RECKONING WITH THE ‘BOSNIA TROUBLES’:

TRAUMA, WITNESSING, AND POLITICS

Jasmina Husanović

University of Tuzla, Tuzla

 © 2004 Jasmina Husanović  All Rights Reserved
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Engaging in a continuous drama of culture, 
as well as reckoning with the critical 
traumatic contents of political reality is the 
state of the Balkans.1 The paradoxical 
(im)possibility of justice is the trouble with 
the Balkans. Because in this knot of 
traumas, cultural crises and political 
injustices we are repeatedly called to judge, 
we also find ourselves permanently situated 
at a site where imagination, memory, and 
agency may and should coalesce into 
emancipatory gestures that traverse violent 
deadlocks of conventional phantasmatic 
politics. 

Over my discussion in this paper looms a 
specter of a very particular ‘face’and, I 
would add, ‘body’ that universalizes the 
predicament of being violently excluded 
from the dominant political/symbolic orders,
not only in the Balkans but also globally –
the face of a woman from Bosnia exposed to
(post)war traumas. This ‘face/body’ is a 
symptomatic subject of the oxymoronic 
Bosnian political community – she who is 
hit by the twin crises of trauma and 
destitution, who is constantly ‘waiting’ (on 
the waiting list, in the waiting room…) for 
justice to be enacted – to return home, to 
have her ‘missing’ found, to see the war 

                                                          
1 This article is dedicated to all Mak’s ‘aunties’
and ‘uncles’ at Škofja Loka (Slovenia) Summer 
School 2004 within the HESP Regional Seminar 
on Postcolonial and Post-Socialist Context in 
Social Scientific Teaching and Writing.

criminals punished, to feel safer in her 
everyday life and more confident about her 
life prospects, and so forth. She experiences 
multiple political dislocations and 
marginalizations finding herself at the end of 
the chain – if we agree that the Balkans 
embody a paradoxical liminality of 
Europe/modernity; that Bosnia has, in many 
respects, become a dislocated, traumatic 
kernel of the always-already liminal 
Balkans; and that the ‘face/body’ I use as a
point of departure in my metaphorical 
universalizations of injurious predicaments 
stands for an exception even within (the 
dislocated/liminal) Bosnia, as an excluded 
remainder of conventional political registers 
we find in Bosnia, in the Balkans, in Europe 
and globally. My ‘face/body’ is truly an 
alien life inhabiting the earthly political 
communities of our times. What is her 
voice, where is her space, how is her 
politics? This discussion of emancipations 
and justice relates to the speechless and 
solitary terrains around her where words and 
company must be found. 

To relate this to an insight offered by Judith 
Butler, women have always known very 
well the question of how a 

collective deals with its vulnerability 
to violence. […] There is the 
possibility of appearing 
impermeable, of repudiating 
vulnerability itself. There is the 
possibility of becoming violent. But 
perhaps there is some other way to 

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live in such a way that one is neither 
fearing death, becoming socially 
dead from fear of being killed, or 
becoming violent, and killing others, 
or subjecting them to a life of social 
death predicated upon the fear of 
literal death. Perhaps this other way 
to lie requires a world in which 
collective means are found to protect 
bodily vulnerability without 
precisely eradicating it. Surely, some 
norms will be useful for the building 
of such a world, but they will be 
norms that no one will own, norms 
that will have to work not through 
normalization or racial and ethnic 
assimilation, but through becoming 
collective sites of continuous 
political labor. (Butler 2004: 231)

Casting a look at the symbolic and political 
constitution of Bosnian/Balkan realities may 
prompt us to think of the Balkans as a 
trauma, particularly in relation to sovereign 
biopolitical fractures that our political 
bodies/subjectivities struggle within and 
against. At stake here is a complex dynamics 
between political community and trauma 
with regards to the ‘survivors’ and their urge 
to witness, to speak, and/or to act. However, 
the interstices of law, literature/art, and 
politics, when it comes to witnessing trauma 
and ‘speaking to power’ not only in relation 
to the war crimes tribunals but also within 
larger deliberated public spheres in our 
societies, are poorly researched. This has 
huge implications for any endeavor to 
reinvigorate politics and empower agencies 
dealing with trauma and justice.

