The Graduate Center’s Public Programs, together with The Writers’ Institute and the Leon Levy Center for Biography had the honor of hosting the event, “Exiles: A Conversation between Andre Aciman and Aleksander Hemon” at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Proshanksy Auditorium last night as part of the Public Programs series.
Andre Aciman, originally Egyptian, and Italian, French, and New Yorker depending on the occasion, is the founder and director of The Writers’ Institute and Distinguished Professor and Chair at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Program in Comparative Literature. He is also the acclaimed writer of the memoir Out of Egypt and novels Call Me By Your Name, Eight White Nights, and most recently, Harvard Square.
Aleksander Hemon is the highly acclaimed Bosnian-American fiction writer of Love and Obstacles: Stories, The Lazarus Project: A Novel (a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Awards, and named a New York Times Notable Book), Nowhere Man (also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award), The Question of Bruno: Stories, and most recently The Book of My Lives, his first collection of non-fiction essays, many of which have appeared previously in The New Yorker.
The two writers drew from their extraordinary lives as exiles, immigrants, and writers who translate the experience of multiple belongings and the question of home through their work, and discussed how immigrants find themselves in America. Hemon, articulate, personable, and completely without pretension, spoke to the immigrant need to draw comparisons between him/herself and “America” in order to find legitimacy. He shared generously of his own stories and those of his family, telling how Miles Davis was instrumental in his discovering American soul, how finding true friendship and community is fundamental to threading oneself into the geography of place, and how his daughter taught him how we create our own stories to explain ourselves into the world. Sharing anecdotes from life in Sarajevo, Chicago, and New York, and openly answering the questions of participants, Hemon provided a refreshing take on the immigrant or exiled experience and what it means to write oneself into both identity and place.
Both Aciman and Hemon come from multinational and multi-linguistic backgrounds that provide them with unique and often startling insights into the world and mind. Andre Aciman’s Harvard Square and Aleksander Hemon’s The Book of My Lives are both available in stores now.
