Contextual Reflections: Dealing With the Past

Dealing With the Past
In the aftermath of a traffic accident people are firstly under the influence of a shock, but inevitably, immediately after this, comes the need to go through the whole situation which has lead to the accident. And that happens, if for no other reason, at least, to explain the occurrence of that accident to him/herself, to see through. War, difficult pasts, always, as accidents of a human mind before anything else, stand there in our way, and in the future’s way, until they are resolved. They, or rather ourselves, memories, forgotten in traumatic experiences wait for us to be reached out and rediscovered until they satisfy our being the way we are, or for that matter the way we should be at present.

As a matter of fact each one of us, living in Kosovo, knows at least one situation when leaders of that time (read: people acting upon the trust we have given them), acted upon a matter, or matters, bringing, instead of any resolution, some discomforting results to us first of all. On the other hand, each one of us knows at least one situation when the very same leaders in a way, through their acting, brought peace and hope in our own believes. Each one of us knows that mistakes are a part of everyday life, and a much frequent occurrence in extraordinary situations like wart. When thinking about the war, particularly ordinary people like us, with a direct experience, and a safe detachment in time, yet, we can not but realize the absurdity of it. We can not but realize the tremendous shift of things that make a life, the shift of values, as the very first victims of the war. We can not but realize the extraordinariness of that life we have been through. Knowing this, yet, we always tend to think of these things with a "sharp eye", with an eye selecting only the moments of pride and victory over that shift of our lives, forgetting (dismissing) completely the discomforting results, mistakes, etc. And this is, again, an extraordinary state of mind, being directed only towards actively remembering the moments of , not victory, not pride, but moments that had provided some safety for us.

Our very memory of it, unresolved, stays in our mind like e tampered bomb, always, absurdly enough, carefully protecting ourselves from its last click, though that is a bomb exploded long time ago. Always setting us, creating a mind set within us, a ritual which we have to obey for the fear of wrongly pushing that button of the long exploded tampered bomb, always protecting the mistakes and vulnerability of people , whether family members or public actors, entrapped in the war situation, then and in the memories in the present. Always dragging us to that war-made-hole in our mind, that special room. And yet it only is a memory.

And it takes years, it takes many mediums of all kind and years of researching to explain what really happened. But the usual mistake of ordinary people like us, having been dis-valued in that extraordinary (unfortunately for its ugly character) period of time, is carrying in the very same mediums, all that fear, first of all, and hate and inner pain and folding it together with the true value, the true strength, that of life conquering that horrible invention of ours, war.

True explanation of that horrible past, the dismanteling of that "long ago exploded tampered bomb", whether it lasted for a few months, years or decades, and maybe even for centuries for some of us, can be done through a number of means, like: trauma work, memory work or so called history (books and notebooks), story telling, public debates/media, Transitional Justice, Arts, and many many more ways, old and new as categories of dealing With the Past. And Dealing With this Past is one of the ways to heal ourselves, to draw ourselves out of that “hole”.

It should be emphasized that these are some of the means (whether further developed in other activities or not) of dismantling that bomb within us and within our environment, of Dealing With the Past, with our own past. And that for one and only important reason, to truly neutralize the cancers of our own future: fear, hate and pain. For only then can we go into those holes that have been created within ourselves, or into that collective hole, created (or rather constructed) while hiding from that shift of values, and release our forgotten selves from being hostages to the long ago ended war.

The war is only solved when seen in its inhumane, absurd and cancerous hold of our future.

B.H.