Literature as Testimony:  
The Poetics of Memory in Poetry
Blerina Rogova Gaxha
University of Prishtina, Faculty of Philology, Department of Albanian Literature, Rr. “George Bush”, 
p.n. 10000 Prishtinë, Kosovo
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9701-0744
blerina.gaxha@gmail.com
This article examines the representation, transmission, and circulation of war 
memory, and the role of personal and collective memory in shaping meanings, 
attitudes, and identities. The discussion will alternate between two aspects of the 
topic: the particular truth claim to truth that witness literature puts forward, and the 
process that leads from catastrophe to creativity, turning the victim into a writing 
witness who can undo forgetting and denial. War memory and its intersection with 
the concept of trauma is explored in the works of authors Xhevdet Bajraj and Ivana 
Bodrožić, renowned poets of contemporary literature in their respective countries. 
Their views provide a geopoetic and cultural background for a theoretical 
discussion of literary and cultural aspects of war memory. The main objective is 
to examine the concept of poetry as testimony and its relevance to contemporary 
literature in Croatia and Kosovo. The theorizing introduction is followed by poems 
by authors, but at the end there is a theoretical offshoot on the topic.
Keywords: testimony literature / poetry / memory / war / trauma / Albanian literature / 
Croatian literature / Bajraj, Xhevdet / Bodrožić, Ivana 
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Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 45.3 (2022)
The skills of Ars Memoria remain magic or occult art characterized by 
the effort to bring memory to life—everyday life—not only for the sake 
of monumental art but for the sake of the direct artistic relationship 
with life as well. Memory preserves a close emotional distance to life 
by envisaging images and dramas as representations. Previously experi-
enced images and events invade our life by mixing referential relations 
between memory and literature where mnemonic art plays a crucial 
role (see Lachmann).
Is the poet the guardian of memory, similar to the mythical dragons? 
Is the poet capable of creating that transcendental music that defends 
existence, and all these thanks to his mnemotechnical power, and mas-
tery of the word? As spirits, daughters, and shadows of Mnemosyne 
and Zeus, the poets initiated their creative acts prompted by Muses. 
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Yet literature would not be possible without the ordinary recollection 
of things, events, people, images, and ideas.
The poetic brain remembers everything from its own life as an indi-
vidual. The return to the self in the form of memory is the expectation 
of letters in postwar society. Memory returns to the realities of a differ-
ent time, thus gaining poetic weight. But what is the memory of war 
in the work of poets who have experienced war? What is their poetic 
testimony, if the witness, as Margalit points out “is one who experi-
ences suffering—one who is not just an observer but also a sufferer” 
(Margalit 150)?
The postwar period and the dreadful past that the people of the 
former Yugoslavia went through during the 1990s led to a return to 
the traumas, which would be exposed artistically in literature and other 
fine arts. Authors in the literature of post-Yugoslav countries captured 
the brutal and surreal realities of living under the constant threat of war 
violence and the harsh postwar realities.
The war and its trauma in literature are forged into the fusion 
between individual and collective, historical, political, and cultural 
experience, but always under the shade of Memories. The memory of 
the victim has produced a literature of trauma as a kind of collective 
and personal debt, turning literature into an intentional mechanism 
of selecting real and imagined evidence in history and life. Traumatic 
memories are always there, and it is always possible to use memory in 
fiction, thus poetic situations provide us with a perfect space for such 
traumatic palimpsests.
Approaching a comparative analysis of Xhevdet Bajraj’s collection 
of poetry Mi cachita del Cielo / Copa ime e qiellit (2015) and Ivana 
Bodrožić’s poetry book Prijelaz za divlje životinje (2012), we will 
explore how war memory is projected in their literature, and how this 
concept intersects with the concept of trauma. In this way, we aim 
to highlight how archived memory becomes literature, as evidence, as 
instant memory, or as a memory of the past.
The great crossroads of time in Kosovar and Croatian society: the 
fall of the socialist state of Yugoslavia in the early 90s, the war that 
followed this collapse, the change of political and ideological systems, 
and the transition that has not yet ended, has produced a range of 
socio-cultural phenomena. Crossroads carried its effect in poetry as 
well. And the poets, such as Bajraj and Bodrožić,1 wrote poetry as a 
1 Selection of the authors was made based on their presence in the national and 
international literary scene, the evaluation by critics, and the numerous literary awards 
with which their works have been evaluated.
