Passing through: negotiating identity, sexuality and movement in Ahmed Imamovic’s Go West

Abstract

Bosnian director Ahmed Imamović’s 2005 film Go West, situated at the breakout of war in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the disintegration of Yugoslavia, follows an ethnically mixed gay couple as they attempt to escape war and gain entry to Europe. While hiding out in a small village in eastern Bosnia, Milan has his partner Kenan dress as a woman so that they can ‘pass’ as a married heterosexual couple. The notion of ‘passing’ and ‘passing through’ are some of the key themes in the film and will be the focal point of my analysis. My claim is that Go West’s emphasis on a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Europe lacks an intersectional understanding of power relations and directly influences the scope of (im)possible identities and sexualities that are presented in the film. Moreover, looking at how identity and sexuality are constructed and mediated in the film through the lens of ‘nesting orientalisms’ and ‘Balkanism,’ my aim is to bring to light an ideological duality that is created between the idea of a peaceful, liberated Europe and another Europe that always lags behind the West.

Keywords:

• Balkanism
• representation
• cinema
• (ex-)Yugoslavia
• Orientalism
• intersectionality

Notes

1. It is widely written and believed that the disintegration of Yugoslavia occurred as a result of inter-ethnic hatreds that spanned centuries before they would result in an explosive confrontation in 1992. However, as Natasja Vojvodić argues in ‘Gender Analysis in Ethnic Conflict: Causes & Consequences in the Case of Yugoslavia,’ the actual origins of Yugoslavia’s breakup are to be found in the failure of socialist modernization processes which were marked by the death of Josip Broz Tito, former president of the socialist republic, in 1980. Moreover, as Vojvodić shows (2012, 3), the territory of Yugoslavia had historically been an intersection of many different nationhoods, and after its fall all of the resultant nation states struggled to acquire national identities that would be clearly enough distinct from their shared Yugoslav history. Today, from the seven countries that make up former Yugoslavian republics, only Slovenia and Croatia are members of the European Union. Croatia’s membership was granted very recently, on July 1st 2013, whereas Slovenia joined in 2004.

2. Of course, Kenan’s anxiety is doubled by the fact that he can be exposed as a Muslim in Serb territory and as a homosexual. In his analysis of Go West, Kevin Moss points to a trend in films from the former Yugoslavia of the early 2000s that have a ‘gay’ thematic: all of them use the figure of the homosexual/lesbian as a metaphor for pointing to certain tensions that the filmmakers actually wish to address: issues of national belonging and ethnicity (Moss 2012, 352).

3. For instance, she has spoken about feminism’s frequent reluctance to take into account questions of race and racial inequality, which ultimately leads to internal division and opposition within the movement: ‘When feminism does not explicitly oppose racism, and when anti-racism does not incorporate opposition to patriarchy, race and gender politics often end up being antagonistic to each other and both interests lose’ (Crenshaw 1992, 405).

4. The disintegration of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s brought to the rise largely nationalistic political parties in the separate states. These conservative parties were motivated by religious and patriarchal ideologies that, among other things, propagated ideas of women’s place being ‘at home.’ This ideological shift was reflected in a dramatic drop in female representatives in government functions, from 24% in 1986 to merely 3% in 1990. Some feminists understood this shift as directly motivated by the desire to ‘to regenerate nations through motherhood’ (Bamburać, Jusić, and Isanović 2006, 48).

5. The educational system in Bosnia and Herzegovina largely enforces negative views on homosexuality. Some school textbooks contain explicitly homophobic text, from which follows that intolerant attitudes towards difference and otherness in general are also being promoted (Schrag 2010, 58). The explicitly heteronormative and patriarchal attitude is enforced very early on, as in common statements such as ‘Mom makes lunch and dad goes to work’ (as quoted in Schrag 2010, 58). Moreover, the formal educational system in Bosnia and Herzegovina still largely enforces divisions among the students based on their ethnic belonging, whether among student bodies or in the class curricula (Stovel 2000, 7). A survey conducted in 2005 on attitudes towards LGBTIQ persons showed that as much as 82.5% of 1550 interviewees had a negative opinion on homosexuals (Djurković 2005 as quoted in Schrag 2010, 20). This attitude is largely enforced by political leaders, who often draw upon religious laws to condemn homosexuality and present it as a disease. This rhetoric operates according to an ethnonationalist logic, which means that the new Bosnian state is being created on the basis of certain inclusions and exclusions. Since the political and cultural sphere operates according to (strong) patriarchal norms, homosexuality becomes the radical Other that gets associated with another sphere (in this case, the West, and most notably Western Europe), and is shown to have no place in the Bosnian context (Schrag 2010, 21).