The Book of My Lives Read online

  Yet within months, my parents started cataloguing the differences between us and them—we being Bosnians or ex-Yugoslavs, they being purely Canadian. That list of differences, theoretically endless, included items such as sour cream (our sour cream—mileram—was creamier and tastier than theirs); smiles (they smile, but don’t really mean it); babies (they do not bundle up their babies in severe cold); wet hair (they go out with their hair wet, foolishly exposing themselves to the possibility of lethal brain inflammation); clothes (their clothes fall apart after you wash them a few times), et cetera. My parents, of course, were not the only ones obsessing over the differences. Indeed, their social life at the beginning of their Canadian residence largely consisted of meeting people from the old country and exchanging and discussing the perceived dissimilarities. Once I listened to a family friend in what could fairly be called astonishment as he outlined a substratum of differences proceeding from his observation that we like to simmer our food for a long time (sarma, cabbage rolls, being a perfect example), while they just dip it in extremely hot oil and cook it in a blink. Our simmering proclivities were reflective of our love of eating and, by extension and obviously, of our love of life. On the other hand, they didn’t really know how to live, which pointed at the ultimate, transcendental difference—we had soul, and they were soulless. The fact that—even if the food-preparation analysis made any sense—they did not love committing atrocities either and that we were at the center of a brutal, bloody war, which under no circumstances could be construed as love of life, didn’t at all trouble the good analyst.

  Over time, my parents stopped compulsively examining the differences, perhaps because they simply ran out of examples. I’d like to think, however, it was because they were socially integrated, as the family expanded over the years with more immigration and subsequent marriages and procreation, so that we now included a significant number of native Canadians, in addition to all the naturalized ones. It has become harder to talk about us and them now that we have met and married some of them—the clarity and the significance of differences were always contingent upon the absence of contact and proportional to the mutual distance. You could theoritize Canadians only if you didn’t interact with them, for then the vehicles of comparison were the ideal, abstract Canadians, the exact counterprojection of us. They were the not-us, we were the not-them.

  The primary reason for this spontaneous theoretical differentiation was rooted in my parents’ desire to feel at home, where you can be who you are because everyone else is at home, just like you. In a situation in which my parents felt displaced, and inferior to the Canadians, who were always already at home, constant comparison was a way to rhetorically equate ourselves with them. We could be equal because we could compare ourselves with them; we had a home too. Our ways were at least as good as theirs, if not even better—take our sour cream or the philosophical simmering of sarma. Not to mention that they could never get our jokes or that their jokes are not funny at all.

  But my parents’ instinctive self-legitimization could only be collective, because that was what they carried over from the old country, where the only way to be socially legitimate had been to belong to an identifiable collective—a greater, if more abstract, raja. Neither did it help that an alternative—say, defining and identifying yourself as a professor—was no longer available to them, since their distinguished careers disintegrated in the process of displacement.

  The funny thing is that the need for collective self-legitimization fits snugly into the neoliberal fantasy of multiculturalism, which is nothing if not a dream of a lot of others living together, everybody happy to tolerate and learn. Differences are thus essentially required for the sense of belonging: as long as we know who we are and who we are not, we are as good as they are. In the multicultural world there are a lot of them, which ought not to be a problem as long as they stay within their cultural confines, loyal to their roots. There is no hierarchy of cultures, except as measured by the level of tolerance, which, incidentally, keeps Western democracies high above everyone else. And where the tolerance level is high, diversity can be celebrated and mind-expanding ethnic food can be explored and consumed (Welcome to Taco Hell!), garnished with the exotic purity of otherness. A nice American lady once earnestly told me: “It is so neat to be from other cultures,” as though the “other cultures” were an Edenic archipelago in the Pacific, unspoiled by the troubles of advanced civilizations, home to many a soul-soothing spa. I had no heart to tell her that I was often painfully and sometimes happily complicated.

