Poetry that Exhumes, Poetry that Indicts

• In Event: Yugoslav Responsibility III: Writing against Genocide

Abstract

This paper looks at contemporary poetic witness to genocide in Bosnia and Hercegovina, focusing in particular on Darko Cvijetić’s poetry. Over his writing career, Cvijetić has returned again and again to the site of Prijedor’s genocide, examining both closely its material traces and broadly its shattering effects. These serial acts of writing and rewriting genocide achieve something vanishingly rare: they articulate the tangible proximity of mass death while perpetually rendering it unfamiliar, thereby countering the nationalist necro-politics of postwar Bosnia.

Author

• Antje Postema, UC Berkeley