Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

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