To Spite or Not to Spite
Illustration: Esmir Prlja
An earlier version of this article appeared in the International Migration Review.
“124 was spiteful. Full of baby's venom.”
–– Toni Morrison, Beloved
Beloved has haunted me since I first read it at the age of 29, precisely 10 years after the war uprooted my family from Banja Luka, Bosnia-Herzegovina. The haunting in the opening line, “124 was spiteful,” lies in its insistence on the spite of the ghosts of the enslaved peoples’ past, the spite of those who have the absolute right to spite and yet are not quite spiteful at all. But that is not how I read Toni Morrison's characters, not even the terrifying ghost of the protagonist's murdered baby. The characters in Beloved are and are not spiteful. I should know this because I know something about spite, but a deeper spite, a kind of spite that is also positive in moments of disadvantage, in the face of othering and injustice, packed into the Bosnian word inat. This spite requires what I have come to term an “auto(bio)psy,” a hybrid form of autobiography and critical reflection with features of academic analysis. It is a self-reflection or auto-analysis of one's own creative work from the point of view of a hybrid creative/academic practice and persona.
It is an autopsy in that it examines the past body of work that is both alive and dead, perhaps, like Schrödinger's paradox. In the age of the “death of the author,” an author's reflection on his own body of work creates an uncanny sense of what it means to live with the traumas of war, which were embodied in the past but are very much present. In my view, the presence of the trauma is felt in the body itself. It is a form of muscle memory, or “rememory,” as Morrison calls it in Beloved.
How can we continue to think and write about migration if we already know what forms it must fit? Migration is a movement from the familiarity of one's habitat into other terrains and ecosystems. There must be value in allowing both similar and unique migration experiences to affect how they are analyzed and expressed. Inat seems to call for such a deviation from hackneyed forms.
The essential notion of inat, which will be mainly translated as “spite,” is my guiding metaphor for that element of Bosnian character that seems to survive uprootedness caused by war. This form of both positive and negative obstinacy will be shown as quite a stubborn feature of a people who suffered and survived war and genocide. Morrison's idiosyncratic spitefulness has possessed my own thinking and writing on displaced families. Her particular form of authorial agency, to create ghosts and haunt you, is a form of possession, even in the literal sense of being taken over by an immaterial entity, be it a spirit, an idea, or a word. It should be impossible not to ask if Morrison herself was spiteful in her insistence to open her story about slavery, a narrative simultaneously grand and unbearably intimate, by calling the fugitive slave spiteful. Was she, thus, “contemptuous, disdainful, opprobrious,” as the Oxford English Dictionary defines “spite” on the one hand, or was she simply acting in spite of something she had the right to spite, that is, “in defiance (scorn or contempt) of”, according to OED on the other hand?
The question—can refugees be spiteful and remain acceptable as refugees—spoke to the core of my Bosnian origin, all my experiences of the aggression on Bosnia in the period of 1992–1995, which culminated in the Srebrenica genocide, as well as my new Bosnian-Swedish experience, which would come to become labeled as an existence in “the diaspora.” Across these three years, more than 2.2 million people left their Bosnian homes, and 1.6 million of them sought refuge abroad. According to Hariz Halilovich, this mass displacement “brought an organized Bosnian diaspora into existence.” My part of that diaspora took root in Sweden alongside up to 100,000 others who claim some Bosnian descent.
My striving to communicate my own experiences of uprootedness comes from a place of love, no doubt, or else I would not be able to do it. And yet, I also want to believe it has been shaped by the infamous Bosnian inat, which is, according to all dictionaries, translated as “spite.” There are no such things as perfect translations, for every word is a part of some language game, as Wittgenstein called it, and transforms over time, picks up all kinds of dirt, and gets washed in all kinds of Heraclitan waters. But “inat” seems quite a stubborn one, and here I am letting it, quite stubbornly, shape this auto(bio)psy.
Inat creates this strange intimacy between Toni Morrison and me, an intimacy between our histories and our characters who would come to adapt to, if not internalize, their horrible histories, and unleash them on future generations without much mercy. It is an intimacy between the forms she and I have been struggling to conjure from some Platonic heaven. The OED insists on dressing the word “spite” in the garb of the worst villains from the Marvel Universe. It insists on fixing it with such force as if the ghosts of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida never touched our thinking of language. In its reluctance to change and adapt to new places and language, “inat” displays quite a lot of stubbornness. According to Bosnian, Turkish, and Arabic dictionaries, the term seems to have remained quite untouched until today despite migration across borders of empires. The original Arabic عناد (inaad), according to the Oxford Arabic Dictionary, means stubbornness and obstinacy. A deeper look at other Arabic dictionaries reveals a long history of the term, often denoting a person who is not simply stubborn but consistently contradicts conventional wisdom regardless of arguments and facts. It designates people who base their behaviors on illusions, whims, desires, self-interest, malice, etc. Nothing good so far.