  4. THAT’S ME

  The situation of immigration leads to a kind of self-othering as well. Displacement results in a tenuous relationship with the past, with the self that used to exist and operate in a different place, where the qualities that constituted us were in no need of negotiation. Immigration is an ontological crisis because you are forced to negotiate the conditions of your selfhood under perpetually changing existential circumstances. The displaced person strives for narrative stability—here is my story!—by way of systematic nostalgia. My parents ceaselessly and favorably compared themselves with Canadians precisely because they felt inferior and ontologically shaky. It was a way for them to tell a true story of themselves, to themselves or anyone willing to listen.

  At the same time, there is the inescapable reality of the self transformed by immigration—whoever we used to be, we are now split between us-here (say, in Canada) and us-there (say, in Bosnia). Because we-here still see the present us as consistent with the previous us, still living in Bosnia, we cannot help but see ourselves from the point of view of us-there. As far as their friends in Sarajevo are concerned, my parents, despite their strenuous efforts at differentiation, are at least partly Canadian, which they cannot help but be aware of. They have become Canadian and they can see that because they remained Bosnian all along.

  The inescapable pressure of integration goes hand in hand with a vision of a life my parents could live if they were what they see as being Canadian. Every day, they see the Canadians living what in the parlance of displacement is called “normal life,” which is fundamentally unavailable to them despite all the integrationist promises. They are much closer to it than any of us back home, so they can envision themselves living a normal Canadian life—my parents can experience themselves vicariously as the others, not least because they have spent so much time and mind on comparison with them. Still, they can never be them.

  The best theoretical expostulation on the subject above is a Bosnian joke, which loses some of its punch in translation but retains an exceptional (and typical) clarity of thought:

  Mujo left Bosnia and immigrated to the United States, to Chicago. He wrote regularly to Suljo, trying to convince him to visit him in America, but Suljo kept declining, reluctant to leave his friends and his kafana (a kafana is a coffee shop, bar, restaurant, or any other place where you can spend a lot of time doing nothing while consuming coffee or alcohol). After years of pressuring, Mujo finally convinces him to come. Suljo crosses the ocean and Mujo waits for him at the airport in a huge Cadillac.

  “Whose car is this?” asks Suljo.

  “It’s mine, of course,” Mujo says.

  “That is a great car,” Suljo says. “You’ve done well for yourself.”

  They get in the car and drive downtown and Mujo says: “See that building over there, a hundred floors high?”

  “I see it,” Suljo says.

  “Well, that’s my building.”

  “Nice,” Suljo says.

  “And see that bank on the ground floor?”

  “I see it.”

  “That’s my bank. When I need money I go there and just take as much as I want. And see the Rolls-Royce parked in front of it?”

  “I see it.”

  “That’s my Rolls-Royce. I have many banks and a Rolls-Royce parked in front of each of them.”

  “Congratulations,” Suljo says. “That’s very nice.”

  They drive out of the ci
ty to the suburbs, where houses have grand lawns and the streets are lined with old trees. Mujo points at a house, as big and white as a hospital.

  “See that house? That’s my house,” Mujo says. “And see the pool, Olympic size, by the house? That’s my pool. I swim there every morning.”

  There is a gorgeous, curvaceous woman sunbathing by the pool, and there are a boy and a girl happily swimming in it.

  “See that woman? That’s my wife. And those beautiful children are my children.”

  “Very nice,” Suljo says. “But who is that brawny, suntanned young man massaging your wife and kissing her neck?”

  “Well,” Mujo says, “that’s me.”

  5. WHO ARE THEY?

  There is also a neoconservative approach to otherness: the others are fine and tolerable as long as they are not trying to join us illegally. If they are here already and legal at that, they will also need to adapt to our ways of life, the successful standards of which have long been established. The distance of the others from us is measured by their relation to our values, which are self-evident to us (but not to them). The others always remind us of who we truly are—we are not them and never will be, because we are naturally and culturally inclined toward the free market and democracy. Some of them want to be us—who wouldn’t?—and might even become us, if they are wise enough to listen to what we tell them. And many of them hate us, just for the hell of it.

