Journey — to the Mother Tongue. The story, as I remember it, is as…
By: Peter Z Grimm
Tags: Journey, Language, War, Games Writing, Family

I didn’t know about the Yugoslav Civil War–that there had even been a war in Eastern Europe in the recent past–until fifth grade. I forget how I learned about it, but the knowledge has become a perdurable element of my personal identity.

I have great difficulty trying to study the Yugoslav Civil War, but the assessment I am confident in goes like this; Yugoslavia, a relatively successful state socialist project, suffered from lingering ethno-sectarian tensions going back to the Middle Ages. These sectarian tensions were exploited by outside actors, especially NATO powers, to create a war that allowed Western corporations to loot the country’s most lucrative properties and industries. The region has suffered egregiously high unemployment, low foreign direct investment, and general political stagnation ever since.

Most vivid is the story my parents told me about the US Air Force’s 72-day bombing of Sarajevo. My parents had come to the states in order to keep themselves and my then two-year-old sister together (I had not been born yet). When the war broke out, all travel to Yugoslavia was cut off, isolating them from their entire families.

Unsure of whether or not their family members were still alive, my parents watched barely-color newsreels of the bombing of my mother’s home city, wondering where in the city they were that day, if the bombs had hit them. There was no way to call and check.

My understanding, since the fifth grade, has been that this war isolated me from my family before I was even born. I was born in 1994, while the war was still going on. The story at the beginning of this piece would have taken place in early ’96 to ’97. But by then, even with the family in communication again, my parents had been forced to settle in America.

The knowledge of this history has also isolated me from most of the people I grew up around. I am light-skinned and speak English with a native accent, and I grew up within driving distance of the headquarters of Raytheon, CACI, and SAIC. It’s very hard to identify as a typical white American, knowing that so many people I live near likely worked at companies that abetted the bombing of my family.

But saying this to the people in my neighborhood, at my school, or at any of the places I worked, is taboo. What I’m left with is that feeling of isolating muteness.

I’ve lived most of my life feeling like I got cheated out of the family I might have had. As metaphors go, falling out of the night sky into an empty desert is a good way of describing how displaced and isolated I’ve felt. That mute, lone wanderer isn’t exactly me. But he looks a lot like me, in the right light, at the right angle.

The Air Force planes that bombed my grandparents aren’t magical flying golems. But they are the product of a society bent on using mechanized violence to obliterate its rivals, with similarly self-defeating results. They look a lot less sorcerous than stone wyrms, but it’s hard not to see them as a similar byproduct of an analogous society. There are few things that more effectively reduce societies and people to ruins than bombs.

Journey does not, however, leave you defeated. Even though you fall into the snow of the mountainside as you climb, freezing and exhausted, the shining entities that have been teaching you the cautionary history of this ruined society uplift you and enable you to fly one more time.

I mentioned that this game didn’t produce any kind of uplifting revelation in me, but I’d be lying if I said I’m not moved by the ending. The music soars as freely and exultingly as your wandering avatar. You take flight with the aid and mutual joy of dozens of the cloth creatures that have been aiding you thus far. Instead of sand and ruins and dark corridors and icy, hail-scarred mountainsides, you fly through clear, bright blue sky, gold-brown ribbon-creatures leading you forward. I don’t think of myself as a very sentimental person, but I teared up at this point in both my play-throughs.

The end of the game sees you returned to your spot in the night sky, a star shooting up, now a vessel for the cautionary history of the aggression that ripped apart this terrestrial society.

My mother’s parents are deceased, but my father’s parents have been asking to see me. I haven’t been to the former Yugoslavia to visit my extended family in six years. My aforementioned anxiety and shame, along with logistical difficulties while I was in undergrad, have dissuaded me thus far. When I mentioned to my therapist that my family was asking to see me, and the personal baggage that I’d allowed to prevent me from going, she asked me, “What do you want?”

My immediate, instinctual response was, “I want to feel like I’m a part of this family.”

“You know that just being there will mean the world to everyone,” she said. “So, whether or not you speak the language, just being there for family, no matter what, is what’s important.”

After hearing that, I’m compelled to read Journey as a meditation settling somewhere between my first and second instincts. I’ve always thought of myself as a displaced person, a perennial outsider to my friends and loved ones. Large-scale mechanized violence didn’t make me rootless, but it definitely uprooted me — much like that hooded wanderer in the desert, with all their predecessors buried in the sands.

That uprooted wanderer does experience a kind of adulated communion — something certainly approaching love, or at least care — with others like them, and with the world writ large. War and the instruments thereof threaten to further isolate, cripple, and erase them. But they need not do their job for them. Like the stranger I met in my first play-through, they can thwart isolation and huddle with others in the cold, so that they might do something somewhere between finding home and going there.

Perhaps all that’s needed to communicate love, care, and community is the willingness to be there, no matter what heat, cold, or monsters have conspired to prevent you. Families are not so easily ruined as buildings.

I’m going to visit my extended family in the former Yugoslavia this summer. I’ll certainly try to learn some Serbian beyond cuss words and food names, but perhaps what matters much more is just that I’ll be there. Whether I sing euphoniously, speak, write, or simply sit still, maybe that’ll be enough for my family to know I love them.