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