Human Rights Poetry: On Ferida Duraković’s Heart of Darkness

Abstract

Human Rights Poetry:On Ferida Duraković’s Heart of Darkness Erin Trapp (bio) And you,if you don’t know how to rejoice,rejoice in the skill of one who does!My precious one, nothing is good out there:neither place, nor time, nor action.But must one respect that old dramaticunity? A walk is for something else. —Ferida Duraković, from “Morning Glory, Sarajevo”1 We might approach the question of what human rights poetry is by asking another question: how does a “walk” become legible as an alternative to global capitalism? This substitution of human rights poetry with a “walk” implies that the frameworks within which these terms can be substituted—human rights and global capitalism—are mutually enforcing narratives. In the transition to post-socialism, a period that is marked by the disappearance of an alternative to global capitalism, human rights discourse presents multilateral intervention as an option that remains when there are no alternatives, a form of reparative justice. As Bob Meister notes in After [End Page 367] Evil, the fall of communism marks the correspondence between the emergence of human rights and the emergence of the world community. Further, Meister describes how the breakup of Yugoslavia reframed human rights as an ethical project rather than a political discourse that transformed “Auschwitz-based reasoning into a new discourse of global power” (3). As Meister argues, the function of human rights in this transitional period was to extend the “reasoning” of Auschwitz to the “discourse of global power.” Notably, the logic of reparation relies not just on the extension of reason, but on assumptions about psychological processes of identifying, witnessing, and working through. In fact, these assumptions continue to inform our understanding of both human rights and intervention, while at the same time providing us with the terms for thinking about the disappearance of alternatives to global capitalism. Considered in this way, human rights poetry is critical of the discourse of human rights—the reparative framework of Euro-American human rights, which congealed around psychoanalytic theories of projective identification predominant in the postwar. The conflict—and uneasy resolution—between the bolstering of state power through human rights discourse and its role as a force of opposition against injustice is perhaps most easily perceptible in human rights poetry, in which the human voice, the poetic speaker, is predictably set up as a witness. Looking at how poetry comes to occupy and is occupied by the figure of the witness allows us to see how the psychological processes of projective identification, upon which witnessing is based, inform the production of justice as human rights. The ambiguities of witnessing have been theoretically grounded in Holocaust testimony, predominantly in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s Testimony, in which witnessing is conceptualized through a crisis of literature, “insofar as literature becomes a witness” (xviii). Despite this discourse, human rights assumes this literary function of witnessing, as the terms of Carolyn Forché’s anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, make explicit. Here, victim and listener merge in the experience of witnessing in order to “co-own” the atrocity (Laub 57). But I think that human rights poetry can be read in ways that more aptly configure the problem of the subject of human rights as an “other” of Europe.2 United Nations (UN) intervention in the former Yugoslavia, in “non-European” Europe, reflects the limits of the discourse of human rights understood through the processes of identification [End Page 368] implied in the co-ownership of the atrocity and the common task of witnessing. If the discourse of human rights offers the promise of performing justice through the process of witnessing, human rights poetry can, in contrast, be seen to raise questions about when and how the injustice of the victim can be realized as justice.3 One of the primary ways that it raises this question is by emphasizing the insolubility of the other of Europe in the figure of the witness. The problem of reading others, which has to do with reappraising the distance and difference between victims of human rights violations and those who see or listen, involves the aggressive disidentification of victim and addressee rather than a...