Our America: migratory dreams in Pajtim Statovci’s My Cat Yugoslavia and crossing

ABSTRACT

‘Europe was our America,’ the protagonist of Pajtim Statovci’s novel Crossing (2016) remarks as he prepares to leave Albania. In this novel and Statovci’s début, My Cat Yugoslavia (2014), characters escape the violence and instability that erupts after the collapse of communism in Yugoslavia and Albania. Europe – erstwhile remote to them – promises safety, liberation and opportunity. In both novels, this migration ultimately problematizes the main characters’ accustomed family structures and enables an engagement with gender/sexuality, whilst also emphasizing the practical difficulty of ‘realizing’ Europe. Yet as shifts in location are correlated with shifts in identity, complimentary questions about the opposition of destination and origin are raised. Using notions of literary worlding and Balkanism to explore the novels’ mediation of the differences between Kosovo/Albania and ‘Europe,’ we argue that in these novels migratory identity and Europeanness exist in a mutual, transformative exchange. The idea of Europe, as manifested by the migrant, changes while it also changes them. Ultimately, we suggest how Statovci’s novels show the impossibility of arrival and settlement in a Europe where issues of citizenship, belonging, and identity are hotly debated.

KEYWORDS:

• Pajtim Statovci
• migration
• gender and sexuality
• European literature
• world literature

Introduction

‘Imagine,’ says Agim, Bujar’s best friend, in Pajtim Statovci’s second novel Crossing (Statovci 2019, 145). ‘We can do anything now, we can be anyone, we can go anywhere.’ Having left home, the two boys, fifteen and sixteen years old, live on the streets of the Albanian capital Tirana, full of dreams and desires. These themes – of leaving and starting over, and of becoming someone else – are central to Crossing. Later in the novel, Bujar makes the point even more strongly, when he remarks that ‘Europe was our America; everybody around us wanted to be European, to belong to the European family, to stand on the other side of the invisible but insurmountable fence where people were people, at the forefront of humanity’ (158–9). It is summer 1991, almost two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and in the middle of communism’s collapse in Central and Eastern Europe. Bujar and Agim dream of going to Rome, Berlin, Madrid – to Europe, anyway, and away from Albania, ‘the black spot of Europe, a surreal place with no direction, no sense, a place about which nobody knew a thing’ (65). Statovci’s début novel, My Cat Yugoslavia (2017 [2014]), was similarly concerned with the hopes and dreams of its Albanian-Kosovar main character living in between Kosovo and Finland. In both novels, characters look to escape poverty, to have a better life, or simply to flee the war and violence that erupts on the Balkans in the wake of the collapse of Yugoslavia and the end of Albanian communism.

My Cat Yugoslavia and Crossing are novels of migration, of departure and a pending arrival, and of the relation between Southeast Europe – ‘the Balkans’ – and the rest of Europe. In this paper, we analyse the stereotypical, heavily contrasted relationship between these two spaces these novels, and especially their main characters, construct. Time and again, Southeast Europe is the negative of what the rest of Europe is: poor, violent, conservative versus rich, peaceful, and socially progressive. This opposition is not unique to these novels (see, e.g. Trakilović 2016), yet its self-conscious mobilization makes it distinct from earlier iterations. Building on recent work on Balkanism (Todorova 2009), we suggest this ‘self-balkanizing’ move connects these novels to larger socio-political discussions on the region, its place in European imaginaries, and the way conceptions of gender and sexuality tie in with such conceptions. As such, these novels partake in discussions that take place across politics, society, and cultural production on definitions of Europe and the fraught inclusion of Southeast Europe in all its internal variety in those definitions.

As such, we submit, it is possible to read Statovci’s literary work as engaging in a broader, European-wide conversation on perceptions of Southeast Europe and its relation to – and difference from – other parts of Europe. However, rather than conceptualizing this space as a sphere – the metaphor going back to (English translations) of Jürgen Habermas’ seminal work (1962) –, we follow Lesley Cowling and Carolyn Hamilton in their move to consider publicness as a ‘capillaried network in which ideas are constantly circulating’ (2020, 6). Their work is significant in that it moves away from a public sphere that is totalizing in its universality. The suggestion that discussions enjoy uptick in certain domains and not in others, or that they can spill over from into another, is helpful in locating Statovci’s literature in broader discussions on Europeanness and European identity, especially as to whether the region commonly known as the Balkans is part of Europe or not – and, if yes, how. In My Cat Yugoslavia and Crossing, we have two novels that entertain a discussion on what ‘Europe’ means. Although these novels’ protagonists hold on to clear-cut distinctions, as they migrate from a perceived periphery into Europe ‘proper’, their definitions start to change. To become European is to realize it, in ever shifting ways.

