Articulating Disjunction in Regional Bosnia: The (Post) War Writing of Darko Cvijetić and Stevo Grabovac

• In Event: Yugoslav Responsibility I: Disjunction and the Presence of War in (Post)Yugoslav Culture

Abstract

A prominent trend in novels of the Bosnian War written in the 21st century has been an increased focus on the post-war, which are often combined with wartime and pre-war sequences as a means of attempting to articulate the disjunctions caused by the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia. This paper examines contemporary approaches to writing the War and its aftermath through contrasting Darko Cvijetić’s maximally detailed representation of the experience of the war and post-war in Prijedor (among other places) in his novels Schindler’s lift (Schindlerov lift, 2018) and Why are you sleeping on the floor? (Što na podu spavaš, 2020) with the extreme focus on the inner and lack of external detail in Stevo Grabovac’s Mulatto albino mosquito (Mulat albino komarac, 2019). In both, memories of the War are framed against the pre-war and post-war in order to try and describe and understand what exactly happened between 1992 and 1995. I examine the formal novelty of these texts; the portrayal of wartime and post-war in regional Bosnia; how the expanded temporal frame differs from earlier literature of the Wars of Yugoslav Succession; and, more broadly, the problems encountered in attempting to articulate the disjunctions caused by the disintegration of the SFRY and the lasting effects, social and economic, of the War.

Author

• Theodore Edgar Jefferies, U of Toronto (Canada)