All wars have their own brutal logic, but only a few manage to make an entire country disappear.
The former Yugoslavia was still a one-party socialist country under General Tito when I came to Macedonia from Australia in the 1980s to learn Balkan and Romany folk music. When I returned two decades later, this time as a playwright guest of Belgrade-based theater artists and anti-war activists Dah Teatar, the wars had broken the country into pieces. Hundreds of thousands of people were dead; millions more were displaced.
In researching my novel Nadia, about a young queer Bosnian refugee living in London who fears her co-worker may be a Serbian ex-sniper from the war she fled, books such as U.K. war reporter Misha Glenny’s The Fall of Yugoslavia: The Third Balkan War and Laura Silber and Allen Little’s Yugoslavia: Death of A Nation provided historical context. But the hyperreal, terrifying and tragicomic experience of surviving a melting world, in a war zone and in exile, could only be absorbed imaginatively through conversations with friends and colleagues, and through fiction, memoir and poetry.
Here are nine books—funny, tragic, absurd, harsh and beautiful—about the aftermath of the Balkan wars. While they’re different in tone, style and approach, certain strands recur: Ironic humor as bitter and dark as black coffee; absurdist or fabulist elements, born of the dissolution of reality in the acid of murderous politics; moments of simple observation, when certain details burn themselves into the eye; the use of formal juxtaposition to convey the epistemic shock and grotesquerie of war’s collision with ordinary life.
The Book of My Lives by Alexsandar Hemon
Alexsander Hemon’s extraordinary memoir-in-essays interweaves memories of his life in Sarajevo; reflections on war’s aftermath, food, football and friendship; the divided condition of the immigrant; love, family and heartbreak; and the attempt to rebuild a sense of home in his new city-of-exile, Chicago.
Briefly in the US on a writing fellowship, during Hemon’s absence the looming war engulfed Sarajevo. On May 2, 1992, the day after he canceled his return flight, the last trains left the city and “the longest siege in modern history” began. At first unmoored and unable to comprehend American space, Hemon writes about the need to find in Chicago what he’d lost through exile from Sarajevo: a “geography of the soul.” He builds this, block by block, through walking the city and finding: a café, a bar, a football game in which he can anchor himself.
Hemon’s book is a mosaic made from such maps and stories, the ironies and impact of which are only apparent from absorbing the whole. The essay “The Book of My Life” is about Hemon’s Sarajevo literature professor, who told his students about the book his five-year-old daughter was writing. “She had titled it ‘The Book of My Life,’ but had written only the first chapter. She planned to wait for more life to accumulate, he told us, before starting Chapter 2. We laughed, still in our early chapters, oblivious to the malignant plots accelerating all around us.” Later, the professor joins the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS) “headed by Radovan Karadžić, the talentless poet destined to become the world’s most-wanted war criminal.” When the SDS is involved in the bombing of the Sarajevo library, Hemon writes, “The infernal irony of a poet (bad though he may have been) and a literature professor causing the destruction of hundreds of thousands of books did not escape me.”
It was only on finishing the book that I was struck, in turn, by the infernal irony of Hemon naming his own book by adapting a title (“Life” to “Lives”) invented by the young child of a book-burner and mass-murderer.
The Little Red Chairs by Edna O’Brien
The collapsing black hole at the center of Irish novelist Edna O’Brien’s book is a lightly fictionalized Radovan Karadžić—the “talentless poet” and “war criminal” Hemon references. Dr. Vladimir Dragan has reinvented himself as a mystic shaman and sex healer, hiding out from retribution for his genocidal crimes against Bosnian Muslims in a conservative Irish village. Fidelma, a lonely villager who longs to conceive a child and cannot foresee it happening with her older husband, becomes pregnant by the charismatic outsider. But when the village discovers that Dragan is “the Beast of Bosnia,” Fidelma is reviled, violated by a group of local men, and driven out.
In Fidelma’s subsequent displacement and new life of exile in London, her own experience connects in unexpected ways with that of other refugees from catastrophes large and small. The story is told from multiple viewpoints and ranges from flat, spare prose to hallucinatory insights, and skewers the simple labels and easy cruelties, large and small, that create scapegoats for both misogynist violence and genocide. Yet it is also a story of hope and survival, as Fidelma travels to the Hague to attend the war crimes trial of her prior lover in search of answers. Her world expands through personal loss into a wider grasp of the deadly consequences of following charismatic leaders.
