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