From Bosnia to Australia

On the mobility of pre/post definitions

Featured in

  • Published 20200804
  • ISBN: 978-1-922212-50-4
  • Extent: 304pp
  • Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

IT IS DISTURBING and painful to be told that the world that formed you, held you, has now ceased to exist – nonetheless, this experience is not unusual. You may have questioned this world, disapproved of it, held it in contempt – and it is better if you did. Nonetheless, this world is all you knew.

In Berlin last September – a city I found myself living in, like many Australians in their mid-to-late twenties, rather haphazardly – I attended a two-day seminar on trauma. That I could afford to attend such a seminar says much about my milieu and my lifestyle; something else I suspect is ending, or has ended. The seminar considered trauma as a temporality: is trauma genetically transmitted, can there be a ‘pre’-trauma as much as there is a post-trauma? If so, is this the moment in which we find ourselves?

Already a subscriber? Sign in here

If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au

Share article

About the author

Sanja Grozdanic

Sanja Grozdanic is a writer, recently published in Tank Magazine, SSENSE and The Monthly. She is the co-founding editor of KRASS Press.

More from this edition

Black Russian

GR OnlineIn Australia’s COVID-19 winter of 2020, Melissa Lucashenko (in Brisbane) spoke via the internet with Natasha Cica (in Tasmania), co-editor of Griffith Review 69: The...

Stranger than the dreams of Ptolemy

Essay Although Europeans had believed in the symmetry of the two hemispheres for nearly two centuries, they silently forgot the idea. They tolerantly accepted that...

In the garden of ideas

Picture Gallery Emily Floyd, Owl of Minerva (2019)  Owl: cast aluminium, two-part epoxy paint; lantern: cast and fabricated aluminium, lighting insert 150 x 130.65 x 99.7 cm Photo: Jacqui...

Stay up to date with the latest, news, articles and special offers from Griffith Review.