Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
suffering is thus never “told” or “narrated” as it is experienced, because by
nature it cannot be given words. Suffering is enacted, and its release might
somehow produce a collectively shared sense-awareness of the experience.
The last approach will be used in this paper with a slight addition: that this
“collectively shared sense-awareness of the experience” can be made
possible through a language, both verbal and non-verbal. This language is
shaped by a politics of memory, and yet will also give new meaning to the
unspeakable experience of individual suffering that could otherwise eventually
engender new forms of violence, and perpetuate the cycle of violence
and suffering.
Narration of suffering and displacement
The work done with students in the Archives of Memory project explored
different means by which suffering and displacement could be narrated.
The variety of these methods came from the suggestions of an international
group of teachers with different cultural and professional backgrounds.
Some means were then chosen from these suggestions and
employed by each of the students, according to their individual psychological
backgrounds and their own readings of a collective cultural background.
The chosen media were most often theatrical (re-enactments of
bodily experiences) or verbal (communication through dialogues).
In the theatre workshop, students were asked to narrate their own experiences
of exile during the war through the language of their bodies, gestures,
and sounds, some of which were proposed by the teachers. Through
this activity, the students and their teachers discovered that their different
conceptions of life and different life experiences were interpenetrating.
The students selected the fragments of expression most relevant to their
own cultural backgrounds, then reinterpreted these gestures and expressions
as performance in order to explain to “others” the meaning of
suffering in the Kosovar Albanian society.
It was through these theatrical exercises that we realized how much different
conceptions of life and memories overlapped and complemented
one another, as the students expressed their experience of displacement
and suffering through acts readable by their peers. The “pre-cultural” and
“unspeakable” dimension of this suffering gradually vanished behind the
acting, so that the deep and inexpressible pain derived from memories of
war and exile could develop into suffering that was collectively shared. As
students took turns performing and interpreting the acts of one another,
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