Balkanism in Aleksandar Hemon’s The Question of Bruno and Nowhere Man Western representations of the Balkans and its people Nina Bostič Bishop Balkanism as a paradigm was first introduced by Maria Todorova and refers to historical representations of this region and its people by the West in a negative and stereotypical manner, typically as a place marked by backwardness, violence, savagery and ethnic conflicts. The term is associated with Edward Said’s idea of Orientalism that relies on stereotypes, generalizations, and simplifications of Oriental cultures and peoples, depicting them as exotic, irrational, mysterious, or inferior. In her work Imagining the Balkans, Todorova draws some parallels, but she also points out the differences between the two paradigms. However, she agrees that both paradigms have been linked to reinforcing stereotypes and biases about the regions and their people, depicting them as an inferior Other that is binary to the superior West. In several of his literary works, the Bosnian-American author Aleksandar Hemon addresses this negative construction of a narrative and image of the Balkans that misrepresents the region and its people. He does this by introducing characters who are Westerners practising Balkanism in their relationships with characters, who are often involuntary migrants as a result of the Balkan war in the 1990s. By so doing, the author attempts to demythologize the Balkans and its people. The paper analyses the manner in which the author attempts to deconstruct this negative narrative that does not accurately reflect the complexity and diversity of the region in two of his works, The Question of Bruno (2000) and Nowhere Man (2002). In addition, the paper also attempts to identify how these stereotypical, negative views of the Balkans affect the identity of the Balkan exiles that populate these two works. AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 49 · Heft 2 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2024-0025 Nina Bostič Bishop 192 1. Introduction The paradigm of Balkanism was first proposed by Maria Todorova in her work Imagining the Balkans ([1997] 2009) and refers to the reductionist, stereotypical, biased and prejudiced representations of the Balkans by the West since the 19 th century. Todorova analyses representations of the region throughout media channels as being typically backward, tribal, primitive, savage, uncivilized, and barbaric, therefore, disseminating and introducing balkanist discourse to the general public and thus, gradually constructing a common Western view of the Balkan region and its people as not being able to “conform to the standards of behaviour devised as normative by and for the civilized world” (Todorova 2009: 3) or, in other words, as the Other. The manner in which such biased representations have affected the identities and subjectivities of the Balkan migrants that populate Aleksandar Hemon’s two literary works The Question of Bruno and Nowhere Man is at the centre of this analysis. 2. Balkanism In Imagining the Balkans, Todorova studies the phenomenon that she refers to as Balkanism and the manner in which the Balkan region has been imagined historiographically. Todorova’s concept of Balkanism partly draws on Edward’s Said concept of Orientalism 1 that he developed in his eponymous study, Orientalism, which was first published in 1978 and in which he analyses the Western world’s textual practices of portraying the Orient as an exotic, mysterious and backward Other that is also static, unchanging and passive. In this way, Said observes the construction of a dichotomy of the East and the West that can, therefore, be typically imagined as dynamic, rational and progressive, gaining an authority over the East. However, despite the general tendency to view Balkanism as only one variant of Orientalism, Balkanism is also geographically and historically concrete. Todorova firmly maintains that although both may be used as powerful metaphors, Balkanism is less slippery and intangible in its nature as it is unclear what the real Orient is. Said denied its existence and since the time of the Greeks “the East has always existed as an elastic and ambiguous concept” (Todorova 2009: 11). By contrast, Balkan was at first the name of a mountain, and then the peninsula and the entire region and only became a pejorative symbol with the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire by the beginning of the twentieth century. Therefore, Balkanism cannot be perceived as “merely a subspecies of orientalism” (8) as the two phenomena seem to be identical, but are in fact only similar (11). She also states that, 1 Todorova states: “In introducing the category of balkanism, I was directly inspired by - and at the same time invited critical comparison to - Said’s “orientalism”, as well as the subsequent literature on postcolonialism.” (Todorova 2009: 192) Western representations of the Balkans and its people 193 in addition to the geopolitical reason, Balkanism evolved independently from Orientalism also because of the absence of real colonialism. According to Todorova, in the Balkans “there is always present the consciousness of a certain degree of autonomy” (17) as the region was marked by Byzantium rule for several centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire that was more concerned about maintaining and integrating it into a larger imperial structure rather than establishing a colony characterized by resource exploitation. Among other things, Balkanism can be explained as a “a reaction to the disappointment of the Western Europeans’ ‘classical’ expectations in the Balkans” (Todorova 2009: 20). Another reason is that the region was predominantly Christian, so it possessed for a long time “the crusading potential of Christianity against Islam” (20). Finally, Todorova mentions the construction of the Balkan self-identity that was formed against the oriental Other as one of the reasons why Balkanism cannot merely be a variant of Orientalism. Furthermore, Balkanism was shaped by around 1000 years under Byzantium that had political, economic and cultural effects on the entire region, which was followed by approximately 500 years under the Ottomans that, in addition to long-lasting demographic and cultural changes, also gave this southeast European peninsula its name, as according to Božidar Jezernik, the name the Balkans derives from the Turkish noun balkan, meaning a rugged and wooded mountain chain that in the 19th century became generally used to refer to the area “to meet the need for a short-hand label for the new states that emerged in the territory previously known as European Turkey