Wartime rape in Bosnia

Wartime rape in Bosnia is presented as systematic violence against women and as a rupture that reaches beyond the immediate act: it damages bodily autonomy, the meaning of home, and the possibility of feeling at home in one’s own life. The book sets the survivor’s testimony against a wider silence about women’s bodies, making the act of telling part of how this violence is witnessed rather than allowing it to remain abstract.

Background and Public Response

The narrator recalls returning to New York after her first trip to Bosnia and feeling outraged that, in 1993, an estimated 20,000 to 70,000 women were being raped in the middle of Europe as a systematic tactic of war. What troubled her was not only the scale of the violence but her perception that no one was doing anything to stop it. The figures give the account an unmistakable scale, while her anger directs attention to the failure of response she saw around the violence.

The book frames this outrage within a broader problem of who is allowed to know and speak about women’s bodies. The narrator recalls never hearing the accurate word “clitoris” and describes growing up without language for one area of her body. In her account, that silence left her exposed to shaming language and to the belief that men, whether lovers or physicians, knew more about women’s bodies than women did. This background does not equate ordinary cultural silence with wartime rape; it clarifies why the book treats women’s own testimony as essential knowledge rather than as an incidental supplement to outside accounts.

From Interview to Testimony

The project that gathers women’s experiences began with interviews: the narrator decided to talk with women about their vaginas, and the interviews developed into monologues. She spoke with more than two hundred women, including older and younger women, married and single women, lesbians, academics, actors, corporate professionals, sex workers, and women from several racial and ethnic communities. Many were initially reluctant, but once they began, they had much to say. The range of speakers makes the work a collection of distinct experiences, not a claim that all women share one story.

The Bosnia piece is explicitly identified as based on one woman’s story. The narrator thanks the survivor for sharing it and dedicates the piece to the women of Bosnia, while expressing admiration for the spirit and strength of women she met in the former Yugoslavia. This framing preserves the difference between one woman’s account and the broader community named in the dedication: an individual testimony becomes a means of bearing witness without being presented as a complete record of every survivor’s experience.

The Village Image and the Rupture of Home

The survivor’s monologue begins with a remembered world of green fields, summer dresses, songs, and a hometown imagined as a living village. That pastoral sense of home is then broken by soldiers’ violence. The piece conveys the violation and its consequences through the village metaphor rather than through a detached report: the imagined landscape is damaged, and the speaker’s relation to her body and former home is changed.

The poem describes the aftermath in terms of poison and dying crops and fish, extending the injury beyond a single moment into an image of a whole inhabited world made unlivable. Its recurring return to the vagina as a “live wet water village” keeps the body and the hometown joined in the speaker’s account. The image does not make the violence merely symbolic; it gives the survivor a language in which bodily violation, the destruction of a familiar world, and the loss of safety can be held together.

The ending refuses a simple restoration. The speaker says not to visit, says she lives someplace else now, and admits she does not know where that is. The movement from a named hometown to an unnamed elsewhere makes displacement both physical in implication and unresolved in feeling. Rather than closing with recovery or return, the monologue leaves the survivor in a state of changed belonging whose destination cannot yet be named.

Witness, Silence, and the Work’s Form

The passage’s form matters to its account of wartime rape. The surrounding book presents women’s interviews as material that becomes spoken monologue, and the Bosnia piece carries that method into a testimony shaped around one survivor’s story. The movement from the narrator’s account of public outrage to the survivor’s first-person poetic voice shifts the reader from scale and response to a particular person’s representation of what violence has altered.

The text also places this act of testimony against habits of silence about female anatomy. Elsewhere, the narrator recalls being asked in a workshop to look at her own body with a hand mirror and report what she saw; until then, what she knew had been based on hearsay or invention. That episode is not offered as an equivalent to the survivor’s wartime experience. It underscores a related concern in the book: women’s knowledge of their bodies can be obscured or displaced, while speaking from experience can challenge that absence. In the Bosnia monologue, the survivor’s own language—not a generalized explanation imposed on her—organizes the account of rupture and displacement.

The book’s approach to this subject consequently holds two scales in view. The narrator identifies a vast, systematic crisis and her anger at the lack of action; the monologue gives one woman’s account a carefully marked place within that crisis. Its final uncertainty prevents testimony from being mistaken for a neat resolution: the story makes the violence visible, but it does not claim that telling alone restores the home or safety that was lost.