Nataša Kočiš

Nataša Kočiš was born in Belgrade in 1973 and came to London in 1992. She talks about how difficult it was not being able to travel home while she was waiting for her asylum claim to be decided, and how she felt when she was finally able to go back.

Listen to Nataša (in Serbian, mp3, 453kb)

Transcript

Read transcript in Serbian (pdf, 8kb)

'I could not complete a picture of myself as a person, because of the inability to go home. And therefore this life, in a way, was split into these two parts containing two lives which lived, existed independently of one another: a life that had been once and a life that was now… 

'I stated that, somehow, I had led two parallel lives. One was until ’92 and the other started in ’92. They joined last year after I visited Belgrade for the first time in 11 years. And, somehow I found, on my own, this internal peace that I did not think I would find until I went home. And so, after that visit, I did not have these internal demons any more, who were after some kind of destruction, i.e. they would not let me relax completely.'

Copyright Evelyn Oldfield Unit