Book Review: ‘Where You Come From’ by Saša Stanišić

As I hunted through the symbols in Microsoft Word to find the correct diacritics for Saša Stanišić’s name, I wondered what he would make of that.  Every time I write about the Balkans, I am frustrated and more than a little outraged by how difficult it is to locate them.  In Where We Come From (2021), Stanišić refers to them as “little check marks on our names” and notes that they’ve been a hindrance to him over the years.  To me – an outsider – they have always seemed a powerful sign of regional identity.  Perhaps that’s his point.

Where You Come From is a book that’s hard to describe.  It doesn’t fit neatly into a one-line elevator pitch.  Broadly speaking, it’s a memoir of Stanišić’s childhood in Bosnia, his escape during the war of the 1990s and his life as a refugee in Germany.  It’s also a biography of his grandmother, capturing her descent into dementia, and - as the title might suggest – a discourse on whether or not where you come from really matters, at the end of the day.  But, as the author himself concedes, it is not entirely autobiographical, because he is, and always has been, a storyteller.

 

A review from the Irish Examiner on the dustcover of my copy calls Stanišić ‘offensively gifted’, which seems to me to sum up his writing style perfectly.  There are writers who experiment with convention and fail.  There are writers whose words roll smoothly through your mind because they follow an established consensus on how a sentence should be constructed.  And then there are those rare talents like Stanišić, who create flawless imagery by playing with language in ways you would never consider possible.

 

The passage where he riffs on the name Oskoruška – the small village where his grandfather grew up – and “hard Slavic endings” held me spellbound with its brilliant manipulation of the written word.  It was the distinctive sentence construction that drew me in from the first pages of this book – Stanišić is obscenely talented with words.  (Of course, my half-remembered AS level German isn’t good enough for me to have read it in the language Stanišić wrote it in (his second language), so much credit must go to the translator, Damion Searls.)

 

Stanišić spent the first fourteen years of his life in Višegrad, and his descriptions of the town and its surroundings are wonderfully evocative.  By coincidence, I was also in Višegrad in the summer of 2018, when the final passages of the book take place, and the descriptions of the trips to Oskoruška put me in mind of the cabin we rented on the banks of the Drina; the walk we took in blazing heat, up winding tracks into the hillside, past impossibly remote gardens laden with tomato vines and fruit trees.  (And I couldn’t help but laugh at his judgement of Andrićgrad.)

 

As a true Yugoslav, with a Bosnian Serb father and Bosniak mother, Stanišić does touch upon the senselessness and destruction of the Bosnian War of 1992-95, but it’s not the main theme of the book.  The narrative instead focuses on the experience of leaving a place and trying to fit in somewhere new.  Stanišić’s recounting of the refugee experience in Germany makes painful reading, perhaps because it still seems so relevant now.  We condemn the wars, we feel sorry for the people affected, but do we really want the reality of them living on our street?  Rarely has this sense of disconnection been written about so eloquently.

 

The ending of Where You Come From takes the form of a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’, which is where the book lost me a bit.  I’m the sort of person who gets anxious in museums if the layout doesn’t take me in an obvious direction, in case I experience time in a non-linear fashion, or – worse still – miss any vital information.  Flipping back and forth through the pages, I worried that I would choose the wrong option and miss something fundamental.  Stanišić expresses his love of ‘Choose Your Own Adventure Books’ as a child, which explains the structure, but I couldn’t help wondering if it was this was merely a gimmick.  Or was it an inspired artistic choice?  Are we supposed to re-read the book and each time choose a different path?

 

These fictional aspects of the book certainly pose questions about the unreliability of memory, especially when childhood recollections are so easily clouded by nostalgia.  Themes are interwoven throughout the book so subtly that you don’t notice them at first.  A disappearing village mirrors a disappearing memory.  The fragmented nature of dementia is reflected in the disjointed, dreamlike quality of the final chapters.  The narrative is not linear, and neither is life.

 

Seldom has a book left me with so many questions to ponder.  Does where you come from matter?  Does it define you?  Do we try to foster a sense of attachment and identity in order to anchor ourselves to something?  Is all this more important for those who leave?  And these questions will undoubtedly hold more weight for a Yugoslav – for someone who was born, as Stanišić was, in a country that no longer exists.

