Abstract
This article employs the Bosnian notion of “inat,” often translated as spite, to perform auto(bio)psy of my writing about refugee lives in Sweden. Methodologically speaking, I begin with an assertion that the hybrid form of auto(bio)psy, a method that entangles creative and critical reflection, helps capture what it means to live with the traumas of war, especially in the face of genocide denial and genocide triumphalism. The value of such a reflection that is neither entirely academic nor entirely artistic, neither a court testimony nor data gathered by a disinterested scholar, lies in the possibility of accessing truths that are as material and as emotional as they can be and hopefully, help us better understand uprooted families from 1990s Bosnia and beyond. Following Wendy Pearlman, I argue for the value of emotional sensibility for more profound scientific discoveries. Furthermore, I argue for the need to reconsider the form-content question in the scholarly understanding and analyses of displacement.
Keywords
“124 was spiteful. Full of baby's venom.”
–– Toni Morrison, Beloved
Beloved has haunted me since I first read it at the age of 29, precisely 10 years after war uprooted my family from Banja Luka, Bosnia-Herzegovina. The haunting in the opening line, “124 was spiteful” (Morrison 2010, 1), lies in its insistence on the spite of the ghosts of the enslaved peoples’ past, the spite of those who have the absolute right to spite and yet are not quite spiteful at all. But that is not how I read Toni Morrison's characters, not even the terrifying ghost of the protagonist's murdered baby. The characters in Beloved are and are not spiteful. I should know this because I know something about spite, but a deeper spite, a kind of spite that is also positive in moments of disadvantage, in the face of othering and the lack of justice, packed into the Bosnian word “inat.” This spite requires what I have come to term as auto(bio)psy, a hybrid form of autobiography and a critical reflection with features of academic analysis. It is a self-reflection or auto-analysis of one's own creative work from the point of view of a hybrid creative/academic practice and persona. This method is new, to my knowledge, and originates with me.
I began developing auto(bio)psy in my article “To the Word-Woods and Back: Multi/Trans/No-lingual Movements” (Mahmutović 2022), trying to hybridize autobiography and critical reflection. It is an autopsy in that it examines the past body of work that is both alive and dead, perhaps, like Schrödinger's paradox. In the age of the “death of the author,” an author's own reflection of his body of work creates an uncanny sense that captures what it means to live with the traumas of war, which are embodied in the past but very much present. In my view, the presence of the trauma is felt in the body itself. It is a form of muscle memory, or “rememory,” as Morrison called it in Beloved. And so, this auto(bio)psy is an extension of a hybrid Socratic dialogue on my own past writings of the Bosnian diaspora in Sweden, which I performed at a symposium in Leiden, a stone's throw from the home of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). It is my attempt to examine the role of inat in the Bosnian refugee experience. 1
Previously, I employed auto(bio)psy to highlight an oscillation between multilingualism and what I called “no-lingualism” in the work of a transnational refugee writer. Practically, this analysis entails more extensive quoting and close readings of my own stories, through semi-academic expressionistic prose. This is a rare kind of reading, as authors generally shy away from explaining their work even in interviews, let alone approach themselves with academic methodologies. To assume a purely academic form of analysis, in this case, would, in my view, be harmful, as it would produce a sense of faux objectivity. Therefore, a more hybrid approach, partly akin to Plato's Socratic dialogues, is more appropriate as it includes the elements of creative craft. Perhaps, precisely for this reason, it can offer something different to this special issue than the purely academic genres I usually use as a scholar. Perhaps, precisely for this reason, some regular readers of the International Migration Review will find themselves destabilized by my unique methodology, perceived lack of theoretical framework, and alleged absence of empirical data. “Inat” seems to call for such a deviation from the hackneyed forms.
More generally, I think other researchers and writers might find value in approaching the similar themes and similar forms of haunting with a methodology and form that is at least partly migration from well-established forms. How can we continue to think and write about migration if we already know what forms it must fit? Migration is a movement from the familiarity of one's habitat into other terrains and ecosystems. There must be value in allowing both similar and unique migration experiences to affect how they are analyzed and expressed.
I will first discuss the notion of inat more generally as a possible guiding metaphor for uprooted people, then turn to the more specific Bosnian-Swedish experience. Then I will turn to an examination of “unsettling” as a critical experience and a possible critical tool. This will lead to a closer look at the character of the Mothers of Srebrenica as perhaps the best example of the channeling of complex states of minds of unsettled people. Finally, I will turn to an analysis of the form, which pertains to both the character of displaced people and the esthetics of presentation (rather than representation) in prose narratives.
Inat: A Guiding Metaphor for Uprooted Bosnians
The essential notion of “inat,” which will be mainly translated as “spite,” is my guiding metaphor for that element of Bosnian character that seems to survive uprootedness caused by war. This form of both positive and negative obstinacy will be shown as quite a stubborn feature of an ethnicity that suffered and survived genocide. Morrison's idiosyncratic spitefulness has possessed my own thinking and writing on displaced families. Morrison's particular form of authorial agency, to create ghosts and haunt you, is a form of possession, even in the literal sense of being taken over by an immaterial entity, be it a spirit, an idea, or a word. It should be impossible not to ask if Morrison herself was spiteful in her insistence to open her story about slavery, a narrative simultaneously grand and unbearably intimate, by calling the refuge slave spiteful. 2 Was she, thus, “contemptuous, disdainful, opprobrious,” or was she simply acting in spite of something she had the right to spite, that is, “in defiance (scorn or contempt) of” (Oxford English Dictionary 2022, “Spite”)?
