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Mahmutovic's Thinner than a Hair
by Moa-Aaricia Lindunger
“Daughter, lover, illegal immigrant, and now a broken
prostitute. How in God’s name have I managed to do this? As
if I’m a pebble that a boy once flung across a river and it
only touched the water in four places.”
Already in the prologue of Thinner than a Hair, Adnan
Mahmutovic’s vibrant and poetic language pierces my heart.
The sense of helplessness is striking. Not only that of the
protagonist Fatima in her Bosnian context of the 1990s, but
also in general. The words seem to suggest that, no matter
how hard we try to persuade ourselves the opposite, we are
all small pebbles uncontrollably hurled to and fro over an
enormous ocean. Yet, at the same time, the reader cannot but
be overwhelmed by the warmth, and astonished by the
stoicism, faith and love that abounds Thinner than a Hair
from prologue to epilogue. The novel requires a careful
read. Not because its plot is extremely intricate or its
language too complex but because each and every word is
pregnant with profound emotions and meaning.
Mahmutovic, who was born in 1974 in northern Bosnia, invites
his reader on a magic walk over Bosnian landscapes and
through its history. He shows its rainbow colours rather
than the army green, which we were used to see in the global
broadcasts in the nineties. He gives voice to Fatima, who
tells a story about coming of age in rural Bosnia and
finding love in a sun burnt cornfield. Fatima grows up as an
only child. Her father is “like a tree trunk, like a
country” and her mother hides her loving warmth behind a
cold façade as if for fear of the inescapable consequences
of love. When she is seventeen Fatima meets Aziz, who is
working for her father, and they fall in love. Then, in
1992, the war begins. Fatima and Aziz flee their small town
and end up as refugees in Zenica, Eastern Bosnia.
The Balkan war is characterized by the splitting of the
Balkan people along the lines of religion, ethnicity and
gender, but Mahmutovic highlights the inessentiality of such
categorizing. Fatima says, “Fools, they can’t see the rain
for the water, let alone the rainbow for all the colours.”
While Mahmutovic clearly depicts the Serbian aggression on
Bosnia, it is as if he is trying to show that whether we are
Serbs or Bosnians; Muslims or Christians; women or men or
something in between, at the end of the day we are all human
beings.
As if opening a babushka doll to find her core identity,
Fatima peels off every layer of culturally created layers
until she is totally exposed to the readers. Yet, this
exposure, this vulnerability is also comforting because it
shows that the essence of a human being has the capacity to
survive every humiliation and distress even though it is
thinner than a hair.
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