How a Female Author Perceives Her Homeland: Articulating the Female Voice in the Poetry of Ferida Duraković

Abstract

This paper analyses poetry of the contemporary Bosnian and Herzegovinian poetess Ferida Duraković. The author focuses on the manners in which the articulation of female voice and female experience are used to depict home, homeland, nation, following the tragic outcomes of war devastation, ethnic centrism. Ferida Duraković's poetry opens the question of the role of a woman, poetess, in time of political and ideological turmoil in contemporary Bosnian and Herzegovinian context. Establishing genealogy through the story of the mother is the place from which the lyrical subject articulates the female experience as a place of resistance to the heroic narrative. The lyric subject is a dissident one in the represented political and social context. She offers feminine resistance to any manner of submission, thus criticising the contemporary society.