Geographical testimony: a short history of a Yugoslav family

Abstract

I attempt in this essay to travel outside of and beyond the more spectacular or established geopolitical discourses associated with research on post-conflict regions, and follow instead the trail of another more essential or everyday history and geography. Listening to and responding to the testimony of a single Yugoslav family, I draw from and write of memories of former places, initially returning to the traumatic moments of 1992, and a journey across Europe. In so doing I reflect upon the use of testimony in geographical writing, positioning it as an inherently geographical psychoanalytic technique, which not only eases suffering in individuals and communities, but offers new possibilities for societal change and transitional justice in post-conflict regions.

Towards a cultural geopolitics: on the making of a documentary-poetry film about a post-conflict place

“…Cartography has aided a post-socialist era of never-ending 'transition', of brutal capitalism and diminished democracy, and the continuation of a nationalist governance that it was hoped would fade away (Gordy 2015). Twenty years after the end of the war in Bosnia, it is now evident -yet underreported by the 'cosmopolitan' Europeans guilty of Balkanism (Carter 1977;Todorova 1997;Goldsworthy 1998;Glenny 1999;Žižek 2000;Mazower 2002) -that the endless postconflict, post-socialist, 'transition' era of Bosnia-Herzegovina, has meant for citizens general impoverishment, de-industrialisation, mass unemployment, and a non-democratic rule of divisive and corrupt elites (Helms 2013;Arsenijević 2014;Gilbert & Mujanović 2015;Hromadžić 2015;Jansen 2015;Kraft 2015;Kurtović 2015;Majstorović et al 2015;Mujkić 2015;Murtagh 2016;Riding 2016aRiding , 2017a.…”

“…In the process of attempting to represent a traumatic past, speaking of seemingly incidental moments, and remembering the little details of a place -a location, an apartment, or a bus journey -enables a series of associative memories to occur. In Freud's early writings on trauma, this form of testimony is specifically seen as a way to allow a traumatic event to be 'forgotten' (Riding 2017a). For this reason, telling and re-telling a life-story may be a part of the cure, the giving-up of an important reality, or for a psychoanalyst, "the dilution of a special truth into the reassuring terms of therapy" (Caruth 1995: vii).…”

“…And in so doing, we follow instead the trail of another, more grounded, descriptive, 'everyday', or 'cultural' version of the geopolitical (Bunge 1971;de Certeau 1984;Holloway & Hubbard 2000;Bennett & Watson 2002;Scott 2009). To travel and write outside of and beyond these more 'spectacular' or established geopolitical discourses -"discourses through which the representation, conduct and resolution of the war were sought" (Campbell 1998, 15) -is as Georges Perec (2010) notes, to follow the trail of another, more 'essential' history (Riding 2017a). A great number, if not the majority, of the things in Stuart Laycock's films of Bosnia-Herzegovina have been "described, inventoried, photographed, talked-about, or registered" (Perec 2010, 3).…”

“…Wartime -a time of continuing unease (Baillie 2013) -persists in the cartographic idiosyncrasy of the Dayton Agreement, imposed on the citizens of a small nation in Europe twenty years ago (Gordy 2015). As such, the documentary-poetry film Bridges <Bosnia 20> makes a second clear statement: in order to ease personal suffering and to open new possibilities for change in individuals and communities who have experienced psychic trauma, there is a need to tell others of that traumatic history (Riding 2017a). If the traumatic past is not fully interrogated, the traumatic event itself cannot become a 'narrative memory' and be integrated into a story of the past.…”

“…And also, to build upon the aesthetic geopolitics forcefully brought forth by Alan Ingram (2009Ingram ( , 2011Ingram ( , 2012Ingram ( , 2016, and to speak back to Gerard Toal's (1996) feminist and post-colonial re-positioning of an 'anti-geopolitical eye', torn between anger and academia. With this in mind, the documentary-poetry film Bridges <Bosnia 20> -which this article goes on to describe the making of -sought to demonstrate that it is often the small, discrete, and apparently unimportant things that bear the most psychic weight, that imprison most pain (Sontag 2004;Riding 2017a). Humans live, and survive, in stories, in fragments of stories, and not the grand narratives of the historic record.…”