Imaginations of the ‘Balkans’

‘It is unclear,’ writes John McCormick (2010, 20; original emphasis removed), ‘exactly when the term European was first applied to a specific territory or its inhabitants.’ He argues to fix this moment in the fifth century before Christ. Around this time, the ancient Greeks encountered the Persians and started to contrast their own identity with that of outsiders. This dialogical process, in which Europe defined itself against whatever ‘Other’ was prevalent (although a discursive preoccupation with Islam and ‘the East’ has been dominant since the early Middle Ages), would come to characterize European identity-construction until the present day. The European self was whatever the entity it was contrasted with was not. This process is what Joep Leerssen (2016) has termed ‘oppositional’: identity formation does not emphasize commonalities or sameness, but rather difference and divergence.

There is nothing ‘natural’ or self-evident about the different conceptualizations of Europe throughout the ages: in their bordering and ordering, they do political work (Balibar 2004, 2009). They delineate who belongs and who does not, who is in and who is out, who is home and who is out of place. Where some – external – boundaries are played up, other, internal borders are diminished in importance. Many constructions of Europe create a kind of ‘heartland’ of European countries, which share political histories and geographical affinities. Spatial distance to this ‘core’ becomes cultural, political and perhaps even moral distance, too, in the ‘peripheries’.

One such region that plays a ‘liminal role in the European imaginary’ (Trakilović 2019, 50) is the Balkans, or Southeast Europe. The region, its imagined borders itself already fluid, is most prominently associated with violence, destruction, and backwardness. From the Balkans emanates a ‘potential rupture in the fiction of a unified European self’ (Trakiiovic 2019, 50; see also Trakilović 2015). The Balkans are where whatever Europe is meets its Other, thus exposing the fragility of the former’s self-definition. The often-invoked spectre of ‘Balkanization’ says more about who utters it then the region it supposedly describes (Bakić-Hayden and Hayden 1992; Grubacic 2012). This image of the Balkans as chaotic and always at the precipice of collapse is ‘frozen’, in Maria Todorova’s (2009, 7) words, and thus appears to exist outside of historical time. European perceptions of the region have often been identified as a form of Orientalism, as described by Edward Said, yet Todorova convincingly argues the contrary. To the fantastical nature of the Orient stands Southeast Europe’s overwhelming concreteness, for example, and the Orient’s imagined luxurious wealth contrasts with this region’s dreaded poverty. Her alternative phrase ‘Balkanism’ is meant to describe the region’s ambiguity in the European imaginary and its position as Europe’s ‘failed self’ (Todorova 2009, 18). Identifications of Europe unravel at their borders, and Southeast Europe presents one such unravelling.

This removal of the Balkans from historical time has served what David Norris (1999) calls ‘the Balkan myth’, which allows Western Europe to skip the region and connect its own culture and history to that of Ancient Greece. This erasure of a real, physical geography is accompanied by an ‘imaginative colonisation’ (Goldsworthy 1998, 2), which plays up the region’s supposed danger, violence, and disruption. Scholars have worked to uncover these Western stereotypical representations, as well as the impact they have on the region’s self-image. Working with Said’s and Todorova’s notion, Milica Bakić-Hayden (1995) coined the term ‘nesting orientalisms’ to describe the self-orientalizing moves by ‘Eastern’ peoples. Those who are orientalized by the West in turn orientalize others: the goal is to create space between the self and the ‘East’ in order to move the self closer to the ‘West’. This internalized distancing towards the Balkans is a practice we will see play an important role in Statovci’s characters’ psychology.

