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A Place for the Tragic

Guido Snel

Universiteit van Amsterdam

European Literatures

I never had a house of my own/nor have I ever ceased imagining it (origin.)

(S.M.)

1.

For the Sorrow of a Continent

Going from one American coast to another,

I saw lonely people, sorrowful and angry,
I saw good people, and even those transmitted the
Only warmth they had to the ring on their finger

And I believe I’ve preserved a sorrowful expression

Within me for the sorrow of a continent
Just like a train preserves the memory of a galleon
Since every message reaches me across my feet
What I mean is, I’m a political
Émigré every trip I take
Always on ground treading water
I feel like I shouldn’t be here
And that I’m standing in the plant diagonally
Like those kids drawn on greeting cards put out by UNICEF

Semezdin Mehmedinović; transl. Ammiel Alcalay

2.
We probably all agree that communities are imagined, that they are not a natural
given. What I believe we should think about, is the role and functioning of the
imagination. But the fact that communities are constructions, does not automatically
mean that the process of imagining them is an intentional one, whereby one becomes
what the imagination wants us to be – or whereby we direct the imagination. Stuart
Hall: ‘Identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned, and
position ourselves within the narratives of the past’ (Hall, 394). There is a huge
difference between being positioned and self-positioning, and the order in which Hall
puts the two leaves no doubt that the shape of a community, the stories it lives by, is
hardly a matter of choice. Freedom may be part of the rhetoric of community
building, it hardly ever is a reality.
Since the beginning of the Yugoslav wars in 1991 we have seen the rise of an
important literature and art of exile. Some of this art still takes a form of Yugoslav
culture as its self-designation, as a post-identity, sometimes nostalgically, sometimes
as a critical accentuation in a national context, sometimes merely in defiance of the
predominant national discourses. At the same time, a younger generation of writers
and artists seems to discover the challenges of a cultural space wider than the national
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ones that came out of the violent identity wars of the 1990s. Therefore, I don’t think it
makes a lot of sense to talk about redefinitions of the region without taking into
account two major factors: globalization, which opens up wholly new outlines, not
just for the kind of communities we envisage (no longer national?), but also for the
way we imagine them. Secondly, the debate on European identity that has of course a
sharp political angle to it, with the problematic notion of the Balkans as a counter-
identity. Exile poetry, the poetry of exile, is at the frontline of these developments.
Azade Şeyhan speaks in her book Writing outside the Nation of a ‘third
geography’ when discussing migrant and exilic literature. The third geography is an
alternative to the dichotomy home and host culture. Exiles or migrants, according to
Şeyhan, when writing ‘[…]between borders and languages, have to plot complex
strategies of translating themselves, in an effort to negotiate their loyalties to nation,
language, ethnicity, class, and gender’ (quoted in Şeyhan, 2000, 8). This is true of
course: the oeuvre of a writer like Dubravka Ugrešić makes ample use, also in fiction,
of the genre of the essay, as a means to explain oneself, to position oneself between
home and host community. But Ugrešić’s experience seems to be hardly one of self-
positioning. When we take her two major books of essays, The Culture of Lies, a
deconstruction of nationalist rhetoric and identity politics, ánd Thank you for not
Reading, then we get a rather nasty sandwich of two types of unfreedom, the local,
post-Yugoslav nationalisms and the Western rationale of the market, between which
the author is positioned. She would like it to be different.

3.
Let’s look into the coming about of new imagined communities by scrutinizing some
verses of the eminent exilic poet Semezdin Mehmedinović. Let’s particularly look
into how positioning and self-positioning occur in his work.
PP go back to the poem ‘For the sorrow of a continent’
Of course the last line of the poem leaves no doubt, the I feels wholly
positioned, forced by the gaze of others into the cliché image of the UNICEF figure. But
much more is at stake in the poem.
Let’s focus on the lines ‘And I believe I’ve preserved a sorrowful
expression/Within me for the sorrow of a continent’.
Talking about position: ‘within me’; ‘a sorrowful expression’ and ‘a
continent’.

