Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
“being lost” sometimes pushed them to extreme consequences, in cases
when the separation was definitive. This emerged in a conversation with
Shemsije, whose husband, brother-in-law and two sons had been killed
by the Serbian police. At the time of the interview, she lived with her
12-year-old daughter. In her words: “We are also dead. We lost the men
and we are also dead. We lost everything.”
Men also perceived a dissolution of their family and upsets in its traditionally
patriarchal structure as a shock, as they lost their role as protectors
of their wife and children. Further, as tradition dictates that grown sons are
duty-bound to take care of their parents, their inability to perform this task
was perceived as deeply painful. Such was the experience of Muhamet,
who had the chance to escape the country with his wife and children, but
could not take his parents with him, since they were too old to move. “I
had never left them before”, he said. “I was very worried, I was very sorry,
but I had to do it.”
Several years before the war, Mahumet’s younger brothers emigrated to
Germany, but he himself never even considered following them, feeling
that at least one son should guarantee the protection of their parents. The
suffering produced by the separation of his family thus seems to spring
both from the loss of his protective function within the household, and
from his being forced to give up the traditional roles played there. When
fulfilled, these roles are fundamental components in the construction of the
individual and collective identities, since Kosovo-Albanians usually
describe themselves as people who greatly value the family and respect the
roles played by every single member within it. The inability to perform
these functions therefore strikes at the base of the individual and collective
self.
Because of the importance of kinship in the community, accounts of separation
unrelated to the family were more unusual, and emerged only in different
types of narrative or in contexts that, in their specificity, broke with
the pattern of recurrent discourse. Thus, in a memoir written while he was
refugee, Agim told of the painful separation from the woman he loved. As
soon as the war broke out, Agim sent his family abroad, but he was deeply
in love with a woman living in Pristina and did not want to leave the country.
It was only when she pressed him not to miss this chance of escape to
a safer place that he agreed to leave. In the text he wrote abroad, Agim still
spoke to his beloved, remembering the painful experience of his departure:
“I felt the need to scream like a wild animal when you said goodbye”, he
wrote. Another such “unusual” account was that of Suzana, a 20-year-old
Kosovar-Albanian, who was born and grew up in Belgrade, where her parents
used to work. Her father’s decision to move to Pristina after the end
of the war caused Suzana great sorrow. “It was awful”, she said:
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