At the same time that Europe has been representing the Balkans in a variety of discourses, throughout Europe, the United States, and Canada writers with roots in various countries in the region have produced their own representations. This is an example of how the image of the Balkans circulates in the public sphere understood through Hamilton and Cowling’s metaphor of the capillaried network: various actors discuss related, if not similar topics, without these necessarily being directly influenced by one another. Scholarship on post-Yugoslav writers emphasizes issues of home, the relationship to Europe or the West, border-crossing, and ruins in their work (Kovačević 2008; Sadowski-Smith and Luca 2019; D. Williams 2013). Many of these authors, including Aleksander Hemon, Semezdin Mehmedinović, Bekim Sejranović, Saša Stanišić, and Dubravka Ugrešić, have gone to gain considerable international acclaim. Statovci takes a somewhat unique perspective amidst these authors, not because of a lack of critical and commercial acclaim, but as his life trajectory took him from Albanian-speaking Kosovo (rather than the Serbo-Croat speaking rest of Yugoslavia, where the aforementioned authors have their roots) to Finland, which itself can be said to occupy a less central position in the European imaginary. We will return to this tension in the rest of this paper. Yet these differences internal to the post-Yugoslav space already opens up a multilayered perspective on the question what Europe is and can be.

Worlds of literature

Pajtim Statovci’s novels My Cat Yugoslavia and Crossing, we submit, are written against the backdrop of a Europe in which migration brings demographic changes and globalization breaks down existing ‘structures of feeling’ (R. Williams 1977, 128–35; see also Lowe 2020) and makes possible forms of belonging and identification that go beyond what already exists. Taking our cue from this combination of aesthetics – aesthesis as sense-making – and politics, we do not want to repeat the critical tendency to treat literary works written by postcolonial and migrant writers from a socio-political perspective only (Boehmer 2018). As an alternative, we turn to recent work done under the rubric of world literature to bring together these two perspectives and offer productive possibilities of reading Statovci’s novels.

Recent methodological engagements with the question of how postcolonial or migrant literature are to be interpreted would benefit from thinking about how literature worlds, i.e. how literary works construct worlds and in doing so respond to and refract extraliterary pressures and conditions (Cheah 2016; Hayot 2012; Neumann 2018; Orsini 2023). Adopting this lens allows for the possibility of moving beyond discussions that otherwise remain rooted in narrow perceptions of the clash between the national and the cosmopolitan, and postcolonial literature’s insistence on creating transnational feelings of belonging. We do not dispute this ability, but at the same time want to suggest that the figure of a literary world can better ascertain what is going on both politically and aesthetically in much of contemporary European ‘migrant literature.’ That is because literary worlds function as sites of socio-political engagement on the terms of the work in question itself, while also calling attention to the aesthetic and hermeneutic ways in which such worlds are made sense of.

Our particular contribution in this paper to this debate is to consider My Cat Yugoslavia and Crossing as novels in which the world acts as ‘a horizon of signification’ (Siskind 2014, 14) beyond the protagonists’ native Kosovo and Albania. Their rejection of their places of origin and, up until their adolescence, their homeland – whose boundaries, as we will see, can in the novels be fluidly stretched to cover the Balkans tout court – is coupled with a desire for a larger world, which comes to signify a hopeful future. Appealing to the figure of the world allows authors to overcome the limitations of the national and situate themselves in a less politically charged, minoritarian environment.

Specifically, we want to employ Karima Laachir, Sara Marzagora and Francesca Orsini’s (2018) recent notion of ‘significant geographies’ as a way into the literary worlds of My Cat Yugoslavia and Crossing. Significant geographies refer to those spaces and places, as well as the territories, trajectories, cultures, and histories they hold, that come to matter both inside and outside the text. To conceive of a literary world as a constellation of significant geographies is to see how literature incorporates both the national and the post-national, and counters the type of ‘one-world thinking’ (Mufti 2018, 5) that is so prevalent in much literary criticism – and that relegates Southeast Europe to the peripheral position Balkanism propagates and cements. From this perspective, space is not merely geographic or cartographic: inscribed in the geographies that form the basis of literary worlds are multiplicities of ‘imaginations, theorisations, understandings, meanings … [a] “simultaneity” of stories-so-far’ (Massey 2005, 89).

Using this understanding of how identities can be projected onto spaces allows to critically approach the novels’ construction of a binary opposition between the ‘Balkans’ – conservative places of origin – and ‘Europe’ – progressive sites of arrival. Thus, My Cat Yugoslavia and Crossing express significant geographies that are morally coded, as also explicitly verbalized by Bujar and Bekim. Both protagonists celebrate a fluidity of identity, but at the same time their stories suggest that this fluidity can just as easily be seen as a lack of stable grounding resulting from trauma. Thus, the dominant binary created by the novels’ protagonists is subverted by their own inability to conform to one side of the either/or: their existence, and their inability to ever fully settle, dismantles the stark opposition they themselves believe in.

