Aleksandar Hemon: The Bard of Bosnia

The Book of My Lives                                                                                       by Aleksandar Hemon                                                                                        212 pp. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $25.00.
1.
Through the eyes of the average American or western European, the history of Bosnia is one of victimization and obscurity. The nation—and indeed most of the Balkan Peninsula—has suffered at the hands of many petty, racist bureaucrats, yet has benefited from no famous, forward thinking statesmen. The region isn’t the birthplace of republicanism or fascism, or socialism or communism, though it has received all these –isms secondhand at one point or another. If one learns of the area during primary school, it’s likely in the context of it being conquered by Austro-Hungary, and in recent memory, the only time that Bosnia and its neighbors become geopolitically ‘relevant’ was during the tragic Yugoslav break-up of the ‘90s. Then, despite a relative lack of knowledge surrounding the region, American writers, citizens, and politicians—from Bill Clinton to Christopher Hitchens—felt qualified to comment on the region’s so-called ‘primordial’ ethnic divisions.
It is against this backdrop—one in which the past is poorly understood, yet confidently simplified—that Bosnian-American writer Aleksandar Hemon sets The Book of My Lives, a fragmented autobiography-in-essays stretching from the Sarajevo of the ‘70s, ‘80s, and war-torn ‘90s through the author’s present-day emigrant life in Chicago. While outside observers have filled volumes opining and reflecting upon the Bosnian War—as well as the conflict’s build-up and tense aftermath—Hemon’s firsthand writing adds more depth and nuance to the conflict than a Western newsreel or column ever could.
* * *
When we first meet our young narrator in the halcyon 1970s, it’s clear that we’re meant to grapple with heady questions of race and identity head on. The subtlety of Hemon’s fiction—e.g. The Question of Bruno and The Lazarus Project—is largely lost in favor of more explicit philosophizing. But the author’s narrative directness, which could come across as heavy-handed if wielded inappropriately, is powerful and fitting given the politicized subject matter.
“Part of growing up is, unfortunately, learning to develop loyalties to abstractions: the state, the nation, the idea,” writes Hemon early in the work. “You pledge allegiance; you love the leader. You have to be taught to recognize and care about differences, you have to be instructed who you really are.” Here, the author is reflecting upon his raja—a type of benign, early-childhood gang common in urban Bosnia—but it soon becomes clear that Hemon is also trying to parse out his thoughts on the geopolitical situation writ large, a recurring theme throughout the memoir. Sure, a few boys might form a motley group on the Bosnian streets, but how might these impulses, when left unchecked, atrophy into something truly malevolent? What might motivate a group of Croats to carve out an exclave in Herzegovina, or a gang of Serbs to massacre 8,000 Bosniaks in Srebenica? Why would Milosevic’s henchmen agree to lob explosives at women and children in a starving, fetid Sarajevo? How could the peaceful Bosnian life that the author knew morph into something so ugly, so retrograde?
To some extent, Hemon acquiesces to the Western narrative when answering this question. He tells the tale of an old girlfriend becoming a hardcore fascist in Belgrade; he details the cultural importance of The Mountain Wreath, a Serbian poem published in 1847 and read widely in Tito’s Yugoslavia, in which the hero slaughters all the Muslims in Montenegro; he writes of an old literature professor becoming a high-ranking member of the “virulently nationalist” Serbian Democratic Party—then headed by Radovan Karadžić, a “talentless poet destined to become the world’s most wanted war criminal.”
Yet, he also tells another tale of the Bosnian War, one with which the average Western reader may not be as familiar. From the perspective of a middle-class Sarajevan, he expresses his feeling that everyone in the mountains had simply “gone crazy,” that a bunch of yokels and deranged functionaries had taken to killing over distinctions he’d barely been aware of. During the early stages of the conflict, he writes, “[O]ne could indulge in the thinking that a few bad apples had just gone nuts…” In other words—far from being bloodsavages—Hemon and many of his fellow Bosnians were as incredulous as anyone over the ethnic entrepreneurialism that had gripped their home.
This feeling of bewilderment was, by necessity, short-lived, and as Karadžić ranted violently in the powerless Bosnian parliament and the Serbs closed in on Sarajevo, Hemon and his comrades had to cope with the fact that life would change drastically and for the worse. Hemon’s small act of resistance was writing a semi-popular column in a local magazine, in which the author asserted his city’s uniqueness, its multiethnic harmony, its pride. While others are killing or submitting to slaughter, us Sarajevans, Hemon seemed to be saying, will do neither.
Throughout the war—(though documented only in passing in The Book)—the multiethnic Sarajevan resistance performed admirably. Among many, many other acts of inconspicuous heroism, the city’s paper, Oslobodjenje, continued to publish daily, once infamously printing while its building was flaming from a freshly dropped shell.
