Literature as Testimony: The Poetics of Memory in Poetry

This article examines the representation, transmission, and circulation of war memory, and the role of personal and collective memory in shaping meanings, attitudes, and identities. The discussion will alternate between two aspects of the topic: the particular truth claim to truth that witness literature puts forward, and the process that leads from catastrophe to creativity, turning the victim into a writing witness who can undo forgetting and denial. War memory and its intersection with the concept of trauma is explored in the works of authors Xhevdet Bajraj and Ivana Bodrožić, renowned poets of contemporary literature in their respective countries. Their views provide a geopoetic and cultural background for a theoretical discussion of literary and cultural aspects of war memory. The main objective is to examine the concept of poetry as testimony and its relevance to contemporary literature in Croatia and Kosovo. The theorizing introduction is followed by poems by authors, but at the end there is a theoretical offshoot on the topic.

The skills of Ars Memoria remain magic or occult art characterized by the effort to bring memory to life-everyday life-not only for the sake of monumental art but for the sake of the direct artistic relationship with life as well. Memory preserves a close emotional distance to life by envisaging images and dramas as representations. Previously experienced images and events invade our life by mixing referential relations between memory and literature where mnemonic art plays a crucial role (see Lachmann).
Is the poet the guardian of memory, similar to the mythical dragons? Is the poet capable of creating that transcendental music that defends existence, and all these thanks to his mnemotechnical power, and mastery of the word? As spirits, daughters, and shadows of Mnemosyne and Zeus, the poets initiated their creative acts prompted by Muses. Yet literature would not be possible without the ordinary recollection of things, events, people, images, and ideas.
The poetic brain remembers everything from its own life as an individual. The return to the self in the form of memory is the expectation of letters in postwar society. Memory returns to the realities of a different time, thus gaining poetic weight. But what is the memory of war in the work of poets who have experienced war? What is their poetic testimony, if the witness, as Margalit points out "is one who experiences suffering-one who is not just an observer but also a sufferer" (Margalit 150)?
The postwar period and the dreadful past that the people of the former Yugoslavia went through during the 1990s led to a return to the traumas, which would be exposed artistically in literature and other fine arts. Authors in the literature of post-Yugoslav countries captured the brutal and surreal realities of living under the constant threat of war violence and the harsh postwar realities.
The war and its trauma in literature are forged into the fusion between individual and collective, historical, political, and cultural experience, but always under the shade of Memories. The memory of the victim has produced a literature of trauma as a kind of collective and personal debt, turning literature into an intentional mechanism of selecting real and imagined evidence in history and life. Traumatic memories are always there, and it is always possible to use memory in fiction, thus poetic situations provide us with a perfect space for such traumatic palimpsests.
Approaching a comparative analysis of Xhevdet Bajraj's collection of poetry Mi cachita del Cielo / Copa ime e qiellit (2015) and Ivana Bodrožić's poetry book Prijelaz za divlje životinje (2012), we will explore how war memory is projected in their literature, and how this concept intersects with the concept of trauma. In this way, we aim to highlight how archived memory becomes literature, as evidence, as instant memory, or as a memory of the past.
The great crossroads of time in Kosovar and Croatian society: the fall of the socialist state of Yugoslavia in the early 90s, the war that followed this collapse, the change of political and ideological systems, and the transition that has not yet ended, has produced a range of socio-cultural phenomena. Crossroads carried its effect in poetry as well. And the poets, such as Bajraj and Bodrožić, 1 wrote poetry as a call to the human being, feeling at the same time the personal pulse and the pulse of the ethos of community, the spirit of the collective in a process of constant variability, the alienation of human being in transition and the transgression in the postwar realities. In this way, war memory and trauma in their poetry reveal "much more about our own preoccupations with catastrophe, memory, and the grave difficulties we seem to have in negotiating between the internal and external worlds" (Roth 90-91).
