Diplopic Remembering in Aleksandar Hemon and Velibor Božović's Collaborative Work

Abstract:This article focuses on the Bosnian-American writer Aleksandar Hemon's collaborative work with the Bosnian-Canadian visual artist Velibor Božović. Hemon's The Lazarus Project (2008), which features Božović photographs, and their multimedial e-book My Prisoner (2015), illustrate how the Bosnian Civil War is remembered collaboratively by Bosnian writers and artists in the diaspora. The article calls the form of remembering that emerges from these collaborative projects diplopic. Appropriated from diplopia (double vision), that is, the disorienting ophthalmic condition of perceiving simultaneously two images of a single object, diplopic remembering is posited as a recurring metaphor for how the past is recollected and reconstructed in Hemon and Božović's collaborative work. It helps the reader navigate a textual terrain where past and present, fact and fiction are conflated. Diplopic remembering captures the experience of being re-exposed to traumatic memories and what trans- and intragenerational remembering looks like when the recall and transmission are mediated with images that are left behind and through the testimonies of those with firsthand accounts. In these two collaborative projects, diplopic remembering is the operative mode of remembering that aspires to bridge the past and present and narrow down the schism between diaspora Bosnians with firsthand and secondhand memories.