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Chapter 5 • Giuseppe De Sario, Laura Corradi, Patricia Ruiz, Enrica Capussotti
mented narration, in which the relationship between memory and oblivion
appeared throughout the narrative. According to the second tendency, the
wish to forget was used more as a figure of rhetoric by the interviewees,
who, during the same conversation, would offer a significant quantity of
information about the points they were supposed to forget, had forgotten,
or wished to forget.
In an interview held just after her arrival in Italy with Arta, a 23-year-old
Romany woman, the relationship between memory, silence and trauma
appeared in every sentence. She told the interviewer that her mother has
been killed in front of her by Albanians after the NATO intervention, and
that she and her father had had to escape in order to save their lives. These
traumatic events scarred all of the stories that Arta told, stories that often
contradicted one another, and where “silence” became the main method of
conversation. In her words:
Arta: Nothing… now there is no one left in my country… my
mother has been killed… and me and my father have started
this travel to go to Germany where other people of the
family live… we do not have anyone left in Kosovo… they
also burned our house…
Question: How was life before?
Arta: I don’t remember anything…I don’t want to be back there.
Continuing her narration, Arta referred to her inability to hold a funeral for
her mother, because she and her father had had to escape. This is only one
instance of the dissolution of families, groups, habits, and rituals that occur
in times of war. To compare these accounts with what we know of previous
wars, however, it will be remembered that in each case, it was the women
who took care of their dead, performing all the rituals required with this
passing. One distinctive aspect of this conflict, along with its common
graves, its disappearances of people and corpses, and its forced exodus of
entire populations, seems to be the destruction of the traditional rituals
adopted by women and men in order to cope with trauma and death. 2
Further, in most Roma cultures, funerals are considered extremely important.
They include a great reunion of the family group, and reinforce cohesion
between members as well as with visitors from outside the family. In
the stories Arta told about her experience, however, there was no longer
room for the material rituals that, performed communally with others,
could have helped her face the pain of traumatic experience and death.
Arta continued to discuss this absence of ritual, and connected this pain
with a certain fatigue caused by remembering what had happened, along
with repeated reference to the impossibility of speaking:
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