Remembering and Forgetting: Explorations in Traumatic Memory
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(Library staff access only)
Date
2022
Authors
Roberts, Naida
Editors
Advisors
Szorenyi, Anna
Flanery, Patrick
Flanery, Patrick
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Abstract
Re-collecting Myself: Writing a War Thirty Years On is part of an ongoing
memoir that outlines my childhood experience of war living through the Siege of
Sarajevo and my experience of writing about those memories in the present.
Originally conceived as a series of short, visceral vignettes outlining particularly
heightened experiences from the war, it currently comprises eighteen chapters of
varying lengths that, through different approaches, all involve navigating the war’s
aftereffects through writing. The memoir aims not only to tell the story of some of my
war experiences, but also to be present to and outline the somatic process of writing
so as to remember—or remembering so as to write—and ultimately to heal. In making
direct reference to the effects of the embodied process in the writing of the product,
and documenting the way that the writing endeavour affected what was remembered
and how, the creative work arguably serves as a testament to a continuing process of
trauma transformation through writing.
The exegesis (alternatively titled, in honour of my uncle, Why Would You
Waste Time on Such a Stupid Thing as Remembering the War? Life Today Is Much
Worse!) outlines the motivations, approaches and challenges faced in writing Recollecting
Myself. In doing so, it considers two layers of potential silencing: first the
unspeakability of trauma itself, and second the malignant effects, on the writer and the
creative work, of the continuously tense political situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The exegesis makes efforts toward substantiating this ever-present tension that haunts
survivors, and documents some of the ways it challenged this project. Outlining the
way the wounds of a past war (one that ostensibly ended over twenty-five years ago)
keep bleeding into the present day, the exegesis hypothesizes that this creates a sense
of danger, threat, and/or retribution that is antithetical to the sense of safety required
for the act of remembering to fully take place.
School/Discipline
School of Humanities : English and Creative Writing
Dissertation Note
Thesis (M.Phil.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities: English and Creative Writing, 2023
Provenance
This thesis is currently under embargo and not available.