As would be expected from an art form that has become increasingly associated with testimony, poetry seems particularly apt to express the wound of psychological trauma. The wound and the voice that comes from the past sought in written literature only a few years after the war, highlight great themes, such as identity, freedom, guilt, innocence, courage, compassion, desire, death, etc. If trauma "is always the story of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of a reality or truth that is not otherwise available" (Caruth,Unclaimed 4), the poet's response to these questions and their personal and impersonal experience during the conflict give war poetry an extra-literary significance because of the authorial truth and the subject it deals with. Although "literature of trauma is defined by the identity of its author" (Tal 17), "the thinking of the archive is, in this sense, not only a thinking of memory but a thinking of history" (Caruth, "After the End" 18). Thus, the philosophy of memory is largely occupied with elucidating the relational interplay between different agencies of mind and emotions, concepts, and percepts.
First of all, it seems like the ultimate voice of memory starts from the basic designation and representation of images and deeds toward many complex and sublime interpretations. Consequently, mnemonic discourse very often takes attributes of an argumentative, persuasive, rational, or intuitive discourse. But, in fact, memory seems to survive through a discourse that is always emotionally motivated and intellectually employed, being turned into papyrus for new palimpsests. It is sanguine; poetic origins might hurt documentary memory to the extent that the very identity of memory becomes mutilated, thus turning memory into an absent, incidental, and humiliating agency of human character. It, therefore, makes sense to insist that a "meaningful life is the life of reflective memory, not the life of blind experiences" (Margalit 134).
Fortunately, memory has its own transitive biological sensors keen on fictional entities. So, exploring commemorative poetic discourse, the study focuses on how memory is critically interpreted and reworked by literature-exploring the dynamics of representation, transmission, and circulation of memory.

The traumatized self: Interconnecting the present and the past
The poetic discourse related to the memory and personal experiences of the Croatian war (1991)(1992)(1993)(1994)(1995) marks the work of the writer Ivana Bodrožić, author of the new generation of contemporary Croatian literature, who started her literary path with an unconventional confrontation with the past. Bodrožić, an award-winning author, represents in her literature the traumatic past, the feeling of loss, and being trapped within a new world, under significant political and social changes.
Bringing stories that capture the brute ugliness of conflict, Bodrožić wrote poetry in which the past flows as a memory, as individual trauma and drama related to her present. In her volume of poetry Prijelaz za divlje životinje (Overpass for Wild Animals), the lyrical subject is already an adult girl, a woman. And although the drama of life is growing, the author does not accuse, nor proclaim, only announces human beings in all their complexity. Memory thus becomes a compelling space or even a good playground for poetic life meanings, as it is shown in the poem "Kod nas je drum široka cesta" (Our Road Is a Wide Road): But I often think about that street About a moment in the distant past About someone's life that has stopped About that thin kid on the road About my father who was not guilty And a car that didn't brake in time And that nothing more could be done. What is the use of that memory When there is nothing left Not a child No road Not a car Not a father Not a house Not a grandpa We had the most beautiful roses in Zrinjska No one plants them in front of the house anymore. (Bodrožić 37;trans. Fadil Bajraj) The lyrical subject gently asks "what is the use of that memory," as she remembers the most beautiful rose garden on Zrinjska Street, the one that no one plants anymore-to emphasize here that one of the most important characteristics of memory is its ability to establish connections. And so does the lyrical subject who left without loved ones: without her father killed in the war, without her childhood house, without her grandfather, and without her former self. It is an exciting attempt to recreate the decomposed life and the constant fear of its disintegration. Father, grandfather, and home are protagonists of a life that exists no more. The poet's memories are bitter, like life stories dipping the pen into its wormwood juice: "We had the most beautiful roses in Zrinjska / No one plants them in front of the house anymore." (37) Far from static or immutable, memory is porous and in constant flux, as it is actively engaged in a network of continuous negotiations, connections, and interactions between the past, the present, and the future. In that regard, memory is not just about the past; it is equally, if not more so, about the present and the future and how they all interconnect with each other. As Sigmund Freud explains, "memories work retrospectively, anticipatorily or simultaneously as the remembered event" . In the following poem "Imam prijelaz za divlje životinje" (I Have the Overpass for Wild Animals) the author claims that she already found the overpass through the wild animals, indicating that the enemy is now within her, and this is the kind of enemy she will never be able to defeat: I have a wildlife crossing It goes from the very beginning of the spine Then all the way, all the way down.
