Writing Place after Conflict: Exhausting a Square in Sarajevo

Abstract

This essay returns to Sarajevo, a city visited by Georges Perec in 1957, employing field observation and ethnographic methods that he developed during the course of his writing career. The aim, in revisiting this city and in repeating Perecquian practices, is to move beyond the clichéd ways of seeing and writing Sarajevo only as a site of trauma and as a place defined by violence. My intention as such here is to document three days in one square in Sarajevo. Field-notes taken during this time are copied-out word-for-word in what follows. The words act as a record of the everyday-things, bodily-movements, and non-spectacular-moments, often ignored in descriptions of places defined by their traumatic pasts. Writing turned out to be a performance in-itself, as place, time and word intertwined briefly and the recounting of a present-day Sarajevo took-place. Yet through this repetitive-representational action, trauma and political-unrest re-suggested themselves. And recording place became an attempt at repairing place, in its bodily occupation of a place and in its representation of an everyday place on-the-page.Georges Perec, Place, Representation, Conflict, Sarajevo Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages.

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“…-Anamnesis: the act of focusing and remembering, concentrating intensely -Mimesis -or a 'mimicking', but mainly here of sounds, repetitions that occur as we sit and listen or a refrain we might pick up on -so try to write the down as they come up in consciousness -Congeries -or heaps of words, adjectives that come in no particular order, to be exhausted once the writer is satisfied (Juarez, n.d.) Of course, there is a much wider literature on how people write about interacting with places and spaces (Reynolds, 2007), and other types of automatic or 'writing in place' can be tried in the spirit of experimentation (Riding, 2017) (Honeybun-Arnolda, 2018, p.398).…”

“…I was alerted to Georges Perec's work during the same fateful seminar in which we discussed a piece by Kathleen Stewart (2013), and after which a colleague alerted me to the picture of Burroughs, though I'd picked up a copy of Species of Spaces (2008) many years previously, had it on my bookshelf somewhere. We discussed ways of writing about place, looked at a paper which attempted to 'exhaust' a space (Riding, 2017), which reminded me slightly of Kerouac's spontaneous approach, though they're different; the point was how do we experiment with writing to convey what might be happening, or attempt to give some sense of place, or a space -physical, emotional, dynamic state of being?…”

“…Perec's work often grapples with the urge to classify and categorise, but also uses descriptive methods, approaches, even stylistic devices, which are relevant to ethnography (Becker, 2001), more non-representational methods of approaching research and fieldwork generally (Phillips, 2016). 'The eccentric bard of the mundane' (Back, 2020, xv), his writing is characterised by trying to capture the whole range of experience, from that very mundane to the specific, from background to foreground, the 'infra-ordinary', 'the background noise, the habitual, the stuff that is looked over, missed when gazing at a place' (Riding, 2017). He saw his own work as having four 'modes of interrogation' (Perec, 2008, p.141): the sociological, or 'how to look at the everyday', the autobiographical, the ludic/playful and the fictive -or a combination of all four.…”