Lost in the former West5

Silence, exile and cunning – the three attributes that Joyce reckoned were required of a writer. Sarajevo native Aleksander Hemon learned the meaning of all three words when he arrived in Chicago in January 1992 on a US government-sponsored goodwill junket for Yugoslav artists and writers, the very day his city came under siege. Stunned, stranded and with barely a word of English, he watched the former Yugoslavia ravaged by war on television; it was one of the few nightmare situations that justify the much-abused term Kafka-esque. Not that Hemon necessarily agrees with the Joyce analogy.

“Exile is not the right word for my situation,” he contends, “because I stayed connected, I watched the war on TV and I was in touch with people when they were under siege. For someone like Joyce, who I admire immensely, exile was kind of a noble situation, getting out of the Ireland that he found stifling. It was the exile of an artist. To me, exile implies that some fundamental connection is severed, and I don’t feel that way. Wherever I go on these book tours I find someone from Sarajevo, usually someone I know personally, or otherwise one degree of separation. I didn’t know what had happened to people during the war, and so I spent a lot of time tracking down people around the world and getting in touch with them.”

Hemon, in his mid-30s, is a handsome, athletic-looking individual with the buzz cut and demeanour of an intellectual Navy Seal. Possessing an understated humour, there’s a certain steeliness about his manner that fits the case history. Surviving on a succession of minimum wage jobs in Chicago, Hemon not only taught himself to speak English, but how to write it. Really write it. Slogging his way through the canon, notating and logging words he didn’t understand, he developed his craft at an astonishingly rapid pace, forging a lush anti-minimalist style (he holds that language should be “transformative” rather than representational) that earned him inevitable comparisons with other second-language masters such as Nabokov and Conrad. To achieve this, Hemon trained himself to think in English, dream in English, and even remember through English conversations he’d had in his native language with friends years before. In terms of everyday survival though, he lived in constant terror of ending up on the street.

“Maybe it’s this kind of Slavic thing, but you reach a point where you can only think about the next step in your despair,” he recalls. “All I could experience truly was the immediate future, but I kind of suspended the fear so I could operate. A friend of mine, we were working together for Greenpeace – it was a very poorly paid job and I was in debt – and I remember telling her how constantly frightened I was that I would end up on the street, and she said, ‘You don’t have to worry about that’. It was a great relief that she and her husband would help me, and we stayed friends. But there was a time that I didn’t know.”

There’s one image in Hemon’s debut novel, Nowhere Man, which is so brutal it punches a hole right through its protagonist’s fond recollections. Pronek ruminates on a childhood sweetheart, an athlete, almost casually relating how she lost both legs in the attacks on Sarajevo, her husband trying to stem the flow of blood from the stumps.

“Most people, when they remember something, they remember it in a sort of utopian way, the way it never was,” he points out. “But if something like that happened, you cannot separate it because your life is changed retroactively by this event. Had there not been a war, it would’ve been just a memory of a girl, and there would’ve been other girls, but suddenly it attained a different value, a different meaning, and this is how his past life is redirected, becomes something else.”

But if Hemon’s own story is a classic fable of the immigrant made good, he holds no old world illusions about the nature of the American Dream.

In the United States your value as an individual is kind of measured by your distance from other people, he observes. “In Bosnia and the Balkans and the Mediterranean circle, it is measured by the number of people you know. My mother, when I was a kid, she would always talk about her boss of the company she worked for, she said, ‘He’s a great man because he can talk to everybody’, this is how she would value him. And so I have this constant need for the presence of human beings. To me, living in the suburbs is just hell. Just walking down the streets of Dublin, I cannot see enough of these faces. Bring them on! I want to see them all!”