My Parents by Aleksandar Hemon — second life in literature
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The books of certain authors feel less like discrete artefacts than chapters of a greater book — their life’s work — in which a set of themes, or a world, is revisited again and again, like a dream that expands and deepens night by night. The main subjects of the book of Aleksandar Hemon’s life, going back to his 2000 debut, The Question of Bruno, have been his own past and its excavation, a refrain played on a string stretched between the country of his adulthood, the US, and the Yugoslavia from which he was exiled by the outbreak of war in 1992.
It isn’t a criticism to say that his latest publication, a kind of bipartite memoir or autobiographical diptych, is a broken book. Dispersion, diffusion, disjointedness, decentralisation — these have always been both themes and characteristics of Hemon’s writing. The back-cover text suggests readers start with My Parents: An Introduction, a tender, unshowy, patient telling of Hemon’s parents’ flight to Canada and the unfolding of their new lives. (Hemon himself was on a scholarship in Chicago when war broke out, and stayed.)
When you’ve read its 170 pages, you flip the book over to the start of This Does Not Belong to You, a series of short, lapidary tales from Hemon’s youth. “How is it that I can recall something that happened forty years ago and I can’t recall what I did yesterday?” he wonders at one point; then it hits him: “What I did yesterday was remember what happened forty years ago.” Between the two books lies an expanse of uncaptioned grey photos from the Hemon family album.
“Mama” and “Tata”, having arrived in Hamilton, Ontario, are less interested in becoming “Mom” and “Dad” than in working out how to remain Sarajevan — how to revive Sarajevo in Hamilton. For the newly arrived refugee, raw-nerved as someone recovering from surgery, “assimilation” is not only undesirable, it’s impossible. Their palliatives are the old, communal ones: meals, language, singing, family, compatriots (among the chapter titles are “Food”, “Music” and “Literature”).
But they know perfectly well what has happened to them — their lives have been terribly damaged. As their son notes, displacement is one of war’s defining features; war “inescapably and brutally results in migration”. When he asks his elderly mother whether, on balance, she feels her life has been good, she replies, “No, it was not. Because of the war.” It’s a moment that makes your shoulders sag. “Because of the war” — the katastrofa that “crashed into her life like a meteorite”.
This Does Not Belong to You, the second book, comprises 86 more-or-less oblique scenes from Hemon’s prewar life, played out among the peculiarly intimate spaces of childhood. These are stories of “prepubescent violence”, minor criminality and animal cruelty (frogs, flies, a kitten), the kind that texture any childhood, painted with Hemon’s eye for the tellingly uncanny or grotesque: the friend whose foot is crushed by a railway turntable; the elderly neighbour with an obscenely dislocating jaw; the ailing pet dog taken to the woods and dispatched with an axe.
“When exactly did I become myself,” he asks, “the first person of the many I would be?” Like a lot of Hemon’s work, many of the pieces chart the young man’s developing consciousness of his autonomy, a succession of alarming discoveries: he can harm others as well as himself; he’s capable of love; he will forever be separated from other people by his body; one day he will die. And the great epiphany: he can have a second life in literature. Hemon’s first language, Bosnian, contains no word for fiction. “Narration as a way of conveying self-evident reality is a recent invention,” he writes, “and false at that.” But as he has said elsewhere, “This is not to say that there is no truth or falsehood. Rather, the stress is on storytelling.”
My Parents / This Does Not Belong to You sometimes feels strained. Its halves repel one another. But even if it reads more like an abridgment of the greater book than a new chapter, there are few living authors who illuminate so heartbreakingly the wormholes between present and past, or who are so merciless in recovering the symbol-saturated, eerily lit land that is childhood. Nabokov, to whom Hemon has often been compared, wrote appreciatively of the “syncopal kick” his own exile gave him. Hemon reminds us that most of the world’s displaced are not nobility; for them, that kick can be deadly.
My Parents: An Introduction / This Does Not Belong to You, by Aleksandar Hemon, Picador, RRP£14.99, 368 pages
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