 

It's hard to sum up Where You Come From in any succinct way.  The only thing I will say is: read it.  I can promise you that this is one of those books that will stay with you for many years to come.

A Pirate's Life for Me! (Or why I would have made a terrible pirate)

Is there anyone amongst us who hasn’t, at one time or another, dressed as a pirate?  At some point in your life, you get the urge.  Popular culture is awash with pirates: from Treasure Island, to Peter Pan, to kids’ birthday parties, sexy Halloween costumes, sitcoms, dramas and even ‘Talk Like a Pirate Day’ (19^th September, if you’re interested).  We love these swashbuckling rogues, with their cutlasses and buried treasure.  So, why the Hollywood glow-up?  Why are we all so hell-bent on romanticising these violent criminals? 

Firstly - where do our ideas about peg-legs and parrots and walking the plank actually come from?  Well, you can probably blame Peter Pan for that last one, and potentially the first and second too.  But many other images, of wild beards, wooden sailing ships, and black flags bearing terrifying death heads, all hail from a very specific period of history.  The Golden Age of Piracy, as it has become known, lasted from around 1705 to 1725, and was at its height during 1717-1719.  This was the period when such infamous pirates as Blackbeard, Ned Lowe and Charles Vane menaced European shipping in the Caribbean.

 

Historians have written at length about the reasons why such a Golden Age came into being, but it really boils down to a perfect storm of social conditions: the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1714, resulting in the discharging from the Navy of thousands of destitute and disillusioned sailors; the vagaries of shipping routes and transatlantic trade requiring many ships to pass through the warren of Caribbean archipelagos; and the wrecking in a storm of a Spanish treasure fleet off the Florida coast in 1715.  Though some historians broaden the period to include the buccaneering age of the late 1600s, and the Indian Ocean piracy of the 1690s, most agree that the Golden Age was over by 1730: by this point, all the most famous pirates were either dead (many executed), pardoned or vanished from the records.

 

Ever since human beings first got into boats, there have been pirates, so it’s strange that this short period has had such a huge impact on our collective imaginations.  Stranger still that such a period of intense criminal activity is referred to as a ‘Golden Age’.  It certainly wasn’t a golden time for the merchant ships that were terrorised by the pirate crews!  It appears that we have one Robert Louis Stevenson to blame for much of this. His 1883 novel Treasure Island endures in popularity, mixing fact and fiction to the point where, in the popular imagination, it is sometimes difficult to unwind them. (Israel Hands, for example, is both a character in the book and a genuine historical pirate.  The TV show Black Sails further muddied the waters by having Stevenson’s fictional Captain Flint and Long John Silver rub shoulders with Benjamin Hornigold, Calico Jack and Woodes Rogers, amongst others.)

 

Stevenson, in turn, was influenced by the pirate-historian’s invaluable tome, A General History of the Pyrates, first published in 1724 by Captain Charles Johnson, whose true identity is still a matter of debate.  Johnson tells the tales of many of the pirates of the Golden Age, including dubious biographical details and accounts of their trials and deaths, which lend them an almost legendary status.  Fiction certainly has a lot to answer for, but, then again, perhaps it is merely the fascinating uniqueness of this period which has spawned its weighty legacy.  Never again would the world see an explosion of this kind of criminality, led by such notorious, brazen individuals, whose exploits barely required embellishment to transform them into page-turning thrillers.

 

Yet life as a pirate was hardly one long romantic adventure.  For a subject that fascinates so many, there is a frustrating lack of historical sources around piracy.  Trust me – I’ve read virtually every academic book going, and they all get a little samey after a while, since they’re mostly rehashing quotes from A General History of the Pyrates.  However, one thing that all the books can agree on is that life on board a pirate ship was, for the most part, nasty, brutish and short.  Life at sea was hard and dangerous: in a time before universal healthcare, injury from wood splintered by a cannonball would likely result in death, or - best-case scenario - a lost limb.  Punishments were brutal and crews were unsentimental.  For pirates, it really was all about the loot, and they didn’t much care how they got their hands on it.

