Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Chapter 1 • Silvia Salvatici
Concluding her account, Ardita tried to explain that her gratitude for the
solidarity she received was not without reservations:
I would like to add something else. Because of sufferings I had in that
village of Macedonia, now I look with hatred at the head of the family
that hosted us. I don’t know…. They took care of us… but I feel sick of
him…
The individual memory here disagreed with the collective account, and
demanded recognition for a specific experience that fell away from a concept
of national identity. The prevailing national discourse became complicated
by a question of gender identity.
In Pristina as in Paris
Along the divides
Different experiences and memories of the past were often combined with
different experiences and perceptions of the present, themselves stemming
from these different pasts. To shed light on this multiplicity of experiences
and memories is to watch a solid and compact national identity break
down into one that is much more fragmented and articulated. Between
these fragments lie boundaries. Divisions separate town and country, for
instance, or male and female, or the old and new generations. These distinctions
have and will create rifts and differences in experience. The
accounts of these men and women show fractures or continuities produced
or enforced by the conflict and its aftermath, as well as the various ways
in which these rifts and continuities are and were experienced. Pristina, as
capital of Kosovo and point of intersection, seemed a particularly privileged
observatory from which these processes might best be seen.
The Kosovar-Albanians living in the countryside were typically those who
had survived the most dramatic events of the conflict and it was in the villages,
rather than in more urban areas, that war found its first and most violent
expression (OSCE, 1999, Part I: 26-28). While this difference in the
intensity of experience between the village and city created an additional
rift which further widened the already existent social-cultural gaps
between urban and rural areas (Vickers, 1998: 170-71), the contrast also
helped fix events to the memory of the villagers, imprinting them, vividly,
onto their perceptions of present suffering, as is shown in Ardita’s account:
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My village was one of the first ones in Vushttri’s municipality to be overwhelmed
by the war. At that time I was in Prishtina with my sister, in