Aleksandar Hemon: ‘Bosnia is Stuck in Catch 22’
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| Aleksandar Hemon. Photo: BockoPics / CreativeCommons |
Few Bosnian writers and intellectuals have reached the kind of international popularity and esteem as Aleksandar Hemon, although, he warns, he is wary of being bracketed “an intellectual”.
“The term ‘intellectual’ makes me think of some university professors, writing their manifestoes and connected in some way to political parties,” he tells BIRN at the international Bookstan literature festival organised by the Buybook publishing house in Sarajevo from July 25 to July 28, where he was the curator.
As a writer and a citizen, however, he says he feels he has “a duty to take his stand” on issues that are important for Bosnian society.
Hemon, now 52 and from Sarajevo, won world fame for novels including “The Lazarus Project”, a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award, and for “The Book of my Lives”, which was listed among the ten best books of 2013 by the BBC. He is a frequent columnist for the high-end US magazine, “The New Yorker”.
Hemon first left his hometown of Sarajevo for the US in spring 1992. He had booked a return ticket for May 1 but delayed his comeback after war broke out in Bosnia and eventually settled in the US.
However, he still has a Bosnian passport and regularly returns to Sarajevo, maintaining an active role as observer and commentator on Bosnian politics and society.
“War was a major catastrophe for Bosnia, which changed everything, destroying not only the material infrastructure, but the mental infrastructure of its citizens as well … which has not been rebuilt in the past 20 years,” Hemon says.
He also feels that the situation in Bosnia has worsened again during the past ten years.
“Since 2006, the EU and the West simply decided to give up on any substantial reform in Bosnia … they’re happy with the situation here, as long as there are no refugees and war,” he says, noting that the current political situation in the country leaves little room for hope.
After the widespread social unrest of February 2014, the last Bosnian parliamentarian elections, in October 2014 reinforced traditional, ethnic-affiliated parties, leaving little space for a political alternative, he argues.
“Any alternative must be currently built from scratch,” Hemon maintains, adding that it will likely need to come from outside the existing system.
“The [1995] Bosnian Constitution created with Dayton needs to be changed but any kind of reform will never be approved if it needs to pass through the parliament … this is our institutional ‘Catch 22,’” he says.
Although he spends most of the year in Chicago, where he lives with his wife and children, Hemon takes pride in continuing to play an active role in Bosnian society. “This is not only because I have friends here, but also for my personal principles … I don’t want to give up,” he says.
Worried about Trump:
This is true not only about Bosnia but also about his adopted country, the United States, where Aleksandar remains an attentive observer of the political and social scene.
His most recent book, “The Making of the Zombie Wars,” published in 2015, takes place in 2003, during the start of the Iraq military campaign.
While following the struggle of the main character, Joshua Levin, who is trying to write a screenplay for a zombie-themed B-movie, it also presents critical reflections on former President George W Bush’s “War on terror.”
“That was a time when many things went wrong in history,” Hemon notes, maintaining that the current catastrophe in the Middle East is a direct consequence of the botched US-led invasion of Iraq.
The Islamist 9/11 attacks on New York and the “War on Terror” all had also a negative effect for Bosnian-Americans living in the US, he observes.
“That complicated the position of many Bosnians who are Muslims,” Hemon says, adding that the media focus on Jihadists and on Islamic “radicalization” in Bosnia “don’t help” their situation, either.
Zombies as a metaphor:
Commenting on his latest book, Hemon says the renewed interest in zombies in US popular culture is intimately connected to a sense of national insecurity.
“Popular culture proceeds our subconscious and fears … somehow, 9/11 reactivated the cultural image of zombies as a metaphor of masses who want to destroy our way of life … the fear of Muslims or immigrants, the idea that these people don’t understand us, that they have no life – as far as we can tell – and that they just want to take down everything we have,” Hemon says.
“For somebody like [Republican presidential candidate] Donald Trump, immigrants are definitely zombies,” he adds, arguing that his experience as somebody who witnessed the end of Yugoslavia has made him extremely sensitive to nationalism.
“I can recognise a Fascist from miles, because I have witnessed what happened in Yugoslavia from the beginning,” Hemon says, expressing his concern over what Trump stands for.
“The Republican Party has abandoned the idea of American inclusiveness in order to become a party that represents the idea of a ‘white majority’ … even if Trump doesn’t become the next US President, the people who would vote for him, those who share his view, will still be there,” he says, concluding: “This is scary”.



