I wouldn’t normally enter a beauty pageant, but this one is special.
It’s a battle for the title of Miss Ex-Yugoslavia, beauty queen of a country that no longer exists. It is due to the country being “no more” that our shoddy little contest is happening in Australia, over 7,400 miles from where Yugoslavia once stood.
My fellow competitors and I are immigrants and refugees, coming from different sides of the conflict that split Yugoslavia up. It’s a weird idea for a competition – bringing young women from a war-torn country together to be objectified – but, in our little diaspora, we’re used to contradictions.
It’s 2005, I’m 22, and I’ve been living in Australia for most of my life. I’m at Joy, an empty Melbourne nightclub that smells of stale smoke and is located above a fruit and vegetable market. I open the door to the dressing room, and when my eyes adjust to the fluorescent lights I see that young women are rubbing olive oil on each other’s thighs.
Apparently, this is a trick used in “real” competitions, one we’ve hijacked for our amateur version. For weeks I’ve been preparing myself to stand almost naked in front of everyone I know, and the day of the big reveal has come around quickly. As I scan the shiny bodies for my friend Nina, I’m dismayed to see that all the other girls have dead-straight hair, while mine, thanks to an overzealous hairdresser with a curling wand, looks like a wig made of sausages.
“Dođi, lutko,” Nina says as she emerges from the crowd of girls. Come here, doll. “Maybe we can straighten it.” She brings her hand up to my hair cautiously, as if petting a startled lamb. Nina is a Bosnian refugee in a miniskirt. As a contestant, she is technically my competitor, but we’ve become close in the rehearsals leading up to the pageant.
Under Nina’s tentative pets, the hair doesn’t give. It’s been sprayed to stay like this, possibly forever. I shift uncomfortably and tug on the hem of my skirt, trying to pull it lower. Just like the hair, it doesn’t budge. In my language, such micro-skirts have earned their own graphic term: dopičnjak, which literally means “to the p—y” — a precise term that distinguishes the dopičnjak from its more conservative sub-genital cousin, the miniskirt.
Though several of us barely speak our mother tongue, for better or worse all of us competitors are ex-Yugos; we come from Bosnia, Croatia, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia.
I join a conversation in which Yugo girls are yelling over each other in slang-riddled English, recalling munching on the salty peanut snack Smoki when they were little, agreeing that it was the bomb and totally sick, superior to anything one might find in our adopted home.
The idea of a beauty pageant freaks me out, and ex-Yugoslavia as a country is itself an oxymoron – but the combination of the two makes the deliciously weird Miss Ex-Yugoslavia competition the ideal subject for my documentary film-making class.
I feel like a double-agent. Yes, I’m a part of the ex-Yugo community, but also I’m a cynical, story-hungry, Western-schooled film student, and so I’ve gone undercover among my own people. I know my community is strange, and I want to get top marks for this exclusive glimpse within. Though I’ve been deriding the competition to my film friends, rolling my eyes at the ironies, I have to admit that this pageant, and its resurrection of my zombie country, is actually poking at something deep.
If I’m honest with myself, I’m not just a filmmaker seeking a good story. This is my community. I want outsiders to see the human face of ex-Yugoslavia – because it’s my face and the face of these girls. We’re more than news reports about war and ethnic cleansing.
Like many families, mine left when the wars began, and like the rest of the Miss Ex-Yugoslavia competitors, I was only a kid. Despite the passage of time, however, being part of an immigrant minority in Australia, speaking Serbian at home, being all-too-familiar with dopičnjaks, I’m embedded in the community. Yugoslavia and its tiny-skirt-wearing, war-prone people have weighed upon me my whole life.
Most of these young women moved here either as immigrants seeking a better life (like my family, who came from Serbia) or as refugees fleeing the effects of war (like the Croatian and Bosnian girls).
I am quick to tell anyone who asks that I find beauty pageants stupid and that I’m competing for the sake of journalism. However, I am still a human living in the world, and I would like to look hot. I’ve had my body waxed, I’ve been taught how to walk down a runway, and I’ve eaten nothing except celery and tuna for the last few weeks in the desperate hope that it will reduce my cellulite. I’ve replaced my nerdy glasses with contacts and I’m the most in shape I’ve been in my life.
A secret, embarrassed little part of me that always wanted to be a princess is fluttering with hope. I’ve reverted to childhood habits of craving attention and, for a second, I forget all the things I dislike about my appearance. As I observe my shiny, fake-tanned body in the backstage mirror and smile with my whitened teeth, I think, “What if somehow, some way, I actually win Miss Ex-Yugoslavia?”
Sasha, the competition organizer, waves – it’s time.
The first stage of the competition is called Casual Wear and is in fact just an opportunity for us to get up on stage wearing mini-skirts and t-shirts advertising Sasha’s Yugo-events business. At the last minute, Nina comes up with the genius idea of tying the front of our t-shirts in a knot, allowing us to show off our midriffs and at the same time quietly sabotaging Sasha’s attempt to turn us into commercials. We follow her lead.
As rehearsed, we walk single-file out of the dressing room. There is no actual “backstage” area, so the audience can see us as we walk out and stand in line at the side of the stage, waiting to be introduced. It’s already embarrassing: we hear the whooping calls of boyfriends, family and friends, and the whistles from strangers, while we stare straight ahead.
When it’s my turn to go up, I take the stairs carefully, remembering that I slipped during rehearsal and praying I don’t repeat the humiliation. I don’t like taking chances, so I walk at half the pace of everyone else, out of time with the upbeat music that plays. The applause slows, but not in a mocking way – the crowd simply matches it to the speed at which I’m walking, clapping to a beat that propels me along.
I get to the end of the runway and mouth hvala at the crowd, which means thank you, and I am answered with whistles and cheers.
I toss my head, attempting to flick my hair over my shoulder as I’ve seen other girls do but it barely moves. One of the sausages just hits me gently on the side of the face, and I turn inexpertly on my spiky heel, making my retreat slowly back down the runway.
This is an edited extract from “Miss Ex-Yugoslavia” by Sofija Stefanovic, on sale now.