Ismet Prcic, the author behind Shards, recently visited the KQED studios to record an episode of The Writers’ Block. Get to know him a little better with this Q+A, in which he talks about escaping his war-torn homeland, the In Living Color character he would like to dine with, and much more.
You narrowly escaped having to serve in the Yugoslav army and made it to America, but have said that your mind, in some ways, stays over there. Tell us a little more about that.
Ismet Prcic: There’s no escaping trauma; I don’t care if you’re the fastest human on Earth. Sometimes people with addictive personalities and substance abuse problems believe that it is their environment that makes them drink, smoke, snort; that if only they could move to Seattle where they don’t know anybody they will be able to get back on track and stop drinking, smoking, snorting. But once in Seattle, within a week or two, they are back to the business as usual because whatever they are trying not to think about by drinking, smoking, snorting is a part of them; it has nothing to do with where they are. It’s the same thing with trauma. People on this planet endure and survive horrible things in their lives and the “lucky ones” find a way to escape, or are plucked out of danger zones and set up in peaceful suburban neighborhoods in the West and are expected to be fine, to pick up where they left, to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, to forget the past and look to the future. But what is forgotten is that trauma already changed the physiological and mental constitutions of these “lucky ones,” that what we expect them to do is impossible. You can’t see with bleeding eyes; you can’t think with a broken mind. And you for sure can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Try it?
Reading Shards, one would never think that English is not your first language. How did you become so adept at our idioms and the like?