Witness to Trauma: Beyond the 
Dominant Political/Symbolic (Dis)Orders

Faced with the impossibility of representing 
the trauma, and yet urged to bear witness to 
it, we are bound to mark this very 
impossibility in our speech and through our 
acts, and seek justice from a radically 
uncertain ground. The process of encircling 
trauma instead of gentrifying it produces a 
space for radical repoliticizations of violent 
exclusionary political and social deadlocks 

around us. As Jenny Edkins succinctly 
points out, in the circuit between trauma, 
violence, and political community (which 
falsely promises wholeness and safety), 
something may be qualified as traumatic if 
there is a dramatic gap between our 
expectations and the event, which produces 
a new structure of feeling / cognition / 
subjectivization, experienced as both 
incredible betrayal and radical helplessness 
(Edkins 2003: 9). (In this sense, the Balkans 
as a ‘mismatch’ or ‘liminality’ uncover its 
traumatic livability). Rather than the causes 
of trauma, its ‘measurement’ or 
‘hierarchialization’, of concern here is the 
process of reckoning with the trauma 
through practices of memory, such as 
remembrance, memorialization, and 
witnessing. What this implies, as any 
production of meaning does, is a struggle 
between a myriad of ways in which we 
inscribe and reinscribe trauma into various 
narratives, official or personal, dominant or 
marginalized (Edkins 2003: 15).

Moreover, the political trauma uncovers a 
hidden dimension within the interlocking 
texturing of political community and 
violence – we are faced with the inherent 
traumatic dimension of the political which 
various ideological technologies and 
disciplines mask, repress, or silence. Such 
an experience of personal, social, cultural,
and political fracturings through trauma 
painfully illustrates the dynamics between 
biopolitics and gender within the regimes of 
power, as well as the fact that the experience 
of being reduced to bare life without 
political relevance is proximate to women 
both in times of war as well as of peace, in 
family as well as in community. Political 
community, like family, is a form of 
togetherness that regularly produces the 
subjectivizing formations of powerlessness 
and betrayal of trust, and turns itself into a 
prime site of violence and source of danger 
to our sociality, our political/cultural being 
(Edkins 2003:2-4).

Considering that these social contexts give 
meaning to our lives and underpin our 
identities, when the illusion of certainty, 

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security, and safety they provide implodes, 
we uncover the traumatic kernel and the 
relationships of power below them – in other 
words, we face the radical contingency of 
social and political edifices, as well as of 
meanings ascribed to ways and forms of life 
which were previously considered as a given 
(Edkins 2003: 4-5). We feel radically 
dislocated from the Balkans, from Bosnia, 
from what is imposed to us as our ethnic or 
gender identity or political community. We 
feel a sense of not belonging to the matrices 
around us – and the urge to bear witness and 
testify to this not-belonging which may be 
universalized to all members of a 
community/society/state, and to the 
contingency of political orders around us. 
This is a political act of such a degree that it 
can shake up and reshuffle the fundamentals 
of conventional political registers and 
matrices. Therefore, it is only to be expected 
that the kinds of witnessing that do shake 
and reshuffle our quests for social and 
political transformation are continually 
resisted and suppressed by those agents and 
structures, those discursive/practical 
arrangements, that are themselves threatened 
by any attempt to undermine and destabilize 
the patriarchal identitarian exclusionary 
phantasms embedded in state and family. 

What I want to emphasize here is the fact 
that trauma which happens within family as 
well as within political community is outside 
the possibility of conventional 
communication, because the language we
have to use belongs to the very community 
and the very relationships of power that
traumatized us in the first place (Edkins 
2003: 7-8). The paradox of having to 
witness both inside and outside the 
vocabulary of power produces a further 
sense of dislocation, of never fully 
belonging to a community whose registers 
of communication and discursive 
arrangements we cannot use to express or 
politicize our own experience. Often the 
attempt to witness to trauma brings us back 
to the position of powerlessness, 
speechlessness, and renewed betrayal of 
trust. These are the themes that come back 

to fore when discussing the delicate 
interstices between law, trauma, art, and 
witnessing.