The question — can refugees be spiteful and remain acceptable as refugees — spoke to the core of my Bosnian origin, all my experiences of the aggression on Bosnia in the period of 1992–1995, which ended with the Srebrenica genocide, as well as my new Bosnian-Swedish experience, which would come to become labeled as an existence in “the diaspora.” 3 Across 3 years in the early 1990s, more than 2.2 million people left their Bosnian homes, and 1.6 million of them sought “refuge abroad” (Halilovich 2012, 162). 4 According to Hariz Halilovich, this event of war, ethnic cleansing, death, property destruction, and displacement “brought an organized Bosnian diaspora into existence” (Halilovich 2012, 166). My part of that diaspora took root in Sweden alongside up to 100,000 others who claim some Bosnian descent (Slavnić 2016, 262–280). This is my history and the historical context of this article.
My work and my striving to communicate my own experiences of uprootedness come from a place of love, no doubt, or else I would not be able to do it. And yet, I also want to believe it has been shaped by the infamous Bosnian “inat,” which is, according to all dictionaries, translated as “spite.” There are no such things as perfect translations, for every word is a part of some DNA of language that evolves over time, picks up all kinds of dirt, and gets washed in all kinds of Heraclitan waters. But “inat” seems quite a stubborn one, and here I am letting it, quite stubbornly, shape this auto(bio)psy.
“Inat” creates this strange intimacy between Toni Morrison and me, an intimacy between our histories and our characters whose DNA would come to adopt, if not adapt to, their horrible histories and unleash them on future generations without much mercy. It is an intimacy between the forms she and I have been struggling to conjure from some Platonic heaven. The Oxford English Dictionary insists on dressing the word “spite” in the garb of the worst villains from the Marvel Universe. It insists on fixing it with such force that it is as if the ghosts of Roland Barthes and Jacque Derrida never touched our thinking of language. 5 In its reluctance to change and adapt to new places and language, “inat” displays quite a lot of stubbornness. According to Bosnian, Turkish, and Arabic dictionaries, “inat” seems to have remained quite untouched until today despite migration across borders of empires. The original Arabic عناد (inaad), according to the Oxford Arabic Dictionary, means stubbornness and obstinacy (Oxford Arabic Dictionary 2022, “عناد”). A deeper look at other Arabic dictionaries shows a long history of the word, often denoting a person who is not simply stubborn but consistently goes against generally accepted views despite arguments and facts. It designates people who base their behaviors on illusions, whims, desires, self-interest, malice, etc. Nothing good so far.
Etymologically, the word migrated to Bosnian via Ottoman Turkish. This seems to have given it a somewhat positive meaning as well, designating someone who stands by certain principles, while in modern Turkish it mainly has negative denotations. 6 Rječnik bosanskog jezika has “inat” or “inad” as “tvrdoglavo postupanje suprotno volji drugih, radi očuvanja vlastitog ponosa, ili usljed oholosti, samoljublja, i sl., prkos” (“headstrong behavior against the will of other people due to a desire to maintain one's pride, or malice, or narcissism, etc., contrarianism”) (Rječnik bosanskog jezika 2007, 212). The same is found in Turcizmi u srpskohrvatskom jeziku (Škaljić 1985, 346). Indeed, the old Balkan adage “od inata nema goreg zanata” (there is no worse craft than inat) speaks volumes. It is an evil, malicious craft. And so here I am, like Morrison, investing my life into this obstinate art and craft, moving through layers of historical dirt. It is possible, as Morrison shows us, to simultaneously write from the place of love and the place of spite.
Lagom versus Inat: Conflicting Metaphors Misguiding Bosnians in Sweden
From the (disad)vantage(d) point of view of an almost 50-year-old, I look at my previous work and despair. What was I doing and why? What have I become that I still feel the need to drag myself not only through that past but also reread myself, quite literally, and thus reread my Bosnian-ness and my Swedish-ness?
Swedes tend to pride themselves in being the land of “lagom,” a word they say has no equivalent in any other language, and therefore, it captures the Swedish ethnos. Lagom, which originally meant according to the law (Swe. “lag”), signifies moderation, always finding your place in between extremes, as in “lagom varm” (not too cold nor too warm). Now imagine a population from the Balkans, famous for their hot temper, coming en masse to the land of lagom. That must affect them as much as they must affect this country. The word lagom is an excellent partner for Bosnian inat precisely because it highlights the problem of being a refugee. Does a refugee have to be lagom to be accepted, generally speaking, globally? Is being lagom a key to successful integration? Yes and No. Bosnians are recognized as the best-integrated immigrants, not because they are lagom, but because they have been extraordinarily successful (Prgomet 2023). Together with other immigrant populations, they pushed the boundaries of lagom, and, in my view, showed that Swedes never truly were a lagom nation.
