In these times of fervid nationalism, it is difficult to imagine living in a future where your nation is no more. How do you build yourself a life when you are not only in exile from your homeland, but the very idea of home has been exiled into the realm of impossibility?
My Cat Yugoslavia is the English translation of a novel written in Finnish by an Albanian refugee from Kosovo who fled to Finland at the age of two when the country of his birth, Yugoslavia, ceased to exist.
Its author, Pajtim Statovci, is the kind of writer who can get away with whatever he likes. Such as an immigrant-hating talking cat; or a solitude-loving boa constrictor; or a bloody battle scene featuring the aforementioned cat and boa constrictor. None of these apparent flights of fancy make the slightest dent on the hard-boiled realism of his novel.
The narrative follows, in alternating chapters, two lives unfolding in different time-frames and settings: that of Emine in Tito’s Yugoslavia in the spring of 1980, and of her son Bekim in Finland, some two decades later.
Dream and reality
Emine is a dreamy teenager growing up in a traditional Muslim family in a farming village not far from Prishtina, the capital of Kosovo. Her father’s prompt acceptance of an unexpected marriage proposal that comes for her leaves her excited and disappointed. “When I realised the only reason I went to school in the first place was because an illiterate woman had no chance of marrying a decent husband, the bile rose up to the back of my throat and my food no longer tasted of anything.” Nonetheless, her groom Bajram is a handsome man, and Emine is eager to love him, to be the perfect wife.
The chapters describing the elaborate Balkan wedding preparations, filtered through the consciousness of a young bride, are some of the most brilliant passages of prose fiction you will read this year. They are bound to remind sub-continental readers of traditional Indian weddings with their baaraats , obsession with gold jewellery, and the bride’s ritualistic expression of sorrow at leaving her natal home.
While rich in physical detail, these descriptions are also animated by a strange pathos and an eerie sense of dread that, of course, are borne out by events that follow.
Scenes from Emine’s wedding are inter-cut with those from Bekim’s life—the life of a lonely university student who hates his classmates and whose only friend is a pet boa constrictor. One day, Bekim encounters a cat in a gay bar, singing along to Cher’s Believe . “He was a perfect cat with black-and-white stripes… and he was standing, firm and upright, on his two muscular back legs.” Bekim feels an intense attraction for the cat and persuades him to move into his apartment. He soon discovers, however, that his feline friend is not only sadistic, abusive, and manipulative, but also homophobic and hates immigrants. But Bekim loves him, and wants to be loved and respected by him.
Emine’s love endures a similar fate, as her husband Bajram, like Bekim’s cat, turns out to be a cruel and abusive man. But she tries to make the best of her life, and gives birth to five children.
Life in exile
And then, the daily challenges of domestic life are blown away by something tectonic. Josip Broz Tito, the architect of Yugoslavia and its president for 30 years, dies. The country, a federation of six republics held together by Tito’s statesmanship and iron will, disintegrates, and plunges into civil war and genocide.
Amid rising Serbian nationalism, attacks against ethnic Albanians increase. Fearing for their lives, Bajram and Emine flee with their children to Finland. And thus begins their life as Muslim refugees in an alien land.
In their own ways, all four—Emine, Bajram, Bekim, and the cat—are exiles imprisoned in the perceptions and judgments of a society that offers them little power to represent themselves.
The 20-something Bekim, for instance, in addition to being an immigrant and a Muslim, must also navigate the challenge of being gay in a society that harbours varying degrees of anti-immigrant, Islamophobic and homophobic sentiments. In a fascinating reversal, he finds he has more in common with his feline oppressor, who is in a similar position of marginality in a world where all animals aren’t equal, than with the Finns who took pity on him and let him live in their country.
The contradictory pulls and pressures of love and patriarchy, desire and dignity, and the strange cocktail of pride, shame, guilt, and rebellion that inflects every father-son relationship are the other sub-themes that find potent expression in Statovci’s dazzling debut.
Though rooted in Kosovar Albanian culture and committed to documenting the entrapments of immigrant life even in a country as progressive as Finland, My Cat Yugoslavia transcends the particular. It is an insightful exploration of the multiple layers of exile that everywhere constitutes the human condition in today’s world.
This novel marks the arrival of an exciting new voice in fiction. In fact, 27-year-old Statovci has already been hailed as some sort of Balkan Murakami. But he is not. His cats are nothing like Murakami’s.