But despite these symbolic acts of resistance, Hemon makes clear that as the Serbs closed in, life took on a more fatalistic air. Supplies grew scarce, many businesses closed; the UNHCR entered town, and the magazine where Hemon worked shuttered. Hemon’s embroilment into the Serb-Bosnian-Croat conflict—or at least into the fatalistic atmosphere of Sarajevo—would’ve been prolonged by years had he not received a lucky break: days before the city was effectively sealed off by the Serbs, he received an artist’s grant from the now-defunct United States Information Agency to travel to the U.S. Once there, he decided to apply for refugee status; his application was accepted, and he slowly fell in love with his new city. He soon becomes familiar with the neighborhoods of Edgewater and Ukrainian Village, and when he comes back to the Windy City after visiting Sarajevo via the sniper infested Airport Corridor, he realizes that in “returning from home, [he] returned home.” In other words, the novel becomes a tale both of displacement from a community—and of uneasy re-placement into a new one.
2.
One of the critical wonders of Hemon’s new work is its function as a powerful political and personal tale. In terms of politics, his portrait of Sarajevo does much to challenge the commonly accepted narrative of the Bosnian; it puts the reader in the head of the Other, so to speak, yet it also tells an unglamorous tale of Bosnian obscurity, of a culture wracked by an underlying inferiority complex.
Throughout the memoir, Hemon writes of instances in which he and his Bosnian cohorts wish to assert their national uniqueness, yet also pine for gaudy versions of the American dream. He tells of his annoyance with Americans’ confusion of Bosnia with the “nonexistent Czechoslovakia,” while at the same time said Westerners debate and largely control the fate of a country about which they know so little. Perhaps—the reader begins to wonder—the ethnic warfare of the Balkans in the ‘90s had less to do with primordial ethnic hatred, than with a desire to defy and invert the passive, playdough-ish role that the Croats and the Serbs and other Balkan peoples had come to assume—precisely to avoid the situation that the Bosnians were then assuming. Perhaps there were so many charismatic, yet ultimately deranged bureaucrats running around the region in poorly fitting suits, quoting from nineteenth century poets, because they sought a Romantic, world-historical break from their previous social position, not as members of the Balkan community, but as members of the global community writ large.
These speculations, of course, come dangerously close to the kind of Western speculation that Hemon parodies. But Hemon is not writing an anti-imperialist romp in which Americans are incapable of trenchant insight; this isn’t a literary Orientalism. Rather, he’s complicating—while not wholly overturning—the caricatured, primordial narrative that the West often holds of the region.
On a more personal level, Hemon continually tells tales of minor heroisms in the face of major conflict. Hemon’s defiant local column was one such act; the story of an Assyrian taking solace in chess in Chicago after a lifetime of tragedy serves as another; the memoir itself, written in the wake of a family death, seems a small act of resistance. Never do these actions significantly affect the greater geopolitical forces at work—(this is often the realm of villains like Karadžić)—but these acts of resistance hold their own power, if nothing else, through demonstrating the unwillingness of Hemon’s characters to comply, physically or mentally, with the evil powers that have come to bear over their lives.
3.
Of course, for all its political and personal trenchancy, The Book of My Lives is not without its faults. Hemon’s prose has been described as Nabakovian for its unorthodox, strangely rich vocabulary—the kind that arises from learning English later in life, (as both Hemon and Nabakov did.) In the author’s fiction, the prose arguably does rise to that of the Russian master, but in this foray into nonfiction, the writing sometimes comes off flat, sometimes a bit cliché. For instance, when trying to draw meaning out of immigrant soccer matches in Chicago, Hemon writes, “And all you are left with is a vague, physical, orgasmic memory of the evanescent instant when you were completely connected with everything and everyone around you.” Later, he adds of the experience, “I had the pleasant, tingling sensation of being connected to something bigger and better than me…” It’s brief sections like these that seem the garble of an undertrained sensei or a charlatanic yoga instructor, rather than of a serious and subtle writer.
Part of the problem is that a few sections of the memoir are banal—episodes tacked unnecessarily onto the main narrative thread—and so the author attempts to create meaning where there is little. His life in Sarajevo is fascinating, as are parts of his immigrant experience in Chicago. But when he begins talking of his failed marriage, of his successful marriage, and of his love for soccer, I found myself asking, “Who cares?”
Thus, the reader will need to wade through a bit of narrative fat when reading The Book of My Lives; this, I suppose, is why Hemon’s foray into nonfiction has wallowed in relative obscurity compared to his fiction. But for the reader interested in peering beyond the video clips and newsbreaks of the Balkan conflict—who are interested in the nuanced texture of Bosnian life and of emigrant life writ large, rather than the flat, cartoonish version—Hemon’s memoir is not only an interesting read, but an important one.