Thinking against trauma binaries: the interdependence of personal and collective trauma in the narratives of Bosnian women rape survivors

Abstract

In this article, we draw on feminist trauma studies with the aim of deconstructing the theoretical and methodological binary between individual and collective trauma. Based on first-hand interviews with Bosnian survivors of rape, we attempt to ‘think against’ the private/public split that trauma studies work often unintentionally reifies. We draw upon recent methodological innovations that have been influenced by thinkers such as Derrida and Deleuze. Specifically, we work with what Jackson and Mazzei call rhizomatic and trace readings in the threshold. Through a rhizomatic and trace reading of narrative pieces extracted from the interviews, we engage with the following questions: 1) How do we theorise what Davoine and Gaudilliere call ‘the sociopolitical faultlines’ between collective/public accounts of trauma and those traditionally constructed as private/personal? 2) How do accounts of war rape, which narrate the eruption of the past into the present, elucidate the myriad links between the private and public in a number of ways; among others, the echoes or traces of the everyday ‘before’ in subjects’ stories of the monstrous ‘after’? And 3) What is the relationship between the ‘unspeakable’ in the traumatic memories of the survivors and the ‘speakable’ collective memories of traumatic humanmade events? How does the collective desire ‘not to know’ or ‘to forget’ impact on the individual survivor’s ability to reconstitute their post-trauma identity in a personal as well as a social context? The aim of the analysis is to show that the multifaceted nature of the traumatic reality demands a multifaceted approach that resists binary constructions relating to self/other, private/public, individual/collective.

Keywords

Bosnia rape sexual violence theory trauma war

Often everything is directed to women who are willing to appear on TV, publicly in media, or attend public gatherings and so to speak … and then on the other side, voices of other women are not heard at all … somewhere because of that kind of thinking, I decided well okay, let this small voice of mine be heard somewhere … and it will leave a trace and it might grab someone’s attention sometimes (Azra, aged 42, Bosnian rape survivor).

Between 1991 and 1995, Bosnia was one of the deadliest regions in the wars triggered by the disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and, as in all civil wars, those who were most affected were civilians. Civilians were the principal victims of ‘ethnic cleansing’ performed by all three warring parties – Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks – against members of the other ethnic groups (see Mrvić-Petrović, 2001: 15). One of the strategies utilised by military and paramilitary groups was rape and sometimes forced impregnation of women of the enemy group, with the aim of destabilising and eventually destroying the social fabric of the enemy community. It is estimated that between 25,000 and 40,000 Bosnian Muslim women and girls – the greatest number of women and girls – were victims of rape and enforced impregnation mainly by Serbian forces (Allen, 1996; Skjelsbaek, 2009). The women were kept in rape/death camps, and the systematic nature with which they were attacked later came to be defined as genocidal rape, that is, rape conducted with the purpose of destroying the individual and collective identity of members belonging to a particular ethnic or national group.

Twenty-five years after the war, from recent survivor narratives, there emerges a complex perspective on individual and collective trauma.¹ Visible through these narratives are the psychological consequences of trauma on the survivors’ sense of self, resulting from the nature of rape and sexual violence as ‘the physical, psychological, and moral violation of a person’ (Herman, 1992). At the same time, also visible is the relational, communal and social aspect of traumatic experience that structures how survivors understand and cope with this experience. In other words, their stories show the interdependence of individual and collective psychic and social mechanisms that play a part in how trauma is experienced, manifested and, in some cases, overcome. Yet, despite the obvious connections between individual and collective trauma, a great deal of trauma studies work still maintains the distinction between the individual, subjective dimension of trauma, and the objective, ‘historical’ and collective dimension. For instance, the emphasis on psychoanalysis and the intrapsychic to understand trauma resulting from rape focuses analytic and discursive attention on the subjective aspect of the traumatic event that ‘tears the fabric of the psyche’ (Bohleber, 2007: 335), thereby rendering less visible the real event that caused the trauma, its social, historical and cultural context, as well as the collective environment in which the aftermath of trauma and recovery unfolds. Such distinctions are part of what Cvetkovich sees as a reliance on a gendered divide between the private and public sphere that ‘allows sexual trauma to slip out of the picture’ (2003: 3. See also: Herman, 1992; Kaplan, 2005; Bohleber, 2007; Mucci, 2013). They perpetuate a masculinist understanding of the private/public split, which erases the gendered nature of unequal power relations as they relate to the context of sexual violence against women by male perpetrators. Yet, for girls and women, both historically and in contemporary societies, even so-called private trauma (i.e. domestic violence, childhood sexual abuse etc.) is usually tied into their subordinate status in a larger system of gender inequality.