Etymologically, the word migrated to Bosnian via Ottoman Turkish. This seems to have given it a somewhat positive meaning as well, designating someone who stands by certain principles, while in modern Turkish it mainly has negative denotations. Rječnik bosanskog jezika defines inat as “tvrdoglavo postupanje suprotno volji drugih, radi očuvanja vlastitog ponosa, ili usljed oholosti, samoljublja, i sl., prkos” (stubborn behavior against the will of others in order to maintain one's pride, or due to arrogance, selfishness, etc., defiance). The same is found in Turcizmi u srpskohrvatskom jeziku. Indeed, the old Balkan adage “od inata nema goreg zanata” (there is no worse craft than inat) speaks volumes. It is an evil, malicious craft. And so here I am, like Morrison, investing my life into this obstinate art and craft, moving through layers of historical dirt. It is possible, as she shows us, to simultaneously write from a place of love and a place of spite.
From the (disad)vantage(d) point of view of an almost 50-year-old, I look at my previous work and despair. What was I doing and why? What have I become that I still feel the need to drag myself not only through that past but also reread myself, quite literally, and thus reconsider my Bosnianness and my Swedishness?
Swedes like to pride themselves on being the land of lagom, a word they say has no equivalent in any other language, and therefore, represents the Swedish nation. Lagom, which originally meant “according to the law,” signifies moderation, always finding your place in between extremes, as in “lagom varm” (not too cold nor too warm). Now imagine a population from the Balkans, reputed for their hot temper, coming en masse to the land of lagom. That must affect them as much as they must affect this country. The word “lagom” is an excellent match for the Bosnian “inat” precisely because it highlights the problem of being a refugee. Does a refugee have to be lagom to be accepted, generally speaking, globally? Is being lagom a key to successful integration? Yes and no. Bosnians are regarded as the best-integrated immigrants, not because they are lagom, but because they have been extraordinarily successful. Together with other immigrant populations, they pushed the boundaries of lagom, and, in my view, showed that Swedes never truly were a lagom nation.
The most prominent case in point is undoubtedly the life and work of the global superstar Zlatan Ibrahimović, who recently retired from competitive football. No other Swede's success is comparable on a global scale, except perhaps for ABBA and IKEA. Yet, he has become an icon because establishing the American dream in social-democratic Sweden did not guarantee a sense of settling and belonging. As the son of immigrants, born and raised in an immigrant-tight and troubled neighborhood in Malmö, his hyper-individualist rags-to-riches saga never resolved the question of his Swedishness. Sweden is still split about his identity. He receives so much love, and yet, there is always that one window kept open, which allows for his quick dismissal. My essay Vi är Zlatan charted the unsettling he produced in Sweden and what his presence did to Swedishness:
“This is what Zlatan reminds us of with his extraordinary goals, his body language, and his southern accent: that lagom can no longer represent domestic Swedishness. This is why Zlatan can release an autobiography before he has even lived long enough to earn writing one, and he can entitle it I am Zlatan.”
Zlatan's every reply to journalists and critics is the epitome of inat rather than lagom. One can count on him acting out of spite and often in the worst ways (not simply to appear politically incorrect). Immigrants in Sweden, in general, found his inat in the face of Swedish media coverage of the World Cup in Qatar liberating. As every Swedish media outlet produced a deluge of criticism of Qatar over migrant worker and LGBTQ+ issues, Zlatan gave “10 points” to all aspects of the Qatari experience. Revisiting Vi är Zlatan now in 2024 after he has received his grand farewell in Italy, and not in Sweden, made me realize that nothing has changed. On the contrary, the increased awareness of the conflict of narratives, which seems even worse for Bosnians due to our delusions of whiteness, lies at the core of our unsettling, which we seem to be passing on to the next generation.
