Imagining the European periphery: Post-war Croatia in Aminatta Forna’s The Hired Man

ABSTRACT

Black British literature’s infrequent engagement with European peripheries has largely involved writing back to Europe as imperial centre. Aminatta Forna’s The Hired Man (2013) pushes beyond this postcolonial “burden of representation” by focusing on the religious and ethnic conflicts that have plagued one of the most traditionally peripheralized parts of the European continent, South-Eastern Europe or the generic “Balkans”. Forna depicts post-war non-urban Croatia as a place of entanglement, haunted by its past. Backwardness, decay, and political instability characterize this quasi-rural periphery. The novel juxtaposes the fluid border location of a fictitious small town with allegedly more stable national spaces in the west, and also reveals how Balkanist discourses are instrumental in creating neocolonial spaces in a post-socialist context. Moreover, in soliciting reader complicity it invites an understanding of peripheries as “traumascapes” whose complex relation to a troubled past can be mobilized to offer hope and healing.

KEYWORDS:

• Aminatta Forna
• traumascape
• Balkanist discourse
• Europe
• periphery
• Black British literature

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The use of “quasi-rural” in this article is informed by the fact that, in terms of peripheral spaces, the small town (as depicted in Forna’s novel) occupies a middle ground between the urban (i.e. the city, the metropolis) and the rural (i.e. villages). Small-town places have a strong presence not just in South-Eastern Europe, but also in many other European spaces.

2. Forna had previously published The Memory of Love (winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Best Book Award in 2011) and Ancestor Stones (winner of the 2006 Hurston Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction, the Liberaturpreis, and the Aidoo-Snyder Book Prize, and nominated for the International Dublin IMPAC Award), as well as the 2003 memoir The Devil that Danced on the Water. Her latest novel, Happiness (2018) was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and the Jhalak Prize, and nominated for the European Prize for Fiction.

3. Born to a Scottish mother and a Sierra Leonean father and raised in both countries, Forna herself experienced the tragic effects of civil war when her father, a physician, was imprisoned and hanged during the Sierra Leonean civil war (Lionnet and MacGregor 2017, 199).

4. Bastida-Rodríguez (2017) mentions the novel when debating the “Afropolitan” as a common denominator of Forna’s work.

5. Hickling’s (2013) Guardian review is subtitled “A theme of civil conflict and recent horror rings as true in a small Croatian town as it did in Sierra Leone”.

6. While Forna’s novel focuses on the Croatian context, ethnic cleansings (against Croats and Bosnian Muslims) also occurred in other parts of former Yugoslavia.

7. Duro also explicitly refers to Laura’s son Matthew as a “[c]ity kid” who doesn’t “understand entertainment unless it came with batteries” (Forna 2014, 35).

8. See Duro’s explanation for not shattering Laura’s preconceived, stereotypical tourist myth: “I never lied to Laura. I simply let Laura believe what she wanted to believe. [ ... ] But I knew Laura had a story about us, this place, the house she’d just bought. It was her story, one she told herself long before she came here. And if her story brought me work, then I’d help her hold onto it” (Forna 2014, 92).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO).

Notes on contributors

Janine Hauthal

Janine Hauthal is assistant professor of intermedial studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium. Her postdoctoral research focused on British and anglophone settler “fictions of Europe” and was funded by the Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO). Other interests include contemporary British and postcolonial literatures, metadrama/-theatre, genre theory and narratology as well as postdramatic theatre (texts). Her most recent articles feature in Modern Drama, English Text Construction, Journal of the European Association for Australian Studies, and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Her latest FWO-funded project investigates “Self-Reflexivity and Generic Change in 21st-Century Black British Women’s Literature”.