Taking up Atkinson and Richardson’s question ‘How might we recognize the continuum between personal and collective, without collapsing them into dichotomy?’ (2013: 1), we draw on feminist trauma studies scholars such as Herman, Das, Felman, Brison and Bhutalia, affect theorists of trauma such as Ahmed, Atkinson, Zolkos and Gibbs, as well as recent psychoanalytic studies in trauma such as Mucci’s (2013) Bohleber’s (2007) and Davoine and Gaudilliere’s (2004) to frame our analysis of a particular traumatic context. Based on first-hand interviews with Bosnian survivors of rape, we attempt to ‘think against’ the private/public split that much trauma studies work often still unintentionally reifies. The adjudication of experience as individual vs. collective is made by and for a specific audience (the researcher, or within the courtroom, for example), rather than the subject telling the story. As such, within certain accounts, this distinction functions as a heuristic device for framing a story or a testimony, and acquires a taken-for-granted status within trauma studies as well as within legal proceedings focused on prosecuting sexual violence crimes, becoming a kind of Truth. Rather than reifying what we see as a tired and even artificial dualism, we argue that trauma studies requires better methodological tools for unpacking the often hidden connections between the personal/private and the collective/public. We draw upon recent methodological innovations that have been influenced by thinkers such as Derrida and Deleuze. Specifically, we work with what Jackson and Mazzei (2012) call rhizomatic and trace readings in the threshold. Azra’s words at the beginning of this study capture the nature of the rhizomatic and the trace by an explicit reference to her own voice as a survivor through the metaphor of the trace. By referring to the trace that she would like her voice to leave, she signals the manner in which she sees that voice being situated with regard to this particular body of research, within the context of the more prominent voices of other survivors, but also in more general terms, within the continuum of time with respect to the importance of her personal experience. Through a rhizomatic and trace reading of narrative pieces extracted from the interviews, we engage with the following questions: 1) How do we theorise what Davoine and Gaudilliere call ‘the sociopolitical faultlines’ between collective/public accounts of trauma and those traditionally constructed as private/personal? 2) How do accounts of war rape, which narrate the eruption of the past into the present, elucidate the myriad links between the private and public in a number of ways; among others, the echoes or traces of the everyday ‘before’ in subjects’ stories of the monstrous ‘after’? And 3) What is the relationship between the ‘unspeakable’ in the traumatic memories of the survivors and the ‘speakable’ collective memories of traumatic humanmade events? How does the collective desire ‘not to know’ or ‘to forget’ impact on the individual survivor’s ability to reconstitute their post-trauma identity in a personal as well as a social context? The aim of the analysis is to show that the multifaceted nature of the traumatic reality demands a multifaceted approach that resists binary constructions relating to self/other, private/public, individual/collective. Developing and promoting understanding of trauma beyond these common dichotomies would benefit the survivors as well as their families and larger community as it would make visible the multiple discursive contexts within which they articulate their experience, and illustrate the connections between the individual and the collective when it comes to the realities of sexual violence against women. In turn, this understanding could provide a better foundation for developing long-term support for survivors and communities, as well as helping to inform aspects of the legal system responsible for prosecuting sexual violence crimes.

Methodology

We draw upon recent developments in qualitative methodology that seek to disrupt conventional methods of analysis – what Jackson and Mazzei describe as the traps in humanistic qualitative inquiry comprised of ‘data’, ‘voice’, ‘narrative’ and ‘meaning-making’ (2012: viii). In their view, understanding data through a Deleuzian notion of the rhizome interrupts a search for coherence and linearity in a narrative and, instead, argues for a being/becoming that is neither a beginning nor ending, neither a coming out of nor leading to (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizomatic describes the relationship between language and the real, linguistic and historic reality. According to them, a ‘rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 7) and its principles of connection embody an assemblage that ‘increases in the dimensions of a multiplicity that necessarily changes in nature as it expands in connections (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 8). Rhizomatic connections thus exist ‘across a plane of consistency of multiplicities’, cutting across single structures, open and connectable in all of their dimensions, susceptible to constant modification and always having ‘multiple entryways’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 9, 12). When applied to the context of trauma, the concept of the rhizomatic enables a fuller understanding of the nature of the traumatic experience itself, as well as its aftermaths, for the individual as well as the collective.

We also agree with Jackson and Mazzei that it is vitally important to work the limits of voice and what can be told by a subject about their experiences; to ‘break open’ categories such as ‘rape victim’ (2012: 4); and to account for silences and gaps in what a participant tells the researcher, especially in the context of traumatic narratives like those of war-time rape. Alongside a rhizomatic or non-linear and open-ended analysis of narrative data, Jackson and Mazzei use Derrida’s ideas of the absent present or the trace, which they argue allows for the researcher(s) to search for ‘excesses [which] echo in the text … [and] interrupt and deconstruct the present in its recounting of the past’ (2012: 23). The trace is, thus, a kind of irruption in the text, where language becomes strained, where meaning is missed and where the excess of this irruption ‘produces a snagging that resists a closure’ (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012: 16).

One crucial argument we want to emphasise is that the adjudication of an experience as individual vs. collective is usually made by a researcher or a specific audience, rather than the subject telling the story. As such, within certain accounts, particularly gendered ones, the public/private split functions as a hidden heuristic device for framing a story, a device that rhetorically acquires a taken-for-granted status as Truth. These attempts to theorise trauma can offer explanations that create particular epistemic assumptions, while maintaining a kind of objectivity around their meta-analysis of what does or does not constitute trauma. For example, according to Alexander, the embedding of trauma in everyday life and language has led to ‘common sense understandings’ or what he calls ‘lay trauma theory’ that have become challenges for trauma theorists to overcome (2013: 45). Similarly, Eyerman argues that ‘As opposed to psychological or physical trauma, which involves a wound and the experience of great emotional anguish by an individual, cultural trauma refers to a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the social fabric affecting a group of people that has achieved some degree of cohesion’ (2004: 61). In contrast, our commitment to feminist methodology means that we situate our reading of survivor narratives at the fault lines between the personal and the cultural or socio-political, between the ‘everyday’ lacunae of meaning embedded in the language of those narratives and a theoretically reflexive approach whose goal is not to overcome the rootedness of traumatic experience in the life-world but precisely to search for meaning within it.

The interviews were conducted during a month-long stay in the Bosnian Federation in 2017.² The researcher interviewed eight women survivors between the ages of forty and fifty, and eight leaders of NGOs who shared their experiences regarding working with the survivors. Each interview with the survivors lasted between two and three hours. In most cases, the interviews took the form of a conversation, with the researcher expected to be an active participant, in addition to being the person who asked some of the specific questions based on the prepared questionnaire.³ Each woman approached the interview in a different way: some engaged with the questions systematically and answered them in order, one after the other. Most, however, chose not to refer to the questions directly during the encounter and the researcher invited and respected the women’s exercise of agency and autonomy regarding these choices. It was important to all of the women that they learn more about the researcher as a person as part of the interview.⁴ In all cases, women expressed an interest in staying in touch with the researcher and learning about the work that resulted from the conversations. This context strengthened and solidified the moral and ethical obligation the researcher feels with respect to the representation of the women’s narratives in subsequent work. The nature of the interviews themselves and what emerged as a rich interpersonal context challenge the boundaries between public and private, researcher and participant in a number of ways.

