Unspeakable Home: A Novel - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ismet Prcic was born in Tuzla, Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1977 and immigrated to America in 1996. His first novel, Shards, was a New York Times Notable Book, a Chicago Sun-Times Best Book of the Year, as well as the winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize and the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for first fiction.

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Slouching Toward Pichka Materina

Slouching Toward Pichka Materina

Two Bosnian-born Brits wait at a pedestrian crossing.

A man across the street from them bounds right into traffic, causing havoc. Brakes squeal, horns scream, motorists raise bloody hell. The man somehow makes it across alive, not without a certain clownish, apologetic charm.

“How much you bet he’s one of ours?” the first Brit says to the other in Bosnian. She giggles, shaking her head.

“Excuse me, sir,” the first Brit asks the clown in English, “but where are you from?”

“Iz pichke materine,”* the man says in Bosnian.

Both Brits burst into laughter.

The man’s eyes widen.

“Just like the two of you,” he adds in English. “Just like everyone.”

*Pichka Materina = Mother’s Cunt

—WITNESSED IN LONDON, UK, CIRCA 2005

“We’re not here to answer cuntish questions.”

—GUY DEBORD

“In America you vatch television; in Soviet Russia the television vatches you.”

—YAKOV SMIRNOFF

0.1

We made it through what passed as childhood in Yugoslavia in the ’80s and into the gaucheness and ungainliness of adolescence just as our country was sent back into its mother’s cunt. It happened in the early ’90s. You probably saw some of it, spun this way or that, on your TV.

You and your fucking TV!

We loved you, though, still do, your cheery, mollifying sitcoms in which the TV set laughs at its own jokes, and your prescribed, moralistic dramas, the abridged binary worldview of good guys and bad guys, your representations of human conflict that can be summed up with the sentence: You lied to me! as if lying hasn’t been the only reasonable evolutionary response to what we vaguely like to call “reality,” your cultural exports that made the complex, fucked-up lives we in Yugoslavia both witnessed and lived feel easier to take, so much so that when we, the TZ PUNX (Tuzla punks), got pinched for, say, breaking into a newspaper kiosk to steal porn and cigarettes, we were so young and primed by your worldview that we actually believed we had rights, like you have in the States, and demanded said rights from the obtuse meat slabs that were Tuzla’s cops—kerovi—who leered and kneed us in the ribs and, using our Mohawks and long hair, guided our skulls into various durable surfaces, bloodsplit our ears by pulling off our earrings, and full-on stole our stolen Doc Martens and leather jackets.

We really wanted to be like you. If you asked us TZ PUNX in the early ’90s, we would have happily hung the Stars-and-stripes off of every Soviet-style balcony in our town. Shit, we would have tattooed them on our foreheads. Not because your stars and stripes are beautiful, not by a long shot, but because it would piss off our parents and grandparents and the other miserable commie and old and nuevo-nationalist fucks in charge of everything in our lives.

And yes, we sometimes made fun of some of your punks because they were “raging” against guitar solos that were too long in the ’70s. Kudos for that noble effort and all but, with all due respect, suck it a little. Your Natives and your Blacks were way more punk than any of your so-called All-Americans. Death, baby! Bad Brains, baby! Right?

But let’s stay on topic, shall we?

Mother’s cunt, or pichka materina, as we say, is where the so-called Yugoslavs used to send a lot of things and people, rhetorically, on a daily basis. It was the national pastime. A footballer kicks a ball into a post instead of the goal; send him to his mother’s cunt. A plate of chevapi slips out of hand onto the pine-needle-covered ground at some May Day celebration in butt-fuck Pozarnica; send it to its mother’s cunt. A D string breaks in the middle of a sevdalinka in the early-morning hours of a party when only the true raja—only the cool, essential members of the party—are still up (read: true alcoholics with a built-up tolerance); e nek se goni u pichku materinu.

We could easily have said that “war sent our country to hell” and made more sense here, but we’re not in the business of sugarcoating shit for you. It was back into its mother’s cunt that it was sent, back into the uterus, back into the place where its pieces were first put together and made into a whole, and back there it was backward unmade. The so-called Yugoslavs shoved it way up there and unmade it so well that we, their children, awakened without a homeland.

We belonged nowhere, so we formed our own tribe, chose our own markings and names, our own rituals and sounds. We wrote our own story. Good riddance, beloved homeland; you can go fuck yourself now.

We emancipated ourselves with glue sniffing and laughter in the face of our parents’ grave, fear-soaked talking-tos. Igor the Punk from Titova Street, who wore a giant encircled A on his T-shirt and who broke the communal light switches in buildings’ vestibules with his forehead as soon as they were installed, and who one time, when his own father caught him red-handed with shards of cheap plastic at his feet, gave his father (he didn’t know it was his father) a shiner in the darkness. He got his ass beat to a pulp, of course, but he kept on breaking the damn switches anyway, until somebody from the apartment-dwellers council thought to reinforce them in steel. Igor then started using a screwdriver on them, until his fed-up father sat him down and told him he had to stop or leave the house for good. Igor squatted on the living room rug and started to strain and grimace, as if in terrible pain. His father asked him what was going on.

“I’m trying real hard here to give a shit, Pops, but as you can see, no cigar!”

0.2

Before the war, we were kids who still somewhat respected grown-ups and gave a shit about getting together and playing games like football—sorry, soccer. We would gather after school on the grass behind the boxy building called Furnace One, called that not on account of its incendiary little apartments in the summertime, like everybody thinks, but because the area on which our ward stood was in the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire known for distillation of local plum brandy using big furnaces. In our time, it was considered a tough neighborhood.

Skojevska je oshtar greben,

dodjesh poshten, odesh jeben.

Or, “Skojevska Street is a sharp, gnarly ridge / you may come here all honest but you’ll leave here all fucked.” This is an artless, unrhyming translation. You’re welcome. (Also, the word jeben, or “fucked,” used in this way can be translated as both “to fuck,” as in doing the fucking, and “being fucked with,” as in receiving whatever the fucker can unleash. Both are powers.)

Once there on that patch of grass, we would divide ourselves into cliques or teams, scream and kick soccer balls and each other’s shins, get kicked out of games for missing goals and pestered by resident drunkards. There was this birtija called Snack Bar right around the corner, and the lowlife inebriates who lived there would come out to take leaks right...