Our America: migratory dreams in Pajtim Statovci’s My Cat Yugoslavia and crossing

Abstract

ABSTRACT ‘Europe was our America,’ the protagonist of Pajtim Statovci’s novel Crossing (2016) remarks as he prepares to leave Albania. In this novel and Statovci’s début, My Cat Yugoslavia (2014), characters escape the violence and instability that erupts after the collapse of communism in Yugoslavia and Albania. Europe – erstwhile remote to them – promises safety, liberation and opportunity. In both novels, this migration ultimately problematizes the main characters’ accustomed family structures and enables an engagement with gender/sexuality, whilst also emphasizing the practical difficulty of ‘realizing’ Europe. Yet as shifts in location are correlated with shifts in identity, complimentary questions about the opposition of destination and origin are raised. Using notions of literary worlding and Balkanism to explore the novels’ mediation of the differences between Kosovo/Albania and ‘Europe,’ we argue that in these novels migratory identity and Europeanness exist in a mutual, transformative exchange. The idea of Europe, as manifested by the migrant, changes while it also changes them. Ultimately, we suggest how Statovci’s novels show the impossibility of arrival and settlement in a Europe where issues of citizenship, belonging, and identity are hotly debated.