My Cat Yugoslavia: claiming Europe, changing Europe

In the following sections, based on our readings of My Cat Yugoslavia and Crossing, we make a dual, but intertwined argument: where the former novel shows how claims to Europe put forward by various characters change what ‘Europe’ may mean – within the novels, and within a wider Balkanist frame –, the latter novel hammers home how geographical arrival in a country of destination is never ‘final’ and always deferred. The desired settlement in Europe is never achieved; and just as Bekim and Bujar never fully arrive, but translate a feeling of loss into a continuous searching for other places and stories, so does the Europe they desire to live in never fully manifest itself. Through an exaggerated opposition between sites of destination and arrival, these novels articulate the attraction Europe holds for populations who are not seen to belong to it.

A temporally complex novel, My Cat Yugoslavia follows both Bekim, a young homosexual Kosovar who has lived most of his life in Finland, during his youth between the late 1990s and early 2000s and as an adolescent in the early 2010s, as well as his mother Emine, through vignettes moving from 1980 to 2009. In both storylines, Bajram, Emine’s husband and Bekim’s father, figures as an important character who, however, never focalizes his own perspective. As the violence of the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s sends the family fleeing to Europe in search of safety and opportunity, building a new existence in Finland proves complicated. The reality of being a refugee and a cultural minority in a society that often fails to understand them leads the various characters in My Cat Yugoslavia to develop different stances towards Europe and Kosovo.

From its first pages, My Cat Yugoslavia is characterized by a certain alienation, or contrasting lifeworlds, between the protagonist Bekim and the people around him, be they the Finns or his own family. ‘Immigrants have to grow a thick skin if they want to do something more than wait hand and foot on the Finns,’ he is told early on by his father. ‘Ruin your life by being like them, but one day you’ll see that if you try to become their equal, they’ll despise you all the more, and then you’ll end up hating yourself.’ His father, in other words, advocates keeping one’s distance from the Finnish majority, in order to keep one’s own (cultural) identity. By the time Bekim goes to study, he feels far removed from his fellow students and decries their unexamined privileged position: ‘Their lives were one way, mine was another … Don’t people in this country understand how desperate life is for the majority of the world?’ (Statovci 2017, 32, emphasis removed).

Despite this sense of alienation, and despite his father’s perspective, Bekim develops a pointedly negative attitude towards Kosovo and the Balkans. As we will see, in Crossing Bujar draws a stark contrast between Albania and what he imagines Europe to be, yet Bekim’s efforts at distancing are even more pronounced. While remembering the family’s yearly summer trips to Kosovo, Bekim draws attention to the uneven economic development across the continent: Estonia’s capital Tallinn looks ‘primitive’ compared to Helsinki, Warsaw is ‘forbidding and colorless’ and Polish words sound ‘harsh and violent,’ while German roads were ‘brand-new’ and ‘smelled of fresh asphalt’ and Vienna was his ‘favorite city of all.’ Driving into former Yugoslavia, Bekim’s father repeatedly points out that ‘many people had died’ in Slovenia and Croatia, as well as on the southern and eastern parts of the peninsula, that ‘the most people of all had died’ in Bosnia and that in Serbia many people had died, too, and that this was ‘a good thing’ (ibid., 129–31). What is striking about Bekim’s focalization of these travels is how we has internalized European attitudes of abjection towards the Balkans (cf. Bakić-Hayden 1995; Trakilović 2019): the more he goes south, the worse the world seems to become. This is a significant geography in the sense that Laachir et al (2018; see also Orsini 2023) describe: a specific literary mediation of social space, indicative of characters’ state-of-mind. In this case, Bekim’s father’s assessment of the differences between West and East Europe – and Bekim’s repetition of them in the narrative – reflects a process of creating differences and hierarchies between countries that at the time of the novel’s events would be considered West Europe’s Other.