Blerina Rogova Gaxha:     Literature as Testimony: The Poetics of Memory in Poetry
147
call to the human being, feeling at the same time the personal pulse 
and the pulse of the ethos of community, the spirit of the collective 
in a process of constant variability, the alienation of human being in 
transition and the transgression in the postwar realities. In this way, 
war memory and trauma in their poetry reveal “much more about our 
own preoccupations with catastrophe, memory, and the grave difficul-
ties we seem to have in negotiating between the internal and external 
worlds” (Roth 90–91).
As would be expected from an art form that has become increasingly 
associated with testimony, poetry seems particularly apt to express the 
wound of psychological trauma. The wound and the voice that comes 
from the past sought in written literature only a few years after the war, 
highlight great themes, such as identity, freedom, guilt, innocence, 
courage, compassion, desire, death, etc. If trauma “is always the story 
of a wound that cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to tell us of 
a reality or truth that is not otherwise available” (Caruth, Unclaimed 
4), the poet’s response to these questions and their personal and imper-
sonal experience during the conflict give war poetry an extra-literary 
significance because of the authorial truth and the subject it deals with. 
Although “literature of trauma is defined by the identity of its author” 
(Tal 17), “the thinking of the archive is, in this sense, not only a think-
ing of memory but a thinking of history” (Caruth, “After the End” 18). 
Thus, the philosophy of memory is largely occupied with elucidating 
the relational interplay between different agencies of mind and emo-
tions, concepts, and percepts.
First of all, it seems like the ultimate voice of memory starts from 
the basic designation and representation of images and deeds toward 
many complex and sublime interpretations. Consequently, mnemonic 
discourse very often takes attributes of an argumentative, persuasive, 
rational, or intuitive discourse. But, in fact, memory seems to survive 
through a discourse that is always emotionally motivated and intel-
lectually employed, being turned into papyrus for new palimpsests. 
It is sanguine; poetic origins might hurt documentary memory to 
the extent that the very identity of memory becomes mutilated, thus 
turning memory into an absent, incidental, and humiliating agency of 
human character. It, therefore, makes sense to insist that a “meaningful 
life is the life of reflective memory, not the life of blind experiences” 
(Margalit 134).
Fortunately, memory has its own transitive biological sensors keen 
on fictional entities. So, exploring commemorative poetic discourse, 
the study focuses on how memory is critically interpreted and reworked 
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by literature—exploring the dynamics of representation, transmission, 
and circulation of memory.
The traumatized self: Interconnecting the present and the 
past
The poetic discourse related to the memory and personal experiences 
of the Croatian war (1991–1995) marks the work of the writer Ivana 
Bodrožić, author of the new generation of contemporary Croatian lit-
erature, who started her literary path with an unconventional confron-
tation with the past. Bodrožić, an award-winning author, represents in 
her literature the traumatic past, the feeling of loss, and being trapped 
within a new world, under significant political and social changes.
Bringing stories that capture the brute ugliness of conflict, Bodrožić 
wrote poetry in which the past flows as a memory, as individual trauma 
and drama related to her present. In her volume of poetry Prijelaz za 
divlje životinje (Overpass for Wild Animals), the lyrical subject is already 
an adult girl, a woman. And although the drama of life is growing, the 
author does not accuse, nor proclaim, only announces human beings in 
all their complexity. Memory thus becomes a compelling space or even 
a good playground for poetic life meanings, as it is shown in the poem 
“Kod nas je drum široka cesta” (Our Road Is a Wide Road):
But I often think about that street
About a moment in the distant past
About someone’s life that has stopped
About that thin kid on the road
About my father who was not guilty
And a car that didn’t brake in time
And that nothing more could be done.
What is the use of that memory
When there is nothing left
Not a child
No road
Not a car
Not a father
Not a house
Not a grandpa
We had the most beautiful roses in Zrinjska
No one plants them in front of the house anymore.
