My Thoughts on the Interview

If you’re craving pizza one evening, I recommend that you order up at Domino’s on 5912 N. Clark in Chicago, IL. If you order online and utilize the pizza tracker, once your pizza is out the door you will be able to see who is delivering it. There is an 82.4% chance that your delivery expert is an immigrant. If you call in and order, there is about a 30% chance that you will speak with a Bosnian immigrant. Or, you might get me. I am Mari Lynn Thompson, student at Loyola University Chicago and native Kentuckian. When I first moved to Chicago for school, I resisted applying at Domino’s. I had worked at Domino’s throughout my senior year of high school and was getting a college education so that I would not have to continue to work there. Had I realized the diversity at the local Domino’s, I probably would have gone in much sooner. It was the first thing I noticed when I walked in with my application. What you need to understand is that I love my job here in Chicago. I could not care less about making pizza, but the people I work with are amazing. The Domino’s I worked at in Kentucky was 100% white. I attended an all girl’s Catholic high school. The most diversity in the school was my Indian friend Rima. I had never spoken to a Muslim before I came to Chicago. The diversity at Loyola and at the N. Clark Domino’s astounded me and filled me with joy.

As a writer, I am rather obsessed with people’s stories. I want to know where they’ve been and who they’ve known and what has influenced them. Here, finally, was something completely new. Everyone was different from me. It did not take long for my friends to start telling me to shut up about my job. To understand this obsession, you must understand my heritage. I am about as Kentucky as it gets. My parents do not know when our ancestors came across the pond or even where they were from, but according to my grandparents’ surnames they were Welsh and Scottish. That is it. I find this extremely boring. Further, Welsh and Scottish families that were in Kentucky at the turn of the twentieth century have probably been there since Daniel Boon came through the Appalachian Mountains. I have never been satisfied with this and it has greatly contributed to my dissatisfaction with my identity.

Enter Muris Selak, a young Bosnian immigrant and my co-worker at the N. Clark Domino’s. He is a student of International Business and Accounting at DePaul University, and is paying his own way through college. This is one of the first things that we bonded over. We are both paying for college ourselves and both of our parents have a limited education. Neither of his parents went through high school. My dad only graduated the sixth grade and it took my mother twenty years to go back and get a college degree. Muris and I are also both very driven. Neither of us wants to work at Domino’s for the rest of our lives. That is about where our similarities end. Our life experiences have been very different. Whereas I grew up in the South, he grew up thousands of miles away in Bosnia. Whereas I consider what heritage I think I have to be boring, he embraces and celebrates his despite being thousands of miles away. The reason for the distance is the economic condition of the country following the Bosnian War. According to the CIA Factbook, employment in 2008 was 40%. And the United States is concerned when it is 10%! His parents left not because of the violence and trauma of the war, but to seek a better life in the United States economically. The violence has affected him though. When Muris was just two years old, his country became embroiled in an ethnic conflict – Serbia, under Slobadon Milosevic, began a genocide of the Bosniaks. He touches on this in his interview – “We lost my uncle and cousin to the war”. His family also lost their home. They had to flee from his home to Gorazde where they “hid out” for the remainder of the war.

Having experienced this, it is no wonder that the conflict is still alive in him. You can tell from his behavior at work and the language in the interview. He states that his home in Bosnia is under “Serbian territory,” not that it is in Serbia and Montenegro. He does not really associate with the Serbians who work at Domino’s. Because he does not know them, he can have nothing against them. We did not go into any detail during the interview, but the atrocities committed during the war include the burning of homes filled with people and mass rape as a tool of terror. Previous to this, my only knowledge of the Bosnian War came from the movie “Behind Enemy Lines”. This movie provides the typical American viewing experience, focusing not on the citizens of the country, but the American hero. However, it does provide some information as well as images of the country at war. For a truer picture of the country at the end of the war, and a true representation of the tension that remains – and that one can sense in Muris – one should see the 2001 Oscar winning film for best foreign film, “No Man’s Land.” It is available in its entirety on YouTube. After learning I had seen the film, he asked what I thought of the ending. I do not want to spoil it for the reader, but we both agreed that it could not have ended any other way. As Muris said, in war there are no winners.

To me, Muris is confident in his identity, although he laughed when I mentioned this. He is a proud Bosnian and is trying to get citizenship in the United States. He has applied three times and each time the government offices have lost the paperwork. From my perspective, he will always love and celebrate Bosnia, but he is making a life for himself in the United States. He holds on to his culture through the celebration of his Muslim faith at a Bosnian mosque and various celebrations and festivals throughout the year. He plays football – soccer to any Americans – on Foster Beach with his friends, many of whom are Bosnian. And he listens to Bosnian music. His favorite band is Bijelo Dugme, and of their songs, “Ako Ima Boga” is his favorite. The title translates to “If There’s a God”. At first I thought this might have something to do with his feelings about Bosnia and everything that happened. It does not. It is his favorite because it is a great break-up song.

I choose to interview Muris over the other immigrants I work with because we are able to talk. We have great discussions about politics, the economy, and religion. We are both willing to admit that we do not know much about any of those. And we are friends. In interviewing him, I was able to satisfy some of my curiosity about the people I work with – their history and influences. I could live vicariously through their unique heritage, and in doing begin to build my own identity through my life experiences. I may not come from a unique heritage, but my experiences in life are just as important and influential in forming my identity.