Finally, the experience of collecting these narratives revealed that ‘no matter how hard we may try as researchers to create a ‘safe space’ for the telling of stories of sexual abuse, the participants affirm through their embodied ‘shame’ the fact that the interview, no matter how well-conceived, cannot ‘overwrite’ or escape the habitus, or everyday praxis, that both polices and reinforces the boundary between ‘speakable’ and ‘unspeakable’ (Jolly, 2011). Remaining fully aware of this reality, we seek to avoid reducing the act of violence to one exclusively of an interpersonal nature and construct it as ‘anti-social’, but draw attention to it as an act that is ‘bred out of an extant social context’ (Jolly, 2011). The forms of coping and the ways of speaking about the act articulated by survivors more than twenty years after the violence exist and make sense only when interpreted within that social context.

The public/private divide in trauma studies

Although some contemporary trauma theorists work on the spaces between individual and collective trauma, there is still a tacit acceptance in the larger field of the individual/collective distinction as meaningful. For example, in the introduction to a recent book on trauma studies, the editors note the following:

If there can be a conceptual heart of critical trauma studies—a domain of inquiry as various and global as its subject—we’d settle on a set of centripetal tensions: between the everyday and the extreme, between individual identity and collective experience, between history and the present, between experience and representation, between facts and memory, and between the ‘clinical’ and the ‘cultural’ (Casper and Wertheimer, 2016: 4).

This differentiation of individual and collective trauma has been a mainstay within trauma studies for a long time. For example, Jeffrey Alexander’s social theory of cultural and collective trauma argues that ‘cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever, and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways’ (2012). He goes on to contrast this with individual suffering, arguing that ‘collective traumas are reflections of neither individual suffering nor actual events, but symbolic renderings that reconstruct and imagine them’ (Alexander, 2013: 4).

Theories shaped by psychoanalytic thinking, although different from Alexander’s social constructionist position in that they take for granted the reality of trauma, still emphasise the shocking and brutal nature of injury done to an individual self through an act of such violence that it shatters one’s sense of selfhood, negatively reordering one’s place of being and safety in the world. The act of violence is experienced, in the words of famous trauma studies scholar Cathy Caruth, ‘too soon’ – ‘it is experienced too unexpectedly … to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness’ (1996: 2). Caruth, the most influential scholar behind a psychoanalytic understanding of trauma, describes trauma as ‘an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena’ (1996: 11). And while this definition and the psychoanalytic approach more generally do include a reference to catastrophic events as causing trauma, namely events that affect a collective of people, the analytic locus for understanding trauma is the prism of individual sub/consciousness through which the traumatic experience is trying to be processed and resolved.

The taken-for-granted split between individual and collective understandings of trauma becomes especially problematic when examined in the context of feminist deconstructions of the public/private masculinist binaries whose purpose is to justify and legitimise erasures and silences related to gendered forms of oppression. Maintaining the split between individual and collective trauma perpetuates and reproduces the legacy of modern western masculinist thought and renders invisible the complex connections between self and collective, private and public. Below is one such example, where well-known trauma studies scholars Fassin and Rechtman offer a deconstructive reading of the history of trauma that, albeit unintentionally, reifies this gendered private/public divide:

If we adopt either of these points of view, the humanist or the radical, which are today the largely dominant viewpoints … the universalization of trauma results in its trivialization. In these models, every society and every individual suffers the traumatic experience of their past. Not only do scales of violence disappear, but their history is erased. There is no difference between the survivor of genocide and the survivor of rapes … but can we be satisfied with this reading (2009: 19)?

We can’t help but read in the above quote the sub-text that genocide happens on a scale that merits the use of the word trauma, but to apply the word to an individual survivor of rape risks trivialising the concept. It implies that the first example is a collective experience on a grand scale and the second a private, apolitical event. But who, in fact, is this private apolitical self whose experience of trauma can be disconnected from a collective identity? And if collective trauma must be defined as something that is beyond one individual’s experience of it, then what criterion is legitimate to use to define the collective? Is it local, as in neighbourhood, family or city, or is it more global, as in the nation, international? If one woman is raped in peace time and never reports it, this clearly does not fall under current definitions of collective trauma. But what happens if that woman discovers that the perpetrator has raped before and after her? What if the woman finds out that many other women in her neighbourhood, community, nation-state, world, have experienced rape and many of them have never reported it? Is this now a collective experience? Brison argues that ‘sexual violence is a problem of catastrophic proportions’ in that it ‘victimizes not only those women who are directly attacked, but all women’ (2002: 19, 17–18). Feminists expose the misleading foundations of forms of thinking that depend on dichotomous splitting between the self and society; they argue that the self is always deeply embedded in social and cultural contexts, which serve as the basis of motivation and behaviour, as well as backgrounds against which narratives about the self will be articulated or silenced. And if it is, then why do many social and legal frameworks continue to treat it as individual/personal? Questioning these assumptions reveals what Francoise Davoine and Jean-Max Gaudilliere in their book on history and trauma call ‘the sociopolitical faultlines in which the self has exploded’ (2004: xxvi). The narratives that we discuss in this article illustrate how in the case of war-related trauma, and specifically trauma that is based on rape in addition to other causes, the continuities and interdependence between individual and collective forms of trauma defy ‘objective presentations that would classify mass or individual trauma on a quantitative basis’, as well as those that imply, erroneously, either an ahistorical or universal psychic reality (Davoine and Gaudilliere, 2004: xxvii).

