Pisati nakon Srebrenice: Gramatika tuge i etika svjedočenja
Writing After Srebrenica: The Grammar of Grief and the Ethics of Witnessing

Author(s): Hariz Halilovich
Subject(s): Studies of Literature, Ethics / Practical Philosophy, Historical revisionism, Wars in Jugoslavia, Sociology of Literature
Published by: Institut za istraživanje zločina protiv čovječnosti i međunarodnog prava Univerziteta u Sarajevu
Keywords: genocide; testimony; moral resistance; ethics of witnessing;
Summary/Abstract: This paper examines testimonial literature produced after the genocide in Srebrenica as a crucial space of ethical witnessing, moral resistance, and the shaping of collective memory. While survivor testimonies have played a decisive role in legal and forensic reconstructions of the genocide, the paper demonstrates that literary and autobiographical forms of testimony transcend strictly legal frameworks, engaging deeper affective and ethical dimensions of mass violence. Drawing on memoirs, essays, and poetry written by survivors, the analysis explores how trauma is translated into language through a “grammar of grief” — a fragmented, restrained, and often incomplete mode of expression that articulates loss and the experience of survival without offering final resolution or closure within a coherent narrative form. Situating the analyzed texts within broader debates on testimony, memory, and ethics after atrocity, the paper argues that narration functions not only as a means of personal survival but also as an active intervention in contested fields of historical truth and collective remembrance. Testimonial literature after Srebrenica thus emerges in a liminal space between silence and speech, fact and affect, individual experience and collective responsibility. Within this in-between space, memory is shaped as a continuous ethical practice rather than a finished and closed representation of the past. By foregrounding the voices of survivors, the paper emphasizes their agency — that is, their capacity for action and resistance — in shaping how Srebrenica is remembered across generations, and argues that writing after Srebrenica constitutes a powerful form of moral resistance to denial and relativization.

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