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.
efore the war. Tamara’s husband, on the other hand, had lost his job in<br />
town, and spent most of his time at a café located in the village square.<br />
There, with the other men, he faced a monotony broken only by the<br />
KFOR’s weekly distribution of goods needed for his family. In comparison,<br />
and even though the women’s accounts of their living conditions<br />
emphasized feelings like claustrophobia, lack of motivation and disorientation,<br />
their daily lives preserved a certain stability, rooted in the very performance<br />
of the domestic duties. It therefore seems that somehow, as<br />
women, Tamara and others were given the social duty of expressing the<br />
collective psychological suffering. It was their task to ensure that this pain<br />
emerged in physical signs on their bodies, and was again stressed in the<br />
narratives, in order to become a basic component of the Serbian community’s<br />
self-representation as victims of the war.<br />
“Traumatized by trauma”<br />
<strong>Psychosocial</strong> <strong>Notebook</strong>, Volume 2, October 2001<br />
Throughout the interviews, the Kosovar-Serbs’ self-representation as victims<br />
became an umbrella concept, set to catch the uneasiness falling from<br />
other sources. Thus, in describing the wretchedness of her life in<br />
Gorazdevac, Tamara more than once mentioned that her desire to find a<br />
job was always frustrated by the current situation of Kosovo. In reality,<br />
however, Tamara had not been working before the war, having quit her job<br />
13 years ago after the birth of her first daughter. Tamara said she had<br />
retired because she wanted to devote [herself] completely to her children,<br />
but now that they have grown, returning to work was among her greatest<br />
wishes. Though this wish for a professional experience might be more<br />
reasonably explained by a need to enrich her life after having devoted herself<br />
to her family for 13 years, Tamara found a means of justifying her<br />
desire against a background of suffering and isolation in the enclaves,<br />
which was common to the entire Kosovar community. “If I could be given<br />
an opportunity to work, then I would escape many of the problems that I<br />
have now, living in Gorazdevac”, she said. This construction of a collective<br />
identity rooted in the victimization of the Serbian people seems to<br />
compress individual subjectivity and the development of an individual<br />
identity, each one building upon the other.<br />
This same process also took place within the family, redefining it as a single<br />
unit of a greater “community victim” of the conflict. This occurred<br />
with Kosovar-Albanians, who usually see the family context as a place of<br />
celebration, consolation and protection. In the current, post-war situation,<br />
however, the household, having suffered many losses, was described as a<br />
mutilated and wounded body, an ailing identity through which families in<br />
difficulty could seek new strength and stability. The war, defined as the<br />
traumatic event, was thus presented as the only reason for the suffering of<br />
27