If Bosnia were to split along the veined borders that carve out of its midriff the incongruous shapes of its two governing entities, it would not be a division along the “ethnic lines” that mark these boundaries.  Rather, it would be a food fight, a war waged over whose cevapi – those spiced beef patties that have made the largest Bosnian cities of Sarajevo and Banja Luka famous in the former Yugoslavia – are better.  It would be a war I’d prefer.

The Bosnian restaurant Djerdan in Queens, New York serves Sarajevski cevapi. They are plump rolls of beef, short and neatly ordered along a piece of fluffy pita bread.  They are also dry, stiff, and tasteless compared to my hometown’s Banjalucki cevapi. I tell that, a bit of glee in my voice, to Jasko, a friend from Sarajevo.  “What do you know?” he yells.  “Your cevapi don’t even look like cevapi!”

This opens up the debate on the appropriate shape – cevapi from Sarajevo are individual rolls; those from Banja Luka come in neat rows of four.  The discussion heats up, fueled by vodka and now engulfing more of our friends.  “You over there couldn’t even steal the correct recipe,” continues Jasko.  “That’s because you over there messed it up in the first place,” I counter.  

“We over here” are former residents of Banja Luka, a town that with its Serb majority now belongs to Serb Republic, one of two political entities created by the Dayton, Ohio Peace Accord that ended the four-year war in 1995.  The other entity is Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, a joint enclave uniting the country’s Croat and Muslim populations, with Sarajevo at its center.  Together they form Bosnia.

“You over there” are former residents of Sarajevo, the country’s capital. Here, in the diaspora, “they” greatly outnumber “us.” That is why my conviction about the superiority of Banjalucki cevapi is drowned out by the outraged majority.  I hold my progressively wobbly ground.

It is in Djerdan that I remember the conversation.  This is our war, fought in exile.  Yet neither Jasko nor I can make any claims with certainty: he has never been to Banja Luka; I have never been to Sarajevo.  We only know the diaspora’s interpretations of our culinary legacies. And we know, of course, that there is no such thing as “us” and “them.”

This could easily be, however, a peculiar diasporic understanding.  In Bosnia, where physical boundaries confirm the divide, things are a bit different.

The young girl at the restaurant speeds past the tables, collecting empty plates.  I am about to raise my voice to get her attention, to ask the question I came to ask.  “Are there a lot of our people here?” But I hesitate.  What if she instead asks me…“our people?”

I don't write to become famous, I don't write to be read, I don't write to earn a lot of money...Why do I write then?


I write because I must write.  I write from an utmost need, a need that's possibly irrational or unexplainable.


I write because that which I write is, a strange thing, smarter than myself.  I write for others to find in my writing answers to questions they ask themselves, and which I too ask myself.  I write to explain to myself that which I don't know, and which, through writing, becomes clear and understandable.


I write because it is the only thing I know how to do. Whether that is worth something is a different question. I leave that for others to judge.


I write because it is something stronger than me, something urges me to do it, and I cannot explain it. Is it a need to transfer onto someone else my dilemma or my doubt or is it a wish to pass on a message?


Writing is another, better and richer life. Writing carries within it that fullness of life, wealth and enjoyment that is perhaps greater only in love and in faith.


Finally, I write because I exist only when I write, there I am free and inspired and I feel light, as though winged!  Writing fulfills all of that which life painfully witholds. 


And at end of that act, the miserable quotidianess descends, with all its pettiness and triviality.


Then I feel like I've descended from the clouds, onto the hard ground, where I stumble like a sailor that just stepped off the ship after a long voyage.


I write maybe because also: "the human kind cannot bear very much reality" (Elliot).

A bird's eye view of my leg
Discloses holes in places where you touched me.
The flesh concaved
Accepting fingers shaped like lust
Now the virgin skin swells with jealousy.
Contoured, these limbs tremble along the edges of dawn
Anticipating you
While I wonder whether
Or not
You are really worth a shave.

