Places of Pain

For displaced persons, memory and identity is performed, (re)constructed, and (re)negotiated daily. Forced displacement radically reshapes identity, from successful hybridization to feelings of permanent misplacement. This compelling and intimate description about places of pain and (be)longing that were lost during the 1992 - 95 war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, as well as the survivors' new places of resettlement in Australia, Europe and North America, serves as a powerful reminder that the constant interplay between place, memory and identity is always complicated - but even more so when place has been vandalized, divided up, butchered, scarred. These places of humiliation and suffering are also places of desire, with survivors determined to keep alive their lost local places in the far corners of the globe.