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“Leveling Both Interiority and Exteriority into the Flatness of a Crushed Soul”: the Essential Bosnian Context of Hemon’s “Smithereens”

Aleksandar Hemon’s “Smithereens” is a compact story. Every sentence is saturated with meaning; each word is placed with intention. As we read the piece, we are filled with the overwhelming sense that there is somehow more to it, that its characters merely skim the surface of a richer, more complex existence. The story itself belongs to the author’s larger project of working through his identity as a Bosnian immigrant in Chicago, in fact, all his writing deals in some way with the Yugoslav wars, Bosnia, or Chicago. Hemon is praised for his “semi-autobiographical protagonists, young men from a country that is falling apart” (Matthes 2) and we get the sense that it is one and the same individual – albeit in varying phases of maturity – that speaks to us in all his pieces. Academics often describe it as “fictional non-fiction”, and the author himself notes that “there is no such distinction in Bosnian literature” (Boswell 1). His work also avoids the neat packaging of belonging to a single genre, a particularly witty critic noting that Hemon “[takes] the formal structure of humor, the grammar of comedy, the rhythms and beats of a joke, and used them to reveal despair” (Schine 3). By examining the historical, cultural, and generational tensions that Hemon comes from, the setting and characters in “Smithereens” take on a greater significance. They serve as tools of remembrance and admissions of responsibility for an author whose writing is impossible to separate from the context that it comes from.

It is impossible to examine Hemon’s work without addressing the historical context from which he writes. He grew up in Sarajevo, in what was then Yugoslavia, under the totalitarian rule of Josip Tito’s “relaxed socialism” (Hemon, “Failed Experiment of Yugoslavia” 3). Hemon visited the United States in his late twenties for a summer exchange trip, during which war broke out in Yugoslavia, splintering it into three separate countries. In the matter of weeks, Hemon became a political refugee, left to construct a new life and identity for himself. According to him, learning English and “converting Chicago into my mental space, developing a new personal urban infrastructure, became psychiatrically urgent, metaphysically essential” (Hemon, “Mapping Home” 2). The atrocities of the subsequent Bosnian genocide rendered him unable to write in his own native language, and he explains that “Bosnian was too loaded with what was going on and too damaged with the absence of people who spoke it around [him], which was directly related to the war” (6). English became a way of expressing and working through trauma too painful to recount in his native tongue because he had “no idea when the war would end and when [he] would have access to people who speak the language, or the culture, again” (Boswell 251). The choice of writing “Smithereens” in English is deliberate, in part because it opens a window to a broader Western audience, in part because there is no other way.

Hemon’s work is perhaps most widely examined for his positioning between Bosnia and the US, and in “Smithereens” he explores a world that is fundamental to who he is but no longer exists. He is referred to as a “leading voice of the post-socialist diasporic generation” and academics find particular interest in his “meaningful forms of mirroring, and reverse mirroring between the United States in his native country” (Luca 2). A lot of his pieces, especially his novels, attempt this careful positioning between two cultures, and his characters are always directly engaging with physical spaces in the US and Bosnia. Hemon explains that he is “not so much trying to root stories in some kind of geographical reality, but in a physical reality”, since “the greatest trauma that any immigrant copes with is the sense of rupture and discontinuity” (Hundley 2), and when asked about his early days in Chicago in a recent interview he explains, “the siege was making it impossible for me ever to return to the defined space of my previous life. If my mind and my city were the same thing, then I was losing my mind” (Boswell 247). Writing about places he has lost, for him, is a way to regain a sense of self that slips from his grasp otherwise. The same holds true for “Smithereens”, which is itself an exploration of the world he has lost, full of descriptions of “cafeteria grease, wood fire, and cigarette smoke,” and the “thumping from the disco club in the basement” (1). The setting itself, Jahorina, is the same mountain that Hemon’s family would come to during their winter vacations (Hemon, “The Magic Mountain” 1), and which he returns to in the rest of his writing.

The physical setting of the Bosnia from Hemon’s childhood makes more sense when we also consider the idealism that accompanies his parents’ generation. The decades after the Second World War were an age of “progress and optimism”, which were “evident in the creation of the middle class, which consisted of the people exactly like [his] parents”, he explains in a memoir (Hemon, “Failed Experiment of Yugoslavia” 12). His parents, especially his mother, grew up “building the country as she was building herself” (5). Tito’s authoritarian regime gave his parents an education and lifestyle that was unheard of before that time, and Hemon reminds us that “it’s hard today to comprehend the magnitude of the leap into a better life that someone like [his] mother made in Tito’s Yugoslavia” (5). In “Smithereens”, it is this same lifestyle that enables the mountain cabin in Jahorina. We see further hints of this optimism throughout the piece, with the “banging of hammers, the din of aspiration” of other weekenders who are “perpetually getting ready for some future in which active life would be successfully completed and there’d be nothing but peace, virginal nature, and retirement” (2).

