Navigating Statelessness: Transantlantic Exile and Post-Yugoslav Memory in David Albahari’s 'Bait'

• In Event: Away from Home: Memories and Echoes of Yugoslavia in Post-Yugoslav Prose Portraying Exile

Abstract

The paper centres around complexities of exilic experience and geopolitical displacement in the Serbian author David Albahari’s 1996 novel Bait (Mamac), focusing on the connection between the concept of statelessness and freedom. Special attention is given to the narrator’s perception of Canada, the land of his emigration, which is seen as a sort of “blank canvas”, unburduned by national past and the recent experience of the dissolution of Yugoslavia, followed by the wars on its territory during the 1990s. As the emphasis is placed on the narrator’s struggle to deconstruct his former identity and build a new one—ultimately leading to a sense of apatride estrangement from both his past and present spaces—the paper aims to underline essentially ambiguous ways of experiencing historical transitions.

Author

• Sofija Todorović, U of Belgrade (Serbia)