or Turkey-in-Europe” (Jezernik 2004: 24). Jezernik also states that in the 1911 issue of Encyclopaedia Britannica the Balkans are defined as “encompassing Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia-Slavonia, Dobrudja, Greece, Illyria, Macedonia, Montenegro, Novibazar, Serbia and Turkey” (24), whereas the 1995 edition included Romania, Vojvodina, Moldova and Slovenia, but excluded Greece (24). Jezernik also gives a description of the Balkans by an unnamed German author that illustrates the stereotypical views of the region held by the West as the author writes that the Balkans is like a “garden shed standing beside the noble West European villa housing many people who were unable to get on with each other, and quarrelled incessantly among themselves” (25), thereby enforcing the stereotype. Therefore, it can be concluded that Balkanism is a development with its own characteristics since the imagined Orient that Said theorises was non- European, non-white and closely linked to the religion of Islam as the religion of the Other and was sometimes romanticized, while the Balkans was a geographic region in Europe that had no true colonial past and was as Todorova states the “unrivalled centre of the civilized European world” (11), with a mostly white and Christian population. It was not until the fall of Constantinople in the 15 th century that the term ‘the Balkans’ became pejorative as the power of the Orthodox church diminished and several Nina Bostič Bishop 194 small and economically weak nation-states were created. It is for this reason that Andrew Hammond states that Said “demystified Western representations of the Islamic Middle East and Northern Africa, viewing their binary constructs not as empirically grounded but as an institutionalized, cumulative tradition of textual statements that have channelled and controlled Western knowledge of the Orient from the eighteenth century onwards.” He thereby ascribes the main reason for advancing the imperial supremacy of the West to representation (Hammond 2007: 201) and acknowledges that the influence of Said’s work on Orientalism has had a considerable impact on analyses of Western representations of the Orient and other parts of the world. He also states that there are differences between Orientalism and Western representations of the Balkans: [a]s opposed to the Islamic Middle East, with its status as external to Europe, the Balkans are the internal Other, a liminal zone which threatens the continent’s orderly, progressive civilization from within the perimeters of Europe itself. (Hammond 2005: 136) However, both Hammond and Todorova state that in addition to differences, there are also similarities between Western representations of the Orient and the Balkans, namely “mystery, degeneracy, savagery, immortality, chaos” as they may be identified “persistently in post-Enlightenment writings on the two regions” (Hammond 2007: 202) and that the two discourses “have been structured according to exactly the same binarist logic, with South-East Europe proving as effective an antitype for the enlightened, progressive, imperial West as the Islamic East” (ibid.). After Constantinople fell in 1453 and the power of the Orthodox church declined and Western Europe began experiencing a considerable economic growth, the Orthodox world started viewing the East as less privileged. The division of Europe into the uncivilized East and the civilized West occurred later, during the Enlightenment. At first this split was only spatial but it then developed into a binary between a society that is backward, savage and irrational on one hand, and a society that is rational and civilized, on the other. Todorova claims that this division occurred on the account of the Enlightenment movement and that it occurred when Eastern Europe began to lag behind the West as it was continuously being labelled as undeveloped and industrially backward without the necessary progressive social relations and institutions that the more developed capitalist West featured, along with irrational and superstitious cultures untouched by the Western progressive movement of Enlightenment (Todorova 2009: 11-12). She goes on to state that the term ‘Balkan’ was assigned a negative connotation sometime by the beginning of the 20 th century when the Ottoman Empire collapsed and nation-states were formed, which resulted in nationalistic tendencies, so the Balkans became “a symbol for the aggressive, intolerant, barbarian, semi-developed, semi-civilized and semi oriental.” Western representations of the Balkans and its people 195 (194) On that note, Hammond writes that travelogues of the 19th century feature almost no positive accounts and describe the region as a destination with a rugged landscape and an “ample scope for masculinist adventure” (Hammond 2005: 136). Most 19 th century texts, he observes, report on the region as “abject” and “primitive, chaotic, barbarous and with a “ferocity…inherited from their savage ancestors” (ibid.), which brought about the representational paradigm evolving solely around “obfuscation, savagery, discord and backwardness” (ibid). In Wild Europe: The Balkans in the Gaze of Western Travellers (2004), Jezernik finds the representation of the Balkans to be more or less identical. This pejorative use of the word “Balkan” then continued at the time of WW1. Todorova also states that the great crime of the Balkans, which she refers to as the Balkans’ ‘original sin’, was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Gavrilo Princip, the event that caused WW1. Todorova goes on to say that this event “left an indelible mark on all assessments of the region” and “wiped off all the ambivalence” of whether the region was civilized or uncivilized (Todorova 2009: 118). This negative ‘imagination’ of the Balkans and with it the negative representation of the entire region reoccurred in 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall and continued throughout the war in the Balkans in the 1990s. Similarly to Todorova, Hammond also states that negative representations of the Balkans persisted throughout the Balkan crises of the 1990s when, as he states, “South-East Europe became, via a plethora of travel accounts, films, memoirs, and media articles, one of the West’s most significant others” (Hammond 2007: 201-2) and “[o]ne only has to look at the West’s response to the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, or the wave of racism that has greeted Eastern European asylum seekers over the last few years, to discern the persistence of a prejudice that has debilitated the region for centuries” (Hammond 2007: 215). In fact, his research into