This interview was conducted by william katharine blair between the 6th and 7th of March, 2024 via email.
The questions and answers appear here in their unedited form.

I want to talk a little about narrative and protection. Protection from harm, sure. But also protection, preservation, of a past that could have been lost. So much of this book is an attempt to hold on to the stories of your elders. I keep going back to the afterword to read about your grandparents, your path out of the country, the lyrics and legislation that shaped your young/their old world. How important to you was this inclusion? How present is the preservation of culture in the day to day of your now?

It was very important. “we need a breathing tongue between”, being my first book of poetry, is a sort of self-introduction and, only by introducing those who came before me, can I introduce myself. The book is also a battle against loss – of memory, history, language – and, in itself, an act of preservation. This recordative nature of my writing is perhaps most obvious in “bezdan”, which emerged from the need to remember a journey I took with my mother in 2016, when she helped me transport pieces of my country, my family, to the south-west of Germany. If I didn’t write it, I would’ve forgotten, and all those Austrian saints would’ve left me: unanchored to the poem. At times, this act of remembering is almost ritualistic, sacred, like in “the casting of terror”, in which memory enters the realm of a disappearing practice once common in the Balkans. As I write these words, I’m on my way to Bosnia, this time to ask and listen, write and record. This particular visit is dedicated to my grandmother and those who came before her. It makes me realise that writing is an aid to uncovering, perhaps with an intention to, eventually “become one person, gathered up maybe, during a pause, at a comma.” Like Lyn Hejinian, I think I write to become this one person. The “breathing tongue” is, then, one of my commas. 

History, as they say, is writ by the victors but, as so often in this world of global involvement, those most affected are rarely who win. I’ve been reading up on the Canadian effort from within its own ranks and the language, well, I can’t say that it surprises, but I will say that it offends. Please assume the now expected distancing of culpability, sanitization of atrocity, both sides narratives, and performative grief. Correct me if I’m wrong, but your family was far from alone in its passage to Germany though many have since continued on. What was your reception as part of that migration? What was Germany, have Germans, been told about your war and how has that shaped you? What do you wish we knew then and now?

I never thought I’d end up in Germany but, looking back, the 19th-century Austrian culture shaped my upbringing more consistently than what was happening outside of our front door. I was raised by my mother and two grandmothers, both of whom were highly versed in plugging Austrian-German words into everyday speech. I now realise that they, much like I am today, were trying to distance themselves from the atrocities propagated by our mother tongue. We only differed in our methods – I chose to escape to English, a language far removed from my country, and they returned to an older layer of Bosnian history. The remnants of this long-gone Austrian-German quickly settled in our home: štaub became powdered sugar, zrihtati tidying oneself up, and knap was just right. These old and rarely used words elevated themselves above the everyday: one can’t not afford to eat in Austrian and can very well do this in naški. Likewise, I could only imagine a Doboschtorte with schlag on top in Austrian and had no word for it in naški.

In a way, German language continued its out-there-is-better trajectory in my later years: it became the language of those who left and returned on holidays, bringing back European chocolates and sweets. I remember them all: a foreigner who bought our 4-page comic for a large Milka and a 1-euro coin, my father’s friend who hid a Kinder Surprise in a tree hollow, pretending it was lain by a mockingbird, and my estranged aunt with her yellow backpack full of sweets. The question is – is German still as sweet? The answer is no: German is not as sweet and it was never sweet but we pretended. This reminds me of how my grandma once baked a Doboschtorte, which she sugared with salt. Not knowing, she baked me a perfect metaphor, and it only gets better: we ate the whole damn thing!

We live these moments so fully and then watch as the gaze turns and renders them gone. I’m thinking, I’m always thinking, as I read this again about Palestine, Ukraine, and Sudan. I’m thinking about the Ethiopian famine, the Uyghur, and so many more. My country fought in your country. I wish I could tell you your story was fresh on our tongues. I’m wondering about the experience of having to explain the war again and again to a world that took little notice, has already forgotten, though it still feels so recent, had yet to be born. Your inclusion of an appendices tells me you know this. What is it to have to explain yourself yet again?

