The Literature of Memorialization — Wartime Rape, Gender Violence, and Trauma in the Novel the Screeching of Skin by Amila Kahrović Posavljak

Abstract

This paper analyzes the novel The Screeching of Skin (2023) by Amile Kahrović Posavljak from the perspective of the theory of trauma, gender-based violence and war rape and classifies it primarily as a memorial novel or a novel of memorialization literature, with the pretension of turning it into a textual and artistic monument to the victims of suffering and persecution in the collective memory. The novel follows a twenty-year-old girl, a second-year violin student at the Academy of Music, who finds herself in her apartment in the Sarajevo neighborhood of Grbavica at the beginning of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and immediately after the neighborhood was cut off from the rest of Sarajevo, she falls into the hands of Serbian soldiers who subject her to multiple rapes and other forms of violence. The paper establishes a theoretical framework within which the novel will be analyzed, offers an overview of important aspects of trauma theory, an insight into the issue of rape in the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995, after which it focuses on a careful reading and analysis of the content, but also on the literary techniques of portraying trauma used in the novel, such as the narration, the narrator, the shaping of music motifs in the novel and the significant ending of the novel.