the representation of the Yugoslav wars found that the Western media almost exclusively represented the region as disorderly, poor and with few values as he writes in his article titled “The Danger Zone of Europe: Balkanism between the Cold War and 9/ 11” published in 2005: “  t  he nightly broadcasts of Balkan chaos and savagery, of homes destroyed, of householders displaced, of the civitas besieged, of shells landing in marketplaces, indicated not only a highly undesirable condition in itself, but also a highly symbolic attack on the core values and practices in western society” (Hammond 2005: 150). Finally , Milica Bakić-Hayden in her work “Nesting Orientalism: The Case of Former Yugoslavia” (1995) refers to the dichotomy that may arise within a certain region and states that “[b]alkanism can indeed be viewed as a variation on the orientalist theme that distinguishes the Balkans as a part of Europe that used to be under Ottoman, hence oriental, rule and as such, different from Europe ‘proper’” (921). She states that in addition to roughness, savagery and overall backwardness, typical representations of the Balkans and its people were also female submissiveness and dreamlike Nina Bostič Bishop 196 and infantile thought or lack of reason (ibid.). In this article Bakić-Hayden proposes the term ‘nesting orientalisms’ to denote a gradation of ‘Orients’, which is a “pattern of reproduction of the original dichotomy upon which Orientalism is premised” (918), so according to this pattern, Asia is more “East” and more of an “Other” than Eastern Europe, and the Balkans is more “East” and more “Other” than other parts of Eastern Europe. Moreover, Bakić-Hayden proposes that “within the Balkans there are similarly constructed hierarchies” (918). Accordingly, the Balkan regions that were once under the Habsburg Monarchy, see themselves as more European than the people who live in regions that were once ruled by the Ottoman Empire. Similarly, Eastern Orthodox Christians have perceptions of themselves as more proper Europeans than European Muslims, who in turn, feel more Western, and less Other than the ultimate Orientals from the Orient. Balkanism is a concept that Hemon addresses in his work in order to demythologize the region and do away with Western European thought of the West being politically and intellectually superior. He also refers to this in several interviews as he, in line with Todorova states that Europe needs the Balkans in order to establish the better and more positive Self, acting as the ‘counterexample for the Union, establishing the dichotomy between the Balkans as ‘cancer’ and Europe as ‘healthy tissue’” (Jones 2020: online). 3. Balkanism in The Question of Bruno The Question of Bruno was first published in 2000 and is a collection of seven short stories and a novella titled “Blind Jozef Pronek and Dead Souls”. The stories and the novella are inter-linked by characters and two settings that are Chicago and Sarajevo, with the main aim being to narrate the life of a Bosnian involuntary migrant, his fluid identity as a result of being an exile and the relationships he enters with other characters, some of whom are local and some of whom are migrants. At first glance, the narratives in the collection are fragmented, but a closer reading reveals that the sub-stories in the short stories and the novella make the collection function as a whole. The first story “Islands” presents the reader with life before exile, rupture and ‘nowhereness’, as the Hemons take a family vacation on the Adriatic Island of Mljet, so the story is set in a warm, slow, peaceful and languid place, typically visited by ex-Yugoslav holidaymakers. Hemon speaks about his family patiently waiting for the ferry on a long pier that burnt the soles of his feet when he took off his sandals and the air that was filled with sea-ozone and the smell of coconut sun lotion (Hemon 2000: 5), there are cicadas humming, his family and friends drink red wine while talking and laughing (7), eating watermelons and waking up in the morning into carefree days of the summer with “breakfast on the table in the net-like shadow of the vines” (12). These days on a holiday were mostly spent Western representations of the Balkans and its people 197 swimming, eating and spending time with friends and family on the beach, followed by languidly spent summer afternoons and evenings: We walked up the path as the sun was setting. Everything attained a brazen shade and, now and then, there would be a thin gilded beam, which managed to break through the shrub and olive trees, like a spear sticking out of the ground. Cicadas were revving, and the warmth of the ground enhanced the fragrance of dry pine needles on the path. I entered the stretch of the path that had been in the shadow of the tall pines for a while, and the sudden coolness made me conscious of how hot my shoulders felt. I pressed my thumb firmly against my shoulder and, when I lifted it, a pallid blot appeared, then it slowly shrank back into the ruddiness. (14) These sentences above present the bliss of summer holidays, which the Balkan people enjoy in a similar manner to Western holidaymakers. Thus, Hemon depicts Balkan people as civilized holiday-makers, similar to any other Western holiday-maker in an attempt to demythologize the Balkan region as uncivilized, savage and backwards by challenging stereotypical representations. In this way, the author promotes a more nuanced and nonbinary understanding of the region. The story “The Accordion” in which Hemon tells the story of his greatgrandfather, who had migrated to Bosnia from Ukraine, is centred around the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo that started WW1 in 1914 and which, according to Todorova caused the West to permanently view the region as inferior and uncivilized thereon (Todorova 2009: 118). During the visit of Sarajevo, the Archduke and his wife make several pejorative statements about the region. For example, as they are riding in their coach through the city, minutes before they are assassinated, Hemon writes how the Archduke was thinking about what a monkey language Bosnian was, which is a clear example of Balkanism: “The coach is passing between two tentacles of an ostensibly exultant throng: they wave little flags and cheer in some monkey language (Would it be called Bosnian? wonders the Archduke)” (Hemon 2000: 89). Moreover, the Archduke also sees “[c]hildren with filthy faces and putrid, cracked teeth” (ibid.) and looks at his wife to see her “face in a cramp of disgust” (ibid.), while observing the Sarajevans. Similarly, in “Exchange of Pleasant Words”, a short story in which Hemon tells the