I think this having to explain myself is an essential part of being a poet from a developing country – my history, language and the images I carry, are not commonly known or thought about. When I say this, I pass no judgement: all of us have a limited capacity to encounter, absorb and understand. Knowing that this is always the case, I added the afterword as an attempt to align the reader with the context from which each of the poems arose. In that sense, I had no issue explaining myself. There is, however, another aspect of having-to-explain-oneself that I find quite problematic. Unfortunately, it is very prevalent in German culture, but it is also not limited to it. What I’m talking about is that – no matter what I write and how I write – for many I will always be a poet born during the Bosnian war and raised in its aftermath. When I speak, only those words relating to a preexisting notion of what I was meant to talk about will be heard. A part of this process is our unavoidable need as humans to think in heuristics and make assumptions based on our previous experience and what we know. Another part is, as you put it so well in your last question, a sort of performative grief: grief that is misplaced, or even created, as a way to cleanse oneself or add to an experience of grief. It is also a way to identify with someone else’s grief and satisfy one’s need for grief (for such things do exist), but ultimately, it is a mostly about washing one’s hands of past and current injustices: a selfish act, though it poses as something else. Another issue with this is that, trying to classify and project our own image onto things, makes us miss them altogether. I’ll give you a wonderful example – recently, preparing a lecture, I searched through an extensive AP footage collection filmed in Bosnia in the mid-90’s. I was looking for the bridge in my hometown. What I found were three short videos, all filmed during the most intense months of fighting in the region: never in my life have I heard birds chirp so loud! Now imagine – two armies, one on each side of the bridge, tens of men all tense with rifles, waiting for commands, listening, observing… all that real-time, real-life war-action happening while a flock of birds chirps away near an AP microphone. At that moment, their chirping is so incredibly inappropriate, it is beyond beautiful. When I watch this video, and I watch it often, I think of a stressed crew trying to capture a more subdued footage of the war. I can’t help but laugh. This laughter and the way I now mention it here, so abruptly and out-of-nowhere, is more Bosnian than any definition of what Bosnian is or should be. It is a broad definition and it is a definition of spirit. As such, it is applicable to many nations and many people: to me, you can all be Bosnian, if you will. To end, appropriating Charles Bernstein, when asked 

"is it [Bosnian]" (at all)?” 
the only answer I can give is that 
“–– I think, probably, maybe so / But it could also be not [Bosnian] / –– Exactly”. 

(from "Commentary" on "Solidarity is the Name We Give to What We Cannot Hold”)

And this is the beauty of poetry: being one and the other, all and none while just probably and maybe so. Not exactly.

One of the really compelling visual pieces in this book is ‘the fence used to/maybe they made it’ which overlays the words of a student in the two-schools-under-one-roof education system that sought to segregate children by ethnicity within the same building over a map of the landmine enforced border of the Inter-Entity Boundary Line (IEBL). Both walls within walls. Of the IEBL you say “it is not only passport control and customs clearance. it is a deadly minefield. a thin, wire fence we don’t dare to cross”. There is a malice to a border that raises the stakes from ‘Do Not Enter’ with a sneer of ‘Or Else’. How present still is that trigger? Has the perception of that threat begun to shift generation to generation? Is there a softening of fear as children are born who have not seen the effects of those mines?

I think the border will always remain, in one way or another. The bridge on the river Sava, for example, was always a bordering bridge, even when there were no nations to border. Another way to put this is by juxtaposing landmine-suspected territories and words of the former two-schools-under-one-roof student. In both cases, we’re looking at a shape-shifted idea of border. Examples of this are endless in a country in which layers of history pile on top of each other like an onion skin: you remove one and get another one of the same. These layers occasionally occur in one street, one building, even one word. An extreme example, which is always a good way to illustrate a concept, is an old brick-building across the river Sava – a stone’s throw from my hometown of Bosanska Gradiška. The building was first built around 1715 when it served as an Austro-Hungarian fortress and a war prison. In 1942, under the rule of Axis Powers, this prison became a subcamp of one of the largest concentration and extermination camps outside of Germany – Jasenovac. Soon after the liberation, the building reverted to being a prison, now in service of socialist Yugoslavia who in Stara Gradiška imprisoned those “working” against the socialist regime. The last iteration of this historical shape-shifting occurred in the 90’s, when the Serb forces imprisoned mostly Croatian soldiers and civilians. With that, the old brick building holds four layers of our, largely incongruent, history. Sometimes, I ask myself what is too much for a building to carry. What would be too much for one town, one river, one country? I don’t know, but I think that many of us reached that state: it is now estimated that there are far more Bosnians living in diaspora than there are in Bosnia. And this is the route I chose as well. It is very much like living without a homecountry – I would never return to Bosnia and, the more I live abroad, the less I belong there. This not-belonging is most violently felt in language – my Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian is anglicised, my syntax germanised, I speak slowly and I’m starting to develop a strange accent. Essentially, I’m living the in-between – the uninhabited, lonely space defined by borders but not belonging to any of them. Very much like a no-man’s-land. Like the bridge on river Sava. Like the river itself. 

