The Outsider

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Transcript

Aleksandar Hemon lost much of his previous life to the Yugoslav wars in the ’90s, but there’s a reason he clings to a world that no longer exists.

Aleksandar Hemon: In my particular case, and place where I’m coming from, in my family, there’s a perpetual fear, conscious/unconscious that our experience, our existence in the world will be erased. If I don’t tell stories of my family, there might not be no memory of my family.

Aleksandar, or Sasha, Hemon was born in 1964 in Sarajevo in what was then Yugoslavia. His most cherished childhood memories were his father Peter’s nighttime tales of growing up in Yugoslavia during the Second World War. His father’s descriptions of the lives of Bosnian peasants during that time left a hunger in young Sasha for nostalgia, for people in places that only the collective memory of shared stories can access.

(Excerpt from Hemon’s My Parents: An Introduction / This Does Not Belong to You)

They are the same every time they are narrated, they do not age or die or suffer, they keep existing for as long as there’s a story to be told. This is one of the ways in which storytelling grounds being in the ever-changing world. It worked for Homer. It works for my father.

Hemon’s mother Anya meanwhile was a voracious reader who filled the shelves of their home with great European classics. One after the other, young Sasha devoured Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, Rilke. In high school he put these aside for a while and became obsessed with J. D. Salinger and Raymond Chandler. Books stimulated Hemon’s hunger for knowledge and led him to pursue a degree in literature at the University of Sarajevo. College essays made him see himself as a writer for the first time. Shortly after, he began working as a journalist, writing passionately about his hometown, in a column called “Sarajevo Republika” for the newspaper Naši Dani.

Hemon: I get energized and get involved with the world, but by virtue of by way of writing. That’s why I do it, that’s my high.

As Yugoslavia came close to collapsing, Hemon was chosen for a cultural exchange program in the US. He would have returned to Sarajevo, but got stranded in Chicago when the Bosnian war broke out in April, 1992. Forced into exile, Hemon learned on CNN that his neighbors were being butchered and his beloved Sarajevo was being destroyed.

(Excerpt from Hemon’s The Book of My Lives)

On the outskirts of the city in the hills above, the war was already mature and raging, but in the heart of Sarajevo, people still seemed to think that it would somehow stop before it reached them. My father, however, advised me to stay away. Nothing good was going to happen at home, he said. I was supposed to fly back from Chicago on May 1st. On May 1st, I didn’t fly home. On May 2nd, the roads out of the city were blocked. The last train with my parents on it departed. The longest siege in modern history began. In Chicago, I submitted my application for political asylum. The rest is the rest of my life.

In Chicago, Hemon had little money, no family, no job, no visa, and no idea what to do. For a while he found herself unable to write in his native language. New Bosnian words were coming out of the experience of war, and having watched the conflict from afar, Hemon felt those words were not his to use. At the same time, his proficiency in English was barely sufficient for life in America.

(Excerpts from Hemon’s “Pathologically Bilingual”)

My first legal job was canvassing door to door for Greenpeace, for which I was trained by a nineteen-year-old named Jim…At some point, Jim, somewhat annoyed by me, asked me: “How come you never use the articles?” Patiently and painfully, I explained to him that Slavic languages have no articles and that it might take me a while to get that right. And it wasn’t just the articles. I remember watching David Letterman’s late night show, and having no idea what he was talking about, just staring glumly while my friends roared with laughter.

As the war progressed and the world found out about the genocide being carried out by elements of the Bosnian Serb army against Bosnian Muslims, some intellectuals Hemon respected and admired publicly dismissed the events, and supported the Serbian nationalist president Slobodan Milošević. The urge to write about Bosnia and Yugoslavia grew more vital for Hemon. His voice, his stories were missing from the conversation, and he could no longer stand and watch in silence. To make sure the world would hear him, he poured himself into learning English with the determination of an olympian.

(Excerpts from Hemon’s “Pathologically Bilingual”)

I read and read, at first underlining words on the page to look them up later in my Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, which I’d brought with me…I couldn’t read as much as I needed to because I was working, so I enrolled in a masters program in English at Northwestern University for the sole purpose of reading more, and more systematically. I took out a huge student loan (which I’m still paying off) and signed up for classes with the intention of reading through the history of English literature, refresh what was familiar, discover new things, fill out the gaps…I once broke up with a young woman who thought we had something serious going because, as I told her, I needed more time to read Shakespeare. The sex was fine, but King Lear was better.

Hemon believes the war in Bosnia weakened his mental defenses, blowing his subconscious gates open for the English language to enter, but in retrospect, he understands his linguistically obsessive brain had its origins in childhood.

