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‘I fear there
is no afterlife,
but I really
do believe
in ghosts.’
TÉA OBREHTand the looming battle of who should
get first dibs on them.
But Obreht couldn’t have known that
Inland would be released into a nation
where immigration, and the question of
who has a right to settle where, had be-
come a scalding political potato. Even
though, having seen much of her Bos-
niak (Bosnian Muslim) family flee the
former Yugoslavia, she’s familiar with
the global forces that propel people to
leave home and the kind of reception
with which they are often greeted.
She, her mother and her grand parents
left Belgrade when she was 7, before the
war had reached her city, but after the
discrimination and slights directed to-
ward her mother, whose married name
was Bajraktareviec, and grandmother,
who was a Bosniak married to a Slovene,
began to become commonplace.
She never lived for seven years in one
place again until moving to New York
City as an adult. It created a resilience in
her, a sense that she knew she could just
quarters, the traumas her homeland
endured during the Bosnian War have
certainly left their mark. “I fear there
is no afterlife, but I really do believe in
ghosts,” she says. To her, it’s a matter
of physics; catastrophic events leave
their signature. “I think places can be
haunted. When horrific things happen
in certain places, they are just always
happening in those places in perpetu-
ity, and you can feel the impression of it
pressing down on you.”In the AfterlIfe ecosystem she cre-
ates for Inland, the unfortunates who
die during travesties do not get to rest,
because their send-offs are all wrong.
Worse, they’re isolated. “Nameless and
unburied, turned out suddenly in the
bewildering dark,” she writes of some
slaughtered Native Americans, “they
rose to find themselves entirely alone.”
The dead can see the living, but not
their fellow dead. And (most of ) the liv-
ing can’t see them.
It’s a terrifying idea that reflects the
feelings of its creator. “I’m very afraid
of death,” says Obreht. “I think I started
writing seriously after my grandfather
died, in part because it was the first time
it hit me that actually maybe I didn’t be-
lieve in an afterlife.” Perhaps Obreht’s
belief that there is no final resting place
is connected to a childhood spent on the
move “from vagueness to vagueness,” as
she puts it. “A lot of this book ended up
being about the cost of preserving our il-
lusion of home,” she says.
But every book an author
writes changes her, and Ob-
reht has been altered by her
time spent in the American
West. Like many of the im-
migrants who traveled the
region before her, she felt a
sense of belonging when she
first visited Wyoming, “which
has these incredible vast
plains abutted by unbelievable jagged
mountains—just like out of a postcard.
I really felt a very strong draw of home,
whatever that meant,” she says. “I felt
homesick for it when I left. That was
new for me.” She and Sheehan recently
bought a place in Wyoming, near Jack-
son. Obreht may never find her rest-
ing place, but for now, she at least has a
place to rest. stand up, stretch into a new shape and
start again. She doesn’t even really have
a mother tongue. English is her best
language, but not her first. She could
quote entire English- language movies
before she understood what
they meant, just by learning
the sounds. “Home for me
has never really been tied to
a sense of physical place,” she
says. Thus, she’s fascinated
by the sense of agreement
her Irish husband, writer Dan
Sheehan, and his old friends
and family have about cer-
tain places or events, a shared wealth
of fixed points from which to navigate
life. “Certainty is home,” she says. “This
notion of feeling at home in a place, or
feeling at home in a situation; it’s an-
chored to certainty.”
Although Obreht (whose grand father
asked her to use her mother’s maiden
name for her writing before he died)
never saw the effects of war at closeIn Inland, Obreht continues exploring themes, like the
afterlife, woven into her first novel, The Tiger’s Wife