Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Chapter 2 • Annie Lafontaine
Elena ended the narration by enlarging her individual experience to a collective
one, with her use of “we”. This single word gave another meaning
to her suffering, accounting for it by pointing out patterns within an identity.
With this sentence, she gave a collective dimension to her lonely pain.
She was distinguishing a collective Albanian experience of suffering, from
the distress the Serbs were living after the war, not even considering their
experience “suffering”. Elena used hardship as an ethnic dividing line. She
defined Albanian identity as one based, among other things, on a societywide
and ethnologically specific shared experience: collective suffering
bounded by ethnic belonging.
The experience of this single interview was not the reason why Elena was
giving an ethnic dimension to her own experience of displacement and suffering.
The source of the violent events she had had to endure was already
broadly claimed, through the discourses of authority diffused by the media
or in official speeches, in family or public reunions, for instance, as the
ethnic divisions and struggles on the territory of Kosovo. In all public
events, the victims of the war (displaced, killed, captured, etc.) were presented
as national heroes, whatever their individual experience. The
process of collectivizing the individual experiences in a non-ethnic manner,
sought by the IOM project, does not therefore seem to have been
achieved in this single interview, as the collective seems to be the primary
sphere of narrative, and the individual one seems to have been shaped
afterwards. The notion of an individual experience does not seem to have
meaning separate from the previous collective one.
Free movement, despite borders
The story of Vjoca might illustrate another relationship between displacement
and suffering. Her narrative shows how a displacement forbidden at
a communal level might create individual suffering, and how these individual
instances of suffering penetrate the identities of both the individual
and the community.
Vjoca is a 44-year-old Kosovar Albanian woman living with three of her
seven children in the northern part of Mitrovica, the divided city.
Everyday, on her road to the Italian Non Governmental Organization
(NGO) where she works with a group of women, Vjoca passes the bridge
over the Ibar River, which, because it separates both sides of the city, has
become the symbol of the division between Serbs and Albanians. Every
day, she experiences the crossing of a border in the most concrete sense,
one guarded by foreign soldiers for security. She continues, regardless of
fears and frontiers, because her friends and hopes lie on the other side.
62