Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Chapter 2 • Annie Lafontaine
their ability to understand the meaning of these gestures revived the
commonality of their recent past, of norms, values and of a collective
imaginary realm.
While the IOM intervention focused on the process of rendering memory
“from the individual to the collective experience”, in order to influence the
discursive form that this “collectively shared suffering” would take after
the war, we came to realize that the commonality of the recent past’s
experiences was already embodied in the individuals. The IOM intervention
was innovative in that it aimed at working on experiences of war
and exile through different means of communication (such as theatre), but
the outcomes of its activities were more than just the result of the intervention;
suffering had already been included into the communal memory
to which the recent war became another addition.
Students chose to represent the sufferings of war and displacement by
enacting mourning rituals, funerals and legends like the Këngë e Rexha i
Nanës, the story of a wedding that turns into a funeral. In the Këngë e
Rexha i Nanës, a family is preparing a daughter for her wedding and waiting
for the groom’s kin to arrive and take her away into their family, as is
the custom in the Kosovar Albanian society. While the bride’s family
waits, the groom is kicked by his horse as he tries to feed it and soon after
dies from his wounds. Realizing that the young man is dead, the groom’s
family visits the family of the bride to share their bad news. The bride-tobe
then faints, understanding that she has become a widow before even
having her first child. She can never bear the son that would later recreate
the family of his father in the next generation. Instead of a wedding, it is
thus the funeral of the young man that the families will share, and they will
be linked together by death instead of by the continuation of life.
This story, as well as others, was performed collectively, unlike the other
bodily exercises suggested by the teachers. The aim of the performers was
to express to the other Albanian students, the foreign teachers and the
Albanian tutors that made up their audience, the meaning they gave to
their experiences of suffering during war and exile. In this story, they communicated
the death of their family members, the destruction of their
homes (meaning both their families and their house), and the threat to the
reproduction of their society. The meaning of the story that had become
their expression was then explained verbally to the foreign members of the
audience after the performance.
This little “play” stood as an example of how the once individual experiences
of suffering related to war and displacement could be externalised
by each body, where they were deeply hidden, to acquire a common meaning
for the group. The IOM intervention gave only one more opportunity
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