Rethinking War

Abstract

This paper looks to the ways in which memory works as an ongoing force within disrupted and displaced lives. Based on storytelling and conversations with family, I tie together the mundane and everyday experiences of living and leaving Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina during the Yugoslav Wars of Secession. Here, in the banal moments of disrupted lives, the waiting and going-on that mark an everyday struggle for survival and wellbeing extends into the present. An autoethnographic working, this paper adapts personal and generational experiences to discuss the complexity of war and migration. In doing so, this paper highlights how the effects of war and migration processes, including feelings of fear and uncertainty, remain active hauntings. Tales and retellings come to demonstrate the debris that lingers as forces of history, drawing the body through memory production passed on generationally through remnants like memory, habit, and language. This paper illustrates the messiness of such traces, where storytelling and memory work come to reflect the normalized yet innately disordered life. Ultimately, moving away from seeing the debris of war and refuge as wholly disruptive and violent, this paper instead focuses on how the workings of temporality and storytelling within the migratory experience reveal active modes of being-in-the-world. In such modes, memory and storytelling evidence durational or nonlinear temporalities, as the past mundane experiences of survival continue within the present.