I have a wildlife crossing, But I am afraid, They descend to the city. (Bodrožić 41;trans. Fadil Bajraj) The author's meditation on the past, grief and ugly memories allow us to feel her experience in the war, her feelings, and her mood in postwar society. Perhaps, this is the lesson that love and the poetic debt of testimony combine psyche within mnemonic spaces-and Bodrožić's memory has ethical implications because "it is characterized by its 'ability' to produce empathy and social responsibility" (Landsberg 9). The poet combines longing and pain to seduce and surprise the reader with her confession to poetically remind us that "war experiences can fundamentally change one's sense of self or identity" (Hunt 10). The traumatic experience of war, therefore is transformed from a real testimony into a poetic situation that offers us a perfect space for the palimpsest of traumatic memory: "[T]he thought of death is so far away / shady balconies remind me of Vukovar […] I guess that is how paradise smells." (Bodrožić 21) The book is connected to the system like a mosaic of parts of the hero's life. It starts with the Dječje pjesme (Children's Poems), a cycle inspired by the experience of motherhood. In the next cycle Mamine pjesme (Mom's Poems), the theme changes, and threatening signals multiply. Tatine pjesme (Father's Poems) function almost as penetrating holes to the point where the pain resides. Then follows the cycle Prijelaz za divlje životinje (Overpass for Wild Animals) in which the lyrical subject becomes more fragile. She talks about the attempts to build a shelter in the world, with the help of others. The threat that is felt throughout the book, reaches its peak in the last cycle Skriveni fajl (Hidden File). The murdered world is incorrigible. At the entrance of the apartment, in the intimate world, put the security doors, the terrorized speaker claims: "I am afraid, the enemy is already inside / we buy doors / Anti-burglary / but I am afraid the enemy is already inside." (Bodrožić 73) Therefore, it is not just the story of what happened in the past, "but the current imprint of that pain, horror, and fear living inside [the individual]" (van der Kolk).
Prijelaz za divlje životinje is a poetic confession of the lyrical subject, in its solitude, deep darkness of the soul, a confession of the subject who is stuck in a state of terror and fear. A story of sadness and other painful emotions of life in war and postwar society. Bodrožić's poetry comes as an example of the phenomenon when the story of personal life experience becomes a measure of the mood or mental and spiritual condition of a society, of those people who have suffered from the war and its effects. Therefore, her poetry becomes a literature of remembering. At least in the referred book, the individual memory is deeply in function, constantly connecting the present with the past. "The occupation with first-person narrators is thus always an occupation with the literary representation of individual remembering." (Erll 2) Through individual memory, the book narrates in a deeply lyrical way the shock of a human being in dark times, who tries, but finds it hard to continue, because of the haunting of the past.
As mimetic theories insist, "traumatic events cannot be absorbed or represented, and as such the victim is fated to repeat or act it out in various ways" (Bell 9). Memories of her past about the war in Croatia will become a topic to which Bodrožić will return in one way or another, both in poetry and prose. Through memory, as a portal to the past, the author will take us to the world that the war has wiped out or to the world that the war has made cruel. As a writer, narrating I, she will become "self-erasing inscriptions of history. Traumatic memory thus totters between remembrance and erasure, producing a history that is, in its very events, a kind of inscription of the past; but also a history constituted by the erasure of its traces" (Caruth, "After the End" 20).
The book begins with the poem "Sve je spremno za Tvoj dolazak" (Everything is Ready for Your Arrival) which raises parallels between the three worlds, the three generations-of herself, the parents, and the child that is expected to come to life: Everything is ready for your arrival The war is over My mom once stole for me Black plush leggings in Nami It takes war for that, children without a father. (Bodrožić 9;trans. Fadil Bajraj) Upward verses reveal the signs of personal memory, spontaneously merging the present with the feeling of motherhood and the beautiful with the sad memories of the past. They stand out for the nostalgic tone of a life that is no more, and show the individual sorrowful memories under the bizarreness of war, as they do show the individual who wants to regenerate life force. The author does so through the interconnection of the present with the past, across the three generations: oneself, parents, and child.