The most prominent case in point is undoubtedly the life and works of the global superstar Zlatan Ibrahimović, who recently retired from competitive soccer (De la Fuente 2023). No other Swede's success is comparable on a global scale, except perhaps ABBA and IKEA. Yet, he has become a symbol for immigrants because establishing the American Dream in socialist Sweden did not guarantee a sense of settling and belonging. As a son of a refugee, born and raised in an immigrant-tight and troubled neighborhood in Malmö, his hyper individualist rags-to-riches saga has never resolved the question of his Swedishness. It is almost as if he is still a Gastarbeiter.
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Sweden is still split about his identity. He receives so much love, and yet there is always that one window kept open, which allows for his quick dismissal. My video essay “Vi är Zlatan” charted this unsettling he produced in Sweden and what his presence did to Swedish-ness: This is what Zlatan reminds us of with his extraordinary goals, his body language, and his southern accent: that lagom can no longer represent domestic Swedishness. This is why Zlatan can release an autobiography before he has even lived long enough to earn writing one, and he can entitle it “I am Zlatan.” (Mahmutović 2014)
Zlatan's success is extreme, so let us turn to the more lagom, and more moderate spite of Bosnian refugees in the 1990s. I still remember the moment and the writing of my first autobiographical essay, “How to Fare Well and Stay Fair,” after some 7 years of writing fiction about sad, funny, and, let's face it, sometimes inat-ful refugees. I was putting together my first collection, and I wanted to show not just the true, the good, and the beautiful but also the spiteful side. I decided to open the book with a creative essay reflecting two decades of refugee life in just a few pages. I changed my style quite radically, and the essay found its form in an instruction manual written in the second person on how to be a true, a good, and … well, if not beautiful, then at least a presentable refugee. But then there was that Bosnian inat. In one important segment, where I was describing my late father, the word “spiteful” came out of nowhere, much like all hauntings: Bring your father with you deep into the woods, where you found an old frozen cabin, snow up to the windows, cracked and dirty, the walls made of wooden tile-like pieces, lain in rows like fish scales, only rough and dark red and perfect as a background for refugee portraits. Ask your father to stand against it and start shooting. You will like the fact that you have to hunch over the Hasselblad because the window is on the top. It’ll make you aware of where you stand and how you stand in relation to the object, and it’ll make it hard to take a picture. Hasselblad does not allow for snapshots. Sabur. Patience. Your father will smile. Tell him, Stop smiling for God's sake. Look like a miserable refugee. He won’t stop. He’ll laugh and smirk and guffaw and chortle and do any other take on cheerfulness, and the borrowed Hasselblad will capture that, the true, the good, the spiteful. Years later you will frame that photo and remember that your father was the only one in the entire community who said, I do not long to go back. I have everything I need right here. At the time you will have given him a hard time because he doesn’t conform and because everyone thinks he has no feelings, no sense of home and belonging. If you meet any of those people, years after you all become integrated and naturalised, don’t bother saying Hi to them, even though they will smile their big smiles and look like they’ve missed you so much. (Mahmutović 2012, 8–9, emphasis mine)
Ironically, my fellow compatriots would position themselves against my father, given that they were often quite spiteful in their pride and conceit. My experience of Bosnian refugees who would become what our compatriots in the motherland now call diaspora, almost the way they would use something like the N-word, has taught me that this new community of displaced people is significantly shaped by inat. Looking at our trajectory from arrival through integration to assimilation, we seem to have missed the fact we are refugees exactly because of our inat. This tendency toward inat seemingly becomes what Halilovich calls trans-local phenomena within this particular diaspora group. Inat enables “cohesion,” linking, as it were, “different individuals and groups to a wide global network of like-minded people representing their collective identity and local particularity” (Halilovich 2012, 167). Inat formed a worldview for Bosnians in Sweden that incubated negative opinions of refugees from other places, especially the people from what we still tend to call the Third World, not so much because we really disliked those people but because all of us were treated as refugees. All displaced peoples were seen through the same notions/prejudices of what refugees are supposed to be. Bosnians’ expressions of their difference through phrases like, “We’re not from Africa” spoke volumes and still do to us who remember.
It seems to me that Bosnians, being European and having a history of being the best Gastarbeiter in rich European countries, never really understood they were refugees. 11 The general Zeitgeist in the camps during the time we were waiting to either go back home or get stay permits could be summed up by the question, “Why don’t they put us to work?” It is as if our inat in the face of mayhem and displacement made us oblivious to our reality and we functioned through old imaginaries metonymized by the notion of Gastarbeiter, usually a man who did hard labor in Germany or Austria, came back to his village and built a house three times bigger than any of his neighbors. 12 This is why we could not see that we were indeed also spiteful. Instead, we saw gestures like my father's as being contrarian to our general state of mind. And yet, no matter how critical I am of this, I see that kind of ethnic obstinacy in a positive light as well. It is after all a coping mechanism of the PTSD-ed generation.