The survivors, on the other hand, seek ways 
of resistance, speaking and acting outside of 
the institutional registers where the 
subjection to depoliticizing technologies of 
power and the circuit between victims and 
torturers/criminals will be eschewed (Edkins 
2003: 8-9). Contrary to that, the sovereign 
structures of biopolitical power strive to 
achieve the normalization of the survivors –
the aim is to recover the victims and to 
include them again into the structures of 
power and belonging in a way that will 
gentrify their trauma and make them a 
harmless part of the reproduction of these 
sovereign identitarian (be they gender, 
ethnic…) matrices. Also, considering that 
the concept of trauma always oscillates 
between victimhood and protest, the overall 
atmosphere of victimization around us 
means that sympathy and pity are offered to 
the survivors in return for their surrender of 
authentic political voice (Edkins 2003: 9).

The situation with the women traumatized 
by the war in Bosnia and their attempt to 
witness to it in politically relevant ways is 
more than discouraging. It is far from 
surprising that their experience is that of a 
person hitting a wall of the waiting room, 
never proceeding beyond it. What their 
practices of remembrance, memoralization,
and witnessing attest to, embody, but may 
also challenge is this very dynamic between 
trauma, violence, and political community in 
Bosnia, as well as in the Balkans and 
universally – after all, reckoning with the 
trauma in an emancipatory fashion implies 
the reformulation of identity and 
community. Behind the crises of testimony, 
whose very structure challenges sovereign 
power, lays the inevitable routinization and 
codification of testimony that occurs within 
the public sphere, where we are faced with 
three strategies of coping with testimony: 
mythologization, medicalization, and 
disappearance (Tal 1996:6). 
Mythologization happens when a traumatic 
event is reduced to a set of controlled and 

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contained narratives (notions of rescue, 
redemption, and overcoming in museums, 
documentaries, and so on); medicalisation 
perceives testimony as a symptom of an 
illness (like the post-traumatic stress 
disorder) and blunts its political edge -
survivors are treated through various 
psychiatric and medical practices that aim to 
rehabilitate them and reinscribe them into 
social orders of normality; disappearance is 
a strategy of a refusal to recognize trauma, 
which undermines the credibility of 
survivors (Tal 1996:6-7). All three strategies 
are in different degrees present in the 
complex and regionally-varied interplay of 
practices of remembering in Bosnia.

Witnessing as a political act that threatens 
the status quo is always met with an attempt 
on behalf of dominant political, social, and 
economic forces to retain control over the 
interpretation of testimony. After the 
codification of traumatic events, they are 
appropriated, whereby appropriation 
governed by the official practices of 
sovereignty and identity turns trauma into an 
acceptable and in many respects, 
depoliticized, story. On the other side, 

bearing witness is an aggressive act. 
It is born out of refusal to bow to 
outside pressure to revise or repress 
experience, a decision to embrace 
conflict rather than conformity, to 
endure a lifetime of anger and pain 
rather than to submit to the seductive 
pull of revision and repression. Its 
goal is change. If survivors retain 
control over the interpretation of 
their trauma, they can sometimes 
force a shift in the social and 
political structure (Tal 1996:7).

Moreover, this challenge of witnessing does 
not come only from the survivors of 
traumatic experience, since there are three 
distinct ‘levels’ of witnessing: being a 
witness to the experience itself; being a 
witness to the testimonies of others, and 
‘being a witness to the process of witnessing 
itself’ (Laub 1996:61-75). Such an 
interpretation renders us all witnesses. One 

of the priorities of any politics of social 
transformation is to bear witness to 
sovereign biopolitical traumas through 
unappropriated and authentic political 
voices. Its transformative potential must 
(continue to) draw on an ongoing critique 
and traversal of omnipresent and powerful 
mythologizing-medicalizing-disappearing 
strategies that gentrify, codify, and 
appropriate the Bosnian/Balkan traumas and 
thus reproduce the sovereign biopolitical 
matrices - heterocentric/patriarchal, 
ethnonationalist, and so forth…

Law, Art, and Trauma: Is There a (Legal 
versus Literary) Language of Witnessing?

