10 Best Personal History Pieces: #1 Aleksandar Hemon's "Mapping Home"

The New Yorker’s “Personal History” section is a rich source of reading pleasure. Some of the magazine’s best pieces appear there. Over the past nine months I’ve chosen nine of my favorites (one per month). Today I conclude the series with my #1 pick – Aleksandar Hemon’s great “Mapping Home” (December 5, 2011).

This is a tale of two cities – Sarajevo and Chicago. Hemon is Sarajevan to the tips of his fingernails. He was born and grew up there. Of his 1991 self, age 26, when he was writing a newspaper column called “Sarejevo Republika,” he writes, 

Fancying myself a street-savvy columnist, I raked the city for material, absorbing impressions and details and generating ideas for my writing. I don’t know if I would’ve used the word back then, but now I am prone to reimagining my younger self as one of Baudelaire’s flâneurs, as someone who wanted to be everywhere and nowhere in particular, for whom wandering was the main means of communication with the city. Sarajevo was a small town, viscous with stories and history, brimming with people I knew and loved, all of whom I could monitor from a well-chosen kafana perch or while patrolling the streets. As I surveyed the estuaries of Vase Miskina or the obscure, narrow streets in the hills, complete paragraphs flooded my brain; not infrequently, and mysteriously, a simple lust would possess my body. The city laid itself down for me; wandering stimulated my body as well as my mind. It probably didn’t hurt that my daily caffeine and nicotine intake bordered on stroke-inducing—what wine and opium must have been for Baudelaire, coffee and cigarettes were for me.

Hemon’s sensibility is intensely flâneurial. For example: 

I entered buildings just to smell their hallways. I studied the edges of stone stairs rounded by the many soles that had rubbed against them in the past century or two. I spent gameless days at the Željo soccer stadium, eavesdropping on the pensioners—the retirees who were lifelong season-ticket holders—as they strolled in circles within its walls, discussing the heartrending losses and unlikely victories of the past. I returned to places I had known my whole life in order to capture details that had been blurred by excessive familiarity. I collected sensations and faces, smells and sights, fully internalizing Sarajevo’s architecture and its physiognomies. I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul. Physically and metaphysically, I was placed. 

And then, in 1992, the most devastating thing happens – the Bosnian War. Hemon is in Chicago on a cultural exchange when it starts. He’s supposed to return to Sarajevo on May 1. His father advises him to stay away. Nothing good is going to happen at home, he says. Daily, Hemon wrangles with his conscience: should he stay or return home? Much of that wrangling he does while incessantly roaming the streets of Chicago, “as though I could simply walk off my moral anxiety.” He writes,

I’d pick a movie that I wanted to see—both for distraction and out of my old habits as a film reviewer—then locate, with my friend’s help, a theatre that was showing it. From Ukrainian Village, the neighborhood where I was staying, I’d take public transportation a couple of hours before the movie started, buy a ticket, and then wander in concentric circles around the movie theatre. 

He calls himself “a tormented flâneur”: 

A tormented flâneur, I kept walking, my Achilles tendons sore, my head in the clouds of fear and longing for Sarajevo, until I finally reconciled myself to the idea of staying. On May 1st, I did not fly home. On May 2nd, all the exits out of the city were blocked; the longest siege in modern history began. In Chicago, I submitted my application for political asylum. The rest is the rest of my life.

In Chicago, he experiences “anxiety of displacement.” He copes by walking. He takes a job canvassing for Greenpeace. It takes him all over the city:

So, in the early summer of 1992, I found myself canvassing in the proudly indistinguishable, dull western suburbs (Schaumburg, Naperville); in the wealthy North Shore ones (Wilmette, Winnetka, Lake Forest), with their hospital-size houses and herds of cars in palatial garages; and in the southern working-class ones (Blue Island, Park Forest), where people invited me into their homes and offered me stale Twinkies. But my favorite turf was, predictably, in the city: Pullman, Beverly, Lakeview, and then the Parks—Hyde, Lincoln, Rogers. Little by little, I began to sort out the geography of Chicagoland, assembling a street map in my mind, building by building, door by door. Occasionally, I slacked off before canvassing, in a local diner, struggling to enjoy the burned-corn taste of American coffee, monitoring the foot traffic, the corner drug trade, the friendly ladies. A few times, I skipped work entirely and just walked and walked in the neighborhood assigned to me. I became a low-wage, immigrant flâneur.

He moves to a rough neighborhood called Edgewater, on Chicago’s North Side. He develops a set of ritualistic practices:

Before sleep, I would listen to a demented monologue delivered by a chemically stimulated corner loiterer, and occasionally muffled by the soothing sound of trains clattering past on the El tracks. In the morning, drinking coffee, I would watch from my window the people waiting at the Granville El stop, recognizing the regulars. Sometimes I’d splurge on breakfast at a Shoney’s on Broadway (now long gone) that offered a $2.99 all-you-can-eat deal to the likes of me and the residents of a nursing home on Winthrop, who would arrive en masse, holding hands like schoolchildren. At Gino’s North, where there was only one beer on tap and where many an artist got shitfaced, I’d watch the victorious Bulls’ games, high-fiving only the select few who were not too drunk to lift their elbows off the bar. I’d spend weekends playing chess at a Rogers Park coffee shop, next to a movie theatre. I often played with an old Assyrian named Peter, who owned a perfume shop and who, whenever he put me in an indefensible position and forced me to resign, would make the same joke: “Can I have that in writing?” But there was no writing coming from me. Deeply displaced, I could write neither in Bosnian nor in English.

Gradually, gradually, Chicago enters him. He begins to know it “in his body” the way he knew Sarajevo. He becomes a local:

Little by little, people in Edgewater began to recognize me; I started greeting them on the street. Over time, I acquired a barber and a butcher and a movie theatre and a coffee shop with a steady cast of colorful characters (the chess players). I discovered that in order to transform an American city into a personal space you had to start in a particular neighborhood. Soon, I began to claim Edgewater as mine; I became a local. It was there that I understood what Nelson Algren meant when he wrote that loving Chicago was like loving a woman with a broken nose: I fell in love with the broken noses of Edgewater. On the AiR’s ancient communal Mac, I typed my first attempts at stories in English.

I love this piece. It describes the anxiety of displacement that many of us feel when we move to a new place, and it prescribes an antidote – walk, wander, look, collect sensations, internalize the architecture. In other words, be a flâneur. 

Credit: The above illustration by Riccardo Vecchio is from Aleksandar Hemon’s “Mapping Home” (The New Yorker, December 5, 2011).