The main question here is who has the right to claim you are spiteful? Although inat is negatively charged, Bosnians can also take pride in being the people of inat, being contrarians in the face of larger forces of history. No doubt, we often take pride in certain things at the wrong times and in the wrong places, and that is a part of our curse and the historical haunting, but when it is done right, it can shake the world in all the right ways. It can really produce the litmus test of the global ethos. Many of my politically active friends on what used to be called Twitter have started “inat tweeting” and putting inat as some kind of blue badge of Twitter that validates their activism-from-rock-bottom. With much tongue-in-cheek, of course. The diaspora has claimed inat as a positive, activist charge, a struggle for truth and sheer survival in a world that has sought to destroy every ounce of their being, from extinction (genocide) to the erasure of our history, culture, and, in the end, the persistent, malicious denial of all those crimes.
Unsettling as a Concept and as a Reality
Our newfound spite, I argue, comes from our unsettled being, whose very existence is, somehow, at stake. A simple example is the fact that The Swedish Academy gave the Nobel Prize in literature to genocide denier Peter Handke in a country that has more than 100,000 Bosnians (refugees and the second and now even a third generation). 13 This elitist gesture, and a consistent defense of the choice, not only denied the being of the Bosnians that Sweden took in but also its own being, its own decisions as a country, decisions that defined it. This prize, I argue, not only brought back the feeling of unsettling for Bosnians, but it brought about an unsettling of the very being of Sweden as such. Unsettling as both a reality and a concept, in fact, complicates our studies of displacement in general and of uprooted families in particular.
These kinds of gestures, throughout our life in Sweden, have served as forms of defamiliarisation. We have lived with two parallel narratives. The first narrative is that Bosnians are the best-integrated immigrants, the hardest workers, the overachievers. We have had Bosnian people in Swedish political parties, and some have held minister positions. Currently, four first-generation Bosnians serve in the Swedish Riksdag. Many are involved within almost all political parties except the very far-right Sweden Democrats (to my knowledge, though I know some Bosnians voted for them to spite other immigrants). Some have been involved in building new parties, often with a focus on being an immigrant and Muslim in an increasingly racist political environment. Despite all this, the Handke incident heightened our awareness that none of that matters, and the new mantras are along the lines, “We will never be considered Swedish.” This is why so many of us reacted to the former Swedish Minister of Education Aida Hadžialić's reply on Twitter to Viktor Orban's Islamophobic comment on Bosnian Muslims as Europe's problem. She wrote: “Bosnia-Herzegovina and its people are as European and indigenous as Hungary and Hungarians. A majority is secular and Bosnia is considered the most liberal Muslim majority country in the world. Let's stand up for European values such as democracy and the rule of law.” 14 Her critique, however well intended, contains that old insecurity at its core. When she said that Bosnians (referring mainly to Muslims from Orban's remark) are not a problem because they are liberal, for me it was a throwback to the scenes from the war when young people were crying in the streets, “Why are they killing us, we are not really believing Muslims?” I am quite sure that much of the backlash to Hadžialić was out of inat in the face of sheer betrayal. She is, after all, still the epitome of the success (and failure) of the abovementioned first narrative. Both Orban and Hadžialić once again exposed our fundamental unsettling.
If anything defines a refugee, it is the sense of this perpetual unsettling. Even the word “refugee” is related to “refuge,” that small island in the middle of a two-way street, a place that is simultaneously a place of safety and constantly surrounded, on all sides, by rivers of cars. And, as Heraclitus would have it, you never step into the same river twice. You cannot meet the same refugee twice. Not even me, as this revisiting of my previous work demonstrates. This is why one of my central stories was entitled [Refuge]e, to illustrate graphically what this condition looks like and the fact that it cannot be said. Not even I, as the author, know how to pronounce this title when I do readings, and so often, I avoid performing it. Interventions, Laura J. Nettelfield and Sarah E. Wagner argue, in literary, cultural, or memorializing contexts are never “single, emblematic acts” but should be understood as a “field of interconnected activity that continues to affect postwar communities long after violence has ended” (Nettelfield and Wagner 2013, 3).
But again, I’ll return to the question animating my intervention. What is the form or the idea of a refugee? Does it have to be true, good, and beautiful, or can it be spiteful? It looks like I am, as a displaced-person-of-art, asking a philosophical question that might unsettle readers of this journal who are acclimated to more concrete contributions. Plato was not a great fan of artists, mainly because they had no idea what they were doing and why they were doing it. They were too married to the shadows, too much at home in their caves, too infatuated with the emanations of the forms. For him, we artists cared for the beautiful, but not so much for the true and the good that ground beauty. 15 And yet, here I am, trying to access them all in a form that is neither artistic nor scientific. What would Plato have said about an artist who is a refugee and looks at his own form with three sets of eyes at the same time, the experiential, the contemplative, and the esthetic? Could I say something true, or at least good, or at least spiteful about the idea(l?) of “refugee?” The writer, who also happens to be a refugee, or rather the refugee who happens to be a writer, considers every form and shape of the refugee, the diversity of unsettled forms of the refugee.
