Adnan Mahmutović is a Bosnian-Swedish author and lecturer in English literature. He became a refugee of war in 1993 and has since written on the myths of home. I first got to
know Adnan when we were in the same online writing group together - we
were then both shortlisted for the 2011 Willesden Herald Short Story
Competition. His stories have appeared in a range of journals including
Stand, The Battered Suitcase and many more. His short story 'Gusul' was made into a short film by Artwerk in 2010 (you can watch it
here). His novel
Thinner than a Hair was the winning entry in the First-Novel competition run by Cinnamon Press. His short story collection
How to Fare Well and Stay Fair - which I have just read and mightily enjoyed - was published by Salt last year. Here I interview him about the collection.
AJ: The collection mainly focuses on
the experiences of refugees who have escaped war-torn Bosnia and settled in
Sweden. Did you draw on your own experiences as a refugee for the stories?
AM: Yes, but also things people have shared
with me. Sometimes, when I just listen, I find people will tell me amazing,
often intimate things.
AJ: The first lines of the story 'Myth
of the Smell' are ‘Sometimes I think the only real home for a refugee is an
endless road. In second place, I don't know, maybe a bus.’ Can you talk a
little about notions of home with regard to the characters?
AM: Early on I understood that “home”
was a mobile thing. So my characters are often moving, even when they’re not
doing any physical movement. Some are terribly nostalgic and romantic. Some find
that home is what they carry with them. But they all build their character in
relation to the notion of home. In the beginning, when you first become a
refugee, things tend to go from being familiar and intimate to being notions you
can’t quite understand. To be at home, to find home, for me, is to go back from
this preoccupation with notions and definitions to the mundane, lived
experiences, however small. That’s why the character Almasa finds home in those
real moments of connection, as for instance in 'First Day of Night' where she
meets all the different people and somehow, despite everything, connects with
them, on some level.
AJ: I was particularly interested in
the fact that a lot of your stories focus on female perspectives - Almasa, for
instance, is a recurring character. The book also seems to genuinely celebrate
the female experience (I particularly love the idea expressed in 'Integration
Under The Midnight Sun' which mentions the Bosnian myth
that ‘every corner of a house sings when a daughter is born in it’.) What was
it about the female experience that attracted you?
AM: I was particularly drawn to things
women tended to talk about. During the war gender roles were being ossified and
turned into things I couldn’t quite recognize. This continued once we escaped
war. I was personally disappointed with the ways men behaved during war, and
impressed by the incredibly creative ways in which women dealt with horrors.
Most men I’ve met over the years always
wanted to analyze and intellectualize things as a way of maintaining their
identity. I found women to be more relaxed in their storytelling, and more
oriented to small but infinitely significant details, like the things they say
to each other in 'Integration'. This for me is a more important part of history
than dates and numbers. When I started studying philosophy and literary theory I
found those peculiar little stories a great antidote to the discourses I was
engaged with. The story 'Gusul', for instance, started with an image of a woman
warming up her mother’s feet by pressing them against her naked belly. Things
like that, these raw intimacies tend to stay with me and then at some point
become a story. In 'Integration', I wanted to recreate all types of individuals
and their own quirky ways of being. In a way, I wanted to say, yes these are
all women, and they have their ways that are different from Bosnian men, but at
the same time, there is no such thing as THE female experience. Also, since
they’re all Muslim, I wanted to show there is no one way of being Muslim, not
even within a small community of refugees.
The story about daughters and houses is
something my grandma used to tell like some form of mantra, and since I grew up
with her, things she taught me are the ones that still define me. In
'Integration', having sons is a curse for Aziza because in Srebrenica civilian
men were basically exterminated.
AJ: The stories stand alone as
individual pieces but when you read the full collection you get the feeling
that they accrue - details build and we get a greater understanding of the
worlds inhabited. Did you write each story knowing they would be part of a
larger whole?
AM: Not consciously, but when you’re
obsessed with a few things, they tend to recur, no matter how different a story
is from another piece. I was surprised myself to see how they formed a whole.
Even the one piece that has nothing to do with Bosnians, which I wrote for an
anthology Stories for Japan, deals
with the same themes.
