The poetry of Goli Otok

The largest facility in a network of prisons and labour camps established in Yugoslavia after the Cominform Resolution of 1948, Goli otok has inspired a vast corpus of prose texts, mostly composed by former inmates and published several decades after the events took place. Partly for this reason and partly because of a narrow, strictly documentary understanding of testimony, scholars have focused their attention on oral testimonies, memoirs, autobiographies, short stories, and novels to gain a deeper understanding of the functioning of state repression and the prisoners’ experiences of Goli otok. And yet, poetry was not only a part of life in the camp; for its inmates, it was a vital means of making sense of their experience – both during and after imprisonment. With that in mind, this article will offer an overview of the poetry of Goli otok as a phenomenon in its own right and outline the recurrent motifs, themes, and techniques in the works of former prisoners, focusing in particular on the poems of Ante Zemljar, Veles Perić, Ženi Lebl, and Jovan Stanojev.