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