Author Aleksandar Hemon
This is the story of how Aleksandar Hemon became precisely the sort of writer Chicago deserves. In 1992, the then-twenty-seven-year-old aspiring Bosnian novelist made a chance visit to the city as part of an American tour, sponsored by the U.S. State Department, for Eastern European journalists. While he was staying with a Russian friend in Chicago, who happened to live in the city’s Ukrainian Village neighborhood, the unthinkable happened: War broke out in Yugoslavia. Watching TV reports about the situation, he saw an old friend beaten bloody during a riot in Sarajevo. His family called, urging him to stay in the U.S. With a politicalasylum waiver and less than a month’s rent in cash, he lucked into a job as a Greenpeace canvasser, making his way across every block in the city, soliciting donations for the environmental nonprofit in a halting English.
“When I came to the U.S., I could speak English but I could not write in it,” Hemon said. “To write in a new language, it has to become part of your subconscious mind.”
It’s in Hemon’s attempt to lure English into the psychic recesses of his mind that his story becomes unimaginable. He began to reread literature that he adored in Bosnian translations (Tolstoy, Chekhov, Raymond Carver) in English, seeking to master his second language. Rejected from a PhD program in Chicago, he plunged ahead with a plan to become an English-language writer and began writing short fiction. His stories were informed by the societal breakdown of his home country during the Bosnian war, a lyrical love of the Chicago streets that borders on the surreal, and a prose style marked by high-wire wordplay in homage to Nabokov, the last Eastern European writer to pull off a spectacular literary rebirth in English as a second language.
“Part of it was part of my plan. The other part was despair,” Hemon said. “With writing in English, I was just going to will it. With the war, I didn’t have any access to my previous life. I thought I would never write in Bosnian again. I figured to be a writer, I would give myself five years to master English. It was the audacity of despair.”
By 1995 (ahead of schedule), Hemon had sufficiently mastered English to begin publishing short works in small literary magazines. A literary agent read one and heard a voice so strange and confident that she began shopping his work to major publishers. By the end of the decade, had published his landmark short story “Blind Jozef Pronek,” the tale of a Bosnian immigrant stuck in Chicago, getting fired from several menial jobs, and living with an artist, her boorish ex-boyfriend, and their alwayson TV, which blasts sports, porn, and live coverage of conflict in the former Yugoslavia. In short succession, a novel-in-stories
and a short-fiction collection followed. A Guggenheim fellowship arrived in 2003, and the next year the MacArthur Foundation awarded Hemon a “genius” grant. Since then he has continued to produce books, winning the 2011 PEN/W.G. Sebald Award and twice being named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The 2015 release of his darkly comic
marked his third novel and sixth book released during his exile in America. While his writing varies wildly across genres (memoir, mystery, postmodern pastiche, dark comedy), his subjects almost uniformly involve Chicago, the Bosnian War, and refugees.
“Chicago has been my home for at least half of my life,” Hemon said. “Immigrants and refugees get stuck where they are. They don’t have the option of shopping for cities. Had my last stop [in 1992] been Orlando, Florida, I might have been stuck there for the rest of
While he makes a point not to overprepare for talks and to keep his appearances fresh and spontaneous, it’s hard not to notice the growing political urgency in Hemon’s nonfiction writing. He has already seen his home country quickly and spectacularly descend into ethno-nationalist war. Last year, in the online literary magazine LitHub, he recounted how he nearly assaulted a man who refused him entrance to an apartment complex during a cold snap. He links a new wave of brutal urges within himself to Trump’s rise and the encouragement of a particularly masculine form of violence, regardless of political affiliation. The essay’s déjà-vu-like subtitle was, “When neighbors turn on each other, it happens fast.”
“At the same time, another part of me — the thinking part, a much larger one, I continued hoping — recognized the pathology of craving violence, knew how wrong it was,” he wrote in the column. “The same part of me understood full well that this kind of longing for retributive violence has been essential to the rise of Trumpism.”
Watching President Trump in office, and seeing how various white nationalist groups take his rise as an explicit endorsement of their views, is an experience with echoes for Hemon that ring loud and clear. “A lot of it is familiar. The same rhetorical tropes work here now as they did in another era for Hungary, for Germany, for Serbia, for Croatia. Trump and his associates are garden-variety nationalists, but they are moving quickly towards fascism.
“There are daily shootings in this country. It might not seem now that any of the violence is ideologically motivated. But I know that can change any day. To think that America is in any way inoculated from violence and from history is delusional. It will only get worse before it gets any better.”
As in his own life, if there’s an antidote to any of this, it lies in art, and in finding unexpected solitary with strangers and neighbors. “To be a writer is to look at the world with fresh eyes. If the world ever becomes normal, I would quit my job. What literature and art can do is refresh your view of the world, resensitize us to the world, and make the world seem new again.” ▼
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