Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Chapter 5 • Giuseppe De Sario, Laura Corradi, Patricia Ruiz, Enrica Capussotti
The image of a better past was, of course, integral to the self-representation
of the Roma interviewees. They described how, before the war, they
lived in Kosovo without difficulty, owning their own houses and working
at their own jobs, whereas they are now forced to live scattered throughout
Europe. If this memory of a golden past was associated with the
experience of the Roma populations, what is most unfortunate in their situation
is the total absence of any force that could transform their discourse
into a successful political agenda. No other dominant and powerful discourses
sustain the Roma claim that a better past should be restored nor
support their “right” to return to Kosovo. Their positive reconstruction of
the pre-war period has no citizenship in a world in which the dominating
ideas of public history label every positive reference to a socialist past as
“Yugo-nostalgic” (Jambresic Kirin, 1996).
I had the impression that life was better… because my parents were alive,
I went to school and I was happy during that period of life… after a short
time my parents died of natural death and the life and the situation in
general started to get worse… and I had to start to work and to take care
of myself because no one was helping me… [Hadjar]
I was not supporting anyone but I thought no one had to win…everything
had to stay the way it was, that this system couldn’t change… I thought
it was better if nothing changed… [Baftjar]
In this journey through memory and forgetting, we found tensions and
contradictions, similarities and differences amongst the interviewees. The
last point I would like to stress is that the composition of the group interviewed
did not allow for a better understanding of the gender dimension
in which the stories were told. Of course, gender is a central force in shaping
experiences and in determining the role of each interviewee, and will
be discussed in other sections of the article, but what seemed interesting in
the process of memory was this very lack of a gender difference, which
requires further investigation.
If not gender-related, the differences noticed in the construction of memory
seemed more influenced by the subject’s generational and political
situation, and these differences further seemed due to a realignment of the
conflict along nationalistic ideologies and to a sense of belonging. To identify,
and thus to be identified, with Albanians or with Romany has led to
distinctions in the relationships and experiences of these individuals with
Serbs and with the Yugoslav State, and these experiences then marked the
memories reconstructed and the subjectivities represented in the interviews.
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