Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
portant in peoples’ attempt to sustain and create a meaningful explanation
of their present lived experience, by re-texturing a horizon of continuity
between their past and present lives.
Some of the refugees actually confessed to calming down and feeling
better when they thought that they would someday go back to Kosovo,
while others even claimed that they would do anything to return, a conviction
that should be related to the desire to retrieve an unaltered regime
of ontological security. For all of the refugees, one of the most painful
experiences was that of not having adequate explanations for the pain and
sorrow they had to endure. This was again more evident from people coming
from a homogeneous rural environment and with a poor educational
background, who were more dependent on the cultural resources and narratives
provided by Serb public normative logic.
The narrative resources that sustained ethnic unity against a common and
hostile other had been shattered during the Kosovar-Serb’s confrontation
with a radically different configuration of “Serbhood”. The conflict forced
them into an environment where the differences between Serbs from
Serbia and Kosovar-Serbs, and similarities between Kosovar-Serbs and
Kosovar-Albanians grew increasingly more defined. For many refugees, in
fact, the price of displacement had been this passage from a condition of
privileged entitlement to one of inferiority and estrangement. They had
been Serbian in Kosovo, and yet in Serbia, they were Kosovars. Worse
still, their estrangement was not merely an exclusion from a new society,
but from their own nationalized identity. Many Serbs had, in fact, reported
being paradoxically called “Albanians” and being discriminated against
as such by the very people for whom they had striven to preserve the purity
of the cradle of Serbian civilisation, in their resistance against displacement
and violence. Moreover, for most of the Serbs interviewed, the
ordeal of displacement had also included being confronted with a less conservative
and more open and pluralistic vision of Serbian culture, one that
offered their children far more opportunities to express their identities in
different and varied ways, because of the range of gender and other social
roles that were available to them. Many older rural parents reported being
very concerned about the future of their grandchildren in this radically new
environment where they had resettled. Even this was a great source of
anxiety, as the protection of “traditional” social identities can be attributed
to a moralized subject’s need for security and continuity over time.
Part of the anxiety experienced by refugees should be related to the lack of
narratives and discourses that otherwise could potentially sustain a meaningful
interpretation of these experiences, which were disruptive enough to
shatter a previously coherent moral, social and cognitive world. In experi-
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