Whereas Bekim rejects Kosovo and the larger region, favouring instead Finland and Europe, despite the racism and prejudice encountered there, his father firmly clings to his Kosovar heritage, quickly bonding with other Albanian immigrants (Statovci 2017, 151). Emine, lastly, represents an acceptance of Europe balanced with a connection to Kosovo – attempting to hold both destination and origin together. Thus, these three characters form a spectrum of stances regarding migrants’ positionings in contemporary Europe. They embody the tension between tradition versus new-found freedoms and the opportunities they present, such as Bekim’s homosexuality and Emine’s gradual refusal of patriarchal hierarchy. As such, ‘Europe’ signifies both an abstract ideal as well as a physical space, neither of which can be fully realized due to their complicated integration in Finland.

As these novels’ protagonists almost desperately attempt to become ‘European’, the meaning of Europe itself is continuously renegotiated. Bekim’s queer lifestyle and Emine’s emancipation become ways of professing Europeanness (El-Tayeb 2011), whereas Bajram’s aspirations of wealth and security give way to a sense of Europe being morally deficient and detestable. Thus, the signification of ‘Europe’ within My Cat Yugoslavia is fluid, as those searching for its meaning create their own meaning. Europe represents something that changes by the attempt to realize it; becoming a European is thus a process of individual meaning-making in light of other meanings and outside perspectives, which are mostly created by distinguishing the Balkan’s chaos and disorder from Europe’s order.

Crossing: Europe, where one never arrives

Crossing is marked by its protagonist’s desire to continuously start over again. This is, at first, expressed primarily in relation to Albania’s poor economic conditions. The novel opens in 1998 in Rome, where the protagonist Bujar ponders how people there ‘have all the time in the world to think about the meaning of life from one day, one month, one year to next’ while ‘in my homeland babies die of a fever and malnourishment’ (Statovci 2019, 9–10). Furthermore, Bujar stresses that identity is subject to conscious and proactive redefinition, claiming that ‘nobody has to remain the person they were born; we can put ourselves together like a jigsaw’ (6). Where My Cat Yugoslavia already played with the multiplicity of migrant attitudes vis-à-vis their country of arrival, Crossing is interested in fluidity across the board.

Following this introduction, Crossing jumps back to 1990, recounting Bujar’s childhood memories of his father telling him stories of the greatness of the Albanian people, as well as introducing his best friend Agim. Already, this fierce national pride is being contested however, as the bookish Agim ‘might state as simple fact things nobody else would dare say aloud, things like All religions are the same, or Women are far more intelligent than men’, at odds with Albanian traditions. Agim is also deliberately effeminate, smiling when Bujar tells him that ‘[h]e looks just like a girl’, and inviting Bujar to play his husband in a game of pretend (28, 29; original emphases).

Alternating between these two plotlines, one set in Albania and ending with Bujar’s flight in 1992, the other concerned with his travels across Europe and the US between 1998s and the middle 2000s, Crossing is about the hopeful projection of space and the rootless migrant’s inability to really arrive. As a child, Bujar lives through the collapse of his family along with that of communist rule in Albania, deciding to leave the country together with Agim. Witnessing and enduring destitution, trauma, and violence, the boys’ relationship grows closer until Bujar realizes that he ‘needed nothing else in my life except him, and I knew that he needed nothing else and nobody else in his life except me’ (154). With their present hardship and future aspirations, they begin to disavow Albania and instead focalize Europe as the site of their desires and dreams. Mirroring Bekim, Agim declares that ‘Albanians were shocking people, they were animals’, and consequently deciding that in ‘Europe we will never tell anyone we are Albanians, […], we are no longer Albanians, and I agreed because it suited me perfectly’ (162). This is, again, indicative of these novels’ significant geographies: of their imaginative spatiality in which Europe and, here, Albania are opposed in clearly hierarchal terms. In the more contemporary plotline, indeed, Bujar tells many different stories about who he is and where he is from, shedding skins and identities wherever he goes.

As the boys prepare to get away from Albania by having the odd job and saving money, they continue to grow closer, and Agim sheds his inhibitions about identifying as a girl (182). At the same time, their relationship turns sour, with Agim demeaning Bujar more and more frequently for his comparative lack of knowledge and vision. He claims, for example, that Bujar has always known Agim is ‘better’ than Bujar (178). These tensions come to a head while they are on a boat to Italy and Bujar pushes Agim off the boat, killing him (257).