‘Within me’
In the two books Mehmedinović’s published up to now, Sarajevo Blues and Nine
Alexandrias, ‘within me’ does not mean a safe, inner place. On the contrary. In
Sarajevo Blues, Mehmedinović’s account of the Sarajevo siege, the inner siege, the
confiscation of memory, and the impossibility to change the outer world through the
written word, is as devastating as the physical siege.
In Nine Alexandrias, a book with three long cycles of poems, published in
2002, the I is a traveler in the footsteps of the beatniks (perhaps due to his fortunate
entrance in the USA through City Lights, Ferlinghetti’s publishing house, and not
through the various Slavic departments in the USA). But he is also a stranger, a
foreigner, on a poetic quest from one Alexandria to another, in American space that is
politically highly charged – it is the week after 9/11. Once more, pressure is exerted
upon him, as the world is now becoming polarized in terms of islam vs. non-islam.
After the Sarjevo siege he again faces the threat of an imposed ethnic identity.
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Moreover, Mehmedinović seems deeply aware of what Josef Brodsky

analyzed in the 1980s about the ‘Condition we call exile’: for the exile, ‘to talk about
one’s plight with a straight face’ is impossible:

PP

A Door upright in the Wind

Alexandria’s at the end of the road

I moved there this summer with the
Intention of writing poetry
This says less of my devotion and
More about this experience of home:

Down by the river I saw a door

That wasn’t part of any house
Just a door held upright in the wind.
If you open it, you can walk right into the river, easily

And declare: ‘Homeless door!’

And behind it the

Infinite interior of home with
Giant Italian gondolas and
Goldfish in an oceanic aquarium

The irony, even self-mockery of the I is obvious; the door itself is devoid of a house;
yet it leads into, opens up an ‘infinite interior’. Self-irony means here that the poet
cannot revert to the tragic, his status as a homeless person makes him equal to
millions of other refugees – as Edward Said said, ‘our age is indeed the age of the
refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration’ (174).

‘Sorrowful expression’ PP weer terug naar eerste gedicht

So, exilic self-irony prevents the I from experiencing his own fate as tragic. But
experiencing the tragic, let alone expressing it, was already problematic and painful
under siege in Sarajevo.

(Eventueel overslaan)
In Sarajevo Blues, Mehmedinović tells about his past friendship with Miroslav
Toholj, a fellow writer. One day, under the Serbian siege, Mehmedinović is sitting
next to his little son, who is drawing. He brushes his fingers through his son’s hair and
recalls that his former friend Miroslav Toholj, ‘who [now] fully devotes himself to the
expulsion of a whole people’, before the war, once, did exactly the same thing:
brushing his fingers through the hair of Mehmedinović’s son while the kid was
drawing. What frightens Mehmedinović is what the present is doing to the past: this
memory was once very precious, now it is contaminated with his former friend’s
current activities. This is the real damage the war is inflicting: it inflates the past:
‘Thus time, and everything with which it was filled, has effected that every feeling in
the memory was stripped of its value’ (31).
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Hier sowieso verdergaan

In Sarajevo, death is everywhere around him and this threat makes it impossible to
“identify it through a specific tragedy” (1). M. senses that the war controls his sorrow,
and that too is a form of oppression. Instead, he often thinks of Goethe’s Der
Erlkönig. He uses it as “a sham” that at least “induces a sense of the tragic” (1). He
borrowed, in a manner of speaking, someone else’s articulation of tragic in order to
cope with daily life under the siege. And he uses the same “sham” to define the fate of
his fellow victims, rephrasing the racist term ethnic cleansing into “tragic migrations”.
The “tragic” in Sarajevo Blues is thus not only an individual means of dealing
with a pain that is too direct to cope with, it is also a means to – temporarily,
tentatively – join the community, to give a name to a shared experience, a name he
can shed at the necessary moment, like a snake’s skin. Hence, in Sarajevo Blues,
‘Tragic migrations’ instead of the ‘racist’ concept of ethnic cleansing. Talking about
self-positioning; to reject ethnic cleansing is to claim the right not to be defined by the
people and their ideas who threaten your life.
What sorrow, whose sorrow is the I talking of in M.’s poem written in the
New World?
An earlier exile to the New World, Czesław Miłosz, also pondered about the
tragic, to be precise about a loss of a sense of tragic, in the New World, in his
autobiographical Native realm (1959). Milosz’ long poem Treatise on Poetry (1956)
suggests a poetic reconciliation between the tragic and the ironic, between the old and
the new world, between temporal and spatial imagination, a reconciliation that takes
place in and through nature: the countryside and the woods of Milosz’ native
Lithuania, of France ánd of New England merge, perhaps not into a liberated space,
freed of politics, but at least a temporary dwelling outside politics, a vacation if you
want.
Miłosz also fought another battle, in the field of cultural politics, to create
space for his idea of Central-Europe, that originated in his desire to create space for a
middle voice, and also in a refusal to chose between either history or literature,
politics or poetry, an attempt to come to terms with the cultural diversity of the post-
holocaust Europe in between Russian and German culture. Yet, the ‘third geography’
Miłosz fathered, the discourse on Central Europe, does not work anymore for
Mehmedinović. The ‘dream of Central Europe’ as Konrád once phrased it, has turned
into the nightmare of Sarajevo. Miłosz has become, in the following poem, a literally
towering figure, a figure of cultural power, and the cultural sphere of Central Europe
has become politicized space, the middle voice an authorative one:

