5. “To dream of birds”: The Father as Potential Perpetrator in Nina Bunjevac’s “August, 1977” and Fatherland

Nina Bunjevac intentionally complicates the matter of her Serbian identity by referring to herself as belonging with “the displaced children of Yugoslavia” (Bunjevac qtd. in Obradovic 2015). In the context of the Yugoslav Wars, which were fought mainly on grounds of ethnic and national identity, this is a clear and important political statement.

For an overview of the evolution of alternative comics in Canada, whose first generation began creating work in the late 1970s and early 1980s, see Rifkind and Warley (2016) and Grace and Hoffman (2018).

For a reading of the cat figure in Heartless, see Pearson (2018). For a reading of gender and displacement in Heartless, see Precup (2013).

For additional biographical information on Nina Bunjevac, as well as the creative process behind Fatherland, see Bunjevac (2015). Bunjevac’s website, ninabunjevac.​com, also contains relevant background information.

It would be difficult for those who cannot read the Cyrillic alphabet and are relatively unfamiliar with the history of the ultranationalist movement in Yugoslavia to understand the connection between the man fabricating a bomb and the fascist ideology of the men demonstrating in the midst of this short comic. At least, this was my experience, having read “August, 1977” before knowing it was autobiographical and without being familiar with Obraz. Obraz is an organization whose ideology relies on “the protection of Serbianness, family values, the Cyrillic alphabet, the orthodox faith, and national statehood. Yet, they do not perceive themselves as ultraright and extremist, but as legitimate defenders of patriotic values and normality, struggling against (post)modern and deviant forms of behavior (sects, drug addiction, the gay movement, organized crime, and corruption)” (Šuber and Karamanić 2012, 124). However, the initial target audience for this comic seems to have been made up of readers who are familiar with these issues, and who also possess the cinematic knowledge required to pick up on the many film references in Heartless.

In Fatherland, the last image is the silhouette of a bird, a motionless omen whose presence in dreams announces that the person is about to receive news, according to a Serbian superstition previously explained in the narrative.

I would like to thank Anca Apostol for suggesting this interpretation during our graduate seminar on Memory and Representation in Graphic Memoirs.

Throughout this chapter, I use “Nina” to refer to the autobiographical self from the comic, and “(Nina) Bunjevac” to refer to the author of the book.

Apparently, they were meant to bomb the Yugoslav consulate in Toronto, and, if successful, they would have taken many lives.

Living as they are with Bunjevac’s maternal grandparents, they are forbidden by the grandmother from expressing feelings of sadness over either their separation from Peter—whom she calls a “cold-blooded killer,” even though the memoir produces no evidence that he may have killed anyone—or over his death. In this context, Nina’s older sister Sarah feels compelled to ask her mother for permission to cry for her father’s death, but only when her grandmother is not present.

Bunjevac’s maps do not bear the markings of the personal history of Bunjevac’s family as, for instance, those from Bechdel’s Fun Home, where she pointedly inscribes her family’s history over the geography of Beech Creek, Pennsylvania, New York City, and San Francisco.