(Bodrožić 37; trans. Fadil Bajraj)
Blerina Rogova Gaxha:     Literature as Testimony: The Poetics of Memory in Poetry
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The lyrical subject gently asks “what is the use of that memory,” as she 
remembers the most beautiful rose garden on Zrinjska Street, the one 
that no one plants anymore—to emphasize here that one of the most 
important characteristics of memory is its ability to establish connec-
tions. And so does the lyrical subject who left without loved ones: with-
out her father killed in the war, without her childhood house, without 
her grandfather, and without her former self. It is an exciting attempt 
to recreate the decomposed life and the constant fear of its disintegra-
tion. Father, grandfather, and home are protagonists of a life that exists 
no more. The poet’s memories are bitter, like life stories dipping the 
pen into its wormwood juice:  “We had the most beautiful roses in 
Zrinjska / No one plants them in front of the house anymore.” (37) Far 
from static or immutable, memory is porous and in constant flux, as 
it is actively engaged in a network of continuous negotiations, connec-
tions, and interactions between the past, the present, and the future. In 
that regard, memory is not just about the past; it is equally, if not more 
so, about the present and the future and how they all interconnect 
with each other. As Sigmund Freud explains, “memories work retro-
spectively, anticipatorily or simultaneously as the remembered event” 
(Freud 45–46).
In the following poem “Imam prijelaz za divlje životinje” (I Have 
the Overpass for Wild Animals) the author claims that she already 
found the overpass through the wild animals, indicating that the 
enemy is now within her, and this is the kind of enemy she will never 
be able to defeat:
I have a wildlife crossing
It goes from the very beginning of the spine
Then all the way, all the way down.
I have a wildlife crossing,
But I am afraid,
They descend to the city. (Bodrožić 41; trans. Fadil Bajraj) 
The author’s meditation on the past, grief and ugly memories allow us 
to feel her experience in the war, her feelings, and her mood in post-
war society. Perhaps, this is the lesson that love and the poetic debt of 
testimony combine psyche within mnemonic spaces—and Bodrožić’s 
memory has ethical implications because “it is characterized by its 
‘ability’ to produce empathy and social responsibility” (Landsberg 9). 
The poet combines longing and pain to seduce and surprise the reader 
with her confession to poetically remind us that “war experiences can 
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fundamentally change one’s sense of self or identity” (Hunt 10). The 
traumatic experience of war, therefore is transformed from a real tes-
timony into a poetic situation that offers us a perfect space for the pa-
limpsest of traumatic memory: “[T]he thought of death is so far away / 
shady balconies remind me of Vukovar […] I guess that is how paradise 
smells.” (Bodrožić 21)
The book is connected to the system like a mosaic of parts of the 
hero’s life. It starts with the Dječje pjesme  (Children’s Poems), a cycle 
inspired by the experience of motherhood. In the next cycle Mamine 
pjesme  (Mom’s Poems), the theme changes, and threatening signals 
multiply. Tatine pjesme  (Father’s Poems) function almost as penetrat-
ing holes to the point where the pain resides. Then follows the cycle 
Prijelaz za divlje životinje (Overpass for Wild Animals) in which the 
lyrical subject becomes more fragile. She talks about the attempts to 
build a shelter in the world, with the help of others. The threat that 
is felt throughout the book, reaches its peak in the last cycle Skriveni 
fajl (Hidden File). The murdered world is incorrigible. At the entrance 
of the apartment, in the intimate world, put the security doors, the 
terrorized speaker claims: “I am afraid, the enemy is already inside / 
we buy doors / Anti-burglary / but I am afraid the enemy is already 
inside.” (Bodrožić 73) Therefore, it is not just the story of what hap-
pened in the past, “but the current imprint of that pain, horror, and 
fear living inside [the individual]” (van der Kolk).
Prijelaz za divlje životinje is a poetic confession of the lyrical subject, 
in its solitude, deep darkness of the soul, a confession of the subject 
who is stuck in a state of terror and fear. A story of sadness and other 
painful emotions of life in war and postwar society. Bodrožić’s poetry 
comes as an example of the phenomenon when the story of personal 
life experience becomes a measure of the mood or mental and spiritual 
condition of a society, of those people who have suffered from the war 
and its effects. Therefore, her poetry becomes a literature of remember-
ing. At least in the referred book, the individual memory is deeply in 
function, constantly connecting the present with the past. “The occu-
pation with first-person narrators is thus always an occupation with the 
literary representation of individual remembering.” (Erll 2) Through 
individual memory, the book narrates in a deeply lyrical way the shock 
of a human being in dark times, who tries, but finds it hard to con-
tinue, because of the haunting of the past.