Girl at War by Sara Nović
The Deaf Croatian American Sara Nović’s novel toggles in spare and elegant prose between two periods in her fictional protagonist’s life: Ana’s war-shattered young childhood in Croatia, and her present life as a war adoptee and college student in the US. Like The Little Red Chairs and The Book of My Lives, this evokes the impossibility of fitting a war-shattered past and an oblivious present landscape into a single frame. Nović writes poignantly of the incomprehension of Americans, who mean well but can’t begin to grasp what happened in the Balkan wars; Ana decides simply to shut down that part of her life. Her attempt to do so falls apart when the attacks on the Twin Towers on 9/11 land on her new home city, New York, shattering her fragile inner equilibrium.
Ana spirals back into a barely-buried past full of horrors that resulted, at ten years of age, in her temporary muteness and her becoming “a child with a gun.” She returns to Croatia to trace the remnants of her family’s life. Accompanied by Luka, her childhood best friend, and the book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (Rebecca West’s 1930s travelogue and cultural-historical commentary on the Balkans), Ana sets out on a tour to revisit scenes of loss and violence. Through descriptions of burned houses and overgrown forest massacre sites, Girl at War evokes the imperfect and unfinished work of bearing witness to obscured atrocities. “I looked out at the gilded mountains and thought of the centuries of war and mistakes that had come together in this place. History did not get buried here. It was still being unearthed.” In the book’s gorgeous final image, the moon fills the gaps in a wounded wall, layering memories of past wholeness over current broken-ness through Ana’s attentive and longing gaze.
The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht
In Téa Obreht’s heralded debut novel, the buried past literally poisons the soil: A group of sickly diggers return to the site of an orphanage to find, exhume and lay to rest one of their number who was improperly buried. This strand of the story recurs in the present-day of the narrator, the young doctor Natalia, who has traveled to the orphanage to inoculate the children. At first skeptical of the diggers’ resistance to Western medical solutions to their malaise, she slowly comes to empathize with their search.
The Tiger’s Wife revolves around Natalia and her grandfather’s close relationship in the present and in Natalia’s childhood—also a doctor, he is a story-teller par excellence. Obreht avoids historical specifics of the wars, instead layering the 1990s conflict, its cruelties and unburied grudges and ghosts, over prior conflicts and the mythic stories her grandfather tells her. When her grandfather disappears, Natalia looks for answers by revisiting his stories.
In the novel’s boldest twist, what seemed a Grimm-style folk tale about a witch who marries a tiger turns out to be based on real events from the grandfather’s village childhood: a deaf-mute abused woman befriends a tiger who has escaped from a zoo, arousing deadly suspicions in the village. An innocent boy is tricked into delivering her death, in the disguise of medicine.
Death and medicine, rational science-based healing, and the deeper soul-sickness that only literal and metaphysical exhumation and ritual can heal—all are interwoven in this powerful coming-of-age tale to show that sometimes, only when truth is told slant through stories can certain histories unfold.
The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna
Aminatta Forna’s novel takes place over a decade after the end of the exceptionally bloody conflict in the Krajina region of Croatia. At its center is a house, which an English tourist falls in love with and hires a local to restore. When Duro Kolak, the “hired man” (and narrator), begins renovations, he gradually uncovers the mosaic of a peacock hidden under old plaster, reviving the memory of the previous residents who were violently removed, and raising tensions in the village. The story, like the house itself, is a palimpsest, and Kolak both participates in and resists the slow scraping back of the present to reveal an ugly past. The compelling question posed is not the novel’s most obvious (how could people turn on their long-time neighbors?), but the thornier and more subtle problem of what to do afterwards—how to keep living next door to the perpetrators, drinking in the same bars, doing business in the same shops—when it’s your home and you have nowhere else to go.
