Look Who's Balkan

“A friend of mine who is now a cardiologist in Switzerland and was a doctor during the Siege of Sarajevo once told me how she ran under sniper fire to see Terminator 2. It wasn’t the movie. It was going to see a movie that was worth risking your life. Even Terminator 2, which is shit, occasioned an act of individual sovereignty.”

Aleksandar Hemon is seated in Brooks Hotel on a sunny summer evening. The topic for discussion is art and freedom during wartime, one of the many issues raised in his compelling The Book Of My Lives, a collection of autobiographical essays tracing the journey from his childhood in Bosnia to his current life in Chicago.
“In the end what war violates is individual personal sovereignty,” he continues. “Literature, one might say, is a domain of individual sovereignty where we can at least imaginatively exercise that freedom. We can project ourselves into other peoples’ situations, imagine ways in which such sovereign decisions would be made. And it’s the same for all art.”
In the years immediately preceding the siege, when Bosnia was becoming more and more restless, Hemon took refuge in his parent’s mountain cabin, escaping there for weeks at a time in the company of books.
“Back then I would go away and read so I could control my own environment,” he states. “I would read from eight to two and then I would take a walk and have lunch. It was a way to restore some sense that I had something under my control. Reading is wonderful as it’s spending time with yourself and other people simultaneously.”
Hemon, who travelled to Chicago in 1992 for a month-long visit at the behest of the American Cultural Center, has lived there ever since as war broke out in his absence. He was reminded of the political climate preceding the siege in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks.
“It felt similar after 9/11 when Bush was preparing for the war in Iraq,” he reflects. “The onslaught of propaganda, the blatant obvious lies, the excessive patriotism and clichéd dead language, I experienced it as assault. I was constantly angry and I would get into arguments with people easily about a parking spot or playing football. I would scream at them. For me it came out as anxiety and anger, the future was uncertain.”
He rhapsodises about the beautiful game in his current tome, which has been his saviour on many levels.
“I still play football two or three times a week,” he explains. “In the United States football attracts a lot of immigrant people and Indian Americans too and they always bring their stories. Just a couple of weeks ago I started talking to a guy from Kyrgyzstan so now I have a Kyrgyzstani friend who I milk for stories. How did you get here? Did you come straight from Kyrgyzstan? What is it like in Kyrgyzstan? For me, apart from the fact that I like playing football just for playing football not for intellectual rewards, the contact allows for exchanging stories.”
Stories and books have always played a central role in Hemon’s life but he was forced to re-examine their importance when a beloved college professor was exposed as a right-hand man of Radovan Karadzic during the war.
“I revised what I thought about literature and the way it worked because of that,” he notes. “Is it good for anything? Is it just to pass time and make you feel good about yourself? Does it do anything for the world? Is it just completely useless, an indulgence? So I had to formulate that for myself, to my mind now literature does not change the world, if it changes people it doesn’t happen frequently. If it does so it takes a long time and it changes people who are already conducive to change. But it does not change governments, it does not stop crime. What it does do is create a field in which we can participate in changes. It contains human experience processed in language so then we have an access to an understanding of what it means to be human. Everyone has access to that field, even war criminals. It contains the vastness of human experience.”
Themes of identity have permeated Hemon’s work. He writes about Sarajevo and Chicago with a comparable sense of belonging. So which does he call home?
“I have found ways to relate to Sarajevo as it is now and my friends as they are now, so I’m past nostalgia and similarly I’ve found a way to relate to Chicago,” he attests. “It requires work to neutralise that sense of displacement, to create a geography of the soul, to map out a city so I can claim it as my own. I managed to do that in Chicago and I managed to maintain or restore my connection with Sarajevo. You can have several homes, it’s not mutually exclusive. That’s how I feel about Sarajevo. I go home when I go to visit and then I go back to Chicago where I live with my family.”
A US resident for over 20 years now Hemon also contributes to various websites and magazines as well as tending to his more sizeable literary endeavours.
“I wrote a piece for The New Republic when Alex Ferguson retired,” he smiles. “I’m a Liverpool supporter so I didn’t break down in tears when he left. but I admire Ferguson. He famously said all he wanted to do was, ‘knock Liverpool right off their fucking perch’ and he did! I admire him for his patience and persistence and the way he built and maintained the club.”

The Book Of My Lives is published by Picador