Book of my lives

Dance and theatre performance

The expat experience of the American-Bosnian writer Aleksandar Hemon, which he describes in his autobiographical essays collected in the book The Book of My Lives, may have a happy ending, but that doesn’t say much about it. In his new American life, Hemon too had to face the loss of his world, his own invisibility in a big, foreign city, the consequent devaluation and dehumanization of all his own. In the painful process of building a new self, he, too, often felt humiliated, scared, lonely and angry, and above all, misunderstood. He eventually succeeded, and in his new life, Aleksandar Hemon is a successful American writer, and Chicago is his home, but his story is still easily recognisable to many whose expat experiences do not have a happy ending.

Ivana Djilas is one of those who can recognize herself in Hemon’s story, so the performance The Book of My Lives is also a personal confession of the director, who, with the help of the writer’s emigration stories, tells her own.