  George W. Bush, in a speech to the faculty and students of an Iowa college in January 2000, succinctly summed up the neoconservative philosophy of otherness in his own inimitably idiotic, yet remarkably precise, way: “When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world and you knew exactly who they were. It was us versus them and it was clear who them was. Today, we are not so sure who the they are, but we know they’re there.”

  And then the they flew in on September 11, 2001, and now they are everywhere, including the White House, by way of a falsified birth certificate. Every once in a while we round them up, take them to Guantánamo Bay on secret flights or arrest them in raids and deport them or demand from them to declare unequivocally that they are not them. And whoever they may be, we need to win the war against them so that we can triumphantly be alone in the world.

  6. WHAT ARE YOU?

  Here is a story I like to tell. I read it in a Canadian newspaper, but I have told it so many times that it occasionally feels as though I made it up.

  A Canadian professor of political science went to Bosnia during the war. He was born somewhere in the former Yugoslavia, but his parents emigrated to Canada when he was a child, which is to say that he had a recognizably South Slavic name. In Bosnia, equipped with a Canadian passport and a UNPROFOR pass, he went around with armed, blue-helmeted escorts, fully protected from the war so he could study it. With his Canadian passport and a UNPROFOR pass, he passed through many checkpoints. But then he was stopped at one, and the curiosity of the soldiers was tickled by the incongruity of a South Slavic name in a Canadian passport, so they asked him: “What are you?” His adrenaline was no doubt high, he must’ve been pretty terrified and confused, so he said: “I am a professor.” To the patriotic warriors at the checkpoint, his answer must’ve bespoken a childlike innocence, for they most certainly hadn’t asked him about his profession. They must have laughed, or told stories about him after they let him go. He must have seemed unreal to them.

  To be at all comprehensible as a unit of humanity to the ethnically brave men at the checkpoint he had to have a defined—indeed a self-evident—ethnic identification; the professor’s ethnicity was the only relevant piece of information about him. What he knew or didn’t know in the field of political science and pedagogy was hysterically irrelevant in that part of the world carved up by various, simultaneous systems of ethnic otherness—which, as a matter of fact, makes it not all that different from any other part of the world. The professor had to define himself in relation to some “other” but he couldn’t think of any otherness at that moment.

  To be a professor again he had to return to Canada, where he may have run into my parents, for whom he would have been a perfect specimen of one of them.

  7. WHAT AM I?

  My sister returned to Sarajevo after the war and worked there equipped with a Canadian passport. Because of the nature of her work as a political analyst, she encountered a lot of foreign and domestic politicians and officials. Brandishing a somewhat ethnically confusing name, speaking both Bosnian and English, she was hard to identify and was often asked, by both the locals and foreigners: “What are you?” Kristina is tough and cheeky (having survived an assassination attempt early in her life) so she would immediately ask back: “And why do you ask?” They asked, of course, because they needed to know what her ethnicity was so they could know what she was thinking, so they could determine which ethnic group she was truly representing, what her real agenda was. To them, she was irrelevant as a person, even more so as a woman, while her education or ability to think for herself could never overcome or transcend her ethnically defined modes of thought. She was hopelessly entangled in her roots, as it were.

  The question was, obviously, deeply racist, so some of the culturally sensitive foreigners would initially be embarrassed by her counterquestion, but after some hesitation they would press on, while the locals would just press on without hesitation—my sister’s knowledge, her very existence was unknowable until she ethnically declared herself. Finally, she would say: “I’m Bosnian,” which is not an ethnicity, but one of her two citizenships—a deeply unsatisfying answer to the international bureaucrats of Bosnia, bravely manning government desks and expensive restaurants.

  Instructed by my sister’s experiences, when asked “What are you?” I am often tempted to answer proudly: “I’m a writer.” Yet I seldom do, because it is not only pretentiously silly but also inaccurate—I feel I am a writer only at the time of writing. So I say I am complicated. I’d also like to add that I am nothing if not an entanglement of unanswerable questions, a cluster of others.