Zlatan's success is extreme, so let us turn to the more lagom, more moderate spite of Bosnian refugees of the 1990s. I still remember writing my first autobiographical essay, How to Fare Well and Stay Fair, after some 7 years of writing fiction about sad, funny, and, let's face it, sometimes inat-ful refugees. I was putting together my first collection, and I wanted to show not just the true, the good, and the beautiful, but also the spiteful side. I decided to open the book with a creative essay reflecting two decades of refugee life in just a few pages. I changed my style quite radically, and the essay found its form as an instruction manual written in the second person on how to be a true, a good, and … well, if not beautiful, then at least a presentable refugee. But then there was that Bosnian inat. In one important segment where I was describing a portrait photo shoot with my late father, the word “spiteful” came out of nowhere, much like all hauntings:
“Your father will smile. Tell him, Stop smiling for God's sake. Look like a miserable refugee. He won’t stop. He’ll laugh and smirk and guffaw and chortle and do any other take on cheerfulness, and the borrowed Hasselblad will capture that, the true, the good, the spiteful.
Years later you will frame that photo and remember that your father was the only one in the entire community who said, I do not long to go back. I have everything I need right here. At the time you will have given him a hard time because he doesn’t conform and because everyone thinks he has no feelings, no sense of home and belonging. If you meet any of those people, years after you all become integrated and naturalised, don’t bother saying Hi to them, even though they will smile their big smiles and look like they’ve missed you so much.”
There would be much to dissect here if I were to do an exhaustive auto(bio)psy for some historic trial like the ones that took place in The Hague after the genocide and displacement. I am sure that my father, especially as a displaced person, does not appear here to be “contemptuous, disdainful, opprobrious.” He is sweet, funny, and clever in his defiance of the narrow image of the refugee I was trying to impose on him to make him presentable, and quite digestible, through art. He appears strong and positive exactly because he shows our Bosnian inat not through contempt for people but with narrow ideas that confine his being as someone who, without being aware of it at the time, avoided genocide.
I, in this excerpt, am also a displaced person. The displacement spread across two cognizant generations. However, I am speaking from some safe space in the future, retrofitting contempt for the people who derided him, the hypocrites who sought to belittle his uniqueness. In that, I also feel contempt for myself because I was, as the scene shows, one of those who would scorn my father and often say he was all about inat. Yet, it is evident his inat is not negative at all. Even my own spite towards the people who found him obstinate, in the end, seems like reasonable, justified inat.
Ironically, my compatriots would position themselves against my father although they themselves were often quite spiteful in their pride and conceit. It seems to me that Bosnians displaced in the 1990s, as Europeans carrying histories of being hardworking Gastarbeiter in rich western European countries, never really understood they were refugees. The general tenor in the camps during the time we were waiting to either go back home or get stay permits could be summed up by the question, “Why don’t they put us to work?” It is as if our inat to continue existing despite genocide and displacement made us oblivious to our objective reality and we functioned through old imaginaries exemplified by the figure of the Gastarbeiter, usually a man who did hard labor in Germany or Austria, came back to his Bosnian village, and built a house three times bigger than any of his neighbors.
The tendency toward inat seemingly becomes a manifestation of what Hariz Halilovich calls “trans-local phenomena” within this particular diaspora group. Inat enables “cohesion,” linking, as it were, “different individuals and groups to a wide global network of like-minded people representing their collective identity and local particularity.” This is why we could not see that we were indeed also spiteful. Instead, we saw gestures like my father's as being contrarian to the community. And yet, no matter how critical I am of it, I see this kind of collective obstinacy in a positive light as well. It is, despite everything, a coping mechanism of a PTSD-ed generation.
Now the main question here is: who has the right to claim you are spiteful? Although inat is negatively charged, Bosnians can also take pride in being the people of inat, being contrarians in the face of larger forces of history. No doubt, we often take pride in certain things at the wrong times and in the wrong places—certainly a part of our curse and historical haunting—but when done right, it can shake the world in all the right ways. It can truly challenge global consciousness. Some of my politically active friends on what used to be called Twitter have started “inat-tweeting” and flaunting inat as an ethos to validate their activism-from-rock-bottom. Very much tongue-in-cheek, of course. The diaspora has claimed inat as a positive, political charge, a struggle for truth and sheer survival in a world that has sought to destroy every ounce of their being, from biological destruction to the erasure of our history and culture, and, finally, persistent, malicious denial thereof.
Our newfound spite, I argue, comes from our unsettled being. Our very existence is, somehow, at stake. A simple example is the fact that The Swedish Academy gave the Nobel Prize in Literature to genocide denier Peter Handke in a country that has more than 100,000 people of Bosnian origin (‘90s refugees and the second and now even a third generation). This elitist gesture, and a consistent defense of the choice, not only denied the dignity and existence of the Bosnians that Sweden took in but also its own proclaimed values and principles. This prize, I argue, not only brought back the feeling of unsettling for the Bosnian diaspora, it also brought about an unsettling of Sweden’s very identity.
