Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Chapter 2 • Annie Lafontaine
she can marry and support her needs as a housewife. Liljana is thinking of
leaving Kosovo to study because she does not know what kind of work
will be available to her once the organizations leave. Meanwhile, her job
has allowed her to travel outside Kosovo, and her connections have made
her aware of different opportunities in the United States. In this way, like
Suzana, Liljana has one foot in tradition, and the other in “modernity”.
There they must carry out their balancing act, merely to remain socially
aloft in both the local society and the new international circle.
As local staff, both of them have ceased to identify with the collective discourse
of suffering, given their more elevated social positions. This new
status, seen by the local population as highly desirable, cannot be associated
with suffering because it brings economic success and political
power (through repeated contact with foreigners and the local elite who
work with them). This social “displacement” does, however, bring its own
form of suffering: a widening economic gap between local staff and the
local population (74 per cent of which are unemployed according to the
UNMIK internal documents). The withdrawal of these local staff members
from their previous social and familial networks, and the uncertainties of
a professional future, all combine to create, in these young people, this
prevalent “fear of loss”.
Conclusion
In presenting these fragments of narrated lives, I have tried to show that
displacement is an experience which can take multiple forms. I have also
tried to illustrate how the reification of suffering by individuals, as a consequence
of these displacements, can contribute to the creation of a collective
identity. In my analysis, I began with the assumption that different
displacements would produce different types of suffering, which are not
expressed as such, but deeply hidden inside their bodies. Suffering and
displacement are experienced on an individual basis. They are then narrated
(with verbal language), or enacted (through body language), using
the discourses of authority that shape a politics of memory. This politics of
memory therefore “pre-shapes” the memory of individual suffering and
displacement within a “pre-experienced” collective suffering. These
individual narrations and enactments are directed or influenced by discourses
of authority that reify suffering into an icon, which is communicated
by individuals to become a pillar of collective identity. The collective
identity itself is reified. It then deeply influences the manner in which
individuals explain and narrate their personal experiences of suffering and
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