It is not simply the dialectic and binary logic of centripetal tension that we seek to challenge but the multiple binaries that proliferate in the assumption of the public/private distinction. Instead, we argue that the clinical and the cultural, as well as the private/public, (inter)personal/collective, interpenetrate one another in ways that are multiple, lateral and circular. At stake here is the very understanding of trauma as inextricably linked to ‘the real’, a real – and in this case humanmade – event, and as such, the understanding of traumatic experience as existing enmeshed within events and significations found in the fabric of society and history. As Mucci, a trauma psychoanalyst, recently pointed out in her attempt to foreground the relationship between trauma and a larger social reality, ‘[a]t the root of trauma, there is history itself’ (2013: 4). The nature of these connections – between trauma and history, private/public, clinical and cultural – is non-hierarchical and heterogeneous, linked to the traumatic experience and real event across multiple planes and dimensions.

Reading the fault lines in survivor accounts

The event of rape itself stems from deeply entrenched transhistorical and transcultural attitudes rooted in misogyny and sexism that manifest themselves in particular social, political and local circumstances. In the case of the war rapes of Bosnian women, in addition to this dimension, the rapes also stemmed from a political ideology of exclusionism and the ethno-nationalist rhetoric that unleashed and legitimised extreme sexual violence against the women of the ‘enemy’ group. The collective dimension of the rapes that took place during the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina can be defined in terms of the ethnic group, in that groups of women of particular ethnicities were targeted for such victimisation. Most of the recorded cases pertain to Bosniak women, but Croatian and Serbian women were also raped based on their belonging to an ethnic group. In this case, two of their identity categories, that of woman and that of ethnicity, were taken as a justification for this treatment. At the same time, sometimes the family, immediate community of the women survivors or broader society around them denied, silenced and minimised their experience and its long-term effects:

L. O.:⁵ My mother took me in and accepted me back … There was a story I brought a Serbian bastard, a Chetnik’s bastard. They were saying who knows where I was with Chetniks while some took pity on me and some told me I do not belong here and the best is for me to sort out paperwork and to flee the country. Some said I would not be able to survive there. There were a lot of different reactions. We had some family friends on my mother’s side and they supported me. Some people asked why I need this child and why I brought him with me, some suggested I give him to the orphanage, that he will destroy my life.

T. T.: Do your father and mother know what you went through? Are they aware of it?

Alma: I’ve never spoken about it to them but they know.

T. T.: Have they ever given you support?

Alma: They know what happened, they know everything but they pretend that … as if they heard nothing about it. To them it’s a child born out of wedlock, they prefer to see it that way, rather than … talk about it.

In the above two accounts, we can read tensions between survivors’ awareness of the social norms governing their contexts and their own unspoken resistance to these norms, what Jackson and Mazzei call the ‘absent presence of sometimes imperceptible imprints’ (2012: 21). L. O. describes how people around her narrated her return ‘with a Serbian bastard’ child, and she does not challenge this version directly, except through her actions (she does keep the child). However, her silence might be read as a snag; she does not, in the above excerpt, ever express agreement with these people or shame about herself, suggesting that while she may have gone along with these stories, she has her own truth, which she keeps to herself. Similarly, Alma’s description of her parents’ denial of her experience simultaneously tells their version and hers. Here, weaving these two incommensurable versions of the truth together allows for what Derrida would call the possibility of the impossible (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012: 23): the interruption of an imposed version of reality (the rape never happened; this child is simply illegitimate) with Alma’s actual experience. Alma offers a meta-narrative laced with an affect of resentment towards her parents (see: Zolkos, 2010) for their refusal to acknowledge what she went through (they know, but they prefer to ignore it). She has never spoken about her rape, but she knows that they know. While she goes along with their account, she has clearly not forgiven them for her silencing; their familial relationship is, thus, ‘already-always contaminated’ (Zolkos, 2010: 17) because her parents will never escape an awareness of the excess haunting of their version of what happened to her. The narrative of the self here stands in a rhizomatic relationship to larger narratives that create meaning for the survivor, in that the former cuts across single structures (‘me’ and ‘my individual experience’). The narrative of the self is open and connectable in all of its dimensions to constant modification ‘across a plane of consistency of multiplicities’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 9, 12), which here connects to specific gendered realities: mothers who did or did not accept the survivor and her child, and/or the family’s immediate circle of support or lack thereof. Both of these scenarios are embedded within larger social discourses predicated on gendered forms of nationalist hate, misogyny and stigma directed towards women survivors of rape.

As survivors of the war, the women may be allowed to experience with others what Brison calls the ‘cataclysmic destruction of their world’ (2002: 15). But their more individual experiences of the war and its survival, because it is related to an attack on their sexuality (a category of female identity historically and traditionally regulated through collective, public means), has prevented them from sharing in the ‘allowable’ forms of collective memory concerning the war. The so-called ‘wall of silence’, a phrase often used to describe the women’s reluctance and sometimes outright unwillingness to narrate their experience of rape, is commonly thought of as a marker of their own individual ‘shame’ through which they paradoxically are seen to assume responsibility for what happened to them. But at the same time, how each survivor on a personal level experiences and categorises her trauma (life-threatening, inescapable/preventable, etc) depends on culturally available models and discourses and will, to a large degree, determine the extent of her resilience. Through the women’s narratives, what emerges is that their experiences do not take place outside established linguistic meaning and their sense of self is ‘constituted discursively’, at the fault lines between the individual and the collective, the personal and the public.