These kinds of humiliating gestures throughout our lives in Sweden have served as a form of alienation. We have lived with two parallel narratives. The first narrative is that Bosnians are the best-integrated immigrants, the hardest workers, the overachievers. We have had people of Bosnian origin in Swedish political parties, and some have held minister positions. Currently, four naturalized first-generation Bosnian immigrants serve in the Riksdag, the Swedish parliament. The Bosnian diaspora is involved in almost all political parties except the very far-right Sweden Democrats (to my knowledge, though I know some Bosnians voted for them to spite other immigrants). Some have been involved in building new parties, often with a focus on being an immigrant and Muslim in an increasingly racist political environment. Despite all this, the Handke incident heightened our awareness that none of that matters. The new mantras are along the lines of “We will never be considered Swedish.” This is why so many of us reacted to the former Swedish Minister of Education Aida Hadžialić's reply on Twitter/X to Viktor Orbán's Islamophobic comment about Bosniaks. She wrote: “Bosnia-Herzegovina and its people are as European and indigenous as Hungary and Hungarians. A majority is secular and Bosnia is considered the most liberal Muslim majority country in the world. Let's stand up for European values such as democracy and the rule of law.” Her critique, however well-intended, contains that old ontological insecurity at its core. For me, it was a throwback to the scenes from the war when young people were crying in the streets, “Why are they killing us, we are not really believing Muslims?” I am quite sure that much of the backlash against Hadžialić was out of inat in the face of what appeared to be sheer betrayal. She is, after all, still the epitome of the success (and failure) of the abovementioned first narrative. Both Orbán and Hadžialić once again exposed our fundamental unsettling.
If anything defines a refugee, it is this sense of perpetual unsettling. Even the word “refugee” is related to “refuge,” that small island in the middle of a two-way street, simultaneously a place of safety and constantly surrounded, on all sides, by rivers of cars. And, as Heraclitus would have it, you never step into the same river twice. Neither can you meet the same refugee twice. Not even me, as this auto(bio)psy demonstrates. One of my central stories was entitled [Refuge]e precisely as an attempt to illustrate this condition and gesture towards its ineffability. Not even I, as the author, know how to pronounce this title when I do readings, so I avoid performing it.
Finding the right forms, rather than one universal form, for the portrayal of unsettled families displaced from Bosnia, remains truly challenging. I often come back to Art Spiegelman's father in Maus. Spiegelman ran a great risk by portraying a Holocaust survivor as, at least partly, a spiteful old man disliked even by his own community. We may dislike Spiegelman's father because he is a racist, for instance, but we cannot deny his suffering, his victimhood, and the historical injustice done to him and his people. Like Morrison's Sethe, who attempted the horrible crime of killing her own children gruesomely, we are dealing with people who are testing our sympathy, and even empathy, but nevertheless demand an ethical response. From Sethe's point of view, she was trying to save her children from the zombie-like life of a slave, which, to her, was the worst kind of slow death. She believed she was trying to keep them true, good, and beautiful: “Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing–the part of her that was clean.”
Stereotypical forms almost necessarily infuse my work just like they did Art Spiegelman's visual and written musings in Maus. Representation of the refugee experience comes with the reified imaginary of border crossings, being in a refugee camp getting instructions from some officials, and seeking a job at a local farm or factory (the only kinds of work you could get regardless of your education back home). To be sure, real refugees do get into such situations. We did in the ‘90s. But our experiences were being flattened into cliché. We became characters placed in some prefabricated, predigested plot. I have come to realize that the way I worked, instinctively perhaps, was out of spite against all kinds of clichéd forms of refugee representation that were in circulation at the time my family was forced out of Bosnia.
Perhaps this is why, in my stories, inat-ful characters keep changing form depending on their complicated psychology. My character Almasa in the collection How to Fare Well and Stay Fair, whose name means “precious gem,” was no doubt hard to digest. She was made in the furnace of the war, and she messed up my mind as I was writing her. Or maybe she was writing me. I never settled on which way it really was. With her, I only saw the true and good beauty of a crystal-clear form, but I knew that her inat would be, for many, the most prominent feature. Would people be able to see past all that and find delicacy as well? In one short story, Mind's Garbage, Almasa speaks in the first person. This experimental piece takes the shape of a complaint to the audience about having to fit certain pre-established forms of “being-a-refugee,” and failing to take a more digestible, more lagom form:
“Right now I’m no more than a scrapbook, a damn shoebox full of notes on yellow Post-it squares, or three-ply toilet paper, cut-out corners of tablecloths, napkins, the insides of tampon boxes with scribbles from edge to edge. A collection of pieces from different jigsaw puzzles.
