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.
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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.
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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
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