The fact that trauma is relational (it is a response to an event in which more than a single individual is involved) makes it by default a social experience. But the social aspect of trauma defines the root of the individual experience, that is, the psyche that is shattered at the hands of another in an act of unspeakable violence, as well as the subsequent personal and social re/structuring of the survivor’s identity. For example, some of the participants made reference to a ‘we’ in terms of talking about other raped women, thus suggesting the construction of a collective subject in the wake of mass rapes in Bosnia. The ‘we’ that they refer to is made up of all the women they know and don’t know, who experienced what they did. This ‘we’ is more than the sum of its individual parts; it joins the individual trajectories of each women to a larger collective experience, which is itself multiple, as it refers to all women who were rape victims in the war regardless of their ethnicity, to the women who were part of the group at the time of the event and to women victims of rape of a single ethnicity. Each survivor’s understanding and usage of these categories accounts in great measure for the manner in which she copes with the past that continuously intrudes into the present. Therefore, we argue that when it comes to war rape it is not useful to try to delineate the personal vs. the collective, to determine either/or, but rather, in Deleuzian terms, to see them as ‘and/and’. All events are both private and collective, depending on how both terms are understood:

T. T.: How did the war and your experience in it influence your life?

L. O.: That question is very difficult and I can hardly give an answer … the war made me tougher and more militant and if I can say, sinewy as our people would say. I feel now that no one can do anything to me … I survived what was impossible to survive …

Alma: Us against Them? It wasn’t like that before … we were all one people. The folks of Kotor Varos. I never suspected they would harm me so badly. One of the men raped me and then asked the other to do the same.

In these two narratives, private and public blend in that the survivors situate their individual experience within the larger social and historical reality of the war. Both, but especially Alma in this excerpt, are aware that they were raped first because they are women, but also because they are women seen to bear the ethnicity of those constructed as ‘enemies’. This is a crucial background that allows them to understand the particulars of their own experience within a collective war environment. The rapes took place within a political context where the cultural and nationalist imaginary transformed women into tools and instruments of nationhood and ethnicity, a violent symbolic act resulting in the women’s diminished or obliterated human autonomy and agency (see Takševa, 2015). In the first excerpt, the reference to the larger community is subtle, where the interviewer asks a purely personal question about how the war affected this individual’s life, yet her response is to describe her changed subjectivity through a word used ‘by her people’. In the second excerpt, the reference to community is more explicit; she describes the scenario of war creating an enemy where there was none before. In her description, they were all part of one community, one town, ‘one people’, and part of her trauma lies in the shock of discovering that those whom she saw as friends, neighbours and fellow citizens were the ones who perpetrated these heinous crimes. Alma’s words in particular refer explicitly to better socio-cultural and political realities in the former Yugoslavia with how things were ‘before’, and her incredulity at being harmed by those whom she considered ‘all one people’.

Understanding the nature of the private/public in this context, thus, requires thinking about traumatic events as happening in the threshold. According to Deleuzian methodologists, the threshold represents the in-between space in the process of a becoming (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012). Thresholds contain both entries and exits and are, thus, never either/or but always both/and (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012). If we use the concept of the threshold to understand the imbrication of the private or personal in the public or collective, we allow for trauma stories that do not fit neatly into an either/or model but, instead, following feminist trauma studies scholar Urvashi Bhutalia, offer us a better understanding of how people’s individual stories ‘stretch the definitions and boundaries of history’ (2000: 10):

Sabina: The city was divided along the railway tracks … there was already a curfew in force even though the shooting hadn't started yet … it was around holidays, right before their Christmas. You know how it goes, just like any other girl that age, I was out on the town before I started making my way to my sister’s house … as soon as I crossed the railway tracks, I ran into two acquaintances. We didn’t go to the same class, but you know how it is in small towns where everyone knows everyone. At the time, I had no idea what the war was actually about. There are mixed marriages in my family. Even though my father was very traditional, he never told me I wasn’t allowed to. Blaža, my friend from school, used to sleep over at our place and my father loved her dearly. My family never told me to dislike her because her name was Blaženka, you see? … people didn’t pay attention to it in such an extreme way. And so by chance, I ran into this woman: ‘let’s have a coffee’. If only I had died on those railway tracks … they had probably already embraced that extremism … this was probably some kind of trophy for them, taking in as many Muslims as they could in order to ruin their lives … after they left me, when I regained consciousness, I was completely naked.

In this excerpt, the speaker recounts the experience of a community where everyone lived in reasonable peace until this was shattered by war. Her narrative is especially poignant because of the community and a larger social sense of betrayal she experienced as a consequence of the rape. As a girl, walking home shortly after the war began, she was invited for coffee by a Croatian acquaintance who then gave her up to the army, where we can assume from the rest of her transcript that she was raped multiple times. She is one of the participants whose rapes led to a child that she is still raising and loves, but feels ambivalence towards:

Sabina: Ajna is my reason for living and something most sacred. Without her, I wouldn’t be who I am and yet, you know, because of her, I’ll never forget, just one look, she is my greatest regret, I regret the most in life that, don’t regret, yet I can’t explain to you that feeling … since she was three or four years of age, she had learned to behave as it suited me. She’d come to my room with a gloomy face, and instinctively, I couldn’t stand looking at her and had to throw her out … at the time, she couldn’t understand why I couldn’t look at her. ‘Why don’t you love me?’. There’d be moments when I’d lash at her and she’d fall; if my husband wasn’t there to catch a hold of her, well …

Sabina’s words exist at the threshold between herself and others: the perpetrators but also her child, as well as her husband who is called upon to intervene and mediate in moments of crisis. Thus, her account captures forms of suffering as well as resilience; these forms of suffering are also located in the threshold between the past and the present aftermath that is informed by the past. In her account, as well as those of the others, we recognise the multiple and jarring forms of temporality, where the past simultaneously contains both the traumatic event(s), but also traces of the before of the traumatic event, the individual and collective identities that were shattered at one and the same moment. While trauma theorists emphasise the importance of time, they are not always attentive to the ways that disruption of linearity in traumatised subjects’ accounts may be read as private/public thresholds. In the case of Bosnian survivors, the echoes or traces of an everyday ‘before’ in subjects’ stories of the monstrous ‘after’ should be interpreted as narrative signposts of the link between the personal and the collective. Once the ‘event’ or series of events is over, there is an attempt on the part of most subjects to ‘descend into ordinary life’ (Das), which people do as a matter of survival. But they do not do it without pain or without the jagged edges of the past cutting into their presents. As Das argues, ‘the violence seeps into the ongoing relationships and becomes a kind of atmosphere that cannot be expelled to an ‘outside”’ (2006).

