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 />
sign of absence, and what is repressed is neither the event nor the memory<br />
nor even single traces, but the very connection between memories<br />
and traces. From this perspective, our task as researchers can be defined<br />
in the following way: “dissocier les liaisons instituées”, to break institutionalized<br />
links in order to establish “des liaisons dangereuses”. In other<br />
terms, we cannot but look when trying to understand connections<br />
between silence and mentions, oblivion and memory, for relationship<br />
between traces or between them and their absences, and we must dare to<br />
find interpretations which run the risk of creating new associations<br />
(Passerini, forthcoming 2002).<br />
I have deleted all the tape about it… I cannot remember anything precise.<br />
[Gezim]<br />
Answering a question about traditional celebration of his culture, a 39year-old<br />
man used a metaphor taken from audio-visual technical language<br />
“I have deleted all the tape…” in order to say: “I cannot remember anything<br />
precise”. There is, however, a shift in his declaration, from “I have<br />
deleted all the tape…”, which presupposes the active intervention of the<br />
subject, to a more passive position: “I cannot remember”. This shift can be<br />
seen as representative of the relationship between subjects and memoryforgetting:<br />
it implies both activity and passivity, as well as a combination<br />
of different psychological levels and energies.<br />
The impossibility of remembering traditional occasions of entertainment is<br />
a recurrent theme in the interviews held with Kosovar Albanians. As one<br />
woman said: “We had many parties but with all the problems we went<br />
through… the war, the people killed, whom I knew… so I cannot remember<br />
any of them…” [Violça]. Instead she preferred to remember the people<br />
she had known who had been killed: “They have massacred a woman<br />
from my uncle’s large family… then my uncle’s son… then my husband’s<br />
friend’s son…” [Violça].<br />
On a conversational level, the strategy of forgetting supposedly happy<br />
events of the period before the conflict serves to stress the traumatic magnitude<br />
of the violence and murder that have marked the subject’s life in the<br />
last years. As is usually the case in conversations with individuals, it was<br />
also possible to trace an opposing attitude to remembering and forgetting,<br />
in this case, the clear opposition to any revival of traumatic experiences.<br />
As Gezim answered, when asked about the first violent act he saw: “I don’t<br />
like to repeat those kind of things… I saw many things every day… it is<br />
better do not remember…”<br />
A declared “wish to forget” recurred in many accounts, but varied from<br />
interview to interview in its expression. Here, however, we found two<br />
main tendencies: In the first, the wish to forget was expressed with a frag-<br />
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