Inshallah, Madonna, Inshallah

Inshallah, Madonna, Inshallah begins from a point of listening—turning up the radio, dragging a cafe chair closer to the man with the saz, dropping a record needle. In the Sarajevo of Miljenko Jergović’s childhood, folk songs permeated life. Their dusky melodies filled car rides, scored television programs, and echoed down alleyways, hummed drunkenly as daybreak glazed the city’s steeples and minarets.

In these nineteen stories, Jergović imagines what might have inspired such wistful tunes, crafting a catalog of source material. The reader is loosed from her contemporary seat as relics of an old world arise. Time slows to an ancient cadence. Here lives become totemic, fate hangs like a scarf over the shoulderblades of heroes and scoundrels alike, while misfortune, hubris, and luck transform individuals into a collective cry. Like an accordion which unfolds to fill a room with sound, the book expands and compresses—by turns bawdy, brutal, funny and wise. Drawn from deep wells of folklore and collective storytelling, Jergovic weaves together an extraordinary ethnography that manages to both critique the imperial domination and strife that has marked the Balkan region for centuries, and to display, carefully and tenderly, the lives of individuals, be they Christian or Muslim. Lives that (inshallah) seem to never end, in that boundless space of myth.