Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...
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Chapter 2 • Annie Lafontaine<br />
The violence perpetrated upon groups and individuals, from the most<br />
explicitly heinous to the most covert and implicit acts, penetrates identities<br />
to become constantly resurging ghosts of memory. Conversely, these<br />
events sometimes also become black holes, or memory erasers. The memory<br />
that was created by such an intense physical experience as coerced displacement<br />
may consequently become a traumatic recollection which manifests<br />
itself through the body (Pandolfi, 1990, 1991, 1993, 1999; Young,<br />
1995). As violence manifests itself bodily in individuals, it also contributes<br />
to the formation of a collective identity. This collective identity is shaped<br />
by a politics of memory that influences, through some discourses of<br />
authority (Foucault, 1968, 1971), each individual in a different manner.<br />
One may appropriate for her/himself a rigid form of this collective identity,<br />
while another may reject it or try to change its form (to change or produce<br />
new discourses of authority). When violence targets social or ethnic<br />
categories created out of existing discourses of authority, individuals may<br />
experience violence as a consequence of being socially or ethnically<br />
identified and then reify this category.<br />
These identities can be further made real to such an extent that they<br />
become iconic weapons in individual and local strategies of social<br />
positioning, thus generating what has been called “social suffering”<br />
(Green, 1998; Kleinman, Das and Lock, 1997). In this way, the victim of<br />
violence may become a symbol of the suffering experienced by a group<br />
targeted as a social or ethnic category, while suffering, as an experience<br />
reified into an icon, may become a means of political resistance, and the<br />
basis of the individual or the group’s identity.<br />
In the field of refugee studies, it has been suggested that because pain is a<br />
normal part of the human experience, the suffering derived from enormous<br />
events like wars should be understood on a continuum, along with the<br />
sufferings and trials of daily life (Davis, 1992). The process by which a<br />
victim becomes an icon of a reified collective memory of violence would<br />
therefore take place when “unusual” events (such as forced exodus)<br />
become integrated into this pattern of everyday sufferings. This theoretical<br />
model considers pain and suffering as social afflictions only because of<br />
their cause (one, such as war, experienced by the entire community), and<br />
because of their accumulation in the communal memory formed out of discourses<br />
of authority.<br />
Other theories are known in the literature, however, and among them, E.<br />
Scarry’s approach is particularly interesting. In 1985, she wrote of suffering<br />
as a “pre-cultural” bodily experience that lies beyond a given language.<br />
According to Scarry, the strength of political violence is derived<br />
from this unmentionable, unspeakable nature of suffering. In this model,<br />
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