Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Chapter 1 • Silvia Salvatici
I cried for two months… You know, I was born there, 18 years spent in
one town with a lot of friends. Then to come to a city which is smaller,
no friends, only the family… It was really… how should I say, very hard.
Especially at the beginning, I looked at my pictures… I have also the
videotape with my friends, with Belgrade. I still listen to songs in
Serbian, but many people tell me not to do this, because it’s not safe, and
people here after the war are totally different, even those people who
want to listen to Serbian music, they listen to it with walkmans, just so
that the Serbian voice cannot be heard by the others. And because of that
it was very hard at the beginning, but life goes on…
If war and forced exile were the causes of shattered families and of separation
from loved ones, these ills could also result in a new network of
relationships forged in different contexts, most often by women. Thus,
Valbona, another interviewee, not only maintained a good relationship
with the women of the family that hosted her and her children in Tetovo,
but she also became a good friend. This friendship sustained her during the
time of her forced exile from Kosovo, and lived on, even upon her return.
After the war, Valbona’s friends from Tetovo came several times to visit
her and her family in Pristina.
Shyrhrete had a similar experience. When she was staying in Albania with
her two daughters, her husband and her mother-in-law, the families living
in her neighbourhood came to visit them every day. A friendship “mainly
between women” formed there. In Valbona’s words:
Valbona: We used to prepare the food together They liked the way we
prepared our specialities. So we did the work together. Even
when we went downtown, we went there together. They
were always with us, trying to take our grief away.
Question: Did this work? Did this make you feel better?
Valbona: Yes it worked. It helped me a lot. […] We are still in touch by
phone and when the war was over they came here to visit us.
The war and the exile, then, extended relationship networks beyond the
lines of family and kinship. This enlarged network became a resource during
the war, and often was or could be a resource in the present. In narratives
of war, however, forced separation, hardship and exile were almost
never seen in this light. The ability, displayed in other cases, to face and
overcome hardship, was not emphasized in the accounts, which focused
rather on suffering and a sense of loss. 7
A suffering with deep roots
All of the interviewees placed the origins of their suffering far back in the
past and underlined its continuity into the present. The massacres that
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