Authors

Enrico Davanzo¹;  ¹ Università degli Studi "G. D'Annunzio" Chieti-Pescara, Italy

Discussion

The proposed paper aims to analyse how Sarajevo-born writers Aleksandar Hemon and Miljenko Jergović portrayed in their autobiographical works the 1990s Yugoslav conflicts and war-induced displacement as disruptive experiences brutally leading them into adulthood proper. Both authors were in their late twenties when war forced them to abandon their native city, since Hemon was left stranded in Chicago as a visiting student by the outbreak of hostilities in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992 and chose not to return, while Jergović definitively left the besieged Sarajevo for Zagreb in 1993; later, they depicted the abrupt transition from peacetime to war as the end of a prolonged adolescence, which they identified with the coeval political agony of socialist Yugoslavia during the 1980s. In this perspective, the disruption of the seemingly orderly pre-war society and its core values (which both writers linked to the post-WWII experiences of their parents’ generation) appears to be mirrored by the traumatic entrance into the ambiguous world of adults, symbolised by the countries where the authors respectively settled in, namely the Clinton-led United States and Croatia under the rule of nationalist leader Franjo Tuđman. The analysis will mostly compare Hemon’s autobiographical short story collection The Book of My Lives (2013) and family-centred memoir My Parents/This Does Not Belong to You (2018) to Jergović’s similarly themed works Otac (Father, 2010) and Kin (2013), focusing on how both authors resorted to “hybrid” linguistic choices and multiplicitous narrations in order to describe the consequences of Yugoslav unity’s disruption on their lives. Indeed, Hemon began writing almost exclusively in American English but still uses Bosnian and Ukrainian realia (given the mixed ethnic origins of his family) together with dual points of view to depict his condition as an immigrant; on the other side, Jergović went on writing in his native language while also employing heterogeneous regional elements and fragmentary perspectives to express his dissent towards nationalist-backed purist linguistic policies, along with his feeling of alienation in the shattered postwar Balkan context. By pointing out the similarities and differences occurring between the two writers’ literary outputs and life paths, we will examine how they described the emotional challenges that usually accompany the shift from adolescence to adulthood as metaphors both for their relocation to different countries and the loss of Yugoslavia’s linguistic and geopolitical cohesion.