It is a straightforward enough question: what is the relationship between forced displacement, popular memory and trans-local identities? In striving to answer it, we discover that it is anything but straightforward. Places – unless simply understood as geographically situated social networks – do not move, remember or create their identities. People do. Hence, displacement, memory and identity are embodied experiences of real people and the communities they belong to. These experiences are remembered, (re) constructed and enacted in diasporic spaces and in the original homeland as well as in cyber space, creating an in-between space, which is sometimes bothhere(‘where I...

Before 1992 hot summers would always attract visitors to Klotjevac and other towns along the river Drina, separating Bosnia from Serbia. Famed for its beauty, its clean water and the breathtaking canyon through which it flows, for centuries the river has boasted many notable bridges – including the bridge at Višegrad made famous by Ivo Andrić in his Nobel Prize winning novelThe Bridge over Drina. In 1992, when war broke out in Bosnia, the eastern Bosnian border region along the Drina known as Podrinje assumed strategic importance for Serbia and their separatist Serb¹ compatriots in Bosnia, who planned to join...

We now move outside the borders of Bosnia-Herzegovina, to explore three individual stories of displacement of Bosnians in Austria: Sejo, Edita and Ibro – separate individuals with separate life stories, which intersect. The stories do not necessarily represent three typical Bosnian stories of flight, refuge and homecoming; nor is it possible to label any such story as typical, as each story of displacement is based on a unique individual experience, so that different individuals are differently affected. Nonetheless, these three narratives – presented in this chapter as one story, involving different actors – are very much emblematic of the memories of violence and...

Edita’s adoption of elements of others’ narratives into her sense of who she once was might be viewed as a personal battle over memory. Many scholars have argued that the Bosnian war itself was a war over memory which involved the manipulation of ‘traumatic memories’ of real and perceived past sufferings and injustices done to one’s own people.² The war over memory, which was so emblematic of the conflict in Bosnia, included systematic destruction of the institutions of cultural memory which symbolised the ‘other’. Some authors, like the Bosnian historian Ivan Lovrenović (1994), have called such acts destruction of memory...

In previous chapters we have seen how, years after they were ethnically cleansed, many displaced Bosnians – like Edita, Sejo and Halid – have made a number of ‘homecomings’, in some cases turning their permanent displacement into regular seasonal movements between their new places of residence and their former home towns and villages. We have seen how physical and psychological displacement has created new forms of (non) belonging, with the feeling of permanent homelessness and exile contrasted with the dual or multiple senses of belonging. These conflicting feelings have been felt and described by the same individuals, with many displaced Bosnians developing...

This chapter² explores how forced displacement has affected Bosnian women and girls and their identities. The ‘in-country’ case studies described here come from my fieldwork in the wider region of Podrinje, in eastern Bosnia, and the Prijedor region, in western Bosnia, as well as from diasporic places like the Melbourne suburb of St. Albans, where a significant number of women and their surviving family members from these areas settled after the war. While the war has affected almost every single village and town in the country, the regions of Podrinje and Prijedor have become synonymous with ethnic cleansing, concentration camps...

This concluding chapter marks the completion of a journey that has been not only a metaphoric and intellectual venture through text, but also literally a journey around the world, from the southern to the northern hemisphere, from Australia to Europe to North America and back again. In this moving fieldwork – which was multi-sited, multidirectional and involved a number of sub-journeys within and between different sites – I encountered many people who became not only research collaborators and informants, but also generous hosts. Many of their stories are ‘written’ between the lines, this book – like any ethnography dealing with complex fields – being...