Somethought. Something. Someone

Somethought

Inspiration rarely shows up on schedule for me.
The busier I am, the less inspired I feel. Maybe so busy chasing I don’t leave time to actually be looking and listening and thinking critically about things.

And then I find I've mostly just been waiting for the inspiration to come back instead of going looking for it.

So I jumped on a flight which landed me in Sarajevo.

Well, it actually landed me in Split, Croatia, summer holiday mecca and, after a quick swim in the Adriatic Sea, we drove up through Herzegovina, into Bosnia and landed in Sarajevo.

After a few days here, reading and listening to stories of the ancient, and recent, history of this place, what stands out to me most is that today, this truly feels like a city where everyone is welcome. A true melting pot. In fact, it even feels like a melting pot geographically. In a natural basin, surrounded by steep hills and and dense forests, it feels that everyone is welcome and has a place here. All backgrounds, all cultures, all beliefs. And that is a very, very nice feeling to be surrounded by, especially with the context of all the blood that has been spilt in these streets.

I'm not the person to explain Sarajevo's history properly. I've been here four days. But I've felt inspired to start writing again this week, for the first time in a while, and it's because of something a writer here, Ennis Ćehić, already put into words better than I could in his book New Metonyms

New Metonyms - Words By Ennis Cehic and Photography by Shantanu Starick

Something

Every country ends up with a shorthand version of itself. France is the Eiffel Tower. England is Big Ben. Bosnia, for most of the world, is still the war. A photography book Ennis Ćehić and Shantanu Starick made called New Metonyms went looking for a different answer to that question. Landscapes, monuments, daily habits, Hari’s ćevepi, the stuff that's actually here now, not just the worst chapter in a very long story. The whole point was to allow a place to tell it’s own story, one it gets to choose, instead of the one it got stuck with.

So here's the something this week. Think of the old metonym attached to where you live. The one-liner people default to, fair or not, like it or not. Then think of the new one. The version that feels true now, the one you wish people actually knew. Write both down. That's it.

The more we seek to be understood, the more likely we are to seek to understand.

Someone.

Ennis Ćehić was born here in Sarajevo, in 1984. When he was seven, the war forced his family out of Bosnia to Germany and then to Australia. He grew up in Melbourne. Built a career as an advertising copywriter. Then, as an adult, moved back to Sarajevo and spends much of his time thinking and writing about the idea of immigrating home, of returning back to a place you were forced to leave.

So much of his work is about symbols, not just stories. After the publication of New Metonyms in 2020, he then published Sadvertising, in 2022. A collection of short stories from the margins of creativity. I’ve been listening to the audiobook version all week and these gems are really what has reignited my inspiration. Fiction is SO important!

I highly recommend finding an audio or physical copy of Sadvertising.

New Metonyms is harder to get your hands on but if your can, it’s truly moving and changed the way I think about place and the stories we tell about ourselves.