As mimetic theories insist, “traumatic events cannot be absorbed 
or represented, and as such the victim is fated to repeat or act it out 
in various ways” (Bell 9). Memories of her past about the war in 
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Croatia will become a topic to which Bodrožić will return in one way 
or another, both in poetry and prose. Through memory, as a portal to 
the past, the author will take us to the world that the war has wiped 
out or to the world that the war has made cruel. As a writer, narrat-
ing I, she will become “self-erasing inscriptions of history. Traumatic 
memory thus totters between remembrance and erasure, producing a 
history that is, in its very events, a kind of inscription of the past; but 
also a history constituted by the erasure of its traces” (Caruth, “After 
the End” 20).
The book begins with the poem “Sve je spremno za Tvoj dolazak” 
(Everything is Ready for Your Arrival) which raises parallels between 
the three worlds, the three generations—of herself, the parents, and the 
child that is expected to come to life:
Everything is ready for your arrival
The war is over
My mom once stole for me
Black plush leggings in Nami
It takes war for that, children without a father. (Bodrožić 9; trans. Fadil Bajraj)
Upward verses reveal the signs of personal memory, spontaneously 
merging the present with the feeling of motherhood and the beautiful 
with the sad memories of the past. They stand out for the nostalgic tone 
of a life that is no more, and show the individual sorrowful memories 
under the bizarreness of war, as they do show the individual who wants 
to regenerate life force. The author does so through the interconnec-
tion of the present with the past, across the three generations: oneself, 
parents, and child.
The inner testimony of the war: Suspending forgetfulness
The Kosovo-born poet Xhevdet Bajraj is the cult author of the postwar 
Kosovo literary scene, a recipient of numerous awards, and his work 
was translated into multiple languages. Bajraj explores war and peace, 
innocence, and grief, composing a humbling meditation on human 
existence. He is the poet of the crucified Albanian life, radical changes, 
and transitional democracy, the consequences of which threaten his 
life and peace, and provokes revolt. He is a modern-day emigrant who 
was forced to flee his homeland during the 1998–1999 war in Kosovo, 
seeking political asylum in Mexico.
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While living in Mexico City, his poetry took a different path. His 
country, the political turmoil, the war, and the memory of the war 
became his poetic topos. The grieving tone of the poetic imagination 
that has touched many writers in the region is permanent in his post-
war poetry. That grieving tone is all over the bilingual poetry collection 
in Albanian and Spanish Copa ime qiellit / Mi Cachito de Cielo (My 
Piece of Heaven), whose core is the concept of home, exile, memories, 
and war trauma.
In spite of the fact that fiction and poetry are not designed to offer 
factual testimony, “they can tell us what it means to be traumatized” 
(Hunt 171), and Bajraj chose to visualise war victims and to transfer 
his war trauma into poetry. The alliance between historical perception 
and writing thus merge into poetic discourse, as evidence of life under 
mental, physical, and spiritual terror.
The poet strives to offer the reader the spirit of a particular place 
and of a particular time period. The poem “Gjellë shqiptare” (Albanian 
Food) is one of his emblematic poems which explicitly refers to the 
recent war in Kosovo. This narrative poem about war crimes is com-
plementary because it shows the unchanged essence of war: crime. It 
strikes the reader with poetic brutality in figuratively presenting the 
crimes committed against Albanian civilians:
Enemy soldiers in Kosovo
Had rich Albanian menu
In the morning
Milk from torn mothers’ breasts
And newborn babies boiled in the fires of the homes that were burning
Served with black eyes, blue eyes or brown eyes
And a bottle of boiling tears.