These Albanian vignettes form the backstory to Bujar’s travels through Italy, Berlin, Madrid, New York, and, ultimately, Finland. Crossing is the story of those various moments at which Bujar changes what follows the words ‘I am.’ In Berlin, he tells a man he is Ariana from Bosnia (99), who is married to an Italian man (103); later in Madrid, he tells the woman who becomes his girlfriend that his family died in a fire (110); again later, in New York, he tells his Finnish roommate he is an actor and transposes scenes from his own life into films he has acted in (119). After New York, he moves to Helsinki, where he starts dating a transgender woman, Tanja. He enters a singing competition and assumes her identity: although ‘Tanja’ cannot sing very well, the producers keep her on because of her story as a trans woman from Turkey (231). Underlying all these transformations is both his adoption of Agim’s androgyny, as well as Bujar’s refusal – also taken from Agim – to never profess to coming from Albania. This rejection of his origins leads to a life unmoored.

Given his almost yearly change of persona, the only constant in Bujar’s identifications is his attempt at non-Albanianness. Leaving Albania for Europe, the harsh reality of living in Italy as a refugee complicates his imagined ‘promised’ land (see, e.g. Ter Wal 2002). He never settles anywhere, as Albania always looms in the background as something he left but can never forget. The dream projected onto Europe always seems to be found in another ‘Europe’ than where he currently is. Wishing to restart his life with each new location, foregoing a stable sense of self, Bujar’s self-realization as a singular person and his satisfaction with life is always deferred to the next place. Crossing documents this inability to arrive and to form a stable sense of self, and its imbrication with an (unacknowledged) impossibility to disconnect from one’s origins.

Europe, the Balkans, and internalization

In both My Cat Yugoslavia and Crossing, the protagonists continuously think about leaving behind their current lives and start anew. After an argument with fellow students, Bekim ponders this possibility:

I could always leave, start afresh somewhere else. I could leave everything behind, refuse to look at anyone or listen to anyone, I could change my name and get new official documents. I could have a nose job and get cheek implants to make me look completely different. Then nobody would know the first thing about me because I wouldn’t look like anyone with those looks and a name like that who had ever achieved anything or ever existed. … I could wash dishes in Spanish tavernas, pick South African passion fruit on sun-drenched farms, look after stray dogs in an American shelter, bring aid to people caught up in natural disasters.

(Statovci 2017, 34)

Despite the promise of these visions of the future, Bekim never acts upon these desires to start over. Yet what is striking about his reverie in this passage, is how Bekim imagines the possibility of a new life: it can be seemingly anywhere else – Spain, South Africa, the United States, without discriminating between these countries’ vastly different socio-political and cultural make-ups –, but also with a new name or new looks. If we understand such passages as revealing these works’ correspondence ‘to the basic philosophical or social world-imperatives of [their] age,’ as Eric Hayot (2012, 137) has suggested about literary worlding, we notice the specific social meaning that protagonists in both novels accord to space. This meaning is coloured by the desire to leave something behind, rather than to arrive in a specific location, as Bekim’s easy conflation of Spain, South Africa, and the United States attests to, as well as Bujar’s constant travels across Europe and America.

Spatially, both novels sketch sharp – or significant, to use Laachir et al.’s (2018) phraseology – contrasts between the protagonists’ countries of birth and the European world beyond them. The degree of negativity with which Bekim and Bujar regard Albania and Yugoslavia suggests they have internalized the discourse that figures the Balkans as backwards and inferior to (Western) Europe – as its internal Other (Todorova 2009; Trakilović 2015). Both protagonists project their hopes and dreams onto Western European and Scandinavian countries and capitals, while Bekim’s assessment of 1990s Central and Eastern Europe quoted earlier is barely more positive than his appreciation of the Balkans. In other words, both novels are pervaded by a strong sense of hierarchy, in which Albania and Kosovo are places determined by a stifling, conservative status quo, while ‘Europe’ – and, briefly, New York in Crossing – is characterized by a possibility of progress and renewal.

