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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: 198
<strong>Psychosocial</strong> <strong>Notebook</strong>, Volume 2, October 2001 Yes, the UCK… they have beaten me too… I could not talk anymore… It happened the same to my father… I don’t know what to say, I don’t remember anything… the only thing I know is they have treated us badly… the Albanians came during the night and we had to escape… [Arta] Psychological and physical suffering merge together in the body and in the narration, and the body itself becomes a sort of memory, bearing the traces of past experience. Women and men thus referred to their bodies in order to stress the traumatic consequences of the violence they had witnessed: He says that his wife has got heart problems and she still feels sick… she has this sickness because of the trauma she went through… [Rexhi] In my nephew’s house… my son’s son… a woman with a UCK uniform came in and before taking away the things… they scared that man so that he couldn’t stop them… they put a gun under his throat to scare him…since I saw it I have had heart problems… now she has this sickness… because she saw that scene… [Blerta] Lytfi, a Rom who left Kosovo and went to Montenegro when the conflict between Albanians and Serbs became more violent, said: Perhaps it is better not to talk about it [the conflict]… it is a theme that makes me feel sick… because they have killed all these people… don’t ask me about that… it is better if I don’t remember it… I cannot speak anymore. As in his case, the body can be used to indicate suffering, even when it has not been directly wounded or hurt: It can therefore also be a means for physically expelling the pain that words cannot express. Throughout the stories told during the interviews, it seemed that violent events were more difficult to face when, according to their survivors, the conflicts were unexpected: Arta: Before, we had a good relationship with the [Albanians]… yes, before yes… we played together, we worked together, we got on well with them… also at the wedding parties: we had our weddings and also the Albanians came… afterwards everything changed… Question: Suddenly? Arta: Yes, suddenly… In her testimony, Arta mentioned two of the most important rituals of Roma culture: wedding celebrations and funerals. In order to stress that the Romany and Albanians once lived together peacefully, Arta referred to different aspects of daily life, drawing attention to play, work and marriages. 199
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Archives of Memory: Supporting Trau
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Contents Introduction Beyond the Ar
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Introduction • Natale Losi which
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Chapter 3 Violence Following Violen
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Sections G through H In sections G
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Many refugees also pointed out how
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