In our multiple readings of the interview transcripts, two things struck us: first, the living presence of the past in subjects’ accounts, both their lives before the war and their traumatic experiences during the war, part of which involves active incredulity that this could have happened in their communities; and second, the disruption of linearity that made life narrative as a form difficult if not impossible for subjects to take up successfully. It is the possibility or impossibility of the post-conflict ‘there’ that links the individual story of rape with the community or collective. Whether or not subjects returned to the place they were born and raised or whether they attempted to forge new paths in other cities or villages, their encounters with the ghostly remainders of the war were woven throughout their narratives; and not simply as struggles to move past their trauma, but also as an inability to trust the community around them and awareness of the fragility of these collective identities:

T. T.: Will you tell me something about life before the war?

Azra: Typical Bosnian story, everything was ok, we used to live nice, my sister went to study, I planned that I will study too …

T. T.: And then the war started.

Azra: Yes, the war started. That is why I say typical Bosnian story; one nice life, everything got interrupted … for so many, many, many years I was unable to continue with my life …

Azra’s narrative shows the degrees to which the self exists as embedded within social and political contexts, and her manner of telling demonstrates trace-like irruptions, where ‘language becomes strained, where meaning is missed’ and where the excess of this irruption ‘produces a snagging that resists a closure’ (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012: 16). Here, the trace of the before is found in the words ‘typical Bosnian story’ and ‘one nice life’. Azra is speaking to an audience (the interviewer but also the reader and the outside world) about a past that was completely decimated by the war, the event that echoes, ‘that continues to interrupt and deconstruct the present in its recounting of the past’ (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012: 23). There is also a haunting ‘imprint’ of what could have been, what would have been if not for the war. Through these few words (‘I planned to study’), we are offered a poignant glimpse into a past that could have existed, a possibility that was permanently erased yet still haunts the memory of what actually occurred.

Alma’s story is similar, in that she was a high school student at the time of the war beginning, and she ended up giving birth to a rape child:

T. T.: Could you tell me about your life before the war … your memories of Kotor Varos, for example?

Alma: Very good.

T. T.: Where did Croats find you?

Alma: The army showed up and detained me along with five other young women … I was saved by a major. He said ‘I know her father’, so they shoved me into the attic. All the other five women were raped … he managed to take me up to the attic.

T. T.: How was that major?

Alma: I’d rather not say.

T. T.: You do not remember?

Alma: He’s horrible … I have a daughter, the result of those rapes … I used to beat the baby … in a bout of anger I’d beat the child. It wasn’t the child’s fault.

The above excerpt confronts us with the ways that ordinary social relations, such as meeting someone who knows one’s family member, are so completely transformed in traumatic contexts that they can simultaneously function as critical to one’s survival and devastating to one’s bodily integrity. In the above excerpt, Alma tells the researcher that she was ‘saved’ from multiple rapes by a major who knew her father; yet she wants to make it very clear that this salvation took the form of being raped by the major himself, and bearing a child as a result.

Here, ordinary familial connections become inextricably linked to a larger social context of horror, where to ‘know’ someone’s father, brother or family member does not entail escape from the gendered nature of wartime rape, but offers a limited form of still terrible protection. Narratives like Alma’s are clearly not ‘tidy’ (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012: 31); again, they are testaments to ‘the possibility of the impossible’ (Jackson and Mazzei, 2012: 23). Alma is protected/raped, a storyline that, by definition, refuses coherence, but she has the child and still struggles to raise it, at least for a time. In fact, despite losing custody at a certain point, at the time of the interview Alma was actively engaged in trying to reconnect with her estranged daughter. Alma’s story weaves together the strands of the before (‘I know her father’), the after (‘He’s horrible … I have a daughter, the result of those rapes’) and the haunted present where, based on the love she has come to feel for her daughter, and her deep remorse over her inability to care for her when both of them were younger, she still struggles to rebuild a relationship with her.

It is worth noting that all the participants struggled to offer a coherent and linear narrative of their lives. Although there was a clear delineation between the time before the war, the time during and after, the stories themselves seemed to move in and out of these different temporalities that are linked rhizomatically. It is true that we as researchers called forth these stories because of our focus, but the ways that subjects talked about their experiences was not periodised as it often is in narrative accounts (i.e. this happened, then this happened, at this point I felt this but I no longer do). Atkinson describes trauma as ‘the past operative in the present’ (2013: 249), which creates ‘a kind of continuum of presents less solid than we like to imagine’ (2013: 261). In this vein, subjects struggled with the ongoing eruption of war-time violence and trauma into their post-war lives:

Alma: Oh my, what an attack I had a few evenings ago … it crushed me. Last night … I was dreaming that I was there again. We’re walking through forest, there’s shooting, the air’s resounding with shots. Lojzo appeared in my dream. Lojzo who is deceased. He is waiting for me, but I can’t catch up with him. Shooting is all there is, I stop, to hell with it, I won’t run anymore. Luckily, I was not attacked.

In the above excerpt, several things strike us as unusual temporally. First, the description of the dream as an attack, a word that usually signals a physical encounter of some sort; second, the back-and-forth use of the present and past tense (‘we’re walking’, ‘Lojzo appeared’); and third, the almost jarring use of the word ‘luckily’. In this story, the speaker is deeply relieved that she was not raped or killed but both she and the interviewer are aware that this is a dream, not an event that she survived. But is it actually an event she survived? That is, is it a version of an event she survived? The experiential nature of this supposed dream never becomes clear; it might be understood, instead, as a poignant example of what Derrida calls ‘a spectral moment … a moment that no longer belongs to time’ (cited in Atkinson, 2013: 261). Alma finds herself in the threshold between real life and nightmares, nightmares that potentially contain, at one and the same time, real memories of what happened and visceral fears of what might have happened, had she not been ‘lucky’.

