Embodied Memory and Trauma: Recovering from Rape in Jasmila Zbanic's "Grbavica"

As the sequence continues, Zbanic questions the limits of speech in expressing the trauma associated with rape and physical violence. As the therapist (notably seated in the front of the room at a higher position than the girls on the floor to suggest her separation from the group of victims) asks the second woman how she feels, Mirha, a younger woman than either of the two speaking, interjects and tells her to “cut the crap.” Mirha disdainfully asks the therapist to tell the women if the center has money or jobs available, striking down the therapist’s methods of helping women handle their tragedies. As the therapist explains that “some women need to share their feelings”, she is shot at a low angle from the floor. This distance from the other women’s suffering makes her seem out of touch with the reality of trauma, and the laughter of the first woman during this speech further reinforces the absurdity of asking women to express these grotesque memories verbally. At the end of her speech, Mirha angrily tells the therapist that “she’s taken care of.” In essence, because the therapist has not been affected by the same violation as the women at the center, Mirha recognizes that she cannot fully comprehend the “memory-knowledge” that plagues them. As Mirha storms out, the room bursts into laughter to suggest how absurd it is that they could verbalize something that exists so deep below the level of language.

Husanovic sees Zbanic’s films (including Grbavica) as part of a “collective endeavor that renders art into a transformative model of communication and engages the subject in dialogue and reflection on the traumatic contents of Bosnian realities” (106). She believes that women’s art imbues female victims with a power of speech that allows for the formation of a community of victims. This community develops a “new symbolic framework for the negotiation between silence and speech” that reduces marginalization at the hands of the metanarrative (Husanovic 109).

If we consider Zbanic’s film to exist as part of a larger women’s art with this goal, it becomes clear that in Grbavica, art has the ultimate power to promote recovery from a traumatic past. Zbanic hints at this solution in the final sequence at the woman’s center, which takes place following Esma’s revelation to Sara.

The scene opens with a medium close-up of a woman singing. Accompanying her song is the loud patter of rain. After thirty seconds, the camera begins a slow motion reminiscent of the film’s opening sequence. This time, however, the camera focuses on individuals from the beginning of its motion rather than providing a sweeping view of the group. In fact, because of the camera’s pauses on individual women, the scene’s length here is tripled from the initial scene (Koebel). Yet precisely because of this excruciatingly slow motion, it becomes clear that despite any superficial differences in their appearance, all of the women are unified by their meditative reactions to the singer’s melody. They have the same meditative (and somewhat distant) gaze and have similar posture and body language. This stands in stark contrast to the second scene at the women’s center, where the women’s gazes are distant and dejected.

At this point in the film (as opposed to the opening scene), the viewers now fully understand what brings the women to the center and can better intuit how music seems to affect these women on a more primitive level, helping them deal with their pasts. As the camera gets closer to Esma, the song’s lyrics reveal hope for the future: “When our tears melt away/Even the desert can bloom/In a vision of paradise…”. This promise of recovery (and to some extent, redemption) is only accessible through art and song, as both this scene and the opening scene make evident.

When the camera finally lands on Esma, she is once again distinctly separate from the other women. Rather than gazing directly at the camera, Esma now averts her gaze as she cries. Following a cut to an extended scene with Sara, the camera cuts back to Esma. It is clear that the song has elicited a response from her, as she now attempts to tell her story.

Koelber sees Esma’s verbalization of her personal horror as her way of seizing some agency and becoming a “speaking subject.” This reading ignores, however, that it was only through both a physical struggle with Sara and the power of the music at the beginning of the scene that Esma could access her tragedy in such a way that it could be verbalized. This reading also ignores the extent to which Esma can adequately communicate her tragedy. Her words in this scene are about the birth of her daughter and how it proved to be a crucial step away from an intense depression. She does not, however, confront her memories of the rapes in any way except to briefly mention them as they connect to Sara. Additionally, while Esma’s words are far more comprehensible than those of the women in the second women’s center sequence, they still lack the clear narrative pattern expected when “memory-knowledge” is transformed into “memory.” To a certain extent, Esma is still troubled by her memories and cannot fully take agency through her speech.

The ultimate redemptive moment in the film comes at its end. As Sara boards the bus for her school field trip, we see mother and daughter separated by physical distance. As the bus travels away, the class begins to sing “Sarajevo, my love.” Sara is pictured in the rear window of the school bus when she raises a hand to her mother and presses it against the window. The song has taken her away from the trauma brought about by hearing the truth about her father. The music has reunited mother and daughter as women in “Bosnia, my wounded homeland, land of my ancestors.

According to Tanya Horeck, the way rape is represented has larger suggestions “about the relationship between film and audience, and reality and representation” (105). By choosing not to use flashbacks, Grbavica creates a distance between the viewer and the film that ensures the spectator is actively interpreting the cinematic events. This focus on the present effectively demonstrates the lasting impact that trauma has on a subject without sensationalizing rape. The result is a meditation on the singular nature of embodied memory that reinforces the failure of language to effectively represent trauma.

Culbertson, Roberta. “Embodied Memory, Transcendence, and Telling: Recounting Trauma, Re-Establishing the Self.” New Literary History 26.1 (1995): 169-195.

Elsaesser, Thomas. “Postmodernism as mourning work.” Screen 42.2 (2001): 193-201.

Grbavica. Written and directed by Jasmila Zbanic. 2005. Film.

Horeck, Tanya. Public Rape: Representing Violation in Fiction and Film. London: Routledge, 2004.

Husanovic, Jasmina. “The Politics of Gender, Witnessing, Postcoloniality and Trauma: Bosnian Feminist Trajectories.” Feminist Theory 10.1 (2009): 99-120.

Koebel, Caroline. “Torture, maternity, and truth in Jasmila Zbanic’s Grbavica: Land of My Dreams.” Jump Cut 51 (2009): n. pag. Web. 13 Dec. 2009. .

Turim, Maureen. “The trauma of history: flashbacks upon flashbacks.” Screen 42.2 (2001): 205-210. Print.