Sarajevo Blues by Semezdin Mehmedinović, translated by Ammiel Alcalay
Poet and novelist Semezdin Mehmedinović remained in Sarajevo with his family for the duration of the siege while he played a vital role in the city’s renowned cultural resistance. This harrowing and beautiful book of poems and short prose juxtaposes small everyday moments, both tender (stroking a child’s hair) and horrifying (walking past corpse-eating dogs), with insights into the ubiquity of death and the persistence of beauty. The everyday and the world-rending are entwined.
In the poem “Iman Bey’s Mosque,” Mehmedinović writes, “Here’s what I think: there are neither major or minor tragedies. Tragedies exist. Some can be described. There are others for which every heart is too small. Those kind cannot fit into the heart.” Through the precision, gaps and collisions of his writing, Mehmedinović creates an imaginative space in which the kind of tragedies that “cannot fit into the heart” reverberate. He now lives in the US: prompted by surviving a heart attack and reflecting on his bifurcated life, his autobiographical novel, My Heart, was published in 2021.
The Bosnia Elegies by Adrian Oktenberg
The simplicity and spacing on the line of Adrian Oktenberg’s poems evoke a kind of thought punctuated and shot through with silence, on the border of the unspeakable. There is love, and a bed lit by sun. Roses. Scenes of public destruction; micro-moments of acute personal loss. These poems convey the psychic aftermath of war as inextricable from the ruinous politics of genocide.
“Memory persists with or without speech
Spoiled memory humiliated memory memory broken
into its heartbroken parts every strand shredded
Common memory deep memory
Ruined by this war.”the form for it is a spiral
Me & My Multi-cultural Street by Jasmina Tešanović
Jasmina Tešanović’s book is a multi-genre mixture of personal essays, reflections, letters and political manifestos. Published by Feminist Publisher 94 in Belgrade in 2001, the book is split in the middle between text written in English, and—turned upside down and read the other way—in Serbian. Tešanović is an anti-war activist, feminist, translator, film-maker and pacifist whose worked for decades with Women in Black, a group who opposed all war and supported refugees. With Habiba Metikos and Julie A. Mertos, she also edited The Suitcase: Refugee Stories from Bosnia and Croatia, where through essays, letters, poems, photographs and personal testimony, refugees of all ethnicities from Bosnia and Croatia recount tales of forced exile.
Although Me & My Multi-cultural Street is unavailable in the U.S., I include the book for its formal inventiveness and moral force, and also simply to make its absence here visible. The book presents radical feminist and anti-war perspectives from former Yugoslavia that are often missing from patriarchal and Anglophone frameworks, and depicts the absurd and lethal results of forcibly sorting the inhabitants of a thoroughly intermarried and inter-ethnic country into “pure” ethnic groups.
The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugrešić
Dubravka Ugrešić was a Croatian literature professor and an ironic and scathing critic of the politics of ethnic division in her former country who relocated from Zagreb to Holland after the wars. A major international literary voice, she died this year.
The Ministry of Pain’s protagonist, like Ugrešić, is a literature professor who has fled Zagreb and finds herself teaching a class to her fellow exiles on a subject that no longer exists: the literature of Yugoslavia. Sensing her students are as lost as she is, Tanja Lucić changes the course to a therapeutic purpose, the collective reclamation of nostalgic memories. But language itself is now a minefield: For instance, Serbo-Croatian is now two separate languages, distinguished only by minute differences in dialect. When the course falls apart, so does Lucić; finally, she is shaken from numbness into rage and grief after reporting a degrading assault by a former student.
Lucić has a bleak and prescient view of the future of displaced Eastern European humanity that could equally describe the precarity of today’s American gig workers: Undergirding the emerging rhetoric of connection, fluidity, globalism, “[a]ll through the grey backwaters people will be eking out precarious livings manufacturing the goods the West European magnates are calling for […] They will sell their sperm, their kidneys, they will sell any organ that will fetch a price on the global black market. They will rent out fresh Eastern European sexual organs to the weary ones of Enlarged Europe […] And some of them will travel all the way to the shores of Western Europe, where the more fortunate will pick asparagus in Germany and tulips in Holland and the less fortunate will scrub toilets.”
And yet the numbness is broken; while retaining its ironic tone, the book concludes with Lucić walking through a landscape at once imaginary, flooded with nostalgia, and a toy-like Amsterdam which is, nevertheless, now her home.