Mothers and Families, Unsettled and Inat-ful
It is hard to imagine a greater unsettling than that of the genocide-surviving mothers, wives, and daughters who were left without fathers, husbands, and sons, like the women of Srebrenica (Petrila and Hasanović 2020, 132–156). 16 This unsettling, both physical and psychological, would, without doubt, come to be a condition for life. Bosnians can often fight their historical ghosts with spite. Their inat is often a defense mechanism, and it is less directed to people as it is directed to rigid notions of what they are and what they are supposed to be, and what they are supposed to do to be loved.
I never felt the power of this positive spite more than in the autumn-winter of 2019 when our Swedish King Gustav himself was pinning that Nobel medal on the chest of that spiteful man Handke while a thousand of us stood outside in the Swedish cold protesting protesting protesting. To some — very few, in fact — he seems to have written some of those disgusting narratives out of artistic spite for our time's political correctness. In my view, his spite is very much the OED-defined spite. It comes from a place of disdain for the victims of the Bosnian genocide. His spite toward the women of Srebrenica seems based on his esthetic preference for victimhood. Just like I wanted to portray my father as a beaten-down refugee, so did he want to reduce those women to sad empty shells, withering widows. That was the only form of pain he could believe. Any other form, anything more complex than that, seemed to prove to him with practically Cartesian certainty that they were fake. They were not, for him, true, good, and beautiful. He needed them to be fake so he could save the war criminals from the narrow form of being villains in this history. He could not stand the fact these women refused to bury their heads between their legs and die crying.
Cry they did, no doubt, but they cried in the double sense of the word. They shed tears and they raised their voices. They showed agency. Together with women from other parts of Bosnia, and our own Swedish Christina Doctare who returned her Nobel medal in protest, they managed to shake the international community, bring war criminals to justice, and pave the way for new international laws such as the recognition of rape as a war crime (Engle 2005, 778–816). I am sure many saw them as stubborn, defiant, loud, and yes, spiteful. But for us, their spite, this positively charged inat, came from their unsettled character. The unsettling inat of those women unsettled the world. It showed, like all the best mirrors, the Handkean spite lying right there at the core of that weird creature people call the international community. These women accepted their new unsettled nature, and they settled in their own constructive inat, which made them strong enough to keep unsettling the world, which continues to be selective when it comes to the unsettled peoples.
As I mentioned in the beginning, this auto(bio)psy has its own time and place as it was originally a performance given in an intimate and friendly symposium in the country whose own Dutchbat had the mandate and the obligation to protect the Srebrenica enclave, and botched the job and made the genocide possible (NIOD, “Srebrenica”). This alone brings to mind one of the greatest spiteful refugees, Hasan Nuhanović, who was one of the two translators for the UN in Srebrenica (which is why he survived in the first place). Consider the fact that Nuhanović sued the Netherlands and won (Netherlands Institute 2002). And imagine that only 20 min by train from the cozy town where I was delivering this auto-dialogue, there was the ICTY of Den Haag where war criminals from former Yugoslavia were put on trial, where so many victims dared to come and face the monsters, in spite of all the Handkes of the world which had sought to push them into dark private rooms of their grief. And, despite the overwhelming historical data, these witnesses still must face the ever-growing industry of genocide denial. Some people who have met or seen Nuhanović on TV, and the other surviving translator from Srebrenica, Emir Suljagić, 17 had the impression of angry, loud, conflictual people who seem to say and do things out of spite.
Finding the right forms, rather than a universal form, for the portrayal of unsettled families from the Balkans during the war 1991–1995, remains extremely difficult. In my search for the right forms, I have often thought of Art Spiegelman's father in Maus (Spiegelman 1996). Spiegelman ran a great risk by portraying a Holocaust survivor as, at least partly, a spiteful old man disliked even by his own community. We may dislike Spiegelman's father because he is a racist, for instance, but we cannot deny his suffering, his victimhood, and the historical injustice done to him and the six million and more. Like Morrison's Sethe, who attempted the horrible crime of killing her own children in a gruesome way, we are dealing with people who are testing our sympathy, and even empathy but nevertheless demand an ethical response. From Sethe's point of view, she was trying to save her children from the zombie-like life of a slave, which, to her, was the worst kind of death. She imagined she was trying to keep them true, good, and beautiful: “whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing–the part of her that was clean” (Morrison 2010, 125).
I think that my identification with both Morrison and Spiegelman has to do with the scope and character of the refugees which should have had a great head start — being white Europeans with an already existing pre-war diaspora (Gastarbeiter). The realization amongst my compatriots that we would be dragged through the same political games of othering and put on an equal keel as, for instance, African or Middle Eastern immigrants, made them suddenly understand themselves as somewhat indigestible (but miss the way they themselves were othering those unlike them). The fact I mentioned earlier that we would become recognized as the most lagom, in that we would become most successful on average, seems to me to have played into our conceit as being a special kind of refugees. The simultaneous othering, because Europe in general still has issues with Muslims, even if they are white and indigenous, and the amazing forms of integration and progress, has nevertheless kept us in the quantum state of Schrödinger's equation. Just as in Homi Bhabha's discourse, we are white but not quite. This is becoming even more apparent as Bosnians have a hard time placing themselves on the current political spectrum, ranging from Left to far Right (though in smaller numbers at the extreme ends). In the current political climate, when the Swedish state has suddenly, very much out of the blue, decided to cut funding for ethnic NGOs, we are thrown all the way back to the early years of refugee life, as none of our diligence has helped us, nor did it help any other ethnic groups. We are bunched up together once again, and the discourse seems to have come full circle and been reset to the original settings.
