Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Chapter 1 • Silvia Salvatici
Daily heroism
From a woman’s perspective
Interviews held with the women of Kosovo revealed an awareness, though
rather confused, of the importance of gender differences in the fragmentation
of past and present experiences. Often women only spoke of this
when questioned directly, not bringing up the subject themselves. In
Kosovar Albanian communities, the females interviewed immediately
recognized the extra consequences of the conflict on their segment of the
population, aware (as it is well known) that women were victims of rape,
constituted the majority of refugees expelled from Kosovo during the war,
and returned to face multiple losses within families and villages that had
become largely “feminized” (OSCE, 1999, part I: 122-126). Yet the
wrongs borne by women were usually presented, during interviews, as a
single fragment of the Albanian peoples’ tragedy, which both added value
to the fragment (adding the womens’ suffering to the survivalist image of
the Albanians) and minimized its importance, in comparison to the more
“noble” sacrifice of husbands, brothers and sons who died for the freedom
of their people. The women interviewed thus shaped their accounts along
the lines of the collective narrative, sharing their memories in order to
reinforce a peoples’ communal identity. Despite this, recognition of their
own role seemed to emerge when women shifted their memory from the
collective and public sphere to the familiar and private realm. Mothers
and wives could thus claim a daily heroism in which they had been active
leaders. In a conversation with Nazife, for instance, she told, with a certain
pride, of how she had managed to feed her family, despite her very
limited resources:
When the war broke out I was in a very bad position. I didn’t have
money, nor any stock of food. Lenora 13 gave me something... we had
only 600 DM. I lived on them together with my family for three months
and I had enough for the next days. […] 600 DM for three months and I
still had 200 DM when the war was over… One piece of chicken meat...
only the leg, for my husband, my sister’s husband and me... I prepared
the lunch with just one piece of meat and... it was super!
Drita, another interviewee, remembered, in her painful story, how she had
succeeded in providing for her children during their trip to Macedonia:
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...It was very difficult to find food and also water. Like all the other
people, we had left the house without taking anything. All the villages
were burnt. But I always managed to have something for the children. I
always took care of them.