Читать книгу Post-War Identification - Torsten Kolind - Страница 43

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 they lacked the right words, nevertheless they did develop ways of communicating (about) their experiences which gave them coherence, set them in a moral framework. A central strategy is what I will call ‘amputation.’ By ‘amputation’ I mean that when mental categories do not suffice and/or are invalidated, new categories are invented. While they cannot fully express war-related experiences, they function as a kind of symbolic shorthand.