Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

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