  I’d like to say it might be too early to tell.

  SOUND AND VISION

  My father spent a couple of years in Zaire in the early eighties, constructing Kinshasa’s electric grid, while Mother, Kristina, and I stayed at home in Sarajevo. In the summer of 1982, he came back home to take us to Zaire for a six-week vacation whose highlight would be a safari. I was seventeen, Kristina four years younger. We’d never been abroad, so we spent sleepless nights imagining everything we would experience that summer. The days, however, I spent watching the soccer World Cup, as I’d vetoed the possibility of going anywhere before the tournament was over. Once Yugoslavia was, as usual, eliminated early and embarrassingly, I became heavily invested in the Italian team. A couple of days before we left, I cheered for Italy in the World Cup finals, in which they beautifully beat Germany 3–1.

  The World Cup over, we were on our way to Africa. The first stop was Italy, as we were supposed to catch an Air Zaire flight to Kinshasa at Rome’s Fiumicino Airport. At the airport we discovered that the flight had been canceled without explanation and until further notice. Father handled it all: he argued with the Air Zaire representatives; he retrieved our suitcases; he showed our passports to the Italian border-control officer. We were to wait for our flight at a hotel in a nearby town, to which we took a crowded shuttle.

  Kristina and I were impatient to see what all the brouhaha over being abroad was about. What we saw during the shuttle ride was not all that impressive: nondescript buildings flying Italian flags; shop windows sporting pictures of the national soccer team, the Azzurri. Ever a great wrangler of silver linings, Father promised us that we would go to Rome, which was half an hour away by train, as soon as we had settled in at the hotel. He was our leader in this foreign world: he spoke in stern and bad English to the airport staff; he located the shuttle and got us on board; he exchanged money and dispensed it from his little manpurse with the confidence of a man used to international currencies. Kristina and I
proudly bore witness to his negotiating two rooms for the Hemon family. He was conspicuously tall in his azure shirt, winking at us, entirely comfortable with all the worldly matters at hand.

  But then, suddenly, dark fields of sweat appeared on his shirt, and he started frantically pacing the lobby. His manpurse was gone. He ran outside to see if he’d left it in the shuttle, but the shuttle, too, was gone. In garbled English, he yelled at the receptionist. He randomly interrogated guests and service staff who happened to enter the lobby. His shirt was now covered with sweat; he reeked of an imminent heart attack. Mother, who had previously idled in the lobby flipping a Rubik’s cube, tried to calm him down. We still had the passports, she said; it was only our cash that had been stolen. (Coming from the promised land of socialism, we had no credit cards.) Several thousand American dollars, Kristina and I realized in horror. All of our vacation money.

  Thus we found ourselves penniless in an obscure Italian town, unable to go to Rome for a day trip, let alone to Africa for a safari. The possibility of our simply giving up on being abroad and returning to Sarajevo was real and devastating. The hotel looked at a long wall, over which ugly, thirsty trees peeked at the displaced tourists. Father was on the hotel phone making calls, informing his co-workers in Zaire that we were stuck without money somewhere in Italy, hoping they could help him get the hell out of it, or find a way back to Sarajevo, or on to Zaire. In the process, he found out that the Kinshasa flight had been canceled because a Zairean army general had kicked the bucket and the dictator Mobutu had requisitioned all three Air Zaire intercontinental aircraft to fly his large entourage to the funeral.

  The next day, Father was still obsessively analyzing every moment of the unfortunate trip from the airport to the reception desk, retracing his every step to determine at which point the clever thief struck, which would help identify him. Running out of clean shirts, he eventually came to the conclusion that the theft had taken place at the reception desk and reconstructed the full sequence of events: Father had put his manpurse down on the counter while filling out the forms, and, when he turned to wink at us, the receptionist had slipped it under the desk. Consequently, Father installed himself in the lobby, intently monitoring the receptionist—a handsome, innocent-looking young man—and waiting for him to make a revealing mistake.