Writing After Srebrenica: The Grammar of Grief and the Ethics of Testimonial Representation

This paper examines testimonial literature emerging from the Srebrenica genocide as a crucial site of ethical witnessing, moral resistance and memory-making. Drawing on survivor-authored memoirs and essays, it explores how trauma is transformed into language through a grammar of grief: a fragmented, hesitant mode of expression that articulates loss and survival without resolving suffering into narrative closure. Situating these texts within debates on testimony, memory and post-atrocity ethics, the paper shows how narration functions not only as personal survival but also as intervention in contested fields of historical truth and collective remembrance. Testimonial literature after Srebrenica operates in a liminal space between silence and speech, fact and affect, individual experience and collective responsibility. Here, memory becomes an ongoing ethical practice rather than a finished account of the past. By foregrounding survivor voices, the paper highlights their agency in shaping how Srebrenica is remembered across generations and argues that writing after Srebrenica constitutes moral resistance against denial and erasure.