Some were content only with the roasted head
At lunch
Broken hearts of all ages
Cooked in the juice of bones
And back meat roasted in live coal
Accompanied with children’s fried brains
And a salad of shouts sprinkled with vinegar of horror
And one and half liter of raped girls’ blood
Some were content only with the roasted head
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At dinner
Black and white lungs
Here and there a kidney
Child meat mixed with the blood of mothers
Some old man’s flesh roasted on a spit
Salted with the salt out of the tears. (Bajraj 75; trans. Fadil Bajraj)
This bizarre scene of war reveals worlds that sleep in memory and as 
memory suddenly wake up. The poet projects the collective memory 
of war events as life, as reminiscence, and as the permanent presence of 
evil. Thus, he researches the collective memory of the war and with im-
ages and words reconstructs in a bizarre way the fate of Albanian fami-
lies. The evil, the demonic, inhabits this past, while the poet’s imagina-
tion in this ‘reconstruction’ of the murder of the innocent is not just an 
attempt to bring back the memories of the crimes committed against 
Albanians—so it is not an exploration of memory, as much as it is part 
of the meaning of the expression “search for the truth” (Deleuze 3). So, 
in this spirit, Bajraj’s memory, or the play within memory, is read as the 
present and the permanent future of the demoniac.
The same ideas of the clash of the innocent with the sinner, Bajraj 
conveys in the poem “Djali i kishte gjashtë vjet, vajza tetë dhe qanin” 
(The Boy Was Six Years Old, the Girl Eight and They Cried). The story 
of Albanian refugees who were forced to flee Kosovo is engraved as an 
evocative photograph:
The father was forcibly pulled out of the car
One held an automatic rifle like the beast that hardly can be controlled
Others hit him rubber truncheons of hell
The woman took the children in her lap and cried
the boy was six years old, the girl eight
they cried out to the dome of heaven
there is no God for them, no mercy for them
the children continuously looked at the father and at the mother.
(Bajraj 62; trans. Fadil Bajraj)
In this scene where the executioners are presented on one side and the 
victims on the other, we have a retold, heard life story, which with its 
testimony serves the memory of the war as a monument of the op-
pressed life of the individual under the repression of the war. This poem 
narrates/remembers as a logical counterweight to forgetfulness—not to 
be forgotten! Individual memory here is redoubled and combined with 
collective memory, “as two complex forms of memory, which have 
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unlimited combinatorial possibilities” (Rrahmani 134). The poet sees 
the story in his subjectivity and turns it into literature, as poetic evi-
dence of the past.
Verses of the following strophe take us to the biblical finale of the 
sacrifice or to an instinctive sacrifice because the event itself is the event 
of sacrifice, of human solidarity, or of the instinctive protection of the 
parent, the most beloved human being. The author highlights, through 
childhood, the activation of the ethical and biological principle, dormant 
or suffocated by violence, the nerve of reacting in an extreme situation:
Then the boy opened the gate and ran
through his murdered childhood he fell upon his father
the black sticks remained in the air like outstreched brenches of death
casual passers-by began to approach slowly.
(Bajraj 62; trans. Fadil Bajraj)
A shocking sight of a child being sacrificed throwing himself upon the 
victimized father, in which the biological principle of protecting the in-
nocent and weak man is activated, where the child protects the father.
Bajraj within this poem creates a film spot that has the plot, the back-
ground, the scenography, the props, the characters, and the principle 
of the archetypal sense of good, innocent (children), and evil (murder-
ous cops), with a prologue that defends innocence of the victim and an 
epilogue depicting the fragile world of innocence—tears:
the cops spat and ran away swearing in their language
the boy was six years old, the girl eight
their mother was twenty-eight years old and they all wept.
(Bajraj 62; trans. Fadil Bajraj)
The poem is distinguished by the spirit of silent revolt, because as 
Camus affirms “every revolt is nostalgia for innocence and a call for 
being” (Camus 111), and the poet through the secret code of naked 
violence seeks not to correct the world, as something impossible, but 
to perpetuate it in poetry, and again, not to be amnesia. Bajraj through 
his art ironizes the idea of closing his eyes (not to see the crime) and 
opening a secret gate, that of childhood through which the character 
flies away in the past, and immediately stays here, in the event. A child 
that throws himself over the father to protect him with the fragile force 
of innocence from violence, is the poetic icon of Bajraj.