history of his family and surname originating from Ukraine, Hemon writes that Uncle Teodor “talked about Hemons defending European civilization from a deluge of barbarian Slavic marauders” (108), thereby suggesting that Slavic people that live in the Balkans are not European and that Europe needs protection from these barbaric Slavs, while Ukrainians, who are technically also Slavs are not Balkan and are, there- Nina Bostič Bishop 198 fore, more civilized. Thus, Balkanist attitudes practiced here divide the European continent into a civilized part and the uncivilized part that is the Others, who are in this case, barbaric Balkan Slavs. The novella “Blind Jozef Pronek and Dead Souls” is autobiographical and is titled after the Sarajevan blues band one of whose members is also the main character. It introduces the character Jozef Pronek who is, similarly to Hemon, an exiled writer from Sarajevo who travels to the United States after the start of the war in Bosnia. Similarly to Hemon, Pronek also decides to stay in the USA and in an attempt to make Chicago his new home, he finds that his identity has been transformed, which is in accordance with Stuart Hall’s understanding of the anti-essentialist post-modern subject that has no essential core because it is “formed and transformed continuously in relation to the ways we are represented or addressed in the cultural systems which surround us” (qtd. in Voicu: 17). Pronek has become an exile who, while travelling around America, is experiencing culture shock, encountering new feelings of displacement and non-belonging that grow stronger every time he is a target of Balkanism, which is more or less whenever he comes into contact with local Westerners, who have biased views of the Balkans, suggesting that it is, as Todorova and Hammond maintain, an all-encompassing stereotype present in Western societies. For example, at the dinner party at his girlfriend’s parents’ house Pronek is continually othered as Balkanism is practiced consistently. Consequently, throughout dinner he is only able to utter a few short responses that consist of one or two words. He was othered even before he sat down at the table when he took off his shoes, as is customary in the Balkans, and was looked at strangely by Andrea’s mother, who was not aware that the gesture is an expression of politeness. As the dinner party progresses, other members of the family continue to other Pronek by being ignorant of Bosnia’s location, openly confusing the country with Czechoslovakia and practicing Balkanism as Westerners, degrading the Other who is from the Balkans, a region that has had a long history of violence and is, in their opinion a profoundly dangerous place: ‘Nana,’ Andrea’s mother said, ‘this is Andrea’s friend from Bosnia.’ ‘I never was in Boston,’ Nana said. ‘Bosnia, nana, Bosnia. In Yugoslavia, near Czechoslovakia,’ Andrea’s mother said, shook her head, and waved her hand as if pushing away a basketball, asking Pronek to forgive Nana. In a moment of confusion, Pronek took off his shoes. Andrea’s mother glanced at his feet, then locked her hand, pointing to the left, in front of her bosom and said, ‘Let’s move to the salon.’ (Hemon 2000: 175) Western representations of the Balkans and its people 199 Also, at this dinner party it is clear that they understand the Balkans as the cultural Other, which is as Todorova states “one of the most powerful pejorative designations in history” (Todorova 2009: 7), and a stereotypical powder keg, and exaggerate the differences between the West, in this case the USA and the East, the Other, the Balkans or in this case Yugoslavia: ‘So what’s going on in Czechoslovakia? ’ Andrea’s mother asked. ‘Yugoslavia, Mom, Yugoslavia,’ Andrea said. ‘I read about it, I tried to understand it, but I simply can’t,’ Andrea’s father said. ‘Thousands of years of hatred, I guess.’ ‘It’s a sad saga,’ Andrea’s mother said. ‘It’s hard for us to understand, because we’re so safe here.’ ‘It’s mind-boggling,’ Andrea’s father said. ‘I hope it is over before we have to get involved.’ (177) From the above extracts, the dichotomy between the ‘safe’ and civilized West and the unsafe and uncivilized Balkans is clear. The novella features negative representations of the region as theorised by Todorova, Hammond, Jezernik and Bakić-Hayden as Pronek is from South-East Europe and, therefore, represents places that are synonymous with a primitive, backward, war-torn and barbaric world and, which are in opposition to all that is the West. The focus is on the differences between the Self and the Other and they are often exaggerated, while similarities are minimized in order to legitimize negative attitudes. Westerners in this novella see themselves as better, more civilized and more sophisticated people than those from the East, which, as Todorova claims, may be the result of an ongoing negative and stereotyped portrayal of the region. This is further exemplified in the following example that depicts Pronek in a bar where he wants to order his first beer in America and the waitress thinks that he is just another foreigner, assuming that the selection of beer in countries that are ‘the Other’, is limited. Again, the binary built on the differences between the East and West is obvious: ‘Beer,’ Pronek said. ‘What kind of beer? This is not Russia, hun, we got all kindsa beer. We got Michelob, Milleh, Milleh Light, Milleh Genuine Draft, Bud, Bud Light, Bud Ice. Wh’ever you want.’ (Hemon 2000: 141) Similarly, when Pronek is having dinner with some “intellectually distinguished friends” (Hemon 2000: 151) they very clearly show that they think that Bosnia is a backward place where most people do not own a television set or know what asparagus is, which is in line with Todorova’s observations that Balkanism is omnipresent in the West as people tend to generally think that the Balkan regions lag behind the West as a result of continuous Nina Bostič Bishop 200 negative representations throughout the public media from the 19 th century onwards. This can be identified in the following questions that the local Westerners ask Pronek: What’s the difference between Bosnia and Yugoslavia? Huge. Do they have television? Yes. Do they have asparagus there? Yes, but no one in their right mind eats it. (Chortle on the right, chuckle on the left.) What language do people speak there? It’s complicated. Is the powder keg going to explode? Yes. (ibid.) Also, the question “Is the powder keg going to explode? ” is asked by a Westerner who has been influenced by the generalization, reductionism and stereotyping of the Balkans in the media that Hammond and Todorova write about as a region with a long history of violence and war. Moreover, when Pronek is in Los Angeles, he is also othered as people that he talks to utter stereotypes of the Balkans and make it clear that they think only the West can help the region that has been affected by ‘thousands of years of hatred’ (153), which is the second time in the novella that this exact statement is uttered: ‘Do you people in Sarajevo like Sam Peckinpah? ’ Milius asked. ‘We do,’ Pronek said. ‘No one made blood so beautiful as the old Sam did,’ Milius said. ‘I know,’ Pronek said. ‘I didn’t know you could watch American movies there,’ Reg Butler said. ‘We could.’ ‘So what’s gonna happen there? ’ Milius asked. ‘I don’t know,’ Pronek said. ‘Thousands of years of hatred,’ Reg Buttler said and shook his head compassionately. ‘I can’t understand a damn thing.’ Pronek didn’t know what to say. ‘Hell, I’ll call General Schwarzkopf to see what we can do there. Maybe we can go there and kick some ass,’ Milius said. (Hemon 2000: 153) Also, Andrea tells him “[y]ou Eastern Europeans are pretty weird” (Hemon 2000: 170), generalizing the East, expressing a pejorative attitude and again and similarly in perpetual violence that has permeated the region is expressed here: “‘What’s with you people? ’ Chad asked. ‘Can’t you chill out? ’ ‘They just hate each other over there,’ Carwin said.” (Hemon 2000: Western representations of the Balkans and its people 201 173). It is, therefore, clear that Westerners see the Balkans in a thoroughly negative way as there is nothing positive about the region and its people that they ever express when talking to Pronek. 4. Balkanism in Nowhere Man: The Pronek Fantasies The novel Nowhere Man: The Pronek Fantasies was first published in 2002 and follows the life of Jozef Pronek, a character that Hemon first introduced in The Question of Bruno. In Nowhere Man, Pronek is a dislocated migrant residing in-between two cultures as in Homi Bhabha’s conceptualisation of the Third Space where hybrid identities, generally produced between two, but also more cultural elements that come into contact with each other and result in something new and different than either of these elements individually (Bhabha 1994). This Third Space is the intercultural space of enunciation, which is the liminal space where identities become fluid. In Hemon’s novel an unnamed Bosnian migrant comes to Chicago in April 1994 and confesses “Had I been dreaming, I would have dreamt of being someone else” (Hemon 2002: 3), signalling that one of the main topics in the novel is identity and its hybridization, that is its transformation as a result of involuntary migration and the resulting trauma. In August 2000, Pronek finds himself in Shanghai. Pronek is now a transmigrant in line with the definition provided by Glick Schiller et al. who observed that the processes of accelerated globalization that were enabled by the development of transportation and telecommunications resulted in migrants turning into transmigrants, defining transnationalism as the “processes by which immigrants build social fields that link together their country of origin and their country of settlement” (Glick Schiller et al. 1992: 1), thereby challenging the traditional view on emigration as a linear path of movement from the home country to the receiving country. Transmigrants are according to Glick Schiller et al. “immigrants whose daily lives depend on multiple and constant interconnections across international borders and whose public identities are configured in relationship to more than one nation-state” (48). In line with the latter definition, Pronek lives simultaneously in his home country Bosnia, and his host country that is the USA through memories and his actual presence. In the process of connecting his previous identity with the new one in the hybrid liminal space, his identity is transformed in accordance with Edward Said’s view that in exile “habits of life, expression, or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment” (Said 2000: 55). The novel is narrated through seven distinct sections or chapters each linked to specific dates and cities with the main protagonist Jozef Pronek Nina Bostič Bishop 202 being the main character throughout these seven chapters, thereby connecting seemingly disparate stories. Through the narrators who come into contact with Pronek either as family members, friends, colleagues or only as acquaintances across several different cities around the world including Chicago, Sarajevo, Kyiv, Lviv and Shanghai, the readers learn about Pronek’s life across different periods of time and multiple locations. Therefore, the narrative follows a fragmentary, non-linear thread with geographical transfers mostly between Eastern Europe and America. The individual segments delve into the complexities of Pronek’s life, spanning from his carefree childhood and adolescence in Sarajevo to a crucial moment in Kyiv in 1991 where he attends a Ukrainian language course. Subsequently, he finds himself in exile in Chicago in 1991. Multiple narrators provide perspectives on these pivotal moments, offering insights into the turning points of his past, which extend over various decades including the entire 20 th century and places, encompassing Pronek’s youth in former Yugoslavia with a focus on Sarajevo, his experiences in Ukraine and ultimately, his time in Shanghai. Characters’ perpetual mobility between the East and the West, in this case from Bosnia to America, as well as from the West to the East or from America to Ukraine, allow for the negotiation of difference, transforming Pronek’s identity along the way. Hemon’s borders between the East and the West are porous and transnational identities as defined by Glick Schiller et al. above are constructed as a result of cross-cultural exchange, through which individuals from different cultural backgrounds interact, share, and influence each other’s cultural practices. whereby the West permeates the East. Since Hemon attempts to illustrate that generally Americans know very little about the Balkans and that their knowledge about this part of the world and its people is restricted by typical representations of the Balkans in the media, American characters in the novel frequently stereotype and denigrate Bosnia along with former Yugoslavia and the Balkans in general, which are all typical elements of Balkanism. There are several examples of Balkanism in this work as a result of how the ‘civilized West’ has been interpreting the ‘barbaric East’, whereby the Balkans and its peoples are typically portrayed as backward, degenerate, savage and immoral. With this in mind, it could be said that Hemon reveals Western, and