Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
The fear expressed in her dream paralyzed her. The suffering of having
experienced multiple coerced displacements and the fear of loss froze her
limbs. The violence of the threat that she might lose her daughter became
concrete, a reaction in her body, and a threat to her own physical survival.
This happened when Elena was in Shkodra. It was not before her return to
Kosovo that Elena discovered that her daughter was alive, even though she
had been kept for days in her village without food.
When she came back from Albania, Elena was hospitalized because of a
kidney problem and had to receive a blood transfusion: “... the illness started
to appear clinically there [in Albania] but it deteriorated with the sadness
and weeping”. she said. She was made ill by the violence, both physical
and psychological, that she had experienced during the war: “When I
returned to Kosovo”, she remembered in her narrative, “I looked pale. I
felt weak and I was stumbling”. This was the continuation of the physical
suffering which had first surfaced with her dream.
During this time, Elena was staying in the hospital of Mitrovica, her town.
The hospital was located on the northern side of the Ibar River, where a
majority of Kosovar Serbs lived. The presence of these people, living
reminders of the source of Elena’s suffering, made her feel unsafe:
Even in the night we didn’t dare to sleep because we were afraid that...
[...] I spent three weeks at the hospital and my husband was not allowed
to come to visit me. [...] We were only three [Albanian] women.
There, in northern Mitrovica, Elena experienced another form of “coerced
displacement”: She was separated from her family and not even allowed
to see her husband. She also suffered from the fear of losing her life. At
the end of her narrative, Elena gave a collective dimension to her deep
and incommunicable individual experience of fear and bodily suffering.
While at the beginning of her narrative, she was giving meaning to her
suffering by explaining her individual displacements, the division of her
family and her fears (expressed in the dream), at the end of the narrative
she included her own experience into a collective experience bounded by
ethnic belonging:
[...] There [at the hospital] worked a [Serbian] cleaning woman and she
was complaining for their conditions [in north Mitrovica], saying that we
were lucky because of our children that are working abroad. We were
eating bananas and she was complaining that they had only boiled potatoes
to eat. She did not move me with her complaint because we have
suffered a lot from the Serbs before.
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