Lagom Spiteful: (In)Digestible Refugees and the Question of Form
Stereotypical forms infuse my work just like they did Art Spiegelman's visual and written musings in Maus. 18 Forms present their own challenges. Starting with the inat-ful image of my defiant father, which I used to open up this discourse on form and content with a focus on this troubling word “spite,” I want to argue that the way I worked, instinctively perhaps, was out of spite against all kinds of clichéd forms of refugee representation that were in circulation at the time my family was forced out of Bosnia. These clichéd forms were not simply a matter of written stories, but general narrations of real refugee lives. For example, if you were at a border crossing, or in a refugee camp getting instructions from some officials, or in a court of law, or seeking a job at a local farm or factory (the only kinds of work you could get despite your Yugoslav education), you were always a part of this ongoing storytelling. You were some type of a character placed in some manageable, predigested plot.
These clichés of history were not only coming from foreigners but were very much a part of the inner circles of diverse communities. Though finding one single saleble and sanitized form to accommodate hard-to-digest content was strategically the best move, I still could not do it. Perhaps this is why, in my stories, inat-ful characters keep changing form depending on their complicated psychology. My character Almasa in How to Fare Well and Stay Fair (Mahmutović 2012), whose name means a precious gem, was no doubt hard to digest. She was made in the furnace of the war, and she messed up my mind as I was writing her. Or maybe she was writing me. I never settled on which way it really was. With her, I only saw that true and good beauty of the crystal-clear form, but I knew that her spite would be, for many, the most prominent feature. Would people be able to see past all that and find delicacy as well? In one short story in that collection, “Mind's Garbage,” Almasa speaks in the first person. This experimental story takes the shape of a complaint to the audience about having to fit certain pre-established forms of “being-a-refugee,” and failing to take a more digestible, more lagom form: Right now I’m no more than a scrapbook, a damn shoebox full of notes on yellow Post-it squares, or three-ply toilet paper, cut-out corners of tablecloths, napkins, the insides of tampon boxes with scribbles from edge to edge. A collection of pieces from different jigsaw puzzles. There's also a well-rounded ME, described in a whole lot of short stories. You see, I was tricked into being the protagonist in fiction. I still don’t know how to pronounce that damn title, [Refuge]e. I gave the author a terrific piece of amateur editorial advice to change it to Memoirs of a Bosnian, or even add ‘Nervous Wreck Bosnian.’ ‘Trust me, that’ll sell,’ I said pointing my thin, nail-eaten-to-the-quick finger at his left eye. The wretched wannabe writer gave me the cold shoulder, and left out all the quirky but fine incidents of my life. So much was taken from me by the war already, my virginity for instance. Then he just chucked half my life into a kind of mind's garbage. He said, ‘I must have some logic and linearity.’ My God, as if I was testifying in the Hague against war criminals, who, by the way, hadn’t been caught anyway, and couldn’t afford to be contradicting or have out-of-character traits. So it's my turn to do it myself. Why let anybody else make your life into art? The idea makes me sick to death. On a pitch-black Swedish winter morning, I like this scrappy-ME better. In these stories, I was described, or rather served to you like a heavy dinner, not a light breakfast in bed, or some such thing. Yes, I was described, through a variety of expressionistic stories, as a Bosnian, a rape victim who has lost her whole family (dad, mum, seven brothers), a victim who fights not to be a victim, who struggles to be taken for her other qualities, one of which is her violent nature, propensity to existential angst, her utter hate of racism and nationalism, inability to connect with people her age (or younger or older), cynicism. ’Nuff said. (52–3)
In the story “The Myth of the Smell,” which is about the quarrel between an old refugee woman and the Swedish camp manager about their homelands, about nostalgia and fitting in, and about reality versus fantasy, Almasa features as something of an outsider but very much calm and rational in her analysis of the situation. The Swede is trying to persuade the old woman that she lives in a fantasy while the Bosnian post-war reality is horrible: “I’ve read that Bosnia is so war-torn now that streets are like fetid rubbish containers. Nothing works there. The locals dump garbage in rivers and abandoned backyards. They don’t think the world of their country. They are hungry, jobless, and pissed off. They’d leave at the first opportunity. But no country wants you now” (p. 28). Here we have a fight between nostalgia and a reality check that comes from the outside. The old woman knows very well, just like every other character, that she is fantasizing, but that fantasy is out of spite for the extreme reality of the situation she is in. The Swede thinks she is being unfair and spiteful toward him and his country, which accepted so many refugees. The readers can see she is not, or rather that her inat is of a different character.
