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Selma leydesdorff, Surviving the Bosnian Genocide: The Women of Srebrenica Speak (Kay Richardson trans., Indiana University Press, 2011) ISBN: 978-0-253-01804-5, 231 pages.
Selma Leydesdorff's Surviving the Bosnian Genocide: The Women of Srebrenica Speak focuses on the complex familial fragmentations that numerous Srebrenica survivors continue to bear or struggle to accept two decades after the genocide. At the heart of this study, rest, above all, the voices of women survivors and their relentless efforts to prevent the life narratives of their family members-mostly men and boys-from slipping into the collective oblivion at home and abroad.
Surviving the Bosnian Genocide: The Women of Srebrenica Speak is divided into seven chapters. These are preceded by a brief story about one of the surviving Srebrenica women (Sabaheta Fejic' ), which is entitled simply "Sabaheta's Story." The function of this particular story remains open to multifaceted symbolic implications at the outset of the book. Yet the last page of Surviving the Bosnian Genocide: The Women of Srebrenica Speak reveals the more precise meaning of "Sabaheta's Story." The latter operates as a mnemonically complex prelude to the rest of interviews, remembrances, and testimonials that constantly oscillate among these women's violently crushed pasts, uncertain presents, and nebulous futures. The connective tissue of the ensuing chapters is the unfolding of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1992-1995), but also its quicksand-like destruction that had swallowed the country's normalcy in general. In particular, this destruction turned a small town in East Bosnia, Srebrenica, into the site of a systematically organized campaign for indiscriminate killings of Bosnian Muslims. Leydesdorff, therefore, constantly reminds her readers of the brutal consequences that still remain plentiful, real, and unresolved. In reading these chapters, the reader is reminded of such consequences through several examples, among others, the approximately 9,000 indiscriminately killed Muslim boys and men; raped and displaced...