Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
for this process to take place, but it was also occurring beyond the project,
in the “outside” world, through other means of communication including
newspapers, on television, in the new songs of well-known singers, in
family conversations, etc.
The play’s theme of “Families linked by death rather than by life” represented
elements in the memories of the students. The suffering of the bride
mirrored the suffering of every woman who had lost a son, a husband, or
a father. Later, through the verbal explanation of the story, their pain took
on a political dimension which was addressed directly to the foreign audience:
the loss and fear of loss that every individual bears became a collective
icon that could be exposed to “others”, and this icon became of
potential political use to their collective suffering.
The performance was therefore a language, communicating meaning
already shaped by the collective memory. Experiences of war and displacement
were thus also incorporated into this collective meaning, further
acquiring a temporal and spatial presence and a political dimension, grown
from the use of a normative language (the legend itself). Individual experiences
were frozen in a cultural form that already existed, that could serve
to justify collective suffering that had been there long before and shape it
into a political discourse.
Forced displacement, exile, and bodily suffering
The Archives of Memory project also involved a series of interviews from
which I have extracted fragments in order to illustrate the hypothesis mentioned
above. First, I would like to explore the experience of Elena who
was successively internally displaced, then a refugee, and then, temporarily,
coercively displaced to a “threatening environment”.
Elena is a 50-year-old Kosovar Albanian woman born in Mikushnica, a
village near Mitrovica. She now lives in the Southern part of Mitrovica.
She first left Kosovo on 15 April 1999 with her husband, two of her daughters
and her mother-in-law; a woman from Shkodra in Northern Albania.
Elena’s mother-in-law had spoken to her about Albania before and Elena
had already visited the country, but she had not expected to go back there
in the context of war. They reached Albania on foot, after having been displaced
in Kosovo many times over. In Elena’s words:
When we left, my husband’s sister was with us at home. From there we
went to [...]. 2 Also that cousin was with us and we walked out and queued
in the column. We stayed one month in [...]… I was driven out from my
house three times, and we stayed in [...] for a fortnight and then we
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