My Cat Yugoslavia
Pajtim Stavoci
[Random House]
Stavoci’s novel opens with an excerpt from a Finnish chatroom dedicated to clandestine hook-ups between gay men. Bekim, the son of Albanian parents Emine and Bajram, responds to one user’s request to meet. After a comically deadpan sexual encounter, Bekim hurries his guest out of the apartment. Shame settles like a fog, and soon Bekim can barely stand the sight or smell of sex’s aftermath. Shame, Bekim confesses, is the first emotion he learned as a child, and this sorely resonant admission goes far beyond the realm of sexuality, and into his experience as a refugee, growing up poor. The novel never broods too long on its protagonist’s sexuality, preferring instead to probe what else can mark a person as different.
Part of the shame of immigration in this novel stems from the paradoxical wish to both assimilate into the new culture and to maintain one’s identity. Stavoci elaborates this frustration delicately in a scene where Emine confusedly mixes up her shopping with another customer’s, leading to sharp reprimands from the cashier; and when Bekim juggles several monotonous names to avoid the searching question, where are you from? Understandably, Bajram laments the fact that “one day you won’t be an Albanian at all but something else altogether.”
Bekim’s experiences in present-day Finland runs in tandem with the origin story of his mother, Emine. Both narratives are told in the first person, their tales unfolding with disparate levels of intimacy – at times Bekim seems unknowable, while Emine divulges the worst of her emotions and impulses in an almost confessional tone that underscores how stifled her avenues of expression are. Stavoci’s style is blunt and non-celebratory, but does occasionally uncoil, with reptilian languor, to flash a jeweled sentence. This all adds to the characters’ restraint, lending the novel a quiet dignity in the midst of all the devastation it chronicles.
The titular cat, then, first appears in a gay nightclub where the strobe lights wrench it in and out of existence so that it looms half-real, a Cheshire cat to lead us astray. The cat becomes involved in Bekim’s life, eventually moving in with him, spraying homophobic and racist trash all over, and becoming a literal manifestation of Yugoslavia as Bekim knows it; hostile and abusive. This novel operates under similar codes as the strangest of fairytales: nothing should be taken at face value.
When Bekim buys a snake, it is more than an unusual house pet: it becomes a manifestation of his own cold-blooded selfishness, and his own reticence as he withdraws from others and himself. So much of Stavoci’s book is about escape, whether it be fleeing a warzone or an abusive relationship or the frightening reality of oneself, but its power lies in extending past these themes into something like freedom.
Words – John Vaughan
