Remembering and Forgetting: Explorations in Traumatic Memory

Abstract

Re-collecting Myself: Writing a War Thirty Years On is part of an ongoing memoir that outlines my childhood experience of war living through the Siege of Sarajevo and my experience of writing about those memories in the present. Originally conceived as a series of short, visceral vignettes outlining particularly heightened experiences from the war, it currently comprises eighteen chapters of varying lengths that, through different approaches, all involve navigating the war’s aftereffects through writing. The memoir aims not only to tell the story of some of my war experiences, but also to be present to and outline the somatic process of writing so as to remember—or remembering so as to write—and ultimately to heal. In making direct reference to the effects of the embodied process in the writing of the product, and documenting the way that the writing endeavour affected what was remembered and how, the creative work arguably serves as a testament to a continuing process of trauma transformation through writing. The exegesis (alternatively titled, in honour of my uncle, Why Would You Waste Time on Such a Stupid Thing as Remembering the War? Life Today Is Much Worse!) outlines the motivations, approaches and challenges faced in writing Recollecting Myself. In doing so, it considers two layers of potential silencing: first the unspeakability of trauma itself, and second the malignant effects, on the writer and the creative work, of the continuously tense political situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The exegesis makes efforts toward substantiating this ever-present tension that haunts survivors, and documents some of the ways it challenged this project. Outlining the way the wounds of a past war (one that ostensibly ended over twenty-five years ago) keep bleeding into the present day, the exegesis hypothesizes that this creates a sense of danger, threat, and/or retribution that is antithetical to the sense of safety required for the act of remembering to fully take place.