Yet in this description of “nothing but peace, virginal nature, and retirement”, there is a subtle but naïve cynicism that is characteristic of Hemon’s generation. The same way of life that is so treasured by the older is quickly taken for granted by the younger; the idealism that fills their parents with hope becomes silly and outdated. When Hemon remembers his youth, he remembers that his “teen-age politics were indistinguishable from [his] precocious cynicism”, and that at the time he equated his parents’ idealism with “primitive patriotism” (Hemon, “Failed Experiment of Yugoslavia ” 6). Hemon presents this idea to us in “Smithereens” with the image of two siblings smashing plates in a trash dump. It is with this act of destruction that two members of the younger generation “discovered the pleasure of unbridled, unlimited destruction, the endless joy of converting something into nothing” (2), dismantling the world that their parents devoted their lives to creating. There is no time to pause and examine the consequences of these actions in these moments, much like there was no time to really anticipate and prepare for the impending war for Hemon himself. “It was hard for me to imagine war in all its force,” he tells us in another memoir, “in much the same way that a young person can imagine all the symptoms of an illness but finds it hard to imagine death: life seems so continuously, intensely present” (Hemon, “Mapping Home” 7).

Hemon doesn’t stop there; “Smithereens” is narrated from a point in the future, and there is an additional layer of retrospective clarity and guilt that comes with it. “This was new to us back then. Now it isn’t”, the narrator tells us, breaking the spell of cathartic release, “now we know that that was one of the happiest days of our childhood, perhaps our entire life” (3). We see a similar use of time in Hemon’s memoirs about his own life, with a wizened narrator reflecting on the foolish ideas of a former self. In a memoir about his mother’s idealism, Hemon notes that “a gap opened up between us, idealogical and generational, resembling in many ways the gap between her and her parents’ generation, except that I never (until now) felt guilty about that discontinuity”. (Hemon, “Failed Experiment of Yugoslavia” 10). This retrospective clarity is articulated more concretely another essay:

Nowadays in Sarajevo death is all too easy to imagine and is itself continuously, intensely present, but back then the city was fully alive, both inside me and outside me. Its indelible sensory dimensions its concreteness, seemed to defy the abstractions of war. I have learned since then that war is the most concrete thing there is, a reality that swallows all, easily overriding any other mode of existence and levelling both interiority and exteriority into the flatness of a crushed soul. (Mapping Home 8)

The act of breaking dishes shares the same innocent lack of foresight that Hemon felt in the buildup to the war, and the consequences of both are irreversible and impossible to unsee, even when “new generation of refuse” come to replace the shattered remains. After all, “underneath it all were our smithereens, that we could go on forging them for as long as we were alive” (3). Consequently, the broken dishes that are buried under layers of trash come to exist only in memory, much like the no longer existent Bosnia that Hemon remembers and calls home. Whatever world is built in its place is built on a foundation of splintered remnants of a former ideal.

“Smithereens” inhabits a realm of utmost significance for Hemon. It is an exploration of a world propped up by the idealism of his parent’s generation and dismantled by the cynicism of his own, a space that is fundamental to who he is and that he will never come back to. We feel the momentary cathartic release, both ideological and physical, from smashing dishes in the back of a garbage dump combined with the bitter aftertaste of the devastation that followed. The narrator is not only coping with the trauma of war and genocide but struggles with a newfound understanding of and sympathy for what he was once so quick to dismiss. While this story is one that is tinged with nostalgia and remembrance, Hemon’s other pieces explore the idea of generational guilt further. “I realize that genocide has been absorbed into the very bodies of Bosnians,” he tells us. “If it is true that trauma can change a person’s DNA makeup, Kardzic and his crimes have entered our genes, changing the way in which Bosnian bodies move, live, and breathe in the world” (Hemon, “Dancer in the Dark” 4-5). If this is the case, then it is impossible to separate Hemon’s writing from the Bosnian context from which he writes, his work a tribute and testament to this immutable fact of his very existence.

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