 

Much is made of the fact that pirate crews were egalitarian in their approach: they voted for their captains; their quartermasters shared the loot, if not equally, then by agreed proportions; they drew up rules that all aboard had to abide by; they had their own rudimentary health insurance policy, in that they received compensation for lost limbs and other significant body parts.  It has been argued that many sailors were drawn to a life of piracy because it was easier than life in the Navy or as a merchant sailor.  This was true – you could make more money as a pirate, and pirate crews tended to be much larger than those on a merchant ship, making the day-to-day running of the ship a little less gruelling.  But it can be too easy to assume that life on pirate ship was one of freedom from the oppression of the state.

 

Pirate crews were exclusively male (search for female pirates during this age and you’ll likely only turn up Anne Bonny and Mary Read, two amongst thousands of men) and many were riddled with STDs thanks to their usage of brothels when in port. Although some crews were multiracial, pirates regarded slaves as fair game for raids just as much as any other commodity.  It has been suggested that pirate ships were places where homosexuality was able to flourish free from societal judgment, but there is no evidence that these ships were any more tolerant than the rest of society.

Aside from the fact that I have no earthly idea how to sail, my general timidity and non-confrontational approach to life probably means I won’t be selling my house and buying a boat anytime soon.  Still, it’s nice to dream sometimes, and I doubt I’m alone.  We’ll all be fascinated by these colourful characters from history for many years to come, and the harsh realities of pirate life, and the terror unleashed on their (mostly undeserving) victims, will be conveniently overlooked.  Because the truth is that the appeal of piracy lies not in the violent crime or the brutality, but in the idea of freedom: of blowing off societal constraints and living by our own rules, sailing the seven seas with a trusted gang of shipmates.  Or maybe we just think we look good in the outfits...

Further reading on the Golden Age of Piracy:

Under the Black Flag - David Cordingly

Black Flags, Blue Waters - Eric Jay Dolin

The Republic of Pirates - Colin Woodard

The General History of the Pyrates - Captain Charles Johnson

A Pirate’s Life for She - Laura Sook Duncombe

A Time for American Heroes? Reflecting on the Legacy of the West Wing

Inauguration. White House.  Supreme Court.  Executive Orders.  Despite having studied the politics and modern history of the US, I can’t hear any of these terms without thinking of The West Wing, a show which has become far more divorced from reality in the past few months than it seemed two decades ago when I first encountered it.

September 2024 marked the 25^th anniversary of The West Wing first airing on US television.  It had been a couple of years since my last rewatch, so I decided to mark the occasion with another.  I was also lucky enough to have been given the book ‘What’s Next’ (written by West Wing actors Melissa Fitzgerald and Mary McCormack) for Christmas, which in turn led me to the West Wing Weekly Podcast, which has been the soundtrack to my commute for the past few weeks, and so I’m currently pretty thoroughly immersed in the world of President Bartlet’s White House and his improbably committed staffers.

It's interesting to look back now, a quarter of a century later, and wonder if the world really was a more hopeful place in 1999.  The series began in the final year of the Clinton Administration and it’s no secret that Aaron Sorkin modelled his dedicated band of staffers on those who worked in the Clinton White House, with some of them even serving as consultants on the show.  Unfortunately, at least on this side of the pond, Clinton’s legacy is somewhat dominated by his scandalous romp in the Oval Office, something it would be unimaginable for President Bartlet to have done.

It was partway through the second season that George W. Bush took office, and many have commented that the show served as wish-fulfilment during the Bush presidency.  However, it could be argued that this was just as much the case during the waning Clinton years.  Elected after 12 years of Republican rule, Clinton espoused a ‘Third Way’ of politics, pacifying the right wing of his own party and winning back the working classes who had been charmed by Reagan’s old-fashioned conservatism.  Clinton courted business, signed up to spending cuts and abandoned unions.  His record on LGBT rights might well have been called “legislative gay-bashing” by President Bartlet.  His foreign policy was more a doctrine of indecision than Bartlet’s “doctrine of intervention when only humanitarian interests [are] at stake.”  Clinton was a centrist – Bartlet was a liberal, and one who (mostly) put principles before politics to boot.  Is it any wonder that the show became so popular in its first season?

