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.
<strong>Psychosocial</strong> <strong>Notebook</strong>, Volume 2, October 2001<br />
person what happened to him. He feels some relief and we<br />
talk sometimes about different things and I want to help him<br />
in this way, but I think it’s difficult because that [memory] is<br />
fixed in his head. I usually try changing the subject of the<br />
conversation and I shift to another one. I say things like<br />
“Let’s talk about something else. It is over, let’s forget it. It<br />
was war and we can’t do anything”. Sometimes it makes<br />
him happy.<br />
Blerta’s solution, as some students pointed out during the plenary session<br />
where the interviews were analysed after the field work, echoes the tradition<br />
amongst Kosovar-Albanians that people should not be brought back<br />
to their painful experiences, thus respecting their need to forget. From this<br />
perspective, the ability to “not remember” becomes an asset, a resource.<br />
Despite this, however, most of the interviewees led their own stories back<br />
to their painful experiences, and later admitted to feeling relieved after the<br />
conversation.<br />
Remembering as duty<br />
A first reason for this contradiction stems from the fact that the lack of<br />
memory, the amnesia or the effort to forget, never seems sufficient to<br />
remove the events that have produced this suffering (and still do). On the<br />
contrary, this non-remembering seems to delete everything outside of<br />
these events, levelling a tabula rasa around them, in which they may stand<br />
out all the more. In this way does trauma radically break the even flow of<br />
a narrative (Antze and Lambek, 1996: xvii). This was exemplified by<br />
Rahim, one of the interviewees. Rahim is a 12-year-old boy who was put<br />
in line to be executed, like all the other men of the village. Rahim was<br />
seriously wounded but survived, while his uncle died. “I always wander<br />
around in my memory”, he answered the students who asked him what<br />
bothered him most, “I think about that day only”. “That day”, already<br />
described in great detail to the interviewers, is still vivid in Rahim’s memory,<br />
though he did his best to forget it. Instead of losing “that day”, Rahim<br />
forgot all the jokes he once knew. In his words:<br />
Rahim: When I was wounded, there were some girls that used to<br />
come for a chat. I was telling them lots of jokes, but now<br />
I’ve forgotten all of them.<br />
Student: Don’t you know any of them?<br />
Rahim: No, I’ve forgotten all of them.<br />
Another reason for this amnesia, is that forgetting can be considered helpful<br />
to recover from painful experiences, but remembering is a social duty.<br />
The oppression, mistreatment and massacres suffered by the Albanian<br />
people cannot be forgotten. The single person will therefore sacrifice his<br />
23