An essay and four prose poems
Exile as a homeland
Who I am and what I’m doing here were questions I didn’t ask myself before coming to Canada. Living for a few years in France, I didn’t need to ask them because I knew I would return to Bosnia. Living in Italy for a year following the Bosnian war, I felt as if I were in a train station waiting for the right train to somewhere. On my map Canada became both destination and destiny. Going there without knowing English, I doubted whether an expiry date is tattooed in the writer’s mind in losing two homelands, the one where he was born and the other, more important homeland, his language.
I doubt that I’m the first to uncork the bottle containing a genie in
the shape of a question: How much is such a writer welcomed in his new country? A supplementary question is: What is the average time an immigrant writer must spend in Canada to be treated as part of Canadian literature? But in fact it’s the same question and relates to how writers are treated as passers-by if they come from a different country. I can’t shake off the feeling that there’s an invisible but unpierceable wall between us and the locally born even though I have always considered literature to be a perfect bridge between countries or continents.
Among the scariest questions I have been asked since I came to
Canada are two, each laden with a ton of politeness, a politeness that makes Canadians unique in the world. They are:
1. Do you like being in Canada after you’ve lost everything in your homeland?
2. Could you go back to Bosnia?
The first question suggested to me that I was supposed to feel happy about losing my bookshop, my family home, my brother who died after having been shot in the war and, on top of that, about the death of my mother, who, though she had survived as a partisan during the Second World War, couldn’t survive this horror. I lost the language in which I had published ten books. Books worth nothing because they had been written in a language that officially no longer exists. My country Yugoslavia collapsed, cutting the hyphen in Serbo-Croat, the language we used in schools, and establishing Croat and Serbian as separate languages.
Everything in my life became shadowed by the prefix ‘ex-’ and it was my biggest loss, bigger than house or bookshop. First I lost Yugoslavia as the country I was born in. Then I lost Bosnia, the region under the umbrella of Yugoslavia. During the siege of Sarajevo (1992-1995) even my city was divided between two opposing ideologies. A Serb, at that time I was married to someone who was ethnically Muslim, and I am now married to a Croat. Most of my friends left our ex-country to become citizens of the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, some of them spread all across Europe.
I am living in a country in which the average citizen knows as much
about Bosnia as about black holes in space. My scars don’t cause me pain any more because after the horror I survived I had a chance to choose between walking again weeping or smiling. I don’t know who to thank, but I choose to walk with a smile.
That’s why this kind of question scares me like a nightmare. After so many years living in Canada I can’t resist the temptation to sing the Canadian anthem even though I never miss an opportunity to show my disrespect for every national flag or anthem. After at least thirty-five years of writing, almost the whole my adult life, I am still writing about how much literature, despite different contexts, tastes, and techniques, builds bridges between peoples all over the world, and much more so than writing under a flag ever could.
The other question relates to one I face almost every day. It is about my perhaps thinking of Canada as a train station and I hold a ticket in my hand going to somewhere else. Possibly America, as the most promising country, even after September 11. It was the same kind of question I was asked while being interviewed by a Canadian Embassy official in Rome. It was a question that made me fall in love with Canada. She simply asked me whether I was sure I wanted to go to Canada. It would be impossible to be asked that kind of question in any other Embassy in the world. When I told her that my goal was to continue to be a writer she told me that I would have difficulties with my poor English. A few minutes later I got my papers.
The question of whether one can return to one’s homeland
embodies a terrible fear that every immigrant faces. Even after establishing yourself as a writer with Canada as your new country, you must be ready to swallow that bitter pill again, the same pill any immigrant has to swallow in dealing with customs officials. Recently, I was invited to read my work in Northern Ireland. Although I am what is called a ‘landed immigrant’ in Canada, I still hold a Bosnian passport. I sent it to the British Embassy in Ottawa to get my visitor’s permit. On the passport my occupation is listed as ‘Poet’. A few hours before my flight to Belfast was due to leave an Embassy official sent me a letter asking me what my real job was. I missed my flight because of the time it took to answer that question.
Page(s) 16-17
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