 

The West Wing ended in 2006 on a hopeful note, with the election of Democrat Matt Santos as the first Hispanic POTUS, which would be eerily prescient in predicting the election two years later of Barack Obama.  In many respects, The West Wing appeared more forward-thinking than much of US politics of today.  In Season 3, Bartlet easily defeats plain-speaking candidate Governor Ritchie (clearly a stand-in for Bush), and the idea that someone like Ritchie could be elected was laughable.  Fast-forward to November 2024, and the American public were busy electing someone far worse.

But America’s shift to the right is not in isolation – the far right is growing in influence all over the world.  The AfD in Germany and Reform here in the UK are making disturbing gains in elections.  This move towards the right stems, of course, from dissatisfaction.  GCSE history students across the country have written countless times how the Great Depression contributed to rise of Nazism in the 1930s.  For this generation, it is COVID-19 and its fallout that is the source of our discontent.  In any case, watching The West Wing now seems more of a fantasy than ever: a world where even Republican politicians are decent, principled people.

The West Wing is undoubtedly clever TV: in how many other shows would a main character deliver an un-subtitled diatribe in Latin?  (I will always argue that ‘Two Cathedrals’ is one of the best 45 minutes of TV ever produced.)  It sparked my own desire to become politically active; a desire which, I’m ashamed to say, has become increasingly jaded over the past decade.  It makes the potentially dull business of government incredibly compelling and honours public servants, painting them as heroes on a tireless crusade to make the world a better place.

 

Whilst it’s tempting to view The West Wing as a perfect liberal fantasy, it’s not without its flaws.  Season 3, airing post-9/11, was rife with anti-Arab sentiment that is hard to stomach now.  The level of reverence shown to the office of the President and the unironic declarations of the USA’s greatness – the idea that it can and should serve as saviour to the rest of the world – come across as somewhat hypocritical.  Coming from such a self-deprecating, buttoned-up little island, it’s a little nauseating to watch these extreme bursts of patriotism and arrogance.

 

It’s also becoming more apparent to me on each rewatch just how much representation is lacking.  Though The West Wing boasts two of the strongest female characters I’ve ever seen on screen in Press Secretary CJ Cregg and Dr Abbey Bartlet (with an honourable mention to the criminally-underused Joey Lucas), the treatment of other women leaves a lot to be desired.  Feminism is often derided, and often by the women themselves.  With the exception of Dulé Hill as Charlie Young, personal aide to the president, the main cast is exclusively white (and mostly male).  And notwithstanding a passing Republican Congressman, no LGBTQ+ character shows up until the final season (and even then, it’s a minor character and not made explicit until very near the end).  There are jokes that land awkwardly and lines (“these women”?) that just don’t sit right throughout.  Part of this doubtless comes from the fact that Aaron Sorkin wrote virtually every episode of the first four seasons.  Reading ‘What’s Next’ has given me insight into just how involved – and how protective – he was with the scripts.  However gifted the writer, scripts written from the sole perspective of a straight white man must inevitably be lacking in representation.

 

Was The West Wing simply a product of its time?  In July 1999, the NAACP President Kweisi Mfume threatened to organise a viewer boycott of major networks when it became apparent that none of the new comedies or dramas being launched in the autumn schedules would feature any actors of colour.  Whilst Sorkin does try to address this in a meta way, with the hiring of Charlie as personal aide to the president, it’s not simply an issue of cosmetics, as Admiral Fitzwallace says.  Progress has been made, but even now, it’s as much about the voices behind the camera as it is about those in front of it.

 

It’s been said that we are in a slingshot era, much like the USA was in during the 1960s' Civil Rights Movement – that to make great progress, we sometimes need to pull back, in order to shoot forward.  Yet I can’t be alone in worrying that we are pulling so far back on the slingshot that the elastic may snap.  It seems more unlikely now than ever that we could see a president like President Bartlet in the White House.  Even Sorkin himself has admitted that writing such an idealistic and aspirational show would be challenging in the current political climate.  And yet, should we not also have hope?  If we could aspire to greatness then, can we not aspire again?  Hope is what’s going to get us through this.  Hope – and action.  It's certainly not perfect, but if the legacy of The West Wing is simply to inspire us to do better, then maybe that is enough.