One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [104]
I was shocked to hear that sentiment echoed by adults all around him and around many other children in similar situations. The adults were trying to forget as well. They stated proudly how their programs were designed to help the children forget the terrible things that had happened to them, to not think about them at all. Words like repression and avoidance buzzed around in my head. I came from a culture where forgetting was seen as pathological. People in America spend small fortunes trying to remember traumatic events as a way to become healthy again. My gut reaction was that this kind of avoidance would only lead to problems, but I’m not a trained psychiatrist. I said nothing. How else to cure trauma but by talking about it, I wondered. Avoiding the subject, repressing the memories of the terrible events of war, would lead these children to problems, I feared. Post-traumatic stress disorder. Pathological behavior. How could they move past the things they’d experienced unless they talked about them, exorcised the demons of their past, so to speak?
A thirteen-year-old Albanian boy named Peter had lost his father, who was shot by paramilitaries. He wore soccer shorts and a red tank top that needed washing. His face was downcast, and he did not join in the conversation with the other children on the day we met. He did not want to talk about the past or the future.
“They took my father and burnt him in a house with some other men, what does it matter?” he said, angry that I would pry, a total stranger. The principal of his school told me he was quite a good student, “well adjusted,” though a bit sullen at times, like any thirteen-year-old boy. His family was poor.
“It makes sense he would be sad,” the principal said. “If the ocean was a piece of paper and the sky was a pencil, that would not have been enough to write the suffering of the Albanians.” The principal was also a published poet and had spent years in a Serb-run prison for his political verses.
Despite my fears at Peter’s avoidance of past troubles, he was doing well under the circumstances. For him, avoiding the subject worked. Talking about it distressed him, being forced to remember and being helpless to change the past. He was not in denial, he just didn’t want to talk about it.
“They took my father and burnt him in a house with some other men, what does it matter?” His words echo in my head, the matter-of-factness, the tight grip on reality.
“We don’t talk about these things in my family,” eleven-year-old Adem said. “Though I know that three houses in our village were burned down by the paramilitaries.” He looked around the classroom where we sat and stared at Peter a moment. I asked the group of kids how they dealt with memories of the past, memories that were unpleasant. Adem answered for everyone. “We play to get over it.” Peter nodded in agreement.
The talking cure, as it is sometimes called, is an individualistic concept. It fits well in the West, where the individual reigns supreme. But in other cultures, the individual is of far less importance on his or her own than the group, the community. In a society emerging from war, it is not just the individual who has been traumatized, it is society. Everyone has felt the sting, not just as individuals but as a community. The very institutions that make a community have been traumatized—laws, moral norms, family structure, economic security. Especially in cases of ethnic conflict, it is the group trauma that trumps all others.
In Bosnia and Kosovo, everyone talked about what they did to us, what happened to the Serbs, what happened to the Muslims, and so forth. Individual suffering was always set in the larger context of the suffering of a people. The children often saw their own suffering not as an individual event but as part of the campaign against everyone they knew or identified with.
In that light, healing