Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Chapter 1 • Silvia Salvatici
a family’s members, while other causes (that might have been exacerbated
by the war, but that originated elsewhere), were left unrecognized. This
appeared in the narrative of Sofije, a 21-year-old mother, whose husband
was killed by Serbian paramilitaries. At the time of the interview, Sofije’s
baby was 11 months old, and she still lived with her parents-in-law, in a
village near Vushttri. During the interview, Sofije and her husband’s family
focused their conversation with the students 5 on the loss of her husband,
which they identified as the cause of suffering for each individual
family member as well as the family itself, as a small community left without
domestic harmony. As the elderly father said: “We lost our son, she lost
her husband. It’s too bad, it’s too bad. The family is destroyed. Nothing
will ever be as it was before”. Later in the conversation, however, other
reasons for their familial disruption emerged: Sofije wished to return home
to live with her parents, but according to Kosovar-Albanian custom, she
could not do this without leaving her child with the family of her husband.
Sofije’s suffering thus also originated in part from this difficult decision
that faced her at the time: She could move into a more protective family
context, more appropriate to overcome the loss of her husband, but the loss
of her daughter would only add to her mourning. In her words: “I don’t
want to separate from her, she is all I have. But I would like to go back to
my parents, to my family… you know, it’s my family…” Sofije complained
of psychological disturbances (she could not sleep, had no
appetite, fainted often), but their origin, despite the way in which her family
represented their suffering, could not exclusively be attributed to the
“trauma provoked by the war”. 6
Divided families, expanding networks
Memories of the suffering created by war and forced exile quite often
raised the theme of separation, and discourse on separation focused mainly
on the family context. To Kosovar-Albanians, any division of the family
group which later prevented it from performing its essential protective
function, was described as a particularly painful experience in which gender
and generational differences played a fundamental role. This was
exemplified by the account of Drita, a mother of two children, who, like
many other women, was forced to leave her husband:
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I don’t know how to express myself. I was somehow lost when I left him.
It was such a deep sorrow… because at that moment they were expelling
us from Vushtrri to Macedonia, but I didn’t want to go. My husband
couldn’t come with us.
This “I felt lost” and “we were lost” were frequently recurring expressions
amongst women who separated from their husbands. The feeling of