Despite the literary memorization of war atrocities, it does not want 
to be a literature of candles and graves, nor does it have the status of 
Blerina Rogova Gaxha:     Literature as Testimony: The Poetics of Memory in Poetry
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mere commemorative literature. The poet relies on the dark era of the 
past to present a poetic and cultural background on which he will raise 
the poetry of protest and socio-political criticism in Kosovo society in 
transition. Bajraj sings as an individual whose public sphere is hurt, 
and who in the poems in which he deals with the war and postwar 
situation in Kosovo, ironizes both the individual misfortune and the 
misfortune of the community through a silent rebellion. The national 
drama has made that “the literary and artistic production in these areas 
(Southeast Europe—my remark) involved a negotiation of tensions 
between nationalism and regionalism, metropolitan influences and 
local patriotism” (Cornis-Pope and Neubauer 5). Therefore, the poet 
draws the faces of wars, democracies and ideological nonsense, the faces 
of the wicked and the innocent and finds himself confronted with these 
strong narratives.
On memory–fiction poetic interplay
Memory is a special poetic space that constitutes a poetic area as a phe-
nomenon and as a tool. Not coincidentally, memory is seen as a human 
skill that oscillates between imagination and intellect. Sometimes even 
writing itself is identified with memory, as one of the ways of its exis-
tence and appearance (Jackson 33). Muses, the daughters of Zeus and 
Mnemosyne, present “the daughters of the sovereign principle of cre-
ation and memory” (33). This myth also represents an interpretation 
of the function of memory. Memory is the freedom of the past, states 
Blanchot, while “to write is to enter into the affirmation of the solitude 
in which fascination threatens. It is to surrender to the risk of time’s 
absence, where eternal starting over reigns” (Blanchot 33).
But, although memory is one of the procedural and thematic 
denominators in the above-mentioned books of Bajraj and Bodrožić, 
‘searching in the past’ is not merely an attempt to bring back memories, 
but rather responds to the meaning of the expression ‘the search for 
truth,’ to research in yesterday to understand today.
Individual memory is usually of psychological dimensions and in 
literature emerges projected as a personal entity. It often excludes the 
collective and historical memory in literature and life. But the excep-
tions and meeting points of these forms of memory are very complex 
and with unlimited combinatorial possibilities. Archived and unar-
chived memory become literature, as a document, evidence, a momen-
tary memory, or a memory of the past (see Rrahmani).
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It seems to Bajraj that the narrative of the past and the fictional-
ization of its fragments is an attempt to preserve it, to bring it back 
through memory, not to forget. A response to forgetfulness, so what 
happened to him, and his country does not become amnesia but turns 
into poetry. It is mainly characterized by the processing of the traumatic 
experience through visual images to evoke in the reader a sense of the 
horrors of war. Bajraj is one of those poets whose life was changed by 
the war, forcing him into exile. Such an experience leaves deep (trau-
matic) traces and marks him as a witness to war terrors because after 
all, he is a war survivor, and what Freud includes as influencing trau-
matic neuroses from the experience of war “is not the reaction to any 
horrible event but, rather, the peculiar and perplexing experience of 
survival” (Caruth, Unclaimed 60). Thus Bajraj tries to place the reader 
in the middle of war situations through extensive use of images, details, 
condensed and uncompromising language, to show the ugly face of war 
and to remind us how shocking, painful, and terrifying it can be.
Meanwhile, in Bodrožić, individual memory is of psychological 
dimensions and in poetry emerges projected as a personal entity. It 
seems that her intention is to understand the essence of the past and its 
decomposition, to understand today’s reality as a cause-and-effect. The 
alienation of the individual also brings the authors closer and makes 
them seek to find the thread in the lost things, as a way to summarize 
the parts of the unit in an inseparable identity, as an experiential sub-
ject, but also as a form of consciousness (Bodrožić), or to foster silent 
resistance to political authoritarianism, as one of the characteristics of 
Bajraj’s poetry.
The literature of both authors can be read as a monument to the 
abused life of the individual by a repressive system. Their poetry is in 
many cases structured as a living proof of life in representative places, 
which comes not only as evidence of the horrors of war but also as 
strong evidence of the postwar transition. This poetry narrates about 
the oppressed human being and their survival in a different new world. 
Bajraj and Bodrožić are poets who do not forget and feel it as part of 
their poetic duty to serve the memory with their poetic testimony.