particularly American representations of the region as he frequently exposes the denigratory essentialization of the Balkans as a result of the established dichotomies between the West and the foreign Other. For example, the narrative titled “Passover: Chicago, April 18, 1994”, which is set in Chicago, begins on 18 April 1994 and is told by an unnamed Bosnian immigrant who used to know Pronek in Sarajevo and is fantasizing “about melting under the shower and disappearing into the drain” (Hemon 2002: 3) as he is living a bleak existence of a Bosnian exile, barely surviving on a minimal wage in Western representations of the Balkans and its people 203 an apartment infested with cockroaches, features several examples of Balkanism. One of the interviewers for an ESL teacher job position says to the other interviewer who thinks that the unnamed Bosnian migrant is from Czechoslovakia: “He is from Yugoslavia. It’s a war-torn country”, to which the migrant replies: “I am from Bosnia,” (Hemon 2002: 16). The interviewer Marcus then represents Bosnian men as brave and passionate and women as beautiful: “You know,” Marcus said, “I was on a mission in Bosnia once. I met some brave men and beautiful women there”. “When was that? ” Robin asked, and rubbed her temple. The skin on it wrinkled and unwrinkled under her finger, the pain still untouched. It must have been taking a lot of strength to maintain the expression of permanent bafflement. “Long time ago,” Marcus said. “I fell in love with a majestic, passionate woman, but circumstances too-fatuous-to-detail took me elsewhere.” (Hemon 2002: 18) This example of Balkanism above is in disagreement to Hammond stating that “male writers went out of their way to emphasize that no impropriety with Balkan women had occurred, denouncing their lack of beauty and even suggesting, on occasion, that their appearance violated physical norms” (Hammond 2007: 210), therefore, claiming that the balkanist discourse typically defeminized the female. However, in Hemon’s work, Marcus found Balkan women “beautiful”, “majestic” and “passionate”. It can, therefore, be concluded that Hemon has his character perceive Balkan women similarly to how Oriental women are typically represented by exoticizing and mystifying them. However, Marcus speaks stereotypically about the Balkans as a perpetually war-torn region, using a patronizing tone so typical of how a Westerner views the Balkans. Thus, Hemon here attempts to demythologize the Balkans by addressing the same stereotype: ““You know a lot about hardship, don’t you? ” he said. “I do not know,” I said uncomfortably”” (Hemon 2002: 17). The other interviewer comes to the conclusion that she does not understand people from the Balkans: “I do not understand these people,” Robin said, still shaking her head. “I simply do not” (ibid.), which is in line with Hammond who writes that “[i]n the Western imagination, the region is less a secure marker of alterity than an unstable and unsettling presence loosed from clear identity, an obscure boundary along the European peripheries where categories, oppositions, and essentialized groupings are cast into confusion” (Hammond 2007: 204) because the Balkans are positioned between the East and the West with several nationalities, languages, religions and ethnicities occupying one region, or as Hammond puts it, “various ethnicities have infiltrated European space while simultaneously refusing many of the West’s models of social development and cultural organization” (ibid). Therefore, due to being different from the West, the Balkans have become an “internal Other”. Nina Bostič Bishop 204 Furthermore, in the narrative “Yesterday,” the title highlighting Pronek’s fascination with The Beatles, Hemon paints a vivid picture of Pronek’s joyful and careless childhood and teenage years spent in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The text is not chronological, depicting Pronek’s upbringing in ex-Yugoslavia during the 1980s as a happy period, challenging stereotypes that portray the Balkans and its communist countries as bleak and oppressive. In that, Hemons attempts to ‘write back’ and show that in the Balkans life before forced migration was normal and content and similar to the life in the West. Pronek’s teenage years parallel those of any Western teenager, filled with experiences like meeting girls, experiencing first sexual encounters, rebelling against parents, and immersing himself in music. Therefore, Hemon portrays life in the Balkan region akin to life in the Western world, by describing how his Bosnian characters enjoy Western music and watch Western TV series like Sherlock Holmes. By doing this, he demystifies the region and challenges the perception of life under communist rule as primitive and uncivilized. To counteract the notion of Balkanism and Western stereotypes of Bosnia and former Yugoslavia as backward, savage, war-ravaged, and primitive, Hemon provides detailed descriptions of Sarajevo in the 1980s, presenting it as “a beautiful place to be young.” (Hemon 2002: 49). Another example of how the Balkans are typically stereotyped as dark and savage is given in the story titled “Fatherland: Kiev, August 1991” that is set in Kyiv and Lviv in Ukraine where Pronek travels, because his father wished him to learn more about the Ukrainian culture. The story is narrated by an American of Ukrainian descent Victor Plavchuk, who is Pronek’s roommate. He gives a detailed description of the Ukrainian people and the landscape, but also American stereotypical perceptions of Eastern and Southern Europe that may be referred to as Balkanism. This part of Europe is depicted as being on the periphery, which is clear from the first page with men drinking several shots of vodka on the train, followed by Victor’s description of Pronek’s clothing to be “Eastern European bleak” (Hemon Nowhere Man 79), continuing by stating that Eastern Europe was overall “unremarkable”, with trays in cafeterias being sticky and “reeking of socialist grease”, tea was “tasteless”, and men had “fiery eyes and mountainous muscles”, while women had “arms that were bones coated with skin” (81), and “Slavs have large Slavic heads and an itch in their crotch” (100). Nevertheless, Victor is attracted to Pronek, which can be traced to a particular form of stereotyping that Blažan theorises. In her work “The Immigrant Is Dead, Long Live the Immigrant: The East European Transmigrant in Contemporary American Literature” Slađa Blažan attributes this attraction to underlying Balkanism, claiming that the reason why Victor, otherwise a closeted homosexual, finds Jozef attractive is that the Balkans have been stereotyped as rough