Here is another excerpt that shares similar qualities:

Sena: I got lost myself in time … memory of one detail, when they took me away, they took me to the bridge in Visegrad. I was not afraid then somehow, I do not know, and now when I remember that it is like I feel that knife on my neck, that cold water. There are periods when I cannot take a bath. I am afraid of the water, when I see a knife I am afraid … those scents and voice reminds me of, I do not know. Knife in the kitchen. I am at home and have to prepare lunch, breakfast, what now, to my child. Each time I take a knife, I would rather run out of the house … that is always present. That is how I live.

In Sena’s account, she does not remember being afraid at the time of her attack, but when she ‘remembers’ it now she experiences it as a physical attack. This is why we put ‘remember’ in quotes; ordinarily when people remember details of their past, they do not experience the memory as happening to them as they remember. Here, Sena clearly does. While the traumatic symptoms come and go and she has periods when they don’t affect her, there are other times when she is triggered. The reiteration of the word ‘knife’ (she says it four times in this excerpt) stands in as the physical experience she is re-living. She lost herself in that time, and she is still there, in phase space.

For many participants, the painful reality of their lives meant that they had to return to an actual place that had been home and became a space of destruction, and was now home again, but with uneasy ghosts haunting the landscape and community relations. For others, the awareness of this contradiction meant that they could not return home, and found themselves in other parts of the country that had less traumatic resonance for them:

T. T.: Tell me about the attitude of the community, have you ever felt that people in your town, in your neighbourhood, know?

Azra: People who took refuge there at the same time did know, because my mother asked for help from them and that happened to other women, too. That if something like that happened to you, no one would take you into their house, you cannot stay at that address any longer. And they found out that they were looking for me and my mother told them about our circumstance and begged even some close people and they did not want to help. Because if people help they will put themselves in danger.

S. S.: They lock you in a room and then soldiers come with stockings over their heads and you see nothing, you do not know who they are. I reckon that there are neighbours of ours because they had to hide their faces … there is no way they could be someone else since other people had no way to come here … I think they all are our neighbours … I have never returned … I would not live there again when I do not know who is who and who did what.

The interpersonal context embedded into the survivors’ narratives challenges the boundaries between public and private and draws attention to the ways in which their trauma is linked to the ‘real’ and multiple contexts of war, which include the collective desire ‘not to know’ and not offer help to the survivor and her mother out of fear for their own safety, as well as the violence experienced at the hands of those who were thought of as neighbours and members of one’s community. Not surprisingly, all of the participants spoke extensively about the ongoing effects of the rapes on their identities. Feminist trauma theorists point to the ways that subjects of gendered violence struggle to return to a place, time or identity that for them can never be the same, where what Bhutalia calls ‘normal life practices’ are permanently destroyed (2000: 89). For instance, Brison, who was raped violently and left for dead in a ditch, describes herself as ‘experiencing things posthumously’ (quoted in Jackson, 2016: 208): ‘The person I was before the rape is gone. She died that night. I had to mourn her death. I am not the same person and I will never get her back’ (Brison, quoted in Jackson, 2016: 208). Similarly, several of our participants spoke about themselves as irrevocably changed:

Azra: When I came to Medica, I was like in one moment, I do not know how to explain it, like I became frozen … somehow all that mourning for my sister … it went so far that I felt nothing when someone was telling me about sexual abuse. Because nothing could touch me.

T. T.: How many years passed since Visegrad and that moment when you started not feeling well? Do you remember?

Azra: I was 27.

T. T.: Oh, so ten years after the events.

Azra: Yes, it simply all started … I cannot describe to you, fear that is not normal, that was not provoked by anything … one evening, somehow something was inside of me, I did not recognise it … somehow forced thoughts began, I could not, in my head, million thoughts, like a swarm and huge fear started and I started, I could not be still any longer, I started, I felt like I will go outside of my own body … then I started throwing up … then it continued, those reactions that I did not have before.

What Azra describes here is the temporal gap that existed between the traumatic events and her recognition of them; in her case, extraordinarily, this temporal gap extended to a full decade during which she did not acknowledge to herself the full weight and impact that the rape had had on her consciousness. Mourning her sister’s death provided an emotional focus that was intelligible to herself as well as to others around her. Azra’s attempt to explain the way in which trauma intruded into her life, demanding acknowledgement after a decade had passed from the time of the traumatic event, calls to mind through the descriptions of bodily, physiological reactions the radical unrepresentable nature of the traumatic experience, since bringing it into consciousness would perhaps in some way diminish its horror. In her state of being ‘frozen’ from herself and from what her body experienced, Azra in fact expresses the meaning of rape as ‘defacement’, in which, as Jolly points out, there is nothing metaphorical: ‘When stigmatization of the body is involved in past and present harm, the embodied victim-survivor … is constituted as an embodied subject only through the assertion of the impropriety of that body in acts of what we may call secondary stigmatization. The feeling is one of others being insensible to one’s bodily presence’ (2011). Azra’s feeling of being frozen for such a long time after the event is experienced as her own ‘inability to inhabit [her] estranged body within the realm of social discourse’ (Jolly, 2011).

The above stories do more than simply personalise the terrible consequences of the Bosnian conflict or give it a human face. In all of the accounts, the rhizomatic opens up an understanding of how individual experiences of trauma are both connected to and shaped by one another, through ‘a visceral level of affect contagion’ (Gibbs, 2010: 186). They illustrate various forms of what Sara Ahmed calls the ‘stickiness’ of affect (2004: 4). Ahmed (2004) argues that the everyday language of emotion interiorises and individualises, thus ignoring the cultural or social discourses and practices that create individual emotional responses; according to her, we need to understand how emotions circulate between and among bodies. The rape survivors that we interviewed had to negotiate an imposed silence around their experiences, both at a cultural and familial level, which generated shame as a dominant affect; at the same time, the awareness among individual survivors that they were not alone created what Ahmed would characterise as ‘an affective economy’ (2004: 8) of pain that re-collectivised individual experiences of sexual trauma.

