being so dependent on multi-nationals. Maybe that's a residue of my thinking from the old Socialist Yugoslavia where we were striving to have control over our own destiny, for better or for worse.

Nevertheless, in general I like living here. Particularly now you can get good coffee, which has only been in the last few years! Dublin is like Sarajevo, still a nice manageable size. And I feel I can relate to Irishness. When you scrape a little at the superficial elements of it, it's not so different. Of course I miss my friends but when you have chosen the nomadic life, that's what you have to put up with. Anyone coming from countries where there was a stronger sense of community will be struck by its absence here, the obsession with privacy, at least in the big city like Dublin.

It's not easy to come close to people. Perhaps, even though Irish people might not like to hear this, it's a kind of relic of Anglo mentality - to keep yourself to yourself. One can be socialising for years with people, even visiting them in their homes but still wouldn't call them friends. Although that's another thing, in my language "friend" is a big word. It's used here broadly, where we might use the word "acquaintance." Language is funny that way: I was talking to an Irish woman about something and she asked me, "Are you happy about that?" And after considering for a while, I replied, "Well, I'm not ecstatic." So then she got worried. But it was just a question of translation. For me, "happy" is another big word. I can be content, pleased, glad, satisfied, but "happy" describes a rare moment.

Allowing for the fact that as a non-native speaker I am not in a position to judge the possibilities that language offers, I feel a little bit deprived sometimes. Adopting a different language as the way of communication, all that pool of expression is different, and maybe this affects interpersonal relationships as well. That said, where I work there are about thirty or so people and while I couldn't say I have friends among them in my sense of, yet they take the initiative to invite me to their homes, which is nice. Something to build on.

I have found religion here more old-fashioned and rigid than anywhere else I have been, including Italy. But perhaps that's related to Irish history where religion had to play a role in maintaining identity. On the other hand, my husband's parents were fantastic from the start. At first they didn't know much about my background. Then they started hearing about the conflict on television. They had never seen a Muslim in their lives before they saw me. So then they asked my husband if I was going to convert. "Why should she?" he asked and they fully accepted that. Denis's father died when we were still in Zimbabwe but he made a phone call which was significant only later, in which he told Denis to make sure to tell me that I am the nicest girl he ever met. They never raised the subject of religion with me and for my part I accepted that different members of the family are religious to different degrees, to the extent of my attending ceremonies with them in church. I don't practice my religion much but still consider myself Muslim. For me the Islamic culture represents tolerance, that's what I got from my family. In any case I think that while the different religions have different rituals, at heart they are the same. Sometimes I'm a bit fed up when I meet somebody new who has these fixed ideas about Muslims, so I tell them that I left my veil in the wardrobe.

I can't keep explaining to people how in the past in Bosnia we were so used to living with one another that we would take part in each other's celebrations. I suppose that's what every religion is preaching at the end of the day: respect for one's neighbour. That's the theory, the practice is often different.

When I first came to Ireland it was the time of "Riverdance", that time when Ireland kept winning the Eurovision song contest. I even bumped into a Bosnian group one day in Dunnes Stores. That phenomenon in music and arts, the upsurge in applied arts, reminded me a lot of what we had in Sarajevo before the war: film directors like Kusturica, original rock groups, a period when we were asserting our identity, after so many years of servility. I got the same feeling of confidence when I came to Ireland. I'm not aware of it so much now. Now it's almost all about selling the image rather than substance, and that I don't particularly like.

I look at the architecture too. We've always admired Finland and Scandanavia. But here there's a sameness and blandness and no one seems to think there's anything wrong with that. Before I started in my present place of work, I took a day-trip with a colleague, driving around Kildare to look that the developments there. I was shocked. It seemed to me that the landscape was wounded. But there are lots of positive things too, and ways to complain, which is great. It'll be interesting to see what the future holds.