The inner testimony of the war: Suspending forgetfulness
The Kosovo-born poet Xhevdet Bajraj is the cult author of the postwar Kosovo literary scene, a recipient of numerous awards, and his work was translated into multiple languages. Bajraj explores war and peace, innocence, and grief, composing a humbling meditation on human existence. He is the poet of the crucified Albanian life, radical changes, and transitional democracy, the consequences of which threaten his life and peace, and provokes revolt. He is a modern-day emigrant who was forced to flee his homeland during the 1998-1999 war in Kosovo, seeking political asylum in Mexico.
While living in Mexico City, his poetry took a different path. His country, the political turmoil, the war, and the memory of the war became his poetic topos. The grieving tone of the poetic imagination that has touched many writers in the region is permanent in his postwar poetry. That grieving tone is all over the bilingual poetry collection in Albanian and Spanish Copa ime qiellit / Mi Cachito de Cielo (My Piece of Heaven), whose core is the concept of home, exile, memories, and war trauma.
In spite of the fact that fiction and poetry are not designed to offer factual testimony, "they can tell us what it means to be traumatized" (Hunt 171), and Bajraj chose to visualise war victims and to transfer his war trauma into poetry. The alliance between historical perception and writing thus merge into poetic discourse, as evidence of life under mental, physical, and spiritual terror.
The poet strives to offer the reader the spirit of a particular place and of a particular time period. The poem "Gjellë shqiptare" (Albanian Food) is one of his emblematic poems which explicitly refers to the recent war in Kosovo. This narrative poem about war crimes is complementary because it shows the unchanged essence of war: crime. It strikes the reader with poetic brutality in figuratively presenting the crimes committed against Albanian civilians:

Enemy soldiers in Kosovo Had rich Albanian menu
In the morning Milk from torn mothers' breasts And newborn babies boiled in the fires of the homes that were burning Served with black eyes, blue eyes or brown eyes And a bottle of boiling tears.

Some were content only with the roasted head
At lunch Broken hearts of all ages Cooked in the juice of bones And back meat roasted in live coal Accompanied with children's fried brains And a salad of shouts sprinkled with vinegar of horror And one and half liter of raped girls' blood Some were content only with the roasted head At dinner Black and white lungs Here and there a kidney Child meat mixed with the blood of mothers Some old man's flesh roasted on a spit Salted with the salt out of the tears. (Bajraj 75;trans. Fadil Bajraj) This bizarre scene of war reveals worlds that sleep in memory and as memory suddenly wake up. The poet projects the collective memory of war events as life, as reminiscence, and as the permanent presence of evil. Thus, he researches the collective memory of the war and with images and words reconstructs in a bizarre way the fate of Albanian families. The evil, the demonic, inhabits this past, while the poet's imagination in this 'reconstruction' of the murder of the innocent is not just an attempt to bring back the memories of the crimes committed against Albanians-so it is not an exploration of memory, as much as it is part of the meaning of the expression "search for the truth" (Deleuze 3). So, in this spirit, Bajraj's memory, or the play within memory, is read as the present and the permanent future of the demoniac.