The conjuncture between law, collective and 
individual trauma, art, and justice in the 
Balkans is a theoretico-practical knot whose 
unraveling deserves more serious and active 
engagement from practitioners and 
theoreticians. The ever-increasing 
obviousness of the link between the 
previous, ongoing and awaiting trials and 
traumas shows us that we not only need the 
reestablishment of the law’s monopoly on 
violence, but also must seek justice, to use 
Shoshana Felman’s words here, “not simply 
as punishment but as a marked symbolic exit 
from the injuries of a traumatic history: as 
liberation from violence itself” (Felman 
2002: 1). Histories of political, domestic,
and sexual violence (in the Balkans and 
wider) amount to our collective traumas, and
they permeate all spheres of deliberated 
public life in our societies, thus turning into 
a matter of culture, literature, art, and 
politics. It is not only the exercise of justice 
by trial and by law that we use to come to 
terms with the wounds incurred by the 
violence in the Balkans, although the 
promise of legal justice remains in many 
respects a vital response to the traumatic 
legacies and collective injuries that shape 
our everyday living to an unprecedented 
degree (Felman 2002: 2-3). How, then, is 
one to enter this nexus between trial, law 
and justice, trauma, collective or private, 
memory, forgetfulness, forgiveness and the 
repetition of trauma? My argument is that of 
all the Balkan troubles and quandaries, this 

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one is most crucial and also the one in 
respect to which we feel most marginalized 
and disempowered by various regional and 
global political and symbolic economies.

With regards to collective/private traumatic 
histories and states of injury, “what has to be 
heard in court is precisely what cannot be 
articulated in legal language” because the 
claims to justice go beyond consciousness 
and cognition and the need to arbitrate and 
decide on guilt and punishment (Felman 
2002: 4). The critical legal events in the 
Hague and soon in our own courts (on a 
presumably much larger scale) represent not 
only the drama of law but the drama of 
much larger cultural crisis too; they encircle 
a critical traumatic content that polarizes 
“the cultural, the political, the moral and the 
epistemological crises” of legitimacy and 
truth amongst our generations (Felman 
2002: 4-5). In contemporary trials dealing 
with the public and collective legal record of 
mass trauma, we see that the two poles they 
address – private trauma and collective 
trauma- keep reversing into each other, 
because trials always at the same time not 
only have a collective echo, calling upon 
collective identifications and 
generalizations, but also bring to the public 
stage and give voice to the ‘bearer of the 
silence’, the individual traumatized subject 
(Felman 2002: 6-7). The ways in which the 
law attempts to contain the trauma by 
framing it through legal-conscious 
discourse, or how the trauma gives a new 
jurisprudential dimension to the drama of 
the law, or how the trauma addressed by the 
trial transforms the relationship between 
what is presumed to be private and 
collective/public trauma, are beyond the 
scope of this article (see Felman 2002 for 
more elaboration on these topics). 

I will, therefore, briefly turn to the 
potentiality of feminism to engender new 
ways of thinking memory and theorizing 
trauma – or to the fact of how one can 
follow in the footsteps of Walter Benjamin 
or Hannah Arendt, arguing with them and 
beyond them, so as to act as a cultural 
witness who turns “trauma as experience 

into insight and whose innovative concepts 
[can give us] new tools with which to think” 
our Balkan troubles and current times
(Felman 2002: 8). In addition to this, 
essential for such witnessing is the 
dimension of literature as a very specific 
dimension of meaning correlative to, yet 
distinct from, the interstices between law 
and trauma (Felman 2002: 8). In any case, 
the cultural significance of historic trials, 
like the ones at the International Crimes 
Tribunal in The Hague, is always 
accompanied by the complementary 
dimension of literature and film.2 “The 
testimony of some literary writers in the face 
of trauma and in the face of the events of 
law corroborates and complements the 
testimony of critics and the thinkers, the 
theorists of trauma,” because “legal meaning 
and literary meaning necessarily inform and 
displace each other” (Felman 2002: 8).

