Elvedin Nezirovic, Sandro
WRITTEN BY: Sheila Jindo
Nezirović's characters are a mirror of the Balkan man, a mere synecdoche of the collective experience of tragedy; and their interrupted or paused destinies a thorough analysis of the role of family and space in defining identity.
The writer in Elvedin Nezirović is inclined towards the intimate and subjective, while the journalist is inclined towards the factual and objective – in the practice of writing, the author immodestly offers private fragments, and then public documents as a guarantee that what he witnessed is based on the truth. Thus, Sandro could be called a novel about the voyeurism of the life cycle of a generation and the territory to which it belonged and/or which it appropriated for political and interest reasons, even despite cases of a lack of will for categorization. The character and vividness of the human objects of observation found their dramatic positions in the narrative about the difficult nineties; but we must not be deceived that these numerous names and their moral commitments of different intensities of extremes are limited to themselves – we are all a little bit them, they are all a little bit us. Nezirović's characters are a mirror of the Balkan man, only a synecdoche of the collective experience of tragedy; and their interrupted or paused destinies are a thorough analysis of the role of family and space in defining identity. It is an attempt to answer the haunting question of free will: can we be what we want or only what we, anyway, must be?
War is certainly a sculptor: a necessary change in both the manifest and the inner sense of belonging to someone or something, following the line of the triangle of territory, nation and body. In this equation, the Balkans applied a categorical approach in paying attention to origins without the possibility of refusal. After the collapse of the common cradle, the consequent individual self-definition became too crude, and one of the most prominent examples is ethnic segregation according to the rules of religion. Mostar, a city that responded strictly to the needs of these political ideologies with its infrastructure, as Nezirović himself writes, paved the way for the future of the dichotomy of Us and Them for the next 300 years. For it, declaring oneself an ethnos, in that binding relationship of the drowning man and his burden, meant a transition from the supranational to the national, from the secular to the religious, from the general to the intimate; and at the same time, a negation of the humanistic, that where there are no ours and yours, only those who do good and bad.
In order to transform the weight of such an imposed self into a reading medium, instead of pure autofiction, the author gives way to another – because with a friend from childhood, the street and school, with Sandra, it is easy to find an internal logic. The things that make up their lives are too densely woven and such an emphasized dose of orientalism allows his partner in revising this psychological history of bursting at the seams to be exactly him. But what about life? Nezirović, he will write – nothing. If it is completely indifferent whether the Chetnik bullet ends up in the snow, the beech or in my flesh – from whom do we hope for mercy? The senselessness of the randomness of assigning death is exemplified in the phenomenon of survivor's guilt.
Anyone who has experienced war knows that even if you manage to survive without a single scratch, you go on with your life knowing that it remains with you, forever, like a wound that will never heal.
You who read will be hungry for comfort. Sandro is not written to serve chronology, he draws conclusions from the past and infuses them with hope. He is there to bear witness to evil and its banality – its elusive, reasonless core.