The same ideas of the clash of the innocent with the sinner, Bajraj conveys in the poem "Djali i kishte gjashtë vjet, vajza tetë dhe qanin" (The Boy Was Six Years Old, the Girl Eight and They Cried). The story of Albanian refugees who were forced to flee Kosovo is engraved as an evocative photograph: The father was forcibly pulled out of the car One held an automatic rifle like the beast that hardly can be controlled Others hit him rubber truncheons of hell The woman took the children in her lap and cried the boy was six years old, the girl eight they cried out to the dome of heaven there is no God for them, no mercy for them the children continuously looked at the father and at the mother. (Bajraj 62;trans. Fadil Bajraj) In this scene where the executioners are presented on one side and the victims on the other, we have a retold, heard life story, which with its testimony serves the memory of the war as a monument of the oppressed life of the individual under the repression of the war. This poem narrates/remembers as a logical counterweight to forgetfulness-not to be forgotten! Individual memory here is redoubled and combined with collective memory, "as two complex forms of memory, which have unlimited combinatorial possibilities" (Rrahmani 134). The poet sees the story in his subjectivity and turns it into literature, as poetic evidence of the past. Verses of the following strophe take us to the biblical finale of the sacrifice or to an instinctive sacrifice because the event itself is the event of sacrifice, of human solidarity, or of the instinctive protection of the parent, the most beloved human being. The author highlights, through childhood, the activation of the ethical and biological principle, dormant or suffocated by violence, the nerve of reacting in an extreme situation: Then the boy opened the gate and ran through his murdered childhood he fell upon his father the black sticks remained in the air like outstreched brenches of death casual passers-by began to approach slowly. (Bajraj 62;trans. Fadil Bajraj) A shocking sight of a child being sacrificed throwing himself upon the victimized father, in which the biological principle of protecting the innocent and weak man is activated, where the child protects the father. Bajraj within this poem creates a film spot that has the plot, the background, the scenography, the props, the characters, and the principle of the archetypal sense of good, innocent (children), and evil (murderous cops), with a prologue that defends innocence of the victim and an epilogue depicting the fragile world of innocence-tears: the cops spat and ran away swearing in their language the boy was six years old, the girl eight their mother was twenty-eight years old and they all wept. (Bajraj 62;trans. Fadil Bajraj) The poem is distinguished by the spirit of silent revolt, because as Camus affirms "every revolt is nostalgia for innocence and a call for being" (Camus 111), and the poet through the secret code of naked violence seeks not to correct the world, as something impossible, but to perpetuate it in poetry, and again, not to be amnesia. Bajraj through his art ironizes the idea of closing his eyes (not to see the crime) and opening a secret gate, that of childhood through which the character flies away in the past, and immediately stays here, in the event. A child that throws himself over the father to protect him with the fragile force of innocence from violence, is the poetic icon of Bajraj.
Despite the literary memorization of war atrocities, it does not want to be a literature of candles and graves, nor does it have the status of mere commemorative literature. The poet relies on the dark era of the past to present a poetic and cultural background on which he will raise the poetry of protest and socio-political criticism in Kosovo society in transition. Bajraj sings as an individual whose public sphere is hurt, and who in the poems in which he deals with the war and postwar situation in Kosovo, ironizes both the individual misfortune and the misfortune of the community through a silent rebellion. The national drama has made that "the literary and artistic production in these areas (Southeast Europe-my remark) involved a negotiation of tensions between nationalism and regionalism, metropolitan influences and local patriotism" (Cornis-Pope and Neubauer 5). Therefore, the poet draws the faces of wars, democracies and ideological nonsense, the faces of the wicked and the innocent and finds himself confronted with these strong narratives.

On memory-fiction poetic interplay
Memory is a special poetic space that constitutes a poetic area as a phenomenon and as a tool. Not coincidentally, memory is seen as a human skill that oscillates between imagination and intellect. Sometimes even writing itself is identified with memory, as one of the ways of its existence and appearance (Jackson 33). Muses, the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, present "the daughters of the sovereign principle of creation and memory" (33). This myth also represents an interpretation of the function of memory. Memory is the freedom of the past, states Blanchot, while "to write is to enter into the affirmation of the solitude in which fascination threatens. It is to surrender to the risk of time's absence, where eternal starting over reigns" (Blanchot 33).
But, although memory is one of the procedural and thematic denominators in the above-mentioned books of Bajraj and Bodrožić, 'searching in the past' is not merely an attempt to bring back memories, but rather responds to the meaning of the expression 'the search for truth,' to research in yesterday to understand today.
Individual memory is usually of psychological dimensions and in literature emerges projected as a personal entity. It often excludes the collective and historical memory in literature and life. But the exceptions and meeting points of these forms of memory are very complex and with unlimited combinatorial possibilities. Archived and unarchived memory become literature, as a document, evidence, a momentary memory, or a memory of the past (see Rrahmani).
