by Aleksandar Hemon
Some years ago, I visited Semezdin Mehmedinović and his family in their Virginia suburb. One evening, we decided to play some basketball on a nearby court. I don’t remember why or how exactly, but we ended up playing with a deflated ball in complete darkness. We couldn’t see the basket, the ball didn’t bounce, we didn’t have teams or keep score. It was the greatest basketball game I’ve ever played in my life, because I remember myself as being totally present in it. It is precisely this sense of total presence that I desire from literature, and that Semezdin Mehmedinović never fails to generate.
I have long felt a kinship with Mehmedinović’s work, as we share a native language, a love for the city of Sarajevo, and a whole world of literary influences, acquaintances, and references. I consider him to be my favorite living writer in our native language—Bosnian—or, for that matter, in any other language. His book Sarajevo Blues, a collection of poems and prose fragments written during the siege of Sarajevo, is immensely important to me and arguably the greatest book to have emerged from the experience of the Bosnian war.
Yet I am still astonished by the impact and the beauty of My Heart, Mehmedinović’s most recent book published in English. I had read in Bosnian each of the three parts that constitute the book, and when I read it again in Celia Hawkesworth’s wonderful translation, I marveled once more at the precision of his observations, his sensitivity to detail, and his incredible ability to be present in the world while observing it.
Each of the three parts of the book—“Me’med,” “Red Bandana,” and “Snowflake”—deals, in a slightly different way, with the bread and butter of art and literature: love and death, and the suddenly enhanced presence of each in Mehmedinović’s life. Each piece is structured as a journey—the writer is unmoored from the harbor of home—that replicates the situation of displacement, internal and external, caused by the war. And on each journey, Mehmedinović generates endless discoveries of what was once familiar and is now strange again, because that is the effect of time and the presence of death, as inseparable as Siamese twins with a shared heart, on a thinking writer.
Mehmedinović’s language is simple, but only because his vision is clear; his sentences are determined and peaceful, as though conditioned by an inner calm rooted in his indelible wandering worldliness—there is a stable center of love inside him, necessary in a world that is inherently unstable. He is the kind of writer who sees just as clearly and calmly under siege as when driving in Virginia. His literature is equally at home, or equally not at home, in any and all places.
Though My Heart is autobiographical in the sense that the person in the book is the person who wrote it, nothing about it is memoiristic or confessional, and certainly never indulgent or self-centered. Experience is refracted in the world, just as the world is refracted in the experience, while the writing is not descriptive but defamiliarizingly reflective and transformative. Mehmedinović generates knowledge—about love, life, death, family, exile, displacement, past, memory—that is not available otherwise, but his need to do so is both personal (if I don’t remember, who will?) and ethical (if I don’t remember, no one will). “We spend a lot of time remembering the past,” he writes in “Snowflake,” “that’s how we check how much of everything we’ve forgotten.”