Reading “A Coin”

By George Vos

A prize of great value must be earned by effort.  The pleasure gained from reading “A Coin”, Aleksandar Hemon’s skillful and brilliantly evocative rumination on war and madness is a prize that one must earn.  “A Coin” is complex and is presented in a non-traditional manner; to appreciate how much Hemon accomplishes requires an understanding of the story’s context and a systematic analysis of its elements.  “A Coin” revolves around war-torn Sarajevo in the 1990s; some knowledge of this conflict and its effect on Hemon will aid the reader.  Hemon utilizes multiple voices, all in the first person, to tell the story; it is critical to read them attentively.  Misdirection obscures the plot; the reader must determine which character drives the story forward.  The story’s non-linear structure is an important element that, if followed carefully, will provide insight into the characters and the disconnections of war.  The piece also contains many metaphors, both clear and hidden; whose interpretation will inform an understanding of Hemon’s vision of the world. Reading “A Coin” requires effort, but it is well worth it.

The reader should note how Hemon uses different voices in the story.  The first voice, in regular type, is Aida, a Bosnian woman living in Sarajevo during the civil war.  The second voice, in italic type, is a Bosnian refugee living in Chicago.  Hemon leaves him nameless (more on that later), but I call him Alek, the author’s name, because Hemon also was a Bosnian refugee who lived in Chicago.  The story is organized in counterpoint; two or three paragraphs of Aida alternate and contrast with a single paragraph of Alek.  Aida is the external voice of the story, and Alek is the internal voice. While the voices are separate, Aida’s voice is in the letters she writes to Alek, so she is really speaking through him.  Her letters are full of life, with a matter-of-fact tone to describe the horrors she sees and experiences in Sarajevo.  An example is her non-judgmental description of snipers torturing people, “Sometimes the snipers play with the body, shooting off his or her knees, feet, or elbows.  They seem to have made a bet how far he or she is going to get before bleeding away.” (Hemon 157)  Living in a war-zone, she now views terror as an ordinary part of daily life.  Even so, she sounds surprisingly normal in her letters as she describes her work and her lover.  Her voice is in stark contrast with Alek, separated from his homeland in Sarajevo, and living “the friendless immigrant life.” (Hemon 160)  Hemon leaves him nameless because, as a refugee, he has lost his identity.  Alek speaks from his room, with a voice is full of dread and self-loathing.  He describes receiving Aida’s letters; “when I open my mailbox … and find Aida’s letter, I shiver with dread.  What terrifies me is that, as I rip the exhausted envelope, she may be dead.” (Hemon 157)  Alek’s description of his existence is “the solitude and nothingness that constitute my life.” (Hemon 162)  Hemon contrasts the voices to show how someone who is engaged can live in the worst circumstances, while someone who is disengaged is effectively dead. 

In revealing the plot, Hemon misleads the reader; while Aida dominates the story, the plot moves through Alek.  The story’s problem is Alek’s alienation; he is disconnected from the world, consumed by fear for Aida, and overcome by his own survivor’s guilt.  Alek’s descent into madness is the story’s rising action.  The story’s turning point is when Alek stops receiving letters from Aida and begins to write Aida’s letters, assuming her voice and continuing her stories as his madness grows worse.  The irony is Alek’s gruesome visions of the war in his letters to himself are no worse than Aida’s matter-of-fact descriptions.  In Hemon’s view, there is little or no difference between war and insanity.

The reader needs to be aware of how Hemon uses non-linear narrative techniques, such as segmentation, to tell his story.  For example, Hemon helps us see Alek’s madness by pulling apart the various stories from Aida’s letters, which would likely have been told in linear fashion in the actual letters, and re-constructing them non-linearly to show the disconnection in Alek’s thoughts.  Hemon employs non-linear narrative for other purposes.  Aida’s letters take months to reach Alek, adding to his alienation.  Hemon makes this disconnect tangible by placing Alek’s description of a picture Aida sends him in the first part of the story, while placing Aida’s letter about taking the picture many paragraphs later.  The seeming disorganization of the story reflects the chaos in both Aida’s world and Alek’s head.  Hemon also uses segmentation to make the reader question whether Aida is real.  Early in the story, long before Alek starts writing Aida’s letters; Aida writes of a dream where a woman is performing her, but incorrectly. In her dream Aida does not understand why she cannot determine what is wrong until, “I realize - it’s the language.  I’m confined in the wrong language.”  (Hemon 160)  This statement doesn’t fit Aida, but it perfectly fits Alek, whose struggle to learn English is one of the sources of his alienation. Is it really Aida’s voice, or is it Alek’s?  Why is Hemon throwing this ambiguity into the story?  Possible answers are: 1.) the reader‘s confusion will engender better understanding of Alek’s state of mind; 2.) Alek made Aida up and the entire story is the internal dialog of a madman.

Metaphor plays an important role in “A Coin”, and the reader has many metaphors to interpret.  They illustrate Hemon’s view of the human condition.  Aida shares her name with the Princess Aida, from myth and opera, who was entombed alive.  Alek is as much as buried alive in the room he doesn’t leave.  In Aida’s letters, dogs are a metaphor for humans.  Dogs eat cats in Sarajevo, just as ethnically different neighbors kill each other.  Different breeds of purebred dogs, household pets before the war, now run in wild packs and create odd-looking mongrels, symbolizing the breakdown of the old order and the rise of a perverse new one.  Dog packs attack children and the elderly, depicting the fate of the weak during wartime.  Snipers, who terrorize Sarajevo in Aida’s letters, are Hemon’s metaphor for God.  They control the city, kill at random, and are feared by all.  Alek also uses this metaphor when cockroaches scurry away in his room; he wonders if their fear is “The instinctual – perhaps even molecular – awareness of the gaze of the supreme sharpshooter?” (Hemon 165)  Whether it is Alek trying to hit a roach with his shoe or a rifleman picking off victims, every creature fears an all-seeing and merciless God.  The story’s final metaphor, contained in both the title and the last sentence, is the most telling. When Alek attempts to describe how one feels after escaping a sniper’s bullet he says, “You …put your hand in the pocket, where you may or may not find a worthless coin; a coin.”  A worthless coin that may not be in the pocket; this is the value of one’s life.  Hemon’s metaphors vividly depict his bleak vision of human existence.

The power of “A Coin” is a testament to how well Hemon employs multiple elements to make the story work on many different levels.  The juxtaposition of Aida going about her life with Alex melting into nothingness in his room captures the Kafkaesque combination of guilt, alienation and morbid outlook on life of the refuge.  His use of multiple voices merging into one brings Alek’s fall into insanity to life.   Jumps in time and narrative make Alek’s confusion, as well as the disconnection of the characters, seem tangible.  The story’s many metaphors illustrate Hemon’s dystopian view: God is merciless, we are all trapped, no one is saved, no one has value, and the worst setting is inside your mind.  “A Coin” is a challenging story, both intellectually and emotionally, but the reader’s prize is the gift of brilliance from this artist’s work.