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