Voices of Jasmina Musabegović

Abstract

This work presents and briefly analyzes a novel by Jasmina Musabegović, Žene, glasovi (Women, voices), set in a multiple person narrative mode, speaking of the latest war at different areas and cities, but, almost exclusively from a woman’s perspective. The structural complexity of the novel is realized through a constant shift of narrative persons and positions, with the shift from ‘I’ to ‘He/She’ form, with the annotation that the third person narration is always subjective. Each testimony is a scream of a crime witness, whereas all the different voices from different time periods collectively lead the author out of the narrative form and into an essayistic reflection of the essence of crime. This novel is the final work in a trilogy of Skretnice and Most, which encompasses the history of the Malić family from WW II to the aggression onto Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s. The focal topic of the novel is a reconsideration of the sense of art in times of war, and the impossibility of the human to rest silent, though, over the committed crimes being the case.