Jasmine Musabegović's Novels in the Conceptions of the Poetics of Testimony

Abstract

This text aims to analyze the novels Skretnice (1986), Most (1994), Žene. Glasovi (2005) by Jasmina Musabegović in light of the poetics of testimony and the immanent transgenerational trauma. From the novel Skretnice to the novel Most and Žene. Glasovi Jasmina Musabegović portrays major historical events through the prism of personal and family stories with a focus on women's experience of war and witnessing it, and the central place is occupied by members of the Malić family in her female line - from mother Fatima to her daughters Nizama and Selma, artists whose creative vocation strongly protests and conserves humanistic values and anti-war engagement. Starting from the theoretical frameworks established, among others, in the research of Alaida Assmann, Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, Cathy Caruth, Pierre Nora, and Renata Lachmann, in this text the focus will be on the forms of witnessing war in the novelistic text of Jasmine Musabegović, and the artistic procedures that memory of war trauma is postulated.