There's also a well-rounded ME, described in a whole lot of short stories. You see, I was tricked into being the protagonist in fiction. I still don’t know how to pronounce that damn title, [Refuge]e. I gave the author a terrific piece of amateur editorial advice to change it to Memoirs of a Bosnian, or even add ‘Nervous Wreck Bosnian.’ ‘Trust me, that’ll sell,’ I said pointing my thin, nail-eaten-to-the-quick finger at his left eye. The wretched wannabe writer gave me the cold shoulder, and left out all the quirky but fine incidents of my life. So much was taken from me by the war already, my virginity for instance. Then he just chucked half my life into a kind of mind's garbage.”
In this story, the need to exercise control over the presentation and representation of one's unsettling is quite explicitly done. It shows both the unsettling and healing through inat, in content as well as in form. Almasa is trying to be very Swedish, applying the country’s social model to the sheer chaos of her soul. However, she is being quite hostile and spiteful towards the new place and culture. At the same time, her inat is not sheer malice against the norm as norm. In her inat, she exposes the social hypocrisy of different systems, from Bosnian to Swedish. Here, the true-good-spiteful form of the refugee lies in the demand for authenticity, and not just the authenticity of the content, but also the struggle for presentation and presentability. The question, still the key one for the unsettled people, is that of form and content, the question of the balance between a truth that tells lies and fiction that tells a truth, the balance between the truth of suffering and the truth that comes through inat, the balance between the settling and the unsettling.
I wrote many stories with other characters who are amalgams of amazing people I had met. They are like Almasa only in that they are idiosyncratic. On top of these, How to Fare Well and Stay Fair includes a few autobiographical essays in which I ventured into thinking about myself as a fictional character. The collection begins and ends with stories about me, which were, despite the allure of the form, hardly more true-good-beautiful than the fictional narratives. The opening of the eponymous essay, which, as I mentioned earlier, takes the form of an instruction manual and uses the second person, goes like this: “Cry when you leave your country if you absolutely must. If you’re an expat, please, don’t even think about it, but if you’re a refugee, make sure you do it out of sight of other crybabies.” The imagery of unsettling speaks for itself, of course, but the consequent settling in the feeling of inat happens through a refusal to be (only) unsettled. The attitude of the teenage mind is clear. The narrator does not want his compatriots to look pathetic. He (me?) wants them in a better form. He wants to see more inat!
My past self must have thought that the form of an instruction manual would be quite unsettling to the reader. Obviously, the events are set in the past and the past cannot be changed, but the unsettling lies in the constant thinking, “What if I did this instead of that? What if, what if, what if?” Another feature has to do with this idea of instructing someone on how to be-a-refugee as such, as if speaking from the vantage point of experience and wisdom. It comes across as presumptuous, and yet, this is exactly what refugees would hear all the time: be like this, and if you do this, you will get that, and if you say this, you will get help with that, etc.
This spite I’m stubbornly insisting on is, in some ways, true, good, and beautiful. It is beautiful precisely because it is true. The phrase “ugly truth” is, from this point of view, a contradiction. The “ugly” here refers to the content of the truth, it being undesirable, disliked, and therefore judged using narrow aesthetic principles. In the ancient way of looking at things, truth is beautiful by virtue of being true. The chain does not start at the end, as in our shallow way of looking at things: if they are aesthetically pleasing, they must be good and true. This is why the spiteful refugee, appearing spiteful like Frankenstein's creature, tests our empathy, our judgment, and our moral standing. It is far harder to see the spiteful refugee as true-good-beautiful than to see my sweet father as being spiteful.
My collection opens for a reason with this epigraph from Shakespeare's King Lear: “The weight of this sad time we must obey, / Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” As I argue, in situations where refugees are met, offered help, and integrated into new environments, whole sets of preconceived notions are operative. My concern is that these, plainly put, prejudices are being reproduced in the generic forms of testimony. I believe the kind of (meta)fictional account given by Almasa/myself in Mind's Garbage can entail layers of trauma and grapple with the real condition of displaced people in ways that typical testimonies and interviews cannot. If you will, form follows emotion. And just as my spiteful character is engaged in a meta-reflection on the art of storytelling which she pits against the craft of testimony, I am here navigating my artistic and academic repertoires, quite schizophrenically, performing an auto(bio)psy to try and access truths that are as material and emotional as they can be, and, hopefully, help us better understand uprooted families from 1990s Bosnia and beyond.