It seems to Bajraj that the narrative of the past and the fictionalization of its fragments is an attempt to preserve it, to bring it back through memory, not to forget. A response to forgetfulness, so what happened to him, and his country does not become amnesia but turns into poetry. It is mainly characterized by the processing of the traumatic experience through visual images to evoke in the reader a sense of the horrors of war. Bajraj is one of those poets whose life was changed by the war, forcing him into exile. Such an experience leaves deep (traumatic) traces and marks him as a witness to war terrors because after all, he is a war survivor, and what Freud includes as influencing traumatic neuroses from the experience of war "is not the reaction to any horrible event but, rather, the peculiar and perplexing experience of survival" (Caruth,Unclaimed 60). Thus Bajraj tries to place the reader in the middle of war situations through extensive use of images, details, condensed and uncompromising language, to show the ugly face of war and to remind us how shocking, painful, and terrifying it can be.
Meanwhile, in Bodrožić, individual memory is of psychological dimensions and in poetry emerges projected as a personal entity. It seems that her intention is to understand the essence of the past and its decomposition, to understand today's reality as a cause-and-effect. The alienation of the individual also brings the authors closer and makes them seek to find the thread in the lost things, as a way to summarize the parts of the unit in an inseparable identity, as an experiential subject, but also as a form of consciousness (Bodrožić), or to foster silent resistance to political authoritarianism, as one of the characteristics of Bajraj's poetry.
The literature of both authors can be read as a monument to the abused life of the individual by a repressive system. Their poetry is in many cases structured as a living proof of life in representative places, which comes not only as evidence of the horrors of war but also as strong evidence of the postwar transition. This poetry narrates about the oppressed human being and their survival in a different new world. Bajraj and Bodrožić are poets who do not forget and feel it as part of their poetic duty to serve the memory with their poetic testimony.
Memoirs formed by traumatic experiences "are inconceivable and hardly identifiable" (Whitehead 4). Recreating, as well as describing, experienced events and emotions is complicated. To transmit experienced emotions and feelings in fiction writers use fictive techniques such as figurative language and a deep point of view, immersing the reader into the story-whether they have lived through the traumatic events or not, carrying within themselves a personal purpose to tell the story, but that sometimes goes beyond it, Bajraj fully fulfills the conditions of being a moral witness, because the moral witness "is one who experiences suffering" (Margalit 150).
Given the sensitive status of memory for traumatic conditions, the question can not be avoided: "How do we recognize a memory and not confuse it with a fiction? How can we know that a memory is genuine and has been neither dreamed nor fantasized, but corresponds to some real historical event, however personal?" (Ender 91) Although the genre of the book is poetry, there are no clear boundaries between what is poetic and what is historical. The aesthetics of the text owes much to a personal experience, which refuses to remain under the rubble of oblivion, still and all "because so much of the literary material is overtly and emphatically autobiographical, it can profitably be explored as a series of case histories of a variety of operations of human memory" (Nalbantian 3).
We have here the sensitive, historical touch of moral and spiritual debt which is embodied as a memory and as a mission. More to Bajraj, but also to Bodrožić, the aim is to find the language of testimony within the genre of poetry. In fact, "the permanent threat of mélange recollection and imagination resulting by turning the memory into an image, hurts the ambition for loyalty as an embodiment of the veritative function of memory" (Ricoeur 7). However, the fact that this can happen does not mean that the nature of memory is unnatural. This is a debt to the poetics of human thinking turned in favor of the honesty of memory. Memory continues to be a confirmation of who we are and what we want to be. However, as Ricoeur asserts, "we do not have anything better than memory to ensure that something has happened before we have founded our souvenirs" (7).
The portrayal of the events of the war in Croatia and Kosovo, as well as the literary representation of the postwar atmosphere, is an authorial literary project to memorize an apocalyptic era-to give voice to a 'speechless horror'. The poems of the presented books poetically portray a terrible past and a fragile present, because literature responds to itself and deals with that truth which is only psychological and spiritual truth, without excluding poetic debt-a cultural-historical image sheltered into the permanent umbrella of memory.