Writing as An Act of Hope and The Politics of Exile

“I am building my career on the loss of a man named Stojan Sokolović, and on the loss of many millions of others, who may or may not resemble him. And one night he told me…” - the book ends with the same sentence it begins with. It’s way past midnight and I drop it down on the floor of my living room as I stare at the ceiling from the comfort of my sofa. What are we doing and whom is this for? A question Dauphinee poses to the writers, researchers, academics - all those claiming to be trying to “understand” and “unpack” and “explain” human tragedy.

Tonight is not the first time I read this book. It came out in 2013 and I read it when I was fresh out of college, looking for purpose as a new Bosnian immigrant to the US. Living in New York at the time, I finally had access to all the books written about Bosnia. Displaced, I was seeking for comfort and familiarity in those pages. I read all nights long, searching for explanation. I longed to understand the knots in my stomach and the fog that prevented me from connecting to the new world around. I thought if I read these “impartial” research accounts of the war, I will get rid of the knots and the fog will clear. I will understand why it happened. Maybe I will even understand how we can make sure it never happens again. But then The Politics of Exile marched in and Douphinee explained why I too need to shred my David Campbell, Noel Malcolm, David Rieff, Thomas Weiss, Susan Woodward and all others writing about Bosnia, just like the researcher in her book does when she realizes that she learns nothing from their “objectivity.”

But this time around, I found so much more in the book. Written in an autoethnographical narrative form, The Politics of Exile offers a unique insight into the complex encounter of the researcher with the research “subject” - Stojan Sokolović. The book centers around their relationship and tells the story of the war through snippets of the researcher’s academic analysis and reflections and Stojan’s memories of the war as he attempts to come to terms with the truth about his brother’s murder and his own role in the violence. The researcher and Stojan develop a relationship in which, as he says it at some point, their lives become two parallels that run next to each other, but never meet.

Even though it is written as a novel, this book is still full of international relations theory. It addresses some of the key themes in the field: war crimes, ethics, identity politics, displacement, genocide. But by using the narrative form, Douphinee doesn’t just push the theoretical boundaries of international relations and challenges the traditional writing styles, she questions the purpose of social science itself - whom is it for and does it do? This book perfectly paints the alienation some academics feel from the world they research and write about. Acknowledging the damaging impact of this alienation, Dauphinee challenges us to identify complicity in the violence we seek to “understand” or “explain” or “engage with” in any way and with a million good intentions.

Scholars working in the traditions of feminism, postcolonialism, poststructuralism and other critical approaches to international relations addressed these issues before. But the way that Douphinee opens up the ugliest sides of academic work and the war itself makes the issues she brings forth ever more pressing. By putting abstract theories into characters, she connects the research to reality in a way that makes it impossible to take a good, hard look into your own reality, identity, purpose and impact of your work, and the stories you tell yourself and others about who you are.

When reading parts of The Politics of Exile, it is hard to tell who is more displaced - the Bosnian war veteran in Canada or the academic trying to understand the war, buried in books and papers, sleeping under her office desk. Her displacement in academia, in her own writing, in her own purpose are the kind of exile we don’t talk about enough. Yet, Dauphinee shows us, gently, that there is hope…that there is a way…that we can write ourselves into the story. She challenges the form to expose the cracks in “objectivity” and shows that the humanity needs to be placed back into academic research and international relations in particular.

The researcher in The Politics of Exile concludes that we are not independent subjects, but rather relational ones. She reminds that this relationality exists even across and despite time. The living and the dead remain forever connected, as do the victims and perpetrators, as do the researchers and their “subjects.” The traumas of her subject become her own. Stojan’s confession to the crimes of war breaks her to the point that the only way she can make sense of things is to break away from all rules of her discipline, research, and academic writing and shred the manuscript of the academic book she finished as her relationship with Stojan unfolded.

Trauma disrupts time as well as people. Even as researchers, we come to our work undone by trauma. Fragmented, we believe we can locate ourselves in the narrative strategies and theories available to us. But with her bold first sentence of the book and the parallel lives of the researcher and subject who never meet, Dauphinee shows that this deception takes us only further away from the “truth” and ourselves. Instead, she gently guides us to come undone and let the writing do the speaking.

“I am building my career on the loss of a man named Stojan Sokolović, and on the loss of many millions of others, who may or may not resemble him.” - these words ring in my ear as I stare at the ceiling of my living room. They remind me of an author I worked with a few years ago who also wrote a book about Bosnia and one of its war criminals. I am reminded of my fear and the inability to, as a research assistant, contradict the “expert.” I am reminded that this “expert” consistently made it clear to me that she knows more than I do because her “objectivity” gives her the superiority over me and my “subjective experience of the war.” I remember how she laughed when I said that she cannot claim a war criminal as her own in the title of her book when she never spoke to anyone about what it really feels to come from a place that he calls his own and where people do consider him to be “naš” (ours). But, just as Dauphinee’s book shows - the victims speak, the living and the dead. No matter how much some try to build their careers on carefully crafted stories that omit, cut, and paste pieces of real people’s experiences and tragedies - their “subjects” will speak back. And in some cases, they might just become the “experts” who write themselves back into their stories, histories, their wars, and their victories.

So, I think, if, as academics, we do build our careers on other people’s losses, then let’s write ourselves in. Let’s write our own losses in these stories too. Only by exposing the interconnections of suffering can we get to the hopeful place in it.