The sun went down right to the gas pumps

Then lost itself in the clouds

I’m standing on Telegraph Avenue and looking

Up, Czesław Miłosz lives on the hill

And because of him I think of my room in Sarajevo

And I think of that room’s bookish utopia

I had wanted to show the symbols of Islam

In the light of so-called western metaphysics

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And I wanted to renew the forgotten

Notion of Jesus the boy wonder

But it all ends in pure desire

As I’m standing on Telegraph Avenue now

I feel like I’m ready, because

There’s nothing else I want to possess

The sorrow of a continent PP weer terug naar eerste gedicht

The last part of the verse: which continent is the poem speaking of? I guess this is also
where we will be able to speak of the imagining of a community.
The earlier quoted poem ‘A door upright in the wind’ already opened a
window on the old world. The sea aquarium is not the first image in Mehmedinovic’s
work to suggest illusionary freedom (and, in the allusion to Ezra Pound, blinded
politics). Glass walls – one gets to look outside, but confinement remains a fact.
Sarajevo Blues already contained valuable pages about the meaning of
freedom. In Sarajevo, the last illusion of literature was shattered mercilessly: the
belief that even under a siege the mind will never be captive, to refer again to Milosz.
Writing under the siege, Mehmedinović understood that the only possible use of his
writing was as an ad for war, no more. Captivity was inevitable – whatever he would
write, it was in one way or another dictated by the siege.
But already in his Sarajevo writings, we can detect another, alternative third
geography, which M. created through actual reading, and through his memory of
books and films he saw before the war. It is not an imagined space of freedom but of
confinement. The war, its ‘hyperreality’ (Baudrillard), and the continuous threat to his
life reminds him of Blade Runner (the last android dying in the rain, the last of his
species PP) and he longs to ‘watch a Yilmaz Güney film again’. Reference is
probably to Yol/The Road, prison film par excellence PP
After 1995, living and writing in the New World, the notion of a third
geography as a prison house, has remained in M.’s poetry. Let’s trace a few of these
notions and look for the outlines of community, where M. situates himself – and I
suggest that the question whether this is a matter of self-positioning or of being
positioned is now hopelessly convoluted.

PP

What time is it?

I am talking to Etel Adnan

daughter of an officer Ottoman empire

– on a windy street in America

in april of the year 2003 –

About Bosnia as it was

before mine and her birth:
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As if I received a letter
postmarked Istanbul
and in the envelop photo’s of mine
that I have never seen before

Etel says: ‘Jack Hirschman whispered

the following story in my ear:
someone asked: What time is it?
And Yogi Berra answered:
You mean, what time is it now?’

