Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

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