my cat in Sarajevo

My cat passed away on March 11. I was not with her. I miss her to the point of breathlessness. She had been with me almost every day for the last 18 years. She passed away between my reading of Aleksandar Hemon's The Question of Bruno and Nowhere Man. My feeling of loss has been fused with the experience of reading Hemon, an experience resonant of the political education provided by my father, my identification (bordering on obssession) with dispossession and displacement and, of course, the appreciation of Hemon's narrative.
I'd like to share Hemon with my students. My motivation is that of a reader's; as a teacher of literature, how is my personal perspective relevant, if at all?
My godfather fought as a volunteer in the first Balkan war, i marveled at the task of reconciling images of war with the demeanor of the sweet man that gave me christmas presents. When i was a child, my family and i vacationed twice in southern Yugoslavia; these vacations were more like a series of lectures on history and geography, interrupted by bland meals served at our hotel. General Tito was alive and well. In my teens, my Serbo-Croatian friends introduced me to Balašević. To this day, i remember the phrases they taught me and the ones i picked up from songs from the cassette tape of Balašević that i still own. I remember the endless conversations during the war, the helplessness that we felt, watching the train being derailed, knowing that the crash was imminent and not being able to do anything about it. Emotions and ideologies were running high. My father and Pinter had nightmares about the war. Pinter argued with his wife about war criminals. On one occasion my father went for my mother in his sleep. Catastrophe was in the air and we were the chorus in this tragedy. Our warning that "this is the Balkans, this is not fun and games," borrowed from our own contemporary bard, was not heeded. We found our friends again after the war and they are alive and well. We found them on facebook.
In 2005 i visited Sarajevo for a conference. The United World Colleges invited us to attend the conference for the opening/founding of a UWC in Mostar. I spent three days in Sarajevo, feeling displaced inside a displaced universe. After all, this was the first time in my life that i could have had my picture taken under a sign with skulls and bones that read "NATO demining project." I didn't. I didn't take a single picture while i was in Sarajevo. I was going to let memory invent my experience at a future date. We were invited to support the founding of the UWC in Mostar, we had an idea for a fundraiser and significant people willing to help. The school administration decided against our involvement.
Six years later, i live away from home (i have displaced myself from home, wherever that may be), i read Hemon and i wonder if the reworkings of memory can really defend me against the appalling timelessness of the unconscious. There is definitely very little that can defend us from the mechanics of our conscious reality.
I have been talking about Hemon's writing to everyone i know; on a couple of occasions, somewhere in my rambling, stream-of-consciousness, literary-criticism-improvisation narrative i interjected "my cat passed away." I have no cat. "There are no cats in Sarajevo." This is where my no-cat lives.