and savage. She maintains that the exoticization of the region and its unfamiliarity and mysteriousness that Victor would have been exposed to as an American “allows Victor to project his Western representations of the Balkans and its people 205 wildest phantasies” (Blažan 2004: 40), similarly to how the ‘civilized’ West imagines coming to rescue to the ‘barbaric’, ‘savage’ and ‘wild’ Balkans before they bring destruction upon themselves. Since Victor sees Pronek as a primitive individual, his Balkanism becomes tangible. Another evidence of this is also in Victor’s complete disregard of Pronek as a former student of literature. Victor does not even tell Pronek about his PhD thesis on King Lear because he thinks that Pronek could never understand it since he, as Balkan people tend to be in his view, is intellectually inferior. Instead, Victor concentrates on Pronek’s physical features more than his intellect: “I loved Jozef Pronek because I thought that he was the simple me, the person I would have been had I known how to live a life, how to be accommodated in this world” (Hemon 2002: 124). Here, “simple” indicates an overall Western superiority over Balkan inferiority. A further example of Balkanism is when President Bush selects Pronek to be his interpreter because he wanted someone who “looked Slavic and exotic, yet intelligible - the whole evil empire contracted in one photogenic brow of woe” (105). Again, Hemon here attempts to deconstruct the myth about the Slavs, Eastern Europe and the Balkans or “the whole evil empire” (ibid.). However, Hemon does not stop deconstructing the myth there as he makes Bush patronizing and ignorant of where Bosnia is (Hemon 2002: 103): “But, I am from Bosnia…”. “It’s all one big family, your country is. If there is misunderstanding, you oughtta work it out.” (Hemon 2002: 106) 2 . Here, it is clear that Jozef represents the ‘conflict zone’, the ‘powder keg’, ‘the Balkans’ and ‘the East’ and that the American President views the entire region as the Other. A further example of Balkanism can be identified in the narrative entitled “The Deep Sleep: Chicago, September / October 15, 1995”, which is written in the third person. In this story, Pronek encounters a private detective called Owen at a job interview. This is where Pronek begins to slide into the state of an angry immigrant as a result of his realization that his new American surroundings do not take any interest in him or his past and that they stereotypically see him as just another Balkan migrant. The environment in which Pronek finds himself is more often than not utterly essentialist, which is a direct opposition to Pronek’s forming of a transnational migrant identity as defined above. During the interview, Owen first addresses Jozef Pronek with ‘Joe’, adapting and Americanizing his name, admitting that he has never heard of Bosnia, but remembering Yugoslavia when Pronek tells him that “[i]t was in Yugoslavia” (141), adding only that “It’s a good place not to be there right now” (ibid.). Owen contacts Pronek 2 Hemon here produces a fictionalised variant of the speech given by President Bush in Kyiv, Ukraine on 1 August 1991, also known as the »Chicken Kiev« speech in which Bush warned Ukraine about potential future nationalism and independence. This speech was given when Ukraine and most Ukrainians desired to gain independence from the Soviet Union, so the speech was not favourably accepted. Nina Bostič Bishop 206 and offers him a job of serving a court summons to a man named Brdjanin, who is actually a Bosnian Serb. When Owen describes the man to Pronek, Balkanism may be detected again since after describing him as a “runaway daddy” (146) who left his wife and daughter and does not want to pay child support, Owen also says: “Are you all like that over there, sonovabutches? ” (ibid.), where “over there” refers to the Balkans. This question startles Pronek and he is humiliated on account of Owen displaying Balkanism to the point that he “imagined himself snorting up all those ashes and butts” (ibid.) sitting in an ashtray. Another example of Owen practicing Balkanism may be identified when he refers to Pronek’s home country as irrelevant and too inferior for anyone to remember, which may be the result of the region having been represented as subordinate, dominated, marginalized and being on the periphery: “  M  y parents are still there. But they are still alive.” “Now, who’s trying to kill them? I can never get this right. (Hemon 2002: 149). Furthermore, Owen refers to Pronek’s language as “your monkey language” (Hemon 2002: 150), thereby once again balkanizing him and making his native language inferior to English. Balkanism practiced by the people that Pronek comes into contact with, contributes to Pronek’s increased feelings of loss and displacement. A further example of the locals practicing Balkanism when they come into contact with Pronek is presented in the narrative titled “The Soldiers Coming: Chicago, April 1997-1998.” In this story, Hemon split the narrator in two in order to emphasize Pronek’s split identity as a result of displacement and difficulties with relating to the locals who frequently denigrate him on account of his Balkan origins. The story is set in the period after the war and Pronek now has a job as a canvasser for Greenpeace. The central theme is Pronek’s growing displacement as a result of the impossibility to overcome linguistic and cultural barriers that deepen his sense of nonbelonging, dislocation, unrootedness and isolation. Pronek starts feeling like a “displaced, cheap and always angry” foreigner (Hemon 2002: 164) also on account of coming into contact with the local American people who frequently practice Balkanism. However, Pronek’s girlfriend Rachel, who is at first his canvassing trainer, is initially one of the few Americans who shows sympathy and knowledge about the war in Bosnia. For example, in the following conversation, unlike other Americans, Rachel asks whether his family are safe and refrains from making comments denigrating the Balkans and its people: “You watch it on TV and feel nothing but numb helplessness. It just makes me angry.” “I know.” “It must have been hard for you.” (Hemon Nowhere Man 173) But soon even Rachel brings up the Balkans in a negative way, attempting to dominate Pronek, showing him that he is inferior to her, which gradually Western representations of the Balkans and its people 207 causes Pronek to feel more anxious and displaced. When he asks her “What do you do in your life? ”, she replies “In my life? What is this? Do you Balkan boys always ask questions like that? ” (170). Here, Rachel responds to a question that