The Experience of War and Mostar in the Prose of Elvedin Nezirović

Abstract

The subject of this paper is the significance of the narrativization of personal experience in the work of the Mostar-based writer Elvedin Nezirović, that is, the construction of identity, imagination, memory, and self-examination of the subject and agent within the context of “external” space and time – namely, a historical period, real events, individuals, and locations rendered from within through narrative discourse. The methodological framework of the study integrates literary-anthropological analysis with a political-anthropological, ethnographically grounded, and cultural-historical approach to a specific locality and to socio-historical processes as both referent and context of the literary text. In Nezirović’s lived, experiential prose, personal themes predominate (the early loss of his father; a psychologically specific relationship with his mother and stepfather), alongside family narratives, depictions of childhood in a village near Stolac and of growing up in Mostar in the 1980s, the experience of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the wars in the Mostar region, participation in the war, and life in a divided city.

By situating Nezirović’s work within the broader phenomenon of postwar Bosnian-Herzegovinian and post-Yugoslav “reality-based prose,” the paper demonstrates that his writing transcends individual and narrowly national frameworks. It constitutes an important contribution to memory studies concerning Yugoslav socialism, to the study of cultural trauma, and to the urban anthropology of Mostar, which functions as both narrative setting and symbolic space. The literary-anthropological analysis of a significant portion of Elvedin Nezirović’s oeuvre, combined with a political-anthropological, ethnographically grounded, and cultural-historical approach, has yielded an anthropological interpretation of the referent and the broader context of the text – its socio-political and socio-cultural dimensions.

Nezirović’s experiential prose draws extensively on the author’s coming of age during the period of socialism, on personal traumas conditioned by the war events that befell Mostar in the 1990s, and on the postwar social reality shaped by ethnic and political divisions between Bosniaks and Croats in the city on the Neretva River. In this respect, he becomes one among a number of individuals who, through their creative work, seek to carve out a niche of their own existence and to (re)conceptualize their ethnic and local identity, relying on memories from family history as well as on the legacy of supranational belonging formed during the era of Yugoslav socialism. Although Elvedin Nezirović insists on an aesthetic distinction between fiction and document, his works reveal the flexibility of these boundaries and possess, in addition to their literary-aesthetic dimension, value as documents of lived experience and as socio-cultural records. Nezirović’s prose, while (auto)biographical and intimate in nature, transcends the confines of individual and collective-national experience, as well as the traditionally conceived national literary framework, and becomes a literary document of the epoch marked by the breakup of Yugoslavia, the wars in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the postwar period. It potentially addresses all those concerned within the post-Yugoslav literary and cultural field, which literary theorist Boris Postnikov has termed the “literary republic of Yugoslavia,” but it speaks above all to the generations of the last Yugoslavs – those who formed their identities in the former common state and experienced the “social drama” of its disappearance: the trauma of war, deportation, displacement, and emigration to foreign countries during or after the ethnic conflicts of the 1990s.