Return to 'Love after Genocide': Of Poetry and of Re-Assembling Ourselves in Bosnia and Herzegovina

• In Event: Yugoslav Responsibility III: Writing against Genocide

Abstract

This paper draws on the art-theory project “Love after Genocide,” initiated in 2010, and its specific iteration, “Public Reading and Analysis of Poetry,” which was conducted across Bosnia and Herzegovina (in Banja Luka, Tuzla, Mostar, and Sarajevo) between 2010 and 2013, and designed as an intervention into the ethnic manipulation of grief. By enabling a “public language of grief” to emerge, these collective reading sessions created the possibility of claiming mourning as social and resisting the political economy of victimhood that characterizes official commemorative regimes. I argue that this collective work introduced a novel perspective and a critical question: the particular question of ‘us’ reassembling ourselves, interrupting the “law of the mass grave” that governs the living and the dead in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Author

• Damir Arsenijevic, U of Tuzla (Bosnia and Herzegovina)