Tamara Janjić

Tamara Janjić was born in 1967 in Bosnia and Herzegovina and came to London in 1992. She explains that Bosnia is no longer the place she used to know. She keeps this tambourine to remind her of Sarajevo.

Listen to Tamara (mp3, 526kb)

Transcript

'I’ve got good memories from back home. I don’t feel like I belong there any longer because everything has changed. And I went back a couple of times and I like to go back to see people I know, but the whole society and what I was, what I used to belong to, it doesn’t exist any longer. So I don’t feel like I belong there.

'I don’t feel 100 per cent that I belong - put it this way, I don’t think I belong to England, but if you look at it like my professional circle, I am definitely part of that, so I do feel that I belong in that community, and with my kid and his nursery now, he is going to be through school and everything, I belong there…

'But overall maybe it is just somewhere in between… I am not sure. But yeah, no, no, no, yeah - I don’t think of going back home, going back anywhere to live in the former Yugoslavia or anything like that…

'But, yeah you can only belong somewhere if you were really born there I think, I don’t know, and lived there. Like my mum, my mother would never say that she belongs here. Because she spent, what, 50 years of her life in Sarajevo. While I got my proper first job here and I got married here and I had my children here, so I associate my life with London.'

Copyright Evelyn Oldfield Unit