Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
On a darker note, many of the immigrants were forced to pass through the
region, and were therefore not allowed to reach their families in other
countries. As a result of this, the refugees’ integration in the Lecco and
Cavanese societies were not always due to the freedom of opportunity
offered them, but because of bureaucratic constraints, and the limitations
on free circulation imposed by the Treaty of Schengen.
The interpreter, whose role was only essential during the Ivrea interviews,
was a helpful participant, and was also respectful of the final aim of the
project. His was primarily a technical function, but he also acted as a guide
to the interviewer and, it seems, did his best to avoid distorting the
accounts or introducing ideas of his own, despite his direct involvement as
a relative of some of the subjects.
Generally speaking, language did not create a problem of comprehension
between interviewer and interviewees. The interpreter was always available
and only those who were completely unable to converse in Italian
made use of him. The goals for which we were gathering the refugees’
accounts were stated before each interview, but the fact that these interviews
were aimed at enlarging an archive to be set up in Kosovo, and that
future readers and listeners would be primarily Kosovars, did not prompt
the interviewees to rely on their mother-tongue. There might, of course,
have been many reasons for this: Undoubtedly, in the case of many interviews
with a higher “political” content and shaped by an attempt to interpret
past or present historical facts, using Italian was their means of telling
me, my country, and the West, what had happened to Kosovo, through me
as interviewer. Another reason for this might have been that for many
younger people, the Italian language was closer to their daily experience.
Colloquial terminology and idiomatic expressions in Italian, and even in
local dialects, emerged in such a way that even in an account referring to
the past or to historical happenings, the interviewees’ language was always
rooted in their new existence.
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