In my workroom I have posted a
photograph of the place I was born. It was taken in 1986, the year of my birth.
‘The past is a foreign country’, goes the opening sentence in the novel "The
Go-Between", ‘they do things differently there.’ When I look at the photograph I
invert this idea, it makes my present foreign, and the past is home, albeit a
lost home in a lost country and a lost time.
I have just revisited Sarajevo,
my lost home, country and time, after an absence of almost half my life.
It was an eerie experience. I felt as if I was being claimed, or informed that
the facts of my faraway life were illusion, and that this was the reality. Then
I went to visit the place I had lived and stood outside it, neither daring nor
wishing to announce myself to its owners. I was overwhelmed. My memory, feeding
on black and white images, where monochromatic and since the colors of my
memory had seeped away, my eyes were now assaulted by a riot of colors. The
vividness of the red tiled roofs, the greens, and grays of the vegetation and
the unimaginable variety of the blues of the water the whole universe in
glorious Technicolor.
Bosnia is a region built,
claimed, and re-claimed by many foreigners. I who have been away so long
qualified for the title. I too have a history to reclaim.
It may be that exiles or
emigrants or expatriates, are haunted by some sense of loss, some urge to
reclaim, to look back, even at the risk of being mutated into pillars of salt.
If we do look back, we must also do so in the knowledge that it will give rise
to profound uncertainties. Our physical alienation almost inevitably means that
we will not be able to reclaim precisely the thing that was lost. In short, we
will create fictions, imaginary places of our minds.
Writing this now, looking out the
window on to a garden that is similar to the one I remember, I am re-thinking
this. I am preoccupied, as I was on the flight and drive back, with the task to
make clear in my mind that, in spite of my ambition to unlock the gates of lost
time so that the past reappears as it had been, what I am actually doing is a
story of memory and about memory, so that my Sarajevo is just that: ‘my’ Sarajevo,
a version, and no more than one version of all the hundreds of possible
versions. I tried to make it as imaginatively true as I could, but imaginative
truth is simultaneously honorable and suspect, and I know that ‘my’ Sarajevo
may be one to which I (who am no longer what I was, and who by leaving never
became what perhaps I was meant to be) was willing to admit I belonged.
It may be argued that memory is a
place from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common
humanity.
The
loop-de-loop Festina Lente pedestrian bridge in front of the Academy of Fine
Art. Credit Todd Heisler/NYT