Huck Finn Sails the River Sava

Abstract

This article follows the course of two rivers—the Sava and the Mississippi—through a close reading of Bekim Sejranović’s Tvoj sin Huckleberry Finn (Your Son Huckleberry Finn, 2015). Rivers trace a long history in literature, an arena where their ability to cross imperial and national borders has made them an all but irresistible framing device. Taking Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) as a point of departure, Sejranović’s novel resituates Huck Finn in a dissected Yugoslav landscape as he sails the Sava and Danube in the hope of reaching the Black Sea. Rather than reworking the American classic, Sejranović’s novel casts issues of empire, multilingualism, and race in new relief. The Yugoslav context of Tvoj sin relocates the great American novel outside the bounds of nationalized literary history, allowing the inter-imperial stakes of Twain’s Adventures to come to focus. Moreover, read together, the novels not only reveal the links between US racial segregation and “balkanization” but also offer insight into how Twain and Sejranović write against the current of so-called pure racio-religious and national identities.