Line 7 - the train that runs from Manhattan to Flushing, Queens - is nicknamed the "International Express." Here are some of the people who live and/or work along its tracks.

It was in Cuba that I first started taking photos. My friend Kelly gave me a tiny digital camera as a gift. It didn't have a flash. I was hoping to hide behind this little camera and undisturbed observe the lives around me. But ironically it made me more visible, an ostentatious mark of my foreignness. It invited curious glances that turned into conversations - at times friendships - giving me a much greater access to Cuba's realities than I would have otherwise had.

If Bosnia were to split along the veined borders that carve out of its midriff the incongruous shapes of its two governing entities, it would not be a division along the “ethnic lines” that mark these boundaries.  Rather, it would be a food fight, a war waged over whose cevapi – those spiced beef patties that have made the largest Bosnian cities of Sarajevo and Banja Luka famous in the former Yugoslavia – are better.  It would be a war I’d prefer.

The Bosnian restaurant Djerdan in Queens, New York serves Sarajevski cevapi. They are plump rolls of beef, short and neatly ordered along a piece of fluffy pita bread.  They are also dry, stiff, and tasteless compared to my hometown’s Banjalucki cevapi. I tell that, a bit of glee in my voice, to Jasko, a friend from Sarajevo.  “What do you know?” he yells.  “Your cevapi don’t even look like cevapi!”

This opens up the debate on the appropriate shape – cevapi from Sarajevo are individual rolls; those from Banja Luka come in neat rows of four.  The discussion heats up, fueled by vodka and now engulfing more of our friends.  “You over there couldn’t even steal the correct recipe,” continues Jasko.  “That’s because you over there messed it up in the first place,” I counter.  

“We over here” are former residents of Banja Luka, a town that with its Serb majority now belongs to Serb Republic, one of two political entities created by the Dayton, Ohio Peace Accord that ended the four-year war in 1995.  The other entity is Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a joint enclave uniting the country’s Croat and Muslim populations, with Sarajevo at its center.  Together they form Bosnia.

“You over there” are former residents of Sarajevo, the country’s capital. Here, in the diaspora, “they” greatly outnumber “us.” That is why my conviction about the superiority of Banjalucki cevapi is drowned out by the outraged majority.  I hold my progressively wobbly ground.

It is in Djerdan that I remember the conversation.  This is our war, fought in exile.  Yet neither Jasko nor I can make any claims with certainty: he has never been to Banja Luka; I have never been to Sarajevo.  We only know the diaspora’s interpretations of our culinary legacies. And we know, of course, that there is no such thing as “us” and “them.”

This could easily be, however, a peculiar diasporic understanding.  In Bosnia, where physical boundaries confirm the divide, things are a bit different.

The young girl at the restaurant speeds past the tables, collecting empty plates.  I am about to raise my voice to get her attention, to ask the question I came to ask.  “Are there a lot of our people here?” But I hesitate.  What if she instead asks me…“our people?”