Broken Records

Abstract

Broken Records combines lyric and narrative forms in order to counter persistent myths about former Yugoslavia and its violent break-up, and to complicate our standard vision of the traumatized Other. The text is preoccupied with the rarely asked question: when a country is gearing up for war, how do we explain why some courageous members of the population stay immune to the politicians’ manipulative appeals to their ethnic identity and refuse to die or kill for the cause at hand? A number of pieces in the book focus the lens on family lore and history related to World War Two, which in Yugoslavia was a complex war with one facet comprising the anti-Nazi resistance, another a related civil war, a popular uprising, and a revolution.

The book is based on witnessing and recollection, with a strong realization about the unreliability and the fragmented nature of memory that can most appropriately be represented through a variety of literary forms. The speaker cautiously expresses her hope that art can give meaning even to gaps in the collective and personal memory.

The title Broken Records is a play on words: on the one hand, it encapsulates the idea that almost any written record about the past is inevitably broken, incomplete, and perhaps even unreliable, and on the other had it refers to the motif of music that reoccurs in the text. Pop culture references also serve as signposts of the narrator’s diasporic identity.