Aleksandar Hemon: My Parents: An Introduction & This Does Not Belong to You

I just finished Aleksandar Hemon's My Parents: An Introduction and am in the middle of his This Does Not Belong to You (they are bound together, tête-bêche). I was recently asked what my methodology of reading is, so I feel like I should say that I bought the book at Unnameable, oh, about a year ago since the author features prominently in the informal curriculum of one of my friendships. I picked it up off my shelf the other day out of bit of nostalgia expressed through the desire for connection through an author, a book. And this all directed me to the text, and propelled me into it, but once inside, though I am still no doubt projecting the friendship (and all my other readerly baggage) onto the text, I enter into the text and its own particular universe of rules and concerns.

Once there, I found myself moved by My Parents, a sort of biography of Hemon's parents (and thus also of apiculture, singing, the rise and fall of Yugoslavia, gender roles, immigrant life in Canada, and many other things besides).

When I reached Chapter 3, whose title is "Catastrophe," I knew that I would have to send this book around to my sisters (who are maybe reading this). My mom (who is also maybe reading this) always told us, when we lived in Dallas around some very wealthy people with their very cold houses and their perfume clouds that we were "mice running with the elephants." Our half-joking family motto is pathein mathein: to learn is to suffer, and our family tradition is that we suffer together. At this moment, I feel grateful for this, because our shared family self-perception as oddballs and outsiders, has taught me about how to be proud of being different, or at the very least, to romanticize it in good cheer—good practice for someone who turned out to be a trans lesbian poet.

I feel like I might be giving the wrong impression, because I also never laugh more than on our family calls that have become regular weekly events during the pandemic. I laughed a little bit like this when Hemon describes the role of katastrofa in his family's life: first when his father said to his wife, "Teri, tell me about your family. What bad happened?" and another moment, when he is driving his mother past a bridge being built when she remarks, "Look at that bridge. It looks pretty weak to me. That bridge will surely collapse."

He explains where his parents are coming from:

The 'what bad happened' was a shorthand (or longhand) for catastrophe. He asked her to lead him into the history of her family by way of outlining the ruptures that defined it, for that's how he would tell the story of our family: the wars, the injuries, the displacements, the losses, the struggles, the moments of danger and despair. There could be no history without catastrophe; to outline a history, one had to narrative its disasters; to formulate one's position in the world, one had to define oneself in relation to the experienced catastrophes. And that which could not be narrated could not be comprehended. A family—a world, a life—without a catastrophe could not be conceptualized, because it was an impossible proposition. If catastrophe is the dramatic event that initiates the resolution of the plot, then its absence suggests a possibility that the tragic plot will never be resolved. A catastrophe, in other words, might be a trap, but it also allows for a narrative escape. If you were lucky enough to have survived the catastrophic plot twist, you get to tell the story—you must tell the story.

Hemon goes on to consider the difference (mainly, by his reckoning, one of degree) between English's "catastrophe" and Bosnian's "katastrofa" and to enlist his sister Kristina, a psychotherapist, in helping to define katastrofa.

I appreciate Hemon on translation in this chapter:

"I'm of a staunch belief that anything that can be said and thought in one language can be thought and said in another. The words might have a different value or interpretative aura, but there is always more than enough overlapping not to dismiss the process of translation, which is essential not only to the project of literature, but to the project of humanity as well. Yet it can be exceedingly difficult, particularly if the meaning of a word/concept is inscribed in the body."

And this is the line I think Hemon meaningfully models how to walk in how he approaches writing about his parents: to identify, but not to over-identify. Part of caring for others is in recognizing likenesses in our experiences and holding that feeling and that knowledge alongside the irreducibly other part of other people. If over-identify, we turn everyone into us and if we under-identify, the world becomes full of strangers.

Last year I started writing an autobiographical novel that I got about 50,000 into (okay FINE, 46,578) but have been stalled on for a while. I should say that something about this book—possibly the way Hemon structures the story of his family, or narrates his role as participant-observer, or his dark wit—unblocked something and has me feeling ready to do more of the memory-work that project requires.