Aleksander Hemon Interview

I meet Bosnian-American novelist Aleksandar Hemon, in Dublin’s Morrison Hotel, on the day the death of Scream director Wes Craven is announced. Although
his latest novel is entitled The Making of Zombie Wars, and features a struggling Chicago screenwriter working on a horror movie, it transpires that the Sarajevo-born author isn’t a fan of the genre.
“I have to say, I stopped watching horror movies,” the tall, bald-headed 50-year-old declares, speaking in his sonorous, heavily-accented voice. “With the war in Bosnia, suddenly all the death and blood became too real and my tolerance for it vanished – I could never imagine it was just a movie after that. It’s referred to as ‘just a movie’, but it always invoked real blood and real murder so, for me, it’s difficult.”
As it happens, the only murder that takes place in The Making of Zombie Wars is that of an innocent cat. The book relates the trials and tribulations of luckless 33-year-old screenwriter Joshua Levin, who teaches English in a Chicago language school to pay the rent. When he allows himself to be seduced by a married student, his already imperfect life completely falls apart.
The multi-award-winning Hemon isn’t known as a comic writer – his 2013 collection of essays, The Book of My Lives, featured a memorably heartrending account of the death of his infant daughter – so this exuberantly funny novel comes as a real surprise.
“Somebody called it a ‘screwball elegy’ recently, which I liked,” he smiles. “It is a departure for me in some ways, and in some ways it isn’t. I like to think there is some continuity, but also that some future books will change the feel, and manifest it all as part of the same field. But yes, I wrote it differently, in terms of production. I produced
it quickly, over a couple of years. It was a lot of fun. I enjoyed organising the book around the comedy – when in doubt, I was choosing the funny option. That was the organising principle.”
Apparently, his agent had no idea he was writing it. “No, neither my agent nor my editor. When they asked me what I was doing I said, ‘Oh, I’m working on some ideas...’ I was producing articles, it’s not like I had a block, but no, I did not tell them about the book. It gave me great pleasure to just plop it in front of them.”
What’s most impressive is that English isn’t even Hemon’s mother tongue. A graduate of the University of Sarajevo, he was visiting the US as a tourist in 1992 when the war in Bosnia began. Stranded there, he was forced to learn English and, having spent some years teaching it as a foreign language, gradually forged a massively successful career as a writer and journalist.
The author of several critically- acclaimed fiction and non-fiction titles, he has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a ‘Genius Grant’ from the Mac Arthur Foundation, the Jan Michalski Prize for Literature, the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award, and, most recently, a 2012 USA Fellowship.
In common with the main protagonist of Zombie Wars, he was a teacher in a Chicago language school for some years. Unlike the hapless Joshua Levin, however, Hemon has actually had his movie scripts produced.
“Yeah, I co-wrote a script recently with a friend of mine, a Bosnian film director named Jasmila Zbanic,” he says. “It premiered last year, it’s called Love Island – it’s a comedy. A comedy in the Shakespearean sense that everyone is on stage at the end, and so I enjoyed it greatly.”
How did the film do?
“It was confusing because of what people were expecting from her, because her previous movies were about a mother and a child who was a product of rape and these heavy Bosnian themes,” he explains. “We both were sick of being relegated to writing about genocide, crime, war and war criminals. I write about it because I think it’s important, but I don’t think comedy only belongs to people who live comfortable lives. We were always capable of doing comedy.
“With comedy and tragedy, it’s all the same life happening simultaneously. There is no
comedy without tragedy and vice versa. So we did not want to be subscribed to how we would fulfil those expectations continuously. European film particularly is difficult. Because Eastern Europe is about bleakness and Western Europe can afford comedy here and there, especially in the festival circuit. No comedy has ever won in Berlin or Cannes.
“Comedy is not serious, serious things are serious,” he continues. “We both deplore that, so we wrote a comedy where people are happy and joyous and from those parts of the world, complicated and have to work out things, but joyous. And, same with Zombie Wars, I wanted to be funny and serious at the same time.”
Although he regularly returns to Sarajevo to visit family and friends, Hemon is now permanently settled in Chicago, where he lives with his second wife and their
two daughters. So what’s his take on Donald Trump’s run for the US presidency?
“The reaction to the Iraq War, to 9/11, brought out the worst in America,” he observes. “Obama changed it somewhat but hardly stopped it and so it festered further. Obama and his administration contributed to that to some extent, with the drones, the cowardice with which they approached the crimes of the Bush regime. Bush and his years brought out the worst in America, and Trump is one example but hardly shocking.
“It’s not that he came out of nowhere – it’s always been there. The Republican presidential nomination debate is like the World Cup of sociopaths except there are no foreigners. Never before did I watch the Republican nomination debate on Fox News, and I did this time because it’s like watching a Nazi rally, to see what is going to happen. I’ve never seen anything like that. It’s ridiculous – and frightening.”
Having seen sickos ascend to power in the former Yugoslavia, he’s concerned that people don’t recognise just how dangerous Trump could prove to be.
“Back in the day, before the war in the former Yugoslavia, there were people not unlike Trump, and we mocked them – people of my generation thought they could not possibly take hold: ‘These people are clowns!’ Those ‘clowns’ became heads of newly-formed states and orchestrated genocide.
“Trump is ridiculous, of course, but it’s because he is ridiculous that he is a very serious instance of the evil that festered in America after Bush was elected. It existed before that, but he brought it to the foreground and that was his policy, to stoke that in his constituency.”
What’s coming next from Hemon? “I have a book coming out on the
United Nations,” he reveals. “It’s a non-fiction book, kind of a contract job, which I enjoyed doing. When I was in Europe in 2012, I spent some time visiting the United Nations complex and interviewing people. I wrote that book while writing this one. I took a break from this one and wrote it in about 100 days.
“I had done all the research and accumulated all this material, sat down and interviewed people and so that also contains photographs by a Magnum photographer, Peter Van Agtmael, a young, brilliant photographer who spends much time in war-zones. He spent some days in the United Nations taking pictures that are going to be in the book. Apart from that, I plot other works of narrative fiction.”