One can even talk of a literary justice, and 
not only a legal one, that emerges when 
literature does justice to the trauma in a way 
that the law does not or cannot, because 
literature does justice to the refusal of the 
trauma to be closed, because it does not 
gentrify the abyss of the trauma but keeps 
encircling it and casting a look over it in 
new and repoliticizing ways. I will 
extensively quote Felman here: 

Literature is a dimension of concrete 
embodiment and a language of 
infinitude that, in contrast to the 
language of the law, encapsulates 
not closure but precisely what in a 
given legal case refuses to be closed 
and cannot be closed. It is to this 
refusal of the trauma to be closed 
that literature does justice. The 
literary writers [can] stand beyond or 
in the margin of the legal closure, on 
the brink of the abyss that underlies 

                                                          
2 An example of problematic dealing with 
trauma in literature are Slavenka Drakulić’s 
novels (see References). On the other side, a 
promising way of tackling trauma is to be found 
in the films of Jasmila Žbanić, such as Red 
Rubber Boots and After, After.

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the law, on whose profundity they 
fix their vision and through whose 
bottomlessness they reopen the 
closed legal case. (Felman 2002: 8)

Literature is what sits at the tension between 
consciousness and unconsciousness, 
language and silence pertaining to the 
trauma, because it is constantly engaged 
with the failure of words; the literary can act 
as a gaze cast at the trial through a 
dimension of speechless embodiment, 
silence, it can encapsulate any site of 
memory to the trauma where traumatic 
histories start speaking beyond the limits of 
speech (Felman 2002: 9). Not only trials, but 
also other forms of testimony and bearing 
witness are at the same time memorable 
discursive scenes and dramatically physical 
theatres of justice: testimonial voices 
always-already relate to the “body of the 
witness [as] the ultimate site of memory of 
individual and collective trauma – because 
trauma makes the body matter and because 
the body testifying to the trauma” always 
matters in new ways (Felman 2002: 9). 

How are we to give politically relevant and 
potentially emancipatory voices to that 
which cannot be said, to trauma as an 
identity and a dimension of the Real/the 
political, in a way that traverses the 
symbolic master-signifiers of Balkanization 
experiences? Legal remedies can never fully 
overcome and subdue a traumatic past 
simply because trauma refuses closure – this 
is why practices of remembrance, 
memoralization, and witnessing, as well as 
literature and art, continually address the 
unmastered and unmasterable past seeking 
the promise of justice. There is no trial that 
can ever bring closure to our Balkan 
troubles and traumatic histories and 
presents. From law to art, from an event in 
law to an event in art, from evidence in law 
to evidence in art is a movement between 
two poles of language – a language of 
abbreviation, limitation, and totalization and 
a language of infinity, irreducibility of 
fragments, embodiment, incarnation, 
embodied incantation or endless rhythmic 
repetition (Felman 2002: 153). In the 

repoliticization of biopolitical fractures 
through art, we see the exercise of the 
testimonial power of a bodily reality and 
presence of the witness that fractures the 
totality of facts sought through the law, 
which fractures and traverses the legal 
muteness by giving incremental meanings to 
our silences (Felman 2002: 153-4). Only 
together these two modes of coping with 
mad and nightmarish traumatic history – the 
literary and the legal language of witnessing 
- engage us in a dialogue with the limits of 
experience and our liminal subjectivities, 
with what is incomprehensible, 
untotalizable, uncontainable, unsayable, 
impossible to narrate, and yet whose very 
registration, dramatization, and enactment 
endows new meanings to the pursuits of 
justice (Felman 2002: 156).

Perhaps the local processing of the war 
crimes will make justice ever more seen 
(rather than just done) than the processing 
done in the distant Hague, because in the 
perspective of a larger cultural and historic 
visibility of testimonials we will be able to 
see jurisprudential drama around the body of 
the witness as a site of memory (Felman 
2002: 162). The physical dimension, the 
witness’s speech, the petrification of her 
body – these are the moments through which 
history as injury dramatically and 
traumatically speaks to us as the audience 
and impresses itself on our memory (Felman 
2002: 164). Speaking through the explosion 
of the legal framework, through the 
moments of its rapture, offers legal and 
conceptual breakthroughs – it is in these 
moments in which both art and history speak 
beyond the legal tool (Felman 2002: 165-6). 
The necessary failures of the trials caused by 
the legal categories that cannot comprehend 
collective trauma or translate it into 
consciousness and cognition through legal 
tools point to something else – to the events 
of witnessing, witnesses’ bodies and voices, 
which have a literary, cultural, and 
jurisprudential speaking power of a higher 
order (Felman 2002: 166).