Etel Adnan – Beirut. Bilingual author – In the heart of the heart of another country
and Sid Marie-Rose. Obviously, what we see here is a skeptical evocation of the myth
of Ottoman cosmopolitanism, a tradition which for instance Kevin Robins has praised
highly as being worth of reconsideration.
A 2nd tradition of cosmopolitanism relevant in Mehmedinmović’s exile poetry
is that of Central Europe. Milosz has was already been mentioned, but perhaps for
Mehmedinovic an even more prominent figure is Danilo Kiš. In an interview I
conducted with M. for an introduction to a Dutch edition of his poetry, he expressed it
as follows: in Kiš’ sentences, in his syntax, slumbers the notion that at any moment,
the ground under your feet can be swept away. Like Ottoman cosmopolitanism,
Central-European cosmopolitanism is therefore a highly instable condition, it seems to
exclusively offer metaphors of instability and disappearance.
The figure of Kiš and his work also ran through Sarajevo Blues; the leitmotiv
of Der Elkonig; Kiš translated Goethe’s ballad; its plot may be detected, moreover, in
Kiš’ fictionalized autobiography Garden, Ashes. I suggest the plot of the father
incapable of protecting his child can also be taken to say something about generations
and the way each of them has to re-imagine one’s sense of community. Not just
because one cannot rely on the fathers (on Kiš, on Miłosz) for the ideological
blindness that each new generation detects in the community imagined by the fathers,
but also because experience, that which sets every generation aside from the previous
one, dictates the failure of that same community imagined by the fathers.
As an exilic figure, Kiš also looms in the background of Mehmedinović’s
exile.
Now, most of Kiš prose, thematically deals with the micro-history of his
family; but as soon as Kiš expanded his view also thematically to Central Europe, in
the Gulag stories in A Tomb for Boris Davidovič, he came very close to a vision of
Central-Europe, Europe, even Eurazia, of a colossal prison house, a gnostic vision of
an evil continent, with anti-Semitism no longer as a historical given but as the very
face of evil. A sense of metaphysical confinement marked Kiš’ last book published
during his life, the collection of stories The Encyclopedia of the Dead, with a phrase
by Georges Bataille as a motto: Ma rage d'aimer donne sur la mort / comme une
fenêtre sur la cour … Self-positioning? Hardly. Documented history, the universal
chronicle of infamy, overtook Kiš.
In order to sum up, in the transnational space opened up in Mehmedinović’s
poetry, we find both the prospect of confinement and of liberation.
There is an opening up towards two different traditions, also two different
styles of cosmopolitanism, that are both highly problematic and can by no means, in
my view, be unproblematically recycled, let alone celebrated. First Ottoman – Kevin
Robins suggestion is that Europe, in order to regain its lost cosmopolitanism, should
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reconsider its suppressed Ottoman past, but let’s not forget that Etel Adnan’s Beirut is
also post-Ottoman, that the aftermath of both the Ottoman and the Habsburg empire
was marked by massive, racist violence; so in this respect we find ourselves confined
in our desire to position Mehmedinović’s literature, and not just his, in a cosmopolitan
past that is still to be imagined.
Now, back once more to Mehmedinović and the sorrow of a continent.
We have seen how he constructs an imaginary, transnational prison house,
with lines that connect Sarajevo under siege, Turkey in a time of political and cultural
oppression, Beirut in civil war; but also, through Kiš, the Gulag Archipelago, Hotel
Lux in Moscow, a Central-European space with coordinates shattered along countless
and anonymous places of remembrance. What kind of space is delineated by these
lines?
A space which contains the violent endings of two cosmopolitan traditions.
Yet it is a transnational space, where Mehmedinović’s I can dwell, or rather
roam, even though he experiences a profound sense of confinement. No space, even
the ‘infinite interior of home’, can be truly and authentically imagined without its
sense of limitation – unfreedom, violence and exclusion.
Being positioned, or positioning oneself – although we can no longer speak of
freedom of choice – for Mehmedinović the very act of imagining turns out to be
extremely fertile and productive. While writing from the perspective of the outsider,
he nevertheless speaks from within American space. So he observes the ‘implosion of
the continent’ from the perspective of native Americans; and he writes consciously, as
M’s English translator Ammiel Alcalay rightly observes, after James Baldwin’s essay
‘The Price of the Ticket’, about the white man’s sacrifice when migrating into the
New World – the loss of identity, the distortion of one’s surname…
We read a verse earlier on about Mehmedinović’s ‘bookish’ and ‘utopian’
desire, as a young poet, to connect Western metaphysics and Islam. The poems quoted
here record the anxiety of being-in-between, of having not yet established the third
geography. The last cycle of poems in Mehmedinović’s Nine Alexandrias, the treatise
on verse on Cadillac, suggest that a similar connection is made – or rather an older
unity of the world, has been restored.

Looking from east to west, the

White hues gradually change to the color of air.
In the summer the Atlantic humidity makes it
Seem like you’re looking at things through
Fine tissue-paper.
As you go further west
And get to Arizona’s solar monopoly,
Form reclaims the sharp features of
Indian faces
Cadillac’s clean lines
Like the photos in National Geographic.
I’m not a painter, but I think
American mysticism might just be found
In the hyper-real pictures of the world.
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Works Cited

Hall, Stuart. ‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’ in