In this sense, the victims’ experiences, feelings and perceptions are not individual stories that tell of personal psychic dramas, but they make up the meaning of the conflict itself (Bhutalia, 2000: 77). The violence they experienced and the psychic trauma they continue to carry are embedded into concrete social and political contexts and cultural exchanges in the realm of the ‘real’. The spectre of war and its multiple violent realities in all survivor accounts constitute the background against which narratives about the self are either articulated or silenced. This is what the war in Bosnia actually looked like for those living through it, something that gets lost in public accounts of statistics, political affiliations and war crime tribunals.

Conclusion

Tracing the rhizomatic and trace-like continuities between the individual and the collective, the private and the public in the narratives of women survivors of war-related sexual violence makes visible the multiple discursive contexts within which the women articulate their experience, and illustrates the connections between the individual and the collective when it comes to the realities of sexual violence against women. Gender continues to manifest itself across multiple socio-cultural and political contexts as a hierarchical principle of social organisation structured in ways that maintain control over women. As gendered harm, sexualised violence and its perception, even among survivors themselves, but especially within communities, larger society and the legal profession, are particularly susceptible to perpetuating misogynist stereotypes against women, their moral, mental and physical inferiority, their presumptive sexual availability and the notion of sexually active women as inherently untrustworthy (see Craig, 2018). The politically motivated, ideologically based and systematic form of rape that took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the last conflict, affecting more than 20,000 women, for the first time in history contributed to the recognition of rape as a human rights violation and a crime against humanity by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, established in 1993, followed by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 1994. The special court in Sierra Leone, set up in 2000, included as crimes against humanity several different forms of sexual violence in the Statute, such as rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy and any other form of sexual violence. This was the first time that the broader social and political context that contributes to the sexual victimisation of women was acknowledged and recognised. This has resulted in the increased recognition, investigation and prosecution of crimes of sexual violence by international courts over the last three decades (de Brouwer et al., 2013: 5). Prior to this, ‘the Geneva Convention of 1949 stated that rape in war was a prohibited attack on individual women’ that constituted a violent attack to the life of the victim. This means that sexual assault and war rape were historically constructed as individual acts or ‘by-products of war rather than an organized form of warfare’ (Papasakos and Gestring, 2015: 807). The articulation of rape as a crime against humanity in legal documents governing international criminal tribunals thus marks a radical reorientation with wide-reaching theoretical as well as practical consequences for understanding trauma and for working with trauma survivors. However, scholarship on trauma resulting from sexual violence in war has yet to fully address the implications of this shift in international law regarding the definition of rape for a systematic investigation of trauma in relation to survivors, but also in relation to the prosecution of sexual violence crimes.

Deconstructing the dichotomy between the individual and the collective in how we approach trauma resulting from sexual violence in war reveals the social construction of many aspects of the private and individual, which would result in the understanding that many of the other dichotomies that accompany the study of trauma – objective/subjective, rational/emotional, private/public – are arbitrary. Challenging these binaries would create an increased awareness of the subjectivity of perception and the impact of race, class and age on attitudes and perceptions of rape (see Sharratt, 2013). This re-conceptualisation of trauma is necessary in order to recognise it as an issue that concerns everyone and that needs to be addressed on multiple levels to be prevented and prosecuted. Recent interviews with judges, prosecutors, investigators and victim and witness units at the ICTY, as well as research into national jurisdiction courts’ treatment of sexual violence, show ‘the narrow mandate and individualistic and reactive nature of the criminal trial process’ (Craig, 2018). The interviews also reveal that many of the aforementioned people hold misogynistic views about women that tacitly ‘reflect a construction of sexuality which discounts women’s subjectivity and privileges the male perspective’ (Craig, 2018). As Sharratt points out: ‘[a]ttitudes toward rape survivors, and more broadly toward sexuality, as well as stereotypes of both the survivor and the perpetrator can and have affected the judgment of court members. Bias is frequently denied, and holders of such bias hide behind legalism and the illusions of objectivity’ (2013: 353). A new, more comprehensive understanding of trauma would help deconstruct broadly held attitudes surrounding sexual violence as a problem that is ‘located within people’s minds, rather than in the cultural fabric itself’ (Gavey, 2005: 45).

In our reading of survivors’ words, we have sought to bear witness to both the narrative and testimonial gaps that remain outside the ‘speakable’ and to the words themselves in their rhizomatic connections to the everyday social and cultural contexts. Survivors’ words show that rape occurred in conjunction with other forms of violence: witnessing the rape, beating, imprisonment and/or murder of friends, neighbours or family members; being left to die; or the looting, destruction and annihilation of family homes. War trauma that includes sexual violence is a particular form of additive or complex trauma, which are terms used to refer to ‘the accumulated effects of multiple incidents of traumatic experience’ and so-called ‘traumatic stressor events and experiences that occur repeatedly, often escalating in severity as they become more chronic over time’ (Papasakos and Gestring, 2015: 9, 139). This means that individual trauma takes place and unfolds in its aftermath within a context that is collective in more than one way: the individual is harmed because they are seen as part of a particular collective; and that collective is harmed by inflicting multiple injuries upon as many of its individuals as possible. As such, ‘the frequency, severity, implications and motivation for war rape’ are ‘much more intimately linked to political and ethnic struggles than are rapes in other contexts’ (Papasakos and Gestring, 2015: 808). Thus, the very nature of war rape attests to the unique interdependence between individual and collective factors, because its multiple consequences resist the categorisation of individual and collective trauma as separate and distinct, both in the moment of violence, as well as in its aftermath.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: ‘“Children of the Enemy”: Narrative Constructions of Identity Following Wartime Rape and Transgenerational Trauma in Post-WWII Germany and Post-Conflict Bosnia’. Principal Investigator: Agatha Schwartz, Co-Investigators: Tatjana Takševa, Mythili Rajiva and Christabelle Sethna.

ORCID iD

Tatjana Takševa

Notes

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