The fact that people know the difference between reality and fantasy is shown in the story when another woman goes back to Bosnia and brings with her a small handful of Bosnian dirt. People start swooning, smelling it, and speaking of the beauty of their homeland. Even Almasa “wanted to smell the piece of Bosnian soil that had travelled about three thousand kilometres and to rekindle his or her nostrils” (p. 30). We can hardly recognize her from the other stories where she succumbs to depression and cynicism. Of course, she discovers the soil “had no smell whatsoever,” but then “What about the truth? I wondered and looked up the broad road to the refugee camp. I waved my hands. What about it? It doesn’t smell good” (p. 31). The true, the good, and the beautiful here lie in this positive, healing inat. Of course, this situation is silly, and the myth of the smell is total nonsense, but it is their myth, it is their right to have a nostalgic phase, just as it was my father's right to resist that myth and not to have that phase.
I wrote many stories with other characters who are amalgams of many amazing people I had met. They are like Almasa only in that they are idiosyncratic. On top of these, my collection How to Fare Well and Stay Fair (Mahmutović 2012) includes a few autobiographical essays in which I ventured into thinking about myself as a fictional character. The collection begins and ends with stories about me, which were, despite the allure of the form, hardly more true-good-beautiful than the fictional narratives. The opening of the essay “How to Fare Well and Stay Fair,” which as I mentioned earlier takes the form of an instruction manual and uses the second person, goes like this: “Cry when you leave your country if you absolutely must. If you’re an expat, please, don’t even think about it, but if you’re a refugee, make sure you do it out of sight of other crybabies” (Mahmutović 2012, 1). The imagery of the unsettling speaks for itself, of course, but the consequent settling in the feeling of inat happens in the refusal to be (only) unsettled. The attitude in the teenage mind is clear. He (me?) does not want his compatriots to look pathetic. He wants them in a better form. He wants to see more inat, even as the content of their lives shows tectonic shifts: you will be moved around the country a lot, and you will keep mispronouncing those names of places over and over. The transfers will give you a sense of change, of progress. Do not be fooled. Nothing will change. It's all a mind trick. But if it does work on you, well, good for you, ignorance is bliss. (p. 4)
There is an attempt to show this in the form of the story itself. My past self must have thought that the form of the instruction manual would be quite unsettling to the reader for several reasons. Obviously, the events are in the past and the past cannot be changed, but the unsettling lies in the constant thinking, What if I did this instead of that? What if, what if, what if? Another feature has to do with the notion of instructing someone on how to be a refugee as such as if speaking from the vantage point of experience and wisdom. It comes across as presumptuous, and yet that is exactly what refugees would hear all the time: be like this, and if you do this, you will get that, and if you say this, you will get help with that, etc. The individualized spite that he shows is just an emanation of the family inat and the collective inat, or at least attempts to muster up this positively charged spite to deal with the new condition. This individual and collective inat is present in all my stories and essays. Although each story about different mainly female character is a quest for form, the greatest variety of form is indeed in the eight stories about Almasa, 19 beginning with “[Refuge]e” in which Almasa enacts the rape she herself experienced on a random woman on a bus because the woman dares make jokes about war and rape. In that story, the joking about extremely sensitive things too is a form of being-in-spite, but so is Almasa's extreme reaction, which does not show her as a quiet victim but enacting the perpetrator of the original crime.
This spite I’m stubbornly insisting on is, in some ways, true, good, and beautiful. It is beautiful exactly because it is true. The phrase “ugly truth” is, from this point of view, a contradiction. The “ugly” here refers to the content of the truth, it being undesirable, disliked, and therefore judged using narrow esthetic principles. In the ancient way of looking at things, truth is beautiful by virtue of being true. The chain does not start at the end, as in our shallow way of looking at things: if they are esthetically pleasing, they must be good and true. This is why the spiteful refugee, appearing spiteful like Frankenstein's creature, tests our empathy, our judgment, and our moral standing (Shelley 2018). It is far harder to see the spiteful refugee as true-good-beautiful than to see my sweet father as being spiteful. In contrast, our fascination with historical monsters, the desire to psychoanalyze and empathize with genocidal beasts, is quite strikingly metonymized by Jessica Stern's development of intimacy with Radovan Karadžić in My War Criminal (Stern 2020).
This need to exercise control over the presentation and representation of one's unsettling is quite explicitly done in the story I mentioned earlier, “Mind's Garbage.” The origin of the story itself shows both the unsettling and the healing through inat, both in the content and the form. The process of writing is itself quite important to relate. I was a new Ph.D. student in English literature at Stockholm University. I was asked to come as a writer to a conference on Derrida. I had nothing I felt was a good fit. At the time, I was reading a story by Alice Munro, whose title I do not recall, and in it, suddenly, there were these two words that leaped off the page: “mind's garbage.” I do not remember the story or what the phrase meant there, but I had an idea to take all the little scenes and sentences that I had removed from other stories, the darlings I had killed, and try to sort them into a readable/digestible piece. So, I wrote an introduction in which the main character says she will take these little outtakes and sort them into different containers, so they appear less messy. Following this stage setting, the sections are simply:
Paper and Cardboard. Pink Container. Hard Plastic. Yellow Container. Soft Plastic. Brown Container. Colored Glass. Black Container. Noncolored glass. Purple Container. Metal. Blue Container. Batteries. Orange Container. Wood. Gray Container. Clothes. Green Container. Food. Green Container (of course). Objects too large to fit into any of the above categories. (I have run out of containers so I’ll just, well, I actually have no idea what to do with this.) (Mahmutović 2012, 55)
It is a form of settling, I suppose, this recycling. Recycling is a way of being a part of nature, of being a part of the smooth circle of life, being digestible, rather than being a contrarian. There is no recycling in Bosnia, which creates an extreme culture shock for many people from the diaspora. It is as if the absence of this modern practice defines a nation that is stuck between premodernity and postmodernity. It is as if the stubborn Bosnians have become, quite out of spite, indigestible to everything, even themselves. Perhaps especially to themselves. It is quite a tectonic unsettling, this one.
