Psychosocial Notebook - IOM Publications - International ...

Psychosocial Notebook, Volume 2, October 2001
displacement. They may modify, reject or adapt very closely to the existing
discourses of authority, and they may therefore eventually change
them and change the politics of memory.
This collective identity is therefore not an essence, but a discursive construct
on individual experiences that cannot be communicated as they are
lived, but only as they should be understood by the others with whom the
person views her/himself sharing a collective experience. According to the
data presented in this paper, the individuality of the experience of suffering
and displacement does not seem to have meaning by itself, without
being “pre-shaped” by these discourses of authority that appear throughout
narration or the enactment.
Displacement can mean being expelled from home or country after having
been targeted for reasons of ethnicity, and physically suffering this pain of
exile, as in the case of Elena. Displacement may also be a desire to leave
a difficult political or economic situation, as was the case of Vjoca, who
was at first harmed by being orced not to leave (because of the traditional
rules of Albanian society), and later disappointed, when she finally
reached this unreachable land she had longed for (because of her agreement
with the discourse holding that a person should remain where they
were born). The story of Bexhet exemplifies how the experience of displacement
is rooted in the memory of Kosovar Albanians old enough to
have experienced the Second World War, and how even after the war of
1998-1999, and without the threat of forced exile, the suffering of past displacements
could be reincarnated as the anxiety of standing powerless on
vanishing ground. In the cases of Suzana and Liljana, I have tried to present
a more subtle form of displacement, occurring as a result of their new
status, and pressuring them to be displaced, this time, from their former
selves and “their people”. Given the position of local staff, they were
forced to separate themselves gradually from the discourse of authority
that reified suffering as a pillar of each Albanian’s identity, especially of
those who experienced the greatest exodus in 1999. Albanians who
became local staff members were progressively exiled from this discourse,
and therefore, in a way, displaced from “the” Albanian identity. As such,
they were made to build ambiguous identities with ties to both the people
who had experienced loss, and a new people, one that could no longer bear
the weight of this collective suffering derived from forced displacement.
From their discursive forms to their bodily and “unspeakable” states, suffering
and displacement feed upon one another and contribute to the production
of new forms or new processes of personal identification. During
the last decade, these interlaced threads of displacement and suffering
have thus been woven into the production of a collective identity of
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