In 1850’s Vienna, subjects from the South Slavic parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire met to discuss and formalize the language that would become Serbo-Croatian. This meeting, and eventual Vienna Literary Agreement, began a long bourgeois nationalist project to found the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the nation of the Southern Slavs. This project later resulted in a series of wars and mass-killings across the land of milk and honey, and subsequently, seven “new” states—Bosnia & Herzegovina, Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia, and North Macedonia, “new” languages, and even more “new” identities. What was once an ethnically diverse country violently shattered, and culminated in the genocide in Kosovo by the Serbian government. In 1999, Bill Clinton went on television to announce a NATO bombing campaign that lasted seventy-eight days, and halted the state-ordered violence there. Independently recognized by the US since 2008, a statue of Clinton stands in Prishtina, and a street named “George Bush Avenue” have helped spark the local joke that Kosovo is the fifty-first state of the Union.
Kosovar-Finnish novelist Pajtim Statovci’s third novel, Bolla, recently released in English, is his first to feature a Serbian character, Miloš, centrally. Arsim, our Albanian narrator, and Miloš have a passionate, three-month affair before Arsim escapes while Milošević’s government escalates its oppression of Albanians in Kosovo.
The book is beautiful. It follows a cruel, guileless Arsim in his pursuit of happiness and joy through the pain he enacts on the people around him. His cruelty stems from his surroundings: war, poverty, and hunger. Arsim’s context twists him into a tragic man, not even an anti-hero, simply a morally unwell person in a morally bereft world. Miloš, who comes to us in journal entries from a war hospital, writes to Arsim about their love and his life.
He writes, those months they knew each other were the best of his life, “untainted because [they] didn’t have to explain anything to each other.” The men later agree that their happiness together is not “destiny”, while any unhappiness is not “wasted” time. Soon after this conversation, Arsim drags his wife, Ajshe, by the hair and kicks her for “becoming pregnant” by him again.
Arsim tells us that his wedding with Ajshe was “traditional,” and they married because a man “should have a woman by his side.” She is “patient and understanding, bighearted;” Arsim remarks that she’s “exactly the kind of person [he] was promised” when they married. The same day Arsim and Miloš first meet, Ajshe announces her first pregnancy. In response to the news, Arsim smacks her. She and his child are in his way.
The novel, similar to Statovci’s other work, centers gay and queer characters and contains a splash of magical realism in Albanian folk tales and imagery. Bolla’s epigraph has a tripartite definition of the word—"(1) ghost, beast, fiend; (2) unknown animal species, snakelike creature; (3) alien, invisible.” The section breaks then dramatize the story of “bolla”—God asks the Devil to remove a snake from his Paradise, the Devil demands a child of God which turns out to be a daughter birthed in incest. The Devil forces the deformed daughter to live with the snake from Paradise and by the third part, the daughter and the snake have joined forces to form “bolla.” A straight-forward reading of this tale places Arsim (Albanian) as the child of God via incest and Miloš (Serb), the snake in Paradise (Kosovo).
Statovci’s first two novels, My Cat Yugoslavia and Crossing, a finalist for the National Book Award in Translation, contain similar events and themes (dual narrators or viewpoints, Albanians in Finland, snakes, Albanian folk-tales, an eventual return to the homeland). In the novels, megalomaniac narrators and characters pursue their solitary goals and hunt their own successes without regard for others.
In Crossing, Bujar, wants to escape post-Communist Albania for something better in Western Europe after his father dies. He has a friend who plays with gender, at varying points identifying as a woman. We follow Bujar in the first person through time jumps, as he spends chapters in Germany, Italy, Spain, New York and finally Finland. At various points, Bujar is a woman, a man, straight or gay. The mirror narrative takes place in Albania as he and his trans friend attempt to escape Tirana with what little resources they have, stealing, begging, and eventually working.
In each chapter, Bujar meets one indignity after another. Bujar, as a transwoman is beaten; Bujar, as an Italian, abused; Bujar, as a resident of Tirana, molested; Bujar, as an American, stricken with poverty and illness. These violences are presented as a product of social difference—Bujar is an immigrant, trans, or gay, and thus those people are subject to violence. Sure, a reader is meant to say, it’s simple. A leads to B.
What is not simple, however, is what this means in the novel and again in Bolla. Why, a reader could ask, are these characters subjected to extensive amounts of horrible beatings and rapes as their most prominent and revealing feature? After all, this book is fiction, the author produced a text and fabricated events, they could happen any way the author wants. This question isn’t meant to suggest fiction should be clean, simple, and kind, like a child’s tale, instead, I want to know why a novelist chose to create stories filled with things so tortured.
