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Chapter 5 • Giuseppe De Sario, Laura Corradi, Patricia Ruiz, Enrica Capussotti
people. Here, at the roots of misunderstanding, a completely different
story is told:
Elidon G.: Roma have done many bad things, they helped the Serbs,
they helped to burn our houses, and they destroyed everything…
Now we are doing the same but… they only helped
the Serbs and not us… we gave them food, we helped them
and they just nothing… No, I cannot understand Roma,
when they were with the Albanians they were good, they
used to say nice things about Albanians… when they were
with Serbs… It is my opinion that they stay where the situation
is better…
Question: Have you ever personally known a Rom?
Elidon: No, I haven’t ever met one…
Question: And how do you know all these things?
Elidon: We know them… Some cousins of mine are in a political
party and they tell us how things happened… all the
Albanians complain about Roma because Roma steal, sack,
beg…
Question: Did you pray together with Roma?
Elidon: No… because Roma have no religion, when they stay with
Albanians they become Muslim, if they stay with someone
else… they have no religion, they have nothing…
It is difficult at this point to draw any definite conclusions, as these pages
represent but a brief reflection on the subject matter. In this paper, I have
tried to map the complex universe shaped by memories and forgetfulness,
from present stances to nostalgia for the past, of individuals and groups.
Certain elements, I believe, are more problematic and need still further
consideration, such as the position of the researcher in the process of
selecting the group of interviewees, and the places and the languages in
which the conversations take place.
One could say that throughout the 1970s, oral history was written from
within a movement which would have liked “to give words” to the subaltern
(the working class, for instance) and women. In our times, however,
oral history is capable of prefiguring the relationships between different
subjectivities and cultures and of revealing the contradictions between the
individual and the community. Oral history can therefore be used to criticize
the mechanism of inclusion and exclusion, and the process of identity
construction based on territories and nationalistic values. The tensions
between the voice of the individual and the dominant discourses of the
public sphere, which legitimize declaration and self position, emerge in
every one of the testimonies, and might serve as a powerful “weapon” with
which to enter the critical debate on public memory and the political use
of the past.
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