*
If autobiographical fiction can find new ways to voice truths, especially those not easily told, what are some of the truths this book is trying to voice? There is an ambivalence to remembering, an impossibility of returning to the past. On the road trip with his son, the author visits the very first apartment his family lived in when they moved to America. The landscape has changed and so have the inhabitants of their former apartment complex, whom they disturb by being there. ‘And I don’t feel good, it’s as though I’ve been driven out of my own past.’ It is not the homecoming he expected.
With this impossibility of returning, though, comes the impossibility of forgetting. When Mehmedinović is given medication to prevent a heart attack, his doctor tells him that one of the side effects can be memory loss—not ideal, the doctor concedes, but at least ‘forgetting doesn’t kill you.’ But Mehmedinović knows that forgetting can kill you. If you no longer remember your loved ones, no longer have your memories, what kind of a life would that be? Who would you be? Isn’t who we are linked to what we can remember; memory intimately linked to identity?
It is hard not to think about what might have inevitably fallen into the empty spaces between the languages as it moved back and forth between translation and re-translation.
Intertwined, too, with memory and identity is language, and what is lost to language through migration. The language Mehmedinović refuses to write in—English—is also the language in which Sanja’s stroke occurs. Therefore, he has to ‘translate’ what happened to Sanja into Bosnian as he takes down notes; into ‘an isolated, fairly remote language’ where ‘some details are not translatable.’ He speaks of the isolation in the empty space between two languages, a space that for him ‘is the same as forgetting.’ I wonder then, what it means to be reading the version translated ‘back’ into English by translator Celia Hawkesworth. Is there a doubling of that empty space, a doubling of what is lost and forgotten? The English translation itself reads smoothly, the language direct and unfussy, rendering clear the small observations and details that permeate the book. But it is hard not to think about what might have inevitably fallen into the empty spaces between the languages as it moved back and forth between translation and re-translation.
Through the accumulation of details and memories in this book, we see how the impact of exile and its attending losses mirrors the threat of forgetfulness and loss in illness. In My Heart, exile is a form of illness to be suffered and endured, it is a double loss—in the actual one suffered, and again in the threat of forgetfulness over time. ‘It’s a shame there isn’t a machine that discovers forgotten events and returns them to the memory.’ For the migrant then, the danger of forgetting can be similar to a death.
*
Just before the pandemic hit last year, my mother was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. A few short months later she died before the first lockdown in Sydney. Reading about Mehmedinović’s hospital visits to his wife Sanja, and how traumatising she found the never-ending series of injections and tests, the transformation of her body into a medical object to be endlessly pricked and prodded at, I recognised my own family’s experience around my mother’s illness. I also resonated with his descriptions of Sanja’s forgetting. At one point during her illness, my mother began not knowing how to do basic things, like how to use a spoon or turn on the tap for water. I’m also not sure if she really knew who we were. We found out that her brain had become so swollen that it was pushing against her skull, causing neural damage. With her mind gone, it felt like we had lost her. But with a few injections of steroids her brain shrunk back to normal size and she came back to us; we were overjoyed. But we only had her back briefly. Very soon afterwards she was gone again, passing away from the cancer.
Throughout the pandemic, more of us have had to face our own mortality and that of those we love. Being hyper-aware of loss, experiencing a warped sense of time, an heightened anxiety—individually and as a society, more of us are questioning what we are doing with our lives and where we are going. All of these are processes similar to that which often occurs when grieving the illness or loss of a loved one. Even in countries and regions that have so far avoided the worst, we are still experiencing a unique form of communal grief.
In My Heart, exile is a form of illness to be suffered and endured, it is a double loss—in the actual one suffered, and again in the threat of forgetfulness over time.
What My Heart reminds us is that while the grief of illness and death will eventually strike us all—perhaps even more so now in these unprecedented times—some of us have already experienced the grief of the immigrant, the extraordinary grief of war and trauma, and the ways in which these accumulate and interweave over time with the more common and universal experiences of loss inherent in being alive. In reading this book, I am reminded of the layers of grief that accompanied my mother’s passing, that have accompanied my family as immigrants who have come from war, and how this complicates our experience of time, memory and loss.
My Heart is in fact a book about mortality, and the many different forms of lesser deaths before the ultimate one we all must face. But it is also about the very specific losses that the foreigner in exile, especially one who has experienced the trauma of war, must undergo. And yet in the book, as in life, there are moments of remembering—fragile and temporary, perhaps—but precious nonetheless.
Shortly after her stroke, to test her memory a doctor asks Sanja if she knows who Mehmedinović is, and he is alarmed to see her looking initially blank:
She’s forgotten me. But then her face experienced a total transformation, she looked at me as though she had saved me from nonexistence, or as though she had just given birth to me, and with an expression of the purest love she said: ‘Semezdin, my Semezdin.’ And that was the moment when my name filled with meaning. I was her Semezdin. That is my love story, and my whole life.
My Heart is available in print and digitally through Booktopia, or at your local independent bookseller.