Hemon: My father and all of my family, my father’s side, they’re all bilingual, and also when I was a kid in school, I was good at language. There was a competitive curricular activity called The League of Young Linguists, because Bosnian is complicated in so many ways, the official language was complicated, so we would study the rules that were written by a conference of linguists and then compete in knowing the rules of the language and then the doublets and, you know, synonyms and homonyms and all that, the whole linguistic vocabulary and language I adopted in elementary school because of that. I was constantly trying to get out of that, play soccer and do nothing, but my parents wouldn’t let me. I think my linguistic ability is partly due to that because I was immersed in language in a very deep level, in my native language, when I was a child.

In 1995 Aleksandar Hemon reached the goal of publishing his first story in English, two years before a self-imposed deadline. His first book, The Question of Bruno came out in 2000, the same year Hemon became an American citizen. Hemon’s books attempt to intertwine his life in Chicago and the cruelty he had escaped in Yugoslavia. Mixing fiction and nonfiction, they amount to an intimate mosaic of a time and place that might have been lost.

(Excerpt from Hemon’s Blind Jozef Pronek and Dead Souls)

So he would watch CNN footage of people with familiar faces crawling in their own blood, begging the unflinching camera for help, people twitching and throttling as their stumps spurted blood, people who were trying to help them dropping like an imploded building, shot by a sniper. And he would know that was the end of their lives.

Literary stardom happened almost immediately, but for Hemon becoming a great writer isn’t primarily a matter of personal pride and vanity. It’s about defining the threat of annihilation.

Hemon: History is, largely still to this day conceived of as stories of great, men usually, but of great individuals who have agency, and they were presidents, and they were leaders and they led the nation to whatever. But who tells stories of the rest of us, the nobodies, right? And so to me, the agency in the world, particularly for displaced people, the primary mode of agency is telling a story. I get to tell stories, and not about myself necessarily, but about the world that defined me, the world that can perish just like that, based on a decision by some big shot. In my particular case, and place where I’m coming from, in my family, there’s a perpetual fear, conscious/unconscious that our experience, our existence in the world will be erased or could be erased. The historical ruptures, that can mean, you know, genocide, holocaust, but also the ease of displacement or the ease of our being subjects of displacement. That we cannot, if I don’t tell stories of my family, there might not be no memory of my family. All we have are these fragments that we’re trying to put back together in various ways and never think that could be entirely put back together. I want to keep those fragments, so that the details, the tastes, the moments, the angles of sunlight, the story is my parents, this is what I, this is, this is my project, I want to keep that somewhere in a book. And so that book could be on the shelf for the next 100 years but someone someday will pick it up and say, oh, these people lived in the world.

Aleksandar Hemon’s books are full of surprisingly intimate disclosures that grant access to the most private domains of his character’s lives. He has deliberately played with the concept of privacy, challenging cultural notions of what can and cannot be made public.

Hemon: Well, here’s the thing: in Bosnian there’s no word for privacy, in fact, the word that is close to ‘privacy’ and ‘private’ in Bosnian and the languages of the Western Balkans is really related to private property, and so obviously in socialism, or in poor societies where no one had private property, except very few people…I also think that, not to harp on this, there’s a certain value that comes from the sort of Protestant Puritan tradition, that privacy needs to be protected, partly because as a sinner, you must have some sins in that private domain, right? And so once you expose yourself to the gaze of others, you know, your domain of privacy, something’s going to come up, right? And so I did not grow up in that tradition. I wrote a book about my parents. We talked candidly about things like the first time they had sex, and yet no one was uncomfortable, right? Because there was no sin involved.

Aleksandar Hemon’s otherness has granted him a place of his own in the US. These days, he teaches creative writing at Princeton University. His novel The Lazarus Project was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award, and he’s received many significant awards, including a so-called Genius Grant from the MacArthur Foundation. But for the most part, Hemon still feels like an outsider, speaking a different language.

Hemon: Throughout this pandemic, I lost touch with a lot of American friends, but I lost touch with none of my Bosnian friends. In fact, we are more in touch than we have been for years. In other words we have learned to stay in touch and to create a collectivity of experience regardless of the circumstances. But it’s also I think that’s the American culture is inherently transient and forgetful. And I think it’s partly related to sort of the, a common belief that you change just renew yourself periodically in various ways, you move from one place to another and just become someone else.

Aleksandar Hemon has most likely reached his goal of preserving the memory of his family and of a place for future generations to know and care about. Whatever he does next, he’ll no doubt also challenge our preconceived notions of who gets to tell the story, what gets told, and why.