Contextual Reflections: Trauma Work

Trauma Work
What is a trauma really? If going back, into the situation or the context of the nineties, or the end of the nineties, or for the Serbian enclaves after 1999; particularly from the comfort (read: security) of now, one can not but realize the unreal (to use a more ordinary term) system of that, let’s call it, “world”. If stripping that world off of the glory of fighting for freedom and the other side’s suppression, one can not believe oneself not being able to get outside of the village, not being able to go to his/her school, not being able to use the services of doctors and going further: being poisoned at her/his school, or being afraid of the “dark” regardless of the age. In this, it is very easy to distinguish, and at the same time explain the “world” of that context, the difference between the real world, the one we had been living before (maybe in the eighties), or the world at that time (nineties) outside of Kosova.

There were totally different conditions, rules and values our lives were systematized within, succumbed to, compared to the “world’ we knew in the eighties, let’s say, or the world outside Kosovo at that very same time: not being able to have a television channel, a radio station speaking in Albanian, the whole system of education forbidden, the whole working power “suspended” (as it was named), not being able to use kindergartens, being afraid of policemen just for passing by them, never having seen parts of Kosova just outside of your own city, etc, wasn’t this a loss of a world? Looking at it from this perspective, the first thing coming to our mind is: How could we live under such conditions? To make it even more illustrative, the Bllace Camp, is an even further degradation of human values and rules and conditions. Running, shouting and pushing one another just for a loaf of bread flying in the air while hundreds of arms would stretch to catch it; well known people, known for their achievements, begging for a piece of plastic sheet; people sleeping on loafs of bread; carrying blankets over their bodies while walking, carrying them as wealth, living the Middle Ages just at the front of the new millennium, not being able to argue against it, having to succumb to it like to a most normal change in life, etc. Again there comes the question: How could we go through that life? Whether it was for a day, a night or a week? If looking at the physical layout of Bllace, neutral zone between Kosova and Macedonia, it looks like a hole, situated on one side under mountains and on the other side under hills and the road passing through it. Making it look like a natural hole in that environment.

The question one should ask oneself is: did we ever get out of it? Or were we stuck there for a lifetime? Did ourselves, frightened for all that was ours, our lives, our beloved and more; frightened of that senseless continuing deeper and deeper in to the limits of degradation of everything that consisted our previous life; did we remain in that hole, afraid to follow that road of unimaginable war-invented-experiences? Or are we still there, maybe waiting for our own selves to pull us out of that hole? Do we rplay, or even get caught playing those rituals of those days spent there? Rituals of those years spent in that “world” of particular values, rules and conditions different from the rest of the world.

Do we not hear, maybe less frequently, maybe more softly than before, but yet evident as our nightmares, the voices of war drama, rising up just at the times when we think all is over and we can go back to our lives? Do we not struggle to do the most ordinary things, and for more, wonder enviously when others can do the very same thing effortlessly? Doesn’t that forgotten you, me, us, bring us down to the hole, to that special space, or basement we forgot ourselves into, any time there is a new change to come, a new road to be taken.

And when reflecting on our “normal selves”, present selves: if our duties are what makes us stand in the system we have created, don’t we go to these very same duties totally randomly responsible? If in some imagination the traffic is the flow of life within this system, don’t we yet drive (however unserious this may seem) with the same disrespecting behavior to the traffic? If the education system, in its hierarchy, is the future that we build, can’t we yet go back to real teaching and learning and by this: back to achieving, instead of tending to randomly finish our Universities and higher qualifications? Can’t we yet believe in our own selves? Aren’t these rituals?

And the ritual must be played, for the trauma we have experienced, and a trauma according to traumatologists is a wound, whether physical or emotional; for the human we have been, afraid and waiting to be exhumed, locked somewhere in that hole. A question might explain more than any other mean: don’t the traffic rules need to be the same as in the rest of the world, respected.

B.H.