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?

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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.

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