Both My Cat Yugoslavia and Crossing, thus, revolve around a broader and more general longing for transformation and living new lives – for crossing borders that are not merely cartographic, but also gendered and sexual. In Statovci’s novels, the experience of migration that is the fulfilment of characters’ hopes and dreams makes possible the crossing of long-established norms regulating sexuality and gender. In both novels, the move away from the Balkan ‘into’ Europe starts a process that fractures or dispenses with traditional family structures, and opens up a more fluid engagement with the main characters’ gender performance and sexual explorations. Regardless of whether the suggested opposition between ‘Europe’ (progressive, open to queerness and genderfluidity) and the ‘Balkans’ (conservative, insisting on the nuclear family model) holds true, we want to emphasize that Bujar and Bekim have internalized these stereotypical views. This type of ‘self-exoticism’ (Iordanova 2019, 56) or ‘self-balkanisation’ (Longinovic 2005) internalized the view from outside that has dominated representations of the region and which sets up its inhabitants for failure. In My Cat Yugoslavia and Crossing, however, this perspective blocks them from ever settling and fully arriving – ‘Europe’ simply is not what they dreamt it to be.

Claiming Europe: Southeast Europe and the public sphere

Who is allowed to hope, to dream, and to imagine a better life? And what do these lives look like? Framed through the experiences of young men moving away from Kosovo and Albania into what they see as ‘Europe,’ these questions lie at the heart of Pajtim Statovci’s novels. As we have shown in this paper, to answer them is to open up discussions on migrants’ national, gender, and sexual identity, in relation to both their country of origin and of arrival, as well as their trajectories in between. By using the notion of significant geographies as a specific way to understand processes of literary worlding, we have discussed how leaving the Balkans behind – and specifically Albania and Kosovo – is more important to the novels’ protagonists than arriving anywhere specifically and definitively. It is in this way that Europe is their America: Bujar and Bekim’s dreams are less about the concrete space, and more about aspirations to be free and somehow ‘themselves’ in Europe.

My Cat Yugoslavia and Crossing’s focus on the desire to move away from Albania and Kosovo into ‘Europe’ suggests how this space – as imagined as it is real – can serve as an emancipatory and liberating horizon for those on the margins. Recognizing, as Bujar puts it, that ‘what people think they know about me isn’t my responsibility but their own construction, their own assumption,’ Statovci’s main characters aspire to take ‘every day [a]s a new chance to be a new person, to be exactly the kind of person I’d always wanted’ (Statovci 2019, 107, 93). Europe thus becomes not only a ‘better place’ per se, but also represents the site of transformative self-realization. The novels thus underscore Europe as an ideal, coupled to a rough physical delineation between ‘Europe’ and the ‘Balkans’, which is itself more imaginative than precisely spatially delineated.

These stories gain further meaning in light of debates on Southeast Europe and its relation to other parts of Europe held widely across the capillaried network that constitutes the public sphere in Europe. If and how ‘the Balkans’ feature in imaginaries of Europe and Europeanness, is a matter under continuous scrutiny (Todorova 2009; Trakilović 2015; see also Claske Vos in this special issue), Statovci’s novels add to this discourse a power articulation of the dreams of its main characters, as well as the infectious spread of Western stereotypes of the region. Both protagonists have internalized Balkanism, yet My Cat Yugoslavia’s Bekim exemplifies the migrant who has re-anchored his identity, who has reached for a ‘Europe’ and found it, and whose story has been found by it in co-definition. Bujar in contrast never finds his ‘Europe’ but keeps searching, as unable to accept the irreality of the Europe he imagined as to accept the past he attempted to exchange for it. Their self-stigmatization, which subordinates their places of origin to a slew of places of temporary arrival, is joined with a continuous border-crossing that is representative of so many writers and migrants from the Balkans (Kovačević 2008).

Statovci’s novels promote such dreams and aspirations, but also serve as a continuous reminder that the desire to start over is never able to leave old lives behind. In Europe, Bekim and Bujar are still who they always have been, regardless of where they live – this is the lesson they learn. Nevertheless, their migration does uproot them, and takes away the context that conditioned them. Their relationship to their native environment is what informs their hopes and desires of change, indeed their sense of self, as it is constructed in opposition to what they hope to leave behind. Who they have been there becomes the stable background against which to re-define their unstable self within Europe.

Acknowledgments

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the conference ‘World Literature and the Minor’ at Leuven University, Belgium in May 2021 and the 19th Etmu days at the University of Eastern Finland in November 2022. We want to thank the audiences for their incisive questions and comments, especially Yasemin Kontkanen. We also want to thank co-editor of this special issue Margriet van der Waal and the contributors to this special issue for their feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).