Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Chapter 5 • Giuseppe De Sario, Laura Corradi, Patricia Ruiz, Enrica Capussotti
Marriage is a fundamental element of Roma society, both because it confers
full social adulthood to individuals and because it represents and seals
a social pact between the families of bride and groom (Liégeois, 1994).
The fact that Albanians were invited to participate in this important social
event is evoked here to underline the suddenness with which the present
situation unfurled, and also, perhaps, to stress the senselessness of the
Albanian acts against the Romany who had given them their trust.
Silence as discursive strategy
Another discursive strategy used in some testimonies to face the traumatic
experiences of violence and war is one which I call the “rhetoric of
silence”. In his interview, for instance, Rexhi – a 42-year-old Rom from
Vuctrin – began by saying, “I cannot talk of all they did because those
were unbelievable things…” He then continued, looking for an explanation:
“because they were drunk or drug-addicts and they didn’t know what
they were doing…” which finally allowed him to list some tragic events,
given validity by the fact that he had seen them happening:
You could find dead people on the streets, wounded people… on my way
to the city centre I would find 30, 40 corpses on the streets… dead people
who were left there… most of them were cut with a knife or a rifle, they
had their throats cut… there is something I saw… I was riding a bicycle
when a man came in a car… the man in the car went close to another man
who was standing there, he took out a knife and struck him under his
throat… then the man who has been hit fell down… I was passing with
my bicycle… these are unbelievable things… [Rexhi]
Rexhi demonstrated great ability to speak of his life and of the events of
the last decades. He talked to me without the need of frequent questions,
elaborating on the topics we were discussing with apparent ease and familiarity
with oral expression. He began his story with the words:
200
When I was a child and I went to school, life was normal, life was all
right… after Tito’s death things started to change, the presidents had
changed and also the system had changed… the school changed, they
split into Albanian and Serb schools and we [Romany] were trapped in
between… some went to Albanian schools, others to the Serb ones…
After school I worked in different places for about 25 years… until I
opened a car shop on my own where I had worked for 12 years before
coming here… I worked in a car shop, I worked as a blacksmith… I was
well off enough because I had a house, I built a family and we were all
together, my work was close, downstairs my house… My documents
were all right, my kids went to school, I used to work ten hours a
day…life was good before, but everything has changed with this war…