Memoirs formed by traumatic experiences “are inconceivable and 
hardly identifiable” (Whitehead 4). Recreating, as well as describing, 
experienced events and emotions is complicated. To transmit experi-
enced emotions and feelings in fiction writers use fictive techniques 
such as figurative language and a deep point of view, immersing the 
reader into the story—whether they have lived through the traumatic 
events or not, carrying within themselves a personal purpose to tell the 
Blerina Rogova Gaxha:     Literature as Testimony: The Poetics of Memory in Poetry
157
story, but that sometimes goes beyond it, Bajraj fully fulfills the condi-
tions of being a moral witness, because the moral witness “is one who 
experiences suffering” (Margalit 150).
Given the sensitive status of memory for traumatic conditions, the 
question can not be avoided: “How do we recognize a memory and not 
confuse it with a fiction? How can we know that a memory is genu-
ine and has been neither dreamed nor fantasized, but corresponds to 
some real historical event, however personal?” (Ender 91) Although the 
genre of the book is poetry, there are no clear boundaries between what 
is poetic and what is historical. The aesthetics of the text owes much 
to a personal experience, which refuses to remain under the rubble of 
oblivion, still and all “because so much of the literary material is overtly 
and emphatically autobiographical, it can profitably be explored as a 
series of case histories of a variety of operations of human memory” 
(Nalbantian 3).
We have here the sensitive, historical touch of moral and spiritual 
debt which is embodied as a memory and as a mission. More to Bajraj, 
but also to Bodrožić, the aim is to find the language of testimony 
within the genre of poetry. In fact, “the permanent threat of mélange 
recollection and imagination resulting by turning the memory into an 
image, hurts the ambition for loyalty as an embodiment of the verita-
tive function of memory” (Ricoeur 7). However, the fact that this can 
happen does not mean that the nature of memory is unnatural. This is 
a debt to the poetics of human thinking turned in favor of the honesty 
of memory. Memory continues to be a confirmation of who we are 
and what we want to be. However, as Ricoeur asserts, “we do not have 
anything better than memory to ensure that something has happened 
before we have founded our souvenirs” (7).
The portrayal of the events of the war in Croatia and Kosovo, as well 
as the literary representation of the postwar atmosphere, is an autho-
rial literary project to memorize an apocalyptic era—to give voice to a 
‘speechless horror’. The poems of the presented books poetically por-
tray a terrible past and a fragile present, because literature responds to 
itself and deals with that truth which is only psychological and spiritual 
truth, without excluding poetic debt—a cultural-historical image shel-
tered into the permanent umbrella of memory.
PKn, letnik 45, št. 3, Ljubljana, november 2022
158
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Literatura kot pričevanje: poetika spomina v 
poeziji
Ključne besede: pričevanjska literatura / poezija / spomin / vojna / travma / albanska 
književnost / hrvaška književnost / Bajraj, Xhevdet / Bodrožić, Ivana 
Članek preučuje reprezentacijo, prenos in kroženje vojnega spomina ter vlogo 
osebnega in kolektivnega spomina pri oblikovanju pomenov, odnosov in iden-
titet. Razprava se bo gibala med dvema vidikoma teme, in sicer med posebno 
zahtevo po resnici, značilni za pričevanjsko literaturo, in procesom, ki vodi 
od katastrofe do ustvarjalnosti in žrtev spreminja v pričo, ki lahko s pisanjem 
odpravi pozabo in zanikanje. Spomin na vojno in njegovo presečišče s kon-
ceptom travme raziskujeta avtorja Xhevdet Bajraj in Ivana Bodrožić, priznana 
pesnika v sodobni literaturi svojih držav. Njuni pogledi predstavljajo geopoe-
tično in kulturno ozadje za teoretično razpravo o literarnih in kulturnih vidi-
kih spomina na vojno. Glavni cilj je preučiti koncept poezije kot pričevanja in 
njegov pomen za sodobno literaturo na Hrvaškem in na Kosovu. Teoretskemu 
uvodu sledijo pesmi avtorjev, na koncu pa še teoretska obravnava tematike.
1.01 Izvirni znanstveni članek / Original scientific article
UDK0  82.091-94:355.01 
821.18.09Bajraj X. 
821.163.42.09Bodrožić I.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3986/pkn.v45.i3.09