This form of being is exactly what I, or rather Almasa-the-protagonist is trying to capture in the weird form of “Mind's Garbage.” Almasa is trying to be very Swedish, applying the social model to the sheer chaos of her soul. Perhaps, given that the contents she puts in different containers do not fit (categorically speaking), she is being quite hostile, and quite spiteful towards the new place and the culture. At the same time, her inat is not sheer malice against the norm as a norm. In her inat she exposes the social hypocrisy of different systems, from Bosnian to Swedish social scrips. The true-good-spiteful form of the refugee lies here in the demand for authenticity, not just the authenticity of the content, but also in the struggle with presentation and presentability. The question that is still the key question for the unsettled people is that of the form and the content, the question of the balance between the truth that lies and fiction that tells the truth, the balance between the truth of suffering and the truth that comes through inat, the balance between the settling and the unsettling.
Conclusions and Inconclusiveness
In the end, what is the value of such a reflection that is not fully academic and not fully artistic, neither court testimony nor data gathered by a disinterested scholar? How should we classify what I have written here? Any genre, as we know, creates restrictions on what can be said and how it can be said to have value within a system. Just as my character Almasa is engaged in a meta-reflection on the art of storytelling which she pits against the craft of testimony, I am here navigating my artistic and academic repertoires, quite schizophrenically, to try and access truths that are as material and as emotional as they can be and can, hopefully, help us better understand uprooted families from 1990s Bosnia and beyond.
The point of such a form is precisely to avoid the generic biases that Wendy Pearlman warns against as she argues for the value of emotional sensibility. Emotional sensibility does not ruin data necessary for deeper scientific discoveries, but its absence from such research seems at least in part detrimental. This is in line with my reasoning about the approach to refugees. My collection uses an epigraph from Shakespeare's King Lear: “The weight of this sad time we must obey, / Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” I have argued that in situations where refugees are met, offered help, integrated into new environments, and finally even researched, as Pearlman shows referring to indifferent studies of Syrian refugees (Pearlman 2022, 5), whole sets of preconceived notions are operative. These preconceived notions, or plainly put, prejudices, are very much akin to genres such as academic writing, which decide a priori what is or is not valuable. As Pearlman puts it, the intent should be “neither to infantilize the actors whom we study nor to raise obstacles to scholarship.” Instead, it should be viewed as “a privilege, not a right” (Pearlman 2022, 2). My concern, then, with generic forms of testimony is, exactly as she outlines, that the form affects the content very much. So, despite the long history of grappling with the form-content question it seems to me that we-as scholars invested in understanding displacement and its consequences-continue to give too much weight to certain rigid forms. Thus, it is not only the context and positionality that affect the data but also the form the data is supposed to have. I would argue that the kind of (meta)fictional account produced by Almasa/myself in “Mind's Garbage” shows layers of trauma and the real condition of displaced people that is hard to access in typical testimonies and interviews.
Something new seems to be happening with the way we are processing what happened to uprooted Bosnian families and individuals. Post-war Bosnian writing has seen an emergence of testimonial narratives and memoirs, the kinds of genre that were not quite typical in previous generations, which, in my view, did not seem to operate with the “fiction vs. non-fiction” binary. Institutions such as The Hague and Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial Center have aided the production of testimonials, while writers such as Aleksandar Hemon, Saša Stanišić, Dževad Karahasan, Faruk Šehić, and many others, have developed new forms of writing in relation to other distinguished literary forms in Western literature. What is more, the type of hybrid text I have produced here, which draws on various forms, can help researchers like Pearlman, Halilovich, Nettelfield, or Wagner see the merge between emotion, experience, and intellectual reflection. Not all research subjects will give the same forms of response. Devaluing idiosyncratic forms is to do harm, and the point of research is to do no harm (Pearlman 2022, 7).
It is obvious from Sarah Cramsey's introduction to the special issue for which this text was solicited that things that were said, and the resonances they made, throughout the series of talks, performances, and discussions at the symposium where the contributors gathered were often more valuable for gaining a deeper sense of the subject of displaced lives than the actual papers that were delivered. This is my attempt to continue that dynamic in written form for a scholarly audience poised to gain much by recognizing inat as at least an interesting category of entry into the discourse on refugees.
I will end with an insistence, then, on my own positionality. I situated my own performance, and now this article, or what we might call an auto(bio)psy, or what we might call “the tale of the two spites,” in the cozy little town of Leiden, a stone's throw from The Hague, without resolution in sight, without the final settling of dust.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
