Kosovo writer invades world's most popular media

The author of “My Cat Youoslavia” explains why it makes sense for his double migration story to include a conversation, a homophobic cat.

Many first novels are originally published as novels, reactions to romance novels and epic novels up to 700 pages that are now forgotten as merciful in drawers.

But this isn't the case for the Statovci settlement. “My Cat Youoslavia”, which has won praise from the New York Times and New Yorker -- not only is it the first novel he's tried to write, but the first part of the note he wrote.

I was working in a grocery store while at the same time studying comparable literature at Helsinki University”, he says.

I asked myself, "What am I waiting for?
18 months later, only 21, he had completed the first draft of My Cat Yougoslavia.
But while author Statovci, polyglot, beautiful and very successful for his age -- now 27 -- can make the writing look easy, he's had to have a genius childhood to get here.

He was born in Kosovo in 1990, a few years before the Yugoslavia war began, and had dreamed of being a writer since childhood.

As a child, I was sensitive and weak at the point that I pretended to be in the events I had consumed, that I gave up the lives of protagonists because life in fiction was much more interesting than that I lived”.

Statovci assures me that his novel “is a extinguisher from the start to the end of”, he agrees to include several autobiographical elements. As one of his protagonists, Emine, he left his home with his family to Finland.
His observation of nationality, racism and migration comes from his own experience, as do people around him.
Bekim, his other character, talks about how he grew up as an Albanian immigrant in Finland.

“One day you will realize that if you try to become equal to them, you will be more looked down on by”, he calls to his father's words to the Finnishs.

My Cat Yougoslavia is made from two events: one is a realistic magic story that conveys a young man, homosexual-Bekim, and his relationship to an annoying human cat that speaks.
The other, for Emeen, is a realistic portrayal of a mother who fled to Finland with her family during the 1980s.
The blessing is Amy's child, but it is hard to tell.
“There is often a space between older and younger generations, in families that have migrated from one culture to another. And sometimes there's no way to find, there's no dialogue, there's no understanding, says Statovci “and space just gets bigger and deeper and the distance between the two worlds is just growing, it never closes”.

Magic reality, says Statovci “does not care about the walls and there are no restrictions, as long as reality does. There are rules, standards and code of conduct.
After the first meeting at a gay club, the association of the annoying blessing cat, homophobic diggers, fanatics, but Bekim thinks that the love you receive from the cat is stronger and stronger because of its limits.
Through fantasy, Statovci describes the hard internal life of Bekim through this either the Emine verses are no less lyrical; doing housework, it marks that “in a clean house, there are no secrets”. But in these landscapes the verses fall on events as they are presented.
In the surreal history of bliss, what happens is as fantastic as it is said.

Reality and fantasy are not completely separate for Statovcin.

“Many things in my childhood and in my life, such as the war in Kosovo, had no meaning to me. They were positioned around my meaning, he says”.
“I guess that's why I've always been attracted to the figment that makes the unimaginable possible and the incredible understanding”.

So why talk to a cat?
Writing the novel, Statovci took an interest in the bond between animals and humans, especially in how the latter possess their feelings by anthropomorphizing them.
The reading of animals as symbols reduces them, violates their right to represent themselves”, he says.
Depending on culture, animals represent very different things, he says.
In Finland cats are domestic animals, while in Kosovo they are seen as dirty.

In that sense, animals clash with cultural stereotypes just like humans.” We live in a world where animal cruelty, racism, prejudice, and stereotypes exist. Oppression and discrimination have been and are present today. Only victims change.

Statovci is not too concerned about his national identity. I don't go to sleep at night thinking about my relationship with the place I was born”, he says.

I speak Albanian as my mother tongue, but I don't use it when I think, write or dream.” However, in his novel, the Albanian grandfather of Bekim holds these very concerns, worrying that “one day [Bekim] will not be an Albanian at all, but something else all together “. There is also a marvelously simple line where the cat decides that” no longer wanted to be a cat; he wanted to be director of film “. Statovci treats species and professions as one and the same: both are the roles we have to play.

While second-generation migrants are often robbed by a national “domestic “, considered foreign both in their adopted and home country, Statovci considers home “a state of mind”. “When I type, this is my house”, he says. This is the big thing about fiction. Its ability to reson within.” That's what he called Statovci's son. It's also what he gives in Maca's Yugoslavia.

Original text:

https://www.theguuardiaan.com/books/2017/sep/07/ reconciliation-state-mey-cat-unugoslavia-interview?CMP=shere btn tw