AJ: There is a variety of styles in the
collection. For instance, 'What We Talk About When We Talk About Suicide' is in
the form of a series of online chat rooms; 'Vacation: A Travelogue' is in the
form of diary entries for each day of the week; 'Consultation With Oxford
English Dictionary' is a very short piece showing the dictionary entries for
three words. I think these work really well together. Did you deliberately want
to try a number of styles when writing the collection?
AM: I did, yes. The thing is when I
started writing I noticed that my style varied from story to story, and that
caused me some anxiety. Raymond Chandler said that the best investment a writer
can make is to create one style. That may be true, but I’ve been drawn to
writers and artists who changed styles over time. Style became something proper
to the story they were telling, rather than imposed on the material. So I
stopped worrying and learnt to love my changeability. I feel that in order to
paint these realities, I had to approach them from different sides. This works,
I guess, because the stories are circling about some common nucleus.
AJ: The story 'First Day of Night' is
excellent and one of my favourite stories of recent times. Can you tell me a
little more about how it was written and the inspiration behind it?
AM: I already had a few stories
following Almasa. Chronologically, 'Integration' comes after, but it was the
first story I wrote. 'First Day of Night' was an attempt to just follow the
character as a free agent, so to say. What I mean is that I often worked with
bigger ideas in mind, like rape in '[Refuge]e', which originally had a fancy
title in French. Often my stories are a combination of a more intellectual
attitude, and an attention to those raw intimacies I mentioned earlier. I do
like that, no doubt. But in this story I wanted to see what would happen to
Almasa if she were released from that awful burden of representing Bosnia, women,
refugees, etc. Still, this happens. As a refugee, she is defined by that
discourse, no matter how much she hates it. I feel that in 'First Day of Night'
Almasa finds some freedom from that.
AJ: A few of the stories make passing
reference to comic book characters such as Rogue, the Silver Surfer and
Superman. Are you a huge comic book fan?
AM: Yep. Big time. The image of the
twin crescent moons, which keeps coming back in all my work, is stolen from the
Italian comic Corto Maltese. I use it a lot in my novel. There are many other
things. I’m the kind of geek who gets all the references in Junot Diaz’s book. I’ll
tell you something I haven’t told anyone, the night before we left Bosnia, my
greatest worry was not whether or not we’d get killed. I kept thinking what
would happen to my comic book collection. I brought with me a few essential books
without which I thought refugee life would be unbearable. I know it sounds weird,
but when I found out we were going to end up in Sweden I was suddenly happy
because I thought I’d be able to find all those comics I’ve only heard about,
the legendary stuff that never made its way down to the Balkans. First weeks in
the refugee camp in this windy town Uddevalla, I went on a prowl for a comic
book shop. I had no money. And even if I could buy some, I didn’t know the
language. That’s the definition of torture.
AJ: What are you currently working on?
AM: I have a draft of a novel, which is
not about Bosnians at all, but it’ll need a lot more work. While that ms is
shelved, I’m working on creative non-fiction. I wrote an autobiographical piece
for World Literature Today, and since I didn’t get any bashing for it at home,
I feel brave enough to do a few more.
* Visit Adnan's website here and buy the collection from Salt here.
Red Room: New Short Stories Inspired by the Brontës is now available to pre-order from Amazon - click here to do that. The book is out in November but if you order now you'll be certain of getting your copy as soon as they're printed. The price is £9.99 but remember that a percentage of the profits will go to a good cause - The Brontë Birthplace Trust - so it's well worth getting hold of a copy if you can. Not only will you be helping the Trust with their plans to promote Thornton in Bradford as a Brontë destination, but you'll also get a cracking book to read too, with stories from Alison Moore, David Constantine, Carys Davies, David Rose, Rowena Macdonald, Tania Hershman, Elizabeth Baines, Sarah Dobbs, Zoë King, Vanessa Gebbie, Bill Broady and Felicity Skelton (plus a poem by Simon Armitage). So, please support a good cause and support short fiction at the same time.
AM: Not consciously, but when you’re
obsessed with a few things, they tend to recur, no matter how different a story
is from another piece. I was surprised myself to see how they formed a whole.
Even the one piece that has nothing to do with Bosnians, which I wrote for an
anthology Stories for Japan, deals
with the same themes.