Blood & Honey:: The Secret Herstory- Balkan Women War Crimes and War Survivors

These first-person stories are raw, disembodied whisperings of the female holocaust, filled with symbols and icons that define trauma. A woman’s trauma is the wounding that cannot be forgotten, indelibly written upon her DNA and that of her children. The field of psychology recognizes herstory as a mode of representing and sharing intergenerational trauma and its psychological consequences, such as Post Traumatic Stress. Blood and Honey contains pages of storied instructions from the Bosnian women with whom I have worked since 1999. While the stories do not follow the typical masculine epic plot, the written pages are the women’s individual secrets, their herstories. They provide intimacy and a sudden knowing as opposed to understanding, an epiphany rather than a simple recognition of fact. What will be pages of tears at moments will become joy, and sometimes laughter, as we foray into herstories.