Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
sign of absence, and what is repressed is neither the event nor the memory
nor even single traces, but the very connection between memories
and traces. From this perspective, our task as researchers can be defined
in the following way: “dissocier les liaisons instituées”, to break institutionalized
links in order to establish “des liaisons dangereuses”. In other
terms, we cannot but look when trying to understand connections
between silence and mentions, oblivion and memory, for relationship
between traces or between them and their absences, and we must dare to
find interpretations which run the risk of creating new associations
(Passerini, forthcoming 2002).
I have deleted all the tape about it… I cannot remember anything precise.
[Gezim]
Answering a question about traditional celebration of his culture, a 39year-old
man used a metaphor taken from audio-visual technical language
“I have deleted all the tape…” in order to say: “I cannot remember anything
precise”. There is, however, a shift in his declaration, from “I have
deleted all the tape…”, which presupposes the active intervention of the
subject, to a more passive position: “I cannot remember”. This shift can be
seen as representative of the relationship between subjects and memoryforgetting:
it implies both activity and passivity, as well as a combination
of different psychological levels and energies.
The impossibility of remembering traditional occasions of entertainment is
a recurrent theme in the interviews held with Kosovar Albanians. As one
woman said: “We had many parties but with all the problems we went
through… the war, the people killed, whom I knew… so I cannot remember
any of them…” [Violça]. Instead she preferred to remember the people
she had known who had been killed: “They have massacred a woman
from my uncle’s large family… then my uncle’s son… then my husband’s
friend’s son…” [Violça].
On a conversational level, the strategy of forgetting supposedly happy
events of the period before the conflict serves to stress the traumatic magnitude
of the violence and murder that have marked the subject’s life in the
last years. As is usually the case in conversations with individuals, it was
also possible to trace an opposing attitude to remembering and forgetting,
in this case, the clear opposition to any revival of traumatic experiences.
As Gezim answered, when asked about the first violent act he saw: “I don’t
like to repeat those kind of things… I saw many things every day… it is
better do not remember…”
A declared “wish to forget” recurred in many accounts, but varied from
interview to interview in its expression. Here, however, we found two
main tendencies: In the first, the wish to forget was expressed with a frag-
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