Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Chapter 1 • Silvia Salvatici
In the construction of a collective memory based on easily defined suffering,
the relationship between communities could only be represented as
subtle and multi-faceted through narratives of the recent conflict over
Kosovo (Duijzings, 2000: 5-18).
The memory of leisure
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Memories of war
The memory of suffering permeated the Kosovar-Albanian accounts of
war, but just beyond it, for those willing to look, a great variety of experiences
lay buried behind the main narrative, waiting to come out. At the
time of the interview, Artan, Bekim and Florina were all 14 years old and
living in Pristina. They were classmates of the Meto Bajraktari school.
Artan was originally from a village. When the war started, his family
joined other relatives still living there, and they later escaped to the mountains.
As Artan told us:
It was very bad. We had no food and four members of my family were
killed. Then we went to Macedonia, but it was still very bad. Four members
of my family had been killed.
Florina was living in Pristina at the time, and remembered the experience
differently:
We lived in the centre, where the situation was much better than in other
places. So a lot of people came from the outskirts. I met many friends,
Albanian friends, new friends and it was great to be in touch with them,
to play with them, to talk with them.. We had a great time. I’m still in
touch with them.
Bekim also remembers the friends he had the opportunity to meet:
I was a refugee in Canada… I met some friends there, Canadian, and also
Albanian already living there. And they were great… Boys and girls…
We are still in touch, by e-mail.
To Bekim and Florina, as well as for many of their classmates, memories
of war are also associated with a time when they had the chance to meet
new friends, to share different experiences with one another, to spend time
in new ways, as their lives had been entirely changed by the conflict.
While their having fun with new friends was certainly a coping mecha-