There’s a chapter in Semezdin Mehmedinović’s Sarajevo Blues (City Lights, 1998) in which he momentarily turns his head from the scenes and micro-moments of the siege and recalls a conversation from a decade previously. He writes, “It was snowing and a kid asked me: What’s the most important thing in life?” He can’t come up with a response but the child answers their own question: “I think the most important thing in life is for a lot of things to happen to you, so you’ll have something to remember!” Mehmedinović then regrets the absence of his photo albums “even though they were filled with snapshots that only preserved all the more or less insignificant data of my life. But without them, it was as if proof of my past had been wiped out. As if every moment I had lived had been in vain.”
In 1996, Mehmedinović emigrated to the United States with his wife Sanja and son Harun, living at first in Phoenix, then in Arlington, VA. He returned home in 2016. But his new auto-fiction, My Heart, finds him back in the American southwest, driving through city and desert with Harun, now an accomplished photographer and “the diametric opposite of me.” The difference between them is noted in terms of memory: “I’ve found that you suppress certain memories (above all of the way). Your reasons are understandable. I envy you that, because my most intense memories are of events I would gladly forget.”
I’m not entirely convinced about “gladly forget” since Mehmedinović portrays himself as lingering all day at the fount of memory. He says, “I immediately make all my feelings public” – but they are stated tersely, everything needless pruned away. My Heart, a travelogue and quasi-diary, shares a fixation and dysphoria about memory with Sarajevo Blues — along with a somberly animated tone.
My Heart begins with his heart attack in 2010 and concludes with Sanja’s stroke in 2015. Both events are recalled not to plumb the depths of suffering or to make claims for victimhood but to incorporate their experiences into the melancholic fabric of life. “Misfortune has reduced as to our essence,” he writes. “And nothing is left of us, apart from love.” The misfortunes are palpable, especially the loss of homeland and native language. “That we are foreigners I know from the silence that sets in when a policeman stops us on the road,” he says, “as we sit calmly in the truck waiting for him to speak to us.” John Berger once wrote, “Emigration does not only involve leaving behind, crossing water, living amongst strangers, but also undoing the very meaning of the world and, at its most extreme, abandoning oneself to the unreal which is the absurd.” Knocked about by violent forces, Mehmedinović survives the strafing of Sarajevo only to suffer a myocardial infarction in a shower stall in Phoenix, a quasi-absurd situation in an extreme sense.
It is a particularly American habit not only to extol the benefits and freedoms of the American Dream but to expect them. My Heart offers a tragic vision, inherently and warily European. Mehmedinović’s mordancy punctures the illusions of his country of exile without naming them, and refuses (or isn’t inclined by temperament) to critique them prescriptively. The melancholic embrace of unfulfillment is heard in prose like this:
“My wishes weren’t big, but still none of them came to anything. I longed for a small window from which one could see blue water. I imagined that my in my fifties I would live a peaceful life, with time freed up just for writing. I wanted a small shady café where I would meet with friends … But I ended up as a prisoner on a vast continent, alone, without people to talk to. A foreigner. And I have grown accustomed to this solitude, I have accepted it as payback for the sins that I have committed in my life. And in exchange for my unfulfilled wishes.”
My Heart tell us that increasingly our lives are shaped by griefs that no one can escape and thus make us resemble each other. Obsessed with the burst and fading of memory, Mehmedinović watches for evidence that his internal impulses still pertain in an frightening world. There is discovery in this effort – even if “every word of this diary will be forgotten.”
[Published by Catapult on March 9, 2021, 240 pages with illustrations, $27.00 hardcover]