Narrative Strategies in the Representation of Violence: Two Contemporary Bosnian Novels About the Bosnian War

Abstract

The breakup of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia unravelled concomitantly with the Yugoslav Wars (1991–2001), which exercised the politics of ethnic cleansing (ethnic communities and their identity material symbols) in the territories of today’s Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, etc. by referring to the nationalist-ideological understanding of territory as ethnic space. The aggressor’s “argumentation” of ethnocide against the Muslim communities that inhabited Bosnian territory is grounded in the Balkanist discourse about the historical site of confrontations between “East” and “West” or between (Catholic and Orthodox) Christianity and Islam, which contributed to the formation of an ethnically heterogeneous space following the expansion of the Ottoman Empire into the Balkans. In the 19^th century, the idea of nationalism (nationalisms), supported by the collective memories of referential ethnic communities, perpetuated especially in folk epic poetry, portrayed the violence as interreligious or as interethnic conflicts deriving from them. Through a comparative reading of two contemporary Bosnian novels (Zilhad Ključanin’s Šehid and Dževad Karahasan’s Noćno vijeće (The Night Council)), which recount the Bosnian War (1992–1995) by (partly) employing testimonial discourses, and in the context of novels also referring to the Yugoslav Wars (written by the authors such as Vojnović, Jergović, Nikolaidis, Drndić, Imamović, Taljić), the article attempts to apprehend how and with what narrative strategies is it possible to narrate the practices of ethnocide in a space between fiction and a brutally experienced history: from the revived collective memory of the Bosniak community, which narratives shape into motifs and themes of “spectres” from the historical repetitions of violence against Muslim communities and their culmination in a “circular” and “melded” temporalities which bind the past to the present of the war experience. In the context of the Islamic religion and its central text (Quran/Qur’an), images of horror and attempts to overcome the horror through narration in Ključanin’s intertextual novel Šehid can also step out of the interpretative field of the magical realism and into the domain of the religious real. On the other hand, the fantastic “spectres” and spatial reference to the Islamic berzah in Karahasan’s The Night Council serve as narrative device which, together with narrative strategy of the “melded time”, suggests a chance of forming the common collective memory, shared by different ethnic communities.