There are many examples to support this, 
and a prominent one is one of the proposed 

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designs for the Memorial Complex at 
Potočari, Srebrenica, which prominently 
figures in the everyday imagination and was 
used for the public fundraising campaign in 
the local media. It offers a vision of 
postcolonial recuperation of identity and 
belonging away from sovereign biopolitical 
matrices, in line with the anthropological 
depth of Mak Dizdar’s poetic 
reconfiguration of modern Bosnia.3 In this 
design a series of embroidered pillows is 
placed on the grassy mountain slope, which 
is a scene that evokes Bosnian medieval
tombs, stećaks (see Buturović, 2002, for 
more details on this). It is important to note 
that Srebrenica women hold a silent public 
protest on every 11th day in a calendar 
month, carrying the pillows on which they 
embroidered the names of their missing. 
These embroidered pillows, waiting for their 
missing sleepers, play with the notion of
memory as embroidery, and as typically 
women’s work. The music accompanying 
the public appeal was the old Bosnian folk 
song sevdalinka “Vezak vezla,” which talks 
about a woman waiting for her beloved 
whilst embroidering. Such memoralization 
of the experience of trauma is a heretical 
resistance to the canon – it is an affirmation 
of the liminal and the defiant tropes in 
Bosnian cultural habitus; it is a response to 
the injury and violence that traverses the 
logic and phantasms resulting in trauma. 
Therein lingers the potentiality of a new 
form of commonality and solidarity at the 
crossroads between the dead and the living, 
the missing and the remaining, the excluded 
and the included, the past and the future, 
forgetting and remembrance, silence and 
speech, disappearance and continuance. 
Indeed, responses of this order (with respect 
to the predicaments of traumatized subjects) 
instantiate the promise of justice with 
regards to the cultural drama of liminality, 
historical injury and not-belonging in 
politics, and call for a political act of 
metaphoric universalizations and 

                                                          
3 Mak Dizdar is one of the most prominent 
Bosnian poets. See References for further 
reading.

identifications with the excluded where 
identity and community are reformulated. 

In such interstices between 
testimony/witnessing and literature/art, 
together but not only with reference to the 
law, there is a potential to recast our own 
speaking and acting power in the overall 
appeals to justice, by starting out from the 
face and body as a site of memory and 
trauma. The space for this is the deliberated 
public life of our societies at large, where 
new specific synergies between culture, art, 
literature and politics should be intensively 
sought and enacted against the backdrop of 
our own traumatic historical 
(im)possibilities of justice.

References Cited:

Butler, Judith. 2004. Undoing Gender, New 
York: Routledge.

Buturović, Amila. 2002. Stone Speaker. 
Medieval Tombs, Landscape, and Bosnian 
Identity in the Poetry of Mak Dizdar, with 
translations by Francis R. Jones, Hampshire: 
Palgrave.

Dizdar, Mak. 1999. Kameni spavač / Stone 
Sleeper, translated by Francis R. Jones, 
Sarajevo: Did.

Drakulić, Slavenka. 2004. They Would 
Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial at 
the Hague, London: Viking Books.

Drakulić, Slavenka. 1999. As If I Am Not 
There: A Novel About the Balkans, London: 
Abacus 

Edkins, Jenny. 2003. Trauma and the 
Memory of Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press.

Felman, Shoshana. 2002. The Juridical 
Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the 
Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Mass.: 
Harvard University Press.

Laub, Dori. 1995. ‘Truth and testimony: the 
process and the struggle’, in Cathy Caruth 
(ed.), Trauma: Explorations in memory, 
Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 
61-75. 

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Tal, Kali. 1996. Worlds of Hurt: Reading the
Literature of Trauma, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

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