Book review: The Making of Zombie Wars
ALEKSANDAR HEMON is a ball of sense and sensibility, but it wasn’t always like that.
Now in his early 50s, living in his adopted home of Chicago with his family, he recalls his life as a teenager in Sarajevo (the capital city of then Yugoslavia, now Bosnia and Herzegovina).
Enlightened by an intellect that blazed a trail for him, and which removed him from his conflicted country to forge a career as a much-garlanded, polemical writer, Hemon’s teenage years were spent living very much in the moment.
“A month ahead was a long time back then,” he says in a voice that is thick with accent yet fluent in language.
“But I had a voracious interest in many things — I watched loads of films, I read books like a man possessed, I was into music; and I still am into all of these.
"I had, I suppose, a general desire to be engaged with the world. And, like any teenager, to be cool — or whatever I had thought was cool at the time.”
Being of that age in the late 70s/early 80s was a fertile time for anyone interested in pop culture, but particularly so when such interest was aligned with politics.
Punk and new wave came to him from the west, but that period of time was also the beginning of the demise of Communism, particularly when (in the early summer of 1980) Yugoslavian president Josip Broz Tito died.
“Then came the subsequent, relative liberalisation,” Hemon explains. “When I was 16, our rebelliousness wasn’t the usual teenage thing. We felt that we carried part of the future on our backs, and that lasted until the war in my country started in the early 90s, when I was in my mid-20s.”
Did the cultural aspects of his interests back then dovetail easily into his increasing political awareness?
“I ran into some trouble with the authorities,” he reveals casually, “but there was a general urban energy in Sarajevo in the early 80s, which many people remember fondly and still long for.
"A lot of talented people started doing interesting things at the same time — from rock bands and movies to writing. My friends and myself were too young to produce anything good, but we were surrounded by all of this art.
“It was clear to us that it was political, but it wasn’t necessarily directly so. It’s not as if we were all writing political manifestos, but the need to speak, and to speak as we wished, was burning inside us. You could not abide by the limitations of society.
"In the late 80s, I started working with a radio station — most of us were recruited for it off the street, and we had no compunction saying things in various ways. We broke many rules, and gleefully so. That time was a very informative period in my life.”
Hemon travelled to America in the early 90s, a young journalist invited there under the auspices of the United States Information Agency, an organisation that operated cultural centres and organised cultural exchanges.
“They were inviting all kinds of people, including young journalists, so they could show them the wonders of a mature democracy,” he says with a sliver of irony.
“I went for a sponsored one-month trip. I stayed on for a little while longer in order to see a friend in Canada, and then to Chicago, but by that time the war in Sarajevo started. My city was besieged, and so I stayed in Chicago.”
What happened next changed his life forever. Hemon took tentative steps to make a living, but his journalistic preferences outweighed everything else.
And so he embarked on a career as a writer of books (including The Question Of Bruno, Nowhere Man, The Lazarus Project, Love And Obstacles, The Book Of My Lives, and his latest, The Making Of Zombie Wars) and for magazines (Esquire, New Yorker, Paris Review, Sarajevo-based BH Dani).
In 2004, the MacArthur Foundation awarded him a ‘Genius Grant’ (the title of which makes him sigh), and his work over the years has seen him being compared to the likes of Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov.
It is apparent that such success (and comparisons) haven’t overly massaged his ego, but he is aware that if history had turned out differently his name might not be as well known.
Does he have any idea what kind of a writer he’d have been like if he had stayed in Sarajevo?
“It’s hard to guess,” he answers pragmatically.
“Maybe I would have been shot in the first week of the war! Hhmmm … I think I would have been less patient, at the very least, about what I do and what literature requires.”
Having lived in the US for so long, does he think being based in such a different country has radically changed him as a person?
“Being the age I am now it’s difficult to say, and it’s hard to tell, also, how I would have aged if I’d stayed in Sarajevo — people age differently there.
"What living in America has allowed me to do is to focus on my work more; it’s a much bigger space. I have carved out an area that’s big enough not to be distracted.
“For example, when I land in Sarajevo, which is a small place, everyone is pulling at my sleeve — not just my friends, but media people, journalists who know my face.
"In Chicago, people know me, but it’s so big that I can always find a corner where I can work without being interrupted.”
The writer, then, is shaped by where they live as much as by what’s in their head?
“It’s unavoidable, but what matters is how you define your space — be it your office, neighbourhood, city, nation or world. The appropriate size for my ideal space is a city.
"I had a hard time attaching myself to a country or a nation, so I live in Chicago, and that has a natural physical urban space.
"That’s important for me — much as Sarajevo was when I lived there. I connect with cities — the concreteness of them — much more than the abstraction of a nation, or even a State.”
Hermon has lived in America since 1992, but as he visits the city of his birth on a regular basis he doesn’t in any way view himself as an exile.
“To my mind, an exile cannot go back, physically, politically or emotionally. I go back often to Sarajevo, I’m in touch with people, and I write for a weekly magazine.
"If I chose to move back to Sarajevo today I could — we still have an apartment that we all stay in when we go there. I have friends there — I land in the city, I go straight to a party, and I don’t have to update them with fresh news of my life too much.”
Homeland, Hermon remarks, is often a nostalgic abstraction. For him, Sarajevo is solid, coherent: “I don’t go back there for nostalgic reasons.”
Would he and his family ever move there? A swift, emphatic no is the answer. Sense and sensibility kicks in.
“My wife and kids are American, and I love Chicago. I’d have no problem spending more time in Sarajevo, but I like to actually do things there, not just say yes to invites to parties.”
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