Embodiments and Voices of Inseparable Identities in The Book of My Lives and The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon

Abstract

Aleksandar Hemon’s books encapsulate a sense of ghostly, yet concrete belonging to disparate places, as he explores in various forms his own identity as an immigrant in the US. Hemon conveys the complex emotional and geographical displacement through a collage of frames and portraits depicting the relationality between past and present. This article looks into the representations of home, family, and distance in the memoir The Book of My Lives and The Lazarus Project through Ortega y Gasset’s notion of intrabody, renewed by the contemporary philosopher Emanuele Coccia in the study The Sensible Life.

Keywords

• aleksandar hemon
• memory
• space
• displacement
• memoir
• diaspora
• intrabody
• emanuele coccia