Aleksandar Hemon: Sarajevo, Narrative Republic

I recognize faces and smells, jewelry and clothing. I eavesdrop on conversations in the hope I might hear a pleasant gossip, expecting I might recognize someone and that they might greet me. Of course, there are also tourists and foreign citizens on that plane who live and work in Sarajevo and who have become part of it. We're all going in the same direction with a certain amount of love for the city. I imagine we're all somewhat excited. However you take it, we're in the same situation of entering the unusual magic of the Šeher.

As the plane glides over the hills and vales and the peripheral houses on the only airway into the Sarajevo valley, I'm already planning my first day there: who I'll call first, where we'll coffee; where goodies I'll have for lunch; where I might be going out that night. None of that is a matter of nostalgia. I'm looking forward to the city as it is: beautiful and complicated, full of people I know and of those I have yet to meet, loaded with possibilities and mistakes, love and edginess. When the plane touches down, my Sarajevo emotional switch is turned on.

In a taxi, even before we reach Dobrinja—that is to say, in the first minute—I ask the driver: “How is it going?” It's a general question; any kind of report is fine by me. Sometimes, that is the only question I get to ask before the taxi driver plunges into his monologue. In those fifteen or twenty minutes to my place, the taxi drivers who don't mind narrating tell me how the business might be going. Sometimes they tell me about the weather, and they get into personal and wondrous stories that could easily end up in one of my novels. My ride to the Socijalno neighborhood, where I grew up and my family still has the same apartment is pretty much my narrative entrance to the city.

Sarajevo is the city of characters and surprises. It's hard—though not impossible—to explain to someone who is not a Sarajevan to what extent is that city a narrative space, how many stories can be found and, indeed, unfold in such a small space. I've lived in Chicago, Paris, Berlin, and I've been all over the world: Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, Cairo, Dallas, Oslo, Chisinau, you name it. Nowhere is the narrative material as available and high-quality as in Sarajevo.

Of course, I'm totally biased. My relationship with storytelling and language was formed and formulated in Sarajevo. I'm not sure I'd have been a writer if I wasn't born there. Nevertheless, I've never heard from anyone anywhere the kind of stories as I'm likely to hear on that first taxi ride, let alone while drinking coffee with urban veterans who are all versed in generating stories and spreading creative gossip.

That's why listening to the stories is part of my being in Sarajevo, which demands from me a certain kind of narrative modesty, an openness to anyone in that space who could tell me something. I pretend to be a visitor, someone who is yet to understand what Sarajevo can offer. That approach is partly a consequence of more than thirty years in diaspora, and partly a habit of a traveler who has opened himself up as much as he could to many cities of the world. I'd rather sit in a coffee shop, talk to people, watch them pass, let the experience assemble itself into a story, than stand in lines outside touristically significant objects, where stories are already given and familiar.

But I don't only seek new stories in Sarajevo. What is also activated are memories of times and experiences already stored away as stories. I'm at an age when I try not to bore the youth with narrating things that happened in the past. Still, it's impossible for me to walk the streets and not see my past, already told or untold and story-worthy. And it's hard not to feel an urge and a need to share some of that past with others, since every city is, anyway you take it, a treasury of its citizens' shared past. Which is why I'm happy to see tourists in Sarajevo, and even happier when my foreign friends come to see Sarajevo, even if I'm not there.