is not impolite in Bosnian and is in fact often asked at the start of a conversation; but Rachel is unaware of this and takes Pronek’s question as overly intruding and personal. Her response in which she practices Balkanism, putting the “boys” from a region as vast as the Balkans in one basket is rude and infantilising and again shows that she feels like the dominant one and takes Pronek as the Other. Furthermore, by using the word ‘boys’ to talk about men she infantilises the entire region of the Balkans. Pronek’s rage deepens as a result of his realization that he is a displaced migrant and continuously belittled due to his Balkan background, which eventually impacts his identity. This can also be detected when he starts working as a canvasser and notices that Rachel, who is canvassing across the street, receives a more favourable response from clients as they tend to react nicely and listen to her while she is talking. But Pronek, who, even at first glance, seems to match the stereotypical image of a Balkan migrant, and becomes aware that people “stared at him with dim contempt” and with “no interest whatever” is treated like the Other. As “[d]oor after door was slammed in his face” (ibid.) his anger grows until he “kicked a neongreen plastic bucket and […] banged [it] against the picket fence” (ibid.). His anger spirals down from that point. Hemon turns Pronek into a split character-narrator to emphasize his displacement as an involuntary migrant from the Balkans and his inability to enter stable relationships on account of his foreignness and otherness. The relationship with Rachel depicts the absolute impossibility for an exile to surpass linguistic and cultural barriers and overcome trauma since the relationship is irreversibly broken. The main reason for this is that, despite the fact that Rachel is the only American character in the book who is kind to Pronek and does, at least at first, not look down on him, she continuously reminds him that he is just another man from the Balkan. Finally, features of Bakić-Hayden’s concept of ‘nesting orientalism’ can also be identified in Nowhere Man as the character of Brdjanin, who is an Orthodox Christian from the Balkans views Muslims from the Balkans as inferior to him and as liars. He expresses bigotry towards Muslims when he and Pronek discuss the massacre that happened during the war in Bosnia at the Sarajevan market. When Pronek tells him that he knows people from Sarajevo who have told him that the massacre really happened, Brdjanin asks Pronek about his friend’s ethnicity and after learning that he is Bosnian, calls him and all other Bosnians lying Muslims and concludes that if “He is from Sarajevo, he is Muslim. They want Islamic Republic, many mudjahedini.” (Hemon 2002: 153) By exposing Balkanism in his writing, Hemon challenges the narrative that perpetuates stereotypes depicting the Western world as civilized and Nina Bostič Bishop 208 the East as savage, filled with ancient hatred and regressive peoples. By strategically reinforcing the very same essentialisms that the region has been subjected to since the 19 th century, thereby practicing “spirited resistance to popular Western discourses about the Balkans” as Matthes and Williams state in “Displacement, Self-(Re)Construction, and Writing the Bosnian War: Aleksandar Hemon and Saša Stanišić” (Matthes and Williams 2013: 35), Hemon criticizes these oversimplified beliefs. 5. Conclusion In both texts, the main character is the Bosnian forced migrant Pronek. He suffers from being displaced and othered as a migrant originating from the Balkans, experiencing the full force of what Todorova defines as Balkanism. This concept, which is a Western creation, implies viewing the region and its people as primitive, irrational, backward, violent, barbaric, subservient and in need of saving. By writing about the life in a Balkan region before the war as pleasant, peaceful and civilized where people listened to the same music as Westerners, watched the same films, read the same books and took nice summer holidays, and by making Pronek reminisce about the time in his youth that could have been spent the same way by any other child, teenager or young adult in the West, Hemon attempts to challenge the omnipresent stereotypical Western representations of the Balkans and its locals. Moreover, Hemon addresses balkanist discourse whose primary aim of representing the entire Balkan region and an otherwise highly diverse range of moral attitudes, languages, customs, religions, cultures and political structures as one in order to make the Balkans a binary of the West, that is an abstract antithesis or a contrasting image against which the West may then define itself as culturally and morally superior. In this way, Hemon attempts to demythologize the Balkans as a place of perpetual conflict and a powder keg zone that is primitive, savage and wild, as so often represented in Western media. 6. References Bakić-Hayden, Milica (1995). Nesting orientalisms: The case of Former Yugoslavia. Slavic Review 54 (4): 917-931. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Bhabha, Homi K. (1994). The Location of Culture. London/ New York: Routledge. Blažan, Slađa (2004). The immigrant is dead, long live the immigrant: The East European transmigrant in contemporary American literature. Dve domovini / Two Homelands: Migration Studies 19: 34-46. Debeljak, Aleš (2014). Bosna u Čikagu: Aleksandar Hemon. (Translation: Bosnia in Chicago: Aleksandar Hemon). Sarajevske sveske 45/ 46: 203-214. Glick Schiller, Nina et al. (1992). Transnationalism: A new analytic framework for understanding migration. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 645 (1): 1-24. Western representations of the Balkans and its people 209 Hammond, Andrew (2005). The danger zone of Europe: Balkanism between the Cold War and 9/ 11. European Journal of Cultural Studies 8 (2): 145-155. Hammond, Andrew (2007). Typologies of the East: On distinguishing Balkanism and Orientalism. Nineteenth Century Contexts 9 (3): 201-218. Hemon, Aleksandar (2000). The Question of Bruno. London: Picador. Hemon, Aleksandar (2002). Nowhere Man. London: Picador. Jezernik, Božidar (2004). Wild Europe: The Balkans in the Gaze of Western Travellers. London: Saqi Books. Jones, Bronwyn (2020). Aleksandar Hemon: The Balkans is just close enough to being Europe to perpetually fail at being Europe. Kosovo 2.0, 16 Feb 2020. https: / / kosovotwopointzero.com/ en/ aleksandar-hemon-the-balkans-is-justclose-enough-to-being-europe-to-perpetually-fail-at-being-europe/ [July 2020]. Matthes, Franke & David Williams (2013). 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