Women and War: Seeing Trauma with Theatre

We first meet Matei Vişniec's characters in the play The Body of a Woman as a Battlefield in the Bosnian War (1997) in a sanatorium where they struggle with suffering (Dorra) and witnessing (Kate) the sexual abuse trauma and the genocidal aftermath of ethnic warfare in the former Yugoslavia. Kate is a psychologist who worked with the personnel processing victims from common graves in Bosnia. Dorra has been savagely raped during the conflict and is now pregnant. The play is a series of monologues and conversations between the two and it uses non-linear, non-chronological flashbacks traversing several geographical and ideological locations. This chapter argues that theatre works to give embodied visibility and voice to victims of trauma. Visibility occurs because the stage and the dramatic form externalize the characters' inner conflicts and help the audience visualize and confront the traumatic past and present. The play achieves this by showing how discursive screens unravel because they replicate obsolete professional, social, national, and gender power/knowledge articulations (Foucault 1980: 51-2), and by dramatizing a critique of Western psychiatric approaches to Bosnian women's trauma. Moreover, the play shows how characters remake their identity by assessing their immediate and distant past as well as their participation in the dominant discourses of their cultures and their professions. I argue that it is only when the characters can move into the space of a different discourse that they are ready to literally move out of their confinement and out of static and restrictive identities. We first meet Matei Vişniec's 1 characters from the play The Body of a Woman as a Battlefield in the Bosnian War (1996) in a sanatorium on the German-Austrian border where they struggle with suffering (Dorra) and witnessing (Kate) the sexual abuse trauma and the genocidal aftermath of ethnic warfare in the former Yugoslavia. Kate is an American psychologist who suffers from PTSD after working with the personnel processing victims from common graves in Bosnia. Dorra has been savagely raped during the conflict and is now pregnant with a baby she at first loathes. The play is a series of monologues followed by conversations between the two women and it uses non-linear, non-chronological flashbacks traversing several geographical and ideological locations. The storyline goes back and forth from the present to the time of Dorra's trauma, and even further back to the story of Kate's grandfather who emigrated from Ireland to the United States, the fragmented form echoing the characters' traumatized psyche