I would like to trade in
This one of mine
For a high-heeled, leather-soled soul
And a second-hand heart
With all its holes sown

To prevent these demons
Addictions
From seeping through the cracks of good intentions
While I arrange moments
Into alphabetical order

And I live only in intervals
Between remembering
Between (A)bsence and
(Z)aborav

I vaguely remember
How the flesh felt fingered
Scooped up into pleasure
My body.

Then they told me
How our limbs filled the space
To music
How we drank the night in gallons
Like milk.

I was also told
That you had wind wedged between your fingers

I seem to remember now

How I

Slipped through
Them.

America had been pulsing in my veins. I first noticed its palpitations on a tongue that after just a few years, rolled r's with reluctance and swallowed hamburgers with eagerness rivaled only by its zealous consumption of Coke. My body reflected only a fraction of this zeal and my culture was conserved in curvature more continental than contextual. I was not what I ate.  However, I also was not that which I had packed in my suitcase and brought over from the Old World. I was a conglomeration, a cultural hybrid looking for anchoring in a postcard from the 50s, a photograph of convertibles parked in front of a movie screen.  I had been looking too hard, it seemed, and was finding only faint facsimiles in museums of memorabilia and in fake sideburns of burnt-out hipsters, missing my America by several decades.  It took a lot of time to realize how little reality resided in these encounters and for a while I sought to restrain restlessness through a pursuit of freedoms I could only rarely identify as my own.  I followed dreams I did not own.  I sought spirit in places where voids were filled only with my imaginations, my longings, the obvious routes to disillusionment.

That summer I had been searching for the quintessential America.  I looked for it in one carnival field (right behind Loew's hardware store), in a drive-in movie theater, a custard-filled cone in Winchester, Virginia.  I looked for it on an open road between Charlottesville and Alexandria (only distance my gas allowance and already accumulated mileage would allow), at frequent stops at Sheetz gas stations along the way. There was something wholesome about these trips and the gas stations, about men I encountered and about the image I carried with me, this quintessential America I never found.  

I was inspired by a boy whose fevers I adopted as my own as together we read "On the Road" by Jack Kerouack.  We both craved open spaces.  We both carried our madness neatly folded inside our whispers, packed away, safe, so that it would not take up too much room.  Mine consisted of worn-out jeans, ripped grandmother's slippers, 2-dollar bills on coffee tables, several heartaches and few untold war stories.  His consisted of a dead mother, dilapidated dream and a deep hatred for women based on several miscalculations from an early childhood.  We both lived only in mirrors and memories, reflections lending substance.  We sold madness at an affordable price, to each other most often and sometimes to those who mistook the flicker of an eye for adolescent mischief and who needed a fix for inspiration.  We sold it off in grams but somehow there always remained enough for yet another aimless coffee drunk over an uninspired poem, for another wasted afternoon.  That is how we spent our days that summer.

We lived well for a while, reproducing the madness, photocopying it for rich, sheltered women and rich, overworked men.  We wrote poems.  We were invited to give conferences about our lives.  We thought up translations, English into Greek, Greek into English and wrote them on the walls of empty households.  "I'm circling around my truths like a vulture" he told me once, but I shrugged it off and said "as long as it sells."

Then one morning I woke up with a headache. Sitting up in my bed, I looked at the mirror in front of me that, observing the feng shui rules and regulations lay rather high on the wall, and realized that I had misunderstood the Cuban son. "I have mistaken it for passion when it is only a survival and today, that is not enough." He too had realized that he had put me together out of wrong things, shoes and accents, different names and he was sorry. "All you are is a shirt that falls off the shoulder, a faint reverberation of a touched, collarbone mandolin. You could have never been my poem." Neither needed to apologize to the other, but crutch-less and wobbling, we were overcome by the realities we so skillfully avoided up until that moment.  It seemed like a good time to run away. Ironically, I chose a land where escapism was a hypothesis tested only by waves and not-so-distant shores of Florida.  Often refuted.

Cuba.

"There are roughly three New Yorks.  There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here , who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second there is the New York of the commuter - the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night.  Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last - the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York's high-strung disposition, its poetica deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness, natives give it solidity and continuity, but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light that dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company."