Globalizing Memory in a Divided City: Bruce Lee in Mostar

Abstract

Commenting on the Bruce Lee statue in Mostar, in southern Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Bosnian author and journalist Miljenko Jergović recounts an anecdote about a clerk at a currency exchange office in Zagreb, Croatia (Jergović 2003). During a transaction, a Bosnian couple experienced a peculiar discriminatory incident. While accepting one Bosnian banknote with the portrait of the Bosnian Muslim poet Mehmedalija ‘Mak’ Dizdar, the clerk refused to handle another banknote, which bore the face of Aleksa Šantić, a Bosnian Serb poet from Mostar.² It turned out that the clerk, who had single-handedly refused to handle currency marked by Serb ethno-nationality, was himself a Bosnian Croat who, as Jergović explains, forged his distinct identity around ‘bitter, belligerent, and distorted dispositions’. Jergović comments on this incident: ‘These same people, “our” people fervently believe that Bosnian currency cannot bear the portraits of both a Croat, even if his name were Muslim, Mehmedalija, and a Serb, even if he had a Christian name, Aleksa’.

We will always be Muslims, Serbs or Croats, but one thing we all have in common is Bruce Lee.

—Veselin Gatalo¹