i am looking for
transport
from a part of
somebody
to far from
a part of
the morning
as early as
early as
early
as
possible

Please forgive me for having a favourite, but I think it may be ‘overbound’, the note for which says “the poem is an unsolicited translation of a facebook post written in a transportsharing group for the ex-Yugoslavia region. “Tražim prevoz iz Prijedora do Rogaške Slatine ili Ptuja 1 juna što ranije ujutru””. There is something so unavoidably gutting in these twelve lines. Can you tell me how you came across the original message? I suppose I’m asking, are you still searching, still seeking? Is the wound of the war still fresh in your day?

“overbound” is my personal favourite as well! Finding this poem was a pure accident: for some reason, one day facebook began to translate all posts written in my mother tongue to English. One of them was from a stranger looking for a ride from Prijedor, a town in northern Bosnia, to Rogaška Slatina, a town in Slovenia. When translated, the Bosnian town became “a part of somebody” and the Slovenian “far from a part of the morning”. I have no idea how this came to be as neither of the names contain any of the words that appear in the mistranslation. The urgency of their request is also highly exaggerated – in the original message, “as early as possible” only appears once. In the translation, however, it is repeated three times – almost like a charm. Perhaps because of the context in which it arose, I read this poem as an ode to the post-war (post)capitalist economy of cheap labour. Many Bosnians immigrated to Slovenia to work, like many Bosnians immigrated to Austria, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, etc. to work. “from a part of / somebody” indicates a separation, an embodied one. Every time I kiss my family goodbye and board a plane, I feel an overwhelming sense of detachment. This detachment is not felt towards a country, a people, but toward an actual body – a body of a mother, father, a body of a grandmother and a close friend. My own body in another language. “to far from / a part of / the morning”, captures the second part of leaving – the feeling of being pushed away into an entirely different morning: that of border-crossing. My mother once said that she prefers goodbyes said in Berlin to those said in Bosnia. What awaits her in Berlin are luggage-checks, passport-checks and long cues for non-EU citizens. When we part in Bosnia, however, she returns to an empty space: a part of the morning: the same morning we parted in. The same morning my mistranslated narrator is longing to escape.

‘agreement on’ is an erasure of the first the articles of the Dayton Peace Agreement, annex 2: “Agreement on Inter-Entity Boundary Line and Related Issues” in which you emphasize the cold bureaucracy that led to your land defined. I’m interested in its creation. What was it to sit with the Dayton Agreement? I’m projecting here (always), is there a grief in being hemmed in from without?

I think that every Bosnian has a complex relationship with the Dayton Peace Agreement. On one hand, the agreement brought the long-awaited peace but, on the other, it was an impossibly difficult regulation that divided the country into three non-functioning units and many more subunits. When I started deleting through the document I was amazed with how badly written it was. This reminded me of a film I recently watched: in Hope Hotel Phantom, Bojan Stojčić captures hallways, bars and dining rooms our three signatories frequented before signing the document. Scrolling through the most recent Google Reviews of Hope Hotel, Dayton, I see that mine is hardly a subjective opinion. Below are two comments mentioning “hope”:

“The Hope is worn out and needs some updates”
“The Hope is very, very basic so curb your expectations” 

These sentences perfectly translate from Hope Hotel to the agreement that followed. Like Hope Hotel, the Dayton Agreement is in need of updates. Like Hope Hotel, it is very, very basic (so curb your expectations). Sitting with this document made it clear that the Dayton Agreement was only meant to be a temporary solution – a sort of shortcut to ceasefire. Unfortunately, thirty years later, we’re still bound by its articles.