I read Statovci’s first novel, My Cat Yugoslavia, while living in Belgrade, inside the corpse of the cat as it were. It follows the dual perspective of a gay man, Bekim, in Finland, and his mother, who struggles growing up in Kosovo. He owns a snake and is tortured and abused by a campy, anthropomorphic feline, who is a man, and they enter a twisted, violent romance. He travels back to Kosovo at the climax and runs through a field tossing a black viper and a white cat off him.
Statovci, in an interview, suggests that the violence in his novels stems from “not belonging and shame.” His work, he argues, attempts to “show the brutality of being forced to start over in a new place, having to battle against prejudice.” This framing by Statovci is oddly naturalist given the elements of magical realism across his novels: these things happen in the real world and thus, fiction should show them. The questions—why do these narrators suffer? why does the author torture them? —begin to have an answer.
What Statovci demonstrates in his work is the problems that happen during identification, but they’re one side of the identification process—what happens when society reacts to difference. To some extent, identity is a “choice” in that we choose what words make our identities. The naming process isn’t linear and often top-down as opposed to bottom-up, but at an individual level, and then in society, we do have agency in presentation. Debates around pronouns for trans people occur not because trans people lack the language to show their full-selves, but because the “public square” hasn’t yet integrated that language into its discourse. That integration is a process, it moves with history.
Identification can be met with all sorts of reactions from society, but identity requires both individuals and society for it to be made. Concepts and identities grow and breath; they aren’t stable or “natural.” Benedict Anderson convincingly argued that national identity came about from political machinations, and John D’Emilio suggested that homosexual identification developed alongside American capitalism. Both these scholars and others (The Fields Sisters in Racecraft being another example) demonstrate that identity, the history of identity, moves. This motion doesn’t halt when we find apt language for who we are, but it continues, in action, through the creation of history. That movement complicates monolithic narratives of pain and suffering. In any subaltern group, there is joy, safety, and life.
After Arsim’s family escapes to Finland and Miloš progresses in his hospitalization, Arsim continues his terror against his family—this time as a result of the pressures of being an immigrant. He browses online for gay sex, meets up with a seventeen-year-old who turns out to be fourteen, and is sent to prison with a promised extradition back to Kosovo. His time in prison isn’t “so bad,” though he tells his family it is so he doesn’t have to see them, and he returns to Kosovo—his family in Finland mutually agree to end communication.
In his “homeland,” Arsim begins to search for Miloš. He eventually tracks him down and begs to a doctor/prison-warden to take on his care. However, Arsim’s feelings change upon seeing the task of healing his former lover— what he once felt toward Miloš “turns into something else.” Arsim chooses to leave Miloš in his own filth and return to his life of solitude in Prishtina. The consistency of Arsim’s selfishness is a brave choice from Statovci, who could have turned the final third of the novel into some sort of English Patient-but-make-it-gay melodrama. However, Miloš’s unsuitability for life in Kosovo can be read within the context of Arsim’s contentment there. After casting out Miloš, Arsim finds an apartment that is “heaven” compared to other places he’s lived, and has clarity about his abuse of Ajshe and their children, admitting Ajshe is a “better parent than [he] could ever be.”
Miloš “fails” in Prishtina because he doesn’t belong, it’s not his identity, not in his blood to be there. He is the snake in Paradise, and any effort to create some beast like “bolla,” like a loving gay-coupling, would result in societal violence. The die was cast long before the novel’s events.
Statovci’s work argues, then, that identity is fixed, even blood-borne. His characters find peace through return to their ordained positions in society. The drive to identify in the novels, the supposed playfulness throughout his novels with gender, nationality, race and sexuality is met with violence. Any effort to stray from one’s doomed national and sexual identity, to even stray from one’s street block, creates violence.
A naturalist view of identity means the world occurs to Statovci’s characters; they don’t make or act in it, which is often how it feels to be subaltern. Any character actions are violent reactions to the world around them, but the real world isn’t so black just as it isn’t rosy. Statovci’s art, in portraying “what happens” in a battle against prejudice contains a particular asociality that is oddly unnatural, given how realist the main events of this novel are. His magical realist elements serve then as a direct metaphor projected back onto the “real” world. Statovci’s oeuvre is beautiful to read, but his intended project linguistically creates a perhaps unintended naturalism shrouded by myth, and emerges to see the “real” world’s immense violence enacted onto the subaltern, while obscuring its joys.