the problem confronts not only anthropologists: it is also central for the victims of war and violence themselves. In essence, the problem is this: how can one communicate experiences when existing categories do not suffice, and when the categories themselves have been distorted by the unprecedented events of war and violence. In addition, victims of violence and terror are also often caught in a dilemma between wanting to forget and wanting to remember at one and the same time. For example, Warren (1993) has described how people in Guatemala did not want to talk about la violencia (a period of intense state violence) because they feared reprisals. At the same time, however, that period came up in all routine conversations, in part because it functioned as a temporal marker in people’s conceptual world. My informants showed the same ambivalence: on the one hand they wanted to speak out, and to put their violent experiences into word to tell the world about them (thereby experiencing the imperfection of words); on the other hand, and at the same time, they wanted to forget, to be able to get on with life and achieve peace of mind.
Problems with forgetting
The evocative power of words was one reason why my informants wanted to forget. Telling someone about horrible events can make them come alive (see also Jackson 2002: 57; Perera 2001: 159). If people did choose to talk about experiences like internment in a prison camp, the horrible time in Blagaj, or the expulsion, they would often only say a little and then stop. They did not want to talk about it because it was like reliving the experience. We see this clearly in the following excerpt from my notebook about a man called Emir, who had been interned in a prison camp with three thousand prisoners and only thirtythree plates and spoons:
Emir: So nearly 100 of us had to share each spoon and plate. When the Red Cross arrived, we washed the spoons for the first time. We had very little time to eat, 15 seconds.
TK: Was it hot food?
Emir: Yes it was soup. We slept on the floor on the concrete. 500 in one hangar. There were no blankets, and if you had to pee, you just had to do it where you were.
He suddenly stops talking, I can feel that he is moving towards the limit of where he still can talk and keep things at a distance. I say that it is impossible to understand how people can do such things to others. He answers that if you could, you would be like them.
According to Anvere, people’s and especially men’s attempts at forgetting are rather general, as she straightforwardly ascertained about her husband.
Nihad he has not told me about the prison camp, he can’t manage. No men tell about their experiences from there, well yes a little when they drink loza [grape brandy].
Like speech, television is a strongly evocative medium. Once the film Welcome to Sarajevo, which depicts the horrendous time during the siege of Sarajevo, was shown on television. Seeing the film with my hosts was a tough emotional experience. We all sat watching: nobody said a word except my landlady, who kept sighing. Her husband, who normally likes to eat the hot popcorn his wife makes, did not touch it. After the film nobody spoke, and we all went to bed. The day after several people asked if I had seen the film. Safet said that when he saw it everything came back to him. He told me how he had relived a lot of episodes from the war, and had not fallen asleep until 4 am. Nusret’s father, on the other hand, said that he only saw the first ten minutes. He had seen it all in real life, he explained, and did not need to see it again.
My informants’ intentions to forget were often sabotaged by the way the subject of the war would surface in many everyday conversations. Anything could function as a trigger of episodes from the war, as the following examples show. My father visited me for four days while I was doing fieldwork, and I remember how it struck me that on the first evening he was with me in my host family’s company, we only talked for about half an hour about the things one normally converses with foreign guests about, such as climate, buildings, family relations, food and so on. At this point the conversation changed topic and we concentrated on the war and the present problems. It was impossible to carry on a ‘normal’ (non-war-related) conversation. Once Osman offered me a cigarette, a Bosnian cigarette labelled Drina. He asked if I knew the River Drina, and I said yes, it is located at Visegrad, which then led him to talk about the war, starting with the atrocities committed by Serbs in that town. And at a child’s birthday party, my comments about the lovely food we were served led to a discussion about the lack of food during the war. Often people did not even need a cue. Experiences from the war often erupted spontaneously.
Problems with remembering: incomprehensibility
I will now turn to the other side of the dilemma in which my informants are caught: wanting to remember and put their terrible experiences into words. Remembering is blocked by the fact that people often cannot understand what has happened. It does not make sense to them. As I was told several times, “how should you be able to understand it, when we can’t?” Many people explained that their memories were all like a dream: one is just waiting to open one’s eyes and wake up. Some of the examples offered above already express this feeling of incomprehensibility. I shall here limit myself to two examples. During an interview, in which Fahrudin had been talking about problems related to rebuilding the ruined houses in Stolac, he suddenly said:
There is one thing I don’t understand. I was born here and I lived here until I was caught and put in prison camp, and then I returned and continued to live here, and I intend to die here. But I cannot understand what was going on in their heads. The people who expelled the Bosniaks from here. Those who committed this urbicide [I come back to this term], genocide. You should talk to them instead if you are interested in this social pathology.
When I asked Amela, a young schoolteacher, what she thought about the situation, she turned my question back on me:
What do you as an anthropologist think about this situation? We live together in an area, Serbs, Croats and Muslims. We were raised in the same system and in the same social environment. Why do they have this will to kill? How can they have the will to kill a human being?
Problems with remembering: epistemology
A more fundamental problem confronting people’s attempts to remember and communicate their experiences in a meaningful form relates to epistemology: how to communicate experiences when existing categories do not suffice. In addition, the difficulty of communicating traumatic events arises from the victim’s experience of feeling disconnected from the life s/he lived before and his/her experience of being out of time. For this reason, “refugee stories are not like the stories we ordinarily tell. They do not carry us forward to any consoling denouement. They do not require others to listen to them or respond. There is no prospect of closure. There are victims, but few free agents. They may bear witness to an event, describe a journey, or recount a tragedy, but they suspend all consideration of salvation or justice” (Jackson (2002: 92). Furthermore, traumatic events are often remembered as bare facts disconnected from the world, as “an unbearable sequence of sheer happenings” (Arendt in Jackson 2002: 92). These events are therefore without meaning. This characterisation of refugee stories has parallels to some of the stories I was told. When people told me about, or rather tried to tell me about, such topics as prison camp, expulsion, separation from family and Blagaj, they lacked the right words and categories, and their stories sometimes sounded disconnected from time and were occasionally held in a prosaic, record-keeping style.2 However, there are also differences. My informants were telling about events that had happened at least eight years earlier, and some of these stories had been given some kind of structure since then, they urged the listener to respond, and they included considerations of ‘salvation or justice.’ Even though (pace Jackson) people were unable to express the whole of their experience, and were frustrated because
